India. It's not all English and Curry.

India has taken me a long time to write about. If I had sent out my first draft of my thoughts on India, I don't think it would have been particularly polite. But I also would not have done the country justice. India has a lot to offer, but you have to give yourself a few days to get over the “Get me the hell out of here. I hate you” feeling that develops over a few weeks. Kind of like a bad break up, you should probably give yourself a little time to really reflect upon the situation before sending an email to all of your friends about it. So after sufficient time, reflection, and a few other country visits, I am able to look back a bit more subjectively on India and remember what was so intriguing about it, what made me want to visit in the first place, and why you just can't stop thinking about it even 5 countries later.

India is a place more entertaining and intense than anywhere I have ever visited. At the same time, it is one of the most trying places to travel. From massive forts in the middle of the desert to chaotic religious shrines, the sites are inspiring. The impressive temples, crowded markets, eerie calls to prayer, and confusing religious rituals means constat fascination. Yet the crumbling infrastructure, crazy driving habits, putrid street smells, and cheating taxi drivers keeps you from ever having a (much-needed) dull moment. I experienced all of this in 100 degree heat and high humidity as a 5'9'' white girl, which added to the challenges. My dad and I spent 4 weeks in the country, two of which we were accompanied by my MBA friend Joseph. We finsihed every day fascinated, annoyed, enlightened, cheated, humbled, sweat-soaked, exhausted, and with the slight urge to murder someone (usually a taxi driver).

India is best described as an assalut on all of the senses. While you can look at the pictures, you do not “get” India until you can also smell the urine wafting from the street, feel the sweat pouring off of your back, hear the deafening horns in the background, and taste the grit of pollution in your mouth. I know, how pleasant, you're thinking. Sign me up! But there really is a lot more too it...

Smell. The smells of wonderful Indian spices and deep fried everything mixed with the smell of trash (fresh and burning—a big thanks to Peru for helping me identify that one), motor oil, and urine.

Site. Amazing or depressing yet always overwhelming. There were massive temples, mosques, forts, and palaces. The streets were filled with taxi's, bikes, tuk-tuks, rick shaws, and ox carts. Women in bright sarees and massive markets, selling everything from fish to underwear, kept it hard to pay attention to the gaggle of traffic that was always just about to run you over. The big, shiny multinational coporatation (MNC) buildings of Gurgaon (near Delhi) spoke to the massive growth that is taking place in India. And the sidewalks of Calcutta, filled nightly with sleeping people and during the day with beggars, spoke to the fact that the growth isn't exactly getting to everyone.

Taste. Indian spices and fresh chipatti bread or burnt corn on the cob from a street vendor made eating in India a real treat. But the true treat came about 12-24 hours later when you realized that the meal would not require Cipro.

Touch. As I walked down the streets, an obvious foreigner, I got pulled at to buy this trinket and grabbed at to give this begger money. I was squeezed in by people when I took part in their group photos (which I did on at least 30 requested occassions). With temperatures and humidity high, and most clothing soaked with sweat, touching people was especially enjoyable.

Sound. At any one time the road could be filled with a taxi, a tuk-tuk, a camel, and an ox cart (yes, even in Mumbai), along with hundreds of cars that were challenging the theories I learned in Operations class. The back of the colorful, long haul Tata trucks that fill the highways read "Please honk horn Please." For once, people here follow instructions. They used the horns to speak. “Here I am!” or “Hey, coming around this here curve in your lane, hope you're not on the other side!” The noise from the blaring horns and gunning cars is deafening and kept me constantly unnerved.

Our tour included 5 different parts of India from urban to rural, north to south, east to west, and rich to poor.

Delhi and Rajistan:

We spent about 1 week in Delhi and the northern state of Rajistan and saw enough city palaces and forts to have flashbacks of visiting cathedrals in Europe. I was really surprised at how much Arab influence had seeped down into northern India. There was awesome architecture, beautiful mosques, and a lot of Islamic culture. Mixed into this were colorful Hindu temples, sacred cows wandering the streets, and women in bright and colorful sarees. The Taj Mahal was great. The loss of the ability to use my lungs due to air pollution, was not.

We had the chance to visit Gurgaon, the "business district" outside of Delhi and visit some US companies stationed there, including the colorful offices of Google. India is growing at warp speed but they do not seem to have the infrastructure to keep up. When you walked out of the expensive, shining, MNC buildings you saw dirt, trash, stray cows, slums, and hanging power lines. The Google office has their own power and water supply as the infrastructure is so unreliable.

Mumbai:

After Rajistan and Dellhi in northern India, we travelled to Mumbai. One evening while walking down the street amidst blaring horns, wandering stray dogs, and chaotic hoards of people rushing in every direction, I was stepping over piles of garbage, trying not to get hit by the 5 lanes of traffic on this two lane road, and avoiding puddles that looked suspiciously like urine...When I decided that Mumbai looked a bit like what you would expect the world to look like after the Apocalpyse hits. It kind of smelled like it too. The area right around the bay was quite pretty but the water has been so polluted that the "fresh ocean breeze" was anything but. In their defense, they do have a law that keeps cows from roaming freely on the streets (unlike Delhi) and it would be hard to keep a city smelling fresh when 50% of the population doesn't have a bathroom (that is a cited figure).

While in Mumbai, we visited Dharavi, the biggest slum town in Asia. There we saw recycling on a whole new level. Men carried massive bags full of aluminum cans, plastic bottles, computers, etc; people were sorting through all of the garbage and separating it out; and then all of these things were being melted down (including the aluminum--by some guys wearing flip flops in a shack with no ventilation, who were pouring molten aluminum from a fire pit into molds), repackaged, and sold.

Southern-ish India:

In the more southern part of India, we visited the states of Goa and Kerala. Goa was colonized by the Portuguese from about 1500 to 1960 and being there felt like I was in a Brazilian beach town with a bunch of Indians. The Portuguese influence was noticeable in the local language (which, although closer to Hindi, sounded suspiciously Portuguese), in the colorful architecture full of Moorish arches, and in the presense of some of the only liqour stores I found in India. Their may not be many great things to say about the Portuguese (they were shitty colonizers) but as far as I could see this was the only place with valid liqour stores in India and that's enough to earn my respect.

The state of Kerala in southern India is most notable for its quiet, jungle backwaters. The backwaters are salt water rivers, large and small, that snake through the jungle. We took a houseboat down the river and then a canoe back into some of the smaller channels to see "everyday village life." (On our authentic tour this meant a guy climbed up a palm tree and then handed me a coconut with a straw). There are no roads leading to many of these towns, but every house had a canoe. This was a welcome oasis of fresh air and quietness. A huge contrast from the overpowering cities that surrounded it. I could breathe. I could hear myself speak. I could smell nothing. It was amazing.

Calcutta:

Calcutta had some interesting sites and a lot of poverty, although it is not as bad as its reputation alludes to. Or, at least its really no worse than the rest of India. My memories of Calcutta are eclipsed by two women that I met on the street. One night I planned to get picked up by my Michigan friend, Abhishek, who is from Calcutta. I went outside to wait for him on a corner near my hotel at around 10:30pm as the streets were shutting down. People were closing their vegetable stands, putting up their cots on the sidewalk to sleep for the night. Kids were playing cricket in the street and I was standing on the side of the road looking a bit like a prostitute.

I was getting stares and starting to get uncomfortable until two women who "work" begging on the tourist block walked up to me. They decided to befriend me and I ended up promising to get a henna tatoo from them the next day. My henna tatoo turned into a 3 hour event: Me sitting on the sidewalk with two women; hand out, covered in henna; watching Ita's bare-bottomed little boy rub his bum all over the dirty sidewalk; drinking milk tea; and listening to these women talk about their 10 children (collectively), sleeping outside the train station on the sidewalk(not inside, or the police beat you), the aspiration to buy a tarp to cover a piece of sidewalk to call home, and a life of begging in the tourist distrcit (arguably, not the worst job from what I saw). The women were dealing with bum husbands, collecting firewood on the streets to cook on makeshift fires they burned on their patches of sidewalk. I saw a lot of this while travelling and so the story, true or not, wasn't that hard to grasp. Ironically, we were all 27 years old. My what a difference a birthplace and birth control makes.

The real highlights of my trip, though, were meeting friends from Michigan on their home turf in India. In Delhi, my friend Kartik played host by accompanying us on some tourist jaunts and invited us to his home to meet his family and have some awesome Indian food. In Mumbai, Kunal introduced us to his family who also invited us for a great dinner. Meeting their families and being invited into their homes was such a welcome “reality check” from the hotels and restaurants we frequented as tourists. It was also nice to have someone else negotiating our taxi fares!

We also were able to meet my friend Karan for lunch in Mumbai and my friend Abhishek toured us around Calcutta. Abhishek took us to a really nice country club in the city where I'm pretty sure my dad, myself, and our backpacks were sites previously unseen. We also got a tour of the Ganges on a boat and I learned how cricket is not like baseball. Thanks guys!

So while there were some very positive notes about my trip, I should also mention the reasons India made me want to pull my hair out by the roots.

One, was crumbling infrastructure. Literally, a piece of a bridge actually fell on us when were driving under it in Mumbai. Imagine our taxi driver's surprise when we heard a loud crash and saw crumbling concrete come down the windshield! The power went out a lot, streets were full of garbage, buildings were old and run down (even in the nicer parts of Mumbai). Museums were unkept or un-updated meaning most facts referred to the late 1970's.

Second, was the level of "persistence" that people had. Walking down the street in India was exhausting. We were constantly being harassed to take this taxi, get in this rickshaw, give that person money, let this person carry our luggage, come into this restaurant, buy this shoddy knick-knack. When I refused to give a beggar woman on the street ay money, she screamed at me that I was a “heartless bitch.” Honey, if your english is good enough to know "heartless" and "bitch" you could probably find a better line of work.

Third, the public restroom is... the public. On any given day in India I saw at least 5 people go to the bathroom in public. This was irrespective of whether I was driving down a village road in Rajistan or on the busy streets of Calcutta. It was mostly men and it was mostly #1, but there were exceptions to that. (I know that Im not exactly the person to be acting holier than though on this one, but I'm just stating the facts).

Fourth, "lack of price transparency" aka "if you look foreign I'm going to quote you 12 times more than usual and see what you do." If you want to pay anywhere close to normal prices for anything in India, you have to be on your guard constantly Or take your Indian friends with you. Everyone, with the possible exception of 3 or 4 people in the entire country, is trying to extract money from you at inflated prices for a good or service you usually don't even want. Taxi drivers are especially creative.

Fifth, religion India style. While Hindus and Muslims spend a lot of time looking for their differences, I seemed to note nothing but similarities between the two. The main similarity being that a religious guy would offer to bless you and then he would start harassing your for money. When you told him you would put it in the charity box at the mosque, temple, or shrine you were visiting, he would insist that putting it in the box was bad and that you should give it directly to him. Besides, he was poor, he would say. Then, when you wouldn't give him money he would get really mad and yell at you. I have been respectively blessed and damned a lot a in the last few weeks.

Sixth, its hard to be the constant center of attention, even for me. While I admit to taking pictures of people when they are not looking, I pride myself on my subtlety. In India, I would catch people following me with their cell phones held up to get a photo. People approached my dad asking him to hold their babies and I was asked to be in professional family photos in front of the Taj Mahal. It's nice to be special, but its exhausting to cause necks to snap on the sidewalk merely because people think you look like a freak.

So, after 4 weeks and countless observatons, what is my take on India?

India left me quite confused. The people are amazing but the country is falling apart. If you listen to all of the chatter, India is supposed to take over the world: It will suffocate us with call centers, overpower us with engineers, and wear us down with tons of cheap labor. But after 4 weeks in India my prediction is a little less rosy: India is more likely to suffocate us with air pollution, overpower us with beggars, and slowly wear us down with frightening driving habits. If India really wants to take over the world, I think that 3,000-person congress better get their act together. And if they do, I'd still probably opt for Mars.

I also could not help but compare India to the other supposed up and coming superpower, China, which I visited last year. While Shanghai has effectively blotted out the sun with pollution, the streets, buildings, and infrastructure of Shanghai and Bejing were fairly well kept (or, in contrast to India, existent). There were shacks, but not rampant, obvious poverty. It looks like China has actually reinvested some of its money into public works projects to spread the wealth around a bit, provide even poor citizens with basic amenities. However, I do realize that China has a slight "edge" in that no one is allowed to disagree with them. Making decisions is always easier when you get the first and last vote. Or if you have oil. More on Malaysia in my next posting.