We just spent two weeks in India traveling to some of the famous tourist destinations including Varanasi, Agra and Jodhpur. It was an intense sensory experience of colors, sounds and smells that this blog post won’t even try to do justice.
Instead here are some things that stuck out for me (in no particular order):
First, India celebrates Christmas. This came as a surprise to me as India only has about 2% Christians and yet Christmas is a national holiday. There were Christmas decorations in all the hotels we stayed and also in several restaurants (admittedly we mostly went to fairly popular eateries). We spoke to several of our hosts about it and they felt it was part and parcel of a fairly long history of religious co-existence. Several of the people we spoke to expressed concerns though that intolerance was on the rise with fundamentalist influences become louder among Hindus and Muslims.
Second, the presence of the military is highly visible. This maybe shouldn’t have been surprising as India has the third largest Armed Forces in the world after China and the United States. But what was striking was that there were large military bases often right in the cities and even the airports for cities such as Agra and Jodphur are in fact air force bases.
Third, air quality is terrible. I had been warned about smog problems in New Delhi by friends before going but was still surprised by just how bad it was. This problem is more pronounced in winter but has now reached such proportions that government is beginning to tackle it with an even/odd license plate scheme for New Delhi. Given what we saw though in many cities, including lots of trash fires, wood fired kilns (eg in the Dharavi section of Mumbai) there is a long way to go.
Fourth, retail appears to still be highly fragmented. We saw tons of tiny stores everywhere we went and in all categories, including categories such as office supplies that are highly consolidated here in the US. Maybe we just didn’t go to the right parts of town but even along the access roads in and out of cities with > 1 million inhabitants I didn’t see the kind of large stores one would find here. More generally the impact of the availability of cheap labor on the economy seems to have been to reduce capital formation.
Fifth, traffic is insane. We have been to many places with wild traffic including China and East Africa, but India definitely outdoes them all. Lanes, traffic lights are all treated at best as suggestions but often ignored entirely. Cars, rickshaws, motorcycles, pedestrians, cows all come dangerously close to each other. And by close I mean inches. People would walk across multiple lanes and often stop in the middle with cars shooting by on both sides. I was amazed that there weren’t nonstop accidents but everyone seems used to it. Oh, and the honking is incessant.
Sixth, sweets are super sweet. Maybe this is to compensate for just how spicy some of the food is but India now ranks ahead of Brazil for me with regard to sweet sweets. Petha was my personal favorite.
Overall if you get a chance to go to India I highly recommend it. At some point when I am less jet lagged I will write a post about what my take away about the role of culture is in human affairs. I have been learning that it is incredibly important but India really drove that point home for me.
