Subject: Delhi, Carter and Orders of Magnitude
Date: Sun Dec 15, 2002

Delhi was a place I was braced for. Everything I'd heard or read suggested that it would be maddening beyond belief. As the most popular arrival point for blinking, jet-lagged tourists, Delhi has developed scamming the unwary into a high art. In the Lonely Planet, a special boxed text goes on for two pages about "Dodgy Delhi," detailing schemes such as the Riots in Delhi story: the taxi-wallah charges you an exhorbitant rate to go to a "safe" hotel which pays him an added commission, which of course comes out of your pocket in the end. When I last traveled in India, I met two girls who'd been so frightened by the imaginary riots that they ended up paying close to $500 to be driven directly to Agra, a two-and-a-half hour ride that costs $3 a head by train.

Considering its reputation, our arrival at Nizammudin Station, New Delhi was downright relaxed. Yes, a taxi-wallah sidled up to us almost immediately as we stepped onto the platform, but he was low-key about it and quoted us a realistic price to take us where we wanted to go. Still, he did try to tell us that there was an auto-rickshaw strike, which was odd considering we'd already agreed to his services at his price. As I gazed out upon the sea of auto-rickshaws waiting in the train station parking lot, I could only assume that the tendency to subterfuge ran so deep that the taxi-wallahs didn't remember anymore how to shut it off when it wasn't needed.

As we drove through the spacious streets of New Delhi, Jenny told me it reminded her of Los Angeles. It felt roomy, relaxed, frankly pleasant. Even the traffic was better than we'd feared; we'd read in the Times of India that Delhi was approaching permanent gridlock, but we had no trouble at all cruising along the well-maintained boulevards to Connaught Place, the geographical heart of Delhi. At Connaught, which is a circular park surrounded by concentric rings and spoke roads, we found our hotel with little trouble, then headed out to explore.

Delhi is the biggest city we'd been in since Hong Kong, and certainly the most worldly. What had us all hot and bothered was the food. After months of dispeptic travel, our dinner at TGI Friday's was the kind of ecstatic experience Sufis like to write poems about. (And not only that, but by the bottom of my margarita I felt a bit like a whirling Dervish.) I used to spurn the chain restaurants when I lived in New York, but life abroad has taught me the deep satisfaction of the predictable, especially when it comes to food. If I order a pizza at Pizza Hut, I don't have to worry that it will involve chapati or kimchi.

We plan to return to Delhi several times; it makes a convenient place to store excess luggage, and it's got a major airport as well. Thus we didn't feel pressed to see all of Delhi's sites on our first visit. We did go to the famous Red Fort, in which most of the buildings were closed for repair. To get there, we went on a long wander through the Old City, weaving our way through the machine tools district, the stationery district, the sari district. In its density and organization it reminded me of Dongdaemun and Namdaemun markets in Seoul, except more colorful. As we waded through dense traffic in a cycle-rickshaw on our way out, Jenny and I tried to pinpoint what it was that made the Indian clutter so much more appealing than the Korean. We decided that it was decoration: the Indians decorate *everything*. Motorcycle shops are hung with marigold garlands and tinsel; crumbling tenements have elaborate wrought-iron railings and stone screenwork windows. Sweepers and haulers wear colorful saris or turbans. Even the trees wind up painted.

That was our one foray into Old Delhi. The rest of the time we spent enjoying the middle-class comforts of New Delhi: eating good Western food, watching Star TV in our hotel room (I've developed a real taste for the Cartoon Network), shopping.

We went to Hauz Khas Village, an upscale shopping and gallery district, and were stunned at the high prices. Yes, the quality was good, but we were amazed to find ourselves looking at $90 designer T-shirts and $600 saris. When we moved on to the middle-class strip malls of Greater Kailash, our shock turned to chagrin. How on earth could the ordinary mallrat clothes cost so much? You'd think there'd be a huge market for clothes that looked like MTV and cost very little, and considering the low prices of both textiles and labor, it was downright bizarre that no such thing existed.

Then we realized we were doing the math wrong.

Mysteriously, we'd been doing the division wrong all day, overestimating the cost of clothes by an order of magnitude. Substantially relieved, we plunged into Fab India, a traditional clothing shop that's supposedly popular with young Indian parliamentarians. We didn't quite find anything, but I'm sure we'll be back. The next day, our math deficiency corrected, we shopped around close to our hotel and were quite pleased at the prices. You can get Levi's here for $24, and they tailor them for free. Good dress shoes are $30, fine silk ties run about $6, brand-name dress shirts and chinos can be had for under $25. It ain't exotic, but it's handy. I'm sure we'll be stocking up before we head home.

For all the comforts and low prices, Delhi does have a darker side. The streets and pedestrian subways are a gallery of disturbing mutilations -- withered legs, leprous stumps, one woman whose upper arm was so thoroughly broken that the rest of her arm simply dangled. Somehow the poverty is harder to take when you're surrounded by jewelry shops and fancy restaurants, though I realize how unfair that is. Crushing poverty is made neither worse nor better by its proximity to someone else's good meal.

On BBC's Hard Talk, I saw an interview with the highest-paid female executive in the country, the director of capital markets for HSBC India. The interviewer kept pressing her about the 430 million people in her country who live below the poverty line. I wished she'd responded by asking why she was more responsible for them than he was. Still, he was right to suggest that there is something especially dangerous about so much poverty surrounding so much wealth. How long will the poor here allow themselves to be shunted aside by the well fed strutting by in our brand new designer jeans?

We also watched an interview with Jimmy Carter, along with much of the Nobel ceremony. We learned that the Carter Foundation has nearly wiped out the horrific, crippling tropical disease of Guinea Worm. Though the foundation has only 150 employees, they somehow managed to get to over 25,000 villages to provide treatment and education. Even with the stature of the American presidency behind you, it's a phenomenal achievement, yet it's only a small part of the work Carter has done to resolve conflicts and fight disease throughout the world. A man as idealistic as Jimmy Carter makes a poor leader of a country that has to stand up to Brezhnev and Khomeini, but as a private citizen his humanitarianism has been stunningly effective. If Jenny and I get into the Foreign Service, we hope that we can learn enough to make that kind of difference, if on a far smaller scale. I see our current travels as part of that learning process, even if the lessons are sometimes hard to look at and the answers hard to come by.

Well fed, wishing the rest of the world was, and not at all certain how to fix the problem,
Josh

=====
"Nothing in the country is ever quite what you expect, and the only thing to expect is the unexpected which comes in many forms and will always want to sit next to you." - Lonely Planet India

Subject: One Step Closer to Eating for My Country
Date: Wed Dec 18, 2002 11:53pm

According to our friend Graeme, an American diplomat in China was once heard to remark that his job consisted of "eating for my country." Today I found out that I am one step closer to saying, "What a fascinating way to stew a rodent!" to the agriculture minister of somewhere.

That's right: I passed the Foreign Service Exam!

This does *not* mean I'm a diplomat yet. It means that out of the 20,000 people who took the test this year, I'm one of the 3,500 or so they are inviting to the Oral Assessment. On May 19th, 2003, in Washington DC, I will be subjected to a full day of interviews, situational tests, etc., and the State Department will begin my security check. Hopefully I will then be one of the 500 people the Foreign Service actually hires.

Still, this is incredibly fabulous news. We still don't know yet whether Jenny passed, but the chances are good that if I did, she did, because I'm pretty sure she's smarter than me. So wish her luck, and wish me luck on the Oral Assessment, and hopefully in a year or two I'll be telling you all about what the Kyrgyz eat at banquets.

Hoping I'll never have to pay a parking ticket ever again,
Josh

=====
"Nothing in the country is ever quite what you expect, and the only thing to expect is the unexpected which comes in many forms and will always want to sit next to you." - Lonely Planet India

Subject: Eating for My Country: Addendum
Date: Thu Dec 19, 2002 11:23pm

Jenny found out today that she passed the Foreign Service Exam as well. We're both past the first hurdle, and even if we don't make it all the way this time, we now know it's possible.

-Josh

=====
"Nothing in the country is ever quite what you expect, and the only thing to expect is the unexpected which comes in many forms and will always want to sit next to you." - Lonely Planet India

Subject: Agra: The Best and the Worst
Date: Sun Dec 22, 2002 1:00pm

You've all seen pictures of the Taj Mahal, so you think you know what it looks like.

You don't.

I'm not going to go into a lengthy description of the Taj Mahal; others have done it better, and besides, there's really no point. You'll just have to come see it. The Red Fort of Agra is similarly exquisite, as is the Tomb of Salim Chishti at the mosque in Fatehpur Sikri, and the lovely palace that the Mughals built there and then abandoned because there wasn't enough water around. If you want a good description of Agra's monuments, pick up "The Far East Suite" by Duke Ellington and listen to track 7; he does a better job in music than most people can in words.

Unfortunately, the city of Agra is about as bad as the monuments are good. It's a polluted town with very little of its own cultural life -- too close to Delhi for that -- and as the de facto tourist capital of India, the harrassment levels are off the scale. You can't walk anywhere without getting yelled at, purred at, followed, blocked, waved at, pointed at, clicked at, etc. Every richshaw-wallah wants to take you somewhere cheap, and they all want to stop at a marble factory (read "shop") or a jewelry shop on the way to collect a commission for themselves, which they receive even if the tourists don't buy anything. The situation is so bad, in fact, that rickshaw-wallahs have begun to present themselves as brave protectors against that kind of bad business.

Babu was a case in point. Yes, he was hanging around in front of our hotel just like the other predatory rickshaw-wallahs, but once we'd gotten some distance away, he began to warn us off the others. He promised us he would take us where we wanted to go without stopping for commissions, and that we could genuinely pay "as you like," which is usually a euphemism that means "as *I* demand once we arrive." For the first day or so, all this seemed to be true. Babu even pulled out a book of handwritten recommendations and photos given to him by his satisfied customers, many of whom praised him to the skies. He kept us reading out loud for quite some time -- he told us he couldn't read them himself, and I think it was nice for him to hear how much he was appreciated. Still, it was a bit much, particularly when we wanted to go back to the hotel rather than sit there reading his praises. And the next day, sure enough, he pressured us desperately to "do something for me," which consisted of -- you guessed it -- going to a jewelry shop so he could collect a commission.

I suppose it's like that at every major tourist monument. Certainly one doesn't go bargain-hunting on Liberty Island, and I'm guessing the pyramids in Egypt must be a nightmare. The worst scheme we heard of in Agra involved poisoning people's meals, then whisking them off to doctors who charge exhorbitant rates to "cure" them of their passing distemper. Two people died from a similar scheme in Varanasi, but so far Agra's kept down the mortality rate.

*

Having seen what there was to see in Agra, we moved on into Rajasthan, where we are now, in the Pink City of Jaipur. More on that later. Next we'll be heading back to Delhi to drop off everything we buy here -- Jaipur's quite the town for shopping -- and then we'll plunge back into Rajasthan, hopefully heading straight to relaxing Pushkar, where we can mellow out for a week or three.

Not particularly interested in going to the marble factory,
Josh

=====
"Nothing in the country is ever quite what you expect, and the only thing to expect is the unexpected which comes in many forms and will always want to sit next to you." - Lonely Planet India