Background

April 15, 2002-Getting To Know You
(photos:Humayan's Tomb,
Qutab Minar)

We decided to eat at the hotel buffet last night. It was a way to learn about the different foods & it turned out to be very good. We particularly liked the fried leeks. There was a cheese curd dish, mutton curry, chicken in a spicy sauce & lentils, plus vegetarian delights. We tried what they call halvah for dessert. It was a very sweet paste made from lentils and sprinkled with a few pieces of a grated hard white cheese. It was a pleasing combination. We avoided the more pedestrian side of the buffet with familiar fare. We seem to have found flavor here. Indians had the key to the spice trade for centuries & certainly have mastered the art of cooking with them.

Since we were at the same hotel for 2 ½ days, we became familiar with many things. Chinese food is on all menus & our guide told us that Indians really like it, but it’s made with an Indian twist. Tonight we found that the twist is that it’s bland. There was an attempt to create atmosphere by playing music in the background. It was the same tape all the time. It began with Over the Rainbow and ended with Summertime. David wanted to buy them a new tape since we have one more night to stay there after we come back from Jaipur. There were a few French tourists in the dining room, but the hotel didn’t seem busy. Tourism fell by 60% after 9/11.
I seemed to have calmed down a bit about my surroundings. I started wearing my watch & wedding band after many reassurances that I wouldn’t be killed for them. That would happen in Nairobi, Kenya. I must have been confusing my travel warnings. We’re still locking the computer in the hotel safe. How can you not trust a country that has men with dirty mops wiping out the floors of portable toilets at tourist sites so you will tip them when you use the facility?

More Mughals

Our guide, Kumar, picked us up at 9:30 AM and we left some luggage in hotel in Delhi. We’d be traveling to Agra & Jaipur over a five-day period & trunk space was scarce. One of our bags had to ride on the luggage rack. We began the day by driving in the area of government buildings. There was no resemblance between that sector & the rest of Delhi. The Parliament, ministries, & government residence were British built between 1914-29, & merged architecture from the Greco-Roman, Indian, & Colonial styles. They were immaculately maintained, as were the parks, gardens, pools, & fountains around them. The avenue leading from the buildings to the India Gate could have been the Champs Elysee. The gate memorialized the 85,000 Indians who died in WWI

We drove on to Humayan’s Tomb, built in the 16th century. He was the second Mughal ruler in India. Called the Red Taj Mahal, it pre-dates the white Taj by one hundred years & is a red sandstone monument on which the white marble Taj was based. We compared it to a photo of the Taj Mahal & the similarities were striking. The Taj was built by a husband to honor his wife. Humayan’s Tomb was built by a wife to honor her husband. The six-pointed star was in evidence as a decorative symbol. It’s also commonly seen on signs & as a sticker on the rear windows of cars. Kumar explained that it’s not only used in the Jewish & Muslim traditions, but is also a Hindu symbol. It stands for the confluence of male & female energy. The Buddhist lotus appears on Mughal buildings as well.

We next went to see Qutab Minar, an 800-year-old Muslim monument. When word got out about all the gold in the Hindu temples, the Muslim invaders swept down & plundered the holy places. Gold is considered to be God’s metal by Hindus because it’s the only metal that requires no chemical process to extract it from the ground. The Muslims finally figured out it would be easier to conquer the source of all these riches, so in the 12th century, they came to stay. They built mosques over Hindu temples &, at this site, erected a 250 ft. tall tower with 350 steps to the top. It took almost forty years to build it & it’s an engineering wonder. It’s made up of sandstone bricks that form conical columns rising past four terraces to the top. It occurred to me that it has withstood earthquakes. When the Afghans stormed in to conquer India, they tried to build a tower that was twice as wide at the base & twice as high. Their failure squats not far from the Mughal achievement.

Heading East

We had a 4-½ hour drive to Agra, so we left Delhi behind & headed east. We traveled through the state of Haryana to Pradesh & were surprised to see barricades & security checks on the state line. Security is a real issue here. As we entered Haryana, I started to remember the names of some Indian people I knew. The guide said it was possible that a woman I know came from this area. Other names of families refer to the caste.

We left the city behind & drove through industrial areas until we got to the rural villages where wheat farming was the mainstay. I couldn’t believe that the roadside was lined with gum trees. They’re following me. There was an attempt at beatification of the highway & flowering bushes filled the center strip. Nothing could help distract from the squalor we passed. We also saw our first camel pulling a two-wheeled cart & signs on the back of trucks that said, “ Horn Please-Use Dippers at Night.” The translation is that they want drivers to sound the horn when passing during the day, but to flash their headlights when passing at night.

We stopped for lunch at a tourist restaurant & shops that were considered deluxe. The tablecloths couldn’t have been washed since last week, but the toilets were spotless. It wasn’t air-conditioned & the fans did little but move the oppressive air around. Agra is hotter than Delhi & it reached about 106 degrees today. As we were eating, an employee filled a shopping cart with goods & circulated among the three tables of eight diners trying to hawk his wares. There were no takers.

A History Lesson

We had a long time to get to know Kumar & learned that he has relatives in the U.S. His sister & brother-in-law are research scientists in Vermont in the field of hematology. He has a brother in Singapore working in the silicon chip industry. He’s had opportunities to move to the U.S., but he’s not the adventurous one in the family & prefers to stay in his native land.

David & I wondered why Indians, who lived in such a poor country, had a different air about them than the Chinese who lived in equal poverty. We found out. As Kumar sees it, the bottom line is incentive, motivation, corruption, & education. There’s no compulsory education in India. Children are supposed to go to school until age fourteen, but there’s no enforcement. There’s also no free education so poor parents would rather have the child help them work to fill their bellies than pay money they don’t have to fill their minds. The hope of moving out of poverty is non-existent.

The British educational philosophy is still in place. The British system was to train bureaucrats to further the British Empire. They destroyed the historic industries of weaving & farming by imposing extreme taxes on the products. They killed the incentive of pride in work & filled the government with bureaucrats who were content to stay in one job forever as long as the bribes kept flowing. The British imposed a 98% income tax. It fomented the reliance on corruption. Workers became more dependent on bribes to live on. The hope of the Brits was to prevent revolution. They fixed it so Nehru, educated in Britain, would be the ruler after independence. Kumar said that India used to be ruled by the white English. Now the black English rule it.

There’s a multiplicity of political parties and nothing is accomplished without corruption. He said that the politicians got a lot of money to give Coca Cola & Pepsi rights to come here. Coke & Pepsi ran the local bottlers out of business by buying up all the bottles & destroying them. The plants are automated and don’t provide a lot of jobs. He said the industry that is needed now isn’t one that will give Indians a place to spend money they do not have on unnecessary products, but industries that will help them build up their infrastructure. An example he gave was manufacturing high-tension electric wire.

He gave us a history lesson on how the English got a foothold here. During the Parsi War there were three hundred English soldiers against eighteen thousand Parsi. The Brits found a Parsi general who was greedy & promised he would be king and get 90% of the riches if he got the Parsi troops to surrender. He did that & the British then killed the eighteen thousand troops who’d surrendered, killed the general, & killed the king. The British never told how they were victorious over such uneven odds. They just used the statistics to intimidate the local leaders to capitulate.

We asked him about medical care & he told us there is no health insurance for rich or for poor. It doesn’t exist. They only have accident insurance. It’s pay as you go, which explains all the limbless people. It’s cheaper to amputate than treat. There are government hospitals, but they still require payment. The motto here is “pay or die.” There’s also no pension for workers in general. Government workers do have pensions & benefits, but in a bureaucracy such as this, the workers expect to be paid just for showing up for work. If you want them to accomplish something for you, you have to grease their palms. He said that getting anything done takes an “Indian year.” We taught him the term “New York minute.”

Bargaining is a way of life, but he said that tourists are in a price trap. We know what things cost us at home & bargain based on that. What we don’t know is what they’re worth here when Indians bargain. The difference is staggering. We may think we got a good price if we get 50% off, but an Indian will pay half of that. They also openly post two entry fees for Indians and foreigners for all admissions to sites. Sometimes the difference is ten times what Indians pay. At the Taj Mahal it is twenty times more.

I asked him about the monsoons since the season starts next month. They can get seventeen inches of rain in three months. Some areas “harvest” the water & save it for future use. Most of it just runs off. They’re trying to clean up the rivers & in some areas industries aren’t permitted to dump waste in the waterways. Instead, they dig deep pits & put the polluted material in the holes. Of course, the pollutants leech into the aquifers & contaminate the underground water, soil, & some crops. Heavy metals turn up in some produce.

Getting back to the question of the difference between the Chinese & Indians, I think the answer is that the Indians don’t have hope. There’s no way to get ahead. Without education they cannot move from one level of society to another. There’s no reason to be motivated. Survival is the name of the game.

Toby