It’s been a long, eye-opening two weeks in India and Nepal; so long – and jam-packed full of activities – that I’m only now getting around to writing about it all. But instead of doing the usual listing of events, I’ll split my post about India into two: I’ll just talk about the India experience in this post, and then cover more specifics of what we did in the next one. A post just about Nepal should be coming soon. Get ready for some long reads =).

Before I begin, though, one piece of business: for annoying reasons involving an SMTP server, nobody has been getting emails when I upload a new post (and I haven’t been getting emails when you write a comment). Oops. I’m trying – and currently failing – to fix this problem, but in the mean time I’ll manually send out an email when I add new content to the blog.

The Ground

Alright, India. I’ll start by talking about the ground. The ground, and everything that stays close to it, is dirty and arid. Everywhere we’ve gone, everywhere we’ve looked, there’s rubble and trash scattered about. Crumbled tan brick and building remnants, lots of plastic wrappers, old food, dirt, and murky water. Very little plant life. The trash heaps are the most noticeable – sometimes you’ll see a veritable hill of assorted trash piled up by the side of the road. What’s worse is that nobody cleans it up; nobody seems to care. I’ve only seen people add to the mess: they toss their trash onto the growing piles, and are happy to piss on any side wall they can find. Who knows where the toilets empty out either… on the train, the toilets are just holes that open onto the tracks. Everyone dumps everything on the ground, and nobody is responsible for it.

The smell, as you can imagine, is horrible. It comes and goes along with the smell of food cooking by the side of the road. One second you smell some delicious spices or greasy papadum (they just call them papad here), the next second its rotten food and shit. The alleyways are the worst – there isn’t much space for the smells to escape, and there have been a few moments where we thought we’d barf on the spot. Of course, these smells don’t often last long enough to make you actually barf; a few meters forward and it smells like dust and hot earth.

Speaking of dust, it’s also everywhere. I had a few cases where I blew my nose and all that came out was dirt and dust. Pollution is also a big problem; if you have asthma, don’t come to India. As far as I can tell, the entire country sits under a thick layer of smog.

I think the most representative thing I could bring back from India would be a small pile of garbage. Forget the textiles and tchatchkes; I want a little snow globe full of plastic wrappers, dust, and rubble.

Cows in the trash

The ground’s biggest victims are the animals. I primarily saw four different kinds: dogs, goats, monkeys, and cows. Dogs are literally everywhere, and they all seem too tired to bother anyone. Some of them wander about slowly, many of them just sleep wherever they can. Goats aren’t as frequent, but still occasionally walk down the road. They tend to look more scared than anything else, and are keener to follow humans on occasion. Monkeys do their own thing and stay out of the way – they’re up on the tops of walls and on the occasional tree, and don’t come down. Cows… cows are special, as you’d imagine. Since they’re considered holy animals, they’re one of the few things that can interrupt traffic without getting honked at, and freely wander and sit wherever they please. Most are skinny, some look semi-decently fed. I can’t really tell whether or not they look happy or scared; they just move about the landscape independent of everything else.

It was very hard to watch the animals eating out of the trash piles. I don’t think anyone feeds the dogs, so they’re probably dependent on whatever they can find in there. I’m not sure what happens with the goats. Cows seem to be fed occasionally during the day; I’ve seen little piles of grass and plant matter laid out for them to munch on. But at night, the cows stand around in the trash piles and poke for food. In Jaipur, this was especially striking. During the day we hardly saw any cows, but at night, the city was littered with them – all eating trash. It makes you sick.

Salesmen are as hungry and omnipresent on the streets as the animals. Like all third-world countries, they’re desperate to get you into their shops. At this point we’ve gotten used to dealing with touts in the streets, so that aspect hasn’t been so hard. In fact, in some ways the ones in India are better than those in Thailand. Here, at least, people will take “no” for an answer and leave you alone… well sometimes. Maybe 2/3 of the time. Anyway, it’s better than Bangkok.

Begging for food

The Indian salesmen are decidedly worse, however, when you actually have to or want to interact with them. They know you’re a tourist, and many will unyieldingly try to rip you off. At the Jaipur train station, for instance, a guy tried to charge me 100 rupees (~$2.50) for a small bag of potato chips. I tried to haggle with him, but he just gave me a dirty smile and said no. I had to get our tour guide, Varun, to come and buy the chips for me; Varun is Indian, so he was allowed to get the standard 15 rupee price. Instances like this really pissed me off. Other times, if they don’t have the item you’re looking for, the salesman will try to lead you into some back-alley shop where he has his “men’s store” or “warehouse”. I’d occasionally start to follow them, but would never go too far down any alleyway; I’d rather not risk getting kidnapped…

Then there’s the other set of people who want your money: beggars. There have been a few prevailing types: children, mothers with small children, and disfigured people. The kids are usually asking for a few rupees, and will only follow you a short while down the street. Mothers with small children also won’t follow you that far, but they’re harder to ignore. They’ll wait near restaurants or busy street corners, and ask for food. The children look especially dirty: their hair looks like it’s been splayed out with mud and dust. Although it sounds terrible, I sometimes wondered whether the mothers had purposefully made their kids look especially dirty; I’d been forewarned about seeing mothers with purposefully-maimed children (to increase sympathy and donations), so perhaps this was along the same vein. Luckily I never saw any maimed children.

Disfigured beggars are certainly the scariest. They’re usually middle-aged men, and if they have any mobility at all, they’ll follow you as best they can. Many, however, are missing a leg or two and just lie around busy areas. The most memorable instance was a guy near the McDonalds in Jaipur, next to the main Bollywood movie house. His legs or leg joints were somehow broken such that his legs hung straight out to his sides; he moved around by walking on his hands. When I came out of the McDonalds with some fries, he tried to intercept me on my way back to the theater. I managed to avoid him, but it really scared me.

Traffic in Varanasi

Often scarier than the beggars, though, is the traffic. Although the roads are wider and (way) more developed than in Sri Lanka, the sheer volume of traffic – and the attitude people have toward driving – makes things really bad. Like all third-world countries, drivers aren’t willing to wait; they’ll cut you off at every opportunity. The honking, yelling, and speed in India, however, make things exceptionally bad. When you’re caught in a snarl of cars, rickshaws (a.k.a. tuk tuks), bicycle-drawn carriages, motorcycles, bicycles, tourists, locals, children, dogs, goats, and cows, honking your horn doesn’t change much of anything. I think people here just like honking for fun; a fair number of people have ornamental horn noises that play non-stop. And if that doesn’t work (which it doesn’t), some people actually get out of their car or rickshaw and go yell at other drivers, or bang on their vehicle. When the traffic does start to move, things can get dangerous. People literally drive as fast as they can, and brake as fast as they can. We’ve come so close to so many collisions, that at this point it’s actually laughable. In fact, one night in Varanasi the traffic and the speeding were so bad, we literally laughed for most of the ride back to the hotel. We almost killed so many kids and bicyclists, and ourselves… on top of manually bracing ourselves for every stop (forget seatbelts – we’ve been in flimsy rickshaws), there’s nothing else we could do.

At one point I was talking to Varun about drinking and driving in India. He said he actually prefers to drive while drunk; that way, he said, all the crowding and noise bothers him less! And since he’s (usually) aware that he’s drunk, he actually ends up driving more cautiously. Amazing; I really think it speaks volumes about driving here.

Despite all this negativity, there are a few great things about India. For starts, your average family or child in India – that isn’t begging or trying to sell you something – is very nice. Even though there are a fair number of tourists, I get the sense that white people are a bit of a novelty. Little kids love to shout “hello!” and others just want to get a picture taken with you. They’ll ask you where you’re from, how long you’ve been in town, etc. This actually happened quite a bit at the Taj Mahal, to my surprise. As an experiment, I’ve varied whether I tell people that I’m American or Canadian. Being an American gets mixed reactions; some people get excited and say “Obama!” while others give a more neutral, forced-polite nod. Being a Canadian is consistently good. Most people just smile, and some throw in a comment like “nice country”. I’ll stick to being a Canadian when it’s convenient :-p.

Rooms for the wives and concubines

Speaking of the Taj Mahal, it definitely (and unsurprisingly) was the most amazing of the many incredible architectural sites we visited. There was something powerful and awe-inspiring about being in its presence. I think it’s a combination its being so iconic, and that everyone else there is also having a similar experience; it’s such a contrast to the world outside the gates. The other palaces and forts we visited were also impressive, but in a different way. All of them are elaborate, endless complexes, but all of their impressive artwork has been burnt off or decayed with time. The Taj Mahal was the only one we saw that stood in its same, original glory.

Although the other forts/palaces we visited were impressive (despite being a bit burnt and diminished), they all followed the same general story line: some local Maharaja (king) commissioned it and it took a hundred years to build. The later Maharajas then lived there, with their 6-12 wives and 100-500 concubines. We’d see the area where the Maharaja and (current) head Maharani (queen) would sit. We’d see the places where the queens lived, and where the concubines lived. There was often a story about how the Maharaja would pick which Maharani he wanted to have sex with on any given day. Many of the palaces even featured secret passageways that led from the Maharaja’s quarters down to those of the Maharanis’. Like so many early kingdoms, they were a feminist’s nightmare.

Then again, even modern India is a feminist’s nightmare. When it comes to social freedoms, men can do anything and women can do nothing. I was expecting this. What I wasn’t expecting are the additional social freedoms granted to men – freedoms you don’t even see in the first world! For instance, men in India can hold hands while walking down the street. Just as friends. They can rest their hands on each others’ legs while they’re sitting together on a motorcycle. But you can’t do that with a woman – you never see any straight couples holding hands. Contact between women is also prohibited; they can’t touch each other at all. The dress code is similarly skewed: men can wear whatever they want, while all women wear saris. Women can show some skin around the sides of their midriffs, but not their ankles.

A street wedding party

Although the social practices are very restricted, you occasionally get to see some aspects of their lives that are very free. My favorite examples are the wedding parties. They seem to appear out of nowhere; a veiled bride (or groom?) being carried through the streets in a litter, with a pack of traditionally-dressed men playing horns, surrounded by throngs of people, all moving down the middle of a busy street. I saw two such ceremonies; one of them even had fireworks. They’re such fun, and entirely reckless/uncaring about the huge traffic mess behind them. I suppose it all ties into the same “freedom” (or carelessness, depending on your interpretation) that people have when interacting with each other. The trash and sewage on the ground, the aggressive traffic, the street parties; people don’t care if their actions are annoying or hazardous to others. There’s just too many other people, and everyone’s out to make their own buck. You just can’t let it bother you too much. I’d been warned before I left that, in order to survive, you have to “yield to mother India.” It’s very true; with such a sensory overload of smells, sweat, dirt, fear, excitement, shock, disgust, color, and awe, you have to just let it all wash over you. It’s truly an experience.

I’ll close with an assorted listing of memories (that I haven’t mentioned) that stand out in my mind:

• Driving down a highway early in the morning, and seeing at least 50 people sleeping on the center divider.
• My first sight of the Taj Mahal.
• A man without legs lying on the stairs at the Jaipur train station.
• The mothers and children sharing a tiny bed on the overnight train to Varanasi.
• Having my arm touched or grabbed by beggars and salesman.
• The juxtaposition of filthy, barely-standing wood-and-tin structures in front of elaborate old Hindu temples.
• Watching a wrapped body, freshly dipped in the Ganges, lit on fire right before my eyes.