Greetings from Agra, India! Your correspondent has just begun a nine-day, ten-night vacation in the world's second-largest country, so we will be interrupting our (ir-)regularly scheduled programming to bring you a series of posts chronicling our hero's adventures and exploits in the subcontinent. Part one of the chronicle is as follows:
I readily admit that I seem to have underestimated India. This may well be due to the fact that I spent the three months immediately preceding this trip in Afghanistan, but I have been pleasantly surprised by much of the infrastructure I've seen here. The roads, for example, are beautifully maintained (sample size so far: main roads in and around Delhi, and some of the major thoroughfares connecting Agra's train station with my hotel, Fatehpur Sikri, Sikandra, and the Baby Taj). Cell coverage is excellent, and my Afghan SIM card is even sometimes able to find a network it can play nicely with. Terminal 3 at Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi is, in a word, exquisite; it is by far the prettiest airport terminal I've ever seen, in addition to being quite easy to use for tourists.* The sites and monuments are also spectacular. Don't worry, dear readers--there will be a flickr link posted at the end of the trip for those interested ;).
*There was also NOBODY in line at immigration when I got there, which is undoubtedly skewing my perceptions a bit.
But this blog is, at its heart, about the unusual, remarkable, or downright ridiculous things that its author believes provide insight into cultures and peoples. I've been in India for less than 24 hours (damn you, Kabul Int'l Airport, and your 90-minute delays for NO DISCERNIBLE REASON WHATSOEVER), and already there have been several things that fit the above description.
1. The cows. I already knew that Hindus venerate cows as symbols of Brahma, but I hadn't been expecting to see as many of them as I've been seeing. I also didn't know that the Hindi word for cow is pronounced "cow" (don't even think about asking me how it is spelled). Cows are EVERYWHERE in Agra. I didn't see any in Delhi, but it was nighttime and my cab driver was more interested in pointing out the sights than the fauna to me as we drove by (and rightly so). In Agra, however, you can't go more than a hundred yards without seeing at least one cow tied up in front of a store, or roaming freely in the field...or on the median strip...or on the road. There are also dogs everywhere, although apparently dogs are more kosher in Hinduism than in Islam, which probably explains why Agra's dogs look so much better looked after than Kabul's dogs do. Oddly enough, the vast majority of these cows are chained to posts with chains barely long enough to allow the cows to stand up straight, confining them to maybe a one-meter radius around the post. This seems like an odd way to treat a sacred animal, but who am I to judge?
1a. The monkeys. Monkeys are apparently also sacred, and they roam freely in parts of Agra, although they are far less numerous than the cows. Unlike the cows, I had no idea that monkeys were at all sacred. An odd surprise.
2. The trains. Indian trains are amazing things (I can only speak from experience regarding the AC Second Class carriages). First of all, the classification system for the various levels of service is unbelievably byzantine - there are six or seven classes, not all of which exist on every train, and none of which have any explanations on the official website. Furthermore, there is no indication at the stations where exactly your assigned car is. You apparently are simply supposed to know how exactly the twenty-odd carriages of the train are organized, although it's really rather easy in practice.
The trains themselves, though, are really a lot of fun. I had a "side lower" berth on my train from Delhi to Agra, which meant that I had a cot to myself on one side of the carriage. I could draw a curtain across the entire length of my bed for privacy, and I had a window that ran most of the length of my berth. There were multiple mesh holders for water bottles, papers, and the like; an outlet (shaped, like every outlet I've seen here so far, to be able to accomodate Indian, American, British, *and* European plugs); a reading light, and a switch controlling the overhead light in the corridor right above the berth. The train looked a bit dated, but it was clean and left on time, although an unexplained 20-minute halt just outside Agra station did provide some annoyance. Vendors moved up and down the aisles selling snacks and such, although the fact that they only hawked their wares in Hindi made it somewhat difficult (the "biscuit" guy was far and away the easiest to figure out). Also, shortly after the train pulled out of the station, the Delhi area was hit by a lightning storm, which I got to watch from the comfort of my berth. All in all, it was an excellent way to begin my exploration of India.
3. The contrasts. Much of the subsection of Delhi between the airport and my train station (not the main one for the city) was either tree-lined, high-rent residential or well-designed, high-capacity highway. Most of the monument sights I saw today in Agra were well-maintained and securely guarded--apparently the monument guards are from a prestigious special corps drawn from all branches of the Indian military and containing only the best of the best. And yet, while driving around Agra, the desperate poverty of much of the country's roughly 1.2 billion people was unmistakeable. For example, at the foot of the stairs leading to one of the gates of the mosque complex at Fatehpur Sikri--the tallest gate in India, according to my guide, and certainly a stunning piece of architecture--beggars and young children competed for the attention of the foreigners in squalor made all the more startling by its proximity to the lavish architecture of the monuments. India clearly cares greatly about preserving its cultural heritage: roads for some distance around the Taj are closed to automobile traffic in order to try to lessen the impact of automobile exhaust on the building's white marble structure. But it is exactly this care for the monuments that reinforces the surrounding poverty.
I am not out to demonize the world's largest democracy for failing to provide for every person in its multitudinous citizenry, and the government here is clearly doing a lot of things right. Staying on the monument theme, entrance fees for foreigners to major monuments are, at least in Agra, ten times higher than the fees for Indian nationals--at the Taj, for example, it costs me 500 rupees to get in (a little over $11; unlike the afghani-to-dollar exchange rate, which seems to be eternally pegged at 45-to-1 despite not actually being pegged at all, the rupee-to-dollar rate varies from place to place), but it costs an Indian national only 50 rupees (about $1.20). This makes a lot of sense: it places most of the financial burden of the monuments' upkeep on those who have money (the foreigners) rather than those who have comparatively less (many Indians), while simultaneously ensuring that all but the poorest of Indians will be able to experience and learn about their own heritage. Still, though, the sight of such poverty so close to the splendors of past empires was striking--striking enough that even my own guide, whose job it is to show off India to me, expressed his disappointment at the government for allowing such a situation.
It's been a long day, and it's time for me to kick back and see if Ireland can actually manage to pull off the upset against Bangladesh in the cricket World Cup. More to come soon...
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