Freshnosed andinshock Chaotic, traumatic, surprising and contradictory; Catrlona Gray describes her early impressions of New Delhi
Facing page, top: The seatbelt-Iess Ambassador taxis would later prove luxurious compared to door-less autorickshaws. Bottom: A bird's eye view of the ceaseless streets
FROM THE moment we arrived in Delhi airport, the change in atmosphere was palpable. Despite it being the cold season, it was still far hotter, and the air much drier than it ever gets in Ireland. Even the view from the aeroplane window suggested a promise of what was to come: a wide expanse of reddish ground, dotted with the occasional dusty green tree, the panorama punctuated by clusters of low, white concrete buildings. Outside the airport buildings, the culture shock really struck, as we searched for our taxi amidst the throngs of people milling about and shouting to each other in a mix of Hindi and English. There were a surprisingly small number of tourists, all of whom looked very out of place amongst the chaotic bustle of the small dusty area outside the airport. The taxi ride to the hostel was my first experience of Delhi driving. The taxi driver drove his 1950s style, very battered Ambassador at a breakneck speed, beeping his horn constantly as he swerved between lanes of traffic, and displaying a casual disregard for any of the usual rules of the road. Still fresh off the plane at this point, the lack of seatbelts in the back was a bit unnerving, although in comparison to the auto-rickshaw rides that would be our primary mode of transport through-
out our stay, this taxi-ride was sheer opulence. We were staying in Pahar Ganj, which is right in the centre of New Delhi, and is one of the biggest tourist markets, mainly due to its close proximity to the railway station. Picture thousands of people crammed into a very small area, filthy streets lined with stalls covered in brightly covered souvenirs, with beggars, traders and random men all extremely eager to assist you in parting with your newly acquired rupees as you drag your suitcase behind you and desperately try to find your hostel which is located down one of countless, unidentifiable, dodgy-looking side streets. The stalls are nearly exclusively run by men, who spit effusively and constantly, and stare blatantly at any tourist, particularly the female ones. After much trauma, we eventually found the hostel, and immediately embarked upon an argument with the manager regarding the price of the rooms. Money seems to be everyone's overriding obsession - in Pahar Ganj at least - and haggling is obligatory, as prices are automatically hiked up for tourists. Whilst in India, we had to talk and think about money all the time. It was a constant issue, despite the fact that the prices involved were often
Left: The autorickshaw, our main source of transport - and haggling disputes
ridiculously small when converted into euro. We frequently spent ages haggling with a rickshaw driver in order to get a reduction of 10 or 20 rupees, which is the equivalent of 16 and 31 cent. Taken out of context, it seems incredibly miserly to quibble about such tiny sums of money, but it was more a matter of principle than anything else, as it seemed wrong to have to pay four or five times the price that an Indian would pay for the same journey. The different value of money is also something that seems particularly unique to India. The division between rich and poor India is unbelievable, with people surviving on as little as one rupee per day on one hand, while by contrast a night in the plusll Imperial hotel could set you back up to 80,000 rupees. India has a disparity between rich and poor that is non-existent in the West: the very structure of our society does not permit such an extreme gap between poverty and affluence. The sheer size of India's population, however, enables such contrasts to exist, and it was one of the aspects of our stay that struck most strongly. We went to India a week after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and although I was not particularly aware of it at the time having never been to India before, looking back now it is clear that they did have some impact
on our stay. There were quite a lot of security checks - we had to go through metal detectors and be searched not only at airports and when going to see national monuments, but when going into shopping malls and even when we went to the cinema. Having no conception of what was "normal" in India, I accepted this as standard procedures, but in retrospect, the atmosphere was quite tense, there were less tourists than expected (although, to be fair, it wasn't the tourist season) and all three of us noticed the number of security guards who seemed to be present everywhere. Delhi itself is one of the most surprising and contradictory places I've ever visited. It is an assault on the senses: in the bostel the noise of car horns and shouting was in constant competition with the Hindi film music emanating from the room across the hall, and walking down the street it was impossible not to notice the aroma of spices and cooking that mingled with the smell of incense and cow dung. Throughout the course of our stay in India, the culture difference continued to reassert itself, and it became increasingly apparent that, given the enormity of the country and the way the society and economy is structured, our decision to write about "Development and India" would prove to be a far harder task than we had initially thought.
Right: Main Bazaar, Pahar Ganj: Our home - and that of many backpackers and tourists - for the duration of our stay.
Our eyes have beenopened
Some final thoughts from Catrlona Gray on this trip and the problems we encountered in Delhi.
REFLECTING UPON such an intensely eye-opening trip just emphasised the diversity of the problems that India faces, and also how little it is possible to know about India, as a visitor. Personally, I felt a terrible feeling of being completely unqualified to write about it, although I am not sure whether anyone could ever be in a position to write authoritatively about a subject as broad as "Development and India". India is huge; the country is home to approximately 1.13 billion people and Delhi alone has a population roughly three times that of Ireland. There are so many different aspects of India that it would be impossible to ever fully understand all of them. What the trip to Delhi did do was open my eyes to the enormity of the country and the incredible complexity of the problems that India faces. Having been told that it was a third world country, it came as a surprise to see the abundance of shopping malls and five-star hotels. These showed a very different side to India than the one so often propagated by charitable organisations. The country seems to be comprised out of countless layers, from the amazingly rich to extremely poor and everything in between. India is not only the most poverty-stricken place that I have ever seen, but also the wealthi-
est. From an outsider's perspective, it seems incredible that all these different layers manage to co-exist, and that the wealthy and the impoverished live at such close proximity to one another. It is common to find slums directly outside private gated residences, and barefoot children knocking on the darkened windows of expensive, chauffeur-driven cars. While we were in Delhi, we spoke to Amarendra Singh from the World Bank, who explained the structure of Indian society and the imbalances which exist within it, saying that there is still huge inequality between the sexes which sees girls being taken out of school much earlier than their male counterparts, and he also noted the caste system which still survives and creates further divisions. The sheer size of India also means that there is a huge difference in living conditions between regions as each region can vary significantly in everything from customs, language, religion, and even the different food that they cook. There is such extraordinary diversity in India that it is almost impossible to make general observations about the development of the country as a whole. The thing that was most striking was the scale of the problems that Delhi is experiencing. Having seen the head-
quarters of Prayas, and having been shown around several of the schools, it was clear how much of a need there was to incorporate more children into the educational system, and improve the extremely basic facilities that the children who are already in Prayas and state-schools have. In the schools that we saw, there were about forty children of all ages packed into a single classroom, which was roughly the size of the average office in Trinity's Arts Block. The children had no tables or chairs, and it didn't seem as if they even had enough books or stationary to go around. Despite the best efforts of their teachers, it seems impossible that they could receive a proper education in such an overcrowded and under-facilitated environment. The efforts of the individual seem
to be merely a drop in the ocean given the enormity of the problems that exist, even in an organisation like Prayas. We only saw a tiny aspect of the challenges that India faces, but it was enough to open our eyes to the magnitude of the overall difficulties that exist within the country. To really understand the problems that India experiences, it is necessary to view them from an Indian rather than a Western perspective, which is extremely difficult as an outsider. India is evolving and changing at a rapid pace, and at the moment has an economy that is thriving as much as our own is struggling. A week spent in Delhi has not provided any definitive answers to the questions that we came with, but it did draw our attention to the scale of the social and economic issues that India is experiencing.
Below: Nightclubs, such as this one in trendy Basant Lok, are part of the rich people's India, which often backs right onto poor street dwellings. Right: Pahar Ganj's Main Bazaar never fell silent, even late into the night.