Day Eleven:
February 17, 2005: Delhi
New Delhi felt different from the other cities we'd seen. Wide avenues, lined with trees; parks and greenspace. The usual bevy of trishaws, but here they're all green and yellow. It feels urban, modern, almost like north London.
We spent a while at the National Gallery of Modern Art. The best stuff there was the wing of new acquisitions, contemporary Indian pieces. Some were frustratingly derivative, but some were really fresh and original and cool. One of my favorites was called "Three cows," a large hyper-real painting of three parked bicycles laden with tin milk jugs.
We did some shopping, then hung out a while at India Gate -- another Arc-de-Triomphe-like monument. Having started our trip at Gateway to India, it seemed right to end with India Gate! The park around it is vibrant and green, and filled with Indian tourists relaxing; vendors sell cotton candy, bhel puri, peanuts.
Of course, relaxing there turned out to be impossible. Because we're white, we're always objects of fascination in India, and the India Gate park was thronged with little kids who eventually surrounded us chanting "money, money, money." We got up, moved to a new location, and got bugged by kids seeking money there too. Also by vendors. Some, the shoeshine boys and nutsellers, were bugging the Indians as well; others, like the girl who wanted me to pay her to get henna designs on my hands, were only soliciting from obvious Westerners. It got pretty frustrating; we just wanted to sit on the grass and read our books! But since that wasn't possible, we left.
We spent a while walking near Connaught Place, a busy shopping district in New Delhi. (We opted to skip Old Delhi altogether: we didn't have the energy for another fort or another oxcart-crowded bazaar.) We strolled an underground bazaar, a labyrinth of concrete passageways lined with shops (we bought half a dozen pirated dvds, which may or may not work on our dvd-player, but it was fun to browse for them anyway) and then spent a while in the park atop the bazaar: grass, flowerbeds, trash, a walkway made of broken concrete slabs. Here too we were targets for vendors (touts, ear-cleaners, shoeshine boys, beggars) but we actually managed to tell them to go away, so we sat for a while, watching the bustle of the city going by and talking about race, class, and travel.
That day we talked a lot about those things, actually. We agreed that the fact that we were beginning to find the beggars and touts frustrating was probably a sign that it was time to go home. We talked about authentic encounters, how difficult it is to have them across the chasms of race and class separating us from our surroundings, the difference between business travel and pleasure travel (and between travel and tourism).
Late in the day we stopped for a snack from one of the ubiquitous roadside vendors: puffed rice, mmm.
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And then we returned to the Claridges, where we sat on their beautiful lawn (protected from the bustle of the road by palms and hedges), sipped fresh lime soda, and one at a time ducked inside to change into our travelling clothes in the lobby's posh restrooms.
We met our friend Atanu Dey for dinner, which was fantastic. (The food was fine. The company was superlative.) He is a philosopher who pursued a PhD in economics at Berkeley to answer the question "Why is India poor?" We talked about that, naturally; and also about blogging, how a country's greatest strength may be its greatest weakness, and being a person who belongs in two worlds at once. It was a profound treat to begin and end our trip with a blogger dinner; I continue to be delighted and warmed by our Indian friends' hospitality.
Then we began the long trip home.
Or, back to the index.