Thoughts about India - jim

For years I have looked forward to going to India, usually with thoughts of getting to know a ancient and esoteric culture. Why do I always let myself think in such generalizations? As usual what I found in India were a lot of ordinary people trying to make a life for themselves and trying to make sense of the advantages and disadvantages that life has given them. In other words I found the same people that live everywhere. They all speak different languages, look a little different, do things a little differently (we call this culture), and are either richer or poorer, but other than that they are all just plain, or not so plain, human beings. Some of them are good, some bad; some industrious, some lazy: some big, some small: some smart, some not so smart, you get the idea, there are differences from individual to individual but we are all basically the same in our humanity. So that was my strongest impression of India, as it has been of every other country I've ever visited, but there were plenty of other impressions that India and this trip made on me which I will now try to summarize.

As a disclaimer I would like to note that at this point, after two months in India, what I observed, what I read and what I learned from conversations with Indians and others have all run together and formed the impressions I will be writing about. Where I remember specifically where the thought came from I will mention it but one thing I can tell you for sure they didn't all come full formed from just my observations. Most of my impressions are at this point a combination of all these sources of information which my mind as formed into what I now call "my" impressions. They are mine only in the sense that it was my mind that made the connections.

India is huge! Even today when I look at it on a map, there hanging off the bottom of Asia, it doesn't look that huge, but it is. Part of my impression of its size definitely comes from the slowness of travel in India. If you don't fly, you end up traveling by train and bus, the roads aren't so good so the buses are slow, and they sometimes break down; and the trains, especially the local lines, don't travel much faster than the buses, but they are a whole lot more comfortable, we usually took the lowest price sleeper class. As an example, our train from Delhi to Bangalore, which was one of the fastest trains in India, took 30 hours and there is a lot of India still north of Delhi and south of Bangalore.

India is ancient! To visit a historical site with 1000 year old buildings is nothing, things only really get old in this part of the world when you go back 2000 years. Buddhism and the Jain religion were started by men who were born about 640 BCE, and they were born into a culture that was already fully formed, in fact Hinduism looks upon both religions as simple reform movements with the Hindu religion. The exact dates are debatable but it is generally agreed that clearly Indian history goes back to around 3000 BCE. Buildings like the Taj Mahal and Akbar's fort are almost modern in comparison.

India is full! Especially in the north,twice we traveled by train and a little by jeep and bus across the middle of Northern India, Uddar Pradesch and Bihar, and it was just full of people. I had, of course, always read about the great population density of India but to see it out the window is another thing. In this part of India you never saw one person, it was always 30 or 40 people, no matter how seemingly small the town you were going through. Interestingly, this was brought home most clearly to me when, during the last two weeks of our trip, we traveled south. You could literally see at a glance that there were fewer people around, despite the fact that by most other measures even the south of India is pretty densely populated.

India is full of religions! Lets start with the main ones, Hinduism, Islam, Jain, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Christian, Buddhism, Judaism, and I am sure that I am leaving out a few. This doesn't even mention the long philosophical history of agnosticism and atheism in India, atheism is even one of the accepted schools of Hinduism. Religion in India is very public, it is not unusual to see religious practices in progress on almost any street. Unlike the USA, where we generally confine our religious practices to one day of the week and it all happens indoors, the Hindu's, for example, have small shrines or temples seemingly everywhere and most often you will see one, a few or many praying or worshiping at these holy places. In fact we saw places where roads were routed around small local shrine, in one place where the most direct path of the road would have been through the temple the road split with one lane going around each side leaving the temple in an island in the middle of the road. At least externally religion is an integral part of the lives of India's citizens. There seems to be among most Indians a great deal of tolerance of other religions, life in a country with so many religions would be impossible without this tolerance. This doesn't mean that intolerance is non existent, recent and past history proves that it exists, but it is most often confined to fringe groups, and/or politicians looking for an advantage. It appeared to me that religion came in two flavors in India, as it does in most other places. There is the intellectual brand and the everyday brand. The intellectual brand goes back three or four millennia and is one of the most complete and deep found anywhere in the world, this brand is found in the universities, the monasteries and especially the bookshops of India, but not very much on the streets. The everyday brands of religion in India is found on the streets of the big cities and in the shrines and temples of every village in the country and it is an emotional and visceral form of religion. It is worship rather than thinking, faith rather than understanding. Both forms are important to each other while at the same time being separate from each other in every day life.

India is rich and poor - all at once. India, especially in the south, is building high tech office parks by the hundreds and the people who work in these buildings are making very good salaries for the local economy. At the same time India has a very low literacy rate, much lower in the north, and the illiterate live much as there forefathers did 500 or a thousand years ago. I found it often difficult to think of India as one country, because these people live such different lives both economically, socially and intellectually.

India is bureaucratic. Boy is it ever!! We sometimes complain about the bureaucracy in the U.S., but all it takes is a few weeks in India to realize how good we have it here in respect to bureaucracy. We could see this very clearly and as travellers we had very little interaction with government agencies, mainly the trains and the post office. But we would often here Indians talk about how long it took them to get this or that paper and how much it cost them to grease the wheels to get the paper at all.

I'm sure that in a few weeks I will have many more thoughts that I could have added to this post, and I will add posts as new conclusions come to mind, but for now the necessity to get my life up and running again in the states is dominating my mind and time. Adam's mom, Shiela, sent me this link to an article about culture shock by the travel writer Rick Steves which I'd like to pass on to everyone. He explains it very well I think.