Wheels and class

There are many visible indicators of class and wealth in India. You can see it in the way people move, their body language towards each other, the clothes they wear (not just the quality or costliness, but the aesthetics), and in their faces (a browse through the faces on milaap.org, a brilliant site that facilitates micro loans to needy people in India, will show many people for whom the daily toil of life for millions of Indians adds decades to their appearance). And you can also see it in how they get about.

Transportation may not seem a particularly important marker of class or power, particularly in a country where millions identify themselves as poor by proffering a begging bowl. But as any country's economy develops, the need to move about - and the desire to do so in comfort - grows inexorably, and this puts massive stress on infrastructure and inhabitants. In Delhi, with its crowded roads and might-is-right traffic rules, traffic and transportation are becoming one of the most visible battle lines of class conflict. As the city grows, so does its inequality, and this battle looks set to go for a good while yet.

Take this story, for instance. Gaurav Jain, a 26 year old journalist, researching the lives of cycle rickshaw pullers by doing the job himself, was assaulted by a police officer for 'blocking the road'. Before I say anything else I want to say: kudos to Mr. Jain. Most of the time, Delhi seems to consist of a million or so "important" people and countless millions of others who get ignored. The cycle rickshaw pullers, the street hawkers, the hijras tapping on your car window at the traffic lights. Your average car-driving Delhiwalla barely seems aware of the existence of these people, never mind having such an interest in how they live that they'd be willing to take on a tough and - let's face it - demeaning job in order to understand it.

I don't say this to be critical. Anyone who has lived in a big city will understand that urban survival depends on an ability to act as if you're the only person walking down the street, standing on the train, driving to work. There are just too many people. We can't acknowledge them all. And the ones we do acknowledge tend to be those most like us, the ones to whom we can relate. So in Delhi it's no surprise that the aspiring middle classes pay scant attention to the poor guys slogging their guts out dragging a family of five on the back of their bike for 15 rupees. It's the way things are, and after living here a while you find your blinkers tend to come on pretty quick.

Anyway, back to Mr. Jain's story. Following the attack he went to the local police station to make a complaint, but was ignored. "It's strange how much a person's professional standing or profile can affect the way the law treats him", he said. Quite. Somehow I don't think his rickshaw puller colleagues would find it all that strange.

That the rich and privileged can expect better legal redress than the poor and excluded is no surprise. What was interesting to me was the reason for the attack: "blocking the road". Read: getting in the way of the car drivers, who are far more important than you.

This reminded me of another story that came out a few weeks ago, about the ongoing saga of Delhi's bus lanes and the objections from car users that they are causing delays. The quoted comments in the article lay bare the stark class divide here, and the assumptions made by the privileged about the millions of dispossessed Indians (on whom they depend for everything from domestic cleaning to shoe shining). "People" are being delayed by traffic jams because of the bus lanes, argue campaigners. "How does it matter if a peon reaches his office five minutes before time?" asks one. The apparently radical idea that "people" should also include those who use public transport has to be specifically pointed out by a professor from the Indian Institute of Technology.

It should be obvious that when only 10% of a city's inhabitants drive, yet the streets are already clogged to all hell, public transport has to be at least a part of the solution. But the fact that the bus lanes are fighting for their survival is testament to the disproportionate power held by those 10%. Of course, while they appear to be fighting for their own benefit, if they get what they want it will simply ensure a miserable future for everyone: a city even more gridlocked, fume-choked and cacophonous than it is already.

And this is what worries me most about the emerging battles around Delhi's transportation system. It seems to encapsulate a situation where growing inequality leads to class-based battles that belittle ordinary people and lead to the privileged taking decisions in their narrow benefit, rather than recognising the need for development to work for all, not just the "wealth creators".

The result, it seems to me, is usually a set of outcomes that are worse for everyone.  There are parallels to be made here with the increasingly unequal societies in the UK and the US (among others), which in the past 30 years or so have become massively richer, massively less equitable, and arguably a good deal less happy, healthy and secure. Repeating those patterns in a city the size of the Netherlands - let alone a country of 1.3 billion - is a scary prospect.

Indian workplace relationships explained

A friend of mine posted this recently on Facebook and I thought it deserved a share.

For a simple little cartoon, this tells you an awful lot about workplace relationships in India. Note for instance:

• The over-usage of the word "sir". This is not an exaggeration. People really do use it in every single sentence when talking to their boss.
• The complete lack of stress on the face of the late employee (reading back, that sounds like he's dead. But you know what I mean). He knows he's late, he knows his boss will be angry, but it's just how things go. He may even suspect the truth of the matter and know that his being late doesn't actually matter so much. But even though he's happy as Larry, note also:
• The crucial need to make a show of repentance, even if you're blithely sitting on your scooter enjoying a few minutes more of the illusion of freedom.
• The equal need on the part of the boss to make a show of "bossiness".
• The clearly far greater stress levels being experienced by the boss, even though it's the employee who is getting a dressing down. 
• And finally, the completely unexaggerated depiction of Indian traffic at its worst. Though the idea of there being this many stationary vehicles in one place without anyone trying to sell anything is somewhat fanciful.

Hierarchies are really, really important in India (and that's from someone from the UK). The need to maintain the outward appearance of those hierarchies can lead to some pretty surreal situations. I'm sure this one has happened in reality more than once.

Loo confusion

When, a little over a year ago, I arrived for the first time at Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport, I came quite close to getting into trouble before even getting through Customs by walking brazenly into the ladies' loo, to a chorus of horrified shrieks from the ladies therein.

There are few more cringe-inducing experiences than going into the wrong loo. Even though your chances of actually seeing any untoward body parts are practically nil (at least in the man-walking-into-women's-loo case; in the reverse scenario it's a bit more risky), it is drummed into us from the time we're old enough to walk unaided that the Opposite Sex Toilet is forbidden territory. Having my first contact with the local population of India consist of them screaming at me as I beat a hasty retreat was hardly an auspicious beginning to my relationship with the country I would move to some five months later (something I had no idea of at the time).

I'm not denying my own clumsiness, but there are two mitigating circumstances behind my faux pas. Firstly, I'd just got off a long flight and my body clock was telling me I should have been in bed hours ago. Secondly, the authorities at Delhi airport seem to have gone out of their way to increase the possibility of errors like this occurring.

Context: Delhi's airport is new, and sparkling, and on the whole quite a nice place to spend time (which is fortunate for me since I seem to spend half my life there at the moment). It has gleaming walls, and sculptures, and bright and attractive artwork everywhere. The problem is that the airport authorities have applied this rule of attractiveness to something that should, in my view, only ever be purely functional. Viz: the signs for the loos.

This is what the entrances to the various loos at Delhi Airport look like:

(this was taken with my phone, hence not being great quality...whipping out a big clunky camera in a major airport in a security-sensitive country didn't really strike me as a good idea...)

Now this is all very lovely. Definitely more attractive than your average toilet entrance. And therein lies the problem: to the weary traveler, the pictures on the wall look more like another marketing tool for Incredible India than something telling you where you're supposed to go to relieve yourself. Your brain just doesn't process them as something that contains important information relevant to the task at hand. They don't, in short, look like signs.

The situation is not helped by the choice of male model, either. I mean, no offence to the chap in question, but you'd think that if you were going to use a nice photo of a handsome chap for this particular purpose, you'd choose someone as butch and masculine as you can get. Someone who screams (or preferably roars) "this is a MAN's room where MEN do MANLY things".

Not someone with a baby face and dimples, wearing pink and white, and fingering the beads round his neck. There's a bit of facial fuzz there but it's not helping a lot, to be honest. 

I'm not the only one who has this problem. Pretty much every time I go through the airport there's someone standing uncertainly outside, wondering where the signs are and why those nice marketing posters are positioned right at the entrance to toilets.

Anyway, moral of the story: aesthetically pleasing design is wonderful (and if anyone from Heathrow is reading this, I recommend a visit to Delhi). But when it starts getting in the way of functionality, that's a sign that something's wrong. And of all areas in life where functionality is important, the toilet is pretty damn high on the list.

In my view there's absolutely nothing wrong with the below. And it would save a lot of people some excruciating embarrassment.

The drivers of Amritsar

"I have girlfriend. I ask her to marry me many, many times. But always she say no."

Tara, Matt and I made collective sympathetic noises. We were in a taxi on the way into Amritsar from the airport and the driver, Shubha, was proving to be something of a talker. After the usual interrogation about where we were from and what we thought of India, we had moved on to Shubha's own life. He was proud to be the only one working for his taxi company who could drive foreigners - "because only I am speaking English any" - so "I get the bigger tips, yes?" (the last with a hopeful sideways glance at Tara, who had the front seat).

Shubha's love life, though, clearly was not going as well as his business. So why, Tara politely enquired, had his proposals been rejected?

"Her family do not approve. They think is bad marriage. Because we are related."

There was a pregnant pause, punctuated only by the sound of Matt's foot hitting mine in the back seat as we exchanged a "did you hear that the same way I did?" glance. Tara, to do her credit, managed to carry on the conversation with only a slightly strangled tone.

"Oh...so, er, that's considered...a problem then?"

"Yes," Shubha said, sadly shaking his head, "in India is not considered good for relatives to marry."

"Oh. Um. Yes, that doesn't really happen in England either."

"Really?" Shubha perked up momentarily at this apparently surprising news, then slumped back into gloom. "I will never marry another. I will stay alone and I will keep asking her to marry me. When I am 70, if she needs me - I will be there."

None of us had the nerve to ask the question we were all thinking about: exactly how related were they? And Shubha looked so disconsolate about it all that we didn't really have the heart to push him further on the topic. He brightened up a bit when we changed the subject to the World Kabbadi championships, which were happening in Punjab at the time and in which India had just, unsurprisingly, trounced England.

Our encounter with Shubha may have been a trifle disturbing, but it was nothing compared to the auto rickshaw driver who picked us up outside the Golden Temple to take us back to the hotel the following day. What seemed at first to be a natural exuberance and cheerful disposition quickly transpired to be something verging on the lunatic - even for an Indian auto driver. With a grin permanently plastered on his face, he merrily weaved at full speed in and out of the traffic, looking mostly at us through the mirror rather than at the road, occasionally taking his hands off the wheel to salute passing friends. There was a maniacal glint in his eye that had me convinced, as we were thrown around in the back like puppets, that we might not make it back to the hotel alive.

We passed a roadside stall which particularly seemed to delight him. Pointing at it, he leaned back to face us (entirely failing to notice that he'd come within a whisker of flattening a stray dog) and yelled excitedly: "Bhang! You know??!"

For those who don't know (as I didn't at the time), Bhang is a cheap and potent intoxicant made from cannabis, which is legal and popular in India and is frequently consumed in a drink colloquially known as a bhang lassi. Matt, who's a bit more versed in the ways of India than I am, knew what our driver was talking about, and asked (understanding beginning to dawn) if he himself ever frequented said stall.

The driver gave a wicked laugh and said "Twice a day I am going! One in morning, one in evening!"

"So...you've already had one today then?" An elderly lady in a faded sari flattened herself in terror against a wall as our rickshaw careened across her path.

"Hahahahahahahaha! Yes! Very good! I have one half an hour ago!" And on we rocketed, bouncing from one side of the road to the other, while our chauffeur continued to laugh in delight at our discomfiture.

I will never, ever, criticise Delhi auto drivers again. They may drive like nutters, but at least they are not usually high as a kite when doing so.

Delhi roads: expect the unexpected

Delhi's public transport has already been fairly well documented on these pages, but that is only one part of the smorgasbord of vehicles you can encounter on Delhi's streets. One day I will do a longer post about the countless unexpected forms of transport that you can encounter making your way around this city. For the moment, though, here's an example - seen on one of the busiest roads near my house a few days ago when I popped out to the supermarket:

I'm not sure where he was going. He trotted past the supermarket, did a U-turn at a crossroads, went halfway up the flyover you can see in the background, did another U, and then meandered in and out of the honking cars for a bit before stopping to have a chat with a lady selling magazines. For all the world as though he was just out for a recreational canter. On a main road in Delhi. Poor horse.

The thing about horses in Delhi is that you very rarely see them without the kind of velvet-and-tassles get up you see in the photo, although in comparison with some of the ponies I saw in Mumbai the decoration on this one is quite understated (and a lot drier). Cows are so commonplace on the roads that they are hardly worth mentioning, and even elephants (which I've seen a couple of times in the city) seem to be workaday creatures used for haulage. But horses only seem to come out for a special occasion (possibly weddings?), though it appears that once their ceremonial role is over their handlers like to take them sightseeing for a bit.

The horse seemed remarkably unfazed by the hullabaloo of Delhi, even when car horns were going off on all sides of it, but I felt rather sorry for it all the same.

An evening of culture

Delhi has many things going in its favour: great food, beautiful parks, friendly people (until you put them behind the wheel), lively markets...but a thriving theatre scene is not generally seen as one of them. Mumbai and Kolkata are known as India's main centres of the arts, in comparison with which Delhi tends to be seen as a bit of a cultural backwater (as much as you can ever describe a city of 17 million people as such). Most of the theatre that does exist is in Hindi, which hopefully in a year or so will be less of an obstacle than it is now. But for the moment, I have a very limited choice of English language productions.

However, you can't keep a good theatre buff down, so tonight I armed myself with my trusty Time Out and set out for the Akshara Theatre, a venue that according to the Hindustan Times has "a certain feeling of deity in it, a stillness that feels like a temple or a church at vespers." I figured that sounded like the kind of place it would be good to know in this enormous, noisy metropolis.

They were showing a play called The Strange Case of Billy Biswas, about a privileged city dweller who chooses to renounce urban life and take up with the tribal people of Chhattisgarh, a state in East-central India with a large indigenous population. I don't know much about Chhatisgarh, except that it is one of the more unstable states in the country due to an ongoing Maoist insurgency and to conflicts between the indigenous population and the government over its extensive forests and mineral resources. But the play sounded interesting.

Alas, my evening of tribal drama in an atmosphere of sacred peace was well and truly hijacked by the aforementioned metropolis. Misled by my map of Delhi (for the first time, I have to concede) I went to entirely the wrong end of the road on which the theatre is located and ended up wandering around Connaught Place - possibly the most confusingly-laid out piece of urban planning in existence. The local tourist office had never heard of the Akshara, and nor had the first five people I asked for directions.

Finally I found someone who did know it, who plonked me in an auto rickshaw which then spent the next ten minutes moving approximately 100 metres through the nightmarish traffic. Giving up on the rickshaw, I started walking in the direction I understood the theatre to be in, only to give up when, 10 minutes after curtain up, I hit a massive roundabout designed to put off even the most determined pedestrian.

Delhi had thwarted my cultural plans, although I did stumble upon the largest (and clearly thriving) Sikh Gurudwara in the city, Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, which looks fascinating and is definitely somewhere I'd like to go back to:

Anyway, I may have given up on Chhattisgarh, but as it turned out Chhattisgarh had not given up on me. Re-checking TO showed that a performance of music from there was being staged at the India Habitat Centre, somewhere I was already familiar with. It's a beautifully landscaped business, culture and hotel centre near the Lodi Gardens, with a red brick architecture that owes nothing to India's heritage (and is probably not to everyone's taste) but which I find very pleasing in a similar way to Robinson College (which is also not universally popular).

Anyway, I digress. I just about had time to get there in time for the concert, so I hopped into an autorickshaw (after rejecting an offer from the first driver I approached to charge me three times the going rate and take me via Gandhi's burial place and the Red Fort, neither of which are particularly on the way). (On the way, incidentally, we drove past India Gate and the Raj Path, and in the warm evening light with families and friends chatting on the wide lawns, I have to admit it looked rather idyllic. Maybe my previous harsh judgement about the place was just due to going at the wrong time of day.)

The concert was interesting. I wouldn't go crazy for the music, although there was some impressive drumming and a really beautiful performance on a high-pitched pipe. But the costumes pretty much stole the show:

There was also some enjoyable singing from the lady in the middle here. At the same time. she and the lady next to her expertly kept up a rather complex 5/4 rhythm on their drums, until the chap on the other side of her joined in rather too enthusiastically and at a 25% quicker tempo, earning some truly dagger-eyed looks from her...

And there was some athletic dancing from these chaps, including at one point a move reminiscent of 80s break dancing, when they planted one hand on the ground, held themselves horizontally and propelled themselves round in circles, keeping the drum beat going with the other hand the entire time. It was really quite  impressive.

But my favourite person on stage had to be this chap, who looked about twice the age of everyone else on stage and had a rather perplexed air about him for the whole performance. I'm not sure where the string attached to those birds on the end of his instrument goes, but as he hit the bottom of it they pecked and bobbed along in time to the music.

And the night was rounded off by this lady, from Uttarakhand in the Himalaya, who sang traditional songs in a rich and lovely alto, though still marked by that warbling, nasal quality that characterises Indian singing and which I have to confess I still find a bit difficult to listen to.

Having thus established my credentials as a connoisseur of world culture, I rather spoiled matters by eating at the All-American Diner, which serves hot dogs, peanut butter shakes and nachos (though the burgers are strictly of the chicken or bean variety, naturally) and which looks like this:

But the food was damn good. You don't have to be American to enjoy a big ol' plate of stodge (with a big ol' glass of stodge on the side) from time to time.

Anyway, I may have failed in my first attempt to visit the theatre, but the evening did make me even more curious to learn about India's tribal areas (they caught my attention at the national museum too). Another thing to add to the very long list of must-dos I am acquiring...

Road trip reflections

I'm writing this in a hotel in Hisar, about 140 miles west of Delhi in the state of Haryana. I'm en route to Sirsa, a town about 60 miles east of the Pakistan border, where we are involved in a project. This is my first time out of Delhi since I moved here, and only the second time I've been outside of a major city in India (the last time was in Kerala in January).

There's not an awful lot in Haryana to interest travellers. It's unrelentingly flat and agricultural, and our route here was a repetitive series of fields punctuated by identikit dusty villages. My attempt to get on with some work was thwarted by the variable quality of the roads (a couple of shuddering potholes and my stomach resolutely refused to let me look at any kind of screen or printed matter), and looking out of the window quickly lost its appeal (brightly coloured saris, playing kids and stoic cattle are all picturesque in their own way, but after a couple of hours tend to become a bit less exciting).

So maybe that's why I've been a bit reflective today. I have been thinking anyway - as I imagine has everyone - about the horrendous attacks in Norway last week, and I had ample opportunity for further ruminating on the journey here. So apologies that this post is going to be a bit glooomy, but this is what's on my mind.

I can't help but compare my reaction to the events in Oslo with my reaction to 9/11, almost exactly 10 years ago. For me, the circumstances are quite similar: in both cases I had recently arrived in a foreign country (in 2001 it was Korea, where I arrived in August), was feeling to some degree bewildered and isolated, and was staying in a large, mostly empty and somewhat cavernous apartment.

I remember very clearly watching the news coverage from the USA and feeling like the bottom had dropped out of the world. I didn't know anyone in the 9/11 attacks and I don't know anyone hurt or killed in Norway, but despite the distance of events in 2001 they provoked an extraordinarily profound sense of fear and confusion as I watched the towers fall in my lonely flat. I don't think any event before or since has shocked me to the core so utterly - even including the July 2005 bombs in London, which of course struck much closer to home.

My reaction this time has been different. Shock, yes, dismay, sympathy for those killed and their families, and concern that such awful events could happen in such an unlikely place - but my sense of horror and terror has not approached what I felt in 2001.

There are plenty of reasons. New York and Washington are, of course, iconic and familiar in a way that Oslo is not, so even though in 2001 I had only visited New York once (just as now I have only been to Oslo once) I felt that I knew it well. The sheer dramatic impact of watching those two behemoths of capitalism at the World Trade Centre topple could not but magnify the impact on people watchin events unfold. And while we didn't expect Norway to be attacked because it is largely peaceful, we didn't expect 9/11 because, at the time, the USA seems invulnerable. Both events shook what we thought we knew about the world, but the implications of 9/11 seemed mind-boggling (more so, perhaps, at the time than in hindsight, but still true today).

On a personal level, 9/11 came at a time when I was personally quite vulnerable and unhappy. I don't in any way wish to compare my experience with that of people who were directly affected by the events that day, but the loneliness and isolation I was feeling at that time seemed to double in intensity - not only was I out on my own in a strange place, but suddenly the whole world seemed a lot more strange and hostile than it had before. Of course this was mostly just a raw emotional reaction brought on by being at a difficult time in my life, but my memory of those feelings tells me they were very real. Today I am in a very different frame of mind and am much more able to deal with what the world has to throw at me.

Oddly enough, I don't think that my different reactions are down to the difference in the number of people killed in the two sets of attacks. We all know that numbers cease to mean very much beyond a certain point. It's hard to comprehend the tragedy of a thousand people being killed, and much easier to engage emotionally with one death. We just don't have the emotional resources to apply grief and horror proportionally to events of greater scale.

But my fear is that all of this rationalisation is nonsense, and that actually I've just become accustomed to random events of great violence springing up in unexpected places. I grew up in a country that was regularly the victim of terrorist attacks. All my life I have known to ask about unattended bags and, to this day, I often pop litter into my bag to dispose of at home out of habit rather than look for a rubbish bin (which were frequently absent in the UK in the 1980s as they were favoured places to plant a bomb).

But in my adult life the frequency, scale and spread of terrorist attacks has grown, and technological change has changed the nature of security threats in some terrifying directions. Attacks from Iraq to Manila, Mumbai to Oklahoma City, seem to be a standard feature of news reports today in a way I don't remember them being before (am I right here, or am I romanticising a past that has always been just as violent?)

I don't want to live my life in fear. But at the same time I don't want to lose my capacity to respond emotionally to the deaths of innocent people. If this starts to seem normal, that's when we really should be scared.

Pomp and circumambulation

I did quite a lot today. Having decided on another "tourist Saturday", I hopped on the Metro and headed up to the heart of New Delhi, the Rajpath, at the centre of the bombastic capital designed by Lutyens for British India and still the heart of power in India. Over the course of the day I ambled up and down the Rajpath and Raisina Hill (which leads up to the home of the Indian president), carried on to the National Museum, and then walked through the leafy avenues of New Delhi to lovely Lodi Gardens, through the park and on to the India Habitat Centre for dinner at the (impressively accurate) "All American Diner", before hopping back on the Metro at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium (the one built for the Commonwealth Games).

That's not a bad walk for this climate, and I have to admit by the time I got to the park I was flagging. The inhabitants of Delhi think I am bonkers for wanting to walk anywhere at all. My landlord, who is lovely, tried and failed this morning to hide his view that my tendency to walk the 10 minute journey from my flat to the Metro station to get around town was a plain indication of my lunacy. In Delhi, the only people who walk are those who have to (this is still, it should be added, an awful lot of people). Everyone else is either in their car, on their bike, sitting in a tuk tuk, taxi or rickshaw, or driving them. And if you're white and anywhere NEAR a road, however much you think you are just pottering along minding your own business, what you are actually doing (as far as all the tuk tuk and rickshaw drivers are concerned) is carrying a large sign that says:

I AM A DESPERATE, LOST FOREIGNER WHO WILL PAY THREE TIMES THE GOING RATE. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE FOLLOW ME DOWN THE STREET RINGING YOUR BELL INCESSANTLY UNTIL I COME TO MY SENSES AND GET IN YOUR RICKSHAW. IF I SAY NO, I DON'T REALLY MEAN IT. KEEP TRYING.

The thing is, Delhi is actually for the most part quite a walkable city - especially the parts I visited today. Admittedly crossing some of the roads can be a hair-raising experience, but with a decent map navigation is unproblematic and it compares favourably with walking in a lot of other Asian mega-cities (I still shudder a bit at my memories of trying to walk round Bangkok).

But try telling that to the people who live here. I'm not the first person to experience this bafflement in the face of someone who actually enjoys being able to walk around the city at my own pace - Sam Miller's book Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity is based on his experiences of doing just that for a year (nice life these journos have) and I'm pretty sure he had to fight off legions of rickshaw wallahs every day.

Anyway, enough about walking. Having packed in a lot of stuff I have a lot to blog about, so I am going to be sneaky and use a lot of it as ammo for future days when I can't think of anything decent to write (see Tuesday and Wednesday this week). So for now I'll just talk about the Rajpath and New Delhi.

I think of all the bits of Delhi I've seen so far, the Rajpath is far and away my least favourite. Don't get me wrong, it's very impressive. The buildings are magnificent and suitably awe-inspiring; the scale of the broad mile-long avenue running from the Rashtrapati Bhavan (the President's home, formerly home to the Viceroy of India) to India Gate is as immense as anything I've seen anywhere else in the world and makes the Champs Elysee look like a back alley. But the whole place just feels wrong.

Part of it is that there's just too much space:

The Rajpath and its surrounding lawns are so wide (I'd say at least 120 metres, though I'm not much good at estimating such things) that walking there, even when the sun is not too bad, makes you feel kind of like this traffic light (which is situated at Vijay Chowk at the bottom of Raisina Hill):

That is, isolated, exposed, and liable to get utterly drenched should the monsoon rains make an appearance (they did, but I was rescued by a friendly tuk tuk driver who - bless him - offered to take me somewhere for free as "it is a human right to stay dry". I got him to take me round the corner to the National Museum and paid 20 rupees for a 45 second trip).

The second thing is the lack of people. I know this was a Saturday and I'm sure it's busier during the week, but I can't quite believe that enough people ever come here (except for the big parade on Republic Day) to fill that yawning vacuum of space. Today there were a few lacklustre guards, some underwhelmed-looking tourists, a few families lounging in the grass, and a lonely ice cream man (I bought an ice lolly and then came back for another). Combined with the self-important architecture and the vast expanses of tarmac and patchy grass, the lack of people gives the place an austere, desolate air quite unlike the rest of the city.

In fact, although the Indians have taken the colonial infrastructure here and made it their own, that's the problem: it doesn't fit. It looks and feels like a massive colonial folly (I don't include all of New Delhi in this, by the way, a lot of which is really quite lovely) and is at odds with the packed, hardworking Indian city around it that is by turns elegant and squalid in equal measure. I don't blame India for doing this: in fact they are to be praised for embracing history and taking charge of it, rather than seeking to erase it (as in Seoul, where Japanese colonial buildings were torn down without regard for historical or aesthetic value). I just find the whole ensemble rather alienating (come to think of it, maybe that was the idea).

(On a side note, all my guide books tell me that Lutyens wanted the Rashtrapati Bhavan to be visible all the way up the Rajpath, and was really annoyed when he realised it only comes into view when you get towards the top of Raisina hill. Having been there, I have this to say: Lutyens was a bloody idiot. If you stick a big building on top of a hill but set it several hundred metres back from the summit edge, it's going to have an impact on its visibility from below. It's not rocket science. Greatest British architect, my aunt Fanny.)

Anyway, here are a few more photos of the Rajpath area if I haven't totally put you off (by the way, the National Museum and Lodi Gardens were both amazing, so subsequent posts will get a lot less critical...)

The Viceroy moved out, the President moved in. If you ask me, it's hard to see why either of them would need so much space.

*Insert metaphorical caption about Indian democracy*

No presidential residence is complete without pachydermal topiary.

Get out of the road, crazy white man!

I was going to upload a couple more but the connection speed has just dropped through the floor, and this post is probably long enough already anyway. Don't worry, lots more to come!

A brief tour of Defence Colony

I went round my neighbourhood with a camera today. Unfortunately, I feel so self conscious as a sweaty foreigner snapping away that I tend to try to take them reallyreallyreally quickly. This usually means they are completely out of focus. However I did manage a few that were half decent - will try again this weekend and try not to be so neurotic this time.

Another poor bugger dragging a ton of stuff around on a bike. Why don't these guys have thighs like tree trunks?

There are a lot of lovely parks near my flat. Note to self: buy badminton equipment. Further note to self: learn how to play badminton.

Start of the market area. At this very specific spot it smells horrible, and I'm not sure why. Three feet further on and it's gone. Weird.

By far the cheapest way to get fruit and veg in Defence Colony. I just wish I could work out how to know where exactly he'll be at any one time.

The main street in the market. The middle is quite a cute little park (see below).

Sagar restaurant, purveyor of the aforementioned masala dosa, God bless 'em. A couple of doors down is Cafe Coffee Day, which is a big chain here (and doesn't charge 240 rupees for a coffee).

Defence Bakery. Best (only?) baklava in Delhi and some truly amazing-looking cakes and chocolates, which I have so far resisted (it's bad enough that here I apparently have a size 34 waist).

This is the little park in the middle of the market area. Generally occupied by sleeping old men.

This is a little roadside stall round the corner from my flat (not far from the man with the ironing board, who I haven't snapped). Very handy indeed for the basics in life.

No, no, this one is SUPPOSED to be blurry. It's an action shot.

Right, that's it for the moment. I was going to post about the joys of Hinglish and settling into an Indian office, but I think that will wait for tomorrow - these photos took a horribly long time to upload (me and technology again) and bed is calling.

And DAMN I wish my TV was working so I could watch some of the tennis... :-(

Commuting

Delhi is vast, and getting around can be a struggle, though not as much as it used to be (so I'm told). Anyway, here's a wee post about the extremes of Delhi locomotion.

I used a cycle rickshaw for the first time yesterday. This has got to be one of the toughest jobs in the world:

I tend to avoid them because I feel so damn conspicuous and, well, white, sitting all sweaty and imperious in the back while the poor bugger on the bike heaves his way to my destination for a few crappy rupees gives me a bad case of the heeby-jeebies (remember that liberal guilt thing I need to get over?). But yesterday I had been shopping for various necessities around the house and kind of overdid it (it was hot, dammit) and not seeing any auto rickshaws about, this seemed like the best option.

Yeah, I felt bad. Especially since my accumulated goods added a good few kilograms to the load (which was already heavier than it should be, on which more later). Fortunately, such niggles can be cast out by the magic process known as Giving A Large Tip. He'd earned it.

At the other end of the scale, behold the Delhi metro, on which I had my virgin experience today:

Oooh, it's nice. It's sleek, it's roomy, it's air conditioned, and best of all the tickets are basically tiddlywinks. Most of it is elevated, and the stations stand out above the Delhi skyline like immense palaces or temples to the gods of commuterland. There's the slight annoyance of having to go through a scan machine and pat-down every time you use it, but otherwise I was seriously impressed (and, I might add, safe).

My favourite thing about the metro was the announcements. Some were comfortingly familiar (they say "mind the gap"!), others seemed to my jaded English ears to come from a different age (I don't think the Tube will be instructing male passengers to "vacate those seats reserved for ladies" any time soon). All delivered in Hindi and perfect, upper-class English with an Indian twist, while an endless landscape of temples and high rises, parks and slums unfolds before you.

London Underground? You can keep it.

Arriving

So I finally made it to India. I've been here for two and a half days now, which has been just enough time to get an internet connection sorted and start to find my way around Defence Colony, the little, green corner of Delhi I now call home.

The beginning was not auspicious. Having slept dreadfully on the plane, I arrived at about 10.30 on Friday morning with a strong desire to check into a five star hotel, have a long bath and book a masseur. Unfortunately I had instead to go to my new apartment, which was likely to be scantily furnished if at all and which would certainly lack a masseur. However, before I could do so, I had to find it.

The Delhi street address system resembles the Seoul street address system in the following way: they are both insane. As in Seoul, Delhi neighbourhoods are divided up into sub-units, within which houses are numbered. As in Seoul, there is no discernable logic in the way in which this is done, meaning that if you don't happen to know exactly where unit C413 is, you could spend a good hour driving round before you hit upon it.

My driver did not know where unit C413 was.

Another thing about India is that if you ask someone for directions, they will give them to you whether or not they have the first clue where the place is.

My driver asked for directions about 15 times.

Altogether I was quite proud of myself for staying calm and using the time to think about how I would amusingly convey the experience in the present blog post. We made it eventually, and I was happy to find that my apartment did in fact have furniture (albeit with a touch of the 1970s about it) and functioning bathrooms (albeit with one mysteriously missing toilet seat).

It's hot. Seriously hot. It's pre-monsoon here, so the height of summer has yet to be broken by the rains (though we have had a couple of storms which in the UK would be thought significant). The problem with heat is that it slows you down, which when you have a thousand and one things to do on arriving in a new country is a bit of a problem. I've developed a pattern over the last couple of days of doing two or three things, then stopping for a juice or a coffee. Fortunately there is an excellent market near me with a couple of nice air conditioned cafes that don't object to sweaty westerners visiting every couple of hours.

So far I've done pretty well in terms of getting essentials sorted. Groceries are expensive, at least in Defence Colony, so I need to work out a better place to go shopping. And I haven't quite figure out how to attach the toilet seat (which eventually turned up) to the toilet. On the plus side, I don't need to worry about ironing, because there is a man with an ironing board who stands on the corner by my local park and does shirts for 5 rupees each (about 7 p).

Words can't really express how glad I am that this man exists.

The rhythms of Indian life are so totally different. I doubt I will ever get used to the existence of "servants" or be comfortable with the way in which such relationships are conducted here. I already knew this of course, and knew I would have to put aside my liberal prejudices and accept certain roles to which I am not accustomed. But this is going to take practice. When I leave my flat, for instance, it's quite clear that I am not to latch the gate behind me. This is one of the many diverse duties of Santosh, who is for want of a better term the security guard. Invariably as I emerge from the gate, Santosh is already trotting towards it to close it behind me. When I insisted on closing it myself my reward was a look made up of equal parts reproach and hurt.

I have not closed it myself again since.

Anyway, I don't want to start all this off with an enormous post so I will save the rest of the long, rambling discussion I have in mind for future entries. Love to all back home...

Chris