Category: Delhi

Cairo may have been Hustle City, but Delhi must be the Hustle Capital of the world. I sort of knew this would be the case, judging from my experience with Indian merchants in other parts of the world. About the only people who will hustle you in Singapore, for example, are Indian tailors. They always start out casually chatting with you as you walk down the street. They like to act like they’re just sociable people who are interested in visitors. You learn to never answer questions like “is this your first visit?” in the affirmative because you quickly realize that it will only encourage them. The next thing you’ll know, they’ll be taking advantage of your naiveness while they herd you into their cousin’s shop.

So sure enough, in the lions den of hustle (so to speak), I found Delhi to have the most persistent hustlers I’ve ever come across. Now I had long heard that India was notorious for its hassles in getting from place to place and dealing with the crowds, but I found the hassle nothing compared to the hustle. In fact, the biggest hassle was from hustlers trying to “save” you from the alleged hassle of travelling through India.

At times it would get so bad walking around Connaught Place that I would have to retreat to my room back in the guest house. Not only did people constantly try to steer me into some travel agent or “emporium” of Indian relics, they would do so in such a persistent manner that I couldn’t help but become extremely protective of myself. I would initially try to respond politely, but when that only seemed to encourage them, I would end up snapping. I later found myself snapping at people on the street the second they opened their mouths with lines like “You look like a movie star!”

This was interspersed with beggars walking along side me and pleading for my money as well. Even some of the begging appeared to be hustling. I spotted families of beggars walking down the street before they saw me and they seemed to be healthy, happy people. Their kids were smiling and running around playing with each other. As soon as I came into view of them, however, that would all immediately change and they would start their groaning and begging act. It was quite disturbing.

The saddest incident happened when a group of kids tried to persuade me to visit a travel agent. I kept telling them I wasn’t interested, but they kept persisting with their sales pitch. I finally whipped around, glared, and snapped “I don’t care!”, only to find a frightened and confused look in their eyes — as though they honestly felt they were trying to do me a favor. Poor kids. I actually felt sorry for them. It was as if someone told them that they were doing an honorable service by helping tourists find places to spend all the money they were just dying to get rid of. As though I had been out on the street yelling that I had all this money and desperately needed somewhere to spend it all.

After a typical bout with the hustling, I would find myself back to the seclusion of my room at the guest house to watch my multitude of Indian cable-tv channels and nurse my post-traumatic hustle stress disorder.

There were headlines in the India Times yesterday about a CIA study that concluded it would be inevitable that China and India would become the world’s next superpowers over the next twenty years. I didn’t get a chance to read the article, but it seems hard to imagine with all the problems India is currently facing — namely its poverty.

It almost seems as though a huge percentage of the population here is living on the streets. I had to venture out at 6AM for a trip to Agra the other day and I must have walked passed well over 100 people sleeping on the streets in a three block jaunt I had to make to hook up with my tour company. And those were just the ones I noticed who weren’t sleeping in total darkness. There were a number of fires burning along the way to keep several of them warm.

Along the train lines and along the highways outside of Delhi are tent villages with scores of people living outside. At most intersections and in shopping areas you will come across beggars, staring in the windows of your taxi or reaching in for money. If you happen to be in an autorickshaw, which is a noisy tricycle-type motorcycle with a roof but no doors, they’ll just climb in with you. Some are disabled, many are small children who spend their time otherwise playing with each other in the gutter or median strip, waiting for the next traffic light to stop traffic they can approach. No one seems to hand over any money to these people. Lonely Planet advises giving a donation to a charity that will look after them instead. It’s all quite disconcerting.

On the other end of the scale are the very wealthy, living in individual compounds that initally looked like embassys to me — each with big gates, guards, and servants. There seem to be door men for every store you go in and security guards lurking around inside, presumably to keep the homeless out. My guesthouse locks down tight from about 11PM until 9AM and has a guard sleep nearby the front door on the couch. Occasionally you’ll hear banging on the front door in the middle of the night, which is a bit creepy.

India is proving to be quite a fascinating place. I feel as though I’ve had a pretty good primer on congested cities while visiting Cairo and a pretty good primer on Indian culture while visiting Singapore and Fiji (where there are large Indian populations).

Although Delhi has a comparable population to Cairo (12 vs 10 million), it seems much greener with lots of broad leaf trees and grassy parks, and is much more spread out. Kind of like Manhattan vs. Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, I guess. Its something my fellow travellers seem to notice immediately as well.

Unlike Cairo, however, there is a much greater variety of cultures, so I never seem to get tired of looking around. I’ve seen just about every vehicle imaginable travelling down the roads, and I have been through some sections that are even more congested than Cairo. And I’ve seen just about every kind of colorful food, flower, and craft product being sold from vendors alongside the roads.

There does seem to be a lot more poverty about, with beggars on just about every street corner. One major bonus about traveling around India (from my Delhi perspective, anyway) is that most people seem to be able to understand and speak English.

I’ve signed up for a few tours (gasp!) put on by the Indian government to help with my tight schedule here. The good thing about the tours is that the tourists are mostly Indians themselves (currently living overseas or in other Indian states), so I feel as though I’m not isolated from the culture I’m viewing. I did a tour of Old Delhi yesterday afternoon and got to see some exquisitely designed buildings in the “Red Fort”. We also made a visit to where Gandhi was cremated as well as a few Hindu and Muslim temples. All the people on the tour were very nice and sociable. I will do the New Delhi tour with them after travelling to Agra and the Taj Mahal tomorrow.

I spent most of my afternoon today browsing through the National Museum of India which had objects dating back to 4000BC. There were lots of intricate stone carvings from temples and a large collection of “Indian Minature Paintings” that were extremely detailed, beautiful, and absolutely fascinating to pour your eyes over. I spent a long time scruitinizing each one. One guard eventually walked up to me and said “You must be a teacher.”

My guest house is in a great central place in an area known as the “circus” that is loaded with good restaurants and shops. I even get a TV in my room that has 99 cable channels of pure Indian entertainment. No Western channels in sight!

You have to hand it to this country. With over a billion residents, it’s huge (poised to be the world’s largest in the next 20 years) and is definitely wrapped up in itself with little need to look to the West. Has it’s own movie industry (Bollywood’s bigger than Hollywood these days), it’s own culture, etc, etc. It hardly seems as though anyone around here even pays attention to what’s happening in the U.S. (unlike many countries around the world). I haven’t ever felt that way in any country I’ve visited OUTSIDE of the U.S. (the most famous of all for navel gazing).

So I’ve arrived in Delhi, India, after a few too many hops through the Persian Gulf region. The only flight I could get between Cairo and Delhi took me overnight through Bahrain, Adu Dubai (UAE), and Muscat (Oman), before heading up to Delhi. Each plane ride was only 1-2 hours long with 1-2 hour stops between each point — but all in the middle of the night.

So yes, I arrived exhausted, but was greeted at the airport and whisked to my guest house for a good long nap. The airline, Gulf Air, was quite nice and insisted on serving a hot meal for each of those short segments. There were plenty of Westerners about, in the terminals and on the planes. In fact, every stewardess was either European or Asian. The airport waiting areas seem to be full of people ranging from Saudi Arabian shieks doing their duty free shopping in the glitzy Bahrain airport to European hippies headed for India.

I got the impression that many of the Indians travelling on my last fight into Delhi had not flown in a while. When stewardesses game through the cabin to collect headsets, they would try to give them everything (pillows, blankets, magazines, etc). When my neighbor asked for a second helping of his Indian dinner, he got infuriated because he claimed the rest of his food got cold before they brought it — ruining his meal (as though he was in some fine restaraunt). The second the plane touched the ground, long after it has even gotten off the landing runway, half the Indians were already on their feet grabbing all their stuff out of the overhead lockers. The stewardesses were screaming at them to get back in their seats and buckled up.

This behaviour seemed to continue after we got off the plane. When we all arrived to go through immigration and customs, many of the Indians looked around and tried to scheme ways of circumventing the long “Indian Citizens Only” line. They would try sneaking through the non-Indian tourist processing line as though it might be a short cut, but the customs officers refused to serve them. I guess this behavior all comes from having to deal with the competition you face for attention from the other billion people in this country. That and perhaps a poor understanding of the English language.