February 2015
As this is my second trip to India, albeit to a completely different region, my ending thoughts are far different than my last trip and I thought I would share them.
Internet
The strange thing about India is the Internet. One thinks of India and thinks technology and especially Internet, but it just isn’t so. Internet is spotty at best, and even if you can find it, you are dropped so regularly as to want to pull your hair out. The interesting thing is that the technology and expertise is there, but it seems that the next step “is not my job”. This leads to perfection right up to the millisecond before the critical point, and that is where it connects you to the rest of the world. It is nuts!
Airports and Airport Security
This is an exercise in redundancy on steroids. You cannot enter an airport without a ticket, great, unless you live on line (see above) and don’t have one. In that case they bring out a long dot matrix printed list of every manifest and see if you are on it.
Now, you go to the counter to get your boarding pass, if it is a domestic flight they weigh your bags. On one flight I was 7 kilos over (an in country flight you are only allowed 15, but I had 22 because you are allowed 34 coming into the country). No problem, pay the overage. BUT, that is not here at the counter, we will hold your bags, come back with a receipt. You get to the overage counter and say “I don’t have any more cash than this”, that is okay ma’am, but it will take 15 minutes to print your receipt, no ma’am you can not get back through security without your receipt, you wait, no problem, everything is okay.
Next is the real security, there is a line for the men and a curtained room for the women. You MUST have a tag on every piece of hand baggage and once you go through security it must have an official stamp, because you cannot get through the door of your plane without this stamp. OH, and if you shop in the airport and they forget to give you a tag for the bag that holds the things you bought, well welcome to hell.
This is why you arrive at an airport in India a minimum of three hours in advance.
Once on board DO NOT loose your boarding pass, you cannot get off the airplane without showing it. This final step is not so much idiocy as making sure you haven’t gotten off at the wrong airport.
All of this is India. Things are simply done differently in India. There are no large machines to off-load trucks, that would take jobs away, mechanization is hard to find and in a way that is a very good thing, more employment, but the time it takes to do simple tasks is mind-boggling.
If you have been a reader of mine, you know I love India. The people are so friendly and the entire country has an open arms policy, you just need to learn that this family just works on a different time schedule than you.
India has an artfulness to living that is so missing in the United States. Everyone here stops to smell the roses. Things are done with beauty in mind rather than efficiency and cost. An ever changing daily mandala would never survive the corporate bean counters of the west, but here it as much a vital part of the day as breathing.
Being required to leave your cab when he gets a CNG fill-up would strike anyone outside of India as ridiculous, after all your safety is far more endangered on the insane roads of this country than blowing up in a fueling accident, but it is the law, and everyone piles out of the car when it enters the station.
These are the things that endear me to India and will make sure I keep coming back.
Namaste