Until Next Time

As I'm sitting on my bed (yes, I'm back home in the United States, almost over my jet lag) and thinking about an adequate title for the very last post of this blog, I'm wondering how to adequately summarize my trip in India. It was busy, hectic, stressful but at the same time, it was relaxed, fun, and peaceful.

But before I go on, let me just recap what I did during the last week we were in India. My last day of work was Monday, and so the rest of the week involved getting ready for our flight on Friday. Tuesday we went shopping in Rajori Garden; after four hours of shopping, I finally bought a pair of sandals. Needless to say, my aunt never wants to go shopping with me again. Wednesday we didn't really do much, but at night we went to the Great Kebab Factory. My cousin, brother, and I all ate more than double of what we normally ate-8 kebabs, chicken biryani (which is rice), daal (lentils), okra, tandoori roti, and five desserts (I had four of the desserts, by that time, I was stuffed). Thursday we stayed close to home, visiting a relative (I found out that I was now an aunt, my mother found out she was a grandmother), and shopping. While we were shopping, we saw a little stall that was selling my favorite food-gol gappa. And so we ate four plates of them. The guy selling the gol gappe handed out a small paper bowl to all of us (my mom, brother, and I), and as he was making the gol gappa, he would dump them in our bowls. According to my mother, he went really slowly since he could tell that we were new at the art of eating gol gappe, but it was hard to keep up. The water from the gol gappa kept spilling in the bowl, filling the bowl up, and leaving less room for the actual gol gappa. But it was delicious. There are no words to describe the satisfaction I felt eating gol gappe on the streets of India. Friday was our flight, so naturally, we didn't do much. I wanted to get some mehendi (henna) done on my ankle, but unfortunately, the person close to my aunt's apartment had gone to some event. The Indian government recently build a new terminal for international flights, Terminal 3, so that's where we went. The airport was quite comparable to many other international airports of the world, but on a smaller scale, since it didn't seem as though they had finished constructing all the stores. Nonetheless, all of us bought books (generally the only thing we buy) and ate a McDonald's Chicken burger. The flight was full, and unfortunately for me, something upset my stomach, so my new best friend for the 16 hr plane ride was the air-sickness bag. Seriously folks, I now know where they keep the extra air-sickness bags. It was bad. There was a time when I was unable to drink water for fear of regurgitating it. Thankfully, the air sickness passed, and when we landed at Newark Airport at 4:30 am, I was ready to go home and eat something.

With the recap over, I have finally come to a conclusion about India: it is a jumble of contradictions. There are places like Leh, beautiful, clean, serene, and then there are places like Mumbai or Delhi, where breathing the air is almost as hazardous as smoking and honking cars are the only sound one hears. India is a land of the rich, with buisness men like the Ambanis buying their wives jets or apartment buildings for their birthdays, but also the land of the poor, where many families live on less than a dollar a day and resort to begging. It is the land of modern values and more traditional ones, with more girls going to college but fathers and brothers committing "honor killings" if a girl marries someone outside her gotra or caste. It is a land of the good and honest, with people like the man I met in South India last year, taking care of hundreds of orphans, not only feeding them and clothing them, but also teaching them. But at the same time, it is the land of the corrupt, with government officials often siphoning public money to finance their own (often home improvement related) projects, with the worst offenses coming at the time when India, a land that can compete with the rest of the world, has finally gotten the chance to do just that. With India hosting the Commonwealth Games, the entire nation should rise as one above the petty politics and create something that the whole nation can be proud of. But instead of that the workers building all the Games-related infrastructure earn only 130 Rupees for 12 hours of work, much less than what anyone can live on, while many Indian officials pay 4,000 Rupees for toilet tissue paper rolls, pay a rent of 10 lakh (1 million) rupees on treadmills that cost only 1 lakh (100,000) rupees, and siphon off an inordinate amount money on the side, losing the respect of much of the Indian population in the process. India is ready to join the rest of the developed nations of the world. But to do that will require a strong government and a reconciliation of all these conflicts.

And with that, shukriya for reading my blog.