India blog...finally

So, it’s December 6^th, almost two months after I was in India…and I still have more of my India blog to write.  I decided since I want to procrastinate getting started on my studying, this is something that can help me achieve my goal.  The next paragraph was where I started my re-write…

 

            I’ve decided to take some time before our Viet Nam logistical pre-port tonight to re-write my India blog.  I wish my flash drive hadn’t decided to go haywire on me and that I still had the five pages that I wrote already, but such is life.  There are far greater things that I should be worrying about.  Therefore, I’ll just suck it up and get to writing…

            Going into India, I knew that I would encounter many things that I wouldn’t be prepared for.  Many people told me that a person could try as hard as they’d like to prepare themselves for how India would be but there would come a point where preparation can’t protect you from a certain element of culture shock.  Therefore, I mentally prepared myself for culture shock rather than preparing myself for how I thought India would be.  I found that this idea turned out to be far more helpful than the other option.  Since I was mentally ready to encounter a culture completely foreign to my own I was able to stop comparing what I thought India would be like to what India actually was and just accept it.  I feel like too many students went into India thinking that they were going to see, smell, taste, and hear certain things.  That’s like memorizing an entire textbook word for word in preparation for a test rather than reading between the lines and then going into it and finding out that the test was completely different than what you studied for.  To follow that analogy, I opened up the textbook, read what I thought was important, read between the lines, closed the book and went into the test without any preconceived ideas and was happy to find out that the test wasn’t as hard as other people made it out to be.  Now, in non-analogous terms, I learned the most important things that I needed to, listened to the advice of others who had been to India (thanks, Gretchen!), decided to go in without any defined idea of what I thought I could expect, and then walked off the ship ready to soak it all in.

            The minute I placed both feet on the ground in India, I not only felt like I was in a completely different world, but I knew I was in a completely different world.  The immediate port area felt very similar to Namibia as well as the fifteen-minute walk to the port entrance, but other than that, there were absolutely no similarities between India and anywhere else I have been…ever.  I knew it would be hot but it was hotter and more humid than I have felt before.  I knew it would smell in certain areas but I smelled odors I’d like to never smell again.  I knew I would see poverty but I saw poverty on a scale that I wasn’t aware even existed in our world today.  I knew I would taste food unfamiliar to my palate and it was some of the best food I’ve ever had.  I knew I would hear the honking of horns from rickshaws but I never knew I would hear the begging of a woman with a one week old baby and then have my heart break because I had to tell her that I had no money left after spending my last dime on a stupid souvenir.  What I didn’t know is that I was capable of feeling so much anger, so much sadness, so much compassion, so much helplessness, and so much shame all at one time.  I felt anger towards every single government in the world for not doing enough to help fight poverty and put an end to food and water shortages; I felt sadness every time a beggar came up to me and asked for money and then had to politely say no because I’d already given all my available change away; I felt compassion not only for what I could give to those in need but I felt it when other members of my group gave away all they could as well; I felt helpless when I was surrounded by over a dozen street children begging for money, for food, for anything they could possibly re-sell to make money and I had absolutely nothing to give but some words of hope, a few smiles, and the touch of my hand upon a newborn babies cheek; I felt shame while walking through the streets of Agra, and Delhi, and Varanasi with my expensive camera equipment, relatively new clothes, and money (or credit cards) readily available to purchase my next meal.

            I wanted to do more for them than I had the means to do and that upset me.  One billion people live in India.  Hundreds of millions of people live in conditions that those of you who are reading this right now would scoff over.  They live in buildings without roofs, sleep on dirt floors that are insect and pest infested, or they sleep out on the streets lined up over a hundred people long right besides sleeping cows, dogs, and goats.  I cried when I saw this.  It broke my heart to see people living this way.  I realized that I never judged these people the way that I am sure many of my peers did.  Why should they be judged?  They have absolutely nothing but the torn and tattered shirt and pants that are on their backs and maybe a pair of shoes if they are lucky.  How can you judge another human being that has nothing?  I heard many people saying, “Why don’t they just go out and get a job?”, “Why don’t they do this or that?”  I can’t tell you how much these remarks angered me.  Quite honestly, I lost respect for quite a few of my peers over the course of five days.  The entire reason why the people who live on the street live on the street is that India has a caste system that has yet to be broken down by modern society.  They are Untouchables or Dalits as they are more formally known.  If their parents were Untouchables than they became Untouchables by default.  There are very few instances where a person has moved up in the caste system from being a Dalit.  They are often seen by other Indians as nothing more than wasted space.

            The concept of one human looking down so harshly upon another human is something that I am unable to fully comprehend.  I’m not sure if it’s because I’m the type of person who appreciates every human for being a living, breathing, individual or if it’s because I’ve grown up in a society where even those who are looked down upon by other individuals, for whatever reason, are still considered more than just wasted space (although I’m sure there are bigots out there who believe otherwise).

            On my five-day independent trip (props to Johnny Hunter…great job planning everything) I visited three large cities: Agra, Varanasi, and Delhi (both New and Old).  We flew from Chennai to New Delhi on the first day and then immediately hopped on a charter bus from New Delhi to Agra.  I think we spent somewhere around 10 hours traveling that day.  We arrived at the hotel around three in the morning and had to be up for breakfast at 8:30 and out the door at 10.  None of us complained though because we were going to the Taj Mahal later on that morning.  Who could complain about anything they day they go to see the Taj?

            I thought I would be amazed by the Taj Mahal but I was wrong.  I was absolutely blown away.  I still can’t believe that I saw it with my own two eyes and touched it with my own two hands and walked inside with my own two feet.  The shear beauty and size of the structure is monumental.  It was also a unique experience in that I was photographed more by people than I photographed my surroundings.  Everywhere I looked, people had their cameras pointing at me, clicking away.  Have they never seen blonde hair before?  I had quite a few men come up to me and say “picture for memory?” and they would stand next to me, have their friend take the picture, and then scatter away.  Very amusing.  I could have been like some and simply blown these people off, but what did I have to lose?  A small act like this that puts a smile on people’s faces is worth the ten minutes of time that it took out of my day.

 

 

This is where I left off writing my blog so please bear with me when I try to remember some details from over two months ago…

 

            I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what we did after the Taj Mahal but that night we took our first of two overnight sleep trains to Varanasi.  You have not lived until you “sleep” on a sleep-car train…trust me.  Forty-seven American students invaded a train from Agra to Varanasi and all went pretty smoothly…Yes, there were a few mishaps like one kid getting so belligerently drunk that he puked his brains out in a disgusting bathroom for hours, another kid having to pay a fine to a train official because he was caught drinking (it’s illegal to drink on trains in India…but because we’re American, they took advantage of the kid and made him pay an outrageous fee or else he would be kicked off the train [we later learned that this was complete BS and that he wouldn’t have been kicked off the train so basically he was scammed]), another person threw up in the bathroom because she unfortunately came down with motion sickness, two girls had their purses stolen, and I was fortunately able to scare off a would-be thief in the middle of the night.  It was a pretty eventful 12 hours.

            Varanasi is a place that I will never forget.  I will also never be able to explain to you through words, or pictures, or video what exactly it was like.  Most of us decided to take a boat ride down the Ganges River and that was an eye-opening experience.  Fortunately, we didn’t see body of a dead person floating in the river, but there were dead animals floating right past where people were bathing.  Up river, people would wash their cows that were covered in only god knows what and then there were more people bathing downriver.  I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.  Sanitation doesn’t even cross the minds of people who can’t afford clean water to bathe in.  The Ganges River is their sacred water source.  On its banks are where funeral pyres are located, burning the bodies of the dead morning, noon, and night.  I saw a few different bodies being cremated and at first I was very uncomfortable seeing this.  Then, as I pushed through my cultural ignorance, I realized that this was the cheapest, most sanitary, and quickest way to dispose of a body.  With a billion people in the country, a lot of people die every day; therefore, the need to cremate bodies never ceases.

            We didn’t have very much time to spend near the Ganges River as our tour guides rushed us off to lunch in order to stay on schedule.  I do wish we had more time to explore the city.  It would have been nice to wander through some of the streets and allow my senses to take in as much as they could handle.  Again, I unfortunately forget what we did for the rest of that afternoon, but later in the evening we made our way to the train station to catch another overnight sleeper-car train to Delhi.

            Let me tell you a little bit about the train stations…So, picture a New York City subway station…complete with rats and trash.  Now, multiply that a few times.  That is what the train stations looked like (more or less).  The smell of urine fogged the air, and seeing a man urinating on a random wall was not uncommon.  I made sure to sit on the waterproof rain cover of my backpack when I sat down anywhere, since I never really had an idea as to what it was exactly that I was sitting on.  Again, I saw hundreds of homeless people laying on the walkways on the train station, laying on shredded pieces of material that they would use as a mattress.  Many people had tin cans with them.  Not for collecting money, but for holding water.  Where this water came from was a mystery, but I can only imagine what it would do to my stomach. 

            The people living at the train stations still haunt my memory to this day.  One woman in particular surfaces every now and again and I wonder if she is still alive.  She was probably no older than forty but looked as if she was close to seventy years old.  I had never before seen what a starving person looked like in person.  She didn’t move because she couldn’t.  She didn’t have an ounce of fat, let alone muscle, on her body.  She just laid there, in an almost comatose state, her eyes blinking every few seconds.  I can remember the clothes that she had on…mere pieces of tattered cotton fabric that were stained brownish green with months, if not years, of wear.  Her protruding ribs would rise, only slightly, every couple of seconds, to bring a shallow breath of air into her lungs.  I can only imagine that with every blink of her eyes or every breath she took, she wished for death to come, for the bright lights of the other side to engulf her and put her out of her misery.

            Even if I had the means to provide her with food for the rest of her life, I am sad to say that I think it would be too late.  She was to the point of starvation that makes me believe that she could not have been nursed back to health.  This is just one example of what hundreds of thousands of people go through on a daily basis in India.  Just writing about my memory of that woman brings emotions back that I haven’t felt again since that day…

            The second night on the train wasn’t as eventful as the first night and I remember sleeping pretty well.  The entire experience was slightly unusual, but I adapted pretty quickly.  I chose to sleep on the top bunk (there were three bunks stacked on top of each other) and I’m not sure if this was the right choice because I hit my head on more than one occasion on the ceiling.  However, I felt safe and secure and out of harms way so high up.  That still didn’t keep me from sleeping with my pack and my camera behind my head, taking up a foot of potential room to stretch out.  I didn’t complain though…how could I after seeing people sleep on concrete?

            Our last full day was spent exploring Delhi on our own.  My friend Eilis and I broke away from the group around noon and decided to see and do as much as we could before nightfall.  We hopped in a rickshaw, went to an underground market (most westerners would probably have avoided this but we decided to be adventurous), walked around the main parts of New Delhi, and then hopped back in a rickshaw and hired the driver for three hours to give us a tour of Delhi, local style.  He took us to many different places, most notably Gandhi’s Tomb.  There were very few times over the past three months where I’ve felt so at peace.  There’s something to be said about visiting the tomb one of histories greatest preachers of peace.  Tranquility flooded the air and it felt like any worries I had or any burdens I carried were instantly replaced with harmony and serenity.

            The next morning, we were out of our hotel by 4am to make sure we were made our flight back to Chennai on time.  Overall, traveling with 45+ college kids went remarkably well and although we encountered a few mishaps along the way, we all had a great time.  A day after arriving back on the ship, I ended up coming down with a bad cause of traveler’s diarrhea, but it hardly phased me.  I was happy, otherwise healthy, and on my way to Malaysia…