Landing on Planet India

Arriving for the first time I had taken the beginners option and arranged to be picked up at New Delhi airport. I braced myself. The car launched into the melee. OMG!

The half-hour drive to the grandly named Hotel Singh Palace in the grungy, dilapidated suburb of Karol Bagh was like having my nervous system lanced with a hot knife. The streets were awash with filth and bathed in the smoke from burning God-knows-what. Rivers of humans filled streets oozing disheveled people and dirty beggars with limbs missing or added and all struggled amid a deafening cacophony of horns, shouts, barks and the constant metallic clatter of chronically congested traffic. Battered vehicles and scooters, rickshaws, convoys of buses pressed with flesh, tuk-tuks and cyclists competed and weaved, shoved and cajoled their way jerkily through and among the pedestrians, around the ubiquitous wandering holy cow and people pushing food carts to a halt next to the two elephants stopped at red lights while apparently on their way to a wedding. Every single pixel of this constant and noisy, nerve-battering image, so alien, so surreal, was absolutely gripping!

I felt like I’d landed on another planet. The relentless pace, collision of colours and cultures and brutal rudeness rugged up with a special generosity gifted from ordinary people was utterly enthralling.

Within only a few hours of being there I was overwhelmed by the reality of the lives of the people I met, making me feel a very fat, over indulged, spoilt, coddled westerner.

Arun is a tuk-tuk driver, aged 37, who has driven these over-sized lawn mowers with seats and three wheels since he was 15. His day of smog and the endless whine of the two stroke engine begins at 8am and ends around 9pm. He says he has never had a day off work, even for sickness. After 22 years he says he is saving for a holiday!

Taxi driver, Krishna, is a 48-year-old Ghandiesque wisp of a man who matter-of-factly explains that all three of his sons died at the ages of 3 months, one year and six years. His adopted daughter 'Shrusti' (a child sentenced to death for being female whom he saves), he describes as ‘my world', is now seven. About his sons he says stoically, “God give them to me and then he take them back.”

At the end of the oddest day of my life I retreat to an odd little café in a Delhi alley. A stunningly beautiful middle-aged Indian woman serves me beer in a teapot! Because as a woman she’s not allowed a liquor license! I wash down the day’s dust dazed and amazed. “That’s a shame you can't get a license” I say. "In India there is nothing that should be cause for shame. This is India!" How right she is!

I was thoroughly confronted by my first 24 hours in India. The cliched words ‘culture shock’ are very real for the India travel virgin. This is normal and then it wore off when I realised India wasn’t going to eat me. On the contrary, I was going to eat it.