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March 16th 2006

Published: April 16th 2006

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Lynch Mob

Paranganj

Main Bazaar

A still shot.

A missing eye. A missing appendage. A missing limb. A twisted limb. A filthy mother. A starving child. A dazed beggar. A sweaty beggar. A drunken beggar. A man kicking a dog. A starving dog. A dog missing a limb. A dog missing an eye. A starving pack of puppies. A filthy pack of puppies. A rabid pack of puppies. A pile of human feces. A painted cow. An emaciated cow. A holy cow. A cow eating garbage. Garbage. More Garbage.

A drunken one eyed, one armed beggar, fighting a filthy twisted fingered mother, holding a starving child while kicking a rabid three legged dog into its puppies that are wallowing in a pile of human feces while sharing a meal of garbage with a holy, holi, emaciated cow.

Welcome to Delhi…

The last I posted, a month ago, I was running out of a hotel that over charged me largely due to my own naivety which led me directly into one of the oldest traps in the books.

The scam:
Hapless tourist arrives at the airport without reservations to a hotel
The nicest taxi driver around is kind enough to take you

Paranganj

Cow

to “wherever you want to go”
In an effort to save time, he takes you to a “government sanctioned tourist office” where no matter the hour you meet the kindest tour agents in town
Unfortunately all the places you suggest from your lonely planet tour book are regretfully at capacity or undergoing renovation
The tour agent suggests a place they happen to know right around the corner that just might havea room available for you…
WHAM!
You are paying three maybe even four times as much for a room than if you had given directions to a hotel and lied about having a reservation
That extra money goes to the taxi driver, the tour agent and the hotel who are all in on the scam and are probably playing some foreign version of poker with your money in some back room as you thank your lucky stars that you were picked up by the nicest taxi driver that thankfully took you to the nicest tour agent that booked the nice room you are about to sleep in…

After a solid night’s sleep in a nice big bed (of course they didn’t have any rooms with two beds so Royal

Paranganj

Back Alley

and I had to get our own rooms thus doubling their profits) and it was a nice big bed, we went back to our new friends at the travel agency where they arranged a driver to take us all around Delhi. Mind you, at this point in time we hadn’t read the passage in Lonely Planet clearly labeled “tourist traps” and thus felt that our new friends were trustworthy because they had provided for us in our hour of need.
-Another note worthy of mention at this point is the currency of India and my value of money. In Australia I paid on average $25 US dollars per night to sleep in a dorm style room with sometimes as many as 14 other people. In Singapore, the price dropped to $15 and in Malaysia we were paying anywhere from $4-10 depending on whether or not the room had a fan, bathroom, window, sheets, etc… In Thailand the rooms were priced radically different and we stayed everywhere from a nice hotel with A/C for $10 a night, to a bungalow on the beach where I was potential rat food, for $3 per night.
Which brings me back to India where the

Paranganj

Back Alley

over-inflated room cost us 700 rupees per night (mind you not split cost between royal and I as al the above prices were) equivocating to $16 per night per person. Having just gotten to India and not able to shop around for prices because all the other guest houses were “full” the price didn’t really seem too far off for what we got. To make a long story short, we didn’t know the value of the rupee and that 700 rupees could have gotten us a room with a personal servant there ready to turn your pillow for you to the cool side as you sleep. Ok that’s a little dramatic but you get the point…

So back to our trustworthy friends, they found us a driver who was more than willing to take us to restaurants that were open “despite the holiday” doubtless of whom served him a hefty commission for bringing in customers. He also took us to see the sights of Old Delhi, not to be confused with New Delhi because they are in fact two wholly separate entities consisting of differences though muddled differences as they may be.

You know you are in Old

Paranganj

Side Street Chess Match

Delhi when while driving, you pass a man, wearing tattered sandals, the kind reserved for use in public showers. The feet inside those sandals are peddling a bicycle rickshaw though they look as if they should be shuffling behind a walker. The job of bicycle rickshaw driver is not a glamorous one and is generally reserved for the older men in Old Delhi who really have no business on a bicycle at all let alone hauling passengers of any kind. Bicycle Rickshaws are not allowed in New Delhi, so if you’re ever lost, that’s the easiest way to find your bearings because if you stop to ask someone where you are, you are likely to be mowed down by an old man riding one of these chariots who is unwilling and probably incapable of stopping his beast in motion.

Though we were paying our driver to take us to the places we thought we wanted to see on the schedule we thought we had, he appeared determined to show us all of the beautiful sights Old Delhi had to offer in as little time as possible. I won’t remark on his driving, or the driving of any of the

Paranganj

Alley Cricket

other insane motorists in India for now, as that will necessitate a passage too lengthy to place here. But the big spots were easy to pick out and hard to miss. We went to the Red Fort that served as the catalyst to move the capital of India to Delhi where it served as the capital of the country for some years within its walls.

Red Fort is HUGE geographically and most of it is inaccessible. The parts however that are accessible aren’t very informative aside from random stone tablets minimally describing a particular building’s significance. Rain dampened our afternoon as the cameras had to be hidden under shirts and the sunny day turned gloomy turning some of the more dilapidated buildings into what would pass as the haunted house of my eight year old nightmares. I did buy a little informational booklet about the Red Fort though none of the information proved worthy of moving into long term memory. I sometimes reflect that its a shame that I’m not remembering more regarding the history of what I’ve seen thus far on my trip but the thing about history is that it never changes. I can read up and

Paranganj

Ox Cart in front of a Barber Shop

learn more about on the places I’ve seen and the cultures I’ve experienced long after I’m back into my own little comfort zone but I can never change what I’ve seen with these two eyes.

Outside the Red Fort, into the drizzle, Royal and I wandered back to a random parking lot shared between the tourists of the Red Fort and the Patrons of the largest Mosque in India. Given the present situation between the Muslim culture in the Middle East and our American citizenship, we decided that it probably wasn’t the best of ideas to grace this holy place with our presence. Our driver would have absolutely nothing to do with that. Its not that he wouldn’t let us back in his car but he essentially pointed out the silliness in our thinking and conclusion and we sauntered off towards the Mosque.

What these two eyes saw on the walk from the Red Fort to the Mosque was something that I’ll never forget. I’ve been told before that there are some things in life that I’ll never need a picture of because what I will see will be forever in my mind. This walk was my introduction

Paranganj

Exactly how Merrill Lynch started out...or was that Morgan Stanley?

to poverty. There is a feeling of guilt associated with raiding a camera and taking a picture of something because it is seemingly already dead. The lives we passed were not much of lives at all. The rain only heightened the setting as there were eight and sometimes ten people huddled underneath a tarp covered structure that served as a store on sunnier days. What was being sold is of no real consequence because there were so many people inside these structures that commerce had ceased. I realized then that these structures were also houses and then the number one billion popped into my head. Royal had said it earlier and seeing all these people under one roof made sense. They lived there! This is how you fit one billion people into a country the size of India. Ghettos like this one. But what I passed wasn’t a single occurrence. There were row upon rows of these houses/stores all the way to the Mosque.

At no point in time did I ever fear for my safety as they were just as stunned to see Royal and me walking through the streets as we were to see them in their

India Gate

homes. There was a moment on the steps of the mosque (after we still decided not to enter) when we did break out the cameras to tape an empty lot full of children playing cricket. What was worthy of filming was that there were about 15 different games of cricket happening in a row like a bowling alley has multiple lanes for many different people. Out of nowhere, we were suddenly surrounded by twenty dirty locals who were absolutely mesmerized by the digital cameras. This happened once in Malaysia at the Batu Caves but most of the people living around where we were have never seen anything like a digital camera, let alone their own picture. I videotaped Royal showing some of these people their own pictures until they realized that they could watch themselves, INMOTION! on my camera! Whoever thought of the swivel feature on the LCD screen for digital cameras is a genius because these people looked at me and my device as if I was walking on water. It was good to see the same sense of wonderment in the eyes of people who live in the direst of situations as I see in my nephew’s eyes,

India Gate Fountain

who will doubtlessly grow up in a very similar, privileged, situation like I did.

After the initial shock of Delhi wears off, and its all just degrees of filth, there are aspects of the city to appreciate. I spent a day wandering through Paranganj, where we intended to go had we not encountered the nicest taxi driver in Delhi. Paranganj, commonly known as Main Bazaar, is located just on the border of New Delhi, in Old Delhi and encompasses everything about India that I thought I’d see. This blog’s opening paragraph is something I saw while walking through the main bazaar. There are cows that rule the streets and traffic must subside to the will of a walking hamburger. There are men walking around selling toy machine guns in one hand and textiles in the other. Walk into a Walmart and imagine every commercial item that isn’t for sale there and you’ll find it for sale at the Main Bazaar. People even have roaming stores on carts. They walk up and down the street countless times before sundown when one side street turns into vegetarian heaven. This is also where I bought the chess table I’ve been searching for

India Gate

for years. Black and White inlaid wood with stone. I am trying to simplify my life, but it was soooo nice and soooo cheap.

All in all, I would say that Paranganj is the Delhi that you would expect to see if you have only heard about from India from other people, and that’s because it’s the most bizarre and forgiving for tourists that come to a city that is so radically different from anything else in the western world. It’s a flea market on mescaline, set in the sewer.

I spent an afternoon at India Gate and got some good pictures that you’ve doubtless already looked at so I should add a blurb about that. India Gate is the biggest park around where I stayed and the best place to lose the insanity for a moment. The Gate is a Memorial to all the soldiers that have died in the Wars of the past century that India has fought. It is similar to the mall in Washington where the Gate would be the Washington Memorial and there’s a road that leads all the way to the Government Buildings that house the ruling members of the Indian

India Gate

Parliament. India Gate park is a family place, a friendly place and overall, a cleaner place than those that surround it. It’s redeeming qualities are countless but above all it was a place where I could go and reflect on the last few days in Delhi and digest all that was going on around me.

Another place that could serve the purpose of escaping the insanity would be the Gandhi Memorial Park which we visited directly after the ghettoes and the Mosque. Unfortunately, the rain picked up again there and the visit was limited to but twenty minutes time but I was so shaken over what I had seen previously that I suppose I lost some of the somber effect the Gandhi Memorial is attempting to achieve.

I know I’ve gotten a little long winded here and I could go one and on about what I’ve seen even in my short stay in Delhi but for the sake of the blog and the time everyone is taking out of their day to read it, I’ll stop here with one last thought. I think that Delhi has helped me develop a photographic memory as I don’t think I will

India

ever in my life be able to shake some of the images I’ve seen here. Inherently, I currently feel that I will never need to return to Delhi for as long as I live unless someone pays me an exorbitant amount of money in order to do so.

Now, on to the rest of the Golden Triangle…

Additional photos below

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