Hello. This is Eddsel and I am currently in Delhi. I have been here for 5 days now and I feel like my world just got a lot bigger, which is a good thing. I left from Winnipeg-Minneapolis- Amsterdam-Delhi. Then took a domestic flight (via Spice Jet) to Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Stayed there for 3 days then came back to Delhi to meet the rest of the group for the actual course. Here are a few observations so far:
-The sheer number of people is astonishing. It is crowded everywhere. And I am not talking Polo Park on boxing day or Stella's on a sunday morning. India's population is more than a billion people, and they are everywhere. As a local put it to me 'we don't know where all these people come from'.
-The juxtaposition between the rich and the poor is shocking. This reminds me of El Salvador, my country of birth. We have seen sky scrapers and slums side by side. Posh stores with beggars outside their doors. It is just the way things are.
-Happiness. Our guide says that the poor are happy and that the beggars make more money than he does. We 'Westerners' typically associate poverty with pain or unhappiness. The 'West' has a lot to learn from these poorest of the poor.
-The traffic! It is indescribable. Side by side cars centimeters away from each other, no lanes, bikes, rickshaws all thrown into a street. It is a miracle that traffic flows at all, but it does (slowly).
-As our professor put it 'They have a lot to be proud of, India by all accounts and purposes shouldn't work at all.' They have been ruled, pillaged, oppressed for hundreds of years, they have dozens of languages, and several different religions. Look at the problems we have in Canada just with two different major languages. They have come along way and show no signs of stopping.
1 comment:
Hey Eddsel, Good to hear you are enjoying India. You'll have to fill me in with greater detail and some travel tips. Take care, Joe
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