Thoughts on a Plane

As I sat in the terminal in Dehradun waiting for the plane that would take me to Delhi, where I would then catch a connecting flight to Bangalore, I was struck by an odd sensation. It was actually a very similar feeling to the one I had walking around a mall in Noida, outside Delhi a few weeks ago. The airport, like the mall, could have been any airport in America, and with that, so unlike everything else in India.

Take, for example, the trip to the airport. To get to the airport, I took an autorickshaw. The process of getting an autorickshaw to take you where you want to go for a price you want to pay is a small ordeal in itself, especially when you have to catch that rickshaw at a rickshaw stand in the middle of a popular tourist destination. How do you pick a rickshaw driver out of a crowd of 20 that are all trying to get you into theirs? How do you then convince that driver that you are not going to pay 400 rupees for a trip that you know shouldn’t cost more than 250? How, as a white tourist, do you get anyone to take you for the said price of 250? I finally ended up agreeing to pay 300, but that didn’t stop the driver from asking for 350 once we got to the airport. Of course, at that point, I’m the one with the money, and I don’t need the driver anymore, so he really has no grounds for haggling, and its not difficult to stick to 300. Just make sure you don’t give him the 500 rupee bill until he has 200 rupees in change in his hand. He was a nice driver, and I enjoyed the ride. I would have been tempted (despite already being overcharged) to tip him an extra 10. But as soon he asked for 350, that tip went right back in my pocket.

I ended up in a rickshaw with 4 other Indian passengers who didn’t look they were going to the airport, but seemed to enjoy having me ride with them. After about 10 minutes, we stopped somewhere, and they got off, which much smiling and hand shaking and wishing me good luck, and then I was by myself in the rickshaw for another 30 minute ride through the forest and past fields and farms to the airport. The ride was slow and bumpy, with the usual amount of honking, swerving, braking, and general physics-defying driving that I have come to expect in India. The dusty air blows through the open rickshaw and brings with it all the various scents and smells (good and bad, but mostly good) of the country side.

For the past three and a half weeks, all my travel has been by train, bus, rickshaw, and motorbike. While I never rode in one of the train cars you see in pictures of India with people on the roof and hanging off the sides, the transportation still all shares some distinctive characteristics, a certain shabbiness that you might normally associate with something worn with use, but at the same time impossible to picture new. It’s shabby and has always been shabby. The padding is mostly gone, the colors are faded, things are held together with string and wire. The train station is a chaotic mob of people, the busses may or may not go where their signs say they go, and god knows how the rickshaws stay on the road. It’s a system of chaos that somehow seems to work smoothly and efficiently (and cheaply) to get people where they need to go. After that, the organized, clean, and shiny new airport terminal seemed completely out of place.

If I put my face against the window and looked back as far as I could, I could see the sun-lit snow-capped Himalayas receding in the distance. I wish I hadn’t left my camera in my luggage! Although I don’t really know what kind of picture I would have been able to get anyways. Below me was a great plain filled with farms and dotted with houses, but filled and dotted in a way distinctly unlike the US. In the US, the farm plots of the plains are large and extremely geometric. Either large squares, or large circles depending on the irrigation system. The farm houses are spread out at regular intervals amoung the circles and squares.
The field of the Indian countryside is a much more intricate patch-work of small irregularly shaped plots of farmland. It’s difficult to judge size from the inside of a plane, but by comparing to buildings and roads, each patch of green or brown making up the quilt seemed about the size of a large-ish suburban back yard. The buildings, instead of being spread evenly through these plots, are all bunched up together in groups of anywhere from 50 to 1000, like herds crowding together in the middle of an open prairie. The resulting image of a green and brown quilt with clusters of houses reminded me of clusters of stars forming galaxies, and then the galaxies themselves clustering together, but each one still a distinct individual.

It made me wonder about the Indian notion of space and crowds. At first I thought that there are so many people in India that they are simply used to crowds, but I’m not sure anymore. I think maybe their culture actually feels more comfortable being as close to others as possible. In the US, everyone wants to get as far away from each other as possible in the given space. Take the subway, for example. Get on to a nearly empty subway in New York (preferably one like the C train, with long bench seats) and you will invariably see the same pattern of sitting. The very first spots to be taken are the spots at the very ends of the benches, right next to the doors. Once each end is full, the next spots occupied are those exactly in the middle of the benches. This pattern continues in almost mathematical consistency with each new person taking the spot in the middle of the empty space. On other trains, like the A-train, with it’s groups of benches that are 3-seats wide, with slight dips to delineate each seat, and each seat being just slightly too small, you will get people sitting on either end, but then people will stand rather than try to squeeze into the middle spot. Squeezing into the middle spot would require (gasp!) touching the other two people.

Watch, instead the subway in Delhi fill up (if you are ever lucky enough to get on a train that is not already filled to bursting). Given a bench with one person sitting at one end, the second person to sit down will often sit, not at the opposing end, but directly next to the first person, leaving the rest of the bench wide open. (although not for long, since the seats in a Delhi subway are rarely open for long). Furthermore, people would rarely if ever remain standing if there is any possible space to squeeze onto the bench, no matter how small or uncomfortable squeezing into that spot may be. To me, standing for a few stops is far more comfortable than half-sitting on someone’s lap. The fact that many Indians would choose the half sitting reflects not their discomfort with standing, but more closely reflects their discomfort with being alone. I don’t know, I’m not an anthropologist, and I’ve only been here for a few weeks, so I don’t presume to actually know what I’m talking about…

I’m reading a book (Shantaram) and found this quote that I find quite amusing. An Indian man is trying to explain to other Indians in his village what his white friend (30 years old) is doing there in the village.

“Where is he from?”

“New Zealand, in Europe”

“Why isn’t he there with his parents?”

“He’s traveling, he’s looking at the whole world.”

“Why?”

“Europeans do that. They work for a while, and then they travel around, lonely, for a while, with no family, until they get old, and then they get married, and become very serious.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Yes.”

“He must get lonely, without his mummy and his daddy, and with no wife and children.”

“Yes. But the Europeans don’t mind. They get a lot of practice being lonely.”


...When I get back to the states, my plan is to go to Seneca Lake to spend as much time there as I can before going to Taiwan. I’ll be as far away from people as I possible can (realistically and comfortably). I imagine many days will be spent without the company of anyone else the entire day. Lonely, maybe, but right now it sounds glorious!

There’s another quote from the book that I quite like, about the white guy’s first impressions as his arrives in Mumbai:

“The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding, indefatigable, and distant past that had crashed intact, through barriers of time, into its own future.”


Sorry for the long post. I wrote it on the flight from Delhi to Bangalore and didn’t really have much else to do. Plus I was feeling slightly sentimental about leaving India so soon when there is so much more to see and do and experience here. That’s the thing about traveling…. It often feels before you leave like each new country is a giant museum. You’ll go to one room, look at all the paintings, and then move on to the next. Each hour spent in a museum is one hour less that you need to see the whole museum and thus complete your trip. Obviously, a place like India is far too great a museum to see in one month, and you know that coming in, but you still think that one month now is one less month that I would have to spend later…. But that’s not the way it works. The truth is that each new country is not a museum at all. A museum is finite, a country infinite. One day spent in a country does not reduce the necessary time to “finish” the country, but instead opens up another week of days that you didn’t even know you needed before. A month in India does not lessen your desire to see India, but makes it even greater.

That’s the curse of traveling, but it is also a blessing. It’s a blessing because it’s impossible to see everything, and by understanding that and accepting that, you can let go of the pressure to cram everything in, and you can instead take your time and relax and enjoy the things you do see. It’s a blessing because you know that no matter how much traveling you do, and how much time you spend somewhere, there will ALWAYS be something different to see, something unique to experience, and something new to learn.