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| Agra, India |
I added a paragraph about the Delhi smog to my last post. You may not have read it because I added it later to the original post (due to a browser error…long story). Anyway, we were told that the pollution nowadays is worlds better than it was a few years ago, before all government vehicles were required to use CNG (compressed natural gas). My lungs weep at the thought of anything worse than it is now.
We hired a car to take us from Delhi to Agra, then on to Jaipur. This three day sightseeing and travel trip was definitely the way to go. The first sight in Agra was King Akbar’s tomb. Again, for me, this was forgettable. Nice structure with a tomb in it, which is really just a box jutting a bit out of the floor. The highlight of this place was the monkeys. They live amid the trees and grass of the huge compound, and some self-appointed trainers had food on hand so we could feed them. Eventually they cajoled the monkeys into climbing onto our backs for a photo. Feeding a monkey is a tremendous experience. They use their little monkey hands to grab your food-bearing hand, to ensure it isn’t removed from them. It feels strange to have a non-human animal touch you with hands - my pattern recognition circuits keep flashing "human", but it continues to remain a furry monkey.
After tipping the "trainers" way too much, I realized this monkey business is a perfect example of the free enterprise system allowing for a non-zero-sum result. The trainers made great money, the monkeys got free food, and we got a once in a lifetime experience to interact with monkeys. Win, win, and win. Earlier on the road to Agra, we had passed monkeys on leashes, whose owners want money to make the monkey do some kind of trick (we didn’t find out what it was). This is the dictatorship system, and I don’t like it. I much prefer it when the monkey is free to trade favors for food, as well as reject the deal. Also not free are the "dancing" bears, of which we saw several, even though it is illegal in India. "Dancing" is a euphemism for the bear trying not to have its face severed when the owner raises a rope over the bear’s head. The rope is tied through the top of the bear’s nose, as it has been since he was a cub. It's a sad sight to see. The silver lining is that it is much less prevalent than it used to be. The Indian government has been cracking down (somewhat), and most tourists are hip to the cruelty involved, so they don’t patronize the bear slave owners. During a forced stop, one bear owner approached us, and Kelly chewed him out, "(Pointing to the bear) Look at that! You should be ashamed of yourself!" The guy quickly recoiled from our car. Hopefully if enough people respond like that, the practice will stop. I hadn’t made the connection before, but learning about the dancing bears has changed my attitude about animal circuses, which before I hadn’t thought much of. In the battle to end cruelty to animals, it seems the first place to start is ending exploitation or suffering inflicted on them solely in the name of entertainment. Killing for food or using a horse, cow, elephant, or camel to pull a cart are certainly debatable, but all can be done without inflicting undue suffering on the animal.
Ah, the Taj. What a structure! I enjoyed it immensely. It was everything I had been told: beautiful, large…well, basically I had just heard those two adjectives. Actually, one feature I had read about was its amazing "scale". I had interpreted that to mean simply that it was very large, but after seeing it I have a more thorough understanding of what is meant by the word. We hired a guide, who many times showed us an inch long design consisting of semi-precious stones set in marble. That few inches took a week to construct. A quick glance up would reveal that the Taj had miles of that pattern covering it. Now that’s scale! The other thing I had heard was that the Taj would likely take our breath away, which it did, but only because Agra's smog is as bad as Delhi's.
The workers who built the Taj spent 22 years doing so, and got paid 6 paise a day. Using today’s exchange rates, that is 0.13 cents per day - less than a cent per week, and less than a half-dollar per year. Did I mention Shah Jahan (who had the Taj built for his late wife) had a harem of 365 women, one for each day of the year? For the wages they were paid, I'm surprised the workers didn't just phone it in. But in fact the attention to detail obviously employed in its construction is its most striking feature. The Taj has all sorts of fascinating nuances. It took 22 years to build, and there are 22 marbe steps leading up to the entrance. It was completed in 1643, and there are 16 squares and 43 fountains in the garden area. The entire Quran (Koran) is written along its walls, and the writing gets progressively larger the higher up the wall you go, to ensure that it all looks one uniform size from the ground. On the other side of the long thin fountain, there are framed doorways, each offering a perfectly centered view of the dome. Everything about the Taj is perfectly centered, symmetrical, and smooth. It was really amazing, and easily made the Agra Fort, which we saw afterward, underwhelming (and not much worth writing about).
The good hotels in Agra were all booked, so our driver took us to a place that was not so great (we were the only whiteys staying there…red flag!). We left our room with thirty more blood stains on the walls than when we arrived, each blanketed by the mangled mosquito body which had earlier contained it. I am quite the mosquito hunter; we slept bite free. Before leaving Agra the next morning, our driver took us to a store for some shopping. He obviously would get a commission for anything we bought (which in this case was nothing). But he wasn’t underhanded about taking us there, and I don’t mind when a driver wants to take you to a couple of his shops over a three day tour (it’s sort of the difference between meeting your real estate agent at a social get together versus a cold call).
Anyway, the story gets funny after we entered the shop. I find Kelly at the jewelry counter, where a guy has taken a large (egg-sized) gem from a box. He explains that it is the world’s largest amethyst, looted from the Taj Mahal centuries ago, and bought by the store’s owner for $250,000 in 1970. The store looked very legit, and the jeweler wore clear, non-prescription glasses that made him look quite legitimate. I did the quick math: $250k in 1970, we’re talking around a million in today’s dollars, assuming no appreciation. Okay, let’s see…largest in the world million dollar Taj jewel, and it just happens to be at this store we were in. How lucky can you get! I mean, if I were the owner of a million dollar relic like that, I probably would want it in a vault or museum, and heavily guarded. But not this owner. He was willing to have it passed around to shoppers in his security-free store…a store which is staffed by employees far less well off than he is, and surrounded outside by beggars, touts, and thieves without a rupee to their name. Thanks to that shop owner’s selfless risk taking, Kelly and I were able to each put our grubby mitts on the world’s largest amethyst.
Later the jeweler treated me to a one way conversation about how all Muslims are evil. He explained India's superiority to Pakistan by stating that if the entire Indian army peed toward Pakistan they would flood it. He also informed me (true or not) that Indians love George Bush. This is because he has taken a hard line with Pakistan, and their perception is that he will protect India from possible Muslim attack. Take this information for what it's worth...which is a million dollars!
The drive from Agra to Jaipur, it turns out, takes all day. Our driver had told us it was about 120 miles, but I had failed to factor in that a drive from San Diego to LA (roughly the same distance) would probably take longer than 2 hours if the freeway were replaced with a one lane bumpy road inhabited by cows, water buffalo, and camel-drawn carts. We have been in India long enough now that I have adjusted to the crazy traffic. I must emphasize again just how crazy the driving is. I suspect it's the only place where livestock enter into traffic negotiations. As we were weaving around camel drawn carts and jeeps with Indians standing all around the car's exterior (the interior is already full), it hit me how shocked I would be had I just arrived. But with a few weeks under my belt, it was just a normal afternoon drive. The traffic has definitely gotten more "out there" since leaving Delhi. Way more animals are involved now; add elephants and camels to the long list. Incidentally, camels, which I had remembered as horse-sized, are significantly larger and higher up than horses. Anyway, even with my greatly increased tolerance for driving risk, our driver pulled some moves that scared me. On the one lane road, passing is constant, and our driver would often pull into the right lane (remember it's reversed here) into oncoming traffic in an attempt to pass. A few times, he was too optimistic in his distance calculations, and the oncoming car was forced to slow and turn off into the dirt. The times he did make it, the margin of error was often gut wrenching. Unrelated to the passing, we also blew our front left tire. As the driver jacked up the car and replaced the tire, I confirmed that both the blown tire and the spare were balled. Good times.
I am now writing from Jaipur, which is like a smaller, more frenetic Bombay. I must admit it is getting really hard to characterize all these different places in India. Many in northern India are feeling identical. They all look horrifically run down, and have myriad trash heaps, beggars, animals, rickshaw drivers, touts, blaring horns, and staring Indians. One of Jaipur's major differences is that it is a gem hub. We walked along the street and passed countless men with little sachels of gems, which they were frenetically trading with each other.
I am thrilled to report Kelly and I saw our first Bollywood film last night. It was a movie called "Dhoom", which was playing at a really large, nice theater in Jaipur. It wasn't the most traditional Bollywood film, which are typically devoted to a formulaic love story. This one was about a motorcycle gang that performs heists, and the cop and his sidekick who try to stop it. It was a really fun movie. Understanding Hindi was not a requirement for following the movie. We understood the entire plot easily, through the help of its simplicity, as well as the random English phrases thrown in for seemingly no good reason. There would be a long conversation in Hindi, then the cop would say, "I think that's their plan," or the bad guy would ramble along to the sidekick, and then throw in "Don't throw your life away." I'm not sure if this is similar to Spanglish and used regularly, or if they're hoping to break into an English market eventually. The special effects were surprisingly good. Not quite up to current American standards, but it had the feel of an American action movie. There were a few amateurish giveaways, the most glaring being the actors glaring...into the camera. Also toward the end of the movie they decided (all of a sudden) to abandon physics, with cars jumping off nonexistent ramps (a la Knight Rider), and actors jump kicking one another, then reversing direction to land perfectly on their feet. The audience didn't seem to mind. They were cheering throughout the movie, mostly when when the leads got that "I'm gonna kick ass now" look in their eyes, and when the movie's two female leads got their Playboy Presents number. For the Indians it was sexy, and for Kelly and me it was just hilarious. As one lead woman was featured, the movie instantly transformed into a slow motion supermodel shoot. She rode her jetski in slow motion while wearing revealing clothing, all the while the camera featuring her from different angles, each usually focused shamelessly on a single body part. By Indian standards, this is porn, and I now realize why Bollywood is so popular.
The major uniqueness to all Bollywood films are the song and dance numbers. They were really entertaining. The movie breaks out into song just like a musical, except (and this sounds impossible) more gay. The numbers feature the man singing and dancing his love for a woman, and her singing and dancing her coy response, telling him no with her lips and yes with her eyes, body, and smile. Sometimes they have just met, and by song's end they are an item. There is no attempt to make the lip syncing look legitimate, or even make the singing voice sound similar to the actor's voice. The dance moves are riveting, but are moves we in America would do if we were mocking someone's dancing style. Many times the people in front of us turned around, because Kelly and I were laughing at all the wrong times. In the theater, there was no dancing in the aisles like we were expecting, but it was a relatively uncrowded (but still crowded) weeknight showing.
I want to re-emphasize how much being white in India feels like being a celebrity. We met two Swiss girls before the movie started, and an Indian girl approached one of them asking for a photo. They refused, and told us it happens constantly, but they don't like the idea of the fake stories the girl will likely tell her friends with photo in hand. Even when I am not being prayed upon by salesmen smelling white money (which is always), I am still unable to walk down the street and be ordinary. Constant stares. Constant appeasement. Constant attempts to find out information about me. It really is like being a celebrity, and I can identify now more than ever with its novelty and eventual imprisonment. I often long for the anonymity provided once I'm safely in my room, or perhaps behind a guarded door of an upscale hotel or restaurant where only the rich may tread. The movie gave me an insight into my celebrity status. Whiteness is coveted in India. All the lead actors are white. Okay, they're still Indian, but many are so white I would have sworn they were American. Those who are more obviously Indian are sporting impossibly light skin. There were four or so commercials before the movie, and *all* of them were for "Fair and Lovely", a skin lightening cream. One of the commercials showed a darker skinned Indian woman being rejected, applying the cream, and then being overaccepted as her new, light-colored self. The commercial would cause riots in the States, both of laughter and protest. But in India, it's accepted. Whether Bollywood is creating the white is right phenomenon or merely reflecting existing culture, it is at least reinforcing the stereotype. Kelly and my celebrity makes a lot more sense now that I know that we look much more like Indian movie stars than Indians do.
