Delhi Day 1

Our trip to Delhi was vastly superior to our trip to Solan on the first day – this time we got to take that coach bus we’d missed earlier, and what a difference it made! Air Conditioning and comfortable (blue) seats and movies all the way through the 9 hour trip to Delhi. Actually, I’m glad I didn’t take it the first day, it wouldn’t have been as much of an adventure, and I would have gotten the wrong impression of the country, and felt guilty for being treated in a way so obviously different from the common Indian. As it was, I truly felt like I was in India, and by the time I took the coach bus I could genuinely appreciate it because I knew the alternative.
It’s amazing, the contrast between the hills and the plains. You can tell immediately that one is more prosperous and less populated than the other, and it’s a shock to see the poverty I had expected before I came, but had almost forgotten about in Solan The poverty in the plains is made worse by the heat – well over 100 every day, even though the monsoons were supposed to come and cool things off – it must have been hell for the people carrying bricks and digging up the roads. I have never seen so many people sleeping in the streets before, day and night. People on the dividers between the two lanes of the road, on the sidewalks, on exposed pipes, at train and bus stations...
I don’t know how they manage to sleep with all the noise – cars and trucks blow their horns like maniacs or aspiring members of a marching band at all hours of the day and night, whether or not there’s any reason to announce their presence to the world.
We stayed with Nidhi’s Uncle – the one who picked us up the first day – in their little flat with three rooms and a kitchen.
Nidhi and I have to do research for our Extended Essays – 4,000 word essay for the IB that we have to do over the summer – hers is on the reasons for the accession of Kashmir to India, and mine is on Philip Pullman’s treatment of religion in His Dark Materials. So we went to find books on our respective subjects. The first library was useless to both of us, though a nice escape from the heat, so we left it feeling a little down-hearted.
Then Nidhi’s father asked whether we wanted to go to the Parliamentary Library. “Isn’t that restricted?” Nidhi asked, but apparently her dad knows someone in the security from his days as a government worker, and so we went to try. A few conversations and several cups of tea later we were in the beautiful new library of the Indian Parliament. Both of us were more successful there, so we made a trip to the photocopier and then had lunch (south Indian food). Then the security man took us on a tour of the Parliament itself, which was super-cool.
When we left, we went to Gandhi Smriti (an organization to promote Gandhi’s ideals) and had a meeting with the editors of Yamuna, a children’s newspaper for which Nidhi is the “foreign correspondent” (I’ve contributed an article as well). Then the organizer introduced us to a 13-year-old boy that the organization had just adopted. He came from a small village and is a math genius – we watched as he did the times tables of 200,554 as easily as you or I would do the times tables of 6 or 7. So they’re sending him to a prestigious school in Delhi to give him a good education and a future for his intelligence. Wow.
Then we went to the place where Gandhi was assassinated on his way to the Morning Prayer and the multimedia museum on his life – one of the most amazing museums I’ve ever seen. They had staff for each room of the museum to tell you about the exhibit and background information about Gandhi, and the exhibits themselves were so cool – you sing into a straw basket and a speaker nearby plays Gandhi’s favorite song, or you blow into a bowl filled with water and steam and it shows one of Gandhi’s messages as light on the steam, or you spin Gandhi’s spinning wheel and it plays a movie about his life. Such organization!
That night we went to Connaught Place (the main market of Delhi) and shopped. I was overwhelmed at first by the colors and sparkles of countless stalls – where should I start? Each person had a stall about 4ft wide and maybe 10 feet deep, and it was like walking into a tunnel of colors (if you were in a clothing stall) or glitter (if you were in a jewelry stall). But by the end I was having fun bargaining with the shopkeepers – bringing things down to half their original price with the help of Nidhi to translate the more complicated parts. It’s a good thing she was there, because apparently the shopkeepers hike up the price exponentially for foreigners, but because Nidhi was with me they treated me like a native. So we came back laden with bags and Nidhi’s uncle congratulated us on getting good prices for everything.
Yay!