Delhi
We arrived in Delhi yesterday morning. I can't believe we walked to Delhi. I can't believe I'm here. Photos and descriptions of our arrival and more are making their way up onto Bhopal.net as I write this. We're in a strange space -- everyone is super excited to be here and to have completed our grueling journey, but there is still a lot (or even more) tension now that we are about to go up directly against the central government and so many people will be starving themselves on the hunger strike, which will be painful.
I love Delhi. I never thought I would -- I've heard almost nothing but bad things about it, like Westerners having mental breakdowns upon arrival in India through Delhi, or having breakdowns in Delhi after approaching from other parts of India. It might just be because I have been traversing some of the most strange and primitive land on the planet, but Delhi is making me feel like I'm back home in NYC right now. I can almost imagine myself being happy living here.
Delhi has 12 million people. (NYC is 8 million, Mumbai is 16 million). I like it better than Mumbai. Delhi manages somehow at the same to be surprisingly intimately in touch with deep interior Indian culture and highly, highly connected to the international brainsphere. Mumbai, to me, seemed to be neither of those things -- a city struggling to distance itself from the rest of India (clothing, culture, etc) while managing to seem no more connected to the rest of the world than the bandit country we just got through. In Delhi a stunning number of young, sharp men wear kurtas, the Indian male gown-style clothing, more than in the small villages, towns in the middle of nowhere, and more, even than in Bhopal. And yet, when I got a chance to flip through the channels on a tv here I immediately found whole channels in Japanese, Chinese, and even Italian. For the past week we've had all kinds of people from Delhi coming to see, film, photograph, and/or interview the padyatra, and they all have been very impressive, like New Yorkers as a group -- people that have a much higher-than-average awareness of what the hell is going on the world. Upon arrival here I was greeted by all kinds of cool people, including a lot of very young students who were refreshingly much more interested in the issues facing Bhopal than in the fact that I was from another country. No one cares that I'm foreign here - sweet relief!! I can tell, too, that Delhi is a huge community of people from all parts of India -- something I did not see or notice in Mumbai as much. There are, for instance, tons of people here from the Northeast of India, which is geographically separate (hanging on by a thread), east of Bangladesh and west of Myanmar. People from there look like they are from Burma or Thailand (as opposed to what most Indians look like) and speak completely different languages. There is that smell in the air here, similar to the one in NYC, of cross-pollination, of huge numbers of people converging upon a spot for myriad fascinating reasons, to create, to affect, to change the world in one way or another.
I love Delhi. I never thought I would -- I've heard almost nothing but bad things about it, like Westerners having mental breakdowns upon arrival in India through Delhi, or having breakdowns in Delhi after approaching from other parts of India. It might just be because I have been traversing some of the most strange and primitive land on the planet, but Delhi is making me feel like I'm back home in NYC right now. I can almost imagine myself being happy living here.
Delhi has 12 million people. (NYC is 8 million, Mumbai is 16 million). I like it better than Mumbai. Delhi manages somehow at the same to be surprisingly intimately in touch with deep interior Indian culture and highly, highly connected to the international brainsphere. Mumbai, to me, seemed to be neither of those things -- a city struggling to distance itself from the rest of India (clothing, culture, etc) while managing to seem no more connected to the rest of the world than the bandit country we just got through. In Delhi a stunning number of young, sharp men wear kurtas, the Indian male gown-style clothing, more than in the small villages, towns in the middle of nowhere, and more, even than in Bhopal. And yet, when I got a chance to flip through the channels on a tv here I immediately found whole channels in Japanese, Chinese, and even Italian. For the past week we've had all kinds of people from Delhi coming to see, film, photograph, and/or interview the padyatra, and they all have been very impressive, like New Yorkers as a group -- people that have a much higher-than-average awareness of what the hell is going on the world. Upon arrival here I was greeted by all kinds of cool people, including a lot of very young students who were refreshingly much more interested in the issues facing Bhopal than in the fact that I was from another country. No one cares that I'm foreign here - sweet relief!! I can tell, too, that Delhi is a huge community of people from all parts of India -- something I did not see or notice in Mumbai as much. There are, for instance, tons of people here from the Northeast of India, which is geographically separate (hanging on by a thread), east of Bangladesh and west of Myanmar. People from there look like they are from Burma or Thailand (as opposed to what most Indians look like) and speak completely different languages. There is that smell in the air here, similar to the one in NYC, of cross-pollination, of huge numbers of people converging upon a spot for myriad fascinating reasons, to create, to affect, to change the world in one way or another.
posted by Michael M. at 4:06 AM
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