As I am writing this, I have just come back from my four week trip to India and am writing my impressions of the trip.
We left on May 25th in the late morning to the airport where we took a four hour flight to Newark, which is right next to New York City and then a fourteen hour flight all the way to New Delhi. The intercontinental flight did not seem long at all due to the airplane having on-board entertainment where my parents watched a Bollywood movie and me listening to some music and watching American sitcoms.
We arrived at New Delhi just an hour before midnight on Friday, quite exhausted and weary. I was shocked to see myself sweating so much outside the airport and the heat at night was as hot as Houston on a summer day! I never expected New Delhi to be so hot and soon found out we come on the hottest part of the year in India, unfortunately, which did hamper our enjoyment of the trip quite a bit. Even more so did me and especially my younger brother suffering from diarrhea despite us drinking bottled water always and taking other precautions. We are pretty sure that the bottled water we drank in Bihar was just bottles refilled and sealed with regular water not suitable for our stomachs but fine for the locals.
I knew India would be quite different from the U.S but was still taken back at all the stark contrasts and differences from the orange juice tasting quite differently from its American counterpart to driving on the left side of the road. Seeing the immense poverty really did leave me saddened; it is nothing at all like the poverty in the U.S. In the U.S, the poor literally live like kings compared to India’s poor, who have no homes, wear only filthy rags, seeking us tourists out for just enough money to survive but are still fighting as hard as they can to survive and be happy and are doing well and many seemed content to me. They were very religious and spiritual, unlike most of the poor I have seen in America. I was ashamed to be complaining about the constant power outages when many I saw outside had only sheets of metal supported by sticks over their heads as homes.
In a few ways, India has changed quite a bit from 1997 and it most ways, it hasn’t changed a bit since I visited it almost a decade ago. In fact, it felt as if I was going back into time into 1997 again as I traveled around. Even some of my relatives didn’t seem to age a bit or only marginally, quite amazing. The modern, clean and efficient Delhi Metro is something to be proud of and very much needed in that overcrowded city with poor infrastructure. Driving in that city is complete chaos and I was amazed to never have seen any car accidents while there what with so many traffic rules being broken and such. If you can drive there, then you are truly an expert driver worthy of praise! I was amazed to see so much real estate boom in the capital, especially with all the malls built. From what I heard, there was only one mall in the entire country just five years ago and now there are over 300 with at least 30 being built each year!
We had first arrived to my mother’s oldest brother’s home, where I was in fact taken to just after I was born in New Delhi. Everyone was quite excited to see me, given that I hadn’t visited India since 1997. During this entire vacation, we mostly went from house to house, visiting as many of my relatives as we could and also visiting Mumbai and the Taj Mahal. In the few days we spend in Mumbai, we visited Gateway of India and the Elephanta Caves which were on an island a few miles from the coast. Mumbai is quite a beautiful and cultured city, surprisingly more so than the capital. I did see in the capital an incredibly large and very beautiful Hindi temple built by Swami Narayanan’s followers. There is a much smaller version in Houston and it completely pales in comparison to the one in New Delhi.
On the last day of the vacation, I was quite and still am depressed at it being over. The four week vacation only felt like a week long in fact and still does to me; I am amazed by how fast it went by. It feels to me that most of the time spent was just a blur and I still cannot believe that I am at home right now, typing this as I speak. Every time I went on vacations, I would hate them very much and kept thinking about going back home but this is the first time in my life that I am not happy to be home. Although I did not nearly enjoy India as much as I should have due to the heat, the stomach illnesses, the lack of many comforts and me worried about university, I right now miss India very much and cannot wait to go back there again. I hope to visit it again in two to three years maximum and hope to enjoy it much more than I did this time.