Delhi

We set off from Newark in the snow on Monday morning and after twenty hours of travel landed in Delhi yesterday morning.  The first thing we noticed was the smokey smell, reminiscent of the London smogs of our childhood.  Then as we emerged through the barrier of bored men holding notices with people's names on, the dogs, barky and fractious, but not threatening.  A young man finally coalesced  from the sea of notices bearing my name and led us to a grey and stained concrete multi-storey, barely distinguishable through the smokey haze, where his battered saloon awaited us.   The drive to the hotel took an hour or so in a honking motorcade with bikes and scooters weaving between the cars and tuk tuks.

Yesterday evening we met up with our friend Sarah and her colleague Lotte, who by an odd coincidence have been working here for the last three weeks.  Following Sarah as she weaved confidently through the middle of a crowded market with the help of Google maps, it suddenly struck me how smartphones are enveloping us in an information bubble which obviates the need to actually inhabit the places in which we travel.  Later, the talk turned to Trump and it hit me that his presidency happened while we were all staring into our 'phonescreens pulling in information confirming our own prejudices and then we looked up and found Trump in the Whitehouse and the UK leaving the EU and we wailed "how did this happen?"

I like to record first impressions because they are so fleeting and then they disappear forever.  Coming to a country for the first time we are especially vulnerable as our preconceptions collide with reality and we struggle to adjust both until they agree with each other.  At the moment the thing that's impressed me most is the dense complexity of Delhi, that there is so much diversity in wealth, social standing, culture, mood and time.  In the space of twenty four hours I've seen:

• Government buildings surrounded by barbed wire and sentry posts, like world war two prison camps.
• Air conditioned shops stuffed with globally fashionable goods.
• Comfortable Indian middle class old buggers eating fine traditional food served by uniformed waiters.
• A tiny frail thin man with a tubercular cough curled up on a metro station wall preparing to die as comfortably as he can.
• Outright hostility and open-handed helpfulness.
• A man having a shit on a piece of wasteground next to a busy thoroughfare.

We've got two and half months of this and as I sit here in my hotel room, satellite TV flickering, I'm facing this prospect with a mixture of intense excitement and outright fear.