Six days in Delhi

I'm sat in our hotel room waiting for a taxi on our last day in Delhi.  I've got tendonitis in one foot, explosive diarrhea and I'm physically and mentally exhausted.  We have met a lot of good people, like the lovely family with the delightful pink baby who insisted on including us in their family snaps on a tour of the Red Fort.  Some hostility and rudeness too, people on tubes and at breakfast who will openly discuss the odd foreigners next to them.  And everywhere desperate people trying to make a rupee or two who will tell you anything to gain your attention and your money. 

The Red Fort was one of the highlights, the site is vast and the architecture exquisite.  Like on the metro and all public buildings there is security everywhere, although much of it seems more ritualistic than effective.  Summed up for me by this guard at the fort engrossed in his smartphone under the indifferent gaze of a sleepy dog.

We did the usual tourist things of visiting some of the major galleries.  The National Museum has a great collection of India art and antiquities, which we shared with parties of cacophonous schoolkids.  Sadly, it lacks that one essential ingredient of all decent museums - a coffee shop.  The same goes for the National Museum of Contemporary Art which tells a fascinating story of the development of Indian art from the sixteenth century and how it has interacted with the art of of its European colonisers.  Before our visit I had no idea that the poet Rabindranath Tagore was also an artist.  Another thing I will carry away with me is an image of Winston Churchill as a malevolent spider at the centre of an imperial web.

More than anything though what I will leave this city with is a vague understanding of what it's like to live in a megatropolis of more than 20 million souls.  On our last full day (Sunday) we went to the Lotus Temple, the centre of the Bahia faith and queued with thousands of people to be searched to enter.  The whole visit was a slow shuffle through the grounds, into the temple and out again, the queue outside the grounds surrounded by taxis, tuk tuks, street vendors and the collective roar of the City.  It was the point at which I reached peak culture shock, angry, my feet throbbing and near to tears in my desire for everything to just stop for a while so I could hear myself think.  Later that day we rode the metro further out into the suburbs and saw nothing but the City extending in every direction under a smoggy brown/blue sky, a patchwork of heavy industry, low lying shanties and public and private housing blocks of every design and state of construction or decay.  Part of South Delhi is dominated by what looks like an enormous slag heap.  This city has no neat edges, the pavements are broken down and plastered with dead, dirty and rotting things.  The infrastructure can't cope and so two lane highways accommodate three lanes of cars and trucks and where necessary the motorbikes just ride the the pavement, honking their horns in threat or warning.  The traffic, like the City is itself, contains an incredible variety of moving things from the latest Mercs and Toyotas to broken down tuk tuks and bicycle rickshaws all coexisting in some kind of dynamic tension.  It makes London seem like Cheltenham on a Sunday morning.

I will be relieved to jet out of this maelstrom later today, but I think I will carry with me the uncomfortable feeling that I'm also running from our collective future.