India Day 2

The morning is kind of blurry, we took a bus to the Chennai airport which was pretty dirty and not very nice.  KingFisher airlines however, the main airline in India, is SO DOPE.  Everyone is treated like a king!  You have these comfy seats and everyone has a little screen in front of them and they bring you drinks (no alcohol) and food constantly.  Now that I think about it, I was surprisingly wide awake on the airplane. I watched the news and some of a Bollywood movie which was extremely silly and over the top. 

We got to New Dheli and the airport was NICE. I was pleasantly surprised.  We met our tour guide (I actually never learned his name, he was referred to as “the tour guide” for three days… maybe it was hard to pronounce???) and spent the next couple hours taking a driving tour around Dheli.  We stopped at this place, I think it was in a hotel for lunch, and they had a buffet set up for us and it looked like a Bat Mitzvah… all of the tables were white with pink, purple, blue or green accents.  The food for lunch was good, and after lunch we went to see the place where Ghandi was cremated which was very beautiful and peaceful.  We only got to stay for around 30 minutes which didn’t feel like enough time but there is a lot to see in India!

The rest of the afternoon was kind of just driving around, stopping here and there, and eventually we made our way to the train station.

The Dheli train station was the first really hard thing I experienced in India. There were people everywhere, literally everywhere, thousands of people traveling. Some of them were well dressed and others appeared to be families in rags with everything they owned, just waiting. Everyone stared at us, a group of 40 white people with backpacks and cell phones making their way through a sea of Indian faces. 

Our train was delayed so we found an open area and sat down to eat our boxed dinners.  Everyone sat there eating and all of a sudden a small man approached us.  There was something wrong with his legs, they were small and bent up and he dragged himself towards us with his arms.  His voice was really scratchy and the only English he knew was “madam” and he said it over and over with his hands out.  I handed him some rupies out of my purse, probably about the equivalent of a doller or less, and he kissed them, touched his hands to his forehead and bowed, thanking the gods for sending someone to give him money I suppose.

He continued to make his way down the line and another girl in my group, Sara, approached him and handed him her extra food.  He immediately tore off the rapper of some bread and started devouring it and we could see how hungry he was. Slowly, everyone in the group passed their extra food towards the man and he put all of it in his shirt, apples and bananas and chicken and anything else that ended up, his shirt was overflowing by the end.  After we had no more he made his way to a corner and ate like he hadn’t seen food in days, and perhaps he hadn’t.

Hunger in India is one of the hardest things I and others experienced.  It’s so hard to see people who are legitimately starving and not want to help, how can you stand there with laptops and cell phones and look at someone starving and not give them food? But the problem is that giving these people food and money perpetuates the cycle and may prevent them from getting out of poverty and moving forward. If they know they can get fed by begging at the train station they may just continue to do that. It’s very tricky to determine when to give and how much. I personally am an absolute sucker, I can’t see someone and not want to help, but as you’ll learn about when I discuss my second trip to the train station, it’s my downfall.  Another problem in India is the caste system. Basically, people are born into a caste and it’s hard for them to get out of it. If you’re born a Brahman you’re at the top of the line and you will live a very good life, but if you’re born into a lower caste you aren’t even allowed into the cities.  Because most people are Hindu they believe that if someone is of a lower caste it’s due to their sins in their past life.  Because they weren’t good people they have a bad life in this cycle and therefore the people at the top think very highly of themselves and aren’t motivated to help the lower castes.

Eventually we discovered our train was going to be too late and it made more sense to drive to Agra, so our bus came and picked us up and we began our six hour bus ride. We were all exhausted from the traveling and slept for most of it.

We got to our hotel around midnight. It was HUGE and gorgeous.  I think this is the hotel that most people going to the Taj stay in. There was a problem with the rooms and they didn’t have enough for us with double beds so they needed volunteers to sleep in king beds together. I was paired up with a  \girl named Jackie who is a good friend of my roommate so we said we could sleep in a bed together.  Great decision. We were upgraded to a suite where we had a dining room, a living room, a massage chair, a bathtub and TWO pet fish. Sadly we were only in this room for about 6 hours but it was nice to be in luxury although a cruel contradiction to what we had seen of India earlier in the day.

After bustling around our room for awhile we went to sleep, trying to get as much rest as we could before our sunrise trip to the Taj Mahal.

To be continued…