Goodbye India

India is a very interesting place. Out in the countryside far from any cities, there is an crazy mixture of old and new.

In several towns I have seen women on the banks of a river or a pond washing their clothes. They bang the clothes on a rock to clean them.

I routinely see goats being herded down the middle of the dirt roads. Ox carts pull supplies to and fro. Women fetch water from the town well. Cows, chickens and pigs are everywhere in the countryside.

Some scenes look like they haven’t changed in a thousand years!

On the other hand some aspects are absolutely twentieth first century.

Everyone has a cellphone. Most have a smart phone. There’s an app that tourists like me are required to download. It does contact tracing to quickly identify and respond to COVID-19 outbreaks. We never managed that in the United States.

in order to enter the country, I had to submit online forms and receive the results on my cellphone. No paper required. The United States doesn’t have that.

Trains are a perfect example of old versus new.

At each railroad crossing, there’s a gate attendant. As a train approaches, he manually cranks down the gates. After the train passes, he cranks the gates back up. This is exactly the same process we had in my hometown back in the 1950s. The train cars, even the fancy AC2 cars, don’t have sit down toilets or toilet paper; just squat toilets (two metal footprints, a hole, and a bidet hose).

In stark contrast, I bought my train ticket on line. When the train was late, everyone checked its status on their cellphones. An app showed exactly where the train is currently located, accurate to a kilometer, updated every second or so.

So strange.

Everything looks to my eyes to be at least 50 years old. Brick, stone, concrete. All look very old and weathered. The only items that are newer are the cars and motorcycles. Even they look old.

Everyone seems to have electricity in their homes now but there are several power outages every day. Fortunately the outages rarely last for more than a few minutes. Most houses do not have glass in the windows. That implies that they don’t have air conditioning.

The cities are invariably crowded and chaotic. Constant horns blowing from the cars, buses and tuktuks. The air is always polluted.

Everyone seems to want clean sidewalks. I frequently see people out sweeping the sidewalk with a broom or palm leaves. What amazes me is that they never pick up the litter trash. They just sweep it to the side of the sidewalk. The result is nice smooth dirt sidewalks everywhere with trash piled up beside it.

At first glance many of the homes look abandoned. On closer inspection, there is a family living there under poverty conditions that I can’t begin to imagine.

Something I see frequently that I do not remember seeing when I was in India 14 years ago is lots of fat people. I blame it on Indians adopting American style bad eating habits.

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Will I ever return to India? Probably. Will I ever return to Southern India when it’s not the dead of winter? That’s a big solid NO!

Tomorrow I will be flying back to Dubai. My first stop will be the mall next door to my hotel. Why? There’s a Wendy’s there! Cheeseburger and fries!