Greetings from a place I couldn't have imagined during our tour - and which would doubtless be even more astonishing to these villagers (who watched us in a remote part of Madhya Pradesh as if it were a horror movie).Connected to Delhi by a ten-lane freeway lined with shiny new business blocks, Gurgaon bristles with enormously tall luxury apartment buildings. And malls abound: the world's biggest, bigger even than the Mall of America, is in construction - it'll be 1 kilometer long! I spent the afternoon in a 4-storey mall full of international brands with a TGIF on the ground floor - I believe it's called The Metropolitan - whose interior I recognized from some article about the new India I must have read somewhere; across the street is an identical-seeming mall with a Ruby Tuesday on its ground floor. The only visual overlap with what I've seen this past fortnight are the clusters of colorfully decorated cycle rickshaws waiting along the road between the malls, and a few roadside stalls selling their drivers snacks.
It's a new world, the world described in The World Is Flat. Most of India may still live on $2 a day, but its middle class is bigger than the population of the US. My friend tells me that the west and south of India are developing at a galloping rate, while the places we went on with our tour are in states which, if important not so long ago, are now stagnant. My fellow Intrepid travelers (except the two going to Mumbai for a few days) will have no inkling of this new India. Nothing I've seen or read on this trip has prepared me for it. As a crash course in it I picked up a popular new novel at the mall called one night @ the call center. According to the back cover, the plot gets going when a call comes in late one night - from God! Somehow I don't think he'll be reminding them about rural poverty.
I'll have time to read it (along with more discerning fare by the wonderful Amitav Ghosh and the wise Amartya Sen) on the little trip to Rajasthan I've settled on in consultation with my friend and his family: Pushkar via Jaipur and Ajmer, and should these somehow fail to thrill me, Udaipur too. (I'll save the places farther afield for next time.) It makes sense to spend less time en route - it's just a few hours to Jaipur, a few more to Pushkar and Ajmer - and more time exploring. While not off the beaten tourist track (except perhaps Ajmer) this itinerary lets me see pretty desert scenery, a beautiful pink city, a major Sufi shrine and the pool from which Brahma made the universe - not bad for five days!
The Rajasthani trip probably means another little gap in blog postings, but I should be back on in five days, though I may well be more ambivalent and confused than ever now that I've seen Paree. If words fail me I might once again be able to post a picture. (Is the picture above not what you thought I'd post? It's not what I was expecting either but seemed somehow the least inappropriate of my available photos at this juncture. In a little over a week, when I'm back in Melbourne and have loaded the pics in the computer and can resize them, there'll be a river of images. Brace yourselves.)
