21. Golden Triangle of India

India is almost impossible to get a good first impression. Spending four days around the major tourist sites near Delhi almost guaranteed that I would get a bad impression. Unlike in Cairo, however, I was prepared this time. The hustlers hounded and hassled me no end, but I in return taunted them and bargained hard. Such annoyances didn’t bother me much this time. The abject poverty, so blatantly visible, was a shock to me. The diversity of Indian culture and people I found fascinating. Saris I found to be supremely beautiful.

The effort that went into getting my Indian visa was heroic. I visited the Indian Embassy in Riyadh at the beginning of June. They told me that I had to go to my country of residence to get my visa. That would have been the end of the story on India since I wasn’t planning on going back to New York any time soon. However, since I was getting a residence visa for Saudi Arabia, I was told that they could issue me a visa after I had my iqarma, and it wouldn’t take more than a day. Of course, the Saudis couldn’t give my passport back until a few hours before my flight. I was glad that I didn’t have to cancel the trip. Then I went to the Indian Embassy in Dubai. They could issue me a visa, but it would take three to five days because they had to talk to Washington or Riyadh. My last chance was Singapore. Sanjay had found out for me earlier that the visa would take two days. I wanted it on the same day since I arrived in Singapore on Friday and planned to leave on Sunday. I didn’t want to change my itinerary and take another day away from the already very hurried four days in India.

I paid a visit to the Indian High Commission, which is not too far from Sanjay’s place, as soon as I arrived. It’s amazing how amid the ultra-modern Singapore, the Indian High Commission is still so very Indian – old furniture, ceiling fans and no AC in the waiting room, three different queue number dispensers, confusing notices on the walls, workmen on ladders fixing some wiring. The great news to me was that it’s possible to have the visa on the same day for a small additional fee – S$100, or about US$60. At first I was told that I should see the vice consul, then I was told that it wouldn’t be necessary. I believe that a normal tourist visa is good for six months. I was given seven days. The visa itself was S$85. Americans had to pay S$40 extra for some telex charge, the purpose of which I didn’t attempt to figure out. At least I got my visa and I didn’t have to change my plans.

The flight on Singapore Airlines was pleasant enough. You know that you are not in Singapore anymore as soon as you step off the plane at Delhi airport. The modernity of Singapore was in such direct contrast to the poverty of India. After immigration, there were money changers and then prepaid taxi booths. The booth keepers would yell out to me to get me to go to them. I ignored them all. The money changers all offer the same deal. I exchanged $200 and got a stack of 85 brand new 100 rupee bills, which I had trouble stuffing into my undercover money pouch. The prepaid taxi booths, however, offered different deals. One offered me 250 rupees to go to Connaught Place, but everyone lined up at the Delhi Traffic Police pre-paid booth. The same ride was only 155.

Getting out of the terminal building was intimidating even with the mental preparation I had. It was as if I was thrown into a lion pit. It looked like a mob out there. Faces of the waiting crowd pressed again the chain-link fences. Once I was out there, hustlers immediately came up to me to offer to take me to my prepaid taxi. I was a little scared so I was very firm, "Don’t follow me. Don’t touch me. Go away." I went to a booth to get my taxi number. The same hustler guided me to a taxi. "Show me the number, 1090." Of course it wasn’t the taxi I was supposed to get. It probably didn’t really matter, but I wanted to call his bluff. Car 1090 soon came.

The taxis are the so-called yellow tops. These are Indian made 50s models in dilapidated conditions. The meter is shaped like a cube street gas lamp and is installed on the outside on the left side of the hood. Of course, no one uses meters. They most likely don’t work anyway. Five minutes into the ride, the taxi driver offered me cigarettes. "No, I don’t smoke." He motioned to ask if he could. "Sure, go ahead." I had been smoking ever since I got out of the terminal building anyhow. The air was so thick with blue automobile exhaust I almost choked. What’s a bit more tar and nicotine when I have been smoking sulfates? LP says that breathing Delhi air is like smoking 20 cigarettes a day or 40 if you are in the middle of traffic.

It was all local roads into the city from the airport. I don’t want to know how these guys drive here with high beams and horns blasting through thick blue air. I thought we were still in the outskirts of the city, when the taxi stopped in front of Nirula Hotel at Connaught Place. Connaught Place straddles Old Delhi and New Delhi in the center of the sprawling city. It didn’t look any different from the rundown buildings, broken pavement, dirt and garbage that I had seen on the way into the city. What a dump the place was.

The price of a room at Nirula had gone up almost 75% from what was listed in LP. The guy at the front desk surprised me as he wouldn’t budge from the posted price. The nearby York Hotel was a bit cheaper and probably in a bit worse conditions, but I decided to drop anchor there.

I felt rather travel fatigued not only physically but also mentally. I felt like I was going through the motions of visiting these places but without any of the anticipation, the interest, and the excitement of being in such an "exotic" place. I could just stay in the hotel and not go out at all, except that the room had a choking smell of burned garbage. I couldn’t tell where the central AC drew its air.

Connaught Place in the morning looked somewhat better. It is a vast traffic circle with two- or three-story high colonnaded buildings of uniform style arranged in concentric circles around a park in the center. The buildings must have once had an air of majesty, but they are now old and grimy. The government tourist office was behind Nirula Hotel. I went to ask about their tours. The guy first tried to steer me towards hiring a private car for three days for 7000 rupees. Well, I don’t want that. Let’s talk. LP India was extremely useful as it had accurate information about the various options. The tours organized by the government tourist office are a good way to go. Indian tourists take these, so that prices are exceedingly affordable. A half-day tour of Old Delhi was only 100 rupees; a half-day tour of New Delhi was 125; and a full-day tour to Agra, where the Taj Mahal is located, was 600. My major expense was the $110 airplane ticket to Jaipur the next day, Tuesday, July 27. Taking a train to Jaipur would have been too slow to make it back the same day.

I had a few hours before my afternoon half-day tour of Old Delhi. So I walked around Connaught Place. The heat and the humidity were a major drag. Lunch at the Host, which served a mixture of Chinese and Indian dishes, wasn’t bad at all. I had also chanced upon the Indian Airline airport bus, which cost a mere 30 rupees. I got the hang of ignoring the constant barrage of tuk-tuk drivers and various other touts. For experimentation, I answered "no" to every single question a tout would ask. It usually didn’t take more than five no’s for the guy to give up. "Taxi?" "No." "Japan?" "No." "Where are you from?" "No." "English?" "No." "Tourist office?" "No." …

The Old Delhi tour included three points of interest. The main one is the Red Fort which takes its name from the red sandstone walls. It was completed in 1638 at the peak of Mughal power. Nowadays an assortment of souvenir and crafts hawkers line the entrance. The grounds, the buildings, and the several small museums looked poorly kept. There were a lot of men who were kind of just hanging around and doing nothing. As we stopped to listen to the tour guide in a semicircle, those people would magically appear, gather to form the complementary semicircle, and stare at us.

I had almost never traveled solo before. I didn’t think that I would like solo traveling, but it seemed fine since I joined these tours and would usually find someone to chat with for a few words. On the Old Delhi tour it was Natelie. She turned out to be a newly minted Wharton MBA who was going to work in New York for a major competitor of the Firm. Apparently a lot of the MBAs go on whirlwind tours of the world after getting their degree and before going to a well-paid job. India was just a few weeks out of a much longer trip for Natelie.

The second place on the tour, we saw a circular area in a park. It looked like some memorial. One must remove his shoes to enter. I wasn’t too sure what it was. Natelie didn’t know either. The guide didn’t do a very good job at explaining what we were seeing and the people on the tour didn’t seem to care. Perhaps the breakdown of the AC has something to do with this. It must have been Raj Ghat, where Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. The third place on the tour was most likely Shanti Vana, where all the assassinated prime ministers of India were cremated. It had an eternal flame. Great, I came all the way to India, and I didn’t even know what I was seeing. I was travel fatigued.

I got up early to catch the last Indian Airline bus to the airport, but took the wrong concentric circle around Connaught Place. By the time I backtracked and found the office I had already missed the last bus. Connaught Place in the early morning was free of the hustle and bustle. The touts were already out there hassling me; but the many street people generally left me alone. Street cleaners were out sweeping the sidewalks with large brooms. I saw one man scooping some stuff out of a sidewalk latrine with his hands and some cardboard to dump the shit into a pile of garbage along the curb. They were for sure the untouchables. I have seen documentaries on the demeaning ways the untouchables had to perform the various dirty jobs, but it just blew my mind away to witness someone cleaning dirty latrines that way.

The Alliance Air 737 that I took from Delhi to Jaipur was the most beat up, run down, and patched up 737 I had ever seen. (Well, that is until I took the plane from Jaipur to Delhi the same night.) It had a coat of paint that looked like you and I had done the job with a toothbrush. Its logo on the side of the door was spray painted with a stencil. Paint droplets spread out from the edges of the letters. Open the overhead bins and you see the aluminum foil backed insulation and the air vent tubes. The seat covers were soiled. Some of the brown fold-up tray tables had a coat of brown paint that I didn’t think was supposed to be there. I know that rationally speaking, this beat-up 737 was still a lot safer than the 1,600-pound Katanas I flew, but the dilapidated conditions of this plane made me worry about its airworthiness. How exactly did they do maintenance? I practiced the night-time helicopter forced landing procedure: 500 feet about ground, turn on your landing lights; if you don’t like what you see, turn them off. I slept through the flight, got religious, and prayed for favor from the probability god.

From Jaipur airport I went directly to the main railway station where the government tourist office was. I had about a hour and half to kill before the 1:30 p.m. half-day tour of Jaipur. There wasn’t too much to see immediately outside of the railway station. No restaurants that I would dare dine in. So I turned back, bought some Pepsi and cookies, and sat in the half air-conditioned tourist office. Two western women came in to speak with the agents. They were about to break down in tears. They had paid something like 6,900 rupees from some travel agent for train tickets that added up to only 4,900 rupees. The experience of riding on an Indian train hadn’t been exactly pleasant either. Other people took their sleeper berths and wouldn’t leave. "We are desperate. Everyone cheated us – the hotels, the taxi drivers, the travel agents. Everyone! We’ll never come to India again." The agents probably had heard similar stories many times before. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot they could or would do. The only way to survive through India is to educate yourself with guidebooks like LP, count your change before you leave, and no more nice guys.

A minimum of six people were required to run the city tour. I was the third. The first two were an Israeli couple. I was sitting there thinking what I was going to do if they couldn’t find six people. The tour itself was only 75 rupees (about $1.75). I figured that I had spent $135 to get a visa to come here, $110 to fly from Delhi to Jaipur, 200 rupees (vastly overpaid without bargaining) to get from the airport to the train station. Now, am I going to let three people, 225 rupees, be in the way of getting my tour? As 1:30 approached, I told the woman agent there that she should contact the Israeli couple and that I would pay for four seats. The agents did call the Israeli couple at their hotel, but they had changed their mind, hired a taxi to see something else, and would take a full-day tour the next day. I spoke to them and failed to convince them to come. Some dialogue in Hindi went on between the two agents for a while. I think that I had sufficiently impressed them with my offer to pay for four seats on the tour. She told me that she would arrange a car for me for 300 rupees (about $7.50), since I was the only one so determined to see Jaipur. A taxi without a guide for five hours, the length of the tour, would cost 440 rupees. The guys outside would surely ask for a lot more and give a lot less. So 300 rupees for a guide, a driver, and a private car for five hours was in fact a good deal in any case. This just goes to illustrate how affordable India could be and how in relative terms I was overpaying for everything else, even though in absolute terms nothing was expensive.

Jaipur is about 200 kilometers southeast of Delhi in the state of Rajasthan. The city owes its name to the Maharaja Jai Singh II, who ruled in the early eighteenth century. Jaipur is also known as the Pink City for the color of its old walled city that was planned by the same Maharaja.

The first stop on my "VIP private" tour was the Jantar Mantar, or observatory, built by Jai Singh in 1728. It is well preserved and restored. The numerous instruments for telling time, seasons, the positions of the constellations, etc. were made of fine stones and bricks. They were huge instruments because of the level of precision they could achieve. The most striking is a 27 meter tall sun dial. From the top of the sun dial, I could see the beautiful red façade of Hawa Mahal, or the Palace of the Winds, rising up from a field of small houses.

Near the observatory in the heart of the old city is the City Palace. I was quickly guided through the textile and armory collections. Various things were pointed out to me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t understand about a quarter of what the guide was saying. The other three quarters went in one ear and out the other. There was one oil painting portrait of the Maharaja. No matter from what angle you view the portrait, his shoes and his eyes follow you. Of course a two-dimension portrait of a man gazing directly at you looks like a flat portrait of a man gazing directly at you whether you view if from the left or the right. It’s the suggestion that there is optical illusion that makes you think that the Maharaja’s gaze is following you. There were two huge silver vessels, the largest silver objects in the world, which one maharaja used to take water on his visit to England. There was certainly very interesting architecture to be observed in the palace, but I don’t know much about architecture.

Outside of the city of Jaipur the chief attraction is the fort at Amber, the ancient capital of Jaipur state. On the way, we briefly stopped to view Jal Mahal, or water palace, built in the middle of a lake. The road from Jaipur to Amber was the only place where I saw cars, trucks, tuk-tuks, bicycles, humans, horses, dogs, cows, camels, elephants all share the same road. Yes, camels and elephants!

More Rajput architecture was to be observed at Amber Fort, situated on top of a hill overlooking a lake. From the fort I could see some kids playing and an elephant bathing in the lake. It’s amazing how little I remember about the fort except the guy who hassled me for money. A small group of Indians and I were in one room that had a great deal of semi-precious stones and glass etched into the walls and the ceiling. My tour guide closed the doors to block out the light. Some guy who seem to hung out there lit a candle and waved it to show the twinkling reflections from all the small glass pieces. Then the doors were opened and everybody left. The guy with the candle asked no one else but me for money. By now I had gotten into the habit of keeping a roll of dirty crumbling small bills in my front pocket for easy access. The smallest bill is on the outside. I happened to have a crumbling one rupee bill wrapped in plastic cover. I sure didn’t like the fact that he targeted no one else but me for money. I gave him the one rupee without realizing that it’s worth about two and half cents. I suppose that it must have been pretty insulting, but hey, I was insulted too. This one freaky looking guy, whom I had noticed before at the ticket booth, pointed his finger at the candle guy and let out a shrieking laughter.

After passing by what must have been Gaitor Maharaja Cenetophs, we stopped at Birla’s Temple. Or maybe it was Baril’s Temple. I don’t remember. The guide did not go in with me to explain things to me. I had to leave my shoes outside because it was a temple. My white socks had gray soles after the visit. It looked like a newly built temple in honor of someone. A small collection of photos and personal items were on display downstairs underneath the temple itself. As I walked in, the uniformed guard immediately followed me to tell me what I was looking at. I tried to ignored him by following some other Indian visitors closely. He didn’t manage to get more than a few words in, but I didn’t manage to slip past him on the way out either. As I took out five rupees, I gave him a piece of my mind, "It’s the same everywhere. You ask me for money just because I am not Indian." With that, of course he waved his hand to decline. I had no qualms about not giving him the money. I don’t mind tipping for good service or even just service, but I was really annoyed by having "service" I never wanted forced upon me and then being asked for tips.

Near where my tour guide dropped me off, I found Niro’s Restaurant. LP claimed that it’s usually very busy, but it was completely empty at around six when I got there. As I waited for my food, which by the way was excellent, I saw one guy on his hands and knees cleaning the floor with a piece of cloth. Have they not invented the broomstick? Tony Wheeler, the founder of LP, had a sidebar in LP India about seeing people, almost certainly of the lowest caste, on their hands and knees cleaning floors even in the fanciest five-star hotels. "People higher up the caste ladder like to see the lower castes down there where they … belong."

After dinner it was about time to leave for the airport. I in fact couldn’t find a taxi, except the tricycle tuk-tuks. I asked at a hotel nearby and learned that the fare to the airport should be around 40 or 50 rupees. It must be a half dozen drivers that surrounded me when I asked if anyone would take me to the airport. Competitive bidding got the price down from 150 to 70 rupees, which everyone seemed to be offering. Finally one guy went for 60. It was a butt busting, horn cracking, suffocating long and slow ride. My fare was probably still higher than an Indian would have gotten. I nevertheless gave him 70 rupees for the long trip.

My Alliance Air flight to Delhi was merely four hours late. It was around two o’clock when I got back to the York Hotel. I knocked on the locked glass door. The security guard had such a rude awakening that he literally fell out of his chair and onto the floor.

Wednesday, July 28, was a rainy day. It was a little cooler than the day before but not by much, which meant that instead of drenched in my own sweat, I was drenched in a mixture of rain and sweat. Summer wasn’t a good time for sightseeing. Had it not been the timing of the project in Saudi Arabia, I would not have come at this time of the year. Neither would the high court barrister and the family of three on my tour to Agra. The barrister was from Karala, a southern state. He had been in Delhi for business several times, but this was the first time that he had some time to go sightseeing. He told me that he only learned Hindi in school, so coming to Delhi was his opportunity to practice it. English is the language of the legal system. The family of three was also from somewhere in the south. Dad was an exporter. They came with their son, who had just been admitted to a university in Rajasthan.

Although poverty was so visible everywhere I went, there was no doubt that India has a well-educated and established middle class that do go out to see their country. The tourist agencies run by various levels of government operate affordable tours that they can join. This is not so different from China, where there is a sizable tourist industry for the Chinese, except that there the language barrier keeps the majority of foreigners from accessing such affordable alternatives. In contrast, on the circuit of major tourist sites in Egypt – the Pyramids, Luxor, Aswan, and Abu Simbel – I had not seen Egyptian tourists. The exorbitant cost of getting to a site, such as Abu Simbel, as I shall explain in my next letter on Egypt, probably puts it out of reach of most Egyptians. No local alternatives seem to exist either.

Agra is about 200 kilometers south of Delhi. Before going to the Taj Mahal we stopped at the red sandstone tomb of Akbar, the great Mughal emperor, who ruled in the late sixteenth century. It is a place to study the architectural designs that evolved into the Taj. The resemblance in layout and style is hard to miss. The decorations are a blend of Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain symbols and motifs. With the similarities it is then not hard to guess that the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum. I had always thought that the Taj was a palace of sort, which only goes to show how little I know about India.

Taj Mahal was the mausoleum built by Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his favorite wife, Mahal, who died in childbirth. It was built of white marble. The story goes that the emperor intended to build another one for himself of black marble. But before he could do so, he was deposed by his son and was locked up in Agra Fort. For the rest of his life, he looked out of his room in Agra Fort to the final resting place of his beloved wife. With his eyesight failing, a lens was used to project the image of the Taj onto the wall. It’s a sad story. I don’t know much of it was true and how much fiction, but the result is the most recognizable symbol of India. Even on this rainy day, there were quite a lot of visitors. One thing I had to get used to was having to take off my shoes in order to enter a lot of these places. When it was dry, I kept my socks on. Rather my socks get dirty than my feet. When it was wet, I had to get rid of the socks. Eh, who cares. I was a mess at the end of the day anyway.

From Taj Mahal, we went to Agra Fort on the bank of the Yamuna River. The Taj was barely visible in the distance on this misty day. Construction on the fort was started by Akbar. By the time his grandson Shah Jahan ruled, it had partially become a palace. There was a great deal to see in the fort and lot of courtyards and empty rooms to be explored.

Any tour would not be complete without a requisite stop at a shop. I felt better that I wasn’t singled out because I was the only foreigner in this small tour group. I bought a small marble statue of the Taj Mahal. The marble is translucent. If a small light bulb is put inside from the bottom, light would shine through quite nicely.

On the way back, we picked up a few more people bound for Delhi. They had gone on a two-day tour to Agra the day before. I was surprised to bump into one guy from California who was also on my tour of Old Delhi two days ago. Actually it’s not all that hard to see the same tourists again and again on the same tourist trail. I had seen the same people again and again on tours last time in Greece.

I would have stayed until Friday, but flights to Riyadh were awful on Friday. So Thursday, July 29 would have to be my last day in India. My morning was spent on the New Delhi tour. The first stop was the Jantar Mantar built by the same Jai Singh who built the observatory in Jaipur. The two are similar, but this one’s painted mostly in red whereas the one in Jaipur is painted in yellow.

The second stop was the Ramakrishna Mission and the exhibition there on Swami Vivekananda. The major event of his life seemed to be his participation in the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893. It must be a significant undertaking at that time. I know these tidbits of facts only because I kept a brochure from the exhibition. Yet I still have no clue what sect or religion this was.

The third stop must have been Lakshmi Narayan Temple, a modern Hindu temple painted in garish red and yellow. The temple must be visited by tourists quite often to have a sign in the shoe room that forbids tips. Our tour guide had also told us not to give any money to whoever’s in the shoe room. Still the guy there asked, and still Max of Bavaria, who sat next to me on the bus, gave him ten rupees. He wasn’t listening to the tour guide and paid no attention to the sign on the wall. Max and his father had been trekking in the Himalayas. His father had seen Delhi before, so Max took the tour by himself. They had just came back from Leh, 150 km from Kargil in Kashmir. "Oh, it’s just one small hill they are fighting over." He didn’t seem to be concerned at all that they were so close to the flash point. Although it hadn’t been a factor for me, the concern about two nuclear powers fighting over a small hill and all the irrationality and emotions that went with it had come across my mind, since Delhi isn’t all that far from the Kashmir.

We stopped at India Gate only briefly enough to take some pictures. Then it was Humayun’s Tomb. It is an example of early Mughal architecture. The semispherical dome seen here gradually evolved into the bulbous dome of the Taj Mahal. While I had seen the blend of symbols and motifs from different religions at the tomb of Akbar in Agra, I was still baffled by the star of David here. The tour guide explained that it had no relation to the Jewish faith, but a symbol in Hinduism. The same holds true for the Swastika found in Hindu temples.

Next was Bahai Temple. The building, constructed in 1986, is shaped like a lotus flower, but when I first saw it, I thought it looked more like something from outer space. The temple is open to people of any faith for prayer and meditation according to their own religion. This is in such contrast with Saudi Arabia, where one and only one religion is allowed and must be followed. Everywhere I look around the world and through history, from Bosnia to the Middle East, I find people of different religions at each other’s throat. India is no exception and has its share of murderous conflicts between Hindus and Muslims. Yet in spite of this, India is a place of great diversity and complexity. Many religions and faiths have coexisted more or less peacefully for eons. It is then no big surprise that some of the less conventional sects find a place in India, that the Mughal mausoleums take symbols and motifs from many religions, and that a temple encompassing all religions exists here.

The last stop on my morning tour was Qutab Minar, on the outskirts of New Delhi. It was an example of early Afghan architecture. The most notable part is the tower of victory after the defeat of the last Hindu kingdom.

After a delicious lunch at the Coconut Grove at Hotel Ashok Yatri Niwas, the tour’s drop-off point, I found my way back to York Hotel, got my backpack, and went out for one last round against the taxi drivers. In one corner of the ring was me, who hated getting cheated and paying more than I had to. In the other corner of the ring were experienced hustlers and the one taxi driver who finally agreed to take me to the airport for 170 rupees, still 15 more than the official fare.

As we rode along the road towards airport in pouring rain at time, I realized that I didn’t have exact change for the fare. Before I left the hotel, I had counted how many rupees I had left for exchanging back into dollars. I had two 100-rupee bills in my pocket, but all the smaller bills and loose change added up to only 69 rupees. That’s not going to cut it. I figure if the guy should be honest and give me change for 200, I would give him a nice tip, but if he was not … The third time you run into a taxi driver who’s got no change, it should dawn on you that it’s just a ploy. I had thought about my counter-tactic. If he didn’t have change, then I shall cheerfully go find change for him. I may, understandably, have a difficult time finding change. In the meantime, he has to patiently wait because I haven’t paid my full fare.

We arrived at the airport. I got out of the car with all my stuff. I gave him the 200. Sure, he had no change. I grabbed one of the 100 bills out of his hand. "Okay, I’ll go get change." I didn’t think I should be so mean as to ask for change from shop owners, who would be expected to curse me off. So I went to buy a Coke for 10 rupees. "Do you have 10 rupees?" was the question from the Coke guy. Sure, I have ten, but that would defeat the purpose of the purchase. So, "No." Hey, if he doesn’t give me change, I don’t want the Coke. I went back to the taxi, and gave the guy his 70 rupees. The price of the Coke, plus more, would have been his tip. I loved that sour look on his face.

By the mere fact that I could travel this far to India, I surely earn far more than these taxi drivers and hustlers. People sometimes brush off being cheated a little as charity to these poor people. But I hate being taken, even though the gains from hard bargaining don’t really add up to a whole lot of money. Given that India is so cheap, I estimated that if I had not bargained at all on this whole trip, I would have paid perhaps an extra $20 or so. At times when I didn’t feel like spending the energy, I caved in more quickly. Other times, I was more tenacious. I wondered whether I had become too tough. But what is the best way to help the desperately poor here? First, I doubt that the taxi drivers and the hustlers that prey on tourists are the most deserving. I thought about giving money to local charities, but that still is only fixing the symptoms. Mother Theresa has been criticized by some for blindly fighting the symptoms of poverty and not looking at its causes. I agree. In a land of such richness in culture and history, with so much talent, resources, and the advantage of English, why hasn’t India prospered like some of its neighbors? It crossed the one billion population mark with no signs of slowing down. My money would probably be better donated going to something like a UN population planning council.

Terrence
Riyadh
October 16, 1999