it's a wonderful day. the weather is cool thanks to the rain earlier and i'm seriously tempted to actually get out of the house and maybe - dare i say it? exercise? - at least the tempation is there. whether i'll succumb remains to be seen. i sent mum off at the airport this morning to taiwan with the aunties and cousins, which meant that i had to wake up early, which made me really tired.
yesterday we had the most amazing Zapple Section Outing at andrea's house. it was pretty awesome coz so many people were there. and geok woon supplied the bbq food, which was really delicious as always. i think he's going to get alot more business after this bbq. unfortunately it ended late and i was so tired when i got home.
ok so that was life yesterday and today. now to blog about India.
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India was everything i expected and more. no thanks to Slumdog Millionaire, everyone went to India expecting it to be a crime-infested, poverty-stricken, orphan-overrun place and the number one tagline when friends learnt i was going to India was to take care not to get my shoes stolen at the Taj Mahal. to a large extent that version on India was true. upon arrival, i got my very first taste of India, from the pungent haze that greeted us on arrival in Delhi, to the messy roads where you horn to indicate that you were going to beat a red light and the slums the peppered the roadsides. training aside, during R&R we went to Agra and New Delhi. and i think what really gripped me was that India was so in-your-face. it was different and didn't even try to dilute its 5000-year-old culture and way-of-life just to make tourists feel better. travelling on the fabled India Railways to Jhansi, we passed by the rural Indian towns where i finally understood why some people say the toilet bowl was the greatest invention of the 20th century. there were whole tracts of land just polluted with human waste, and not just the plastic bags and cardboard boxes, but the literally man-made variety. what disturbed me the most was seeing a woman - yes a woman - taking a crap on a polluted field adjacent to the train track. it's an image that completely seared my mind.
In New Delhi we were taken to a first-class shopping mall, not unlike Marina Square. it was a very disappointing trip. they had everything you could find at MSQ - Giordano, Bossini, United Colours of Benetton, Nike, Adidas, you name it. why, for the love of Gandhi, would the tour agency bring us to a half-opened shopping centre where you could find everything we had in Singapore and less? MSQ has Topman, Zara, Puma, John Little and Lee Jeans, just to name a few, and it's not as though the Nikes in Select Citywalk, New Delhi were 3.1 times cheaper than in Tampines Mall, Singapore. the whole point of the abovemention rant was that the tour agency should know better than to take people who travel 5 and a half hours to a city as colourful as New Delhi and take them o a shopping mall barely as good as Marina Square. if i wanted to go shopping i would head down to the three-mall cluster at Tampines, or take a day trip over to JB. but i digress. the reason i mentioned the mall trip was to bring out a point that the contrast (some would say inequality) in India is just amazing. just outside a mall stocked with merchandise you could pay for in euros, were street kids begging for food. some of them would play drums and perform cartwheels to get your attention. it's not like we didn't want to spare them a few rupees so they could buy some food, but we were warned that indulging even one kid with a 50-rupee bill would attract a whole mob of children. it saddens me, really, that just outside a luxury mall, were scrubby, dusty kids who probably were working for some kind of syndicate.
Poverty aside, New Delhi was brimming with development. when Discovery Channel had this series on Megacities, i think New Delhi should be a prime candidate. looking out from a plane window, Delhi at night is a sea of orange lights. Singapore is nothing compared to New Delhi in terms of sheer scale and urban sprawl. New Delhi, is just a part of the larger Indian metropolis of Delhi, 1484 sq km in area and 12.25m in population. that's sheer madness. there's something about India that excites, i guess. the city is hosting the Commonwealth Games this year and there's construction everywhere. they are building a Metro system and highways are sprouting up all over the place. i think it's a really interesting city, humming with development. what was really special for me was when we travelled down this stretch of road with all the embassies and that got me really excited as i was trying to find the Singapore High Commission, to no avail.
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ok, enough about my general comments about India. i was really excited in the run-up to this trip because i've always wanted to visit India after watching Slumdog. i think the movie has done so much to raise awareness of India and it both dispelled and reinforced certain pre-conceived notions i had about India. the highlight of the trip was of course the Taj Mahal. we spent almost 2hours there, spamming pictures and getting our photos taken. (100rupees for 1 photo! ready in 20minutes!). the Taj was just amazingly awesome, despite the rather morbid fact that it was a tomb and we got to go inside to see the actual graves. it was beautiful and really grand. to think the Mughal emperor would build that entire complex just to remember his wife. i like the story of the Taj Mahal. after giving birth to 14 children, the empress died and on her deathbed she made the emperor, Shah Jahan promise her three things: that he would not remarry, that he would take care of the children and that he would build a monument for the world to remember his love for her. and boy did the world remember. funny how tombs are monuments of love. a grand marble-domed structure for an empress to remember his wife, an empty tomb for a Father to remember his Son...
anyhow, we totally visited at the right time, just as the sun was setting, meaning it was cool and there were these beautiful golden pools of the evening sunlight on the Taj, giving the whole place a magical feel and gave us gorgeous shots of the Taj and the surrounding structures. i tried to take a picture at the Diana Bench as well, but i couldn't find the exact bench, unfortunately. nevertheless, we had a wonderful time posing for photos and doing lots of crazy things like baby freeze at the Taj Mahal courtyard. it was a really magical experience (take that Sentosa) and i guess at the end of the day people are drawn to legend, mystique and history. it makes the IRs, as the best tourist destination in Singapore seem almost sad. pity some Johor Sultan didn't build a marble tomb in Woodlands or something 300 years ago so we could get ourselves in the seven wonders list as well.
other than that we did the usual touristy things: go to the marble shop and bargain, have a nice buffet dinner in the hotel (free flow of Naan!), and chill out in the hotel watching Home Alone with room service.
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the third and final leg of the journey was to New Delhi, which was quite a disappointement because firstly: we were brought to Chinese restaurants for both lunch and dinner, which is a travesty because it completely insults the proud Indian culinary tradition. i mean, why would Chinese people living in Singapore travel all the way to Delhi just to eat Chinese food that doesn't taste as good as the zhi char stall at 85? it's like who flies to China to eat Tandoori chicken, Paris to eat burgers, Italy to eat tom yum goong and Mexico to eat pasta? i was really miffed that i did not get to eat good, traditional Indian cuisine. although my travel companions were quite happy to get a break from the curry and spices.
Delhi, as i mentioned earlier, was chaotic and messy and compared to Singapore, slightly wild. it had no beautiful skyline, no charming waterfront and no legendary creature spitting water into the bay. but then again, Delhi's no Singapore. and i think it was a very good experience to go to a developing country like India and see first-hand both the poverty and the frenetic development taking place there. the street kids i saw represented the old India everyone knew and the Delhi Metro and the CNG bus fleets represented the new India, the India economists and journalists and businessmen talk about when they talk about emerging powers and a multi-polar world. it also showed me that India was still far from rivalling even China, much less Europe or America, but it also showed the potential that India had to grow.
we went to the India Gate, a war memorial. it was ornate and stately, befitting a national monument, but it was all. we then went to the very disappointing Select Citywalk mall where we had only an hour to shop at a place larger than Marina Square. it was a mad dash here and there and buying nothing. in hindsight, maybe going to an Indian cafe to eat some Tandoori was a better idea. it was really nothing special. besides the shops, the food was also very Singaporean. Coffee Bean, Gelato, brownies, what's new? disappointment.
we then left for dinner at a very nice restaurant that actually served passable chinese food. and then we went to the Indira Gandhi International Airport. and back home to Singapore.
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maybe i should mention the training. Babina is located in a semi-desert region in Uttar Pradesh state and we were at the Merlion Camp (lol) where it was very hot in the day and very cold at night. the conditions were awesome and the thing i loved most was the Butterscotch ice cream that i am so craving for even right now. (Indian ice cream is fantastic, by the way). the most special time was the last night when we had the end-of-frame dinner. we were treated to a buffet spread of great Indian food, including butter chicken, naan, and other wonderful things i do not know the names of. at the end of the dinner, there was a fireworks display! it was the first time i've seen fireworks being set off at such close proximity. it was quite special and quite amazing to see fireworks so close. and it' such a once-in-a-lifetime experience because no way any of us was going to go back to Babina ever again.
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i do not miss India. the only thing i do miss was the relative freedom we had in the campsite. no need to wake up at 5.30 and wait for everyone to march to the cookhouse for breakfast, just go yourself. how nice. i do not miss the R&R either because after going to India, i've come to appreciate the comforts of Singapore even more. i would presume that the Indians living in the slums, should they have the opportunity to come here, would be floored by the relative 'luxury' that is our HDB flats, personal computers, iPhones, lifts and TVs that we so take for granted. even the rich Indians would be jealous of our relatively congestion-free and orderly roads, our crowded but efficient MRT, our smogarsboard of shopping malls and the variety of brands they carry. not that India is inferior to Singapore, we're just at different levels of development.
i shall return, i guess. because i want to see what India will become in 10 years' time. i think the city, and the country at large will be radically transformed. i like India because it is so lively, its people are friendly and it is an interesting country. i admire their millenia-old civilsation and respect its diverse cultures. i am slightly taken aback by the chaos, the poverty and the inequality, but respect that it is what it is and that India will be what its own citizens deem it will be, and not what its governmental elites or what foreigners dictate it will be, that it will chart its own course and will take its own time reaching their destination and doing it in a style and fashion it will determine for itself. India is indeed incredible.
