Farewell to India

Last day in India

Checked out of the Holiday Inn, which took a while since the reception desk seemed totally disorganised, a shame since the hotel did well on everything else. Although I did get a bit of a shock when I walked  outside to find myself on a wet, muddy service road with no obvious access to the main road. Luckily a passer-by showed me the route through the Samsung building forecourt next door. Then back to real India for a few hundred metres, a few modern buildings interspersed with squalor, garbage and a couple of cows on the way to the "City Centre Mall, which was quite civilised. It may not have been up to Singapore standards but it would pass muster anywhere else. Realise I have been in Singapore too long when I judge the world by the standards of shopping malls! Obviously malls are where middle class Indians come to do their shopping, not the city centres. It looks like, as in the US, there has been a flight to the suburbs leaving the city centres looking bleak. In the US there has been a reversal over the last 20 years as young affluent people have moved back and gentrified the centres; perhaps Connaught Place is the beginning of the same trend in India. Bought, read and finished “Murder in Paharganj” simply because that’s where I was staying in Delhi. It’s a fast paced, if not very believable,  thriller.

Got my last yellow Ambasador taxi to the Holiday Inn, picked up my  bag, and then it was a slow crawl along the few km to the airport.  

Still trying to organise my thoughts on India. The palaces, monuments and forts surpassed my expectations, even the incredibly hyped Taj Mahal. Not only are they impressive but they are excellently maintained and restored. Obviously there is a middle and upper class Indian world which I saw little of beyond Connaught Place in Delhi and a shopping mall in Kolkata. But outside that world, in all the cities I visited, I was overwhelmed by the poverty, squalor and lack of development. I am astounded by how far India is behind China and most of South   East Asia.  On the plus side, I never felt threatened or unsafe, people were friendly and polite, and although I have heard horror stories of  Indian male attitudes to women, I only saw respect and care. What did shock me was the number of women doing very menial, manual labour and how few were in “white collar” occupations.