The pacing of these blog posts is hard to pull off when I have so much to do everyday but I want to keep you guys updated anyway, so here goes.
In the past three days we have had an overwhelming amount of awesome stuff we've been able to mark off of our bucket lists. The biggest one being the Taj Mahal, and I guess the point of this post will be to try and convey the feeling(s) I had standing there in front of one of the proclaimed "wonders of the world."
So the first thing to know about the Taj is that in India it is actually pronounced the Taj Mehell - we look like US rednecks when we pronounce it Taj Mah Hall. The building was built by Shah Jahan in 1653 for his wife. Think of the Taj Mahal as an Egyptian pyramid - its primary purpose was a burial site. The Taj Mahal has both Hindu and Muslim symbolism built into the structure in both design and artwork that is embedded into the marble on the inside of the structure.
When I first saw the Taj I actually got a chill - I never get chills, and my thought process at the time was that the Taj is a timeless artifact. Millions have visited it since 300 years before my birth and will continue to visit it centuries after I am no longer here. I'm not religious by any means but there was a religiosity in reverence for what I was seeing and experiencing in my mind at that moment, and I couldn't move.
The thoughts that permeated along with timelessness were that of awe of construction processes of the era. The magnitude of such a project in comparison with how things are handled now isn’t even worth comparing. We live in an age of metal materials that will decay and fade away in the blink of an eye, but for the earth to swallow the Taj Mahal it will take thousands of years of slow erosion and even then the marble slabs would hold fast for possibly a million or so years.
Incredible. Mind-rocked.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Day 1-2: Delhi
So I know this first post has been a couple of days coming now, and I'm sure a few of you were a little anxious to see what I would post. The thing is, when I got off of the plane I realized nothing I thought I knew from what I had read or watched could have prepared me for the world I am in now. There is just too much going on for any one author to put down everything in words. Even though the Indian people all look and sound the same to us Americans, it truly is a melting pot of culture and societal norms that vary as wildly as they do in the states. But unlike the states, it's a different melting pot - a different brew. Instead of adding western ideas in the batch they have a whole slew of eastern ideas with western ideas as the spice in the mix. So I had to reconsider the things I'd originally wanted to blog about as I want to be oppinionated, but I want everything to be factual. I'd hate to reverberate my usual garbage at you clowns.
So the first cultural difference I encountered was the outrageous disorder on the streets. These guys make Memphis drivers look like chumps. I'm saying if you held your arm out the window of your vehicle it's be in the passengers face of the car next to you, and they aren't wheeling around in shitty cars either. I saw a beamer cruising these streets. The intersections have lights but they don't always work, and somehow the traffic knows when they can go and when they should stop. But it looks like chaos - I kinda like it.
It's neat that, for a society and culture often wrapped up in minimalistic ideas how infatuated with capitalism they've become. There are more businesses than there are cars on the street - and motorcycles included, thats a lot. When we were circling the city of Delhi you could see big business surrounded by massive poverty. There are large clean skyscrapers at on end of the city's skyline and those buildings are forefronted by a mass of tight living conditions - slums. Think.. Alladins view from his little room in the Disney flick.
Only recently has the government in India allowed big business to start monopolizing on products - even walmart was halted for many years from entering the country until recently with its Indian franchise "BestPrice Modern Wholesale," named so to keep the Bentonville haters at bay.
Oh, and it's neat reading about America in their newspapers - it's kinda like listening in on someone's conversation when they're talking about you. In an article I read this morning in the India: Times, they referred to the "unhappy Americans" being upset about their not pitching in on a defense agreement that would involve them dishing out.. $50 billion? I think.
More to come...
So the first cultural difference I encountered was the outrageous disorder on the streets. These guys make Memphis drivers look like chumps. I'm saying if you held your arm out the window of your vehicle it's be in the passengers face of the car next to you, and they aren't wheeling around in shitty cars either. I saw a beamer cruising these streets. The intersections have lights but they don't always work, and somehow the traffic knows when they can go and when they should stop. But it looks like chaos - I kinda like it.
It's neat that, for a society and culture often wrapped up in minimalistic ideas how infatuated with capitalism they've become. There are more businesses than there are cars on the street - and motorcycles included, thats a lot. When we were circling the city of Delhi you could see big business surrounded by massive poverty. There are large clean skyscrapers at on end of the city's skyline and those buildings are forefronted by a mass of tight living conditions - slums. Think.. Alladins view from his little room in the Disney flick.
Only recently has the government in India allowed big business to start monopolizing on products - even walmart was halted for many years from entering the country until recently with its Indian franchise "BestPrice Modern Wholesale," named so to keep the Bentonville haters at bay.
Oh, and it's neat reading about America in their newspapers - it's kinda like listening in on someone's conversation when they're talking about you. In an article I read this morning in the India: Times, they referred to the "unhappy Americans" being upset about their not pitching in on a defense agreement that would involve them dishing out.. $50 billion? I think.
More to come...
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