New Delhi (Sat, 26 Feb)

It was the last day in India and we were quite excited about getting to our good old Singapore soon. But we still tried to catch some more of the famous attractions of Delhi.

We started the day with going to Humayun’s tomb. The tomb was built in 16^th century for Mughal emperor Humayun.

It presents a nice combination of red sandstone and white marble, and it’s windows are all made of lime stone “lace”, which makes the whole construction look quite delicate and airy. It has also a nice garden and several other buildings around. I liked it better than Taj Mahal, probably because my expectations were much lower (basically, I had no expectations, as I had not heard of this tomb before coming to Delhi) and it was far less crowded there.

Besides the Taj Mahal, the Baha’i Lotus Temple was one of the few other sights that I had heard of before going to India. So I was determined to go to see that and hence, we headed there. It is a quite extraordinary building for its shape of a lotus flower. The temple was build by and for the Baha’i religion, but as Baha’i philosophy revolves around universal peace and elimination of prejudice, adherents of all religions are welcome to visit the temple and/or prey or meditate there. I found this rather nice.

We finished our sightseeing of Delhi with a walk in the Lodi garden, which was right next to our guesthouse. It’s a nice park, where locals (mainly the residents of the rich neighbourhood around it) like to go for jogging or for a walk. It encompasses also several old tombs from 15^th century. A really nice place to close the India chapter for us.

After that, it was time to collect our luggage from the guesthouse and head to the airport. We could use the new metro airport metro line, which had been opened during the time we were in India. Hence, it was really brand new, and I must say quite swift and convenient :).

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New Delhi (Fri, 25 Feb)

This was a day of lot of walking. We started by taking metro to Connaught Place, which is Delhi commercial centre and is representative for its colonial architecture. It is made up of a central circle and several circles around it and has many streets radiating from the central circle. Quite nice.

We walked to the famous India Gate from there. This is 42 metres high memorial, which reminds the arc de triomphe. It is dedicated to the Indian colonial army soldiers who fought in the First World War. We continued from there along Rajpath, which is a nice alley starting from India Gate and ending with governmental buildings and the president’s palace. Half way towards the other end of Rajpath, we stopped at the National Museum for several hours and educated ourselves about the last 5000 years of India’s history. It had quite rich exhibition of artefacts of early Indus valley civilisations (such as Harappan Civilisation) and of the early years of Buddhism. For instance, it was quite interesting to see that the earliest figures of Buddha have lots of similarities with ancient Greek figures, in particular the dressing and hair.

After quite a long visit to the museum, we continued walking along Rajpath, around the president’s palace the neighbourhood and in the districts, where the really wealthy people (judges and high politicians) reside. It was all clean and neat and felt almost like Singapore.

We ended the day with a nice dinner with Nakul sharing our experiences of India. Nakul briefed us of the real estate prices in “the bold and the beautifuls’” neighbourhoods – millions of US dollars. At the same time, a few blocks further, people live on streets in extreme poverty. The contrast between the rich and the poor are more apparent and more extreme in India than in any other place I’ve been to so far. It kind of feels that it is only question of time for the two extremes clash. But at the same time, India has a democratically elected regime, so it is different from the situation in the Middle East.

It also feels in India that life is a constant fight and there’s little politeness or respect toward others. It is quite apparent in the traffic – no motor vehicle ever gives way to a pedestrian, no one ever gives way to changing lines, etc. But it’s also apparent for instance when visiting the museums – everybody tries to push ahead in queues for security check, stepping on other people’s way when taking pictures or stepping on other people’s toes is a normal thing, etc. It feels so rude and against normal rules of social co-existence for me. But this seems to be just part of the overall chaos in India. Hence, the rule seems to be that forget about being nice, if you want to survive India.

Another rule that we soon learned – being a pedestrian is punishable. Pavement bricks are often about a half metre high, which makes it quite a good work out to cross roads. Zebra crossings have no meaning what so ever. They often end with lawn, the high pavement bricks in the middle of the road, with a fence or simply in the middle of an expressway. According to Nakul, zebra crossings were painted on the roads quite randomly before Commonwealth Games, just to make the city look more orderly. Pavements are generally good for parking or having a bazaar, etc.

We were also quite surprised by the poor level of English of the locals (e.g. service personnel in busses). As India is a former British colony, English used to be widely spoken, but probably not by all groups of the society. When applying to foreign universities, I’ve often noticed that while applicants of other nations are required to prove their English with Toefl (or other similar tests), Indians are exempted from this requirement. Based on our experiences in India with many of the locals, who spoke hardly any English at all, I felt that this exemption was quite unfair.

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