Digging in the Dirt

Sunday 9 November 2008
Delhi

So after a good three hours' sleep I was up again, feeling half dead though just tired and not hungover. After breakfast I was late for the meeting and the guy had disappeared. However I recognised a guy on the street from yesterday and through a combination of lots of things that are too detailed to go into here I eventually found my driver.

We saw the sights but the whole time I was fighting my fatigue. Luckily the Tata Indica is an easy car to fall asleep in the back of, and for the second day in a row I did just that. I saw a bunch of sights which was great and all. The most memorable was probably the Indira Ghandi Memorial, which is actually the house in which she lived and was assassinated, and includes the sari that she was shot in, as well as the clothes that her son and immediate successor as Prime Minister, Rajiv, was also assassinated in.

The precise location that she was killed in the garden is covered in glass, and the walk she took that led to it is also covered in a clear material of some sort. What is remarkable about all this is that she is commemorated at all. She was responsible for destroying all the civil liberties that her father, Nehru, fought so hard to create in the formation of the nation, including habeas corpus, freedom of the press, and the right to political opposition, and it was enforced through unlawful imprisonment, violence and murder.

Of course the bitter irony that led to her death is tied in with all of this. While in her first stint as Prime Minister there was a Sikh separatist movement that wanted an independent state for themselves. They were based at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest place in the world for Sikhs. Ghandi responded to the threat by calling for the state of emergency that suspended those liberties, and then sending in the tanks, killing the separatists and destroying much of the temple (which has since been rebuilt).

This sacrilege was not forgotten and revenge came a good few years later when her own body guards turned on her and killed her. In retrospect it was probably not the best idea for her to have her personal bodyguards chosen only from within the Sikh population. A bit of an oversight there. Humans are notoriously bad at assessing risk.

Rajiv in turn was killed in a terrorist bomb planted by the Tamil separatists from Sri Lanka, supposedly in revenge for his country's support of the Sri Lankan government's military support from India. As you reap, so you shall sow.

It's worth noting that Indira was not related to Mohandas “Mahatma” Ghandi, it is just coincidence that her husband had the same name.

And finally, in a poetic reversal of fate, Rajiv's wife, the Italian-born Sonia, is currently head of the INC which won the last election. But rather than take the role of Prime Minister, she handed it to the country's first Sikh PM, Manmohan Singh.

The only other thing to mention about the trip is that while I was at the Red Fort (Lal Qila) I saw my First Indian transsexuals. I thought they only did that kind of thing in Thailand?!
After that I came back, checked a few things on the web, had supper and went to bed nice and early. Tomorrow, it's meet the ancestors.

If there's one impression that I have of Delhi in the two days that I've been here, it's the dirt. Maybe that's partly tied in with the area where I'm staying, and the cheap hotel that I booked, but you get the impression that everywhere is covered in it. The roads, the plants, the cars, the buses, the monuments, the people, even the air, with the dense, unshifting fog seems to have succumbed to it.

Tables in most restaurants have hardly been cleaned. They're usually only wiped with a slightly damp cloth, never seeing any cleaning products or disinfectant. The menus, like that old joke, tend to have most of the food on it, not just written. It's definitely a different way of life, and I'm not sure that the good Doctor would enjoy it that much if he were here. I have to say though, that for short periods of time it is quite fun to slum it a bit. But not for too long. I can see myself checking in to an InterContinental Hotel at some point in the future!

And the bitter irony is that there's very little wifi, rendering my laptop a little useless. At least I can update my blog whenever I feel like it in my room. The problem is though is that I can't upload it to the web as well, so it's just sitting here on my hard drive waiting for the right conditions.