You can see a lot of a place without really seeing anything, or see very little of it and still see a great deal. This was brought forcibly home to me by a recent trip to India. I spent just over a week in Rajasthan, travelling, living cheaply, seeing things that tourists see. One face of India. The second half of my stay was spent in and around Delhi to see two of my friends (both Indian) get married. Suddenly, I was face to face with (one part of) the real India, not a posed photo, not a cardboard cut out for the foreigner, not an image from years ago. For the first time I felt myself in a fundamentally different place.
What can a visitor hope to absorb of India in a short time? Nothing but glimpses, dancers captured in the light of a flash gun. How you see a place affects what you see, how you feel affects what you experience.
India can be a very cheap place to visit, how much you spend can be however much you want, it depends on your tastes. The biggest problem with India and the arrival in Delhi is the shock of the new. If you are thinking of going (and I strongly recommend it) then make a hotel booking for the first night before you arrive, and don't worry too much if you are getting ripped off by the taxi driver that first day. Try and get out of Delhi the first full day, get a train to Jaipur, or Jodhpur, or just somewhere else and save Delhi for another time. (Speaking for myself, I hated Delhi when I arrived, but when I went back a week later it was a wonderful, vibrant place. I had changed, not Delhi.) In Jaiselmer stay in the walled city if you can do it. By all means take a camel safari but don't book one until you have looked around at the prices. Some travel guides say you should take a full 4 days of camel safari to see the desert etc. For me, once you have seen the desert, it is not especially interesting, the scenery is quite repetitive, and riding a camel is very uncomfortable. The only people I met who really, unreservedly, enjoyed their desert trip had just hired a motor bike for the day and buzzed off alone.
In general, be prepared for the slowness of things in India, if you keep looking at your watch and worrying about your schedule you'll go nuts. Don't be surprised or unduly worried by long pauses, or painfully slow progress on the roads and railways, it is normal. Also stay away from anything run by the official government tourist agency. If you want to go to the Taj Mahal do not take a bus trip from Delhi, take the daily express train to and from Agra. It is cheaper, much quicker, gives you much more time and freedom to look around, and gets you back to Delhi hours earlier.
That's it for my tourist bit, now what about India? During my "holiday" I barely scratched the surface of India. As a tourist I never felt as if I was in India, just looking at it. A week later I had begun to see beneath the skin of this wonderful land and its culture, it was a different place from the one I had just visited.
When I was a guest, my experience was undoubtedly shaped by the attentions and deference of my hosts although they eventually started to relax a little (and so did I). But several things have rooted in my mind:
-- In general, the shop keepers the taxi drivers, the officials, and practically everyone with any publicly displayed reponsibility was a man. Having said that, in my friends family there were several daughters, one a hospital doctor, one a scientist (doing her Ph.D.) in North America. However much one may generalise, it is important to realise that things are always changing.
-- The coffee (which I was offered every ten minutes) was very milky, very sweet and quite weak. It seemed perfectly natural and normal in India but if I was offered it here I'd probably spit it out. The things going on around you can deeply affect what you find acceptable and even pleasant.
-- Hand shaking. Having once been introduced to people at the house (guests, relatives etc.), every time I ran into them they would make a point of shaking hands and saying hello. I got used to it, but the apparent formality of it made me extremely uncomfortable for a few days.
-- Servants. In a moderately well off household, middle class, not too fancy by western standards, people frequently have servants. In fact, they may lack many of the "modern conveniences" many of us take for granted (like a dish washer, a stereo system, a coffee maker, a home computer or whatever). But they are more likely to have servants, to do the washing, the ironing, the cooking, maybe even the driving. Human labour is cheaper and easier to obtain than many other things and it keeps a lot of Indians employed.
-- Kindness and friendliness. I was overwhelmed by the kindness and generosity (I mean social rather than financial) of my friends' families. I had begun to accept India as a rough, dirty, aggressive, tiresome place, but now I found it warm, relaxed, friendly and sophisticated. It was suddenly a wonderfully enriching and uplifting experience to simply be there amongst these people. (And yes being with a well off family must have helped to shape that perception.)
-- Indian society is very different from North American (in general). Parents and adults and older people are generally more respected. Marriage, children, and a decision to suit the family are much more expected and normal than might be the case here. It was particularly sobering to encounter the real differences in how Indians saw their society. Some thought that it was a privilege to be a good son/daughter, a fulfilment, a service to others to bring up children, get them married, have grand-children, etc. Some saw merely a cycle of dependency, look after your kids, teach them to be dependent on you until they get married and have job, then they will teach their children to be dependent and therefore obedient. Is the bottle half full, or is it half empty?
-- Richness. From my place as guest and friend in a relatively very well off family, the dirty, squalid, crowded, noisy, disorganised society of Delhi appeared entirely different. From that point of view it was exciting, alive, interesting, vivid, striking, almost intoxicating.
My final feeling (which may pass) is that there is no such thing as the truth about any country. There are only points of view. I don't mean anything so trivial sounding as "different opinions," I mean real substantive differences in nature of reality depending on the situation from which you see a thing. The true situation, the true nature of society, real life, are all subjective (to a large extent). Despite the incredulity of some of the more narrow minded people around here, I understand why my friends are so homesick for that country, why it is home, and this place is not. I have always understoood homesickness in an intellectual sense of course, though never really felt it. Now I have seen two people I know quite well in the North American environment slip so comfortably and easily and naturally into a place in a fundamentally different life in a society whose conceptual basis is different from mine. Now I see them perhaps with slightly different eyes because I have seen some of the forces which have shaped them. I understand in my stomach what they miss (even if I could never feel at home there).
