-Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, “Some Loud Thunder”
Locations:
Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2047977&l=cc9c2&id=1101094
Temperature: 97
Morale: 7
Spinning: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Some Loud Thunder, Elliott Smith - Roman Candle, Belle and Sebastian - The Life Pursuit
Talking: In even slower English to a Korean guy before I decided to cut my losses and ditch him.
What’s next (I think):
Before I get to
Think about what these horns are doing to the hearing of the locals, who have to live with them all the time! If I were running this country, my first order of business would be to install normal, non-dead-waking horns in all buses. If this keeps up, we’re going to end up with an entire country full of deaf people.
Anyhow, I woke up at 5:15am yesterday to catch my bus to
I walked to my bus and was very glad I had done the same walk the day before, because walking in
But I made it to the bus, which was a luxury Volvo bus complete with A/C. The only problem was that the bus driver didn’t turn on the A/C until the bus started moving, which didn’t happen until everyone had been sitting there for 20 minutes. So, of course, my shirt was soaked with sweat by the time the A/C came on and cooled me down. More on sweat later.
I was sitting next to a Sikh guy who worked in
Anyhow, the bus was comfortable, and a combination of iPod and sleep made the four hour trip feel like a breeze. Speaking of breeze, it would have been nice if
I checked my pack in the cloak room of the bus station because I didn’t plan on spending the night in Chandigarh, and then I went to the train reservation booth to see about getting a train to Delhi for that evening. The booking process was actually incredibly easy, and I had a ticket (Rs 475) on the 6:20pm Shatabdi Express in about 5 minutes.
On my way out of the train reservation booth I passed the tourist information center, which I usually avoid, but given that I was only here for a day and wanted to see as much as I could, I decided to stop in and get some suggestions on how to tackle this rather spread out city in only eight hours.
A quick introduction to
Also,
The man in the tourist office told me to stop by the famous rock garden, built by a local artist (more on this later), and to visit the large artificial lake that was part of Le Corbusier’s plan for the city. I figured all that would take me 3 or 4 hours including the auto-rickshaw rides, so I asked him if I could also visit the “Temples of Democracy”—the three huge, concrete, government buildings designed by Le Corbusier to house the High Court, the Secretariat, and the state parliament. Supposedly these buildings were the highlight of Le Corbusier’s experimental architecture, so I figured they were worth a look from the exterior. But the guy thought I meant that I wanted to go inside the buildings, and he said, “To go inside you must be architect.” Well, I’m not a Seinfeld fan for nothing—I know full well that if George Costanza can be a fake architect, then so can I. But I took the easy way out and told him I was an architecture student (just so that if it because obvious that I knew zero about architecture I could say I was in my first year of studying, or something). Anyway, he bought it (or maybe he just didn’t care), and he sent me in to some other cog of the bureaucracy to get a letter of permission to tour the buildings.
Inside the office was a random government official (RGO—I would meet many of these in the next few hours), apparently whose entire job it was to grant permissions for architects to visit Chandigarh’s government buildings, along with a Korean guy who I assumed actually was an architect and who needed to visit the Temples of Democracy for some legitimate, profession-related purpose.
The Korean asked me, in broken English, if “I was architect” (those turned out to be more than half of the English words he knew), and I told him I was a student of architecture (which is possibly true—I am a student of many things), and he said he was a student in architecture as well. So who knows, maybe he had come up with the same ruse for getting into the buildings as I had.
Anyhow, we got the permission letters, which at first glance looked official, but which in reality were absolutely hilarious. An entire paragraph was devoted to explaining why it would be good for Punjab/Haryana in the long run to allow foreign architects to visit Le Corbusier’s buildings. I’ve never seen a permission letter that makes a case for why it is granting permission. I always thought the point of authority was that you didn’t have to explain why.
The Korean “architect” and I walked across the street from the bus station, permission epistles in hand, to find a “Photostat” (photocopier)—we had to make two extra copies of the letter because each of the three buildings would take a copy and presumably refuse to give it back. I made three copies so that I could keep the original for my own entertainment. When I’m 90 and in a nursing home, I will still be laughing at that letter.
We hailed an auto-rickshaw and took it from Sector 17 (bus station) to Sector 1, where the Temples of Democracy were (numbered sectors were fundamental to Le Corbusier’s plan—each sector is 1 sq km and has its own shops, schools, and places of worship).
On the way the Korean and I attempted to converse, because he said he spoke some English, but apparently he does not speak any English because I was speaking so painfully slowly that I wanted to break his face and still he could not understand. Halfway through the ride I gave up and sat in silence the rest of the way.
When we got to Sector 1, I immediately made for the High Court, the closest of the three buildings, but the Korean balked and asked if we should get lunch first. My chance at last! I told him, mostly through a series of non-verbal gestures, that I wasn’t hungry, but that he should get lunch and that maybe I would catch up with him later. He didn’t seem to have a problem with the idea, so maybe he found our attempt at conversation as painful as I did.
As I approached the High Court, I had to go through many layers of security, which brings me to the real reason that I jumped at the chance to lie my way into these buildings—yes, architecture is nice, but the highlight of any trip to a developing country is the opportunity to watch that country’s government bureaucracy in action. There is nothing quite as entertaining as observing, and poking, these government officials, who are convinced that they are incredibly important and competent. And the best part happens when you are overly polite to and complementary of them, and they stop being “official,” let their guard down, and go back to behaving as they do when no one is watching, which is like barnyard animals.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first few government officials I met were actually quite official, and very consistent in their behaviors. They were so consistent, in fact, that I am convinced that they were in fact all the same person masquerading as three different people, because there is no way that the Indian government would have multiple people doing the exact same thing, right? Right?
This was the course of events in my interaction with this government official who thought it was hilarious to dress up as three different people and make me go through the same procedure three times:
1. Ask for my permission letter.
2. Inspect said letter as if he had seen nothing like it in his life.
3. Turn said letter from side to side, as if looking for some kind of watermark or hologram (there was none).
4. Ask me for my passport.
5. Inspect photo page of my passport, looking from the photo, to me, to the photo, to me (repeat 4 times), and then pointing to my glasses and saying “glasses”, to which I replied that while I was indeed not wearing glasses in my passport photo, I did in fact wear glasses sometimes, and then pointing to my beard and saying “beard,” to which I replied that despite the fact that I did not have a beard in my passport, I was capable of growing one, and had chosen to do so over the past week and a half.
6. Attempt to find the Indian visa in my passport for an amount of time that one would have thought would have allowed careful inspection of every single page in the passport at least three times, followed by a disapproving scowl when, fed up, I grabbed the passport and turned to the correct page.
7. Some kind of official-seeming, but totally illegible notation in a spiral notebook that will most likely be used as tinder for the fire come next winter.
8. A wave of the hand to send me away to the next room, whereupon I met what must have been the same exact man, because the procedure was identical to the above.
9. A final meeting in a third room with what looked like a different man, but obviously was not.
After my three meetings with this ever-so-quick-to-change-clothes government official, I was sent to the main desk to sign in (you mean in all those meetings I never actually “signed in”?). It was there that my camera was taken away from me, which is something that I really do not appreciate. I was told to go up to the Protocol Office (that sounds tedious) on the third floor to get permission to use my camera.
But I was pleasantly surprised, because it was in the Protocol Office that I got to observe Punjabi government officials in their true form. Everything seemed official when I walked in—they had me sit on a couch in the middle of the room (about 10 people were sitting behind desks, which all faced my couch and made for quite an intimidating scene) and inspected my permission letter and passport while I waited in silence. But then one of the younger government officials asked me where I was from, and we moved from there to a profound discussion of American vs. Indian politics, baseball vs. cricket, and Justin Timberlake vs. Britney Spears.
It was after this discussion that these guys really “opened up to me,” by which I mean that they began behaving like adolescent youths whose parents were away on vacation. An old Sikh dude came into the room, and it turned out he was the office’s servant and had come to bring tea. He went around the room putting tea on everyone’s desk, but when he was finished he had no tea left for me, which of course didn’t bother me and which also didn’t surprise me considering this man would have had no way of knowing that I was even in the office until he arrived himself. But the Punjabi officials didn’t see it that way, and shouted what appeared to be insults at the servant, and then one of them slapped him on the back, sending him out of the room to get more tea. Classy, folks.
Finally I had my piping-hot tea (just what the doctor ordered in this 97-degree heat) and we resumed our discussion, this time about my itinerary in
I headed back downstairs and reclaimed my camera, and then strolled around the building, which had interior ramps instead of staircases, strangely shaped windows cut out of the concrete walls, a curvy roof, and brightly colored support columns. In the end, the building was fascinating and totally worth all the marathon security procedures through which I had just gone.
I left the High Court and proceeded to the Secretariat, where I went through a procedure very similar to the above to get inside, except at the Secretariat I got the added bonus of having the security guard who wrote permissions to enter the building tell me that I had to give him the original copy of my permission form. I of course had the original, but I wasn’t about to give it to him unless I really had to, so I told him that I had given the original to the High Court and that the official who had given me the form had told me that copies were acceptable. The guy argued with me for a while, but in the end he gave in and accepted one of the photocopies. I’m not entirely sure what he had to gain by getting his hand on the original. Strange. Maybe he found the letter as hilarious as I did and wanted it as a souvenir.
I made it to the front door and figured that from then on I wouldn’t have to go through many more hoops. But I was wrong. I went from the security guard at the door to the main security guard in an office on the first floor (all these men, by the way, were in military uniform), and from there I was sent up to the 9th floor to see the registrar, and was accompanied by a junior soldier who sported a huge machine gun. Nice. I went through the same exact procedure with the registrar that I had with the two guys I met with outside the Secretariat—permission letter, passport, visa, scowl, etc. Finally the registrar sent me back down to see the main security guard.
At this point I was getting a bit tired of the whole routine. I mean, it was somewhat interesting, at first, to see the inefficient functioning of the Indian bureaucracy, but now it was getting old. Luckily, the main security guard (who I had already seen once and who couldn’t possibly know anything more about me at this point) was my final checkpoint—from there, I was escorted by Junior Soldier Machine Gun Man to the roof, where I got a superb view of the other two government buildings as well as the entire city of Chandigarh. I also got a view of two government officials who were hard at work on the roof, by which I mean they were passed out in the shade.
And that was the whole tour. Seriously? You have to go through that much security just to stand on the roof?
I was taken back down to the main security guard to “check out,” but he was on the phone, and not wanting to stand there any longer and figuring that the worst thing they could do now was kick me out (which is where I was going anyway), I walked out of the office, and, shockingly, nobody did anything about it. I kept walking—out of the building and through the security gate, thinking to myself that if my perception of Indian government is correct, somebody’s head is going to roll for that terrible disaster of me not checking out.
Next was the state parliament building. Wait, never mind—there was no way in hell that I was going through that process again. I walked down to the main road and caught a cycle rickshaw to the rock garden.
The rock garden was built by the artist Nek Chand, who is actually a former transport official who built the garden illegally over time before being discovered, reprimanded, and then given a salary to complete the garden. Hmmm.
The garden was strange, but fascinating. Everything is made of recycled odds and ends, such as electrical sockets and broken pottery. The place is like a maze, and as you find your way through it you go from courtyard to courtyard, some complete with canyons and waterfalls. The highlights are humans and animals made out of electrical wire. But the whole thing is best related in pictures, so I’ll stop here.
After leaving the garden I caught a cycle rickshaw to the lake. I had planned to go out onto the lake in a paddle boat, but by this time I was so hot that I could hardly stand up straight (yes, my entire shirt was soaked with sweat—until I tell you otherwise, just assume that my shirt is always soaked with sweat), so I nixed the paddle boat idea and ate lunch in the shade at an Indian fast food-type restaurant that was right on the lake. I had “finger chips” (French fries), paneer pakora (unfermented cheese deep fried in a crispy shell—basically fried ravioli), a big Fanta, an even bigger bottle of water, and a chocolate sundae to top it all off. By the time I was done eating I felt much better.
But I still wasn’t about to go back out into the sun, so I hung out at the restaurant until it was time to catch an auto-rickshaw to the train station
I was excited about the train. I’d heard from Jas and Jatinder that the Shatabdi trains were quite comfortable, and more importantly that you got a “whole mess of food,” about which I was hopeful based on the quality of the food I was served on my Indian airline flights thus far.
Sure enough, the train did not disappoint. This is no NJ Transit, folks. The train was fully air conditioned and had big, comfortable seats with loads of leg room. We were served tea and biscuits (cookies), a one-liter bottle of water, and then a full meal of Indian food. I’m not certain exactly what the food was, but whatever it was it was fantastic. I still have yet to have a bad meal in
On the train I sat next to a girl named Deepti who was 26, a flight attendant on Kingfisher airlines, and married to a military officer who was based in Ahmedabad. She was very Western looking and obviously upper middle class, and she had traveled all over (but never outside of)
Anyhow, I had a good discussion with Deepti (she spoke perfect English, which was a relief after my experiences with the Italian and the Korean), and then after dinner I went into food coma and slept for the last two hours of the five hour train ride. I got into
I felt a quiet comfort returning to
Anyhow, I was still a little groggy from my sleep on the train, so I got a little annoyed when the touts started approaching me and grabbing my arm and yelling at me to come with them. I even lost my cool once and yelled “NO!” at a guy who kept bugging me about coming to his hotel. Then another guy followed me for a while, talking about an air conditioned room in the center of Paharganj for Rs 500. That actually sounded like a good deal, so I had the following conversation with the guy:
Me: Ok, show me where your place is on this map.
Guy: Yeah, yeah, you come with me, I take you to the place and--
Me: NO, NO, I’m not going anywhere until you show me on this map where your place is.
Guy: No map, I take you there. Very central.
Me: Not a chance. Show me. Where is it?
Guy: No map, it is on
Me (consulting my map):
The tout progression for me is always suspicious engagement for the first few days of a trip, followed by annoyed yelling, followed by smartass comments like the ones above, followed by an equilibrium of finding something humorous in the touts’ lies and playing along, but conceding nothing. I hit equilibrium the following day.
I walked by Hotel Vishal, where I had stayed the last time I was in Delhi (you may recall the “hellhole”), without so much as a thought of staying there, and on to Hotel Shelton, which I knew had decent rooms and, more importantly, A/C. The manager told me that rooms were 450 for non-A/C and 700 for A/C, which was just not enough of a price difference given my average sweat output over the past two days. I took an A/C room (which also had a TV, so I caught up on world news the next morning by watching CNN-India) and took a much-needed shower before going to bed.
Now is probably a good time to mention a couple things I learned over those two days in
The first is that I sweat a whole hell of a lot. Even in
I’m not comfortable when I’m drenched with sweat. I don’t think anyone is. But I guess this trip has made me kind of sort of more ok with it (is that a weak enough assertion?). I’m still hot, sweaty and uncomfortable 99% of the time here, but I’ve learned to deal with it and not let it ruin my day. And I’ve learned to appreciate the rare A/C train or hotel room. I’ll probably keep paying up for A/C as I venture into Rajasthan if it’s reasonably cheap, which it probably won’t be.
Secondly, I’ve learned to be cool with being dirty. One would think that I would have learned this long before now, in Boy Scouts, Outdoor Action, or any of the other countless camping trips I went on growing up. But I really didn’t—before I just thought I was ok with being dirty. I would still shower immediately upon getting home from a backpacking trip. Now, I can be disgustingly dirty for days, so dirty that even the locals shun me, and it doesn’t bother me that much. You’d think this new development would bother Emily, right? Wrong—she’s already much better at being dirty than I am!
Finally, I’ve learned steps to staying cool (read: as cool as possible, which still isn’t all that cool) in
1. Don’t carry your pack on your back for more than 100 meters from 6am-10am, and for more than 20 meters post-10am (and yes that includes night time, which is humid as all hell), or you will be sweating.
2. Take a cold shower every time you possibly can, which should come out to at least 15 showers per day, or you will be sweating.
3. Take frequent auto-rickshaw/cycle rickshaw rides, no matter how short the distance. If you think, “I can walk it,” you can’t, and you will be sweating.
4. Make frequent use of air conditioned restaurants/internet cafes, even if you aren’t hungry/have no emails to send. You’re not paying for the food/internet access.
5. Sit next to the window on buses and jeeps, no matter how much more comfortable the aisle seat looks. If you sit in that comfortable looking aisle seat, I can promise you that you will be sweating.
6. Invariably, even if you follow all the above rules, you will still be sweating. So go take a cold shower and start the process over again.
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