(HOST) Commentator Madeleine Kunin recently visited India. Here are some of the impressions she brought home with her.
(KUNIN) Eighteen days in India with my husband, and I’m a different person.
How to describe it? Sensory overload, emotionally draining, stunningly beautiful, shocking.
Every time our bus stopped, we were surrounded by the usual souvenir hawkers, and beggars. Ten year old girls with matted hair, holding sleeping or drugged babies, gestured with their closed fingers, bringing them to their mouths. We were told not to give them money because it only encouraged them, and the government wanted them to give up begging and attend school. That was hard.
Driving from the Bombay airport into the city, we saw the worst packed together sagging slums, often hugging the sides of new skyscrapers.
And then, in Agra, the Taj Mahal: pristine, more beautiful than I had imagined. We got up before sunrise and saw it rising out of the morning mist, like a mirage. A perfection of symmetry and white marble, built to express the undying love of a ruler for his princess wife, who died after the birth of her 14th child.
It’s a country of friendly, smiling people, boasting of religious tolerance, of Gandhi’s peaceful passive resistance. It’s also where Hindus and Muslims slaughtered one another after partition, a country where three of its leaders were assassinated and where ultra-tight airport security hints of continued violence. It’s the country with a persistant caste system, and a rising middle class, prompted by the technology revolution.
It’s a country, where the effects of 150 years of British rule remain evident. The English language is credited with India’s emergence as a world power, uniting a country with twenty-six languages and more than 3,000 dialects. And there is cricket, the game that’s played in every open space, and followed passionately by the nation.
It was in the streets of India that I realized what a population, of almost 1.3 billion, means.
First the smells and then the sounds. The smell of cow dung, open piles of garbage which cows feed upon, raw sewage, heavy exhaust fumes. The sounds. To pass, every bicycle rings a bell; every one else honks, non stop. Trucks have the words “honk horn” lettered on the back.>br>
Riding in a bicycle drawn rickshaw in old Delhi was like riding in bumper cars at the Champlain Valley Fair, only more scary because there were no bumpers. We swerved between cows, motorcycles – often carrying mother, father and two children – new cars, old buses, three wheeled taxis, and wagons piled high with goods, pulled by oxen, or men.
The pictures in my mind are vivid; camels, elephants, monkeys, the ever present colorful saris, saffron, red, green.
New wealth, old poverty, tradition and change – this – I now understand – is a developing country; this is the future.
Madeleine May Kunin is a former governor of Vermont.