I just got back from 17 days in India. Wow! What an experience.
It all started at River Hills when my friend and tennis partner of 35 years, Sudha Madakasira, waved at me and shouted, “join me for a drink.” Somehow, I sensed something significant was about to happen.
We chit chatted. I asked him what’s new and he said, “I’m going to India to visit my family.” I said, “I’ve always wanted to go to India.” He said, “Do you wanna go?” I sat back, glazed out into space for a while as my mind processed it all and said, “yes!”
As it turns out, Sudha’s family lives in Bengaluru, the third largest city in India. That’s where one of my website development team resides. The other team is on the east coast in Chennai, just a 45-minute flight away. I have worked with these folks intensively for four years. It was time for a visit, especially since I had an Indian friend to accompany me.
I realized that if I didn’t go, the last two weeks of January 2024 would be like every other two weeks (except cold and miserable). But if I went to India, I would remember those two weeks for the rest of my life.
Other things fell into place. I checked the weather in India in late January — dry and mild. I asked my son Lawrence, who is finishing up college with two easy online courses, if he wanted to go. “Are you kidding,” he said. “That would be an opportunity of a lifetime.” So now I have father-son bonding to add to my list of reasons to go.
In my 65 years, I’ve done my fair share of world travel. But India was a big missing line on my travel resume. I realized if I didn’t go with Sudha, I would never go. So I went.
One last thing: The flights. Turns out they’re affordable with good connections. And the cost once you arrive is unbelievably cheap. The dollar goes a long way in India.
Sudha, a psychiatrist (he owns Psycamore here in the Jackson area), was scheduled to present a paper at a medical conference. That gave me the opportunity to meet with my business partners. Then we would meet in Bengaluru, hang out with his family for a day, then head to northern India where some of the biggest sites to see are located.
It takes a lot of mental energy and planning to make a trip like this work. With a smartphone, you can make all your airline reservations, book all your hotels, plan your day tours and plan everything in advance. I always book directly with the airlines and the hotels rather than going through an online app like booking.com or TripAdvisor. This is very useful for special requests and communication.
The flight over was Jackson to Atlanta, Atlanta to Paris (eight hours) then Paris to Bengaluru (10 hours). We left at noon, so we weren’t really sleepy until we got on the flight to Benguluru, about 1 a.m. Jackson time.
Lawrence and I found these special pillows on Amazon for sleeping on a plane. They easily inflate with your breath and sit in your lap. The large pillow has a hole in the top to place your head in and holes for your arms. It basically allows you to sleep comfortably while seated. Man they worked great. I’ll never fly overseas without one. I had some short-acting Zaleplon sleeping pills and I awoke refreshed just in time to have a cup of coffee and land.
Bengaluru is the third largest city in India and probably the nicest. It’s in southern India, which is more affluent than the north. At 3,500 feet elevation, the weather is cool and nice. It’s known as the Silicon Valley of India. I would call it the San Francisco of India.
My first impression of India was overwhelming. The brand-new airport in Bengaluru was voted the nicest in the world, complete with waterfalls and tropical vegetation and cool bamboo structures everywhere. You just have to see it to believe it.
It was midnight India time and we took a taxi to our hotel, The Leela Palace. For the cost of a room at the Hampton Inn in Jackson, we felt like real princes in a real palace. The place was gorgeous.
I slept four or five more hours and woke up around 8 a.m. feeling great. Lawerence was jet lagged. I attribute my lack of jet lag to age. All those sensitive sensors in my brain have deadened with age and my body has no idea where in the world I am.
The buffet of Indian food was outstanding and we were feeling pretty good. Then it was off for a mile walk to the cell phone store to get an Indian “sim” card for my smartphone.
It is absolutely imperative when traveling abroad that you have really good Internet connectivity. Without it, traveling is impossible. For $25 bucks I bought a local sim card that gave me all the data I needed with local connectivity.
The streets of India are not like the streets in America. There are people everywhere, little stores everywhere, teeming with activity. Here in Jackson, we strive to create just a couple of streets with pedestrian activity and shops. In India, the entire country is like that.
I never saw a grocery store. Instead, each street is lined with a dozen little shops, often made of plywood, open until late at night, selling maybe a dozen different items a piece. Walk down any street, any time and you can find a shop to buy just about anything you might need.
Driving is chaos, like nothing I’ve ever seen. Motorcycles, cars, bikes, pedestrians and the ever-present “auto rickshaws,” known in Indonesia as “tuk tuks.” These are a combination of car and motorcycle.
Three autorickshaws, two cars, four motorcycles and three bikes would all be going as fast as possible, nobody staying in their lanes, toward a narrowing. Surely you think they will all collide into a heap. Yet somehow, magically, at the last microsecond, separated by inches, they all fall into line one by one as the road narrows.
I am thinking this is some kind of Hindu karma thing going. They are communicating telepathically. Or maybe, like whales, they communicate with their horns in some special code only Indian drivers understand. The horns never stop honking, but it’s not mean-spirited, aggressive honking. It’s a form of communication.
The other obvious appearance on the streets is India’s comprehensive long-term recycling program. I mean very long term. They just throw the trash on the street and wait 2,000 years for it to deteriorate into dirt. Trash is everywhere.
I asked Sudha why everybody litters and nobody picks up the trash. He blames it on the caste system, in which you are born into a “caste” which determines your role in life. Try as the government does, the caste system is stubbornly resilient.
The lowest caste, the “untouchables,” are supposed to pick up the trash. All the other castes think picking up trash is beneath them. Meanwhile the untouchables, being the lowest caste, aren’t particularly interested in fulfilling their role at the bottom. As a result, nobody picks up the trash.
This becomes a problem in a country one-third the size of the U. S. with 4.7 times its population. One state in India is the size of Mississippi with 150 million people. Most Indian states have population densities 20 to 30 times that of Mississippi.
Next week, more on India.
