SAMPLE OF A DAY IN THE 3RD WORLD
By David Sanders, Certified Master Consultant
September 18, 2005, LUCKNOW, INDIA: At the end of my 15-hour layover in Hong Kong en route from LA to India, I was relaxing in the posh Cathay Pacific Business-Class Lounge in the super-modern Hong Kong International Airport till I got on my flight to Delhi at 10:25 PM. I sat beside a Rajasthan native who imports furniture from China and wholesales and retails it near Jaipur. He wasn’t very open to being consulted on his business but he wanted me to come visit his state (to the west of Delhi, the opposite direction from Lucknow) and told me about it the region. I read on the flight in my Lonely Planet tour book of India and got a little sleep on the plane.
I arrived in Delhi about 5 hours later, about 2:30 AM Delhi time. After getting through the long line in customs, changing $550 into 23,820 Rupees and meeting my friend Thomas, it was about 3:30 AM. We loaded my 100 kilos of luggage into a V2 (no joke) Tata Indian-made car drove on the left side through an amazing maze of tiny, narrow streets and into a section of town where my 2-star hotel was 4 blocks of slightly muddy dirt roads into a backwater off a main drag.
I managed to shower despite almost no water pressure and get into my extra-firm bed (at no extra charge) by 5:00 AM, up by 10:00 AM. Thomas had arranged a 20% discount and when I tried to pay my bill 1600 Rupees ($36) plus the 40 Rupees ($.92) for my 2 liters of bottled water, the front desk person said he didn’t have change for the 2000 Rupees I offered him. (I found out from Thomas later that was his effort to have me round it up to 1700 Rupees to give him a dollar tip which would have probably given him a 50% raise for the day. Unfortunately for him, this went completely over my head and I found more exact change.) I paid each of the 4 bellmen 10 Rupees ($.23) for carrying my luggage to the car.
My driver had been sleeping in his car outside my hotel but was there at the appointed time. We left by 11 AM to go through the unbelievable experience of traveling by car through Delhi. Of course, Lucknow is much wilder, but I’ll describe both in one general report below.
DRIVING IN INDIA
I love cars and, as you know, I drive a fast Mercedes SL 500. I kind of considered myself a pretty wild driver and, while I drive much faster than one could possibly go in India, I would not attempt to drive here at all. HOLY COW! The closest parallel I have seen to it in the West is a fast video game where you have no foggiest idea of what is going to come at you next and must constantly swerve or dodge, blow your horn and push by trying to get to your destination. You could watch a 30 minute video of routine Delhi traffic and I swear you’d insist that it was some fake Bahlliwood mock up! It’s unbelievable!!!
Since it would be hard to get across what it’s like driving on a narrow muddy back street lined with cars on both sides and somehow making 1 lane work for 2-way traffic, let me give you a little glimpse of the traffic on the closest thing they have to a freeway. It’s about 2 lanes wide, often with a dirt shoulder on one side. There may be as many as 8 vehicles side by side at a congested point. No one takes lanes seriously.
Of course, like the British, they drive on the wrong side of the road, which is confusing enough by itself.
Nobody uses rear view mirrors or looks behind them at all. In fact, most vehicles have lost their rear view mirrors, which have been smashed off in driving by other vehicles using the Delhi 1″ rule of thumb — that’s the required distance between needed to pass another car going either direction. Amazingly, I didn’t see many dents or smashed up cars.
I’ll give you an idea of the vehicles traversing the major roads. There are very few Western cars here. Although there are some small SUV’s and quite a number of very small Ford Focus type sub-compact cars, the diverse array of modes of transportation would make it’s own book!!
There are quite a number of large, dump-truck sized trucks and a dozen gradients down to smaller trucks of all descriptions. There are thankfully no 18-wheelers or semi’s and strangely enough, I don’t even recall seeing any pick ups. Some big trucks had lost their driver’s side door and they had been replaced by commercial refrigerator-type doors or other unbelievable combinations.
I have not seen any Mercedes or luxury cars of any kind. Small SUVs are the top of the line. We saw one precession of a high-ranking politician, which was composed of 8 or 10 tiny white cars that look like French styles from the 1940’s with darkened windows and a single small red or blue light on top.
There are many bicycle-powered rickshaws with and without tops, and quite a large number of motorized rickshaws with a bright yellow vinyl top to keep out the rain. They often had removable plastic roll-up windows in the back, although nobody ever looks back, so I don’t know what they’re for. They have a top speed of about 40 km/hour and often this is posted on the rear of the vehicle so traffic coming up behind them can see what their top speed is and blow their horn to pass.
For every car there are 5 motorcycles and 10 scooters. These are almost all driven by men. Where their wife or girlfriend is with them, they sit side-saddle and do not straddle the seat. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried this but it takes incredible balance and I only attempted it once when I was young and foolish. They don’t normally even have a place to put their feet. They may put their arm on their husband’s shoulder or waist to stabilize themselves, but often they do not. About 1 out of 10 has a small baby in her lap held with their left hand and one out of 20 has also a toddler sitting in front of the father — a family of 4 on a scooter or motor cycle traveling at 40 miles an hour through this video-game-like traffic maze! Wow!
There aren’t any Harley hogs or big bikes at all. For every motorized scooter or motorcycle there are 5 bicycles.
The cars, trucks, rickshaws, motorcycles and scooters mostly all drive in the right (fast) lane and when a faster vehicle comes up on them, they simply honk their horn and the slower vehicle very slowly moves to the left a small amount until the tailgating vehicle has an inch clearance to drive by their car, rickshaw, bike, etc., at which point they barrel on past and honk at the next one.
Of course, every so often there is a sacred cow ambling across the road to get to the center divider to munch in the fast lane. I’m told there are elephants which join this procession, but of course I’d never believe that.
One oddity is that when a car or motorcycle is in a big hurry, they can’t make good enough time trying to fight their way through all this traffic. Their solution is to drive in the slow lane of the other side of the road directly at the oncoming cars, trucks, bikes, families on motor scooters, vendors pushing their carts full of indescribable vegetables, pedestrians and tiny (often unaccompanied) children.
I never saw a single accident, although I saw hundreds of situations that would have become accidents in the West. Thomas says that in his 3.5 years here, he’s never seen an accident (beyond a little fender bender, from which the offending driver simply drives off). And that includes a 400 km trip he took cross-country where his driver drove the whole way on the wrong side of the street in the face of opposing traffic so he could make better time. This cured Thomas of taking lengthy trips by car.
I could go on for pages and would still only give you a small taste of the culture shock of it all, since the photographs don’t do it justice at all. I found it quite enthralling and among the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen!
Once I got to Thomas’s very nice apartment/office on an impossible-to-find dirt street, I had grilled cheese sandwiches for breakfast and lunch.
ON TO LUCKNOW
We packed up, drove to the airport and had a very smooth flight on a small prop jet for 1:10 to Lucknow.
Sahara India Pariwar (family), the 900,000-person corporation we have come to negotiate with and hopefully deliver to, put us up on the 11th floor of their 12-story headquarters building in Lucknow. Our room is a sort of a posh Motel 6 with a lot of marble, firm tiny twin beds and no Internet.
But down on the 4th floor is the newspaper staff who work till 3 AM and Thomas has a very good friend who is one of the well-connected senior editors there. He invited us down to connect up to their “broadband connection” (64 kbs shared by 100 people). The journalists here have been extremely helpful. So after having pizza and ice cream across the street, we took our computers downstairs. I took an hour’s nap and arrived about 11 PM.
We are about the only Westerners anywhere around. After giving us wide berth initially, the journalist’s curiosity began to get the best of them. They came in a couple at a time. Thomas speaks some Hindi and some of them spoke some English and we were busily making friends while we waited the 10 minutes needed for our email with attachments to send. Of course our high respect for them resulted in more and more people crowding into our office until we had an audience of about 15 observing the conversations.
My first Hindi lesson (spelling not guaranteed):
Ap quese hay? (How are you?)
Mea theek whon. (I am fine)
Angie (yes)
Nahin (no)
Ab cub aye (When you’ll come?)
USA se (I’m from USA)
Ap se milkar achalaga V.K. Moria (Nice to meet you, V.K. Moria)
Dhan yavaad’ (Thank you), or in Urdu it’s shuquria
Kripya (please)
OBSERVATIONS
This has been a time when I have varied between extreme fascination and being so stunned that it would be an hour or two before I’d notice I hadn’t taken any photos. This trip is an exercise in stretching my reality.
In talking to and observing the people, it is clear that Thomas and I stand out like billboards. There are very, very few white faces around here.
I found that people here are generally pleasant. However, there is a very noticeable presence of beggars and assorted weirdoes. I didn’t have attention on whether there were any criminals trying to steal things, but dozens of people wait around different parts of the airport trying to carry one’s baggage for 10 Rupees and they get offended when you don’t let them wheel your baggage for you and even more so when you don’t pay each of them who is able to grab a piece of your luggage his 10 Rupees.
I observed that motorized transportation has really impacted this part of the world, but still shares the stage with older modes. There are a lot of men (and very few women) in western casual dress. Nobody was in a suit.
Lucknow is a large city with only a few tall buildings (the Sahara India headquarters being one of the few) and amazing, bustling traffic as described above.
Only certain parts of our western culture have been clearly accepted in this area.
It felt a bit odd to be out of communication — Thomas has our only cell phone and we are 12 hours off from the US. I still have to work out what to have my assistant doing while I’m here, as I just had not gotten to it before I left. I’ll email that to her when I get a chance to put it together. I have not found the charger for my PalmOne Treo 650 PDA / cell phone (which doesn’t work outside the US) / calculator / dictionary. But it’s still working and I can calculate the cost of things by dividing the Rupees by 43/US dollar.
I have little idea what I’d be running into if I went a few feet off the main drag. But overall things are going quite smoothly.
I have had very little jet lag, but I have yet to completely adjust to the change in hours. I napped for an hour about 10 PM last night, then up till 3 AM and after only 4 hours of sleep I woke up wired and ready to go — I wanted to get up and record some of my observations and lay our some plans.
PHOTOS & VIDEO
I took a few photos of the airports, the plane, Delhi, Lucknow and some traffic. I was in such shock that it took me awhile to realize that I wasn’t taking many photos, and when I looked at the photos I was getting and how poorly they communicated what was actually there, I didn’t take too many of them. I showed Thomas how to use my Olympus Stylus 800 digital camera and he’s taking a few photos of me in the process.
Thomas decided to leave our potential video cameraman behind. So I read a bit in the instruction book on Geoffrey’s new camcorder in preparation to shooting the video ourselves. We took his Panasonic DVX100A camcorder to the airport, but we were not allowed enough kilos of carry on luggage, so we called Vinay, who had dropped us off, to come back and pick it up. So we’re stuck with just still photos at the moment.
But I’m looking for some good people to interview and will continue to look for good future interviews. Several of the journalists will do very well and have very nice things to say about L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology and us.
PLANS FROM HERE
Thomas and I are expecting to meet Madam Kumkum, whose title is “Younger Sister,” about 10:30 AM. I expect the next day or so will be the turning point of the trip. We will either have some tea with Madam Kumkum and then look for other people, or we’ll get her to get us in to see even more senior family members and get started doing some business this trip. I’m generally following Thomas’s lead, but am contributing more and having wins. It appears that we’re an excellent team, although the stats will tell the tale.
Thomas and I plan to stay in Lucknow today (Monday) through Friday but we don’t yet have any commitment of delivery to be done or any appointments beyond this first one. I’m optimistic that we’ll line up something and I’d be happy to do some negotiating and consulting here with Thomas’s help and gather enough data to close a big cycle.
Sahara employees are not allowed to take any gifts beyond a bouquet of flowers, so we’ll probably do that. This is probably a good thing, as it reduces the corruption that is rampant in India generally.
I’m still organizing, getting a presentation ready for Madam Kumkum, practicing with my camera, trying to get onto the exact opposite sleep/waking pattern needed in India, getting in communication with people here, etc. What a trip!
David Sanders
