India

On a warm summer’s eve…

Well all true except the summer part.  It is now day six—technically day 7 due to the hour—of the trip through northern India.   The first day was simply the 19-hour pair of flights here.  The last 5 days revolved around the conference.  I have plenty of notes and remarks regarding those, none of which would bolster this blog.  It was an educational conference, and it has been nice to witness my own development, as I have a lot more attending experience under my belt.  The last conference of the International Federation of Societies for Surgery of the hand (IFSSH) was in South Korea three years ago.  My comfort with procedures, and enough of them done to develop preferences in technique and workup, have allowed me to learn weighing the lectures against what I have experienced, as opposed to accepting what was said as gospel because I didn’t know any better.

Currently I am on a train bound for Udaipur, having left New Delhi at 7 pm last night.  The trip is a little over 12 hours.  It’s actually a nice experience. The sleeper cars are open, the trip is almost entirely at night, and the seats are ardent pseudorock, but the people are pleasant here in our compartment, as they have been throughout the trip.   Our four-bed compartment is shared with a civil engineer who is on his way to Chattagarh to give a lecture in the morning; and with a South Korean who has spoken quite little.  Actually I think three of us were more inclined to sleep as soon as we got rolling, so there wasn’t a whole lot of conversation, just about half an hour revolving around Belinda’s and my travels to Udaipur.  Afterward, it quickly became an uneventful trip, and despite general dinginess and unclean smelling linens, rest came quickly. I am quite sure that we were all four asleep before nine.

Accordingly, I was pretty much awake by four, well before our civil engineer acquaintance’s alarm on his cell phone alarmed from the bunk over Belinda to allow him to step off the train a couple of hours before our stop. His agility did not match up to his cordial nature, but he managed to get himself down from above.  As I have been up and writing, he sat on the end of my bench/bed awaiting his stop.  Before leaving he informed me that we were running a good 15 minutes behind.  How a train could fall that far behind on an uneventful night I am uncertain. 

All the same we should be in Udaipur about 7:30.  With my lack of preparation for this part of the trip, I have run out of food stashed in my pack, so I look forward to getting there. I intend to have very few boxes to tick on daily activities.  Good meals, coffee (which has been a notch above consistently in this country), reading, conversation, photos.  Both Belinda and I seem to be of the same mind, to let the adventures come to us.  In general, the plan is to spend a couple of days in Udaipur, Jaipur, Pushkar; then a single night in Agra to be one of the first at Taj Mahal on the day we have to get back to the airport.

The first of the adventures struck just minutes before this leg of the trip began.  I lost my iPhone. As I have continued to use it for everything, it couldn’t have been amiss more than 5 minutes before I realized it.  Yet the trail had already gone cold.  Katleen Libberecht, a friend from fellowship at Kleinert and Kutz who hails from Belgium, had kindly allowed me to stash my luggage in her room so that I could change clothes before catching the taxi to see a couple of sites in the city along the way to Delhi Hazrat Nizamuddin Railway Station.  When I arrived to her room she was frantically throwing her belongings into her bags, checking out at that moment in a sudden change of plans, deciding to add in a shopping tour of the city before going to the airport late that night.  Just a few moments after she left, I decided that one of the things that I should do during the hour lapse until my taxi arrived was to charge my camera and phone, both of which I had used a great deal at lectures that morning. That was when I realized my phone was no longer with me.  I thought that I had had it in hand when I spoke to the hotel manager at the front desk when I returned from the India Expo Center, but now I am not so sure.  There was a fiasco for the next hour, as I spent the first half tearing through all my bags, returning to the front desk, looking under furniture, then trying to get Katleen’s contact information, as I had deduced that, in her rush she had mistakenly grabbed the phone.  I had her email address from before, and I had just gotten her phone number the night before—and saved it on my phone.

Three p.m. arrived without a phone sighting.  The housekeeper, and later a European couple in the lobby checking out, called the phone, but no response.  I fear that I left it on silence from the conference.   But on schedule, I left the hotel for us to pick up Belinda, who was staying at the five-star hotel down the road.  There the IFSSH staff—who were located at each hotel—were able to reach the bus driver on the trip Katleen was taking. The call was of course dropped seconds later, but a second attempt was successful at conveying the problem.  Later that evening, Belinda got a text from Katleen saying that the search through her luggage had been unsuccessful.

So I am left with this computer and emails as my communication means home.  It may be less of a handicap than I initially felt in my panic, as I had turned off the cellular function on the phone anyway. I was getting by on wifi for Facebook messaging and Skype.  The loss is in text messaging and the convenience of receiving texts with a device I carried in my pocket.  I also had a lot of information from the conference on the phone.

I have now decided that the evidence points more to the phone having fallen from my pocket on the bus back to the hotel from the conference.  I had noticed that morning, as I bounced along in a tuc-tuc on the way from the hotel to the conference, that the slacks I was wearing were allowing the phone to work its way out.  Perhaps the same happened on the bus.  Belinda sent a text to her friend, who was the logistics coordinator in New Delhi, to try to locate the phone.  I now have my doubts about its return.  Not due to the ethics of the people, who have been quite nice and, as far as I can tell, honest.  But logistics haven’t been the strong suit of most here. So I doubt that my phone could make it to the right hands for safe return due more to shortcomings in effort.

On the bright side, there is an opportunity for a new phone. The greater loss is the information that was on it.

My impressions of New Delhi

I can start by saying that I am glad that the taxi driver took us through some newer parts of the city yesterday while showing us the India Gate and the Lotus Temple. Our conference was not actually held in the city, rather in a distant suburb, distant being more in terms of time than distance, from the city conveniences, such as sights, mass transportation, a variety of restaurants, etc.  There were three hotels, not enough for all attendees, and one of the hotels was quite nice, a five-star resort with guards and high walls protecting the contents from the grimey surroundings and from less desirable people.  Having visited there for dinner, I can say that this rivaled or topped higly touted hotels in the states or anywhere else.  But they charged a fee even beyond the quality, in my mind, so I stayed at one of the other two hotels, just a kilometer or so away, and closer to the expo center. 

This leads me to a correction to what I stated above.  While the loss of a phone was the first mishap of this leg of the trip, the first proper one for me in India was the arrival at the hotel.  Standing at the front desk at 3 am, I was told there was no record of my online reservation, which I had made about a month earlier. After whipping out the computer and hooking up to the hotel’s wifi, I showed them my receipt. Only then was it clear that there were three Savoy Suites in the city, and that the one I had chosen was a good 30 km away!  Furthermore, the Tournier rep from France, Laurent, with whom I had been chatting from the airport to the hotel, had met a snafu, as his reservation was not until the next night. As a result, he took the last available room in the hotel.  Luckily Belinda lent me the couch in her suite.  Magically, the next morning, before 9 am, the front desk did indeed have a room available, already cleaned, well before the housekeeping arrived.  Interesting.

So by this method I began to learn a bit about India.  In general, there is a lack of thoroughness.  Structures are put in place, but the execution falls short.  The conference is awarded to New Delhi, but then it turns out to be poorly coordinated.  There are metal detectors abound—in train stations, at the conference, at the nicer Jaypee Greens hotel, at temples—but at none of them, and I should add the airport as well, was there any thoroughness.  Pat-downs were minimal.  I set off every metal detector due to the phone and camera in my pocket, but that was either met with nonchalance or a metal wand.  The wand would sound, then they would send me on my way regardless.  The most thorough was the guy that asked me to remove the culprit metal from my pockets.  When I showed him the camera, he was satisfied, not checking to see if there was more in the pocket.  Nice people, but the security did not add much to my, well, security.

There is also a lot of smog in the big city.  In fact, I have never been to a more polluted city.  Perhaps the population density should be taken into account, but there is no clean smell except soaps and perfumes.   The smog is incessant, the cars unclean, windows covered with a film.

This is not to say that there isn’t any charm.  On the contrary, there are wonderful places, but they are here and there, behind facades.  The couple that I found reminded me of Latin America, where wonderful homes could be hidden behind adobe fronts. Spain was similar though with less contrast.  Jaypee Greens Hotel and Resort was the most stark example, but it was also seen in restaurants, and in the home—the haveli-- of the tour guide that took Belinda and me through Old Delhi.

Sidebar

The sun is now coming up in the Rajasthan countryside. Before pulling into the station, it is difficult to discern between here and west Texas.  Not much in the way of hills, savannah-like vegetation.  Single-track footpaths are a maze alongside the railroad.  The plants are hardy, some appearing to be cactus.  Waist-high stone or cement walls are common around yards and some small fields.

But if there were any confusion, the vehicles at the road crossings, and certainly the train stations, will set you right.  The clothing of the men is universally a button-down shirt and coarse slack, typically topped off with flip-flops, perhaps a sweater vest.  Sikh headwear relatively rare, but not enough to be eye-catching.  For the women the variety spanned from western-world, though never liberal, to burkas. 

It should also be noted that there are very few women on this train.  There are apparently women-only cars, but the few women I have seen are mothers with their families, a couple of anglo girls traveling together, and Belinda.