Kvetch Beyond Borders

Too tired for a clever subtitle

Delhi

Unless you are critically ill (say, recovering from malaria in the hospital), never, ever try for the in-country visa extension through the FRRO. Just bite the bullet and leave the country.

It takes forever - in this case, nearly 2 weeks - and though they tantalizingly leave open "amount of extension requested," in fact they never grant more than 2 weeks. So, it took me 2 weeks to get 2 more weeks. And, about five various office trips. The icing on the cake will be a personal visit from a police officer to my hotel tomorrow morning "sometime before 1pm" (sounds like waiting for the cable guy).

Supposedly this will help him with "verification of (my) activities" (I'm sitting in a hotel - I could actually be doing anything, not sure what this will prove).

After the ennervating morning at the RK Puram FRRO (I wish I could have taken photos...it was like Central Casting. Afghanis in full turbans, Africans with braided hair, women in burqas, Burmese monks in orange robes) I went for a long walk in Lodi Gardens. After watching a family of wild green parrots nestle down for the night (they live in a hollow tree), and playing with not one but two Basset hounds - plus a bunch of the less pedigreed local hounds who live in the park - I almost felt normal.

It's amusing the way the park signs prohibit "dogs without leash." There are so many strays living all over the park - and they're very friendly.

I was momentarily gripped by a fantasy of rounding up all the Lodi Gardens strays, getting them spayed/neutered/vaccinated by the volunteers of Vets Beyond Borders, giving them all names, registration numbers and collars (yes, it is crazy...I know) and starting a program called Dogs of Lodi Gardens.

Then I came to my senses, remembering what happened to the Dharamsala branch of Vets Beyond Borders. (Someday I will tell this story. Sorry, not now. The good part is that they are still operating successfully in a couple of Indian cities, but I am afraid to even talk about that for fear the successful programs will get shut down too. The short story was: it was too successful. They were making the Indian veterinarians look bad.)

Anyway - Lodi Gardens is home to some sweet stray dogs. The ice cream vendors have befriended them.

Maybe there's already a dog care program for the Lodi Gardens neighborhood - I know there is one for Khan Market area.

Living lawn mowers

These beautiful bullocks (in America we call them "Brahma bulls") pull the old-fashioned grass cutter at the Taj Mahal, then eat the results.

I wish I had been able to get the whole Taj without including the ugly metal fence in foreground.

In a comment that would no doubt irritate proud "progressive" Indians, my Canadian friend said, upon seeing this scene: "now THAT, to me, is India."

Meaning: men and cows doing a job that most of the rest of the world does by machine, slowly, in a green, clean, sustainable fashion, in front of an ancient monument of genius. In America, we now consider this progress.

It's so alarming to hear agricultural specialists and progress wonks in the press crow about how many tractors there are now in the Punjab and how someday soon, "EVERY farm in India will have a tractor" (instead of bullocks).

No to Nano
I mean, India has always made such a big deal about doing everything on their own terms and in their own way...why are they racing to match the standards of the developed world in all the least desirable categories?

Is anyone even a nano-teenth as excited about, say, a new literacy plan or the reputed $100 laptop computer as they are about this damned Tata Nano budget car that has hogged the news all week long?

Suddenly there were no more problems in Pakistan (except the cross-town catfight between cousins Bilawal and Fatima) - only this rather ugly car.

Cheap cars are cheap for a reason, no one seems to have figured that out here yet. Just ask owners of the Ford Pinto. Any money you save on the front end you will end up spending on repairs, guaranteed. But don't listen to me...Americans know nothing about cars. ;-) or pollution. Or traffic, or gridlock, or about going into debt for life just to pay for your car habit.

A car - when you live in a place with ample public transportation - is an extravagant hole you will throw money into for the next 5 years. (A cheap car won't last longer than that.) At the end of that 5 years, you will have nothing for your investment. People have been driving (literally) round and round in this trap in America for decades and again, it is alarming to see other countries fall down the same rabbithole.

Thinking Americans (yes, admittedly we are a minority, ha ha) are going in the opposite direction. Everyone wants to move to a city or country with public transport so they can escape the car trap, with all its maintenance and monthly payments. It's a very costly illusion of freedom.

Anyway, rant over (for now). It just seems that if any country had the potential to figure out a truly progressive sustainable solution to such a problem (transportation) - a solution that suits their unique population and logistical needs - it would be India. Just copying the mistakes of the west in a cheaper form is nothing to applaud.

The envelope, please

Land of legal limbo
Delhi

So here's the upshot (not the end!) of yesterday's Foreigners' Office story. (I am so sure you are fascinated....)

I returned (along with many others) to the Home Affairs Ministry at 4.30 pm to await my fate. While waiting I met some Ugandans, Pakistanis, and a Mexican Hare Krishna devotee wearing full dhoti and kasturi tilak. The Mexican man was married to an Indian citizen, but this didn't help his status much within the country.

An Indian-origin woman living in Miami, was having trouble getting an extension because she had now been a US citizen and passport holder for 37 years. The office claimed there was no proof of her Indian origin, which technically, I suppose, was true. Her US passport said "place of birth: INDIA," but "even that is not enough, they say."

All these people, including myself, were petitioning for permission to stay a bit longer on this visa. But one Norwegian couple were desperate just to get out, and couldn't even get the exit permission.

How had this happened? Why was it so difficult to get OUT of the country?

The Norwegian woman, who was in tears, explained the story to me. They had first been in Varanasi, where all their bags, passports and everything, had been stolen. The Norwegian Embassy had issued an emergency passport/travel document - but of course, this did not contain any evidence of their original proper Indian visas. Under such circumstances, you must get permission from Home Affairs before exiting the country.

As if it wasn't enough to be robbed blind, the man had then dislocated his shoulder in a surfing mishap down in Kerala. (I didn't know people surfed in Kerala; learn something new every day.) They were told they could not fly home directly from Kerala, but had to report to Delhi for exit permission.

I could see the lymph fluid (or something) oozing from his shoulder and seeping through his cotton shirt. He must have been in a great deal of pain. They wanted to leave the country for Norway right away.

As it was a Friday, the office claimed they would have to wait the entire weekend till Monday when the case could be reviewed properly. (I think I mentioned before that the office only accepts incoming applications from 9am to 12pm. The couple had made that deadline, but for some reason weren't going to be given a result the same day.)

Finally they were given the fateful sealed plain brown envelope, to be opened only by the FRRO in RK Puram, another part of town. They set off full of hope (and probably full of painkillers) at 4.45 pm in an Ambassador taxi.

The rest of us received our plain brown wrappers with instructions NOT to open them, and to report to RK Puram office on Monday morning. Which for many of us, means an entire weekend without valid papers. Fortunately, I've learned to live with a great degree of ambiguity.

Tomb of the unknown Mughal

I go to the FRRO
Chanakyapuri & Nizamuddin, Delhi

After spending the better part of a day running from one office (used to be the Foreigners' Regional Registration office, but that shifted some three years ago...not reflected on maps of course) to another (yes, this is the FRRO but you need to go to yet another Foreigners' office, in another part of town) to yet a third (yes, this is the right office but despite the fact that we're all present and it's only 3pm, you will have to come back Monday between 10 and 12 only) - after such a day, what I wanted was a little escapism.

(Just in case you have to pay them a visit, the FRRO is currently out near the Hyatt Hotel in an area called Bhikaji Cama Place, Ramakrishna Puram. None of the guidebooks show this yet. They all show it as still in Hans Bhavan near Pragati Maidan. )

(Long ago, back in the heady days of the early 80s, I owned an ancient James Brown 45rpm record called "Escapism (Parts 1 & 2)." For those of you who have never seen a 45rpm, Part 1 was on side 1 and part 2 was on what we used to call the B-side. James pronounced it eee-SKAY-pizm. It's probably worth a lot of money now, wherever it is. Other than a chance to mention James Brown, there is no point to this anecdote, so I will stop now.)

As I have mentioned before, Delhi has a lot in common with Washington, DC. Both cities are national capitols, obviously, but it goes beyond that. They share very well-planned streets, meticulous greenways, many museums, lots of white marble, and lots and LOTS of memorials.

Luckily, the third office (called Jaisalmer House, for the curious) was walking distance from the giant Arc-de-Triomphe-like India Gate, which I had never seen properly, so I took a stroll. India Gate and surrounding well-groomed grounds were full of tourists, hawkers (selling everything from cotton candy to plastic beads to slices of star-fruit to my favourite orange popsicles), armed guards and police, and the crew of men erecting scaffolding and awnings for upcoming Republic Day (January 26).

Republic Day is an annual mega-spectacle of patriotism, pageantry and military might. I have never seen it on location - frankly you probably get a better view with less hassle on the national TV coverage. I love the way each state chooses a theme for their parade float. Bihar, surprisingly enough, usually chooses "the Buddha" rather than kidnapping or corruption, and Gujarat has chosen to stay away - so far- from the popular "communal violence" theme. I think this year the float will just be a giant mockup of Narendra Modi's big fat face with dozens of people wearing the Modi Mask riding aboard.

The India Gate is essentially a war memorial, engraved all over with names of Indian who gave their lives in various wars. I wondered if there were always so many armed guards - you can't even walk under the arch or touch the pillars (which are at a considerable distance from the arch itself). Are all national symbols being guarded so fiercely in today's terrorist environment? Or, was it just in the run-up to Republic Day?

For those of you who haven't been to India yet (like my 2 sisters -though they say they are coming this year), watching the tent-masters erect these pavilions and awnings is a uniquely Indian experience. Very few buildings are large enough to house Indian crowds, so we just make a temporary "building" outdoors.

If you have seen the movie Monsoon Wedding, you have some idea of the process. Out of nowhere, a green field or dusty lot will be transformed with cloth walls and roofing (and sometimes even jute carpet flooring) for 1000s of people. Using bamboo poles, hand-made bamboo ladders, kilometres of jute rope and acres of cloth sheeting, the tent-wallahs were constructing awnings, railings and so on to protect 10s of thousands on Republic Day. A street dog had found a comfy bed, crashed out atop a coil of rope four feet high.

On the peacock lawn
Dusk was approaching and I realized I was a Delhi stone's throw from Humayan's Tomb, a World Heritage site that has been on my to-see list forever. So I splurged on yet another autorickshaw (40Rs from India Gate) to Nizamuddin. Admission is supposed to be $5 for foreigners, but as they have set the rate at 250Rs it is now $6.00.

It's worth it. Humayan's Tomb was the first of its kind (Mughal four-quartered gardens with tombs) and evidently the prototype for the Taj Mahal. It's not just one tomb, it is an enormous enclave of geometric gardens, waterways, fountains and several giant tombs, built in the 1570s - any one of which would be worth seeing on its own. The purple haze of twilight gives the buildings a romantic, lost-civilization feel.

Since it was nearing closing time, I hurried through the first two mausoleums, which already felt like something from an orientalist Arabian Nights scenario - octagonal buildings of marble, onion domes, marble latticework windows surrounded by date palm trees. In fact I would recommend going in the morning - the complex opens at dawn - in hopes of seeing sunlight filter through the intricate patterns of lacey marble.

Then I caught a glimpse of the main attraction through the mammoth arched gateway. I couldn't help breathing "Ohhhh!"

The actual tomb of Humayan is a dream, glowing in red sandstone. It is elegant and ornate without ever being garish or baroque. Every one of its many marble-jali windows seemed to have a different geometric pattern, echoed in the marble inlays on the floor.

A gaggle of western art students emerged from the front archway, clutching their sketch books, now filled with the geometric designs. As the sun sank, a call to prayer went up from the neighboring DhamDhama Sikh Gurudwara, with its own dome visible just over the ancient fence. Okay, wrong religion historically, but to hear such devotional music in that setting at sunset really makes my spirit soar. Bright green parrots shrieked as they streaked around the sky.

I stuck around till well after closing time (it's so huge, how are they going to throw everyone out?). The cat-like cries of peacocks sounded across the lawn. Peacocks in a Mughal garden at sunset, it was just perfect. I crept around the edge of the wall toward the cries and watched them nesting for the night. I didn't even know they could really fly, but there they were in the treetops. I could see the S- curve of their necks against the sky.

On Global Voices
Yesterday's post about dynastic democracies made it to Global Voices. If I had known people were actually reading it, I would have put more work into it....