Our tour of Delhi was good as far as tours go. Most of what we saw you can see in any guide book, so I won’t bore you with the details of the mosques, temples, and memorials we visited. Our main challenge was to make it through the tour without dozing off. The eleven and a half hour time zone difference and twenty-three hours of travel was laying heavy on our enthusiasm. I, on the other hand, kept worrying about where I was going to find the next restroom. Even having limited myself to one cup of coffee wasn’t enough to give me comfort for long, and Delhi is not long on public toilet facilities.
I think the highlight was our bicycle rickshaw ride through the rat maze of old Delhi. I’ll try to include some pics, because words can’t do it justice. Much has been made of the poverty and beggars of India, and we did see and experience both, but it wasn’t nearly as pervasive as I’d thought. The little kids did rip your heart out though. They were cute, clever, persistent, polite, sometimes humorous, and probably needy. Our guide, Sunny, had warned us off making random donations.
I’d told Sunny early on that I had to be back at the hotel by 3:00 for a meeting, and he was clearly a little miffed. Guides world wide, at least the good ones, have their own agenda of what they think you need to see, and if you don’t want to see or don’t want to take the time, they get a little insulted and sulk. We saved the day by telling Sunny that we’d be back in Delhi for another couple of days at the end of our trip. That seemed to satisfy him.
At three I met Anil A. for coffee and experienced one of the new generation of Indian entrepreneurs. He was amazing. He started out as a barman in the Taj Hotel at seventeen. Through family connections, he wound up selling shoe uppers to manufacturers in Moscow, then electronic components, then color picture tubes from South Korea to the Europeans. Now he’s in real estate, oil and gas and technology having founded one of the hot Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies in Delhi. High growth rate and high margins are a great combination. He and a partner have also bought a UK shoe company and will be opening a retail outlet in Victory Plaza in Dallas. Go figure.
We’re off to Agra now. More later.
