Republic Day

Today, January 26, is Republic Day in India. While this may be observed quietly in other places, in Delhi this is major event with a presidential speech and major parade through New Delhi starting at the Presidential Palace, proceeding through the India Gate and terminating at the Red Fort . As always, but apparently even more this year, security is a major concern. There have been recent reports that a terrorist activity was threatened for Republic day. I called the UV office in Delhi yesterday (I was in Jaipur for the day) and discovered that the the building had been vacated so that military could secure the building. Our office building is a mile away from the parade route, so that seemed a little over the top. Amir had tried to get tickets for front-row seats from his cousin-in-law, but had failed. Since the crowds are ususaully huge, he bailed out and decided to watch it on TV. That is not why I came to India. I've got to see the real thing. Since most of the activity is centered around the India Gate, I avoided that part of town and walked where I could intersect the parade route further down and hopefully avoid some of the crowds. I walked north from the hotel for about 10 minutes and then turned right into a side street to hit the parade route. I ended up coming through a nursing school campus and tried to exit the campus through the main gate onto the road. I was stopped at the gate and told that no one was allowed on the road and if I wanted to see the parade, I would have to wait and watch behind the gate! That seemed a little odd, so I asked if I did not want to see the parade but just wanted to walk down the road, would that be OK? That seemed too obvious of a ploy,, but he fell for it, and let me enter the street. Now this was a very wide boulevard with at two lanes in each direction, wide sidewalks and a large median. A security fence had been recently constructed to keep people on the sidewalk and off the street. I also noticed that every manhole had a fresh little patch of cement on its edge with a paper seal on it so that they could detect if there had been any disturbance. These guys were thorough! The only odd thing was there was no one on the street. Every 50 yards or so there was a soldier looking out for suspicious activity and more at each intersection, somtimes with a shter built of out sandbags. I can ensure you that there was not much of this going on since there was no one around. I smiled at each soldier I passed and figured that if I could continue to walk along the route towards the parade I would eventually end of watching the parade at close range and have the whole street to myself! This was too weird to be true, and after I got about 4 blocks down the street, someone decided that this was not right and someone with a even bigger gun told me I could not be on the street and sent me through a barrier on a little side road. Now this barrier was a good 30 feet off the parade route and would offer a pretty poor view of the parade. I decided to not stay there but scout out a better place. I figured out that an intersection of two main roads would provide a wider angle of view so after checking the map on my iPhone, I headed a block south tried to turn back to the parade route. Alas, they had decided that this would be too insecure and had completely blocked off the road and would not let anyone within block of the parade route. Instead they sent every one who tried back to where I had just come from. This was getting a little crazy, Why have parade when no one can see it? I was beginning to wonder if I should go back and watch it on TV at the hotel, but I am not one to give up that easily. I figured that if they blocked off the main roads, perhaps I should go the other extreme. I found the smallest lane running beside a railway track and guess what, at the end of this dirt path sat another soldier who assured me I could go further and since the rope was well back from the road and provided no visibility of the route whatsoever I headed back and crossed the tracks and tried the other side. This street was a little bigger and actually appeared to offer some view of the street. A large group of people had already started to gather there, but this was going to be my best shot. Since I do have a little height advantage over most of the local population, I could actually see a little bit of the street. After standing there for about 20 minutes they guards actually let the front 3 rows come forward and sit on the sidewalk!. I suddenly moved from the 6th row to the 3rd! Standing in the middle of a large crowd in India does have its own rules. Several time I found somenone's arm resting on my shoulder. I learned not to be too surprised. A couple of times someone would grab my shoulder and then push me aside so he could get in front. I got used to this pretty quickly, but never felt the urge to wrap my arm around the guy standing beside me. I am sure he was glad of that as well.
I have posted the pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/hayojager/RepublicDayParade#

No Smoking No Spitting

We are all familiar with various programs to reduce smoking, especially in public places. Delhi is not without similar programs. What is different here is the accompanying warning "NO SPITTING", written in both English and Hindi. For those who may be wondering what could be possibly wrong with spitting in public, there is a small paper sign beside it that helpfully explains that spitting is an "UnHygenic Habit". Other posters in the building explain that spitting "causes TB and H1N1". Nevertheless, spitting is a habit that is hard to break.

Lat week Friday, I went on 40 minute ride on the back of a motorcycle to visit the computer center where we host our main servers. That was an adventure all by itself. At one point we came to a stop light and as usual all traffic edged forward into whatever space was available. We pulled up between a bus and the curb and just as we slowly wedged our way into that little bit of space the bus had left us, a long stream of brown spittle was propelled from an open window. I was both horrified at the thought that it may have hit me, and at the same time extremely glad that it didn't.

I now take a big detour around any stopped bus and hope that more people heed the sign.

Old Delhi

Today is Saturday, and after spending the morning in the office, I decided to go for a walk. When I leave the hotel grounds I always have to run the gauntlet of cab and auto-rickshaw drivers who are sure that I need their services. Not only that, but some will also insist that I am going the wrong way and that the best shopping is in the other direction. I think their basic assumption is that any westerner is loaded with cash and is looking for a place to leave it in a store. Shopping is not what I had in mind for the afternoon. I headed in a north-easterly direction towards Old Delhi (yes there is an Old Delhi as well as a New Delhi). As I approached the gate into Old Delhi, I was approached by another auto-rickshaw driver who warned me that I was about to enter a very dangerous place and that he would take me wherever I wanted to go and make sure I was safe. I am never sure if this is an honest concern for my well-being or if this like Luigi warning you that your business will burn down unless you buy his insurance. Anyways, I thanked him for his concern and ensured him I would be very careful, and bravely entered the old city. Wow, this really is an old city. Every building appeared to be several hundred years old, and in a very serious state of advanced decay. The streets ranged from 15 feet wide down to about 4 feet. And not another westerner in sight. I did began to wonder if the rickshaw driver might have been correct. I moved my wallet out of my back pocket and made sure to leave my iPhone tucked away out of sight. I had counted on its GPS functions to guide me through the streets, but I figured I had better try to find my own way in and out. I tried to keep to streets that were at least 10 feet wide to give some room to move, but sometimes the street would just peter out into a narrow alleyway before suddenly opening up onto a wider through way. There are virtually no cars in Old Delhi, but the streets are clogged with pedestrians, handcarts, mules, bicycles, tricycles and motor bikes. In the picture above the traffic a cart while a tricycle was heading in the opposite direction. Since the street was not wide enough for this, all traffic, pedestrian and otherwise, came to a complete halt while they sorted this out. One the bicycles was lifted aside and traffic started to flow again. Is is easy to imagine why when the British decided to make Delhi the capital of the Indian subcontinent, they left Old Delhi behind a built New Delhi as the capital. While some of the wares for sale in the shops are of recent vintage (e.g cheap Chinese made mobile phones), some of the offerings have not changed a bit. I encountered a copper smith banging away at some metal and making a new pot. A poulterer with a cage full of chickens busy was plucking the one a customer had just selected. A butcher was chopping away at some cuts of meat while a carcass hung behind him, and several bloodied goat's head were displayed on the front counter. A baker was pulling freshly baked naan, a sort of flat bread, out of an oven built in to the floor of his shop. Fruit sellers sat among their wares. I could almost imagine that life must have been much the same on the streets back in the days of the Mughal empire.
My real destination had been the Red Fort on the other side of the old city, but it was closed today. The journey itself was an even better experience.

Back In Delhi

We take so many things for granted. Most people might assume for example that a modern office building in major city might have adequate bathrooms. Not here.
We have offices in a office tower in Connaught Place, a major business and commercial center in the heart of Delhi. This appears to be a business condominium with each office being owned by a different person or company. We rent such an office on the eighth floor and have about 16 people working there. Each office is separately owned and has its own window air conditioners, telephone connection, Internet service, and yes, its own bathroom. The common services appear to limited to the elevator and some lethargic security guards at the front door. Now our bathroom was small and primitive at the best of times, but sometime last year it seemed to have failed and like many things around here, repairs are not quickly made. I had heard something about bathroom problems in our office at the time, but had forgotten all about this until I got here. On my first day, I was reminded by the helpful staff that our bathroom is non-functional but that the person who owns our office also owns another office on the same floor and he had agreed that we could use their bathroom. I was taken for a tour and introduced to the relevant staff in the other office so I would not be kept out when the need arose. Fortunately their bathroom was in reasonable condition given local standards. Some passing comments were made about another public bathroom being accessible on the ground floor but this was not deemed relevant information.
Our office works every other Saturday, and this week was a working Saturday. After a large breakfast in the hotel, I went to the office and as nature would have it, I needed to visit the bathroom. Unfortunately, the other office was not open and access to the bathroom was barred by a very solid looking wooden door with a huge padlock on it. I gingerly asked for information about the other facility on the ground floor. It appears that if you go out the back door and go through the garage there is another bathroom. I was not encouraged when I was sent off with a chuckle and "good luck" as I headed downstairs. Sure enough, there at the back of the garage, there was a set a urinals behind a little brick wall about waist high. I could smell them long before I could see them. The plumbing appeared to be incomplete as the urinals drained into a little trench on the floor with no drain in sight.
Fully working bathrooms are a wonderful invention,

Why I should not be your travel agent

Just before the Christmas break we had talked about me taking another trip to New Delhi to spend some time with the development team. I waited until after Christmas to book the flight so I could coordinate the dates with the church's annual congregational meeting. It seemed that it would be best if I were to leave on Jan 10 and return on Jan 28; that would get me back in time for the congregational meeting on the Jan 29. I booked my tickets and started to make the preparations to get my visa. Although I was cutting it a bit close, I knew that they were capable of processing a Indian business visa request in one day. We were also traveling to Burlington, ON and Napierville, QC over the holidays and I needed my passport to get back and forth across the border US-Canada border. I completed in the application, enclosed my passport and two shiny new passport pictures and sent them to the visa processing in New York using FedEx overnight delivery. They received the visa on Dec 31, but since Jan 1 was a holiday, the application was not sent to the Indian consulate until Monday Jan 4. This should still have left me with lots of time since I had prepaid for the return delivery of the passport with the visa. I checked the on-line system for the status of my visa every day that week. When Thursday passed and there was no progress on my visa I started to get worried. On Friday morning, I called the visa processing center and confirmed that even if my visa was processed on that day, it would miss the delivery cut-off and would not go out until Monday Jan 11 with a delivery on Tuesday Jan 12 - two days after my flight was scheduled to leave. I called Expedia see if I could rebook my British Airways flight for later in the week on account of my visa not being ready. They said that it would cost me $1750 to change my ticket. The original ticket was only $1300, so that seemed a little steep. Convinced that this could not be correct, I called Exedia several times that morning and asked the same question and consistenly got the same answer, so it appears that they were really serious about this. I called the visa processing center again and they made some encouraging sounds in that although there were no guarantees, there was a good probability that my visa would be ready later that day. On that meager hope, I asked them to hold my visa for pick-up instead of shipping it back via FedEx and booked a ticket for the next flight to New York. An hour later I was at Boston Logan airport and while waiting for my flight, I got an email from British Airways saying that they had already canceled my Sunday evening flight from Boston to Heathrow due to severe winter weather in the UK. That was great news, but I was already in the airport holding a non-refundable ticket to New York. I got to JFK at about 3:30 pm and took the subway into Manhattan and was at the visa processing center before 5 pm and queued up behind all the other people picking up their visas. When my turn came I gave them my request number and they used that to check the status of my visa. It was not done! All I could do was go home. I walked back outside into the rapidly darkening cold winter air and headed for the first Starbucks to recover and refuel. I dejectedly got back on the subway and headed back to the airport. As I got off the subway to take the airtrain to the terminal, I got another email on my iPhone saying that my visa was ready for pickup! It was now after 6 pm and the office was closed so heading back downtown was out of the question. My guess is that it had been delivered by the consulate to the visa processing center that afternoon but since their on-line data had not yet been updated, they did not know that they had it. If I had just given my name and had them search the box they would have found it, but since I had helpfully given the the visa request reference number they just checked on-line and said "not here".
I had booked the last flight out for the evening and did not get home until after midnight. So now I had neither passport nor a booked flight to India.
On Saturday, I called Expedia again, and asked to rebook my flight. At first they told me that I would not have to pay the re-booking fee of $250 but would have to pay the difference in fare. My guess was that this was going to cost me about $1500! They changed their mind about this , and agreed to rebook me for a Jan 13 flight without additional costs. On Monday I called the visa processing center again, and they confirmed that my visa was ready for pick-up. I managed to convince them to go back to the original instructions and FedEx the visa to me so that I would have it on Tuesday. To my great surprise they quickly agreed agreed and I soon got the email confirmation. By Tuesday afternoon at 3 pm, I had a passport with visa and ticket and was all set to fly on Wednesday morning with 18 hours to spare!
I think I will renew my visa a little earlier the next time.