16 minutes

I'm on Kingfisher flight 162 from Jaipur to Delhi, a state capital to a national capital. We are still on the ground, and I am staring at the setback display, which right now is telling the statistics on our upcoming flight. Distance: 230km. Time to destination: 16 minutes.

The drive, I've been told, takes six or seven hours of dodging traffic, cows, and potholes. Which I suppose is why I, along with my hundred odd fellow passengers have bothered to take the time to cram ourselves through the mutilple layers of officious security of one of India's domestic airports it exchange for 16 minutes of flying time.

It's india's infrastructure problem underscored. The flight cost $70, for what in the US would have been a two hour drive consuming $10 of gas (well maybe $20). In india, most people either suffer through the drive or an equally slow and unreliable train ride, or most often, just don't go.

It blows the mind to think what might happen if India ever built modern expressways and managed to keep the cows and rickshaws off of them. People could move about. An economy based on cheap and efficient domestic trade might sprout up, such as what has long since happened in the US and elsewhere.

But its just idle thought. India's much vaunted Golden Quadrilateral road system, which is supposed to be a giant step forward, is in reality just an expantion of existing roads. Instead of a two laned cow infested, potholled morass, they have four lane cow infested, potholled morasses. And this is vaunted as a massive step forward. India is decades away from a road network such as even brazil or south africa have, let along what can be found in China (where the roads put ours to shame). I think its more likely that india will find a way to put cows on the information superhighway than to get the cows off of their actual highways.

Trespassing on the Roof of the World, East

So, as I have noted many times, this is my third rainy-season visit to the Himalayas in as many years, giving me ample reason to complain about my own travel-planning skills, but also placing me in a fine position to reflect upon these mountains and the services offered to their tourists. My previous two trips were to Tibet and to Nepal. Both were rather miserable affairs. Both offer splendid scenery, but both are rather over-traveled.

My first trip was to Tibet, as part of a massive Beijing-to-Calcutta jaunt before I started business school. Tibet's vastness does much to absorb the crowds, especially once you leave the tourist hot-spots of Lhasa and Shigatse, but the romance of the place is belied by the unavoidable fact that it is mostly a vast wasteland of parched rocks and oppressed peasantry.

Nepal, on the other hand, despite a decade of civil and military unrest, is largely singularly un-oppressed, perhaps too much so. I was there last summer for a week-long trek around the holy mountain of Anapurna. It's the Himalayan destination of choice for Western and Asian tourists alike, and has been since the hippie-trail overland days of the 60's and 70's. Kathmandu today is basically a large low-end tourist resort, with backpacker cafes and hostels and very muddy roads and not much else. The trekking paths there are very well worn, plied by countless shepa guides and endless packs of North Face-clad tourists, humurously over-equipped for what has become largely a pleasant walk between the many restaurants and hotels that line the routes. No one camps around Anapurna. And soon no one will walk-- by last summer, a Chinese-built road had snaked halfway around the mountain, and by now would be due for completion, together with a connection to the Chinese border at Mustang. Once the inevitable Chinese bus tours commence, there is no turning back.

Bhutan, acutely aware of what has happened in Tibet and Nepal, has chosen a different route. Firstly, they completely eschew all trade with Tibet and China to the north – the passes are all permanently closed and guarded by the prickly Bhutanese army. Despite the obvious cultural connections to Buddhist China and Tibet, all trade with the north must pass through Bangladesh or India. Secondly, Bhutan's paternalistic state plays a heavy hand in regulating tourism, preventing Nepal's free-for-all. The $200/person/day “minimum tariff” is an admirable free-market mechanism for reducing the number of visitors the the country to a manageable 20,000 per year (or about 100 arrivals per day in the high season). There are heavy regulations and guidelines for all hotels and travel agents, mandating a minimal level of service and specifying that each group must be accompanied by a guide with a college degree and an additional two years of guide training.

Trekking here is a different story altogether. There are no “tea-houses” to serve meals and provide rooms along the routes. Trekking is trekking. Everything is carried in, and everything is carried out. Our trek, “The Gangste Culture Trek”, was a marvelous three-day jaunt through the highlands of Central Bhutan. We chose to do a trek through a rural area, rather than a mountainous one because the season dictated a heavy cloud cover for the entirety of the trip, making mountain watching impossible. We started at an elevation about 2,000 meters in an agricultural area of small potato- and rice-farming villages. By the end of the first day, we had cleared 3,200 meters and were surrounded by lush blue pine forests. This altitude still is considered to be quite arable by Bhutanese standards, and as we walked we passed many small potato farms and several cow herds, spending their summers away from their villages below.

It's an interesting time for Bhutan, with the Gross National Happiness initiative and related programs placing a heavy emphasis on rural development. In our region, this came in the form of “farm roads”, which were being built to connect the isolated mountain homes that we passed to the modest highway far below. What was being built was merely a twisting dirt track, suitable for a tractor and perhaps a very aggressive four-wheel-drive vehicle, but even this was sure to bring huge change to the villagers who would no longer need to cart their produce several days to bring it to market. The road followed largely the same route as the ages-old walking paths that connected the various valleys, which sadly was the same route that had been planned as our trek. This meant that on the last day, when we crossed the most completed portion of the road, the trail was largely obliterated. This left us with the option of either following the very circuitous switch-backs of the road, or trying to find what remained of the path, now largely eroded and rendered very slippery by the rains. We tried both in turns, and ended up very, very muddy.

Despite the inconvenience caused to us by this progress, the trek was a throughly enjoyable experience. My mother, sister and I had the company of our full-time guide, in addition to six additional staff and seven horses. Our campsite would be set up upon our arrival by the staff which raced ahead of useach day. Our meals, taken in the dining-tent on table and chairs, were hotel-quality muti-course affairs, produced magically from the kitchen tent. We retired at night to our sleeping-tents where we slept like babies on foam mattresses, though not before relieving ourselves in the toilet tent. Yes, a toilet tent (which covered a dug latrine). There were some hiccups, like the soap being eaten by a cow, but by and large the trip was very smooth, and the frequent rain showers didn't bother us at all.

Bhutan

Bhutan's national airlines, Druk Air, is the only airline permitted to fly into the themed airport of Paro, the only landing strip in the country. The airline has two planes, which each make one dramatic, winding, mountain-lined approach into the airport. They are fairly modern A319's, in good repair, each carrying less than 150 tourists -- capping the number of tourists at 300 per day.

In order to receive a visa, tourists must contract with one the many local tour companies, which are required to provide an all-inclusive service, for which they must charge a fixed price of $200 per day. I emailed a recommended agency called the Bhutan Travel Bureau, whose agent was was flexible and responsive. Our guide and driver met us at the airport, and whisked us through the mountains for 90 minutes to the capital of Thimpu, where we were put up in the adequate Druk Hotel (basic rooms with TV, decent indian food in the restaurant).

Along the drive, the guide related some of the enthusiasm I've heard from many the few Bhutanese I've spoken to. 2008, for them, marks the centennial of the country's monarchy, but also the beginning of the transition to democracy, instigated by the fourth king, who this year also voluntarily passed the crown to his 28-year old son. In March, a new parliament was formed, and given power over most civil and economic matters (the king retains foreign policy, religious, and military authority).

I've been asking about to see what actions the new democratically elected government has taken -- and the only concrete example I've heard is that they have brought forward the deadline for increasing the country's hyrdroelectric capacity from 2GW to 20GW by 2015 (previously it had been 2020). Hydroelectric power is the country's biggest export, and several of the Bhutanese I've spoken to are quite proud of the new dams being built.

It's a nice place, this -- not nearly as isolated as I had thought. There's satellite TV and Internet (at least in the hotels), and there seems to be a healthy trade of goods and services with India and Bangladesh beyond. No links to China yet, that I can see, but there are quite a few Chinese tour groups staying in our hotel. I was looking forward to see the people dressed in "national costume", but it turns out it's only required for office wear-- so yesterday in the evening most of the people strolling the streets were dressed like me.

Caste and Class

 I've been reading Edward Luce's excellent book In Spite of the Gods, a dispatch from post-independence India written with the wisdom that comes from having lived in India for many years, immersing himself to the point of marrying and Indian woman, but maintaining the perspective needed to remain the FT's South Asia correspondent up until today.  

The story he paints is that of a country hopelessly mired in corruption, where there are no real heroes and very few innocents. For those trapped in the vortex of poverty, doomed to be charmed by political bosses who's very power and prosperity flows from keeping their own constituency impoverished and disenfranchised. They win government posts which enable them dispatch patronage in the form of government jobs – an effective tool as long as the people who's votes you're trying to win are desperate enough to want a government job more than public services. The formula is simple: pick one of India's myriad ethnic, language, or religious groups, ideally one that feels oppressed enough to fall prey to some angry rhetoric. Promise them jobs, and government services, and furhter induce them to vote for you with the help of a little goon muscle – if you're a mob boss yourself, all the better, because in winning a parlimentary seat you also win yourself immunity from prosecution.


This is interest-group politics at it's very worst, and it's a wave that has swept India over the past few decades, eroding the voter base of the two main parties, Congress and the BJP, now together pull only just over 50% of the vote. The remainder goes to small interest-group parties. The worst of the lot is probably that run by a certain Lalu Prasad Yadav, the former criminally corrupt Chief Minister of the state of Bihar, who recently was elected an MP to the national government. His party helped cement Congress's governing coalition, and so he was essentially offered his choice of ministerial portfolios. What did he chose? Finance? Foreign affairs? Nope – Railways. A natural choice, because the railways employs 1.5 Million people – each representing a potential piece of patronage to be disperesed.


Luce also gives the first lucid description I have read of the caste system which is what is largely responsible for these rifts in society that corrupt politicians can exploit. Hinduism and the Indian caste system are notoriously difficult for outsiders to understand. The first step is recognize that they are largely one and the same. Hinduism is not really a religion as much as it is a system of related tribal religions. The very term Hindu is not indigenous to India – it was simply used by Muslim invaders to describe the pagan beliefs of the non-muslim local population. Each caste in india is essentially a tribe, which has it's own gods, it's own mode of dress and worship, and importantly, it's own traditional occupation. The tribes generally lived in very close proximity to one another, and each filled a need of the broader society. The tribes didn't inter-marry, and it's members were kept to their traditional occupations by a strong belief in dharma, or duty. The tribes, known as castes, varied in social stature from the Priests on the high end to various “untouchables” such as cow-skinners and manure-shifters on the low end.


What we think of as “Hinduism”, with it's holy trinity of Bhrama-Vishnu-Shiva and it's holy Vedic scriptures was actually the religion of the highest priestly castes, called Brahmins. Their gods were considered paramount among the many gods worshipped by the lower castes, and they maintained exclusive access to many of the temples and religious writings. As society advanced and knowledge proliferated, many lower-caste Hindus began to emulate the Brahmins and their practices. Hence, the worship of Shiva and Vishnu have become widespread, and the practice of vegetarianism likewise. Even Lau Prasad Yadav, the corrupt politician from Bihar who has made a career of pandering to his Untouchable power base, has started to adopt the Brahmin religion.


Luce's describes all of this interspersed with a good number of anecdotes and war stories from his years in India, and a good dose of modern history thrown in for good measure. Despite it's bleak painted picture, it's a cheerful book – perfect to take along on a vacation to India.

Rivers of Life

I'm back in India, starting a two-week trip through the sub-continent with my mother and sister. It's my fourth trip on four years. We started in Delhi, took a two day-jaunt to Agra to see Taj Mahal, and are then driving back to Delhi from where we will fly to Bhutan for a week of trekking, fulfilling one of my mother's long-held suburban dream. Now that she has bought a Prius, all that remains for her to complete a perfect year is for St. Obama to be elected president...

We've seen all the major Mughal monuments: the Taj Mahal, the major forts in Delhi and Agra, the eerie abandoned palace complex at Fatepur Sikri. We've seen most of the over-sized, built-to-last imperialist Edwin Lutyen architecture in New Delhi, the relics of the headiest days of Britain's colonial rule. We've dabbled in Modern India, staying in some of the world's finest hotels (the Oberois in Delhi and Agra-- both excellent). But what has impressed us the most has been the view between all of these sites – the view from the inside of our air conditioned car of the endless, chaotic flow of humanity that overflows indias highways – what Rudyard Kipling referred to as “the river of life”.

It's my fifth trip in four years to India, but the first of Ima and Mimi. I think every visitor here reaches a moment, usually within hours of arrival, where you suddenly give up all Western expectations of orderly transport, and simply start to admire the system of movement around you. The incessant horn of your driver, ceases to be a reckless substitute for orderly overtaking and becomes a sort of background music. The cows lounging in the road cease to be a disappointing example of lack of order and become simply part of the scenery (as you are to them). It's part of what makes, to my mind, India the last great Asian redoubt – life here requires a sort of inner Zen lost to the Western world and more orderly East Asia alike.

The roads we were driving on were fairly new, so there wasn't much turbulence, just a lot of sudden motions as Narinder, the driver would swerve the car to avoid a reckless motorcyclist, or a burst of noise as he would lay on the horn to inform an encroaching lorry of our presence. As we sat in the air-conditioned oasis of our comfortable car, we watched essentially every form of ground transport known to man weave together around us in a strange and noisy dance that seemed to stretch the limit of the road to its absolute physical capacity.

The new best best kept secret in air travel

Back in the old days, before there was a new york to singapore direct flight, singapore airlines used to operate a connecting route via frankfurt. You could buy the US-frankfurt route seperately, although it was hardly marketed. The result was a cheap, spacious, civilized way to get to europe.

Today, i just completed a flight on Air India, from JFK to new delhi. Despite my premonitions of long lines at the check in counter and screaming children packed into an old 747, the result was almost as pleasing as the memories of my singaporean dreams of yore.

The flight, which was the sister route of a daily service to bombay via london, cost about 500 dollars. That was less than half of the alternative Continental flight. The service, supplied by attractive young women in saris, had more in common with india's excellent private domestic airlines than with anything i ever thought a state owned enterprise could provide. Check in, even in coach, was a breeze, although i did have to spend 45 minutes navigating the menagerie of TSA security. There was an above average in flight entertainment system, but best of all, the flight was inexplicably half empty, leaving we with a row to myself. They also have of a $100 credit towards a future flight, just for showing up, and let me check three bags without protest.

I'm not likely to fly to delhi from new york any time soon, but i do plan to make good use of the jfk london segment.