Squalor and Splendor Are Inseparable Companions
We arrived in Delhi just
prior to the expected arrival of the monsoons. The coming rains would cool
things off quickly the driver told us as we careened through the streets
missing only by inhaled prayers (OMG!) and shouted expletives the thousands of
cars, cows, people, rickshaws, motorcycles, and tuk-tuks, that clogged the
narrow roads. It was already a bit cooler (116 degrees) than it had been the
previous week thanks to the tumultuous gray clouds that turned the brilliant
sunlight to utter darkness as they briefly rumbled through each morning.
Unfortunately they hadn’t dropped any rain yet. “But any day now”, the driver
told us.
The monsoons, those
devastating saviors, continue to have a direct and immediate impact on
virtually every aspect of life in every area of India. Baked and cracked under scorching red skies
for almost a year, the earth is simply dust here now. There is no moisture to
be felt or to be seen.
Looking out the window of our
air-conditioned rooms, a small family scrapes together their paltry life from
within the corrugated tin roof and walls lashed together on the empty fields
next door. At dawn they prod their few emaciated cattle across the parched
fields in a choking cloud of dust to some unknown location, only to return at
dusk to the unbearable heat and constant hardships of their meager existence.
When the rain begins it will fall like
droplets of water on a hot frying pan, sizzling and popping, bouncing off the
hard earth and rolling to the riverbeds. The waters come so quickly and with
such intense force that the rivers overflow within hours, flooding villages,
homes, towns, businesses, cities and fields.
There is simply no place for the water to go, so in a city with a
population twice the size of New York, it sits there creating hardships of a
different sort for everyone who lives here, until gradually the water is
absorbed into the parched fields and the bleached red earth begins to turn
green again. But through all this no one complains. Water is life, and it’s
easy to see why the celebrations, and the age-old and weeks-long ceremonies surrounding
the arrival of the monsoons are still such an integral and important part of
life here. At home, I sometimes think we live too far from the earth. The great
migrations of all living things across the millennia have followed the rains
around the globe. It is not by chance that India has the second largest
population of any country on this earth.
Delhi is endlessly
fascinating. Squalor and splendor are inseparable companions. Elephants and
Mercedes are careful to swerve around the cow standing in the middle of the
street, but are often less accommodating to the beggars so emaciated and
contorted as to appear at first glance to be a tree branch in the road. Old and new elbow for dominance in business,
religion, politics, and culture. Nothing seems to work as it should, but no one
it seems ever actually expects that it will, so life continues to lurch
headlong into the 21st century.
The city is ancient.
Indraprastha in the southern part of Delhi was prominent in the Mahabharata,
the great narrative epic of the Hindu religion written some 3,500 years ago, at
about the same time as the exodus out of Egypt or the fall of the city of Troy.
These were perhaps the last times in all these cultures that man walked
together with gods on this earth. It is seemingly impossible as I look around
that this is the same ground, these are the same fields, and the same enormous
silver moon that lit the battlefield and bore witness to the conversations here
between Lord Krishna and Prince Arjuna as recorded in the Bhagavad-Gita at the
beginning of time.
Delhi is in the midst of a
massive infrastructure project that will provide a metro system that is
scheduled to be completed by next year when it will host the Commonwealth
Games. Designed in part to highlight India as the new player on the world
stage, it is a massive, twenty first century task undertaken with a remarkable
partnership of cutting edge technology and fourteenth century tradition. At
construction sites men with hard hats and laptops converse on cellphones while
women in saris carry staggeringly heavy baskets of cement on their heads,
donkeys struggle to drag enormous cart loads of bricks, and tiffen-wallahs
bring lunches prepared daily by families in villages many miles away to the
construction workers sweating in t-shirts and sandals.
The director of the project
has published a very successful management text credited in large part for the
success of the project. That book is a reprinting of the Bhagavad-Gita. It is
now embraced by many in the upper echelons of the international business and
diplomatic communities around the world. This extraordinary melding of old and
new, this relevance of age-old observations and axioms to the current world is
in large part the essence and the strength of this society. It is this same
eternal relevance that caused the director of the Manhattan Project, Dr. Robert
Oppenheimer to quote in awe from the Bhagavad-Gita in the first few seconds of
the dawn of the atomic age as the first atomic bomb exploded over the white
sands of Alamogordo, New Mexico. “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to
burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty
One... I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds”.
The Qutab Minar in the
northern part of the city dates from the onset of Islamic rule in India and the
defeat of the last Hindu kingdom in the twelfth century. The colossal stone
tower, 20 stories tall and intricately carved, still stands at the sight of the
first Muslim mosque in this country. Built on the foundation of a sacred Hindu
temple, an inscription still visible over the main gate proclaims that the
mosque was built using the stones that were ‘taken from 27 idolatrous Hindu
temples that were destroyed on this same ground’. These same tensions and divisions
would rise to the surface again 800 years later as the era of the British Raj
came to an end, transferring power to the Hindu majority and once again
marginalizing the Muslim population, resulting eventually in the monumental and
devastating partition of India and the two Pakistans. These same issues are of
course becoming increasingly volatile again today.
