India

I just spent two weeks in India. I actually only meant to spend a week—but then the weather got bad in Kabul, one thing led to another, and voila, 2 weeks goes buh bye.

Over the last 5 years I have been to India a billion times—or once for every person there. And each time I go, I come back with a kind of glazed look in my eyes---it seems that I keep seeing more, but understanding less. Or maybe I just better understand that I don’t understand. For instance:

**Volume: The shear numbers are amazing. Each day in Bangalore, over 800 vehicles are added to the street. 2/3 of them will be motorcycles/scooters (aka 2 wheelers). A mere 300,000 vehicles each year.
**Infrastructure: Everywhere you go, there is infrastructure being built. New roads, subways, overpasses, airports. It takes a helluva lot of infrastructure to move a billion people—or some days, NOT move traffic.
**Chaos: Driving in India is a bit similar to fish in an aquarium—it is real hard to figure out what the rules are. In fact, it seems that most Indian drivers ARE fish—they constantly blow their horns, ‘pinging’ out their location to their fellow fish, in a hope that no one collides.
**Awful things: Try sipping a beer along the ocean, and up comes a guy crawling on his hands, with terribly mangled limbs that require you to turn your head away. Do you part with a few rupees? Try to deal with the repulsed, ‘please, just go away’ feeling you have. It happens time and again, and I still don’t know what to do.
**Beauty: Indian women. Sarees. Incredible. The beaches, the ocean, the Taj, the old castles, elephants. Amazing beauty is everywhere.
**Progress: Visit a world-class tech company in Bangalore. Bunch of dang kids working their butts off in the belief that the world is headed their way. Great campus, looking like Nike in Beaverton. Putting greens for god sakes.
**Fragile lives: The young man laying dead and mangled in the middle of the road, uncovered, while 4 cops smoke cigarettes and wave your car by. The son of a friend, 17, killed one day on his scooter. There are no guarantees in life, but India is one of those places that existence is very tenuous.
**Everyone working really hard: Kids in Bangalore tech companies. The hotel driver that makes $80 a month (plus tips) to support a family of four and often sleeps in the car during a 24-hour shift. The people trying to sell knock-off Barbie dolls at the intersection to cars/3-wheelers sitting for hours in traffic. In India, EVERYONE is working incredibly hard, some to get ahead, and some to just stay alive. In fact, it is the biggest thing you have to realize in much of the world—you have to work damn hard just to stay alive. In the US, if you don’t work hard you are poor. In India, if you are poor you have to really work hard.

India--It is truly a most wonderful, awful, beautiful and brutal place.