Bavarian buzz: India: Delhi Part I

Time to finally dive into stories/photos from my trip to India (last year at this time!). The flight over was long, but not too bad (~30 hours door-to-door including a 5 hour stopover in Frankfurt where I devoured a ridiculous amount of excellent Lübeck marzipan).

My relatives picked me up at the ungodly hour of 2 am local Delhi time. I don’t understand why Delhi has so many late night flights! On the other hand at least traffic was manageable at this hour and people didn’t lay on the horn quite as often.

I spent the first two days getting over jet lag before joining a 2-week Intrepid tour. My Indian relatives were incredibly welcoming and spoilt me with delicious food including idli with coconut chutney and green beans, as well as fresh chapati (unleavened flatbread) with every meal. I was also impressed by the sheer number of people living in their house (12 including hired help), as well as the bustle of maids, drivers (to get people to work and kids to and from school), multiple cooks, and people stopping by with laundry, ironing, and all sorts of other goods. India has certainly changed for the middle-class from 25 years ago when I was last visiting family in Delhi!

My first sight-seeing was visiting the Lotus Temple with my Mom (also visiting from Canada), cousin, and my little second-cousins. The temple is shaped like a lotus flower and is a Bahai place of worship. It’s no ancient architectural wonder (opened in 1986), but I did enjoy the lovely ponds of water (see title shot for this entry) and padding around on the cool white marble in my bare feet. People of all religions are welcome to worship, although silently. It was lovely to see Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims all praying peacefully together.

The next day I joined my tour group and we started with a walk around Old Delhi. Immediately it felt like pure chaos with all of my senses being simultaneously assaulted with noise, light, strange smells and people pressing against you. Trying to keep up with our local tour leader I nearly got run over by cycle-rickshaws and tuk-tuks multiple times. We weaved our way through numerous narrow alleyways crowded with shops selling jewellry, spices, hot steaming paranthas (deep-fried bread), fruit trucks burning incense to draw in customers, brightly coloured tunics, and so on. I wasn’t able to snatch very many photos, but here are a few:

In the midst of the chaos I decided to look up….and saw this mess of wires! It’s doubtful that all of these are legal connections from the electricity company, but you can’t help but have sympathy for all of those in poverty and unable to pay. I saw a great documentary this past year on the issue of power generation/supply in India called Powerless.

I had some relief from the chaos of the street visiting a beautiful historic Gurdwara (Sikh temple) in Old Delhi. Everyone must cover their heads out of respect before entering the gurdwara. Sikh men generally wear turbans and Sikh women typically wear head scarves. The temple had bandanna-like cloths on hand for tourists such as myself to visit the gurdwara.

As in all gurdwaras, there is a main hall with the Sikh holy text prominently on display. Worshippers sing hymns accompanied by musicians.

A kitchen is part of every gurdwara that provides a free vegetarian meal to any who come (Sikh or non-Sikh). Everything is cooked by volunteers and serving hundreds if not thousands of meals every day is a major operation! I helped roll a few roti (another word for chapati), although my oblong bread pieces were far off from the locals’ beautiful symmetrical circles. We all had a good laugh about that.

Volunteers making roti in the gurdwara kitchen.