Weather forecast for August 4, 2017:
Constance Marina, The Ohio River River, Cincinnati, Ohio
Partly cloudy, low 73 high 90.
Captain’s Log: August 3, 2017
So, it was 5:00pm and I was at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport waiting to catch a 7:00pm flight to Cincinnati; my stomach was growling. With two hours to kill I headed over to the TGI Friday’s restaurant near Gate 12 in Terminal E. The queue of weary and hungry travellers was beginning to grow past the restaurant doors and into the main hall of the terminal. There were two men in line directly in front of me and when the host asked if the three of us would mind sharing the 5-seat, round-top in the corner that had just been cleared; we agreed.
As we were being seated someone joked about who was going to pick up the tab. I said ‘I like you two, but not that much’ and we all laughed; the ice had been broken.
The conversation started off small. Are you heading home or leaving home? Where are you from? What do you do? The guy to my right was a retired Continental Airlines pilot from Denver; the guy to my left was a software engineer from India who was on his way back to Minneapolis, his home for the last 11 years.
After I mentioned to the retired pilot that I had once worked for General Electric Aircraft Engines we talked about airplanes and aviation for some time. The Indian guy didn’t have much to say on that topic so I eventually mentioned to him that I had spent ten days in India on business back in January of 2016. I recalled a few of the places I had visited; Pune, New Delhi, Agra and the Taj Mahal being among them. India’s history, it’s potential and current problems dominated the rest of our conversation.
As I devoured my barbecue chicken sandwich and French fries I remembered that, on the 15-hour flight back home from India I had put my impressions of that mysterious land down on paper (digital, that is). I finished my meal, paid my bill and then bid farewell and a safe journey to my new, nameless friends.
A bit later I found myself squeezed into the window seat of the very last row of the commuter jet that was going to deliver me to the Queen City of the West, to the ‘Natty’. Soon I was at cruising altitude, 32,000ft, mesmerized by the scene outside my window - a wingtip outlined by the beautiful brilliant orange-white, puffy clouds of a fast-approaching sunset. The stunning scene before me seemed oddly familiar; I had seen a very similar wingtip silhouette on my flight home from India. Once again I found myself reliving those adventurous 10 days back in 2016.
After the scene faded I pulled out my laptop and reread my impressions of India. Now, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with sailing, I have decided to share those impressions. After all, it was a great adventure, just like sailing….
Impressions of India (01/31/2016)
As the wheels lift off and we steadily gain altitude the perpetual haze of the mega-city slowly begins to obscure the objects below. My many conflicting impressions of India are still fresh and, with the fifteen-hour flight from New Delhi to Newark ahead of me, now is the time to capture them for future reference. The Qutb Minar tower, built by the Mughal emperor Qutub-ud-Din Aibak in 1200, is the last visible object I recognize from this altitude. Then, all is grey. Minutes later a crystal blue sky emerges. A pale and lop-sided waxing moon hangs in the northeast and scattered clumps of cumulus clouds float in the distance. We are heading for Islamabad, then Kabul, Dushanbe, Tashkent, Moscow, Murmansk, the North Atlantic, Greenland, Baffin Bay, Hudson Bay, Quebec and finally the good old US of A.
I am very anxious to get home but a part of me is reluctant to leave this land of stark contrasts. I have been captivated by the beauty, the history and the mystery of this country and by the smiling, dirty faces of the people. I have been repulsed by the garbage, the raw sewage, the ineptitude, the filth and the chaos of this country. There are 1.2 billion people in India, the majority being poor and uneducated. India has an average population density of 13,000 people per square kilometer. In contrast, the USA has about 2,000 people per square kilometer and has three times the landmass. Over-population is the catalyst for the insanity that is India.
A bit of history: The Hindu Maharajas ruled India for centuries until the Islamic Ottoman Turks invaded from the west in 1197. The Mughals, descendants of Genghis Kahn and also Islamic, came in from the east and defeated the Ottomans in 1494. The British defeated the Mughals and added India to the Empire around 1761. The Rajas, Ottomans and Mughals each built lavish palaces, temples, mosques, tombs and fortresses, many of which I had the distinct pleasure to tour and which remain in surprisingly good condition. The massive scale and opulence of these structures speak to the absolute power these rulers had over the people. The rulers, each in turn, systematically raped the country, hoarding its wealth and suppressing the masses. The Ottomans, and the Mughals in particular, had extreme disregard for the common people.
Although they did not build on a scale comparable to the previous rulers, the British also left their mark and raped the country. The Brits even plundered the Taj Mahal, stealing the gold from the crescent moon atop the main dome. In 1947 the British divided one country into Islamic Pakistan, Islamic Bangladesh and the Hindu India of today. Pakistan and India have been, since independence, mortal enemies.
After about sixty minutes of flight I can see the snow-covered Himalayas to the northeast and the Hindu Kush below. Although I can’t be certain, I believe that I see either Mount Everest or K2 way off in the clear distance. Thirty minutes later we are flying at 31,998 feet and the peaks are almost parallel with our wingtip. It seems as if I could reach out and touch the snow-covered cliffs.
The role of religion: India is approximately 70% Hindu and 13% Muslim with the remaining 17% consisting of various other religions including Christianity. The Hindus worship idols in temples. These idols can be found in very large and very lavish structures in population centers and in tiny, dilapidated structures along the roadside and tucked into shantytowns. There are ancient and contemporary temples throughout India. The Muslims worship Allah in mosques built by the Ottomans and Mughals. The mosques that I have seen are very large; smaller ones exist throughout the country but in much fewer number than the Hindu temples. From what I could observe, people are extremely devoted to their belief systems, extremely devoted.
The glaring lack of urban planning, the apparent absence of any recognizable traffic regulations and the almost total lack of traffic law enforcement leads me to speculate that a large majority of the intelligent and well-educated population have moved elsewhere, primarily to the United States. I commonly complain about the incompetence of our government and the people who populate it. India’s federal and local governments appear to be more incompetent by orders of magnitude. Nothing seems to work. What does work seems to do so in a manner that is totally devoid of common sense.
Perhaps I am being too harsh. It is highly probable that the apparent incompetence here-to-fore described is, in reality, the inevitable result of a lack of adequate funding. India is, after all, a country struggling to liberate itself from the third world.
An anecdote about traffic:
Each morning my driver would pick me up at the hotel and deliver me, safe and sound, to the office. Each trip was a unique, exciting, invigorating and disturbing experience. Countless automobiles, their horns blaring, were outnumbered 10-to-1 by the equally noisy auto-rickshaws, which were outnumbered 10-to-1 by the even louder motor scooters.
Rickshaws, designed to carry two people (in addition to the driver) commonly carried 4 or 5 people. Scooters commonly carried 3 or 4 people, usually with bags or backpacks in tow. I actually saw five people on one scooter!
Riding in the back seat of a Mercedes in this chaos gives the passenger a real up-close but insulated view of the action, much like watching an NFL linebacker make a devastating hit on the quarterback on a high definition, big screen TV. Riding on the back of a scooter in this moving madness is like having the wind knocked out of you as that same ferocious linebacker buries his helmet in your chest.
It would require too much effort and too much time to accurately describe the India that I have become acquainted with. Therefore, I will describe some of the scenes that I have witnessed and let you paint your own picture:
A big pig walks along the concrete divider of a four lane road at 11:30pm.
An old man rides a half-dead horse, against traffic, on a major, multi-lane city road. Cars, motor bikes and auto-rickshaws bob-and-weave, with horns blaring, to avoid a collision.
Garbage everywhere; along the road; in vacant lots next to shanties; piles of it everywhere; pond and lakes filled with trash. Garbage in every direction.
Stray dogs sniffing through piles of trash, walking along busy streets, lounging among the grounds of national monuments and lying dead in the road.
A tractor pulling an old wooden cart across three lanes of traffic; each lane comes screeching to a halt as the tractor invades. The head and neck of a dead camel hangs off of the back of the cart; lifeless jowls flopping as the tongue hangs from a gaping mouth.
Shanty towns crowd the walls on three sides of the grounds of the Taj Mahal. Once inside the walls, you enter another universe, a man-made paradise, and you marvel at the genius of it all. Yes, it is a tribute to a dead wife, an eternal testament of love but, at the same time, you are repulsed by the retched excesses of the ruling class and their total disregard for the masses. It is a spiritual experience, both positive and negative.
A man drops his pants and defecates, in broad daylight and in public view, along the roadside. Men urinate on graffiti-covered walls.
Sacred cows (literally, not figuratively) wander along the roadside and in traffic, dropping and urinating as they go.
Women patting cow dung into patties. The patties are dried in the sun and sold as fuel for cooking.
Smiling faces, some very beautiful, some very ugly, many speaking English, scratching out a tough and meager life by any western standards.
Child beggars, some as young as four and five, scurrying through traffic to peck on car windows for handouts. The booty is then taken back to the mother(?) sitting in the dirt on the side of the road.
Half-finished and abandoned construction sites everywhere; in big cities and in back-road towns.
The Qutb Minar tower, 47 feet at its base, tapering to 9 feet at its peak and standing 240 feet tall, made of red sandstone and marble; it is a skyscraper that is over 800 years old. An inscription in Persian proudly proclaims that the material used in its construction was salvaged from the demolition of twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples.
Very large buildings under construction with poor people living in cardboard and tin shacks, with their children and cows, right on the construction site.
An insanely beautiful, chaotic and ugly world, India is a stark testament to the burden of overpopulation. Even the well-off live in what the average, middle-class American would consider very tight space. There is no escaping your fellow human in India.
Until next time, may your tomorrow bring fair winds and following seas!