Trip to the North Part I: Delhi

Hello all! Once again, it appears a blog entry is long overdue. I just returned from two weeks of traveling through north India. I visited five cities in 12 days, traveling by train and making stops in Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, and Indore. It was a fast and furious trip, quite depleting at times, but very rewarding. I got a good sampling of some of India’s best Mughal architecture, tried a variety of different cuisines (Punjabi, Rajasthani, Gujarati), met very warm, hospitable people in every city I went to, and even got a few days of work in while in Indore.

Since I have so much to share, I’ll split my writing about this trip into multiple entries. I am pledging myself to write an entry a day for the next five days about each of the places I went. I’ll start now with Delhi. By the way, in case you are wondering, I have two more weeks of work. After that, Arianna is coming (!!!!!) and we will spend a few days in Mumbai, before venturing south for a week or so. That takes us up to August 24 when we will fly back to the U.S. just in time for the start of fall classes.

I arrived in Delhi in the late afternoon, after a 24 hour train ride from Mumbai. The train ride was quite comfortable and caused me to curse the lack of viable intercity train options in the U.S. on numerous occasions. I rode in the A/C 3rd class, which meant I had a bench that folded out into a small bunk at night. (In case you are really curious about all the classes offered – there are eight! – check out this website). I found a hotel in the backpackers’ district of Delhi where I happily noted the difference in cost between Mumbai and the rest of India.

My first day in Delhi was spent mostly visiting different places of worship. I intended to walk around the federal building area in the evening but got sidetracked by a little rain (more on that). It was a blazing hot day, and the temples provided a great haven from the sun (not to mention the honking vehicles and the aggressive salespeople). I visited four places this day: the Friday Mosque (Jama Masjid), the Laxshmi Mandir (Hindu temple dedicated to the goddess of wealth and good fortune, Laxshmi), the Sikh temple, and the Ba’hai temple (aka the Lotus Temple).

The Jama Masjid dates back to when a Mughal emperor (Shah Jahan) moved the capital from Agra to Delhi in the 1600s. It was a very large mosque and I guess is historically significant, but it was not one of the more beautiful mosques I saw on this trip. They were also real sticklers about photographing it, so I had to steal a photo from online. The mosque is in Old Delhi, and the area around it has a bazaar feel, full of hawkers selling everything from chicken biryani to speaker systems.




The Laxshmi temple was one of the more beautiful temples I saw. It has received a significant amount of renovation within the last century, though the original temple dates back to the 1600s. It is really an entire campus, surrounded by gardens, fountains, and numerous shrines. Unfortunately, no cameras were allowed inside. There was something very distinctive about the style – it has the bold colors and intricate adornment with little statuettes and vignettes depicting the Hindu pantheon that is typical of Hindu, and especially South Indian, temple architecture. Yet it also has some modern touches. The colors are bold, but the temple has a limited color scheme – just red, gold, and white. And all the adornment is a bit more subdued than most other Hindu temples I’ve seen. It was like the spirit of a Hindu Temple meeting the cleaned up, stripped down aesthetic of a modernist designer.





The Sikh Temple was very cool, mostly because there is a round-the-clock reading of sacred texts that happens, accompanied by organ and drums. Anyone is free to just go sit in the temple and sit and pray or soak up the ambience of the reading. There is also a large bathing pool that was nice to walk around.



The Ba’hai Temple is also one of the more unique buildings in the world. I’ve decided one of my life goals is now to visit all of the Ba’hai temples in the world. I’ve been to 2 (Chicago and Delhi) of 9, and both are among the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen. The Delhi temple is designed to look like a Lotus Flower and is surrounded by nice pools. Like all Ba’hai buildings, it features nine identical sides. The symmetry and the geometry of all of the panels are stunning.




That evening, I was in the process of walking around the area of the city where all the government buildings are. This part of town was planned by the British and feels very federal – broad streets on a square/diagonal grid linking proud roundabouts. It’s very much in the vein of Paris or Washington DC. Unfortunately, my tour got cut short when the skies opened up to the first monsoon rains of the season that Delhi had received (the storms move northward so they were just arriving in Delhi). I initially took refuge under the overhang of a little shack with about 25 other people, but then made a run for the nearest metro station. I got soaked to the core within the first 20 seconds of my mad dash. When I got back to the neighborhood I was staying in, I discovered it had been inundated with about a foot and a half of water. I had to wade through the flooding to get back to my hotel, in the dark no less. My pictures don't fully convey how bad it was, but maybe this article does.

I spent most of my second day visiting monuments—the Red Fort and Humayun’s Tomb—and doing some nerdy transportation planner tourism. The Red Fort was also a Shah Jahan undertaking. Its size and heft are simply stunning – the fort must measure nearly a mile long by half a mile wide and the walls are all several stories high and probably 20 to 30 feet thick. Inside there are a number of palaces, but many are now in disrepair. The décor of the palaces is in a typical Islamic style, lots of arches and devoid of figures but featuring instead floral and geometric patterns. Interestingly, the palaces are built directly into the walls of the fort. I can imagine it was even more opulent when the gardens were fully maintained; unfortunately now, the military occupies large parts of the fort grounds, a legacy from when the British occupied it. Overall, either due to lack of preservation or because the sequel isn’t as good, the Delhi fort did not match the splendor of the Agra fort on which it was based and which I later visited.











Humayun’s Tomb, on the other hand, has been spectacularly preserved and has no comparison that I have seen. It was built for the second Mughal Emperor (before Shah Jahan) who was also the father of Akbar the Great. I was pleased to learn that Humayun’s widow oversaw both the design and construction, even camping on the site. Way to go, gender equal opportunity. This tomb has been called the warm up for the Taj Mahal, but I think the sandstone gives it a unique beauty.









I spent the rest of my day riding the parts of the Delhi metro that are now online. It’s an impressive system, though it is already very over capacity. It runs on time, the stations are nice, easy to navigate, and conveniently placed, and the trains are clean and comfortable, though stuffed. It has received much accolade because it was completed on time and within budget, rare for any major infrastructure but especially rare for a project here (most go over schedule and are somehow the source of embezzled funds). It’s very encouraging that a major transit system has been so well designed and delivered.



The rest of Delhi, on the other hand, is currently one massive construction site. The city is preparing for the Commonwealth Games in October and is repaving most of its streets, washing its monuments, etc. to impress the rest of the world. It looks highly questionable that they will be done in time. The day after the downpour, the newspapers were writing more than anything about how the city’s infrastructure might be poised for embarrassment in October.

Other impressions…I had some of the best paneer and lassi I have had yet in Delhi. Delhi is in Mughali/Punjabi food region and meat and dairy are specialties. I had a paneer tikka snack one day – it was fluffy, lightly spiced, and perfectly smoky. Lassi, meanwhile, is available everywhere on the street; I should have taken a picture – basically they just have enormous blocks of thick curd, and they skim some off, stick in a blender with ice and sugar, and serve it right there. So rich, yet so refreshing.

Overall though, Delhi didn’t have the same infectious quality that I have found Bombay to have. The two cities vie for the title of leading city in India, and I would have to say I much prefer Bombay. Bombay instantly makes you love it or hate it. It is smelly, horribly polluted and congested, crowded unlike anywhere else in India, and noisy, yet so intriguing and stimulating. As you walk around, there are dozens of interesting things on every block. You can sense that Bombay has received migrants from all over the country and has been heavily touched by the British and Portuguese. Things stay open late and there are distinct districts of the city, each with rich histories. It is in a very select class of cities, with company like New York or Mexico City. I didn’t stay in Delhi for too long and probably didn’t see the right parts of town since I was monument hopping. Nevertheless, my impression the whole time I was there that, in spite of being a city of 14 million, it didn’t have a whole lot going for it outside of the Mughal history and the fact that it is now the federal capital. In Bombay, almost immediately, I could feel the buzz of the city; in Delhi not so much. I guess I’ve developed a lot of civic pride for my adopted home in just two months.

After 2 days in Delhi, I was pleased with the time I had had but also ready to move on. The morning of my third day, I boarded the train to Agra.