a trip to kolkata and new delhi
trying to be cultured
After going to Washington D.C. last year, I realized that despite traveling to India a bunch of times to visit my grandparents, I have never ventured north to see its biggest cities and capital. So I decided to take a ten-day detour to Kolkata and New Delhi to see what it was really about.
Kolkata was only a four-hour flight away from Singapore and only when planning the trip did I realize that it was the capital of British India until 1911 and the second biggest city in the Empire (after London). I guess I should’ve known purely based on the number of times I have seen its name before when reading history from that era but oh well. Of course, it was then moved to New Delhi where it remains today.
Kolkata is often described as the “cultural capital” of India and well it didn’t disappoint. It finds itself in an interesting spot as it remains as the largest city not just in its state of West Bengal but in the entire region of Eastern India and its cultural and historical importance helps as well in attracting people from all the region making it a very large city.
Visiting the various temples, museums and sites in Kolkata and learning about the lives of the people who lived there like Rabindranath Tagore, Mother Teresa, Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna and Subhas Chandra Bose was interesting. But unfortunately, Kolkata does also prove a lot of the negative stereotypes about India (some of which are rare and outdated in most other cities of its size). Objectively speaking, it’s a city that has been in perpetual decline since the state of Bengal was split in 1947 in the partition and the decades after when it was in political turmoil and unrest which led to it losing its economic and political standing but the culture somehow still remained because of its historical significance and events like the Durga Puja. I guess it makes for a fascinating case study and a great time capsule of what India was.
On the other hand, New Delhi was about what you would have expected a nation’s capital to be. I guess the most shocking thing was the pollution. During my time there, it was said that it had the lowest pollution levels in six months but every time I stepped out it felt like I was smoking second-hand smoke and the moment I left New Delhi, it took me a while to get used to seeing and breathing clean air outside. The India Gate (the arch) and its surrounding areas with monuments and memorials to soldiers reminded me of the national mall in Washington D.C. so I looked it up and turns out it was inspired by it and also obviously the Arc de Triomphe in Paris as well.
The biggest culture shock was taking the metro in New Delhi because it was so crowded during peak hours. We had already wasted so much time getting caught up in Delhi traffic because of constant roadblocks for security reasons as important personnel move around. We got our tickets at the ticket machines (side note: the usage of mobile QR code payment services everywhere in India is simply incredible), and then had to go through a metal detector and get our bags scanned before entering the metro (New Delhi had so much security presence everywhere with even police officers and traffic police carrying rifles at every street corner which I guess makes sense considering it’s the capital of the most populous country on earth. Also three weeks after we left, at the exit of the metro we took at the Red Fort, there was a terrorist attack with a car bomb blast killing over a dozen people with multiple other threats stopped which explains the security).
Anyways, I didn’t think entering a train would have even been possible because of how crowded it was. I felt like I was practically being floated into the train but it was still somehow a lot more comfortable inside than most of Singapore’s MRTs because the AC was on full blast. Thankfully they haven’t started making quality of life miserable for its people in the name of “climate change” and forcing 25C everywhere. Anyways, I was worried that I would miss my stop because I was caught on the other side of the door but somehow pushing against everyone floated me outside seamlessly and I reached my destination. I doubt frequency or anything changing could handle the sheer number of people in New Delhi but I guess the floatation system did its job as I got from one place to another whilst avoiding Delhi traffic.
As with Kolkata, visiting the famous temples and sites and museums was fun but the main attraction was actually 300km away. Taj Mahal is often synonymous with New Delhi so I would’ve thought it would be right there on the outskirts of the city but it takes about 5 hours (though most of it is just in Delhi itself trying to get out of the city and its traffic). Though the train would have only been 2 hours, we wanted to visit some historical temples en route (like the temple in Mathura built around the place Krishna was born) so driving made a lot more sense.
I was fully prepared to be disappointed by the Taj Mahal because oftentimes these places look a lot better in pictures because of the weather and photo editing but somehow it looked just as majestic and pretty in person.
Our guide was talking about how the Taj Mahal was only opened to the public about 50 years ago and how apparently Princess Diana and the photos she took over there in 1992 made it truly popular around the world. Then in 2007, it was added as one of the “Seven Wonders of the World”. I think the tourism board really outdid themselves by having everyone enter the main compound to see the Taj through a reddish structure that was in and of itself beautiful. There’s a keyhole sort of first view of the Taj Mahal and it was just ethereal. The weather certainly helped but the colors of the ivory-white marble just shined so incredibly bright that it looked unreal.
While paying for a guide was great, the real MVP was paying for a photographer over there. Obviously why go there if you can’t get a photo sitting or standing near the iconic seats next to the water like every famous person or politician who has visited it. While iPhone photos would’ve sufficed, the real issue was preventing people from getting into our shot. While a local would have some power in getting tourists scared, a person who looks local with a camera and a lanyard shouting at you who has money on the line gets people moving fast which makes for nice photos and worth the exorbitant prices they charge.
Anyways, that was my trip and somehow I didn’t learn my lesson about Delhi traffic after almost five days which led to a fun experience on the last day. I trusted Google Maps when it said it would take 30 minutes from our hotel to the airport because it was only ten minutes longer than what it took when we first arrived. It ended up taking 2 hours and we almost missed our flight and had to join a queue of people who were shouting at the special check-in counter because they too were stuck in traffic.
The delay was mainly due to once again the roads being blocked everywhere for special people to move around safely and this having been a common occurrence and having experienced so many traffic jams, I should have learnt my lesson but I didn’t. Luckily our driver got the mission once we said what time we had to reach the airport or else miss our flight and went on the most random side streets spamming his horn and cutting people off and we made it with a minute to spare before check-in closed and obviously missed it lugging suitcases around trying to find the counter. So we were referred to the special counter where we met our fellow travelers who had also misjudged traffic and everyone was screaming for their luggage to be checked in.
To be fair, we would have been pretty screwed if we missed our flight because it was the only flight going where we needed to go and it was the Friday before Deepavali weekend. It’s like missing a flight the Friday before Christmas or Chinese New Year weekend. While the shouting continued as people kept pushing each other at our special check-in counter, there was this one girl around my age who had enough and started shouting “EXCUSE ME HELLO IM THE DAUGHTER OF THE PILOT”. It took a laudable amount of self-restraint for me to not burst out laughing while everyone was stressed and I moved aside to catch my breath leaving my dad in charge of getting our tickets. However, the trick worked and the girl pushed through as she was screaming and got her bags checked and with her ticket in hand ran off to catch the plane her “dad” was piloting. So joke’s on me. I was considering doing the same but my dad being there would’ve given it away. Maybe mom would’ve worked? Idk. Anyways, eventually we made it and turns out the flight was delayed because of course it was.
