DAY 14, APRIL 4, DELHI

INDIA'S ARMY

Eleven lakh has the Army Corps.
With their families they make a crore.
At the polls they'll have their say.
As for the amount of their pay,
They wish it were somewhat more.


DELHI'S DOGS

Though not her problem sole,
Delhi's dogs are hard to control.
Of a program not haphazard,
Reduction of this hazard
Is the worthy goal.


LOTUS TEMPLE

Beautiful it is, oh my –
The Lotus Temple of Bahai,
A faith of a attractive kind
Stressing unity of mankind.
And you don't kiss your old faith goodbye.


RICKSHAW RIDE

A rickshaw was our convenience
As old Delhi we experienced,
Riding on its chair, oh,
Through streets so very narrow,
With humanity packed so dense.


JAMI MOSQUE

One of the things we did
Was visit the Jami Masjid.
Twenty-five K muslims in can hold.
The reason for the shawls, we're told,
Is to keep ladies' shoulders hid.


RAJ GHAT

We visited the samadhi
Of Mahatma Ghandi.
Like a god, he is worshipped.
With love and charisma equipped,
He was the father of his country.


We learned from Som that Delhi has an estimated 16 million people.

Som also told us Old Delhi was built in the 18th century and New Delhi circa 1910 to 1930.

I learned from an article in the Hindustan Times that “There are 11.3 lakh men and women in the Indian Army and together with their families and ex-servicemen, they add up to a cool one crore, according to one estimate.” A lahk is 100,000. A crore is 100 lahks or 10 million. An Arab is 100 crores or one billion.

In the morning we visited the quite new Lotus Temple of the Bahai faith. The temple and its spacious grounds are beautiful. There are no religious symbols inside or outside the temple. It is built to look like a lotus, which is an important symbolic flower for several religions. Man should emulate the lotus because it maintains its beauty and purity regardless of its surroundings. Bahai was founded by its profit Bahaullah, who lived and was persecuted in the nineteenth century in Iran. He is presented as the most recent in the line of profits including Abraham, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and others. The Bahai faith stresses unity of mankind. It's kind of an amalgamation of all religions. People of various faiths hold services in the temple. The headquarters of Bahai is in Haifa, Israel. There are Bahai temples in several countries including the one in Chicago. Bahai has no clergy or hierarchy. Those who convert to Bahai don't have to discard former beliefs. They just enlarge their perspective while continuing their former faith.

Incidentally, it was interesting to me to learn that Zoroastrianism (the ancient religion of Iran/Persia) is a living religion in India, although it is declining. Believers tend to be wealthy and include some very wealthy persons. It seems that when the Muslims took over in Iran, they drove most of the Zoroastrians out, and the latter settled in India.

With an hour to apply to it, I went ahead and spent $9, to Helen's chagrin, to get on the Internet and tried to post my blog entries. I had a lot of frustration, got only half of them posted.

Before lunch we had an orientation and everyone introduce themselves (again). Californians Margaret and Sandy joined our group, having arrived at the hotel at 1:00 AM.

At lunch we were on our own. Helen ate in the hotel room on things she'd saved from the breakfast line. Lunch in the hotel would have been exorbitant. John Stewart and I walked over to – not a McDonald's although there apparently is one nearby – but to an Indian equivalent. It was dirt cheap. We had a hamburger with french fries, and I had a pepsi. It was OK, so-so, not spicy at least. We scraped away the lettuce that came in the hamburger.

In the afternoon we experienced a short ride in Delhi's underground metro system (packed in like sardines).

We came out of the metro into a totally different world, hard to describe, never experienced before – that of old Delhi. Extremely crowded, decayed, very narrow streets, a tangle of old electric wires overhead, lots of sounds and smells and movement, people on foot, on bicycle rickshaws, on motorcycles, people pushing and pulling various types of handcarts, shops of various kinds. We all had a nice, long ride through this environment on bicycle rickshaws. At one point we were stalled out for several minutes by the crowd. This has to be a highlight of our visit to India.

We then toured the Jami Mosque, which is right there in old Delhi. It was built (started) in 1648 and is the largest mosque in India. All or our ladies were loaned shawls or robes so their shoulders would be covered – each being a single pastel color with white polka dots.

The memorial to Mahatma Ghandi is at the spot where he was cremated. At time (1968) the river flowed right by the spot, but now the river is nowhere close. The extensive, attractive grounds includes a lot of lush green grass. The monument is a simple marble slab bearing an eternal flame. Indians filed by to pay their respects. Som gave a detailed history of the Mahatma. He concluded by noting that, while everyone looks to Ghandi almost as a god, Ghandi's lessons of unity and nonviolence seem to be ignored in India.

Back in the bus, Som gave the history of the Ghandi political family. First he said there is no relationship except in the name between Mahatma Ghandi and the political family. And he feels that the family is capitalizing on the Ghandi name, and many people vote for them only because of the name. But there is a relationship, as he explained, because former prime minister Indira Ghandi (daughter of former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru) married the adopted son of Mahatma Gandhi – after breaking from her love of another man she could not marry because he was not a Hindu. Indira was eventually assassinated. Her first son, prime minister Sanjay, died in the crash of a light aircraft. Her second son, Rajiv, had not been interested in politics, but then was trained in politics, became prime minister, was assassinated. His widow, Sonja, an Italian Catholic, is head of the Congress party and the most powerful person in India, could be prime minister under the constitution, arranged for the present prime minister, Dr. Singh, to stand in for her instead, while she wields power behind the scenes.

We all had an Indian dinner at the restaurant Lazeez Affaire. Lazeez means religious.

Fortunately the Indian foods have not been as spicy as they were at Nathu's Sweets the first night here.

Bernie :-)