to Delhi and home

Overnight train back to Delhi. Shared a compartment with two Swedish medical students, who, coincidentally know my Swedish friend who is also a medical student.

Back to Delhi for the final two days before flying home. Having been here twice now, I'm pretty familiar with the city.

However, in walking around Connaught Place I sort of rediscover the place and gain a whole new appreciation for it. When I was here last year Connaught Place was a big construction site. Now, the construction is over and the result is a beautiful new park in the center of the great circle. It's a fantastic public space - green, full of people and interesting architecture. The circular buildings that radiate out from the park I'd found rather underwhelming last year. But now they seem more spruced up and the whole area is a classy, friendly public commercial district.

I was impressed by the new Metro system last year, and I continue to be impressed. The Metro continues to expand, and by the time of the Commonwealth Games in 2010 will be massive and include a high speed rail link to the airport. The Metro is like a totally different world than the India above ground. It is clean, spotless, sleek, modern, quiet, orderly, efficient. The people who ride it seem to behave in a way that matches their surroundings. It is a totally different scene than anything above ground. People are orderly, polite. And it is busy, too. I'm glad to see so many people using this new form of public transportation. And it's cheap, too. I rode one of the elevated Metro lines out to its terminus, several miles out into the suburbs. It's a great way to sightsee. It was this way that I discovered a complex of four modern shopping malls, way out in the suburbs. I wouldn't have known they were there had I not seen them from the metro. They were so new that one of them barely had any stores. The others, though, were full of glitzy designer clothes and consumer products and food courts and expensive restaurants and rich teenagers.

On my final day in Delhi, I woke up at 4:30 am and went for a long pre-dawn walk. Then it was to the airport, and I flew Virgin Atlantic to Heathrow. They've got an excellent movie selection on that airline, and I saw Fast Food Nation (after which I resolved to become a vegetarian), The Namesake, and Half Nelson. There were so many other movies I also wanted to see, but not enough time to see them. Unfortunately the next leg of my flight to New York was on American, one of the world's crapiest airlines. There was nothing worth watching so I slept. Spent the night in New York, then next evening Chinatown bus back to State College which is where I am now.

There's some sort of Arts Festival going on right now. I saw a booth full of photographs of the places I'd just been. The photographer was selling them for several hundred dollars each. Many of them were photos of people. I don't know. It kind of bothers me that someone could take photographs of people for pennies (or for free) and then charge so much money for them here. How much of the essence of those photographs is in the people who are their subjects, and how much is in the photographer's skills as an artist? More the former, I think.