Writings by Brandon Podmayersky that accurately captured my feelings about this trip: Having just returned from the wedding of the illustrious Mr. Kunal Poddar in Jaipur, I wanted to take a few moments to reflect on my (admittedly very short and mostly holed up in a posh resort) first trip to India.
The striking dichotomy of wealth and poverty started to become apparent at the downgrade from modern jet bridge in the International terminal to packed-to-the-brim bus to the plane on the domestic side. But nowhere was it more evident than the abject squalor along the roads on the trip from Jaipur airport to the resort. To quickly realize that what seemed at first a pile of rubble was actually someone’s home drives an immediate gratitude towards the confluence of historical factors that have led to the modern prosperity we enjoy.
Even at the 5-star resort, the miniscule cost of human labor completely changed the service dynamics. With a one-to-one ratio of staff to guests at the wedding, as visitors we could barely even walk up to a door or elevator without a hired hand rushing ahead of us to greet us and open the door on our behalf. Any event with food had ~20 people walking around serving appetizers and drinks, and it was impossible to hold a conversation for more than a minute without having to dismiss yet another offer. That is to say nothing of the pushiness for tips, with one of our friends being adorned with a half-completed turban for a while because he was unable to tip the man hired to tie it - at which point it apparently wasn’t even worth it to finish the job.
I don’t think I would ever be able to drive on Indian roads. With a cacophony of horns replacing turn signals and right-of-way determined only by who could squeeze by more daringly on the side of a lane, I could barely wrap my head around the chaos that our drivers expertly navigated. As a naturally conflict-avoidant person I was getting pushed around in the line for fruit at a reception by several small older women, dumbfounded by the expectation that I would physically push them ahead if I wanted to get anywhere. If I can’t even get a piece of fruit, how could I barrel my way past thousands of motorists?
A heightened sense of racial awareness was in the back of my mind, but at no point were people anything other than kind to me. The small children pointing out that there were white people on their flight from Jaipur to Delhi were endearing. So was the man who engaged me in conversation about the book I was reading and tried to convince me (nonsensically) about the nature of energy, and that it was an outrage that binary included only 0 and 1 and that we did not use -1 in our representations. And my condolences to the girl immediately in front of me in line to board the flight back to SFO, as many people went out of their way to ensure I could stay with her; presumably they thought we were a couple as we were both white and in our 20s. I found this thoroughly amusing but can only imagine it was more uncomfortable to her, as I was just some random guy who hadn’t said but a few words to her in passing earlier.
Taking such a short trip also reminded me how small the world is with modern transportation technology. I left on Friday morning and got back early Wednesday morning, and nonetheless felt like I had a fulfilling experience despite going all the way around the world. Truly it is only my own time investment and mental exhaustion from dedication to my work that has prevented me from enjoying travel much to this point, and I see how valuable such experiences could be to me, through either restructuring my time or a financially independent version of myself later in life. There’s also something to be said about how the process of memory formation works - I already look back with fondness on what were, at the time, some of the most boring and challenging hours of the trip.
