India Report: Culture
Where to begin talking about the culture of India? Good question. And after thinking a lot more about this topic, I realized that Dave and I experienced very little of Indian Culture. We were too busy and traveling too much.
This is what I can tell you: India’s culture is very diverse and very interesting. And very different. But in a good way. India is a country of over 1 Billion people. It’s a country with a red hot economy and growth. And it’s a country with a lot of problems to solve, and from what I could tell, some of those problems will result from the shifting and changing of historical cultures as they clash with the ‘western’ way of looking at the world.
Probably the most ‘cultural’ thing we did (and also the most touristy) was to visit the Taj Mahal.
The Taj (as the locals call it) is one of the coolest man-made things I’ve ever seen, maybe the coolest. We mentioned to almost everyone we met (whether travel guides, drivers, company reps, etc.) that we visited it and almost without exception everyone quickly said, “You know that it was just voted onto the new list of the 7 Wonders of the World.” Apparently a company in Switzerland started a new contest in 2001, and they just announced the ‘winners’ July 7, 2007. I guess people from around the world voted and in India it was a national campaign of great importance to get enough votes to get The Taj on the list. It seems to me that The Taj is THE definitive symbol of national identity and pride for Indians, and I can’t say I blame them. It’s dang cool.
(Apparently Americans are cool too as evidence by the photo above, they REALLY wanted their picture taken with us. 
)
Another one of the things I noticed right away is the culture of service that pervades the country. Everyone we met and dealt with was incredibly nice and did everything in their power to serve you and make you feel important and comfortable and taken care of. You can see that in these two pictures. The one on the left show approximately 17 Kingfisher Airlines employees helping 6 customers. The one on the right shows a budding Indian entrepreneur ready to serve customers with a shave at his shave parlor.
Here are 6 photos that show some example of that cultural shift, the new and the old running into each other:
Cows and cars and cows and motorbikes.
Elephants taking on bicycles. Brand new building construction interspersed amidst slums of Pune.
Modern toilet (notice the porceline and auto-flush sensor), just different style to say the least. Salute to the international culture clash that is McDonald’s.
One of these days, I’d like to visit India again but with more time to see and experience this very diverse and interesting place. The bonus is that with such radical and fast-pasted change afoot you could go back every 10 years and visit, in essence, a different country.
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Steve
