Noise from Peter:

I originally thought this blog entry would be about our experience with our guides in India, starting when our guide in Jaipur City jumped in our car and asked “What’s your program?” I had this pretty good rant going in my head centered around this guy—I never got his name—who wore a leather jacket and hairstyle like Bobby Sherman on Shindig. He had his agenda and kind of made ours fit his. But it didn’t set to well with me, this cheap shot I was going to take and I couldn’t see it getting anything but more negative. What I’ve been thinking about since about our second day in India has a bit more substance. I think I finally have begun to process India in my tiny brain.

India is world of contrasts and contradictions. Soaring architecture built on civilizations thousands of years old; Five star hotels next to squatters’ villages; camel drawn carts hauling high tech goods to market; industry and entrepreneurism adjacent to unspeakable poverty; rickshaws navigating streets with Mercedes; beautiful colors and pervasive layer of dust on what seems like everything; business people with graduate degrees relying on illiterate taxi drivers to get them around town; beggar children with faces of cherubs and hands of pick pockets; it’s mud and masala. There seems to be unbridled opportunity and poverty. This is the world’s largest democracy with a government that seems most adept at managing scandal. Infrastructure seems as fantastic a concept as drivers who obey traffic laws.

So I don’t begrudge our Hindi Eddie Haskell (how Laura & I refer to our Jaipur guide) from setting us up at all the usual tourist traps. He survives, I’ll bet even prospers. Like India he uses modern technology building on an ancient foundation to navigate the 21^st century, another lotus blooming in the mud.

Namaste.