Short trip (mostly medical) to New Delhi

A few impressions from New Delhi India where I recently traveled for 10 days or so partly to check out India's medical resources and partly to use up a bonus break given by the university (but not in the usual dolce far niente style of the carefree tourist). I’ve wanted to visit India, yes, for quite some time but to be honest with you this was no travel adventure due to the medical issues I mentioned. I still count it as a semi successful trip though since I was able to satisfy some of my cultural and geographical curiosity about this vast country.

But first, some impressions of the famous, fabulous, mysterious, and supposedly frightening place. During my first week in “Delhi,” as everyone calls, it I saw not one skyscraper, saw many pleasant treelined boulevards, noticed little blue sky but no lurid, abject poverty either. Moreover, the amount and intensity of the street touts, hawkers and unwanted sales corps was much less than I’d expected. Overall, I found ordinary Indians pleasant, polite and helpful – and more than competent at English.

On the medical side, I was able quickly to locate the neurosurgeon recommended by my Indian doctor in Al Ain who took a look at an old MRI then told me pretty much what I already knew; damage in the lower back, for which I would have to keep doing physiotherapy and not contemplate anything more drastic until all other recourses were exhausted. My local doctor is a urologist whom I've known for many years as a patient. He'd had neck surgery with this surgeon and had high praise for him. Although the hospital (Sir Ganga Ram) was the busiest one I'd ever seen, it was very decent and clean--probably a very good hospital for India. However, the pain relief prescribed me was mild to the point of unnoticeable.

I also took advantage of this hospital to do a couple of physiotherapy sessions and also saw another doctor for a new ailment in my right knee, alas. It may be some kind of arthritic or rheumatoid attack, but whatever it is it hindered me more than the old back problem; once again the pain relief prescribed wasn't very effective. Since coming back to the UAE, I've gone back to good old-fashioned volteran and swimming which does help fortunately.

My overall impression of Indian medicine is positive; all of the medical personnel I met were kind, competent, and spoke English fantastically well. The facilities of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital were incredibly crowded, granted, but still clean, decent and well maintained. As for the cost, well, for a 40 minute consultation with a well-known neurosurgeon, I was billed for a total of 700 rupees. At 50 to the dollar, I paid a mere $14. Shockingly cheap in fact; so much so that I should have felt guilty (but didn't of course). The medicine prescribed in fact was almost as much.

This is the first time I’ve ever gone to a foreign country purely for medical reasons, in other words, for medical tourism. And of course my first time to India. In other words a very odd kind of trip. In view of how little I did or saw in India, the reader may be surprised to know that the trip was still worth it. As for trusting myself to the strangeness of a new country, I felt that I had actually been in India many times before. No I don’t mean in previous reincarnations (as I’m sure you think I’m going to describe) but right here in AL where hundreds of thousands of citizens from India live and work. Actually most of the Indian immigrants in this town are from Kerala, a southern province with a popular tropical coastline that I’ve heard described and praised dozens of times by colleagues on holiday there.

At any rate, I’ve long appreciated the hard work, friendly attitude, intelligence and nearly inexhaustible serviceability of Indians I’ve known working on many levels here, from taxi drivers, store clerks, and restaurants to travel agents, doctors and nurses; not to mention the high achievements of people I know at the University, teachers and professors.

So you can see that after all this friendly and mostly intelligent interaction with Indian immigrants in AL, I had few qualms about going to a strange country that wasn’t all that unknown. I can also say that my positive preconceptions about India weren’t disappointed. Also more surprisingly perhaps, my negative pre-conceptions about the country went unfulfilled.

Though I tried on several occasions to break out of the New Delhi syndrome (spending two afternoons in Old Delhi) and the pseudo London pretense of the place, I failed to find any truly ghastly lurid poverty on the scale described by countless visitors to India.

There’s not a whole lot of literature available on American-Indian relations (as there is for the Brits of course), so this gives Paul Theroux’s stories in Elephanta Suite a certain rarity value. As the stories demonstrate, despite this lack, there is a definite shape to American and Indian narration in the new successful India. These generally well received novellas are definitely worth reading for the India traveler although they paint a fairly dire portrait of the place; a pair of rich Yanks die in a mob riot (in unexplained circumstances), and the book’s most appealing heroine, a young American college graduate named Alice is raped by a fat repulsive Indian whom she later arranges to have trampled to death by a male elephant in heat. In the most believable tale, an American businessman and an ambitious young Indian go-getter exchange places and values; the Indian heads off to Boston to move up in the academic-business elite while the American adopts his one time employee's Jainist puritanical belief system.

Another recent Theroux title Ghost Train to the Eastern Star dealt with India at about the same time in a reprise of the routes he made famous in The Great Railway Bazaar (he said he was doing it before someone else got the idea!); I tried to get my hands on a copy of the book (whh I'd read and liked a couple of years ago) before I left – but no go, & no ecopies. I remember the Indian section as fairly mellow and even affectionate toward the country. All I had in hand to read was Naipaul’s ancient Million Mutinies Now of Bombay/Mumbai. Still worth reading (20 years old) and not totally out of date.

As Theroux’s stories show, Americans and Indians seem to have a sentimental sympathy for and friendly impulses toward each other based perhaps on ex-colonial solidarity (?), a penchant for mysticism and idealism…? Or an intuitive understanding and acceptance of each other’s sentimental form of religiosity? Americans (as in these stories) seem to be "shopping" for religion, particularly some personal kind, as opposed to the abstract God of Protestantism, that can be practiced concretely; and Indians as is obvious have quite a few of these on offer. Indians also give touchy Americans the “space” they need on sidewalks and in public. Whatever it is the common language (at least among the educated city-dwelling English speakers) allows them to explore their curiosity about each other – and feel attraction if it’s warranted as well as the greed and lust that motivate the characters in Elephanta Suite. The kinds of dubious sexual involvements Theroux’s characters get into with negative outcomes are entirely believable.

For post-Asian veterans, India is less of a problem, less shock, less fear, less irritation and annoyance (travelers come in two types: pre-Asia and post Asia. The dividing line). Hardly any more difficult to deal with than a country I usually think of as tourist friendly – Turkey. A distinct improvement on Sri Lanka whose street hawkers struck me as a tad aggressive, (ready to take umbrage at the slightest impatience on the part of the hawkee).

I’ll spare you my story of the ultimate tourist cliché the Taj Mahal (it was still interesting to me as an example of Islamic architecture). The Gandhi Museum in New Delhi, however, was very worthwhile; I felt a renewed interest in his life and ideas.

What about the dreaded “Delhi belly” rumored to be latent in the most innocent ice cube? I didn’t get it anyway – took only the usual precautions such as drinking bottled water and avoiding street food and drinks.

Maybe a more serious concern -- certainly in this area of northern India – is the climate’s narrow visiting window. I arrived at the end of the high season – late March – when most tourists had left (hence the empty hotels). Despite traveling from residence in one of the hottest climates in the world – the Arabian Gulf – the Delhi heat with humidity was serious business – and I more or less fled the Taj Mahal site (on the one day I managed to tour) due to furnace like temperatures. Fortunately I found a restaurant with A/C nearby where I parried imminent collapse with cold beer and a hot curry.