India: An Assault on the Senses

I have been here a full week and the words to describe India elude me. Overwhelming is too small. Incredible is inaccurate. Insane is inappropriate. But "an assualt on the senses" seems to fit.

Spending two days in Chennai pretty much primed the group for what was to come. With a population of eight million, the city is as big as Los Angeles, but the sprawl and infrustructure is unlike anything I have ever witnessed. There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason for anything. Spencer Plaza, the westernized shopping bazaar marks the center of town, and enormous billboards advertising gold, diamonds and silk saris rise above crumbling buildings housing merchants selling autoparts, truck tires, bike accessories. I try to find something to relate to, something that will keep me tied down.

Our hotel sits to the side of a main road into the city and the street noise is non-stop. And when I say that, I mean it.

Twenty four hours a day.

Horns of various timbre and volume, a quack, a blare, toot toots are all part of the cacaphony of noise. The barely paved street carries and bikes and people and motorcyles and trucks and cars and tuk tuks to destinations unknown. With the sheer mass of traffic, we find it difficult to orient ourselves. Side streets spill over with poor families, goats, dogs, chickens, cows and crude altars. Garbage is everywhere. People stare at us, some are brave enough to say hello.

Despite these bleak images, bright, color abounds from every direction, women in saris float by like snowflakes, scents of sumptuous spices from the street vendors hit our noses and assails the stench rising with the heat. Crammed buses blink multi-colored disco lights on the outside and play Bollywood movies for the passengers. All of the vehicles are brightly painted in yellows, reds, greens and turquoise. The average dump truck is its own work of art. With this juxtoposition, every image is an indelible photograph.

The group has been straggling in. One of the young women received a voice mail on her stopover in Doha that her sister had been hospitalized after a serious car accident and I've driven her back the airport in hopes that she can make it to Cincinatti. She had only just arrived ten hours before. The mother & son team have been delayed in Paris and are due to arrive in two days and after arranging transportation for them to Pondicherry, we pack up our disco bus and head south.