I arrived in New Delhi at 9:30 am on Tuesday February 19 at the start of a five-week trip to India. My arrival was the day after Varghese’s wedding in Bangalore. At the international arrivals terminal, I quickly got an India SIM card for my cell phone. That was a contrast to the major hassle it had taken on my last trip in 2011.
I had come first to Delhi to go to the American Institute of Indian Studies to meet Pradeep Mahinderatta, the vice-president. He had been extraordinarily helpful over the previous months with the bureaucratic arrangements for my up-coming project. I first went to the AIIS office in Delhi, only to learn that shortly before I arrived, he had gone to the AIIS Center for Art and Archaeology in Gurgaon, south of the city. His secretary kindly arranged to have a taxi take me there. I met Pradeep and the director Vandana Sinha and browsed a bit in the library.
The taxi driver then took me to my hotel near the airport, which I had booked over the internet. It took an extraordinarily long time to find the hotel, because, as I have experienced before in India, the location of the hotel as shown on Google Maps was way off and my driver kept trying to get me to go other hotels where he could get a kick-back for taking me there.
The next day I got up early for my flight to Hyderabad, Stupidly I went first to the domestic terminal, quite a distance from the international terminal, which Air India uses for all flights. The departure of my flight was delayed by fog, and I arrived in Hyderabad at 10:30 am.
At the Hyderabad airport I contacted Shobha, my friend and colleague from my days at the Henry Martyn Institute, and we agreed to meet at the City Centre Mall. It took me a while to get there and upon arrival I discovered that my cell phone no longer worked. So to contact her, I had to walk around until I found a pay phone, which are no longer very common since everybody has cell phones, and I had to call repeatedly until I was finally able to connect to her. So after wasting an hour and half, we finally met in a coffee shop in the mall at 2:15.
Once we met, I learned more about today’s comedy of errors. I had gone to the coffee shop when I first reached the mall, but stupidly failed to see her sitting there waiting for me to show up. My calls from the nearby pay phone failed to reach her, because her cell phone did not work inside the multi-storey mall, and only when she had given up waiting and returned home did we connect. Anyway, we had a pleasant chat.
I then went to see my friend Timothy Marthand, the concert pianist, to pick up the fancy digital camera that he had for me. Our meeting had to be very brief and in my haste I failed to notice that the camera lens was not in the box with the camera body and other accessories, but rather was on the table next to us. So in my third case of stupidity for the day, I left without the lens. That thwarted my hopes to have the use of this fancy camera during the following weeks.
After meeting Timothy, I went to the Secunderabad train station for my 8:30 overnight train to Visakhapatnam.
I had come first to Delhi to go to the American Institute of Indian Studies to meet Pradeep Mahinderatta, the vice-president. He had been extraordinarily helpful over the previous months with the bureaucratic arrangements for my up-coming project. I first went to the AIIS office in Delhi, only to learn that shortly before I arrived, he had gone to the AIIS Center for Art and Archaeology in Gurgaon, south of the city. His secretary kindly arranged to have a taxi take me there. I met Pradeep and the director Vandana Sinha and browsed a bit in the library.
The taxi driver then took me to my hotel near the airport, which I had booked over the internet. It took an extraordinarily long time to find the hotel, because, as I have experienced before in India, the location of the hotel as shown on Google Maps was way off and my driver kept trying to get me to go other hotels where he could get a kick-back for taking me there.
The next day I got up early for my flight to Hyderabad, Stupidly I went first to the domestic terminal, quite a distance from the international terminal, which Air India uses for all flights. The departure of my flight was delayed by fog, and I arrived in Hyderabad at 10:30 am.
At the Hyderabad airport I contacted Shobha, my friend and colleague from my days at the Henry Martyn Institute, and we agreed to meet at the City Centre Mall. It took me a while to get there and upon arrival I discovered that my cell phone no longer worked. So to contact her, I had to walk around until I found a pay phone, which are no longer very common since everybody has cell phones, and I had to call repeatedly until I was finally able to connect to her. So after wasting an hour and half, we finally met in a coffee shop in the mall at 2:15.
Once we met, I learned more about today’s comedy of errors. I had gone to the coffee shop when I first reached the mall, but stupidly failed to see her sitting there waiting for me to show up. My calls from the nearby pay phone failed to reach her, because her cell phone did not work inside the multi-storey mall, and only when she had given up waiting and returned home did we connect. Anyway, we had a pleasant chat.
I then went to see my friend Timothy Marthand, the concert pianist, to pick up the fancy digital camera that he had for me. Our meeting had to be very brief and in my haste I failed to notice that the camera lens was not in the box with the camera body and other accessories, but rather was on the table next to us. So in my third case of stupidity for the day, I left without the lens. That thwarted my hopes to have the use of this fancy camera during the following weeks.
After meeting Timothy, I went to the Secunderabad train station for my 8:30 overnight train to Visakhapatnam.
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