My usual palatial home in Delhi, at my friend Lauren’s apartment, is full up with Lauren’s out of town friends this month, so I had to seek out other options. I arranged with a colleague from the Schumacher Centre for Development to stay at an apartment they keep for visitors, but discovered that the hot water geyser wasn’t hooked up (and you need hot water during Delhi winters), and it was a little dark and dingy. These things may have all been fixable, but the deal breaker was the strange man sleeping in the living room. He didn’t speak English, so I was a little confused, but it turns out he is the driver and sleeps there all the time. This was a little too much for me, so I decided to move on. I found a nice, clean, very cheap guest house in the Tibetan refugee colony of Majnu ka Tilla, north of the city centre. No kitchen, and it’s a bit far out, but there is a Metro station not too far away. It’s different out here, not like being in India in some ways. There’s a lot of poverty and not much good to eat, but thankfully less eve teasing (this is the new word I learned yesterday).
As for the Metro rides, they are amazing. It’s like nobody told India that the Metro is here. It’s like leaving Delhi and walking into a parallel universe. It’s clean, not crowded, safe, efficient, and fast. There are places fitting that description elsewhere, but they are in the world of the elite. The Metro is cheap – I pay Rs9 (less than 25 cents) to get halfway across town. Why isn’t everyone taking it? The only explanation I can think of it that the process of entering the shiny underground stations, using tokens or pass cards, and crossing the security barriers is foreign and intimidating for many people. It really is a different world than where the average person here lives. Maybe it will catch on with time, because it’s by far the best way to move around this city that I’ve seen.
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