John Davidson's Journals

The India Journals

John spent four weeks in southern Indian from mid-January to mid-February, 2010. His journals appear here. As these notes indicate, he was primarily interested in seeing children, farmland, and present day culture, and in talking to people. In these journals, he shares his impressions of a country that is developing rapidly and that will undoubtedly be part of America's future in one way or another. This trip also illustrates John's maxim that a good way to see America is to leave it, and his views of America that are reflected in the impressions of India are also shared here.

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The India Journals #1

I’m on vacation.

It’s time to see the U.S. again. And I’ve decided one of the best ways to see America is to leave it. It is possible, indeed, to both love it and leave it – to love it and to have a critical view. For years, in addition to our traveling in America itself, I’ve been seeing the States through perspectives gained from traveling in Nepal and South and Central America.

This time, I’m working on a look back from India.

As I write this, I’m still adjusting to a twelve and a half hour time change, wide awake and sitting on my bed in the middle of the night. This time is naturally mid-afternoon for my body, which is feeling like strange territory for a jet lagged consciousness. Even my computer will only register a twelve hour change until I dig into its clock and let it know that we’re not – as Dorothy famously said in her accidental vacation – in Kansas anymore.

My plan was to take some significant time – my ticket schedules me back in seven weeks – and not to have much more plan than that. No tour company, no precise schedule to meet. A little more about being there than seeing there, or at least seeing more there by being more there.

I’ve not been to India before, so the rest of my plan was to travel with someone more experienced than I. A friend, who lives here on and off, met me at the airport in Chennai (the former Madras – remember those shirts?) in southern India. We hopped another plane within a few hours, left the east coast of southern India, and headed for the beach on the west coast in Kerala State. Beach seems like a good strategy to deal with a 26 hour tag team match with three airplanes, and to lay low while laying further plans.

On the way, by the way, I saw the new tallest building in the world from the airport runway in Dubai, the city which has brought prosperity to new and even more questionable heights as well (the question is “why” to both). When I got off the plane in Chennai – my face the only white one among about 300 people lining up for the immigration check – I spoke to a local man who worked in Dubai. “Dubai is in very big trouble,” he said. While we continued to wait on immigration officers to show up in their stainless steel booths, he observed with some disdain that “These people will never change.” He explained that “these people” – his own ethnic Indian people – would never attend to their work in the way that the modern world has come to expect, that is to say, getting things done right now.

So starts the vacation.

Read more of Journal 1 ›