This trip to India has been a rollercoaster of emotions for me. Due to various reasons, Corona Virus being the biggest, I was in India after a long gap of four years. I found that a lot of my parents’ way of living was unchanged. It was like I had never left. But there were also big, noticeable differences in how Indians live their lives which were interesting but also very unsettling.

Due to various reasons, my lifestyle back in the USA is overly simple. For one, we have never used a TV. When I was a kid, my parents refused to have a cable connection so that we would concentrate on our studies and not get distracted. I hated having no TV as a kid, but liked the idea as a grown up. TV is distracting, but it’s the advertisements that are a bigger bane. One thing that I have noticed is that due to lack of our exposure to ads and Television series, our family is living in a bubble while the world has moved to a different place. This, combined with our general disinterest in shopping, made this trip a funny, eye opening experience. I must also mention, countries such as India and the UAE have been prioritizing glamor a lot more than the USA. This is an opposite world from 25 years ago.

During our flight to Dubai we were bombarded with glamorous ads of Dubai. The Dubai airport is also an over the top show of goods and glamour. There were shops after shops full of perfumes, liquor, chocolate and expensive jewelry. We had our first cultural shock right there. The all pervasive smell of perfume was overwhelming to our underutilized noses and we quickly retrieved to a resting space. They space had lounge chairs arranged in various formations with people resting on them! It hilariously reminded me of a scene from a typical science fiction movie, or a Robin Cook book! However, the chairs looked comfortable and were just what we needed to stretch our tired selves and so we proceeded to join the scifi cast!

Getting to India, on a first glance, things look the same. Ladies in sarees, the strays, and an occasional cow on the street. But I soon realized that the wad of cash that I was given to spend by my dad wasn’t going to help me much. Unless I was happy to leave obscene amounts of change with every purchase.

India has become cashless, and most people pay by scanning a QR code that all stores display. Urban India is also into extreme shopping, which seemed to be a disturbing trend. Amazon is everywhere, and they also have a company named “Swiggy”, which delivers anything people want in 10 minutes to an hour. People will sometimes use Swiggy three to four times a day to order anything as per their immediate whim and fancy. Swiggy is akin to Aladdin’s genie. It produces whatever you desire in very little time, with a few clicks and without moving from your house. This creates an endless opportunity for instant gratification, which, of course, ultimately creates dissatisfaction and prevents people from being grounded. Not even to speak about the pollution from all the drivers moving about, the plastic packaging waste and money wastage. So this was undoubtedly the worst trend that I saw.

On the upside, the elderly and disabled can benefit immensely from this system, since you can get things on your doorstep. This is particularly useful since the traffic is a nightmare. But if you think further, the nightmare traffic is created partially by the goods movement by Amazon and Swiggy. We patronize them, thereby supporting the bad traffic. As a result of this traffic, now we sit at home and patronize them further. We still lose out by not getting an opportunity to step outside, thereby using our bodies lesser, and pushing our minds into a rut. This results in more disability, which gives even more business to these companies. What a vicious cycle.

My rants may suggest that I didn’t like being in Hyderabad, but it actually had the opposite effect. I wished from all my heart that I lived there and would be a part of the craziness that is India. It would have been gratifying to be a part of the solution in a country that gets an impressive number of things done, when compared with the meagre amount of resources that they have access to. Despite the Western world squeezing every last bit of resource out of India, pushing regulations that make India poorer, pushing waste that make India dirtier, pushing their GMO seeds to compromise India’s agricultural capacity, and making regulations that they have no recourse against, India functions remarkably. But there’s a lot wrong with the mentality of the population there (as in any other place). A change is desperately needed.

Getting to my parents, their world seems almost unchanged for the most part. There is a nice rhythm to their daily routine. We had a nice, easygoing time there, with us spending a lot of time with cups of tea, sitting around and chit chatting. The kids got a chance to connect with them. Tanya is amazingly in tune with them and their ways. Leena is too, but she is mostly busy either reading a book, or crocheting, or doing some other activity. Tanya would join in the family discussions. Leena, on the other hand, only talked about this animal or that bird! The other topic that Leena would endlessly talk about was general trivia. She is full of trivia and keeps doling them out. Sometimes we stared jaw dropped, or sometimes we laughed, but it would get a little much after a while. Regardless, we all had a great time chit chatting our days away. It was the biggest highlight of our trip.

We came back refreshed and with a lot of material for me to work on this year as I move further into writing. Hoping for, and wishing you, a great year ahead.