Notes from India (1). Arrival: 1971 versus 2024

Above: Taj Mahal, Agra, UP, India. 03 April 2024. Granny, Bishop and Koessler family.

In December of 1972, TIMDT, Mwah (sic), and two-year-old Feebee arrived from Beirut, Lebanon, where we had lived for the previous six months, at the Palam Airport in New Delhi, India at around 2:00 AM. We had come to India to undertake my first work assignment for Citibank at its New Delhi branch. Four hours later, cranky and exhausted, we arrived at the Oberoi New Delhi hotel, escorted by Citibank officer, Surinder Singh. Why the four-hour long delay between arriving at the airport and hotel check in? While at Palam we underwent a first-degree screening as India Customs officers rifled through each piece for our luggage, emptying the contents, checking for hidden compartments, then replacing the contents. With no air conditioning inside, the airport was warm and musty. TIMDT did her best to keep FeeBee pacified, but FeeBee cried most of the time during the customs ordeal. After departing the customs and baggage area, we were accosted simultaneously by a dozen or so screaming touts, offering rides to town, porter service, or currency exchange. Surinder Singh located us, shooshed the touts away, engaged some porters and escorted us outside of the airport into India's unique, pungent, smokey atmosphere, to our non-air conditioned, rickety van.

Yesterday, 02 April 2024, fifty-two years later, TIMDT and Mwah (sic), arrived in New Delhi at Indira Ghandi International Airport, also at 2:00 AM. We had come to join our son's (Koessler's) family for a ten-day tour through India's golden triangle. The kids, who arrived in India two days ago, had already done the Delhi portion of the tour. We would join them for the Agra and Rajasthan segments. After, separating from the Koesslers, TIMDT and Mwah (sic) will travel to Gujarat, a region of India we hadn't seen during our three years of living in India in the early '70's and traveling there fifteen times since. Immediately on exiting the KLM Airlines aircraft's jetway we were greeted by a young woman who escorted us to a golf cart, only feet away. The golf cart driver loaded our hand luggage and drove us quite a distance (the ten-year-old, spiffy, international class, Indira Gandhi Airport has extremely long concourses) to a VIP immigration control desk. There was no one ahead of us at the immigration desk and after the immigration officer reviewed our papers, we were quickly whisked through to the baggage area. The young woman gave our baggage receipt to a porter, who immediately located our baggage (wha?? it had been less than fifteen minutes since we deplaned). With our baggage loaded on a cart, we exited into the public area of the airport to be met by Souvan, a TravelScope India (TIMDT's travel agent for the last 20 years) employee. Souvan, no touts in sight, escorted us to our car, less than one hundred yards away. We arrived at the Imperial Hotel in New Delhi in thirty minutes. We were in bed by 3:30 AM.

The marked contrast between our two India arrival experiences, separated by fifty-two years, is a metaphor for India in general over that period. What once was a third world country, 550 million strong, a democracy, but really mired in bureaucratic socialism and petty corruption, today is a "second world" country, 1.4 billion strong, still chaotic and not without corruption, but leveraging its democracy to tilt, with inexorable, dynamic forward momentum, towards economic freedom and prosperity for more and more of its 1.4 billion citizens.. India grows (5% GDP growth) at a rate that will turn it into the world's third largest economy within three years. Like Indira Ghandhi International Airport of 2024 as compared to Palam Airport 1971, India today is on a far better footing than it was fifty three years ago.

I love coming to India. Indians have to work hard to get ahead. There is no room in India for the lazy. There are few social safety nets apart from family assistance. India is aspirational in an age where the West questions its own purpose. India is spiritual when secularism drains the west of its sense of direction and vitality. We lived for three years in India in the '70's and have been back fifteen times since. We return often because we are ever amazed at India's frenzied progression to becoming a major world player. I look forward over the next three weeks to gaining firsthand insights of transformative India and reporting on them in my Picto Diary/Daily Blog notes.