Many years ago, an Indian friend of mine living in Dubai said to me, “If you want to send a plane to anywhere in the world, including the North Pole, and are worried that you won’t have enough passengers, land in Delhi and I promise you that the plane will take off without one empty seat.” He was correct. There are very few places in this world where there is not a large thriving Indian community. From the South Seas to Africa, Indians have this uncanny ability to adapt to just about any situation and succeed. At the same time, they are one of the few communities that, no matter where they go, manage to keep their cultural identity and ultimately aspire to return home.
This past month I covered the India Economic Summit 2008 in New Delhi. The summit has been an annual event for the past 24 years and brings together the country’s brightest and most influential political and business leaders from all strata of society — from the multi-billionaire entrepreneur Vijay Mallay, whose portfolio includes everything from air transport to beer and tourism developments, to J. Vasudev, sadhguru and founder of the Isha Foundation. The summit also attracted a few influential foreign personalities, most notably former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger and former US Secretary of Defense, William Cohen.
Unfortunately, the timing of the summit this year could not have been worse. Instead of focusing on ways to improve the lives of India’s billion-plus population, most of whom live at or below the poverty line, business and political leaders spent the better part of four days discussing the world’s financial crisis and how to minimize its impact on the region. There were, however, a few local Indian politicians who wanted to distance themselves from the ‘global agenda’ and to use the summit as a political platform, possibly because of the upcoming parliamentary elections, to focus on the plight of India’s poor.
There is no country in the world where the rich and poor are so diametrically opposed and where the divisions in society run so deep. The caste system was officially abolished years ago, but the imprint it has left will most likely last for generations to come. For the average Indian, the solution is not in finding ways to bail out the financial system. Their priorities are more basic: having enough food on the table, educating the children and obtaining proper healthcare. One Indian politician at the summit so rightly put it that, “they had nothing to do with creating the financial crisis in the first place, so why should they be burdened by it?”
After spending almost a week with India’s rich and famous, I set out to discover the other side of the country. While traveling along the road, it’s not difficult to see why some of India’s local parliamentarians attending the summit were keen on using the event as a platform for their campaigns. Everywhere you turn there is grinding poverty. It’s also not difficult to understand why so many Indians have left their country to settle elsewhere. In the past, Indians began settling in Africa and parts of Asia because that was where the trade routes took them. Today, many end up in the Arab Gulf countries as laborers working long hours for a little more pay than they would receive at home.
While staying at a small hotel in Agra, I got to talking with an elderly waiter about travel and where I had grown up. It turned out that the waiter had been quite the entrepreneurial traveler of his time. When I spoke about my time growing up in California and Europe he began to reminisce about his years in the States and how he ended up there after being invited by one of his students, who had been a Peace Corps volunteer in India back in the 1960s. He told me how he moved from job to job until he opened his first travel agency. After the first year he sold the agency and then with the money started another travel agency. Over the course of 15 years he opened and sold 15 travel agencies and then, after having had enough of being an entrepreneur, set out into the world, a traveler once again.
I asked him why he was working now as a waiter in the hotel; he told me that there was really nothing for him to do in India and the one thing he liked to do was be among travelers and reminisce. “Besides,” he said, “ultimately you go home.”
Norbert schiller is a Dubai-based photo-journalist and writer
