Impressions of Jaipur

Jaipur has been a good couple of days. A couple of things:

- India is getting cleaner all the time. It is still India mind you, but they seem to have instituted emissions controls in most of the cities. Delhi has all CNG buses, cabs and auto rickshaws and Agra and Jaipur seem to at least have banished diesel for gasoline the effect on smog is incredible. Also, touts and beggars are at a pretty reasonable level, especially for a place with quite a few western tourists. I am not sure if this is because Nisha and I are OK at handling them (I think), or if there are less, but either way, not too bad.

- One thing that has occurred to me as you see all of these intricate palaces with their detailed marble work and painting is that the power of a society may be inversely proportional to the amount of grand structures and items that it produces. The amount of resources that the Moguls (who ruled this area of the world before the English) must have spent on palaces and art must have been incredible. They were building palaces that put the things in Europe to shame and their whole kingdom was just part of India. The English seem to be pretty conservative builders, for the size of their empire, and they flourished. Also, if you look today, the US churns out very few impressive structures for its size, but that may actually be indicative of our success.

- We went to a place south of Jaipur yesterday which is basically a sort of fake Rajasthani village that is a very popular tourist attraction for middle class Indian families. You pay 6 bucks for admission as well as a quite nice dinner of traditional Rajasthani food served in these big dining hall kind of setups. The fake village itself has many stages with dancers, contortionists, puppets and various other performers as well as Elephant and Camel rides. When you are in a country with domestic tourism, it can kind of be a tourist attraction in itself to go to a domestic tourist attraction. You kind of see what a society think of as an idealized version of itself, much like how a quaint seaside town is an idealized version of New England. It seems like this kind of quaint rural lifestyle was an attraction to Indians as well, but I would surmise that since and real Indian town would be beset by the problems that we solve with zoning in the US, building a fake village is really the only way to attain it.

- I went running for around 6km this morning along a main road in Jaipur. Never got so many "what is this crazy white man doing" looks in my life. Two guys just driving to work on motorcycles pulled over to give me a lift, but I declined.

- Have had some really incredible food here and am staying in a really nice hotel with a pool. We are probably running right about on daily budget right now, which is good because what you can get here in the 35 dollar a night hotel and 10 dollar dinner range is really very nice.