At first glance

”I met one of your prime minister candidates, Siv Jensen, she was not impressive”. This is the first thing Ryios tells us when we answer The Question; we will be asked The Question at least 20 times every day for the next two weeks; “Where you from? Sir! Sir! Which country from?” Stig and I are waiting for our flight from Helsinki to Delhi, in the departure hall we meet Ryios. He is a war correspondent going to Kashmir to investigate how the Taliban is financed by smuggling opium. He has worked for AP for 12 years, and he is not impressed by Siv Jensens take on foreign policy.

The flight is 8 hours long, ample time to see a couple of movies and get some sleep. We arrive in the middle of the night. Delhi is scorching hot. 34 degrees and the humidity is close to 100 percent. Luckily our hotel has a driver waiting for us.

Old Delhi. Everyone stares, the stench of urine and garbage is almost as overwhelming as the constant cacophony of endless honking. The noise is tiring and constant, we try to observe traffic and understand what the honking means. It appears that you are supposed to honk whenever passing someone, when being passed, when driving by pedestrians, when rounding a corner, running a red light or at any point in time when other drivers need to know that you are on the road. It is like no one trusts their eyes – or other people. It looks like most of the People seem to have all the time in the world, they sit around. They typically sit in groups of three or four men, squatting on the floor or maybe leaning against a wall. You never see a single woman; they travel in pairs. No one is in a hurry. But put the same people in a car and their driving is aggressive, like they really need to get somewhere extremely fast. They rush from place to place, but once they arrive they appear to only sit.

As we are walking along a row of shops selling glasses, pants, clocks and pharmaceuticals. We are treated as walking bags of money. Everyone is our friend. Stig notices that some stuff is falling out of his backpack and turns around, nothing important fell out and nothing is broken, but we find it very strange that this should happen since the backpack is closed. Upon closer inspection we see that the bottom of the front pocket has been cut open.

Suddenly we stumble upon a white temple. We stop, an old man wants to show us around, it is pretty obvious that we do not know the customs. He belongs to this temple, he is a Sikh. He tells us that the founding of the Sikh religion was a Hindu reaction to the Muslim influence in India. Hindus do not recruit new members to their faith – Muslims did so quite aggressively. Ten Hindu gurus sought out the ruler at the time because they were worried that the country was going to be converted into Islam. These ten gurus were killed, decapitated. Where they were killed this white temple was built in Old Delhi.

Sikh Temple

Even the diety needs rupees

Before entering we leave our shoes and socks outside, wash our hands, forehead and feet. Inside a man is reading from their holy text – and occasionally fanning it with a large pink feather. We take a seat on the floor next to the bedroom of the holy text and we can finally relax for half an hour.

From a 24th floor revolving restaurant

India Gate

India Gate Park

We did a little sightseeing and shopping in Delhi, but quickly decided that we should try to find a more pleasant climate.