As soon as we arrived at the Indira Gandhi International Airport, we were met by our young Melissa Tours and Travels liaison, Dev. Wherever we were in Delhi, Dev was with us.
First on the agenda was to take us to our hotel, the Jaypee Vasant Continental Hotel, so we could quickly check in and drop off our baggage. After a brief time to wash up and change into some cleaner clothes, we were off on a daylong tour of unusual sites in Delhi.
What captured my attention the most while coming into Delhi from the airport as well as traveling through the second largest city in India, was the ever present poverty. What we were witnessing was worse than the poverty and desperation that I saw over thirty-five years ago as a missionary in Mexico. The well-known Bollywood movie “Slumdog Millionaire” actually portrays the poverty of India’s slums in an antiseptic manner. The only way to truly portray such poverty as we were seeing would be through the lens of a documentarian. Pulitzer Prize winning author Katherine Boo’s recent book entitled “Behind The Beautiful Forevers” paints a masterful and realistic portrait of the lives of these Indians who live either in a patched together slum of hovels or dwellings found under a bridge, overpass, on a median, or just a spot on the sidewalk at the end of the day.
Our first stop was a visit with "Living Religions" author Mary Pat Fisher at the Gobind SadanAshram.
P.S. More to come!
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