The New Delhi railway station was teeming with people who seemed to be leaking from all sides. Surly policemen stood at the entrance, wordlessly directing people to have their bags scanned and their bodies searched. Requests for assistance are rarely entertained by them, usually because the person asking is not speaking a language they understand, so they simply shake their heads and use their lathis (sticks) to point to the information boards.
This time the board was in Hindi only and all I could recognise were numbers. Luckily only one train was due to leave at the time of my trip, so I guessed that it must be mine. The Jan Shatabdi, from New Delhi to Chandigarh is, essentially, a working-class version of the luxurious Shatabdi Express, India’s best train.
Finding it was a like solving a puzzle: First match the numbers and look for the platform, then search for the platform and lug my 25kg of luggage there; find my name (in Hindi and English) on the side of the train and find my seat. If I hadn’t had the assistance of a volunteer from the International Cricket Council who accompanied me, it would have taken me a lot longer. It was chaotic but clearly the kind of organised chaos that locals can navigate.
The truth about India is that, as difficult as it is to understand, it is made easier with the little bit of help that is usually at hand, although it doesn’t always work that way.
For example, the police in New Delhi held up the trucks of food for service people at the match between South Africa and the West Indies last Thursday. This meant that many of the people in the stadium went hungry, tons of food were spoiled and more had to be prepared — so the World Cup, from a South African media perspective, got off to a disastrous start.
The police were protesting against a New Delhi high court ruling which limited the number of complimentary tickets the police were awarded for matches.
The New Delhi police are a well-buttered lot and are used to getting what they want. They refused to allow a Bryan Adams concert to take place on February 16 because they didn’t get as many free tickets as they wanted. The police clearly get more than other Indians.
The sale of World Cup tickets to the public is often for less than half the stadium capacity because so many are distributed to officials. Overwhelming bureaucracy seems to trump everything else but, like my experience in the train station, there is usually a way through it, and finding that reveals the true India.