Trip to India – my impressions
Going to India after 21 and a half years was quite a delight. It was filled with unexpected surprises and lots of joy! All my cousins that are around my age or even 5-6 years younger than me are married with beautiful children! Some of these children are teenagers now!
It sort of made me feel quite old though. 
When these teenagers were calling me uncle!
India has changed soooo much since I came from there in 1988.
I only had two weeks off of work so I couldn’t go every where in India though. I went to some major cities and also the remotest villages. My goal was to visit every single one of my relatives and I think I almost accomplished it. I missed maybe just a few distant relatives.
Here were my impressions. Keep in mind that there is a lot more to India than what I noticed as most of my relatives belonged to the middle class and thus I was not around poverty except what I saw on the street.
Cell phones and plans
Every single person I met, from my relatives, to small shop keepers, to little kids had at least one cell phone. Often two or more! Not only were cell phones quite cheap but so were the cell phone plans. Majority of the people there had pay as you go. And no matter how much money you put on your pay as you go plan, you always received free incoming calls. Incoming calls were always free! Here we have to pay extra to get that feature.
While I was there a new plan was introduced from many different companies which allowed people to have same extremely low per second charge, no matter where in the world they called. Amazing!
Two sim card cell phones were quite common as well. Shops that recharged your account, allowing you to add more money to your pay as you go account, were almost at every street corner, if not after every 100 meters or so. Interestingly enough though, even though every one had a cell phone, no one seemed to have a home phone!
Made in China
Since China is India’s neighbour, Chinese stuff had infiltrated Indian market as well. Chinese stuff was incredibly cheap even by Indian standards. People there talked about Chinese stuff just like we do here in North America. Only difference being that there was a lot more of it available to Indians.
Almost anything you could think of, you could get a Chinese version of it easily, including Chinese cell phones, Chinese motorcycles/scooters. It was awesome! I loved it!
Here in Canada, we don’t have it that good. There is a lot of Chinese made stuff but prices are not that much cheaper. We have $1 stores here but their quality is quite poor. Otherwise, we can buy stuff straight from China from various websites, but not every single thing and often we have to wait quite a while for it to arrive.
I wish we had the same luxury here. We could save so much money! On the other hand, we would gather a lot more clutter as well. I’ve noticed that as things become cheaper, we end up buying a lot more. Just take $1 stores. Everything for a dollar! But every time we go in there, we end up with some items, just because they were only one dollar, that we never were planning on buying! hmm…
to be continued…
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January 18th, 2010 at 6:54 am
It must be fascinating to compare two diverse cultures so directly. It certainly makes interesting reading.
Huh! You feel old – wait until you are being called uncle by a semi-professional Rugby player who is two inches taller than you (that’s my nephew).
I await part two with interest.
January 18th, 2010 at 7:25 am
Agreed that one can only see oneself in the context of how others live as I found at http://myamazingpeople.com/2009/12/11/amazing-people-psychology/
January 18th, 2010 at 11:32 am
hehe at least none of them, my nephews or nieces, are bigger or taller than me yet. But it was sooooo amazing to see the differences between Canada and India. When I came here I left India as a third world country in every respect but now the gap seemed to have closed quite a bit!