India is calling.
Her government wants the world, including Latin America and the Caribbean, to know what her politics and policies are, her advancements and struggles, how she deals with everyday issues and her philosophies on big-ticket global issues such as climate change and the need to go green.
India wants the world to get to know her.
Hence the reason for its Government hosting journalists from the Caribbean and Latin America on a seven-day media sensitisation tour in February.
Media practitioners from Caribbean countries including Barbados, Belize, Grenada, TT, St Vincent, Suriname, and Guyana, as well as Latin American countries Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, El Salvador and Honduras all participated.
I was asked to represent Newsday on this tour and the first eye-opener was the distance from Piarco to New Delhi – India's capital.
It took about four hours from Piarco to JFK airport in New York, and then a monstrous 15-hour flight from New York to Indira Gandhi Airport in Delhi.
Many times during that flight, I begged the stewardesses to ask the pilot if he could stop on some cumulus so I could get out and stretch my legs. They pretended not to understand me.
[caption id="attachment_1069257" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Inside the ornate, serene Gurdwara Bangla Sahib temple in Delhi. - Ken Chee Hing[/caption]
Sitting in the lobby of the swank Le Meridien Hotel in Delhi, my first order of business was to damage Caricom integration and relations when, after hearing my media colleague Nadia Slater speak and listening to her accent, I made the wrong assumption and asked where in Jamaica she was from.
An indignant Slater declared, “Me not from Jamaica, me is Vincey!”
My error threatened to push TT’s diplomatic relations with St Vincent and the Grenadines back 30 years. The glare she gave me was enough to kill that conversation dead in the waters of the Caribbean Sea.
Enter Dawne Parris, another Caribbean media colleague, to save my skin and Caricom. Her accent was as crystal clear as the morning sea in Speightstown. “You are from Barbados, right?” I asked Dawne who nodded in the affirmative.
India is a living, breathing lesson in contrasts. But that’s the beauty of why she is hardly ever not in the world news. There is never a dull day there.
From farmers protesting over minimum support prices for their goods, to a child happily playing near her mother who is busy making chapatis (a type of flat bread similar to TT’s sada roti, but thinner), to sell.
From three-wheeled CNG-powered rickshaws to sleek Mercedes Benz and human-powered vegetable stalls on wheel, from well-groomed huskies walking their human pets to wild macaque monkeys scavenging on the pavement – India is beautiful even with all of her imperfections.
Here are some snippets of my time there.
Taj Mahal, a legacy of love
221 km from Delhi, or a little over four hours of travelling in a bus, lies the city of Agra in the state of Uttar Pradesh.
In this p
