India, Nikon and Me: DELHI, 02/11/2012

´Has`nt changed in two years. That nauseating, chemically, burnt smell still pervades around the airport strip, which I find, as always enveloped in a predawn mist. The cool thing is that as soon as you enter the arrival lobby you come across a smoking room, which although packed with fellow addicts is welcome after nearly nine hours without a smoke. Besides, theres no point in rushing to get through immigration as you are guaranteed to be waiting around for about an hour, while the immigration officers take their time perusing passports, with no great sense of urgency. If you only learn one thing on a visit to India, it will probably be the virtue of paitience. I eventually got round to changing 200 euros and wandered out to find my driver. I managed to find him. I say managed because amongst the other waiting drivers I see a short chap with nepalese factions jumping up amongst the others, holding a grubby A4 which said Mr. F******** J****. I sigh and walk behind him and tap him on the shoulder." You late !", he blurted and went on to tell me how he had been waiting over an hour. Rather irked by the attitude of this little upstart, I told him to take it out with the pilot or to buy himself a watch. I then informed him that if he had any problem with my tardiness I could always take another cab. This put the little chap's purpose in life into some sort of perspective and he dropped the negative approach with which he had received me and it spurred him into delivering me to the Vista Inn, Karol Bagh district without getting me hurt and with no pedestrians being knocked over. I light up a marlboro wondering what would kill me first, Delhi's traffic and contamination or the cigarettes. By the way, you do'nt need sunglasses in this city. The sun wo'nt blind you. It will just hang in the sky like a dull, orange disc, with it's rays unable to penetrate the severe contamination which gets worse day by day. The only thing which you receive is it's muggy and stifling heat.
Delhi is a huge, asian cauldron packed with thirteen million souls, probably about a half of them living in abject misery.John Lennon said " God is a concept, by which we measure our pain ". There is a lot of pain in India and as a consequence there is a lot of god. You will spot hundreds of gods and deities all over the place. You will find them in simple shrines on the street, private little ones in the humblest of dwellings, right to the elephant god, Ganesha, which evey hindu cabbie will have on his dashboard. An eastern St Christopher, which they touch with reverance before turning their engine on. I had only two reasons to be in Delhi on this bright friday morning. One was to grab a "fast train" to Lucknow and the other was to buy tea. To this end I went to visit Mr Vikram Mittal, of " Mittals teas" at his modest, but busy shop in the Sundar Nagar market, about twenty minutes from Karol Bagh. Mr. Mittal is a polite and engaging person with a delightful lilt in his voicereminding one of a John Reid BBC. He also happens to be a tea artesan. We spent quite a few hours, in between his attending customers, elaborating my personal blend of masala chai. After mixing and changing ingredients and proportions, we finally hit on a brew which pleased us both. The result was ten kilos of masala chai, vacuum packed in 250gm packets with a label boasting my name. It was a brew with an Assam leaf base and with added flavors in varying amounts such as fennel, green cardomom, cinnamon, vanilla, orange peel and rose petals. The aroma is inebriating and the taste sublime. The recipe is now in Mr Mittals database, so that it can be reproduced whenever I need a new batch sent to me. Along with the chai I purcased a kilo of white tea and a hundred fresh vanilla pods. The pods were larger than the ones to be fond in the local supermarket and so fresh that they stained the inside of the plastic in which they were vacuum wrapped. The only problem was that my order was completed on sunday, the only day of the week the post office shuts and therefore I was unable to send my , in total fifteen kilos of goods home. Iwas going to have to cart this along with four kilos of camera bag and another four kilos of personal kit to Lucknow and send it from there the next day.