New Delhi was built like a British Parade Ground. Vast avenues simply wait for trumpeting hordes of elephants and Maharajahs borne aloft in finery.
There is a speech I once made, about how in a world of commodities, branding is one of the few ways left of taking unfair advantage of the competition. I was tryng to explain to my assembled audience, the need we have in Western society, now that we own more appliances than we have space for in the graveyards under the sink, to find ways of doing things that are unique and special, in order that we might feel or be unique and special.
So I made up a story about how, when it was my son?s Barmitzvah, we went to the Exotic Barmitzvah company to organize a truly unique event. And they had us and our party of visitors off to India to go on the backs of elephants to spot Sumatran tigers in the deep dark forests. We?d been lumbering along for a while when the mahut on the lead elephant raised his hand and brought our party to a rumbling halt.
Through the clearing, came another troop of elephants, mounted similarly by a traveling Barmitzvah party as our Mahut called out ?Make way for the Rosenberg party??
The audience for this speech consisted of earnest Kiwis and Kiwis can be very earnest. I doubt whether they had ever heard the words Barmitzvah before let alone know what it meant. And so, as my story ended there was a deathly hush through the room as they wondered what whether it was a truly exotic barmitzvah or whether all Barmitzvah?s might be this way
One might think that being in an advertising agency, I would be able to find a toilet that I could use in New Delhi without a severe vomit reflex. But that simply was not the case. I had resolved in all my time in India, not to eat anything I could not peel. But as the day dragged deep into the night and the thirsty Indians drank away at whatever brain matter I had left, I did partake regularly in the most appalling tea so commonly served throughout India.
It consists of a percolator, that sits atop a stove all day, with milk, sugar and tea added. By the time the day ends, it has formed the syrupy consistency of a well-known brand of superglue which is perhaps the effect they were seeking to offset all the common forms of diahorretics they face in day to day life (I did just invent this word too).
So with one cup after another, like a child on an 8 hour Chevrolet trip to Durban I held on, and held on and held on some more. The porters in my five star hotel must have been entirely bemused as I stormed the door of my room that first night in a state of fountainous desperation.
I organized, naturally as one does, to take a train trip from Delhi to Agra to visit the palatial Taj Mahal. The rail system in India is well known as the last true remnant of the once smoothly oiled machine that was the British Empire. Trains run on time.
One reads about train crashes in which vast hordes die, but apart from that anomaly, trains run on time. My train was to leave for Agra at 5am and so I had organized for a car from the hotel to take me to the station.
It was only once I had been dropped at 4:30 and made my way into the station that I discovered that there were 18 platforms at this particular junction and none seemed to offer a train to Agra. I learnt a lesson in trust that morning for my hand was taken by a scruffy looking vagabond who examined my ticket and determined that I was a long way from the appropriate station.
Without common language and any sign of reassurance that he might be a man one could trust not to lead you up a blind alleyway to be pounced upon by a group of slum dogs, I let him lead me onto a third class train ? a sight the like of which most travelers on the train that morning had clearly never witnessed before.
The Indians have something in common with Israelis of old. There was a time when you would walk into a blackened cinema in Israel and as you made your way to your seat, the noise made by the crunching of the veritable carpet of seed shells underfoot was deafening. On the Indian trains it is the Betel nut shell that is spat so liberally to create a similar form of flooring.
But we travelled the trunk line to a station some miles away and by 5am I was on board the Agra Express. Precisely at 5am the train left on time for Agra with me comfortably on board, and a young scallywag with a lifetime?s worth of tips left to explain his remarkable and unexpected fortune.
The passage to Agra is unremarkable. It is a disconcerting fact that the smog in India rarely allows visibility of more than ten feet beyond the railroad track. You could be on a ghost train (the Flying Indiaman) for the sense of isolation that envelops you.
I had been in Agra for a few days, seen all the tourist spots, visited the factories where young boys crouch like frogs all day long cutting fine pieces of coral and azure stone to cut into marble for the millions of trinket Taj Mahals that would be sold in the shops.
That night I decided to sit atop my hotel roof to watch the sun go down behind the Taj Mahal, as the cooking fires began to darken the sky and Muezzin cries emanated from mosques all over the town.
It was a fortunate choice. I shared the roof that night, with the full Israeli Philharmonic orchestra under leadership of the India-born Zubin Mehta as they practiced for that night?s concert in the city. With me as their only and remarkably privileged audience of one.
Sometimes, as I listen to my daughter sitting at her piano and singing, or watching the sun sink into a deep purple haze that night, with a beautiful building dedicated to love, and the strains of a Dvorak concerto, I know that life never will really be any grander. There is a choice to make at that moment.
To live in expectation of greater heights that will probably never ever eventuate. Or, more sensibly to choose to live in expectation of small pleasures, a good cup of tea, a stranger?s smile. Knowing that momentous pleasures are rare and have more to do with chance than purpose. That what makes life truly unique is a willing heart ready to go out in the world, to listen and to see. What it takes is a readiness to give trust to vagabonds.