JUN-B-4
THE LONG TRANSIT
TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD:
TWO LONG FLIGHTS,
A TRAIN RIDE, AND, NOW, ENDLESS CONVOY RIDES IN MAHINDRA “JEEPS” INTO THE “HILL
COUNTRY”
ENROUTE TO THE
SPITI VALLEY OF THE HIMALAYA
JUNE 12—15, 2002
I am typing this up in two short sessions—limited by the battery life of the laptop computer. This segment is being typed aboard the train from Delhi toward the end of the line, and then by jeep to Simla where I will be in a real bed tonight. This follows the very long flights of about eight hours each with the delays built in, which displaced the backpack of Michael Eiffling’s son whom I met in FRA in boarding the LH 760 flight to Delhi to arrive at 1:30 AM. We spent an additional hour trying to get a claim on his backpack, which we will have the local travel agent chasing down. But, now, it will come later along with something else overlooked---my entire luggage, left here in Delhi for transfer to the trip up to the Spiti Valley. “But I thought you wanted to have that saved here for Ladakh!” Yes, but it also has everything I need for this and every other trip to India that is planned for the next however many trips I will be taking to India—and having my luggage already here, is why I left it here in the first place, and now it is as useless to me as if it were lost in transit.
I cannot complain about our Lufthansa service at Dulles. I greeted Zita-Colemna the head of IAD L/H operations. She said as she saw the MAP packs (my ONLY checked baggage) come right this way—and checked me and both my students Carla Mandili and Matt Gummerson onto the IAD to FRA flight in Business Class—an upgrade that was a royal way to start the trip, since Matt had never been out of the USA and had never been on a 747. All 750,000 pounds of our 747 named “Frankfurt am Main” and built in July 1990 out of six million parts, and which got up to its 200 mph takeoff speed in 40 seconds pushed by the four jets that generate 256,000 HP, got us airborne for the first of the flights, with one third of that weight being consumed along the seven hour trip. These same statistics happened again in going from FRA to DEL. Now I am enroute by train through the usual stop at Chandrigarh for the Dharamsala trip last month and further north to start the long trip by ground into the “Hill Country”. Tomorrow morning (without any change of clothes, thanks to their forgetting that I might need my luggage left here last week) I will be giving a lecture to the medical school at the Indira Ghandi University Medical Center in Simla. It is a good thing that I remembered to stuff a few slides of the topic “Tropical Surgery” into my carry-on bag as I left for the airport. However, I will be principally talking to our own group, which consists of 14 (out of the 22 originally reserved) mostly freshmen medical students from a variety of schools, one surgeon, one of my former senior students now resident at Colorado, Keith Bair, who has come back in to the trip after canceling out, and a couple of hangers on, like Bill Norton and Michael’s son Blake. I have already been talking to the group about what to expect in our clinics, and will get them interested in the clinical problems for successive sessions in which they give case presentations and I give them lectures on a regular basis.
Outside my window in the retreating scenery is all of India. The fields in which the harvest was being gathered on my last trip up this same rail are now flooded rice paddies with painfully individually hand-planted rice seedlings being pushed into the muddy slop by the stoop labor in which India seems to be almost as well supplied as China—the world’s leader in this commodity. Not much has changed through he millennia on the basic process of manual labor of those stooped over at the waist standing barefoot in knee deep watery mud, pushing seedlings into the dung fertilized slop in the murky brew under a 95* F overhead sun and 90% monsoon season humidity. If this does not sound like an ideal tropical medicine laboratory for the creation of cholera, hookworm, the miracidia of schistosomiasis, or tetanus, this is just the long story of man’s incessant struggle to stay alive while working to feed himself tomorrow.
In the headlines of the newspaper, the journalists of the Times of India do not even pretend to be unbiased, and have references to the Pakistani intransigence after the reasonableness of India on the Kashmiri dispute that seems to have only the US talking about nuclear war. Their upfront prejudices are also reflected in the headline “Karzai prepared for his coronation” referring to the Afghanistan succession. So, I am on my way to the “real world of India” as the newspapers of the first world’s concern are focused at a level quite above the concerns we have about life/death hunger/food growing. And the religions of Buddhism and Hinduism above the Moslem/Hindu conflict along the “LOC.”