Little Change and Lots of It

For a reporter returning to the Indian capital for the first time in nine years, the overwhelming first impression is how little things have changed here.

A McDonald’s restaurant (serving “no-beef” mutton burgers) has been added to the Vasant Vihar market. There is more air pollution and a little more traffic than a decade ago.

But most cars on the road are still the boxy, 1954-model Morris Oxfords--long extinct in Britain but still made by India’s Hindustan Motors. Pariah kites and vultures still soar above the city’s piles of uncollected garbage. In frightening fashion, lepers, emaciated sacred cows and hairless, mangy dogs compete for space on the crumbling central islands of main streets.

But the city also retains its charms: Bustling Hindu temples spill over with dhoti-clad priests and enthusiastic devotees with vermilion smears on their foreheads; there are wondrous spice markets, brilliant flowers, unexpected perfumes and an unimaginable variety of birds; and above all, there are overtones and undertones, the glorious cacophony of languages--Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil.

Still, the place remains filthy--lovely parks and footpaths fouled with human and bovine excrement. Garbage is all over, as are illegal, unregulated and pestilential shantytowns. Packs of beggars, children and adults, importune everywhere. Power failures occur daily; the running water, undrinkable, flows intermittently. The telephones, though improved, are still undependable.

India has always had a minuscule population of the extremely wealthy and a small middle class.

Now, however, the middle class appears larger--and more ostentatious. Dinner at an upscale hotel offered a spectacle of plump matrons in silk saris shot with silver and gold overindulging in syrupy sweets while loud men decorated with Rolex watches complained about the latest fall of the government, the third in less than a year.

The contrast with the abject poverty everywhere outside is shocking.

As for Beijing, the Chinese capital has changed so dramatically in the past decade that it is hardly recognizable. On the most banal level, Beijing now has more than 30 McDonald’s eateries. On June 1, Children’s Day, block-long lines of cheerful customers formed outside those American franchises and the dozens of KFC chicken outlets.

Former residents who return after even short absences nearly always make the same comment of Beijing: “I hardly know the place.”

New Delhi has remained a horizontal city, dominated by the red sandstone pile of Rashtrapathi Bhavan, now official residence of the Indian president but designed by the English architect Edwin Lutyens for the British viceroy.

Beijing, meanwhile, has gone vertical. Although the city plan bans skyscrapers downtown, the ancient web of narrow lanes--hutongs--threading among one-story courtyard houses is disappearing. Instead, 30- and 40-story buildings have sprouted, many with bold, even fantastic, silhouettes that pierce the northern sky.

Pollution is often bad. But in Beijing, at least, the air is improving as the city converts to natural gas-fired power plants. Beijing streets, once as grim as a halftone photograph, now bustle by day with young men and women sporting the latest styles. At night, the capital byways glow wildly with commercial neon animation.

There is a strutting confidence to the place. One has the sense of destiny, of fierce concentration, maybe even of divine right. There are poor people in China--80 million by official count--and even a handful of beggars in the major cities. But there are no shantytowns. The streets and sidewalks are not used as latrines. City workers regularly dispose of garbage.

Most people who have lived in both India and China admire the heroic ambition of Indian democracy. Anyone who has witnessed an Indian election must be impressed by the intelligence and conscientiousness of the voters, many of whom are illiterate and must mark ballots with party symbols and sign them with an X.

The vitality of debate, the liveliness of the free press and the spiritual exaltation of the many religions are, quite simply, thrilling.

India is everybody’s favorite underdog: the game water boy on the battlefield in Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Gunga Din.” China is everyone’s favorite bully. How could anyone like a country that forced into exile the Dalai Lama, the world’s gentlest man and a friend of favorite movie stars?

But there is also the sense that India, founded on the principles of equality and nonviolence, has failed to serve its people.

And, for an American, China’s lack of humility is somehow attractive; China does not have an obsequious style. Chinese in the People’s Republic have been through hard times--even insane ones--but they have been through them together. The sense of union, in misery and in triumph, is widespread.