The Road to Agra

We left Delhi for Agra on Friday, February 11, at about mid-day, going by car, with driver provided; very thankfully, since the traffic seems utterly chaotic to the untrained eye. Eventually you begin to pick up an underlying pattern, and see that there is some sense of order that allows for progress to be made with minimal damage to vehicles and pedestrians.  At this point, however, I wasn’t feeling the order at all, in any part of my surroundings or myself. I was feeling mentally and emotionally much the same way I had been feeling physically just a couple of days earlier, i.e., that it would bring disastrous results to try to digest even a morsel of input from this strange and foreign environment I found myself in. In short, I was overwhelmed. I was stuffed to the brim with the constant onslaught of unfamiliar sights, sounds, smells and sensations of India.

Now, you may have noticed that there is an inverse relationship between the novelty of our surroundings and experiences and the passage of time, so that in a familiar and customary world, time seems to fly by faster every year; by virtue of longevity, each year is less novel and takes less effort to process, or so it seems to me, and therefore, there is less to take note of, and it all goes by in a blur of ever-increasing speed. During the past week and a few days, and especially in the first 4 days after arriving in India, time slowed to a c – r - - a - - - w - - - - l. It was tremendously disorienting. I felt that I hardly knew which way was up.

Naturally, my response was to shut down. I enveloped myself in a fog, behind dark glasses, with noise-reducing headphones dampening the incessant horn-blowing on the highways, and tried to ignore my surroundings for a while. On the road to Agra, that turned out to be impossible; my curiosity kept getting piqued by some flash of color or an unusual face, or a camel pulling a massively overstuffed cart, or cows of every size and shape wandering across the road or plumping themselves down in the median, and so on and so on. The very thing I was trying to manage was managing my attention for me. It was out of my control. I gave up and took more pictures, but even then, the speed of our progress on the road prevented me from fully taking in, never mind actually taking, many of shots I tried for, as I have mentioned already.

But, here are a few more from that area between Delhi and Agra, and next I will tell you about the great tombs of Agra, the tomb of Akbar and the Taj Mahal.

Note the drivers perched at the front of the cart.

Cows parked out front.

Sugar cane in the truck toward rear, produce stands, a small town scene.

Artfully stacked cauliflower

Lumberyard - basically, trees and branches used as-is for building, while a passerby chats on his mobile.

A woman does her own hauling

 

 

 

 

No hands needed

 Sharing the road with one and all . . .

One or the other will move over after sufficient horn use. 

so much color  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peaceful fields of green