Tomorrow we have a 34 1/2 hour day, leaving at 6:45 AM and arriving around 4:00 PM after 18 hours in the air. I’m charging up the PDA so it will be juiced enough to last until at least Heathrow, hopefully giving us the chance to watch a movie of our choosing and listen to some music we brought with us. The capacity of a half-dollar sized memory card is truly staggering: three movies or 20+ hours of digital music.

I’ll have a lot of time to think on the trip, too. I decided shortly after we arrived here to hold off on deconstructing the trip while we were still on it, opting instead to just let the experience of India wash over me (for better or worse). So in the coming weeks, you’ll probably get some pithy (potentially tedious) punditry of the kind that preceded the trip.

But I can’t resist making a few small observations before going.

On Newspapers: India has a multitude of “national” newspapers and they’re almost all crap. Okay The Hindu is good, and to be fair I couldn’t get past the masthead of most of the non-English dailies. The Economic Times wanted to be good, but it was full of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms), had one otherwise good story on the Indo-Pakistani-Iranian energy pipeline written in reverse chronological order, stopped short of analysis in its feature pieces, and used current events pictures next to unrelated stories simply to draw your attention (think, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt next to an article on electricity for farmers). The Hindustan Times has the most consistantly bad reportage and the most pictures of decadent westerners in skimpy clothes. While The Times of India reserved most of its space for subcontinental sex kittens and Bollywood beaus.

Television: I think we already mentioned TV. It’s maddeningly fascinating. There are more news channels on cable in Shimla than what we get with DirecTV, and the news seems more balanced. English language entertainment is heavily US-centric, but the Hindi markets seem much bigger. This is 180-degrees opposite of TV in Canada, which is just pathetic.

Cricket: Still a bit of a mystery. I can’t quite figure out how to tell if something good happened. Lisa disparages the game as inferior to baseball, but only watches one or two bowls at a time.

Controversy: India seems willing to embrace controversy in public discourse, whether it’s nationalism, the caste system, or religion in public and private life. Quite refreshing really.

Military Presence: It still shocks these American eyes to see guys with big guns walking along the street (without a moose or elk in tow). Machine guns at the airport? Common. Walking down the road in Shimla we passed a couple of sentries in rather effective camoflauge with their belt-fed machine gun pointed in our direction. At the airport in Jodhpur we passed fortified bunkers with fighter planes at the ready. Every train was shuttling soldiers somewhere or another.

The Supermarket: I went to “The Ranch Store” around the corner in Madras to buy some cold water at a reasonable price (8 rupees, about 20 cents, for a half liter instead of 100 rupees at the hotel). My feelings for India brightened significantly. It’s so nice to be able to think about what food I want, put it in a basket, change my mind, and pay for everything with a 500 rupee note without having a dozen pairs of impatient eyes boring into my back at the stall on the street. Plus, mini Twix candy bars and “imported” Diet Coke! For a moment I was at our corner grocery. Fear not, globe-trekking MathWorkers, I did buy some local stuff too, but hygenically packaged. Why did this have to wait until three days before we left? [See also shopping malls.]

Shopping Malls: Go around the corner from our hotel, past some sketchy-but-probably-safe food stalls, a few beggars and an Indian guy selling paraphernalia praising the Third Reich (Hello, irony!), and down the narrow dirt sidewalk fronting a busy street and you will arrive at Spencer Place shopping mall. This is where we bought our kurta and salwars — Yes, I will post pictures after we return — and it houses the small supermarket. It’s one part mall, two parts bazaar, and completely Indian with a healthy smattering of American brands for zest. It’s a maze of discount shops selling all manner of dry goods wit ha few department stores to anchor the atria in place. The food court — with its clean stalls, Pizza Hut, Subway sandwich shop, and local vegetarian restaurants displaying menus on the big board and serving on plastic trays — is the least “typically Indian” place we’ve visited. There’s also the Landmark store, which is a bizarre Borders Books / Wal-Mart hybrid.

Yes, I’ll be taking a different perspective back with me stateside, but I’m going to be really happy to be home from a purely mass-produced, branded, material culture perspective.

Thoughts on politics and “Global, Inc.” to follow.

By the way, we have about 1,000 rupees of talk time left on our phone. American relatives may get phone calls yesterday night / this morning.