I have been to Delhi, the capital city of India, many years back and i still remember the hassle i had to go through at the airport to travel to my home town in South India. I have always had a bitter experience when i arrived in Delhi or Bangalore after having a very smooth departure from Oslo, Helsinki or Frankfurt. Though the experiences i had before were not particularly impressive, i decided to go to India on vacation recently and arrived at Delhi this morning. First, I was impressed with the amount of effort the officials have put in to control swine flu from being a pandemic – it is now required by law for everyone have to leave their details with the immigration office and also have to walk through a temperature sensor that alerts if anyone has exceptionally high temperature thereby helping them to isolate people at the borders. A thing like this would be unimaginable a few decades ago – but it is in place today!!
Then i transferred myself from the international airport to the domestic airport to take my other flight to my home town, and believe it or not, the airport was to the same standards as any other airport in a developed country. Everything that one would expect in an airport in a developed country was available – from prams to wheelchairs and plenty of shops and cafes to entertain the travellers. If i didn’t just know that i am in India, i could have been easily fooled i was somewhere else – it felt really good!
That said, the system is not perfect in anyway. When i came out of the international airport, i was respectfully threatened to bribe – which i managed to speak my way out of. The airport has free transfers but the system is nowhere designed to be efficient. The coach stops wherever the driver feels like and it is no where near compared to the safety that we enjoy in a developed nation. The domestic airport itself was tiny for the population and the flight departure gates resembled Oslo central bus station! (Not joking here)
But the bottom line is, India is growing and transforming ! It took many educated men and centuries for the developed countries to come up to the state they are in today and i think it is incredible for a developing country like India to follow suit of the developed countries and be able to do something what they can do – in a span of few years. I was only hoping so far that the world would get better and be a much nicer place for ALL of us to live, but today i get a feeling that it is no more a mere hope!
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Posted on December 4th, 2009 at 9:01 am by admin
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