GroundTruth

NEW DELHI – I arrived late at night into the heat and chaos and filthy, crumbling infrastructure of the international airport here. It certainly stands in marked contrast to the air-conditioned and clean, sleekly modern architecture of Jakarta’s new airport or the spectacular new airports I saw in Beijing and Singapore.

In the early morning yesterday on my first day on the ground, I awoke to a city that was calm and quiet. It was Gandhi’s birthday – a national holiday here in India.

It is a day of contemplation and family time, a chance to step away from the wild kinetic chaos of New Delhi. That relentless pace of day-to-day Delhi, is replaced on this national day of remembrance by a slow, languid rhythm that held through the morning.

I met at the hotel with a steady stream of prospective correspondents for Global News, an unbelievably talented and passionate group of aspiring freelance, foreign correspondents. India is an extremely important country for us to cover and one where we expect to assign at least three correspondents. China is the only other country where we will have this many reporters finding the stories we believe our viewers of the website will need to know to understand these two Asian behemoths who are shifting the tectonics of the global economy.

In the afternoon, one of the reporters who I had met with, Sonyah Fatah, and her husband, Rajiv, offered to drive me around the city in their old, battered but soulful orange Fiat. They were great guides to my first glimpse of the city.

We stopped at the India Gate, a towering testament to British colonial architecture that now stands as the gateway to the modern India. This is the India that Gandhi forged through his independence movement 60 years ago, and you can’t help but wonder what would Gandhi think of India today.

There at the foot of the India Gate, families were gathered on the wide, well-groomed lawn that stretches on acre after of open public space. The families gathered on blankets and ate grilled corn on the cob and “pan pouri,” delicious small puffed pastries seasoned with tamarind and coriander and mint. The crazy flow of traffic and car horns and bicycles and motorized rickshaws were the backdrop of sound, as always in this city. But in the forefront was the more pleasant and gleeful sound of a flute player. Children played with simple red balls and kites. Gandhi’s ideal of “simplicity” was right here among these families observing his birthday. His dream of India as a strong, independent country was right here flickering with life like the eternal flame that burns at the base of the India Gate. And the families gathered here were the living evidence of Gandhi’s tremendous vision and the country’s stunning success as a modern economic, political and military force in the world.

Gandhi’s birthday seemed the perfect day on which the US Senate would vote to approve an historic — and crucial — deal for India to be able to access the US civil nuclear fuel and technology. It will provide India with a more affordable form of energy which it will need to continue its stunning pace of growth. The more than three years of diplomacy that went into forging the deal was a definitive moment for India’s Prime Minister Singh. He had staked his political career on achieving the deal, and yesterday succeeded.

But on this day when India remembers Gandhi, Rajiv shared some insights with me about modern India and how Gandhi might feel about where it is today. A filmmaker and journalist, Rajiv has an eye for his country. And he said there were certainly aspects of modern India that Gandhi would question and almost certainly disapprove of, including a crass “culture of consumerism” and “an abandoning of the simplicity of village life” for a country that has flooded its urban centers with migrant workers who live in abject poverty. The caste system remains in place in many aspect of life in India, and ethnic and religious conflict is not a thing of the past but very much a part of the present as a spate of recent bombings proves. India remains plagued by a failing education system, a crumbling infrastructure and a vast and widening gulf between the rich and poor.

Today, there is so much Gandhi would be proud of, but for sure there are many challenges that Gandhi would push India to face.