MUMBLINGS December 29, 2005

Like myself, a lot of people seem to be excited about our trip to India. Thank you for your interest.

The history, present and future, of this Asian giant is amazing and in these columns it would be impossible for me to do more than just skim the surface. Hopefully, the few highlights we do mention will be to your liking.

As already mentioned, India is likely to play a very important part in leading the world in success in the 21st century. Handicapped by various religious beliefs and cast system etc., they may, thus not do as well as China in continued growth. China is more solidly in agreement on religion, they have none, and thus do not have the religious factions and fights etc.

Although, not exactly accurate our guide had what I believed to be a beautiful thought. He said the reason Americans are so successful is because they do not pray only for individual success but also for success for the entire country.

India is the largest democratic country in the world and they are friends of the United States. This is not true with most Muslim and other central and African nations.

In the hotels they give you a newspaper each morning in your room. Interestingly, it is US News, which is a fine paper. However, India has it’s own National paper The Indian Times with a circulation of 2.6 million. This is one of the highest circulated newspapers in the world, except in Japan they have two or three with bigger numbers.

They do not have huge shopping centers like we do here but they do have some big stores. The front maybe very small on a back street but you go in them and it may spread way out. However, most stores that we went in specialized in items such as jewelry, carpets etc.

Guides always have some friendly stores that they take you into and if you buy something they will go back later and get their commission. However, in Abercrombie and Kent, select stores that the guides may take the tourists to are of top quality.

We went into this one store where they sell some of the finest carpets in the world. It is amazing. They had carpets there made out of the finest wool in the world and some of them with as many as 1,600 knots per square inch. For example, we were looking at a 7 x 9 carpet, and it had taken one family over three years to make. It was varied colored and the color would change when you would look from different angles. As you can imagine they where rather expensive. This particular rug was $12,000.00. But always, according to our guide, you can “dicker”, and they will usually give you about thirty to thirty five percent off.

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The best wool in the world comes from the throats of a rabbit sized, goat like animal who lives in mountains in the northern part of the country. They have been so hunted that the government has stopped people from killing them and thus the black market is rampant.

In a fine jewelry store they had hundreds of different items of jewelry including rubies, which can be as expensive as diamonds. The manager of this particular store gave us a printed sheet stating that 9 out of every 10 precious jewels in the world came through India where they are cut and polished.

He claimed the best rubies come from Burma and admits they are superior in quality to those found in India, which are also excellent.

He showed us a four and one eighth carat ruby that was truly beautiful. I had never thought about the difference but this particular item was clear and bright and you felt like you could see through it. The price was $24,000.00. He did agree to come down to $21,000.00 but he still made no sale to us. He had a lot of beautiful stones with the Star of David clearly shown in them. However they were inferior quality.

This particular store had been in the same family for generations. This is typical in India. Our guide was a cousin of this particular store operator and worked for him in South America gathering various precious stones several months in the year. He was in a different city and wanted to meet us there but he could not. He told us later that when we went back through New Delhi that he could have gotten this particular stone for us for $18,000.00. Still it would have been no sale. His cousin had millions of dollars in jewelry with some pieces as high as $500,000.00.

Literally thousands are employed in the jewelry cutting and polishing. Indians are hard working and do not seem to mind long hours because they are so anxious to get jobs that they will take most anything. Indians are hard workers and will take a job making one to two dollars per hour and work long hours. There are also jobs for young women to work the long distance phone service. If you call 1-800-… at any point in the world, it goes through India; even if you were calling a place as close as Loxley. Here the girls make $1,500.00 per month and they have to work 11 hours a day 7 days a week. Even so they are anxious to get jobs like this or any other kind.

While we were there the weather was beautiful every day. It would be about 60 at night and up to 75 or 80 during the day. The sun was so bright and I got bad sunburn even though I was not out in the sun much.

More later, hopefully.

See you again soon, I hope.