Business travel can be the source of enjoyable moments, especially when it takes me to India.I stayed at the Taj Residency Ummed, near Ahmedabad's airport early last week. At the hotel restaurant, Narmada, I enjoyed excellent Indian cuisine on a background of entrancing live Indian classical music. I love a raga starting slowly with apparently aimless chords struck on the sitar until it breaks into a rhythm accentuated by the tabla. It is always a great pleasure to me to hear the two musicians pushing each other to new heights of frenetic invention.
And then there are India's street life and colors, which I unfortunately could capture only as I was driven in cars riding at 40 to 50 km/hr.
An improvised fruit stall on a wheeled cart
A man dressed in the fashion of Nehru
Colorful garlands of flowers for sale
Dogs and people fleeing the heat in the shade to be found under idle wheeled carts
A colorful teeming commercial life ... people living and eeking out a meagre subsistence from commerce in the streets of Ahmedabad
A couple on a motorbike, apparently happy to see me taking pictures of them
As an incidental tourist in Ahmedabad, I felt at times a little ashamed peeping into an extreme poverty which I found exotic and colorful from the outside, but which people living inside cannot wait to shed and leave behind (assuming they know that there can be a better life). Snatching those sights partially hidden in a car moving through traffic was a lot easier than walking and taking pictures more closely, which may have evoked reactions of disapproval if not outright hostility.
Commerce is everywhere conducted in small shops crammed one on top of the other, hardly more than holes in the wall, or on stalls on the pavement.
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