"India is where all human realities - past and present - exist at once."
As I've already said, it's 15 years' to the month since I was traveling in India for the first and only other time. In that time obviously India has changed a lot. A great deal in fact (and so have I of course!) But in so many ways India has not changed at all. In fact at the most essential level India hasn't changed in the last 100, 500 or even a thousand years.
Since I was here there is now a very efficient, nation-wide mobile phone network, better (in my experience) than Australia's or America's. There is far more foreign investment thanks to Prime Minister's Singh's economic reforms of the Naughties; and the country has grown substantially to become a global economic superpower as a result. But just as since independence the country has adopted TV and developed a huge film industry; and since the arrival of the British built out an envy-of-the-world rail network; the essentials remain just the same. In the time that the moguls have come and gone, and as far back as Alexander the Great, the core of Indian life remains the same: family, community and puja. Despite Call Centres, Bollywood and Bangalore's Software houses - India remains a fundamentally agrarian society. Ancient knowledge from the ancient texts of Ayerveda to the Yoga Sutra still define how Indians live, the core answers to the meaning of life were resolved for Indians many thousands of years ago. All the rest is mere detail and decoration.
So I haven't really found any significant change in the country at all. Everyone is still trying to get you to visit their cousin's Emporium. The mysterious head wobble remains for me a very inconclusive answer to a question. Any five yard stretch of street can at once present both the most wonderful and the most foul smells you've ever experienced and you continue to run the risk of 24 hours in the bathroom with each meal you dare to enjoy.
But the traveling experience has been revolutionized in a very short space of time by the huge technological developments of the last 15 years and it's only when you come and do something again like this that you get a feel for how much life has changed. In many cases the balance of power has significantly shifted for the traveler thanks to technology. For instance, where before I was totally in the hands of a Rikshaw driver's sense of direction before; now, using the magic Blue Dot on Google maps, I can tell when he's going off course via his cousin's Silk Emporium! Equally, feedback on a hostel - good or bad- can be delivered on the WiFi network in the lobby that very moment using Tripadvisor and shared with the global traveler community. This is so important because on my last trip I found that a hostel would rest on the laurels of a good Lonely Planet write up for years, knowing that the traffic would keep walking in the door no matter how low their standards dropped. Now they must keep their game high perpetually.
(Equally as I wrote on my business blog, the advent of tools like Tripadvisor has changed the mechanics of Trust for the Indian Tourist service provider in ways that are quite fundamental.)
In good ways and bad ways, today's ability to keep in touch with friends and family while traveling is cosmic. You can be in the Rajasthani Desert or the Keralan Backwater canals and post blogs, pictures and status updates to the folks back home using Facebook or Twitter instead of postcards and round-robin emails to lists of addresses from your address book. Skype has destroyed the STD long-distance phone call business and free hotel WiFi has challenged the Internet cafe business that was so very nascent when I was here before. Text messages (SMS) make a rendezvous with a fellow traveler an instant and cheap reality where Post Restante and "leave a message on my home voicemail" were long-winded and fraught with failure.
The iRevolution has changed the quiet times of course, of which there's much in hotel and hostel rooms, on trains, in airports and at railway stations. Fifteen years ago, I carried 15 of my choicest albums in a clunky carry-case with my Walkman. Now I have every album I've ever liked on something a quarter its size. You can watch your favorite TV shows and movies in HD quality on a tablet screen that really doesn't weigh anything at all, and instead of a bag cluttered with books, you can take an entire library of novels with you - and even the Lonely Planet Guide book itself - on tiny devices that take up less space than your shorts. (Not to mention an array of board games for those long journeys - Backgammon, Risk, Monopoly anyone?) As for the ability you have to record every second of your adventure in high clarity and digital photo or video footage and share with the world the next day - posterity is so much richer for it!
But all of this development is, while seemingly important in western life (and certainly a chalk-and-cheese difference in terms of comparing the two journeys then and now) mere detail on the surface. A veneer even. For what remains amazing about India is the very fact that none of this matters. Indians don't care about it. Sure, they all have mobile phones now - but their way of life remains bound around simplicity, spirituality and family just as it was when the Bhudda gained enlightenment. What India teaches you about yourself, about your body and mind, how to adapt to change, perspective and different ways of understanding the very meaning of life is just the same as it was 15 years ago and I'd wager was just the same for the Romans who came here thousands of years before.
Technology may have helped the way we process all of that, but that is all. "The more it changes, the more it is the same thing."