Republic Day Parade

Yesterday was Republic Day here, so I headed off to see a parade they hold in Delhi which heads through India Gate and down to the Red Fort. I was there with one of my housemates by 6.00am to get prime seats; unfortunately we didn't know that cameras and mobile phones cannot be taken in because the parade is a 'high security operation'. And here I was planning on selling pictures of Indian missiles to the Soviets. I can just imagine a group of bureaucrats sitting in a room charged with turning the Parade into a 'high security operation' and coming up with ridiculous rules like 'no cameras' and 'no mobile phones'; what do they expect me to do with a phone?

Anyway we returned home and travelled back to the parade minus cameras and phone. Unfortunately my housemate had some gum, but after they had watched him eat a piece, they decided it probably wasn't poisonous and allowed us entry.

We had been told that the parade started at 8am. At 9.30, we finally heard some voices and it began.

After half an hour of speeches in Hindi, the tanks came rolling out. We had been sitting on a grass patch in quite a good spot surrounded by a few thousand people (we were in the free seats as we had missed out on buying reserved seating). Police forced everyone to sit so that everyone could see, even smacking the odd person on the head to get their point across. But as soon as the first tank came out everyone jumped to their feet and pushed forward, until the police waded in pushing people to the ground. This happened maybe a dozen times during the parade, whenever one of the more interesting floats (eg any float with dancing girls on it) came out. Each time it happened we got pushed closer and closer together and it got more and more difficult to sit down again. By the end of it there was a human jigsaw puzzle on the ground, and it was hard to work out where I began and everyone else started.

The parade was a mix of Indian defence force grandstanding and floats from different regions of India. The highlight for me was a huge army vehichle with the title 'information warriors.' Basically it was like a big flatbed truck with a large radar attached and two big glass cubes full of computer machinery. Two soldiers in full parade dress sat like secretaries at a couple of laptops in these glass cubes, pretending to tap away, engaged in some sort of 'informatin warfare', presumably.

Another thought-provoking float for me was from the Annaman Islands, a beautiful archipelago to the east of India. It consisted of a model jail complete with prisoners behind bars and a little guard in a tower. It celebrated '100 years of cellular jail', surely an achievement which can only be captured through the medium of parade floats.

Of course there were plenty of enjoyable floats, like the one to the right from Goa, which had great music and some interesting hawaiian shirts and dancing. And there were also some noisy helicopter and jet flyovers which I always like. Overall it was good fun.

This weekend I'm off to Jodhpur, the 'Blue City' of Rajashtan.