I now write sitting on a Flixbus from New York to Boston. I lost track of time and forgot to get King Dumplings, which I always get when I take the bus from Canal St, which is every time, since it is three minutes away from awesome dumplings. Alas. I’m having some major cultural whiplash. Last night I took an Uber to my friend Nick’s apartment, and I found myself getting frustrated that the driver was stopping at red lights. Everything feels so expensive, and so clean, and spacious, with so much room to breathe between each little element. 

The night bus to Agra was a horrorshow, but somehow I arrived in the city of the Taj Mahal (jumping off the bus unceremoniously in a nondescript highway shoulder at a red light once I realized we’d driven past the neighborhood I was staying in) full of energy and excitement. I was staying at a highly-rated hostel called Joey’s Hostel. Its reputation was well deserved– it was at their rooftop cafe that I scored my first glimpse of the Taj. Man! It is definitely, easily, one of the top 7 most wonderful things in the world. I took a guided tour that afternoon, and learned about the history of Sha JAhan, who built the Taj as a mausoleum for one of his several wives. 

That evening I took a chai making class, and a tour to a park across the river, to view the Taj from behind. There lies the abandoned foundation of the Taj Mahal’s proposed mirror, a tomb for Jahan himself. The finished Taj had nearly bankrupted his kingdom, and when he embarked on building the second one, which was planned to be constructed out of all black marble, his sons joined forces and arrested him. They didn’t want him to sink their entire inheritance into a simple mausoleum. Shah Jahan didn’t mind, they say– his sons had always fought amongst themselves for power and control of his empire, and it was only against his spending that they could unite, setting their feuds and differences aside. 

I only spent a couple of hours in the city of Agra, walking around a market famous for spices, but it’s hard to prioritize looking at anything in the world when you have the option to look at the Taj Mahal, right there. Seriously, I felt completely hypnotized. It’s just so freaking pretty. As a bonus, I got to recreate pictures that my grandparents and great grandmother took in the very same place. What a thrill. 

Maybe it was the lingering effects of spending time in the world hubs of two different religions, or some residual calmness from meditating under the tree at Bodh Gaya, but I felt a new sense of calm in Agra. Until this point, the blanket baseline levels of busyness, chaos, noise, pollution, and hustle pretty much everywhere had been stressors for me. In Agra, I felt for the first time a sense of ease, or maybe resignation. Or maybe I was simply used to it after over a month in the subcontinent. Or maybe this salmness was in part the product of a string of awesome social interactions I had in Agra. Maybe it was that I was picking up a nasty headcold, and all my senses and cogitation were dulled by nasal congestion. Maybe I had just grown desensitized after seeing so many heartbreaking situations and scenes, and my heart had hardened a shade or two in self-protection. 

Regardless of the exact formula of origin, I was feeling calm and regulated as I took my evening train to Delhi. In fact, when I left the station, my genuine reaction to going around Delhi was something along the lines of Wow, I don’t know what everyone was talking about. This is such a clean, quiet city. I had to take a step back and, with a more objective lens, I reevaluated this stance a bit, but not by much. In Delhi, I felt like I understood how things were moving. I can’t say I was ever even close to understanding how everything worked, or even what exactly I was seeing in the overlapping mesh of millions of personal, spiritual, and commercial lives. But I had an intuitive understanding of the way the sum of Delhi swayed, approached and drew back, attacked and defended, as I wandered its streets. It felt strange, to say the least, but not unpleasant. 

Lots of people I met said that they didn’t leave the Delhi airport, going straight to Agra, or Rajasthan, or Punjab from there, skipping Delhi as a sightseeing destination. To be blunt, Delhi has a reputation as a dirty, congested, polluted mess of a city with hardly a handful of sites to tour around. In some ways, I get this– if someone didn’t have a lot of time in India, it is probably not a city I’d prioritize seeing again. To me, it is always fascinating to be in the administrative capital of a country, especially in the bureaucratic behemoth that India is. 

I would never say that anywhere is a “shithole”, which is a term I’ve heard countless times applied to countless places, including by Western travelers in India, to places in India, including Delhi. I really don’t like or approve of the use of that term. I also think that there is a school of thought that pushes back against cynical and paternalistic ideas like the “shithole” school of thought in defense of the autonomy, agency, capabilities, history, and cultural richness inherent in every single place. I completely believe that these qualities are paramount, and that every place, city, and community is worth understanding and protecting and fighting for. At the same time, I think that those who righteously combat the “shithole” school of thought may pave over many real issues and valid critiques. Delhi is horribly polluted. India is fantastically corrupt. Caste is horrifically oppressive. Many of India’s shortcomings and struggles are the direct legacy of the more than two centuries of British colonization. There are real problems in India, real dehumanizing conditions and millions of struggles for the most basic needs every day. This is rambling and I’m not sure that I’ve really expressed my thoughts as they are formed internally. I guess that the point I’m trying to make here is that “India is complicated”. Who knew? Just musing.  

Upon arrival, I did a half-hearted smattering of sightseeing around the city. I walked through the Red Fort, through Delhi’s biggest knock-off market (no undies this time, sadly), around Delhi’s biggest mosque, and through the maze of Old Delhi, where one can find just about anything you want to buy in the entire world, and more, I’m sure, provided you know who to ask. 

My main purpose in Delhi was to run the 2026 Cognizant Delhi Marathon, on January 22nd, and to get a sick ass tattoo on January 23rd. The marathon started at 4am, mostly to beat the heat. I took a room at a hotel close to the start/finish point, the Jaharawal Nehru Stadium. The day before, I taxied to a Decathlon warehouse store out in the sticks to pick up a cheap running vest, some gels, and a soft flask. I packed up everything, reserved my uber for a 2:45am pickup, and tucked in for a fitful couple hours of sleep. Sadly, my shoulder sublexed in my sleep and was still aching like a mf when I got dropped off at the start line. It was about 50 degrees, and the AQI was 285. Boston averages about 40, though Delhi sometimes hits the quadruple digits in the late fall. 

An ill-informed aside on air quality. Delhi regularly ranks as the city in India with the worst air quality, and top 5 worst air qualities in the world. This rating changes throughout the year, in concert with the agricultural cycle, with the worst air in the autumn, after the harvest. To the Northwest of Delhi are Punjab and Chandigarh, two of the most agriculturally productive states in India. These states rely on using monsoon-replenished groundwater reserves to irrigate their crops. With India growing, the demand on this groundwater became higher and higher, and the government created a short window of time in which farmers are allowed to draw on the ground water. This restriction made the harvest season considerably more rushed, and to save time, farmers began clearing their fields with fire instead of by hand or machine. Combined with a general increase in machine agriculture since the 80’s, the air quality of Delhi takes a massive blow. These days, one in seven deaths in Delhi is linked to air pollution (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation), and more than 200,000 acute respiratory illnesses were documented in Delhi hospitals in 2022-2024 (BBC)

Anyways, back to the marathon I’m about to run in this air. About an hour I spent milling about, watching other people do their warmups, stretching. I’ve long felt the benefits of a good stretch out, but for the life of me, I can’t fathom doing half an hour of sprints to warm up before a marathon. I feel like we’re going to be plenty warm soon enough, right? Who am I to judge– in my tired state of fascination with everything going on around me, I forgot to stretch basically at all!

Before I knew it, the thousands of other marathoners were lining up, waddling in synchronous to the start line, and I was jogging. My plan was simple–start with a solid pace for the first half, at about a 4-hour finishing pace, and then see where we go from there, with a solid cushion. My longest training run had been about 12 miles around Central Park in Jaipiur, with 8-ish mile jogs in Chennai, Jodhpur, and Jaisalmer, and a half-marathon at home before the trip. So, yeah, not the most preparation. 

Honestly, the entire marathon had no right to go as well as it did. For the entire first half, I was able to sustain my intended pace, and I felt physically pretty fine. Mentally, I felt like I almost completely blacked out. All of the thousands of half-marathoners started exactly 2 hours after us, so around mile 13 I was wading through a massive crowd of runners. If I had wanted to pickup the pace, I couldn’t have. Good thing I didn’t! A few miles later, the sun rose, and I began to feel the fatigue. I did some rough but, by this point, well-practiced mental math, (.6 mi/km, 1.6km/mi, and various pace calculations), and realized that I really didn’t have to keep running. Walking at just a moderately brisk pace would get me across the finish line with plenty of wiggle room for the 6-hour cutoff, spare me any potential overuse strains of injuries, and let me soak in this singular experience for a while longer. Plus, to be honest, I just didn’t feel like freaking running anymore! 

So I took out my headphones and walked it out, jogging in spurts every now and then, and actually *running* the last mile or so, now brushing shoulders with the 10k’ers and the 5k fun-runners, darting through them, trying not to trip myself or anyone else. I crossed the finish line at 9:11am, with a time of 5 hours 10 minutes or so. Far from my greatest athletic performance, but hey, I did it! And it is quite a thing to celebrate! To celebrate, I pretty much stayed in bed, chugged water, and took a series of brief but steamy showers (the water heater in my hotel room had a capacity of about 2 minutes of hot water), resting my tired legs and doing my best to soothe my scorched sinuses. 

The next day was much the same, and I spent most of the day sitting for a pretty awesome chest tattoo, hostage in the chair for much of it while a longwinded friend of the studio told me about the hostel he was starting and his personal philosophy of the world, a marathon in its own right. 

The next day, my time in Delhi was up, and I caught my train to Punjab.