Sorry for the lack of posts.  I’m trying to get caught up while hanging out on the beach in Goa.  Some of these posts have been sitting around my laptop for a long while.

The most famous sight in India is the Taj Mahal.  Every tourist visits it.  It’s one of the wonders of the world.  Made out of translucent white marble, it’s a fantastically beautiful memorial to Shah Jahan’s third wife, Mumtaz.  It was also absurdly expensive.  Marble and precious stones were transported from across India and Asia to build it.  At the time, the Mughal empire in India was the richest empire in the world.  Perhaps Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal due to his pure love for his wife and a willingness to accept any cost to build the perfect tomb.  Or maybe he was investing in the future of india, knowing that someday foreign tourists would pay a lot of money to visit this monument.

The Taj Mahal admission fee is the perfect example of the tourist tax that frustrates many foreign visitors to India.  The fee to enter the Taj Mahal is 750 rupees for foreign tourists (about 15 dollars) and 20 rupees for Indian citizens.  The per capita income of the average Indian is about 1068 USD, whereas the per capita income of the average American is about 44 times that at 47000 USD.  So, the entrance fee is about right if you compare per capita incomes.  But is this moral or fair?  Should foreigners pay 32 times what locals pay?  It certainly makes sense that the poor of India should be able to visit their own monuments, so I can’t really begrudge the 20 rupee price tag.  That’s still a lot for the average Indian.
If you ask a local, you will generally find that the prices quoted to a tourist in a shop are at least 3-4 times of what an Indian would pay for any particular good.  Taxi drivers hike up their prices very high and as a white guy, I have to work very hard to drive them back down.  But if the government of India thinks it’s OK to charge me 32 times what they charge Indians to visit the same sight, should I not expect a shop owner to charge me 3 times as much for the same item they sell to a local?  The government of the country sanctions the tourist tax by mandating different prices for foreigners, so perhaps I shouldn’t I expect any different from the people of the country.

I hate it when I know the price for something and I can’t get close to it.  I know that other tourists do too.  I’ll walk to a place over a difference in rickshaw price of 10 rupees (about 20 cents.)  We all say “it’s the principle of it.”  But I’ve begun to question that.  I guess Westerners value equal treatment.  We don’t like being treated differently because of our skin color and country of origin.  To us, as Westerners, that’s just wrong and we think that if a taxi driver tried to charge a black man 4 times as much because he was black in the US, that would be discrimination and it would be criminal.

But I’m not sure the moral argument is on our side on this one.  An Indian doing my exact job in Bangalore would probably make about 1/5 of what I make and he would be way richer by Indian standards than I am by American standards.  There are plenty of tourist oriented five star hotels, taxi drivers, and restaurants in India which will charge me almost the same as I would pay in the United States.  But I choose to stay for 6-10 dollars a night, pay 1 dollar for a ride across the city and 2 for an entire meal.  Economically speaking, there is no reason I shouldn’t be able to pay these prices.  But do I have a right to get angry when I can’t get them?  It’s worth 5 times as much to me easily.  I spend 5 dollars for a taxi ride and 10 dollars for a meal in the US and think it’s cheap.  I didn’t walk away from the Taj Mahal at 32 times the price.  It shouldn’t really anger me if poor merchants in India try to get me closer to what I’m willing to pay rather than what everyone else pays.

Prices are driven down by competition.  Theoretically, the driver has to charge me the Indian price if I can bargain him to it because some other driver will give it to me.  There is massive supply in India and limited demand.  It’s not like New York where sometimes I can’t find a taxi.  Usually I can find five of them in one spot, and the biggest annoyance is getting them to stop following me.  So there’s supply and limited demand.  Competition should enable me to get the Indian rate.  The government can charge me 750 for the Taj because it’s not like I can go to the other Taj Mahal across the street.  But drivers set artificial tourist prices and try to keep them up.  I’ve even noticed that drivers form little mini-cartels to price fix for tourists.  If I start to negotiate with one guy, the others sometimes won’t negotiate with me if I walk away.  If I do get a better price from a different guy, he’ll send me back to the first guy with that price.  In the end, it’s in their own best interest to keep the 300% price intact for the other guy so they can get it when the next tourist comes through.  Even if it were economically sound to undercut him to steal his sale, the heavy supply means they spend 90% of their time hanging around, drinking chai together.  Why piss each other off unnecessarily?

The last thing that helps them overcharge me is inequality of information.  I could get the best price if I knew what that price was and I bargained hard.  Most of the time I have no clue.  I get off a bus and I have literally NO IDEA where I am.  Public buses go to the bus stand but they are crowded and slow.  Private buses are much better but they can really drop me anywhere at all.  I’ll be in the city I have a ticket for.  But imagine if a bus dropped me “in New York” and i had to take a taxi with no meter.  These taxi drivers know I don’t know and I know I don’t know.  They can tell me anything and I pretty much have to believe them.  It’s sort of like bargaining for the mystery prize behind door number three.  I don’t know what I’m buying, I absolutely have to have it, but damn if I’ll pay more than a dollar for it.  It’s not a strong bargaining position.

If my maximum price for an item would realistically be 10 dollars in America, it stands to reason that if it were in short supply, I’d pay the same in India.  If I can get it for 40 cents in India, then the gap between what I’d be willing to pay and what people are willing to sell for is pretty huge.  The price I do pay could land anywhere in there.  I think I should pay 40 cents because I think that’s the market rate.  Usually the price will tend towards the seller’s minimum price because if he doesn’t give me it, I can find someone else who will.  That’s an economic reality of the marketplace.  But I think most people will agree that while the market is a mechanism which sorts out the going rate for something, it’s neither a moral mechanism nor a particularly fair one.  It’s just how things work.  I don’t have a right to be angry when someone tries to “cheat” me because he’s not breaking a moral code.  He’s just trying to get a better price.  It’s good business if he can pull it off.  If I can find an alternate supplier in the market to give me what I want at the market price, then I’ve just utilized the economic reality to minimize my cost.  Neither of us is being immoral.  Maybe because bargaining is not part of our normal business, we get too attached to the emotion of arguing over price and that’s a part of why we take prices personally.

These were the thoughts that were going through my mind in Agra when I visited the Taj Mahal.  I don’t think there’s much to say about the Taj Mahal.  We’ve all seen pictures of it.  It’s quite impressive.  I also visited Agra Fort which was the capital of the Mughal Empire at one point.  What I’ve learned about Mughals is that they really loved changing the capital.  I think they liked building forts and palaces.  I’ve seen the Red Fort in Dehi (once the capital of the empire,)  the fort in Agra (also a capital) and after Agra, I saw Fatehpur Sikri, the capital built by Akbar.

Akbar is a personal favorite of mine.  He was a secularist Muslim leader of India back when secularism didn’t exist in Europe.  He had frequent meetings between the leaders of all faiths in the country and even tried to institute his own religion, which was a synthesis of many religions.  He married a Hindu, Muslim and Christian wife and built a different palace for each in his fort capital. His synthesis religion failed, the same as his capital and his attempts at secularism.  With all the associations we have of India with religion, it’s interesting to see that Akbar was able to make a secular government so early in Indian history.

After Agra and Fatehpur Sikri, I visited Bharatpur to see the bird sanctuary.  It really was for the birds.  The failure of the monsoon early in the season meant that the water regions weren’t very watery, the migratory birds hadn’t shown up and many of the local birds had looked for a different place to hang out.  There were a few birds, but the coolest thing I saw was a monitor lizard that came within about 10 feet of me as I was trying to take a picture of a crane.  Check out the picture.  The thing was pretty big and I definitely was way more excited about it than i probably should have been.  I took about 30 pictures and unfortunately that’s the best one.