Business Class is class

My flight from Chicago to New Delhi was 14 hours long and I was worried that it would be awful, so I used some extra miles to upgrade to business class.

It turned out the flight was almost empty so I had a whole row to myself.  Not that it matters because these international business class seats are a marvel of technology.  I think I spent the first hour just converting it back and forth from a seat to a bed and moving around the individual parts and laughing.  I would have been embarassed for myself but no one was really around.

I watched Sunshine Cleaning which was OK, ate my multi-course dinner, turned my chair into a bed, slept for 10 hours, turned my bed into a chair, ate my breakfast and watched X-Men Origins: Wolverine.  My plane flight was pretty much indistinguishable from an evening at home.  I’m a fan.  And in a standard tradition of mine which started with Sideways on the flight to Africa, I missed the end of the movie because the plane landed.  I think it’s a good sign.

Modern India and China are fascinating enigmas to me.  Encompassing a huge percentage of the world’s abject poverty, they trace their origins back to some of the greatest and oldest civilizations on Earth.  India turned back Alexander the Great on his quest to conquer his way to the ends of the earth.  China built huge technology, culture and technology in near solitude, finally exposed to the west by our lust for Chinese worm spit.  During the 1500s, India and China were the two largest economies in the world and together made up almost one half of its GDP.

But somehow when the west began to industrialize and modernize, they did not follow along.  Perhaps it was economic, or due to colonialism, or maybe their traditional culture.  I certainly don’t know, as I’m no expert. . . yet.  Today they are firmly part of the third world, but they are also undergoing vast changes and modernizing at an incredibly rapid rate.  Some people predict that in 50, 30, 20 years they will surpass the United States to become the biggest economies in the world.  They certainly have the manpower.  The two countries together only cover about 8.7% of the land of the earth.  China is smaller than Canada.  India is a little bigger than Argentina. Yet they account for almost 40% of the human population.

Tomorrow I leave the United States to travel in India and China for a year each.  I want to see everything: the history, the land, the people.  I want to learn what I can about all of it, see the trends, and also have a wonderful time.  And it’s my plan to report it all back here on this blog to anyone who cares to follow along.