January 12, 2008

Day Eight: Delhi, Apollo Hospitals, & Journey to Agra
In the morning we left MDI at 8:30 to get to see Qutub Minar, the world's tallest brick minaret, where were greeted by the world's most excited schoolchildren. We stopped by the Bahai temple famous for its architecture resembling a lotus flower and India Gate, where we saw our first camel and our one millionth youngster trying to sell us trinkets.
Travelling to Apollo hospitals was a treat and a challenge, as we had sufficient time to scope the environs fighting traffic. We passed two ancient mausoleums with domed tops, both about the size of the presidential monuments in DC. We also passed some child beggars that had developed their own circus. Rather than stand at stoplights with a cardboard sign to invoke sympathy and guilt like the American homeless, these children put on a show worthy of compensation.
We pulled up to Apollo Hospital in Delhi, surrounded like most of urban India with congested traffic, the poor making do how they can, and dilapidated buildings, to see a busy scene of cars unloading and crowds moving through the lobby. A sign greeted us stating that Apollo Hospitals Group is the first Indian hospital to be accredited with international standards. Everything we saw reflected that fact, from the nurse/patient ratios, overall cleanliness, use of hi-tech equipment, and quality of caring employees. We learned about the hospital's structure from a senior manager and viewed a background video before interacting with the hospital's managing director, the equivalent of a CEO, the first white American we had visited. We then toured the modern facility, which included meeting the chief cardiologist. Notes on the meeting will follow, but the key takeaways are that I would be totally comfortable coming to Apollo for a major surgery, and I have mixed feelings about their profit strategy of serving the upper echelon of society. While they designate 100 out of 600 beds for charity, they operate a retail model whereby you pay in advance for all non-emergency services, and pricing puts most care out of reach for the bottom of the pyramid.
Our travel to Agra was slowed by the endemic traffic, but I did get to see a cornucopia of domesticated animals amongst grass huts neighbored by tall offices of large multi-national corporations. I saw my first peacock, along with pigs, dogs, mules, vultures, and of course cows. The trip, originally slated for four hours took about six and a half, including a stop to get beer and watch Steve get chased by a cow and use the restrooms of a motel where I bought a juice box of mango nectar. We arrived at Taj View in Agra at about 10PM, and after dropping our things in our rooms we chowed on the dinner buffet of Indian treats until we had gotten our 900 rupees worth of value. For me this included hot and sour soup, a salad of exotic fruits, a heaping plate of all of their vegetarian dishes, and three trips to the dessert table. It was healthy, mind you, because it was all vegetarian.