You get off the elevator on the ground floor at 5:30 in the morning.
Here loud, quite terrible, Ameican music and world pop greets you at far too loud a volume.
Is this the Holiday Inn in Delhi or elsewhere? Does it matter? With this music and as the AC hums?
Everywhere in the world that offers the bubble environment offers it badly, though, of course, at different price points.
Yet always as if no one who does the work, like the guy at the desk who must stand and listen to this crap for another hour until the guests get up and start checking out, has no ears or opinions or say in what is a self evidentally terrible aesthetic envornment.
And yet mostly what I notice in such places is how no one notices.
Anyway, after avoiding yesterday’s 108-degree heat by staying safely ensconced in the hotel, and after this morning’s breakfast and coffee, it will be time to depart a city where well over thirty million people--thirty million--live and listen and cook in their world of cement and cars and pollution, all free from my concerns or the poppy-happy song that plays now in this empty lobby: “We can live with God on our side . . . we won’t be divided . . .”