by Bob Van Leer

  (NEW DELHI, INDIA, May 10, 1995) - The morning began with a visit to the National Museum in New Delhi. New Delhi and Delhi are adjacent to each other, not really separate cities.

  This is an old, old civilization. Artifacts in the museum go back 5000 years. We saw an exhibit of bronze implements, quite well done, dating to 2500 B.C. At that time, Europeans were still breaking bones with rocks.

  The museum building is one of the best-maintained public buildings we have seen in Delhi.

  The museum has a number of collections including: jewelry, arms and armor, paintings and decorative arts. But what impressed us most were the diverse displays of culture. The style is peculiarly Indian and often consists of a frieze of human forms with a half-dozen or more per foot.

  There was one life-size stone statue of a man with a large belly. Our guide, the director of the museum, said there was a tradition that rubbing his belly brought good fortune. The museum tries to discourage the rubbing but the belly looked as if the campaign wasn't making much of an impression.

  After lunch, we visited the Indian Institute of Mass Communications. This school teaches beginning and advanced journalism to Indian students and foreigners.

  The foreign segment impressed me. It is called the Non-aligned News Agency Journalism Course and this year's was the 24th. The students are from South America, Africa, the Arab countries and Southeast Asia. By now, the course has trained approximately a thousand who have gone home and still took to the institute for advice. This appears to be a real way to get "more bang for a buck".

  Journalists are fairly well paid, according to the information we received, and they get some perks with the occupation. One perk mentioned was being able to get a telephone installed because it is needed for business. Yadava said without such preference it takes three to five years to get a phone installed.

  On our way to our last stop of the day, a program of native dancing, we passed India Gate, a huge arch erected as a memorial to the Indians who died in World War I (not II). We were told that 16,000 names of the dead are inscribed on the arch.

  The program of native dancing was interesting, but not exceptional. One of the dancers seemed to go on forever. One of our party said, in a whisper, "She's going for the Guinness Book of Records".

  The hall where the dances were performed is owned by the Parsis religion, whose origin is the Persian Zoroaster sect. One of the buildings on the compound had on it a marble sign that said, "Zoroastrian Fire Temple - Zoroastrians Only". The Parsis apparently control a lot of wealth and have a far greater influence than their small numbers would indicate.

  Tomorrow there will be no meetings. We will spend the day sightseeing. We are going to drive to Agra, about 130 miles from Delhi where the principal attraction is the famed Taj Mahal.