Sunday, January 15, 2006
The Nizam's Jewels
After spending all morning walking around taking pictures of my new surroundings I met up with another expat from Dublin and a couple of people from the office to go to the Salar Jung Museum to see the Nizam's Jewels, a collection of gold, diamond, pearl, and other precious stones and materials worth an estimated US $4.4 billion.
The jewels exhibit is kept in a separate wing of the museum behind a huge vault door, with lots of armed guards and security checkpoints outside so when you go inside you choose either the normal museum tour or the jewels. There is a separate line, separate tickets, etc. Everyone I was with raved about the museum's normal exhibits but since the jewels are only here temporarily, on loan from Delhi, and everyone else had already been to museum before, we went to see the jewels.
Buying the tickets to the exhibition was actually the first time I was exposed to an interesting local phenomenon that seems to be very prevalent here. In the U.S. tickets are usually divided into categories based on age, so you will have child tickets, adult tickets and senior tickets. In India, ticket prices are divided into two categories - low price for Indians, high price for foreigners. The sign above the counter for the jewel exhibit actually said, "Indian: Rs 50, Non-Indian: Rs 500", which is quite a markup. Granted 50 rupees is only about $1 and 500 just over $10 which isn't a horribly big deal, the notion that you pay a different price based on race is a hard one to swallow, and apparently this applies to train and plane tickets as well as local attractions so it's a fairly wide-spread practice.
Interestingly enough most of the other expats I spoke with don't seem to mind this blatant form of racial discrimination. I took it in stride as well, after all being a Westerner here pretty much guarantees a near-celebrity status treatment at most places, being waved through police checkpoints, welcomed in places you might normally have to wait in line or need special invitation, etc. The result is clearly much more "positive" discrimation, and the prices here are already so low that even with the foreigner markup things are still cheaper than back home.
However, the positive treatment is easier to accept due to the fact that it's usually done on a very personal level, people just seem more interested in you which is to be expected due to the fact that you have an unusual appearance from what they're used to. The separate prices on the other hand are an institutionalized way of treating people differently based on race which is not a far leap from "separate but equal" facilities to my Americanized mind. I suppose technically it's based on Indian citizenship but in reality no one checks your passport unless you look a certain way. Anyway, back to the Nizam's Jewels exhibit...
After we bought our separate but equal tickets, checked our cameras and cell phones into a locker (no pictures of the jewels are permitted), and went through at least two separate pat-down sessions to ensure we weren't armed, we finally made it into the first part of the exhibition. The main part of the exhibit, the jewel room, is a large square room with a huge vault door as the only point of entry and the jewel display cases along the walls. People are let in, 50 or so at a time, the door is locked and they get 30 minutes to go around the room and look at the jewelry. However, before you get to see the main event you get to wait in another room which contains a few manequins wearing traditional clothing and glass jewerly and several dozen posters along the walls with pictures of the Nizam rulers (to whom the jewels belonged) along with descriptions of their reign and accomplishments. Going around this room and reading the posters was the first, but definitely not last, time here that I realized just how little is taught about this country in the United States. I recognized absolutely none of the places or names mentioned there, despite the fact that they made up an important part of Indian history, at least judging from the size of the territory these guys ruled.
After waiting for some time in this "waiting room" we finally made it to the vault. However, just as we got to the door the vault became filled so we were looking at another 30 minutes of standing around, this time with nothing to do since we've already looked at all the posters. That was until the guards noticed me and the other expat and ushered us in despite the fact that it wasn't yet our turn (all our Indian companions got in as well). That alone was pretty strange, but in addition to getting to go in out of turn, once inside we were allowed to roam the room freely and look at whatever display case we wanted at any given time while the Indian visitors were made to go around in an organized manner from one display case to the next. I guess maybe it was only fair, seeing as how we paid 10 times more in admission than anyone else there, but it was definitely an example of the "positive" discrimination we receive here.
Overall, I actually wasn't that impressed by the exhibit. I supposed it's hard to process the fact that the little shiny things you're looking at are worth a collective $4.4 billion. The Jacob Diamon, 3rd largest in the world, was pretty impressive however. They had it mounted on a spinning pedestal with a light source above so it looked a like a not-so-little disco ball.
After our 30 minutes of gawking were up, we split up with our Indian companions and went down to the Charminar, a large historical monument/mosque, surrounded by a very lively and crowded market. It was getting late in the day so the mosque was closed but we took a bunch of pictures, including a very strange one of a billboard with George W. Bush and a bunch of Arabic writing, which I'm now dying to get translated. It was a pretty interesting place, and the traffic in the surrounding area was completely insane, but after staying for a short while we headed off to Mebaz, a local tailor shop that's extremely popular with all the expats, to get some tailor-made suits!
The jewels exhibit is kept in a separate wing of the museum behind a huge vault door, with lots of armed guards and security checkpoints outside so when you go inside you choose either the normal museum tour or the jewels. There is a separate line, separate tickets, etc. Everyone I was with raved about the museum's normal exhibits but since the jewels are only here temporarily, on loan from Delhi, and everyone else had already been to museum before, we went to see the jewels.
Buying the tickets to the exhibition was actually the first time I was exposed to an interesting local phenomenon that seems to be very prevalent here. In the U.S. tickets are usually divided into categories based on age, so you will have child tickets, adult tickets and senior tickets. In India, ticket prices are divided into two categories - low price for Indians, high price for foreigners. The sign above the counter for the jewel exhibit actually said, "Indian: Rs 50, Non-Indian: Rs 500", which is quite a markup. Granted 50 rupees is only about $1 and 500 just over $10 which isn't a horribly big deal, the notion that you pay a different price based on race is a hard one to swallow, and apparently this applies to train and plane tickets as well as local attractions so it's a fairly wide-spread practice.
Interestingly enough most of the other expats I spoke with don't seem to mind this blatant form of racial discrimination. I took it in stride as well, after all being a Westerner here pretty much guarantees a near-celebrity status treatment at most places, being waved through police checkpoints, welcomed in places you might normally have to wait in line or need special invitation, etc. The result is clearly much more "positive" discrimation, and the prices here are already so low that even with the foreigner markup things are still cheaper than back home.
However, the positive treatment is easier to accept due to the fact that it's usually done on a very personal level, people just seem more interested in you which is to be expected due to the fact that you have an unusual appearance from what they're used to. The separate prices on the other hand are an institutionalized way of treating people differently based on race which is not a far leap from "separate but equal" facilities to my Americanized mind. I suppose technically it's based on Indian citizenship but in reality no one checks your passport unless you look a certain way. Anyway, back to the Nizam's Jewels exhibit...
After we bought our separate but equal tickets, checked our cameras and cell phones into a locker (no pictures of the jewels are permitted), and went through at least two separate pat-down sessions to ensure we weren't armed, we finally made it into the first part of the exhibition. The main part of the exhibit, the jewel room, is a large square room with a huge vault door as the only point of entry and the jewel display cases along the walls. People are let in, 50 or so at a time, the door is locked and they get 30 minutes to go around the room and look at the jewelry. However, before you get to see the main event you get to wait in another room which contains a few manequins wearing traditional clothing and glass jewerly and several dozen posters along the walls with pictures of the Nizam rulers (to whom the jewels belonged) along with descriptions of their reign and accomplishments. Going around this room and reading the posters was the first, but definitely not last, time here that I realized just how little is taught about this country in the United States. I recognized absolutely none of the places or names mentioned there, despite the fact that they made up an important part of Indian history, at least judging from the size of the territory these guys ruled.
After waiting for some time in this "waiting room" we finally made it to the vault. However, just as we got to the door the vault became filled so we were looking at another 30 minutes of standing around, this time with nothing to do since we've already looked at all the posters. That was until the guards noticed me and the other expat and ushered us in despite the fact that it wasn't yet our turn (all our Indian companions got in as well). That alone was pretty strange, but in addition to getting to go in out of turn, once inside we were allowed to roam the room freely and look at whatever display case we wanted at any given time while the Indian visitors were made to go around in an organized manner from one display case to the next. I guess maybe it was only fair, seeing as how we paid 10 times more in admission than anyone else there, but it was definitely an example of the "positive" discrimination we receive here.
Overall, I actually wasn't that impressed by the exhibit. I supposed it's hard to process the fact that the little shiny things you're looking at are worth a collective $4.4 billion. The Jacob Diamon, 3rd largest in the world, was pretty impressive however. They had it mounted on a spinning pedestal with a light source above so it looked a like a not-so-little disco ball.
After our 30 minutes of gawking were up, we split up with our Indian companions and went down to the Charminar, a large historical monument/mosque, surrounded by a very lively and crowded market. It was getting late in the day so the mosque was closed but we took a bunch of pictures, including a very strange one of a billboard with George W. Bush and a bunch of Arabic writing, which I'm now dying to get translated. It was a pretty interesting place, and the traffic in the surrounding area was completely insane, but after staying for a short while we headed off to Mebaz, a local tailor shop that's extremely popular with all the expats, to get some tailor-made suits!
