Let me tell you a story that has nothing to do with India. At least on face value.

In 1962, Don Richardson took his wife Carol and their newborn baby to New Guinea to work as medical missionaries with a cannibalistic tribe known as the Sawis. There was certainly a great deal of need for them there – the Sawi tribe was constantly suffering from malaria, hepatitis, and outbreaks of dysentery.

Like many missionaries, the Richardsons’ goal was to use medicine as an inroad to spread the gospel, but getting the message out turned out to be more difficult than they could have expected.

We’re lounging in a swanky hotel restaurant in the Delhi airport, trying to wave down a waiter who can give us the WiFi password. Mike has chased after wireless internet on this trip with a voraciousness that Ishmael might feel a need to document, and his dedication has led us to this exceedingly comfortable room, overlooking the lights of the city, drinking $4 Diet Cokes.

As is tradition on any foreign trip, I’ve become obsessed by one particular product. My love of regional soda insists that I love “Thums Up Soda”, a generic Coke product that dominates the marketplace here. Everywhere I look, billboards insist that I drink the soda, if only to ‘Taste The Thunder!’ The soda itself is rather unremarkable, I must say, but the logo’s great. I’m shopping for t-shirts as we speak.

Without realizing it, I’ve suddenly gotten my feet under me here in India. For the first few days, it was panic and exhaustion and constant movement, and I barely had my wits about me. It didn’t help much that I’m pretty certain I got sunstroke that first day – I turned a particularly luminescent shade of red, and my notes from that day have the vague disconnection of someone battling dementia. Squinting at my shaky handwriting, the only two things I could make out were “boy, the Indians sure like Gandhi a lot,” and “Rob just called me a lobster.” Heady stuff.

A young man here introduced me to the story of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar today. I was unfamiliar with him until now, though I’d noticed the statues of him scattered along the streets. According to everyone else in the conversation, the Indian government tries to keep people in the West from becoming too aware of him. That’s the sort of statement that normally sends me scurrying to Scopes, but the fellow telling me about him had just finished getting his masters degree on Ambedkar’s influence, which makes me inclined to believe him (also, I don’t have a lot of time to trawl the internet out here).