So I just wrote an email to Ben and realized this portion of it might be a good brief update on the trip so far:

I flew into Mumbai a couple days ago, stayed with a guy I met on couch surfing, and flew to Delhi yesterday morning. If one word were to encapsulate India so far it would be paradox. It is the most beautiful, ugly, human, inhuman, sweet smelling and stinking place I have ever been. The list could go way, way on. It also fills the outsider with paradox: mine right now is feeling immensely poetic and utterly speechless. Another way to describe it, more succinctly, would be fucking insane. I couldn't begin to say more than that. It's only 1 in the afternoon, and I've already ridden in four autorickshaws, two cyclerickshaws, a donkey, and a horse carraige (not costing more than a dollar), and walked entirely lost through an endless labyrinth of alleyways lined with shops selling everying on the face of the earth, pushing my way through a shouting throng of men and women and children, stepping over and around dead dogs, human feces, children playing dice, beautiful women in spotless saris crouched in the mud spinning cloth, legless half starved men staring blankly through gaunt eyes muttering unintelligibly and holding up fingerless, filthy stumps of hands...