Dirty Chaos

(Bob:) That’s the description that came to mind after a couple of days in India. Then Luana and I got to the parts that were even worse. Our 6-day visit was only rescued somewhat on our last day during an orphanage visit in the southern state of Kerala on the southwest coast, which is the most literate part of India and also probably the most prosperous. We’ll describe it at greater length in a separate blog entry. We also found many friendly Indians who love the U.S. and love to talk at great length with people from America. But there are also a number of Indians who enjoy ripping off U.S. tourists, including the tourist company that took us to the Taj Mahal (another upcoming blog entry).

But in general, the country struck us as the poorest, filthiest, most inefficient, most chaotic place in the world with a level of income inequality that boggles the mind. When you see the conditions some of these people live under, you want to throw up. In most other countries, if the government allowed these conditions to exist while spending resources on building atomic bombs, the leaders would be dragged out of their offices by mobs and beheaded in a public square. And if that happened in India tomorrow I would be cheering.

Of course, that won’t happen, as 85 percent of Indians are Hindus, and as one of our guides explained to us, the oldest religion on earth is more than a religion, it’s an entire way of life. Most importantly, it’s a social structure that says you are born into your status on earth and you should just accept it. If it’s bad, maybe you’ll have better luck in the next life. In the meantime, just accept your fate and don’t associate with people below you in the social hierarchy, other than to give them orders. As I see it the only solution to all this is education, so that people become more secular and can see the harm their system and religion does to the entire country. Anyway, that’s my take.

We did have a lot of interesting and enjoyable moments that we will describe in other entries, including seeing the sunrise while on the Ganges and watching people doing their ritual bathing, visiting an Indian home, visiting an amazing Indian orphanage, and having Luana almost trampled by a herd of cows at a busy intersection.

But before we get to that let me close this entry with a few stark images:

Imagine so much garbage littering the streets and vacant lots and God knows where else that you begin to think it really must have rained garbage for this much to be around.

Imagine train stations, even in New Delhi, the capital, with the lobby floor covered with sleeping poor people. Then imagine the smaller stations where the rats wander among those people. You become glad when it’s only cockroaches that crawl across your eating table on the trains. Although you worry when you kill that cockroach that since it’s India you may have killed someone’s great uncle.

Imagine a major source for heating and cooking fires being cow pies, with the pies collected and piled for drying in interesting pyramid shapes in many different locations. Imagine being the lucky person who picks up all these pies and carries baskets full of them on your head.

Imagine riding a train for two hours at sunrise from New Delhi to Agra, the site of the Taj Mahal, watching the male villagers come outside the village in the early morning to squat beside the tracks and do their business. It’s like being mooned for two straight hours.

Imagine the city, Varanasi, that the Indians say is the oldest occupied city on earth. Then imagine that nothing has changed in that city in all that time, except that they've never taken out the trash, and now they sell some modern products in the millions of stalls lining the streets, and the streets are now filled mainly with motorbikes, but also with a few cars, and a lot of three-wheeled taxis and pedicabs, all blowing their horns, ringing their bells and with drivers shouting at one another, all at the same time. The level of noise is unimaginable. Oh, and add cows to that street mix everywhere. I wanted to get a picture that had an “LG -- Life’s Good” advertising sign right above people sleeping on the sidewalk, but I couldn’t get it in time.

Imagine a constant level of smell that assaults the senses and that’s also constantly changing, from exhaust to fresh spices to raw sewage to God knows what.
Imagine a heavily overpopulated country with more than a billion people, yet only about half speak the main language, Hindi. About 100 million people speak English, usually as a second language. And the rest of the country speaks more than 20 other languages, with the country divided into states usually on linguistic grounds.
After awhile, as stark image piles on stark image, you begin to think this can’t be real, but it is. It’s India.