impressions of india, part 2

my earlier post about India was admittedly, seen through rather rose-colored lenses. so let me clarify my early impressions just a little bit.

when i said people lived ‘organically’ i wasn’t kidding. i was, however, being somewhat euphemistic. “organic” to me has never meant orderly straight clean lines; it has always implied a natural state of disarray, although with a beautiful logic of its own. with that said, i have to point out that things are really messy here. don’t get me started on whether things are ‘messed up.’ that’s another post to come. 0_o

there’s garbage everywhere — on the streets, in piles along the unpaved roads, in front of the hovels and shanties people live in. on the drive to jer’s work, i noticed there were a lot of people kind of randomly squatting along the road, in the fields, anywhere. I had assumed it was just a natural rest squat — you know, where you don’t want to plant your butt anywhere but don’t want to stand any longer. what i hadn’t noticed until jer pointed it out was that their pants were down! they were actually going to the bathroom, and the pots of water next to them was for washing themselves afterwards. This public defecation is starting to change, however, as there is now a local government initiative to install public bathrooms along the streets. The new outhouses seem like they will be nice — they are small brick structures, kind of like the ones you’d see at a campsite, and i saw one that had a pretty mural painted on it. i do wonder whether the country has the infrastructure to handle the kind of en masse water sanitation system, not to mention a sanitation system at all, considering 50% of Mumbai’s residents are without water or electricity, and approximately 600,000 people live in its slums, which are the world’s largest. There is a long way to go.

The contrast between the haves and the have-nots is particularly jarring and astounding. The driver of our rental car (when you rent a car, it comes with a driver cuz there’s no way a foreign driver can hang with India’s traffic habits!) took me to a department store called Saga in Andheri West. The store is six stories tall, with big placards of expensive brands displayed on the outside of its brushed steel and glass windowed exterior. It sits on the banks of a rather pretty little lake, but that’s the only prettiness around it. Everything around the store is the same cement boxes of makeshift shops, and stalls supported by graying sticks of 2x4s, roofed with corrugated steel sheeting, and draped in muddy gray cloth to extend some shade. And this is not an unusual contrast. Driving down the nicer clean roads is quite pleasant, if you keep your eyes on the lush green planters in the center divider. Look to the shoulders and you’ll see the awkward edges of the pavement, which end abruptly and jaggedly into yellow brown dirt, and which are already beginning to engulf shards of the road into its crumbling morass. You’ll see the people walking alongside the road, dodging the rickshaws and cars that appear ready to dive into them at any moment as the vehicles play the rate*time=distance game when they pass each other. And you see the same ramshackle villages along the sides of these main roads, of the people who just happen to live where this thoroughfare goes through. In some ways, they fare better than others who have been cleared out of their slums to make way for new highways. But “development” always carries with it a very high price…

The contrast is also very apparent where we are staying. Everything about our hotel is gorgeous, from the relief murals depicting the story of Ramayana in the Lobby to the marble that exists everywhere — the floor, the staircases, the walls, etc. But right outside are the same shacks and stalls..

To Be Continued…