So, as I mentioned
previously, I had some serious concerns about going to India and expected to find it a huge culture shock, despite the fact that I've routinely traveled to the developing world over the last decade or so. I pictured endless slums and people living in abject poverty without proper sanitation or healthcare. I pictured lepers begging for money and dense crowds jostling and molesting you in the streets. Somehow, setting off to India made me feel like I'd never before left the US, much less that I'd been living abroad for a year or that I routinely jetted off to countries much more foreign to the average American than India.
Given my level of trepidation about traveling to India, I figure the only way I can do penance for my previously held erroneous beliefs is to write about India in agonizing detail. Or at least until I get bored and/or finish sorting through my photos. So anyway, I landed in Delhi in the midafternoon and noticed that the impressively modern airport was completely empty. There didn't seem to be anyone waiting at gates to get on or off planes and when I approached the immigration counter my challenge was in finding an immigration officer who was awake since I was the only person at the eVisa counter. As I exited the airport to look for my taxi driver, I expected to be bombarded by hundreds of offers of taxis and drivers and was mentally preparing myself for the onslaught - instead, there were only a handful of people standing outside the airport and not a single one offered me a ride or a tour or anything else.
The drive from the airport to my hotel was utterly terrifying. Lanes and traffic rules are mere suggestions and before we got out of the airport my taxi was almost in a collision with another car as both were trying to share the same lane (although I use the term "lane" loosely - it's probably more accurate that both cars were simultaneously trying to share the same spot in the road and neither was willing to back down). Cars meandered across the roads, including into the oncoming traffic, and it was not unusual to see cars traveling the wrong way down the road. At stoplights cars squeeze in as close together as possible, maneuvering into open spots with mere centimeters to spare on either side of the car. And to add to the chaos, there were also tons of motorbikes, bicycles, horse carts, human carts, pedestrians, tuk-tuks, wild animals, etc. The only saving grace seems to be that no one drives very fast, so at least a collision would likely only result in a fender bender rather than death. I later learned that all one has to do to get a driver's license in India is pay for it (rather than take a driving test), which makes so much sense now.
On the drive in I also noticed that men were peeing everywhere, with seemingly no concern for privacy or sanitation. After about a week in I noticed some of the public urinals, which were basically just open stalls on the streets for men to pee in, but again without any real privacy. I expected the pervasive smell in India to be that of curry-scented BO - instead, urine is the single scent that stands out in my mind from the trip and it's simply because men pee wherever it's convenient. And, all things considered, I'd rather there be rivers of pee than
rivers of poo in the streets.
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| Happy as a pig in shit in the streets of Jaipur |
All things considered, however, my culture "shock" was minimal. For starters, I didn't actually see any of the slums that movies have led me to believe exist in every Indian city. I'm sure the slums are awful and depressing, but they didn't pervade the entirety of the cities quite like I expected. In the three cities I visited (Delhi, Jaipur and Agra) and in the handful of train stations I was in, I did see homeless and poverty-stricken people. Poverty and homelessness is always sobering, whether it's in an American city or an Indian train station, but I can honestly say that what I saw in India wasn't any worse than what I've seen in other developing nations or even on Skid Row in Los Angeles. In fact, I've seen more homeless people poop on the streets in the US than in India (I actually only saw one small child poop on the streets in India, though there was a distressingly large pile of poop on the stairs in one of the train stations - I'm still hoping that poop-pile was caused by a very dexterous cow capable of maneuvering up and down train station stairs rather than a human, but I digress). I still think the worst poverty I've ever seen or experienced was in Cambodia and what I saw in India doesn't even begin to compare to that.
Speaking of cows, they're everywhere in India and are not eaten by Hindus. It's not correct to say that Hindus worship cows, but one of the religious reasons that cows have a protected status is because the Lord Shiva rode a bull (the non-religious reasons are pretty practical - live cows can sustain life far longer than cow meat by providing milk and dung, both of which are important in Indian rural life). It's one thing in the villages to see cows freely roaming around, but it's another thing to see free-roaming cows in cities. Especially when those cows choose to lie down in the middle of busy roads or stand around chewing cud at a busy intersection. Cows (and water buffalo and dogs and donkeys and goats) also add tremendously to the utter chaos of driving in India. Some of the cows have homes that they return to at the end of the day for some more substantive food, but other cows have been disowned. Apparently Indian superstition maintains that it's really bad for a cow to die in one's home, so when cows stop producing milk or start to get old, many Indians will just release the cows to wander about freely. These cows are still relatively well fed, since in all Indian homes, when a woman bakes
chapatti (Indian bread), the first
chapatti of the evening is made for the wandering cows and the last is made for the stray dogs.
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| A cow, doing what cows do in India. Namely, hanging around and eating stuff. |
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| We watched these cows cross a busy road in Jaipur to then hang out in the street or in the median. Didn't seem at all bothered by the cars rushing past. |
Based on the numbers of stray dogs we saw, you'd need a lot of
chapatti. But unlike other developing nations where the sight of stray animals is enough to make me want to put all my spare income into animal rescue organizations, strays and animals in general in India didn't seem so bad off, especially compared to some of the homeless humans. Over 80% of Indians practice Hinduism or one of Hinduism's splinter religions (Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism), all of which believe in some form of karma and the concept that mistreating even an animal could affect one's karma or reincarnation (in fact, some devout Jains are so concerned with the sanctity of life that they cover their faces so as to avoid inadvertently swallowing and killing a bug and others carry peacock feathers to dust off places to sit to avoid sitting on an insect and killing it). While a lot of the dogs looked mangy or hungry, none looked beaten or scared of humans and we often saw stray dogs living alongside the "stray" humans on the streets. In fact, the only animals in India that truly tugged at my heartstrings were the elephants, many of which have been forced into terrible working conditions as a result of the tourist industry.
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| Cows, pigs and dogs happily cohabiting a trash pile together in Ranthambore. |
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| The pink gates of Jaipur, as well as the crush of humanity and pigs, dogs and cows happily munching on trash - totally a standard scene in India. |
We also spent a few days in an Indian village, Tordi Garh, which I found fascinating. Village life in India resembled a lot of the village life I've seen in Africa or Southeast Asia, though the Indian homes were surprisingly immaculate. Our guides pointed out that while the streets were dirty with trash or animal dung, the insides of the homes generally had tiled floors that were kept very clean by the women of the families. Most if not all of the houses had running water and electricity; while we saw some men bathing in public water spigots, our guide told us that was likely due to personal preference rather than necessity, since many of the home showers are cramped and hot and can be uncomfortable to bathe in.
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| A village water pump in Tordi Garh. We saw these all over the place and people used these for washing, drinking and bathing. |
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| A house in Tordi Garh - the paintings on the wall were to advertise a wedding, thereby inviting all the villagers to the wedding or anyone who happened to pass by the house |
Even more impressive is the government's promotion of the villages. One thing that's easy to forget is that while many in India live below the poverty line, the economy of India is booming and the government is not necessarily poor. We learned that schooling in the villages is free and children receive a free lunch, which also helps promote attendance in the schools. There are forms of village welfare where poverty-stricken families can receive deep discounts on certain food products and there are specific jobs offered to low income families (i.e., help build a road for 2 hours tomorrow and receive a full day's wage for 2 hours of work), not to mention all the charitable religious organizations. There were free medical clinics and other civil services that sort of put what we have in America to shame.
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| The streets of Tordi Garh |
All of which begged the question of why so many people live on the streets in the cities or in the slums or in the train stations rather than in the villages. Some leave the villages in the hopes of a more exciting life in the city (or, as frequently happens with teens, they want to be Bollywood stars), some move to the cities for jobs and then are too ashamed to return to the villages when things don't work out, some people don't want to be farmers in villages and some people just don't want to work for a living. But you could ask the same question and get many of the same answers if you asked why there are so many homeless people in expensive American cities - I often wondered why the homeless people I saw freezing in Boston winters didn't find some way to head down South and find a nice warm place to squat in Georgia (not to mention the huge savings in the cost of living in the South vs. a northern city).
So, long story short - India was a lot of things, but it wasn't necessarily a culture shock for an experienced traveler. And it wasn't any worse than most other developing nations and even had a lot of governmental and social programs that could be compared with similar programs in the US.
