Do WE care? . .. .

[Guest guest]

Dear friends

Forwarding u a mail which I recently received.

Please send in ur reactions.

 

Reflections on India

 Kelley 

http://www.seanpaulkelley.com/?p=620

       

 

If you are Indian, or of Indian descent, I must preface this post with a clear

warning: you are not going to like what I have to say. My criticisms may be very

hard to stomach. But consider them as the hard words and loving advice of a good

friend. Someone who’s being honest with you and wants nothing from you. These

criticisms apply to all of India except Kerala and the places I didn’t visit,

except that I have a feeling it applies to all of India, except as I mentioned

before, Kerala. Lastly, before anyone accuses me of Western Cultural

Imperialism, let me say this: if this is what India and Indians want, then hey,

who am I to tell them differently. Take what you like and leave the rest. In the

end it doesn’t really matter, as I get the sense that Indians, at least many

upper class Indians, don’t seem to care and the lower classes just don’t

know any better, what with Indian culture being so intense and pervasive on

the sub-continent. But

here goes, nonetheless.

 

 

India is a mess. It’s that simple, but it’s also quite complicated. I’ll

start with what I think are India’s four major problems–the four most

preventing India from becoming a developing nation–and then move to some of

the ancillary ones. 

 

 

First, pollution. In my opinion the filth, squalor and all around pollution

indicates a marked lack of respect for India by Indians. I don’t know how

cultural the filth is, but it’s really beyond anything I have ever

encountered.  At times the smells, trash, refuse and excrement are like a

garbage dump. Right next door to the Taj Mahal was a pile of trash that smelled

so bad, was so foul as to almost ruin the entire Taj experience. Delhi,

Bangalore and Chennai to a lesser degree were so very polluted as to make me

physically ill. Sinus infections, ear infection, bowels churning was an all to

common experience in India. Dung, be it goat, cow or human fecal matter was

common on the streets. In major tourist areas filth was everywhere, littering

the sidewalks, the roadways, you name it. Toilets in the middle of the road, men

urinating and defecating anywhere, in broad daylight. Whole villages are plastic

bag wastelands. Roadsides are choked by it. Air

quality that can hardly be called quality. Far too much coal and far to few

unleaded vehicles on the road. The measure should be how dangerous the air is

for one’s health, not how good it is. People casually throw trash in the

streets, on the roads. The only two cities that could be considered sanitary in

my journey were Trivandrum–the capital of Kerala–and Calicut. I don’t know

why this is. But I can assure you that at some point this pollution will cut

into India’s productivity, if it already hasn’t. The pollution will hobble

India’s growth path, if that indeed is what the country wants. (Which I

personally doubt, as India is far too conservative a country, in the small

‘c’ sense.)

 

 

The second issue, infrastructure, can be divided into four subcategories: roads,

rails and ports and the electrical grid. The electrical grid is a joke. Load

shedding is all too common, everywhere in India. Wide swaths of the country

spend much of the day without the electricity they actually pay for. With out

regular electricity, productivity, again, falls. The ports are a joke.

Antiquated, out of date, hardly even appropriate for the mechanized world of

container ports, more in line with the days of longshoremen and the like. Roads

are an equal disaster. I only saw one elevated highway that would be considered

decent inThailand, much less Western Europe or America. And I covered fully

two thirds of the country during my visit. There are so few dual carriage way

roads as to be laughable. There are no traffic laws to speak of, and if there

are, they are rarely obeyed, much less enforced. A drive that should take an

hour takes three. A drive that should

take three takes nine. The buses are at least thirty years old, if not older.

Everyone in India, or who travels in India raves about the railway system.

Rubbish. It’s awful. Now, when I was there in 2003 and then late 2004 it was

decent. But in the last five years the traffic on the rails has grown so quickly

that once again, it is threatening productivity. Waiting in line just to ask a

question now takes thirty minutes. Routes are routinely sold out three and four

days in advance now, leaving travelers stranded with little option except to

take the decrepit and dangerous buses. At least fifty million people use the

trains a day in India. 50 million people! Not surprising that waitlists of 500

or more people are common now. The rails are affordable and comprehensive but

they are overcrowded and what with budget airlines popping up in India and

lowers classes are left to deal with the overutilized rails and quality suffers.

No one seems to give a shit.

Seriously, I just never have the impression that the Indian government really

cares. Too interested in buying weapons from Russia, Israel and the US I

guess.

 

 

 

The last major problem in India is an old problem and can be divided into two

parts that’ve been two sides of the same coin since government was invented:

bureaucracy and corruption. It take triplicates to register into a hotel. To get

a SIM card for one’s phone is like wading into a jungle of red-tape and

photocopies one is not likely to emerge from in a good mood, much less satisfied

with customer service. Getting train tickets is a terrible ordeal, first you

have to find the train number, which takes 30 minutes, then you have to fill in

the form, which is far from easy, then you have to wait in line to try and make

a reservation, which takes 30 minutes at least and if you made a single mistake

on the form back you go to the end of the queue, or what passes for a queue in

India. The government is notoriously uninterested in the problems of the

commoners, too busy fleecing the rich, or trying to get rich themselves in some

way shape or form. Take

the trash for example, civil rubbish collection authorities are too busy taking

kickbacks from the wealthy to keep their areas clean that they don’t have the

time, manpower, money or interest in doing their job. Rural hospitals are

perennially understaffed as doctors pocket the fees the government pays them,

never show up at the rural hospitals and practice in the cities instead.

 

 

I could go on for quite some time about my perception of India and its problems,

but in all seriousness, I don’t think anyone in India really cares. And that,

to me, is the biggest problem. India is too conservative a society to want to

change in any way. Mumbai, India’s financial capital is about as filthy,

polluted and poor as the worst city imaginable in Vietnam, or Indonesia–and

being more polluted than Medan, in Sumatra is no easy task. The biggest rats I

have ever seen were in Medan!

 

One would expect a certain amount of, yes, I am going to use this word,

backwardness, in a country that hasn’t produced so many Nobel Laureates,

nuclear physicists, imminent economists and entrepreneurs. But India has all

these things and what have they brought back to India with them? Nothing. The

rich still have their servants, the lower castes are still there to do the dirty

work and so the country remains in stasis. It’s a shame. Indians and India

have many wonderful things to offer the world, but I’m far from sanguine that

India will amount to much in my lifetime.

 

Now, have at it, call me a cultural imperialist, a spoiled child of the West and

all that.  But remember, I’ve been there. I’ve done it.. And I’ve seen 50

other countries on this planet and none, not even Ethiopia, have as long and

gargantuan a laundry list of problems as India does. And the bottom line is, I

don’t think India really cares. Too complacent and too conservative.

-    ----    - -   -

Kelley is a travel writer, former radio host, and before that an asset

manager for a Wall Street investment bank that is still (barely) alive. He

recently left a fantastic job in Singapore working for Solar Winds, a software

company based out of Austin to travel around the world for a year (or two). He

founded The Agonist, in 2002, which is still considered the top international

affairs, culture and news destination for progressives. He is also the Global

Correspondent for The Young Turks, on satellite radio and Air America.

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