India’s Great Leap Forward
I last visited India in about 1993. I stayed in Paharganj, which is more or less in Old Delhi. I stayed three or four days – long enough to visit the Red Fort and make travel arrange to go north to the foothills of the Himalayas.
Now seventeen years later, when I told people we were intending to visit India. I found I had a very similar conversation several times over with various people.
I was told by Indians I met who are living in Leeds, that things have changed in India and that I won’t recognise the place.
One taxi driver told me that people living abroad, such as he was, were sending so much money (in Indian terms) back to India that it had changed the balance of life in the villages fundamentally. Now, instead of a largely subsistence existence, people had spare money, and with money came aspirations.
I wondered whether and how India, with all its technological advances and money sent back home from abroad, could transform itself and its more than one billion people in seventeen years. More particularly I wondered how Delhi could have changed.
I have now had the opportunity to see the great leap forward first hand when we visited the Red Fort in Old Delhi.
The Red Fort is at the eastern end of the street known as Chandni Chowk. The metro station nearest to the Red Fort is also named Chandni Chowk and walking from the metro to the Red Fort is, in one sense, just a walk through a very busy city area.
But it is not just any busy downtown area. It is filthy in a way that only many years of diesel fumes,neglect, and poor living can beat a place down.
Everything is blackened, torn loose, or twisted and barely hanging on. The air pollution is terrible.
The upper floors of the buildings, almost without exception, look as though howitzers or warplanes have attacked them and left them as scarred, blackened shells.
And down below, on the street, the traffic is wild and never-ending. The vehicles are blackened and decrepit. The disrepair, dirt, grime, and the clamour of vehicles assault the senses in a way that nowhere else I have ever visited does. It is so far off the ‘dirt’ Richter scale that it looks like a mistake – like a vision from hell – like a refugee camp years after a total breakdown of civilisation – like Mad Max with a cast of many thousands.
Why?
The question that kept coming into my mind was why? Why continue to live like this?
I exchanged some lovely smiles with people, so it is not as though they have lost their humanity on account of the life they had to lead – quite to the contrary.
I didn’t feel threatened – quite to the contrary – either in the street on in the bazaar streets the run alongside and behind Chandni Chowk.
Moreover, the place is humming with activity and energy – unlike some countries where people’s lives seem to have run out of steam and be waiting for someone or something to wind them up again.
But for all the activity and life-being-lived on the streets of Old Delhi, why live like this?
The answer may be that the people simply don’t see things the way I do. Perhaps their vision of what is near and bothersome and what is far away and not bothersome is different from mine.
After all, my garbage ends up in a landfill, but because I do not have to look at it, I can live without ‘seeing’ it.
And just like I look after my bag and my clothes when I travel, and don’t extend my ‘province’ beyond that, perhaps they do not see what is beyond the province of what they cannot control.
Or perhaps it is simply that they don’t have the means to change things.
But someone does. After all, isn’t this the India of the huge technological leap forward?
We visited the Apple Shop in Ansal Plaza, in the south of Delhi. The plaza is typical of malls in struggling countries – the promise is great but the reality is more scruffy. Once inside a shop, the illusion of wealth and consumer opportunity is sometimes complete, sometimes not – but the real India is always intruding, however much the aspiring classes want to pretend it isn’t.
To find the real India, you just need to walk ten feet from the entrance to the mall. There you will find autorickshaws blackened with diesel fumes, mounds of rubbish by the roadside, vacant lots full of rubbish, broken signs and makeshift shacks.
Haridwar
Since writing the above we are now in Haridwar six hours or so north of Delhi. Haridwar is a town of a quarter of a million, situated on the banks of the River Ganges. It is also one of several pilgrimage centers in India. Every few years, at specific times (February to April 2010 being one of those times) it is visited by upwards of 60 million people who descend on the town to bathe in the Ganges.
At the moment the town is busy but not overcrowded. The devotees are living in makeshift camps outside the town on the opposite bank of the Ganges, and in smaller camps behind the main street here. The camps are cordoned off – not for the eyes of the simply curious.
Of course, the devotees come into town to buy things, so we see them all the time. The predominant color they wear is orange. Orange headgear, orange sashes, orange coats. Or they are dressed in more or less nothing and sometimes covered in ash. Some have the bearing of princes and some look like anyone you might see anywhere – just out shopping, dithering about undecided while they talk about prices and quality – or so it seems from the interactions we have seen.
And out of all of this, the thing that has surprised me most has been the middle class Indian families who seem just as interested in the devotees as we are. They look and gawk at the sadhus openly, seeming to think the whole thing is a grand joke.
I saw a family having a group photo taken while sitting in a horse-drawn rickshaw. Presumably, such rickshaws are not common where they live.
So where do they live, these middle class Indians? In what sealed-off bubble of fantastical modern India do they live? Is it the India of the television, which bears no resemblance at all to the reality of Delhi and of India – even the better class parts we have seen?
I think the thing I am trying to get across is that while all countries indulge in manufacturing fantasies about what can be obtained in pursuit of the consumer dream, the contrast is so great in India as to be grotesque.
