An editorial in today’s Times of India decries India’s under-achievement in attracting tourists. The points it makes touch on some of our own experience of India so far.
But first a step back. The editorialist claims to know that many Indians think that tourism is unimportant to the New India – i.e. wealth generating India. Not so, not so at all, readers are told. Tourism as such “is a money-spinner” and Indian tourism is already one of the country’ largest spinners of all: India’s third largest foreign exchange earner, amounting to more than two percent of the country’s GDP.
Nevertheless, the editorialist complains, India is a tourism laggard compared to other countries in Asia. Why? The writer gives several reasons:
The hassle of getting an India tourist visa [not so bad in Ottawa, although I haven’t tried from Vanderhoof?] and the nuisance of the single entry provision.
“Appalling” roads, buses, taxis, trains and airports (Let’s be a little more specific and inclusive here: reckless drivers, rupee-grubbing transport companies of every stripe, filthy departure/arrival stations of every kind, derelict public buses and trains).
Unusable signage, poor city maps, unfriendly information booths, few places to exchange money (all minor stuff I’d say);
The habitual “corruption and cheating … constantly and annoyingly, from the taxi on arrival to the taxi on departure” (Check! Check! Check!);
And, lastly, as the editorial writer puts it – and to get around to our real topic – “for a people obsessed with personal and household cleanliness we have the filthiest public spaces.”
Cleanliness and filth. After seven intense in northern India, I am still taken aback, as apparently is the Indian editorialist, by the stunning contrast between people’s clean, often fastidiously clean, personal appearance and immediate personal surroundings (especially the women, where this is amplified by wonderful attention to often stunning combinations of colours and patterns and sparkle in dress) and what are for us filthy public habits and public surroundings.
Spitting for example: usually but far from always done by men, always preceded by loud and powerful horkings and snortings up of phlegm, and done repeatedly anytime and anywhere … at your passing legs and feet, in the midst of conversations, or out of car, bus, tuk-tuk and train windows into whatever and whoever is downwind.
Sure vast expanses of India are dusty – the air thick with real earth dust laced with the toxic dust of disintegrating human garbage, animal shit, construction sites and the stirrings of many millions of vehicles. The same might be said of many sad places on earth where people spend their days coughing and blowing and face a later life gasping for oxygen. But I have never been in a land so awash with Anywhere, Anytime, Anyhow spitters.
Then there is the matter of cow shit, unnamed by our delicate editorialist but surely an essential element of his “filthiest public places.” Consider again the tastefully combined colours and patterns of the always flowing, naturally refined sari, then consider that wavy, sparkling band of gold trim along the ankle drooping, ever so slightly, into a brown-green puddly slippery stinking mound of cow shit, those stinking-in-the 30-degree-afternoon-sun variety mounds of cow shit that sit in wait on every street, narrow laneway and market plaza in pretty well every Indian city.
Consider the day’s smearing of these shitty mounds (motorbike and car tires, the hurried errant bare foot, many shiny shoe or flip-flop soles) across paving stones, pavement, at the foot of staircases, in front of open-fronted shops, across railway station platforms.
Consider each unlit laneway at night and the odds of foot (the woman’s glittering with jewelled toe rings) and shit colliding in the dark.
Consider the dry days between monsoons, the dust of cow shit blowing through windows and rooms, into noses and eyes and lungs. Or consider the wet monsoon days, narrow public passageways running greasy with shit.
Not all India town and city dwellers are so happy with the freely street-wandering and street-shitting holy cows. We have met a few dissenters, although at least as many rationalizers. Some cities are sending the cows to the farm, others like Udaipur have launched Rescue Centres to give untended cows appropriate food rather than the garbage – including plastics, styrofoam and other toxic materials – that Hindus watch their holy cows eat day after day.
We have been told that these drifts of plastics and other toxic forms of containers and packaging, which so many Indians so nonchalantly drop or toss behind them and which their holy cows now forage in, hoofs stepping across not earth but urban stone and pavement… that this toxic pasture is something only 15 or so years old, perhaps (unlike its glassy malls and bargain-price this and that latest consumable) too new even for New India.
But – to continue taking a more physical closer look at what the editorialist’s “filthiest public places” means – consider the many men pissing in public places (again, as with the spitting, this is predominantly a male activity) … against any wall pretty well anywhere, along city street edges, at shop corners, at every public nook and cranny.
(A statistic: in Rajasthan state where I happen to be writing this, today’s newspaper reports that only 13 percent of the state’s people have access to anything designated as a “toilet.” The government promises to “launch a program of awareness on a community approach to total sanitation.” Yes, pissing and shitting into pits of “awareness” should do the trick.)
Consider the intensifying, sweetly rank stench of urine sun-baked into bricks and pavement, oozing into open sewers, becoming sludgy rivulets of newspaper, water bottles, cloth, plastic chai cups, cow and children’s shit, tuk-tul oil, market-garden waste. This is the world we and so many Indians walk through day after day.
As with holy cows foraging in their poisoned pastures, not everyone likes walking to day-care or work or for morning chai through block after block of reeking urinals. For example some neighbourly folks in one of the most congested parts of Delhi – folks with an ingenuity the knights of New India don’t hear about in B.Comm school – have cemented small ceramic plaques/squares showing Vishnu and Rama and other images of the gods into the local men‘s favourite pee walls along back alleyways, daring the men to piss into the faces of the gods. They say it’s working, and when we walked through these same laneways we agreed.
Another source of “filthiest public places”? The nonchalant, habituated free-for-all of garbage tossing, today combined with the steep increase in unnecessary forms of packaging, the increasing public use of plastics and other non-biodegradable materials, and the sharply rising number of new consumers.
Consumer plastics alone are burying India in waste – like the increase dependence on (and fashion of) drinking bottled water, or the billions of small plastic chai cups that have recently replaced biodegradable clay cups. You can’t blink before you see someone dropping their plastic chai cup where they stand. (Let’s hope the Turks hang on to their re-used glass tea cups.) Another blink and you’ll see someone tossing garbage out of their shop fronts, onto bus and train floors, handfuls and bagfuls out train windows. Even if more Indians wanted to use garbage bins, most are either derelict, the bottoms rusted out, or they are buried in heaps of waste.
Road margins and corners are drifts and mounds of waste, street sides and shop fronts are covered in scatterings of paper, plastics, food stuffs, cow shit. The back streets of the poor and low caste trades, out of sight to anyone with influence, contain walled yards filled a storey or two high with plastic bottles. River eddies swirl with plastics, garbage forms a thick fetid scab over lake corners and shorelines.
Sweepers and plastic and paper collectors choke their way between windfall and being overwhelmed: despite their dogged bending and sorting, so many streets are still littered with garbage dumped moments and weeks ago.
Meanwhile, all this waste is slowly, ever so slowly, being pulverized into finer, more mobile pieces and finally into toxic dust which, stirred by ever greater traffic and seasonal winds, blows down the streets, around every corner, through windows and doors, into noses and mouths and back out in spit.
It is unlikely that the wealthy and powerful experience much of this mess first-hand – being driven in comfortable cocoons from front door to glass tower, living as they do in yards and streets swept daily by “the boy” or “the girl” (20 or 70 years old, it doesn’t matter) who live … well, somewhere else. Let the people work and buy and toss, and let me enjoy my profits from this New India, thank-you.
From a cursory reading of the newspapers, India’s pundits seem especially anxious about the country’s global ranking on every conceivable scale. Is there one for “filthiest public places”? I have no idea. If there was, would India be right up there at the top – like its cricket team or its penchant for corruption? The odds seem very good.
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