Monday, April 04, 2005
Day 229 - Continued (The Taj Mahal and Fatephur Sikri, India - 23rd March, 2005)
I was rudely interrupted with this blog as Julie and I were both struck down with "Delhi Belhi" and then we went away for a week to the mountains. But I will continue now ....
Julian and I ran for all we were worth towards the central area of the train station. There is simply no chance that I can describe this scene, as I simply don't have the words that would bring it to life but here are some of them; stinking hot, fetid aroma, semi-darkness, half a million people in one station, chaos, a thousand horns blaring. The heat, the smell and the crowds simply have to be experienced.
We got to the main area and started to look for a display that would give us a platform number for the train to Agra. For some reason that I still can't fathom, an official looking person asked us if they could be of any help. This is usually the sign to be extremely wary and in most cases these offers (which we have subsequently discovered, are not all insidious in nature) should be ignored. I asked which platform we needed to be on for the train to Agra. Immediately the reply came that it was platform one. Handily this was the platform nearest to us and did not require traversing any stairs or other barriers. We pushed our way forward (it helps to have good elbows in India) and made it to the platform and started looking for our carriage. By now I could see that we had at least 2 minutes in hand so I started looking for Julie, Valerie and Sammy. By luck they had also bumped into a helpful man who had directed them to the same platform and it was only about 30 seconds after we had arrived that they turned up. We found our carriage number and all jumped aboard. I think we were the last to arrive before the train departed a minute or 2 later. Slightly flustered, hot and bothered we had made it.
I just can't believe the trains here. We were left for hardly 10 minutes at a time before we were offered something to eat or drink or read. All the food, which included a full Indian breakfast and a snack at 11:00 am was included in the fare. We were on the top class express train but still the single fare for the 4 of us to Agra (300 klms and 3 hours away) was only about £20.
The journey south through the outskirts of Delhi is an appalling assault on the senses as you see mile after mile of slum dwellings fit only for pigs. It takes about half an hour on the train before you get into really rural community areas and even then you are again battered by the view, as you pass through smaller towns and cities with the same problems as Delhi.
India really is a massive toilet. This is not because I think so but because it us used as one by it's population. We were obviously travelling during the peak morning toilet period. Every piece of scrap land, roadway, culvert, rubbish dump and footpath had people on it crapping. With one look out the train window you could see up to 30 people crapping. With absolutely no sense of order or discipline, you simply find a spot where no one has been before and you crouch down and crap. Then you clean yourself off with your little tin of water. All in front of everybody and the passing Agra express. It really puts you off your breakfast.
This desire to perform your bodily functions in public is not only restricted to the slum areas on the outskirts of town. Men in the cities love to find the most prominent spots to wee in public. In the middle of the central reservation is my favourite but anywhere will do. There is not a moment in New Delhi when you can't see someone peeing. Some spots become well used over a period of time but you can never mistake where they are because the stench is overwhelming. Women, who I am sure, are required to expel the same amount of urine as men, are never to be seen performing in the city streets. I just don't know what they do and whatever it is, why can't the men do it?
I don't want to dwell on this any longer than necessary but dear reader it is necessary to get it off my chest. This "crapping anywhere" is apparently cultural. Of course most of the residents of the areas concerned don't have a house of their own, let alone a toilet. You have to go somewhere. But why crap so ardently on your own doorstep? We have been to some of the most famous places in India and as soon as you step off any main pathway you are confronted by human crap. Forget about dog shit, this is human crap and there is no poop and scoop.
In the simplest most primitive societies (since when was I an anthropologist?) I would expect there to be some form of crap control. How about; just dig a hole. It would take a couple of people a couple of hours to construct a privvy that would provide modesty and sanitation at virtually no cost. This simplest of tasks does not happen. Even in the poorest of shanty towns there is some semblance of order and cohesion in the communities. Why then can't they get it together on the sanitation front? I simply cannot believe that the whole country has not been struck dead by typhoid or cholera which can only be spread through direct contact with human feces.
Julie has been reading a book called "A Fine Balance" by Rohinton Mistry which tells of the story of four people who have to leave their rural existence in an Indian hill station and are plunged into living in a shanty town on the outskirts of a big city. The first thing they had to learn to do was to crap in public on the available wasteland. The book describes in great detail how foreign this was for them. They presumably had different arrangements in their village home. But it highlights one of the main reasons it exists. There has been a massive increase in population in the last 20 years (it has grown in this period by nearly half a billion and continues to grow at a rate of 50,000 per day or 18.5 million a year). Much of this population can no longer be supported and fed in the rural areas and there has subsequently been a massive exodus from countryside to city areas. There is probably less chance of becoming malnourished in the city where it is certainly possible to live off 15 to 20 rupees (20 pence) per day for food (we could feed our family easily on 40 rupees or 50 pence per day). This can be earned quite easily by begging, rubbish re-cycling (1 kilo of plastic re-cycling fetches 12 rupees from the recycler) or other menial tasks. Rickshaw (the pedal variety) drivers, who predominantly live in shanty towns, can earn about 100 to 150 rupees per day, which would be enough to support their families.
In the rural communities there has been much exploitation of one caste by another and many of the small community farmers have been driven out of business by having to pay extortionate interest rates of between 100% and 450% to borrow money from the local mobster to buy seed. Even then the farmers and agricultural workers will only earn on average 10 rupees (12 pence) per day ....
Other comments are just guesses and my own deluded and biased opinion about the state of this country. I am (if you had not already guessed) completely upset by it. I am a person who lines things up symmetrically on my desk. My pictures must hang straight. There is probably a psychoanalytical term for my condition (chronic pathological linearist?) but there is no known treatment for it. Therefore when you are in a country where everything is made off centre, out of true, with no alignment, no explanation or reason and not finished, it simply drives you insane. These rantings are therefore the result of this disease of my mind.)
Phew, here we are, we haven't even arrived in Agra yet and I am diverted onto an essay about Indian toilet habits! I think the longer we are away from home the greater necessity I have to blurt out at random. It seems to me that the observations are of more interest than the places. My readers probably do not agree but we shall see.
Anyway to get back to the point, we are on our way to Agra and I am going to continue this blog in another posting that will appear on top. This one is getting too big already.
I was rudely interrupted with this blog as Julie and I were both struck down with "Delhi Belhi" and then we went away for a week to the mountains. But I will continue now ....
Julian and I ran for all we were worth towards the central area of the train station. There is simply no chance that I can describe this scene, as I simply don't have the words that would bring it to life but here are some of them; stinking hot, fetid aroma, semi-darkness, half a million people in one station, chaos, a thousand horns blaring. The heat, the smell and the crowds simply have to be experienced.
We got to the main area and started to look for a display that would give us a platform number for the train to Agra. For some reason that I still can't fathom, an official looking person asked us if they could be of any help. This is usually the sign to be extremely wary and in most cases these offers (which we have subsequently discovered, are not all insidious in nature) should be ignored. I asked which platform we needed to be on for the train to Agra. Immediately the reply came that it was platform one. Handily this was the platform nearest to us and did not require traversing any stairs or other barriers. We pushed our way forward (it helps to have good elbows in India) and made it to the platform and started looking for our carriage. By now I could see that we had at least 2 minutes in hand so I started looking for Julie, Valerie and Sammy. By luck they had also bumped into a helpful man who had directed them to the same platform and it was only about 30 seconds after we had arrived that they turned up. We found our carriage number and all jumped aboard. I think we were the last to arrive before the train departed a minute or 2 later. Slightly flustered, hot and bothered we had made it.
I just can't believe the trains here. We were left for hardly 10 minutes at a time before we were offered something to eat or drink or read. All the food, which included a full Indian breakfast and a snack at 11:00 am was included in the fare. We were on the top class express train but still the single fare for the 4 of us to Agra (300 klms and 3 hours away) was only about £20.
The journey south through the outskirts of Delhi is an appalling assault on the senses as you see mile after mile of slum dwellings fit only for pigs. It takes about half an hour on the train before you get into really rural community areas and even then you are again battered by the view, as you pass through smaller towns and cities with the same problems as Delhi.
India really is a massive toilet. This is not because I think so but because it us used as one by it's population. We were obviously travelling during the peak morning toilet period. Every piece of scrap land, roadway, culvert, rubbish dump and footpath had people on it crapping. With one look out the train window you could see up to 30 people crapping. With absolutely no sense of order or discipline, you simply find a spot where no one has been before and you crouch down and crap. Then you clean yourself off with your little tin of water. All in front of everybody and the passing Agra express. It really puts you off your breakfast.
This desire to perform your bodily functions in public is not only restricted to the slum areas on the outskirts of town. Men in the cities love to find the most prominent spots to wee in public. In the middle of the central reservation is my favourite but anywhere will do. There is not a moment in New Delhi when you can't see someone peeing. Some spots become well used over a period of time but you can never mistake where they are because the stench is overwhelming. Women, who I am sure, are required to expel the same amount of urine as men, are never to be seen performing in the city streets. I just don't know what they do and whatever it is, why can't the men do it?
I don't want to dwell on this any longer than necessary but dear reader it is necessary to get it off my chest. This "crapping anywhere" is apparently cultural. Of course most of the residents of the areas concerned don't have a house of their own, let alone a toilet. You have to go somewhere. But why crap so ardently on your own doorstep? We have been to some of the most famous places in India and as soon as you step off any main pathway you are confronted by human crap. Forget about dog shit, this is human crap and there is no poop and scoop.
In the simplest most primitive societies (since when was I an anthropologist?) I would expect there to be some form of crap control. How about; just dig a hole. It would take a couple of people a couple of hours to construct a privvy that would provide modesty and sanitation at virtually no cost. This simplest of tasks does not happen. Even in the poorest of shanty towns there is some semblance of order and cohesion in the communities. Why then can't they get it together on the sanitation front? I simply cannot believe that the whole country has not been struck dead by typhoid or cholera which can only be spread through direct contact with human feces.
Julie has been reading a book called "A Fine Balance" by Rohinton Mistry which tells of the story of four people who have to leave their rural existence in an Indian hill station and are plunged into living in a shanty town on the outskirts of a big city. The first thing they had to learn to do was to crap in public on the available wasteland. The book describes in great detail how foreign this was for them. They presumably had different arrangements in their village home. But it highlights one of the main reasons it exists. There has been a massive increase in population in the last 20 years (it has grown in this period by nearly half a billion and continues to grow at a rate of 50,000 per day or 18.5 million a year). Much of this population can no longer be supported and fed in the rural areas and there has subsequently been a massive exodus from countryside to city areas. There is probably less chance of becoming malnourished in the city where it is certainly possible to live off 15 to 20 rupees (20 pence) per day for food (we could feed our family easily on 40 rupees or 50 pence per day). This can be earned quite easily by begging, rubbish re-cycling (1 kilo of plastic re-cycling fetches 12 rupees from the recycler) or other menial tasks. Rickshaw (the pedal variety) drivers, who predominantly live in shanty towns, can earn about 100 to 150 rupees per day, which would be enough to support their families.
In the rural communities there has been much exploitation of one caste by another and many of the small community farmers have been driven out of business by having to pay extortionate interest rates of between 100% and 450% to borrow money from the local mobster to buy seed. Even then the farmers and agricultural workers will only earn on average 10 rupees (12 pence) per day ....
Other comments are just guesses and my own deluded and biased opinion about the state of this country. I am (if you had not already guessed) completely upset by it. I am a person who lines things up symmetrically on my desk. My pictures must hang straight. There is probably a psychoanalytical term for my condition (chronic pathological linearist?) but there is no known treatment for it. Therefore when you are in a country where everything is made off centre, out of true, with no alignment, no explanation or reason and not finished, it simply drives you insane. These rantings are therefore the result of this disease of my mind.)
Phew, here we are, we haven't even arrived in Agra yet and I am diverted onto an essay about Indian toilet habits! I think the longer we are away from home the greater necessity I have to blurt out at random. It seems to me that the observations are of more interest than the places. My readers probably do not agree but we shall see.
Anyway to get back to the point, we are on our way to Agra and I am going to continue this blog in another posting that will appear on top. This one is getting too big already.
1 comment:
LOL I think the term is obsessive compulsive.
I confess I did not have any real desire to travel to India in the future and I think now after reading about your experiences I will be completely striking it from my list. I think I'm too English to be able to endure it.
Kirsty
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