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India
Some thoughts on India for you to peruse. I know that it's bad form for someone to comment on the inefficiency, or possibly the faults, in other nations, but I'm a bitter, evil bastard, so I'm going to do it anyway.
Although, on thw whole India was a nice sort of place that just looked like it had a busload of problems. And I'm just the sort of bitter person who complain about it.
Ha! Suck it.
So, a travelogue of sorts, to keep you entertained:
I managed to leave O'Hare about 18:00 on a Saturday, which meant that I didn't get into Mumbai until approximately 1:00 in the morning on Monday (I had a stopover at Heathrow too-at least they had a shopping mall to walk around in). Due to the total inefficiency of Indian customs it took quite a while to get through the airport and find my ride, at which point I was whisked off to my hotel. This took about an hour.
It was fairly busy in Mumbai at 2:00 in the morning, all things considered. Not as busy as it would be in the day, where the roads were jam packed with either people or vehicles for twenty-four hours straight, but busy nonetheless. There were knots of people clustered around dimly lit areas under the orange glow of streetlamps, talking to each other. There were people lying on the sidewalks, many of them asleep, but some still awake. The traffic on the street also shifted between non-existent and slightly crowded.
For a foreigner, three things register immediately. First is the environment, the heat, the general soupiness of the country, even in February, and the smell. The weather reports said that Mumbai's weather would be “smoky” and they appeared to be entirely correct. There was a constant miasma of something in the air, either gasoline fumes, wood smoke, or industrial waste-nobody could really tell. The heat itself is oppressive-even at night it feels like it's on the verge of being too warm to work.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, the poverty registers with the visitor. For a westerner, the airport itself looks like some leftover from better days. From the occasional crack in the scuffed floor to the sheer emptiness of the building, it seemed to be something akin to a half-abandoned mall. Even in the large US airports, when empty, most of the buildings are clean, and most of the space is decorated in some way with posters, advertisements, coloring schemes, or something. The entrance to Mumbai is large, colorless, and generally windowless as well.
This stands in contrast to the city in some ways. Once you are outside, the city has a lot of color, even if not a lot of variety in that color. Everything in the outsides of Mumbai seems open-air, perhaps because it is a futile effort to keep the air from invading your room. The airport gives you the idea that you are entering almost a second-world nation or uninspired concrete architecture, badly painted walls, and the mass-produced sort of feel to it. Outside, the city looks more like a poor African metropolis that has migrated to somewhere in southeast Asia.
My impression of Mumbai, from the first night, was only reinforced on consecutive evenings spent inside the city, and can be explained only with some difficulty. It feels as if the designers of the city sat down and divided the land they were to build on in a precise grid of squares, before retaining a trio of developers to draw up careful and detailed plans for each square on the grid. Before starting they gave each developer careful instructions, one was to create a colonial city, one a modern business capital, and one a refugee camp. Then, upon receipt of those finished plans, they threw them up in the air, slapped random blueprints down on random grid squares, and filled all the empty grid squares with slums.
Luxury apartments rise fifteen or twenty stories in the air, only a few blocks away from neighborhoods where literal shanty towns have arisen. People live in houses built above small shops, all made out of corrugated metal sheets and old boards that appear to have been ripped off of billboards. The sparkling lights of the seashore overlook crunched neighborhoods where people gather around open fires. It has no more poverty than I expected (actually, it has quite a bit less) but the slapdash way in which everything was thrown together surprised me. That would continue throughout the week, a trend of luxury cars fighting to cut in front of old, broken-down taxis (these seemed at times to be the only two types of cars on the road), smartly-dressed young businessmen (or people who looked the part) lying down to sleep in the middle of the sidewalk, and a number of other things that just seemed discontinuous to me.
All of this, of course, was overshadowed by the third realization, which is that there are no traffic laws in Mumbai, there are only suggestions. It takes a few hours to get used to a driving culture that makes the Italians look positively beatific, and the singular mode of communication; honking one's horn. One quickly realizes that the sound of a horn is not the American expression of anger; instead it can indicate everything from someone passing you, to someone cutting in front of you, to someone trying to demonstrate their own existence. Once you get used to it, the entire driving experience becomes normal. Until then, you spend a lot of time wondering what your driver is doing.
Anyway, got to the hotel at around 2:45 in the morning. Got to sleep at 3:15 or so, and then woke up with the wake-up call at 7:00. Got up slowly, took a look around at the room and the lobby (I was curious-it was my first time in a five star deluxe hotel), then went for breakfast. I saw a lot of people who looked familiar, but none whom I actually know, so I ended up waiting until about 8:00, when the bus showed up.
We got to TIFR and took a look around there. For one of India's premier scientific research facilities, it did seem a bit old and run down, but that has to be expected. At least it was air conditioned. We got in and registered near the Homi Bhabba auditorium, where I sat down and waited until my contact showed up (he had a later bus). TIFR itself lies on the edge of the ocean (literally, you can walk down to the edge and get pushed off into the sea), in the middle of a military zone. There are some nice gardens there, and a lot of people wandering around whose purpose is not immediately apparent. A lot of military personnel wandering around too, I saw a great deal of the Indian military on that trip.
Presentations started. Posters went up. The usual. I had only gotten two hours of sleep on the flight, so all told I had slept about five hours in the past forty-eight, so I snoozed in the second round of plenary talks. Not a lot to report on anyway, except that everyone is still making the same presentations about the LHC that they did at CKM2005. Went to lunch, had Indian food, and broke my cardinal rule about never eating anything that I can't identify. It was good though-although not spectacular. So it goes with mass catering.
My talk was towards the end of the day, by which time I was at least somewhat awake. I was pretty nervous going into it, but there were only twelve or so people there, so it was mostly wasted nervousness. I'm not going to say what it was about, since my name is on it and I categorically refuse to reveal my identity on the internet, but it seemed to be well received. Apparently people think that I actually perform a useful function. Ha! The fools.
Later that night I walked from my hotel for about two miles down to the Gateway of India. It was sort of impressive at night. More impressive was the large crowd of people attempting to sell to tourists, even though I appeared to be the only tourist in sight. My dodging skills were not entirely up to the task unfortunately, but so it goes. The Gateway, for all the hype, was not really that impressive compared to the Arch of Constantine-a pity in a way. In the meantime though I got to see a lot of the India that normally tourists only see out of the windows of their air conditioned bus, so all was well.
Tuesday my boss finally managed to show up at the conference, but otherwise it went much the same as Monday, with the benefit that I had no stress from a possible upcoming presentation, and the fact that we stayed late at TIFR for dinner. They also had a presentation, for all of us foreigners, of traditional Indian music-foolish in a way considering that the music the presented tended to be of the soft and twanging variety, and most of the people they were playing to had come from time zones at least five hours away. The American contingent spent most of the recital fighting off sleep, through no fault of the musician who seemed very good. Then we had a banquet, which seemed to have been planned for a hundred people, and was not ready for all five hundred of us. Too bad because the food, what there was of it, was actually quite decent.
Wednesday they did a lot of grid presentations in the morning, which was sort of interesting, but trickled off at the end. Then there were a lot more regular presentations. Unfortunately I was still fighting sleep during the parallel sessions, and I missed a great deal of what went on. Also I ended up tuning out on most of a presentation of classical Indian dance. There's not much to report on that day. We went back to my hotel in the evening for the conference banquet, which went quite well, with the inclusion of about five kinds of cheesecake along with a mix of both Indian and western food, almost all of which was unrecognizable. They charged for drinks though-so it's fortunate that I don't drink.
Thursday my advisor and I played hooky (it's our money, we can do what we want) and went with a whole bunch of other people out to go sightseeing. We went to the Gateway, and from there we took the hour long ferry ride to the island where you can see the caves of Elephanta. The city looks a lot different from the ocean-the dirt has disappeared and only the skyscrapers and imposing towers are left. It looks very clean and very modern.
For the curious, the caves of Elephanta are official a UNESCO World Heritage site. They are a series of caves carved from living rock, starting apparently in the 5th and 6th centuries. Sculptures carved into the walls of the caverns depict Shiva in several different postures, and possibly in several different aspects (translations were limited). It is rather impressive work, considering that they basically carved out a huge chunk of the mountain itself in which you stand. The island as a whole is also rather pleasant, away from the hustle and bustle of the city. It reminds me of California in a way, near the sea, warm and, that day, dry. Then we fled the caves and returned in time for the afternoon sessions.
Later that day I went on the bus tour of the city. They didn't show us much. We got to see the Ghandi museum (a mistake trying to funnel several hundred people through that particular building), as well as the Hanging Gardens (which were nice, but rather small). All in all we spent a great deal of time peering out of the bus windows at crowded buildings and other features of modern Indian architecture. Mumbai is a crowded place in general, and trying to maneuver those huge charter buses through it was difficult at best.
Friday was pack-up-and-leave day. This was made difficult by the fact that TIFR was swarming with military personnel in preparation for the Valedictory speaker, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, a scientist who also happens to be Chief of State for the world's largest democracy, the nominal representative of a billion people. President Abdul Kalam gave a rather interesting, and promising speech, about the future of Indian science, in which he promised a massive expansion of international grid work in India itself. This was said to a packed house, made up mostly of TIFR students and faculty. I am curious to know if the questions at the end were staged or not, but it was hard to tell.
After the President left, I finished my paper and then also departed, braving the traffic in a taxi to get to the airport, arriving four hours early, just to avoid possible delays. I left Mumbai about 1:30 in the morning on Saturday, arrived at Heathrow at about 5:30, and then made it back to O'Hare at almost 1:00. I then managed to stay up until about 11:00 at night, even though I had gotten only three hours of sleep on the plane, because I am crazy.
Notice that so far I've gone out of my way to avoid saying anything at all of substance, and you have instead been treated to a rather dry recounting of my visit. This is because India has more problems than it has people, and this became obvious as I went through. Now, it's usually considered rude for a citizen of another country, especially a country where someone who makes near-poverty wages can afford to stuff his face with food, to pass judgment on a country that is so poor as to merit third world status, but I'm going to do it anyway. I've never been a particularly polite person in this LJ, and I see no reason to start. Hence, I'm actually going to talk about what I saw.
The first problem I noticed, one that really stood out to me as a foreign observer, was that there were too many Indians. This says nothing about the Indian people, whom I found to be, on the whole, polite, courteous (except when driving), cheerful and generally pleasant, but it says volumes about the size of the city. Mumbai should be a pleasant city, discounting the oppressive weather, a combination of sparkling beach, corporate headquarters, and the remnants of a colonial age. It would be a very pleasant city with a population of four to six million people. Instead, Wikipedia claims that Mumbai has a population of close to 12 million. Even this might not be so bad, except for the fact that the population density is even higher than the most densely populated section of Tokyo. Tokyo has the rebuilt architecture, the planning, and the infrastructure to support small zones with a population density twice that of New York City. Mumbai, to speak frankly, does not.
As I walked around the city it did strike me that the place would be very different if it was not always awash in the ocean of humanity that lives there. Could cheap, standardized housing be built in a market with extremely low labor costs for the poor instead of shanty towns? Yes, but not for this many. Could transportation problems be eased by managing traffic flow to open up the city's thoroughfares? Yes, but not with all these people filling the streets. Is India rich enough in land to feed her people? Of course, provided it doesn't have to feed that many more of them. I remain ignorant of the statistics that the government has, no doubt, dutifully compiled, but from the ground it appears that India is being driven by her exploding population beyond the means she has to sustain them.
There is a point for every nation where the infrastructure is strained to the breaking point, and from what little I could see, India appeared to be approaching it. Unfortunately, India also did not seem to be doing much about it. She has an invaluable resource in the manpower of her people, one that should not be underestimated. I would have expected the government to use that resource more effectively. Instead, what public works I did see seemed to be done in a haphazard manner, a small gang of workers here, another one there. A trench in the street that stays open for two or three weeks before someone remembers to close it, or before they get the equipment in the right place. Random cleanings of public bathrooms, on which whole blocks of people depend. The only organization that seemed even partway organized was the military, and I have little respect for their capabilities from what I saw.
It seems strange that a nation whose corporations can buy massive ventures overseas cannot maintain a simple road repair crew. It seems odd that a nation which is willing to spend $1.5 billion to buy an old Soviet aircraft carrier in order to defend it against...who again? Sri Lanka? Anyway, that a nation capable of buying an aircraft carrier that expensive is unable to build better sanitation facilities for block after block of slums seems peculiar. It seems odd that the entire city seems to be on its last legs, and yet is so obviously full of energy and potential that it has a nearly unlimited future.
I don't have much of a point to make. India survives in the end, for now. Slowly the infrastructure is built to give her rural population a place in her new economy. Slowly the cities will improve. Hopefully that growth will outpace the growth of her urban population. I found the nation to be spinning around in the midst of disorganized chaos, and even in the prosperous areas I found little sense that things were organized and moving in a definitive direction. I saw little sign of progress in anything that did not bear a corporate logo. But the city survives and builds and thrives and does all those things that cities do, irrespective of how it is managed, or what the weather is, or what strange foreigners may think of it while they wait in the airport for their flight home.
And, in the end, what more can one ask?
Although, on thw whole India was a nice sort of place that just looked like it had a busload of problems. And I'm just the sort of bitter person who complain about it.
Ha! Suck it.
So, a travelogue of sorts, to keep you entertained:
I managed to leave O'Hare about 18:00 on a Saturday, which meant that I didn't get into Mumbai until approximately 1:00 in the morning on Monday (I had a stopover at Heathrow too-at least they had a shopping mall to walk around in). Due to the total inefficiency of Indian customs it took quite a while to get through the airport and find my ride, at which point I was whisked off to my hotel. This took about an hour.
It was fairly busy in Mumbai at 2:00 in the morning, all things considered. Not as busy as it would be in the day, where the roads were jam packed with either people or vehicles for twenty-four hours straight, but busy nonetheless. There were knots of people clustered around dimly lit areas under the orange glow of streetlamps, talking to each other. There were people lying on the sidewalks, many of them asleep, but some still awake. The traffic on the street also shifted between non-existent and slightly crowded.
For a foreigner, three things register immediately. First is the environment, the heat, the general soupiness of the country, even in February, and the smell. The weather reports said that Mumbai's weather would be “smoky” and they appeared to be entirely correct. There was a constant miasma of something in the air, either gasoline fumes, wood smoke, or industrial waste-nobody could really tell. The heat itself is oppressive-even at night it feels like it's on the verge of being too warm to work.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, the poverty registers with the visitor. For a westerner, the airport itself looks like some leftover from better days. From the occasional crack in the scuffed floor to the sheer emptiness of the building, it seemed to be something akin to a half-abandoned mall. Even in the large US airports, when empty, most of the buildings are clean, and most of the space is decorated in some way with posters, advertisements, coloring schemes, or something. The entrance to Mumbai is large, colorless, and generally windowless as well.
This stands in contrast to the city in some ways. Once you are outside, the city has a lot of color, even if not a lot of variety in that color. Everything in the outsides of Mumbai seems open-air, perhaps because it is a futile effort to keep the air from invading your room. The airport gives you the idea that you are entering almost a second-world nation or uninspired concrete architecture, badly painted walls, and the mass-produced sort of feel to it. Outside, the city looks more like a poor African metropolis that has migrated to somewhere in southeast Asia.
My impression of Mumbai, from the first night, was only reinforced on consecutive evenings spent inside the city, and can be explained only with some difficulty. It feels as if the designers of the city sat down and divided the land they were to build on in a precise grid of squares, before retaining a trio of developers to draw up careful and detailed plans for each square on the grid. Before starting they gave each developer careful instructions, one was to create a colonial city, one a modern business capital, and one a refugee camp. Then, upon receipt of those finished plans, they threw them up in the air, slapped random blueprints down on random grid squares, and filled all the empty grid squares with slums.
Luxury apartments rise fifteen or twenty stories in the air, only a few blocks away from neighborhoods where literal shanty towns have arisen. People live in houses built above small shops, all made out of corrugated metal sheets and old boards that appear to have been ripped off of billboards. The sparkling lights of the seashore overlook crunched neighborhoods where people gather around open fires. It has no more poverty than I expected (actually, it has quite a bit less) but the slapdash way in which everything was thrown together surprised me. That would continue throughout the week, a trend of luxury cars fighting to cut in front of old, broken-down taxis (these seemed at times to be the only two types of cars on the road), smartly-dressed young businessmen (or people who looked the part) lying down to sleep in the middle of the sidewalk, and a number of other things that just seemed discontinuous to me.
All of this, of course, was overshadowed by the third realization, which is that there are no traffic laws in Mumbai, there are only suggestions. It takes a few hours to get used to a driving culture that makes the Italians look positively beatific, and the singular mode of communication; honking one's horn. One quickly realizes that the sound of a horn is not the American expression of anger; instead it can indicate everything from someone passing you, to someone cutting in front of you, to someone trying to demonstrate their own existence. Once you get used to it, the entire driving experience becomes normal. Until then, you spend a lot of time wondering what your driver is doing.
Anyway, got to the hotel at around 2:45 in the morning. Got to sleep at 3:15 or so, and then woke up with the wake-up call at 7:00. Got up slowly, took a look around at the room and the lobby (I was curious-it was my first time in a five star deluxe hotel), then went for breakfast. I saw a lot of people who looked familiar, but none whom I actually know, so I ended up waiting until about 8:00, when the bus showed up.
We got to TIFR and took a look around there. For one of India's premier scientific research facilities, it did seem a bit old and run down, but that has to be expected. At least it was air conditioned. We got in and registered near the Homi Bhabba auditorium, where I sat down and waited until my contact showed up (he had a later bus). TIFR itself lies on the edge of the ocean (literally, you can walk down to the edge and get pushed off into the sea), in the middle of a military zone. There are some nice gardens there, and a lot of people wandering around whose purpose is not immediately apparent. A lot of military personnel wandering around too, I saw a great deal of the Indian military on that trip.
Presentations started. Posters went up. The usual. I had only gotten two hours of sleep on the flight, so all told I had slept about five hours in the past forty-eight, so I snoozed in the second round of plenary talks. Not a lot to report on anyway, except that everyone is still making the same presentations about the LHC that they did at CKM2005. Went to lunch, had Indian food, and broke my cardinal rule about never eating anything that I can't identify. It was good though-although not spectacular. So it goes with mass catering.
My talk was towards the end of the day, by which time I was at least somewhat awake. I was pretty nervous going into it, but there were only twelve or so people there, so it was mostly wasted nervousness. I'm not going to say what it was about, since my name is on it and I categorically refuse to reveal my identity on the internet, but it seemed to be well received. Apparently people think that I actually perform a useful function. Ha! The fools.
Later that night I walked from my hotel for about two miles down to the Gateway of India. It was sort of impressive at night. More impressive was the large crowd of people attempting to sell to tourists, even though I appeared to be the only tourist in sight. My dodging skills were not entirely up to the task unfortunately, but so it goes. The Gateway, for all the hype, was not really that impressive compared to the Arch of Constantine-a pity in a way. In the meantime though I got to see a lot of the India that normally tourists only see out of the windows of their air conditioned bus, so all was well.
Tuesday my boss finally managed to show up at the conference, but otherwise it went much the same as Monday, with the benefit that I had no stress from a possible upcoming presentation, and the fact that we stayed late at TIFR for dinner. They also had a presentation, for all of us foreigners, of traditional Indian music-foolish in a way considering that the music the presented tended to be of the soft and twanging variety, and most of the people they were playing to had come from time zones at least five hours away. The American contingent spent most of the recital fighting off sleep, through no fault of the musician who seemed very good. Then we had a banquet, which seemed to have been planned for a hundred people, and was not ready for all five hundred of us. Too bad because the food, what there was of it, was actually quite decent.
Wednesday they did a lot of grid presentations in the morning, which was sort of interesting, but trickled off at the end. Then there were a lot more regular presentations. Unfortunately I was still fighting sleep during the parallel sessions, and I missed a great deal of what went on. Also I ended up tuning out on most of a presentation of classical Indian dance. There's not much to report on that day. We went back to my hotel in the evening for the conference banquet, which went quite well, with the inclusion of about five kinds of cheesecake along with a mix of both Indian and western food, almost all of which was unrecognizable. They charged for drinks though-so it's fortunate that I don't drink.
Thursday my advisor and I played hooky (it's our money, we can do what we want) and went with a whole bunch of other people out to go sightseeing. We went to the Gateway, and from there we took the hour long ferry ride to the island where you can see the caves of Elephanta. The city looks a lot different from the ocean-the dirt has disappeared and only the skyscrapers and imposing towers are left. It looks very clean and very modern.
For the curious, the caves of Elephanta are official a UNESCO World Heritage site. They are a series of caves carved from living rock, starting apparently in the 5th and 6th centuries. Sculptures carved into the walls of the caverns depict Shiva in several different postures, and possibly in several different aspects (translations were limited). It is rather impressive work, considering that they basically carved out a huge chunk of the mountain itself in which you stand. The island as a whole is also rather pleasant, away from the hustle and bustle of the city. It reminds me of California in a way, near the sea, warm and, that day, dry. Then we fled the caves and returned in time for the afternoon sessions.
Later that day I went on the bus tour of the city. They didn't show us much. We got to see the Ghandi museum (a mistake trying to funnel several hundred people through that particular building), as well as the Hanging Gardens (which were nice, but rather small). All in all we spent a great deal of time peering out of the bus windows at crowded buildings and other features of modern Indian architecture. Mumbai is a crowded place in general, and trying to maneuver those huge charter buses through it was difficult at best.
Friday was pack-up-and-leave day. This was made difficult by the fact that TIFR was swarming with military personnel in preparation for the Valedictory speaker, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, a scientist who also happens to be Chief of State for the world's largest democracy, the nominal representative of a billion people. President Abdul Kalam gave a rather interesting, and promising speech, about the future of Indian science, in which he promised a massive expansion of international grid work in India itself. This was said to a packed house, made up mostly of TIFR students and faculty. I am curious to know if the questions at the end were staged or not, but it was hard to tell.
After the President left, I finished my paper and then also departed, braving the traffic in a taxi to get to the airport, arriving four hours early, just to avoid possible delays. I left Mumbai about 1:30 in the morning on Saturday, arrived at Heathrow at about 5:30, and then made it back to O'Hare at almost 1:00. I then managed to stay up until about 11:00 at night, even though I had gotten only three hours of sleep on the plane, because I am crazy.
Notice that so far I've gone out of my way to avoid saying anything at all of substance, and you have instead been treated to a rather dry recounting of my visit. This is because India has more problems than it has people, and this became obvious as I went through. Now, it's usually considered rude for a citizen of another country, especially a country where someone who makes near-poverty wages can afford to stuff his face with food, to pass judgment on a country that is so poor as to merit third world status, but I'm going to do it anyway. I've never been a particularly polite person in this LJ, and I see no reason to start. Hence, I'm actually going to talk about what I saw.
The first problem I noticed, one that really stood out to me as a foreign observer, was that there were too many Indians. This says nothing about the Indian people, whom I found to be, on the whole, polite, courteous (except when driving), cheerful and generally pleasant, but it says volumes about the size of the city. Mumbai should be a pleasant city, discounting the oppressive weather, a combination of sparkling beach, corporate headquarters, and the remnants of a colonial age. It would be a very pleasant city with a population of four to six million people. Instead, Wikipedia claims that Mumbai has a population of close to 12 million. Even this might not be so bad, except for the fact that the population density is even higher than the most densely populated section of Tokyo. Tokyo has the rebuilt architecture, the planning, and the infrastructure to support small zones with a population density twice that of New York City. Mumbai, to speak frankly, does not.
As I walked around the city it did strike me that the place would be very different if it was not always awash in the ocean of humanity that lives there. Could cheap, standardized housing be built in a market with extremely low labor costs for the poor instead of shanty towns? Yes, but not for this many. Could transportation problems be eased by managing traffic flow to open up the city's thoroughfares? Yes, but not with all these people filling the streets. Is India rich enough in land to feed her people? Of course, provided it doesn't have to feed that many more of them. I remain ignorant of the statistics that the government has, no doubt, dutifully compiled, but from the ground it appears that India is being driven by her exploding population beyond the means she has to sustain them.
There is a point for every nation where the infrastructure is strained to the breaking point, and from what little I could see, India appeared to be approaching it. Unfortunately, India also did not seem to be doing much about it. She has an invaluable resource in the manpower of her people, one that should not be underestimated. I would have expected the government to use that resource more effectively. Instead, what public works I did see seemed to be done in a haphazard manner, a small gang of workers here, another one there. A trench in the street that stays open for two or three weeks before someone remembers to close it, or before they get the equipment in the right place. Random cleanings of public bathrooms, on which whole blocks of people depend. The only organization that seemed even partway organized was the military, and I have little respect for their capabilities from what I saw.
It seems strange that a nation whose corporations can buy massive ventures overseas cannot maintain a simple road repair crew. It seems odd that a nation which is willing to spend $1.5 billion to buy an old Soviet aircraft carrier in order to defend it against...who again? Sri Lanka? Anyway, that a nation capable of buying an aircraft carrier that expensive is unable to build better sanitation facilities for block after block of slums seems peculiar. It seems odd that the entire city seems to be on its last legs, and yet is so obviously full of energy and potential that it has a nearly unlimited future.
I don't have much of a point to make. India survives in the end, for now. Slowly the infrastructure is built to give her rural population a place in her new economy. Slowly the cities will improve. Hopefully that growth will outpace the growth of her urban population. I found the nation to be spinning around in the midst of disorganized chaos, and even in the prosperous areas I found little sense that things were organized and moving in a definitive direction. I saw little sign of progress in anything that did not bear a corporate logo. But the city survives and builds and thrives and does all those things that cities do, irrespective of how it is managed, or what the weather is, or what strange foreigners may think of it while they wait in the airport for their flight home.
And, in the end, what more can one ask?