Reflections of India

While in Australia, I picked up the book The City of Joy from a Book Swap shelf. It tells the story of a Catholic priest who dedicated his life to helping the poor in the slums of Calcutta in the mid-1980s. The book has blown me away and brought me to tears. Although Charlie and I only briefly encountered at a distance the terrible destitution that exists in India - and even though we visited Mumbai and Chennai in 2010 and not Calcutta in 1985 - I found the descriptions in The City of Joy all too recognizable. And so I share the following passage:

The arrival of these successive waves of destitute people had transformed Calcutta into an enormous concentration of humanity. In a few years the city was to condemn its ten million inhabitants to living on less than twelve square feet of space per person, while the four or five million of them who squeezed into its slums had sometimes to make do with barely three square feet each. Consequently Calcutta had become one of the biggest urban disasters in the world - a city consumed with decay in which thousands of houses and many new buildings, sometimes ten floors high or even higher, threatened at any moment to crack and collapse. With their crumbling facades, tottering roofs and walls eaten up with tropical vegetation, some neighborhoods looked as if they had just been bombed. . . . In the absence of an adequate refuse collection service, eighteen hundred tons of refuse accumulated daily in the streets, attracting a host of flies, mosquitoes, rats, cockroaches and other creatures.

In summer the proliferation of filth brought with the the risk of epidemics. . . . Articles and reports in the local press never ceased denouncing the city as a refuse dump poisoned with fumes, nauseating gases ad discharges - a devastated landscape of broken roads leaking sewers, burst water pipes and torn down telephone wires. In short, Calcutta was a 'dying city.'

And yet, thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of people swarmed night and day over its squares, its avenues and the narrowest of its alleyways. The smallest fragment of pavement was occupied, squatted upon, covered with salesmen and pedlars, with homeless families camping out, with piles of building materials or refuse, with stalls and a multitude of altars and small temples. The result of this was an indescribable chaos on the roads, a records accident rate, nightmarish traffic jams. Furthermore, in the absence of public toilets, hundreds of thousands of the city's inhabitants were forced to attend to their bodily needs in the street.

The above photo is of the street corner across from our hotel in Chennai. The woman in the blue sari in the corner of the photo by day sold chai on that little piece of sidewalk and by night slept in that same spot along with her two children, one about the age of three years old and the other not even one year old. She is one of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands or more who sleep on the congested, broken and filthy excuses for sidewalks in Indian cities because they have nothing and nowhere else to go.

In the last 25 years, with outsourcing and the IT revolution, I am sure some Indian citizens have escaped brutal poverty. And yet, maddeningly, widespread poverty still exists today. I have yet to visit North Korea or Mexico City or Haiti or the shanty towns of Africa. But of all the places I have visited, nowhere have I seen such pervasive and abject poverty as in India and I am haunted by it.