Chronicles Of The Return

The day before yesterday I received yet another email about my recent writings on India. Kim, the author, has graciously agreed to let me post the letter in toto. He makes some excellent points about India and my perception of the country, or rather, he points out some of the faults in my perception of the country. Here it is:

Sadly, embarrassedly true.

BUT—and here’s where you are quite myopic—you’re judging India from a narrow American point of view. You equate cleanliness, good infrastructure, lack of bureaucracy, etc, with progressiveness. And, from some perspectives, you may be right. But that’s just material/industrial progressiveness (on the other side of which is a myriad of damaging problems—fractured communities, gaps between haves and have-nots, an exploited environment, etc.). And that’s not the entire story.

First, it’s not true that Indians don’t care or are complacent, as if that were a cultural genetic problem. The majority of us do care. Hindu philosophy preaches cleanliness next to godliness. The problem is that the task appears too gargantuan to handle in the middle of our attempts to survive. Anyone who has lived in India (as opposed to visiting India) knows that it’s like going to war everyday as we fight our way from dawn to dusk—dealing with traffic, bureaucracy, overcrowded workplaces, poor salaries (so you feel unappreciated), rising prices, etc. It is mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausting. This isn’t an excuse. It simply means that this is the kind of society most of us were born into—we inherited it. It’s easy to praise the British legacy of railways and bridges and forget that they ignored rural India (which is the largest part of the country). That lack of emphasis created a massive influx into the major cities, thus exacerbating and even causing most of the problems.

In the U.S, for example, you could live quite comfortably in a town of 50,000 to 100,000—good universities (therefore decent fine arts performances, global speakers, and other educative programming), car dealerships, malls, Thai restaurants, parks and recreation events, good doctors, hospitals, etc. In India, that’s little better than a village and everyone wants to get the hell out of Dodge and head to Mumbai or any of the other metropoli!

In other words, it isn’t easy to find an incentive to clear up the mess, which would take a herculean effort (no exaggeration)!

BUT—we should make that herculean effort, no question. And the largest impediment to that is the lack of education. For all the Nobel Laureates, scientists, philosophers, etc. that India has produced the sad fact is that millions of Indians are impoverished and uneducated. Here are some depressing statistics from a few years ago:

average number of students per teacher: 220
- people partaking of higher education: 1 person out of every 14,000
- number of pupils at the City Montessori school in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, 2002:
26,312 pupils (world record) [GBoWR]
- number of Indians going as students to Britain: 17,000 per year
- number of Indians going as students to the US: 14,000 per year

people below poverty line: about 260 million (acc. to AB Vajpayee feb 04)
- poor living in India: one quarter of the world’s poor [BBC Aug 04]
- people living on less than 1 Euro per day (50-55 Rs) 2004: about 30 % of population
- * number of people in India living on less than 50 pence per day: about 300 million
[BBC News Night, Oct 2006]
- number of people living in slums: 150 million [BBC 15 sep 2004]
- people in Mumbai living in shanty towns, open spaces, or on pavements: 50% of
Mumbai’s population [BBC, Nov 2005]
- world’s largest slum: located in Mumbai; Dharavi, 432 acres
- number of inhabited buildings declared as dangerous or dilapidated in Mumbai:
19,000 [BBC; Sep 2005]
- number of children in India who die before the age of 5: 63 out of 1000 according
to UN report [BBC; Sep 2005]
- children under 3 years of age in Orissa severely malnourished: 21 % (Feb 04, acc to
National Family Health Survey); or 3.8 % (acc. to data collected by the state)
- tribal children below the age of six who have died of malnourishment-related causes
in 15 districts of Maharashtra: 9,000 (between Apr 2003 and May 2004)
- number of street children in Delhi: 150,000 estimate [BBC; Sep 2005]

Now, before you think this is an excuse (and before you suggest that these problems were caused by complacency), I’d like to inform you that it isn’t easy to locate the sources responsible for these facts. It is also a fact that India is trying. There have been significant improvements to the numbers of people being offered education opportunities, but it is difficult to overcome centuries of tradition and ignorance. We had recycling systems among ALL levels of society (most of them because it was profitable to do so) long before the term became popular. We have three times the number of people in less than a third of the space than in the U.S., but guess which country has caused more harm (BY FAR) to the environment??! So although America’s streets may be cleaner, relatively speaking, its greenhouse gases and carbon footprints have rendered the environment less clean than almost any other country (and this despite the smog of Mumbai and other cities). There are free hospitals and comparatively low healthcare costs in India, which isn’t true in the U.S. And which country has exploited sweatshop opportunities in so-called third world countries (thus adding to the problems—young women and children should be in school, not seduced into low-paying sweatshops just so Americans can wear Nikes)??? You see, there are many ways to define the causes of the so-called “mess.”

All this isn’t to suggest that the British are solely responsible for the situation, but it does contextualize the problem, whereas your gut-reaction betrays a lack of deeper understanding and sounds like the analysis of a freshman social psychologist! You claim you’ve been there, done it. What—a few weeks or months (whatever) in a subcontinent as vast, complex, and vibrant as India and you feel empowered to make snap judgments?! We who have spent lifetimes in India still don’t understand much of it. And, yes, we’re embarrassed by the mess. You would argue that then we should have done something about it. But India is still a young nation, barely 60 years old as an independent republic. It will take time, patience, and education to reverse the situation. And, yes, it will not happen in your lifetime—of that I too am certain. As if that’s some kind of hallowed benchmark—your lifetime!!

Why do Americans want everything NOW? And in the drive to acquire it “now,” American societies care little about the long-term effects—witness the economic, cultural, and environmental mess. Everything they do suggests that they think of Time as an opponent to be attacked, diced into slices, and controlled so they can apportion and assign tasks to every minute of the day–the American work ethic, they say. It seems to be different in countries with ancient cultures–they have a more friendly perspective of Time, are more willing to meander along with it. They don’t see it in terms of hours and minutes or even days; after billions of yesterdays they know there’s always another tomorrow. It is no accident that Americans have the least national holidays of any country, less vacation time than most, and are constantly fiddling with Daylight Saving Time like children afraid of the dark!

But India will emerge from the age of Kali. How do I know? Because, despite your derisive characterizations of it, there is a renewed sense of vigor and energy in the country, which will continue to grow because the pride of Indians is growing now that the world community is taking notice. Whether or not you believe it, India is a world player if only for the fact that the world community thinks it is. Once you raise the level of expectations, people rise to meet it—any kindergarten teacher will tell you that! It isn’t a coincidence that the Kerala you praise so much also has the highest literacy rate in the country. And that’s how I know—because eventually the next few generations of Indians will become better educated and they will eventually carry India into a new society.

There is something else, which is the other side of the story that I referred to at the beginning. As in all things Indian there are two sides to every coin—tradition, which can sometimes be an impediment to new ideas, can also be a unifying foundation for change. Indian societies (one almost has to use the plural in India for it is many things all at once) are built on a firm base of mythology, religion, and community. Sometimes they cause fissures but eventually they shift back into solidity. These force fields invigorate the national conscience (and collective unconscious) because they are cultural bonds; people feel connected to one another—uneasily sometimes, but connected all the same. There’s strength in numbers and in the knowledge that we are not alone.

American societies draw their strength from pride in individual pursuits, which is why Americans treasure privacy among all other things. Once their tenuous communal moorings are cut they become alienated, lost, and disaffected; probably why you left your business behind to wander the world in search of cultures to criticize!

And, of this I am certain—it will take India less than 100 years. In 225 years as a nation the U.S. is doing what? Fighting wars on several fronts; endangering the environment more than any other nation; existing complacently while more than 40 million people have no health insurance; claiming improvements in race relations in the midst of hundreds of examples to the contrary every day, as if the presence of a black president is a magic wand to dispel decades of appaling racial hatred! Is this what you call “America living up to its ideals?” These are American ideals? Greed which has caused its financial systems to run amok? Arrogance that it can build other nations into its false image of democracy (where elections are stolen and career politicians use cheap fear-mongering tactics to hold on to power and where a political party gloats because it now has the one vote that will allow it to be an obstructionist)? These are American ideals? Where homelessness and poverty lurk in the fringes of the richest society in the world? It’s just a façade, Mr. Kelley, this so-called ideal state that you feel gives you the right to criticize others.

So Mr. Sean Paul Kelley, in response to your disingenuous invitation to call you “a cultural imperialist, a spoiled child of the West and all that,” I will do precisely that!

Kim and I had a nice chat and I’ll post my reply soon.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 6th, 2010 at 12:19 pm and is filed under India. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.