Wheels and class

There are many visible indicators of class and wealth in India. You can see it in the way people move, their body language towards each other, the clothes they wear (not just the quality or costliness, but the aesthetics), and in their faces (a browse through the faces on milaap.org, a brilliant site that facilitates micro loans to needy people in India, will show many people for whom the daily toil of life for millions of Indians adds decades to their appearance). And you can also see it in how they get about.

Transportation may not seem a particularly important marker of class or power, particularly in a country where millions identify themselves as poor by proffering a begging bowl. But as any country's economy develops, the need to move about - and the desire to do so in comfort - grows inexorably, and this puts massive stress on infrastructure and inhabitants. In Delhi, with its crowded roads and might-is-right traffic rules, traffic and transportation are becoming one of the most visible battle lines of class conflict. As the city grows, so does its inequality, and this battle looks set to go for a good while yet.

Take this story, for instance. Gaurav Jain, a 26 year old journalist, researching the lives of cycle rickshaw pullers by doing the job himself, was assaulted by a police officer for 'blocking the road'. Before I say anything else I want to say: kudos to Mr. Jain. Most of the time, Delhi seems to consist of a million or so "important" people and countless millions of others who get ignored. The cycle rickshaw pullers, the street hawkers, the hijras tapping on your car window at the traffic lights. Your average car-driving Delhiwalla barely seems aware of the existence of these people, never mind having such an interest in how they live that they'd be willing to take on a tough and - let's face it - demeaning job in order to understand it.

I don't say this to be critical. Anyone who has lived in a big city will understand that urban survival depends on an ability to act as if you're the only person walking down the street, standing on the train, driving to work. There are just too many people. We can't acknowledge them all. And the ones we do acknowledge tend to be those most like us, the ones to whom we can relate. So in Delhi it's no surprise that the aspiring middle classes pay scant attention to the poor guys slogging their guts out dragging a family of five on the back of their bike for 15 rupees. It's the way things are, and after living here a while you find your blinkers tend to come on pretty quick.

Anyway, back to Mr. Jain's story. Following the attack he went to the local police station to make a complaint, but was ignored. "It's strange how much a person's professional standing or profile can affect the way the law treats him", he said. Quite. Somehow I don't think his rickshaw puller colleagues would find it all that strange.

That the rich and privileged can expect better legal redress than the poor and excluded is no surprise. What was interesting to me was the reason for the attack: "blocking the road". Read: getting in the way of the car drivers, who are far more important than you.

This reminded me of another story that came out a few weeks ago, about the ongoing saga of Delhi's bus lanes and the objections from car users that they are causing delays. The quoted comments in the article lay bare the stark class divide here, and the assumptions made by the privileged about the millions of dispossessed Indians (on whom they depend for everything from domestic cleaning to shoe shining). "People" are being delayed by traffic jams because of the bus lanes, argue campaigners. "How does it matter if a peon reaches his office five minutes before time?" asks one. The apparently radical idea that "people" should also include those who use public transport has to be specifically pointed out by a professor from the Indian Institute of Technology.

It should be obvious that when only 10% of a city's inhabitants drive, yet the streets are already clogged to all hell, public transport has to be at least a part of the solution. But the fact that the bus lanes are fighting for their survival is testament to the disproportionate power held by those 10%. Of course, while they appear to be fighting for their own benefit, if they get what they want it will simply ensure a miserable future for everyone: a city even more gridlocked, fume-choked and cacophonous than it is already.

And this is what worries me most about the emerging battles around Delhi's transportation system. It seems to encapsulate a situation where growing inequality leads to class-based battles that belittle ordinary people and lead to the privileged taking decisions in their narrow benefit, rather than recognising the need for development to work for all, not just the "wealth creators".

The result, it seems to me, is usually a set of outcomes that are worse for everyone.  There are parallels to be made here with the increasingly unequal societies in the UK and the US (among others), which in the past 30 years or so have become massively richer, massively less equitable, and arguably a good deal less happy, healthy and secure. Repeating those patterns in a city the size of the Netherlands - let alone a country of 1.3 billion - is a scary prospect.

The summer that never ends

Readers in the UK might see the title of this post and think "how lovely". Make no mistake, this is not going to be a lovely post. This is going to be a big old moan about Delhi's climate. Yes, I know I've been silent for two months and it's not good form to return on a whinge. I don't care. The weather in Delhi is to a large degree to blame for my failure to write anything since August, and it's about time I just said it out loud so we can both move on (hopefully, into a nice chilly winter).

I am sick and tired of this summer.

It is now seven months since the temperatures rose to what I would term largely uncomfortable. Admittedly for some of that time I was out of India, thanks to visa complications, but for the sake of rhetoric I will disregard that. Seven months of being perpetually sweaty. Seven months of attempting to sleep to the lullaby of my geriatric AC system or else lying spreadeagled on the bed feeling beads of moisture trickle down my forehead onto the pillow. And seven months of getting gradually, progressively, inexorably, more and more exhausted.

I don't know how people do this every year of their lives. I've never been so tired. OK, my job is fairly responsible, involves a lot of multitasking and a fair amount of travel, but on the other hand I'm not exactly working 18 hours shifts in the Emergency room. I shouldn't come home at the end of the working day with barely enough energy to open my front door. I shouldn't wake up in the morning after 10 hours of sleep feeling like I've had three. Doing something I love (recently, singing with my choir or making a short mostly-Hindi-language film with friends, which involved standing around on roadsides a lot and not understanding anything about the plot) shouldn't feel like an impossible demand designed to wring out the very last drop of enthusiasm from my mangled get-up-and-go. But that's how I feel right now.

Maybe it's not just the weather. Maybe it's Delhi - the traffic, the crowds, the pace of life, and all those other things that you have to deal with here. Maybe I just need a holiday (a proper one, rather than snatched long weekends which, although terrific fun, are not all that effective as a restorative). But my heart says that I just need to spend some time in temperatures well below 30 degrees C for a while.

I've lived through the Delhi summer before, but when I arrived last year it was already mid-June. This year, breaks aside, I've been here for the entire seven months. I think my body's just caved in. I'm not designed to cope with these temperatures for this long. Hell, I don't think anyone is.

So, the last couple of months have been marked by a feebleness unmatched by anything I've experienced since I was hooked up to a dozen medical machines as a 4 month old with meningitis. Since this has coincided with the recruitment of my team (finally!) and the corresponding increase in my workload (I'm sure that's not how it's supposed to go, but it has) it's left me unfit for much in the evenings beyond staring open-mouthed (and quite possibly dribbling) at YouTube videos of 1980s English cooking shows. I wish I was kidding about this.

I exaggerate but a little. To be honest, I've actually spent a lot of the last couple of months thinking about a whole ton of things and how India has changed my perspective on them. I haven't yet reached a sufficient degree of lucidity to blog about them yet. I hope that the cooler weather just around the corner (please, Lord, please) will let me do so. But for as long as summer keeps its gnarly hands grasped round October's throat, my productivity is more or less confined to the working day.

Dark and Dry

If you're reading this outside India, you've probably already heard that we've been having some power problems of late. On Sunday night, somewhere around 2 a.m., I was awoken by the unmistakable sound of my AC unit clunking off with a finality that can only mean "power cut". Believe me, it's not a sound you want to hear on a Delhi summer night.

To be fair, Sunday night was only slightly sauna-like, positively mild by Delhi standards, and anyway I was too dog-tired to have much difficulty getting back to sleep. To my surprise, though, the power was still off when my alarm went off five and a half hours later, and hadn't returned an hour after that when Anil came to pick me up.

Turned out, as I'm sure you're all aware, that I wasn't the only one having problems. In fact, everyone in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh had apparently also lost their juice. The whole northern-central part of the country - millions and millions of people - had been affected by the Great Northern Grid Failure.

Only we can't call it that, because it happened again today, this time in the afternoon. Or at least that's what I'm told, because our office generators did sterling work and we didn't even notice (a colleague spotted it on the BBC news). But it's all quite worrying. India has creaky power infrastructure and supply shortages, but a failure on this scale hasn't been seen for about a decade. So I'm thinking two in one week is not a good indicator of things to come.

As if that wasn't bad enough, it's looking like the future is going to be increasingly dry and hot as well as dark. Delhi is parched right now. Last year, when I got caught in a downpour at Humayun's Tomb, it was the start of a couple of months when it rained almost every day - not constantly, but reliably there was a pretty hefty dumping of water every afternoon during the monsoon. This year, there have been three serious bouts of rainfall that I can think of. Days and days go by during India's famous rainy season without a drop. I'm told the last few monsoons have been late and capricious. This year, the monsoon just hasn't bothered at all.

The rains fail every now and then and it's unpleasant for the city's residents, worse for the farmers who depend on the monsoon for their livelihoods. But there is now serious talk of a permanent change in the monsoon patterns. That's a truly terrifying prospect. One drought can be weathered without significant social change; take away the monsoon, and you lose a key part of what makes this much life possible in such a relatively small amount of space. The majority of India's population is still rural, and the majority of them still farm. And all of them, of course, need to eat.

This week feels like a rather alarming foretaste of things to come, if India's stressed climate does not get some relief. A hotter, drier, hungrier Delhi with paralysing power shortages and ever-more people moving in from the parched fields? It's a scary vision indeed. 

Dust to dust

Delhi is about as hot as it gets right now. Today was 43 degrees and we are set to hit 45 on Friday. This isn't the first time I've experienced these temperatures here - this time last year I was in Delhi looking for a place to live, and when I moved in mid-June it wasn't much cooler. I can't say I enjoy it much, but it's better than Delhi's meanest climate trick, which it saved until the very end of my first year here: the dust storms.

This time of year, as the city burns like a furnace, the broiling air rises rapidly and creates a vacuum into which some pretty strong winds can sweep. When those winds come from the South West, from the deserts of Rajasthan and Gujarat, they come laden with dust that can transform a merely uncomfortably hot day into a swirling tornado of misery.

I was in Green Park market when the latest one hit Delhi. It's a surreal experience watching the approach of the storm: a distant blurriness on the horizon transforms into an advancing brown wall, gradually obscuring the buildings until suddenly it's upon you. The air suddenly becomes thick with grit and particles; the dust whips your skin and creeps into your ears and eyes; breathing becomes a matter of sucking a minimal amount in through clenched nostrils; when you clench your teeth you can feel the grit grinding between them. The streets empty as everyone seeks shelter wherever they can. The polluting effects, several newspapers noted, are even worse than those caused by the insane quantity of fireworks let off during Diwali (which says a lot about just how insane that quantity of fireworks is). The dust gathers in great swathes on any horizontal surface, which dance and morph into new patterns as the wind sweeps over them. Vehicles, balconies and pavements are caked in the stuff. It becomes inescapable.

Photo taken from The Hindu website

This isn't my first time dealing with this; Seoul's infamous "yellow dust" comes from the deserts of Mongolia at a similar time each year and blankets much of Eastern China, Korea and Japan in choking squalls. Maybe it's just the luxury of distance, but I don't recall the experience being quite so unpleasant as Delhi's dust storms though.

Apparently these storms are set to get worse as desertification increases across Asia, including North West India as well as Mongolia. Already the storms - rather than the dust - are deadly; India's often-sub standard infrastructure is vulnerable to severe weather and buildings frequently collapse under the high winds. But the health effects of the dust itself are also becoming severe, with rising cases of asthma and other respiratory conditions.

There's not much that can be done about the storms themselves, which will continue for as long as the deserts do. But it seems that the job of cleaning up the dust is currently something that is beyond the city authorities. Outside of the squeaky-clean, embassy-heavy areas around India Gate and Chanakyapuri, Delhi's streets are constantly dusty and dirty, and walking for any length of time here will leave you needing a shower. I suspect that the May storms are the origins of a lot of this dust (though the non-stop construction work must also play a significant role). Contrary to popular belief, despite the crazy traffic, vehicular emissions represent only a small percentage of the total particulate matter in the city. 

For the most part I haven't found Delhi's pollution to be half as bad as you might suspect, but the figures speak for themselves. The city has made successful initiatives on the environment in the past (particularly its much-ballyhooed initiative to LPG fuel. But it's already too big to manage easily, and continues to grow at a breakneck pace; and there seems to be more pressures for new malls and new roads than for environmental improvements. Delhi's dust is probably not going anywhere any time soon.

India's garbage: there is hope

Anyone who has spent much time in Indian towns and cities will know that garbage management is not a forte here. While the plush bits of Delhi and the major tourist attractions are generally kept sparkling clean, elsewhere it's a different story. In places, it's not uncommon for the piles of rubbish lying on the streets to get so big that passing vehicles have to swerve to avoid them, and pedestrians are well-accustomed to having to step over all manner of nastiness to go about their business.

Why is this a problem for India? Partly because the country is undergoing rapid urbanisation, and the kind of infrastructure necessary to keep the impact of spiralling city populations to a minimum is just not in place - not to mention a shortage of funds that can only be exacerbated by the country's corruption problems. But this doesn't explain everything. Even in smaller towns, the same issues arise, and on my road trip in Kerala earlier this year I witnessed stretches of semi-rural roads with garbage lined up along either side for kilometres at a time. So is there something more fundamentally problematic in Indian attitudes towards their public spaces?

That seems to be what the people behind the Ugly Indian initiative in Bangalore think. I read about this on the BBC a couple of days ago: a group of anonymous volunteers who meet up via social networking and email, to clean up Bangalore one street at a time. By the looks of it they are having considerable success.

What I find interesting about this story is that it both confirms and challenges some stereotypes about India. The country is, in Western minds, inextricably linked with dirt and poor hygiene - a very common reaction when I told people I was moving here was "don't get sick", and recently the movie Eat, Pray, Love caused outrage here when a character was advised not to touch anything after coming to India. It would be foolish to pretend there isn't some truth in this, though I've been here nearly six months now without having any major problems (a slight upset following my trip to Varanasi aside).

The organisers of the Ugly Indian initiative seem to acknowledge that this is a real problem with attitudes, not just a symptom of a developing country: the mission is rooted in an attempt to "understand the Indian mind and attitude towards cleanliness" and "outwit him/her with clever solutions". This positions it not just as a matter of picking up litter, but actively combating everyday Indians who neglect the cleanliness of their environment.

So the "dirty" stereotype has some justification. But at the same time, the development of this initiative shows that society here is a lot more innovative and dynamic than it is sometimes credited with being, and that there is a healthy sense of community spirit. Before coming here I read Pavan K Varma's brilliant Being Indian, in which he argues that Hindu spirituality, which emphasises individual approaches to God, and a linked social structure based on tight family units and rigid social divisions, has led to a country disinclined to evangelism and aggressive expansionism, but also inward-looking and lacking in community sentiment. There's maybe something in this - but I find it hard to reconcile with an initiative so selfless as the Ugly Indian.

The most astonishing thing is the anonymity. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think even the most altruistic initiatives in the West wouldn't take this approach (I'm not talking about anonymous charity donation, which is a bit different I think, but active community initiatives). But here it has been seen as a big factor behind the success - maybe (and I'm just speculating) because it frees the participants from the traditional sense of shame about engaging in the menial and dirty activities reserved for the low castes.

Whatever the reasons for its success, I hope London and other UK cities are looking at this as an inspiration (I'm sure, as a colleague of mine pointed out, that Mr Cameron would just love to have this kind of "Big Society" initiative take off in the UK). I also hope that Indian activists like Anna Hazare (the anti-corruption campaigner and hunger striker whose approach I'm not the biggest fan of) take a look and maybe reflect on the fact that if an issue isn't made into a personal promotion, it allows everyone to focus on what's really important.

But most of all, I hope the initiative spreads to Delhi and that I can join in the clean up. Anonymously, of course.

Birds and bikes

It's been quite a week. A two day visit to Kolkata and a two day skills conference in Delhi pretty much meant that work took over all my time since last weekend, hence my paucity of postings. So it's now been over a week since Rishneet and his friends took me along on a day trip to the Keoladeo National Park in Rajasthan, about 200 km south of Delhi. It's a World Heritage Site known for its diversity of birdlife, and is long established as a refuge for migratory birds particularly during the winter season.

We were there during the low season, so there were no massive flocks to be seen. Indeed, in recent years the park has seen steep declines in the numbers of visiting birds, as the water supply to the park has dropped local demand for water has risen (the immediate vicinity is relatively densely populated). As a result, it's in danger of losing its World Heritage status unless current efforts to boost the water supply by the park management are successful.

Still, Keoladeo is a beautiful place to pedal around (despite my hire bike being about the right size for an 11 year old), full of lush green vegetation and punctuated by small lakes (a lot smaller than they used to be, apparently):

Our route took us past a place that pretty much encapsulates the extremes of India. I wish I had taken the time to get a better picture of this, but you get the idea:

The massive flocks may have been absent, but we did spot quite a number of birds, including green bee-eaters, grey hornbills, and (my personal favourite) a roosting flock of storks standing proudly silhouetted against the twilight sky:

The day also featured the ugliest and greediest turtles I have ever seen, who live in a lake in the grounds of a temple where they are fed by the temple keepers. Watching them approach the jetty where we were standing - a formless lump pushing ominously and rapidly towards us through the green surface algae like the monster in a B-movie - was genuinely unnerving, and those jaws looked powerful enough to keep us all well back from the water's edge:

The temple also hosted a religiously-inclined pig:

As a parting gift just as we were about to exit the park (very sweaty and with rather a nasty headache from overdoing it in the sun), we were treated to a beautiful sight as the sun approached the horizon. Peacocks are ten a penny in India, but this one just demanded to be photographed:

 

It was a (very) long and tiring day - we set off at 3 am from Delhi and we didn't get back until the same time on Sunday morning! Fortunately for me my companions were highly tolerant of my grumpiness on the trip back (the headache didn't help in this regard). Despite that, it was a great day and a completely different side of India - it would be nice to go back some time in the Winter months and see what the park is like in its peak season. 

I couldn't help but feel a bit sad, though, as I read about the park's troubles and its decline from its glory days. It seems like the price for development is paid most consistently by the natural treasures each country has, and India, being crowded as well as fast-developing, is more vulnerable to this than most. No surprise either that it is water that is the issue. India is one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, and its developing industries are inevitably exacerbating that demand.

As the ground water on which much of India depends becomes more fiercely contested, what chance do the migratory birds of Keoladeo have of getting their share? I wonder whether a visit to the park will be as rewarding in five or ten years' time, and whether Keoladeo can ever return to its former glory. Just another challenge on India's road to development.