Reflections on India By Sean Paul Kelley

Sean Paul Kelley is a travel writer, former radio host, and before
that an asset manager for a Wall Street investment bank that is still
(barely) alive. He recently left a fantastic job in Singapore working
for Solar Winds, a software company based out of Austin to travel
around the world for a year (or two). He founded The Agonist, in
2002, which is still considered the top international affairs,
culture and news destination for progressives. He is also the Global
Correspondent for The Young Turks, on satellite radio and Air
America.

Reflections on India By Sean Paul Kelley

If you are Indian, or of Indian descent, I must preface this post
with a clear warning: you are not going to like what I have to say.
My criticisms may be very hard to stomach. But consider them as the
hard words and loving advice of a good friend. Someone who’s being
honest with you and wants nothing from you. These criticisms apply to
all of India except Kerala and the places I didn’t visit, except that
I have a feeling it applies to all of India, except as I mentioned
before, Kerala. Lastly, before anyone accuses me of Western Cultural
Imperialism, let me say this: if this is what India and Indians want,
then hey, who am I to tell them differently. Take what you like and
leave the rest. In the end it doesn’t really matter, as I get the
sense that Indians, at least many upper class Indians, don’t seem to
care and the lower classes just don’t know any better, what with
Indian culture being so intense and pervasive on the sub-continent.
But here goes, nonetheless.

India is a mess. It’s that simple, but it’s also quite complicated.
I’ll start with what I think are India’s four major problems–the four
most preventing India from becoming a developing nation–and then move
to some of the ancillary ones.

First, pollution. In my opinion the filth, squalor and all around
pollution indicates a marked lack of respect for India by Indians. I
don’t know how cultural the filth is, but it’s really beyond anything
I have ever encountered. At times the smells, trash, refuse and
excrement are like a garbage dump. Right next door to the Taj Mahal
was a pile of trash that smelled so bad, was so foul as to almost
ruin the entire Taj experience. Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai to a
lesser degree were so very polluted as to make me physically ill.
Sinus infections, ear infection, bowels churning was an all to common
experience in India. Dung, be it goat, cow or human fecal matter was
common on the streets. In major tourist areas filth was everywhere,
littering the sidewalks, the roadways, you name it. Toilets in the
middle of the road, men urinating and defecating anywhere, in broad
daylight. Whole villages are plastic bag wastelands. Roadsides are
choked by it. Air quality that can hardly be called quality. Far too
much coal and far to few unleaded vehicles on the road. The measure
should be how dangerous the air is for one’s health, not how good it
is. People casually throw trash in the streets, on the roads. The
only two cities that could be considered sanitary in my journey were
Trivandrum–the capital of Kerala–and Calicut. I don’t know why this
is. But I can assure you that at some point this pollution will cut
into India’s productivity, if it already hasn’t. The pollution will
hobble India’s growth path, if that indeed is what the country wants.
(Which I personally doubt, as India is far too conservative a
country, in the small ‘c’ sense.)

More after the jump..

The second issue, infrastructure, can be divided into four
subcategories: roads, rails and ports and the electrical grid. The
electrical grid is a joke. Load shedding is all too common,
everywhere in India. Wide swaths of the country spend much of the day
without the electricity they actually pay for. With out regular
electricity, productivity, again, falls. The ports are a joke.
Antiquated, out of date, hardly even appropriate for the mechanized
world of container ports, more in line with the days of longshoremen
and the like. Roads are an equal disaster. I only saw one elevated
highway that would be considered decent in Thailand, much less
Western Europe or America. And I covered fully two thirds of the
country during my visit. There are so few dual carriage way roads as
to be laughable. There are no traffic laws to speak of, and if there
are, they are rarely obeyed, much less enforced. A drive that should
take an hour takes three. A drive that should take three takes nine.
The buses are at least thirty years old, if not older. Everyone in
India, or who travels in India raves about the railway system.
Rubbish. It’s awful. Now, when I was there in 2003 and then late 2004
it was decent. But in the last five years the traffic on the rails
has grown so quickly that once again, it is threatening productivity.
Waiting in line just to ask a question now takes thirty minutes.
Routes are routinely sold out three and four days in advance now,
leaving travelers stranded with little option except to take the
decrepit and dangerous buses. At least fifty million people use the
trains a day in India. 50 million people! Not surprising that
waitlists of 500 or more people are common now. The rails are
affordable and comprehensive but they are overcrowded and what with
budget airlines popping up in India like Sadhus in an ashram the
middle and lowers classes are left to deal with the overutilized
rails and quality suffers. No one seems to give a shit. Seriously, I
just never have the impression that the Indian government really
cares. Too interested in buying weapons from Russia, Israel and the
US I guess.


The last major problem in India is an old problem and can be divided
into two parts that’ve been two sides of the same coin since
government was invented: bureaucracy and corruption. It take
triplicates to register into a hotel. To get a SIM card for one’s
phone is like wading into a jungle of red-tape and photocopies one is
not likely to emerge from in a good mood, much less satisfied with
customer service. Getting train tickets is a terrible ordeal, first
you have to find the train number, which takes 30 minutes, then you
have to fill in the form, which is far from easy, then you have to
wait in line to try and make a reservation, which takes 30 minutes at
least and if you made a single mistake on the form back you go to the
end of the queue, or what passes for a queue in India. The government
is notoriously uninterested in the problems of the commoners, too
busy fleecing the rich, or trying to get rich themselves in some way
shape or form. Take the trash for example, civil rubbish collection
authorities are too busy taking kickbacks from the wealthy to keep
their areas clean that they don’t have the time, manpower, money or
interest in doing their job. Rural hospitals are perennially
understaffed as doctors pocket the fees the government pays them,
never show up at the rural hospitals and practice in the cities
instead.

I could go on for quite some time about my perception of India and
its problems, but in all seriousness, I don’t think anyone in India
really cares. And that, to me, is the biggest problem. India is too
conservative a society to want to change in any way. Mumbai, India’s
financial capital is about as filthy, polluted and poor as the worst
city imaginable in Vietnam, or Indonesia–and being more polluted than
Medan, in Sumatra is no easy task. The biggest rats I have ever seen
were in Medan!

One would expect a certain amount of, yes, I am going to use this
word, backwardness, in a country that hasn’t produced so many Nobel
Laureates, nuclear physicists, eminent economists and entrepreneurs.
But India has all these things and what have they brought back to
India with them? Nothing. The rich still have their servants, the
lower castes are still there to do the dirty work and so the country
remains in stasis. It’s a shame. Indians and India have many
wonderful things to offer the world, but I’m far from sanguine that
India will amount to much in my lifetime.

Now, have at it, call me a cultural imperialist, a spoiled child of
the West and all that. But remember, I’ve been there. I’ve done it..
And I’ve seen 50 other countries on this planet and none, not even
Ethiopia, have as long and gargantuan a laundry list of problems as
India does. And the bottom line is, I don’t think India really cares.
Too complacent and too conservative.