Incredible India!

The Indian Government has an advertising campaign going on now. They had ads in the New York Times and they have billboards in certain cities in the US. “Come see Incredible India!”

Unlike most ad campaigns, there is some truth to this one. The word, “Incredible” comes from the Latin “in” or not, and “credible” or believable, so it first meant “Not believable.” That pretty much describes India. It is hard to believe it until you see it. The disturbing poverty right next door to the nearly-royal wealth, the inefficiency that boggles the mind, and the abortion of human potential when children are put to work at the age of five. Welcome to Incredible India!

It’s difficult to pinpoint one specific instance where poverty was right next gross richness. I guess the best example is, in New Delhi, there is a five-star hotel called the J.P. Continental. The workers who built that hotel had to also build their own little shantytown. So within a hundred feet of one of the classiest business hotels in south Delhi are kids who grow up with no running water, who can’t go to school, who recycle plastic bags for a living. Incredible India!

A few nights we took a night train to get out of India to Nepal. We signed up for first class sleeper tickets, and paid about 300 Rupees (US$6), but they didn’t give us bed numbers. Generally, for night trains in India, they have a computer printout list of the names of passengers and their beds, but when the train arrived, there was no list. We got on and all the beds were taken. We meet these two dumb British girls (they were dumb but that’s not part of this story), and they were having the same problem. We found a train official, and he said that we would have to wait for the important train official to come. He couldn’t do it himself. The caste system has insinuated itself into the bureaucracy so that anyone has to have permission from someone higher up. This fat @*(#$ came onto the train. I could have spotted him as a tool from a mile away. He had a small gold chain around his neck and a little gold plate that said in Hindi that he was the big man on the train. But most importantly he wore a black jacket, and his authority seemed to be encapsulated in that black jacket. So, the train had been overbooked and this fat !)(@($ had to assign seats since no one had assigned tickets. He looked slowly at everyone’s ticket, car by car, and he gave his friends beds. For the guys he didn’t like, he assigned them to beds with other people. He didn’t like me, so I had some guy lying on my bed until 3 A.M. The bureaucracy is empowered, and its all idiots who run it. Incredible India!

The abortion of human potential, the inability for people to live lives that comes close to meeting their potential, is something that you see in both of the other stories. Kids who can’t go to school but spend their childhood collecting bottles can never reach their potential in a modern world. They will always make a dollar a day. And if idiots in black jackets run the country, then the country is going to go to Hell in a handbasket pretty quickly (India has been there for a while). We meet young guys who spoke good English in several places. They could get good jobs at call centers or somewhere else, but there are no good jobs in these areas. So they just hassle tourist to buy their knickknacks in some mosque in bumbleflip, Uttar Pradesh. Sometimes poor parents will even chop of the foot of their children just so that they can make more money begging.