Some notes about my Indian experience

Even before leaving for India, I became familiar with quite a few of the problems that I would experience, mostly through Sam and Mike's blog: http://travel.michaelwebdesign.com/. I quickly learned that poverty, corruption, and lack of sanitation would be three main challenges I would deal with while traveling there. I prepared myself for what I knew would be more of an experience than a true vacation.

I also knew that I wanted to see the world. Not only did I want to go and see the beautiful beaches, mountains, and man-made wonders, but I wanted to see how people across the globe, across all walks of life, are living. In my mind, getting as far outside of the Lincoln Park / educated middle class bubble as possible would open my eyes to the problems that exist across the world and also to how fortunate I truly was (Note: I am truly fortunate, and I have a much deeper appreciation for the advantages I have had in my life after seeing how the least fortunate are living in India).

In my mind, my timing to start the trip could not have been better. Mike and Sam had been in India and Nepal for two months already, and they had seen some areas of India that are much worse than anything I was going to encounter, at least in terms of poverty levels. While in the Ganges valley, for instance, their clothes were actually washed by their hotel in sewage. I, on the other hand, was fortunate enough to see the Taj Mahal in the first few days of being there and also spend more time in the South, where the people are generally more educated and less impoverished. I was excited.

While dealing with some of the more absurd problems we encountered in India, Mike, Sam, and I did a fantastic job of maintaining our morale and seeing the humor in what we saw. However, once we had booked our flight to Thailand and could start counting down the days until we left, our patience started wearing thin. We were tired of dealing with the problems that exist, which I will do my best to lay out here.

The biggest challenge in discussing the problems with India to people who have not been there is that an honest assessment will look exaggerated. When I say that people in India do not understand what a germ is, I am not saying that some of the places are less than sanitary. I literally mean that they do not have the fundamental understanding of cleanliness and Germ Theory. Except for the top 1% or so of educated Indians, not a single one we talked to could grasp the concept of a microorganism that would cause disease. When trying to find a place to eat, for instance, we could not make decisions based on whether the menu looked nice or the prices. We literally had to go into the kitchen and see if the conditions were satisfactory. Of course, our standards of cleanliness dropped suddenly at first, and continued to drop over time. By the end of the trip, if we were eating at a restaurant and there were 100 flies hovering around, landing on us, the dirty dishes on the other tables, and on various spots in the kitchen, but there were 8 other tourists eating there, we would find it acceptable and deal with the flies. Street vendors are a popular source of food for locals, but rarely did we find it acceptable. Most of the food sold by street vendors was some variation of fried meat, potatoes, and vegetables that had been fried hours ago and had been sitting out in the sun, completely unprotected from the hundreds of flies buzzing around it, for hours. Occasionally, we would find a place that was making fresh food, and we would happily indulge. These vendors did not understand the fact that fresh food was cleaner and safer, only that westerners had some "strange" preference for it, and they could therefore make more money by cooking the food fresh.

On the same note, there is absolutely no infrastructure for sanitation. In most cities, there are open-air sewers that dump the sewage straight into the nearest body of water. These cannot actually do even this simplest function, of course, because locals throw all of their garbage on the ground, which eventually collects in the sewers. The garbage will remain here until someone feels compelled to gather some of it up and burn it. Incineration is not a formal form of waste disposal, but rather a quick way to produce some heat and get rid of the garbage. One night in Delhi, while trying to find a hotel in a very busy district, we stumbled upon a young man who was lighting plastic bags on fire and holding his hands in front of them for the heat. Nevermind that burning plastic has to produce of the most noxious gases possible, it was 55 degrees Fahrenheit and he was cold. The plastic garbage was the easiest thing to burn, so he did. This occurred in the city, so of course the pollution filled the air and moved into people's houses, hotels, and restaurants. But no one on the street even gave him a second glance. In Allappe, I took this picture. The street vendor has a wooden cart from which he sells bananas on the street. Apparently there was too much garbage in the sewers a few feet away from him, so he decided to light it on fire. After talking with him, he expressed no concern that the fire could burn down his stand.

In Hampi, the ancient city with many natural rock formations and man-made rock carvings, we stumbled upon this garbage pile. In the same city, we saw children drawing chalk designs around cow dung. Unfortunately, I did not have my camera to take a picture. Since cows are considered holy, they are permitted anywhere they wish, including in the cities. And when they defecate, the dung will just sit in the middle of the road until it is stomped into nothing or put in a pile with other garbage and burned. I wish that these were isolated incidents, but this is really the overriding theme. There is garbage everywhere, no sewage system, and nobody seems to even view this as a problem.

The mosquitos in India are brutal as well. Toward the end of the trip, while in a more tropical climate, the three of us began accumulating mosquito bites at an alarming rate. Each day I would check and somehow have more bites than the day before. This is in spite of wearing deep woods off 24 hours a day and sleeping under a mosquito net. With the ever-present risk of malaria everywhere in India, constantly having 40 mosquito bites not only made us quite itchy, but provided a large health risk as well.

Although I touched on this already by discussing the lack of garbage removal and sanitation systems, another one of the major problems in India is the lack of infrastructure. Cities do not really exist in the western sense of the word. Villages simply merge together and become overcrowded, leaving winding, barely paved roads to be shared by cycle rickshaws, autorickshaws, pedestrians, mopeds, and cars. Everything is lackluster in location, since nothing was actually planned. For instance, when trying to leave Delhi, it feels like one should be getting out into the suburbs after leaving the truly packed downtown area. However, the "outskirts" of the city actually composes most of the population and can continue for miles, with no sign of organization. On a positive note, while the British were in control, they created a basic transportation system that makes it possible to travel around the country. Roads and railroads have been built and make land travel possible.

Traveling around is its own challenge, and may actually be one of the hardest parts of being in India. When riding a bus, for instance, the buses will speed down the road at a breakneck pace, honking continuously and forcing vehicles going in both directions to pull over the side of the road, simply because the bus is the biggest vehicle. It is like a giant game of chicken. Spending too much time on a bus is out of the question, as it is both stressful and nauseating. Although the track is in place, taking a train is a difficult process as well. There is a website with ticket availability and times, but it wrong about 30% of the time, and you cannot order tickets online anyway. So showing up at the train station is really the only way to buy tickets. Once the tickets are purchased, it is really a crapshoot as to when the train will show up. A twelve hour train ride could easily depart two hours late and lose another four hours during the journey, arriving a total of six hours late. I was on a train that was supposed to take four hours and somehow took eight. So much extra time needs to be reserved for travel, and only one leg of a journey can really be booked at a time, due to the uncertainty of the trains.

This brings me to one of my worst experiences of the entire trip. While already tired from a few restless nights and stressed out from various hassles, our only option for traveling from Hampi to Bangalore on an overnight train. Mike and Sam told me it was actually nicer than the normal trains, as you could get an air conditioned sleeper class. For some reason I was thinking that it would be like the train system in Europe, where the a/c sleeper class was actually a convenient and comfortable way to travel. My experiences with the trains had been all right so far. For the shorter trips, we had taken a non a/c on the train and it had been less than sanitary, but tolerable. On this overnight train, in the nicest cabin in the entire train, I was near panic. Once we got into the train, Mike and Sam fell asleep rather quickly as they were quite tired, but I decided to read for a while first. In the non a/c class, everyone throws their garbage out of the windows, so that the train is actually reasonable clean. However, the windows do not open in the a/c class, so everyone throws their garbage on the floor. Of course, there is no one that cleans up the garbage with any regularity, so the train becomes a breeding ground for insects, in this case silverfish.

Maybe more than other people, I strongly dislike bugs. I am not afraid of them, but I know they are disgusting. Mosquitos, flies, and silverfish all breed disease and are a nuisance as well. Cockroaches are the worst.

On this train, once the lights were mostly out, the silverfish began to come out and scrounge around looking for food. While sitting on a bunk and reading, I saw them crawling along the floor, up the walls, and onto the mattresses where other people were sleeping. Whenever any of them would come near me on the ground, I would stomp them to death. Given our relative sizes, one would expect that one stomp would be enough to end their lives, but in many cases it took three. As more and more came out, I started to lose it. What made it worse was that the remaining Indians who were awake on the train not only thought I was odd for killing them, but they were amused and laughed at me that I was not comfortable with these bugs. Any hope of sleeping quickly disappeared as I resolved to keep the bugs off of me. I had gotten a copy of Slumdog Millionaire on DVD, so I turned on Mike's laptop to watch it. 2/3 of the way through the movie, the power on the laptop was fading, so I plugged it into the outlet. No power. I asked what the problem was to an employee, and he told me that none of the outlets were working; they would be fixed in the morning. I went back to the bunk and sat down to start to read. With enough adrenaline pumping through my veins from the bugs, I was nowhere close to being tired at this point, although I was sure to feel the consequences in the morning.

Then I noticed that there were various Indians waking up, brushing off a few silverfish, and walking to the toilet. The toilet on the trains is actually just a hole in the ground. When I was using it, I could actually see the tracks below me. Because the toilets are just squatters (meaning no seat, just a hole in the ground), the bathroom becomes a veritable pool of feces and urine. The Indians, who are accustomed to going barefoot everywhere, were walking to and into the room completely barefoot. While walking back, I could see their wet footprints, and I watched them as they stepped on the sixty or so silverfish I killed over the course of the night. Being trapped on this train, I felt completely isolated from the world, and I felt a world away from anyone who had the slightest idea what hygiene was. A few times during the night I began to hyperventilate, but I managed to get to Mysore without anything worse than some trauma to my nerves.

The poverty and lack of education almost goes without saying. So many people in the cities and villages are living on almost no income, living in collective shanties. Education is minimal, and many children are pulled out of school at a young age so that they can work. Since no job really pays a real wage, each family needs every child to be supplying income to the family from a very young age. The book White Tiger does a great job describing in much better detail many of these systemic problems. I would recommend this book for anyone who wants to get an insider's look at the various societal problems in India right now.

Corruption is another large problem. Anything can be accomplished in India for the right price. An interesting observation was made by another foreign backpacker I met. He said that while we are not technically above the law, there is no crime we could commit that we do not have enough money to bribe our way out of it, thus giving us above the law status. Native Indians who want to avoid prison can bribe police officers and judges. To buy a house or start a business, bribes have to be paid to the right people to ensure that all applications make it through the bureacracy on time. Doctors are able to use bribes to "double dip;" they will receive a government salary for working at a public hospital, give 1/3 of the salary to the regional director, and then work full time at a private hospital. This is the reason there are no doctors at the public hospitals (Another example from White Tiger). With a system of corruption so pervasive, it is impossible to imagine how to change it.

One of the worst problems is actually the hardest to notice at first, but the racism in India is worse than anything I have seen anywhere else in the world. Although the caste system is technically illegal, it is still very much followed in practice. Untouchables are given the job to move cow dung from one spot to another and are not allowed to make eye contact with above classes. Anyone with any amount of money will have a team of servants to handle all of the day to day errands that would take hours or days without them, and when their uneducated servants do not live up to their standards, they will beat them. The masters try to keep their violence private, especially from westerners, but on occasion we have seen it happen. While Mike was at a computer store getting his laptop fixed, the owner went into the back of the store, and after a quick discussion, slapped his servant across the head. He thought Mike did not see it happen, but once he realized Mike had, he simply pretended it had not happened. With no education system in place and no way to make political changes in the corrupt system, it is impossibly difficult to rise above one's position from birth.

When combined, all of these problems make for a mostly chaotic society. With so little education and organized business, labor productivity is at absurdly low levels. I cannot begin to count the number of people I observed "working," but who were not doing anything conceivably close to an economically productive activity. Scammers and trinket sellers are two easily defined examples, but there are also quite a few people who are doing something that defies reason. For instance, in Delhi, I saw a man, who did not appear to be employed by any organization, taking apart the sidewalk, one piece at a time. Why he was doing this defied logic.

From the tourist perspective, India is one of the worst places I have ever been. In many places across the world, tourists occasionally pay too much for a good, are targeted by pickpockets, or eat at overpriced touristy restaurants, but overall the experience is still enjoyable. In India, the entire tourism industry is designed to scam tourists. 90% of monuments and ruin sites in India cost 10 rupees ($.20) as an entrance fee for natives, and 250 rupees ($5) for tourists. Many of these places are only tourist sites because they are old, but they are poorly maintained and definitely not worth any entrance fee. While in Madurai, we signed up for a bus tour that was supposed to include our entrance fees, but upon arriving to each minor site, we were told that we needed to pay 250 rupees for an entrance fee and another 80 rupees for our cameras. After overpaying for too many sites in India, I stopped paying the fee for any site that was not clearly on my destination list.

Luckily we had a Rough Guides tour book, which served as a good guide not only for the sites we wanted to visit, but also for the prices of rickshaw rides. On almost every occasion, rickshaw drivers would try to charge 400 or 500 rupees for a ride that should never be more than 50 rupees. It would take stern negotations with four or five drivers to finally secure a reasonable fare. Even so, the driver would almost always try to charge us more than the agreed upon price once we arrived at the destination, or they would not take us there at all. When we arrived, they would pretend like the original conversation had never happened. On the rare occasion that a driver offered us a fair price and took us to the location with no hassle, we would normally leave a monstrous tip, simply for being one of the 5% of people who were somewhat honest. Hotels were not honest with us as well. Even when paying a deposit and receiving a receipt, the desk clerk would try to change the terms of the arrangement. In one hotel, we paid for an inital night up front when we were showed to our rooms, and when we tried to check out, the clerk told us we had not paid. He had security cameras of the main area, where we should have made the payment. Since he did not have any video of us paying originally, we would have to pay for the first night again. Obviously the clerk who took our payment in the room knew that this was how they functioned and took advantage of us.

It is truly infuriating to not be able to trust a single person in the tourism industry for even the simplest of agreements. Always being vigilant becomes quite a tiring process.

Since the tourism industry is mostly about scamming people anyway, it would draw in the most aggressive and dishonest people. While traveling, we all tried to latch onto anyone who was friendly and worked outside of the. We were able to meet quite a few locals who did not have much, if any, exposure to tourists. These people were almost invariable hospitable, kind, and generous to a fault. Mike and I met one young man in Allappe who invited us to his home for lunch, cooked by his mother. While we were there, he explained a fair amount of his cultural experiences and his ambitions to us. He also tried to give us presents, which I did not feel comfortable accepting. However, it was very refreshing having prolonged exposure to someone living there with a much more positive outlook who is also quite friendly. It gives me hope for the future there.

Overall, after quite a lot of thought and some time since the experience ended, there is not any aspect of Indian culture that I would implement in the United States. Whenever I have traveled previously, there have usually been a few aspects of the culture I thought were superior to the culture at home. Unfortunately, this was not so in India. Culturally, India was deficient in every way. That said, my trip through India has been an incredible learning experience and a great test of my patience.