India had done me in and Id only been in the country for 4 days.
I couldnt decide what was worse- the sheer noise as millions of people went about their daily lives, the madness of the roads where tuk-tuks and cars, their drivers with one hand on the wheel and the other permanently on the horn, all madly weaved in amongst scrawny and dirty cows, the beggers and hawkers accosting you at every step along the pavements of battered and broken dreams, or the smells- humanity and its by-product- filth.
Delhi, home to some 14 million people at last count with India housing some 1.18 billion people. 32.7% under the poverty line- a statistic which in a percentage form fails to convey the bleakness of being born in this bracket. That is 410 million people who failed to be able to afford one square meal a day with minimum nutritional needs. The poverty line, so the UN had decreed was earning under some US$1.25 a day. Globally, India accounts for 17% of the world's population but about one third of the world's people living in poverty. It was heartbreaking that, when faced with the daily pitifulness of people trying to eek out a living, my heart was becoming resolutely harder each day. For handing out a few battered rupees to the old man huddled outside my hotel, a smelly bunch of rags swathed around his bony body, a stump of a left leg and a non existent right leg propping his weathered torso up on a piece of cardboard, a few red stained teeth left in a brown slash of a mouth downturned on one side with a permanent trickle of saliva flowing down his leathered face, did little to alleviate his life....or the four more sitting next to him, let alone the 38 I counted as I walked to a restaurant around the corner.
While my heart might have been hardening, the guilt however was omnipresent and rising. Imagine what the US$140 a night my room had cost me would mean to the old beggar. I spent more in one week than what some Indians had a whole year to live on. What would the hotel say if I brought him in to have a bath in my room? or a meal in their restaurant? Would he have a tale to tell me as to how he ended up on the streets...or was this where he started in life and stayed? Did he once have the same dreams I had as a child- to be an astronaut or a fireman or a scientist? Had he reconciled those dreams with how his life had turned out...or did he fight daily against the futileness each waking hour brought?
Throughout all my time in this country, one educated, well-off, travelled, happy go lucky and somewhat short tempered gremlin sat on my shoulders saying the same thing over and over....."how lucky you are not to have been borne here". How was it that India could bring the dichotomy of the have and have-nots so brutely into view? If you were borne here, how would you get out? Could you get out? What would you spend the day doing if you had to stay there? What caste could you have been borne to? I think if I was born in India, I'd want to be a Hindu as Id need to believe in re-incarnation. It might well be the only way to hold on to some sanity in this country.
But I digress- Palace of Winds or Hawa Mahal to give it its proper name, in Jaipur- known as the Pink City.
I couldnt decide what was worse- the sheer noise as millions of people went about their daily lives, the madness of the roads where tuk-tuks and cars, their drivers with one hand on the wheel and the other permanently on the horn, all madly weaved in amongst scrawny and dirty cows, the beggers and hawkers accosting you at every step along the pavements of battered and broken dreams, or the smells- humanity and its by-product- filth.
Delhi, home to some 14 million people at last count with India housing some 1.18 billion people. 32.7% under the poverty line- a statistic which in a percentage form fails to convey the bleakness of being born in this bracket. That is 410 million people who failed to be able to afford one square meal a day with minimum nutritional needs. The poverty line, so the UN had decreed was earning under some US$1.25 a day. Globally, India accounts for 17% of the world's population but about one third of the world's people living in poverty. It was heartbreaking that, when faced with the daily pitifulness of people trying to eek out a living, my heart was becoming resolutely harder each day. For handing out a few battered rupees to the old man huddled outside my hotel, a smelly bunch of rags swathed around his bony body, a stump of a left leg and a non existent right leg propping his weathered torso up on a piece of cardboard, a few red stained teeth left in a brown slash of a mouth downturned on one side with a permanent trickle of saliva flowing down his leathered face, did little to alleviate his life....or the four more sitting next to him, let alone the 38 I counted as I walked to a restaurant around the corner.
While my heart might have been hardening, the guilt however was omnipresent and rising. Imagine what the US$140 a night my room had cost me would mean to the old beggar. I spent more in one week than what some Indians had a whole year to live on. What would the hotel say if I brought him in to have a bath in my room? or a meal in their restaurant? Would he have a tale to tell me as to how he ended up on the streets...or was this where he started in life and stayed? Did he once have the same dreams I had as a child- to be an astronaut or a fireman or a scientist? Had he reconciled those dreams with how his life had turned out...or did he fight daily against the futileness each waking hour brought?
Throughout all my time in this country, one educated, well-off, travelled, happy go lucky and somewhat short tempered gremlin sat on my shoulders saying the same thing over and over....."how lucky you are not to have been borne here". How was it that India could bring the dichotomy of the have and have-nots so brutely into view? If you were borne here, how would you get out? Could you get out? What would you spend the day doing if you had to stay there? What caste could you have been borne to? I think if I was born in India, I'd want to be a Hindu as Id need to believe in re-incarnation. It might well be the only way to hold on to some sanity in this country.
But I digress- Palace of Winds or Hawa Mahal to give it its proper name, in Jaipur- known as the Pink City.
While the colours are pretty spectacular in the fading sunlight or at sunrise, Im not sure this is one of the 1000 places to see before you die. Built in 1799 by Maharaja Sawai Pratap Singh of Rajasthan out of pink and red sandstone and designed in the form of the crown of Krishna, it is rather unusal to look at. About 1000 tiny latticed stone windows rise some 5 storeys high in a honeycomb structure. The palace is actually little more than a facade, built in the days when the royal harem, in purdah and therefore not allowed to be seen by anyone, could overlook the activity on the street below safely. As the palace sits on the main road of Jaipur, perhaps in the days of its use the women were comforted to see life as they would have experienced it on the ground before they entered the royal life. All the chaos of being in India...you guessed it- tuk- tuks, cars, beggars, filth, souks and.....those bloody cows! Personally, if I was in the harem of a Maharaja, despite Wikipedia saying that the Mahal is a counterpart of Versailles- even if I was just one of hundreds- I can think of 1000 better views Id be demanding.
And one of those was less than 500 clicks down the road- Lake Palace...now that is definately worthy of one of the 1000 places to see before you die.
