How was India?
In 2008, I went to India for the first time, and stayed for a month.
Since returning, everyone has asked the same three-word question: “How was India?”
It’s impossible to sum up in a few sentences, so my smart-ass answer has been “scrappy”.
Here I’ll try to explain my real thoughts about India so far.
This was my first visit to India, and I’m going to return many times, so this time I went only to meet with some companies, in the cities of Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Kolkata. No tourist sights or countryside. Just meetings and cities. So of course I saw India from a business and urban point of view. Everything I say, below, is just my observation from visiting these three cities.
Rubble and Garbage
In India, there is rubble and garbage everywhere.
- walk over rubble on every sidewalk
- walk around rubble to enter an office building
- walk past huge piles of garbage on nice residential streets
- even bigger piles of rubble between every building
- and garbage lines everything, almost everywhere
Rubble right in front of stores:
Rubble in front of multi-million-dollar buildings:
Rubble in every available space:
I found myself thinking, “They’re so often announcing how many billions of people are here. I see hundreds just standing around right now. Couldn’t someone just pick up that rubble and garbage?”.
Then it reminded me of British teeth.... In England, I asked a good friend who grew up there why the Brits have a reputation for bad teeth. She said, “Really? We do? From our point of view, we wonder why Americans are so fanatic about having unreasonably perfect teeth.”
Aha! Just as the casual dresser might look at the super-clean ultra-primped person and think, “What a freak!”, maybe all the rubble and garbage is just the norm to someone growing up in India. It’s not a problem to be solved any more than my wrinkled t-shirt and day-old jeans are a clothing problem I should solve.
Someone posted these photos on their blog, intending to show how disgusting the beaches of India are.
But when I see those photos, I smile nostalgic, thinking, “Yeah — that’s India!”
I miss that garbage smell, a bit.
Noise
The sound of the city is the sound of hundreds of drivers honking constantly, every few seconds, all the time. Watch this video to hear what I mean.
It’s just considered safe driving. To honk your horn is to say, “I’m here”, which you’re supposed to tell everyone every few seconds, partially because of the way they drive, which I’ll explain later.
I met a programmer from Bangalore who just went to the U.S. for his first time, to Chicago, and I asked his impression. His eyes got wide and he said, “It’s so quiet! Many people but so strangely silent. It was hard for me to sleep, at first.”
Again, like the rubbble: no right and wrong. They’re not messy, we’re just neat-freaks. They’re not noisy, we’re just strangely silent. A great reminder no matter what cultures you’re comparing.
Scrappy (opportunistic)
The dictionary defines “scrappy” as both “consisting of disorganized, untidy, or incomplete parts” and “determined, argumentative, or pugnacious”. Exactly! It’s the combination of both definitions that struck me about India.
It’s most obvious in the driving. Everyone fills every available space. The little vehicles wind in the gaps between the bigger ones. All lanes are ignored. My friend who lives in Bangalore described it as, “our ad-hoc solution to fitting twice as many people onto the road.” It makes a lot of sense!
Watch this video of a typical intersection. It’s self-organizing in a very effective way. Watch for the white car near the end that goes the wrong way down the street, from the top of the screen to the bottom.
Someone sent me this photo of thousands of tangled phone wires, as an example of how disorganized India is.
But to me, that’s a great example of the scrappy, opportunistic, self-organizing that I love about India. It reminds me of the movies that portray New York City in the post-depression 1930s.
Everybody seems to be using whatever they’ve got to do what they need to do, which really inspired me in a very purely entrepreneuristic way.
That’s all I have to say for now, but I’ll go back again and have an entirely different perspective on it.
(P.S. Two years after I wrote this, I married a woman from India, had a kid, and became an Overseas Citizen of India. So I have a little different perspective now.)
Did I see some goats in that 'taxi from airport' video? There must be animal waste everywhere. Is stepping in cow poo the social norm just like their garbage/rubble landscape, or is it just a constant struggle to try to avoid it?
Very interesting blog/pictures/video. Thanks, Derek!
Stephen - yeah - goats, dogs, and occasional cows. I didn't notice the poo so it must just be blended in with the other garbage.
I love it when western visitors go to India and post back thier experiences and try and "sum up" India. Mostly you have it all wrong, I'd say you have it about maybe at best 5% right but other than that you make your judgements on the very little you see and hear.....it's like me going to NY, LA etc and saying, "well all of America must be like that...."
You are right in pointing out that there is garbage, chaos and noise in India , because these things *do* exist in modern urban India. But there is a lot more in addition to this.......India lies not in it's vast urban cities but it lies in it's vast network of villages (This is a quote by Gandhi who spent months visiting rural India to try and figure out what he was going to fight for and why).
About 80% of the population of India still lives in it's villages but those areas are never accessed by any tourists. The rural lifestyle and mindset is quite different. The urban idea in India is a new one and it is still all in a state of development...
I will stop my rant here I think otherwise I will be here all day, ah well!
Atul
I think you have to be careful Derek when you post images like these in isolation as they present a very one sided view of India. I check out a load of my friends' facebook pictures who visit India and yes they do have images like these but they also have other positive images of India. One of the most common qualms of the Indian people is that western tourists visit India and then post up these sort of images.
Where do I begin to recommend books on learning about India? It is such a huge country with so many states/religions/languages...it is impossible to sum it up. Since I've lived in the UK for so long now I am fascinated at all things Indo-British and as such I took up reading a history book called "Raj" by Lawrence James. It's a 500 odd page book but he does document the formation of modern India (from 1700 odd - until the British left in 1947) with quite a bit of detail, I guess that is a good start...
Linus, 1991 was a very long time ago to be in Delhi, you should go again now and try out the Delhi metro, which actually puts the London Underground system to shame....The buses were the main mode of transport in Delhi until 2 years ago and they had to cope somehow with the enormous demand that was placed on them. Once again it is a developing country, which means exactly what it says on the tin.
An image says more than a thousand words...I mean you can put up loads of text around the image, but the first thing people observe are images. And if you selectively put up certain types of images of course you are going to piss people off.
There's nothing brave, radical, or unique etc etc about this post. Indian people complain about these problems in India too. Have you been to someone's home in India? The point is perspective.....describing an elephant from the elephant's tail perspective (no matter how accurately the tail is described) is still only describing just the tail, still a long, very long way away from understanding what the elephant might look like.
Delhi as a city is expanding at a ferocious rate, a lot of new pavements and buildings are being made. A lot of these projects are state administered (i.e slow...things get put on hold quite regularly and often people gather and demonstrate against why their area has been left out or put on hold in preference to other areas). Labourers even get killed because of negligence from contractors, labourers that come to the city from their villages in hope of a new life....The story of the development of this city is no different to the development of any city.
I am drifting now....but the point being, it's easy to say "I went to India, there was a lot of rubble and garbage and no one seems bothered by it, look look I have photos to show that" and it's another to actually try and understand why that might be there, what is happening and what do the local people think of it all?
I toured India for 5 weeks in the 90's with my previous band Dal Dil Vog. Aside from that my roots also reside in the Punjab.
Your opinions are correct on India Derek. There is chaos, but it's India's chaos and they make it work. Notice in the traffic jams how close the cars are to each other, yet they still make it work and try to avoid each other.
My fav bumper stickers (which are painted on)..."Horn Please!"
Ranj.
Hey guys, and by that I mean my fellow Indians - give this man some leeway. What he has written is agreed selective but is also the truth.
If you overlook that you will notice most of his posts are very well written and at times even inspiring.
Gotta love how any post about India anywhere in the frigging blogosphere inevitably attracts a bunch of apologists attempting to set the picture right. Just amazing.
Just thought I'd add this about that enormous tangle of wires in your last photo. That isn't just the government or corporations stringing haphazard cable - they are very likely the residents stealing cable or electricity :)
This is rampant in the inner parts of most major cities..
Exactly! I love that scrappy entrepeneurial “just go get what you need” approach. If the electric company says it will take months to come to your location to wire you up, might as well just take it. I'm sure America in the 1800s was like this. — Derek
Your photo of the rubble next to the multi million dollar buildings reminds me of a story I told a friend. She asked me what India was like, and I responded with "it's a place of extreme juxtapositions."
This comment came from having just visited Agra (where the Taj Mahal is) for a wedding where the groom was the son of the guy who basically owned the primary ice cream franchise in the city. They were very rich. Their compound was 4 houses with a 2 foot thick 15 foot high wall. Inside was ridiculous, including an aston martin. Right outside their home, a few feet from their massive wall, was a poor guy taking a sh*t.
A year ago I realized that the USA isn't that much different. I was on Broad Street, behind the Goldman Sachs HQ getting lunch. I saw a homeless guy walking around, and then I looked up at the Goldman building thinking that Lloyd Blankfein's office is a mere 35 stories up. OK maybe the homeless guy wasn't as physically close, but the economic distance between Mr. Homeless and Mr. Blankfein was far more than the guy in India and Mr. Ice Cream....
So it happens here too, but just not as overt...
Wow! Just watching the video of the intersection. Take a look at the man on the very right of the screen right at about 0:36. He stands right in between a car and motorcycle! THAT looks like an intersection in India!
@dman
So you think US has sacrificed it's own people to prevent other people from getting slaughtered, and not because it has it's own interests at stake?
So, basically do we assume that USA went to Iraq to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein(never got to know why they didn't do it in the first place back in 1991 itself), oh and if you think the reason is because they found the WMD's, where are they now? Even after 7 years, there's no trace of WMD's, yet you still think that US has sacrificed it's soldiers to save Iraqi's from getting slaughtered.
Maybe going back to high school to get some proper education isn't too late, and there could be a realization perhaps that every country and it's people would think of their nation as the best in the world, can you define the best in categorical terms, I bet you cant' even start thinking beyond your narrow right winged realm of thought
Hi Derek,
Interesting but not unsurprising at all! These descriptions are very common when people visit India for the first time!! Of course, what you see here is just the scenes you saw since you were on a business trip there, but that is not how the whole India is, is it?? As somebody who commented above, please visit the other India - the untouched, rural part. Yes, cities are chaotic and dirty..why? My opinion, primarily, corruption and the fact that Indian cities have had modernity and urbanization - vehicles, roads, etc - thrust upon them, without control and without trying to understand or blend it with the Indian way of doing things..unlike in the western world where things have been planned and urbanized systematically and people did not have to 'get used to' a new way. Have to say, urbanization was born in the west but the methods of going about doing it, have not been imbibed in India.
If America is the richest country today, that was what India was thousands of years ago..a rich, cultural, civilization when there were kings and kingdoms ruling places in an orderly way and known for being rich and a spiritual country!
BTW, I loved the video about how traffic moves...it was hilarious that it was being even talked about when for me it is so normal!
Next time you visit India, come to Kerala, the 'God's Own Country'. Not on a business jaunt of course!
I was just in Kerala last month, and loved it. But still my observations here apply. I'm sad to see the garbage everywhere. I watched an Indian man and his family taking a boat through the Allepey backwaters. After eating their meal on the boat, they walked to the edge and dumped all their plastic plates into the water. We all know there were garbage bins on the boat, but it just didn't bother him to dump it outside. Not thinking of the consequence of 1.3 billion people doing that each day. If this continues for another generation, India will be one massive garbage dump. — Derek
Hey Derek,
Just happened to bump into your blog and website today while surfing through some stuff and to be very honest, was enthralled by all the little points about everyday life you have made everywhere. I as a person, too think about many of the things you have talked about, but putting them down so simply, matter-of-factly is a different game altogether, and I congratulate you for that.
The reason I’m writing here is that I am an Indian and was a bit annoyed with some of the reactions of my fellow countrymen about your post. The following is for them:
Having a great past and some beautiful places is no justification for having filthy, littered, rouble filled cities and towns! Get over it my friends. We Indians are simply complacent and have a bad attitude. I never stand back and look a person throwing garbage on the street/river/sea. I always make it a point to walk up to him/her and politely ask him/her not to repeat that and put the trash in its place if possible. I try not to honk, unless some one runs across the road in front of me, or rushes into my lane from my left. There are many groups working towards sensitizing the common Indian man towards cleanliness and a better city. There is an enormous apathy in India, especially among the bureaucratic circles towards making our cities better – and remember, it is not about the money. There is enough money to get the basics right. We just do not have the attitude or the will to change things, happy basking in our 1000 year old glory!
Instead of getting annoyed with what one’s perception is about the country in his first visit, we should look inside and try to think and act toward changing that perception, so that Derek can return after 10 years and say, Hey! WOW! The garbage has gone!
Partho - Thank you for your comment. It's very encouraging to hear your thoughts on this. — Derek
And yes, there are enough people standing around doing nothing or begging to help remove the garbage and the rubble, and India being the 7th largest country in size, has enough spare land to remove it to....
Actually, what i discovered about you is, you just wanted to see the India which is not changed or which is gonna to change and you can find these kind of undeveloped areas even in Europe and U.S (those who are crying now a days for economy growth) but you didn't wanted to see the India of 21st century.I am shocked that you were on business trip and you even didn't find a single nice and advance place near to your company for getting capture in your camera. You just found these places. Plz don't come again.
For my fellows of Indian extraction -
— Derek
I cannot understand all the fuss is about - if it is 1% that's filthy, well yes, it is! How does it matter who points it out? My suggestions to fellow Indians - when you see a visitor, first extend a welcome, buy them a meal, show them your home. Then talk them up on the good stuff hiding underneath the grabage, but be prepared to take the time to explain yourself.
Derek has every right to make his observations -after all he too is as much a child of mother earth as you are and I read no malice in his intentions.
And that's a polite way of saying - "Get a life!"
Have been to India 6 times - the last was 2 years ago.
The peace and quiet has gone and the country is drowning in garbage and plastic. And this was in Bharata! Kerala, Kharnataka and Tamil Nadu.
If you look at some youtube clips of India years ago you will notice how clean the streets were and the absence of cars.
According to Indians I have spoken to, the changes have all happened in the last eight years and it has happened all over India.
Maybe the discarded plastic is a measure of modernity?
Only one month in India so you don't know shit!
Correction - you do know shit, you know that shit is everywhere in India!
To read the comments is to see people with a lack of boundaries. That, and a lack of reading.
For although Derek explicitly said he had only seen a little of (urban) non-countryside India, people supposedly thought he was describing all of India including the countryside. Other non-readers thought he didn't realize that an elephant had more than one part, such as a trunk and countryside.
Lack of boundaries, to me, is rather innocent when you say "we" won the Olympics, not-so-innocent if saying "we Indians" interferes with your reading ability.
Lack of temporal (time) boundaries is rather innocent if you say we had a revolution in 1776, not so innocent if you say we fought the awful British, if you say "they" are still awful. I once found a book from WWI where a man is telling his fellow Americans with amazement that just as the English no longer wear buckled shoes, so too they no longer believe in tyranny.
An American Muslim to me is rather innocent if he says "we Muslims," not so innocent if he says "we Muslims world-wide" are under attack, and he/she is especially lacking temporal boundaries if he/she refers to modern Britain, France and Italy as "crusader nations."
You can imagine how, besides interfering with reading, lack of boundaries can have serious consequences. Therefore I try to check myself for such tendencies.
See this:-
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKOh9DfQBgU
Thank you for posting this! — Derek
Well I liked your post Derek. But I would also like to show the other side is India. Please check out this link: youtu.be/iVC7ZpiSmGg (or search on YouTube: cyberhub Gurgaon India”)
Interesting! Further proof that whatever you can say about India, the opposite is also true. ☺ — Derek
Basically we have been continuously invaded. Any development which comes to us actually do good to the invaders than us. Therefore by default we do not want to be perfect, have a great display of our wealth and businesses. We are deeply spiritual, accommodative and very adaptive. That is why we can survive anything.
That's the reason why we are always having the underdog approach
The density of population is also difficult to control - some feel that by littering they make the people to do their duty and like that. Hence even after a lot of growth and development, we still have this issue all over the country.
Yet, from 2008 now in 2026 we have grown a lot.
Yours
VN