Planes, Trains, and Auto-Rickshaws

by Laura Pedersen

  A Delhi metro system, which is being built in phases, now has more than 120 stations plus links to airports. Residents are so thrilled with their subway that riders volunteer to police the cars for spitting, littering, sitting on the floor, or any other antisocial passenger behavior. As a result, the system remains clean and pleasant, a great source of pride, and already has its own museum at the Patel Chowk station.

  Another transportation revolution is under way in the shape of the Tata Nano, a rear-engine four-passenger automobile billed as the world’s smallest (and cheapest) car. The Tata Nano, manufactured in India, and not to be confused with the iPod nano, will provide families currently packing five on a scooter with a substantial upgrade. I test-drove one of these tiny wonders in Mumbai (I was test-driven, is more accurate) and it’s amazing—an actual four-seat automobile with incredible suspension (to handle India’s bone-rattling roads), air-conditioning, radio, and cup holders that doesn’t feel like a bumper car or golf cart and can be sold fully loaded in your choice of three colors for under three thousand dollars! Just don’t ask how Mumbai is going to handle one more automobile on its already cratered and overflowing city streets. As for the rest of the country, thirty-five out of every hundred households in Delhi now own a car and only twelve of every hundred in Calcutta, so there’s enormous potential demand if incomes continue to rise and jobs are created.

  As a result of so many improvements, the economy has been growing at a rate of more than 9 percent a year and is expected to soon reach 10 percent, while economists predict that India will grow faster than any large country over the next twenty-five years. How can they beat out China, where the government orders fifty thousand miles of tracks to be put down and the following month you’ve got a world-class railroad? Due to China’s one-child policy, the workforce is aging, while India has what’s called a demographic dividend, with the ratio of children and old people to working-age adults one of the best in the world. (A check that can only be cashed if India successfully educates these youngsters.) Furthermore, where China’s growth has been state directed, India is a country of millions of entrepreneurs with enormous capacity to solve problems through the application of their unlimited creativity, ambition, and imagination. Indians can also say whatever they want about the government without being swept off to jail. Ideas tend to flow more freely in a culture that doesn’t insist upon secrecy, censorship, and occasional crackdowns on their own citizenry with tanks and machine guns. (China executes more people in a week than India has since Independence, in 1947.) Protests against corruption that swept the country in 2011 were not crushed by soldiers. Just the opposite. Government officials listened to the people and promised a more intense package of reforms. Indians do not fear their government. In fact, the prevailing attitude, especially in the big cities, is that authority is there to be defied. The abuse that traffic police alone must deal with should be enough to prove that this is the farthest thing from an authoritarian state.

  Access to the Internet is unrestricted, and India has a larger circulation of newspapers than any country in the world. There are more than four hundred independent television stations in operation, with more than half concentrating on news. Journalists and tourists in India may go and explore wherever they wish and stop and talk with whomever they like. Despite the fact that this results in a continuous barrage of reports about the growing gap between the haves and have-nots along with land-use disputes, to its great credit, India has nothing to hide.

  With numerous plans on board for even better infrastructure, including faster trains, new highways, airports, backup generators, and water-treatment plants, India is hoping to make a successful bid for the Olympics over the next decade or so. The 2010 Commonwealth Games, which gathered athletes from seventy-two nations in New Delhi, got off to a rocky start with schedule delays and accusations of corruption, but most agree it was mainly a success, with India’s athletes also performing well. Maybe there’s room for both sports and premed classes, after all!

  As for what seem like endless charges of casual corruption amidst a tangled bureaucracy, the computerization of information such as landholdings and individual work histories, along with a number of new laws enacted to empower the citizenry, is making it easier for individuals to navigate government services and secure pensions. These changes are taking the form of a Better Business Bureau, which forces officials to clean up their acts now that ordinary citizens can access records, file complaints, and seek redress for being overcharged or stonewalled. A law protecting whistleblowers is also in the works. Websites such as I Paid A Bribe allow victims to anonymously report any government officials or service providers who ask that palms be greased, and for what, without fear of retaliation. Meantime, programs to help the poor are employing local village watchdogs to make sure that all of the funds reach their proper destination. On the downside, the man appointed by the government to head India’s anticorruption task force was recently forced by the Supreme Court to resign when faced with charges of corruption.

  As a large multiethnic democracy, India has much in common with the United States. However, the subcontinent is often called a salad bowl as opposed to a melting pot, because so many different languages, faiths, and cultures maintain their separate places in a large, liberated society. Throughout the ages, the mystique of India has inspired journeys by Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama, the Beatles, and beat poet Allen Ginsberg. It’s the world’s most famous destination for pilgrims—religious, spiritual, and otherwise—wanting maladies healed, heartaches cured, conundrums solved, and demons vanquished. It’s where soul searchers check into ashrams looking for enlightenment, much the way American movie stars head to rehab. And I truly believe that Westerners seeking answers can and do find them in India. The wandering scholars of medieval Europe described the double helix of travel and wisdom as solvitur ambulando, “It is solved by walking.” One quickly comes to see that if you have twenty thousand dollars a year on which to live plus health insurance, then you’re very lucky and/or blessed and that fulfillment is about spending time with people you like while enjoying both your work and play. As the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “If you desire to change the world, where would you start? With yourself or others?”

  As much as I enjoyed the writing in Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, with regard to India she said, “Outside the walls of the Ashram, it is all dust and poverty.” There’s dust and poverty and color and excitement and ingenuity and much, much more. As Mark Twain wrote 110 years earlier, “So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.”

  However, my favorite quote came from a passenger aboard my Air India flight on the way home. The plane was departing New Delhi at midnight, and all of us weary travelers had the same idea—eat Domino’s Pizza in the departure lounge, climb aboard the plane, and pass out for twelve hours. But after only three hours, a flight attendant went around waking everyone up for breakfast. There was basically a passenger mutiny, but whereas Americans were just grumpy and muttering oaths, a feisty Indian woman shouted, “Tell me where it is breakfast time—not in India, not in New York! Where? Honolulu?” Alcoholics like to say that it’s always five o’clock somewhere, and so perhaps the same can be said about the breakfast hour.

  India continues to be a place of contrast and contradiction, where whatever you imagined will probably be proved wrong and you’ll eventually find an example of the exact opposite. But what can one expect from a country named after the Indus River, which is now mostly in Pakistan? A place of snake charmers and wandering storytellers, but also of cutting-edge technology and students flocking to medical schools. Where people make pilgrimages to worship goddesses, but girls are often killed in the womb for being female. A landscape so varied as to include snowcapped Himalayas, scorching deserts, placid lakes, vast mustard farms
, lush saffron fields, verdant cherry orchards, deep jungle backwaters of rice paddies and coconut groves, dark forests inhabited by tribal villages, southern mountain ranges blanketed with spice gardens and tea plantations, and thousands of miles of white sand beaches? India is said to be the birthplace of chess, navigation, algebra, trigonometry, calculus, martial arts, and the board game Chutes and Ladders (a.k.a. Snakes and Ladders), although other cultures have also staked their claims to these disciplines (except for Chutes and Ladders), similar to the way that more than a dozen outfits in Manhattan claim to be Ray’s Pizzeria. (However, one competitor attempted reverse psychology by naming his shop Not Ray’s Pizza.)

  The largest problem is, of course, poverty on a grand scale. Eight Indian states account for more poor people than the twenty-six poorest African nations combined. I feel particularly guilty about this because I just leased a new Lexus, and apparently they ran out of luxury add-ons and decided to keep our backsides from sweating by blowing cool air out of the seat cushions. People shouldn’t be going hungry or suffering from malaria while my butt crack is being electronically cooled. Things were only made worse when I read on the Lexus Internet forum that buyers were actually complaining that their asses weren’t cool enough, while their backs felt warm and “swampy.”

  Microlending, the practice of extending very small loans to those in poverty as a way of sparking entrepreneurship, has been enormously successful despite some recent setbacks along the lines of the subprime mortgage crisis in the States. Billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla is turning out to be the Bill Gates of India, as he applies the laws of commerce to build entities that will provide people with a pathway out of poverty. Khosla backs businesses involved in win/win services, such as making education loans, distributing solar panels in villages, and helping dairy farmers. Azim H. Premji, chairman of the information technology giant Wipro, has started a foundation to improve public primary schools. The Indian conglomerate Tata Group finances numerous research, medical, educational, and cultural institutions. Other Indian businessmen and billionaires (Forbes estimates there are now nearly seventy) are following in their footsteps, although somewhat slowly, since the tradition used to be that when you raked in the rupees you raced camels, bought cricket teams, and built big temples. However, several flashy moneymen have recently placed substantial orders at yacht dealerships.

  Meantime, the Self-Employed Women’s Association of India (SEWA) is a trade union for low-paid female contract workers and entrepreneurs who don’t earn salaries or qualify for benefits. Its main goal is to lift women out of poverty through education, access to banking, introduction to technology, and leadership training. Almost 93 percent of all women work outside the organized employment sector and thus lack any sort of job protection or security. SEWA also champions women’s rights. In 2006, after a twenty-eight-year-old Muslim woman was raped by her sixty-nine-year-old father-in-law, several Muslim clerics decided that the marriage to her husband, with whom she had five children, should be declared void, and she should marry her father-in-law and treat her husband as her son. After SEWA and other women’s groups protested, the father-in-law was instead given a ten-year prison sentence and ordered to pay the woman 8,000 rupees (about $180) in compensation.

  India provides the highest number of foreign students to the United States. The South Asian population in the States has grown more than 200 percent since 1990 and now tops 3 million. Meantime, the children who were born in America following the wave of immigration in the mid-1960s have fully assimilated and are a growing force in entertainment, fashion, culinary arts, politics, academia, medicine, entrepreneurship, IT, finance, architecture, and engineering. Why, Indians are even starting to be indicted for insider trading. In fact, it’s said the only things preventing one from becoming president are that there’s no chance for promotion, and the White House isn’t big enough for all of their in-laws. Indian Americans are currently the wealthiest ethnic group in America. Not only that, they are ferocious spellers, so you’d better start brushing up on definitely and separate if you don’t want to be embarrassed.

  One can only hope that as the Indian economy continues to expand, a rising tide will lift canoes and catamarans and especially lifeboats along with the billionaires’ yachts. Whereas 54 percent of the population lived below the poverty line in the 1970s, it is now down to 25 percent. Famines have been largely eradicated. When a drought strikes, food is moved from one place to another by railway, truck, or plane. Government agencies and charities are hard at work implementing solutions. It’s possible to make donations to organizations that help clean the water, stamp out disease, feed the poor, and educate children. If you decide to travel to India, your tourist dollars trickle down to help eradicate poverty. While there, if you see a woman selling scarves on the street (the quality is usually very good) and can buy some as presents, this money almost always goes directly toward her household and for schooling her children. Or else make a gift of the money. In a new book called Just Give Money to the Poor, three economic development experts argue that donations to relief organizations mostly go for training and development projects with varied results while much of the money is wasted on administration. Meanwhile, money given directly to the poor (with advice on how they should use it) was usually spent sensibly on starting businesses, educating children, and buying fertilizer, seeds, and farm animals. As it turns out, the thing that poor people lack most is money!

  Indian TV shows and advertising are beginning to feature more modern lifestyles, such as young people wanting to experiment with dating and/or living alone before marriage. Or a financially independent daughter making her own purchasing decisions. There are even story lines featuring live-in boyfriends and girlfriends and uncommitted couples who flirt with others. Although, in a nod to tradition, there’s a reality show called Perfect Bride in which mothers select wives for their sons. However, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before an American reality show has audience members voting on spouses for the participants.

  Nowadays, Indians are wild about contests—singing, comedy, dancing, personality. Hence, the popularity of Indian Idol. “What so appealed to the millions of viewers was not the singing and dancing itself, but the ruthless fairness that the shows suggested,” writes Anand Giridharadas in India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking. “For many, life in India had not been very fair. So many spheres had required a connection or a bribe or a favor: getting into a school, getting a job, getting the apartment you loved. The competition shows resonated because they suggested the coming of a new world in which everyone would have their chance to sing, and the market would judge, and the best would truly win.”

  The Internet is also doing its part to introduce older generations to modern lifestyles. It’s possible to educate oneself on various topics without the entire family knowing about it. And as we’ve discovered in America, forwarding to older relatives jokey e-mails and cute animal videos that accidentally result in them receiving ads for penile enlargements, vaginal rejuvenation, and Viagra is a great way of breaking down communication barriers.

  Interestingly, I noticed many more smiles on India’s poor than I find on residents of Park Avenue apartment buildings in New York City. If you ask ministers whether they’d rather counsel the rich or the poor, they’ll usually answer the rich, since wealthy individuals know that money doesn’t solve most problems. One can also argue that the fewer possessions you own, the less you have to worry about. Likewise, the more goods you have, the more you have to lose. Ideally, everyone on the planet should have what they need plus discretionary income, but endless desire can be a source of suffering that leaves the financially blessed poor and distressed.

  I found that drug addiction and violent crime were much lower in India than in the West. The prisons are not overflowing. Yes, there’s a Mafia, actually several, but you tend not to get gang-related drive-by shootings, and entire towns aren’t being lost to methamphetamine addiction. Funnily enough,
the general populace is just as spellbound by the hookups and breakdowns of their Bollywood stars as we are by the shenanigans of our own tinsel town royalty. However, people are not as quick to anger as they are in the West, especially in a city like Manhattan, where natives regularly become enraged over perceived slights and petty injustices. (Okay, I yelled “We all paid for a ticket!” at a well-dressed man who jumped the line to get on the ferry in Mumbai, but I hate cutters, and they claim the country is a democracy.)

  In an Indian slum, strangers are welcomed and even shown hospitality. At the very worst, they’re left unmolested. In an American slum, this tends not to be the case. My own experience as an American in a number of bad neighborhoods throughout the United States is that residents view my presence warily, want to know what business I have there, and make it clear that I’d best be on my way. A foreigner would certainly have an even worse time.

  From the point of view of world politics, the most stunning story that India currently has to tell is what happens when women are on their way to fully participating in a democratic society. The most poverty-stricken nations are dictatorships and theocracies where women remain down-at-heel. These countries are suppressing a full 50 percent of their talent, creativity, and potential and will continue to flounder until their women are no longer subjugated. India’s rise has proven that educating girls and empowering women can be the most successful antipoverty campaign known to man.

  Bangladesh, which was a part of India before Partition and practically synonymous with starvation in the latter half of the twentieth century, has over the past fifteen years transitioned from being one of the poorest countries on earth to maintaining a strong economy and reducing poverty by 20 percent. This is largely the result of educating girls and women and making them productive partners in a secular and democratic society. No more star-studded famine fund-raiser concerts for the Bangladeshis, thanks all the same.