INDIA

To even contemplate writing some sensible conclusions on India would be ridiculous.

We were there hardly a week and the country is vast. We didn’t get close to scratching the surface.

We both expected this concluding tab to be full of pictures of the Taj Mahal, the Moghul Palaces or other great Indian historical sites.

We saw some of these places and they were truly magnificent. We have the pictures, we were there but these pictures can be downloaded from Google Images.

This tab is not about the tourist side of India.

This tab is really about the people of India. We totally respect that we come from a different culture but as we thought about our week in India we both came to the conclusion that there is a huge disconnect and for us we saw things that to us, made no sense.

Women making fuel for cooking from cow dung.

The people that we saw in the streets, those that had very little material possessions were always exceptionally well dressed. The ladies especially in their beautiful sari’s were wonderful.

Prevalent along the side of the roads from the cities to the middle of nowhere were tall mobile telephone masts. We never experienced a ‘no service’ and more often the signal strength was 5 bars (we struggle with reception in our house in Chalfont!) and it seemed everyone, irrespective of living standards had a mobile phone (apart from the very old)

Yet to go through village after village where leaves are being swept up but where litter is just left to rot seems to make no sense. We watched in surprise as a cow, in-front of our eyes ate a large plastic bag. We didn’t find it funny but very sad.

Whilst the women were in the fields toiling, bringing water to their homes (50% of Indian homes have no running water) the men appeared to be sitting and chatting. Why? Perhaps India should encourage it male population to have a ‘clean up within 20 yards of where you are sitting day’

Certainly the men we saw appeared not to care and were happy to watch. They should be ashamed.

Perhaps the population have become blind to it but surely it cannot be good for hygiene, it must encourage vermin, it smells and looks appalling.

 

Without getting religious, what a dumb world we live in where you have professional beggars with their children that are obviously malnourished yet the pigeons are neither culled, but are fed. This is the same with the monkeys……it’s Tuesday so to appease the monkey god food is given, the food they could have eaten by themselves. To us, it made no sense.

Yet we saw people that smiled, that appeared to have hope and desire to better themselves, that seemed to want to get out of the garbage rotting mess they were living by.

Some will succeed, most will fail.

We had heard from our guides that India was a hugely corrupt country at Government level.  Interesting that the UK sends millions of £’s in aid whilst the Indians are more advanced in space travel than us. They had just spent £1,000 million on securing F1 motor racing. This is madness.

The road we travelled from Jaipur to Delhi was appalling. Although a new road was being built it was stop/start for 200 kms. Nothing was finished, surrounding the road were half finished houses yet people were living in tents.

The Indian Government should hang their heads in shame. They let down their people yet benefit financially with riches out of all proportion when awarding contracts.

But perhaps that is just life?

Perhaps what India has taught us on this first leg of our adventure is that we are incredibly fortunate to have been born in the UK.