Poverty in India: A little TV tonight? Your tarp or mine?To: Family and Friends Date: Wednesday 9/24/2003 12:18:13 PM Subject: Poverty in India. A little TV tonite? Your tarp or mine? 
To help you understand the fascination about commuting in India, let me give this analogy. There is a large homeless population in India. That means that people's entire lives are going on right beside the road. (Literally beside the road: as I have noticed large fields with no homeless people in them, while grassy strips that flank the roadways are teeming with India’s impoverished, I conclude that the large fields must be privately owned and that the places beside the road are public lands.) Imagine, if you will, what would happen if you took the walls off all the houses in your local neighborhood and drove through the neighborhood. What would you see? People cooking dinner, flossing their teeth, watching TV, scolding their children, beating their dogs. The possibilities are endless. This is India's daily commute. I travel home around midnight every night and you would think that there would be little to see at this hour, but even then there are amazing sights. The cover of night unveils a picture of poverty in India that is difficult to imagine. The poorest of the poor sleep beside the road. Some have make-shift shelters made of tarps or cardboard, but many prefer to sleep outside with only night wrapped over them. One homeless clan, for example has 10 or 12 cots parallel parked along the street under the light of a bright street lamp. Petite, bone-slender bodies one or two to a cot lie under an assorted collection of blankets with black haired heads pointing toward the street. Less affluent family clans spread blankets on cement sidewalks. Neither the roar of trucks, nor the din of horns (although there are fewer horns at night) seems to disturb their slumbers.
It was an odd sight to see. Who would imagine such a thing? The accompanying reflections about homelessness and poverty in India are far more disturbing ... A roof over your head, a bed instead of cement, a color TV that doesn’t get rained on, these are blessings indeed. The pictures at the top of this page put a face on poverty in India. They show children that I met in an outdoor market. I took their picture and gave them a coin. The two girls trailed us around the market for thirty minutes, touching our arms and begging for more money. They only left us alone after some shop owners shoo-ed them away. It was heart-wrenching.
|
By far the most surprising sight spotted on one of my nightly commutes was a large color TV. Seen through the open end of the inverted V of a family tarp, figures flickered on a television screen. Don't ask me what they plug it into, or what kind of channel line up they receive. What do the neighbors say? "The Kumar's just got a color TV, should we go over and watch a little TV?" What happens during the Monsoon? Surely, it must get a little wet...