We land at 4.00am and our good friend Ramesh is there with his big smile waiting to greet us. It’s a welcome sight and Ramesh has his driver there to drive all of us back to his house for us to meet his wife (Lakshmi), his 11 year old daughter (Maghana) and his 7 year old son (Siddtharth). Ramesh and his family have just returned to India after living in California for 11 years. They live in a gated community and, as well as their children, support their driver, their cook, their gardener and the cleaning lady. They are Brahmin Hindus and so we are on a vegetarian diet without eggs. We are invited to look at the Hindu shrine in their home and we begin our journey at trying to understand a little of yet another new culture for us. The Lonely Planet Guide for India, at 1200 pages of size 8 font, is twice the size of the one for Egypt. The Indian culture seems less accessible to us and so we have our homework to do but we’ll give it a shot.
India is one third the size of the US and has four times as many people-1.15bn and growing.
Many Indians speak three languages. There are 28 states each with their own language (surprisingly different from one another); the National language of Hindi and then English.
Ramesh’s daily newspaper is full of stories about corruption and so we discuss that a little. While we might think that the power in Zimbabwe and perhaps Egypt is held by a corrupt few the corruption in India is much more pervasive and systemic. It’s become much more of an accepted way of life and thus much harder to dig out but it’s clear to Ramesh and others that we talk to that it’s regarded as a real issue and a real barrier to progress. Ramesh tells me the story of how he had to register his electricity meter in his name after recently buying his house. The junior bureaucrat held all the cards-he told Ramesh that he had to get a sign-off from the previous owner then (who had moved out of India), and on the next visit, he told him that he would need to visit to get the serial number of the meter. Ramesh visited three times and then eventually gave up and paid the extra needed for the office guy to agree the job was done. 300 rupees and a receipt for 100 rupees.
We are told that Bangalore particularly has enough tax money but the roads etc are never finished, the money goes somewhere. The living standard seems reasonable as far as we can see anyway. We visit shopping malls full of young people buying stuff and chatting on their cell phones. If you took away the lack of sidewalks and the traffic congestion a lot of it would look like a city in the US. This place is crowded though, it needs mass transit and push bikes. The noise and fuel pollution from two-strokes is awful (they are building a metro). Someone needs to invent an electric bike and forget about an electric car for now. Cows graze unattended in the medium strips, we pass a cow that has been hit lying in the road and surrounded by people.
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