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The elitist way
I too have seen the reprehensible conduct of the so-called ‘elite’ who let their dogs defecate on the public road (MM, July 1st) with nary a thought or concern for hygiene. At the same time, they have the gall to talk about the unhygienic habits of slum-dwellers.
The ‘educated’ upper and middle classes are expected to be role models, but they fail miserably. Take saving energy – the need for which is self-evident. Walk into any of their homes. You will find ACs on at full blast even when nobody is in the room. Ditto for lights. I hope I am wrong, but I have observed a curious commonality in these homes. It seems there is an inflexible rule that all lights – 100 watts, no less – should have energy-guzzling, inefficient incandescent bulbs, the only ‘lip-concession’ to energy saving being a flourescent light in the kitchen. I don’t know why. Is it that if you practise energy saving more effectively, you cease to be ‘in’ at the Club? Perhaps, in these circles, a dwelling lighted by ‘cheap’ energy-saving lights is considered really ‘cheap’!
The same goes for water. No buckets and mugs for baths, thank you. And while brushing your teeth or washing your face, the tap must keep running not in a gentle stream but in full flow.
I have tried to encourage energy and water-saving measures with some people of the aforesaid groups, but failed. I have even tried to persuade them by making appeals through their children. Again, a blank.
Have you noticed a curious thing? These are the very same people who enthusiastically, and demonstratively, observe the annual charade of ‘Earth Hour’ by switching off lights for one hour on the designated day as though that is all they owe society and themselves.
G. Sankaran
T43A, 7th Avenue
Besant Nagar, Chennai 600 090
New heritage wall?
In a letter the Corporation of Chennai has addressed to the University of Madras as well as to other institutious on the Marina, for whom an ancient compound wall forms a common border for their buildings, it is stated:
“Plan to beautify the western side of Kamarajar Salai by demolishing the existing compound wall from Napier Bridge to Vivekanandar Illam (Ice House) and build a heritage wall...”
The existing wall, which is over 100 years old, is a heritage wall. How can the Corporation make a statement to the effect that it is planning to build a heritage wall by demolishing the real heritage wall? It is really funny.
In the name of beautification of the west side of the Marina, which is the only side available at present for any rework, the Corporation has proposed to pull down the existing wall and reconstruct it. The sketch of the new design is attached. The eastern side had already been ‘beautified’ during the previous regime.
It is learnt that the Syndicate of the University of Madras has rejected the request on grounds of the heritage value of the standing compound wall.
Dr. T.D. Krishnamachari
Flat 1A, ‘Rajam Mansion’
4/41, Luz Avenue,
Fourth Street Chennai 600 004
The Lord’s name
Lord Siva in Purasawalkam temple (MM, June 1st) is not Gangadeeswarar, but Gangadhareswarar.
P.S. Ramamurti
75/15, Vellala Street, Purasawakam Chennai 600 084
Correct title
In Prema Nandakumar’s article (MM, June 16th), the title of S.K. Chettur’s book is mentioned as Street Frame and I. It should be Steel Frame and I.
Rev. Philip Mulley
philipkmulley@gmail.com
Hard to stomach
I fully understand our total lack of public sense and consideration for others in all respects (MM, July 1st). Dogs’ excrement was a big problem in Europe, even in cities like Paris and Brussels, because they used to do the same thing as our friend does now in Chennai. But,as MMM has rightly portrayed, they have changed now. Even the Chinese, who were like us once, have changed, I believe. Will we change?
Please read the article below which I received from the former Cabinet Secretary of the Government of India, T.S.R. Subramanian, together with his comments and also the comments of another senior official, Anand Sarup.
– Dr. G. Sundaram
* * *
T.S.R. Subramanian: All or nearly all that Kelley says is true; needs to be remedied. But I am not ashamed to be an Indian on the contrary.
Anand Sarup wrote: One has to acknowledge that though this sounds like a chapter from the much reviled Mother India, it is the kind of truth nobody is fighting to reform but is mostly answered by reviling the author and blaming it on Western prejudices.
Reflections on India by Sean Paul Kelley*
If you are Indian, or of Indian descent, I must preface this post with a clear warning: you are not going to like what I have to say. My criticisms may be very hard to stomach. But consider them as the hard words and loving advice of a good friend. Someone who is being honest with you and wants nothing from you.
These criticisms apply to all of India except Kerala and the places I did not visit, except that I have a feeling it applies to all of India.
Lastly, before anyone accuses me of Western Cultural Imperialism, let me say this: if this is what India and Indians want, then, who am I to tell them differently. Take what you like and leave the rest. In the end it doesn’t really matter, as I get the sense that Indians, at least many upper class Indians, don’t seem to care and the lower classes just don’t know any better, what with Indian culture being so intense and pervasive on the sub-continent. But, here goes, nonetheless.
India is a mess. It’s that simple, but it’s also quite complicated. I’ll start with what I think are India’s four major problems the four most preventing India from becoming a developing nation and then move to some of the ancillary ones.
First: Pollution. In my opinion the filth, squalor and all around pollution, indicates a marked lack of respect for India by Indians. I don’t know how cultural the filth is, but it’s really beyond anything I have ever encountered. At times the smells, trash, refuse and excrement are like a garbage dump.
Right next door to the Taj Mahal was a pile of trash that smelled so bad, was so foul as to almost ruin the entire Taj experience. Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai, to a lesser degree, were so very polluted as to make me physically ill. Sinus infections, ear infection, bowels churning were all a too common experience in India. Dung, be it goat, cow or human fecal matter, was common on the streets. In major tourist areas filth was everywhere, littering the sidewalks, the roadways, you name it. Toilets in the middle of the road, men urinating and defecating anywhere, in broad daylight.
Whole villages are plastic bag wastelands. Roadsides are choked by it. Air quality that can hardly be called quality. Far too much coal and far to few unleaded vehicles on the road. The measure should be how dangerous the air is for one’s health, not how good it is. People casually throw trash in the streets, on the roads.
The only two cities that could be considered sanitary, in my journey, were Trivandrum the capital of Kerala and Calicut. I don’t know why this is, but I can assure you that, at some point, this pollution will cut into India’s productivity, if it already hasn’t. The pollution will hobble India’s’growth path, if that indeed is what the country wants. (Which I personally doubt, as India is far too conservative a country, in the small ‘c’ sense.)
The second issue, infrastructure, can be divided into four subcategories: Roads, Rails, Ports and the Electric Grid. The Electric Grid is a joke. Load shedding is all too common, everywhere in India. Wide swathes of the country spend much of the day without the electricity they actually pay for. Without regular electricity, productivity, again, falls.
The Ports are a joke. Antiquated, out of date, hardly even appropriate for the mechanised world of container ports, more in line with the days of longshoremen and the like.
Roads are an equal disaster. I only saw one elevated highway that would be considered decent in Thailand, much less Western Europe or America and I covered fully two-thirds of the country during my visit. There are so few dual carriage-way roads as to be laughable. There are no traffic laws to speak of and, if there are, they are rarely obeyed, much less enforced (another sideline is police corruption). A drive that should take an hour takes three. A drive that should take three takes nine. The buses are at least thirty years old, if not older and, generally, in poor mechanical repair, belching clouds of poisonous smoke and fumes.
Everyone in India, or who travels in India, raves about the railway system. Rubbish! It’s awful! When I was there in 2003 and then late 2004 it was decent. But, in the last five years, the traffic on the rails has grown so quickly that once again, it is threatening productivity. Waiting in line just to ask a question now takes thirty minutes. Routes are routinely sold out three and four days in advance now, leaving travellers stranded with little option except to take the decrepit and dangerous buses.
At least fifty million people use the trains a day in India. 50 million people! Not surprising that waitlists (each) of 500 or more people are common now. The rails are affordable and comprehensive, but they are overcrowded and what with budget airlines popping up in India, like sadhus in an ashram, the middle and lower classes are left to deal with the over-utilised rails, and quality suffers. No one seems to give a shit.
Seriously, I just never have the impression that the Indian Government really cares. Too interested in buying weapons from Russia, Israel and the US, I guess.
The last major problem in India is an old problem and can be divided into two parts: that have been two sides of the same coin since government was invented: bureaucracy and corruption.
It takes triplicates to register into a hotel. To get a SIM card for your phone is like wading into a jungle of red-tape and photocopies from which you are not likely to emerge in a good mood, much less satisfied with customer service.
Getting train tickets is a terrible ordeal: first you have to find the train number, which takes 30 minutes, then you have to fill in the form, which is far from easy, then you have to wait in line to try and make a reservation, which takes 30 minutes at least and if you made a single mistake on the form, back you go to the end of the queue, or what passes for a queue in India.
The Government is notoriously uninterested in the problems of the commoners. Too busy fleecing the rich, or trying to get rich themselves in some way, shape or form. Take the trash, for example, civil rubbish collection authorities are too busy taking kickbacks from the wealthy to keep their areas clean that they don’t have the time, manpower, money or interest in doing their job.
Rural hospitals are perennially understaffed as doctors pocket the fees the Government pays them, never show up at the rural hospitals, and practise in the cities instead.
I could go on for quite some time about my perception of India and its problems, but in all seriousness, I don’t think anyone in India really cares. And that, to me, is the biggest problem. India is too conservative a society to want to change in any way.
Mumbai, India’s financial capital, is about as filthy, polluted and poor as the worst city imaginable in Vietnam or Indonesia and being more polluted than Medan, in Sumatra, is no easy task. The biggest rats I have ever seen were in Medan!
You would expect a certain amount of, yes, I am going to use this word “backwardness”, in a country that hasn’t produced so many Nobel Laureates, nuclear physicists, eminent economists and entrepreneurs. But, India has all these things yet what have they brought back to India with them? Nothing.
The rich still have their servants, the lower castes are still there to do the dirty work and so the country remains in stasis. It’s a shame. Indians and India have many wonderful things to offer the world, but I’m far from sanguine that India will amount to much in my lifetime.
Now, you have it, call me a cultural imperialist, a spoiled child of the West and all that. But remember, I have been there. I have done it and I have seen 50 other countries on this planet and none, not even Ethiopia, has as long and gargantuan a laundry list of problems as India does.
And, the bottom line is, I don’t think India really cares. Too complacent and too conservative.
*Sean Paul Kelley is a travel writer, former radio host, and before that, an asset manager for a Wall Street investment bank. He recently left a fantastic job in Singapore with a software company, to travel around the world for a year or two. He founded The Agonist, in 2002 which is still considered the top international affairs, culture and news destination for progressives. He is also the Global Correspondent for ‘The Young Turks’, on satellite radio and Air America.
A garden and a tree
Two items in MM’s June 1st issue interested me especially.
The note on My Ladye’s Garden (People’s Park). Even in the early 1980s this garden was impressive. The most remarkable inclusion here was the floral clock, which indeed worked (how accurately I am not sure, though). In the 1960s it was managed by one Krishnamurthy who was the Chief Horticulturist for the Garden.
As a former resident of Purasawalkam, I was delighted to read the piece on the Purasawalkam Siva temple by Chithra Madhavan. I remember the period when the sanctum area of the temple was locked for several years due to renovation work in the 1960s, when I was a school boy in Purasawalkam. I am not sure whether the name of the principal deity is Gangadeeswarar. As well as I can recall, it is Gangadaréswara. I was very pleased to read that the Gangadaréswara-Pankajakshi temple is genuinely linked to the later Chola period; hearsay stories used to float around that it was so. Nice to hear this point from the authoritative voice of Chithra. By saying that purasa tree (plasa vrksa, Butea frondosa) is the sacred tree of this temple, does Chithra mean that this tree is the stala-vriksa? I am not sure. I have heard that the lianous Hiptage benghalensis (=H. madablota, Tamil: Vasanthakala Mallikai, kurukkati; Sansk, Madhavi Lata; the ‘old’ species name madablota is a derivative of its Sanskrit name Madhavi Lata), which produces attractive winged fruits (samara), similar to an aircraft, is the stala-vriksa. One shrub of Hiptage benghalensis still grows in the temple precinct, but it may not survive long, unless some effort is made to conserve it.
I send herewith a beautiful sketch done by the Madras artist Rungiah, who did the illustrations for Robert Wight for his Illustrations of Indian Botany, 1840, of Hiptage benghalensis, then referred to as H. madablota. In the figure numbered 9 the elegance of the fruit (samara) of H. benghalensis may be seen.
Dr. Anantanarayanan Raman
ARaman@csu.edu.au
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