Encounter with India

Travelogue by Kevyn Jacobs Oh. My. Gods. I wasn't prepared for India. I don't think any of us were. We knew it was going to be poor, but knowing and experiencing are two completely different things. I'd seen poverty before, in most of the countries I've visited this semester. I saw homeless people sleeping on the streets of Tokyo and Hong Kong. I saw families in Shanghai who lived in tiny, cramped and dingy ghettos. I saw children in Vietnam who were forced by poverty to hock postcards on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. But nothing I'd seen up to that point - nothing - could compare with the widespread squalor I saw in India. India was a mind-blower, an overwhelmingly depressing place. We arrived in Chennai, India's fourth-largest city, on the morning of Oct. 6, after six days at sea. Chennai, formerly known as Madras, has to be the least pleasant, and my least favorite, of all the cities we've visited this semester. Chennai is, in short, a hell-hole of a city. With all due respect to any Indians who might be reading this, and I apologize if I offend, Chennai is an oppressive, stinking, polluted, overcrowded, impoverished, racist and corrupt city that, frankly, I hated. I'm sure India has many fine places in it, and I'm also sure Chennai has its defenders. But as for me, I couldn't get out of India fast enough to protect my sanity, my health and my wallet. It's unfortunate my entire impression of India as a country was formed by Chennai. I am sure if I had had the opportunity to get out of the Chennai area, I might have felt different. But because of my limited finances, I was forced to stay in a place I felt drained by, instead of enriched by. The first thing that hits you about Chennai is the stench. The smell of stale urine, waste, rot and exhaust fumes fill the air. The whole city is one big, open sewer, where people openly urinate, and sometimes even defecate, on sidewalks. Many people don't have indoor plumbing, and public toilets that are available cost money. Of course, for someone with no money, this is a problem. And there are a lot of people without money in Chennai. Chennai is also incredibly and oppressively crowded. Shanghai never felt this packed. Maybe it was just the atrocious conditions that made it feel so to me. India's population is fast approaching 1 billion (some say it has already reached it), and it is second only to China in population size. In another couple of decades, India's population is expected to be larger than China's. This can only mean conditions in India will get worse. Hunger is extremely widespread, and when you put that many impoverished, malnourished people together in squalid conditions, disease is inevitable. India is a plague of mbuttive proportions waiting to happen. Chennai itself has so many people that there just aren't enough homes to go around. Huge slums of shanties are everywhere, and walking down any Chennai street you can see whole families living under tarps. The conditions of these dwellings are atrocious, and it was heart-wrenching to see people forced to live like that. There was a high level of racism in the midst of all this. Because of my white face, prices were sure to automatically inflate whenever I went to buy something. I found this out when a Canadian acquaintance of mine from the ship, who happens to be of Indian ancestry, would go out with his European-descended clbuttmates. Corruption is also rampant in India, and the country seems to have made inefficient bureaucracy an art form. "Baksheesh," or bribes, are the grease that move the wheels of India. You have to pay baksheesh to get almost anything done. Semester-at-Sea students encountered this first-hand in Chennai, where gate guards at the port wouldn't let us back in to board the ship without first paying baksheesh.