India and its Idiosyncrasies: Namaste to the Newbie

There is broad consensus that the dramatic increase in food allergies in Western society is partly due to the ultra sanitized world we have created for ourselves. Mr. Muscle and his army of military grade detergents have inadvertently blunted our immune systems to the point that they can’t defend us from ostensibly benign microbes later in life.

Not so in India.  Sanitation and serviceable sewage systems have unfortunately been deemed surplus to requirements in this sprawling sub-continent and in a country where children are more familiar with Dengue Fever than Dettol, peanut allergies are unlikely to make an impression. It’s a very serious cloud complete with an imperceptibly small silver lining but spending time in India will quickly prove that any and every silver lining should be savoured. 

At time of writing, the population of India is 1.3 billion people and it is expected to become the most populous country in the world by the end of the next decade. More than 50% of that population are under the age of 25. One in five Indians live below the poverty line while 130 billionaires call India home. Such a fact leads to some disconcerting truths. The most expense residential property in the world is owned by Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man. The house towers over Cumballa Hill in Southern Mumbai and is 27 stories high, 6 of which are dedicated to cars. In a city with some of the largest slums in the world (one million people live in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum alone), one would struggle to conceive of a more ostentatious and brash display of wealth. The fact that the land was bought from an orphanage, in controversial circumstances, only aggravates such nefarious undertones.

This is especially true in my own case, given that the first time I went to India, in 2012, was spent teaching in an Orphanage just north of Chennai with an organisation called Care and Share. It was there that I began to appreciate the warmth of the Indian people and to get a grasp of the intricacies of their culture. The children and staff I worked with were tremendous but the treacherous realities of life in India, especially for an orphan, were always disconcertingly close at hand.

While HIV isn’t as prevalent in India as in many African countries, estimates are that over 2 million Indians carry the virus, and it is particularly common among orphans. A very high proportion, if not the majority, of the children in the orphanage I volunteered at carried the virus and typically had bumps on their face as a result, advertising their misfortune to the world. This is of course life threatening should the virus progress to AIDS, but in a country complicit to the Caste system as is the case of India, it has additional consequences.

The Caste system, borne of the Hindu religion, dictates that a person’s social status is decided by their ‘caste’, which is inherited.  All too often, the jobs they will work, friends they will socialize with and neighborhood they will live in duly follow. Needless to say, the overwhelming majority of the students at this Orphanage were deemed to be untouchables or ‘Outcastes’ and the aforementioned bumps on their faces would leave no Indian in doubt as to this.

No Indian perhaps, other than the children themselves. The first words that come to mind when initially landing in India may well be ‘Smells’, ‘Sweat’ and ‘Sewage’, but upon arriving at the Orphanage in Andhra Pradesh the only word I could think of was ‘Smiles’.

The Smiles. The glistening smiles seemingly transfixed on every child’s face, day in, day out. Thanks to the superb work of Care and Share, theirs is a happy childhood with a full primary and secondary education. Success has many definitions but in this instance limiting it to statistics such as the rate of progression to tertiary education feels callow. Sometimes a facial expression is enough. It was for me.

Venturing to the local village, where two dirt roads intersected was chastening and as alien to Dublin as anywhere I have been.  Starbucks replaced by a sprawling Tea Palace the customers of which spilled onto the streets, apples swapped for tremendously exotic coloured fruits and pavements replaced by nothing in particular. With the notable exception of the ludicrously ubiquitous Coca-Cola, I often needed convincing that my journey from Dublin hadn’t been inter-galactic. I’m more than open to the idea that one gets an understanding of how alien somewhere is because of the small things. The way people smile. The surprisingly ingratiating way Indians wobble their head at any available juncture in an interaction. The way they dress. However informed such details are, they are easily overwhelmed.

They are overwhelmed by the sheds which peppered the streets, housing people lying motionless, staring at the corrugated iron roof, their bodies little more than skin draped over bones like a cloth over a table. They are overwhelmed by the barely clothed children shuffling through mud on the side of the road and by the families I would see in the evenings sleeping under trees on the roadside. They are overwhelmed by the poverty.

These are not things you ‘notice’. They are things that knock you over the head, relentlessly. They arrest all your sense at once and command your interest to a point that no film, or blog, can hope to. But most of all they make you feel helpless. They make you feel stupid and naive for subscribing to the notion that your volunteering would make any discernible difference. They make you feel selfish and self-centred for that time you cursed your internet connection for lagging, or bollocked a barista under your breath for serving you a luke-warm Latté. It’s a process anyone volunteering overseas goes through. Its difficult and challenging, but also worthwhile and necessary.

On one our weekends off we visited a Hindu temple in Vijaywada, dedicated to the Hindu Goddess Durga. Traveling to new and varied countries has afforded me a better understanding of countless  customs and cultures and the centrality of religion in so many people’s lives is one of the most potent. Nowhere, and I mean absolutely nowhere, has this been more compelling than in India. This wasn’t so much a temple as a theme park of worship and wonder and in truth my 19 year old mind couldn’t process it at the time. I don’t doubt that Daedalus’s Labyrinth was at once intricate and stupefying but it surely couldn’t compare to this profusion of pathways, palaces and Pujaris at Sri Durga Temple.

We queued to have our faces dabbed with paint in praise of a deity I was as yet unacquainted with. We saw people, often whole families, overcome with emotion at various statues but also in seemingly unadorned corners. We were ushered into an intimate shrine to be festooned by prayer and contemplation while our foreheads were dotted with vermilion at will. It was beguiling and powerful, not for the religious element itself but to see its remarkable impact on people’s lives. It struck me that while the the tide of atheism washes over the West, nothing has emerged to fill the spiritual void in people’s lives when they decide that religion isn’t for them. I don’t mean this as a defense of religion but society is assuredly poorer for the absences of something that, in the Durga Temple at least, provides such joy and cathartic relief.

Therein lies the central contradiction of life in India. It is difficult to conceive of a country where poverty is as ubiquitous, as transparent and un-apologetically laid bare, as India. But it is also a country that can boast an absurdity of riches that you wont be able to measure in Dollars or Euro. Genuine faith in the spiritual. Dedication to family. And a touching urgency in their efforts to make you feel welcome as warm as the curries it invariably manifests itself as.

Cold hard facts such as life expectancy and literacy rates mean that it would be foolhardy and ignorant of me to assert that life in India is demonstrably more fulfilling that that offered in Ireland, but it is certainly true that there are truths and values central to life in India which we would be well advised to observe more keenly. 

Just last year, while travelling in Guatemala , I met a French man in his late 20s. Having quit his job he set about travelling the world and was, at that stage, in the 10th month of doing so. Upon hearing that he had begun in India I was eager to hear his thoughts on it. ‘Well I was there for 2 months, but I still can’t work out if it was my favorite or least favorite place.’ I smiled and nodded. ‘I understand’ was my succinct response.