Reflections on India Part 1: The People

(Audrey) As I prepare to leave Delhi in a few short days, I think it’s valuable to reflect upon what I’ve learned in my time here. First and foremost, I’ve learned a lot about the Indian people. One can never effectively generalize about any group based on nationality, especially when they constitute 1/6 of the world’s population. But still, I will hazard to say a few things. I was constantly struck by how many Indians work at physically difficult jobs every day. It’s striking the difficulties that people endure here in order to make an honest living, whether it is carrying bricks at a construction site or sitting on the hot, dirty streets for sixteen hours just trying to make a few sales. A few pictures I snapped over the course of the year—

Of course, not everybody in India does such back-breaking labor. Here’s a group of JNU professors hard at work on strike—

The tough academic life notwithstanding, Indians are overall impressive workers, especially given the challenges of a country that lacks infrastructure, often has really horrid weather, and places an incredibly low value on human labor.

Amongst those that can’t or simply don’t work, namely the beggars, much of what I saw broke my heart. What can you say about the poverty, the constant begging? Just yesterday a little beggar girl, maybe 4 or 5, brushed her head against my hand. My instant reaction was to recoil, not so much because she was filthy but because of fear of lice. This is not a good system, and I’m certainly not proud of how jaded I’ve become, that I do often treat beggars as nuisances, like mosquitoes, rather than like people. There are moments when you wonder—how can I still be a human being when I see so much suffering, sadness, malnutrition, and then go to a fancy restaurant and laugh over a meal that costs what some families eat off of for months? How can I still laugh and enjoy life after what I see here every day?

But then one goes inside, off the streets, and escapes the beggars. Indoors, in private spaces is where I have encountered a lot of the individuals who have made the deepest impressions on me in India. There’s the gentlemen who helped me last October to get inside of Jain archives in Jaipur that are usually closed to outsiders. I remember riding around the narrow alleys of the Pink City on the back of his motor-cycle as we tracked down a text that nobody had looked at for probably 80 years. And there’s the librarian, who against all logic and self-interest, slipped me a CD of a manuscript in secret (copies being quite illogically against the rules of the library, of course). Add in all the friends, academic contacts, and you’ve got an impressive bunch of educated, generally well-off Indians who went out their way to help out a foreigner.

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Tags: beggars, humanity, India, Indians, people, reflections