Delhi is a shithole

View of Paharganj: the neighborhood lies in the very centre of Delhi.

A fellow blogger's view of India's capital city:

First of all, let me just say one thing about Delhi. It’s absolutely fucking filthy. I mean, London is filthy, most cities are filthy, granted. But New Delhi is just in a whole league of its own. During monsoon it gets especially worse because of the rubbish sewer systems and apparently non existent waste disposal services. You can imagine how torrential rain does nothing to improve this. Contrary to what you may think about the rain cleaning the streets and washing away the cities filth what it actually does is just turn the roads into muddy rivers of garbage and human excrement and the junctions into swirling cess pits and quagmires of shit, rubbish and grime. Its difficult to imagine why anybody would want to come here. I saw most of the interesting sights in one afternoon drive around the city and frankly that was enough.

My room was a shitty little box with a toilet that didn’t work and a window that didn’t open (lonely planet recommends this place so god knows what the bad places are like) and it was a staggering 400 R’s per night. Compared to my pleasant 250 R’s a night room in Varanasi this was a rip off.

The idea of any more than a few days in Delhi makes me want to cry to be honest and I was so happy to get on that train to Varanasi.
The whole time I was there I didn’t take my camera out of its bag, partly because I was very jet lagged and just wanted to acclimatise and get used to India before I became the intrepid photojournalist and partly because the place just didn’t interest me. It was just shitty, muddy, filthy, smelly streets filled with people trying to rip you off, crazed rickshaw drivers, annoying touts and shop owners who see any white person as pay day.
I fucking hated it. As soon as I got off that plane and the heat and the smell hit me I knew I would hate it. The smell, the fucking smell. Mix, petrol, shit, sand, piss, smoke, filthy water, sewage, rotting rubbish, and miscellaneous pollution together and hey presto, you have New Delhi. I’m no cynic, and I wont be this negative about everywhere I go. But let me get this straight. Delhi is horrible. Just horrible. It’s everything I hate about India all in one place.

(text and photo: Jack Laurenson)

Jack gets it absolutely right. No other place is India is as disgusting as Delhi. Which is why I don't go out: no sightseeing, no visiting places, no shopping strolls, nothing. This shithole doesn't deserve my time.

Sunday treat: Airtel

First of all, Airtel is crap. Despite being one of the biggest telecom service providers in this country, their service is lousy at best, downright cheating otherwise.

We got a wireless router for our internet connection. After you pay a hefty price for it, they make you buy the router - nothing is free in India. It cost about 20 euros.

We soon discovered that said router would not work across the flat - which is less that 50 square meters! From my work station, I'd only get a feeble signal, or none at all.

We call the customer service, and the first time someone came who didn't speak one word of English; he changed the router, replacing the old with a new, identical one. Obviously the problem remained. We could not get the message across, even with my best attempts at explaining the situation in Hindi.

Today, someone else showed up. A young boy. No ID whatsoever. How can you tell it's someone from Airtel and not a passer-by is another matter.

He scientifically assessed the situation, and concluded: the router doesn't work because there are walls in this house.

Marvelous. Walls. The problem is walls.

After seeing our faces, he added: Airtel only sells Beetel routers, and they don't work in a different room. To get a strong signal all over your property you need to purchase a Netgear routers.

We asked (drooling with rage): so why the fuck did your installation engineer (engineer being the operative term for whoever handles tools and wires in this country) tell us that this piece of shit would work, and made us pay for it?

What followed was half an hour of discussion involving physics, management, contract breach, various gods being called various names.

Airtel cannot do anything about it. It sells you a product that will not work. If you want it to work, you have to shell out some more money and buy a new router.

The myth of India as a cheap country is, well, a myth. Nothing is ever cheap here. You have to pay 3, 5, 10 times to have things to work just fine. You have to call people, shout at people, accept the fact that service engineers will show up while you are having dinner only to fiddle around with a few cables. You have to know that whatever you buy will break, you will have to bring it back, try to get it repaired under warranty only to discover that the warranty was fake.

Best of luck to the people (the husband!)who are trying to develop business between India and the West.

Some pictures

I am turning into a cow: slow, fat and spaced out.

I need meat. I need meat and fish to survive. I need animal proteins. Not soya. Not bloody beans.

I feel lethargic all day, don't have the energy to do anything more than the strictly necessary. And my body is covered by a jellyish stratum of fat. My tummy is forever bloated but I am hungry all the time. Potatoes, tomatoes, cucumber just don't cut it.

Oh yes, be creative. Experiment new ways of cooking your veggies.

Except they are still veggies at the end of the day. (Same goes for eggs)

Cheese could reasonably improve my dietary deficiencies. But alas, my dear nonexistent readers, the only cheese consumed by India is called 'paneer', a sort of solid, unsalted ricotta. Yummy eh?

Help me.

P.S. So now I really cannot understand how people who live in countries where all sorts of foods are available, tasty and cheap, choose to voluntarily give them up and live off vegetables and grains. And no, I personally do not understand the 'ethical' aspect of it.

White man's wallet

Photo courtesy of World of Stock

Last night the taxi driver tried to scam us. We hired a taxi from Dial-a-Cab, a radio taxi service that seems to work fairly well (they show up almost on time, they almost know the city, they almost speak English). The guy in question was funny and talkative. On the way back, he started chatting in Italian, telling me how he'd worked for Italian tourists for many years. He cracked some jokes and told us about his family. We were having a really pleasant trip home. Then, when we arrived and asked for the price, he looked at intentively into a corner of the car ( where a non-existent meter was supposed to be) and after too many seconds he gave us a ridiculously high price. Fucking ridiculous.

The husband got so angry he shouted for five minutes, we paid what we thought was correct and got out of the car. This incident spoilt an otherwise pleasant evening.

There we were, again, angry and frustrated.

Now. We must look at the bigger picture. Some will say that generalising is wrong, sure: but how am I supposed to meet all Delhiites before I can say something about them?

So, I submit that most people in Delhi are shameless crooks. There I said it. In almost two months we have been cheated, scammed and screwed on a daily basis; we have to be constantly on the look-out for potential scams. We are ALWAYS given inflated prices unless it's bloody printed on the thig we want to buy.

I am doing my best to live among people. As I said before, we did not want to live like expats. Now I am beginning to see the expats' choice as a necessary one. One must live separated from the shameless populace. One cannot afford to be democratic, open, or nice towards people.

The ugly truth is that a large part of Indians are only in it for the money. Fast cash earned by doing as little as possible, as badly as possible. The entire system is based on a continuum of cheating; short-sighted cheating, to be precise, for they cannot see the monetary advantage of doing something properly.
I'll explain: if you as a miserable, despicable taxi driver give me a good service for a fair price, I am likely to call you again = you will earn more money. I might even give you good tips = you will earn even more money. This is something even a two-months old child can understand, right?

No.

In the mind of the Despicable Indian*, there lies a problem in the idea of 'will earn'. Why should he want to earn 80 rupees today and 10000 rupees tomorrow, if he can make 100 today?

I do know better. Things like this have deep structural causes that sociologists all over the globe are trying to uncover.

Still, think of a country where almost a billion people behave like the Despicable Indian, and tell me, show me SCIENTIFICALLY how that country is set to be a 'global superpower'.

C'mon, tell me.

*The Despicable Indian is an analytical category, not a term of substance.

Why the hell I moved here

Question asked by Herr Heidi von der Mauer.

I moved here because my boss told me to. My other boss, the better one, figured out that I could obtain a scholarship for nine months paying a fairly good monthly stipend, and learning sociology at the same time.

In the meantime, a research project was in the making: but TRAGICALLY the person who was supposed to come here and do the fieldwork couldn't do it anymore. My better boss suggested me as a replacement, perhaps not realizing that I don't have a PhD and I had never done fieldwork (although I told her, I swear).

So the scholarship and the project were combined and I was sent off with a one-way ticket.

Why I accepted all this: because I get money in until next year and get to save part of it, which will hopefully pay me a trip to a really fun holiday destination. And also because in the European country where I have lived for the last year it's always cold, even when it's warm (roughly 7 days a year, non consecutive).

This is my 4th time in India, so I am almost used to the inverted logic and the impossible chaos. I think that, after 9 months on this roof, I will want to explore other places. But who knows.