Foreign Policy Diary – The US-China Standoff in the Indo-Asia-Pacific Region (MUST SEE!)

Hi Sanjay…yes, I would love to live in India, but perhaps will have to wait for another life…probably I already have lived there, in a previous life…as we all probably have. In this 21st century life of mine, there are way too many problems to think about travel..and I would like to live in India, not just to visit. I would like to be a farmer, fighting GMO’s in India.

thanks for your very eastern input…

In 2011 I stayed in India for three months. During that time, I was constantly harassed by people trying to scam me, sell me stuff I didn’t want, sell me overpriced train tickets. I took an overnight bus ride from Bodhgaya to Kolkata. The bus steward played music at full blast in the middle of the night, laughing sadistically at passengers trying to get some sleep.

While in Bodhgaya, two teenaged boys badgered me into giving them about $100 for their education, because they are in utter poverty, like just about everyone else I met there, with hundreds of beggars bussed in to badger people for money.
Everywhere I went, I saw piles of garbage in the streets, cows and pigs scavenging for it because they had no decent fodder.

I met a couple –two psychiatrists who help people with mental problems, and watched as the wife verbally abused her Brahmin caste husband, and even slap him across the face right in front of me, even though her caste is Kshatriya (sorry for incorrect spelling). And they are supposed to help others with mental problems.
While in Bodhgaya, I was asked by a college student to do a survey, I was pretty much at the end of my rope, desperate to get out of there. After the survey, which had to do with Indian development,
She was complaining about the low state of the people there, that they don’t work.
I said, ‘they don’t work because they have no hope.’ It is well known that a Sudra doctor cannot treat a person from a higher caste, because they are not worthy to touch the body of the higher caste person. And besides the basic caste structure, the society is further divided into religious and ethnic castes. That results in a massively fragmented mutually adversarial social structure. The lower castes will clean the toilets of the upper castes, and that is the way it is set up and going to stay, if the Modi’s have their way, which they probably will.

I saw the utter poverty of the city of Bodhgaya, which has many thousands of Buddhist pilgrims bringing in all their money to spend on food and accomodations. And yet, people were sleeping under tables, selling butter lamps and fashioning cow dung by hand for drying, stuck on the outside of the temple compound wall. Where is the money going? The temple is the most holy place in Buddhism yet Hindus make up the majority of the governing board siphoning funds for their own purposes. No one asked me any questions upon entering the temple. But when I went with a friend to a Hindu temple, I was excluded for entering. I went to a river bed that had dried up,, and a Brahmin priest offered to do a small ceremony. He charged me 10 times the normal rate, and my friend, an Indian journalist angrily intervened. The priest lowered his price, which the friend said was set. Half way through, the priest demanded more money to finish the ceremony. My friend justifiably exploded at the ‘guardian of morality’ priest reneging on the deal.
Another Indian friend of mine, from Tamil Nadu, somehow managed to pull himself out of the miserable life his father had, got a medical degree, which of course no Brahmin would accept. He got to America, and made a decent life for himself. He said to me,
“Anyone who can get out of India gets out!”
Arundhati Roi has written extensively about the serious oppression of much of Indian society, the farmers the tribal peoples who make up the vast majority of the population. 100,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide because of the impossibility of carrying on farming in the new India.
I read that with the introduction of industrial agriculture, the tens of millions of day laborers, who get 50 rupies a day, about a dollar, will be thrown out of work. They have no land, and soon no job.

While there, I visited a village school, There is a spigot for the people in the village, who appear to me to be living in filth and poverty. I gave out pen and paper to each child as a gift, and each child came up to me for me to say hello. and offer a little kindness. Their physical condition was clearly poverty level. What is the government doing in all these years to raise their education level?

By the time I left, I had a serious case of bronchitis, I am pretty sure, without the proper medicine, I would have died there. I will never go back to India. And my observation is that that country, as devastated by the British as it was, has had as much time to recover as China did, and China, from a social standpoint appears to me to be way way ahead, Unless the caste system in India is dismantled and class relations radically improved, we will see a massive die off of the impoverished marginalized masses. And I think that is probably the plan anyway.

Just offering this as another perspective, taking into account the great scientific achievements and advancement of about 1/3 of the population. But overall, I see a dark future for India’s mass majority of impoverished lesser castes.

Coming from the USA, I thought my country was the most corrupt in the world, but after seeing India, I realized that compared to even the USA, India has ongoing extremely serious problems.

I wish India all the best, as I would all peoples, but I have no illusions about the state of the country.

@ Sanjay,

Q; India is way advance than any of the place existing today on the planet.

R: But modesty died in the process of getting there, didn’t it?

Sanjay, I know India, a little, from traveling there. It is one of the great civilizations, and the oldest, Homo destructans having settled there not long after leaving Africa. Its spirituality is deep, long and complex, but not unique. It was the elder brother to much Chinese culture, but the Chinese adopted, then adapted, the gifts that flowed over the mountains or through Central Asia.
However, India is in trouble. It has a huge underclass, being ignored by the Free Market. Its infrastructure is deplorable. Its pollution is even worse than China’s. Its ‘democracy’ prevents the sort of single-minded action that the Chinese have undertaken to transform their country. It is riven by communal violence, such as the brutal repression of the Kashmiris, of tribal and lower caste rebels and north-eastern separatists. The caste system casts a pall over the entire country. And ecological collapse, particularly anthropogenic climate destabilisation, will probably make much of the country uninhabitable in the near future.
And Modi, the BJP and its progenitor, the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh)from whose ranks MK Gandhi’s assassin came etc, are fascist, chauvinist movements. The RSS was closely allied to Germany under the Nazis in a crazy ‘pan-Aryan’ mutual admiration society, which left the Moslems out of calculations, and compared to the Jews in Germany. Unfortunately this Islamophobic tendency has been exploited by the Israelis to penetrate Indian elites, with dreadful portents for the future.
Everyone wishes Indians a rosy future, like all the other people of the planet. India would, in my opinion, prosper best by aligning itself to no-one, certainly not the West that regards them with racist disdain, and co-operating with everyone, particularly its neighbouring world civilization China.