chinaSMACK - stories in digital China [Note: some of these photos are quite disturbing.]
My only hope is that the photographer picked the worst part of India to photograph, and most of the rest of the country is splendid.
Or perhaps I just live in a bubble. 
Not Indian here, but I scrolled through the pictures, and I can say that India covers the spectrum from that idiot building a huge tower for his family abutting a major slum, all the way to those homeless living on the street. Yes, cows do wander freely, as do many other animals. Yes they do burn bodies and launch the remains in the river Ganges and bathe in the same river. [I am personally oogied out about that myself.] Yes the homeless crap on the streets and in the fields, and they do use cow shit as a cooking and heating fuel in areas where wood is scarce. I will also note that in many areas where wood is rare and there are cows or other large quadrupeds the shit gets burned and even incorporated in building material.
I will also note that in rural China they have been known to use horse and cow dung as a fuel, human crap as a fertilizer and have been known to crap in the street and in fields. In some cultures, ‘sky’ burial is practiced - leaving the bodies exposed for vultures to consume, and in some cultures bodies are buried until they rot, then dug up, the bones cleaned and put into ossuaries. In many areas crapping in the streets and fields is not unusual. Where would you expect field workers in third world countries to crap?
That doesn’t happen worldwide? I think most people who have lived in a major city can remember one or two locations like a certain shop entry way that seem to be used as toilets night after night.
Hell field workers in first world countries crap in the fields, there have been outbreaks of hep A and other diseases linked to raw veggies grown in the USA.
Count me as someone who does not know such locations for the majority of the cities and towns where she’s lived, during most of the time.
Foreigners peeing on the street during Sanfermines are a different kind of animal; it’s not because they don’t have access to free, public toilets (every bar, hotel and restaurant, for starters), it’s because they’re too stupid to look for one.
FWIW, I was just talking at lunch today with some colleagues who have spent a lot of time in India, and they both mentioned seeing corpses floating in the Ganges.
I have been a couple places on mission that can best be described as hell-holes; India was the worse. Were it actually possible I would have my brain removed and those three months burned from my memory totally. And considering the stories my Dad told of his time there in WW II that good old days weren’t much different.
Of course, corpses are never seen floating in the Thames, or Sydney Harbour or New York Harbor or the other waterways of first world cities.
I am at work, so cannot look at the pictures now - but if it is the ones supposedly taken by a Chinese tourist, featuring several shots of bodies in the Ganges - no, this is not representative of India, or at least not the area of North-West India where I have been (Gujurat and Rajasthan)
Yes, India is pretty dirty, there is extreme poverty everywhere and immediately adjacent to incredible opulence. Yes, it is fairly unsanitary - spit, urine and faeces everywhere.
But it is also magnificent, an amazing and eye-opening place to visit. I would suggest that in order to burst your bubble, you go and see first hand.
Well, that definitely explains the problems India has with cholera.
I look at these photos and I just think of how lucky we in the First World countries are. Most of humanity lives in conditions closer to this sort of filth and poverty than to the comfortable affluence we have here.
Well, when they are it makes the news.
Spot on. Without the captions, how would you even know whether you were looking at photos of India, New York, or London? They’re all identical!
Careful… in these threads, some people forget to turn on their sarcasm detectors.
No pictures capture the scope of the filth and poverty or the vastness of it and the sheer scope of it in terms of people.
You might find a slum somewhere in the USA of 20,000 people. In India, that slum would be a good life. A festering slum in Mumbai will have (can’t say ‘house’) a **million **people living in conditions you don’t want to remember. One slum… in one area… and you’ve not scratched the surface.
Oh, they might have 200 million people doing well, but that leave practically almost another billion people (almost a BILLION PEOPLE), living in wretched conditions.
So, they can have a US-sized economy** and** almost a billion living in filth. The numbers are hard to grasp.
The world is a dirty place. We mostly get away from that, but it takes incredible resources to do so. Most of the world doesn’t have the luxury.
Much of India is poor and crowded, and it does get pretty overwhelming. But I also agree that India is a freaking amazing place to travel. If you think stuff in Europe is old…well, India makes Europe feel like California. Just an incredible place.
The corpses in the Ganges thing is gross, but it’s a religious thing, and religious things often don’t make sense. People would rather cremate and that is the strong preference, but some people are so poor they cannot afford the (actually quite substantial) amount of wood that it takes, so they have to take their chances being weighted down by rocks.
It’s really pretty much a thing that happens in one city. I will say it is incredibly bad manners to take pictures of the corpses. You really, really aren’t supposed to do that. Those were people, and they were people with dignity. You should afford them some dignity in death, even if they couldn’t afford a more dignified final resting place.
I’m surprised to see this from a Chinese person. One of my favorite restaurants in China had a literal river of blood flowing through the center from where they’d slaughter chickens and rabbits in back of the restaurant to the gutter on the street. Children in “split pants” poop openly on the street, it’s normal to throw bones and tissue and refuse on the floor as you eat, and so on. Hardly the cleanest place on earth.
CrafterMan, we ask that people give some idea where a link is going, esp. if the images are disturbing. I’ve added a note to your OP.
Thanks,
twickster, MPSIMS moderator
Look I’ll admit India isn’t the USA or the UK etc, but some people just seem to get carried away and will act like the homeless pooping on the street or rampant rats etc aren’t problems worldwide.
Crafter Man, you live in a bubble. I’m sorry to say so, because I quite enjoy reading your non-political posts. You have an engaging style and always offer useful information.
But, you live in a bubble.
The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet, the wealthiest nation in history, and we still struggle with issues of public health, sanitation, and drawing the line between religion and politics. The only other nations on par with us are western Europe and the remnants of the British Empire.
India has one billion people crammed into a much smaller geographical area. Hindu religious leaders won’t consider prioritizing human health above the sacredness of their river, so bodies continue to be dumped there (which is a problem, because cows sometimes consume human remains, cow remains are picked up and added to feed that is shipped to the US and fed to our cattle, which we then eat. It’s the perfect vector for prion transmission, but no one’s listening to the epidemiologists screaming about it). There are no resources for the abjectly poor to better their lives, and even if there were, most of them wouldn’t be able to take advantage of those resources because water-born diseases like cholera, typhoid, and malaria (carried by water-hatched mosquitoes) knock them down. There is no health care system for the poor. There is no education. There is only poverty, pollution, disease, violence, and death.
A strong government, like our own, could fix that. India lacks a strong government, so it’s going to stay that way for the time being.
I understand what you’re saying— but really, when your bloated and unrecognizable corpse is floating down a fetid river or being devoured by dogs in a trash pit, is there any dignity remaining to be robbed?
A strong government like in the US can’t fix all of our problems. It’s a gross simplification to imply that the problems of India could be easily solved with a stronger government. The scale of the problem is beyond any easy fixes.
Actually one of our dream vacations is to take a particular tour that starts in Agra and ends up by the Golden Temple [and hits a couple wildlife refuges along the way, and plenty of other very interesting sites including the UNESCO one that is the really deep well/building] I have wanted to visit India for decades. But then again, we also want to go to Cambodia and see Angor Wat as well.
The biggest complaint of the pictures seems to be the corpses of humans and sacred cows, that is not filth that is religious ceremony. Good luck on easily changing that.