Priorities - About Shitting and Chatting

A frequently reported semi-embarassment for India this month was the joint WHO and UNICEF report titled "Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water".

To avoid misunderstandings, a definition from the report:

"An improved sanitation facility is one that hygienically separates human excreta from human contact"

OK. I feel that the term "improved sanitation" may be misunderstood - an improved sanitation facility could be expected to be one that showers and blow-dries your backside after use, but that is perhaps too much a Japanese view on things. No, for WHO and UNICEF, a sufficiently deep hole in the ground will do.

As far as the drinking water is concerned, let us just keep in mind that no mountain spring or melting ancient glacier is required for an "improved drinking water source", just some plain H2O without turds.

What was reported widely in Indian media - to an only mildly embarrassed readership - is the fact that India lets 665 million of its people shit in the open every day. Only 31% of India, roughly 366 million privileged people, have access to the fancy amenities the report defines as Improved Sanitation.

Interesting is the comparison: 545 million mobile phones currently operate in India, i.e. 45% of the population have a CDMA or GSM digital cellular phone, 3G currently being rolled out.

Is it only me or is there something wrong with the priorities?

Moreover, whereas the report states that "Open defecation is largely a rural phenomenon, most widely practiced in Southern Asian and Sub-Saharan Africa", I see and smell it in the very urban context of Bombay every day. And if the forest or scrubland of rural India may absorb a lot, urban pavements simply can't - despite the widely spread belief that undesired matter, whether faeces or garbage, disappears if you drop and then ignore it.

It would be unfair to say that nobody cares, there are meaningful initiatives like Sulabh International doing excellent work for the health and dignity of the people. Donate and support, even if the whole thing has a slightly unsettling messianic streak.

On the other hand, there seems to be an underlying issue in Indian culture which does not seem to worry too much about shit.

One example: A while ago at the Bombay Exhibition Centre, in preparation of an international lifestyle-related trade show, I noticed that there were no toilets available, so the workers emptied themselves into an open gutter right next to the exhibition hall and returned with little chance to clean themselves up.

I could not blame the poor guys for leaving disgusting finger prints on my show booth and the smell of the trench everywhere, so I complained with the owners of India's largest private sector exhibition facility, demanding that they open the toilets. They responded that they could not open the visitor toilets for "Labour". Sanitation for "Labour" is unheard of - a plainly bizarre idea. Labour is cheap, labour is low-caste, labour is filthy. No point in trying for hygiene and cleanliness.

It would, however, miss the point if we just blamed "the system". Take a tour of Dharavi and watch the kids shitting on open garbage piles right next to their homes. Pass through the slums along the main roads any early morning and watch the men literally take a crap on the roadside - paved or not. Be on the rooftop of the Rang Sharda hotel at Bandra reclamation in the evening and realise that the barely noticeable movement in the darkness below are women who try to use the cover of the night to save a little bit of their dignity, doing what the WHO would call defecating in the open in a urban environment. More than half of these people have a mobile phone, many of them have satellite TV. Is it really so difficult to organise and execute a hole in the ground?

At the end of the day I can't help noticing the irony: How many of the privileged men I see using proper toilets in hotels, airports and offices keep on chatting away on their phones inside their cubicles or whilst pissing - before leaving the Improved Sanitation Facility either without washing their hands at all or after performing a uniquely Indian ritual of rubbing thumb, index and middle finger of their right hand under running water for 2 seconds. But hand hygiene is a different matter, I suppose.

The Great Indian Motorist and the Ultra Low-Cost Car - An Open Letter

Dear Renault-Nissan, dear Bajaj, dear Volkswagen, Honda, Toyota, GM, Hyundai and the rest of you,

I understand that more or less all of you intend to follow the lead of Tata's Nano and roll out Ultra Low-Cost Cars, small vehicles carrying a price tag of USD 2k ... 3k, within the next 2...3 years to flood India and other emerging markets. This is obviously a challenge and will be one of the most dynamic sectors in automotive engineering. Time to think out of the box, and reason enough to question the traditional Indian approach to take foreign designs based on, well, mature technology and then primarily rely on India's low labour cost, scale effects and a more cavalier approach to product quality in order to bring the price down.

So, Gentlemen, here comes some free advice and a deeper look at what functionalities can fairly simply be dropped on Indian roads:

1. Indicators: Whereas the rest of the world creates fancier and more elaborate designs, just skip this feature. No motorist in India uses indicators in any consistent or even predictable way, except, strangely enough, when switching on the hazard flashers in tunnels and fog. If your customers do not know what they are for and do not use them - why bother?

2. Rear view mirrors: As we now no longer require the mirrors to accommodate fancy indicators, there is no real reason to bolt these things to the vehicle. Your customer, the Great Indian Motorist, folds them in anyway or does not replace them after they have been brushed off by pedestrians or other motorised vehicles. The internal mirror should be kept, so that your customer can occasionally check on his hairdo. And isn't there an underlying message? What you see in the rear view mirror is the past, and India shall not dwell on that - we look into the future, which, of course, lies ahead. Which brings us to point 3.

3. Headlights: Yes, the Great Indian Motorist will need them. After all, few places in the Universe are as dark as Indian roads at night, and few things have bigger holes in them. But why complicate matters by offering a choice of High Beam and Low Beam? The Great Indian Motorist only uses High Beam, of course, because he can see better and further. It is an interesting observation that some of the world's most sophisticated driving machines are imported to India with ultra-bright high-tech Xenon lighting systems, which then burn the retina of other people on the road to crisps as they are never ever switched into low beam. That oncoming traffic cannot see anything is someone else's problem, and India does not dwell on problems. There is one situation to dip the lights, though: To support the horn by flashing at and annoying the hell out of vehicles and other obstacles ahead. Nevertheless: To get the same obnoxious strobe effect, we can also briefly switch off the lights totally. Done.

4. Ventilation: Whereas the rest of the world demands air intakes, HEPA filters and high-performance climate control systems, you will be able to ignore all of that. The Great Indian Motorist does not believe in oxygen, and always sets the ventilation system to closed circulation. Fresh air is for other parts of the world (and rarely available in Indian cities anyway), your customers prefer the stale odour which can only develop in hermetically sealed environments under the influence of humidity, heat, underpaid slum-dwelling drivers spending long waiting hours in the vehicle and the worlds highest consumption and digestion of lentils. Aircon it is, on full throttle, refrigerating yesterday's gaseous content of the vehicle.

Now, you will say that you cannot do this, as these features are considered crucial elsewhere and important to protect your customers.

Face it: Your customer, the Great Indian Motorist, is the world's worst driver, and he is more than happy to prove that by killing 150,000 fellow countrymen per year on the subcontinent's roads. Your job, however, is to manufacture and sell cars, not to run a driving school. The Great Indian Motorist does not give a rat's arse about his own safety, and much less about the safety of others. The Great Indian Motorist knows best what is good for him and what is silly stuff for the rest of the world - or as he would put in: People in Foreign. Indicators, mirrors, low beam, fresh air, common sense and regard for other people are not asked for in India.

So, Mr. Ratan Tata, Carlos Ghosn, Chung Mon-Koo, Takanobu Ito, Mr. Whitacre, Winterkorn, Bajaj and Toyoda, here is a straightforward way to shave unnecessary costs of your revolutionary cars and to help bringing out even more imbeciles to the roads of India. Take it, it is free.

You are welcome.

Flora Fountain, Fort, Mumbai, 22.11.09

Mutant?

Hrithik Roshan is a superstar and universally adored by women.

Here he is, advertising a new call plan of the conglomerate which has pioneered the adulteration of Indian GSM mobile telephony to a point that it costs 1 USD cent per minute, but is of such poor quality that it makes me violently angry any time I make a call. Anyway, meet Mr. Roshan by clicking here.

An attractive man, I admit.

But now go back to his picture, zoom in and have a look at his right hand: The guy has two thumbs. Eek! One can only speculate what other redundant body parts he may sport. Mind you, most Indians don't seem to find this odd at all.

One might also suspect that this is what is bound to happen when caste rules force people to reproduce within the same genetic puddle over generations and generations, but that would, no doubt, constitute that very kind of neo-colonialistic, chauvinist ranting that we do not partake in.

The Aesthetics of Indian Popular Culture - Part 1: Siva Sambo

Sorry, I haven't posted anything for a long time. There are a few things I would like to share, but I would need to go out there and take some pictures.

In the meantime, have a look at the psychedelic video. He may look light a slightly obese insurance salesman in a dress he has outgrown decades ago, but in his heart, he is a rocker - and, quite seriously, a superstar in the south of India.

Varanasi, 22.07.09 - The Day of the Eclipse

We were there...

Varanasi, 22.07.09 - Along the River

Waiting - Versova-Juhu Link Road, Mumbai

2 hours to kill before 4 pm. 

Will he be the same?

Perhaps we should have gone for Grade I...

Men and Machines - Part II

First post in almost 3 months, and I get annoyed with blogger.com immediately - again, it will not show the pictures in any kind of full screen mode for no obvious reason. Anyway, here are some taxi drivers and rickshawwallahs whom I met in Juhu today...

GQ

I am not an expert for brand building, certainly not one of this fine publication's readers, perhaps not even part of its target group. Nevertheless,  I could not help the feeling that there may be some kind of discrepancy between the desired brand image and the reality of promoting it on the ground when I saw this a few weeks ago in South Bombay. Anyway, Gentlemen's Quarterly is here. 

There is an India outside Bombay...

and it is nicer, more quiet, less polluted and, all in all, less insane.

This blog has not died a silent death, I am just reluctant to go on photo safaris in the intense heat of the last weeks. Last weekend, however, we left Bombay by car, had a look at Ajanta & Ellora Caves, and popped into Nasik on our way back. 

Dr. Ambedkar in a small town in Maharashtra:

Men and Machines - Dahisar, Mumbai, 06.09.08

Horn OK Please

Dangers and Safety Nets

Again, no pictures, sorry.

As per the Times of India count of Monsoon related deaths in Mumbai (154 this rainy season and counting), this fine city saw 12 dengue victims and 46 malaria cases admitted to hospitals within 24 hours. That in itself is nothing unusual. Dengue, Malaria and Chikungunya are simply not funny; all three are around, and all three are transmitted by mosquitos.

This, together with the observation that there were more and more mosquitos in my place and that I already had a fair number of bites, was reason enough for me to venture out and try to procure a net to put over my bed. Strangely enough, I drew a complete blank. Not a single shop I visited was able to sell me a mosquito net, even more, all these shopowners did not really understand my point. Why would anybody want to have one? Firangi whimp...

I can only speculate why Bombay's consumers simply can't be bothered. It may be what I consider a rather distorted perception of risks to one's life and limb in general, or it may be that these people are simply to preoccupied with, well, perhaps Dhat Syndrome (you will have to check this out!).

Eventually, it was the internet that saved my life: www.kwalitynets.com (run by an extremely helpful Mr. Prakash Kajaria) tailored me an excellent box-shaped net within 48 hours and delivered it to my office for a total of Rs. 1,600/-.

I can only hope that my fellow lost souls, anxiously roaming the streets of Bombay and the pages of the www in desperate attempts to get some mesh betwen their mortal coils and the vectors of death, find this link and Prakash - he deserves it.

An Italian in Bombay

If you want the full story of this car, read this. If not, just look at these pictures of a Lamborghini Gallardo(?) being transported Indian style and weep with me. Sure, I have very few sympathies with the owner, yes, I agree that Bombay is not an appropriate habitat for this vehicle, yes, I also agree that this is nothing compared to the human suffering on the same streets every day, but, please, see what they are doing to this car...

Pictures stolen from the Times of India and Mumbai Mirror, who seem to have stolen them from someone with a mobile phone. 

12.08.08 - Andheri Subway, Andheri, Mumbai

A fairly benign accident which caused some considerable traffic disruption at Andheri Subway, which is a bad spot on any given day. The poor fellow with his Apé *almost* got through, passed the first 5 or 6 beams, but then failed the final one by a few millimetres. 

To fully appreciate the pictures, I suppose you must try to visualise the course of this mishap in slow motion.