Reflections on India

I wanted to write one last post on India, including some reflections, ways in which my opinions have changed, and stories that didn't fit in my previous posts. I could go on and on and on about India, and there are many topics I still can't find a way to fit in here. But here are a few things I couldn't leave unwritten.

First and foremost, I've already mentioned a bit the humility that India imposes on its visitors, and the ways in which my perspective on my place in the world changed when faced with India's poverty, crowdedness, culture, and social conditions. I feel lucky to be born where I was and to have lived most of my life in the United States. I'm also more aware than ever that I am the product of my circumstances.

My view on American declinism has also shifted. Everyone in the States hyperventilates about whether America is declining; how fast we're declining; and who's sneaking up from behind us to take our hegemony away. India, along with China, is a usual culprit, but having been there I don't feel remotely threatened. First, there's the obvious point, that hundreds of millions more doctors, scientists, and innovators can only benefit mankind on a scale far outweighing the effects of potential economic redistribution. If India and China become true knowledge and innovation economies on a level rivaling the United States, all of us will reap the benefits. I'm not saying that there wouldn't be challenges if the world travels down that path, but that the good would far outweigh the bad.

But second, I just don't truly see that as India's likely path. The challenges they face are staggering, and while according to the blunt metric of GDP they may one day catch up with or pass us, it will be centuries, if ever, before India looks anything like the United States in the important ways. They could move 300 million people to the American standard of living, and still have a billion left in destitution. Their subcontinent is one third the size of our country and already crowded to the gills. They have relatively few natural resources. They have barely any basic infrastructure like roads, and even less a basic educational or health care system. Their society has rifts and backwardness far outscaling in severity and longevity the social challenges that America has faced over the last 200 years, or faces today. They will continue to make great strides, I have no doubt, but I'm more confident than before that declinism says more about the state of mind of the West than the realities of the East.

Perhaps more difficult than building roads or an educational system will be changing Indian culture, which could present certain major obstacles to the creation of an advanced economy in the subcontinent. At university my classes referred every now and then to a "trust-based economy," as opposed to economies in countries where basic trust between people doesn't exist. In India, though, I saw the difference between a trust-based economy and one rife with so much cheating, corruption, haggling and deception that even many of the Indians I met professed not to trust their fellow countrymen. (Much less their leaders: the first time I picked up an Indian newspaper, every article on the front page was dedicated to perceived or actual government corruption accounting for alleged billions of dollars stolen.) Trust is a critical economic lubricant. India's current reality is an understandable outcome of the state in which most people live, and will take generations to change. In the meantime, it strongly undermines India's competitiveness, in my opinion. And while the situation is undoubtedly worse for tourists, my conversations with the locals make it clear that it's not just a tourist thing.

One minor example familiar to tourists, though, is dealing with cabbies in India. Almost every cab driver will try to rip you off, either by hiding the meter and keeping it running from a previous trip (when they use the meter at all), or lying about and inventing new costs. A prepared rider can call them on this, in which case they apologize profusely, but cheating is just the norm. Cabbies will also try to take you to a different place than you asked in order to make commission. If you ask for a hotel, they will insist that it has closed down or is full, and will take you to one where they'll get paid a bribe. I had one cabbie in Goa refuse to take me to the airport before I visited a shop where he gets paid to take his passengers. He even tried to bring me in on the deal to cheat the store owner: "You don't have to buy anything, just look around and I get paid. But don't tell him I told you that." The man who was cheating me was trying to get me to help cheat the guy on whose behalf he was cheating me! I could go on with example after example. After a few weeks in India I found myself in a siege mentality, expecting (accurately) that almost everybody was trying to weasel money out of me. As a result I got more tight-fisted than ever -- not the result the con men were looking for. Now imagine that tight-fistedness and distrust on a billion-plus person scale.

There were a few other interesting things I noticed. First, race is a big issue in India and manifests itself in some obvious ways. Light-skinned Indians are considered more upper class. Partly this is because of ancient history (or legend), when the Aryans are said to have invaded India from Iran and conquered the Dravidians. The Indian population is defined in the popular imagination somewhat as a clash of the northern Aryans and southern Dravidians, and the lighter-skinned Aryans were seen as the higher class. Additionally, skin color is associated with caste, as the higher castes generally had no need to spend time outdoors doing manual labor and so were likely for genetic and environmental reasons to have lighter skin. Lower castes spent their time outdoors, and became genetically darker and circumstantially more tan. One of my drivers in Goa, as he drove me from the airport to my hostel, told me that "Nobody from here goes to the beach. You don't want to get any darker, because then the girls won't like you." Watching Indian TV is also shocking, because everybody on it is light-skinned -- almost white -- to appeal to their cultural sense of beauty. Meanwhile among the most common commercials I saw were for "fairness cream," which bleaches the skin to "lighten" it. And to think, so many people in the West are concerned with getting tan.

Attitudes towards sex remain an issue, too, as dramatized comically for me in a pair of newspaper articles I saw in Delhi. In the first, a man made a scene when, sitting on an airplane, a woman's voice came on the line for the traditional captain's greeting. He stood up and refused to let the plane depart, screaming, "I'm not going to fly on a plane flown by a woman! I don't want to die! I'm not insane!" The next day, in the very same spot in the very same newspaper, an article appeared titled something like "Woman Pilot Suspended for Dangerous Landings." It was like an unintentional rebuttal for the article the day before. Of course it wasn't necessary to identify the pilot as a "woman pilot," who had been landing her planes front wheels first rather than the safer back wheels first, but there it was, unintentional(?) sexism. The same paper reporting on sexism one day was abetting it the next. One wonders which paper the man from the first article reads.

The last of the major shifts in my worldview that India caused (so far) concerns climate change. Pollution is an enormous problem in India, and it's only going to get much, much worse before it gets better. I can't help but come to the conclusion, already reached by people like Dr. James Lovelock, proposer of the Gaia Hypothesis, and my dad, that we're past the point where we can reverse course and stop climate change from happening. Not only are the positive feedback mechanisms quickly taking things like GHG emissions out of our hands, but even if we in the first world dramatically curtailed our use of fossil fuels, rising demand and use in the third world will continue to drive GHG levels upwards. Consider that scientists believe that the processes causing climate change began more than 100 years ago. Our governments are talking about leveling off sometime in the next 10 to 20 years, followed by a reduction to 2008, or at most 1990 levels. Even if we went back to 1930 levels, climate change would continue apace. And consider that despite the huge pollution problems in India and the third world, they're still relatively small contributors to the problem on a per capita basis. They're going to grow, and it's almost inconceivable that they won't continue to tip the scales no matter what we in the West do to reduce our own consumption. Given that the next few decades may be make-or-break for affecting the course of climate change, we're running out of time for a game-changing technology, and even if we had it the challenge of rolling it out in a place that can't even adopt basic technology to keep its water potable is daunting.

In short, I'm not sure the solution to climate change is to reduce our emissions in the States, though I still think we have many other reasons to do so including reducing pollution in our local atmosphere. I just am not convinced that doing so will have an impact on the global scale. Lovelock puts forward the idea of replacing "sustainable development" with "sustainable retreat" -- we have to start thinking about how to adapt to a changing climate, rather than trying to reverse it. Perhaps that's the way forward. Or, perhaps it's climate engineering, like the proposal of increasing the reflectivity of the atmosphere by shooting aluminum particles over the Antarctic. Arguably we could take that route, pollute to our heart's content, and maintain global temperatures by effectively installing a planetwide thermostat. (This idea has its own obvious flaws, like potential secondary effects and the fact that intervention, once started, cannot be stopped with predictable consequences.) I'm not sure what the right way forward is, but I'm less confident than ever that any of our politicians' solutions have any chance of making an impact on the broader problem, even if they were implemented, which they probably won't be. Without solving the issue of the emerging world, we are backpedaling into a tsunami.

As you can tell, this trip has given me much to think about, for which I'm grateful. India was an incredible experience -- beautiful, fascinating, the most interesting trip of my life. I left India optimistic about the United States, impressed by the scale of change in India, and concerned by the many challenges I see ahead for the subcontinent. At many times throughout the trip I thought to myself (or to M. W., or A. D., or P. D., or anybody who would listen), What will India be like when my kids visit decades from now? Will it have transformed? Or will it be surprisingly the same? I don't know, but my best guess is, probably both. Zooming into the future, and stuck in the past.