Sunday 16 November 2008

When lulling in and out of train-sleep, every glimpse out of the window is like the new article in National Geographic. On pulling into a station, awake and you might see the cut paper doll silhouettes of women carrying as-yet empty shopping bags, waiting for the early morning train. Open your eyes an hour later and you will see wide open landscapes that are not unlike the bracken-filled copses outside any British Rail window. As the train wallah prods your breakfast through the curtain, look out to the edge of a slum, bricks painted with bright advertisements in Hindi, children running towards the railroad tracks as young boys sit on the littered mounds and look on.

Though all regions blur into one, mobile phone text messages give a rough global positioning. “Welcome to Airtel M. Pradesh. For India-England live one-day cricket scores, did *646*605#.” “Welcome to Airtel Goa/Maharastra. Calls cost 1rs/min STD” “Welcome to Airtel Tamil Nadu.”

India is an enormous landmass. It’s easy to forget this, spending time in a city where people clamber over each other like mice in a bucket. When told there are 1.2 billion people in a country, you sometimes imagine that there is no space at all. And then you realise that India is no Luxembourg, covering some 1,269,210 square miles.

It’s also difficult to believe that there are stretches of Indian land not covered in a smattering of garbage. And yet it is one of the most enviromentally-aware cultures I have lived in. Tips on how to be greener fill the newspapers, and warnings of the current and future natural disasters are everywhere. Perhaps this is because the effects of pollution are tangible here: floods in Bihar, failed crops across the country, early snowfall in Kashmir. For the last couple of days a permanent smog has hung over Delhi, more intense than even the usual. The Times of India reported yesterday that it was part of a huge brown cloud hanging over South Asia, blocking the atmosphere. They even had a fairly terrifying graphic to illustrate it.

Recycling programmes are in effect across the country. People are paid to keep piles of old newspapers; they are bought back and collected by the government for a good proportion of their original street price. This scheme is so effective that news publishers have had to carefully track vendors to avoid them selling their papers to recycling wallahs rather than readers. There are other schemes in place, even in the most remote villages. One consists of swapping old clothes for kitchen utensils. Autorickshaws and public buses run on compressed natural gas, and there are plans to make these vehicles solar-powered. At stoplights, huge government signs encourage motorists to turn off their engines. One of the country’s first Critical Mass events was held in Delhi last week, and though the turn out was hardly significant enough to truly earn its moniker, there are increasing numbers of bicycles on the roads.

Compare this attitude to the US, for example, where at least 31,000 scientists still deny that global warming exists. In New York, for example, recycling schemes are fairly primitive compared to other big cities such as London. You have to make something of a scene to prevent being given even a cup of coffee in a takeaway bag. Only until last year was it made illegal for stores to keep their doors open with their air conditioning on full blast, enticing summer customers in from the heat. The New York Times rarely publishes environmental features. Despite this, Western governments are quick to point the un-green finger at rapidly industrialising countries, especially China and India. London is trying, but it is not that much better. India is blamed for its poor infrastructure, but it has been more proactive in evangelising the green message than most African countries.

Of course India is not perfect; and it’s often difficult to understand the ethical rationale behind preaching the recycling message to a people without access to basic santitation. But India is a country that experiences the destruction of global warming firsthand. While people in Devon suffer flood damage to family airlooms and row dinghies to the local post office, families in Bihar die in their thousands for lack of food aid. It’s no wonder that the latter are more willing to accept the global warming problem, and begin to think of solutions.

Sunday 2nd November 2008

“This should be such a beautiful place,” says Alex. “But instead, it’s like a dead body soup.” He’s standing on the edge of a small concrete jetty on the River Yamuna. We’ve been spending the day, myself, Alex who’s an art critic, and artist Nitin, taking photos for a Delhi gallery exhibition piece. It’s called Nature of the City, and, today, involves travelling around the Delhi hinterlands, and finding the places where nature lives alongside the worst of the city’s pollution. Right now, we’re waiting for a boat to take us out onto the river.



Searching for a boat and helmsman, we accidentally wander into one of Delhi’s crematoria. In the city every day, there are between 600 and 900 cremations. Two of the grounds that serve this demand stand here: the ‘electric’ crematorium, and Raj Ghat, which uses wood. Looking for the river, we stumble across its gate, where street wallahs are selling bundles of firewood to the poorer tribute-makers. In a small stone hut resembling an Auschwitz gas chamber, the ordinary people of Delhi bring their dead to be burned using Compressed Natural Gas, or CNG, the fuel that auto-rickshaws are run on. It’s also used to burn stray dogs. For the production of cremains, 500 rupees (£6) changes hands. It’s above the heads of most people. The other option, and a popular one, is just to dump bodies in the river. This must be done under cover of darkness.

Moving swiftly past the CNG chamber, we come to the last destination for Delhi’s well-to-do. In carefully sequenced plots, bonfires in various states of combustion flame and smolder; it takes some ten hours for the average body to burn and some of the fires, if you look closely inside the sticks, are yet to consume the bundles inside. Beside others are the charred remains of marigold garlands. Men stack wood on top of plots, waiting for the next bodies to arrive. We shouldn’t be here. But we are fascinated, floating through the scene, guided by perverse curiosity. We just cannot leave. We walk up and down the concrete ramps between fires, through the stench of burning wood and human flesh.

Behind us, an ambulance pulls up to the gates and from its back doors. Men hoist up a stretcher, upon which lies a body, swaddled in embroidered linen. It is covered with garlands of bright orange marigolds. The women remain outside the gates as the men begin to chant prayers and follow the procession up the concrete ramp and past the burning bonfires on either side. They pass the three of us as we stand and stare, and for the first time in India I feel invisible, as if I am a ghost at a funeral. They hoist the body up to a chlorinated pool which looks like a kind of morbid water-park feature: a garishly-painted statue of Indra, the manager of heaven, overlooks a platform set on the water. The long bundle is laid on top of it. More prayers are said in Hindi, the body is doused, and brought down to the river. Here, again, are more bonfires, and hundreds of men looking out across them. These bonfires are covered with canopies made of coloured foil and sticks, which partially burn along with the fires. Older boys are hoeing the riverbed, setting up and putting out fires, removing piles of ash. No one has said anything about there being a white woman in the presence of men, because no one has noticed. There is a silence here which is indescribable.



Eventually we feel uncomfortable enough to leave, and persuade a young Indian man to take us out in a boat down the river. Nitin wants to take some pictures of the Yamuna River for his project.



So here we are, on one of the most polluted rivers in the world, a river in which New Delhi dumps 57% of its daily waste. We are rowing through the dead body soup. From the other side of the river, the masses of men are obscured by the smoke, and the place looks like a factory. A couple of hundred yards further down the river, there are people picking among the rubbish dunes. Piles of garbage are everywhere, and birds circle overhead. Somewhere, a group of children are hoeing in the mud near their hut – they’re trying to make some home improvements. In front of them, men are defecating in the water. The air smells of shit and burning human flesh. Above us towers a monstrous concrete flyover. In the water around and on the banks of the river are scattered pieces of Diwali detritus: incense boxes, tinsel, marigolds, cigarette packets, plastic casts of Laskshmi, empty crisp packets. They float on the surface of the water like sparkly algae and cover the ground in a garish, half-rotten carpet. There are literally islands made of the stuff, and we float through them in our smelly lagoon.

“This is religious pollution,” says Alex. And he’s right, there’s sacred tat everywhere, just thrown into the river. And bodies, too are just that: sacred to be used and thrown away, because the party is over, and another one’s about to start.

It’s not that Indians have no respect for human life, as some have said. It’s that they have no fear of the dead. They can be dumped in water, burned by taxi fuel, or charred in open air, in front of all, before being floated out on the river covered in fancy aluminium foil. The party is over, after all. Why mourn it for so long - their next one might be even better.