Nothing feels safe in South Africa, feels sane in America, will ever feel just in China.
Such “downs” of a country are easy to find if you insist on making snap judgments and narrowing your view, or, as may be the same thing, assess and scan when embittered by something like a far too long, far-too uncomfortable train ride.
Still, Dearest India, don’t you think you make the wish for more uplifting views a little too easy?
Because it does look, India, as though everyone here is always sweeping yet nothing is ever swept, as if everyone always hammers without anything ever holding fast, and as if nothing is practical, nothing sensible, nothing sanitary or ever worked through to be helpful by the standards of a person born after, say, 1820.
And yet everything is sacred: cows, spirits, and your maddening but admirable tolerance for accepting that “this is how it is” so let it be.
Perhaps all these contradictions explain why, to me at least, everyone looks so well kempt and immaculate in their person.
But mostly, mostly, the cynical view comes as a repeat of all the other places where oil and cement and “the modern” create poverty from life lived on the edge of the grid rather than poverty from life lived alongside nature, an exchange which, whatever its benefits, always includes desperate architecture, endless disrepair, and a lack of beauty that can only be called oppressive.