On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 5:39 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan <che...@gmail.com>wrote:
> I am yet to see a calamity that will force Indians to evacuate. If Indians > were the kind that would quit unhealthy environments, then prices of land > in Bangalore should be falling right now. > This is quite true of most places in India. A combination of dust, smoke, concrete and other assorted particulate matter have made most urban/semi-urban habitats next to impossible to live in without some version of respiratory disease. One can only grow angry or sad that this isn't going to end nicely. In an > ideal world no one would pay half a million dollars for an apartment built > on a toxic waste dump, like you can see in any large Indian city, but it > happens here. > I'm also going to add here that a general aversion that Indians have to risk means that they won't go to a place that's relatively less unhealthy. They have found ways of making their lives more comfortable without having to migrate at the cost of their livelihoods. And in India, livelihoods trump everything, even life expectancy. When things hit a new low Indians shockingly grow dumb to its ills > and persist. It's almost as if Indians have been actively engaged > in finding ways to lose the ability to see what's good for them. > This sounds like you believe most Indians actually have a choice. See above for the livelihood argument. An ugly public building comes up right next to a 1500 year old temple. A > monument to incompetence and corruption built in the backyard of > a millennial legacy of elegance and brilliance, and no one bats an eyelid. > I refuse to accept that any building constructed several hundreds of years ago is brilliant or elegant purely by being there for that long. I find a number of temples in India to be festering eyesores, and while I'd balk at calling modern structures beautiful, they're not ugly just because they're new, either. I'm drifting from the topic at hand, but unless you're referring to something specific, I'm going to call bullshit on this sort of generalization. Life couldn't rub their noses in the dirty reality any harder, and yet they > are either by choice, or otherwise, blind to the irony. I think they recognize their dirty reality better than most, and with a shrug of their shoulders, follow that maxim their former colonists employed during the Battle of Britain: they keep calm and carry on. -- Sumant Srivathsan http://sumants.blogspot.com
