City Glorious

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                -  DWAYNE HUNN, INDIA 23

 

Most of this report was originally written for the Division of Volun­teer Recruitment as a personal account of some Peace Corps experiences. A few changes have been made and some paragraphs have been added. What follows is what part of India 23 has been exposed to and has re­acted to with diverse work situations - from Municipality-based jobs, to orphanages, to recreation, to schools. The reaction has been with vary­ing degrees of personal success. This part of Bombay and these Volun­teer reactions are what most touring Volunteers fail to see. Bombay to them is usually their RR. This is not really meant as a criticism but more as a querry. The villages are 70% of today’s India. But the squalid economic and social conditions of city life, without astounding changes, will be tomorrow’s India. Perhaps more of us should also try to know this India.

 

Bombay is a city of five — nine million people, in many areas the density is 1,000 per square mile (Calcutta has one toilet per 23—25 people and one water tap per 25—30.. .Bombay is not far behind). Pro­bably about one half of Bombay’s population live in chawls (our nearest relative equivalent being tenements), about one half of these people must live in hutments (scrap-made shacks). Referring only to the chawls and similar structures, a recent Indian Express report stated: Ninety thous­and families lead a nightmarish life in dilapidated houses which are in eminent danger of collapse”. A municipal survey has stated that out of a total of 17,490 buildings, only 275 could be said to be in a very sound condition. An estimated 500,000 - 1,000,000 sleep on the streets every night. There are an estimated 6—10 rats per person in Bombay. To you and me this may seem sad, but not many natives seem to care.

A few days ago, a top state official told me that Americans are well meaning but too sentimental. Perhaps, but maybe we are just not con­ditioned to the poverty and sickness of mind and body present here.

The official is Columbia-educated and a determined type of person He believes India should go without foreign aid and suffer through on her own. I just need to look at a niche of my experience and wonder about such a situation. I look at the Catholic orphanage and its 250 boys I work with and wonder. Their resources are meager now. What would their diet be like without the rice donated by Spain, wheat and milk by America, and canned goods by the Dutch?

 

 

         Allow me to switch focus to a representative chawl. They are three­-storey, dirty gray tenements with barred windows. Each floor has ten to fifteen Inhabitants. In the chawl areas, water is supplied for one to two -hours daily. Rags hang from everywhere. From one chawl to the next there is usually a fifteen yard separation. This area is littered with gar­bage, excrement — mostly human but also otherwise — rags, chickens, cows crows, children playing and nightly rats.

Another picture: Bombay and her schools. India’s literacy in the last three years has tumbled from 29 to 20%. A greater number of people are being educated. But, a new Ceylon (13 million people) is added annually, and this plus improved health conditions have more than offset the num­bers increase in education. Bombay is India’s most literate city at 54%; this is probably based on an ability to read any of the four dominant city languages.

         Illiterate parents, a wretched home environment, a mendicant economic situation, and a very poor educational system are ominous signs for India s future. Instead of a few bright spots in these essential areas of human growth, the areas are becoming more cloudy — with ominous forecasts. Slums cause trouble - as Watts and Harlem have recently shown - unless their inhabitants are offered the educational and economic means to work their way out of them. Economically, inflation, a seemingly inhibiting tax structure on the private sector, and inefficient production due to the lack of trained manpower dims hopes in this area. Educationally, a Municipal School offers a good lesson. Such a school will have 35—50 students per double session class, with overworked, poorly prepared and paid (Rs. 65 per month starting salary) teachers. These are anything but harbingers of a balanced step into the 20th Century.

         And, the cycle continues. The villager unknowingly comes to the city in search of higher pay. Once here he must, with the rest of the masses, succumb to degrading living conditions. He and his family daily scratch out a living – many, so many, as beggars. The masses continue to produce more children than the upper classes. (The only recreation the masses can afford is sex.) Their children receive the low quality—high quantity education which almost seems all that is possible for the immensity of the problem and lack of available resources. So another, larger generation of the chawl (slum) mentality is produced. This mentality is so obvious one need only move on the street, try to work through or with these people, to see It. Crudeness, inefficiency and ignorance are ubiquitous. But, after continued exposure, you almost plan on and accept it.

Personally, one should become more aware, more sensitive and broader minded for living among such conditions. As a person, most of us should be better for the experience. But, working amidst such an immense problem, one realizes how insignificant his contribution will be. One realizes how many more tools (meaning virtues, abilities, and qualifications…in that order), one could have used and should have possessed. One also realizes how many, many more are needed with the above assets to work against these conditions. I am reminded of Edwin Markham’s quote:

Why build these cities glorious

If man unbuilded goes?

In vain we build the world, unless

The builder also grows.

 

Yet the immense complications of the problem multiply in the Mal­thusian style. Your little contribution may make a dent, but the spiraling illiteracy, crudeness, numbers, and plummeting economic conditions make one wonder whether one’s work contribution is not like paddling up­stream with only half a paddle.

A Jesuit friend once defined life as that - “ paddling upstream with only half a paddle. That is part of the reason why this experience has been so intense. It has been spent amidst people paddling against the rapids — fighting for the bare essentials of life. (It makes one accustomed to more, to appreciate the basics of life much more.) They are fighting for life as few of us comfortable Americans know it, though as most of the underdeveloped world know it, as our slums in a related sense know it, and perhaps as those parents who suffered through the depression knew it. As to whether one’s contribution is worthwhile, once here, one often needs to look back to the beginning and realize or rationalize that:

 

That little bit of good you may have done -

Would not be there to leave —

                                           If you had not come.

 

There are two points I would like to close with. One is that the economic educational and social conditions of the city should not be left without another city group to struggle against them. And, two: the presence of a full group and its potential for exchanging ideas and atti­tudes with the present and future leaders of India should not be forgotten. In the case of Bombay and Group 23, it should not now be abandoned.

The early explorers crossing the Atlantic, the frontiersmen winning the West, and soldiers fighting wars had intense experiences. Usually these are dramatized as romantic experiences. But, frustration, disgust and sickness played the leading roles in the real—life dramas. The satis­factions may have been minimal. They may have been satisfactions only when viewed in retrospect. Or perhaps the satisfactions were only for those who followed...

Why build these cities glorious?