India - Part 6 - The countryside

India is an Agricultural power-house.  It has 10 million farmers, and the agricultural sector accounts for 52% of employment (that's a pretty striking figure in terms of the absolute number of agri workers - particularly if you consider that the official unemployment number is 2.55% - 37m people "only").  According to the department of agriculture:

"India is among the top producers of several crops such as wheat, rice, pulses, sugarcane and cotton. It is the highest producer of milk and second highest producer of fruits and vegetables.  In 2013, India contributed 25% to the world’s pulses production, the highest for any one country, 22% to the rice production and 13% to the wheat production.  It also accounted for about 25% of the total quantity of cotton produced, besides being the second highest exporter of cotton for the past several years."

Interesting pic, in terms of the numbers above - (in the distance in white) people planting by hand, plenty of water, and India's beautiful and varied landscape.

Pilgrims in the landscape.  Every time I go out of the cities in India, I encounter people on pilgrimages.

Trucks stopped overnight, in the early morning landscape.

Herdsmen on the road, Amit up ahead.

Heading down into the Grand Canyon of  India, entry road cut through the granite hills - had to put the phone away because the speed was picking up significantly; time to tuck up, get all the bits and pieces in, and fly.

India - Part 7 - The urban edges

Bicycles are drawn to small towns and the periphery of the large.  Being in the middle of nowhere for days on end is emotionally challenging, and of course the heart of a city (in all the ones I've lived) is just downright hostile. The urban edges are hard places however.  The indifference of humans to one another, and the real meaning of privilege, swirl somehow together to ensure that those with least have to spend most getting from where they live, to where they might work. So the urban edges are mostly gritty, dusty, decorated with informal living, and mass transport hubs.  They are seldom pretty, but always real. Like people. 

The grit and grind of the urban edge.

Our stage after the show, at a bus depot, the Indian equivalent of a Transkei Missile rolling in.

I absolutely LOVED this town, an altiplano delight - climbed out of a long valley, snaking up (after a fantastic descent) into this little jewel with its bustle and market.

Somewhere in Gujarat - bright clothes, jewels in the dust.

The urban edges are also like city-gates of old, a kind note, implicit invitations back.

And then those carve-outs for the well heeled too, country clubs, things that need space.  The Malpani rooms had seen better days, but the pool was ocean-like.  I think mal-pani really translates to bad water - mal from latin, pani from Hindi.

India - Part 8 - The people

I'm lost in the labyrinth of how to talk about 1.4 billion people in some sort of generalized way - so I won't try - but there are some comments worth making.  Firstly, the parallels.  The people who came to the activation points are by and large indebted. It's depressing that the poor and those falling into that dust from the bottom of the middle class in India and Africa have that in common.  From a finance perspective, how depressing that debt is the common experience.  So, a learning from the tour as a whole, is that investment literacy is secondary to debt awareness.  Indebtedness is the modern spiked neck-ring of semi-slavery, and the masters of the trade both the silver tongue of loan shark, spurred by the unquenchable and infinite need of the many.

One of the halls for an evening event, captured by the panorama phone function, in this instance India's middle class.

Hemal and Amit in action on the edges of one of the activation stops - this time a tuk-tuk stand on the town outskirts.

Again, what it means to be a man; this boy, I think damaged in some sort of an accident, was not all there.  But such is the allure of a bicycle, that he was fascinated, and open in his curiosity, couldn't keep his hands off them as they leaned against the back of the stage truck.  The gear levers; the brakes; the lights; they all held great fascination.  The reaction was interesting; back home I'd have expected a harsh reaction, perhaps a sharp klap even.  But the men of India, either let him go for it, or very gently reached out to him, tactile, and ever so gently suggested that he not explore too fully.  Enough violence and short straw for one lifetime.

At one of the activation points, people engaging Shreenivas.

 People making a living, doing things for others.  Hemal spotted a guy cooking in a round pot fired by several large, dry cow-pats, and pulled off saying that this particular dish made primarily of sweet potatoes was an absolute must.  The pot was duly fetched off the smoking pile, and opened, and the stew of goodies inside carefully removed, served onto a paper plate on an old needle and spring scale.  I have to fight myself, despite totally trusting my colleagues (and I mean that in a deep way, trust in their love and kindness), some part of me still says, how kosher an idea is this?  But African manners thankfully still defeat fear and of course it was totally rewarding - they were fantastic and delicious and fiery and wonderful.

India - Part 9 - The challenges

India has challenges, like all countries do, its compounded by the multipliers interwoven into emerging market realities, and enhanced by its vast population.  It is also a country of triumphs: the worlds largest functioning democracy; grinding poverty, yet with relatively low levels of crime; optimism and gentility, despite it all. But for a visitor, momentarily freed from the path beaten between hotel and meeting-place, the thing that is very hard to comprehend is the casual degradation of the environment.  It just seems to make everything so much harder, and so much of it seems pointless.  Fires for heat and cooking are necessary, on some level.  Factories that absolutely spew shit into the air and the water are not.   We rode through a town called Vapi, which I was told is the most polluted city in India. Delhi has the externalised reputation of  having filthy air (no doubt it does) but Vapi's super-industrialised nature makes it consistently worse.  In that regard, it is as if people are disposable. I can only imagine the impact that the pollution has on the people living and working there.  It seems unlikely that the cost of health-care and loss of productivity makes economic sense - unless people are fungible and disposable - and perhaps they are, in some crude economic way - but the suffering that comes with that is real and unnecessary.  

Plastic, which litters absolutely everything, everywhere near a human settlement, seems stupidly and pointlessly subtractive.  It thoroughly tarnishes a sheen that its beauty as a country should have.  I doubt India uses proportionately more plastic per capita than other nations of similar economic standing, but it is hyper cavalier about where it is thrown.  Is a litter-free country that buries its plastic any better?  I think it is.  It's at least a concentration of an outcome of a problem (though the concentration does have the limitation of not confronting the people generating that waste with the scale of the problem, something very much the case in the United States).  Given the great will of its people, and determination of its leadership, it seems an obvious thing to address.  But as a species, we are all frogs-in-a-pot, and people get rapidly used to the things that are pick-pocketing their lives and potential.

Metaphoric, and pretty grim; last resting place of a dog, perhaps hit on the highway;
last resting place of a bottle, perhaps flung from one of its vehicles.

The taxi rank; a double entendre.

Looking like something from District 9; outside the Hotel Fun City.

The outside and inside of the filters after a morning (at most).

India - Part 10 - The end

Seven days and nights of not so much sleep, seven hundred k's, an awful lot of joy, soot, sun-cream,
and satisfaction; growth.

Painted by the sun, with feet, hands and the rest left out.

Govind, Gaurav, Jai, Amit, Shreenivas, Raj, Hemal, Fatima, and Vikas.  Thank you all.

Big Blue, taken apart and wrapped up in the Mumbai sun, shirt sweated right through.

Back in Hong Kong, Big Blue, stripped, cleaned, oiled; brand new, with a missing S, left somewhere in India; S for sublime, soulful satisfaction.

The soul of Hong Kong

I took a camera to work today. Hong Kong is eerily, eerily strange.  In the city, there in its working heart, it feels like looking at a human skeleton: something simultaneously grim and fascinating, and reminding of frailties.  It's also suddenly structural, with the flesh of its relentless busyness boiled off by these invisible vapors of a real threat confronting the collective mind: everyone is masked into anonymity; extras in a medical movie ... and so movie-like it is.

Streets so silent in Central

Central Station platform, space and lines.

Central Station itself, beam me up Scotty (I have never before noticed those circle-arranged screens).

The near empty veins of the escalators; beautiful in a hyper-urban way, their Escher-like painted turquoise top corner.

A sprinkling of masked pedestrians, on what is usually a heaving corner.

And then the office itself, mute phones, matt-black monitors.

The boys! In a woefully slow start to 2020