Colors of India

This post goes together with this photo album.

Tuk-tuks at New Delhi main railway station

India is a country of extremes. It is often described as a ‘sensory overload’. You can find the richest palaces standing right next to the poorest slums. One would expect this rising world power to be a little more organized, but I found it to be not much more than a third world country, and a quite overcrowded one for that matter. It is dirty and chaotic. Rules do not seem to exist and neither does hygiene. Anything can be bargained for, traffic is mad, you can find people sleeping and animals roaming anywhere, trains and buses are overcrowded, sexual harassment omnipresent and everyone – all one billion Indians – just throws his or her garbage on the ground.

Travelling through this vast country it is very hard not to see the very extreme and often squalid conditions under which these people have to live, not to mention the effects of climate change, which are slowly turning this country into a huge desert, where life might become nearly impossible within the next century. (If you are worried about the refugee issue now, worry about what will happen when hundreds of millions of Indians will have to leave their homes because of drought!) As I often wandered off from the tourist track into Indian everyday life, I was really torn out of my comfortable first world bubble and could no longer ignore the suffering of these people. I saw so many people living in ramshackle huts or even – literally – lying in the gutter, street kids, handicapped and elderly, desperately begging for money, people living amongst their own rubble and dirt

Festival (Bodhgaya, Bihar)

Still, through it all, one cannot help but admire the indestructible spirit of these colorful people, determined to go on and find their way, no matter what the circumstances. I met a lot of people who were after my money, but I met just as many who were kind and generous – even to a complete stranger. I saw people crying and begging in the street, only to turn a corner and run into a group of people dancing like crazy to a – be it ridiculously loud – colorful parade. I saw people who seemed to have lost all hope, but many, many more who prayed with all their hearts in one of the many (colorful and loud) temples, convinced that things would turn out all right. It is no coincidence that, no matter how poor the people were, one could always find a temple or shrine nearby, one could always find a song or a dance and one could always find lots and lots of color. So let this photo album be a tribute to the multicolred spirit of India.

If you are moved by these photos, and want to contribute to make a change, I got involved in several projects in India, a reforestation and water conservation project in the south, aiding refugees in Dharamshala, and an orphanage and a well construction project in a poor rural village in the north. They will be very interested to receive your contribution, either monetary or in the form of volunteer work. Let me know if you are interested. A word of thanks also to Arianna of the Global Development Network in Delhi, who made me aware of how pictures can help to raise social awareness and inspired me to make this reportage. Here’s to the people, here’s to the colors of India!

Kids looking into their future? What will it behold?
(Hazrat Nizamuddin, New Delhi)