It is time for me to leave India.

I haven't posted anything here for so long, even though so much has happened. There has just been so much to do I couldn't stop to write about it. I took notes offline.

Anyway, I thought I should make a last post before leaving India, so I have collected a few photographs I have shot over the past two months and included some explanations. In the last three weeks that I was here I spent time consecutively in each of India's three largest cities: Delhi (population 12 million), Kolkata (Calcutta, population 13 million), and Mumbai (Bombay, population 16 million).

This might be the last post from India, but I plan to either keep posting to this blog at this URL, or to move or change it into something or somewhere else.

Forgive me if these photos are too dark on some computers. They seem to look different on every computer.

BHOPAL

Bhopal has, of course, been my main home in India this year.



A little girl in Gupta Colony, one of the neighborhoods where the water is poison and the people suffer from its effects.




Ahmed Khan in his family's home. Ahmed is the son of Jabbar and Nafeesa, both of whom walked to Delhi with the padyatra.






Raju (holding baby), another padyatri, and his family at home in Nawab Colony, another water-contaminated area. Raju works carrying and laying bricks.



In an alleyway behind a post office in Bhopal, local Hindus are constructing, painting, and dressing mannequin representations of Krishna (seen here with no legs), other gods, and monsters to prepare for celebrations of Ganesh's birthday.




Still wearing on its neck some tinsel wreaths from Diwali or another recent celebration, this cow rummages through the piles of trash, licking out plastic bags and other tasty things. I've probably said this a thousand times, but India is getting suffocated by plastic trash. It is choking the streams and rivers, choking the sewage and drainage systems, and filling the streets. Everything you see here will eventually end up pushed together into a pile and set on fire, releasing chemicals into the air that are much worse than plastic on the ground.




The view northeast from Sambhavna Clinic towards the new mosque at sunset, when the call to prayer can be sung out from the minarets of every mosque in the city. Sunset is also the most popular time in Bhopal to burn huge amounts of plastic and other trash.




Our friend Sanjay, the little brother Sunil Kumar Verma left behind this summer. On the floor of the clinic's library, Sanjay is catching up on finding articles relevant to the Bhopal situation in the local and national newspapers. This is one job his brother used to do.




A little boy in Jai Prakash Nagar, the neighborhood directly across and downwind from the Union Carbide factory.



The wall of the abandoned Union Carbide factory. The tall structure you see behind it rises above the methyl-isocyanate tank that burst in 1984, killing most people in this neighborhood.




Inside the factory grounds, goats and water buffalo graze on grass that grows out of extremely toxic soil. They will later be milked.




From inside the factory, a closer look at the gas scrubber tower, under which the methyl isocyante tanks still lie, now empty.




AGRA



Facing the deafeningly beautiful Taj Mahal, a solitary man lies in the shade of the adjacent mosque.


PACHMARHI

Pachmarhi is a small town in the middle of thick jungles and hills in southern Madhya Pradesh.



At the top of the highest hill in sight is a Shiva temple where monkeys far outnumber human pilgrims.



Getting a clear shot in the low light of this cave was difficult. Off the range of the photo, to the right, is a circular passageway through a cave dripping with water. You have to duck way down to squeeze through. At its deepest curve, a man in orange robes sits burning incense and receiving gifts for Shiva. There is so much incense burning throughout the caves down here that from above and outside (up the stairs) you can see and smell huge clouds drifting up from the gorge.




Sanjay



DELHI

After Bhopal, Delhi has been my second home base in India. I've been there about seven times now. I tend to forget that I should be photographing it. Here are a few shots from my last two visits there.







Above three photos taken from within Jama Masjid.




Laborers collapse on their carts to sleep through the intolerable midday heat.




My dad and sister looking quite like Dorothy and Toto. Ruby slippers nowhere to be found.




Every kind of vehicle leans into the curve of Connaught Place's outermost concentric circle as the morning rush builds up just after sunrise.




Rashtrapati Bhavan (government seat of India) deep in the haze, looking down Rajpath. One thing Edwin Lutyens apparently did not consider when designing New Delhi for the British in the early 20th century was that air pollution would so conquer the city that one end of his designs might end up invisible from the other end. On this particular day, India Gate was indeed completely invisible from the driveway of Rashtrapati Bhavan. The sun "set" at least an hour before it hit the horizon, striking a deep red tone when it was still high in the sky. By the time it actually met the horizon, it was represented only as vague circle of a lighter shade of grey.


KOLKATA (a.k.a. CALCUTTA)

Kolkata is my favorite city in India. When I first got there, I felt that I should begin serious efforts to find a way to move and live there. My experience of the few days that followed compelled me to modify that goal. Regardless, I am aching to return there as soon as possible, for any amount of time.

As with the other cities depicted in this post, my small collection of photos of Kolkata is not balanced or thorough in any way. In his book about Calcutta, author Geoffrey Moorhouse wrote that "you return from Calcutta, unless you are very tough or a professional, with a camera that may be full of exposed film but which contains hardly any record of people." This is somewhat true. Moorhouse goes on to write that for the same reasons it is difficult for a feeling person to raise a camera "...comparatively few Western hippies are to be seen in the city [this is a major plus]. They are to be found in hundreds at places like Benares [Varanasi], ...but in Calcutta hippies are few and far between and they do not stay long even when they come... The reputation of the city has stopped most hippies in their tracks elsewhere in India; and on first acquaintance it is enough to destroy any romantic illusions about gentleness and brotherly love and a dominating concentration upon the beatific vision. It is a place where disagreeable statistics are translated into men and women and children without number."



On Kolkata --

Robert Clive: "The most wicked place in the Universe."
Rudyard Kipling: "The City of Dreadful Night"
Mark Twain: (on Calcutta weather) "enough to make a brass doorknob mushy."

"Imagine everything that is glorious in nature combined with all that is beautiful in architecture, and you can faintly picture ot yourself what Calcutta is." -- William Hunter, 19th century

"Find, if you can, a more uninviting spot than Calcutta ...it unites every condition of a perfectly unhealthy situation .. The place is so bad by nature that human efforts could do little to make it worse; but that little has been done faithfully and assiduously." -- Sir George Trevelyan, 1863

Speaking of travellers to Calcutta, Moorehouse writes (laments, actually) that "they go home and cry woe unto the city, take its taste out of their mouths with a gin and tonic or a Pepsi, and recall it thereafter only as an emblem of experience, to show that they now know the worst that Life has to offer."

I did not do the work of collecting the above quotations -- all these people are quoted in Moorhouse's book.



People hang out the sides of the trains because there is no room inside, but a perk of the position is relief from the heat and suffocation inside. Here, a permanent settlement of families uses the tracks as its backyard and living space every moment they are not occupied by a moving train.




Victoria Memorial, once the chief monument to British power in Calcutta, is now the best museum of the Kolkata's history and the city's role in the fight for independence.





Pigeons survey the chaos below. Kolkata traffic is the most violent and intense I've found anywhere in India.



On Chittaranjan Avenue, a poster for a new movie at a local theater.



I read that West Bengal (the state of which Kolkata is the capital) is the longest running democratically elected communist government in the world. Whatever the details, Kolkata has surely been the beating heart of revolution and revolt in India over the past century and a half. That's why the British had to turn tail and abandon it in the first few years of the 20th century and move their capital to Delhi.







The southern of the two huge bridges spanning the Hooghly River in the middle of the city.




Off Chittaranjan Avenue




Kolkata is the only city in India where you will find rickshaws pulled directly by men. Usually they are barefoot, often shirtless. This is disturbing even to people of Mumbai and Delhi. It puts before you the awkward choice of callously ignoring these men as they languish by the side of the road, desperate for your business, or being someone who is pulled through the streets by a human horse. I couldn't ever ride one of these things. I have a hard enough time with the bicycle ones.




I've never seen anything like The Park Street Cemetery in the middle of downtown Kolkata. It is completely overgrown. The graves belong players large and small of the British East India Company, their friends, wives, and lovers, and other figures in 18th, 19th, and even 20th century Calcutta. Given the visible condition of many of the graves, I half expected to step on one of their skeletal hands or feet sticking out.



The jungle inside Park Street Cemetery. It is like a museum of elaborate monuments to people, inscribed with incredibly royal compositions which often rhyme. Here is an example I jotted down, one that happens not to be in Park Street Cemetery itself, but which is nonetheless perfectly representative of what's to be found there: "Erected by the British Inhabitants of Bengal / In Testimony of Their High Sense / of the / Wisdom, Energy, and Rectitude / of his Administration". That's a short one, actually.




Some people have evidently decided that all the fancy tombs of these dead British officials should be put to some kind of practical use.




Sunday morning at BBD Bagh, the center of Kolkata's business district. People here were fishing, bathing, checking each other out.




A huge flock of sheep runs alongside traffic on Central (Chittaranjan) Avenue. This is a mystery to me, because to stand in the middle of Kolkata is to know that nothing even resembling a farm is any closer to this place than to Grand Central Station in Manhattan.


MUMBAI (a.k.a. BOMBAY)

Mumbai shocked me this time around. The city was my entry point into India and at that time it seemed to me like a completely unworkable chaos. Seeing it almost a year later, it was almost unrecognizable to me -- spacious, convenient, and, as it turns out, one of the most friendly places in India. Mumbai is a lot of things, as any city of 16 million must be. It calls loudly for deeper investigation the next time I am in India.

Most of the photos below are from a protest I was photographing, and so are not a rounded survey of what the city looks like.



Churchgate, Fort Area.




Guests at the Hyatt can enjoy a birdseye view of those slum dwellers who survived to tell of how the Mumbai authorities set their homes aflame to make room for a gang of luxury hotels near the airport.



Victims of both gas and of water contamination in Bhopal chain themselves together and prepare to lock themselves across the front gate of the Intercontinental Hotel, where the India Chem 2006 conference was taking place.



Mumbai police respond. This included a squad of female officers in identical khaki and navy blue saris like the one you see here. I may have mentioned before that male police officers aren't allowed to touch or arrest any female, so most protests attract two separate groups of police, one male, one female.




The issues are fairly obvious. You have here a convention of transnational chemical corporations clearly interested in India's fabulous combination of a huge market with almost no rules. At least one of the attendees was Dow Chemical, happily chasing more and more new projects in India while Bhopal chokes on poison. Also in attendance was India's Minister of Chemicals and Fertilizers, who Bhopalis wanted to remind that many of them are actually still alive.




It's me, at the protest. Photo by Diana.