SOCIAL INEQUALITIES AND APPEARANCES

It is time to get back to Delhi. Cécile has a plane, and Perrine should meet an Indian puppeteer there. First we go to the almost inexistent train station of Bundi, where happiness radiates from the people working there. Only side note to this warm atmosphere is the coming of an American lady, in her late 50’s, who arrives completely stressed out, thinking she could have missed the train (and must have been hell for her taxi driver the whole race through). She asks about 5 times to different people if the train for Delhi leaves from here, showing her ticket to be sure there would be no language misinterpretation… A bit more and she would manage to disquiet us. We exhange a few words that show us she comes from a wealthy background and will not see the India we know, but that “beautiful and authentic” India meant for tourists who take the ready made tours. We calm her down, saying we take the same train. Silence.

Maybe we shouldn’t have told her not to worry, for Indian trains are never simple. If they aren’t late, they’re cancelled. Ours was cancelled. As a train comes in (45 minutes before our scheduled departure) our American starts asking around if that’s the train. She runs everywhere and some wealthy and English speaking Indian tells her our train has cancelled its stop in Bundi and will depart from Kota. He gives us two options : we can jump in this train, jump off in one small station and jump in our scheduled train at its 2 minutes stop there; or take a taxi to Kota. For us there is no question, we take the train option, our American follows doubtful because “she has to be in Delhi”. In contrast with her, we notice how calm we have grown since we arrived. If there is a problem, well there is a problem, and we will deal somehow with it. India has helped us with a new philosophy: the “let’s see” philosophy. However, to be really fair, without her over worrying, we don’t know if we would have reached Delhi as we planned. Of course the train we are in is the slowliest train of India and our American is going up every ten minutes to ask for more information. Our calm is highly challenged and we notice how contagious her stress is. In the end, our local train reaches the station before our Delhi train comes in, by more than 45 minutes. We spend them with a bunch of Indian businessmen who happily showcase their knowledge about Europe!! It is a pleasant, funny and instructive conversation. We hear for instance that “Indians go to bed 2 and wake up 3”, that Delhi is 3 times the population of Finland in a similar superficy. They learn that French toilets can be as bad as Indian ones. The Delhi train arrives, we jump in and so does the American with her 40 kg luggages.

We don’t expect as we jump in the train what we will be the witnesses of. Our wagon is the SL10 (Sleeper class, the middle class and the equivalent of the 2^nd class in Europe). We get in the SL 7 and think we just have to walk up three wagons before we reach our beds. But as we get through the 9^th wagon, there is a locked door. Those doors usually lock the different classes so that they can never see each other, a way to hide the social difference as we do in planes between the business and the economic with curtains. The rich cannot see the poorest and vice versa. There is no way this door can be opened. We ask an Indian and he tells us we have to jump off at the next stop and jump back in again into the next wagons. Many more Indians are in the same case as us, and since the stop is very short, everyone pushes his way through. When we climb back up (the train starting to move already), we step in another world. The wagon is full of spacious little rooms, perfectly heated up, very cozy and comfortable, where a few people only are seated. We are welcome by a sikh, who almost bows in front of us and shows the way to follow, extremely politely. Even though our bags and our clothes scream “we don’t fit here!”, because we have our two little white faces we are treated the most respect, like ambassadors. The other Indians don’t have this chance. The sikh really thinks we have bought the upper class ticket. We pass through another wagon, less spacious but still extremely wealthy compared with the Sleeper class. Where there are 8 beds fit in the SL, only 4 are here, much wider and soft, in which one can sit straight. The windows close properly and the heating system is on. We meet again our American here. Again, thanks to our white faces, we are seated on one of these beds, while the Indians are parked next to the doors and toilets. We offer one of them a seat (since we don’t fill the whole bed with our two pair of asses). But clearly one of the Indian who has paid for the upper class refuses he seats anywhere close to him. It is surrealistic to see so brightly the social (wealth?) hierarchy. The train embodies the social inequalities. These two worlds cannot mix, not to talk about the lower classes (that are on the edge of being endurable from Perrine’s memories). It is so clear and assumed that it is revolting. How can this only be ? And so much based on the appearance! Anarupa tells us later this simple explanation “people think the British are gone, but they are not, they were replaced by Indians themselves”. When we jump off and on again to  get to our wagon, the air drafts strike us. It is cold, the windows don’t close so well as to keep the cold air to come in. People sleep under their tiny blanket, snoring as loud as they usually do. We are back to the India we know. We start thinking of all these Westerners who come and travel through India only in the upper class, following well-traced routes away from the poverty, seeing only the architectural and natural wonders of India and hardly ever the misery and dirtiness. Our American embodies this people who come to India but will never see it. It is like coming to Paris and only walk through fashion designers boutiques where French employees wear a beret and hold a baguette. You see the stereotype that you want to see, the one that fits the books. India is not a fairytale land, with traditional clothing and maharajas descendants. It is poor, dirty, difficult and that’s where the beauty also comes through, in how people still share their happiness of being, in how great a mastered gesture can be, in the eyes of the pilgrims who reached its destination, in the candle that flows down, in the peaceful grazing cow... India is incredible, but not by the book of wonder. It is a wonder in itself, and you have to walk down the streets to see it, not driven by a chauffeur.       

Our journey through the social inequalities has only started in the train. It starts with trips in the metro, a metro that is much more high tech than the Parisian or Finnish ones. All is spot clean, we go through body checking every time we step in, the rules are extremely strict (no spitting, no drinking, no smoking, no photos, no eating, no men in the women’s wagon…). It is like being in the Sim’s city, in the middle of the Indian capital. On the second day, we meet Anurupa (an Indian puppeteer and an incredible woman), in a district of Delhi called Khan Market. This area is a pure copy of the Occidental model, taken even higher up in the level of bling-bling. Mac Donalds stands next to Hilfinger, there are countless expensive shops where books are exactly the price of the European market if not above. All around are brand new cars parked by parking men. We end up going for a drink in the fanciest bar we’ve ever been, full of successful Indian men and Occidentals. It sweats money and pretention from floor to ceiling, designed especially for their customers. Crazy. Really we feel we are back in Europe and cannot figure out that this can stand next to the poverty of the chowks.   

We discuss further with Anurupa on this. She belongs from birth to the upper class, yet she actively works to empower the lower classes and the women and lead puppetry projects with disadvantaged children. She tells us that many of her friends who went to university, earn now a lot of money and represent what the rest of the Indians wish to be, are heavily depressive. Many got married in the last years so to fill the void they have, and end up now getting divorced. Many also take loans to live above their pays, to showcase their success and respond to the image people expect. They live in the reality like the actors in the Bollywood movies. Sadly we know that most of the beggers we have met in the streets wish to reach the same social class, that the goal of most people is individual success. How to make them understand that the advantages of some means the disadvantaged of the others ? As Anurupa formulates it Indians have taken the bad sides of the Western model (social inequalities) and maintained the bad sides of the traditional societies (cast system). They are loosing the solidarity that used to exist inside each class. The individual success is the goal, and they don’t see this comes along with depressive pills.