July 14th

The more I hear about what is going on for the Commonwealth games, the more obvious it seems to me that hosting the games is not what this country needs. In a country of over 1 billion people with millions in extreme poverty, and human development indicators worse than some nations in Africa, the focus for this country surely should be on supporting the poorest and bringing them up to some minimum standard of living. How can a nation say it is developing when it’s ‘development’ is at the expense of the poor and forcing more and more to live on less and less, and in worse conditions. Take the small street, where the temple is situated that we visit every morning, as an example. Diggers have come in and ripped up trees and mud to build a drainage system, as this needs to be in place as a sign of development to visitors, yet all they have done is ripped it up and for days now have not done any more work on the system. There are piles of mud and bricks on the road side and no drainage system for the people – they wanted the drainage system in place as they do not want visitors to see the people doing their business by the side of the road but what do you expect when you rip up their drainage system and effectively take away their toilets.

Another example of how the games are proving so detrimental for the poor, is the case of the horse drawn carts. There are only around 200 left in Delhi, and are all owned by old and poor people that have always tended to their animals and used these carts for a living – they do not know how to live any other way. However, rather than letting them die out gradually (as they would have done soon enough), the officials decided overnight that they would destroy their carts and not allow them to operate their horse drawn carts any longer. What was an attractive sight in Old Delhi, has been seen by officials as a sign of underdevelopment which they cannot allow other nations in the Commonwealth to witness, and as a result have done away with them as they have done with many slums, clearing them out so extravagant hotels can be built in their place. The offer given to the people with the horse and carts was a kiosk where they could start a small business from, however none of them would know where to start. If this wasn’t bad enough, what they actually offered them was a small slab of concrete to operate on, which is miles and miles from where they live. It seems that the government has their head deeply buried in the sand as they feel that they can try to prove to the rest of the world that they are a developed economy by building big hotels and stadiums, whilst sweeping the poor under the carpet. I am sorry but this is not a sign of a developed economy, and there are too many poor people in this city alone to convince anyone that India is developed. It would seem that they think people come to India to see a copy of the western world, when this is completely wrong – you want to see the people, the traditions, the street food stalls, yet the government seem set on destroying India’s natural beauty and building some unsustainable and unsightly version of what they think people see as a developed economy. I really do struggle to understand what they are trying to achieve, and more importantly why they are trying to achieve it.

As for my teaching today, it wasn’t the best day I have had as I was teaching class 2 and 3 who are very young and therefore very chatty and hard to control, especially as I do not speak Hindi and they have very limited English! We had fun but it is very frustrating, as I have mentioned many times, with the little ones because whatever you try to do, they just repeat you and are not taught to think about questions. All they are looking for is what they do in school which is read a question and assign a rehearsed answer to this question – I have tried many things but with children so young it is difficult to explain unless you can speak Hindi to explain what is being asked of them, as too many times they clearly do not know what they are supposed to say. We did the same activities as we did earlier in the week but they still did not know what was going on and seemed to have forgotten everything we had done previously. A lot of them are very bright, I just feel with a better government school program they could all do very very well – but this does not seem to be on the horizon. I suppose I will have to try to change my style with these classes, as I want to teach them something by the time I leave!

So a fun but frustrating day, but an amazing Indian dinner followed by home made cookies and ice cream sorted everything out!