I wouldn’t say you “see” India so much as experience it. I’ve just returned from a two-week tour and my abiding memory is rubbish. Rubbish, rubbish everywhere. There is no refuse collection, and plastic lasts forever – so the ground was littered with white knives and forks. Even in the Himalayas, where it looked like snow on the mountains. One morning as our train pulled out of New Delhi, we passed a row of men casually defecating in a field of white cutlery. You don’t see that in Majorca.
I’m not disparaging the country. It’s just very … different. The poverty is so common that it’s almost casual. Families sleep out in the open, surrounded by dogs and water buffaloes. The buffaloes give milk longer than cows, yet Hinduism forbids the killing of the latter, so any cows you do see are abandoned and normally at death’s door.
