Alvida India

Alvida India! [Goodbye India!]

We're now in KL, Malaysia, with little sleep from the overnight flight out of Delhi. It was time to leave India ... the place is remarkable, but wears you down too. Not least the pollution, which has given me a chest infection and stripped the lining from Suey's nasal passages, so she has a bloody nose most of the time.

India's full of contradictions. So is the West I guess, though perhaps ours are better hidden. The place is swimming in filth, and the population is set to double by 2050. That will then be two billion Indians swimming in uber-filth. I'm not convinced that one billion people, or two billion people, have to live like India lives. I need to think on it more. Is India a true snapshot of a overcrowded, exhausted planet? I hope not. The other huge contradiction is Hinduism itself. The philosophy behind karmic reincarnation I can handle. OK, so maybe you do bad things, you come back as a dog. But the Hindu caste system is plainly no good. No good. You do bad things you come back as an Untouchable? This is just a convenient scam by those in higher castes. Inequity is inequity, no matter how you cloak it. It's a monumental scam in a country of myriad tiny scams. Karma indeed.

Speaking of dogs, what really made me ready to leave was seeing a sad little pup in Varanasi, six months old, with a broken, infected foot. No one to care for it. Not much of a life to look forward to. Of course, we also sadly saw many people in abject states of misery. But at least people have the capacity to reason about it and, one hopes, have others to care for them. This poor little pup was just a poor, sick, lonely little pup.

Anyway, India was amazing. We'll put some photos up soon.

So, the first thing that happened to us when we hit KL was being cleverly scammed by a taxi company. They made us think our airport transfer wasn't coming. We fell for it. Oh well. Live and learn. Yes, our guard was down, especially after India,  where the worst that happened was being shortchanged by another taxi driver. We were more vigilant. Our bad for not being more savvy in KL. But still, it's a funny old, sad, silly world, in India and beyond.

See you all soon. Home Sunday. xoxox