Lessons from a trip to India 

Coming off a 10-day visit to India for the first time in over half a decade, I have a lot to take in and not quite enough time to do so.  

The visit was for my cousin’s wedding, the first in my close family. The events spanned nearly a week and allowed me to engage with, even as an onlooker, an incredible culture from which I’ve long been distant. I got to enjoy elaborate and vivacious wedding parties, eat mind-blowing food and experience the (legal) union of two remarkable families. I’m still reeling from all the ecstasy of encountering and being in community with so many people, new and old, and truly enjoying the country in a way I never could have imagined as an angsty, aloof high school-age teenager. I’m truly floored by the short time I spent there — even if I have to do some academic damage control this week — and I hope my experience can be a testament to the inimitable experience of traveling home for all (hashtag) diaspora kids still looking to “get in touch with their roots.” 

Yet, my unforgettable visit to Bengaluru and New Delhi has not been without difficult tensions between individualistic enjoyment and the catastrophic state of the country and world around me. The first and most profound time I experienced this was actually almost 5,000 km outside of India. During my 12-hour flight to Abu Dhabi, our plane flew directly over the Sinai peninsula in Egypt — roughly 200 km away from the city of Rafah, Gaza, which the Israeli government is seriously flirting with invading as part of their ruthless assault in the Gaza strip. Flying over a human tragedy that the International Court of Justice rules was plausibly a genocide is enough to make your stomach drop all 40,000 km to the ground below, especially when you’re en route to a wedding which is, to be frank, an inherently hedonistic affair.  

This isn’t to undercut the significance of the event itself (seriously, congratulations family), nor to make a genocide about my own privileged western guilt. Rather, I want to highlight a reality that not enough people recognize, let alone internalize and practice in their politics: the world is increasingly divided into the immiserated and the comfortable; the exploited and beneficiaries of exploitation (passive and active).  

The drive out from the newly suped-up Kempegowda International Airport, also known as T2, in Bengaluru put this inequality in plain (or perhaps plane?) sight. The ₹13,000 crore ($1.6 billion) airport terminal lights up the city around it. The sprawl in the surrounding highways are rife with billboards for luxury vehicles and high-end real estate. Yet a 15-minute walk from T2 lies a slum area in the village of Kithaganar. One hour out from T2, the wealthy neighborhood of Whitefield, containing a tech park, luxury housing and numerous malls, looms over slums that house migrant workers and students. The slums of Thubarahalli and Kundalahalli are vulnerable to weeks-long power outages, and residents are often evicted due to improper disposal of solid waste via trash burning — despite the fact that trash burning is allegedly contracted out through the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), the city agency responsible for waste management and other civic services.  

2,000 such slums — characterized by the UN as having a lack of durable housing, sufficient space, clean water, proper sanitation and protection from displacement — exist throughout the megacity, whereas the government lists fewer than 600, suggesting significant undercounting. Some estimates indicate that as much as 23% of Bengaluru’s population of 12 million live in slum areas, marking the extreme inequality that exists within the “Silicon Valley of India.”  

Liberalization of the Indian economy — referring to the privatization of state-owned enterprises and opening up of the economy to foreign private investment — is often lauded by western-dominated financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for the country’s rapid development and the alleged elevation of millions out of poverty. Two major manifestations of this are the tech boom, spurred by globalization in the form of offshoring and responsible for tripling Bengaluru’s population since the 1990s; and India’s burgeoning real estate industry, financed by billions of dollars in foreign investment topped by Canada and Singapore.  

Yet the massive wealth brought about by international finance and real estate capital have done little to ameliorate the extreme poverty that persists throughout the country. Glass, steel and concrete monstrosities forming high-rise apartments in New Delhi and corporate headquarters in Gurugram serve as monuments to the deepening divide between upper and middle classes. This affects masses of impoverished migrant workers, farmers, children, mothers, tribal peoples (also known as Adivasis) and peoples from oppressed castes. 

To briefly parse through the other social issues inflaming India during my stay — such as deadly police responses to farmers protests in Punjab and to protests by indigenous Kukis in Manipur — would be a disservice to their importance. India is indeed as fractured as any other country boiling above the flames of global capitalism, religious nationalism, patriarchy, casteism and occupation (in the case of occupied Kashmir). For all the complicated feelings I have about vacationing in this powder keg of social contradictions, I realize that guilt is not necessary or useful as the motive force for change. Far more important is rejecting a society in which the comfortable or lavish lifestyles of relatively few are only possible because a great majority are chronically exploited, displaced or disenfranchised.  

Next time I visit India — hopefully soon — I don’t want to hit the tarmac with the imperialistic intention of white-knighting democracy, equality and secularism into the country. However, for what little it’s worth, I do have every desire to continue learning from and supporting the people there who are educating and struggling for a better world.