Arrogance and Unpredictability

Matt

I'll start from the beginning. When we emerged from the airport into the warm air of Kolkata it hit me. I'm in India. My first breath was filled with smoke and dust and the cacophony of horns started and is yet to stop. Our first taxi ride was insane and taught me many things; seatbelts, airbags and lanes are over rated and honking your horn is a suitable replacement for indicators. I then learnt after the taxi that 3 people to one bed is quite normal and is an ingenious way to room more customers at once. But to be honest I did expect those things to be commonplace in India.

I have found that I haven't been effected by the poverty at all really. One of my first realisations upon arriving in India was that it appears exactly how I thought it would appear with tangled 'power lines' everywhere, beggars on every corner, stray dogs roaming the street and clustered buildings resembling dirty boxes with peeling paint. This realisation led me to not being infected by the feeling of extreme guilt for being ungrateful for our privileged upbringings or the feeling of deep sorrow for the troubled lives they are forced to live. Call me insensitive or arrogant but that's how I felt.

Yesterday as we travelled across the city with four of the Jungle Crows I started to develop a different mind-set about people who live in what I perceive as extreme poverty. We travelled with our Jungle Crow friends to two locations in the outer part of the city where Khelo Rugby teaches kids to play rugby. The first location was a small community named Dhapa within the farms in the shadow of the old city dump. We were taken on a tour of the community by Bikash, a Jungle Crows member and Khelo Rugby coach, taking a canoe into the pond they fish from, climbing the old city dump to view the city from above and interacting with the local children of the village. It made me realise that these children are happy with their lives despite the poor living conditions. Not once yesterday did I see a kid without a smile on their face. This made an impact on me because it seemed that the children living in this small community were happier than us. We are the ones who live in multi-million dollar abodes, we are the ones who always have food on our plates, we are the ones who are basically guaranteed to go to university and get a well-paying job and yet we are the ones who are unhappy. I don't know what you readers think but to me that is a pretty confusing notion.

The second location was a slightly richer area of Kolkata in an area known as Salt Lake where Bikash also teaches rugby. There we played a game of touch with thirty or so children whose ages ranged from 3-12. It was an awesome experience to play with these non-English speaking kids in a sandy box but what I really took away from it was how much of a celebrity we were treated like. The Jungle Crows said that these people had never seen foreigners in their neighbourhood before and this was the first time I actually noticed how much people were staring at us. There seems to be a stigma about white people in India and people seem to think that all white people are uber-rich and intelligent. If I had been an brown skinned walking through the streets of Salt Lake yesterday I would have been ignored and I certainly don't think thirty people would have turned up to play rugby. I guess what I'm trying to ask is why do the Indians strive to be like us back home in New Zealand when they are much happier in us? Why do people pay thousands of rupee to undergo skin whitening treatments? Who created the fake idea of more money equals more happiness?

It seems that I do feel a little ungrateful for my privilege now. Maybe I should be happier about the life I live. I guess I have been affected by poverty after all. Feel free to laugh at me for thinking that India is how I thought it would be and that I thought I could predict what would affect me, I certainly am. I'm sure that it is one of many surprises I'll experience on this trip.