An outstanding and humbling piece of TV last night. I strongly recommend that you catch Welcome to India on the Beeb's iPlayer if you can, before it disappears. The first in a series of three, it was a programme that would have shown even the most stubborn of ingrates counting their blessings in western Europe.
Some startling facts emerged from this programme - that some 17% of the world's entire supply of gold is in the homes of Indian housewives, for example, a figure to exceed the combined total of the reserves of the UK, the US and the IMD. Gold, in fact, featured heavily in what followed. The wealth stored up in that total is not, does not, of course, filter all the way down the production chain.
We were introduced to the lads who smelt gold in very small quantities on the rooftops of Calcutta houses, mixing the raw materials by hand. Raw materials which included strong acids and liquid mercury. They 'cleaned' their hands by rubbing them against the nearest wall, taking the top layer of skin off in the process.
Further down the scale, though, were the lads who leave their single-room dwelling, which fifteen of them were sharing, at 3am to go to work. Walking the (briefly) quiet streets of Calcutta at this hour, past the dozing bodies of countless hundreds of people sleeping out in the road (any one of whose stories could surely just as easily have been told), they swept up the dust and shit (literally) from the road in the gold district and processed it, looking for the tiniest flakes of gold. Hunting for dust-sized flakes from people's skin or clothes, they eked a living from the street.
One entrepreneurial chap had decided the drains offered better opportunities, as so many people wash in the road that there must be gold down there. Standing in a culvert that was basically the size of an upright coffin, shovelling black mud, rubbish and sewage into bags to sell on to larger-scale operators, they formed part of an economy in which two-thirds of the country's GDP is 'off the books'. With his meagre income he and his friends had, through their willingness to stand neck-deep in filth every day, earned enough to rent a room of his own. One room, about the size of a British box room, in which he and five or six others would be able to live happily and escape the prison of fifteen-to-a-room rented accommodation he was used to. I could not even begin to adequately describe the toilet facilities. Our entrepreneur, though, was a very happy man with the new arrangements.
There were other stories. People living in shacks of bamboo sticks and plastic sheeting, trying to grow fenugreek on the beach or run an illicit bar, dodging council demolition trucks intent on destroying their homes. Lads selling pirated books to people in cars, dodging traffic on the busiest main roads in the city and sleeping in the park. None of these people complaining about their lot, all of them quick to smile, all looking out for each other.
I will make a point of watching the other two programmes in this short series. My girlfriend and I were looking at each other during this first episode, marvelling at how extraordinarily wealthy, how incredibly fortunate we are. But for an accident of birth any one of us could just as easily be living the same life, or worse, as those featured. I urge you to catch this if you can - as well as a lesson in our own good fortune, it will also serve as a reminder that for all the mindless, vacuous, tissue-thin celeb-obsessed bollocks that's on telly these days, it's still capable of pedagogical and emotional power.
No comments:
Post a Comment