Thursday, September 17, 2015

Interesting India


Yesterday I had an opportunity to take a car ride from New Delhi to Jaipur. (~4 hours each way)  It was definitely an interesting experience.  Imagine a major heavy use 3 lane each way highway that has no controlled intersections, slow vehicles drive in any lane they want, cars sometimes exceed 70 mph, people walk across the road ocassionally, there are many trucks, there are many farm tractors and don't forget the horse/camel drawn carts or the cows in the 4 foot wide median.  Here are a few of the memorable images.

4 people on a motorcycle.  Yes the mother is carrying a toddler.  I missed getting a photo of the guy carying 4 sheep in the saddle bags of his motorcycle. (2 on each side)
 Repeatedly we passed jeeps that were full to brimming with passengers.
 Many of the road side villages had trash and cows 15 feet off the road.
 Not to read too much into their culture, however mostly I saw men along the road.  Some working but many seemed to be hanging out.  And the construction workers, waiters, truckers, etc were all men.  The women I saw working seemed to be harvesting the fields by hand, planting grass tufts by hand, maintaining the plants in the median, etc.  It was interesting.

 


 
 

2 comments:

Unknown said...

India does look very interesting. Here is an interesting story I just read which might interest you as you work in the auto industry (I think.) It reinforces the liberal view that corportations are sometimes evil.

WTF, Volkswagen?

Unknown said...

Here is another interesting story I read today;

What it's like to live on $2 a day in the United States

from the article we learn that the number of people receiving welfare is way down from 20 years ago.

"In 1994, the old welfare program served 14.2 million people, two thirds of them children. Today's program serves 4.4 million, and Edin and Shaefer describe many extreme poor who believe the government is no longer giving out money at all. In a handful of states, fewer than 10 percent of poor households with children receive TANF benefits. In some poor communities, it's so hard to find TANF recipients that other families believe the government has exited the welfare business entirely; they never even apply."