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Comment by unmole | Hacker News Reader

> religious leaders were so obsessed with the idea of ritual purity and pollution that physical cleanliness took a beating. It is not easy to understand even for an Indian.

Yeah, no. You see the same happening in poorer parts of South East Asia and Africa.

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I've travelled extensively all over Asia, and spent a lot of time in India (especially Mumbai and Delhi) - IMHO India is by far the worst for trash and filth. The only parts even remotely close I've seen were in Nepal and Indonesia.

Indeed, I was particularly struck by how clean and tidy poor parts of SEA are!

In one of the Attenborough documentaries, they showed Hyenas visiting the capital of Ethiopia that locals feed them at night. I was like looks like a much poorer city than Bangalore, but darn their streets are so clean (even at night).

I have been to many villages in India, where even local streets are narrow, hard to navigate for cars. And people love to occupy a few more feet from the street for personal use (you can see this behavior in cities too, by extending buildings onto streets). Sometimes, these issues lead to fights among neighbors, including deaths. A local daily reported that a family was sending a drain pipe from their washing machine onto the street; and the next door door had been complaining for months, leading to a fight. The end result: the dishwasher's owner's wife was killed by a huge stone hurled at her by the neighbor.

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