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>The salesman in a high-end TV shop taking the bus to work.

This one kinda sticks out of the list. That would happen in many metropolitan centers worldwide, its simply more convenient.

This is basically what it is like commuting by bus in India: http://www.preetindersodhi.com/pictures/the-indian-bus/

Imagine being crammed in during a 100-degree+ summer just to get to and from work every day. Oof.

I live in NYC; we have a very tame definition of "taking the bus" as compared to India.

Come on, that picture is more exception than the norm. I travelled by bus for years when I was in school and college. There are definitely people hanging near the doors but nowhere as close as to what you mentioned in the picture.

> Come on, that picture is more exception than the norm.

The norm isn't too far from the exception.

I spent 4 years in Chennai, and this was a common sight.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_-4o_J8R8OVg/TIy3nfGUzdI/AAAAAAAAAo...

Though I have never seen the bent buses in Bangalore yet in the 5 years I have been here. That is not to say public buses are pleasant here - you still deal with being densely packed with other commuters of varying degree of hygiene.

I see that picture ever day in New Delhi (capital of India)

I was in Delhi a long time back(9 years), and when I came to Chennai, the Delhi buses started to look pleasant in comparison. The only buses which ran on the route my college was on were skewed to the side owing to the hanging passengers. In Bangalore, at least the damn door closes and no one is falling to his death.

When I was in Delhi, I was a broke student and took buses most of the times. Some routes were quite pleasant. Some were outright hell. The one that runs between south Delhi and Najafgarh is packed(especially after 8 in the evening), and people are knowingly and unknowingly thrusting their crotches into each other.

You guys should come by the Mission district or China Town or Lower Haight ( here in San Francisco ) or take public transit (any of the BART stations - 16th, 24th, Civic Center or Glen Park). The foulest stench of excrement anywhere. Some blame the Hispanic population and some blame the Hmong and others blame the street urchins. But I never expected to smell anything so odious in a major metropolis in the U.S.

Well, you may be exaggerating, but I found my stay in SF similarly disorienting.

We were staying at 4th and Mission, surrounded by luxury stores and hotels. At night, though, it was like Dawn of the Dead, with street-zombies wandering around talking to themselves.

Sadly (to me), they were almost all black. In Toronto, the homeless have the decency to be fairly racially inclusive (with Native Americans somewhat over-represented).

Travel, huh. Different places are different.

That's odd. I've been to these places and have never smelled anything unusual.

I always just blamed the systemic paralysis of sf bay government caused by poor design of the intersection between public power and private power over the commons.

Every time I go to SF, I take the BART from SFO, and travel through many of those stations. It's nothing like what you allude to; it's also completely underused.

I am certain that you have never been to India.

I question whether you've been to New York City, in the summer.

That picture is definitely o lot busier than average but in my experience the majority of urban buses were unpleasantly hot and crowded in India, particularly during the rush hour. I avoided using them if at all possible, and I generally really enjoyed most of the other forms of transport on offer there, especially the more dirty and dangerous ones.

Try using the london underground in summer. It gets a lot hotter than 100 degrees. It gets dangerously crowded sometimes too.

EDIT: Oh shit, it's you. You should know, heh.

I mean, the central point of the original comment was the stark contrast between rich and dirt-poor, who often sit side-by-side, and how we better hide these differences in Western nations.

I had just wanted to nitpick that the bus example is actually a very good one to highlight why "riding the bus" is not a bad indication of poverty, which I think we agree on!

None of this detracts from the fact that riding the subway during the summer is miserable for everyone, but isn't (in my mind, or in the parent's) quite the same as an Indian bus!

Its not that bad, I took public bus to school as a thirteen year old. It was as crowded as an MTA bus. Except there is no Air Conditioning, otherwise it is not that bad. Trains however tend to be much worse, since the doors never close.

Guess I was thinking more from a standpoint of the social status of taking public transport versus having your own car. But you're right, those considerations are irrelevant next to the aforementioned heat and overcrowding.

When I was growing up in Chennai I would lean out the bus doors (with one hand) primarily to impress the young hotties walking along the side of the road.

If you shot every corrupt person in the country , their would not be many men left. We have become a nation of people who would rather pay someone a little money than wait for our turn in a queue.

Corruption is a two handed process , one hand gives and the other takes. Both should be stopped.

> The leaders and the bureaucrats of the Govt. of India deserve to be shot in a public square for their sheer corruption and incompetence.

The Indian public deserves an equal or greater share of the blame. Government is the people's responsibility in a democracy. If governance sucks, the citizens are not doing their job.

You are living in a developed country, right? You got many years of language, writing, speaking, thinking and maybe higher education. You don't know what illiteracy means (when you can't read/write; and don't understand anything about democracy or the banking system).

Your average person in a developing and poor country is not Arun2009. It's a fairly ignorant person who doesn't know either his rights or his duties.

Yesterday an article made it to our frontage about what 'bubbles' we live in. By bubbles the author meant assumptions that shape how we see and interpret everything.

I think literacy & education is one of the biggest bubbles. I had to spend a lot of time thinking about it, and talking to people with experience in the subject before the vast idea of what it means to be illiterate started to dawn on me.

For example, teaching a class on how to use computers to people at the library. They all want to know how to 'look for a job' online. Show 'em how to use the mouse, what icons represent the internet, how to get email, and see they're having trouble. Slowly begin to understand they're only memorizing shapes and patterns of letters, and don't really know how to read or write.

We're all so hyper literate, I can say that about everyone here. We're practically a different species than people who don't know how to wirelessly communicate through space and time. It's impossible to hold poor people in india who basically only have spoken word communication, and oral tradition historical context, to our standards.

Easier said than done. You know it is more complicated than that. India is a namesake democracy, same families get elected all the time. With about 30% illiteracy rate, people don't even know they have a choice, thousands of years of oppression of majority of the population, ... so on.

Do you seriously think that the average Indian citizen is less politically empowered than the average American citizen?

The average Indian is likely making less than $2 a day [1] and likely illiterate with not having the ability to read or write ANYTHING[2]. Is a dirt poor, illiterate person "politically empowered"?

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_India (the numbers here are severely underrepresented - there is consensus among most NGOs that more than 50% illiteracy prevails)

Why does one have to be literate to be politically active? Do you think that most US voters base their political decisions (or their decision whether or not to vote) on something they read?

I don't know why this got down-voted to hell. You raise a very valid point. That democracy has to be representative is one of its basic tenets, and you cannot have that if you shut out a large fraction of your citizens. It is very patronizing to assume that the uneducated do not know what is good for them and the educated class knows what is better for them.

Another basic tenet of democracy is that its citizens must be informed. I think it's fair to assume that those who lack access to written knowledge are at a disadvantage in this respect. For what it's worth, I upvoted the comment. Downvoting it to the point of invisibility strikes me as rather undemocratic.

You shouldn't have been downvoted to hell because you were right on some account. Literacy is only part of the problem. Even if you have 100% literacy it won't stop corruption. Case and point: Kerala -> The only state in India with about 94% literacy and yet there is still a good amount of corruption! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala

bad example. Relatively speaking, Kerala has pretty low amount of corruption. I'm not sure that high literacy is the cause. I have a hunch that the high literacy is a byproduct of the common cause (whatever it is). Most people in Kerala have strong political opinions, politics is debated in an intellectual atmosphere. Isn't just literacy, the median Keralite is also a graduate (Bachelor's degree).

As the son of a military officer who has stayed everywhere in India (north/east/west/south) from childhood to adulthood, I can confidently and un-equivocally state that Kerala is amongst the _least_ corrupt states in India. My personal view is supported by several reports of corruption in India (Google them).

> A beggar & her naked child ...

Actually, a lot of the time, the child is not hers. It's rented from the child's real mother, so that the beggar can earn more money. But I'm sure you already knew that.