Work in Progress

The large numbers of unskilled and illiterate people in India have created an economy with a massive micro-leveled work tier. If Britain was referred to once as 'a nation of shop keepers', then India must be where they got the idea. In the cities as well as the tiny villages entrepreneurship flourishes. Great numbers of people do small parts of much bigger jobs and multitudes of one or two person businesses exist simply to supply the needs of the large numbers of people who live either on the streets or in shanty housing without electricity, plumbing or a means to store food. I have never been around a people so commercially motivated nor seen services so engaging displayed or hawked. Everyone has some little something they are making, selling or a service they can provide. Food is affordable and readily available. The streets are full of metal wok shaped bowls on bamboo stilts that contain tiny charcoal fires dressed with incense roasting vegetables or meat across which marigold blossoms and petals are decoratively scattered. Creating shelter is an art form stretching the western mind to the far extremes of possibility for location and materials. People live everywhere-under viaducts, right up beside the curb of busy highways, on their pallets next to their food stands, in alleys and in pitched tents next to the high rise buildings they are working on. There is a growing middle class in the cities and increased pressure for more housing and more commercial items. Western influenced advertising; Internet and television seem to be fueling that demand but on the whole the largest sector of the 1 billion people still live very meagerly and simply. In my conversations with the people I met I experienced a deep, quiet pride and dignity about their country's ancient and advanced culture, especially in comparison to the development of the Western World. Yet I felt there were also undercurrents of exasperation, even a sense of futility, not just for what they felt was a lacking in the world's opinion and understanding but for the challenges they face in trying to create lasting progress in such a large and diverse nation.

For more glimpses of the everyday working world, click on India Photo Journal at the right.