Utopia

Early morning.

Already a warm and wet Pale sky, no clouds, no wind.

Security guards watch us approaching the main gate.
Stare at us with respect.
Open the gates.
Smile respectfully, tilting the head.
No word.

That’s the way the day begins, each time. That’s the way the day ends up, each time.
Stepping through the gate, you already know how different the view and the mood will be.

Pale sky, no clouds, no wind.

That’s what remains after leaving the secure walls of that foreign and small world.
Under the same sky, a world apart.
Smells in the air intoxicating your lungs.
Undefined mixture of too strong essences from this land.
Pollution, animals, rubbish, garbage, litterm humans.
All together.
A punch in your stomach, a slap in your face.

The smell of poverty.
The harsh sensation of lives whom only reason is

surviving till the new day.
Standing in front of the gate, waiting for a taxi.
Sort of.
Always late, always dirty.

No way to communicate, no way to talk, no way to share, no way interact, no way to explore.
The eyes as the only weak possibility in catching a glimpse of humanity and behind those unreadable faces
Standing in front of the gate, waiting for a taxi. Looking around, trying to understand, soaking the mind with such a different world.

Under the same sky, a world apart.

Disorder and mess I could call the never ending mixture of rubbish, waste materials, rusty bicycles, noisy scratched cars, buses too old and filled with people, even on the top.
Chaos of man, women, children, animals. In the road and everywhere, each one living his own life as no other were there.
Bunch of people locally aware of themselves and completely separated from the rest.

Men digging the road just outside the walls.

Bunch of men preparing the concrete with old tools, sometimes with bare hands.

Bunch of women helping those men. Carrying materials on their head, slowly, continuously, silently.
Heavy bricks, water, water and heavy bricks

Bunch of children buzzing around without any control, helping the adults, their own way.
Not sure this is a game, for sure it is a work. An heavy one, again and again.

Middle class children collected together under the tight control of middle class mothers.
Serious, good looking, well dressed.
Confident.
The future is just a time to come, no real troubles to carry clouds on a clean sky.
All of them standing still, out of the main gate.

Static representation of the wealth, they are well beyond the basic steps of surviving.
The small group standing in the middle of the mess.

All others moving, talking, sweating, working, maybe dreaming a rest they cannot have, certainly pushing hard on the harsh wall of the life.

No intersection between those groups, no one really seeing or watching the other.
You can understand this looking to the eyes pointing beyond and simply passing through the people in between.
Children are still different in that they are already in a well defined path.
Education is called.
Not necessarily from the school.
The basic one is the belonging to a group.
From here you learn how to behave, how to feel the world and yourself, how to act.
This is what makes you confident or not.

Looking now to these small groups you see well how the smallest one has really a future, a relative possibility to grow up in a wealthy and secure harbor, while the other is simply stuck into the parent’s limbo.
No way to escape.
No way.
You can see the cages here, open for someone, close for all the others.
That’s life here, that’s how the story is in this land of slick smells.
The contamination of the western civilization have had a small impact till now, at least in these borders of New Delhi.
Bangalore is different, for sure, but Bangalore itself is something too specific and peculiar to really count.
The culture of classes is so strong here, the religion and its concept of acceptance of the human condition and the original role you have given, that is really impossible to think to a different organization, a possible way to take away so many people from the strongest poverty.
This is really what poverty means.
These are the Parias. These are the untouchables.
This is India, despite newspapers articles and interviews and studies.
This is India, the new economy player in the far east area, the new giant-to-be.
Military and economic giant.
Facing the unreliable Pakistan and the mighty China.
This nation keeps moving despite the culture, the mentality, the limitations she has.
A big banner at the entrance of the road, against the pale sky.
Nothing around but the burden of living
Just one word written in huge letters visible from far.

Utopia.