Important Notice : These are journal entries from my trip to India in July. I’m currently back in Friday Harbor for now. 30 June [New Delhi How do you stay clean in a city with no sanitation? Each morning before yoga, I watch the street below from the roof top. Men bathe quite thoroughly and vigorously out of buckets. Very methodical. They are clean. A woman rinses garbage into the center of the street, sweeping it out of the shop. She scrubs the cement with water and a bruch. Today small girls in clean and tidy dresses were aggressively selling pencils at Connaught Place. So it’s not that people aren’t clean: they are. But the social structures of garbage collection, waste management, recycling, etc. are missing. (I understand that plastic bottles are recycled. I hope so!). Tsering [Lama Tsering Phuntsok] showed us a restroom stall for men, and I noticed two street-side urinals. But today I did see the apocryphal man defecating in public. Thank God! The trip to India would have been incomplete without that. My point is that Indians share so-called Western standards and values of cleanliness as individuals. However, I guess the sheer numbers make these standards daunting to achieve as a collective body. [We went to a cremation ground that day which left me with questions.] Q. Why aren’t women at funerals? A. Because they’re at home preparing the funeral meal for the men. Or, lower caste/class funerals may have more men in attendance than higher status individuals. A random question. Comments are closed.
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Author Rebecca Moore is Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at San Diego State University. She is currently Reviews Editor for Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions and Co-Director of The Jonestown Institute. Archives
December 2021
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