India: Don't Pass Urine Here

India has surprised me on a lot of fronts. One of the most apparent has been the degree to which life takes place on the street. On any night on Calcutta, one side of a city block might consist of 25+ people asleep on the sidewalk, some separated with mosquito nets and blankets, others just curled up in a corner or wedged in line with the rest.

In the morning you would find these people, as well as those who slept in their small shops or in rented rooms off the street, all on the street living out their morning routine. The sidewalks were overflowing with people eating a morning snack, bathing in public water spouts, and brushing their teeth with small sticks that looked like the over-sized pencils from first grade.

The degree of privacy that we expect in the US is hard to find in this country of almost a billion. A practice that's embraced in Calcutta and being transitioned out in Hyderabad is the act of peeing on the street. In Calcutta men would not hesitate, even in front of the hundreds around them, to relieve themselves on anything that did not clearly belong to someone else. Any plant, shadowed corner, or pile of concrete was a fair target for this traditionally private act. In some spots, the city had even erected waste high partitions where three men could line up and relieve themselves in relative 'privacy'. The smell from the open air stalls was strong but at least the act (and smell) was being confined to one place.

Whereas Kolkata accepts the fact that people will pee on the street, a more modern Hyderabad has been trying to phase the practice out. There're signs like this one in several places as well as a couple of more graphic billboards that depict a man using a bathroom next to a man peeing on the street followed by the caption "be a good man not a bad man."

There's no question that India is advancing rapidly; however, even with drastic economic and industrial leaps forward, the country still has a ways to come. India may share a language and culture with much of the western world, but the practicalities of day to day life here are still drastically different.