A Passage to India

The website has been quite quiet because Nick and I have been away for two weeks.

In the course of our travels we visited India, where we last stayed some years ago.  We were told by more recent visitors that many of the cities in the country, such as Delhi and Calcutta,  are much improved from the point of view of rubbish in the streets etc.  Unfortunately this progress does not seem to have been shared by the one city we visited, Chennai (formerly Madras) on the East coast.   The curse of the world, the plastic bag, was in evidence everywhere!

 The local authority is making some small effort however, particularly at temples and other similar sites.  In the interest of continuing the occasional series of posts on refuse management round the world I took the picture above of a fine granite rubbish bin at the extensive temple complex at Malibupuram, together with the exhortation to citizens below.

Apart from some very attractive but dilapidated colonial buildings Chennai did not have a great deal to recommend it. It is predictably dusty and hot, and is divided by two heavily polluted rivers.  The city boasts one of the largest air conditioned shopping malls in India, but this was a sad and soulless place on the whole.  One bright corner was a shop selling western bric a brac, staffed by a pleasant woman, pictured below, who explained that she was selling off a large collection of domestic artifacts from the colonial era that had been accumulated by her family over many years.