Delhi's growing pains.

It rained one day last week, intermittently and not too hard. It was enough, however, to throw the city into mild chaos. The dusty streets turned instantly to mud, outside markets scrambled for their makeshift tarps, and cycle rickshaw drivers cursed their choice of profession. Most astonishingly, my commute to and from work took significantly longer than usual. I sat in the bus, staring out at the sea of unmoving cars all competing for space, and wondered: How can a place that is plagued by heavy monsoons a quarter of the year be so poorly designed for rain?

With highways that are covered with vehicles to the last centimeter, even a slight slowing of speed has immense yo-yo effects collectively. Moreover, improper drainage forces sections of roads to close, which creates a bottleneck effect of remaining routes. I was totally appalled by this. We're not talking about some small city in an underdeveloped country; this is New Delhi! This is the center of some of the world's most spectacular economic development, and not even the basic necessity of rainwater drainage is properly attended to.

I came to India just days after the monsoon ended, and I'm constantly reminded by my flatmates how lucky I am to have escaped those horrors. They tell stories of having to walk knee-deep in muddy stillwater, how it takes two additional hours to get to work, and how offices occasionally flood. One mentioned that a small cut on his foot became infected from wading through dirty water. There are undoubtedly plenty more serious health consequences from the lack of proper drainage.

Is the city, the country, growing too fast for its own good? It's like a child who experiences a massive growth spurt overnight, and his body's necessary functions are unable to keep up.

An exercise in humility.

It’s not that I haven’t seen dire poverty before. The most vivid memories of visiting China for the first time aren’t of family or food or noise, but of how beggars slept outside, covered in flies and dirt, directly under the entrance of the city’s upscale shopping malls. The contrast seemed stark to me even then, at the age of twelve when at any other time I would have been more concerned with my gangly arms than with the social run-offs of a country’s booming economy.

In America, it’s easy to forget about the poor. They don’t send their grimy children to implore you to buy their wares. They don’t clean your house and wash your laundry for almost free. They don’t sleep on the sidewalks a dozen to a block, under torn, weathered tarps. The rich don’t touch them, and they don’t ever have to see them.

Here, it is impossible to ignore the hardship that is behind nearly everything I see and touch. Life is so hard. Why?

Once, I heard a friend state that “beauty is an accident”, and I mulled over the quote with interest. But increasingly I see that not only is beauty an accident, but so is success, wealth, social circumstance. People pride themselves on hard work, integrity, charm, and all sorts of voluntary factors to explain their successes. Out of this attitude comes a sense of entitlement, a sense that you deserve your place in life, that you earned it, that those who struggle beneath you are there for a reason and can struggle themselves out if they really wanted to.

But this is false.

Imagine the trajectory of one’s life as a tree diagram. With each stage of life, we have choices, and each choice leads to more, and more, and more, until we have experienced a complex labyrinth of decisions, interactions, and influences that together determine where exactly we are at present. The key observation, however, is that a huge number of these choices, and certainly most of the important ones, are made for us long before we can talk or think or take reasoned actions ourselves.

Hard work and integrity and all those things are not the deciding factor of where we are, but should be seen simply as details in a life path that is already largely predetermined. Suffice it to say that I doubt the existence of free will, but this has nothing to do with God.

Despite what it may seem, the emphasis in these thoughts is not to deplore the futility of human effort. I’d be stupid to deny the observation that humans do regularly break the mold and beat the odds, and I allow for some correlation between conscious individual decisions and resulting position in life (though, as I said, not to the extent that most people convince themselves).

Rather, I’m simply mulling over the relative efficiency of a bottom-up to top-down approach in alleviating human hardship. Let me explain.

Go back to the tree diagram. Among a million people, there are a million paths through the tree, leading to a million outcomes and a million stories. One way to solve the problems of these masses of people is by working backward, by starting at where they are now and working down, working individually. Aid workers and people on the ground are essential components of any effort to extend help to those who need it.

We need some element of this top-down approach, but there are shortcomings to using it singularly. For example, institutions like the World Bank and IMF throw vast chunks of money at African countries with rosy goals of alleviating hunger and poverty and disease, but the results are disproportionately low to the effort and costs.

The goal of a bottom-up approach is to intervene early, thereby preventing problems from happening at all, and precluding the necessity of solving them if/when they happen. Instead of leaving a cookie jar out and punishing a child for stealing, remove the cookie jar. Relating this to the tree analogy, this involves steering people or protecting people early on from going down certain paths that typically lead to suffering. If providing education to a child saves him from the streets, we have by a simple push set him on a trajectory far removed from the uglier alternative. This is just a small example. There are much bigger and much more compelling ways to change the flow of the system, but all involve altering the source, not the outcome.

I offer, of course, zero empirical evidence for these thoughts, just anecdotes and observations. Even so, it makes some sense to me, and perhaps the evidence will follow.

Social environment.

It’s amazing how quickly people adapt to their social environment. Consciously or subconsciously, it is hard to resist the draw to mimic the behaviors of the bigger group. When social habits are as different as they are here, these behavioral changes can be drastic.

There are the superficial conformities. For example, most people quickly learn to wear more conservative and looser-fitting clothes – good luck warding off the advances from creepy men and blatant finger-pointing from women if you bare shoulders or show leg! Adopting new eating manners is another way to avoid unwanted attention. Some have even learned to nod once to the side to say “yes”; no one nods up and down here.

The most interesting behavioral changes, of course, are in attitude.

Most Indians have blatant disregard for the environment. In Delhi’s case, this is not for a lack of governmental effort. Plastic bags are banned from a fair proportion of establishments (it may even be banned in all of Delhi, for that matter), but I haven’t seen a single place enforce it. Tiny trees are planted around the city center, surrounded by signs urging people to care for the environment, which seems like a rather weak form of advertising. City buses and auto-rickshaws run on natural gas, but there has been nothing to regulate the myriad other forms of transportation that clog city highways. These efforts are well-meaning, but they don’t seem to make a dent in the psyche of the city’s residents.

Without public trash cans, streets are used as a dumping ground. People use small plastic bags to carry everything. There is no recycling; even if it was available, I can’t imagine people being motivated to use it. For the typical household, water bottles and jugs provide the only form of filtered water besides boiling. Forget organic, free-range, local; even the thought is laughable.

The environmentally-conscious who first come to India may wallow in guilt for a little while. But since it’s extremely difficult and perhaps impossible to be green in the Western sense of the word, the guilt goes away very quickly and turns into active habit. If everyone else chucks their bottles in the gutter, and there’s nowhere else to throw it, and no recycling available, why not and who can fault me? I’ve seen this attitude shift with nearly every other foreigner that I’ve met. Even the ones from more environmentally progressive countries like Australia consider me uncommonly ecological for refilling my steel bottle instead of buying water.

One way to explain this is cognitive dissonance. People nurse their conscience by making themselves think in ways that justify their behaviors.

This briefly calls to mind the Stanford prison experiment, conducted in 1971, where participants were randomly assigned to roles of either prison guard or prisoner. In a short time, the prison guards became psychologically abusive and sometimes violent towards the prisoners, and the prisoners became submissive and despondent. It says a lot that the guards were able to justify their actions despite the fact that they never would have behaved in such ways in a normal context.

People are so powerless against social and psychological forces.