Coimbatore

Arriving in Coimbatore, we are picked up in an SUV arranged by a friend - the first car with seat belts in India - what a radical idea!  In strong contrast to Bangalore, the streets are perfectly paved.  The city itself, however, is quite worn down; crowded buildings sit side by side littered with various advertisements, garbage, and animals.  It is cloudy and everything takes on a shade of grey.  As we drive down these poverty stricken streets, I look out and try to picture what it might feel like to be one of these people, to live in these conditions, to fight each day to survive.  It is too difficult to imagine, too unbearable to picture.  It makes me feel tremendously lucky, yet horribly guilty for all that I have, for the life that I live, for the luxuries..

We drive out of the city and are surrounded by fields of red dirt where it appears that nothing grows but garbage. The fields are barren and dirty and ever so often lies a small house or two. We drive onto a dirt road, come upon a series of huts where where a man can be seen bathing outside with water from a series of buckets. Finally, we enter into a guarded complex of newly built houses, one of which belongs to a friend's family.  Everything is so wonderful that I almost forget what we drove by to get here.  We have hot water, shampoo, towels for showering, a bed with sheets and pillows to sleep on, and an absolutely delicious South-Indian breakfast awaiting us. 

After breakfast, we go to a few factories specialized in making metal parts for oil lines.  It's interesting to see how they operate and what it means to have "made in India" on the label of something.  Many parts that say "made in Canada" are really made in India and slightly altered upon arrival (by adding labels, company logos etc.).  Clearly labour is much cheaper here: we saw some women polishing metal at 200 Rupees per day.  Likewise safety standards are much lower with Asbestos roofs and older machinery..

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Interesting things learned: South Indians use a lot of coconut in their cooking.  They eat everything with their hands, including rice, which is rolled into balls and flicked into the mouth.  Here in the state of Tamil Nadu, they speak Tamil and Urdu. Hierarchy on the roads (from top to bottom): Cow, truck (lorry), SUVs, cars, bikes, people.  Honking is used as a way to signal you're presence on the road and to pass other vehicles (or cows, dogs, scooters, etc.).