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India: A World of Contradictions
By
Carrie Benson
Before
landing in
Chennai, I was told by the inter-port
lecturer that India was a land of contradictions. After
having the privelge of spending five days in India, I have
learned that the professor was completely right. I
had the ability to explore southern India by myself for two
days, and with a homestay family for the remaining three days, and
through the
two different types of travel I was able to discover many different
sides of
Chennai.
When exploring
the city of Chennai by myself, I tried to get lost in different
neighborhoods
so that I could see how all sorts of people lived in the urban spaces
of
India. I stumbled upon one neighborhood
that most would classify as a “slum.” The
slum was a simple series of make shift houses that
looked almost
like tents and other small wooden huts that could be comparable to a
shed. The people of the community were
kind enough
to allow my friends and I to enter their houses. The
houses inside were very basic. There were
no TV’s, ovens, or other amenities that have become
common in the global world. By simply
looking at this type of Indian neighborhood, which I later found was
very
common in Chennai, a person would think that India was a country very
rich in
the vernacular. However, as soon as I
stepped out of the small community I saw large, colorful billboards
advertising
western clothes, cars, high tech electronics, and fancy hotels. The advertisements made it clear to me that
though there was an overwhelming amount of poverty in Chennai, there
was also a
growing amount of the transnational in the city.
I got in
even better glance at the transnational at my homestay as I stayed with
a
wealthy family from Chennai. The family
used western cars, had TV’s in every room of their home, and the
children wore
western style clothes and spoke perfect English. Though
the family still relied heavily on Indian ideals, their
everyday lives were becoming increasingly global.
When I
tried to compare my two urban experiences in India I was able to come
to the
conclusion that both the vernacular and the global exist there. However, different people of different
social-economic classes are exposed to different amounts of
globalization, and
while India as a whole is growing economically, it will be a very long
time
until the poor of India are exposed to large amounts of globalization. India truly is a land of contrast because it
posses large amounts of both vernacular and transnational space.
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