Indian Railways Television.

We set off at 1730. Sarah and I went and sat in her mums cabin next door, rolled up the blinds, and watched the world go by.

This is like watching wide screen tv. You just can't change the channel. Like those brilliant Samsung tv ads we see on NZ television. Replace the railway windows with flat panel screens, then put anything you want on there, in full HD. That's what we've got. Full HD entertainment, two screens in every cabin.

I'm sure there are slums everywhere in the cities, but they obviously line the railway tracks as well. These are our first glimpse of slums in New Delhi. No need for a slum tour.













We saw pigs snorting around on a mountain of rubbish. I imagine they eat all of the organics, leaving the rest for either recycling, or burning. We saw both. People rifling through the refuse for plastic. Bottles, packaging, anything. There is no lofty motive here. No green planet agenda. They are simply salvaging what can be sold. Otherwise it gets burned, to make way for the next load to take its place.

There are the solid buildings that have become slums due to overcrowding and dereliction. And then there are the standard issue slum, corrugated tin held together with string and spit. There is no shortage of spit, because people do it everywhere. We get all indignant when a tourist spits in a rubbish bin back home. Well, come over here. You will be ducking and diving to avoid the hoiks and spits as they flow thick and fast.





Talking of spitting everywhere, there is something else we noticed a lot of on our Indian Railways widescreen channel. Peeing!
Along the tracks, there was hardly a few metres goes past, without seeing a guy zipping up his fly, or in full stream. No faulty prostates here. And occasionally squatting over a hole, too!

Now the third kind of slum we saw, was made of fabric, wrapped around sticks in the ground. Walls only, no ceiling. Not much protection from the elements, so must be for modesty only. Given that these people are happy to pee and poo wherever the mood takes them, I wonder what they require any kind of modesty protection from.

In case you think that this is somewhat voyeuristic, the entertainment goes both ways. I am sure that their idea of a family outing is to load everybody up on the scooter, and pop down to the railway tracks. It's Sunday night, lets go down and laugh at the rich white people go past in the blue train. We can buy popcorn.
Their Indian Railways widescreen is in full colour, and the channel changes every couple of seconds, quicker if the train is going fast.




All this we saw in the first 30 minutes. Then the train stopped. For another 30 minutes. Then we started going back the other way. Oh, good, back to visit the pigs. Nope. We were soon watching different slums on our Indian Railways TV set.

This happened a few more times. Changing tracks, changing direction. We don't have a map to see how efficient their routing is, but there must be method, right?