In India, there's a gap between rich and poor that remains simply astonishing:
"Step outside, and you see sedans reeking of new affluence. Inside are drivers, many of them asleep because they work 20-hour shifts, waking up at 6 a.m. to catch a train, taking the boss to and from work, then to his dinner, then to drinks, then dropping him off at home at 1 a.m. and catching a taxi to go back to the tenements. At 1 a.m. back in the boss’s apartment, the hallways are often littered with servants and sweepers who work inside by day but sleep outside by night. They learn to sleep on cold tile, with tenants stepping over them when returning from evenings out. India may be changing at a disorienting pace, but one thing remains stubbornly the same: a tendency to treat the hired help like chattel, to behave as though some humans were born to serve and others to be served. “Indians are perhaps the world’s most undemocratic people, living in the world’s largest and most plural democracy,” Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar, two well-known scholars of Indian culture, wrote in a recent book, “The Indians: Portrait of a People.”
Remember this the next time our progressive friends denounce American "inequality."
And the situation in India today shouldn't surprise, in any case; remember, this is a nation with a culture in which there used to be rigid castes and divisions in society; a place where those labeled "untouchables" were simply forbidden to rise above the level of those holding the most menial jobs. Why? Simply because they were born into that caste. Things change slowly.
