Spirit

Again, another picture from the lost/found library of pictures. I guess I feel I need to get these up because I just had my desktop computer die a spectacular death and it took thousands of pictures with it (although I had them all backed up other places). Once again the topic is my second trip to India in August 2003. I don't know why this picture speaks to me, other than the fact that it may be the first picture I took of the seemingly never-ending slums of Mumbai. I can still remember snapping the picture out of a car window and my then new friend John telling me that the people who lived there rented the space (I think we were talking about our constant problems with our campus and slum lords). I guess it had never occurred to me that someone might be paying to live there. Maybe I just assumed that people defiantly carved off the space and threw something together, which, obviously, someone did - but those people then began to rent out the space. It's a big issue in India because the political parties and local politicians compete to get the vote of "squatters" so they're always messing with the date in which you couldn't build more shanty towns. Plus, and obviously, the corruption is staggering. On the one hand the situation is depressing, but it also speaks to a spirit to survive that few of us in the U.S. could hope to match. And, thinking back to my previous post, if my biggest daily challenge is finding alternative bike routes then I (and most Americans) don't really ever have anything to complain about. One of the things that I noticed after spending time in India is that I stopped having much sympathy for student complaints about the challenges of getting their work in on time (or, for that matter, much sympathy for faculty complaints about the horror that is our job).