Yes, poverty exists

I assume not this room

My mom asked me to post about how "rural" the area I was living in is, which so far I've declined to do because I don't like talking about bathrooms or garbage. In comparison to true rural India, i.e. places people don't flock to year round to stare at the Dalai Lama's driveway (which he's never ON), this place is pretty damn cosmopolitan. And most people here have better living standards than slums in Mumbai or Delhi, because those are slums. But yeah, people are pretty poor here.

This is where I live

This area of Himachal Pradesh (the state Dharamsala is located in) is pretty posh. Most people have access to water that's usable for washing and only needs to be filtered or boiled before drinking, and if you drink a little of it (when you brush your teeth) you won't get super sick, so I don't know how "potable" that makes it. Buildings are made of cement, not brick or wood. There isn't any heat except via space heaters in the winter or A/C in the summer, but most people have access to some kind of electricity and running water. There are power outages but usually only a few times a week and not for very long, maybe an hour. The pollution, except for physical trash, is pretty low. Some people wear masks because it's dusty but I don't think it's that bad.

Maybe when I'm back in the States that paragraph will be a lot more depressing, but here I'm used to most things. The space heater thing, though, I really do not like. It doesn't really work anyway. Wearing your winter jacket around is OK, but the buildings are often the same temperature as the outside (or colder, because cement holds in cold during the day), unlike in America where you go from heated place to heated place. So at a cafe, they'll serve your meal really hot because they know it's going to cool off quickly and by the time you pay your tab, it's going to be ice cold. It's warming up a bit now that we're later into March, but this is a small window before June, when the monsoon comes and it doesn't stop raining until September.

The two main groups of residents in McLeod-Ganj, the specific area of Dharamsala where I live, are Tibetan refugees and Himachali Indians. It's hard to tell who's better off. The Tibetans have only refugee cards and limited access to the court system, can't own land, but live off money from abroad. The Indians are citizens who own land which they rent to the Tibetans, but they don't have huge benefits on their behalf at Radio City Music Hall. There's also a lot of transit workers, specifically Nepalese or people from the Punjab, the state next to Himachal, who have come because the tourism industry is good to people in comparison to working on a farm. Nepalese vendors try to pass their Nepalese art off as Tibetan and Punjabi Sikhs open restaurants with their specific style of food, which is good, but I'm still partial to Southern Indian food.

Then there are some people on the outskirts of McLeod-Ganj who are just rural poor. Sometimes they beg in town, but usually they work the land or take low-level construction jobs that are incredibly brutal and get mad when you take pictures of them. Construction is constant because of the tourism industry, to the point where it's actually starting to affect the structure of the mountain, and landslides are common in the rainy season.

There's also a ton of dogs here. Of cows I'd say there's a normal amount, but there's just a lot of dogs. People are too poor or uninterested in getting their pets neutered because it seems cruel to the animals, and so you wait 20 years and you have a lot of stray dogs and occasional rabies outbreaks. They are all pretty docile to humans, fighting only with each other and cows. BTW, the cows always win the fight.

I think everyone would agree that McLeod-Ganj has a major problem with trash. It's not for lack of trying to do otherwise. There are places to refill water bottles with filtered water. Soda in restaurants is served in bottles that are then sent back for refilling at the plant. Plastic bags are outlawed, so you either get your item at the door in a paper slip or a cloth bag. But the real problem is that it's a tiny city, and cities produce waste, and that waste has to go somewhere, but there's garbage trucks that I know of to carry the waste off. I've seen maybe one truck that looked like a garbage truck, and it was too large to go down most of the roads. People took away public trash bins but it had kind of a reverse effect, and now the roads and valleys are lined with chip bags and empty bottles. My building has four different bins for sorting trash (wet, wet paper, dry goods, recyclable) but I'll be damned if I know where it goes. There are recycling plants and bins, but the bins are far out of town on the road. I know people burn their trash, sometimes for heat and sometimes just to get rid of it, but usually only paper and in very small amounts, so you see burned paper on the side of the roads.

People have incense going all of the time, but it's mostly for religious reasons. There isn't a serious smell problem. I wouldn't say it smells great here - I would just say I haven't noticed any particularly bad smells except when a bunch of cows or donkeys are clustered together. And I live in New York, which is filled with bad smells. Mostly the streets smell of incense and cooking food, neither of which are bad except when highly concentrated.

There are a ton of signs posted everywhere about being responsible about the environment, but I seriously don't know a way that I can make less trash. Food comes in stuff. Napkins are used and it costs more to wash them and still uses energy. The only thing I've refused to do is give up toilet paper, because, you know.

The phones are pretty inconsistent. Landlines are particularly bad because people steal the lines in the ground to sell the copper. People also tend to buy the cheapest cell phones available and use them for six years, meaning by the end they hold no charge and don't work so well. There are outages in the the cell phone towers. People, when handing out their contact information, will give me three different numbers to try, knowing I may not get through at all.

All of that said, it's pretty livable here. I say that because I'm shelling out $200 a month for a really posh apartment that has a Western-style bathroom and a space heater. I'm sure some of you are thinking, "Damn, shell out another fifty and go to someplace better" but there aren't actually a lot of places that are going to be better, because some problems are city-wide. At a certain point you're just paying for atmosphere. Celebrities and dignitaries stay at Kashmir Cottage or Glenmoor, both of which are really nice and somewhat to American standards, but not cost-effective for a long stay, plus they're a taxi ride away from town, and you can get kicked out of your room if a member of the Spanish Parliament shows up. Richard Gere, I believe, lives at Kashmir and yeah, he is the real deal, spending a ton of the year here studying Buddhism and working hands-on in the community. I still don't think much of his movies, but give the guy some respect.

Anyway, feel free to panic about my health and safety in the comments section even though I feel fine, just maybe a little tired from the fact that every road is at like a 45 degree incline.