Friday 12th October

Wednesday’s BBC 2 at 9.00.  This quite remarkable and enlightening programme called ‘Welcome to India’ is a revelation.  I don’t think I have ever seen anything quite like it.  For a start it is full of optimism and admiration and enthusiasm, both about India the country, and it’s hard-working and desperately poor but enterprising people.  There isn’t a shred of self pity in the presentation, or the words of the narrator, or indeed the incredibly hard-done by subjects.  In fact quite the contrary, there is no hint of an apology for the fact that people have to live like this, in ramshackle huts or filthy shanty-towns besides railway lines or rubbish dumps, or for there being no welfare state at all for these people, or for the dangerous work they do, or for the way they are screwed over again and again by those with money and power.

And every one of these desperately poor people, scraping a living by going down drains and heaving up mud and shit to be ‘panhandled’ for tiny amounts of gold, or cutting up rusting ships with no safety measures in place, or melting down animal fat in stinking vats, are smiling and laughing and living their precarious lives in a far happier state than we in the West can ever hope to achieve. It also makes you realise that we are rich on the backs of, and precisely because this rank poverty exists.

It makes you wonder just how we in the privileged and pampered West would begin to manage if suddenly the safety nets of Welfare and Job Security and all the conditions of what we consider a decent society were to disappear. With only the market as arbiter and raw capitalism let loose would we resort to both the enterprise and the hard work of these wonderful people, or would we succumb to self-pity.  In some ways we have lost something which these people have, but I bet given the chance they would all readily swap places with us if they could.