For all India's purported mystical and spiritual qualities, read ignorance and poverty and see how closely these are bound. In South African townships there's poverty too: people in tiny corrugated shacks in the middle of a dust bowl who walk shoeless miles to fetch food. Yet (I'm wary of rose-coloured spectacles) there is less intellectual poverty in these townships than in what I've seen of India. Education is compulsory in South Africa and even where children have to sustain themselves because of family disease or unemployment, all are acutely aware of forsaken schooling. Contrast this with India where education is optional, even state schools are fee-paying but remain incredibly under-equipped (no desks or chairs), children working in shops, factories, train stations and streets... or is this famous Indian entrepreneurship? Moreover, in South Afrrica the population is politically mature, while in the world's largest democracy, prejudice reigns.
I wonder if the hegemony of the caste system, the unthinking acquiescence to a feudal order that condemns so many to every form of poverty, is what apartheid would have become given another century or so to fester. A sense of community as we might understand it seems to have been blighted by three thousand years of knowing your place. Not even Mahatma Gandhi -- himself a catalyst for the anti-apartheid struggle -- could foster this social conscience. Vishnu, preserver of the Hindu world, ensures that barely half the population is literate; and that's by the Indian government's measure which judges literacy as being able to read and write your own name...
So for all the saddha bathing in mother Ganges, muezzin at dusk, Buddhist pilgrims and Jain monks, India convinces me that atheistic scepticism offers the straightest path to social conscience.
