Last week, SM reader “S” emailed us a tip about the October issue of National Geographic:
Just wanted to send a quick link to a story I worked on for ngm.com (National Geographic magazine). It’s a story about India’s highway project and has some amazing photography. The photo map has photos submitted to our site by readers.
The highway project is called the Golden Quadrilateral (GQ), and it is
…the brand-new, 3,633-mile expressway linking the country’s major population centers of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata. [ngm]
Some history behind the project:
Announced in 1998 by then Prime Minister Atal B. Vajpayee, who is credited with giving the project its grandiose name, the Golden Quadrilateral is exceeded in scale only by the national railway system built by the British in the 1850s. For decades after its 1947 independence, India practiced a kind of South Asian socialism in keeping with the idealism of its founders, Gandhi and Nehru, and its economy eventually stalled. In the 1990s the country began opening its markets to foreign investment, led by a pro-growth government and staffed by an army of young go-getters who speak excellent English and work for a fraction of the wages paid in the West. Yet India’s leaders realized their decrepit highways could hobble the country in its race toward modernization. “Our roads don’t have a few potholes,” Prime Minister Vajpayee complained to aides in the mid-1990s. “Our potholes have a few roads.”
Ten years after Vajpayee’s announcement, the GQ is among the most elaborately conceived highway systems in the world, a masterpiece of high-tech ingenuity that is, in many ways, a calling card for India in the 21st century. Seen on a 48-inch flat-screen computer monitor at highway administration headquarters in Delhi, the GQ seems as beautiful as a space capsule. Its designers describe it as an “elegant collection of data points,” or a gleaming, “state-of-the-art machine,” a technologically advanced conveyor belt moving goods and people around India with seamless precision.
It’s easy to be swept up in their enthusiasm for a system so technologically advanced that one day, any rupture in the pavement could be detected by sensors and maintenance crews dispatched; where tolls would be computerized and instantly tabulated against long-term projections; where accidents trigger an instantaneous response from nearby emergency teams. And there is no doubt that the highway and the development it has generated have quickened the pulse of the nation, boosted traffic volume, and brought millions of workers pouring into medium-size and large cities from the countryside. Yet the GQ has also brought old and new India into jarring proximity, challenging the moral and cultural underpinnings of a nation founded on Gandhian principles of austerity, brotherhood, and spirituality. It’s sharpened India’s appetite for material possessions—especially cars—and many Indians, especially those over 30, have a hard time recognizing the India they see advertised on television and billboards, which comes in a wide choice of designer colors and does zero to sixty in under ten seconds. [ngm]
Our Amardeep wrote a series of posts about Ramachandra Guha’s “India After Gandhi”. Guha is quoted in the National Geographic piece, here:
“I see the GQ as a metaphor for modern India, speeding along today at a hundred miles an hour,” says historian Ramachandra Guha, author of India After Gandhi. “Imagine we stop at a traffic light and roll down the window. There’s a path next to the highway, and a little old guy riding past on a bicycle. As we wait impatiently for the light to change, he calls to us to watch out, slow down, don’t be so reckless and single-minded in our pursuit of growth and affluence and material goods. Well, that chap on the bicycle is Gandhi. He’s our conscience, and even with all that’s changed in India, he cannot be ignored.” [ngm]
The pictures— as one would expect from National Geographic— are gorgeous and the article is well-worth a read. Ranging from car/scooter pujas (which, to be fair, isn’t such an exotic concept…my Mom had our priest douse my last car with holy water, right after we took delivery of it in NorCal) to the tale of a truck driver named Rakesh who chews masala-tobacco to stay awake, to stories about the farmers whose ancestral lands were confiscated to create the pavement Rakesh drives upon, the article offers a compelling glimpse at how India is growing— and who is affected, along the way.
My only wish is that they had included more about Chandini, the transgendered sex worker/educator whose photograph is above. I couldn’t forget hir picture:
Posing with his relatives, a transgender sex worker named Chandini, 23, lives on the outskirts of Delhi in Kalandar Colony, a community of 5,000 families engaged mainly in the sex trade, servicing truckers and others along the nearby highway. HIV/AIDS in India is epidemic, and Chandini has worked to educate other sex workers, and their clients, about prevention efforts, funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Indian government. [ngm]
I have brown, trans friends who aren’t as accepted/loved by their family members, so I’m glad Chandini has such support— and that ze is doing such important work. As roads grow smoother, more trucks will race over them, and that means more men seeking out diversion. That makes me think that India’s truck drivers and sex workers need education about the prevention of HIV/AIDS now, more than ever.
