That's a beautiful bird in an unbeautiful setting. You mention several times in your narrative through India that you saw garbage piles everywhere. Does this photo capture the general state of things that you experienced in urban settings?
well, this particular instance wasn't actually urban - Dalhousie is a little village in the mountains and this photo was taken at a dumping spot in the forest which was attracting several species of birds.
But, yes, India is basically one continuous garbage dump. There is so much trash everywhere that when I got to southeast Asia (Bangkok to be precise) it seemed almost pristine in comparison. I don't think it is possible to even comprehend the scale of the problem in India without having seen it first-hand.
@Chlidonias That is astonishing because as you know one of the most striking things you notice on arriving in southeast Asia (or parts thereof) from somewhere a little more "developed" is how much rubbish there is.
I know. I had always noticed the rubbish everywhere in southeast Asia, and the way people just naturally throw everything out a bus window or whatever. Especially at waterfalls (where these are tourist attractions) there will be great amounts of rubbish.
And yet, after India I walk around thinking "this is pretty clean". Bangkok literally seemed like New Zealand in comparison to India. I was going along the highways on the buses in pure wonderment at the lack of filth.
The thing with India, too, is that it isn't just rubbish lying around - it is vast hills of rubbish lining roads or railways, and bank-to-bank rafts of rubbish on rivers. There are regional differences of course - Kerala (and the Dalhousie area come to that) is generally pretty good, Ladakh is great. The major cities like Delhi or Calcutta are the worst by far, as may be expected.
In my thread I made the supposition that the problem is due to the introduction of modern materials (coupled, obviously, with the gross over-population of the country). In the older times plates were banana leaves, tea cups were little clay mugs smashed after use... basically everything was either biodegradable or eaten by the pigs and cattle. Now all the plastics etc just sit there, the piles growing ever-larger, and nobody knows what to do so they just keep throwing more on the piles.
It is pretty sad seeing rows of houses actually boxed in amongst walls of rubbish metres high, only a path from the door to the street, with kids playing in the piles and people using them as toilets. (Seriously, people will walk out their door and go to the toilet right beside their own house. On most bus rides I was on you'd be passing someone using the roadside as a toilet every five or ten minutes. At the Little Rann of Kutch, the small lake near the place I stayed was a combined rubbish-dump, toilet, and clothes-washing-site).
if you Google Image "rubbish piles India" or a similar phrase you can see what I mean. A lot of the photos are actual rubbish dumps, but others are just the streets etc.
if you were to decide to go to India, I would recommend Assam, Ladakh, Kerala, and Himachal Pradesh. I think I made the comment in the thread that those states aren't "real India" (i.e. Assam is southeast Asia, Ladakh is Tibet, Kerala is like Sri Lanka). I did like Gujarat but it is much more rubbishy than those previous states.
I'm in no hurry to return to the country though...
@Chlidonias To be honest it's so far off my radar as to be irrelevent; if I ever get to the point where India is the most attractive remaining destination in Asia for me I'll just head off to South America instead.
Having said that, I did almost visit last autumn just because my sister was there and I had nothing better to do for a week. Such a circumstance could easily arise again I think.
