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I’ve lived in India for three years now, and the author is sort of right and sort of wrong. Yes, living here is a bit like living in a very diffuse landfill. There’s a lot of litter. However, Puri isn’t as bad as he makes it sound, for one thing. Also, many Indians *do* use toilet paper, and unlike westerners many middle-class Indians actually bathe after going to the toilet. Only the very poor and uneducated don’t clean themselves. Also, the animals aren’t “wild” here. There’s a lot of “feral” dogs, and (at least where I am) many many cows, but pigs are actually pretty rare. The dogs do eat a lot of trash, but there’s a lot of plantlife around, so the cows usually eat that.

Thanks for the objectivity. More from the site.

There are a small number of middle-aged men and women squatting on the steps brushing their teeth, none of them using toothbrushes, half of them using their fingers, the other half using twigs, swallowing the water after brushing, and then cupping and drinking down a few more gulps, which happens to be in the opposite direction of people in other countries brushing their teeth and then spitting the water out.

Perspective Nudge:

The Ganges River pics are exceptions to what I've witnessed firsthand. The diseased alive and definite dead are there, but you'd have to go looking for them. Shat shore must be a very isolated area that I never had to negotiate walking down the beach. Accurate is that men urinate out in the open at what appear to be public pissing walls — which I determine to be adequate license for having survived transit through any traffic roundabout.

No prob.

Another point: The “hospital” there is likely a fairly rural government hospital. In the cities, even the government hospital is reasonably clean and modern, and the private hospitals are on par with the middle-ground hospitals in any Western country. The real difference comes when you need things like x-rays or lab tests. I had to get a chest x-ray here, and instead of dealing with a clinic referral and a wait time to get an appointment, we just went downtown to a storefront that did x-rays. Granted the machine was older (probably nearly as old as I am), but it was a genuine GE x-ray that used films instead of digital, and was probably powerful enough to see through walls. It cost me about $10 total for a full set of chest exposures, and they were handed to me in about 15 minutes. A full-on dental cleaning at a high-end private clinic is about $20 total (not copay; full cost). The drugstores will dispense just about any medication even without a prescription as long as you are known to them and the request is genuine (refills on the kid’s medicine, or a course of antibiotics if you know you’ve got a respiratory infection, for example), and the cost is usually just a couple of dollars equivalent.