"Kindness as Forbidden Pleasure"

The modern world exhorts us to take pleasure in possessions, in power, success, and independence. In Mumbai, just like any other major world City, having “Made it” seems to involve accumulating property, land and acquiring great financial wealth.  It is through with these things, we often have the illusion that we are indestructible and our true dependence on others is dispensed with.   Kindness to people, it seems, is increasingly becoming something akin to being a little dumb, or foolish and wearing bad sandals.

Freud believed that there is more than one sort of kindness.  There is kindness as a moral obligation, ‘I should be kind or people won’t like me’, or kindness as calculated bribery, “I’m going to be nice to her so that she will do xyz for me later”. Then there is a genuine kindness - a deep desire that arises in a person. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips says that people come to therapy not because they are more unhappy than anyone else, but because they feel “limited in their capacity to care for others”.

Walking alone through Breach Candy last night, a wealthy area of South Mumbai, I passed half a dozen people, curled up, some on straw mats, on the streets where they will sleep for the night.  This is their home. There was a huddle of three mothers and two small children no more than three or four years old. I don’t know their names.  Maybe like my dear friends, their names are Pooja, or Parveen or Angali.  I don’t know how these mothers came to be on the streets, or whether they will eat tonight, or if like me as a mother, they are scared that if they sleep, their children might be taken or wander off.  One of these little children looks just like the son of friends of mine.  He has a cheeky alert face. He is on the streets because when he was born, he was undoubtedly issued fewer tickets in the lottery of security and pleasures than my friend’s son. 

It strikes me that our moral actions, what we do when faced with an opportunity to act with kindness, are deeply contextualised and located.  If these mothers and their children were sitting in this awful deprived state, in the village of Piddinghoe in England, where I used to live, any number of neighbours I can think of would quickly have them under their roof.  Neighbours like Gill would produce cakes and have toys out for the children, Chandra would be on the phone to some politician seeking guidance to help them and Mike next door would no-doubt be doing all sorts of kind things, especially if he could do them without people knowing.

But this is not Piddinghoe.  It is Mumbai and the problems of homelessness, massive poverty and starvation, seem so insurmountable that we have to keep a distance.  To imagine these mothers as human beings, with thoughts and feelings just like my friends Pooja, Parveen and Anjali, is virtually unbearable.  We cannot bear such closeness, such proximity, even in our imagination.  The British Psychoanalyst and paediatrician, Donald Winnicott wrote extensively on the human dance of closeness and distance.  We distance in order to defend something – pain in this case, of avoiding connecting with the deep suffering of others.  We distance in order not to bear any responsibility for their suffering.  Perhaps we distance ourselves from the joy of being kind to them. Mothers have to learn to gradually distance themselves more, from their growing children, step by step, least they smother their children’s confidence and belief in their ability to explore the world with some independence. Distance isn’t always inadvisable.  But distance invariably leads to disinterest.

One way some of the wealthy citizens of Mumbai distance themselves from the suffering of others, is by never leaving the comfort of the rear seat of their chauffeur driven cars.  They rarely take to the streets and step closely amongst the poor.  One client of mine took the risk of closeness, deliberately, in order to feel the pulse of the City.  Walking close to the railway station he found a baby girl on a pile of rubbish.  What struck him most was how many people simply looked at this baby girl and walked on by.   He took action and she is now funded by him, safely in a very good orphanage. Just as the writer C.S.Lewis said, “The greatest mystery of life is to give is to receive”. This man feels genuinely good about himself, more than any kind of person acquiring might and is now investing time and money in those like this baby girl born with few tickets.

The only vague sense of a rulebook of kindness is perhaps the kindness expected of parents towards their children. It seems it is the one area of virtually international agreement where kindness is expected, with a lot of country-level variation of course.  But what does kindness mean to those in such unfortunate positions as these mothers and their children on the streets? 

Psychoanalysis reminds us there is enjoyment in hate which prevents kindness.  There is pleasure to be had, although only confessed to with some difficulty, in discharging our aggression, our spite, our envy, our retaliation. The pleasure of hate takes the time when we might otherwise be kind. There are dangers of course in feeling too much. But it is only those humans who have learned to bare frustration – our self-satisfying narcissistic pleasures who are capable of putting the needs of others before one’s own.  Freud believed that those with a deeply rooted sense of kindness are much less susceptible to moral coercion of what the masses are doing, like mindlessly chasing money, and able to live more fully from their own conscious and what their particular version of ‘right’ is.

Gandhi once said that “He simply wanted to please his own conscience which is God’s”.  In Hindu scripts we are asked to act with kindness and not expect gratitude, Christianity asks of us to “Love thy neighbour”, and Muslims remind us to give 10% of our wealth to the poor. All religions and faiths preach the importance of kindness. But if a visit to the Church, the Mosque or the Temple doesn’t translate into humanitarian action, into the daily grind of kindness, it seems a rather pointless exercise, and little more than a few hours spent wearing a faith as though it is merely a religious jacket, to take on and off at will.

There is a wonderful movement called “Random Acts of Kindness”.  Quite simply, one performs a random selfless act, to make the wellbeing of a stranger just a little better. Creative friends of mine once spent a day randomly giving strawberries to strangers who looked unhappy.  Another gathered up as many elderly people as she could who were going to be alone over the Christmas holidays.  They all came to her table for the day. She had cancer at the time, yet doing this made her feel good and she lost her absorption in her own suffering for a while.  Along with the bunch of ole folks, she was able to enjoy the reality that we are deeply dependent on others, and that is not such a bad thing. In fact it’s a pleasure.  

There is a lovely little book called “Kindness”, where the authors assert, that children are born kind; that it is the family that is the primary site that children learn to value or fail to value kindness.  Highly self-involved parents teach their children the values of self-absorption.  Parents only interested in their children’s grades in examination, will of course fail to nourish their offspring’s moral development and humanity towards others. Yet sometimes, that brutality nurtures a compassion for others, learned through one’s own suffering.

One of the living Indian Saint’s from Kerala is called Amma.  She is known as the ‘Hugging Saint’ for the way she gives love by hugging people fifteen hours a day.  She lives and practices the most profound compassion and love for all of humanity, in providing numerous schools, hospitals and homes for those in dire need of care and consideration.  She lives a frugile existence in a room, just six feet by six feet. May be she will not change the world.  But she will have the joy of knowing that she is taking a slice of the world’s poverty and making it her responsibility.

She is the happiest person I have encountered.  People like Amma, existing with such few needs, disturb the consensus of the masses that kindness is sacrifice rather than pleasure. People who are highly generous to others, yet seem to have virtually nothing by way of our material standards of success, disturb us.  They rattle our theories about ourselves. They risk closeness and seem to be enjoying it. They are a threat.

Whatever the names of the mothers on the street are, whether one is called Anjali, another is called Pooja, and the other is called Parveen. I still wonder what your names are and what new kinds of conversations are possible.

"War, Suicide & Sublimation"

All humans carry a potent charge of aggressive energy and Freud believed that in the deployment of this energy, we generally have only a pair of choices. (Although there is another way that I’ll come onto later.)  Either we bottle-up the aggression, turn it on ourselves, inflicting a self-abusive narrative of doing something wrong for whatever it is we are feeling or experiencing. Our alternative, is to aim our aggression outwards towards the world at large and begin large or small-scale wars.

 In today’s Asian Age, there is a tragic story of a middle class wife who committed suicide by hanging herself from the ceiling fan.  Suicide is always an extreme version of aggression turned inward. The person is both a murderer (of themselves of course) and a victim of being murdered (by themselves of course).   Yet at the same time, there is a passive aggression towards those who are left behind – often hurt, bewildered, and likely to spend the rest of their lives wondering what they could have done to prevent this. 

Intensive bottling-up feelings, Freud believed, is a result of an overbearing “super-ego”, a part of oneself that issues overtly strong, often fixed messages of how one should behave.  Clients I see struggling to release themselves from the edicts of the superego often speak in a very tightly bound narrative – “I don’t like music”, “I have to stay with my husband even though he beats me”, “I’ll enjoy my life once I retire”.  Their language lacks creativity and often one sense’s an overriding sense of guilt should they do what truly makes them happy.  Perhaps rigid on their path that fits well with social norms, but perhaps not themselves, one often feels in the presence of a kind of masochism, a commitment to suffering and stubbornness that can infuriate others.  But as a French psychoanalytic teacher once reminded me, “never underestimate the lengths a masochist will go to, to be attacked”.   Masochists essentially get pleasure in being attacked – that’s their perversion, their “thing”.

The parting words of a man to his wife (who I knew), shortly before he committed suicide by standing in front of a train, were “I will do something that will make everyone hate you”.  Suicide always involves others in this way. Yet, the headline of today’s article, of the woman who has hanged herself from the ceiling fan, reads “Cops arrest husband for woman’s suicide”.  Her aggression not only turned inward, but outward, the result being that her husband is punished and imprisoned for something that she did.  I find this law rather absurd and in need of some review, particularly in light of the psychology of suicide and its violent element of punishing others.

We have choices if we find ourselves in miserable situations. When Brian Keenan was held hostage he told the world on his release “you can always take power – whatever is happening to you – even if it is a refusal to eat for a while”.  There is often a way out, that doesn’t involve this level of harm.  This woman has probably hurt her family members as well as her husband in a way from which they will likely never recover.  I find myself wondering if this law may in fact punishes people who are terribly distraught already.   

Whilst either one purge oneself of inner tensions by going to war in some way or another, or bottles-up to a degree that leads to a deep malaise or depression, Freud pointed out there is another way.  And that way is the arts of sublimation.  In the acts of sublimation, we convert our instinctual energy into writing, painting, science or some other artistic creation.  But Freud also pointed out that it is only those with intelligence and intellectual ability that are able to convert in this way.  Yesterday, at the Taj Hotel bookshop, opposite the Gateway of India, I came across a fantastic magazine called “Adbusters” (see Adbusters.org). It is a creative sublimation of energy and rage about the “perfect” idols and images in fashion and beauty advertisements.  One for example shows two rather perfectly carved faced boys, advertising Burberry clothes, with the text changed to “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”. 

So if you are feeling flooded by rage and like going to war over something or feeling deadened by the life you are living, sublimate!  Put down the bar of chocolate and the remote control.  Maybe that piece of prose, play with paints and colours, or pick up the drum you played as a child might give you a more creative solution to what it is that is troubling you.  And if you don’t know how to do that perhaps you need to see a psychologist.

"The Psychology of Corruption"

The Psychology of Corruption

The view that India is a society riddled with corruption and almost terminally crippled by it is a stereotype that is reinforced in the Indian newspapers on a daily basis. A brief glance at the front page of The Times of India newspaper this morning, I can see stories of bribing of MP’s votes in a nuclear deal and army officers found guilty of a housing scam.   Evidence of the perception – and the stereotype of corruption the country appeared in comments by two Indian Supreme Court justices during a 2007 bail hearing of a former state chief minister who had been sentenced for violating the Prevention of Corruption Act of 1988 “The only way to rid the country of corruption is to hang a few of them from a lamp post,” the justice declared adding, “Everywhere, we have corruption.  Nothing is free from corruption. Everybody wants to loot the country”.

Is rampant corruption merely a question of basic human immorality, or is there something more complex that happens in our relationships with one another and the ways in which we derive our self-esteem? A hugely popular social sport in the elite clubs of Bombay is to chatter about the extent to which the various clubs are corrupt, especially, how much a large brown envelope under the table should contain in order to gain membership.

Imagine if you will, in a mahogany walled meeting room of one of these old colonial clubs, the all-male, elderly Executive Committee are having their quarterly meeting, when suddenly, a man barges into the room and begins a lengthy tirade against the committee.  He is accusing them of gross misconduct and corruption in the form of receiving bribes from contractors and of giving free club membership to members of the police to get them “on-side”.  The Chairman, visibly frustrated, censors the dissenting voice by having the man forcibly removed from the room.  What this dissenting voice has to say is effectively silenced.  The Chairman then adjusts his tie, and instructs everyone to turn to item 78 on the agenda - whether to invest in an additional swing in the children’s area, near the pool area.  Without exception, everyone in the room is struggling to suppress an array of emotions, including the Chairman who continues to pet his tie in the way a child might pet a dog.

It is true to say of the executive committee that the dissenting voice is no longer among them; they are free from his presence, from his insulting laughter and his comments. But in some respects, nevertheless, the repression has been unsuccessful; for now he is making an intolerable exhibition of himself outside the room, and is shouting and banging on the door. More repression ensues as the security-staff are told to remove the man immediately.  Which after about 20 minutes, they do.

What this reminds us is that censorship and suppression never quite works effectively or compliantly. This is perhaps one of the most powerful teachings of psychoanalysis – that repression is rarely entirely successful.  That evening in the bar, the man who is dispelled from the room, along with fellow club members, are sipping their whiskey’s and begin to question the motives of the Chairman – “if the allegations aren’t true, why didn’t he let him talk?” says one person, adding “was he in on a deal?”   Of course, many others in the bar overhear the now animated conversation, the volume fuelled by alcohol so much so that a journalist is busy taking notes on his blackberry on the table behind them. Two days later, a news item appears with the headline “Corruption at One of India’s Elite Clubs”. 

But what of the expelled man who made the original accusations?  What happens to him now?  He is of course at home, not to be seen at the club, concerned whether some  officials might be exercising the real price for their ‘free’ memberships, by hurting him or a member of his family, as the anonymous phone call suggested.  Meanwhile, the Executive Committee decide it is important that they have the right to permanently evict any member from the club in the future, should they feel that they aren’t “Serving the interests of the club well”, whatever that means.  So at the next AGM, they propose an amendment to give the committee the powers to effectively dismiss any dissenting voice and essentially remove the members of their basic civil liberties.

Sadly in many working groups, dissenting voices are intolerable; to be silenced and or characterised as mad, in a manoeuvre to justify the expulsion of individual(s) and any accompanying more sinister acts that may ensue.  But why such terrorism towards dissention? Why such fear of thinking and speaking out?  According to Freud and I think this is a hugely neglected aspect of his work, many adults never acquire a true moral conscience.  In other words, what they have is no internalised prohibitions on their own behaviour, no true sense of feelings of guilt concerning how they behave or the consequences of their actions.  What these adults have instead is social anxiety. This social anxiety concerns firstly the fear of being caught doing the wrong thing in the eyes of one’s peers or social circle and secondly, a fear of loss of love which contains an inherent loss of regard by others.

So the herd-like behaviour, devoid of thinking, is essentially about a fear of not being loved.  Of course a person with a higher sense of self-esteem, of greater regard for oneself, is less likely to act immorally. After all, if your moral compass is strongly internal and of your own, you won’t need to receive your self-esteem from others or in a stack of bribes in quite the same way. What this also implies in my thinking is the best way to deal with people who lack a true moral conscience is to “out” them, or ostracise them and increase the very thing they fear most, social anxiety.  Of course, one might also attempt to emotionally hold a sense of rage, as well as, empathy.  Easier said than done perhaps. After all, it is the poor who suffer most at the hands of corruption.

"Psychoanalysis: The Science Of Love"

Psychoanalysis: The Science of Love

Psychoanalysis views extreme versions of excess as perhaps a cry for help. The man I sit with (and for obvious reasons I am fictionalising here) in my consulting room here in South Bombay is a highly successful entrepreneur in financial terms. Sadly, his fiancé left him over a year ago. Yet ever faithful to his illusions, he continues to mentally scheme and strategist ways to get her back. She is in fact, now married to someone else and has a child. This reality is simply too unbearable for him. He has entered the pretend play world of the child, rather than bare a functioning engagement with reality and avoid the difficult grief-work of acceptance and loss. What causes this sort of hallucination? Over time, I learn that as a child when he turned to his mother to say tell her he could not sleep, or was frightened by a bad dream, her response, rather than to enter into some sort of comprehension of his emotional world, or comfort, she would more often than not, completely negate his feelings with rather severe comment, “you’re fine, nothing will happen to you,”.

As a child he spent much of his time in the fantasy world of computer games, alone in his room. Drugs, especially cocaine, add another method of further cutting off from reality, a disorientating fuel for his romantic and the grandiose illusions. Each drug binge leaves my client with a sense of yet further depletion of his sense of self and any meaning from his real life. It brings a sort of self-disgust that often leads to yet another drug-spree. The challenge of working with this man is that he is obstinate, rather deceitful to himself and has great difficulty learning from his experience.

When two millionaire brothers compete with one another to accumulate as much land and property as they can, it is far too simplistic to view this as merely a vulgar display of wealth. Again, psychoanalysis complicates matters. In the analytic space, we learn that as children, the brothers were regularly graded as to their performance at school during the week. Their father would shout, pointing a finger, “you are an ‘A’” to one child and “you are a ‘D’” to the other. This harshness of parenting seems not uncommon in the clients I see in this City. No doubt, the well intentioned father was trying to drive the boys to achieve more. However, rather than help them gauge their success based on an internal compass that asks “are you doing your best here,” the competition is externalised and the enemy that stands between succeeding or failing is identified: one’s own brother. Without some sort of working through the effects of this early training in rivalry, the skylines of the City will continue to be marked by the symbols of their childhood experience.

The guiding principles of psychoanalysis, is that our basic psychological framework for trusting others is formed in the relationship with our primary caregivers, typically our parents of course. In the site of the family, we develop a prototype for later relations. In that family setting, we learn and develop internal working models or theories if you to like, to make predictions of how other people will respond. In a healthy family, you are likely to hear frank communication of the parents own working models, spoke aloud, such as “I seem to think that if you stay out late tonight, something might happen to you…” Yet this sort of communication is perhaps rare in many families and instead - there is a defensive exclusion of information - important things that need to be said, are not said. When parents, sadly pretend things are not as they in fact are, to a degree that is a sort of farce, it may be just too unbearable for the child to think about.  When the memory that is supplied by those around him is experienced as vastly different from the child’s experience, the family narrating one thing, but the child knowing something else, a place of non-though provides the comfort to temporarily protect the child from mental pain, or confusion or conflict. This is what might be going on when we see children who appear to be excessively wilful, or indeed excessive will-less. It is a recipe of course, for the child to seek safety and comfort in getting lost in a world of fantasy, devoid of reality, a childhood way of coping with what is just too unbearable to think about.    

In a sense, this is a recipe for the child and soon to be adult, in learning to become a fake, a master of disguise.  What the child (now adult?) most longs for, is that when reaching out for comfort that he or she receive love and attention and support to independently explore the world. Without this sort of support, the child develops an internal model of themselves as both untrustworthy and incompetent. Distant caregiving involves distancing from oneself. It sets the norm where real contact with reality is diverted in fantasy production, and nullifies a healthy curiosity for self-understanding.

So it is here in the family that we learn the essence of how to relate to one another, and how to form close attachments not only with others but with ourselves. Healthy love relationships delight us, give us confidence and support us.

This close emotional bonding is what we call love and the scientific study of love and how it develops has its roots in psychoanalysis.

"Psychoanalysis & The Indian Property Boom"

Psychoanalysis & the Indian Property Boom
 

Psychoanalysis essentially bursts a bubble. There are mutterings in The Times of India today that home sales in the City are dropping by 50%, with the chairman of Knight Frank, global property consultants commenting that “Developers are in denial mode”. A friend shares with me that the interest on many of the property developer’s loans is in the region of 40%. Psychoanalysis is the voice of dissention. It speaks of what might otherwise remain hidden, out of sight, lingering in the corner of one’s mind, or in jokes or in dreams. Freud, a Jew, who died two weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War, in 1939, was naturally, if not by circumstance alone, fascinated by the workings of power. The belief that cool-headed reason could rule the world, it would seem, was revealed to be nothing more than a failure, a fantastic dream in itself, as the catastrophe gathered across Europe. Psychoanalysis offered something else. More than the simple workings of any single individual, he asked what leads to our collective delusions. How do otherwise competent individuals, seem to lose their ability to think rationally and critically when they form a group? How does a group fantasy, a grandiose story of itself take such a hold of its members?

One of the most powerful group fantasies to be found in every corner of the world has to be the collective belief that property and land prices will endlessly rise. Here in India, I am told that buying land is often preferred to laying money in untrustworthy Indian banks. I’m also told that in the Punjab region, there are some who still bury gold in their land as the safest depository.

But does psychoanalysis and the virtual collapse of the Irish economy have something to offer our thinking about property booms and the trajectory for India? In the lead up to the Irish spectacular downturn, Morgan Kelly, Professor of Economics, at University College Dublin, wrote an article for the Irish Times suggesting that the “it is not implausible that Irish real estate prices could fall, relative to income, by 40-50 percent”. He was ignored. The signal that concerned him, was that his young students, barely out of graduate school, suddenly became the ‘expert-voices’ making their pronouncements and predictions on the Irish economy. When he wrote a second article along the same lines for wider circulation with the Irish Independent, it was rejected on the grounds that the article was offensive and they would not publish it. They wrote, “You are either for us or against us”. Essentially, the moment you cease to believe that property prices will rise forever, that it has become terrible long-term investment the market will crash. On the 29^th September 2008 the value of stock of the three main Irish banks fell between a fifth and a half in a single trading session. A fifth of the Irish workforce was employed in building, nearly a quarter of the country’s GDP construction industry. His dissenting voice was only picked up later when the Irish crash he had predicted happened, throwing an economy, a community and its people into chaos. Twenty four property developers committed suicide.

What psychoanalysis offers us is a way to make sense of a collective withdrawal into fantasy which led to the crash of the Irish economy. Fantasies have a dissociative quality, a numbing, deadening way of taking oneself away from oneself and one’s true reality. This place of illusion, John Steiner referred to as a “psychic retreat”, medication against the invasion of reality into a comforting place of non-thought. Yet psychoanalysis heeds a cautionary word that our development of more critical consciousness, with clear distinctions, is a journey fraught with obstacles. These go by the name of “resistance.” Resistance hardens over time. To coin a popular phrase, we are “stuck in our ways”. Resistance defends both against something and for something else. Most of all Freud warns of our resistance to living fulfilled engaged lives as we “cling to our disease”.

The rather crude stereotype of the Irish is that they have the “Gift of the Gab”, a tendency to use very descriptive colourful, visionary, optimistic language, rather than the more factual, evidence-based style of speaking. As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips points out, there is no magic cure, pointing out that “ideally it (psychoanalysis) enables you to realise why you’re prone to believe in magic and why you shouldn’t, because to believe in magic is to attack your own intelligence”.

Be cautious of believing in magic and Irish fairies. Here in Mumbai, there’s a real estate company called “Magic Bricks”.

"Welcome to "Bewildered in Bombay"

Welcome to “Bewildered in Bombay”, a blog written by a psychologist who lives and works in the city.  My intention here is to share ideas, thoughts and resources I've come across in my travels as a I arrive, settle-in and tentatively begin to belong in this city. My fascination which is profoundly well-fed here is with post-colonial dynamics and what it might mean to be a cosmopolitan citizen. You don't need an Indian identity to identify with and have passion for this country. It’s my belief that the most profound theoretical device for helping us to make sense of a "growing" India, globalization and the confusions, aspirations, losses, gains and hates that emerge, is through psychoanalysis. And here in the course of the blog I’ll share why I feel this, and introduce you to some interesting thinkers I've had the pleasure of learning from.


So is it ‘Bombay on the Couch’ a friend asked?  We’ll see.  Mostly it feels like I’m on the couch, disorientated, confused - hence naming the blog “Bewildered in Bombay”. I hope you enjoy the blog, and that it’ll bring you a little closer to an experience of the city and some useful thoughts about the psychology of things.


Let me now tell you a little about Bombay, or I should say Mumbai, its official Hindi name!  It is a huge metropolis of a city brimming with extremes, as jarring as they are incongruous.  The nouveau rich lavish luxury on themselves unmatched in any medieval court.  The combined wealth of roughly 70 Indian billionaires is more than a fifth of national gross domestic product, a concentration of wealth far greater than almost anywhere apart from Russia. It is here in Bombay that vast numbers of destitute immigrants from different corners of India struggle to exist in shacks pitched on pavements, beside railway tracks or over putrid rivers of sewage, battling against bureaucrats, degradation and the raw unfairness of daily life in pursuit of dreams and imagined riches. It is boggling to the senses, and can feel hard on one’s heart to understand how this can be.


The population of this city is close to the 20 plus million people that inhabit Australia. Yet there is a sense that the Gods are always close-by; in the man singing his Bhajan as he cycles past you and smiles, in the endless festivals that worship one God or another. At weddings, services are conducted by Hindu pandits, but often people’s heads are turned towards the cricket on the TV in the background. Yet this morning I watched someone praying under an old Banyan tree, it’s branch-like roots reaching down to the ground. In crowds, faces look up at you and smile an implicit “Namaste”; the God in me greets the God in you, or something like that. It feels so very fearless of tomorrow, flexible and so deeply inhabiting of the "now". I walk past the makeshift Sai Baba temple.  It is constructed from a few sticks of bamboo and plastic sheeting, tied to what is ostensibly the corner shop.  No matter what time one is wandering about, a candle is always burning bright.


On mornings like today, I cannot imagine I will ever leave this City.  The characters I meet on the street-life of the City are warm, expressive full of eye-contact and seem genuinely pleased to see you.  But they are of course the poor.  Many of the rich don’t leave the comfort of their chauffeur-driven cars.  An elderly man from Kerala, in the South of India, who I meet on the street tells me that people are becoming more unhappy in his homeland these days.  When I ask him why, he tells me, “they have money now”.