Indian Cleanliness

One paradox about India that has puzzled me for the longest time is the situation here with cleanliness. One one hand most streets have a gutter of disgusting water, littered with garbage running down the side of the road. But in the morning you will see shopkeepers out meticulously sweeping their shops and making sure that everything is perfectly clean. Piles of trash are common on the streets, but the marble floor of our 15 dollar a night hotel is hand mopped by a guy on his knees with a rag several times a day.

This may be incorrect, but my observation has been that Indians seem to have a very distinct separation between the places that are their responsibility and should be clean and places that they are not responsible for and therefore they don't care about. I would suspect this is why the shopkeeper is so careful to keep the little concrete step in front of his shop clean, even if there is a smoldering pile of trash one meter away.

There are even places within rooms that are on various sides of this clean separation. In the room I am in right now the marble floor is perfectly clean, as is the desk the computer is on. However, the little windows that let the only sunlight in the room have not been cleaned in forever.

The one impotent thing to take from this as a westerner in India I think is that you often cannot judge a book by its cover. The outside walls of most buildings fall into the not cared for category because they face public areas and therefore are OK to be filthy. But, the inside can be very well cared for, and that does not seem to be an odd contradiction to the average Indian.