India has it all there—every aspect of existence laid bare, nothing tucked away. Squeeze millions of people into a dense urban space and the city erupts with what I can only call life-things. It’s an inadequate term for something visceral and overwhelming, but consider: everyone needs shelter, food, community. Everyone produces waste—bodily, material, structural. Buildings crumble mid-construction and stay that way. Sidewalks crack and buckle. Garbage accumulates in corners. Human waste finds its way into gutters. Stray dogs sleep in the shade of temples. The sacred and profane don’t just coexist—they’re indistinguishable, inseparable.
Then layer in the spiritual: temples where people gather at dawn, cremation ghats where bodies burn openly by the river, that same river where others bathe and pray downstream. Birth, death, worship, commerce, decay—it’s all happening simultaneously, in plain view, without apology.
The West has a different approach. We manicure. We sweep streets before dawn so you wake to the illusion of cleanliness. We tow abandoned cars within hours. We push the homeless to the edges, out of sight. We regulate relentlessly—where you can park, where you can piss, where construction debris can sit, how loud you can be and when. We create the impression that life is orderly, that its messier aspects happen elsewhere, managed by someone else, on a schedule you’ll never see.
In India, that illusion breaks down completely. Or maybe it was never constructed in the first place. Even the roads operate on a different logic. There are no real lanes, no strict rules about who goes where. The only principle: don’t hit anyone. Everything else is negotiation. Honking becomes language. Space becomes fluid.
What strikes me isn’t that India is chaotic—that’s the lazy Western take. It’s that India refuses to hide what’s always been true: life is all of this, all at once. The beautiful and the rotting. The holy and the profane. The thriving and the dying. We just choose, in other places, to keep them in separate rooms.
Colin