How We Live

From India Today's cover story 'How We Live' (registration required), based on information from the latest Indian Census:

... There are 179 million residential houses in India-that is about six people to each house. About 40 per cent of Indian families live in one-room houses. ... There are more places of worship in the country (2.4 million) than schools, colleges and hospitals combined. ...

People in India don't seem to buy as many cars, TVs and refrigerators as was once anticipated. That is despite income levels having risen much faster in the 1990s than ever before. Here's one explanation: Only 52 per cent people in the country live in houses with permanent walls and roof. Only 56 per cent have electricity at home, just 38 per cent have water. When incomes of these families grow they may like to add these amenities rather than buy a consumer product. ...

Relative to their incomes, Indians enjoy fewer basic amenities-drinking water, power, cooking fuel-than they own consumer products. Sixty-two per cent of families (that is 118 million households) do not get drinking water at home. About five million families-mostly rural-still fetch drinking water from ponds, tanks, rivers and springs. Urban India does better though with 65 per cent of all families living in cities having access to drinking water at home. But the Census tracks only the access, not the duration or the quality of water supplied. ...

Against 88 per cent households in urban areas, only 44 per cent rural families have access to electricity. ...

India was a country of 1,027 million people in 2001. Nearly 40 per cent of Indians (402 million) are in the working age and 15 per cent in the age group of 0-6 years. ...

firewood is still the most widely used fuel with over 52.5 per cent Indians depending on it. Surprisingly even 23 per cent urban families use firewood for cooking. LPG, whose price swings are a headache for any government, is used by only around 18 per cent families (48 per cent urban households). The use of crop residue as fuel by more than 10 per cent rural households is an instance of recycling. ...

Homes without kitchen or toilets have TVs and two-wheelers. Manufacturers say that inadequacy of electricity-and not insufficiency of income-is a bigger restraint on the demand for their products. ...


Want to see the website of a Tamil film? Try Vaanam Vasappadum (The Sky Can be Controlled) (via scribbles of a lazy geek). The director is P. C. Sreeram, who started out as a cinematographer. He worked on a number of films, including several by my favourite director, Mani Ratnam before making films of his own. Take a look.

Buddha Poornima

Today is the birthday of Gautama Buddha, which is celebrated on the full moon in the month of Vaishakh. Here are two poems in his praise from Sanskrit Poetry From Vidyakara's Treasury, translated by Daniel H. H. Ingalls:


May that victorious moment of the Buddha save you
when the soldier Mara, weapons rendered impotent,
screwed up his courage to that pitch
where, angry, he would swallow up the sacred head,
but then within a jewel of the wondrous crown
did see his own wide-open-mouthed reflection,
at sight of which his courage failed.

--Sri Pasavarman


For whom the thousand shining eyes
of Indra falling at his lotus feet,
fulfill the rite of offering
a wreath of dark blue waterlilies;
for whom the rays of wondrous light
from diadems of prostrate gods
compose a new and saintly robe; may he,
the Sakya Saint, protect you.

--Vasukalpa

The Cat Catcher

A man carrying a long pole with a metal loop on the end told Bahadur that he was a cat catcher, and Bahadur let him inside the gate without question. He was after a stray cat which had been coming in and out. The cat jumped over a wall, the man also departed. Ramesh reprimanded Bahadur for letting all and sundry walk in the gate, and Bahadur erupted with a tirade “ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya,” which goes on until you interrupt him and repeat what you have just said. Then he goes muttering away – one of many crochety individualists who have worked in our house.

I was struck by the image of the cat catcher, roaming with a long stick, always on the lookout and trying to outsmart those swift creatures. (That loop of wire looked nasty, though.) The man was young, with a mop of curly hair, a ragged green plaid lungi. He left smiling, as though being a cat catcher was a fine thing.