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I think Kulak had posted that here on the Motte too, and given that I have a rather high threshold for discomfort, I sat and watched through most of it. I'm going off memory, because it's definitely not worth watching a second time.
The short answer is: It's full of shit. Pun perhaps intended.
You're being treated to a lowlight reel lovingly amassed by 4chan of all the wretchedness and misery a poor nation of 1.4 billion people has to offer. Did the incidents depicted happen? I expect so, it's not trivial at all to deepfake all of that. I expect that budget was blown on free ElevenLabs credit.
It is however, not remotely representative of a single human's existence in the subcontinent. Or what you might observe passing through. It's as honest as compiling reels of SF fent addicts drowning in their own feces and triumphantly depicting it as an accurate representation of Americana as a whole.
For fuck's sake. I am often the first to criticize India, and am bearish on its future. That doesn't mean the country is a literal cesspit. It's a highly diverse, unequal nation where billion dollar privately owned skyscrapers tower over slums. The majority of Indians lead a difficult, but reasonably optimistic life, one that wouldn't strike a Westerner as being devoid of experiences worth living. We're poorer, we live in a corrupt and polluted land, we've got funny accents and an Eternal September to end all the rest when internet access became cheaper than bottled water. We're not savages, not en-mass.
No.
No when it's 4chan writing the script.
I can assure you that I have spent the majority of my life in the country having seen precisely zero gang rapes or public sexual assault (if someone got their ass pinched in front of me, I've yet to notice). The number of times I've seen someone defecate in public is a number between 1 and 3, and that's a conservative number because I can't rule out never having seen it. Let he in the West who has never seen evidence of human feces on the street cast the first stone.
The majority of Indians, even Hindus, have no truck with the consumption of cow feces and urine. They're fucking weirdos to the rest of us.
Let us be thankful that this particular example certainly doesn't.
If it's not obvious, it isn't that bad. I might be upper middle-class, but I'm not blind, and have used my fair share of public transport and gone out into the boonies and slums on many an occasion. It's not a post-apocalyptic movie out there, it's just dirty and congested.
Leave aside power-washing, unless you're using a backed up septic tank as your water source, you can't ridicule the country this badly.
I'm reasonably certain that even the terminally online would forget its existence in a week.
"Only a fool would take anything posted on 4chan as a fact".
Eh, probably not? What's the West supposed to do, tactical airstrike us with bunker-buster portapotties? India is dysfunctional in a rather coup-complete way, or perhaps AGI-complete.
Foreign aid is unlikely to fix our actual issues. Political pressure is of dubious utility, though like SF miraculously divesting itself of the homeless when Xi paid a visit, some foreign scrutiny can't hurt. Unless the West is willing to invade and annex a country where the average person doesn't have an utterly miserable life, what's to be done? We're not North Korea.
In a slower world, we would slowly keep rising up the ranks till we were comfortably middle-income. It seems unlikely events will play out that way.
Call me self-serving and biased if you will, but the kindest thing the more fortunate denizens of the West can do is let some of us on the raft. Selectively, with skilled immigrants first and foremost, I don't ask for charity. Indians Not In India are much luckier Indians on the whole. Fuck brain-drain, if the country wants to keep us, it better make it worth our time to stay. And a non-negligible proportion of those who could trivially leave, don't.
At the very least, I attempt to be a decent denizen of where I'm at. No street-shitting for me, though I can cop guilty to taking a leak on someone's fence at the dead of night after dragging myself home, subsequent to crawling more pubs than was good for me. An honest Scottish pastime, someone gift me a kilt already.
This was my first reaction too. It's got a bit of a Cormac McCarthy problem of the "gritty realism" of history consisting of the worst things anyone ever had happen to them.
Europe seems to have a far more common relationship with public urination than the United States. A Singaporean friend told me he was sure he'd be arrested for that back home. Americans generally try to find a side street or hide behind somebody. Spaniards just find a storm drain.
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God bless you sir!
Thanks for the thoughtful reply! It seems to mostly fit my priors.
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