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Notes -
I had much the same argument with my sister about cleaning up San Francisco and she simply refused to concede that any San Francisco elites actually care about stepping over human waste on their way to the office. Perhaps it's the same in India.
In San Francisco at least one can point to some kind of ‘war’ among the elite, with intense power struggles over the lax treatment of the homeless and some tech lords taking strong, opposing political stances, Alex Soros getting involved, the drama around the DA recall and school board stuff, national politicians using it as a key indicator, huge dissent within Silicon Valley etc. Yes, it’s still a dump, but also (a) the nice parts like Pac Heights where rich people live are mostly still ‘relatively’ clean and (b) it’s a major topic of conversation. In Mumbai there is no great public obstacle to cleaning the streets, people don’t worship garbage the way the left worships homeless vagrants in major progressive cities in the US. In India generally there is some religious sensitivity around curbing the rights of cows specifically, but they’re not the main issue and there are solutions acceptable to religious conservatives.
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