On Bangkok (or Why Indian cities should be like this one)

Thoughts on Bangkok - bottom line, I wish Indian cities were like this one.

- public transport, underground, sky train, motopods, taxis are clean, efficient, reliable and have air con (not motopods and tuk tuks obviously)
- traffic is crazy at peak hours but everyone obeys traffic laws, drives within lanes and no crazy Indian style obnoxious honking, at all
- everyone uses public transport not just the population at the bottom of the hierarchy
- taxis and tuk tuks are super clean. It always amazes me how and why Indian taxis are so gross.
- streets are clean and so walkable.
- people do not have a bad BO problem
- I can eat from a hole in the wall or a street cart and not get Delhi belly. 3 days in Bombay with a frankie and vada pao knocked me out! The hole in the wall places might be small in Bangkok but unlike their Indian counterpart they are clean - try out the nizam place behind Taj in Calcutta and I promise you the sight of it will make you give up food for a week even if the nizam roll there was pretty phenomenal.

Observing the way bangkok runs, makes me wonder whether we Indians are innately smelly, unhygienic and incapable of long term innovation beyond quick fix jugaad.

The Bombay I spent my summers in is now just a growing dust bin. I don't care how many fancy malls and swish hotels come up, the streets are filthy and infrastructure poor. The beaches I grew up on building sand castles are not only covered by tarmac now but also filthy. Observing Ganpati being celebrated in the city unfortunately only brought out the worst of its character. I can't imagine how Mumbaikers have the patience to live through it year after a year - a festival that is clearly so politicised that it has lost all cultural and religious value.

Consider Delhi, my old home. That I prefer Delhi to Bombay today is unambiguous but despite the metro, the new roads and the city being cleaned up since I lived there 15 years ago, fundamentally life hasn't changed. The features of Bangkok that make me admire it so much are entirely missing in Delhi as well.

Certain differences between BKK and Indian metros can perhaps be forgiven or be written off due to my jaded view of India or, arguably, unreasonably high expectations of where it should have been today. However, I don't believe it's possible to accept or justify why the quality of written English of national newspapers is so very poor. I was pretty disappointed reading 5-6 different newspapers in Delhi and Bombay and observing that celebrity gossip is given more space and importance than national issues. Also the space allocated to celebrity endorsements makes reading a newspaper plain irritating. The quality of analysis is certainly very poor as well. On top of that poor grammar too? English is a national language, how can this be accepted?

I leave bangkok in a day from now and expect to do so with much respect for the city. If Bangkok with its "Asian" ways, so very similar to India, can create and sustain such a living environment, we Indians really need to stop kidding ourselves and actually make India Incredible rather than just delude ourselves that she is so already. The chaos used to be amusing but now it's just embarrassing.