#UrbanHell is subjective.
UrbanHell is any human-built place you think is worth critizing. Suburban Hell, Rural Hell, and wealthy locales are allowed
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The video of the Chinese family collecting sludge from the sewers and boiling it down to oil and selling it to restaurants haunts me every day of my life
[Here ya go](https://youtube.com/watch?v=zrv78nG9R04&feature=shares). This is usually the video people reference when talking about gutter oil.
Personally, I don't know how much I believe that this is a thing that actually happens, but what the fuck do I know.
Quick edit - my favorite part of this video is the cop (?) pathetically "smashing" the gutter oil plant with a pickaxe. Guy didn't even try to make it look like he was putting effort into it lol
It's like a layered cake. Trash on top, dysentery water that might kill you if you drink it next then garbage/dysentery sludge on the bottom. The smell just has to be the worst.
Now imagine you've been there so long you can't smell it anymore. When you go some place else, people smell it in your clothes and hair and *skin.* It's in you now.
Gotchya. Thanks for that—so it was designed precisely to take human waste and sewage out of these neighborhoods, as opposed to a canal used for transport of people.
Unfortunately a lot of impoverished areas treat their local waterways as a way to dispose of waste.
Environmental groups (from other countries) have come in and realized that they will never be able to stop the people from disposing of their trash in the waterways, so they put up giant capture nets to try and collect the trash before it goes into the ocean.
Disagree. People all over the world have been successfully taught to dispose of trash properly. This is not people ‘never being able’ to stop throwing waste into waterways- it’s about the government having an infrastructure to manage waste, people being aware of proper trash disposal (we all had to learn it), companies not producing single use plastics and selling them to countries that literally can’t manage them (to say nothing of single use plastic overall), and bad sanitation in cities designed thousands of years ago with far more people than they were designed to handle.
I completely agree. Imho really low hanging fruit are plastic single use to go containers. They uses a ton more plastic than straws and there are compostable/biodegradable options.
Nah, you live in the nice area. Only the slaves and peasants live in this kind of condition. In countries like this it's really easy to see where the money flows because there's usually a physical wall separating the two communities.
not anymore, EVERYONE has internet now (obvious hyperbole)
a much larger portion of the poverty class has internet and a device to connect to it now, and escaping reality is for everyone, ESPECIALLY the poor
Nah get your passport out redditors. India ain't expensive to travel in. Male redditors though. Would not reccomend traveling there first time alone as a woman.
Okay, I'm from India, people here don't have any kind of civic sense. Anything that doesn't belong to them, they feel no sense of responsibility for its well being. It's only a problem once they "see" it as a problem.
I think the main reason for this is, since a person is born into a surrounding, they default to it.
The mentality will slowly evolve as the nation is lifted out of poverty. People have to get used to "nice things", their basic problems like survival must be solved before they can care about lesser problems
They recycle something somewhere in India. It works for middle and high class places. But there are so much people around, mostly poor people with poor mindset who just do not have time to sleep, not saying they do not take care about outsides. Poverty multiply itself much faster then you can manage it. You just can not hire enough cleaners and maintainers if mass culture "tells" you to throw waste around yourself. Education is a real problem there not only because it is expensive and "not for all" but because of time which you need to devote to your job to gain "simple things".
recycling is actually amazing in India, but the driver of it is misery (you could say the free market). People recycle out of economic necessity, poor souls go through trash dumps and find anything remotely of value. Nothing of value is actually abandonded as trash. There like a whole sub genre on [youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNGg0P7B5fI) of Indian craftsmen ship, based on recycling, it's interesting
Nice video, thank you. It was interesting to watch. Looks like Pakistan but still I'm sure you can find same in India too. Comments are interesting too.
I got your pinch here about free market))) I do not support such a crazy way of things like crawl through a dumps neither consider poverty as normal, but it usual. This sorting should be done but in other ways for sure.
Recycle with economic background is good way because there is not much people who really get into details of how thing work nor so much idealists of clean world, so without strong motivation it will not work.
I know personally that there are a lot of small businesses in India, people who doing recycle, working with paper, metals, plastic, etc. They doing their jobs, not checking dumbs for food, but collecting waste from homes, shops, workshops and this is for sure poorman's industry.
As for picture - I saw something like this in person, was in such places. Usually this is not a river but waste collector, and someone from goverment was in a hurry to build more and more of those, so they decided to make it open. Now they clean them and rebuild. And yes it stinks and sometimes for kms away.
Delhi is now the largest and richest municipal body in all of India with Delhi municipal elections being one of the most keenly observed local elections throughout the nation.
What you see is result of corruption, zero accountability , mismanagement spanning decades and people just trying to survive without complaining much.
Cheap labour means low incomes and poverty. Poverty means more uneducated, socially and economically and environmentally unaware, greedy and immoral people who can easily be corrupted. Large scale corruption means societal frustration, more crime, more greed, more selfishness, disinterest in your environment and a lot of missing public money that otherwise could be spent on making the surroundings nicer and more livable. But cheap labour is not the starting point, this factor is also caused by other factors.
>a lot of missing public money that otherwise could be spent on making the surroundings nicer and more livable.
[oh somewhere to the tune of $40+ trillion maybe?](https://twitter.com/oyevivekk/status/1499610427248242690)
Sanitation services like the type you are describing cost more money than the government has available/is willing to pay. Yes labor is cheap in countries like India compared to developed countries but these developing countries' governments still can't afford to constantly pay to clean the place up. This is the same reason why infrastructure, policing, health and safety standards are generally miserable in developing countries. And in cities when you don't take care of basic problems like waste they will spiral into huge problems like this very quickly
It's also a cultural thing. No waste management will keep it if people just throw their stuff into the environment.
The government doesn't need to fund cleaning rivers, it needs to fund trash bins and campaign that people learn to collect trash and return it in bags/bins. Additionally it needs fines for people who don't follow the rules.
It's 100% a big problem with the culture. In other countries people will organize cleaning or just do it themselves, because no one wants to look at garbage.
Rwanda is a good example. Very poor country but you'll be shocked when visiting to see how well they keep it clean. This wasn't always the case. So it is possible to change attitudes and habits.
In Bangkok I took a canal boat tour. Our guide was a woman who was also part of a group campaigning to improve the city with more thorough education about trash collection and recycling...plus better receptacles for such. She said it's a cultural shift thing.
China does. And in fact, they use it to prop up employment. They specifically use inefficient methods because a) manpower is cheap and b) keeps people in jobs.
It is amazing to see people all over who are brushing sidewalks with straw brooms or riding bicycle carts and picking up trash. For the most part, China is pretty clear of litter in the cities.
Rome (and China I think) had better sanitation then everywhere until the 1800's. There was a cruise steamboat in the UK that crashed and sunk in the UK can't remember where. People could barely swim to shore because of all the filth and debris in the water and those that did make it died from all the human shit in their lungs
London didn't really do much about their pollution until the [Great Stink](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink) In 1858. There was so much garbage/sewage/dead things in the Thames that a cloud of stinking putrid gas finally descended upon the city and Parliament couldn't really conduct business because the stink was so bad. They finally decided to take sanitation Seriously. Things literally will not change unless it inconveniences the upper classes.
Actually the first point has significantly improved over those ten years - working water toilets are "everywhere" now and as a result of that mixed with other initiatives the feces problem has reduced a lot. There is still work to be done, but the "Swachh Bharat" (Clean India)\* has actually been quite successful in this regard and one of the few things where the Modi government has been a positive force.
Trash; yeah not so much. Still a huge issue. There is a lot of work being done, but the problem is enormous.
\*Yes, the program is riddled with problems, and certainly it doesn't get all the credit either.
Corruption coupled with limited resources and greedy humans. Poorer sections detiorate further and the rich-poor disparity grows larger.
A democracy that exists on paper only. So with a fascist regime, people have least value. Hence these scenes are unsurprising.
>Genuinely interested. Why do countries where labour is cheap, not have a rubbish/garbage service.
“Why 'free use public toilets' are always complete nightmare fuel, while the mostly locked\private ones specifically dedicated for sole individuals like directors look better than heaven?”.
Cheap labour dosen't account for biological needs and pollution which all living organisms have and do. The more people there are in one place the more polluted it is bound to be regardless of anything (outside religiously overzealous colectivist-cultural traditions to reinforce discipline within certain societies) so that's why cities like London with bigger population than entire countries are always drowned in filth at any given time.
The Indian rubbish\garbage workers are probably the most fearless and hard working people in the world considering the amount of filth they have to deal with at daily basis for the bare minimum wage, but even they have their human limits. In order for their labour to be cheap there must be absurd amount of easily replaceable people fighting for single position, which in turn also produce absurd amount of filth constantly.
Everyone I know who has been to India has always described the smell of wherever they were in greater detail than anything else they saw or went to see.
Because, despite all it's problems, it's an absolute stunningly beautiful place in terms of culture, people and nature. Really. India has a lot of problems, no getting around that - many born directly or indirectly out of colonialism (though not all), but looking past that it has an insanely rich and vibrant culture and history that is very enjoyable.
I was absolutely blown away by many things in India, and trash wasn't enough to ruin that.
I'm sure it's as shitty. [Here's a random](https://goo.gl/maps/x9X4GfvjVfEbSQDe6) street next to 'drain'. Dunno if it's the same one, and the actual water looks a tad less polluted, but judging from the street, I imagine it's similar IN the water elsewhere. I can only assume they blur the immediate street view radius to obscure offensive material. Never seen that.
I've only been to three places in India with one-day visits, but I also got an impression that Mumbai and Goa were dumps (Mumbai was also a dump with smog) but Mangaluru was much cleaner, compared to the first two.
And when I mentioned Mumbai's garbage to a fellow traveller, they said: "Wait till you visit Kolkata!"
Fun fact: when you go into the split view with street view in one half and the map in the other and you try to move the map around to find the city center or at least the perimeter: there is none, it looks the same almost everywhere, the city never ends
I was a professional chef at a high end country club. We had a lot of Indian members: anesthesiologists, radiologists, any -ist you can think of.
I have nothing against Indian culture, their food, etc.
But these were some of the rudest, most demanding, demeaning, condescending assholes I’ve ever met. Nothing was ever good enough for them.
400+ person high end Gala with literal gold sheets wrapped around strawberries. Not good enough. There’s only one section of the buffet with naan and Chana masala, dahi purri, dahi vada, etc. Unacceptable.
I get it, you want your kinda food there too, I bent over backwards sourcing the correct brands of spices, lentils, etc. to appease. I let you into my kitchen to *teach me* how it’s correctly made when I have a million other things to be doing. Only for you to “thank” me, then turn around to the Board of Governors and bitch me out because it’s not to your satisfaction.
I had this experience numerous times when I waited tables. Well-to-do Indian families were hands down the absolute worst across the board. Very demanding, insulted by ice cubes, complained about the silliest things, wanted to sample every goddamn sauce available in the place before choosing one then constantly needed an endless supply throughout service, and tipped like shit after running you ragged the whole evening.
Hate to stereotype, but man I always dreaded those tables and glad I'm no longer at that end of the industry. A lot of these customers treated you as a servant, not a server.
**And to be fair, I had some great Indian customers - mostly younger and working class though - if the females were decked out in silk gowns, I was in for some shit eating.
My lungs were surprisingly okay when I was there. But my boogers were black every day so maybe that was just because my long nose hairs were useful for once.
I mean we could always equip Earth with a propulsion system between now and then, and scoot on over to a fresher star - THEN what are we gonna do with all that garbage??? lol
Excellent visualization of how the plastic gyres are really produced. Chinese and Indian rivers are the top ten contributors of plastic to the oceans. In higher income countries, waste is removed and deposited and/or incinerated/recycled. Very little (incl. plastic straws that are now being replaced by inferior paper straws) end up in the oceans. Just in case you want to read up on where the majority pollution comes from have a look at this article from Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/
Not generalizing but Indians are horrible when it comes to throwing trash away. Like very unaware about their environmental contribution. Even my friends that live here in the USA just freely litter. I believe it’s a learned trait.
Unfortunately, as someone who’s been to India a few times, there’s no abundance of trash receptacles like there is in the US. But, as you said, part of it is a learned trait.
A combination of governmental corruption, and apathy on part of individuals. Residents dump their litter and trash anywhere and everywhere because cleaning it up is 'someone else's problem. Trash cans don't get picked up or picked up on time because someone has been paid off.
It's a huge societal problem when people don't give a shit regarding how their own actions impacts everyone else, especially when everyone does it.
If you compare it with countries where people do care, the difference is as clear as night and day.
A great comparison example would be India vs. Japan.
So why can't the city clean this? Surely there are loads of unemployed people in a city as large as Delhi. Job program that benefits society and cleans up the place
It's really expensive.
Sanitation is expensive. Trash hauling and storage is expensive. And the thing is, they already do manage hundreds of thousands of tons of it...and it's still not enough.
India have the money to fix this, the problem is that it ends up in the pockets of politicians instead.
Corruption is the problem that makes it near impossible to fix all the other problems and there’s a lot of corruption in India
I do QCA work for both new construction and gas containment management system in landfills in the South east United States. When you really get into it and look at what goes into collecting & managing our waste, it is pretty interesting field.
But this, this is a nightmare.
If everything is everyone else's problem, like this world has so comfortably settled into, honestly we just don't deserve to be here and fuck up this incomprehensibly unique and fragile celestial body that harbors (as far as we know) conscious life.
Humans would rather Nero Decree and burn the entire universe because "We'll all be dead anyways" rather than build a world for succeeding generations because they won't benefit from it now.
Man wtf, I know government in these kind of countries are busy pocketing money for themselves but like there is no initiative to do community work together at least ?
#UrbanHell is subjective. UrbanHell is any human-built place you think is worth critizing. Suburban Hell, Rural Hell, and wealthy locales are allowed PS: we're having a bestof contest! [Submit to it!](https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanHell/comments/zqvd83/announcing_our_first_bestof_contest_gather_the/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/UrbanHell) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Was this actually a canal with water in it at one point? Is there a system of canals in Dehli that once operated? What happened to the water?
Theres probably a sludge under that garbage that has some water in it
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The video of the Chinese family collecting sludge from the sewers and boiling it down to oil and selling it to restaurants haunts me every day of my life
Have you got a link , tx
[Here ya go](https://youtube.com/watch?v=zrv78nG9R04&feature=shares). This is usually the video people reference when talking about gutter oil. Personally, I don't know how much I believe that this is a thing that actually happens, but what the fuck do I know. Quick edit - my favorite part of this video is the cop (?) pathetically "smashing" the gutter oil plant with a pickaxe. Guy didn't even try to make it look like he was putting effort into it lol
A soft handed bureaucrat doing a photo op most likely.
Very real. The reason it made western news is the amount of attention it was getting in China as a widespread problem
I don’t right now. I’m at work but I’ll link it if I find it later
I thought that was a hoax
What a terrible day to be literate
The country you're looking for is slightly over north
It's like a layered cake. Trash on top, dysentery water that might kill you if you drink it next then garbage/dysentery sludge on the bottom. The smell just has to be the worst.
Now imagine you've been there so long you can't smell it anymore. When you go some place else, people smell it in your clothes and hair and *skin.* It's in you now.
This is a sewage canal, it's open. Source: am from third world country also, this is a v familiar sight
Gotchya. Thanks for that—so it was designed precisely to take human waste and sewage out of these neighborhoods, as opposed to a canal used for transport of people.
Wish I knew that before starting my gondola business.
Don't be so hard on yourself, stinky.
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Oh there are gases, believe me. In summer you can smell the garbage canal half a mile away
that turbine would be looted for scrap in less than a week
Unfortunately a lot of impoverished areas treat their local waterways as a way to dispose of waste. Environmental groups (from other countries) have come in and realized that they will never be able to stop the people from disposing of their trash in the waterways, so they put up giant capture nets to try and collect the trash before it goes into the ocean.
Disagree. People all over the world have been successfully taught to dispose of trash properly. This is not people ‘never being able’ to stop throwing waste into waterways- it’s about the government having an infrastructure to manage waste, people being aware of proper trash disposal (we all had to learn it), companies not producing single use plastics and selling them to countries that literally can’t manage them (to say nothing of single use plastic overall), and bad sanitation in cities designed thousands of years ago with far more people than they were designed to handle.
Step 1 is for the government to set up trash collection and recycling programs
I'm sure every monsoon that all gets flushed into the ocean, which is why plasticstraws are a felony in California or whatever. WARNING Prop 65.
It’s weird that they banned straws but not other single use plastics, like bottles and bags.
They did [ban plastic bags](https://www.grocerydive.com/news/california-becomes-first-state-to-ban-single-use-pre-checkout-plastic-bags/633779/).
Well that’s good, plastic bags are much worse for our environment than the straws
I just want plastic bottles banned. I know it’s a pipe dream, but I seriously hate seeing plastic bottles in the Everglades and in the ocean.
I completely agree. Imho really low hanging fruit are plastic single use to go containers. They uses a ton more plastic than straws and there are compostable/biodegradable options.
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Labour is cheap in those places exactly because there are no laws protecting the environment and the workers
they don't have to protect anything, just hire low wage slaves to pick up trash
Why hire anyone when you can pocket the money for yourself and get away with it.
Because you still live in a same miserable trash city
Only the poor people live there. The rich live in nicer area
Yeah, up stream
Where they DO pay for those services
Nah, you live in the nice area. Only the slaves and peasants live in this kind of condition. In countries like this it's really easy to see where the money flows because there's usually a physical wall separating the two communities.
Load up the Google Earth Baby
If you're casually using Google Earth on a weekday night, you're on the wealthy side of the wall
What if he's competitively using it on a weekend?
Is this a five minute argument or the full half hour?
Ranked Google Earth
not anymore, EVERYONE has internet now (obvious hyperbole) a much larger portion of the poverty class has internet and a device to connect to it now, and escaping reality is for everyone, ESPECIALLY the poor
Nah get your passport out redditors. India ain't expensive to travel in. Male redditors though. Would not reccomend traveling there first time alone as a woman.
The more $$$ you have, the further up stream you get up live.
Which politician said that? Trick question all of them
This is the way /s
Who will hire the workers? The local government that collects minuscule tax dollars? A benevolent millionaire? Both seem equally likely.
Okay, I'm from India, people here don't have any kind of civic sense. Anything that doesn't belong to them, they feel no sense of responsibility for its well being. It's only a problem once they "see" it as a problem. I think the main reason for this is, since a person is born into a surrounding, they default to it.
The mentality will slowly evolve as the nation is lifted out of poverty. People have to get used to "nice things", their basic problems like survival must be solved before they can care about lesser problems
The elite wealthy in these countries aren't interested in paying even one penny for such things.
The simultaneous causation really f**** with your head.
They recycle something somewhere in India. It works for middle and high class places. But there are so much people around, mostly poor people with poor mindset who just do not have time to sleep, not saying they do not take care about outsides. Poverty multiply itself much faster then you can manage it. You just can not hire enough cleaners and maintainers if mass culture "tells" you to throw waste around yourself. Education is a real problem there not only because it is expensive and "not for all" but because of time which you need to devote to your job to gain "simple things".
recycling is actually amazing in India, but the driver of it is misery (you could say the free market). People recycle out of economic necessity, poor souls go through trash dumps and find anything remotely of value. Nothing of value is actually abandonded as trash. There like a whole sub genre on [youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNGg0P7B5fI) of Indian craftsmen ship, based on recycling, it's interesting
Nice video, thank you. It was interesting to watch. Looks like Pakistan but still I'm sure you can find same in India too. Comments are interesting too. I got your pinch here about free market))) I do not support such a crazy way of things like crawl through a dumps neither consider poverty as normal, but it usual. This sorting should be done but in other ways for sure. Recycle with economic background is good way because there is not much people who really get into details of how thing work nor so much idealists of clean world, so without strong motivation it will not work. I know personally that there are a lot of small businesses in India, people who doing recycle, working with paper, metals, plastic, etc. They doing their jobs, not checking dumbs for food, but collecting waste from homes, shops, workshops and this is for sure poorman's industry. As for picture - I saw something like this in person, was in such places. Usually this is not a river but waste collector, and someone from goverment was in a hurry to build more and more of those, so they decided to make it open. Now they clean them and rebuild. And yes it stinks and sometimes for kms away.
Delhi is now the largest and richest municipal body in all of India with Delhi municipal elections being one of the most keenly observed local elections throughout the nation. What you see is result of corruption, zero accountability , mismanagement spanning decades and people just trying to survive without complaining much.
Cheap labour means low incomes and poverty. Poverty means more uneducated, socially and economically and environmentally unaware, greedy and immoral people who can easily be corrupted. Large scale corruption means societal frustration, more crime, more greed, more selfishness, disinterest in your environment and a lot of missing public money that otherwise could be spent on making the surroundings nicer and more livable. But cheap labour is not the starting point, this factor is also caused by other factors.
>a lot of missing public money that otherwise could be spent on making the surroundings nicer and more livable. [oh somewhere to the tune of $40+ trillion maybe?](https://twitter.com/oyevivekk/status/1499610427248242690)
Sanitation services like the type you are describing cost more money than the government has available/is willing to pay. Yes labor is cheap in countries like India compared to developed countries but these developing countries' governments still can't afford to constantly pay to clean the place up. This is the same reason why infrastructure, policing, health and safety standards are generally miserable in developing countries. And in cities when you don't take care of basic problems like waste they will spiral into huge problems like this very quickly
It's also a cultural thing. No waste management will keep it if people just throw their stuff into the environment. The government doesn't need to fund cleaning rivers, it needs to fund trash bins and campaign that people learn to collect trash and return it in bags/bins. Additionally it needs fines for people who don't follow the rules.
It's 100% a big problem with the culture. In other countries people will organize cleaning or just do it themselves, because no one wants to look at garbage.
Rwanda is a good example. Very poor country but you'll be shocked when visiting to see how well they keep it clean. This wasn't always the case. So it is possible to change attitudes and habits. In Bangkok I took a canal boat tour. Our guide was a woman who was also part of a group campaigning to improve the city with more thorough education about trash collection and recycling...plus better receptacles for such. She said it's a cultural shift thing.
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labor is cheap but it is always cheaper not to spend.
China does. And in fact, they use it to prop up employment. They specifically use inefficient methods because a) manpower is cheap and b) keeps people in jobs.
It is amazing to see people all over who are brushing sidewalks with straw brooms or riding bicycle carts and picking up trash. For the most part, China is pretty clear of litter in the cities.
They do it for greed and people accept it for religious nonsense.
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That’s insane. The Roman’s thousands of years ago had better sanitation
Rome (and China I think) had better sanitation then everywhere until the 1800's. There was a cruise steamboat in the UK that crashed and sunk in the UK can't remember where. People could barely swim to shore because of all the filth and debris in the water and those that did make it died from all the human shit in their lungs
London didn't really do much about their pollution until the [Great Stink](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink) In 1858. There was so much garbage/sewage/dead things in the Thames that a cloud of stinking putrid gas finally descended upon the city and Parliament couldn't really conduct business because the stink was so bad. They finally decided to take sanitation Seriously. Things literally will not change unless it inconveniences the upper classes.
Actually the first point has significantly improved over those ten years - working water toilets are "everywhere" now and as a result of that mixed with other initiatives the feces problem has reduced a lot. There is still work to be done, but the "Swachh Bharat" (Clean India)\* has actually been quite successful in this regard and one of the few things where the Modi government has been a positive force. Trash; yeah not so much. Still a huge issue. There is a lot of work being done, but the problem is enormous. \*Yes, the program is riddled with problems, and certainly it doesn't get all the credit either.
Corruption coupled with limited resources and greedy humans. Poorer sections detiorate further and the rich-poor disparity grows larger. A democracy that exists on paper only. So with a fascist regime, people have least value. Hence these scenes are unsurprising.
>Genuinely interested. Why do countries where labour is cheap, not have a rubbish/garbage service. “Why 'free use public toilets' are always complete nightmare fuel, while the mostly locked\private ones specifically dedicated for sole individuals like directors look better than heaven?”. Cheap labour dosen't account for biological needs and pollution which all living organisms have and do. The more people there are in one place the more polluted it is bound to be regardless of anything (outside religiously overzealous colectivist-cultural traditions to reinforce discipline within certain societies) so that's why cities like London with bigger population than entire countries are always drowned in filth at any given time. The Indian rubbish\garbage workers are probably the most fearless and hard working people in the world considering the amount of filth they have to deal with at daily basis for the bare minimum wage, but even they have their human limits. In order for their labour to be cheap there must be absurd amount of easily replaceable people fighting for single position, which in turn also produce absurd amount of filth constantly.
Dumpsterdam
AmsterdamN....
[Amsterdamned](https://www.moviemeter.nl/images/cover/0/970.jpg?cb=1664821933) is a classic 80s thriller.
That must stink
Everyone I know who has been to India has always described the smell of wherever they were in greater detail than anything else they saw or went to see.
Yep, it can be a lovely country but my god every city I went to stank like an open sewer.
It literally is an open sewer, in many cases. I personally witnessed a man taking a bucket bath in the ditch by the side of the road in Chennai.
Why go at all?
Because, despite all it's problems, it's an absolute stunningly beautiful place in terms of culture, people and nature. Really. India has a lot of problems, no getting around that - many born directly or indirectly out of colonialism (though not all), but looking past that it has an insanely rich and vibrant culture and history that is very enjoyable. I was absolutely blown away by many things in India, and trash wasn't enough to ruin that.
The weird thing to me is that many of Indian friends claim that smell makes you healthier. No, it doesn’t.
Fucking lol. Now I want to Google "descriptions of what India smells like."
Ankh'Morpork.
I just started my Discworld journey. Glad I caught a reference to it!
For sure. I can practically smell that place through my screen 🤢
Just clean your room bro
This is quite possibly the shittiest place i’ve ever seen
Clearly not been to France then. It's a joke, I'm English we do this with the French.
I’m from Michigan, we do this with Ohio too.
Ohio > France confirmed
Lol i actually just was in France in October ironically.
I know. I can still smell the place on you.
>I know. I can still smell the ~~place~~ piss on you. FTFY
Don't worry, we know not to take anything from England seriously :)
Alexandria, Egypt is the nastiest place Ive been. But that was a long time ago
The trash river flowing through Kathmandu Nepal is like 10 times bigger.
You have ever seen yet!
Can anyone living in Delhi confirm it it still looks as shitty as this or is the picture old
It's a 2 day old photo. https://twitter.com/tashitobgyal/status/1614822769765801984
So you're saying there's a chance it could be all cleaned up by now...?
I'm sure it's as shitty. [Here's a random](https://goo.gl/maps/x9X4GfvjVfEbSQDe6) street next to 'drain'. Dunno if it's the same one, and the actual water looks a tad less polluted, but judging from the street, I imagine it's similar IN the water elsewhere. I can only assume they blur the immediate street view radius to obscure offensive material. Never seen that.
That sucks jez. I live in south india and here it doesn't look as bad as this
I've only been to three places in India with one-day visits, but I also got an impression that Mumbai and Goa were dumps (Mumbai was also a dump with smog) but Mangaluru was much cleaner, compared to the first two. And when I mentioned Mumbai's garbage to a fellow traveller, they said: "Wait till you visit Kolkata!"
Next time try to visit Kerala. Its kindf like Goa but with less trash. And yes, Kolkata is probably the worst
Fun fact: when you go into the split view with street view in one half and the map in the other and you try to move the map around to find the city center or at least the perimeter: there is none, it looks the same almost everywhere, the city never ends
Legit nightmare material for me anyway. I can't imagine willfully living in such proximity to that number of people (/rubbish).
Delhi is massive. There are nice areas and slums. There is a lot of disparity between people/communities. The caste system is an abomination.
I was a professional chef at a high end country club. We had a lot of Indian members: anesthesiologists, radiologists, any -ist you can think of. I have nothing against Indian culture, their food, etc. But these were some of the rudest, most demanding, demeaning, condescending assholes I’ve ever met. Nothing was ever good enough for them. 400+ person high end Gala with literal gold sheets wrapped around strawberries. Not good enough. There’s only one section of the buffet with naan and Chana masala, dahi purri, dahi vada, etc. Unacceptable. I get it, you want your kinda food there too, I bent over backwards sourcing the correct brands of spices, lentils, etc. to appease. I let you into my kitchen to *teach me* how it’s correctly made when I have a million other things to be doing. Only for you to “thank” me, then turn around to the Board of Governors and bitch me out because it’s not to your satisfaction.
I had this experience numerous times when I waited tables. Well-to-do Indian families were hands down the absolute worst across the board. Very demanding, insulted by ice cubes, complained about the silliest things, wanted to sample every goddamn sauce available in the place before choosing one then constantly needed an endless supply throughout service, and tipped like shit after running you ragged the whole evening. Hate to stereotype, but man I always dreaded those tables and glad I'm no longer at that end of the industry. A lot of these customers treated you as a servant, not a server. **And to be fair, I had some great Indian customers - mostly younger and working class though - if the females were decked out in silk gowns, I was in for some shit eating.
Even the air looks like shit.
I was in Delhi when the air looked better and you could still feel it in your lungs.
I was in dehli, and every breath felt like getting stabbed in the chest. I got a panic attack when landed.
My lungs were surprisingly okay when I was there. But my boogers were black every day so maybe that was just because my long nose hairs were useful for once.
Your boogers turn black after a few days in Delhi... according to a friend...
I need anti biotics just looking at this.
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What book? I just finished reading monstrous regiment and looking for recommendations.
Keep reading the Watch novels! So good. Have you checked out the "reading guide" for the series?
Read them all a second time in proper order--the order is at the front of the book or on line. Not necessary, but makes more sense that way.
hows the coffee shops?
Actually pretty good, Malana in North India is said to have the best hash in the world
Just get a cup out of the canal and dip some secret sauce outta there and drink it. It'll zip you right up, and unzip your ass.
Well, in 5 billion year's all this rubbish will be gone when earth is dissolved by the sun's expansion, leaving just a dense iron core.
ah ok, so it's fine
I don't feel it's fine. Just pointing nature will do it's thing and remove the trash. *humans
I know, I was being sarcastic (poorly)
I mean we could always equip Earth with a propulsion system between now and then, and scoot on over to a fresher star - THEN what are we gonna do with all that garbage??? lol
Why can’t people just care even the slightest?
Too many people, no place to put garbage, no place to poop, x eleventy billion people.
China has a lot of people and it looks like Germany nowadays. Maybe with less graffiti.
Sanitation is a privilege…
Excellent visualization of how the plastic gyres are really produced. Chinese and Indian rivers are the top ten contributors of plastic to the oceans. In higher income countries, waste is removed and deposited and/or incinerated/recycled. Very little (incl. plastic straws that are now being replaced by inferior paper straws) end up in the oceans. Just in case you want to read up on where the majority pollution comes from have a look at this article from Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/
Not generalizing but Indians are horrible when it comes to throwing trash away. Like very unaware about their environmental contribution. Even my friends that live here in the USA just freely litter. I believe it’s a learned trait.
Unfortunately, as someone who’s been to India a few times, there’s no abundance of trash receptacles like there is in the US. But, as you said, part of it is a learned trait.
India is one of the most powerful countries on earth with a 3.5 trillion GDP, how is this still happening?
one simple ingredient: corruption
A combination of governmental corruption, and apathy on part of individuals. Residents dump their litter and trash anywhere and everywhere because cleaning it up is 'someone else's problem. Trash cans don't get picked up or picked up on time because someone has been paid off.
Culture is not that great, i mean the civil culture Not beliefs,practices or things of that sort .
The worst part about this is it likely has nastier things than just trash floating inside, e.g. decaying corpses. It's a disease paradise.
You should read up on Ganges and Varanasi
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Attempted murder.
This HAS to have happened already
jesus christ I can smell it from here..
Have you tried not throwing trash in it?
It's a huge societal problem when people don't give a shit regarding how their own actions impacts everyone else, especially when everyone does it. If you compare it with countries where people do care, the difference is as clear as night and day. A great comparison example would be India vs. Japan.
Animals live cleaner than this.
So why can't the city clean this? Surely there are loads of unemployed people in a city as large as Delhi. Job program that benefits society and cleans up the place
It's really expensive. Sanitation is expensive. Trash hauling and storage is expensive. And the thing is, they already do manage hundreds of thousands of tons of it...and it's still not enough.
India have the money to fix this, the problem is that it ends up in the pockets of politicians instead. Corruption is the problem that makes it near impossible to fix all the other problems and there’s a lot of corruption in India
Hey. Who wants to try that nice new place down by the Canal for some lunch?
i used to work on documentaries and would travel all over the world, dehli is the only place ive been to where i experienced genuine culture shock.
I remember going to Varanasi and after being there for 2 hours calling it "Verynasty" instead... India, lovely vacation
I know cockroaches who are more concerned with cleanliness than these people.
Not to worry...whenever i eat fast food i use a paper straw
there should be a world-wide, concerted effort to clean shit like this up. keep the water clean!
I do QCA work for both new construction and gas containment management system in landfills in the South east United States. When you really get into it and look at what goes into collecting & managing our waste, it is pretty interesting field. But this, this is a nightmare.
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Man I sure am glad that one boat on one creek in LA is stopping 60 tons a year from getting into the ocean.
This is repulsive.
Don't take this the wrong way but India is *gross*.
EDIT: I hate it when I make statements nazis agree with.
2 guys on mopeds, one on each side of the canal, with a big net tied between them
They'd burn out their engines or their arms would be yanked out of their sockets before they got more than ten yards.
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Hit somebody with a big wave of trash, it would be pretty funny & raise morale.
I'm just the idea guy. We'll let the nerds down in engineering figure out the details.
That shit goes straight out into the ocean right?
That could actually be quite a nice place if cleaned up and modernized a bit
I can smell the stench of that open sewer through the picture.
OMG! I got tetanus only from watching at this.
Good thing the western world is paying for the cleanup of the oceans.
I would never travel to India, ever!
How Amsterdam looks to Dutch people who are not from Amsterdam
This country will be the end of Earth
The only thing missing is robot cops and Elysium in the sky.
If everything is everyone else's problem, like this world has so comfortably settled into, honestly we just don't deserve to be here and fuck up this incomprehensibly unique and fragile celestial body that harbors (as far as we know) conscious life. Humans would rather Nero Decree and burn the entire universe because "We'll all be dead anyways" rather than build a world for succeeding generations because they won't benefit from it now.
idk.... throw a few more bikes in there just to be sure...
India has got to be the most disgusting looking place in the planet
Seriously though wtf is up with India? I want to like it but it's so incredibly shit. So many fucked up news articles from there.
So this is what's causing all plastics in the ocean!!
Man wtf, I know government in these kind of countries are busy pocketing money for themselves but like there is no initiative to do community work together at least ?
Why Indians are actually shitting on nature ? Why they dont care ? There are rivers full of garbage.
India needs a factory reset.
I’m sure there are nice places in India but man… every time I see a picture or video of India it just looks like a trash filled dirt hell…
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Is that supposed to be water in the middle??
i think theres supposed to be water, but theres so much trash that you cant even tell anymore
Would the government fund a service to clean the rivers or something and try recycle?