Mortville Realized
 We’re riding through a series of slums and shantytowns on the way to our first destination. It goes on forever, and seems to be a confluence of countless eras all occurring in the same moment. Nothing is organized, street signs are so scarce that our bus drivers stop frequently to ask for directions, on one overpass I saw a man on a motor bike who had pulled over to the wall to pray as buses and cars squeezed around him. Drivers honk constantly… actually, “continuously” might be a better word, and Western-style advertising adorn the hovels that line the roads. The overwhelmingly peculiar thing is that this dystopic dispersion of trash, free roaming urban livestock, lawless traffic, and half-starving people basking on blocks of concrete like corpses in the mid-morning Sun seems to work. It’s not efficient, far from ideal, but the people don’t appear to be gripped by the ennui that seems to plague the American homeless. So what’s the difference? Not every indigent I meet in the U.S. is discontent. Many of them are homeless because they want or at least choose to be. But still, many more are discontent, scornful, jealous, pathetic. The necessitous of India are nonetheless doing what is possible with the opportunities t hey have. The Americans do not. I walk through Woodruff Park to and from class on a daily basis during the school year, and although I’ve not been asked for money on park grounds, I can see why they have none. They stand around and smoke and socialize and scratch off Mega-Millions all day long. And why not? Without a shred of ambition, a vision for their own and others’ future, or—and this is key—the need to work to survive, to eat, and to be self-reliant, a need that is defused by the altruism of “homeless advocates,” the American homeless willfully endure their exhaustive, pathological boredom, and in that illuminate the disparity between the American impoverished and those of India. Seven-hundred million Indians live in destitution because of the conditions of their society; and few hundred thousand Americans live in destitution because of the conditions of themselves.
I’ve made the above observation of Indians from a bus seat. I’m anxious to get on the ground and see what they can tell me about themselves, if I can communicate with them at all. I don’t understand a fraction of what there is to know about the culture of poverty that exists here, but it’s so pervasive that to ignore it would leave a huge gap in my sense of what entrepreneurship means here and how it affects Indian society as a whole.
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