A boy and his dog, Chennai India; photo: Richard Hart

From PP14’s India trip article. Text excerpt:

Thank you skateboarding, for leading us not into tourism but delivering us from safety. And into real life. Very real. The streets of India were a sobering experience. The incredibly poor, begging from the very poor. (It’s all relative, isn’t it?)

Somehow there was beauty in all this too. Some sights seemed postcard-like even amidst -or perhaps because of- the poverty. Puppies playing by an open sewer, ancient gnarled banyan trees, idyllic beaches (“but don’t swim if you have any cuts”), whole families on one scooter dodging cows in the street, a trendy French bakery on a country lane on the way to a 60’s utopian hippy commune with a giant golden dome. The fruit, the fabric, the fracas. And on the background televisions, always cricket.

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