Saturday, November 10, 2007

The Things We Don't Really Need

I am in my hotel room as I try to work to get on a plane back to India. Actually, my parents are trying to help me with this, as my cell phone does not stay connected all the time in India. So it is 9:30pm Saturday here and it is 10:00am Saturday in Kansas City.

There are more than 7.5 million people in the city of Chennai, but few people in the US have ever heard of it. According to Wikipedia Chennai is the 34th largest metropolitan area, but the numbers they show are too low. It's the 4th biggest city in India.

No explanation can do it justice. No description can explain how many people there are, the squalor that some live in, the pollution, the traffic, or the joy that many of them find in life.

As Americans (which I know most readers of this blog to be), we take for granted everything that we have. We feel that we "need" things that we don't actually need. Here is an extreme example: You don't NEED toilet paper.

Think about that for a minute. TP is cheap, right? So everyone should have it. Not true. In fact, in Chennai and a large part of the third world, they don't use it. They use their left hand which they then clean in a bucket of water. Sounds disgusting? It is. But it is something that we think we need, but we don't.

Okay...now think of all the things that you would give up BEFORE you gave up using toilet paper and started using your left hand!!!

No comments: