Geo-Journal #4

It’s been almost a month since my last Geo-Journal. I am sorry for that. And now I’m too sick to go out and do a new journal, (especially in the 40 degree heat), so I have decided to do a Geo-Journal special edition. Enjoy.

Geo-Journal #4 – Special Edition: Population Density

I’ll start with this. I love Google Earth. I mean, how great is it that you can look and see exactly what the layout is of the places you have been and the places you want to go. I have used Google Earth a lot since coming to Delhi, and it has proved itself invaluable. From scouting out new fun places to go explore, to planning routes for my walks in and around the city, or just trying to find the best route to one place or another so the Auto-walla doesn’t take us the long way (thereby jacking up the price on the meter). Then one day after spending months pouring over every nook and cranny of Delhi and New Delhi on Google Earth, I decided to look at Abbotsford. I don’t remember what made me do it, I just did and I was given quite a shock. Now we all know that Abbotsford is a much, much smaller city than Delhi. We also know, or at least can assume that the population density of New Delhi is somewhat higher than that of Abbotsford. But I could not believe what my eyes were seeing. Abbotsford looked totally empty. It almost felt to me like someone was playing a joke on me, and that the real Abbotsford had been hidden beneath a photoshop-ed landscape that somewhat resembled Abbotsford, but had had every second house removed. This got me to thinking about population density, and I realized two things.
Firstly, I realized that I am probably going to be mildly auto-agoraphobic upon my arrival to big, empty Abbotsford. By now I am quite used to literally squeezing through tight alleyways, dodging motorbikes and rickshaws, and bumping into peoples’ shoulders as I pass them. The second realization is that I will probably never be able to explain just how tight this city is packed to someone who has never been here. I can hear it already, “Packed? You mean like parts of Vancouver?” or, “Packed? You mean like Robson Street on Sunday?” No. I can’t explain it.
But then it hit me. The initiator of this entire train of thought could be the very resource that could make it maybe a little bit clearer for those who may never come here. So, I opened the Google-Earth browser, and flew on over to New Delhi. I took a snap, and I flew on over to Abbotsford, where I took another. Then I compared to two, and I was amazed. And now I will show them to you.
I’ll explain my methodology here for a minute. I first isolated a typical area of each cities residential areas. Both cities were captured at exactly 1000 m eye altitude using the print-screen function on the laptop, and the copied into Photoshop, where they were cropped to the exact same size. So, to the best of my knowledge, this is a fair comparison between the two cities. It should also be noted that while the Abbotsford image shows single family homes, the Delhi image shows two or three story tall housing complexes, thereby increasing the density even further. There is a good chance that there are more people living within the confines of this picture than there are in all of Abbotsford. I know this will still not do justice to what it is like to live in such a crowded place, but perhaps it makes me feel a bit better about my attempt to explain so.

Easter in Hindustan

It is 7:39am on Good Friday morning.
For the last half hour I have been listening to the same song being sung over and over again, echoing throughout the neighborhood. It will end and there will be chanting and talking, either from a man or a woman, and then the same song again. I know very very little about the Easter celebrations of the Indian Church, but I know they're loud. As I walked around the neighborhood this morning just after 7am, it seemed like everything was just as normal. People were walking around the tiny parks, performing their morning rites at their shrines, washing their cars, or standing around talking. The only difference is the giant blazing loudspeakers freshly installed on every third telephone pole. From these the story of the death of Jesus is being told, and worship, possibly from the church two streets over, or possibly from the cemetery (I have learned that many churches worship Good Friday by re-enacting Christ's death in a cemetery).
Anyways, my point is this... I am Canadian.
I am part of a church in Canada, and while we try to reach our communities with the Gospel message, I think we would indeed stop short of tying giant loudspeakers to telephone poles and filling the whole neighborhood with the sound of our worship. That being said, as I walked around this morning, my first feeling was that I wondered how the 'others' felt. How do the Hindu's walking around the park feel? How about the Muslim on his way to work? What do they think about all the noise and the message being forced onto their streets and invariably into their houses? I thought to myself as I walked that perhaps they would be a little resentful. I mean, it is 7:00am, and these speakers are turned right up to 11. This is an invasion of personal space.
But then I remembered when we first got here to India, how every morning at 4:30am we would wake up to the Muslim call to prayer s it blanketed the city, and then again at 7:00am if we were still in bed. Then we would often hear a somewhat discordant, "Haaa-re Hare Jai Krishna..." being projected from speakers at the local Hindu temple. We don't really hear these things any more. I am used to hearing the call to prayer 5 times a day, so much so that now I don't hear it. The same can be said for the men running up an down our street yelling and selling. The same again for the hammering as they have been slowly (over months) tearing down the house beside us. All day long, 8am to 9pm, or sometimes later, hammering! And now I just don't hear it.
Anyways, in Canada I'm pretty sure we'd have a heap of angry people throwing eggs at our churches if we filled their neighborhood with loudspeakers and cranked up the sermon, and so being a Canadian I reacted with uncertainty, or perhaps almost embarrassment at the uncouth methodology employed in sharing the gospel message here in India. But thankfully I was reminded that in this cultural context, their methodology is sound (pun not necessarily intended). It's normal to fill the streets with the sounds of your worship. People do it all the time, for worship or elections or weddings or selling fruit. Loudspeakers are A-Okay!!!