One tree Hill

Climbing one tree hill.


As the working week in India is 6 days, the weekends are corresponding short. Just 1 day, being Sunday. Apart from the long weeks, the working days are long (starting at 8:00 from “home” and arriving 20:00 back from work.


On your free Sunday the normal practice is to be lazy and doing nothing. Usually we get up late, me and my house buddy Leon from Tampico, Mexico, we have breakfast/brunch with bacon which we get from Pune. Mostly later in the day we have a shave and or a hair cut and face/head massage. In the evening we prepare our mostly Italian dinner with ham (again from Pune), watch a movie and end our weekend for another exiting week at the office.


For the bacon and ham we once in a while go to Pune to do shopping. Pune is a 7 million population town with more cosmopolitan habits than Aurangabad and is a 4-5 hour drive to the shopping malls where they sell International foods and stuff we like apart from the local cuisine.


On other occasions we are active from dawn till dusk. So we are in a planning stage to visit a tiger reserve and spot an Indian tiger in the wild. Another activity is to go to Nepal, Kathmandu and have a round trip by plane to Mt Everest.


The company where I am presently employed is part of a very big conglomerate called Vedanta Enterprises. As part of their mission they want to improve Indian society. In this respect they are presently showing regularly a commercial on Indian television nationwide called “creating happiness” In this commercial they show what they can do/are doing for society. I put a YouTube link so you can have a peek.



http://video.google.com/a/?pli=1#/Play/contentId=8536d381a25b1b98



As an explanation on the showed figures 1 lakh equals to 100.000 and is a typical Indian measure not known in Europe.


The village you see is a typical Indian village which you can find every where. Although the population equals 1.2 billion most of the villages are tiny not having more than 500 people living and the conditions are very primitive. Most houses do not have electricity nor running water or sanitary conditions. In here most girls marry at age of 14-15 to further serve a husband at the choice of their parents. Most parents start saving money as soon a daughter is born in order to have enough money to acquire a proper husband for their daughters. Having a daughter is a costly affair and from same colleagues of work they inform me that they have to pay 40 Lakh Rupees for marriage funds to the parents of the groom and marriage festivities. Can you imagine, as their salary equals mostly between 20-50.000 per month for a management position, how long they have to save in order to afford a daughter. This explains why daughter are not always wanted and India has even penalties and prison sentence on pre birth echo scans to avoid any abortion.


Behind our bungalow are some low hills and as I said earlier we sometimes do other things. One of these activties was to visit the village and climb the hill to have a nice view over Aurangabad. Ingrid did twis as well with Mikael when they were here in October last year.


The pictures showed the real Indian live under harsh conditions. The people living here are mostly either unemployed or receive very low wages. Working in agricultures pays only 12.000-20.000 Rupees per year (yes per year). Factory workers are being paid more but still receive only very low wages. If management gets paid in range of 20-50.000 a month (max 700 €) workers are mostly getting 2.000-6.000 a month for a 12 hour working day, 6 days a week. For some people it is difficult to comprehend that someone is happy to have such work which pays 100-200 rupees a day. (70 Rupees equals 1 Euro). If you think that everything is cheap for workers you are surprised to know that gasoline sells for 75 Rupees/liter. This may be cheap for European understanding but it is extremely expensive here for the locals.


We are living here very luxurious, having everything we want and traveling 4-5 hours one way to have bacon on our Sunday breakfast. Sometimes it is good to understand one position and how fortunate we are. Here in India they have their own solution for this “problem”. Although the caste system officially does no longer exist it is everywhere in Indian society. People consider this caste system being holy and a fact of live/destiny. God had meant it this way and just except it. By doing good one can be promoted in a next life. Don’t envy other just except your faith. This is why Indian society is such a harmonious society where people are living in extreme wealth and at the same time people need to live from 1 Euro a day and nobody bothers because it is a fact of life.