North to the Mountains

David Carrington • July 17, 2015 • Nainital, India

After the hustle and bustle of the capital, we decided to get away to a different part of India. I chose a place called Nainital, a beautiful region north of Delhi in the forested mountains of Uttarakhand. To get there, we took a 7 hour bus ride. Now, you might be thinking that 7 hours on a bus would be boring, but the time flew by because there was so much to see out the window…

Things seen from the bus window:

Things not seen from the bus window:

By the time we reached Nainital it was dark, so we didn’t see much aside from the bus station and our hotel. But the next morning welcomed us with an absolutely gorgeous view. The “tal” in Nainital means “lake,” and I love waking up on the waterfront! The lake, at 2,048m above sea level, is nestled between a series of cliffs, and there are row boats and paddle boats dotting the water. The city itself wraps around two-thirds of the lake, and the clouds that roll through like fog bathe the whole place in an epic aura.

We spent four days in Nainital tasting delicious food, checking out the Naina Devi Temple, taking a paddle boat ride in a strangely yellow swan (see picture), and hiking up to Naina Peak. For me, the hike was the highlight of that leg of the trip. Two hours of steady trekking brought us to the 2,615m summit, and it so worth it. For part of the time we were actually inside a cloud, and when the wind changed we got a stunning view in which all of Nainital spread out below us. Only a few other tourists took the strenuous hike, so for much of our time at the top it was only me and Sarah -- along with a few birds, a few bees, and some ladybugs flying in tandem.

Nainital was not nearly as crowded as Delhi, but it still felt like a resort town catering to tourists. To find an even quieter remove, we went a few kilometers southeast to a village called Saattal (“saat” means “seven,” so Saattal means seven lakes, which were all in close proximity). The main lake was very peaceful, and the activities we did there centered around it. On our first day we skipped stones at one end of the lake while fishermen fished at the other -- I like to think we were helping the fishermen by scaring the fish toward them. The second day there was a light rain in the morning, so we went out to swim while there weren’t any people out. There were plenty of minnows, though, and those nibbled ticklishly at our toes.

Springs and Social Signaling

The third day we walked a few kilometers to find a nearby spring that we’d been told was beautiful. By itself the spring was indeed picturesque, with cascading waterfalls surrounded by foliage. The whole experience would have been great if not for two things: first, there was trash strewn along the banks of the falls and down the river; second, there was a group of loud tourists who were contributing to the mess by leaving cigarette packs by the spring and throwing plastic bottles downstream. When they left, Sarah and I got to enjoy the spring in peace, which included wading in its icy waters and taking a few photos. We left “nothing but footprints,” as the saying goes, but I did leave thinking about India’s trash problem.

I first recalled a concept I learned about in sociology called “social signaling.” The idea is that when people enter an environment, they pick up on clues for how to behave in that place. If people enter a neighborhood that is ordered and clean, that sends the signal that the area is monitored and maintained, so they are more likely to keep it that way. On the other hand, when people enter a disorderly neighborhood (with broken windows, graffiti, and excessive trash), it sends the signal that the area isn’t maintained, which begins a negative feedback loop where the neighborhood gets more and more disorderly.

The trash around Saattal spring was a micro example of social signaling, and the same garbage problem seems to be happening on a larger scale in India’s major cities. As one Bangolorean put it, “Bangoloreans dump their trash in the streets not because they are poor, but because of habit and culture. ‘As long as my house is clean,’ they think, ‘what’s the big deal?’” (Sachs, Garbage Everywhere). The big deal is that metropolitan areas like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Hyderabad are growing so fast that their aging infrastructure cannot keep up with the waste, and this problem is being compounded by rapid economic growth, overcrowding, and poor urban planning.

When I mentioned the problem to Vidhu, our amazing friend and host in Varanasi, he explained that a big part of the problem is population density. In the U.S., there is lots of land where no one lives, so trash from cities can be sent far outside the city to dumps where it’s out-of-sight-out-of-mind. In India, there isn’t excess land near the ever growing cities. People who live in the far outskirts don’t want smelly dumps near the land that their families have owned for generations, so there aren’t easy places for trash to go. In some neighborhoods, we saw people burning little mounds of trash, but those were small mounds relative to the growing problem.