183
" The poor are almost fashionable. And this idea of intermediate technology has become an aspect of that fashion. The cult in India centres on the bullock cart. The bullock cart is not to be eliminate; after three thousand or more backward years Indian intermediate technology will now improve the bullock cart. 'Do you know,' someone said to me in Delhi, 'that the investment in bullock carts is equivalent to the total investment in the railways?' I had always had my doubts about bullock carts; but I didn't know until then that they were not cheap, were really quite expensive, more expensive than many second-hand cars in England, and that only richer peasants could afford them. It seemed to me a great waste, the kind of waste that poverty perpetuates. But I was glad I didn't speak, because the man who was giving me these statistics went on: 'Now, if we could improve the performance of the bullock cart by ten per cent ...'
What did it mean, improving the performance by ten per cent? Greater speed, bigger loads? Were there bigger loads to carry? These were not the questions to ask, though. Intermediate technology had decided that the bullock cart was to be improved. Metal axles, bearings, rubber tyres? But wouldn't that make the carts even more expensive? Wouldn't it take generations, and a lot of money, to introduce these improvements? And, having got so far, mighn't it be better to go just a little further and introduce some harmless little engine? Shouldn't intermediate technology be concentrating on harmless little engines capable of short journeys bullock carts usually make? "
― V.S. Naipaul , India: A Wounded Civilization
186
" on the other side of Howrah Bridge which, if one could ignore the stalls and rickshaws and white-clad hurrying crowds, was at first like another Birmingham; and then, in the centre, at dusk, was like London, with the misty, tree-blobbed Maidan as Hyde Park, Chowringhee as a mixture of Oxford Street, Park Lane and Bayswater Road, with neon invitations, fuzzy in the mist, to bars, coffee-houses and air travel, and the Hooghly a muddier, grander Thames, not far away. On a high floodlit platform in the Maidan, General Cariappa, the former commander-in-chief, erect, dark-suited, was addressing a small, relaxed crowd in Sandhurst-accented Hindustani on the Chinese attack. Around and about the prowed, battleship-grey Calcutta trams, bulging at exits and entrances with men in white, tanked away at less than ten miles an hour. Here, unexpectedly and for the first time in India, one was in a big city, the recognizable metropolis, with street names – Elgin, Lindsay, Allenby – oddly unrelated to the people who thronged them: incongruity that deepened as the mist thickened to smog and as, driving out to the suburbs, one saw the chimneys smoking among the palm trees. "
― V.S. Naipaul , The Indian Trilogy