Must See - The Other Side of India

In the western media, we often see only one type of Indian image. Crowded, dirty and polluted. The pictures would be often taken from random sewage canals and slums. The problem is that those underbellies exist in every part of the world.

This is not to deny that Shanghai and other great world cities have nicer infrastructure than the Indian metropolises. It is just that we are seeing things in binary instead of shades of gray. Indian cities sure have more than their share of dirtiness. Those are the reality and so are the ones below. The problem is that if only one type of pictures are shown it totally distorts the reality. Here is the other side.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mumbai skyline:

Driving through Mumbai's marine drive.

A few kilometers north, Bandra-Worli sealink that connects traditional Mumbai city with its suburbs:

 

The new Mumbai airport & its environs

The serene Sabarmati river running through Ahmedabad

Jaipur: The land of palaces - now getting modern

The heart of Bengaluru: Vidhan Soudha

Mysore: Bangalore's royal cousin

Heart of New Delhi during the parade

The sparkling clean Delhi metro

Heart of Chennai in lush greenery

Chennai's iconic Marina beach

Chennai's southern skyline - not as good as other Indian metropolis but getting better

Kochi's aspirations to enter as a Tier-1 Metropolis

Hyderabad center around the Char Minar

Rapidly growing skyline of Hyderabad:

Kolkata - the old capital of India

Kolkata's Vidaysagar Setu

Heart of India's former summer capital - Shimla

Gangtok: The serene northeastern city

Jodhpur: India's blue city

Chennai's Anna Memorial

New Delhi's Lotus Temple to rival the Taj

The Yamuna Expressway to Agra.

New 8-laned expressways of Hyderabad

Nashik city :

Chennai's Kathipara junction

India's new highways.

India is moving. Not one or two cities, but the whole nation. By not looking at the pictures above we get the distorted view that India is not progressing. If a media house shows a picture of New York, which of the following would they normally use?

 

Both of them exist in the same city, but we use only one of those pictures as representative. Same for most cities in the world. However, when it comes to the Indian cities, we take only the negative images as default art to portray and that is a travesty to people who are working to build the country. Let's be fair in representing cities of the world as that impacts investments and poverty alleviation. Romantic skylines for one city and a dirty sewer for the other city is not fair.

We need to be real. But, that doesn't mean dwelling in pessimism.