A long-time neighbour and friend who made a dreadful hash of his personal life leaving him with regret and a large void in his life, now fills it by peripatetic travel.  Every few months he goes off on one travel tangent or another, and in the space of a decade he has visited just about every tourist destination on the face of this Earth, often enough several times. He has his clear favourites. India is not one of them.

This is a man of a disposition toward order, although disorder prevailed in his life because of his roving eye. He lives alone in a large house in which there is never a mote of dust to be seen resting on any surface, where everything has a place and is never moved from its place; he is meticulous, careful to ensure that all is to his satisfaction, in place and presentable to the most demanding eye; his own.

He is a charming man, ready and eager for conversation, and happy to indulge in light-hearted banter. And always prepared to speak at length about his impressions of his travels. Just having returned from a visit to India, he is scathing in his condemnation of the squalor in evidence everywhere and the hordes of children begging in the streets. His luxury accommodation at a highly recommended hotel was unequivocally excellent, from the attention to detail, cleanliness and food consumed in sumptuous dining rooms, to the crisp, attractive linen on the beds. That all had his approval. Not so the scene as soon as he left the hotel entrance, where the overwhelmingly foetid odours of poverty and human degradation assailed his nostrils, nor the unwelcome sight of depressing poverty everywhere he looked.

The Ganges, that holy waterway of Indian cultural tradition and religious sacredness represented a travesty of nature; filthily polluted, with ashes of the dead ceremoniously scattered over its water, while pious Hindus immersed themselves in its purifying filth, and the domestic acts of laundering took place at the edges, beside which wedding ceremonies were being carried out, while cattle waded through, leaving their bodily deposits to wash downstream. Faugh!

Indians would be distraught to know that they had disappointed the expectations of a visitor who anticipated its history and culture to be reflected in a passion for pristine cleanliness, an eye to hygiene in a country where the majority have no access to toilet facilities and evacuate publicly in the out of doors. They would immediately drop their concerns, those that care among that vast population of 1.2-billion people, about the issues of cultural gender-feticide and rape, the indigent poor, and abandoned widows, and cower in self-abnegation and blame over the 34,406 children gone missing and never recovered, from among the much larger number that have been abducted in the last year, and trained to beg in the streets, become prostitutes, work as slave labour on farms and mines, or had their internal organs harvested for tourism-transplant sale.

All those soul-defeating failures would immediately assume a lesser degree of concern, to the far greater one of appearance to the critical, demanding eye of foreign visitors who look with a huge measure of distaste upon a society, a culture and a scene so utterly lacking in measured order and self-respect.