The air was sort of brown from this combination. There are many poor people living in Bihar or were then in December of 1985. So, they didn't have electricity or gas to cook with. So, they had to burn wood or whatever they could. There were very few trees there and they were protected mostly so that meant that people cooked by burning cow dung that was dried enough and plastic like plastic bottles and wrappers of various kinds. However, Burning plastic is also carcinogenic. Most people know this is true but since most people this area might not either be educated or if they were they didn't have the financial resources to do anything else but what they were doing.
So, this problem was or is still endemic when you have over a billion people living this close to one another. It's actually 1.38 Billion people similar to China.
The other thing we had to deal with then a lot was dead bodies lying in the streets who had died of old age or starvation there on the streets. In Indian culture at that time 1985 and 1986 if you helped someone you had to help them for life like hiring them as a live in cook or nanny like an Au pair person or something like this. It's just the way the mores and likely the legal system works there at least then.
Many people tried to get us to take them to the U.S. However, most people don't have passports or any legal identity at all and so couldn't legally or easily travel the way people do from Europe or North America. What I mean by this is most people, especially out in the countryside are not born in hospitals but at home (at least this was true in 1985 and 1986). Home births often have no birth certificates so the person is not a legal entity like we are here in the U.S.
And this isn't just in places like Bihar, India.
In Bangkok, Thailand I was there before I went to Nepal and India, the sound was deafening during the day. There were no mufflers of any kind on any vehicles and no catalytic converters were there either. So, not only was the air brown and smelled funny but you couldn't stay in bed past 6 am and sleep either because the trucks and cars and motorcycles were so incredibly loud. You might ask do people hear well in these kinds of situations. The answer then was no.
For example, when I was in New Delhi, India before I took a fancy tourist bus back to Nepal with my family I went to a movie: I think it was revenge of the Jedi with the Ewoks? then.
Well. The Ewoks were speaking Tibetan so it was quite funny to the Tibetan Lama and his Darjeeling Translator that were attending the movie with my family and I. However, I had to stuff napkins in my ears and my children's ears because it was so very loud in that theater I was going just about deaf in that theater like one does at many rock concerts in the U.S. The lack of mufflers on cars and noise abatement in general harmed the hearing of people in India and Thailand I was aware of when I was there in the mid 1980s. So, often I had to have my kids cover there ears like they were listening to jet aircraft take off on the runway or something. In other words there were ear damaging sounds everywhere especially in all the Asian cities I visited of one kind or another.
One time they snuck a 9 year old driving a three wheeled taxi and they got away with it because they had a canvas wall between us and the driver. So, I didn't find out a 9 year old with a block of wood taped to his foot so he could hit the gas and brake and clutch pedal was actually driving us so I had to pay a 9 year old for driving us illegally at that point. Crazy! IT was raining at the time and we were also glad to get out of the rain in the taxi. But in the 1980s it was often like this or crazier the places we went.
When I say dead bodies on the streets were common maybe that explains a lot too.
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