Pratica di Shadowing: Why is India SO DIRTY?! - Impara a parlare inglese con i video
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This is the first thing people think of when they hear India.
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So on my left and right, you'll see a bunch of shacks, just trash everywhere.
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What is the dirtiest country in the world?
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And as an Indian, it sucks.
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Not only because it makes us look bad, but also because it's true.
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We can't escape it.
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It is a part of us.
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It is us.
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But what if I told you India was not always like this?
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When we read ancient foreign accounts, India was not a spectacularly polluted place.
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In fact, many travelers describe it as cleaner than their homelands.
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While Indians bathed daily, Europeans only bathed a few times a year during the colonial era.
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So that brings us to this contradiction.
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How did India go from this to this?
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And even more importantly, can
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Indians actually solve today's calamitous pollution crisis?
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This is what we'll find out today in a story of how a civilization that exalted purity succumbed to its own filth.
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So let's start with the elephants in the room that everyone likes to blame for India's pollution crisis.
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Colonialism and caste.
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Now colonialism was indeed catastrophic for India.
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Before colonization, India accounted for roughly a quarter of global GDP, but by the time the British left, it plummeted to 4%.
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This was caused by contrasting forces.
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While Great Britain birthed the Industrial Revolution, they systematically prevented the subcontinent from industrializing itself.
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Historian Will Durant writes how the British used tariffs to crush domestic Indian textile manufacturing and other industries,
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forcing the country to recede back into agricultural pursuits.
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And on top of that, they decimated the farmers themselves with even more taxes and restrictions.
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The Indian economy couldn't create that value add we see in developed or manufacturing economies because of the stranglehold of the Raj.
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And as a result, extreme poverty nearly doubled during British rule, from 23 % in 1810 to 50 % at India's independence.
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I can keep going on about stats about how like the British Empire was bad, but here's where I need to tell you an uncomfortable truth.
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it's all cope.
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If you look at a lot of the paintings or even archival footage from British India, cities and towns are fairly clean.
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More clean than modern India in many cases.
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Now, some people will push back
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that a lot of this was due to these places having European quarters
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and how the British use sanitation drives to justify demolitions and social control.
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That's true.
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But even the princely states or villages with more autonomy were quite clean as well.
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Credit to those Indians actually.
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Princes like those of Barda and Mysore created sanitary departments and city improvement trusts to enforce cleanliness.
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So we can't pin all this on colonialism.
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Now let's address the other elephant in the room, caste.
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The common explanation is that
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Indians don't care about common spaces or even each other because they're divided by caste.
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The thought basically goes, why should I care about that part of town?
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It has nothing to do with my caste.
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I only care about my caste quarters.
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And like, I understand where this idea is coming from.
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It is logical.
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But the thing is, history proves it completely wrong.
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Now I've gone through like thousands of ancient foreign accounts at this point via a series called The India They Saw.
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Strongly recommend you guys read it.
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And whether it's the Greek Megasthenes or the Chinese Fashian or the Berber Ibn Battuta,
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none of them did the classic foreigner observation of India today where they look around
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and wonder why is there garbage and pollution everywhere?
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In fact, a lot of them were actually surprised by how wondrous and rich and high -minded India was.
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Hell, even a British painter, William Hodges, who came with the East India Company, notes that Indians were exceptionally clean, even in the villages.
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Yes, I mean an employee on the literal payroll of colonizers is telling you that pre -colonial India was cleaner than England.
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This is a really crazy mothafuck at this point.
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And we haven't even gotten to indigenous Indian ideas about cleanliness.
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In the ancient
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Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, one of the pillars of yogic discipline was shaucha, or purity.
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Various scriptures mandate daily bathing, with the Padma Purana claiming that one who does not bathe in the morning is a sinner fit to suffer.
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So to summarize, a civilization that mandated daily bathing as religious law,
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that foreign observers described as wealthy and well -ordered for over 2 ,000 years, this civilization's pollution crisis?
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It cannot be ancient.
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It has to be modern.
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But here's where I'll level with you.
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Colonialism and caste do hold a piece of the puzzle.
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The link with colonialism is direct.
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It caused massive poverty.
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More poverty, more pollution.
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But caste is something more subtle.
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For millennia, caste by itself didn't make
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Indians build mountains of trash on the streets.
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What it did was plant a seaweed.
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It created a lack of a concept of commons, of a united society owning something between them, something they were all responsible for.
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So what watered that seed and made it into a plant of pollution?
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What force capitalized on that plane of poverty?
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It's ironically something that was good for India.
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It's freedom.
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Here's how freedom made India filthy.
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Look at this diagram.
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It's called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
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Maslow believed
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that humans needed to fulfill one set of needs before moving
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higher up the pyramid to fulfill others from physical needs to safety to love to self -esteem to self -actualization.
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Now this was made for individuals but let's apply it to Indian society.
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As we pointed out earlier India was dirt poor at independence.
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Not just that but India was partitioned on religious lines.
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While Pakistan became an Islamic state and cleansed its non -Muslim population India chose secularism.
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That meant India had to manage the fallout between various communities and try to build a state, an economy, and of course, a united Indian society.
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That is extremely difficult and had to do all this being in the throes of poverty.
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Yet we cannot solely blame the British for this.
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At the republic's onset, India embraced something called Fabian socialism.
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This ideology was en vogue amongst decolonizing countries as capitalism was simply seen as an extension of colonialism.
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Now that's It's not necessarily true, but one can empathize with this viewpoint,
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considering how rapacious colonialism was and the overlap of the colonial administration with capitalist entities like the East India Company.
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However, even the father of Marxism, Karl Marx, realized an iron truth here.
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Capitalism must come before socialism.
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Without capital and wealth, there is nothing to redistribute for socialism.
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Thus, India didn't even progress to capitalism.
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It rotted in feudalism, where agricultural extraction eclipsed wealth and innovation.
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This dynamic prevented India from growing or industrializing.
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So instead, India would languish and remain in poverty.
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Indians remained at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy.
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And naturally, with more poverty and more pollution.
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But that's not the whole story.
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Poverty cannot explain it all.
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Other countries like
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China and Singapore were also poor and polluted, yet they radically transformed their level of societal cleanliness.
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The big difference is something that has a great reputation, and I think deservedly so.
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The difference is democracy.
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Now India embraced full democracy very early, just three years after independence.
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This meant every man and woman, every individual from every community had an equal vote.
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Now the thing is, India's democracy has a distortion to it, diversity.
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As not just a country, but civilization, India is extremely diverse.
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Thousands of castes, hundreds of languages, every single religion in the world was present in India.
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But people would not vote as individuals or on issues like development.
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They voted on community lines and for the freebies that socialism promised.
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Let's dial into that concept of commons we discussed earlier.
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When people are poor and the state is weak, their social security is primarily their community.
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So voting on community lines has tangible benefits.
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Your castman will favor you if in power.
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He'll cut some more welfare for you, defend you against riots.
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Hell, even beyond politics, caste and community gave people rituals and traditions that mattered.
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Caste was akin to ethnicity.
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So in democracy, Indians retreated into their community rather than embracing unity.
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This meant common areas, common infrastructure, common markets were not the priority for Indians.
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The priority was the spaces, infrastructure, and markets of one's community.
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You'll even notice this inside Indian houses which are fairly clean
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and hygienic but step outside into the streets and it looks like a literal war zone.
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And part of that is because Indians now began living in mixed developments next to people of different communities.
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And with no concept of commons, why would they care what's outside their homes?
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So that brings us to the question, why doesn't India just copy Singapore, China and other countries that escaped poverty and pollution.
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These countries use law and order to crack down on pollution.
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So why can't India?
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Here's a messed up part that we have to explore next.
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If the government cracks down on pollution, there's a good chance that they're going to lose elections.
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So let's dive deeper into Indian Democracy to understand this phenomenon.
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Okay, so I have to admit, when I landed in Mumbai, I was a total of four.
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I told my driver to go to the main attraction with my fellow friends, the world's largest term, Darvi.
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Now, Darvi is important not just because of this world record, but what it tells us about these relationships with poverty, policing, and also democracy.
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Darby has been the target of redevelopment since 1985.
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Yeah, that's 40 years back.
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Back then, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi allocated 100 poor rupees for Mumbai's redevelopment, with a significant count to 60 for Darby's upliftment.
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But they didn't work.
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So in 2000, the state government created a redevelopment board.
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This also completely failed for nearly two days.
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Real redevelopment only started happening a couple years back when billionaire
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Delta Madani's company was awarded the rights to Dalvi's redevelopment.
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But progress is still slow, and redevelopment is still terrific.
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The core question here is why has it taken decades for the Indian government to clear this slum, this epitome of Indian film,
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the subject of movies and straight up poverty pornography
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that foreigners pay to go on tours of just to see how dirty it is.
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Y 'all let's peel back to my trip and see where I learn from later.
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Pushback against Garvey's redevelopment comes from a few different places.
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Let's start off with the most important thing, economics.
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The Indian government is giving Garvey residents a free flat to relocate to, which is usually bigger and more clean than their current living food.
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But many residents don't want a flat.
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In fact, when they're actually given that flat, Please work it out and just go back living in their place in Darby.
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Why is this?
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Well, Darby is more than just a dirty place in the middle of Mumbai.
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It is a market.
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Specifically, Darby has five million industries.
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Leatherworking, earthen pottery, wheat, fifth -fifon cube for workers, and the infamous scrap which is sold off over a second.
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Darby's redevelopment is a threat to these local industries as they've been organically in different quarters as well.
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These mini bazaars, workshops, and tourist places are apparently not beginning to plant for redevelopment.
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This is why many locals are resistant to.
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This is actually the most understandable aspect.
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The other is an element that is darker, engaged to the heart of Indian heart.
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A couple years ago, I wrote about this thing which I call Egyptism.
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And no, it's not that whole white supremacist is it mean going on these days.
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Egyptism is a phenomenon that
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Indians glass all teeth by claiming that their identity or honor is being attacked.
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Sounds weird, but let's get through some again.
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Many times you'll see these crazy NGO types complain that the redevelopment of Darby is Islamophobe,
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or caste -based, or other unrelated identitarian visitors just because Darby has a high number of Muslims,
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or certain caste, or whatever identity they don't point out.
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To see is, many people do actually lock onto it, and it causes them to entrench their positions of being against the felonies.
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This sounds the same but it happens across India.
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In Punjab, farmers gain a trust -tops at the end of poverty, which causes gargantuan levels of smog that suffocate neighboring areas like this.
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When the government tries to crack down on such practices, the farmers claim that the government is getting anti -Kanjabi or against their caste,
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even against the Sikh religion, when none of this has anything to do with caste, or ethnicity, or religion.
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In the sacred city of Varanasi, redevelopment of infimously disgusting streets and safely polluted holy areas has garnered pushback from locals,
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claiming their honour, their ism, is being insulted and that the soul of Varanasi is being destroyed.
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Some even accuse the government of being against their caste.
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In an obvious scenario, Bahri,
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Kanjai, Varanasi, and beyond, the locals threaten to vote for the opposition if development and anti -pollution efforts are not stopped.
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I have to stop and say, God damn, India can be super fusted and infeorating at times.
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But that's also what makes it so interesting.
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Like here you can see that even when India's politicians try to enforce the law, when they try to liberally clean India up,
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it's Indian society itself that pushes them.
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And it's this type of diverse democratic dynamic that authoritative countries like
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China, single -party city -states like
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So, where any developed democracy do not have a place.
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India, Indian society, the Indian democracy are playing and hard on it.
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So, is there any hope or is India deemed to see the bent of the world?
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Yes, there is a gem.
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A city that used to be infamous for that third place was recently crowned as India's famous city.
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And it's here where we have some new lessons on doing India well.
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In the 1980s, my parents moved to a small city in the West Indian state of Gujarat called Surat.
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Back then, it was just starting to boom.
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Jobs were flowing in, Surat's diamond and textile industries were taking off.
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The city was shining on the coast of the Arabian Sea.
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But the infrastructure and governance couldn't keep up with the city's population growth.
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Overcrowding and open sewers began to define the city.
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My parents told me that they remember rats the size of cats scurrying around the streets and sometimes even in their house.
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Surat was becoming one of India's most polluted cities, and it all came to a head in 1994.
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Monsoon flooding caused the open sewers to overflow, and not just with waste, but also the bodies of dead rats that lived in its depths.
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This caused an outbreak of the pneumonic plague.
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The news of this plague spread like wildfire, not just through word of mouth, but also through the Indian media who worsened the mania.
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This caused 300 ,000 people to flee Surat, the largest exodus in India since the Kashmiri Hindu exodus of 1990.
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The irony, only 56 people died in this plague.
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And it's actually this contradiction of 56 deaths versus 300 ,000
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people leaving where we first see the shimmer of a clean Surat.
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One of the reasons the death toll was so low was not only because of the migration, but also the quick actions of the state government.
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Paramilitary enforced quarantine while the state government rushed antibiotics to combat the plague.
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Nonetheless, Surath as a whole suffered greatly in economic terms.
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The migration out and lockdown caused 600 million dollars in losses, a mammoth amount for a third world city.
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A Burjian commercial center now became a backwater.
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So the government of Surath brought someone in to fix the city and unlock its great potential.
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His name was S .R.
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Rao or Rao Sahib as he came to be known.
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Rao Sahib was tasked with cleaning up the city, literally.
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When Rao first met his staff, they complained that the problem was genetic.
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They noted how they'd send workers to clean streets at 9pm, and by 10pm the people would have just made a new garbage pile.
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So Rao went to these places personally.
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He waited in the garbage and sludge piles with his own feet to make a point to society.
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He would call his officials to clean the mess while he watched.
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But this type of individual signaling and surveillance can't clean an entire city, even if Rao was leading from the front.
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To learn how Rao succeeded, we have to look at this chart.
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You can see how
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China and the US have a lot more local government employees versus India, who concentrates more power at the center and especially state level.
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This imbalance causes a lower level of accountability.
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While the center tends to national interests, state governments in India are frequently the biggest dens of corruption and inefficiency.
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This causes the understaffed and stretched local officials to be reduced to equally corrupt and or overworked pawns.
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So what Rao did was place more emphasis on local governance.
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He created something he called the 6x6x6 system.
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Rao divided Surath into six zones.
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Each zone had six districts.
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Crucially, each zone leader was empowered with more executive authority,
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so they could make quicker decisions so that those under them in their six districts could execute faster as well.
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Rao introduced a redressal system for reporting to district authorities so they could respond quickly.
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He bent bureaucratic levers to introduce an administrative charge for nuisance, basically a fine for lawyering.
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Later, the city was equipped with CCTVs that linked license plates to owners
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so if someone throws litter out of the car they get fined.
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Solid waste removal went from 35 % to 95 % during his tenure.
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Disease rates went down 70%.
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And soon Surat was being labeled the cleanest city in India.
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So now consider this.
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Why did that factor we talked about earlier, Izathism, not cause an electoral backlash here?
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While Rao was a bureaucrat, so not a politician, if the people got angry enough, they could goad politicians into transferring it.
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But they didn't.
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And the reason ties back to the plague.
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The damage it caused in Surat affected everyone.
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Hindu, Muslim, upper caste, lower caste.
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Legit everyone.
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This crisis made the city realize they had to change.
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That they had to stop politics over petty identity honor battles and instead elevate priorities like combating pollution.
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And that kind of sucks.
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The reason I'm saying it sucks is because it takes a massive crisis for Indians to change.
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Does that mean we should send a plague to every Indian city?
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I don't think so, but when I scroll the internet today, some people seem to have that idea.
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I mean, anti -Indian sentiment is kind of off the rails nowadays.
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But let's rest with that sentiment for a second.
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What if it is that anti -Indian sentiment that may just be the crisis that spurs change for Indians?
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What if the internet could make India clean?
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In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched one of the most ambitious cleanliness campaigns in human history, Swatsh Bharat or Clean India,
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a national mission to transform India's relationship with not just pollution, but also human hygiene.
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The government built over 100 million toilets, they ran awareness campaigns, they even got
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Bollywood involved, they made cleanliness a matter of national pride.
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But the thing is, it failed.
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While infrastructure improved, people's behavior didn't.
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When all of India was given toilet coverage, many people still wanted to defecate in the open.
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The central government tried to push cleaning drives, but state and local governments didn't follow through.
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And while some did try to clean their streets, more kept polluting them.
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India's pollution is as much a cultural problem as it is a policy problem.
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So let's come back to Maslow.
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At independence, over 50 % of Indians lived in extreme poverty.
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Today, it's below 5%.
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390 million people lifted out of poverty in a single generation.
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That's more than the entire population of the United States.
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Indians are racing up Maslow's pyramid now.
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And as survival becomes less of a daily crisis, something else starts to matter.
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Self -esteem.
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How the world sees you.
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How you see yourself.
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32 million Indians traveled abroad in 2025 and hundreds of millions more are seeing the world through their phones.
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And it's not just Tokyo and London they're comparing themselves to anymore.
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It's Nairobi, Hanoi, Medellin, cities that were synonymous with chaos and poverty a generation ago, now beating Indian metros on basic cleanliness.
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So when young
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Indians see this, something cracks.
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This searing hot shame is going viral within India.
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And shame, like the plague, is indiscriminate.
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Indians being insulted for their pollution doesn't target people by religion, caste, or ethnicity.
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It lands on all Indians simultaneously.
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That is a commons, and for the first time it's being forced on us whether we like it or not.
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Recall that the Suurath Plague created a shared crisis that dissolved Izathism long enough for Rao to do his work.
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Now the internet is also spreading a plague.
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That not just of anti -Indian sentiment, but the truth of India's reality, of its inadequacy of its shortcomings, of its broken potential.
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So what should
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Indians do with all the shame?
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Because we are, and I say this as an Indian myself, a race of world -class complainers.
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We think that whining is wisdom, that being cynical is like the ultimate expression of intelligence, that expressing the same loser think,
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that our parents, our uncles, our aunties, our dadas, our daddies, our baes, our bands, everyone says the same thing in a pathetically scornful
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and sarcastic way that some people think makes us rebellious or innovative in our thought.
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My friend Samyak really hit me with a zinger when he told me this.
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That every complaint
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Indians make about India now is nothing different than what
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Indians 20, 50, 100, 200 years ago made.
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There's nothing new about this at all.
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What India needs is more Rao Sahibs.
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It needs more Afro's Shahs who organize cleanups of Mumbai's beaches.
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It needs more Abdul Kalams who dare to dream.
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It needs more leaders who do not look away at India's shame and instead urged citizens to overcome it.
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It needs more average
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Indians who are willing to make a difference, to speak up, to sacrifice.
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Because the question was never whether India could be clean.
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Surat and India's past have answered that.
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The question is whether enough
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Indians are done whining and ready to do the work.
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Vocabolario e note di pronuncia per questa lezione
Questa lezione di conversazione si basa sul video “Why is India SO DIRTY?!”. Le parole che ritornano più spesso: Indian, India, caste, pollution, poverty. Questo video contiene 321 frasi e 3800 parole da ripetere con lo shadowing. Il parlato dura 23:15. Chi parla ha un ritmo naturale di circa 163 parole al minuto, vicino a una conversazione quotidiana. Solo il 78% delle parole rientra nelle 3.000 più comuni dell’inglese, quindi il lessico è impegnativo.
Vocaboli chiave di questo video
15 parole del video che vale la pena imparare, con pronuncia e significato:
| Parola | Pronuncia | Significato |
|---|---|---|
| caste sostantivo | /kæst/ | casta |
| poverty sostantivo | /ˈpɑːvɚti/ | povertà |
| pollution sostantivo | /pəˈluʃən/ | inquinamento |
| plague sostantivo | /plɛɡ/ | peste |
| infrastructure sostantivo | /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/ | infrastruttura |
| bath sostantivo | /bɑːθ/ | bagno, vasca da bagno |
| crack sostantivo | /kɹæk/ | crepa, fessura |
| socialism sostantivo | /ˈsoʊʃəlɪzəm/ | socialismo |
| suck verbo | /sʌk/ | succhiare, suggere |
| priority sostantivo | /pɹaɪˈɒɹɪti/ | priorità |
| garbage sostantivo | /ˈɡɑɹ.bɪd͡ʒ/ | immondizia, spazzatura |
| colonial aggettivo | /kəˈloʊ.njəl/ | coloniale |
| farmer sostantivo | /ˈfɑɹ.mɚ/ | agricoltore, fattore |
| civilization sostantivo | /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/ | civiltà |
| capitalism sostantivo | /ˈkæp.ə.təlˌɪzm̩/ | capitalismo |
I phrasal verb che sentirai
| Parola | Pronuncia | Significato |
|---|---|---|
| point out verbo | additare | |
| clean up verbo | ripulire | |
| find out verbo | scoprire | |
| get through verbo | /ɡɛt ˈθɹu/ | superare, farcela |
| go back verbo | tornare | |
| go through verbo | attraversare | |
| keep up with verbo | tenere dietro a | |
| mess up verbo | incasinare |
Frasi da ripetere
Frasi brevi e complete del video che puoi riutilizzare nella conversazione di tutti i giorni:
- Indians actually solve today's calamitous pollution crisis?
- Let's start off with the most important thing, economics.
- Sounds weird, but let's get through some again.
La grammatica di questo video
Le strutture che chi parla usa di più, con le parole esatte del video:
| Struttura | Nel video |
|---|---|
| Forma passiva be + participio passato — conta ciò che accade, non chi lo fa | was caused · was made · was partitioned |
| Present perfect have/has + participio passato — un’azione passata che conta ancora adesso | I've gone · haven't even gotten · has been |
| Frasi relative who / which + frase — un’informazione in più su una persona o una cosa | one who does · houses which are · scrap which is |
Pronuncia a cui fare attenzione
Chi parla usa 33 contrazioni e forme ridotte, come didn't, can't, don't. Pronunciale nella forma breve, così come le senti.
- I suoni “th”: bath /bɑːθ/, ethnicity /ɛθˈnɪsɪti/, wealthy /ˈwɛl.θi/, nonetheless /ˌnʌnðəˈlɛs/
- I suoni “sh” e “zh”: pollution /pəˈluʃən/, socialism /ˈsoʊʃəlɪzəm/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, trash /tɹæʃ/, migration /maɪˈɡɹeɪʃ(ə)n/
- Parole lunghe — attenzione all’accento: infrastructure /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/, socialism /ˈsoʊʃəlɪzəm/, priority /pɹaɪˈɒɹɪti/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, capitalism /ˈkæp.ə.təlˌɪzm̩/
I suoni difficili per chi parla italiano:
- Consonante finale — senza aggiungere una vocale dopo: caste /kæst/, plague /plɛɡ/, bath /bɑːθ/, crack /kɹæk/, sentiment /ˈsɛn.tɪ.mənt/
- /æ/ — più aperta della “e”: caste /kæst/, crack /kɹæk/, capitalism /ˈkæp.ə.təlˌɪzm̩/, trash /tɹæʃ/, dynamic /daɪˈnæm.ɪk/
Come esercitarsi con questo video
- Ascolta tutto il video una volta senza parlare e annota le parole che non conosci.
- Inizia a velocità 0,75×, fai shadowing frase per frase e torna alla velocità normale quando diventa facile.
- Registrati e confronta con l’originale, facendo attenzione a parole come caste, poverty, pollution.
Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?
Shadowing è una tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue supportata da studi scientifici, originariamente sviluppata per la formazione dei traduttori professionisti e resa popolare dal poliglotta Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Il metodo è semplice ma potente: ascolti un audio in inglese di madrelingua e lo ripeti immediatamente ad alta voce — come un'ombra che segue il parlante con un ritardo di solo 1–2 secondi. A differenza dell'ascolto passivo o degli esercizi di grammatica, lo shadowing costringe il tuo cervello e i muscoli della bocca a elaborare e riprodurre simultaneamente i modelli di discorso reale. La ricerca dimostra che migliora significativamente la precisione della pronuncia, l'intonazione, il ritmo, il discorso connesso, la comprensione dell'ascolto e la fluidità del parlato — rendendolo uno dei metodi più efficaci per la preparazione alla prova di speaking dell'IELTS e per la comunicazione reale in inglese.