Shadowing Practice: Why is India SO DIRTY?! - Learn English Speaking with 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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Woordenschat en spreektips bij deze les
Deze spreekles is gebaseerd op de video “Why is India SO DIRTY?!”. Deze woorden komen het vaakst terug: Indian, India, caste, pollution, poverty. Deze video bevat 321 zinnen en 3800 woorden om na te spreken. Het gesproken deel duurt 23:15. De spreker praat in een natuurlijk tempo van ongeveer 163 woorden per minuut, dicht bij een alledaags gesprek. Slechts 78% van de woorden hoort bij de 3.000 meest gebruikte Engelse woorden, dus de woordenschat is pittig.
Belangrijke woorden in deze video
15 woorden uit de video die het leren waard zijn, met uitspraak en betekenis:
| Woord | Uitspraak | Betekenis |
|---|---|---|
| caste zelfstandig naamwoord | /kæst/ | kaste |
| poverty zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈpɑːvɚti/ | armoede |
| pollution zelfstandig naamwoord | /pəˈluʃən/ | vervuiling, milieuverontreiniging |
| plague zelfstandig naamwoord | /plɛɡ/ | pest |
| infrastructure zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/ | infrastructuur |
| bath zelfstandig naamwoord | /bɑːθ/ | bad, badkuip |
| crack zelfstandig naamwoord | /kɹæk/ | barst, breuk |
| socialism zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈsoʊʃəlɪzəm/ | socialisme |
| suck werkwoord | /sʌk/ | zuigen |
| priority zelfstandig naamwoord | /pɹaɪˈɒɹɪti/ | voorrang, prioriteit |
| garbage zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈɡɑɹ.bɪd͡ʒ/ | huisvuil, vuilnis |
| colonial bijvoeglijk naamwoord | /kəˈloʊ.njəl/ | koloniaal |
| farmer zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈfɑɹ.mɚ/ | boer, boerin |
| civilization zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/ | beschaving |
| capitalism zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈkæp.ə.təlˌɪzm̩/ | kapitalisme |
Phrasal verbs die je zult horen
| Woord | Betekenis |
|---|---|
| point out werkwoord | aanwijzen, aanduiden |
| clean up werkwoord | schoonmaken |
| find out werkwoord | ontdekken, onderzoeken |
| go back werkwoord | teruggaan |
| go down werkwoord | afdalen |
| mess up werkwoord | verrommelen, in de war brengen |
| take off werkwoord | uittrekken, afzetten |
Zinnen om te herhalen
Korte, volledige zinnen uit de video die je in alledaagse gesprekken kunt gebruiken:
- 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.
Grammatica in deze video
De structuren die de spreker het meest gebruikt, met de exacte woorden uit de video:
| Structuur | In de video |
|---|---|
| Lijdende vorm be + voltooid deelwoord — het gaat om wat er gebeurt, niet om wie het doet | was caused · was made · was partitioned |
| Present perfect have/has + voltooid deelwoord — iets uit het verleden dat nu nog telt | I've gone · haven't even gotten · has been |
| Betrekkelijke bijzinnen who / which + zin — extra informatie over een persoon of ding | one who does · houses which are · scrap which is |
Uitspraak om op te letten
De spreker gebruikt 33 samentrekkingen en verkorte vormen, zoals didn't, can't, don't. Spreek ze kort uit, zoals je ze hoort.
- De “th”-klanken: bath /bɑːθ/, ethnicity /ɛθˈnɪsɪti/, wealthy /ˈwɛl.θi/, nonetheless /ˌnʌnðəˈlɛs/
- De klanken “sh” en “zh”: pollution /pəˈluʃən/, socialism /ˈsoʊʃəlɪzəm/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, trash /tɹæʃ/, migration /maɪˈɡɹeɪʃ(ə)n/
- Lange woorden — let op de klemtoon: infrastructure /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/, socialism /ˈsoʊʃəlɪzəm/, priority /pɹaɪˈɒɹɪti/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, capitalism /ˈkæp.ə.təlˌɪzm̩/
Klanken die Nederlandstaligen lastig vinden:
- Stemhebbende eindmedeklinker — /b/, /d/, /g/, /z/, /v/ niet verscherpen: plague /plɛɡ/, garbage /ˈɡɑɹ.bɪd͡ʒ/, bend /bɛnd/, divide /dɪˈvaɪd/, pyramid /ˈpɪɹ.ə.mɪd/
- /æ/ — opener dan de Nederlandse “e”: caste /kæst/, crack /kɹæk/, capitalism /ˈkæp.ə.təlˌɪzm̩/, trash /tɹæʃ/, dynamic /daɪˈnæm.ɪk/
- /g/ — een harde plofklank, geen Nederlandse “g”: plague /plɛɡ/, garbage /ˈɡɑɹ.bɪd͡ʒ/, migration /maɪˈɡɹeɪʃ(ə)n/, governance /ˈɡʌvəɹnəns/, greatly /ˈɡɹeɪ̯t.li/
Zo oefen je met deze video
- Luister de hele video één keer zonder te spreken en noteer de woorden die je niet kent.
- Begin op 0,75× snelheid, spreek zin voor zin na en ga terug naar normale snelheid zodra het makkelijk gaat.
- Neem jezelf op en vergelijk met het origineel; let daarbij op woorden als caste, poverty, pollution.
Wat is de Shadowing-techniek?
Shadowing is een wetenschappelijk onderbouwde taalleermethode die oorspronkelijk is ontwikkeld voor professionele tolkentraining en gepopulariseerd door polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. De methode is eenvoudig maar krachtig: je luistert naar native Engelse audio en herhaalt het onmiddellijk hardop — als een schaduw die de spreker volgt met slechts 1–2 seconden vertraging. In tegenstelling tot passief luisteren of grammaticadrills, dwingt shadowing je hersenen en mondspieren om echte spraakpatronen tegelijkertijd te verwerken en te reproduceren. Onderzoek toont aan dat het de uitspraaknauwkeurigheid, intonatie, ritme, verbonden spraak, luisterbegrip en spreekvaardigheid aanzienlijk verbetert — waardoor het een van de meest effectieve methoden is voor IELTS Speaking-voorbereiding en echte Engelse communicatie.