We left for Delhi in October and came home at Thanksgiving. India was crowded: In 2020 it will surpass China and have the largest population in the world. Self-sufficient in food, it is a rich country in soil and agriculture as well as in heart. Most Indian people you meet connect easily with each other and with outsiders. Everywhere you go in India, there is a flurry of activity. It is all yang all the time. There are bright vibrant colors.

Jaipur market. People selling stuff on the roof too!

We saw so many people piled on vehicles.

Camel cart and tractor in Rashijistan

People are very happy despite many of them living in poverty. We saw women in bright sari (dresses) cooking food under an overpass in Delhi. We went to the Sanjay Gandhi Animal Care Center. Some animals looked okay and others needed more help. They have 3000 animals there.

We saw tent cities with people jammed in like sardines. For the most part, people are engaged, attentive (you have to be or you will get run over by motorcycles), and positive and at times it’s shocking.

As you can imagine, animals do not normally look very healthy. Dogs sleep all day because of the heat and because they were up all night defending territory since dogs are not neutered, they are aggressive. In Leh, Ladakh up north there are forty-fifty dog bites a month at the local hospital. People are afraid of dogs.

Street dogs:

So the head monk at Hemis monastery started a dog rescue sanctuary to spay/neuter/educate and train dogs to help with the human:canine bond. He is also involved with programs to help the local impoverished children and through his initiatives was able to plant 40,000 trees in 5 minutes, attaining the Guiness world;s record for most trees planted the fastest. That is one rock star monk!

We visited: It was the best dog rescue place we found in India with plans to expand and take volunteers but the altitude was hard for me at over 12,000 feet so I was not sure I could handle it. They do a tubal ligation or spay differently than we do, with a flank approach rather than on the midline.

In Ladakh, they have banned plastic, smoking, and drinking.

But in the rest of India there is plenty of garbage (not so much smoking and drinking though) I don’t think there is much in the way of garbage services and once in a while you will see people sweeping up the garbage and get excited to think of its proper disposal, only to see them walk over and dump it off a ravine. I think if the Modi really wants to help, it would be easy to have a government-run pick up point with a huge dumpster and just pay people per kilo for the garbage they bring. This way the cows and street dogs will stop eating it.

Leh, Ladakh is not like the rest of India. There are primarily Tibetan Buddhist temples and ancient monasteries. We were lucky to visit during a fall festival!