On our one day in Lucknow we whizzed around the city. Our least favorite spot by far was a park of the most grotesque nature. It was a barren dry land of injustice at its extreme. The park is been deemed by its maker as a Park for the Poor. It is poor. Colorless, Hard, Hot, Merciless, Endless, Repetitive, Waterless, and Without Natural Beauty. Poverty is so many things and I am not trying to capture it here but both my husband and I were moved to tears in this place of hard beating heat. Even the massive row of elephants landed flat on our souls in the face of gross injustice and misuse of funds. Millions of dollars on a park in a state where in many cities there is faulty power, faulty water supplies and no real sewage system. Millions of dollars on a park in a state where education is often for one child per family not for all. In a state that needs trees not stone elephants set in the sea of marble floors. Millions of dollars on a park where children can't play, families can't picnic and lovers can't hide.
It is an immense park with no exciting crannies for kids to get lost in or trees to picnic under. Here it is in pictures. Even as I write I see a little red, not the black and white of words written objectively so instead of letting the red seep in I will stop here. The sadness was overwhelming as we sat and looked at a floor made of stone, with buildings made of stone, housing statutes made of stone, with large googling eyes made of stone. For shame.
It is an immense park with no exciting crannies for kids to get lost in or trees to picnic under. Here it is in pictures. Even as I write I see a little red, not the black and white of words written objectively so instead of letting the red seep in I will stop here. The sadness was overwhelming as we sat and looked at a floor made of stone, with buildings made of stone, housing statutes made of stone, with large googling eyes made of stone. For shame.
Here we are half way from the only gate into the park.
We are running to get to the elephants across a shadeless glowing floor
shimmering with the endless, merciless heat of the sun.
For those currently in blizzards there was nothing sunny about this walk.
It felt like a desert and my husband made mention of a long movie about
people walking across a desert.
It felt as though we would never make it back.
A part of the elephant parade.
Just to give you a little perspective of the size of each monster.
Abe's face tells you how he felt. It is supposed to be awesome.
Awful really.
Notice how red we all are!
A bird's eye view from far away.
As we ran with our kids in arm through the middle to get to the elephants,
there loomed on either side identical buildings (as pictured here).
They were too far to cast shade on the main throughway.
Inside apparently are massive statutes of living people and those dead.
Those that built the park want to be remembered.
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