There are a lot of people in India, 966.8 million as of 1998. I don’t know what they want with the atomic bomb. They already have the population bomb and it’s working like a treat.

Nevertheless India, with a population density of 843 people per square mile isn’t as crowded as the Netherlands, which packs 1,195 people into the same space. Nobody comes back from Holland aghast at the teeming masses of Dutch or having nightmares about windmills and tulips pressing in on every side.

Poor people take up room. You may have noticed this when tatooed guys wearing motorcycle-gang insignia come into a bar. And poor people who depend on agriculture for a living, as 67 percent of Indians do, take up more room than Hell’s Angels. If 67 percent of New Yorkers depended on agriculture for a living, someone would be trying to farm the dirt under the floor mats of your Yellow Cab.

Everything is squeezed together in India to keep it out of the picnic-blanket-sized rice field that’s the sole support for a family of ten. Every nook of land is put to use. At the bottom of a forty-foot-deep abandoned well, which would be good for nothing but teenage suicides in America, somebody was raising frogs. The public rest rooms of Calcutta employ the space-saving device of dispensing with walls and roofs and placing the urinal stalls on the sidewalk. No resource goes to waste, which sounds like a fine thing for you to advocate next Earth Day - except in the real world of poverty, it means that the principal household fuel of India is the cow flop. This is formed into a circular patty and stuck on the side of the house, where it provides a solution to three problems: storage room, home decor, and cooking dinner.

Therefore, what makes a drive across India insane (and stinky) isn’t overpopulation, it’s poverty. Except this isn’t really true either. The reason for those ranks of shops and houses along the Grand Trunk [name of the long road P.J. is travelling on], and for the cars, trucks, and buses bashing into each other between them, is that people have the money to buy and build these things. And the reason for the great smoldering dung funk hanging over India is that there’s something to cook on those fires.

P. J. O’Rourke, CEO of the Sofa, p. 231-232