92/ 100 Jain Hospital Dog

My 100 Dogs of India project has been a series of posts featuring at least one photograph of a dog accompanied by a short story or musing about my time spent in India. The story is sometimes about that one particular dog or, more often, about something that the dog inspired me to think about. Today’s dog led me down a rabbit warren and I’ll have to work hard to condense my jumbled thoughts into something readable.

Halfway through our last trip to India, in January 2026, we had a weird gap to fill between our time in Kerala and our visit to Varanasi. We had already had enough time in Fort Kochi, and the two spare days floating empty in our calendar weren’t enough to do anything meaningful nearby. We didn’t need to add any extra days onto the next stage, our Varanasi visit, either. I thought about this for ages before I realised that our Indigo flight between the two cities had to call at Bangalore for a few hours anyway so I thought, why don’t we stay there for the weekend and have a wildcard stopover?

Absolutely nobody thought this was a good idea. Apparently Bangalore wasn’t suited to tourists, was extremely busy and there was nothing to see. I’ll be the first to admit that it was extremely busy but we had quite a fascinating two days there in the ‘tech hub’ of India, in spite of the traffic. Lots of things about our short time in Bangalore interested me, but perhaps the one thing in particular that was really noticeable here, more than I’d noticed anywhere else in India, was the wealth divide.

The areas around Cubbon Park, close to our hotel, were home to some ludicrously tall and very fancy skyscrapers with names like Prestige Kingfisher Towers and TVS Emerald Cascadia with apartments in the Cascadia starting at ₹14 Crore (over £1 million today). The rows of the usual cafes and shops were punctuated with homeware boutiques selling everything you could need for your luxury penthouse at eye-watering prices. Range Rovers, Mercedes and Porsches glided silently (and extremely slowly) alongside the worst busses imaginable through the congested roads on the way to restaurants that were far more expensive than those here in Britain.

We found ourselves in a weird part of town at lunchtime, completely devoid of the usual street food vendors and cafes selling dosas that would ordinarily have served us well. In need of food we stumbled across a pricey Italian place in an almost completely empty, and absolutely giant, unfinished shopping centre called Marksquare.

Everything above the ground floor was a building site and, this being India where Health and Safety hasn’t been invented yet, you could still ride the very dusty escalator up and see what an entire rubble-covered floor of a shopping centre looks like with no shops or walls. It looked like it could have housed about 1000 people. Back down on the ground floor, next to our cafe, was a branch of the pricey patisserie chain Magnolia Bakery and, looking very much out of place, a Maserati car dealership. Just so that you knew you were still in India there was also a brand-new bathroom for patrons of this high-end shopping mall, but it was already filthy and had sewage leaking all over the floor.

Only days before visiting Marksquare I had been chatting to a lovely sales assistant in an American shirt shop and, after she had quizzed me about the cost of living in the UK, she in turn told me that she earned about £150 per month. I then went on to talk about this with one of the staff at the nice hotel we were staying in and they told us that they too get paid about the same amount. Interestingly they were both quite happy with that and thought themselves lucky to have nice jobs. How obscene must a place like Marksquare seem to them? We spent almost an entire week’s worth of their salary on just one meal. A simple slice of cheesecake and a coffee in the Magnolia bakery was a day’s wage. The more I thought about this the more I felt pretty disgusted with myself.

What does any of this have to do with the photograph of the dog above? [There are actually two dogs there if you look carefully]. On the night I went out to hunt for the famous dog Idli I walked past the nearby Jain hospital. It’s named as such because it was founded by some wealthy Jain philanthropists¹; so the wealthy people of India do sometimes invest in good causes. On the road in front of the hospital was a little parking area for some hospital transport and that’s where I came across a small pack of dogs who were living there alongside the drivers of the minibuses. I made a few photographs, scratched a couple of dogs behind the ears and continued onwards towards the hospital entrance. Almost immediately I nearly broke my ankle on a loose paving stone and simultaneously garrotted myself on a low-slung cable (thank you to the hospital staff who shouted out to warn me about that).

Even late at night the queue of traffic on the road leading to the hospital was brutal and the two or five lanes of traffic — it was hard to tell how many there were supposed to be — were at a standstill. I tagged onto a bunch of elderly people and crossed the road with them as they were the only class of folk that the drivers would seem to permit passage to. The vehicles weren’t moving, but that doesn’t mean there was space to pass between them. The party of pensioners all had trouble clambering up the broken kerb on the other side of the street before wandering over to a cafe for their dinner.

All of this lead me to think about the richer people in cities like Bangalore. What I wonder about is, how they are content to live in a country that really is still quite poor, and how they could be happy knowing that their own people, and maybe even their own relatives, are battling through the many hazards of the streets just to get some dinner? These are hazards that could be completely remedied with a bit of organisation and some money.

The two-tier divide means that the wealthy can increase their wealth much easier than in other countries. They can earn colossal salaries whilst their day-to-day expenses are minimal. You can run a business selling things at Western prices whilst only paying a fraction of a western salary to your employees.

Whilst the rich can get richer, and kit out their fancy apartments with nicer and nicer things, they must surely be making the transition from their curated lifestyle to the impoverished one a hundred metres below their window even harder. You can cocoon yourself in a Beverly Hills life for a little while but, at some point, you will have to leave your home and venture out of your front door (opened by a doorman obvs.) and, as this is India, your apartment block may very well be right next door to a slum.

The photograph of the dog by the hospital triggered this topic because it got me thinking about things like illness — the great leveller of humanity. No matter who you are you are still going to get sick and, when you do, you aren’t going to be able to get to the Jain hospital in Bangalore any time soon because the traffic in your city is absolutely abysmal. You could have the fastest car in the world and it wouldn’t help you get there quicker; you would just get to die on more comfortable leather seats with nice air conditioning.

Why don’t the wealthy people of India do more to improve their cities? In Bangalore, the third wealthiest city in India, there are a staggering 31,600 millionaire households² ($US) so why don’t those folk use their finances and status to try and push for better roads, better footpaths, less litter and all the other things that make a city more habitable for everyone, not least of all themselves?

If I was one of the 31,600 millionaires I would not be content unless I had tried everything in my power to make my neighbourhood a better place to live. It’s surely no good living in a very comfortable bubble if you have to pass through such poverty to reach your destination that day.

I’d probably also have far too many adopted dogs.