We are crammed into the back of a rusting metal cyclo and about to plunge into the seething madness of Dariba Kalan in Old Delhi, when a mêlée breaks out at a Bank Baroda branch a few feet away.
Exhausted from standing in a queue at the ATM machine since dawn, an old man has collapsed. A younger chap, who appears to be his son, is flailing against the advancing queue, who are oblivious to the prostrate human on the steps of the bank.
In the teeming madness and rough-and-tumble that is the washing machine of daily life in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has turned up the insanity dial a few more notches.
In India, where one in three are said to live below the poverty line and half its 1.3 billion people have no bank account, cash is king.
It is a country where 90% of the economy relies on cash to function, and it has been nearly crippled by Modi’s surprise ban on INR500 and INR1,000 notes.
Known locally as “demonetisation”, the move is aimed at cracking down on corruption in the form of black money: cash earned illegally, or within the law but undeclared to the taxman.
Despite the pain, this was the kind of policy expected of the current prime minister.
The son of a Gujarati tea seller and born an “OBC”, a collective term used by the Indian government to describe the “Other Backward Class”, India’s socially and educationally disadvantaged, Modi knows adversity — and inequality — well.
He has used his background to great effect: two long years before US President-elect Donald Trump, the UK vote to leave the European Union and Italian prime minsiter Matteo Renzi’s resignation happened, Modi rode into the Indian presidency on a similar ticket of public governance, trust, morality and hope.
Rightly questioning why the sons of government officials and politicians lived like billionaires while ordinary Indians scrabbled for an existence, he won the hearts and minds of millions of his people.
Once branded by establishment politicians as a “maut ka saudagar”, a merchant of death, Modi swept into New Delhi with his promise of a new Indian dream.
One where the youth can live with hope, and his promise of “clean and green” would also equate with health and sanitation — concepts that any visitor to India would agree the country needs, and badly.
Two years after a landslide general election that was last won as convincingly in 1984, when Rajiv Gandhi was elected, Modi has largely gone on to deliver what he said he would: a clean, green government.
One where even visual cues reflect his intentions: the newly printed INR500 note prominently displays a pair of Gandhiji eyeglass frames to show his commitment to the cause of governance.
But it has been a painful transition, one where poor locals seem to be suffering as much as India’s corrupt officials.
As of now, some 170 people have died in queues waiting for cash at ATMs, while the Modi government scrambles to print new money to replace the outlawed INR500 and INR1,000 notes.
Tourism has been badly affected while small, everyday transactions like petty trade or even paying school fees have come to a standstill.
Those with credit and debit cards suffer through bad data connections, while salaries cannot be withdrawn due to the daily INR4,000 withdrawal limit, with insufficient fresh cash to go around.
Even with all this, Indians recognise the wider objective, the greater goal: demonetisation was necessary to weed out the counterfeit notes that ended up funding terrorism and withdrawing black money hoarded by crooked politicians.
According to one anecdotal account, the “trucks of cash” that had been used to hoard illicit gains have been rendered superfluous in the wake of the measures. And in the apparent case of one crooked politician, the equivalent of RM800 million cash was found in his house.
Among those whom I spoke to, admiration and affection for Modi runs deep and true. Whether Kashmiri, Punjabi, Hindu, Gujarati or Muslim, almost all expressed universal admiration for the man, despite the pain.
They agree with what he is doing to clean up the system. They respect his workaholic, austere nature, his oratory skill, his courage. They buy into the story of his failed attempt to marry up into a higher caste.
A marriage that failed after two months, and which has seen him celibate and dedicated to his political struggle since, someone who only sleeps four hours a night.
For all that, they are willing to, quite literally, die for him.
For me, holidaying in emerging Asia almost invariably ends in a sense of gratitude for what we have in Malaysia: prosperity, a level of development and basic quality of life that most other Asians can only dream of.
And as I try and ignore the dirt-encrusted three and four-year-old children performing somersaults on Abdul Aziz road in Karol Bagh to earn a measly rupee or two, my mind once again returns to Malaysia.
As my mind turns away from the sight of the children’s families living under the highway bypasses in the interminable cacophony of horns, cars and Royal Enfields criss-crossing the intersection, I think of our own leadership and the level of public affection for it, whether real or imagined.
And how, in the affluence of Bangsar, Taman Tun Dr Ismail and Petaling Jaya, our existence is the relative opposite.
Mesmerised by an appearance of prosperity and affluence, Malaysians are loath to change. Averse to “risking it all”, most of us are prepared to countenance and suffer the status quo, even as we recognise the damaging effects of its continuation to our comfortable existence.
India, which craves what we have — an existence that we acknowledge has come not because of, but in spite of, the current administration — is willing to risk it all.
So different, so painfully different, from the Indian experience and yet so similar, so human in nature.
At the end of it, all we ordinary human beings want is a little positive change. And once we get it, how ever little it is, we go to the ends of the earth to protect it, while those who don’t have it are willing to die for it. Such are life’s vicissitudes.
Khoo Hsu Chuang is a contributing editor at The Edge Malaysia
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