Incomprehensible

This weekend I started reading The City of Joy. It is one of the assigned books for me to read in preparation for India. It is a really intense book about Calcutta. I'm having a lot of trouble comprehending that the things I'm reading are actually real. More than that, I'm trying to comprehend that in three months, I will be experiencing this in person. Although I'm only a third of the way through it, I will already highly recommend this book to anyone willing to shake up their view of the world.

Here's one of the many passages that really blew my mind. It is a passage talking about the extreme overcrowding of the city.

In a few years the city was to condemn its ten million inhabitants to living on less than twelve square feet of space per person, while the four or five million who squeezed into its slums had sometimes to make do with barely three square feet each.

I really don't know how that's possible. Sure the space gets multiplied out a bit by buildings with more than one floor, but...

There's a lot more in the book that is just beyond what I could have imagined. More and more I'm coming to realize a little bit of how intense my four months in Calcutta are going to be.