They landed in Calcutta at midnight and what Rick Brooks remembers is the piles of rags. They were everywhere. He saw them on sidewalks driving from the airport and he saw them again from his hotel window. Rags, and more rags.
“They were all people,” Brooks was saying Friday.
He was 13 years old, and it changed his life.
Brooks, 60, is an outreach program manager in UW-Madison’s Division of Continuing Studies. He is also, I think it’s fair to say, a kind of consummate Madisonian.