Indian Instincts

by Miniya Chatterji

  The sounds of pain and lament from the occupants of the beds mixed into one unholy humming sound that resounded in the hall.

  I walked down the hall. The most fragile men that I had ever seen in my life lay on both sides of me on the plastic-covered mattresses of their beds. Some of them were wailing in a high-pitched voice, their eyes closed, fists clenched. A few intently watched me from atop their bed, their eyes following my moves. I walked over and sat by their side for a while. Some had been served a frugal meal of rice and lentils that they were hastily eating with their hands. There was very little medical support. Volunteers in casual clothes sat beside a few patients, a finger on the pulse of their patient’s wrist, or holding their palms out with tablets on them.

  ‘My son left me here to die,’ one of the patients screamed at me from his bed. I went over and held his hand.

  Stepping out of the hall, I stood at the base of the stairway that led to the nuns’ quarters on the first floor, and the women’s hall in an adjoining wing on that floor.

  I felt a sudden tight grip on my ankle.

  Looking down, I saw a man huddled in a blanket, sitting on the floor, gasping for breath and holding on to my feet with his hands.

  ‘Are you a doctor?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I am not.’

  ‘I need a doctor. Help me,’ he pleaded, his eyes gleaming as if with anger.

  I wondered if these would be his last words.

  I quickly looked around for a volunteer, and saw a dozen of them in the hall busy helping the men breathing their last. I realized rather uncomfortably that I could not see a single Indian among them. Why were my fellow billion Indians not here to help? I walked over to a volunteer, who looked Scandinavian, and handed him a piece of paper with the numbers of a few local general practitioners I had scribbled on it.

  I headed to the women’s hall on the first floor. In the hall Just at the end of the stairway, I came across a group of Korean volunteers sitting around a large wooden dining table drawing up charts, along with an Indian resident missionary who introduced herself to me as Sister Rukmini.5

  ‘I took a train from Bhopal twenty-two years ago to come here and meet Mother (Teresa),’ she said.

  ‘Why did you want to meet her?’ I asked.

  ‘I had wanted to dedicate my life to working for the needy. Mother was doing that and I joined her.’

  ‘That’s great. And what are they doing here?’ I asked, pointing towards the group of Koreans at the dining table.

  ‘They are drawing up a timetable which we will put up in the halls,’ explained Sister Rukmini.

  ‘But why do I not see any Indian volunteers around?’ I probed.

  She paused for a few seconds, and then slowly said, ‘The Kalighat Municipal Corporation donated this temple to Mother Teresa. This is where Mother started her work in India, creating the Missionaries of Charity, out of love and compassion for the most needy. We are grateful to the municipality, but besides that, there has been little support from the locals,’ she replied.

  ‘Come, look here.’ Sister Rukmini pulled me by my hand to the terrace outside. ‘All these hundreds of people here, they stay away from Nirmal Hriday.’

  She pointed, in the dim light of the setting sun, at the mile-long stretch below.

  As a stark contrast to the atmosphere where we were, I saw a sea of animated people on the street downstairs. The street was lined with tightly packed shacks occupied with street hawkers energetically selling, to thousands of devotees, items to worship and adore the Goddess Kali’s idol in the adjoining temple.

  I hastily ran down the stairway and out on to the street.

  ‘What are these garlands for?’ I asked a woman, probably in her forties, a rose garland in one hand, a ten-rupee note in the other, who was elbowing her way through the crowd in front of her to the seller sitting in the shack.

  ‘To offer to Maa Kali, what else for?’

  ‘Why don’t you visit there?’ I asked, pointing to Nirmal Hriday, located about 50 metres away. ‘That building, there.’

  ‘I do not know what that building is,’ she screamed, turning to look back at me from her spot, now at the front of the crowd. ‘A temple?’

  I asked a young man on the road, ‘Do you know about Mother Teresa’s home?’

  ‘Yes, right here,’ he replied, pointing with his chin towards Nirmal Hriday, which stood on our left.

  ‘Have you ever been there?’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’ll catch some deadly virus in there! God knows what kind of people they bring there and the diseases they have!’ he said, alarmed.

  A newly married couple was buying a set of utensils made of mud, each piece filled with a special offering to the Goddess. They stood in front of the shop, considering their final selection.

  ‘Have you ever been to Mother Teresa’s home for the dying?’ I asked as they made their payment to the seller.

  ‘No,’ replied the man. ‘It is bad luck to be near the dying.’

  ‘But they are human beings like you. What bad luck can befall you if you offer them your support when they need it?’

  ‘They are dirty people. I don’t know who they are,’ he said with a scowl.

  ‘Why do you say they are dirty?’ I insisted.

  ‘Beggars, poor people, they are brought off the roads . . . who knows what work they did and where they lived?’ he said, shrugging his shoulders as he walked off with his wife, holding their newly purchased offerings for God.

  I spent the evening speaking to at least sixty more locals along the street. As night fell, the crowds got thicker. I persisted in seeking their attention.

  ‘But she has got so much funding!’ someone told me. ‘Mother Teresa got money from everywhere in the world . . . her work doesn’t need us.’

  ‘No, I have never been there. I cannot touch strange people . . . I would feel weird doing that,’ confessed another person.

  ‘I have my own worries in life to tend to, baba!’ said one man.

  ‘Those are poor and sick people,’ another man declared with repugnance.

  The contrast was startling—revulsion towards humankind and exuberance towards the Goddess. I could accept that the locals kept away from Nirmal Hriday out of the fear of catching a disease, but I found it baffling that they considered poverty and homelessness ‘dirty’. To be dirty is the physical state of being polluted. Poverty and homelessness, however, are socio-economic conditions. Evidently, here they were conflating an individual’s socio-economic condition with his physical status!

  I chose to write about our notion of dirt in India in the context of love because of our peculiar inability to embrace it. Our love for our fellow Indian citizens, or, for that matter, for humanity in general, is often carefully directed only towards those we do not consider ‘dirty’. In the past, status in India was prescriptive, a consequence of one’s birth. The lower castes were perceived as ‘dirty’. Today, status in India can be acquired by other means such as wealth, lifestyle and political power. But this has clearly not made people more egalitarian in their outlook. The definitions have just been reworked—of who the ‘dirty’ people’ are—and incorporated into society’s new pecking order.

  Poor people, the homeless, homosexuals, even women, are apparently on the low end of society’s pecking order today. And by habit, we feel that these ‘dirty’ people are undeserving of love and compassion. These sections of our society, in turn, often make do with receiving less of these emotions. There is evidence from behavioural science and economics, the work of Mullainathan and Shafir, which shows that scarcity creates a psychological ability in everyone struggling to manage with less than they need.6

  I found this trait to be linked to an evolutionary mechanism. We have a primordial ability to nurture and take care of those we do not consider ‘different’ from our own selves, and in that sense, consider part of our group. It is this instinct to protect one’s clan that has helpe
d preserve several animal species, even humans. And so, in a stratified society such as India, we only consider those who are at our ‘level’ to be part of our group. Earlier, this was defined by caste, and now, it is increasingly by socio-economic status. Those who are at a socio-economic level below ours are not part of our group and we cannot care for them.

  We cannot even perceive the pain of those ‘below’ us in status, because we are unable to empathize with them. We can argue that empathy in the human species is also born out of a survival instinct. It originates from the perception abilities of animal groups that need to be able to interpret the appearance of other animals to predict their behaviour, so that they can take appropriate action such as attacking, hiding or playing dead. While empathy is valuable for survival, an important precondition for it is that we must consider the subject of our empathy to be like our own selves. We typically have empathy for those in whom we see our own selves in some way. But when we consider someone inferior to us (or even superior), we find it difficult to empathize with them.

  In India, inequality permeates several aspects of our personal life. Often, arranged marriages in India are also based on the principle of inequality, and not love. Large parts of India have a patriarchal society. Here, the groom and his family are superior in status to the bride. They may ask for many gifts (dowry) from the bride’s family, and impose rules upon her against her wishes. According to media reports, in 2010 alone, grooms and their families have been reported to have burnt alive 8391 brides on pretexts such as disobedience and lack of dowry. A decade before that, in 2000, there were 6995 such cases.7 In the majority of arranged marriages, however, since they have the same cultural background and family support, the couple adjusts to each other. Many of these marriages are stable because both do not have equal power, and therefore do not step on each other’s toes. In a couple that comes together based first on love, they form certain said and unsaid rules by which both are equally bound. In contrast, in an arranged marriage, it is only one (in most cases the husband) who leads the way, and the spouse follows. This is one of the several reasons for India’s low divorce rates—0.3 per cent in 2011 as compared to about 50 per cent in the United States.8 The ‘arrangement’ of arranged marriages seems to last and last.

  This is why, in comparison to the topsy-turvy emotional route that love takes us through, Indian society prefers the stability induced by the inequality of an arranged marriage. No wonder our epics, ancient scriptures and sages warn us to be wary of emotions. Marriage, not love, has become the anchor for family, community and society in India while love here is for the movies and for God—both not easily reachable for ordinary mortals.

  References

  Chidbhavananda, Swami, ed. 1965. The Bhagavad Gita: Original Stanzas (Tamil Nadu: Tapovanam Publishing House).

  Dutt, Apoorva. 2015. How and why number of young Indian couples getting divorced has risen sharply. Hindustan Times, 4 January.

  Krishnamurti, Jiddu. 1952. Ninth talk to boys and girls at Rajghat, 19 December. http://jiddu-krishnamurti.net/en/1952/1952-12-19-jiddu-krishnamurti-9th-talk-to-boys-and-girls.

  Shafir, Eldar, and Sendhil Mullainathan. 2013. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (London: Macmillan Publishers).

  Varma, Subodh. 2012. Dowry death: One bride burnt every hour. Times of India, 27 January.

  6

  Parenting

  A visit to the city of Kota reveals a million real stories about parental pressure on children in India.

  Kota is India’s capital city when it comes to test preparation, which has spawned a $400 million exam industry here.1 Aspiring students come to Kota and study in the city’s ‘test preparation schools’ for as long as three months to several years—an essential rite of passage for many seeking admission to India’s top colleges. They dream of winning admission to the exclusive IITs, the sixteen public colleges whose graduates are recruited immediately by global companies offering large salaries. Graduating from one of the IITs, considered the Ivy League of engineering education in India, is a ticket to an elevated social status and a guaranteed job in India or Silicon Valley in the US.

  Every year, about 1.5 million students take the IIT entrance exam, but less than 10,000 are accepted into the institutes. In 2016, about 160,000 students from across India flocked to Kota’s schools, but only a few were successful. In the meantime, twenty-nine of the students in Kota who failed the entrance exam committed suicide.2

  One of the suicide notes read, ‘I am responsible for my suicide. I cannot fulfil papa’s dream.’

  Another boy wrote, ‘Daddy, I hate maths. I am a good-for-nothing son,’ ending his suicide note with a frowny face.3

  These juvenile suicides, committed under the burden of ambition, are not uncommon in India, and we must ask whose ambition it is that they are burdened with. At the age of fifteen or less, it is not likely that all of them have such an intense ambition in them to clear an exam.

  It is also not uncommon to hear of Indian parents goading their children to study hard for a stable job—regardless of what stability means in an increasingly unstable world. If we look at data on this subject, a recent survey conducted by a global bank found that ‘career success’ turned out to be the most popular goal Indian parents have for their children, outranking that of a ‘happy life’.4 The same survey indicated that Indian and Mexican parents were the keenest in the world that their children be successful in their careers. And more parents in India than anywhere else believed that a postgraduate degree was necessary for their children to achieve their life goals.

  Whether it is love, money, education, status, freedom, friends, affection or time, a real or perceived deprivation in any of these aspects of life could leave us all (parents or not) reacting in ways different from the normal. We could be thinking obsessively of nothing else other than that specific pressing need. It might develop in us a keener sense of the value of the resource we lack, or it might be so debilitating that it could shrink our mental horizons and narrow our perspective. Indeed, in the country with the largest number of malnourished children on the planet, there are several situations that induce a sense of deprivation. It is then these reactionary behaviours by parents that severely affect the context in which children in India grow up. Parents indeed want the best for their children, and when they have been deprived of something themselves, they would often be keen to ensure their children aren’t.

  Many parents, frustrated with their own condition, search for avenues of social justice in the schools of Kota. The test preparation schools here, and plenty others elsewhere in India, promise to catapult families out of their state of deprivation. Kota is rife with stories of how children of railway station baggage handlers, truck drivers and cycle rickshaw pullers study and make it to IIT and other prestigious colleges, changing the fortunes of the entire family. Bringing up a child in India involves the same intensely nurturing emotions as anywhere else in the world, yet parenting here holds a mirror to the dark, dubious side of a fast and unequally developing economy.

  I would argue that for children in any country, it is not the GDP of a nation per se, but the quality of economic growth in areas such as health, the crime rate, income distribution and so on that matters more. A healthy mother is more likely to give birth to a healthy child. A society with a low crime rate will be a more nurturing environment for the child to grow up in, with safety and freedom. On the other hand, if there is inequality in the economy—no matter how fast it is growing—there will be parents who will live their entire lives feeling a lack of resources. And these parents would be bringing up their children in a different way from what they would have done otherwise.

  In India, not only is there a severe lack of health and nutrition interventions, which inhibits a child’s developmental potential, but also an abnormally skewed pattern of education opportunities. On the one hand, there is a vast illiterate population, and on the other a privileged few are likely to get the best education resources to become
even better. Increasingly, boys and girls are equally likely to be enrolled in school, but boys are more likely to be attending private schools and to have more money spent on their education.5 We do not have enough primary schools—and even fewer schools where teachers are not missing from class—but we have world-class higher education institutions.

  However, while we hear the success stories of a few sacrificing parents who train the ‘first-bench boys’ of our country, the majority, whose children occupy the middle and last benches, are invisible. The pressure exerted on children in this category is terribly damaging. The consequent cases of juvenile suicide are often ignored, because every success in India is supposed to herald the birth of a thousand dreams, whereas every failure anonymously fades away.

  I had been spared, but my brother, nine years my junior, was at the receiving end of my parent’s life project. They aspired to make him an IIT success. My brother was an average student, a keen cricket player, and an excellent debater. When he was in middle school, I wrote his debate speeches, my mother would sit up with him all night to make him learn by rote what I had written, and he would go on to deliver a spectacular performance to bring home the prize.

  By the time my brother reached senior school, we had moved to live in New Delhi as my father had retired from the Indian Air Force. After a lifetime of service to the country, he had been awarded a pension which was barely enough to cover our family’s monthly bills. My mother worked as a teacher at a local school, and in the evenings, she would teach at home to help our family make ends meet. I did odd jobs, such as working as an usher at exhibitions to cover my university fee and all living expenses. My brother studied in the school in which my mother taught, and so his school fee was waived. However, three years before his IIT entrance exam, my parents decided to shift him to another school that was reputed for having the maximum number of students qualify for IIT. There would be no more sports and co-curricular activities for him. In the evenings, after school, my father would drop him off at an IIT coaching centre in south Delhi, where he, along with some five hundred young children, would be trained in a cramped, windowless room for a test that was three years away.