Indian Instincts

by Miniya Chatterji

  Before we embarked on the journey, Surender Reddy and I sat on the carpeted floor at the first entrance gate. We sipped glasses of hot milk offered free of cost by volunteers, and watched the pilgrims arriving in hordes every few minutes.

  ‘There, you can ask all of them your questions,’ Surender Reddy teased me, wearing his usual broad grin while pointing towards the newly arrived crowd.

  ‘Yes, depends on how long TTD keeps us waiting!’ I agreed.

  Surender Reddy was almost right. I spoke to at least 120 pilgrims that day during a journey to the lord’s statue, which took us about six hours.

  ‘Is this your first time here?’ I asked a woman standing next to me in the compartment. She was accompanied by her husband and pre-teen daughter.

  ‘No, it’s my fourth,’ she said. ‘My husband is a devotee of Lord Balaji and he has been here more than twenty times. Since we got married, we come as a family as often as we can.’

  ‘Do you have a mannat to ask of the lord?’ I asked another girl in the crowd. She seemed to be in her early twenties and was accompanied by her mother.

  ‘Yes, to pass my chartered accountancy exam.’

  ‘And you? Do you have a specific wish as well?’ I asked the man behind me, who was evidently finding it a challenge to keep silent while waiting in the queue. He spoke and joked with everyone around him, his voice booming over everyone else’s.

  ‘I do!’ he declared. ‘I want a job at the World Bank!’

  ‘That is rather specific, no?’

  ‘Not at all. There is a technique to ask Lord Balaji for your wish. One has to be clear-headed and specific in the ask. And then it takes about thirty-five days for fruition. Lord Balaji needs that much time.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘This is my fifth time here! Each time, all my wishes have come true. Last time, I wished for a job switch, and it happened! And before that, I had wished for a US visa . . .’

  His testimonial of the lord’s miracles immediately became a popular subject among the crowd where we stood. Some exchanged notes about their own experiences with miracles, and took tips on how to make wishes come true.

  However, the majority of those I spoke with came to Tirumala with no specific wish. Some told me it was a ‘divine call’. Many said simply seeing the lord gave them peace. Most pilgrims said they came because of devotion and not wishes.

  One man explained, ‘But Lord Balaji knows everything. He probably even knows the wishes in my heart that my brain does not. So no need for me to ask Lord Balaji anything; he already knows.’

  Faith to them meant devotion, an unquestioning and unconditional belief in something.

  ‘When we are up in the sky, travelling in something as dangerous as an airplane, we have faith in the pilot, don’t we?’ explained another pilgrim who was a professor of engineering from Karnataka. ‘It is that faith that keeps us calm all through the journey.’

  It seemed that living with faith in God, a spouse, or even an airline pilot, made their lives simpler and perhaps happier. They abandoned questioning and relinquished doubts about the object of their faith. Their devotion to one central cause seemed to bring them unending stability—and that cause could be anything, as devotion to ‘God’, it seemed, was but a metaphor. In a way, it was beautiful, I thought—the clarity of mind that faith can bring. On the other hand, I realized that the proof of success of religion over centuries was in providing people with convenient truths, leaving no room for doubt.

  At last, at the entrance to the chamber of Lord Balaji, the mass slowed down in its pace, as if readying for the grand finale. I turned to my neighbour and asked him why he was here.

  ‘I have been coming here every year for the last fifty-eight years. This is my annual health check-up,’ he said.

  ‘How is that?’

  ‘Every year, I walk here from Chennai,’ he said. ‘I walk a distance of 140 kilometres from Chennai up to the temple here in Tirumala. While doing so, I discover amazing things about my own body. Are my knees aching? Am I short of breath? The answers point to the state of my health.’

  Just then, Surender Reddy grabbed me by the arm and pulled me inside. As I inched towards the statue, he stood behind me, whispering continuously in my ear.

  ‘Watch him closely, observe, remember what you see forever. Look at his eyes, this is energy, it will protect you.’

  And then we were out in the sun. The darshan was over.

  Sitting cross-legged atop a platform out in the courtyard of the temple, Professor Prashanth Sharma was chanting Vedic verses on a microphone. Surender Reddy had already explained to me that Professor Sharma was the deputy head priest, and in charge of temple affairs these days as the head priest was away travelling.

  I climbed the platform and sat beside the professor, who decided to take a quick break.

  ‘We do not understand the language of the Vedas. Then why do you recite them?’ I asked.

  ‘Vedic hymns and rituals are like pure mathematics. We pandits know and understand it. But other people do not need to understand what these rituals mean. It is just like how people need to know only applied mathematics, and have no need to understand pure mathematics.’

  He added, ‘See, religion needs to be led responsibly. It is like gold, which is great but also dangerous.’

  ‘What does religion mean to you?’ I probed.

  ‘The meaning of religion differs according to one’s experience. At the crux of it, it is to live happily and make others happy. We call this ananda. The Vedic meaning of ananda is different from the popular one, which refers to a person who has sufficient money, worldly resources, and is enjoying the world. Instead, ananda in the Vedas means the shape and size of the universe itself.’

  I gathered that the professor was articulating an important and recurrent theme in Indian religious philosophy, that true happiness is often not accessible through ordinary human experience, but must be achieved through some other transcendental means, which can be yoga, meditation, devotion or rituals. For example, from as early as the seventh century, tantriks have viewed the human body as a microcosm of the universe, focusing on it as the only vehicle for attaining power and liberation. Later, the Bhakti Movement, developed between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries in India, brought in a deeply devotionalist trend, which also included techniques to not only worship but interact with God, the higher levels of which would include a variety of psychological states and emotional responses. The conquests of the Turkish, Afghan and Central Asian Muslim warriors between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries have had a significant effect on India’s political history, establishing Islam as a major religion in India. Yet, there are also the more conciliatory and assimilative activities of the Sufis, which have incorporated yogic techniques and devotionalism, similar to Hindu transcendental practices, to implant Islam as a more customized Indian religion. The monist cosmological formulations of Ibn-al Arabi, the personalization of Allah in Sufi poetry, as well as the renunciatory practices of Sufi masters—all of these have created a mystical form of Islam in India. Even though Sufism originated during the earliest phases of Arab Islam, and flourished throughout the medieval Islamic world, it seemed in many ways uniquely suited to the Indian religious setting.

  The professor was also right in pointing out that ultimately, the meaning of religion for each of us hinges on personal experiences with religion. On my way back from Tirumala to Delhi, I realized that over the past three years living in India, I had learnt to distinguish between my individual experience with religion—which had been full of conflict—from that of the meanings religion has for others in the country. Religion without faith is shallow and meaningless ritualism, whereas faith in itself is powerful. In India, I met people who were spiritual and inspiring, and the source of their faith was their religion. There were those who, using the power of their faith for a positive outcome, had fought enormous challenges and terminal diseases with extreme stoicism, spirit and peace of mind. There were
people across economic classes who had drawn strength from their faith to overcome great personal loss from floods and rebuilt their lives. There were also those who had risen from refugee camps and slums to become millionaires, drawing power from unflinching faith in their own capabilities.

  In each case, there was nothing rational about the source of their faith. It was inexplicable what made them so certain of their beliefs. Their faith, I found, was the very negation of reason. It was not supported by facts. Yet, such a faith was beneficial to them, when they used it to improve their life in a country where, usually, nothing is easy.

  On the other hand, must we forget the killings in the name of religion in India? Can faith be constructive only when we bury our memories of communal violence? I don’t think so. Instead, we need to make a greater effort to remind ourselves all the time that it is the same absolute sense of certainty that can empowers us with so much positivity which also shuts down scientific reasoning such that it has given legitimacy to humans to take the life of another human. So much so that a victim of religious violence is often seen as the criminal, while the ideologies that justify such violence enjoy the patronage of our society, if not of the state.

  Ultimately, the problem is that we find less and less room in India for a middle ground between religion’s two extreme faces—one supremely constructive and the other morbidly destructive. Those squeezed in the middle are looked at suspiciously. Who can be labelled secular has become a great puzzle in India.

  For one who holds secularism as a personal virtue, it means having no prejudice against any other community. But this is possible only if this person also has solid national institutions supporting this secularism. In India, however, secularism does not include an institutional commitment to upholding individual rights, freedom of expression, dignity, equal treatment by the state, and rule of law.

  For one who nurtures secularism as a societal value, secularism means living in religious harmony. But even though India’s founding fathers had initially envisaged such an ethic for the nation, we have not been able to get past the bloody memories of Partition.

  For those who see secularism as a political orientation, these days it popularly means subscribing to the Congress’s narrative of Indian history. But this is a fallacy as well. Indira and Rajiv Gandhi’s regimes took decisions which affected every minority community in India. I have written in this essay how there has been religious strife and conflict in different eras of India’s past, irrespective of which political party was in power. Only during elections are certain minorities appeased. And so in truth, in India, we do not have any national political party that we can really call secular.

  For those who perceive secularism as a nationalist agenda, it demands putting India first. But this raises the important question: What is India? Do we define India by the ethno-territorial interpretation conceived by Veer Savarkar in the early years of the twentieth century?24 When Savarkar coined the term ‘Hindutva’, he believed it referred to a collective Hindu identity as an imagined nation. Clearly, we have given powers to religion—both constructive and destructive—that are larger than life. We choose to ignore the fact that every religion is merely a human creation. We forget that religion was founded as an early form of philosophy, as man’s attempts to explain the world and give some sort of a coherent frame of reference to life and how to lead it.

  Instead, we have utterly complicated the matter, and allowed ourselves to be overpowered—for good or for bad—by a phenomenon of our own making. We have minimized the chances for anyone slipping out of the game. We have given legitimacy to religion’s monopoly on our ethics, and increasingly on our politics—and it is this deadly combination that we should collectively fight against.

  References

  Business Today. 2016. India has highest number of people living below poverty line: World Bank. 3 October.

  Cantegreil, Mathieu, Dweep Chanana and Ruth Kattumuri, eds. 2013. Revealing Indian Philanthropy (London: Alliance Publishing Trust).

  Census of India 2011. http://www.censusindia.gov.in/2011-Common/CensusData2011.html.

  Dalrymple, William. 2015. The great divide. New Yorker, 29 June.

  Indiatoday.in. 2016. Devotees to Tirupati get free food, water after 500, 1000 rupee notes banned. 10 November. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/tirupati-tirumala-devasthanam-tirupati-demonetisation-of-500-and-1000-rupee-notes-temple-donations/1/807004.html.

  Indian Express. 2017. Telangana CM KCR makes another massive donation—gold ornaments worth Rs 5.6 cr—at Tirupati temple. 22 February.

  Janardhanan, Arun. 2017. Tamil Nadu youth killed for being an atheist, father says he too will become one. Indian Express, 27 March.

  Kumar, Rohit. 2011. Vital stats: Communal violence in India. PRS Legislative Research: 1.

  Lopez, Donald S. 1995. Religions of India in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

  NDTV. 2009. World’s richest temple adds gold, crores, and hopefully, Rahman. 2 December. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/worlds-richest-temple-adds-gold-crores-and-hopefully-rahman-405921.

  Nelson, Dean. 2014. Delhi to reopen inquiry into massacre of Sikhs in 1984 riots. Telegraph, 30 January.

  News Minute. 2017. With 2.73 crore visitors in 2016, Tirumala temple sees pilgrim footfall rise. http://www.thenewsminute.com/article/273-crore-visitors-2016-tirumala-temple-sees-pilgrim-footfall-rise-55365.

  Parrish, Andrew. 2016. Saudi Arabia spends 32 times the Vatican budget to spread Islam. Stream, 6 October.

  TTD News. 2016. TTD approves Rs. 2678 crores annual budget for 2016–17. 30 January.

  The Hindu. 2016. TTD approves Rs. 2,530-cr annual budget. 28 March.

  Time. 2008. India’s temples go green. 7 July. http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1820844,00.html.

  Times of India. 2009. Tirupati laddu gets global patent. 16 September.

  11

  Corporations

  India’s unique 24/7 corporate culture is in stark contrast to other laid-back aspects of the country. Indian corporates consider it a badge of honour to be busy, high-strung and available at all times to the call of duty. This is despite the facts that our government is sluggish when it comes to putting systems in place, courts procrastinate for years in many cases and the country ranks as one of the most difficult and slowest countries to start a new business in.1

  It is considered a sign of success for exuberant Indian executives to be in an endless frenetic hustle. A ‘job’—once a smart solution invented by humans to earn a currency by which goods could be bartered now has the supreme power to shape lives. In a country that enjoys the largest number of public holidays in the world,2 executives consider ‘off day’ a dirty word, and hardly ever dream of taking a vacation. While it is an arduous task to find Indian government clerks at their desks during office hours, it is not uncommon to see corporate employees working round the clock all days of the week. We have even made a business out of this enthusiasm, grabbing $28 billion worth of global commerce a year by being the world’s largest base for ‘back offices’ working all through the day and night.3

  In 2014, when I joined the Jindal Group, I had never worked in India, or for that matter, in an Indian company. For fourteen years previously, I had worked across eight countries—first in French politics, then at investment banks in New York, London and Paris, followed by Geneva at the World Economic Forum, which is known to be a highly political and complex organization. Yet, when I moved to India, I expected to be surprised and utterly outwitted by my ‘cultural experience’ at the workplace.

  I knew that in fast-developing economies,4 corporate culture has a strong and unique identity. In countries where the economy is creating opportunities for societal change, there is often a lag between corporate culture and the accepted behaviour in the rest of society. Corporate culture is not always a reflection of what people believe in and expect of others outside the workplace. We have seen this happen most recently in the post-Soviet states, where the c
ommunist societal structure was gradually transformed by the advent of capitalism in the markets. There, capitalism came first to the markets, ushering in a competitive attitude for profit-making in the corporate culture, and then social mindsets gradually began to change.

  In liberalized India, where corporate governance is weak and regulations poorly implemented, the private sector has developed in a fairly independent manner, which is not entirely similar in trajectory to the change in society. For example, one of the first things I realized here was that in a country of 420 million people between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four,5 being sixty is still an essential criterion for being considered for a leadership position in business. On the other hand, while some fathers in India kill their infant girls, considering them a financial burden, corporate India is more accepting of women, even in leadership roles. Indeed, in Indian businesses, power is still associated with virility and manliness, but not with gender per se. A woman willing to be forceful and insistent on simply getting the job done with machismo is accepted in business, but not at home. My point here is that we cannot presuppose that corporate culture in India has the same values as Indian society.

  Clearly, I had made a rather dramatic re-entry into India. From the Swiss Alps at Davos, I moved overnight to the sweat and grime of the factory floor. I was working at Jindal’s headquarters in Delhi on strategic issues for the company as well as those that were pan-industry, often meeting and collaborating with trade associations and other companies in relevant sectors. On most days each month, I would set out wearing my yellow hard hat and fluorescent orange safety vest to oversee several thousand employees at iron ore mines, steel factories, power plants, training centres, and schools and hospitals in the most far-flung parts of Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.

  Atop the Sundargarh hills, our iron ore mines were deep craters dug into the earth—carefully engineered so as to reforest the entire area back to its natural flora once the minerals had been extracted. Our factories would cull out the extracts and process hot, molten, raw iron to manufacture large steel plates, beams and columns, among other products. These we would sell to buyers such as ship and aeroplane builders, infrastructure projects for constructing bridges, wind power projects and large turbines. I would be involved in every part of the manufacturing process as well as in sales, putting in place checks and balances to ensure the company’s holistic growth. Usually, I would be the lone woman in a group of a few thousand male employees. It was baptism by fire, quite literally, as I learnt how business is done in India. There was never a day I did not make a comparison with everything I had experienced in other countries.