Games Indians Play

by V Raghunathan

  His home department has shortlisted twenty names from the list of claimants with the same transparency with which petrol pumps, cooking gas agencies, plum land plots, etc. are usually allotted by any babu in a state government. Each of these twenty is assumed to be highly intelligent; or else they would not have survived squealing on Veerappan. To each of these, the section officer in the chief minister’s secretariat writes:

  Dear So and So

  I am hereby directed by the Hon’ble Chief Minister to write to you to state that you are among the final 20 chosen to receive Rs 50 crore as a reward for your vital role in leading Sri Munusamy Veerappan into the ambush laid out by our brave STF men, under the leadership of our beloved Chief Minister.

  The benevolent self of Hon’ble CM had very kindly announced an award of Rs 50 crore to anyone who helped catch the brigand, dead or alive. Hon’ble CM is a man of his words. He has shown the rare resolve to keep his words by ensuring that only one individual will qualify to receive the award.

  Accordingly, I am hereby directed to congratulate you and state that if you are desirous of receiving the award of Rs 50 crore, you should write to the undersigned and see that it reaches before the close of working hours of this Friday (5 p.m.), stating (in triplicate):

  Important Terms & Conditions: Kindly note that certain strict terms and conditions apply. You must read the following very carefully and comply:

  i. You are one of the 20 brave citizens shortlisted for the award. An identical letter is being sent to the other 19, whose identity is withheld from you.

  ii. You will become eligible for the entire award, provided your communication in triplicate is received by the undersigned before the close of working hours this Friday, and also provided yours is the ONLY communication that the CM’s office receives. Should the office receive a similar communication from more than one of the 20 shortlisted candidates, nobody shall qualify to receive the award.

  iii. Any attempt on your part, direct or indirect, to locate, identify or establish contact, orally or in writing or in any other form, with any of those 19 others for whatever reason will immediately and summarily disqualify you from receiving the award, and the decision of the CM’s office in this regard shall be final and binding. You will be watched carefully from now until the due date for the communication (coming Friday), in order to ensure that you do not violate this important condition.

  iv. It may be reiterated, as directed, that if you do not send in your communication (in triplicate), you will not be eligible to receive the award.

  Now the question is would you write to the chief minister’s office to claim your reward or not?

  Obviously you would not want to miss your chance of getting Rs 50 crore. So you argue: ‘If I don’t write to the chief minister’s office, there goes my 50 crore (according to clause iv). So my only option is to write that note in triplicate.’

  Chances are that the other nineteen have similar thoughts. In all likelihood, the chief minister’s secretariat would have all twenty letters confirming the shortlisted candidates’ desire to receive the award, in quadruplicate (an extra copy added for good measure), long before the last date is reached. So there goes your reward and that of the other nineteen claimants.

  Of course, as a true Indian, you are tempted to get in touch with the other nineteen on the sly, in the hope you can forge a deal with them so that only one of you writes and then everyone shares the booty equally. But the shrewd chief minister, himself a true Indian, has anticipated that and taken adequate measures to prevent you from trying to do so. He didn’t become your chief minister for nothing!

  Now do you see any realistic chance of you or any of the other nineteen claimants getting that award of Rs 50 crore?

  CHAPTER 1

  Why Are We the Way We Are?

  A Manipuri girl’s throat was slit allegedly by an insane man at the Gateway of India on Saturday evening. Tourist Nga Kuimi Raleng (23) died on the spot. The crowd there watched in silence as the chopper-wielding killer attacked the tourist’s friend Leisha Choan (20) . . .

  Express New Service, 14 August 2005

  NOT WHO BUT WHY

  ‘Who am I?’ is not a question that occupies me much. I have neither the intellectual curiosity nor the intellectual endowment to ask or answer that question. But, off and on, like when I have just returned from a visit abroad (by ‘abroad’ I mean not only countries like the USA and the UAE but also those like the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, or Botswana, Burkina Faso and Burundi), I find myself asking some less philosophical questions. For example:

  Why is my sense of public hygiene so porcine? Why do I throw my garbage around with the gay abandon of an inebriated uncle flinging 500-rupee notes at a Punjabi wedding? Why do I spit with a free will, as if without that one right I would be a citizen of a lesser democracy? Why do I tear off a page from a library book, or write my name on the Taj Mahal? Why do I light a match to a football stadium, a city bus or any other handy public property, or toot my horn in a residential locality at 3 a.m.? Why do I leave a public toilet smelling even though I would like to find it squeaky clean as I enter it? Why don’t I contribute in any way to help maintain a beautiful public park? Why is my concern for quality in whatever I do rather Lilliputian? Why is my ambition or satisfaction threshold at the level of a centipede’s belly button? Why do I run the tap full blast while shaving even when I know of the acute water shortage in the city? Why don’t I stop or slow down my car to allow a senior citizen or a child to cross the road? Why do I routinely jump out of my seat in a mad rush for the overhead baggage even before the aircraft comes to a halt, despite the repeated entreaties of the cabin crew? Why do I routinely disregard an airline’s announcement to board in orderly groups in accordance with seat numbers? Why does it not hurt my national pride that in international terminals abroad extra staff is appointed at gates from which flights to India are to depart? Why don’t I vote? Why don’t I stand up or retaliate against social ills? Why is it that every time the government announces a well-intended measure like a higher rate of interest for senior citizens I am not averse to borrowing my ageing parents’ names, or the old family maid’s for that matter, to save my money? Why is it that every time the government announces no tax deduction at source for small depositors I split my bank deposit into fifteen different accounts, with active connivance of the bank manager? Why do I jump red lights with the alacrity of a jackrabbit leaping ahead of a buckshot? Why do I block the left lane, when my intention is to turn right? Or vice versa? Why do I overtake from the left? Why do I drive at night in the city with the high beam on? Why do I jump queues with the zest of an Olympic heptathlon gold hopeful?

  A DIGRESSION

  This last act—jumping queues—I must confess I execute with particular finesse. I have honed it to a fine art. The key to jumping queues lies in not making eye contact with the guy you are jumping ahead of. I usually employ one of the two following gambits, both of which obey the ‘do-not-make-eyecontact’ dictum.

  In one scenario, I just sidle up, very casual-like, ahead of the guy who has been waiting his turn in the queue with bovine patience, as if I simply haven’t noticed what he was up to. If per chance—for they come in all shapes, sizes and sexes—the bovine turns out to be a raging bull rather than a meek cow and is rude and crude enough to bellow and stomp the floor at my cultured ruse to jump the queue, first I acknowledge his existence as if he were a fluff ball that magically materialized from under the bed. Then with elaborate courtesy and hand gesture, I usher him ahead of me, with every pore of my being all but screaming, ‘Here you go sir, ahead of me. What’s all the fuss about? OK, you say you are ahead of me in the queue. So be it. Don’t get excited now!’ And then I look around and steal a wink or smile at some of the others, like a p
arent embarrassed at a child’s unruly behaviour. You will be surprised at how many sympathetic winks and nods you will receive in return in our blessed country because all those civilized folks realize how childish it is of him to stick up for his place in the queue. At times I even actually cut the insolent bloke down to size, particularly if I am in a queue boarding an aircraft, with a quip like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know your flight was leaving ahead of mine!’ That leaves the bloke nowhere to hide! Of course, you must be intelligent enough to figure out the right conditions before deploying this stratagem. It usually does not work, for example, if you wear size six shoes while the cud-chewer wears twelve. But then if he were wearing size twelve, chances are you would not try jumping the queue ahead of him in the first place.

  The second ‘do-not-make-eye-contact’ rule is like this. Here your body language assumes weight. For example, you just walk up (again very casually) and stand next to the bovine guy ahead of you in the queue, keeping your elbow gently ahead of the guy without any overt aggression, all along looking elsewhere. In fact, anywhere but at the cud-chewer, for that is the essence of the tactic. The idea is to create an impression that you are the one in the genuine queue and it is the cud-chewer who has got his mixed up! If you have the size advantage over the cud-chewer, you could always make it a ‘your-word-versus-mine’ kind of an affair. Also, by now you aren’t alone. There are those who lined up behind you thinking you were in the genuine queue, and now the opponents are more or less evenly pitched. If you are unable to capitalize on your size, you could always yield winking and smiling, as if to say, ‘Well, all in a day’s work guys! What’s a small setback when you have these big blokes ready to pull a dagger at the drop of a place in the queue?’

  I never use these gambits abroad. Those bovines there are big as buffalos, and have no appreciation of the fact that an honest Indian can have a native craving to break a measly queue. Wait a minute; I think I am digressing more than I meant to. I was talking about some questions I ask myself every now and then.

  ARE THERE ANSWERS?

  I do not do any of those ‘Whys’ listed earlier out of a sense of depravity. It’s just that I am an average Indian; to use a cliché, ‘I am like that only!’ And when we multiply that average Indian by a billion, the question becomes ‘Why are we the way we are?’

  We could simplify life by merely saying, ‘We are like that only,’ till you go and spoil the party by asking, ‘But why are we like that only?’ From experience I have learned it is usually a sterile exercise to try and answer that question. Even a Naipaul in his India: A Wounded Civilization merely describes India’s many grotesque wounds; he does not attempt to unearth the reasons for the wounds. When I first read the book in the socialist era of the 1970s, I was affronted by what I thought were unkind remarks on India based on just three visits by a person who never had a role to play in shaping this country. It took nearly two decades for me to see and understand what the great Naipaul had observed in those three visits.

  Nor does the eminent sociologist M.N. Srinivas provide an answer to why we are the way we are in his splendid writings and essays. I am a lesser mortal. After much deliberation and reading, I have come to the conclusion that there is no profit in asking a second-order question like ‘Why are we the way we are?’

  My hopes were indeed raised when I encountered a fascinating book, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why by Richard Nisbett. While the book provides an excellent exposition on how Western and Eastern philosophies and their ways of thinking evolved historically, and exactly in what ways and why they differ as promised by the book’s title, it has one problem. The Westerners in the book are primarily Europeans, Americans and the citizens of the British Commonwealth, and the Asians are principally Chinese, Japanese and Koreans.

  Indians in their traits are clubbed with the Westerners! If one is inclined to agree with the author’s analysis of the Westerners, one is also compelled to disagree with his implied analysis of the Indians, for the traits of the two could not be more different. For example, Nisbett observes, ‘people [Westerners] believe the same rules should apply to everyone—individuals should not be singled out for special treatment because of their personal attributes or connections to important people. Justice should be blind.’ But is this statement true of us Indians, who have slotted individuals along caste and feudal lines for thousands of years? Do we seriously believe that everyone should get the same treatment and justice? If the belief does exist, is it reflected in our practices? Clearly, India eludes Nisbett’s analysis. So my hope of finding an answer to the question ‘Why are we the way we are?’ was snuffed out once I read the book in detail.

  What if one dares to ask the question ‘Why?’ Apparent answers begin to pour in from all over in a deluge. Is it our climate? Could it be the density of our population? Or is it really our poverty? Or perhaps our national level of literacy? (Or is it illiteracy?) Many thinkers say our population, poverty and illiteracy are the effects of the way we are and not the causes of the way we are. What then are the causes? I dig into our cultural past, historical past, colonial past, religious past, sociological past, anthropological past, or just good old plain-vanilla past till I unearth the satisfying fact that in the distant past our forefathers gave ‘zero’ to the world, and that we were a golden sparrow before the Mughals and the English came trooping in and plucked our feathers bald, and it follows therefore that we need answer no such question. I am what I am. We are what we are.

  But there are other questions that keep rearing their heads like the hood of a defensive cobra. Am I the way I am because I am genetically encoded to be like that only? Did one of my Neanderthal ancestors strike out on his own, away from his cousins’ caves, vowing to create a race that in due course would lay the foundations of a country called India, which would be among the filthiest, the ugliest, the most selfish, the most apathetic and the most corrupt in the world at the dawn of the twenty-first century? I am not a genetic expert, but if that ancestor did indeed do so, there are few who would not agree that he did a darned good job of achieving his ambition. He certainly laid a strong foundation for a long-lasting Indian culture, where even today some 70 per cent (or some such absurd percentage) of us move on the wooden wheels of bullock carts, carry construction material on our heads and grain sacks on our backs, sweep and mop our homes squatting on our haunches, and defecate on the great Indian plains exactly as we did some 5000 years ago. Perhaps that is why our souls do not rebel at disparaging references to ‘Hindu fatalism’ and ‘Hindu rate of growth’, as if our Hindu gods genetically doomed us into doing things in a predetermined fatalistic way and at a predetermined modest rate of growth and change.1 I would hasten to add here that I use the term Hindu as a proxy for the dweller of the subcontinent representing the Indus Valley in its broadest sense.

  Lest I be accused of being unduly harsh on ourselves, let me furnish some statistics.2 China recently completed the final section of the pan-Himalayan Golmud-Lhasa railway (1956 kilometres) at 5072 metres above sea level. The final section of 1142 kilometres, running across Tibet’s snow-covered plateau—dubbed the roof of the world—presented some unusual difficulties. The engineers had to contend with building on a 550-kilometre frozen belt, with the snow alternately melting and freezing in summer and winter. Workers had to breathe bottled oxygen to cope with the high altitudes and there was not a single death due to this. This stretch of 1142 kilometres was completed in a mere four years.

  Or consider Phase I of Shanghai’s Pu Dong Airport. A fourkilometre runway, two parallel taxiways, an 800,000-squaremetre apron, twenty-eight boarding bridges, 280,000 square metres of terminal building and 50,000 square metres of cargo warehouse space designed to fly twenty million passengers, 750,000 tonnes of cargo and 126,000 flights a year—all these were completed between October 1997 and September 1999.

&n
bsp; In the same league was the completion of the world’s first Transrapid Maglev Railway in Shanghai. It too was completed in less than two years. It takes a mere eight minutes for passengers on the maglev trains, with a peak speed of 430 kilometers an hour, to travel the thirty kilometres between Pu Dong International Airport and the downtown. What is more, this gave the Chinese technicians eight international patents in the manufacturing of high-tech girders.

  The economic development, political integration and social pride that projects such as these engender for China and its far-flung people are all too obvious to elucidate.

  Cut to India. Impressive as the completion of the Konkan Railway or the Delhi Metro Railway have been, they pale in comparison to the Chinese projects, especially where implementation skills and political will are concerned. Consider the statistics. It took seven to ten years to complete the 760-kilometre Konkan Railway. As for the Delhi Metro, between 1950 and 1990, some thirty feasibility studies were carried out by various bodies to evaluate an alternative transportation system for Delhi. The final go-ahead came in 1990. Delhi Metro Rail Corporation Limited was established in 1995 and the first phase of eleven kilometres was completed in 2004. The eighteen-kilometre Calcutta Metro took a good twenty-four years to complete, from 1971 to 1995. In Bangalore, a flyover near the airport has been three years in the making, and is still going strong because the underlying soil was found to be shifty. Our new expressways, the Golden Quadrilateral included, are perennially in a state of half-finish. One or the other side of the throughways is being laid or else under litigation at any given time. It is common for us to see a part of a road dug up one fine morning. And it is equally common to see that road in exactly the same state even after we return from our summer vacation, when in most other countries such works are carried out practically overnight. Now that is what we mean by the ‘Hindu rate’ of doing things.