a few tentative conclusions

India: the short version, or, some tentative conclusions

What will I remember about India?

•      The unresolved contrasts between thatched mud huts or construction-debris shacks without water or electricity, and the gleaming, gated, high-rise apartments right behind them; between village life and city life; between the educated elite (or middle-class) and those deprived of the basic right to an education, to health care, to a job, to sufficient nutrition.

•      The persistence of native dress, even in cities, especially for women. Why not? The sari, kurta, and salwar kameez are flattering, comfortable, and cheap (of course a sari can be a costly garment, but the advent of the nylon sari, ghastly as the designs often are, meant that an inexpensive, easy-care sari could be within the reach of the masses; it also made the fortune of the Ambani family).  India is deeply conservative in many ways, and the survival of these modes of expressing national identity are consonant with that conservatism. Even women who might reject that explanation, however, wear the kurta with jeans, because it's comfortable and looks good. Manual laborers are likely to be wearing a short dhoti, but it's not that rare to see men wearing a lungi [the long skirt-like wrap], or a long kurta with pyjama pants, or even jodhpur-type leggings [suddenly, seeing the desert city of Jodhpur, I understood the etymology of "jodhpur": I wish I could tell Tony], but almost always in pure white, unlike the plethora of patterns for women's textiles.

•      The persistence of caste, religion, and color-prejudice, even among the most educated class. Indeed, rather than diminishing, the Hindutva movement has emphasized and valorized these distinctions, and reservations [affirmative action or aarakshan] for the Scheduled Castes and tribals (adivasi) has led to a rebound of resentment.

•      The paradoxical contrast between the friendliness, generosity, and kindness of the ordinary India, to a perfect stranger, and the apparent absence of civic responsibility. The latter is manifest in behavior that includes the chaotic, competitive, and ego-centric driving-style, the incredible litter everywhere, the lack of amenities like integral sidewalks, and the low voter turn-out. Even the willingness to help a stranger might display civic disregard, as with the young men who were perfectly happy to lend their photo and passport-copy so that I could purchase a SIM card under their name, circumventing the law that tracks SIM-card purchase. An Indian explained this willingness to break laws as a combination of "no consequences," and "everyone does it."

•      In reaction to the negatives (and no one is more critical of corruption, mis-government, etc. than Indians) the optimism that many young Indians express, reflected also in the CNN series, "India Positive," a daily dose of some good news, usually about individuals trying to make a difference somewhere.

•      For every one Indian author [writing in English] and known outside the sub-continent, there must be a hundred unknown [not to mention those writing in native languages].

•      Indians can be masters of English, but English as spoken by the ordinary Indian (as opposed to those educated in English-medium schools) can be quite a challenge for an American ear to decipher. The famous witticism about England and the US being two nations divided by a common language applies even more to India and the US. It's largely just speed and accent that strain communications both ways. On the other hand, Indian languages often adopt loan-words from English, so that in the middle of a torrent of Hindi a familiar English word [sometimes, the proper name of a commodity] will float up.  And of course English has borrowed its own share, like jodhpur, and "dekko"--doubtless more of these loan-words are in British than in American usage. Since returning, I've learned (from the excellent Imagining India, by Infosys founder Nandan Nilekani) that veranda, avatar, cheroot and typhoon are also gifts from India's tongues.

•      The importance of history: India has a lot of it, and although much physical evidence has been destroyed deliberately or by neglect, what survives is still abundant and almost all is contentious, a record of conflict between Hindu and Muslim, Indian and British, and a potential source of future conflict. The fantastically beautiful and technically accomplished stone temple-carvings, for instance, are idols that would presumably meet the fate of the Bamiyan Buddhas in any Islamic-fundamentalist future. No Hindus visit the lovely Mughal tombs of Sringanapatnam, and a Hindutva regime might turn a blind eye to their destruction, as with the mosque in Ayodhya.