The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India - the Emerging 21st-Century Power

8. Hooray for Bollywood

THE NEWS THAT EMERGED IN EARLY 2007 that a leading political party, the Samajwadi Party (then in power in India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh) wished to nominate the Bolly-wood superstar Amitabh Bachchan to India's highest office — that of the president of the Republic — should hardly have come as a surprise. Bachchan declared himself unworthy of the post, a view widely shared by the citizenry, who expected to see in the office a symbol of the state, usually of more advanced years than the sexagenarian heartthrob. But in India, the film world has proved a perfectly adequate stepping-stone to higher office.

This is, of course, not unknown in California, which has given the United States a president (Ronald Reagan), a senator (George Murphy), and a governor (Arnold Schwarzenegger). But Hollywood's muscle-bound hero has further to go than he thinks. He may have become governor, but he can't become God. That privilege is reserved for the Indian movie-star-turned-politician N. T. Rama Rao, who played so many mythological heroes in so many hit films that starstruck fans in his home state of Andhra Pradesh set up a temple to worship him. “NTR,” as he was popularly known, traded his near-divine celebrity for the dross of office by founding his own political party, Telugu Desam, in 1980 and romping to victory in state elections. That made him chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, the equivalent of an American governor in a state of (then) some 50 million people.

NTR wasn't the first Indian movie star to assume control of the destinies of his fans. That distinction belongs to MGR, the actor M. G. Ramachandran of the adjoining state of Tamil Nadu. At about the time George Murphy was singing and dancing into the Senate from California in 1964, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) Party in the (then) state of Madras was using the film world to bolster its burgeoning popularity. The party's leader, C. N. Annadurai (“Anna”), had long cultivated links with the Tamil film industry, and his principal lieutenant, M. Karunanidhi, was a prolific screenwriter. The DMK's biggest draw was the action hero MGR, a sort of Arnold without the pectorals, who brawled and romanced his way into the hearts of millions in blockbuster after blockbuster. Karunanidhi wrote films for MGR that contained stirring speeches about Dravidian pride, a major theme of the DMK, and barely veiled allusions to the rising sun, the party's electoral symbol. In 1967 the DMK rode into office on the votes of avid moviegoers, defeating the stately Congress Party (which sought in vain to counter MGR's appeal by enlisting the aging romantic hero Sivaji Ganesan). Annadurai became chief minister, and MGR stayed in the movies.

But when “Anna” died and Karunanidhi ascended to the top spot in the now renamed state of Tamil Nadu, MGR began to ask himself why he needed to play second fiddle in politics when he enjoyed top billing in the movies. The Congress Party, unable to defeat the DMK at the hustings, wooed him shamelessly; government interference was widely suspected in the decision to award him a national best actor award for a hokey performance as a rickshaw puller. In short order MGR split the DMK, founding the All-India Anna DMK (AIADMK) and winning a majority of seats in the state assembly at the next elections (with the support of the Congress Party). Though Karunanidhi's DMK and MGR's AIADMK briefly alternated in power in Tamil Nadu, MGR soon proved unchallengeable at the polls, demonstrating yet again that movie stars always trump screenwriters (even those on whom they used to depend for their best lines).

So great and so enduring was MGR's popularity as chief minister that when, toward the end of his career, he suffered a debilitating stroke, his party could not afford to let him relinquish office. At the mass rallies thronged by millions that were the AIADMK's principal means of mobilizing support, the speechless and nearly immobile movie star would be propped up on a high stage in his trademark wool cap and dark glasses, while recordings of his past speeches would be played on the sound system to fool the distant crowds into thinking he was addressing them. It worked for a while, but mortality took its course and the AIADMK itself split as MGR's wife and his close companion, both former leading ladies from his screen days, fought over his legacy. The wife won out briefly and succeeded him as chief minister, but her legitimacy was marital, not political. The Other Woman (in her day a far more popular movie star), Jayalalitha, wrested control of the AIADMK, using her fan clubs to bolster her appeal to the voters. She went on to win state elections and become chief minister in her own right.

India's is a federal system, and the appeal of politicians like NTR and MGR remains largely confined to their home states, which speak the language of the films they starred in (Telugu and Tamil, respectively). The closest India has to a nationwide film industry are the Hindi movies made by Bollywood, whose actors have also tried to translate box office appeal into votes. But none of them has sought to dislodge established political leaders in the northern states; they have, instead, aimed for seats in the national Parliament. Bollywood's biggest superstar, Amitabh Bachchan, was elected to Parliament at the peak of his career as a member of the Congress Party, but became rapidly disillusioned with political life and resigned his seat to return to the movies. Others have awaited the end of their movie careers before making the transition, and two even served in the country's Council of Ministers — the former “hero” Vinod Khanna as a deputy minister for tourism and the former “villain” Shatrughan Sinha as a minister for health (which puts an on-screen sexual harasser in charge of India's battle against AIDS).

Movie appeal doesn't always work. In the highly literate state of Kerala, which boasts the sophisticated cinema of Adoor Gopalakrishnan and others, a box office hero, Prem Nazir, tried to enter the hustings and fared so badly he lost his security deposit. Cinematic popularity can get you elected, but it isn't enough to keep you in power. Jayalalitha's reputation for imperiousness and corruption has seen Karunanidhi defeat her twice, though she has bounced back each time (and is unlikely to have served her last term in power as chief minister of Tamil Nadu).

NTR, however, found his magic wearing thin during his first term and lost office comprehensively when he sought reelection. He fought back, augmenting his movie star appeal with populist calls for subsidized rice for the poor, and returned to power. But within months he faced a revolt within his own party, led by his technocratic and unglamorous son-in-law. NTR was unceremoniously ousted as chief minister, suffered a heart attack, and died soon after.

Unlike in his movies, there was no resurrection for NTR. The temple dedicated to him lies in ruins. No one worships there anymore.

9. Democracy and Demockery

SOCIOLOGISTS HAVE ANALYZED THE CLASS COMPOSITION of India's legislatures and traced an important change from a post-independence Parliament dominated by highly educated professionals to one more truly representative of the rural heartland of India. The typical member of Parliament today, the wry joke runs, is a lower-caste farmer with a law degree he's never used.

However, the fact that, particularly in the northern states, our voters elect people referred to openly in the press as “mafia dons,” “dacoit leaders,” and “antisocial elements” is a poor reflection on the way the electoral process has served Indian democracy. The resultant alienation of the educated middle class means that fewer and fewer of them go to the polls on election day.

The abstention of the highly educated from the ballot is only a symptom of a more debilitating loss of faith in the political process itself. Only 25 percent of Indians questioned in a Gallup poll in April 1996 expressed confidence in Parliament (whereas, in comparison, 77 percent said they trusted the judiciary). I have been unable to find more recent polls, but I would be surprised if the figures are much higher.

Defections and horse-trading are common, political principle rare. The spectacle of legislators in one state assembly after another being “‘paraded’” before a Speaker or a governor to prove a contested majority, or — worse still — being “held hostage” in hotels by their leaders so they cannot be suborned by rivals until their claims to the majority are accepted, has done little to inspire confidence in the integrity of India's parliamentarians.

Don't get me wrong: I am not some elitist lamenting the country's takeover by the poor. The significant changes in the social composition of India's ruling class, both in politics and in the bureaucracy, since independence is indeed proof of democracy at work. But the poor quality of the country's political leadership in general offers less cause for celebration. Our rulers increasingly reflect the qualities required to acquire power rather than the skills to wield it for the common good.

Too many politicians are willing to use any means to obtain power. Even the time-honored device of the dodgy campaign promise has sunk to a record low: one leading politician, a former cabinet minister, became chief minister of India's most populous state by promising that, if elected, his first act would be to abolish an ordinance that prevented college students from cheating (the ordinance forbade outsiders from smuggling crib sheets into the exam halls, regulated the examinees’ freedom to leave the exam hall and return to it, and so on). He won the youth vote, and the elections, in a landslide. He was as good as his word: within seconds of taking the oath of office, he withdrew the anti-cheating ordinance.

Sadly, this politician's willingness to elevate political expediency above societal responsibility is all too typical of his fellow politicians today. The profession of politics, for all the reasons described above, has to a great extent become dominated by the unprincipled, the inept, the corrupt, the criminal, and the undisciplined. As with the chief minister I described, their quest for power is unaccompanied by any larger vision of the common good. But they do get elected repeatedly, for one of the failures of Indian democracy has certainly lain in its inability to educate the mass of voters to expect, and demand, better of their elected representatives.

One minister I spoke to said that he had once made a proposal in the cabinet that every politician should attend and pass a course in basic Indian history and civics before being allowed to contest a seat. The proposal was immediately shot down; but patronizing as it sounds, there may be a case to revive it.

Far more dangerous to Indian democracy than the deficiencies of its guardians is the fact that the combination of expediency and corruption, flourishing with impunity under the protection of the democratic state, discredits democracy itself. The institutions of the Indian democracy must be able to deliver what all citizens of democratic states expect, namely national security and economic prosperity. If corruption, maladministration, and political failure results in a citizenry that feels insecure and deprived, the resultant disillusionment with the system can destroy Indians’ belief in the very system that sustains India. And that is something every Indian needs to worry about.

My concern is more specifically to the faith in the system of what R. K. Laxman taught us to think of as the “common man”—the bedrock of Indian democracy. Whereas psephological studies in the United States have demonstrated that the poor do not vote in significant numbers during elections (the turnout in the largely poor and black district of Harlem during the last U.S. presidential elections was 23 percent), the opposite is true in India. Here it is the poor who take the time to queue up in the hot sun, believing their votes will make a difference, whereas the more privileged members of society, knowing their views and numbers will do little to influence the outcome, have been staying away from the hustings. Voter studies of Indian elections have consistently demonstrated that the lowest stratum of Indian society vote in numbers well above the national average while graduates turn out in numbers well below.

Yet they are the ones who also see how little they can expect from their leaders. It is not just the disgrace of fisticuffs, jostling, and the flinging of footwear in our state assemblies; not just the legion of unfulfilled campaign promises, crumbling foundation stones of bridges and roads “inaugurated” just before an election and never completed, fodder scams, and siphoned-off funds of development banks; not even the lordly air with which our elected representatives treat their masters — the people. It is, rather, that even the pretense of accountability is absent from the actions of so many of our politicians. They see themselves as having been elected not to serve but to exercise power and enjoy its benefits. But even this would be forgivable if the power was used to protect people from the vicissitudes of life. Instead the “common man” feels far more vulnerable than before.

Violence is an inescapable reality for the ordinary Indian; we cannot escape being sickened by the daily occurrence of riots, rapes in custody, murders by those who believe their power confers immunity, and rampant incidents of the powerful taking the law into their own hands. If that sounds like an exaggeration, one reads far too often of episodes of poor women in rural India being stripped naked and paraded through streets to humiliate them or members of their family into doing as they are told.

Though individual police officers, administrators, and judges have shown courage and commitment in the pursuit of justice, the democratic Indian state as a whole seems to be able to do little to end such occurrences. Indeed, the Marathi newspaper Navakal once compared the Indian state system to the drunken husband who contributes nothing to the household himself but beats his wife to obtain the money she has worked hard to earn — a telling image in a country where such domestic events are commonplace.

We simply cannot allow our politicians to continue to treat our people this way. There is no doubt that the combination of violence and corruption, flourishing with impunity under the protection of the democratic state, discredits democracy itself. I think it deeply sad that so many cynics see democracy in India as a process that has given free reign to criminals and corrupt cops, opportunists and fixers, murderous musclemen and grasping middlemen, kickback-making politicos and bribe-taking bureaucrats, mafia dons and private armies, caste groups and religious extremists. Worse, the danger is that ordinary people will themselves react by seeking solutions outside the democratic system.

The basis of democracy is, of course, the rule of the demos, the people; the rule, in other words, of all rather than few. Democracies uphold the right of the general body of citizens to decide matters of concern to society as a whole, including the question of who rules them in their name. We cannot let our politicians arrogate to themselves the rights of the demos. Churchill once described democracy as “the worst system of government except for all the others.” It is the quality of our leaders that determines how bad that “worst” is. Our politicians will have to improve if India is to rise to the challenge. Let's send them to “democracy school” if we must.

10. The Bond That Threatens?

THE FAMILY, THAT QUINTESSENTIAL INDIAN SOCIAL institution, has made a modern comeback through a phenomenon that did not exist in the India I grew up in — that of the television soap opera.

Indeed, a major change has occurred in our entertainment habits. No longer do Indians merely throng to the melodramas of Bollywood (or should it now be Mollywood, in deference to “Mumbai”?), where aging superstars chase cavorting virgins around leafy trees, singing of love as the inevitable downpour drenches her blouse but not his ardor.

Instead, the faithful pining wives and drunken villains of Bolly-wood have given way to the multiple adulteries, serial bed-hopping, and steamy passions of Western-style soap operas. This has not escaped international attention. An august American literary journal publishes a picture, in riotous color, of the family at the heart of the television serial Shanti; a popular international newsmagazine reports that the septuagenarian wife of the then president of India, Shankar Dayal Sharma, instructs her servants to tape every episode of the afternoon serial Swabhimaan that her official duties oblige her to miss. Thanks to soap operas, a new vision of the Indian family, teeming with betrayals, infidelities, and rivalries of every sort, has gained entry into the living rooms of the middle class.

No doubt such dysfunctional television families reflect the changing mores of the new liberalizing India. But if they loom larger than life, they do so in only one sense of the term. In size and reach, soap opera families are smaller and less demanding than the families most Indians think of as our own.

The family, after all, is the bedrock Indian social unit. We Indians are as self-seeking as anyone else, but we are not individualists in the Western mode: India is not hospitable terrain for “atomic man,” since India is not a society in which atomized individuals can accomplish very much. To get anything done in India we require other people — allies who see their interests as ours. Such allies are most readily found within the cocoon of a family unit, which generates our most vital support, practical, material, and psychological, as well as the most important of our social duties and obligations.

But we define family more liberally than the rest of the world. We are, after all, the only country in the world where even the taxman recognizes the extended joint family spanning several generations and several branches of the family tree, living together in an arrangement legally known as the “Hindu Undivided Family.”

Sometimes the notion of “family” extends more broadly to a clan or a subcaste or even to distantly related neighbors in a village. I cannot remember a time growing up when there wasn't a young man from either of my parents’ villages in Kerala, some related to us in ways I couldn't fully understand, living in our flat (and sharing my bedroom) while my father arranged for him to have some professional training and got him a job. That is in the nature of things in our society; it was expected that my father, as one who had done well, would help others get their start in life. India is not a welfare state in that the government provides little to our unfortunates, but it is a welfare society in which people constantly help each other out, provided they feel a connection that justifies their help.

Belonging to the family carries with it a complex web of entitlements and obligations, not least monetary. Our culture, with some exceptions, treats family income as commonly accessible, family expenditure as commonly undertaken, family meals as meant to be shared. The broader the definition of family, of course, the more the merry number who feel they have a right to partake of the family's assets.

This level of sharing does not, however, make India fertile ground for the idealistic ecumenism of the socialists. Despite the socialist rhetoric of our political class since independence, we are a society unfit for socialism. Very few Indians have a broader sense of community than that circumscribed by ties of blood, caste affiliation, or village. We take care of those we consider near and dear, and remain largely indifferent to the rest.

Which means that not everything about our family structures is innocent. Amid the many transformations of globalization overtaking our society today, I sometimes wonder if our traditions conspire with modernity against our general well-being. For instance, is the Indian commitment to family a threat to the environment? If the question seems preposterous, let me explain.

At a trivial level, it is common to find sumptuous luxury apartments in buildings that are filthy, rotting, and stained, whose common areas, walls, and staircases have not been cleaned or painted in generations. Each apartment owner is proud of his own immediate habitat but is unwilling to incur responsibility or expense for the areas shared with others, even in the same building. My mother once asked her “sweeper-woman” in Delhi to sweep the stairs of her building as well. The woman, who would have been paid extra for the chore, was astonished at the request. “But why should you, madam?” she asked. “The stairs don't belong to you.”

This attitude is also visible in the lack of a civic culture in both rural and urban India, which leaves public spaces dirty and garbage-strewn, streets potholed and neglected, civic amenities vandalized or not functioning. The Indian wades through dirt and filth, past open sewers and fly-specked waste, to an immaculate home where he proudly bathes twice a day. An acute consciousness of personal hygiene coexists with an astonishing disregard for public sanitation.

Not surprisingly, India is home to many of the world's most polluted cities. The air in Kolkata or Delhi is all but unbreathable in winter, when car exhaust fumes, unchecked industrial emissions, and smoke from countless charcoal braziers in the street rise to be trapped by descending mist and fog. A French diplomat friend, undergoing a routine medical check after serving three years in Kolkata, was asked how many packs of cigarettes he smoked a day. When he protested that he had never smoked in his life, his doctor couldn't believe him: three years of breathing Kolkata's air had given him lungs resembling a habitual smoker's. Delhi is hardly better. When the Australian cricket team played there in November 1996, the manager said the air was so unfit to breathe that his players’ performance was affected.

As a result of such unchecked pollution, respiratory diseases are rife in urban India. Factories belch forth noxious black clouds; effluents pour untreated into rivers; sewage systems reek and overflow. Despite the tree-huggers of the Chipko Andolan, deforestation and overcultivation take their own environmental toll of rural India. Environmental consciousness remains limited. Governments pass regulations, then regularly ignore them. Meanwhile, more and more cars reach the congested roads, more poisons and toxins flow into our water and air, and more small factories open up that do not meet pollution-control standards. But they will never be closed down, because unemployment is a greater political danger than lung cancer.

With respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular diseases, and lung ailments rife, the total health costs for the country resulting from illnesses caused by pollution are estimated at some 4.5 percent of India's gross domestic product. In other words, more than half our country's annual economic growth is being wiped out by pollution, and development is taking place largely at the expense of the environment.

This dismal picture, coupled with corrupt enforcement of environmental regulations, reflects the sad state of the Indian ecology in the first years of the twenty-first century. This does not, however, prevent politicians from making environmental issues an opportunistic excuse to delay major developmental projects. If the choice is between living poor in a “green society” and being prosperous in the midst of general pollution, I have no doubt that most Indians would be happy to choke and splutter all the way to the bank.

Which is why — to return to the beginning — the new soap opera families are both relevant and irrelevant to our real lives. For, given our basic social underpinnings, the triumphs and travails of a television family can seem both familiar enough to Indian viewers to engage us, and distant enough to entertain. Meanwhile, the real damage they do, in leaving Indians indifferent to the welfare of the broader environment in which their families function, takes place offscreen.

11. Cricket's True Spiritual Home

I HAVE OFTEN THOUGHT that cricket is really, in the sociologist Ashis Nandy's phrase, an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British.

This might seem a preposterous notion, in keeping with the characteristic acuminations of that mischievous scholar, whose wispy beard and twinkling eyes have revealed a capacity both to astonish and to provoke. And yet it is an entirely defensible idea: Nandy found the perfect words to express something I have been arguing since childhood. Everything about cricket seems to me ideally suited to the Indian national character: its rich complexity, the infinite possibilities and variations that could occur with each delivery, the dozen different ways of getting out, are all patterned for a society of infinite forms and varieties. Indeed, they are rather like Indian classical music, in which the basic laws are laid down but the performer then improvises gloriously, unshackled by anything so mundane as a written score.

If there is a cricket cliché drilled into fans’ heads by generations of commentators, it must be that of relating to “the glorious uncertainties of the game.” But that too echoes ancient Indian thought, as I have pointed out in The Great Indian Novel. Indian fatalists instinctively understand that it is precisely when you are seeing the ball well and timing your fours off the sweet spot of the bat that the un-playable shooter can come along and bowl you. A country where a majority of the population still consults astrologers and believes in the capricious influence of the planets can well appreciate a sport in which an ill-timed cloudburst, a badly prepared pitch, a lost toss, or the sun in the eyes of a fielder can transform the outcome of a game. Even the possibility that five tense, exciting, hotly contested and occasionally meandering days of cricketing contest could still end in a draw seems derived from ancient Indian philosophy, which accepts profoundly that in life the journey is as important as the destination.

Interestingly enough, Indian expatriation is now becoming the principal driver for the globalization of what used to be thought of as a quintessentially English sport. A recent Indian visitor to New York asked about cricket matches in the city and waxed eloquent about the growth of the game in, of all places, Dubai. When I first heard of the phenomenon, I had visions of Bedouins on camelback trying to turn Chinamen upon the desert sands, and scorecards bearing the regular notation “dust storm stopped play.” Enlightenment soon followed, however: I duly learned about the lead taken in promoting the game by the Air-India Sports Club, the success of the Dubai cricket development program, and that many matches are played on subkha grounds with sand outfields. And why not, indeed? After all, there is a famous stadium in next-door Sharjah, and the United Arab Emirates team would be a force to reckon with for the International Cricket Council (ICC) trophy if it were allowed to field some of the subcontinental stalwarts who play the game around the Gulf.

The globalization of cricket is a phenomenon with which even this chronically sedentary writer has some personal experience. In the course of a peripatetic life I learned not only that Italians and Israelis played cricket, but I ended up playing the game myself in two less likely countries, Singapore and Switzerland.

If ever Singapore gets around to nominating a national sport, you can be pretty sure it won't be cricket. Most Singaporeans appear to believe that the term applies either to a noisy insect or a trademark cigarette lighter. So the fact that every Sunday I would dress up like a poor relation of the Great Gatsby and venture hopefully into the drizzle clutching my bat invariably mystified my Singaporean friends. Bats, of course, they associated more with vampires than umpires. And the notion that anyone would spend the best part of his Sunday on an uneven field in undignified pursuit of five-and-a-half ounces of cork provoked widespread disbelief. “You mean they still play cricket here?” exclaimed one Singaporean. “I thought that ended with the Japanese occupation in 1941!”

In fact, there were twenty teams in the two Sunday Leagues run by the Singapore Cricket Association when I was there in the early 1980s, and innumerable others playing “friendly” matches on Saturdays. They ranged from the sometimes plebeian Patricians to the tavernless Tanglin Taverners, from NonBenders who chased every ball to Schoolboys who didn't, and from the two teams of the elite Singapore Cricket Club to the more esoteric acronyms of SAFSA and SPASA (known to the initiated as the Armed Forces and the Polytechnic respectively).

“I do not play cricket,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, “because it requires me to assume such indecent postures.” Most Singaporeans, a notoriously serious and straitlaced breed whose recreations are golf and economic growth, appeared to share his disdain. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who described cricket as “organized loafing,” and the Nobel Prize — winning author (Kipling), who termed cricketers “flanneled fools,” would have felt right at home in Singapore. Many a local utilitarian with the national devotion to statistics pointed out to me that cricket simply wasn't cost-efficient enough. The amount of space and time it took to give twenty-two players a game could, I was reliably informed, be more productively allocated to one hundred squash players, two hundred swimmers, or three hundred joggers. When I responded that eighty-eight cricketers could have more fun and exercise in the space taken up by the prime minister's daily game of golf, the silence that greeted me could have made central air conditioning obsolete.

Of course, neither Singaporeans nor Swiss, law-abiding citizens to a fault, can be expected to approve of any sport that is based on the principle of hit-and-run. So expatriates, especially Indians, tend to dominate the game in both countries.

But cricket has a surprisingly long pedigree in Switzerland. The Geneva Cricket Club's wine label (yes, they are a rather refined lot, these Swiss cricketers) bears an illustration of a cricket match being played on the city's Plainpalais field in 1817. Nearly two centuries later, the game continues to flourish in Geneva, having survived interruptions during the two world wars. The present Geneva Cricket Club (GCC), revived in 1955, plays in a well-equipped stadium that offers underground parking to sportsmen and the luxury of bowling (and fielding) on Astroturf.

The environs of this international city also house the cricketers of the Center Européen de la Récherche Nucléaire (CERN), where a hefty six might dent the casing of the world's biggest proton synchrotron accelerator. An amiable lot, the CERN cricketers tend to be at their best during the expansive tea breaks for which they (and their gifted if long-suffering spouses) are deservingly famous. (I played for them for four years, and apart from consuming more calories than I expended, I am pleased to report that I still feature in three places in the club records, which they have helpfully posted on the Internet.)

There is also an assortment of teams from the other major cities — Basel, Bern, Winterthur, Zug, and of course Zurich, which supports not one but two Sri Lankan elevens, neither of which is on speaking terms with the other. The Swiss teams are organized in an annual competition for the 40-over Brennan Cup, named for the former Australian ambassador who donated it, and they even boast an annual journal, named — what else? — Swissden.

Though neither the climate nor the quality of the cricket comes close to the ideal that every good Swiss would wish to aspire to, cricket in Switzerland — a country of diplomatic conferences — has found its own place in the scheme of international exchange. Here, British-educated Swiss returning from South Africa (and a few South African émigrés) field alongside Indians both east and west; Pakistani and Sri Lankan refugees shatter the stumps of Indian diplomats and United Nations officials; irrelevant Pommies hit sixes off irreverent Antipodeans. And they all retire to their convivial beers at the end of the game. Even if, in most cases, they don't have a pavilion to drink them in.

Cricket probably remains, along with the English language, one of the few colonial legacies in which imperialism gave more than it took. And in our postcolonial times, especially given the boost provided by the Indian Jagmohan Dalmiya's empire-strikes-back leadership of the International Cricket Conference, it is doing so far more successfully than during the days of the empire that invented the game.

But America remains the great challenge, despite an Indian population that now exceeds three million souls. Americans have about as much use for cricket as Lapps have for beachwear. Ever since Abner Doubleday, in the mid-nineteenth century, introduced a simplified version of the elemental sport in which bat contends with ball, Americans have been lost to the more demanding challenges — and pleasures — of cricket. Baseball is to cricket as simple addition is to calculus — the basic moves may be similar, but the former is easier, quicker, more straightforward, and requires a much shorter attention span. And so baseball has captured the American imagination in a way that leaves no room for its adult cousin. The notion that anyone would watch a game that could take five days and still not ensure a result provokes widespread disbelief among result-oriented Americans. “You mean people actually pay to watch this?” exclaimed one American I tried to interest in the game. “It's about as exciting as measuring global warming!”

“Yeah, and just as important to half the planet,” I responded dryly.

To be a cricket fan in America while the ICC World Cup is going on is akin to being a Brazilian samba dancer quarantined at a Quaker prayer meeting during Carnival week. Sitting in New York, you could as well be in Timbuktu for all the awareness people around you have of what's happening. A billion people may be on tenter-hooks around the world for the results of each match, but the august New York Times, which likes to think of itself as a world-class newspaper, doesn't even report the scores.

In earlier days cricket fans in the United States built their schedules around trying to catch the static-ridden numbers squawked on the BBC World Service twice a day. Today, though none of the 103 channels on my Manhattan cable television set offer a glimpse of cricket, suburbanites with satellite dishes can buy a World Cup package hawked by Indian-American television entrepreneurs. During earlier World Cups, movie theaters in immigrant neighborhoods that normally screened Bollywood blockbusters aired telecasts of World Cup cricket matches instead. And now there's the Internet — willow.tv, named for the wood that cricket bats are made of, sells a package that video-streams all the matches onto your PC. So living in America is no longer cricketing purgatory.

But, except when matches are played in the Caribbean, the avid America-based fan desirous of watching world-class cricket has to contend with the tyranny of what the French like to call the décalage horaire. Cricket is played in the rest of the world when people in America are supposed to be asleep. So satellite television has spawned a curious subculture in New York City. On days of crucial matches, shadowy brown figures flit through the dark predawn streets, heading for the homes of the privileged few who own satellite dishes. They whisper into cell phones in an arcane code: “Who's at silly mid-on? Has Irfan bowled a maiden?”

One night, a grizzled New York doorman regarded my friend Nikhil and me with undisguised skepticism. It was 3:30 A.M. — not the usual hour for visitors to drop by, even in Manhattan. “They're expecting us,” I told him firmly. “Buzz upstairs and see.”

He did, and they were. But the grizzled guardian at the gates couldn't suppress a shake of his head as he directed my friend and me to the elevators. Our hostess, Neera, greeted us at her door and led us down a darkened hallway past a bedroom where one of her sons slept under a blanket. “He has an exam in the morning,” she whispered. In the master bedroom a television flickered. Our host, Sanjay, resplendent in white cotton pajamas and sitting propped up in bed, waved us to a sofa. “They won the toss,” he announced in tones of doom. “We're getting clobbered.”

Nikhil and I sat down heavily, after only three hours’ sleep. “Maybe we shouldn't have got up for this,” I said as raucous shouts arose from the TV, confirming a disastrous Indian showing. “Are you kidding?” Nikhil replied. “Would you have missed this for anything?”

I had to admit I wouldn't. After years of being denied the most sublime pleasure known to Subcontinental Man — watching an international cricket match — this was heaven. For fans like me, New York has long been a citadel of barbarism, where the world's greatest sport is neither played nor reported in the papers. For decades we had to get our news of important matches via shortwave radio. The Internet for the first time brought live scores on demand — manna from on high. But to actually see a match? So what if it was taking place nearly a dozen time zones away? Nothing could beat having a friend in Manhattan with a satellite dish who was (a) a cricket fan and (b) willing to let you into his home in the middle of the night to watch the Indian team in action.

So it was that recent Sunday morning. Roused by the hoots and whistles emanating from the TV, Neera and Sanjay's houseguest wandered in, bleary-eyed from sleep. A while later their elder son awoke; a recent recruit at a big-name Wall Street firm, he had gotten home from work after midnight but was determined to catch an hour or two of cricket before heading back to the office at 7 A.M. The younger son, with his accounting exam to take, joined us next. As the cricketers on screen trooped off to their stadium lunch, Neera whipped up a breakfast of eggs and bagels for the watchers. The match resumed, and as the Manhattan morning advanced, friends who had been obliged to keep more conventional hours began to drop in: a family with young children, another from Connecticut, a young couple who had eyes mainly for each other despite the magnetism of the match.

Conversation sparkled in the combination of Hindi and English that Indians know as Hinglish. A nephew of Sanjay's arrived with his baby; when he heard the score he almost dropped the infant. Relatives who couldn't make it called from assorted locations to ask for news. Masala chai flowed. By noon it was over. India had lost, half a world away. Nikhil and I headed back to reality.

“What's goin’ on up there, anyways?” the doorman asked. I opened my mouth to explain, then shut it again. “You're American,” I said with a sigh. “You wouldn't understand.”

Like the other remnants of the colonial presence, cricket has been thoroughly Indianized without losing its essential British moorings. After producing Oxbridge-educated Test stars for England, Indian cricket now reaches deep into the subcontinental soil, sustaining innumerable grassroots tournaments, attracting the largest audiences for any spectator sport in the world and creating stars more comfortable in Marathi or Tamil than in the language of “silly mid-on,” “sticky wicket,” and “bowling a maiden over.” Indeed, cricket is no longer what Americans imagine it is, a decorous sport played by effete Englishmen uttering polite inanities (“marvelous glance to fine leg, old chap”) over cucumber sandwiches. World cricket now uses Hindi terms (the doosra trips off the tongues of Oxonian commentators). Cricket is now an Indian game; many who play it have no sense of owing it to England. Yet just as Indian nationalists used British traditions and institutions to overturn British rule, so also Indians have taken up an English sport and delight in beating the English literally at their own game. Today more than 80 percent of the game's global revenues come from India, as the vast television audience of a growing economic giant clamors for the sport.

So the cricketing cause in America may lie in the hands of Indian immigrants. Just as the growth in the Hispanic population made soccer a mainstream sport, the enthusiasm of subcontinentals might yet spill over to their American neighbors, just as Indians and Pakistanis have brought cricket stadia to the United Arab Emirates. It may be a long while before cricket acquires the worldwide following of soccer or even tennis, but thanks to the mobility of modern labor and the passion for the game shown by its émigrés, cricket is spreading around the world. Maybe, one day, America might even catch up.

12. Good Sports, Bad Sports

WAR, CLAUSEWITZ FAMOUSLY SAID, is nothing but the continuation of state policy by other means. All international sport is, in turn, nothing but an exercise in national chauvinism by other means. At some level we all pretend to tune in to the Olympics to admire human athleticism at its finest, but none of us can deny the special significance of the flags under which those athletes first enter the stadium, the anthem that is played when the winner mounts the podium — and, ultimately, that impossible-to-ignore, regularly updated medal tally, listing the gold, silver, and bronze awarded to each participating country, which makes up the Games’ real honor roll.

Every Indian who follows the Olympics has known the cringe-making experience of scanning that list, the eyes traveling down past dozens of nations big and small before alighting on a solitary tennis or wrestling bronze that gives India, with its billion-strong population, its modest place on the tally. Even worse, we have all known the shame of waiting day after day for India to appear on the list at all, as countries, a hundredth our size, record gold upon gold while Indian athletes are barely mentioned among the also-rans. The experience has always brought chagrin. Indians like to think we can hold our own against the best in the world in any field: our Kalidasa can stand up to their Shakespeare, our Ramanujan to their Einstein, our Rukmini Devi to their Margot Fonteyn, our K3G to their Titanic and, these days, our Infosys to their Microsoft. In sport, however, it has been a different story. Our cricketers have twice (in 1971 and 1983) come close to being considered the best in the world, and though they seemed to be flirting with greatness again in 2003–4, they have fallen away again in 2007, eliminated humiliatingly with the minnows from the World Cup. Prakash Padukone in badminton and Vishwanathan Anand in chess almost, but not quite, attained the status of undisputed world champions. But that is all. In the Olympics, that domain of traditional sporting excellence since 776 B.C., our country's record has actually declined. The one gold medal we had become used to winning since the 1920s, in hockey, has proved elusive in recent Games, as our players have stumbled on Astroturf. In everything where simple human prowess is at stake — running, jumping, swimming, lifting, throwing — Indians simply don't count.

Poor Madhu Sapre was unjustly denied a Miss World title in the early 1990s because of her answer to the question, “What is the first thing you would do if you became the ruler of your country?” Her response—“I would build a sports stadium”—was considered dumb by the judges, and the almost-certain crown (she was the overwhelming favorite of the bookies) slipped from her grasp. Sapre's answer might not have been the brightest, but if the judges had any idea of how desperate Indians are for sporting success, they would have understood that it was not such an absurd priority for her to express after all.

Why is it that we do so badly? The explanations have ranged from the anthropological to the borderline racist. (Indians don't have the genes, the build, the stamina, the climate, whatever.) There are structural explanations and infrastructural ones: lack of training facilities, gymnasiums, running tracks, equipment, financial resources. We are a developing country, it is said; but other developing countries, from Jamaica to Ethiopia, regularly rake in the medals. Our talent pool isn't really a billion, some argue; it's only the well-off and middle class, maybe 300 million strong, who can afford to play sports. But even that is a larger population base than a hundred countries that do better than us at the Olympics. Yet, it is true that the incentives for success are not great; the years of sacrifice and effort it takes to become a world-class athlete are simply not a realistic option to an Indian who needs to make a living, and sponsors are few and far between.

And then there's the usual Indian problem: sports administrative bodies and government departments are ridden with patronage and petty bossism, with officials more interested in protecting their turf than in promoting athletes. With all these factors, failure in the Olympics, it is suggested, is encoded in our national DNA.

And yet success or failure still depends on the individual athlete. Indian genes in a developing country did not prevent a Vijay Singh emerging from Fiji to rival Tiger Woods as the best golfer in the world. And if Indians can be better than Caucasians and Caribbeans on the cricket field, why can't they beat them in the Olympic stadium? My family's former domestic retainer, Dulal Chandra Dev, as passionate a sports fan as ever lived, had a typically Bengali-leftist analysis of the national predicament. The problem, he averred, was that we were drawing on a limited pool of effete city-bred athletes who were knowledgeable enough about a sport to try to take it up. What we needed to do, he asserted, was to go into the tribal areas, where people had never heard of the marathon or the javelin throw and had no idea what “Olympics” or even “Games” meant. Yet there we would find Santhals and Bhils who practiced these Olympic skills from birth in their daily lives. What's a 26-kilometer run, Dulal argued, to a tribal who runs twice that distance every day just to fetch water or wood? Archery and javelin throwing would be child's play to an aboriginal who hunts with bows and arrows and spears every day just to be able to eat.

It's a thought, and I am sure Dulal would be happy if the sports ministry took him up on it and sent talent scouts to Jharkhand immediately.

But I somehow doubt that the solution is quite that simple. It is one thing to have the skill, quite another to be able to use it in competition. The point about the Olympics is that you are measured against the world's best: it is not just your eye against his, your legs against hers, but what you can do against their trainer, their running shoe, their ergodynamic costume, their titanium archer's bow. And against that entire panoply of requirements, we seem chronically to fall short.

It doesn't have to be so. The newly globalized India of Wipro and Sania Mirza can find both the strength and the resources to compete. Some have seen in the embarrassment of our Olympic failures a metaphor of national decline. I am not so pessimistic myself. First of all, it was not as if India ever stood at the Olympian heights — we have no recorded history of global sporting accomplishment ever, so if we are starting at square one, it is not because we have fallen from square ninety-nine. Second, India always calls for more complex metaphors than most places, and ours is a country where a narrative of decline is never a sufficient explanation. In The Great Indian Novel I wrote that India was not a developing country but a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay. Such comments are the privilege of the satirist, but it is probably true to acknowledge that ours is a country where things are always getting both better and worse at the same time. That is also true in the sporting arena: we may not retain medals we have won in the past, but might gain ones in fields (boxing? weight lifting?) where Indian youngsters have acquired skills we always thought they lacked.

And then there is the final intangible, the vital ingredient of all sporting success, as important as skill, training, equipment, and discipline: heart. There is no national quota for the will to win, the determination to strive beyond oneself for the glory of the country. It is the quality that led Leander Paes, never a serious contender in any other singles tournament that ever mattered, to belie his ranking and battle his way to a bronze medal in tennis at the 1996 Olympics. He played above himself because he wanted that medal, and he wanted to stand on that podium and have “ Jana Gana Mana” played before 300 million telespectators. That desire has to come from within, but it costs nothing. The next Paes might be an archer, a swimmer, a wrestler. It might even (if he and Mahesh Bhupathi can put their differences aside to combine for the sake of the country) be Paes himself.

13. Bad Sports, Bad Spots

I HAVE TO CONFESS TO DECIDEDLY MIXED EMOTIONS on hearing the news that the private broadcaster Nimbus Communications has got into trouble with the government for allegedly broadcasting racist ads on its Neo Sports channel.

The mixed emotions come, first, from the fact that this is a channel I both love and hate. Whenever I visit India, I morph into a Neo Sports addict. After decades living in countries where I was deprived of the possibility of watching cricket on television, I seize every guilty opportunity to cancel appointments and turn off my phone, so that I can sit goggle-eyed before the tube, soaking in the goings-on on the greensward. And no one offers quite the range of cricket that Neo does — live and recorded, from home and abroad, Test matches and one-dayers and Ranji trophy games. Rare is the moment when the cricket-starved soul cannot find some balm on Neo Sports.

At the same time, the channel infuriates me. It possesses, for one thing, the single most irritating voice on the planet, an androgynous sloganeer with a gratingly self-satisfied accent who informs listeners with teeth-grinding regularity of the name of the channel they are watching. Fortunately for him or her, this occurs offscreen, so that viewers never learn who they can throw rotten eggs at. The executives of Nimbus appear blissfully unaware that this creature's mere enunciation of the words Neo Sports has done more than any rival or enemy can to incite sheer hatred toward the brand name among the most Gandhian of cricket fans.

And then there are the ads. One can't blame Neo, which is still a fledgling channel, for filling its commercial spaces with advertisements for itself (after all, how many repeats of Airtel's “Songcatcher” ads can any station inflict on its viewers without being accused of cruel and unusual punishment?). But who on earth conceives and approves these excrescences on the national psyche? I was in India when the West Indies team was touring, and watched in mounting horror as Neo ran a pair of promos in appalling taste about the visitors. One showed a West Indian at a dhaba, his mouth aflame after being served a deliberately overspicy meal, running from person to person looking for water, only to have the Indians there stick their fingers into their glasses, throw dentures into their water, and so on, until he finally flings himself at a tap and discovers it has run dry. The tag line: “It's tough to be a West Indian in India.” Bad enough, but far worse was a second ad, in which a romantic black couple is rowed out to the middle of a lake by a boatman who abruptly stops, glowers at them, and proceeds to strip off his clothes. The audience is clearly meant to expect that he will assault the girl — but once he is down to his shorts he jumps into the water, leaving the couple moored mid-lake without an oar. Repeat tag line: “It's tough to be a West Indian in India.”

Of course, I can figure out from deep mid-wicket what the advertisers thought they were doing. First, they thought the ads were funny. Now, humor is the most subjective of qualities, and though I can't for the life of me find anything remotely funny in these two ads, I imagine somewhere in this vast subcontinent of ours there may well have been a few people who actually laughed, though I can only imagine they must have been hit by a bouncer on the back of the head when they were young. Second, the bosses at Neo Sports probably imagined that this was a clever way of promoting the cricketing contest and in so doing, drawing attention to themselves in the hope of expanding their viewer base.

It doesn't take an exceptional intelligence to point out that an ad that demonizes a group of people, whether identified by nationality or color, as “Others” to be mistreated is inherently offensive. And that a story line that mocks people of that group, and depicts people denying them basic human courtesies, is not funny. Nor that depicting Indians, who as a people must rank among the most hospitable on earth to foreigners of any kind, as being neither welcoming nor courteous but positively nasty to strangers, is unfair and untrue: it both promotes xenophobia and denies our true national character. In other words, the ad campaign was fundamentally misconceived, ill thought out, and disastrously executed, and those responsible should be spanked with the business end of an extra-heavy Tendulkar bat.

But should there be more? This is where I get conflicted again. I detested the ads, but I was not happy to read in mid-February that the government “slapped a notice on Nimbus, asking for an explanation.” And worse still, that Neo Sports faces a minimum thirty-day ban if charges of violating the advertising code are proven. Not only does that seem unnecessarily harsh toward the company, it will punish an entire class of innocents, the cricket fans who would have been deprived of their channel during the World Cup. Far more worrying, it allows the heavy hand of government to intrude into the space for public discourse that is so essential a part of any functioning democracy. An official of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry was quoted as saying: “The ads were in bad taste and perceived to be derogatory against [foreign] citizens.” Bad taste is a matter for individuals to determine, not bureaucrats or even judges. And if Indians are to be punished for being derogatory toward foreigners, it will not be long before we return to the bad old days when the avatars of Indo-Soviet friendship banned James Bond's From Russia with Love and later only allowed its release under the title From 007 with Love. In a free society, when the media errs, viewers should make their views known, advertisers should protest, and the company should be forced to think twice about its reputation. But let's get the government's unimaginative fingers off our remote controls.

14. Salad Daze

IT's NOT OFTEN THAT A MAGAZINE generates an entire subculture, especially when it lasted just a decade and aimed itself at people who are now reaching the age of looking fondly back at their salad days. Yet if anything constituted the lip-smacking dressing of my salad days, it would have been the first “youth magazine” India ever had, the Junior Statesman (soon reduced, in popular discourse, and then officially, after a readers’ contest that confirmed fans’ fondness for the initials, to JS).

It may seem a bit odd today to praise a publication that has already been buried for three decades. But anyone who was a teenager in India between 1967 and 1976 will not need persuading about the extraordinary impact that JS had on their generation. I still meet middle-aged matrons who wax eloquently nostalgic about the magazine, including people who can quote back at me from memory things I'd forgotten I'd written.

With the plethora of entertainment choices available to young Indians today, it's easy to underestimate the impact that a single magazine can have on the consciousness of a generation (of course, a largely urban, English-speaking, and moderately affluent generation). When JS appeared, there was no TV in India (except for a single black-and-white channel in Delhi, largely devoted to agricultural programming, and nothing anywhere else), computers didn't exist, and PlayStation wasn't even a gleam in an inventor's eye. Young people could read books or listen to music; the magazines available were by and large turgid, unimaginative masses of dense text, largely devoted to the increasingly unconvincing utterances of politicians. (No Indian versions of Cosmo or Maxim in those days!) And then JS appeared, with Pop Art graphics, wildly kaleidoscopic illustrations, a foldout larger-than-life blowup of some teen icon, and articles whose sensibility alternated between Seventeen magazine and Hunter S. Thompson on a (relatively) sober day. It rapidly became the must-read mag for Indian teens everywhere.

And it wasn't just importing recycled PR handouts of Western celebrities. JS didn't just make space for, it created a dizzying number of Indian artists and writers.

M. J. Akbar and I made our debuts as writers in the same issue of JS back in 1967. Writing for JS meant sharing space with the likes of editor Desmond Doig, journalist, mountaineer, and dandy; Dubby Bhagat, a general's son who delighted in knocking down every stereotype you might have been tempted to assume about him; Bhaskar “Papa” Menon, who wrote a brilliant column called “Bounder” and became the first JS contributor to go off to New York to work (and write) for the United Nations; Anurag Mathur, who wrote very serious short stories that didn't prefigure the hilarity of The Inscrutable Americans; Sunil Sethi, who reported from and on Delhi with the easy sophistication later known to legions of television viewers; or C. Y. Gopinath, earnest, bespectacled, and erudite, an editor's and reader's favorite. And, of course, the remarkable Jug Suraiya, who in those days had to be read with dictionary in hand, since he loved words nobody else had been inclined to use in print before, and who acquired a fan following nationwide that has since grown (and grown up) with him.

And JS’s eclectic subject matter was similarly nurturing of desi talent. The singer-actress Asha Puthli was first hyped in the pages of JS; so were tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, dancer Swapna Sundari, cineaste Shyam Benegal, and the model-turned-beauty-queen-turned-movie-star Zeenat Aman. Simi Garewal wrote an advice column; Raghu Rai and Sondeep Shankar took pictures of everything; the wonderfully named sisters Papiya and Tuk Tuk Ghosh offered witty insights into all sorts of subjects (they were so prolific that many readers suspected they were the figments of the JS staff's fevered imaginations, until in 2006 came the tragic news that Papiya, by then an eminent historian at Patna University, had been murdered in her home in that lawless city). They rubbed shoulders (or at least column inches) with the likes of Jatin Das, whose paintings JS vividly depicted well before he went on to national prominence as one of our great modern artists (not to mention father of the lovely and talented Nandita). Or King Jigme Singye Wangchuk of Bhutan, who, as a teenage monarch, gave JS the exclusive scoop on his coronation (accompanied by the lush photography JS was known for and which was not yet widely practiced in the country outside the somewhat stodgy pages of the Illustrated Weekly of India).

Nostalgia is a middle-aged affliction; it attaches importance to the memory of experiences that mean little to the majority who did not share them. So writing about JS is a little self-indulgent. The magazine died young, folded while still profitable by the Statesman’s chief honcho C. R. Irani after a quarrel with Doig, who passed away soon after of a heart attack. It barely lasted a decade, and anyone leafing through a back copy today (if one can be found) is bound to find it quaint, with its dated 1960s lingo and its calibrated air of cautious rebelliousness, celebrating youthful freedom but within sensible bounds.

And yet JS’s achievement lay in giving a generation of young Indians the sense that they mattered; that their concerns, interests, fantasies, and creative outpourings had a place in our society; and that they could, through the simple fact of the circulation of a magazine, link themselves to a network of other young Indians across the country who shared these concerns and interests. In so doing, JS expanded, for many of us, the world of the possible. And it encouraged us to go out and make those new possibilities happen. There has never been a substitute for JS, and amid today's plethora of diversions for India's young, there probably never will be.

15. Wholly Holidays

I WROTE THESE WORDS IN NEW YORK ON A GOOD FRIDAY, when, I am pleased to say, most employers observe a holiday. But I had just come across the postman downstairs and retrieved my mail. “You don't have the day off?” I asked somewhat incredulously. He shook his head. “What about Easter Monday?” Not that either, he responded. As a postman he gets just six days off a year, mainly on secular occasions like Presidents Day, and two weeks’ leave. I thanked him and retreated to my apartment, suitably humbled by the Protestant work ethic.

*

Of all the various ways of measuring the relative underdevelopment of nations, from GNP tables to the Human Development Index, I once suggested that the most useful one that I could imagine constructing would be the Holiday Index. Whereas America, with its paucity of holidays, would score poorly on the Index, I think we in India would do pretty well on it. But that's not necessarily a good thing.

Festivals and melas—mass gatherings of people united around a common event — define our need for escape, and I sometimes suspect that India has more of them than any other country. A look at the government of India's official list of holidays also suggests that we are also entitled to take more time off than any other country in the world. Indians contemplate a calendar that offers a choice of forty-four official holidays for a variety of religious and secular occasions, ranging from Independence and Republic Days to Id-e-Milad, the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed. Whereas Western dictionaries describe secularism as the absence of religion, our secularism favors a multitude of religions: the birthdays of Guru Gobind Singh, Guru Ravidas, and even Maharishi Valmiki are legitimate excuses to have a day off, as are the ascensions of Buddha, Christ, and Mahavira of the Jains. Going a step further, we have the Hindu festivals of Mahashivaratri and Ganesh Chathurthi, in honor of the gods Shiva and Ganesh, respectively. Throw in the Parsi New Year and the Shia Muharram, and you can see how secularism has deferred to religion, to the benefit of the indolent of all faiths.

But the secular harvest festivals of Dussehra, Onam, and Vaisakhi are celebrated, too. And the birthday of that eclectic spiritualist Mahatma Gandhi. Deepavali, our festival of lights, may not be entirely secular, despite all the godless gambling it encourages, but Holi is just a Dionysian spring festival and Raksha Bandhan a nondenominational day of brotherhood: we can take them off, too. We flock in our millions to the Kumbh mela and other religious gatherings; we overflow the maidans for our regular Ram- lilas in every little town.

And when it comes to holidays, who needs an occasion? Add to all these official tamashas the 104 weekend days, annual leave, casual leave, compassionate leave, and sick leave, and it is perfectly possible for a government employee to work just one-third of the days on the calendar and legitimately collect a full year's salary. And I have not even counted days lost due to strikes, hartals, bandhs, lockouts, and the like. Or the “unofficial holidays” that are taken in every office around the country when there is a cricket Test match or one-day international on television, and people report to work in body but focus their minds, and as far as possible their eyes, on the distant pitch.

Shakespeare, who had a thought for every issue and an epigram for every thought, pointed out, “If all the year were playing holidays/To sport would be as tedious as to work.” (Henry IV, Part I, Act 1, sc. 2, for pedantic readers). But he hadn't met the Indian holidaymaker: our capacity for celebration is truly undimmed by repetition. Had old William seen the enthusiasm with which our youths spray colored water on female strangers or the lakhs thronging our melas from Pushkar to Prayag, he would undoubtedly have agreed that age cannot wither, nor custom stale, the infinite variety of our holidays.

So India, I suspect, would ride high on the Holiday Index. I wonder how Bangladesh or Burkina Faso would fare. My wholly unscientific theory is that the poorer the country, the more holidays it gives itself, and the more festivals it conducts. Productivity might suffer from so many absences, but part of the problem is that we are not producing all that much anyway when we work, so that we don't lose all that much when we don't.

But wait a minute — perhaps I am being too materialist here. Is it that we are poor because we have so many holidays, or that we have so many holidays because we are poor?

Festivals and melas are the holiday events of the poor. The rich have no shortage of opportunities to enjoy themselves by themselves, whereas the poor have few outlets and pleasures other than communal ones. For an Indian villager, a day at the local mela is his opera ticket, tennis tourney, and beach vacation rolled into one — and in celebrating it he experiences some of the happiness that Thomas Jefferson told rich Americans it was the duty of government to allow him to pursue.

So poor countries — or at least countries with poor people — need more holidays and public festivals to give people the chance to amuse themselves than the rich ones do. Perhaps we should leave our holidays intact, after all.

16. Memories of a Bombay Childhood

IF THERE IS ONE INDIAN CITY that epitomizes much of what I'd like to think I stand for, it is Bombay (Mumbai, as it has recently been renamed), which used to offer a hospitable home for the kinds of ideas and initiatives (though not always the politics) that I value. Thriving, energetic, and resourceful, it was an advertisement for the free enterprise culture I advocated from my schooldays; its citizens rubbed shoulders with one another in an environment that largely transcended the man-made divisions of caste and religion that I despise; and the air was redolent of a cosmopolitanism more eclectic than anywhere else in the land. My own recollections of the city, urbs prima in Indis, involve these very issues.

I spent more of my childhood in Bombay than anywhere else. We moved to the city not long after my second birthday and left it (for Calcutta) just before my thirteenth, so my memories of Bombay are inevitably tied up with my schooling there. This took place in the squat red-white-and-blue building, opposite the Cooperage Stadium, which housed Campion School.

Campion was, like its eponymous Elizabethan martyr, a Catholic institution, one of many through which the Jesuits fulfilled their considerable talent for educating the privileged of the third world. It was a not wholly successful vocation, for the Jesuits were uncomfortably elitist and the elites enthusiastically Jesuitical. But perhaps because of its academic limitations, Campion encouraged the idea that there was more to school than studies. It offered a variety of extracurricular activities that helped you to find yourself outside the classroom even if you had lost yourself inside it.

So it was in Bombay and at Campion that I first acquired a healthy regard for imagination and innovation, and for the hard work that went into developing both. There was a flourishing school magazine to which any wielder of words, however young, was encouraged to contribute. Campion also got its students quickly involved in the pleasures of debating and speech making: we were all taught to elocute, with excruciating precision, from an early age, and one of my earliest experiences of an interschool debate was of being primed, at the age of seven, to interject from the floor in a contest of my seniors with their insufferably superior counterparts from Cathedral.

Above all, Campion instilled in its boys a love of the theater. There were frequent opportunities for participating in what was called (with no pun intended) interclass dramatics; and the school offered, in an inspired and wholly unprecedented coup, optional after-class instruction in drama from one of the most talented, vibrant, and experienced figures of the Bombay stage, Pearl Padamsee — a small, bouncing bundle of barely repressed energy who transformed several classloads of self-conscious, awkward schoolboys into confi-dent, compelling actors and directors. Pearl's classes were great fun, but they also led to bigger things — not just drama competitions at school but to extravagant public productions in overflowing Bombay theaters where people with no connection to Campion paid for standing-room-only tickets to watch us perform.

I loved my theater years at Campion, which sometimes taught me about matters that had nothing to do with the theater. One of the more memorable footnotes to my experiences on the school stage occurred early in my career as a Pearl protégé. I was a ten-year-old representing the sixth grade in an interclass theatrical event at which the eighth grade's sketch featured Chintu (Rishi) Kapoor, younger son of the matinee idol and producer Raj Kapoor and later to become a successful screen heartthrob in his own right. I had acted, elocuted a humorous poem and MC'd my class's efforts to generous applause, and the younger Kapoor was either intrigued or disconcerted, for he sought me out the next morning at school.

“Tharoor,” he asked me at the head of the steps near the toilet, “what caste are you?”

I blinked my nervousness at the Great Man. “I–I don't know,” I stammered. My father, who had shed his caste name for nationalist reasons in his student days and never mentioned anyone's religion, let alone caste, had not bothered to enlighten me on such matters.

“You don't know?” the actor's son demanded in astonishment. “What do you mean, you don't know? Everybody knows their own caste.”

I shamefacedly confessed I didn't.

“You mean you're not a Brahmin or something?”

I couldn't even avow I was a something. Chintu Kapoor never spoke to me again. But I went home that evening and extracted an explanation from my parents, whose eclectic liberality had left me in such ignorance. They told me, in simplified terms, about the Nair caste, to which we belonged; and so it is to Chintu Kapoor, celluloid hero of the future, that I owe my first lesson about my genealogical past.

The other incident connected with my Campion acting career that has remained in my memory is of performing in a Christmas play. It was called The Boy Who Wouldn't Play Jesus and had been written by an American with a social conscience, Bernard Kops. The play was unusual in several respects, including that it was meant to be performed by schoolchildren; the cast were to portray themselves rehearsing a Christmas play. All is good-natured chaos until the hero, a good hamburgers-and-root-beer American kid, decides that, as long as there's so much suffering and injustice in the world, he won't play Jesus. So he leads the cast off the stage and into the audience, collecting funds for — remember this was a 1960s American play — the hungry children of Bombay.

So here we were, privileged Bombay kids, performing The Boy Who Wouldn't Play Jesus (with me in the title role). The play was written to be easily adapted to any group of children, for they were all to use their own names and “be themselves,” but Pearl took the adaptation process a stage further. We too would protest injustice and suffering by refusing to play Jesus; but the issue that roused the Indian cast of Campion's Christmas play, that prompted them to walk into the aisles shouting slogans, would not be India's starving but Vietnam's.

This was 1967, and the Vietnam War was a favorite theme of the anti-American left, but Pearl was no radical, and Campion no training ground for revolutionaries. She had no political message to deliver to the audience of parents, teachers, and VIP invitees in our seething hotbed of social rest. All she was trying to do in changing the script was not to offend Bombayites.

At the time, aged eleven, I gave it no more than a passing thought. We were all aware of the change from our cyclostyled scripts and I believe we all thought it was justified: after all, we were the children of Bombay and we weren't starving, were we? It was only very much later that I realized what I had lent my innocence to. It was the Christmas after the Bihar famine, when thousands had lost their lives to hunger less than a day's train ride from Bombay, and massive infusions of food aid were being shipped in to keep Indian children alive. But we, insulated in the security of our Campion existence, and too young to pay attention to the front pages of our parents’ papers, remained unaware of our own people's plight. We could have changed “Bombay” in the script to “Bihar” or “Calcutta,” and the play might have had a startling relevance to its audience. But a pointed reminder of the reality outside our ivoried bower would only have proved embarrassing to our distinguished well-wishers. We needed an alien cause — popular with the educated class we were being trained to join, but far enough from our daily lives to cause no discomfort — to provoke our carefully rehearsed outrage.

And yet that too was Bombay: cosmopolitan yet conventional, both creative and conformist. It was a remarkable city to grow up in.

17. Nothing to Laugh About

THERE IS, SADLY, VERY LITTLE EVIDENCE TODAY that Mahatma Gandhi's puckish sense of humor has been inherited by his political heirs. Asked once what he thought of Western civilization, the Mahatma replied, “It would be a good idea.” Upbraided for going to Buckingham Palace in his loincloth for an audience with the king-emperor, Gandhi retorted, “His Majesty had on enough clothes for the both of us.”

Gandhiji was an exception: the Indian nationalist leaders and the politicians who followed them were in general a pretty humorless lot. I yield to no one, except perhaps Dr. Sarvepalli Gopal, in my admiration for the extraordinary intellect of Jawaharlal Nehru, but dig deep into his writings and speeches and you would be hard-pressed to come up with a good joke. The best might be the one classic epigram he uttered. Reacting with undisguised culture shock to his discovery of America after a trip there in 1949, Nehru said: “One should never visit America for the first time.”

Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi was no better. While researching my doctoral dissertation on her foreign policy, I read practically everything she ever said between 1966 and 1977. I can honestly say I came across only one line that was remotely witty. “In India,” she remarked once, “our private enterprise is usually more private than enterprising.” But from what one knows of the lady, the comment had probably been scripted for her. Sharp, if not particularly amusing, was her answer to an American journalist in 1971 about why she had refused to meet with Pakistan's General Yahya Khan: “You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.” Both these remarks have the merit of provoking thought beyond the immediate reaction to their cleverness.

But neither, alas, was typical. In his shoddy Reminiscences of the Nehru Age, the former secretary to our first prime minister, M. O. Mathai, cited only one remark of either father or daughter that he found witty. When Nehru and Indira expressed astonishment that Mathai had slept so soundly after the death of his mother, he apparently replied, “That shows I have a clear conscience.” To which Indira retorted, “It can also mean that you have none.” Sharp enough, but hardly an example of great wit.

As for the other remarkable figures who have marched the national stage, as far as political humor is concerned, our national cupboard is bare. During the national movement, the poetess Sarojini Naidu, “the nightingale of India,” came up with a couple of good cracks: her classic comment about Mahatma Gandhi's frugal lifestyle and his army of aides—“If only he knew how much it costs us to keep him in poverty”—is of course one of the great one-liners of the independence struggle. Some also ascribe to her a crack about Sardar Patel: “The only culture he knows is agriculture.” I had heard the line before, but was unaware it had been spoken in a political context, nor indeed that Sardar was its intended victim, so full marks to Sarojini Naidu there.

We have had our share of political buffoons (does anyone still remember the egregious Raj Narain?), but buffoonery does not count as humor, any more than slapstick can pass for wit.

But where are the Indian equivalents of the great political wise-cracks of other democracies? British parliamentary tradition is replete with examples of often savagely cutting humor. In 1957, Labor leader Aneurin Bevan was attacking Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd in the House of Commons when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan walked in. He promptly interrupted himself: “There is no reason to attack the monkey,” he said, “when the organ grinder is present.” Bevan is still worshiped by misty-eyed old Laborites, but he was not universally loved within his own party. The most famous put-down of him came from his near-namesake, the Labor Party's postwar Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. Someone remarked to Bevin that “Nye [Aneurin Bevan's nickname] is his own worst enemy.” Bevin snapped back: “Not while I'm alive he isn't.”

Of course, a lot of political humor involves invective, which the rules of decorum oblige politicians to embroider creatively. In 1978, Britain's then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, reacted to criticism from the Tory who would succeed him, Sir Geoffrey Howe, by dismissing it as “like being savaged by a dead sheep.” The remark is still recalled fondly by political observers nearly three decades later, though both protagonists have long since ended their careers. Decades earlier, Winston Churchill had scornfully described the mild-mannered Labor Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald as “a sheep in sheep's clothing.” This was kinder than his most famous assault on the same prime minister. In a 1931 speech about MacDonald, Churchill described going to the circus as a child, for “an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities.” He had, he said, most wanted to see “the boneless wonder, but my parents judged that the spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes. I have waited fifty years to see the boneless wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.”

The British are also fond of showing erudition in their humor. Churchill was echoing a famous line of the sixteenth-century thinker John Bradford when he commented about Sir Stafford Cripps, “there, but for the grace of God, goes God.” Few could have escaped the allusion to Helen of Troy when a left-wing parliamentarian in the 1960s called a female education secretary, Barbara Castle, “the face that had sunk a thousand scholarships.”

Indian literature and mythology offer plenty of material for similar humor, but few have taken up the challenge. When in the early 1970s Karan Singh, as minister for health, proved slow to act during a junior doctors’ strike in New Delhi, posters went up on the streets asking, “Are you Karan or Kumbhakaran [the mythological figure who slept six months a year]?” But no MP thought of expressing such an idea in the Lok Sabha.

From what we know of them, our politicians have less reason than most to take themselves seriously. Fearing that perhaps it was I who was uninformed, I asked the readers of one of India's more literate newspapers to send me examples of great Indian political humor that I might have overlooked. The results offered slim pickings indeed. The sharp-tongued Krishna Menon proved a particular favorite of Malayali readers. Advocate P. S. Leelakrishnan of Quilandy in Kerala reminded me of Menon's cutting comment when American arms aid to Pakistan was described as not being directed at India: “I am yet to come across a vegetarian tiger.”

Getting back to parliamentary humor, V. Ramachandran of Kancheepuram offered me a line whose author he could not recall. During a debate on the Indian automobile industry, an opposition member declared, “The only part of an Indian car which does not make a noise is the horn.” Full marks for wit but not, I believe (given the deafening klaxons that were always an integral part of Indian traffic jams) for accuracy.

As for the Indian equivalents of the great political wisecracks of other democracies, Mr. Leelakrishnan again offered me the only example worth citing. When Panampilly Govinda Menon was chief minister of Travancore-Kochi (the forerunner of Kerala state) in the early 1950s, he pointed to the chief minister's chair in the assembly and told the ambitious leader of the opposition, T. V. Thomas, “For you to sit in this chair you will have to be reborn as a bug.”

And for Indians to laugh about the sense of humor of their political leaders, they will need to be reborn as hyenas.

18. The Sari Saga

EARLY IN 2007 I FOUND MYSELF unwittingly caught up in a row over sexism (mine) and feminism (others’). It all began with a casual observation in one of my columns, prompted by my last few visits to my homeland: Whatever became of the sari?

For centuries, if not millennia, the alluring garment, all five or six or nine yards of it, has been the defining drape of Indian womanhood. Cotton or silk, Banarasi or Pochampalli, shimmering Kanjeevaram or multicolored bandhani, with the pallav draped front to back over the left shoulder or in the Gujarati style, back to front over the right, the sari has stood the test of time, climate, and body shape. Of all the garments yet invented by man (or, not to be too sexist about it, mankind) the sari did most to flatter the wearer. Unlike every other female dress on the planet, the sari could be worn with elegance by women of any age, size, or shape; you could never be too fat, too short, or too ungainly to look good in a sari. Indeed, if you were stout, or bowlegged, or thick-waisted, nothing concealed those handicaps of nature better than the sari. Women looked good in a sari who could never have got away with appearing in public in a skirt.

So why has this masterpiece of feminine attire begun fading from our streets? On recent visits home to India I have noticed fewer and fewer saris in our public places, and practically none in the workplace. The salwar kameez, the trouser, and even the Western dress suit have begun to supplant it everywhere. And this is not just a northern phenomenon, the result of the increasing dominance of our culture by Punjabi-ized folk who think nothing of giving masculine names to their daughters. At a recent press conference I addressed in Trivandrum, the state capital of Kerala, there were perhaps a dozen women journalists present. Only one was wearing a sari; the rest, all Keralites without exception, were in salwar kameezes. And when I was crass enough to ask why none of the “young ladies” present wore saris, the one who did modestly suggested that she was no longer very young.

Youth clearly has something to do with it; very few of today's under-thirty women seem to have the patience for draping a sari, and few of them seem to think it suitable for the speed with which they scurry through their lives. (“Try rushing to catch a bus in a sari,” one young lady pointedly remarked, “and you'll switch to jeans the next day.”) But there's also something less utilitarian about their rejection of the sari for daily wear. Today's younger generation of Indian women seem to associate the garment with an earlier era, a more traditional time when women did not compete on equal terms in a man's world. Putting on pants, or a Western woman's suit, or even desi leggings in the form of a salwar, strikes them as more modern. Freeing their legs to move more briskly than the sari permits is, it seems, a form of liberation; it removes a self-imposed handicap, releasing the wearer from all the cultural assumptions associated with the traditional attire.

I think this is actually a great pity. One of the remarkable aspects of Indian modernity has always been its unwillingness to disown the past; from our nationalists and reformers onward, we have always asserted that Indians can be modern in ancient garb. Political ideas derived from nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers have been articulated by men in mundus and dhotis that have not essentially changed since they were first worn two or three thousand years ago. (Statuary from the days of the Indus Valley Civilization more than four thousand years ago show men draped in waistcloths that Mr. Karunanidhi would still be happy to don.) Gandhiji demonstrated that one did not have to put on a Western suit to challenge the British Empire. Where a Kemal Ataturk in Turkey banned his menfolk's traditional fez as a symbol of backwardness and insisted that his compatriots don Western hats, India's nationalist leaders not only retained their customary headgear, they added the defiantly desi “Gandhi cap” (oddly named, since Gandhiji himself never wore one). Our clothing has always been part of our sense of authenticity.

I remember being struck, on my first visit to Japan some fifteen years ago, by the ubiquitousness of Western clothing in that Asian country. Every Japanese man and woman in the street, on the subway, or in the offices I visited wore suits and skirts and dresses; the kimono and its male equivalent were preserved at home, and brought out only for ceremonial occasions. An Asian ambassador told me that envoys were expected to present their credentials to the emperor in a top hat and tails. This thoroughgoing Westernization was the result of a conscious choice by the modernizing Meiji Emperor in 1868. One sees something similar in China today; though the transformation is not nearly as complete as in Japan, the streets of Beijing and Shanghai are more and more thronged with Chinese people in Western clothes. In both Japan and China, I allowed myself to feel a perverse pride that we in India were different: we had entered the twenty-first century in clothes that our ancestors had sported for much of the preceding twenty.

Today, I wonder if I've been too complacent. What will happen once the generation of women who grew up routinely wearing a sari every day dies out? The warning signs are all around us now. It would be sad indeed if, like the Japanese kimono, the sari becomes a rare and exotic garment in its own land, worn only to temples and weddings.

Saying which, I went on to appeal to the women of India to save the sari from a sorry fate.

Feedback is, of course, the lifeblood of the writer, but sometimes you get so much feedback it amounts to a transfusion. Practically every woman in India with access to a keyboard rose up to deliver the equivalent of a smack across the face with the wet end of a pallu. E-mails flooded in to all my known addresses, including to my publishers and agents; the blogosphere erupted with catcalls, many of which were duly forwarded to me by well-meaning friends. Having digested as many of them as I could take, the only fashion statement I was left in a condition to make would have been to don sackcloth and ashes.

So where did I go wrong? It seems my innocent expression of concern at the dwindling appearance of the sari on Indian streets and offices was offensively patriarchal. It reflected the male gaze, demanding of the female half of the population that they dress in order to be alluring to the masculine eye. Worse, by speaking of the declining preference for the sari among today's young women in terms of a loss for the nation, it placed upon women alone the burden of transmitting our society's culture to the next generation. And this was unacceptably sexist: after all, I had only called for the sari's survival, never demanding that Indian men preserve the dhoti or mundu. These arguments were made, with varying degrees of emphasis, by a variety of critics, most notably in a lengthy e-mail from Vinutha Mallya and in an “Open Letter” addressed to me by a blogger who signed herself Emma.

I admitted right away that all these points were valid ones, as far as they go. Yes, I wrote as a man, because that is what I happen to be. If columnists were all obliged to be Ardhanarishwaras (the half-man, half-woman figure of Hindu mythology), we might be more evenhanded in our judgments, but I doubt very much that all our columns would be worth reading. The purpose of a column is to offer an individual perspective — with which the reader is not only free to disagree, but encouraged, even invited, to disagree. If my point of view offended any of my female readers, I apologize, but I do not apologize for having expressed my point of view on this subject, as on any other. If a female columnist were to expatiate on the merits of tight jeans on male hips, I may not agree with her, but I would not excoriate her for taking a female view of male attire. What other view could she take but her own?

What about my unreasonable demand that women preserve and transmit Indian culture? I have to concede that Indian men have abandoned traditional clothing in even larger numbers than women have put aside the sari. For every Karunanidhi or Chidambaram who adorn our public life in spotless white mundus, there are ten others in trousers. And, as several of my critics pointed out, my argument was a bit rich coming from someone who spends his working days in a Western suit and tie.

Point conceded, but I should hasten to add that this is not a result of my own preference, but of the norms of international officialdom. Early in my UN career I turned up at work in an elegant cream kurta, only to have my Danish boss ask disparagingly, “Who do you think you are — a surgeon?” I still wear kurtas all the time after hours, at least when the climate permits it, and mundus in Kerala; but it was clear to me that if I was to represent the United Nations to the world, I was expected to do it in a suit and tie. Indian women in India, on the other hand, would face no disdain for sporting the sari: if they choose not to, it is because they choose not to, not because their employment obliges them not to.

And let's face it — whatever the aesthetic merits of the dhoti or mundu, they pale in comparison with those of the sari. It's fatuous to suggest, as several of my critics did, that the two are equivalent. Ask a fair-minded jury of women and they'll agree that the beauty of a well-crafted sari is a source of nonsexist pleasure — to them, not just to men — in a way that no dhoti can possibly match.

Saris may well be a hassle to wear, and less convenient to get around in, but those are points I had already conceded. What they are, though, is special — and to my relief a handful of Indian women wrote to say they agreed with me. Shreyasi Deb sent me a blog post in which she declared, “I know that the ultimate weapon in my kitty is the saree…. This Sunday I have taken down my Ikat, Chanderi, Puneri, Laheriya, Bandhej, Bomkai, Gadwal, Narayanpet, Maheshwari, Kantha, and Kanjeevaram sarees and stroked them in the reflecting sunlight.” (I guarantee no man would ever think of doing anything similar with his dhoti collection.) And Sindhu Sheth wrote that she would heed my appeal: “I have decided to wear a sari (instead of my regular churidar-kurta) — once a week, to begin with.” In that “to begin with” lies the hope that my original appeal will not have been entirely in vain.

19. The Challenge of Literacy

For those who care about illiteracy, India is the largest country in a subcontinent that gives great cause for concern. South Asia has emerged as the poorest, the most illiterate, the most malnourished, and the least gender-sensitive region in the world, with over half the world's illiterate adults and 40 percent of the world's out-of-school children. South Asia has by now the lowest adult literacy rate (49 percent) in the world. It has fallen behind Sub-Saharan Africa (at 57 percent), even though in 1970 South Asia was ahead. Thirty-seven percent of all Indian primary school children drop out before reaching the fifth grade. We have a shortage of schools and a shortage of teachers, and the problem gets worse every year because of population growth. Our subcontinent has the worst teacher-pupil ratio in the world. The illiterate population of India exceeds the total combined population of the North American continent and Japan.

India has made only uneven progress in educating its population. Whereas most districts in Kerala, following the introduction of free and compulsory education by an elected Communist government in 1957, have attained 100 percent literacy, the national literacy level still hovers around the halfway mark; the current figure is 62 percent. Kerala has a literacy rate of nearly 100 percent while Bihar is at only 44 percent. And Bihar has a female literacy rate of only 29 percent.

The traditional explanation for the failure to attain mass education is two-pronged: the lack of resources to cope with the dramatic growth in population (we would need to build a new school every day for the next ten years just to educate the children already born) and the tendency of families to take their children out of school early to serve as breadwinners or at least as help at home or on the farm. Thus, though universal primary education is available in theory, fewer than half of India's children between the ages of six and fourteen attend school at all.

But official national policy is undoubtedly in favor of promoting literacy. As a schoolchild I remember being exhorted to impart the alphabet to our servants under the Gandhian “each one teach one” program; and many of us were brought up on Swami Vivekananda's writings about the importance of education for the poor as the key to their uplift. But it is true that, fifty-nine years after independence, progress has still been inexcusably slow, and that Indian politicians are all too quick, as Mrs. Indira Gandhi once was, to take refuge in sharp rejoinders about not drawing the wrong conclusions from the illiteracy figures. Education, Mrs. Gandhi would often say, was not always relevant to the real lives of village Indians, that India's illiterates were still smart, and illiteracy was not a reflection of their intelligence or shrewdness (which they demonstrated, of course, by voting for her). Fair enough, but Kerala's literate villagers are smart, too.

Now, there has been good news. The adult literacy rate has more than tripled since 1951, from 18 percent in 1951 to 62 in 2001. (But one must be wary of these figures. UNESCO defines an illiterate person as one who cannot, with understanding, both read and write a short, simple statement on their everyday life. By that definition, I suspect fewer than half our population would really qualify as literate.) The increase is even more dramatic for female literacy, from 9 percent to 43 percent. The gender gaps have been closing as female literacy increased much faster than male literacy.

The task of providing elementary education to all children is massive. India is making a major effort now to expand primary education. Our primary school system has become one of the largest in the world, with 150 million children enrolled. But it's not enough.

We hear more and more from progressive economists about the importance of what they call “human capital.” Human capital is defined as the stock of useful, valuable, and relevant knowledge built up in the process of education and training.

Literacy is the key to building human capital and human capital is the vital ingredient in building a nation. There is no industrial society today with an adult literacy rate of less than 80 percent. No illiterate society has ever become an industrial tiger of any stripe.

A key strategy for creating sufficient and appropriate human capital is to focus on basic education for all children. As Gabriela Mistral has so poignantly said, “We are guilty of many crimes, but our worst sin is abandoning the child; neglecting the foundation of life. Many of the things we need can wait; the child cannot. We cannot answer Tomorrow. Her name is Today.”

But it's not enough to inveigh against the lamentable state of our country's literacy. What is striking from the international experience is that whenever and wherever basic education was spread, the social and economic benefits have been quite impressive and visible. The development strategies followed in recent decades by Japan, the East Asian industrializing tigers, and China laid a firm basis for equitable growth by massive investment in basic education for all. Literacy was fundamental not only to accelerating the economic growth of these countries but to distributing resources more equitably and thereby to empowering more people.

It is a truism today that economic success everywhere is based on educational success. And literacy is the basic building block of education. It is not just an end in itself: literacy leads to many social benefits, including improvements in standards of hygiene, reduction in infant and child mortality rates, decline in population growth rates, increase in labor productivity, rise in civic consciousness, greater political empowerment and democratization — and even an improved sense of national unity, as people become more aware than before of the country they belong to and the opportunities beyond their immediate horizons.

Literacy is also a basic component of social cohesion and national identity. The foundations for a conscious and active citizenship are often laid in school. Literacy plays a key role in the building of democracy; Kerala provides a striking example of how higher levels of literacy lead to a more aware and informed public. Adult literacy in Kerala is nearly 100 percent, compared to the Indian average of 62 percent. As a result, nearly half of the adult population in Kerala reads a daily newspaper, compared to less than 20 percent elsewhere in India. One out of every four rural laborers reads a newspaper regularly compared to less than 2 percent of agricultural workers in the rest of the country. So literacy leads directly to an improvement in the depth and quality of public opinion, as well as to more active participation of the poor in the democratic process.

Amartya Sen, the polymath Nobel laureate in economics, has reminded us that “the elimination of ignorance, of illiteracy, and of needless inequalities in opportunities [are] objectives that are valued for their own sake. They expand our freedom to lead the lives we have reason to value.” We sometimes forget that in his most famous poem, the other Nobel Prize — winning Bengali, the immortal poet Rabindranath Tagore, implicitly spoke of education as fundamental to his dream for India. It was in a place “where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; where knowledge is free” and “where the mind is led forward… into ever-widening thought and action” that Tagore hoped his India would awake to freedom. Such a mind is, of course, one that can only be developed and shaped by literacy.

But more prosaically, illiteracy must be fought for practical reasons. How are we going to cope with the twenty-first century, the information age, if half our population cannot sign their name or read a newspaper, let alone use a computer keyboard or surf the Net? Tomorrow's is the information age: the world will be able to tell the rich from the poor not by GNP figures but by their Internet connections. Illiteracy is a self-imposed handicap in a race we have no choice but to run.

But it is also essential to focus on one specific aspect of the literacy challenge in our country today. The saddest aspect of India's literacy statistics is the disproportionate percentage of women who remain illiterate. Sixty percent of India's illiterates are women. Female literacy (43 percent) was 26 percentage points below the male literacy (69 percent). No society has ever liberated itself economically, politically, or socially without a sound base of educated women.

One of the more difficult questions I used to find myself being asked as a United Nations official, especially when I had been addressing a generalist audience, was: What is the single most important thing that can be done to improve the world? It's the kind of question that tends to bring out the bureaucrat in the most direct of communicators, as one feels obliged to explain how complex the challenges confronting humanity are; how no one task alone can be singled out over other goals; how the struggle for peace, the fight against poverty, the battle to eradicate disease, must all be waged side by side — and so mind-numbingly on. But of late I have cast my caution to the winds and ventured an answer to this most impossible of questions. If I had to pick the one thing we must do above all else, I now offer a two-word mantra: “Educate girls.”

It really is that simple. There is no action proven to do more for the human race than the education of the female child. Scholarly studies and research projects have established what common sense might already have told us: if you educate a boy, you educate a person, but if you educate a girl, you educate a family and benefit an entire community.

The evidence is striking. Increased schooling of mothers has a measurable impact on the health of their children, on the future schooling of the child, and on the child's adult productivity. The children of educated mothers consistently outperform children with educated fathers and illiterate mothers. Given that they spend most of their time with their mothers, this is hardly surprising.

A girl who has had more than six years of education is better equipped to seek and use medical and health care advice, to immunize her children, to be aware of sanitary practices from boiling water to the importance of washing hands. A World Bank project in Africa established that the children of women with just five years of school had a 40 percent better survival rate than the children of women who had less than five years in class. A Yale University study showed that the heights and weights for newborn children of women with a basic education were consistently higher than those of babies born to uneducated women. A UNESCO study demonstrated that giving women just a primary school education decreases child mortality by 5 to 10 percent.

The health advantages of education extend beyond childbirth. The dreaded disease AIDS spreads twice as fast, a Zambian study shows, among uneducated girls than among those who have been to school. Educated girls marry later, and are less susceptible to abuse by older men. And educated women tend to have fewer children, space them more wisely, and so look after them better; women with seven years’ education, according to one study, had two or three fewer children than women with no schooling. The World Bank, with the mathematical precision for which they are so famous, has estimated that for every four years of education, fertility is reduced by about one birth per mother.

The more girls that go to secondary school, the Bank adds, the higher the country's per capita income growth. And when girls work in the fields, as so many have to do across the developing world, their schooling translates directly to increased agricultural productivity, which in turn leads to a decline in malnutrition. The marvelous thing about women is that they like to learn from other women, so the success of educated women is usually quickly emulated by their uneducated sisters. And women spend increased income on their families, which men do not necessarily do (rural toddy shops in India, after all, thrive on the self-indulgent spending habits of men). Educate a girl, and you benefit a community: QED.

As my former colleague Catherine Bertini of the World Food Program once put it: “If someone told you that, with just twelve years of investment of about $1 billion a year, you could, across the developing world, increase economic growth, decrease infant mortality, increase agricultural yields, improve maternal health, improve children's health and nutrition, increase the numbers of children — girls and boys — in school, slow down population growth, increase the number of men and women who can read and write, decrease the spread of AIDS, add new people to the workforce and be able to improve their wages without pushing others out of the workforce — what would you say? Such a deal! What is it? How can I sign up?”

Sadly, the world is not yet rushing to “sign up” to the challenge of educating girls, who lag consistently behind boys in access to education throughout India, with the honorable exception of Kerala. Indeed, we have a long way to go: we boast one state, Bihar, which even enthroned an illiterate woman as chief minister — as if to showcase its abysmal figure of a 23 percent female literacy rate, one of the worst on the planet. But her seven daughters did indeed receive an education — so perhaps, after all, there are grounds for hope.

Certainly, there is no better answer. India must educate itself — achieve 100 percent literacy nationwide — if we are to fulfill the aspirations we have begun to dare to articulate and rise to the development challenges of the twenty-first century.

20. Reconstructing Nalanda

FOR THOSE WHO CARE ABOUT INDIAN EDUCATION, 2006 was a curious year. It began with the eruption of the hugely divisive reservation controversy (following a political decision to increase quotas for “backward classes” in India's top universities, regardless of merit) and ended with the impetus being given, inspired by President Abdul Kalam himself, to the endeavor of reconstructing the oldest and greatest of India's meritocratic universities, Nalanda.

Founded in 427 by Buddhist monks at the time of Kumaragupta I (415–455), Nalanda was an extraordinary center of learning for seven centuries. The name probably comes from a combination of nalam (lotus, the symbol of knowledge) and da, meaning “to give,” so Nalanda means “Giver of Knowledge.” And that is exactly what the university did, attracting prize students from all over India, as well as from China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Persia, Sri Lanka, Tibet, and Turkey. At its peak, Nalanda played host to more than ten thousand students — not just Buddhists, but of various religious traditions — and its education, provided in its heyday by two thousand world-renowned professors, was completely free.

The Chinese scholar Hsuen-Tsiang (Xuanzang in today's Pinyin spelling), who visited India in 630 under the Guptas and stayed for some time at Nalanda, has left us a vivid description of the university. He wrote of “richly adorned towers” with observatories “lost in the vapors of the morning.” The university's architecture was remarkable, with nine-story buildings, eight separate compounds, ten temples, several meditation halls, a great library, and dozens of classrooms. Its setting, too, was full of beauty, dotted with lakes and parks. Most important, its finances were secure, since the monarch “has remitted the revenues of about one hundred villages for the endowment of the convent.” In addition, the villagers supplied food to the students, whose material needs were entirely met by the university so that they could concentrate on “the perfection of their studies.”

The accounts of foreign travelers portray a university throbbing with intellectual excitement, a center of learning devoted not only to the study of Buddhist texts but to Hindu philosophy, the Vedas, and theology in general; logic, grammar, and linguistics; the practice of medicine and the study of other sciences, notably mathematics and astronomy; and more down-to-earth subjects like politics, the art of war, and even handicrafts. Contemporary visitors speak of a system of education that went well beyond the oral recitation and rote learning normally practiced in monasteries. Nalanda's teachers practiced a variety of instructional methods: exposition was followed by debate and discussion, lectures featured lengthy question-and-answer sessions, and ideas were illuminated by extensive resort to parables and stories. Admission required a strict oral examination; literally so, since strangers were not permitted to enter unless they could satisfactorily answer a number of questions from the gate-keeper testifying to their basic level of educational attainment.

The university was an Indian invention. In Hindu tradition, education emerged from the gurukul, the teacher's home, where students went to acquire learning. The Buddhists, however, congregated in monasteries, which became centers of learning in their own right, supplanting the home of the teacher. Nalanda was not alone as a prominent Indian university. Kasi (Varanasi) and Kanchi were particularly renowned for their religious teaching, and Taksasila (Taxila in today's Pakistan) placed greater emphasis on secular studies; but Nalanda combined the religious and the secular, a Buddhist university offering a nonsectarian education to young men from near and far. These were the Oxfords and Harvards of their time, centuries before either of those universities was founded. Today our universities, barring an IIT here and a St. Stephen's there, are a long way short of world-class. Rebuilding Nalanda must be more than an exercise in constructive nostalgia. It must involve a new level of ambition, or it will be a futile exercise.

The Yale scholar Jeffrey Garten, writing in the New York Times, argued that “Nalanda represents much of what Asia could use today — a great global university that reaches deep into the region's underlying cultural heritage, restores many of the peaceful links among peoples and cultures that once existed, and gives Asia the kind of soft power of influence and attraction that it doesn't have now. The West has a long tradition of rediscovering its ancient Greek and Roman roots, and is much stronger for that. Asia could and should do the same, using the Nalanda project as a springboard but creating a modern, future-oriented context for a new university.”

Nalanda was destroyed three times by invaders, but rebuilt only twice. The first time was when the Huns under Mihirakula laid waste to the campus during the reign of Skandagupta (455–467), when Nalanda was only a few decades old. Skanda's successors Puragupta and Narasimhagupta promptly undertook the restoration of the university, improving it with the construction of even grander buildings and endowing it with enough resources so that the university could be self-sustaining in the longer term. The second destruction came a century and a half later, with an assault by the Gaudas in the early seventh century. This time the great Hindu king Harshavardhana (606–648) restored the Buddhist university, once again upgrading the buildings and facilities.

But nearly eight hundred years after its founding, Nalanda was destroyed a third time and burned by Turkish Muslim invaders under Bakhtiyar Khilji in 1197. This time there was to be no reconstruction: not only were there no equivalent of the Gupta kings or Harsha to rebuild it, but the university had already been decayed from within by the cancer of corruption on the part of its administrators and by declining enthusiasm for Buddhist-led learning. If we are to rebuild it eight hundred years later, we will need not just money but the will to excellence, not just a physical plant but a determined spirit. A great university is the finest advertisement for the society that sustains it. If we re-create Nalanda, it must be as a university worthy of the name — and we must be a society worthy of a twenty-first-century Nalanda.

21. Cops and Jobbers

IT'S NOT A GREAT TIME TO BE A POLICEMAN in India these days. In 2006 came revelations of the brutal killings of young migrant workers and their children in the Delhi suburb of Nithari (and the fact that the police took no notice of the reports of missing children for over twenty months). This was hard on the heels of public outrage over the shoddy police work in the original prosecution of the Jessica Lall case (when a model tending bar at a private party was cold-bloodedly shot dead by a politician's son, and the killer's influential political connections seemed inversely proportional to the competence with which the charges were documented). And not long after, the police were revealed to have failed to act on the murder of teenager Priyanka Bhotmange and her Dalit family, apparently because her “untouchable” status made hers a low-priority dossier. Then came the unconvincing official explanations for the death of a British tourist in a Goa village in 2006, which suggested the police had something to hide, not least their own incompetence. All of these, taken together with the lingering memories of the complicity of the Gujarat police in the massacres in that state in 2002, have contributed to a sense that the nation is ill served by its policemen. The image of the police is largely of a force besmirched by inefficiency, corruption, politicization, and lack of anything resembling devotion to duty.

If the news pages offer little consolation to the khaki-clad upholders of the law, perhaps it's time to turn to fiction. For the best antidote to negativism about the police must surely be the richly evocative, warmly sympathetic account of the force provided by Vikram Chandra in his monumental novel Sacred Games. (But let me hasten to assure nonliterary readers that this isn't a book review.)

Vikram Chandra's meticulously researched, deeply felt novel is (among other things) a warts-and-all portrait of the police at work in the city he still calls Bombay. His protagonist, the battle-weary, divorced Sikh inspector Sartaj Singh, is a wonderfully imagined and carefully drawn three-dimensional human being, vulnerable to the petty temptations that policing offers in our society, prone to cutting a few corners and bending a few rules, but fundamentally committed to the right values. Sartaj's essential decency is a constant, and it is mirrored in the faith of his constable, Katekar. Both men take seriously the duty to serve the public: “Sadrakshanaay Khalnigrahaniya” is the motto of the Bombay police, “Protect the virtuous, punish the wicked.” As Vikram Chandra writes: “Katekar knew he could never confess this urge to anyone, because fancy talk of protecting the good and destroying evil and seva and service would elicit only laughter. Even among colleagues, this was never to be spoken about. But it was there, however buried it may be under grimy layers of cynicism.” In doing a job that the novel describes elsewhere as mired in “its unspeakable hours, its monotony, its political complications, its thanklessness, its exhaustion,” Sartaj occasionally reveals “a senseless, embarrassing idealism.” Once, after rescuing “a trembling ten-year-old girl” from her kidnappers, he mutters, “Today we did good work.”

Sacred Games depicts cops on the take, but almost never out of sheer greed and absolutely never at the expense of the job itself. Sartaj is a basically honest man who discovers that his monthly transportation allowance barely covers three days of fuel for his motorcycle. And “of the many notes he dropped into the hands of informants every day, maybe one or two came from his minuscule khabari allowance.” So the proceeds of corruption are often spent in the cause of duty — an indictment of our society, that we underpay and underequip our police, rather than of the policemen themselves.

Of course, a novel is not a work of public policy, nor a substitute for investigative journalism. But Vikram Chandra did his research thoroughly, spending many years closely observing the working lives of Bombay policemen. And there is no reason why a good novel can't be as valuable in its insights as serious sociology. Sure, the policemen in Sacred Games are not depicted fabricating cases to frame innocents, or extorting money from law-abiding citizens, or discriminating against Muslims or other minorities — all offenses that our police have, at one time or another, been accused of. They beat suspects, hardly an approved method of investigation, but at least in this novel they never beat anyone who doesn't deserve a good hiding, or anyone you actually feel sorry for. And though the presence of politicians is never absent from their lives — especially that of senior policemen, who are portrayed as unavoidably in thrall to political leaders — Vikram Chandra doesn't show his policemen as to be so politicized as to suborn justice for political ends.

In that he may be kinder to our agents of law enforcement than they entirely deserve: both in Gujarat and, as the Srikrishna Commission so graphically demonstrated, in Bombay itself during the 1992 riots, the police were partisan, and they were partisan because their political overlords wished them to be. The great danger in a democracy is that the police imagine their duty is to the elected rulers of the day rather than to the Constitution and the society that has entrusted them with its safety. Of course, the police are unlikely to be immune to the pressures of political reality in a country where politics infects every activity like a virus. But it is the absence of a self-correcting mechanism when this happens that should worry us all.

Still, I'm pleased that Vikram Chandra's book gives us a more nuanced portrait of the Indian police than we might glean from popular stereotype. Good news stories about the Indian police (like the recent arrival of an all-women's police contingent to help the UN keep the peace in Liberia) are all too rare.

22. Becoming Bengaloorued

ONE INDIAN PHENOMENON THAT NEVER CEASES TO SURPRISE, and often confuse, foreigners is India's penchant for renaming its cities. An American businessman who was planning a visit to India after a long absence told me that his associate there “used to live in Madras, but he seems to have moved to some place called Chennai.” When told that his friend hadn't moved at all but that Madras had become Chennai, his jaw dropped. “But cities don't do that,” he said weakly.

Well, in India they do. The victorious Indian nationalists of 1947 were at first careful not to upend the familiar verities of Indian life when the British left, so the cities of the Raj kept their names for decades, even while streets named for British imperialists were gradually renamed for those who had resisted them. In the first decades after independence, practically the only city that changed the spelling of its name was Kanpur, which the British had absurdly spelled Cawnpore, a form that sounded affected to every Indian ear. The Anglicized “Poona” also became Puné to reflect the way the name was actually pronounced, and Mysore state was renamed Karnataka to resurrect the proud tradition of what the British had called the “Carnatic” region. But the big metropolises of the land — Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, and Madras, the four best-known Indian cities internationally (until they were joined by Bangalore) — stayed what they had always been for the first fifty years of India's independence.

Then change came. The self-appointed guardians of Indianness — politicians looking for new postures to affect, and new issues on which to assert themselves — finally came into their own in the 1990s. They proclaimed their determination to reverse the colonization of the Indian sensibility by “restoring” the “original” names of cities that had allegedly been mangled by the foreign conquerors. So the government of Maharashtra, led at the time by the chauvinist regional party the Shiv Sena, renamed the state capital Mumbai, proscribing the use of the word Bombay for any official purposes. The city of Bombay (whose name came from the Portuguese Bom Bahia, or “good bay”) had never existed before the colonial era created it, but it had developed from a number of fishing villages, one of which may (and I use the word advisedly) have been called Mumbai. So Mumbai's claims were at least debatable, but even if the case for it could be sustained, what was worse was the decision to abandon a name with nearly four centuries of global resonance. This struck me at the time as the equivalent of a company jettisoning a well-known brand in favor of an inelegant patronymic — as if McDonald's had renamed itself Kroc's in honor of its inventor. “Bombay” had entered global discourse; it conjured up associations of cosmopolitan bustle; it is still attached around the world to products like Bombay gin, Bombay duck, and the overpriced colonial furniture sold by “The Bombay Company”; in short, it enjoyed name recognition that many cities around the world would spend millions in publicity to acquire. “Mumbai” was already the city's name in Marathi, but what has been gained by insisting on its adoption in English, aside from a nativist reassertion that benefited only sign painters and letterhead printers? (The Shiv Sena went one step further and renamed the city's main railway station, Victoria Terminus, an Indo-Gothic-Saracenic excrescence universally known as V.T. and completely devoid, in everyone's imagination, of any association with the late Queen-Empress. V.T. is henceforth to be known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus: try telling that to a Bombay taxi driver.)

Not to be outdone, another regional party heading the government in Madras, the DMK — which had, in an earlier spell in office, renamed the state of Madras as Tamil Nadu (“homeland of the Tamils”) — decided that the city of Madras also would be rebaptized. The chief minister had been informed that “Madras,” like Bombay, was actually a Portuguese coinage, derived either from a trader named Madeiros or a prince called Madrie. “Madras is not a Tamil name,” announced the chief chauvinist to justify his decision to rename the city Chennai, the word used (though not always) by Tamil speakers. Once again, name recognition — Madras kerchiefs, Madras jackets, Bleeding Madras, the Madras monitoring system — went by the board as Chennai was adopted without serious debate. More unfortunately, the chief minister had overlooked the weight of evidence that Madras was indeed a Tamil name (derived, alternative theories go, from the name of a local fisherman, Madarasan; or from the local Muslim religious schools, madarasas; or from madhuras, from the Sanksrit and Tamil words for honey). Worse, he had also overlooked the embarrassing fact that Chennai was not, as he had asserted, of Tamil origin. It came from the name of Chennappa Naicker, the Raja of Chandragiri, who granted the British the right to trade on the Coromandel Coast — and who was a Telugu speaker from what is today Andhra Pradesh.

So bad history was worse lexicology, but in India-that-is-Bharat it is good politics. The Communist government in Bengal soon followed: “Calcutta” would henceforth become Kolkata, which was the way Bengalis pronounced it in their native tongue. (The International Air Transport Association, however, resolutely insists that airlines still tag your bags to CCU, not KKT, which belongs to Kent-land Airport in the USA. In Tamil Nadu, the state government has allegedly instructed postmen not to deliver mail addressed to “Madras”—compelling evidence of the pettiness that underlies the directive — but baggage tagged to CHN rather than MAA will end up in Jeonju, South Korea). The habit proved catching: Kolkata's Kommunist kousins in Kerala decided that Cochin — a name that had stood for centuries and even been exported (to Southeast Asia's Cochin-China) — would henceforth be Kochi. And as the twenty-first century dawned with computer professionals in the West discovering Bangalore — and even beginning to fear their jobs would be “Bangalored,” outsourced to India — the politicians of Karnataka decided that their capital's newfound fame more properly belonged to “Bengalooru,” the “city of boiled beans” rather than of India's burgeoning Silicon Plateau.

So can we now buy railway tickets to Bengalooru? I remember how my teammate and I, heading off to represent St. Stephen's College at a debating competition in what was still Calcutta, got our student concession forms made out to “Haora,” as the newspapers had informed us that Howrah, Calcutta's grand colonial-era station, had been renamed. It was only after queuing for two hours that we discovered that, whatever the Bengali Babus of Writers’ Building may have decreed, the Indian Railways had not yet digested the new reality. We were sent back to college with the proverbial flea in our ear — for having attempted to buy tickets to a station that didn't (yet) exist.

It took years for “Haora” to catch on. “Bengalooru” may happen faster. But who on earth benefits from all this? Was it really necessary for Keralites, who had gotten used to calling their capital Trivandrum in English and Thiruvandooram in Malayalam, to jettison both abbreviated forms for the glory of “Thiruvananthapuram,” a word I have never heard anyone actually use? Or to insist that “Trichur,” which is in fact a close approximation of the popular local pronunciation, be respelled “Trissur,” which must have been dreamt up by Kerala's last surviving illiterate? And after sixty years of independence, isn't it time to start drawing the line somewhere? Isn't it time to say we are what we are, the product of a history we cannot deny, and the names of our towns and cities will reflect the centuries of influence from various quarters that have gone into making the India of today?

So far the rulers of Delhi have remained immune to the contagion, even though the name itself is a British misspelling: it should have been either “Dehli” or, more colloquially, “Dilli,” but none of the local languages puts an h sound after the l in the capital's name. Clearly, the people in power in Delhi (both Old and New) have more important things to do than to obsess about the spelling of the city's name. But given the quality of many of the politicians aspiring to national office, it would not entirely surprise me if someone started a clamor to rename India's capital as well. After all, there is something marvelously anti-elitist about being able to oblige English speakers to accept such changes: it is a reminder that, in independent India, power over the English labels of places has passed to those who were never comfortable in that language.

What's in a name, Shakespeare asked, and of course the trains will be just as crowded at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus as they were at V.T. But are we so insecure in our independence that we still need to prove to ourselves, in this childish manner, that we are free? Is there no comfort, after all, in being able to take places for granted, without the continuing sense that they are still susceptible to being renamed? And where do we stop? British spellings may have been quaint or even inaccurate, but they had the familiarity of long usage. If they are to be expunged, will our politicians next move from orthography to religious orthodoxy? After all, the city of Allahabad, on the confluence of the holy Ganga and Jamuna rivers, was known as Prayag for millennia before Muslim rulers renamed it in honor of their God. Will it be renamed, too, on the basis of a far stronger case than Mumbai or Chennai — and if so, what signal would that send to India's Muslims? When will we decide, for pity's sake, that we have disrupted enough of our historical legacy, and that the time has come to leave well enough alone?

In some parts of India, it is customary for a bride, upon marriage, to take on a new name — not just a surname, but a first name — chosen by her husband's family. It's a signal that her old life is over, and that she now belongs completely to another. This is the kind of thinking that underlies India's renaming mania. It is as if the rulers of Bombay and Madras, men of dubious credentials and modest achievement, wanted to show that they were now the lords and masters of these cities — and to demonstrate the change by conferring a new name upon them. For what these aggressive nativists are doing is to demonstrate that they are now in charge, that the old days are over. They are asserting their power, the power to decide what a thing will be, the power to name — for if one does not have the ability to create, one can at least claim the right to define.

23. India's Lost Urban Heritage

WHEN EVEN A BOOSTER OF THE NEW INDIA like myself looks around the decay and dilapidation of some of our cities — our rutted roads, uncollected garbage, choked drains, corroded water pipes, peeling paint, and plentiful potholes — one is tempted to think back to the great Indian cities of antiquity and wonder what went wrong.

Evidence of human habitation in India goes back to the Second Interglacial Period, between 400,000 and 200,000 B.C. Whereas some relics and implements of the prehistoric period have been found, there is no substantial body of information available from archaeo-logical or other sources for the years before 3000 B.C. But Indian religious philosophy and myth describe cycles of existence that are dated precisely back into prehistory. There are continuities in Indian life that suggest a closer connection to the formally “unknowable” past than we might otherwise dare imagine. Historians have seen many of today's rural Indians as virtually a living archive of the country's ethno-history. But what of our city dwellers? Can we trace the heritage of Howrah back to the halls of Harappa?

I'm not being facetious here. The first proof of early Indian civilization, after all, dates back to about 3250 B.C., in the valley of the river that has given our country its name. The discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization occurred by accident, when a pair of enterprising contractors in Sind in the late nineteenth century supplied the builders of a major road with bricks from a desert trove. The bricks turned out to be more than 4,000 years old. This got the Archaeo-logical Survey of India interested, and in 1922 British and Indian archaeologists dug up the source of the bricks — not just one but two complete cities buried in the sand some four hundred miles apart. The bigger city was at Mohenjodaro on the Indus, the smaller at Harappa on the banks of its tributary, the Ravi. Subsequent excavations — within a region some five hundred miles on either side of the Indus and about one thousand miles along its course — unearthed remains of other ancient cities, all contemporaneous with the other great valley civilizations of the world, the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates.

At Mohenjodaro no fewer than nine layers of buildings were excavated, evidence of a city that had been built and rebuilt for centuries. Archaeologists’ finds — jewelry, terra-cotta figurines and seals, statuary, and earthenware — speak of a rich and well-developed culture, well in advance of its time (the Chalcolithic Age, when stone implements coexisted with those of copper and bronze). The cities were well planned, with broad avenues intersecting at right angles, advanced sewage and drainage systems (including septic tanks), spacious two-story homes, and hypocaustically regulated public baths. (Today few Indian towns boast a public swimming pool, but water was clearly important to our civilization in those days, and the remarkable “Great Bath” of Mohenjodaro may have had a ritual significance.) Wheat, barley, and dates were cultivated; several animals, from the camel to the humped zebu, were domesticated (though the cat was apparently unknown); they had already invented the wheel, and probably yoked buffalo or oxen to their carts. Gold, silver, copper, bronze, and lead were used, and garments of cotton spun and woven some two to three thousand years before Westerners wore them.

Somehow our modern cities never quite lived up to this heritage. Perhaps in other aspects they did: historians believe the society of the Indus Valley Civilization to have been a patriarchal and hierarchical one, probably ruled by a dominant priestly class, refined (with much personal ornamentation), religious (worshiping Pashupati, Lord of the Beasts, a precursor of later Hindu gods), and not particularly warlike — for they had no swords or defensive armor. Some historians have deduced a king who was worshiped as divine; others see a bureaucratic system at work in the meticulous organization and professional urban planning. Some of the art that has survived is simply magnificent, with one famous figure of a dancing girl reflecting considerable creative and casting skill. Despite its patriarchy, the Indus society was far more egalitarian, apparently, than its contemporaries, with ordinary citizens living far better than in Egypt or Mesopotamia, even enjoying a degree of comfort and luxury then unknown in the civilized world.

Some of these conclusions are speculative, since the picto-graphic script found on the seals has not been conclusively deciphered, but most are widely accepted. The cities were obviously connected by trade, and recent evidence suggests their commerce was international, for similar seals have been found as far away as Sumer in Iraq, with which trade could have been conducted along the Makran Coast. Here, too, is the earliest evidence of Indian pluralism, for the Indus society was apparently multiracial: the human beings depicted on Indus Valley artifacts are of several ethnic types, as are the skulls found in the excavations.

In other words, in these cities of the distant past, our forebears created a society not unlike our own — and arguably superior to ours in many respects. For over a thousand years, till about 1750 B.C., the Indus Valley Civilization flourished and prospered. It was then snuffed out abruptly. The archaeological evidence — heaps of skeletons, signs of disarray and sudden death — suggests some sort of catastrophe: perhaps a natural disaster, perhaps a brutal invasion. A great flood from the Indus itself, possibly triggered by an earthquake, is one possibility. Another is the advent of a horde of nomads who would one day give our country the foundations of its present civilization — the Aryans. The destruction of the Indus Valley Civilization snapped the umbilical cord that linked its way of life to those of later generations of Indians. Dare one suggest that as we look to the twenty-first century, we might do well to be inspired by an Indian example — one that flourished in the twenty-first century before Christ?