We are like this Only !!!!!
What makes us Indian? We have a proud heritage, we are a crucible of many religions and are well endowed with cultural tradition. But our everyday action has a different Indian to reveal. It is here we get to meet the Indian in its dazzling, confounding, cacophonic complexity.
The average Indian lives from festival to festival, one family function to another and from one public holiday to another. A lot of our action is rooted in a memory of scarcity and thus we have evolved sophisticated mechanisms to work around it. Our Idea of enjoyment should have nothing to do with expenditure. Take the game of Antakshari-we can spend hours singing at each other loudly, tunelessly without spending a paisa.
We learn to recycle everything-sell old clothes for utensils, grow plants in ice cream tubes, reuse the old milkpacket to pack something else and even sell old newspapers to the local kabaddiwalas to add a few notes to our non-taxable income. We throw nothing away, lofts are crammed with an impossible array of useless things we hang on to 'just in case', shoes are re-soled, some use is found for the TV's packaging consisting of bubble wrapping, thermocol etc. Call us frugal, call us thrifty. Call us kinky? Call us masters of improvisation, we hoard cardboard boxes, gift wrappings, disposables, ribbons, used envelopes and stamps, even the baby’s potty. Because we believe in the ‘what if’ principle. What if the salesperson forgets to gift wrap a present? (No worry; there’s wrapping paper saved from last year’s Diwali gifts.).
Education is a means to get ahead economically, it has nothing to do with knowledge. We put degrees on our name plates and ensure that they get mixed up with our initials. In addition we also add obscure certificates to elongate our polysyllabic qualification. Ph.D holders consider it a rare honour to attach the prefix ‘Dr’ before their names. In developed countries, barring medical practitioners, nobody is recognised as a ‘Dr’. Ph.D holders simply prefix ‘Prof.’, which is actually considered higher than ‘Dr’. A glance at the Nobel laureates list is proof of this. Indian politicians even manage to get ‘honorary’ doctorates.
Society plays the biggest role in the Indian's life. From paying absurd sums for college seat to spending huge sums to get daughters married off in a style 'that the world will see'. An underlying anxiety about the future guides much of our behaviour. These days we even have people importing stuff from abroad for a marriage. Flowers are being imported, the wedding sari is from Europe. Limos ferry guests, helicopters shower flowers. The barat is incomplete without the traditional ghodi. Even an ordinary Birthday celebration has soo many strings attached to it. They are theme parties with a hired party conductor. And the return gift is an autographed cricket bat or an expensive video game. Whatever happened to the good old birthday cake, samosa and birthday bumps?
We have schools named as Convent of Rani Jhansi without a trace of irony. Our bhajan's are set to the tune of Bollywood hip-shakers and we sway devotedly to these without embarrassment. Our conversations, instead of following the linear when-you-talk-I-listen mode, follows let-us-talk-together-and-may-our-pleasure-multiply mode. Our traffic follows a similar pattern with many parallel universes co-habiting the same space. What appears to be unbridled chaos is a more refined form of negotiated disorder, where everyone transacts with the road on a second-to-second basis. We honk madly and rape our sense, we overtake on the wrong side, flash blinding headlights and speed off, only to screech halt at the next traffic signal.
The Indian Thali or even the South Indian Meals shows a similar structure. Unlike western meal which proceeds on a sequential basis, the thali is about the joyous symphony of diverse tastes, textures, colours and flavours in one mouthful. The South Indian Meals has everything on one leaf, the culmination of rice,sambhar,curry,chutney is not complete unless the papad is broken on top of all this and then consumed.
The Entire India Ethos revolves around a 6 letter word called Adjust. Borrowing the word from the English language, we have embraced it as our very own. Every self-respecting Indian has gone ahead and adjusted it in his vocabulary. A commuter with one precarious toe on the footboard cries "adjust". As parking in cities gets harder, the adjust mantra saves. Adjust and fold the rearview mirrors, the other drivers will squeeze into imaginary spaces. Why, even Time magazine in one of its issues, quoted a senior Indian official as saying that India would offer to "adjust" the Line of Control by a matter of miles. We are trained well and can adjust to almost anything.
What this comfort with paradoxes has done is to arm us with sophisticated method of dealing with change. Modernity in India, is a continous act of tradition expanding to accommodate our emerging needs. We talk about how things must change. But all we do is go home, take a shower, watch Tv and continue to survive in the same manner.
We are strange lot, we have our idiosyncrasies, and yes, we are changing. Still, we are like this only.
Note:Extracts from the The Week dated 26 December,2004. View complete Article here
The average Indian lives from festival to festival, one family function to another and from one public holiday to another. A lot of our action is rooted in a memory of scarcity and thus we have evolved sophisticated mechanisms to work around it. Our Idea of enjoyment should have nothing to do with expenditure. Take the game of Antakshari-we can spend hours singing at each other loudly, tunelessly without spending a paisa.
We learn to recycle everything-sell old clothes for utensils, grow plants in ice cream tubes, reuse the old milkpacket to pack something else and even sell old newspapers to the local kabaddiwalas to add a few notes to our non-taxable income. We throw nothing away, lofts are crammed with an impossible array of useless things we hang on to 'just in case', shoes are re-soled, some use is found for the TV's packaging consisting of bubble wrapping, thermocol etc. Call us frugal, call us thrifty. Call us kinky? Call us masters of improvisation, we hoard cardboard boxes, gift wrappings, disposables, ribbons, used envelopes and stamps, even the baby’s potty. Because we believe in the ‘what if’ principle. What if the salesperson forgets to gift wrap a present? (No worry; there’s wrapping paper saved from last year’s Diwali gifts.).
Education is a means to get ahead economically, it has nothing to do with knowledge. We put degrees on our name plates and ensure that they get mixed up with our initials. In addition we also add obscure certificates to elongate our polysyllabic qualification. Ph.D holders consider it a rare honour to attach the prefix ‘Dr’ before their names. In developed countries, barring medical practitioners, nobody is recognised as a ‘Dr’. Ph.D holders simply prefix ‘Prof.’, which is actually considered higher than ‘Dr’. A glance at the Nobel laureates list is proof of this. Indian politicians even manage to get ‘honorary’ doctorates.
Society plays the biggest role in the Indian's life. From paying absurd sums for college seat to spending huge sums to get daughters married off in a style 'that the world will see'. An underlying anxiety about the future guides much of our behaviour. These days we even have people importing stuff from abroad for a marriage. Flowers are being imported, the wedding sari is from Europe. Limos ferry guests, helicopters shower flowers. The barat is incomplete without the traditional ghodi. Even an ordinary Birthday celebration has soo many strings attached to it. They are theme parties with a hired party conductor. And the return gift is an autographed cricket bat or an expensive video game. Whatever happened to the good old birthday cake, samosa and birthday bumps?
We have schools named as Convent of Rani Jhansi without a trace of irony. Our bhajan's are set to the tune of Bollywood hip-shakers and we sway devotedly to these without embarrassment. Our conversations, instead of following the linear when-you-talk-I-listen mode, follows let-us-talk-together-and-may-our-pleasure-multiply mode. Our traffic follows a similar pattern with many parallel universes co-habiting the same space. What appears to be unbridled chaos is a more refined form of negotiated disorder, where everyone transacts with the road on a second-to-second basis. We honk madly and rape our sense, we overtake on the wrong side, flash blinding headlights and speed off, only to screech halt at the next traffic signal.
The Indian Thali or even the South Indian Meals shows a similar structure. Unlike western meal which proceeds on a sequential basis, the thali is about the joyous symphony of diverse tastes, textures, colours and flavours in one mouthful. The South Indian Meals has everything on one leaf, the culmination of rice,sambhar,curry,chutney is not complete unless the papad is broken on top of all this and then consumed.
The Entire India Ethos revolves around a 6 letter word called Adjust. Borrowing the word from the English language, we have embraced it as our very own. Every self-respecting Indian has gone ahead and adjusted it in his vocabulary. A commuter with one precarious toe on the footboard cries "adjust". As parking in cities gets harder, the adjust mantra saves. Adjust and fold the rearview mirrors, the other drivers will squeeze into imaginary spaces. Why, even Time magazine in one of its issues, quoted a senior Indian official as saying that India would offer to "adjust" the Line of Control by a matter of miles. We are trained well and can adjust to almost anything.
What this comfort with paradoxes has done is to arm us with sophisticated method of dealing with change. Modernity in India, is a continous act of tradition expanding to accommodate our emerging needs. We talk about how things must change. But all we do is go home, take a shower, watch Tv and continue to survive in the same manner.
We are strange lot, we have our idiosyncrasies, and yes, we are changing. Still, we are like this only.
Note:Extracts from the The Week dated 26 December,2004. View complete Article here
posted by Vivek at 1:15 AM
0 comments
