MINORITIES: What we all are — for no one single Indian group can claim majority status in our country. A Hindi-speaking Hindu male might consider himself a representative of the “majority community,” to use the term much abused by the less industrious of our journalists, but a majority of the country does not speak Hindi, and Hinduism is no guarantee of majorityhood since his caste automatically places him in a minority as well. Amid India's variegated communal divisions we are all minorities. Even in the days of “India is Indira and Indira is India,” Indira Gandhi herself represented this condition: she was a Kashmiri ruling a majority of non-Kashmiris, a Brahmin among a majority of non-Brahmins, a UP-ite facing a majority of non-UP-ites, and (lest we forget) a woman leading a majority of men. Indian democracy is quintessentially about minority rule.
MONSOON: Not, as a Doon School student once put it, a French gentleman, but the season that sets our climate apart from the rest of the world's. Other lands have cold and fog and snow, and some tropical countries enjoy hot and hotter climates relieved by bursts of wetness, but few know the exhilaration of being lashed by monsoon rains for weeks on end, the frustration of vehicles stalled in the 180th successive year of flooded streets, the camaraderie of wading knee-deep in water with shins bared by the privileged and the proletarian alike, and, let's face it, the relief of avoiding our responsibilities as life spirals helplessly to a halt. In our rural areas the monsoon is life-giving, the harbinger of hope for the next harvest, nourishing the parched earth, flooding the paddy fields and filling the wells that sustain people, animals, and plants. The monsoon is integral to the Indian experience; centuries ago, Kalidasa wrote these immortal lines about the monsoon: “A source of fascination to amorous women, the constant friend to trees, shrubs and creepers, the very life and breath of all living beings, this season of rains.” No one who has experienced the monsoon can treat the rains of Western climes as anything but a nuisance; our rains, however, are an event.
MOTHER TERESA: With her compassion, her vigor, and her faith, Mother Teresa brought light into the lives — and the deaths — of many miserable human beings who might never have known what it was to be touched by grace. Yet for all her undoubted greatness, I cannot help squirming at the perversity of those Indians who take pride in her Nobel Prize, who instead of being shamed by the conditions that made the prize possible, organized “committees of felicitation” when Mother Teresa returned to Kolkata with a Norwegian certificate clutched with her Indian passport. We Indians should be striving to create the kind of society that makes a Mother Teresa unnecessary.
MUSIC: Enters every Indian ear; from the classical cadences of the sitar and the sarod to the lyrical lilt of catchy film tunes, music is impossible to escape in India, whether blaring from your neighbor's radio in the morning, broadcast on loudspeakers outside temples and tea stalls all day, or nocturnally available in the all-night concerts of classicians. To the undiscriminating connoisseur there is a vast range to be traversed between Carnatic and Hindustani music, morning ragas and mourning ragas, Ravi Shankar and Lata Mangeshkar. With Muslim ustads playing Hindu devotional ragas and Bollywood playback singers chanting Urdu lyrics, the music of India is the collective anthem of a hybrid civilization. But music represents an even larger metaphor, for it sets the tone for the political life of modern India — in which, rather like traditional Indian music, the broad basic rules are firmly set, but within them one is free to improvise, unshackled by a written score.
NATIONALIZATION: An act of socialist governance that consists of transferring banks, insurance companies, industries, and other functioning institutions from the hands of competent capitalists into those of bumbling bureaucrats. The prevalence of nationalization in the face of widespread evidence of its shortcomings, inefficiencies, and failures testifies to the curious Indian credo that public losses are preferable to private profits. In other countries, this would be known as cutting off your nose to spite your face. (See also Privatization.)
NEHRU: As much the father of modern India as Mahatma Gandhi was of Indian independence. Nehru was a moody idealist intellectual who felt an almost mystical empathy with the toiling peasant masses; an aristocrat, accustomed to privilege, who had passionate socialist convictions; an Anglicized product of Harrow and Cambridge, who spent over ten years in British jails; an agnostic radical, who became an unlikely protégé of the saintly Mahatma. Few national political leaders have made as much of an impact on their nation's ethos. It is to Jawaharlal Nehru that we owe the “socialistic pattern of society,” the dominance of the public sector over the “commanding heights of the economy,” parliamentary democracy, nonalignment, secularism, the electoral system, respect for the judiciary, freedom of the press, the Nehru jacket, the Congress cap, and, at several removes, Rahul Gandhi. (Since I've written an entire book about him, Nehru: The Invention of India, I'll leave it there.)
NEPOTISM: Nepotism, or uncles granting jobs and favors to nephews, does not exist in India. None of our prime ministers, for instance, had uncles of any consequence.
NONALIGNMENT: Was (and in theory still is) the basis of India's foreign policy and consists of equidistance from the superpowers, a concept challenged by both geography and reality, not to mention the lack of a second superpower to be equidistant from. Nonetheless, nonalignment is still paid ritual obeisance by Indian diplomacy, which has been defined by a former doyen of the Ministry of External Affairs as being “like the love-making of an elephant: it is conducted at a high level, accompanied by much bellowing, and the results are not known for two years.”
OPINIONS: As may be readily apparent from this glossary, opinions flow from Indian tongues like the Ganga through Benares: profuse, stimulating, and muddied with other people's waste matter. From village tea shops to urban coffeehouses, Indians give free rein to their opinions, which often, like those who express them, do not have visible means of support. On most issues, however, these are unrelated to any expectation of action, and the Indian public as a whole largely acquiesces in governmental policies even when they are contrary to its professed beliefs. In India, the expression of public opinions is no proof of the existence of public opinion.
PAAN: A concoction of spices wrapped in betel leaf is India's answer to French wine as the essential adjunct to a good meal. It is a useful if mildly intoxicating aid to digestion and the most national of liquid vices, though each consumer is obliged to generate his own liquid and to dispose of it against the most convenient wall. (This even led one Japanese health expert to declare that acute TB was endemic in India because he had seen so many people spitting blood.) The distinctions between a Calcutta patta and a Banarasi mitha are at least as significant as those between a Bordeaux and a Burgundy, but paan chewing is too down to earth to have evolved the same pretentious vocabulary as its French counterpart. It is time we established our own paan columnists to wax lyrical about the “strong body” and “delicate coconut fragrance” of a 2007 Madrasi beeda, contrasting it, perhaps, with the “heady bouquet” and “lingering aftertaste” of a silver-wrapped Mumbai concoction.
PARSIS: see Zoroastrians. (I had to have something beginning with Z, didn't I?)