PARTITION: The scar inflicted by history upon the nation when Pakistan was carved out of India's stooped shoulders by the departing British. Its human cost in lives, in the tragedies of displacement and flight, in lost faith and comradeship across communal divides, in the surrender by people on both sides of a part of their national heritage, was appalling enough; but it was further augmented by the colossal waste of resources thereafter in mutual defense preparedness and in actual military conflict. Partition betrayed both those Hindus who lived in what became Pakistan and those Muslims who were abandoned in India by the more affluent and vocal of their coreligionists. Above all, it betrayed all those, irrespective of religion, who believed that nationhood transcended creed and credo.
POLITICAL PARTIES: They grow in India like mushrooms, split like amoeba, and are as productive and original as mules. The old saw that two Indians equals an argument and three Indians equals two political parties can almost be taken literally, as every “leader” disgruntled with his lot in one party takes off to found another. (Shri Ajit Singh, if memory serves, has actually “led” eleven parties in the last ten years.) As a result, most of India's so-called national parties, with the sole exception of the BJP, are variants of the Congress (or variants of variants of the Congress), even when they have been founded with explicitly anti-Congress aims. The proliferation of regional parties, often with appeals that do not go beyond a single state, has further complicated this situation and virtually guaranteed coalition governance in perpetuity in Delhi. Although there is something to be said for the view that a multiplicity of parties is inevitable in a pluralist polity like India's, where a number of groups contend to defend their interests, a total fragmentation of political representation can hardly be in the national interest. And it is difficult to be entirely enthusiastic about a system in which a political party, rather than being the vehicle for the expression of a coherent set of ideas and interests, is merely a convenient cloak for the ambitions of an individual leader, to be cast off (or stitched to another's raiment) whenever it suits him.
POLLUTION: Indians have learned to live with pollution, inhaling more particles each day than a chain smoker might in the West, and boiling their water for fear of being laid low by every imaginable liquid-borne pollutant (and many a poison, including arsenic). India's cities are among the world's dirtiest. The air in Kolkata or Delhi is all but unbreathable in winter as car-exhaust fumes, unchecked industrial emissions, and smoke rising from countless charcoal braziers are trapped by descending mist and fog. When the Australian cricket team played in Delhi, its coach complained the smog-laden air gave the home team an unfair advantage — by impairing his players’ performance. Factories belch forth noxious black clouds. Effluents pour untreated into rivers. Sewage systems reek and overflow. Governments pass regulations, then ignore them. Meanwhile, more and more cars ply the congested roads, and more small factories open up that do not meet pollution-control standards. Cardiovascular and respiratory illness are rampant, with attendant health costs estimated at 4.5 percent of India's GDP. In other words, more than half of India's annual economic growth is wiped out by pollution, and development is taking place largely at the expense of the environment. But given a choice between living more modestly in a “green society” and becoming more prosperous in the midst of brown, most Indians would be happy to gasp and wheeze all the way to the bank.
POPULATION: India's greatest asset, but some assets are better when they are not growing. We add an Australia every year to our population, which would be fine if we could also add Australia's resources to ours every year. By the year 2034 we will have overtaken China, by the year 2050 every fifth human being on earth will be an Indian. The nation's great challenge will be to ensure that she is a well-fed, healthy, clothed, and educated Indian. (See also Family Planning.)
PRIVATIZATION: The “third rail” of Indian politics, which cannot be touched for fear of electrocuting yourself. Privatization is essential in a society where the government finds itself running businesses for which it has neither the aptitude nor the mandate, and where the public sector's rampant inefficiencies both slow down the economy and impede growth, but the politics of the issue oblige even governments in favor of privatization to tread warily — so that even those who do it call it something else (disinvestment). It is an axiom of Indian politics that our political consensus prefers public losses to the prospect of private profits.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS: Like most British legacies, these are not what they seem; they are in fact private schools, set up to make better maharajas, Indian civil servants, tea planters, and boxwallahs out of their dusky charges. The tradition has continued after independence, so that our public school products can generally be found with a glass in one hand, a sporting implement in the other, and a languid lady within reach. Their recent switch of emphasis from garden parties to political ones has sociological implications that are yet to be studied.
QUEUES: Orderly lines of individuals seeking the use of public facilities and services. They were last spotted at a Delhi bus stop in February 1977, and have never been the same since. Indians don't mind their peace in queues.
RAILWAYS: Vital to Indian unity because they guarantee the mobility that makes Indians conscious of India. And they are also the institution that has made the Indian elite look at Laloo Prasad Yadav — the country bumpkin politico who turned around the fortunes of the Railway Ministry — with respect. For all their inadequacies, our trains are still the best value for money in the country, getting you farther for fewer rupees than any other mode of mechanized locomotion available in the world. Much is made of their lack of punctuality, but being a few minutes late should hardly be held against them in a civilization that rarely takes notice of the passage of years. The railways have spawned an entire subculture, from the congested life on station platforms to the comradeship of what used to be called third-class sleepers (since dubbed second-class in another fit of egalitarian euphemism, as if a change of rank might make them more comfortable). The management of millions of train reservations made, entered, and kept up to date by hand is a human miracle that the most sophisticated computers have only just been able to match. The art of railway traveling is also one that has reached great heights in India — literally, if you take a look at the rooftop passengers on many carriages. India offers more kilometers of passenger railways than any other country, more varieties of gauges (broad, narrow, and meter) and more kinds of train (from the palace-on-wheels that tours Rajasthan to the suburban electric trains of Bombay, from the air-conditioned Rajdhani express to the “toy train” that winds its way to Darjeeling). And Indian Railways doesn't just mean trains. Who can forget such marvelous ancillary institutions as the sumptuous SER Hotel in Puri, with its fabled cuisine, and the famous Railways hockey team?
RAY, SATYAJIT: The late Master, under whom Indian cinema came of age. Artist, musician, children's storyteller par excellence, Ray's creative genius would have won him a following even if he had not happened to be one of the world's greatest filmmakers as well. When he made Pather Panchali with a 35-mm handheld camera, this Renaissance man placed India on the cinematographic map of the globe and confirmed its place there with a series of celluloid masterpieces that captured the soul of his people. His success, directly or indirectly, inspired others — Sen, Karnad, Sathyu, Gopalakrishnan, Benegal, and many more — to lift Indian cinema out of the morass of commercial formulae and earn it the respect of the world. But above all, he gave the Indian subcontinent a cinematic voice whose equivalent India had found in literature with the works of Rabindranath Tagore.