TAGORE, RABINDRANATH: The Shakespeare of the country, our greatest litterateur and a genius on the Da Vinci scale, who wrote novels, short stories, plays, poems, and songs, who founded a new discipline of music (Rabindra Sangeet) and a new university of the arts (Santiniketan), and whose work, even in a poor translation, won India's first Nobel Prize in 1913 (and its only one for literature). Tagore towers over India's cultural consciousness. His Gitanjali still evokes admiration wherever it is read; his “Kabuliwallah” is among the few short stories most Indians remember; and his famous poem, “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,” inspires generations of Indian schoolchildren long after the context of its composition has been forgotten. Rabindranath Tagore is also the only human being in the world to have composed the words and music to two separate national anthems, those of India and Bangladesh. Tagore would have won immortality in any of his chosen fields; instead he remains immortal in all.
TAJ MAHAL: The motif for India on countless tourist posters and has probably had more camera shutters clicked at it than any other edifice on the face of this earth. How easily one forgets that this unequaled monument of love is in fact a tomb, the burial place of a woman who suffered thirteen times the pain of childbirth and died in agony at the fourteenth attempt. Perhaps that makes it all the more appropriate as a symbol of India — a land of beauty and grandeur amid suffering and death.
TATA: The dynasty that long represented the acceptable face of Indian capitalism: efficient, progressive, productive, honest, profitable, and socially conscious. For their pains, the Tatas were pilloried as tyrants and exploiters by a variety of leading politicians whose party coffers they proceeded thereafter to fill. (This peculiarly Indian dialectic was a tribute to the patience of capitalists and the elasticity of politicians.) The Tatas gave India its first indigenous steel industry, its first five-star hotel, its first company town (Jamshedpur), its first IT firm, and its first airline. Whether it can notch up any more firsts in the twenty-first century remains to be seen.
TENDULKAR, SACHIN: The sobriquet “The Little Master” was already taken, but Sachin Tendulkar was our sole “Boy Wonder.” By the time he was fourteen people were speaking of him as potentially India's greatest batsman ever, and after breaking onto the international cricket scene as a precocious sixteen-year-old, he proceeded to fulfill that potential brilliantly. His records will long remain the stuff of cricketing legend, but what future generations will never know is the extraordinary weight of expectation that Sachin carried on his young shoulders every time he went out to bat, and the palpable sense of deflation that accompanied his every return to the pavilion.
TIGERS: India's most significant, yet most fragile, conservation achievement. In 1900 there were about 35,000 tigers in India; by the time tiger shooting was banned under a 1972 law there were only 1,872 left, a decimation rate of 95 percent in seventy years. Thanks largely to Project Tiger, established in 1973, that figure has slowly climbed up toward three thousand. The problem is that the tiger remains gravely endangered and conservation requires political sacrifices that are not easily made, notably the relocation of villages to create tiger sanctuaries, and the maintenance of adequate prey to sustain tiger populations. Tigers need large areas of land relatively free from incompatible human uses, but how can India reconcile the agreed ecological goal of protecting tigers with the pursuit of equitable socioeconomic development for the people of the affected areas? The prime minister's “Tiger Task Force” came up with ideas that, conservationists agree, have not yet solved the problem. Unless real political will is put behind it, India risks the extinction in the wild of this magnificent specimen of our natural diversity.
TRAFFIC: The bane of all Indian commuters. Chaos and crowds are hardly unknown elsewhere, but our extraordinary variety of means of transportation has long since outstripped the length and breadth of our roads, and the problem gets worse each month. The constituents of Indian traffic make for fairly remarkable conditions. Only in India can one get stuck in a jam at a nonfunctioning traffic light amid six Ambassadors in various states of disrepair, five Korean vehicles of assorted sizes, a Maruti almost crushed underfoot by a Tata Sumo, two minibuses facing each other and both on the wrong side of the road, a tram madly if impotently ringing its bell, three buses heading in different directions with passengers dangling from the tailboards and from each other, six rickshaws, one auto-rickshaw with a broken silencer, a homesick cow, a small flock of goats milling about at the zebra crossing, and some three hundred pedestrians picking their way gingerly through the confusion. Exaggeration? It happened to me on my last visit to Kolkata.
UNDERDEVELOPMENT: Used to be the condition erroneously ascribed to India by economic theoreticians, who looked at some of our labor-intensive agricultural techniques and promptly concluded that we were primitive. In fact, everything in India is overdeveloped, particularly the social structure, the bureaucracy, the political process, the monetary system, the university network, the industrial base, and (as Galbraith tactlessly observed) the women. Given its economic and imperial history in a number of previous Golden Ages under Ashoka, Vikramaditya, and Akbar, India is not underdeveloped at all; it is, as I argued in The Great Indian Novel, a highly developed country in an advanced state of decay. Now that we are cleaning up the dilapidation and glitzy malls are sprouting all over what used to be our mofussil areas, and real estate values are going through the roof (usually before the roof is even constructed), India may soon give “overdevelopment” a whole new meaning.
UNEMPLOYMENT: A serious social evil, with the talents and skills of a vast army of ill-educated people being wasted because the economy is unable to absorb them. There are more unemployed engineers in India than there are qualified engineers in the whole of East Africa. Part of the problem is that a number of Indians are being educated out of a job; their learning makes them unsuitable for the work that is available. But there is also an urgent need to create more manufacturing and service industries to absorb and employ people (the entire IT industry only accounts for a million jobs in a country of over a billion people). And remedial training, to make up for the deficiencies of some of our less prominent educational institutions, is also essentiaclass="underline" companies would have people they could hire if they were prepared to invest in training them to par. The unemployment statistics would look even worse if they took into account the vast army of those who actually hold jobs but have nothing to do in them, a form of unemployment particularly prevalent in government service and which therefore carries great social prestige.
UP: Or Uttar Pradesh, is a state in north India that accounts for 10 percent of our population, 20 percent of our industry, 40 percent of our pollution, and 60 percent of our prime ministers.
VARANASI: The new(ish) name for Benares. It was also the old name for Benares, which is why it has been revived, but there is an older name still, Kashi, and that's where most southern Indian pilgrims think they're going when they buy a ticket to Varanasi. It is a town that still attracts sadhus, mendicants, and long-haired seekers of truth to its ghats and temples. The Ganga at Varanasi is the best place for Hindus to wash their sins away, and after what the press has revealed about police brutality in the city's jails and thanas, that may be just as well.