43. Of Cows Sacred and Profane
THE OTHER DAY I RECEIVED BY E-MAIL one of those Internet jokes that constantly do the rounds, particularly among expatriate Indians, whose appetite for desi humor, usually self-deprecating, knows no bounds. It purported to be an essay written by a Bihari candidate at the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) examinations for the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). The sender quoted what was allegedly the candidate's essay on the subject of “The Indian Cow,” which, for the benefit of those fortunate enough not to be assailed daily by the Internet, I reproduce below almost in fulclass="underline"
He is the cow. The cow is a successful animal. Also he is four-footed. And because he is female, he give milks, but will do so when he is got child. He is same like-God, sacred to Hindus and useful to man. But he has got four legs together. Two are forward and two are afterwards. His whole body can be utilized for use. More so the milk. Milk comes from 4 taps attached to his basement. Horses do not have any such attachment. What can it do? Various ghee, butter, cream, curd, why and the condensed milk and so forth. Also he is useful to cobbler, watermans and mankind generally.
His motion is slow only because he is of lazy species. Also his other motion (gobar) is much useful to trees, plants as well as for making flat cakes like Pizza, in hand, and drying in the sun. Cow is the only animal that extricates his feeding after eating…. His only attacking and defending organ is the horns, specially so when he is got child. This is done by knowing his head whereby he causes the weapons to be paralleled to the ground of the earth and instantly proceed with great velocity forwards.
He has got tails also, situated in the backyard, but not like similar animals. It has hairs on the other end of the other side. This is done to frighten away the flies which alight on his body whereupon he gives hit with it.
It goes on for a few sentences more in similar vein, and then the e-mailer added the following footnote: “We are reliably informed that the candidate passed the exam and is now an IAS officer somewhere in Bihar.”
Now let's put aside the obvious implausibilities of this story — the unlikelihood of an IAS exam paper being posted on the Web, the even greater unlikelihood that the IAS would ask its examinees to write an essay on the cow — and consider the sneering that lies behind it. The anonymous candidate is, of course, supposed to be from Bihar, which over the last couple of decades has become a sort of national symbol for corruption, venality, and incompetence in Indian governance, at least among the urban Anglophone classes. (This phenomenon has, of course, accelerated since the ascent of unprincipled rusticity to high office in that state, as embodied in the person of Shri and Smt Laloo Prasad Yadav.) Worse still, the e-mail claims the howler-laden essay actually got its author into the IAS. This is startling, because it suggests that the stock of that institution, once considered the home of the best and the brightest in our society, has fallen lower than any of us could have imagined, at least in the eyes of our nouveaux riches computer-owning yuppies and their NRI friends. In the old days, the IAS officer was the paragon of authority and power, the prospective bridegroom who commanded the highest price on the marriage market. Today, as multinationals and dot-coms (and better still, multinational dot-coms) reward their executives with riches and perks that a mere sarkari babu can only dream of, the once-august IAS man can even be portrayed as a semi-illiterate dehati who can't write a sensible English paragraph but still gets sent off to rule over the masses, at least in Bihar.
I may be making far too much of a silly Internet joke, but I wonder what its wide circulation (I have received it from at least three different people) reveals about the way Indian society is changing. I once wrote about the insidious divisions being promoted between “India” and “Bharat”—between a slice of our country that is seen as cosmopolitan, liberal, Anglophone, technologically savvy, and secular, and the undifferentiated rest that is thought of as traditional, casteist, superstition-ridden, backward, and vernacular. It worries me that, in this era of greater communication, complete interdependence, and the leveling influence of mass television, the gulf of empathy between the “Indians” and the Bharatvasis seems to be widening rather than shrinking. There is probably room here for more serious sociological enquiry than I am capable of. I hope it is undertaken by someone in Bihar.
But I don't want to leave the subject of classroom howlers before making the defensively feeble observation that Biharis, or for that matter Indians, are not their only perpetrators. Anders Henriksson, an American professor of history (at the not particularly well known Shepherd College in West Virginia) has compiled a volume he has titled Non Campus Mentis, a collection of egregious errors taken word for word from term papers and exams conducted at American and Canadian colleges. His chronicle runs from such prehistorical periods as “the Stoned Age” to the more contemporary dramas of “the Berlin Mall.” In his account, Julius Caesar is assassinated on “the Yikes of March” and bursts out while dying, “Me too, Brutus!”
In the student essays the good professor has trawled, there are knowing references to “Judyism” as a “monolithic” religion (whose adherents, in a contemporary computer-age error, worship the god “Yahoo”). Columbus's benefactors, Ferdinand and Isabella, conquer not Grenada but “Granola.” Martin Luther King Jr. (the student even left out the surname “King,” confusing the black American Nobel winner with the fifteenth-century German Protestant reformer) makes a historic “If I Had a Hammer” speech (the title of a pop song — King had, in reality, famously declared, “I have a dream”). Hitler is depicted as terrorizing his enemies with his feared “Gespacho,” a conflation of the Spanish soup, or gazpacho, with the dreaded Gestapo. Kennedy resolves the “Canadian Missile Crisis,” not the Cuban. And so on.
Ignorance, in other words, knows no boundaries. Not even national ones. I don't know how much they might know about the cow, but I have no doubt that none of the American students in Professor Hendriksson's book would have gotten into the IAS.
44. Of Vows and Vowels
THE NEWS THAT THE ERSTWHILE (or should one say “once and future”?) chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Jayalalitha, has decided to add an extra “a” to the end of her name because a numerologically minded astrologer told her it would be more propitious is the kind of Indian story foreigners find almost impossible to believe. There is no other society on earth in which a leading public figure would change the spelling of her name in such a manner, and for a reason that most non-Indians would find frivolous. And yet we take it so cheerfully in stride in our country because we manage to live in that rare combination of modernity and superstition that defines us as a breed apart from the other peoples of the world.
Where else, after all, is so much made of an individual's astrological chart, that mysterious database which determines his opportunities in life, his marital prospects, his willingness to undertake certain risks? I once wrote that an Indian without a horoscope is like an American without a credit card, and the truth of that observation shows no signs of fading away in the twenty-first century. It seems particularly entrenched in our political world. As one who is what we like to call a “God-fearing” Hindu, I make no claims to be a pure rationalist myself, but I am still bemused to read of the swearing-in of a minister delayed because a politician's astrologer told him the time was not auspicious to take the oath, or of a candidate's nomination papers being filed at the last possible minute to avoid the malign influences of raahu-kaalam. My favorite story is of the chief minister who refused to move into his official residence because a pundit claimed it was not built according to the principles of vastu (the Indian forerunner of feng shui) and he would not fare well in it. The bungalow was accordingly redone, at great public expense, with new doorways made and windows realigned to satisfy the pundit. At last the chief minister moved in — only to lose his job and his new home the next day, the vagaries of politics having outstripped the benefits of vastu.