Under the good doctor's care, and with wholesome organic vegetarian fare, I began to glow — and even to lose weight. But we were on holiday, and five days after checking in, it was time for me to move on to the beach.
Dr. Sreelatha wouldn't accept my thanks. “You should have stayed at least a month,” she said disapprovingly. “Five days of ayurveda isn't enough.”
“I'll be back,” I promised.
That, of course, is the point of ayurvedic tourism. Don't just get people to come in and breeze out: get them to stay, and to return. In Dr. Sreelatha's words, treat their lifestyle. Even if it means denying them what they want for lunch.
50. In Defense of Delhi
MOST OF US INDIANS ARE, I SUPPOSE, ambivalent about our capital city. Its broad avenues, late-colonial architecture, and a general air of well-ordered self-importance goes well with popular notions of what the nation's premier city and seat of government should be like. When Lutyens's aging imperial model was given a multicrore-rupee facelift before the 1982 Asian Games, the new highways, overpasses, and tourist hotels made our rajdhani presentable as well as patrician. New Delhi, its inhabitants tended to assure impressed visitors, wasn't like the rest of India. And they meant it as a compliment.
But, at the same time, another stereotype also existed. The chattering classes lament that Delhi typifies an India that has lost its soul, that it's the epitome of a new concrete culture of “black money,” five-star hotels, and shopping malls divorced from tradition, the arts, or the refinements of the higher life. All that was worth cherishing in old Delhi, they moan, has now given way to the over-pass and the fast-food counter, both occupied by hustling Punjabis who feel no real sense of belonging to the city and don't even know the history behind the addresses on their visiting cards.
But so what if New Delhi is, as the intelligentsia claim, a parvenu city? It was re-created by those who had lost everything in the partition of the subcontinent — men and women of the Punjab, Sikhs, and Hindus uprooted from the land that had been the home of their ancestors for countless generations, rejects of history who had to carve out their own futures. They worked and struggled and sweated to make it. They were unencumbered by the baggage of the past, for the past had betrayed them. They succeeded; and as a result of their efforts, they created the first truly postcolonial Indian city.
So families that had trudged across the frontier as refugees today drive shining Suzukis across superhighways; people whose parents had lost their houses now sip imported wine in fancy restaurants. But instead of applauding them, educated Indians from Kolkata or Chennai tend to curl their refined lips in scorn. The crass materialism of the archetypal Delhiite is sniffed at, his lack of culture ridiculed, his ignorance of history deplored. Literate North India, for its part, laments the transformation of a Delhi that was once a byword for elegant poetry, Mughal manners, and courtly civilization.
Old Delhi may indeed have had its attractions, but it was also a moribund place steeped in decay and disease, ossified in communal and caste divisions, exploitative, and unjust. Today's New Delhi — not the musty bureaucratic edifices of government, but the throbbing, thriving agglomeration of factories and TV studios, industrial fairgrounds and software consultancies, nightclubs and restaurants — is a city that reflects the vigor and vitality of those who have made it. It is far and away India's richest city; it provides and reflects a stimulus, unfamiliar to the Indian intelligentsia, of enterprise and risk taking; its people are open and outward-looking. They may have forgotten their history but they remember their politics. They may not know why but they know how.
New Delhi has enshrined performance and effectiveness as more important measures of human worth than family name or pedigree. If, in the process, it has also placed a premium on vulgar ostentation rather than discreet opulence, so be it. The new rich could not have run the old clubs, so they built the new hotels and restaurants. The “five-star culture,” for all its vulgarity, is more authentically Indian than the club culture it has supplanted, a musty relic of proto-colonial dress codes and insipid English menus.
It is true that New Delhi lacks a coherent cultural focus. Its physical sprawl, its disaggregated “colonies,” ensures that the capital is really twenty townships in search of a city. But as the ambitious new Metro railway proves, it is not a city indifferent to the basic needs of its citizens. Nor is it lacking in creative endeavor. Today, fueled by the money and the people that have poured into the city, there are more plays, exhibitions, and concerts on any single day in New Delhi than anywhere else in India.
New Delhi is also, uniquely, a cosmopolitan society in the international sense. We have always been an overly self-obsessed people; our decades of protectionist policies also drastically reduced, in most other Indian cities, the frequency of routine contact and interchange between Indians and foreigners. Thanks to the diplomats and journalists based there, New Delhi is the one place where Indians of every class benefit from relating to, and seeing themselves in the eyes of, the outside world. (Bangalore is getting there, too, but not on the same scale.)
In its urban openness and economic energy, Delhi reminds me of the bustling coastal ports of a bygone era. With the advent of jet travel and the World Wide Web, you don't need port cities as your principal contacts with the outside world: the “coast” can move inland. New Delhi is India's contemporary equivalent — bustling, heterodox, anti-ritual, prosperous. For all its inadequacies, it is a symbol of a country on the move, the urban flagship of a better tomorrow. It has led India into the twenty-first century, even at the price of forgetting all that happened in the other twenty.
51. NRIs — The “Now Required Indians”
INDIA HAS AN OFFICIAL ACRONYM for its expatriates — NRIs, for “Non-Resident Indians.” In my book India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond, I jokingly suggested that the real debate was whether NRI stood for “Not Really Indian” or “Never Relinquished India.” The nearly twenty-five million people of Indian descent who live abroad fall, of course, into both categories. And in recent years, as the government has set about cultivating them through generous new policies, the establishment of a ministry for overseas Indian affairs and annual Pravsai Bharatiya Divas (Overseas Indians’ Day) events in India, it's clear one can apply a third variant to the acronym: “Now Required Indians.”
The 1,600 to 2,000 delegates who have flocked annually to India from over sixty different countries for the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas celebrations were firmly in the “Never Relinquished India” camp. They were in India to affirm their claim to it.
I attended one of the Pravasi Bharatiya weekends — the third one, in 2005, which fell on the ninetieth anniversary of the return to India of the most famous NRI of them all, Mahatma Gandhi, who alighted from his South African ship at Bombay's Apollo Bunder port on January 9, 1915. The nativism that has seen Bombay being renamed Mumbai has not diluted the city's dynamic cosmopolitanism. It still remains the gateway to India, a thriving, bustling, industrious, polyglot beehive of trade and exchange. If Mumbai seems sometimes to be choking on its own traffic, the city's aspirations, both literally and metaphorically, seem limitless. It was the right place to bring the world's largest gathering of NRIs together.
And they came in larger numbers than ever, their enthusiasm undampened by the grim news of the tsunami disaster just two weeks earlier. The vice presidents of Suriname and Mauritius, the former prime ministers of Fiji and Trinidad and Tobago, Malaysian politicians and Gulf-based entrepreneurs, tycoons from Hong Kong and titans from the United States, all united by the simple fact of shared heritage — the undeniable reality that even exiles cannot escape when they look in the mirror. They were united, too, in the words of the typically thoughtful and inspiring inaugural address by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, by an “idea of Indianness.” It is an idea that enshrines the diversity and pluralism both of our country and of its diaspora. In a land and a city that is home to Indians of every conceivable caste and creed, the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas celebrations afforded to Indians — including former Indians — of every conceivable caste and creed the welcome assurance that they were indeed at home.