AMITABH: The star who refuses to fade away, the “Angry Young Man” of yesteryear who epitomized the hopes and dreams of a nation for nearly three decades. Bachchan remains a superstar in an over-laden firmament, a cinema hero of unprecedented popularity whose impact on the nation has been out of all proportion to his talent. To appreciate Amitabh Bachchan, you have to confuse action with acting and prefer height to depth, but there's no denying the way in which the now Complacent Middle-Aged Man has hummed and hammed his way into the nation's hearts. When he had a serious ailment, the nation prayed for his recovery; every vendor of garlands and coconuts stood poised for celebration or mourning. When the ruling party wanted to capture a difficult parliamentary seat and dispose of an inconveniently strong opponent, it turned to Amitabh Bachchan. When he realized politics couldn't be enacted like the movies, he quit, went into business, flirted with bankruptcy, and reinvented himself as a TV game-show host, before returning to the big screen with a beard to complement his baritone. Through it all, Amitabh has remained the “Big B,” but in a glossary of India, he leads the “A” list.
AMRITSAR: Engraved on every Indian heart, the City of the Pool of Nectar drips blood onto the pages of India's history. The tragedy of the massacre of unarmed protesters by British troops at Jallianwalla Bagh in 1917 gave a focus and a cause to the incipient struggle for nationhood — a nationhood on which the deaths in the Golden Temple in 1984 did more than anything else to cast a shadow.
ASHOKA: The great conqueror-turned-pacifist is the one figure of history who has most inspired independent India's schizoid governmental ethos. For decades, his tolerance and humanitarianism, his devotion to peace and justice, infused our declarations of policy; his military might, his imposition of a Pax Indica on his neighbors, informed our practice. Our national spokesmen inherited his missionary belief that what was good for India was good for the world. And in choosing a national symbol our government preferred his powerful trinity of lions to the spinning wheel advocated by Mahatma Gandhi. Typically, though, the only institution they saw fit to give his name to was a five-star hotel.
ASTROLOGY: Not only has it survived, it has grown in importance, as more and more important decisions are made by those who believe in it. Marriages are not arranged, flights not planned, elections not called until astrological charts are drawn up and consulted. An Indian without a horoscope is like an American without a credit card, and he is subject to many of the same disadvantages in life.
BABRI MASJID: This mosque stood for nearly 470 years in Ayodhya before being demolished by a howling, chanting mob who never understood that you can never revenge yourself upon history, for history is its own revenge. The Babri Masjid became the site where contending versions of history and faith fought over the rubble, where the very character and limitations of the Indian state were put on display for the world. Its destruction typifies a great national failure; the continuing impasse over what to put in its place reveals our talent for temporizing while the fundamental questions raised by the event remain unresolved. What could be better than a restored mosque side by side with a Ram mandir (temple)?
BIDIS: Along with paan, India's most original and long-lasting vice. There are few more authentically Indian sights than a five-rupee bundle of bidis—brown-green leaves rolled around a sprinkling of tobacco and tied together with a string of pink cotton. They also represent one of India's great unfulfilled marketing opportunities. Made of wholly natural ingredients, low tar, and instantly biodegradable, bidis should prove eminently exportable to the ecology-conscious international smoking public. If a cigarette had these qualities it would rapidly become the brand leader in its class. And there's no proven link between bidis and cancer, mainly because chronic bidi smokers usually die of something else first. In other words, for once we have the technology and are ahead of the competition. Is anyone in computer land listening?
BIRLA: A name attached to a number of leading Indian institutions: mandirs, planetariums, trusts, schools, clinics, institutes of technology, all of which have been made possible by a number of other leading institutions to which the Birla name is not attached, like Century Mills and Ambassador cars. (Also see Tata.)
BLACK MONEY: The real currency of traditional Indian business, the fuel of election campaigns, the high octane of film star contracts, the spark of real estate deals. The vast majority who don't have any of it are condemned to irrelevance; the lack of black money is the real explanation for the relative weakness of the salaried middle classes, with their printed pay slips and taxes deducted at source. Undeclared income is so widespread that its existence no longer shocks anyone; for all the years of liberalization, the black economy is probably as large as the white one. If it's any consolation, this also means that all the official figures for India's GNP should be doubled to reflect reality, so the average Indian is only half as poor as he thought he was.
BOLLYWOOD: Indian culture's secret weapon, producing five times as many films as Hollywood — and taking India to the world by bringing its brand of glitzy entertainment not just to the Indian diaspora in the U.S. or U.K. but to the screens of Syrians and Senegalese. Without Bollywood, India would simply not loom as large in the global popular imagination.
BUREAUCRACY: Simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art forms. No other country has elevated to such a pinnacle of refinement the quintuplication of procedures and the slow unfolding of delays. It is almost a philosophical statement about Indian society: everything has its place and takes its time, and must go through the ritual process of passing through a number of hands, each of which has an allotted function to perform in the endless chain. Every official act in our country has five more stages to it than anywhere else and takes five times more people to fulfill. (Also see Unemployment.)
BUSES: Indians’ favorite means of transport, whether rattling along country roads taking villagers to melas or screeching through cities overladen with office-goers clinging to the sides, the window bars, and the shirttails of other passengers. India knows a great variety of them, from dilapidated double-deckers to maniacal minibuses, which collectively constitute the cheapest mass public transportation system in the world. Regrettably, the bus drivers’ tendency to plow into pedestrians and drive off bridges also makes it among the most dangerous.
CALL CENTERS: The quintessential symbol of India's globalization. While traditional India sleeps, a dynamic young cohort of highly skilled, articulate professionals work through the night, functioning on U.S. time under made-up American aliases, pretending familiarity with a culture and climate they've never actually experienced, earning salaries undreamt of by their elders (but a fraction of what an American would make), and enjoying a lifestyle of premature affluence and Westernization transplanted to an Indian setting. Critics argue that this is “coolie work” (see chapter 59), but it's transforming lives, boosting our economy, and altering our society. When the story of the New India is written, call centers will play a large part in the narrative.
CASTE: Described as the glue that binds Indian society together, but thanks to the Indian Constitution and decades of democracy, its worst features are beginning to come unstuck. Whereas in the villages caste may still dictate where you live, whom you eat with, and whom you marry, it is more difficult in the cities to pick the shoulders you might rub up against on the bus, and this is leading to a major decrease in urban caste-consciousness. On the other hand, the extension of affirmative action quotas to “backward castes” and not just “scheduled castes” (formerly “untouchable”), as recommended by the Mandal Commission, and (more simply) the politics of opportunism, have preserved the institution into the twenty-first-century. After all, in much of rural India, when you cast your vote, you vote your caste. So the main thing that keeps caste going today is not negative discrimination but positive: the “affirmative action” programs with their quotas and reservations have created a vested interest in social backwardness. Not that the privileges for the scheduled castes and tribes are unjustified: after centuries of oppression, it is the least that can be done for those who have known millennia of suffering. (But today there are many parts of the country where you can't go forward if you're not a Backward.) Caste isn't what it used to be, an ineradicable stigma that could make or break your prospects. Perhaps the most important C-word of all in our glossary should be Change.