EVE-TEASING: A uniquely Indian activity. It is not that Italians and Indonesians don't have the same proclivities, simply that the term itself doesn't exist anywhere else. “Eve-teasing,” with its coy suggestion of innocent fun, is another of the numerous euphemisms that conceal the less savory aspects of our national life. Anyone who has seen eve-teasing in operation in Delhi knows that the term masks sordid and often vicious behavior by depraved youths against victims often in no condition to resist. Calling it “assault” or “molestation” would be more honest and might do more to raise public consciousness against it.
FAMILY PLANNING: Despite the many problems encountered in its implementation, family planning has already taken a hold on the popular imagination in a way that few could have predicted at the campaign's inception. The standard portrait of the four-member “happy family” (not so standard because the posters in southern India give the happy father a pencil-line mustache rather than the curler on display north of the Godavari) is now part of our national consciousness, as is the symbol of an inverted red triangle. Our vasectomy camps of the 1970s and 1980s, where thousands of men went for a quick snip and a transistor, are already the stuff of sociological legend, and who could have imagined the brazenness of government-sponsored advertisements for condoms in a country where a public kiss can provoke a riot? The achievements of family planning were done a great disservice by the excess of zeal, which led to forced sterilizations and to villagers living in fear of being dragged off to fulfill arbitrary Emergency quotas. Ironically, when governments changed, one of the first victims was the name itself, which became diluted to the neo-euphemistic “family welfare.” The urgency went out of the effort. Today we are on course to top the global population charts, overtaking China as the world's most populous nation by 2034. Family planning cannot afford to be forgotten, though. Euphemisms do not prevent babies.
FASTS: These never worked half as well anywhere else as they have in India. Only Indians could have devised a method of political bargaining based on the threat of harm to yourself rather than to your opponent. As a weapon, fasts are effective only when the target of your action values your life more than his convictions — or at least feels that society as a whole does. So they were ideally suited to a nonviolent, moral national leader like Mahatma Gandhi (despite the resentment of a couple of viceroys, who thought his fasts akin to a child browbeating an adult by threatening to hold his breath until he turned purple). Gandhi's example was effectively emulated by other Gandhians: Potti Sriramulu's fast unto death in 1952 led to the reorganization of states on linguistic lines; Morarji Desai's in 1975 led to elections being called in Gularat. But when used by lesser mortals with considerably less claim to the moral high ground and no great record of devotion to principle, fasts are just another insidious form of blackmail, abused and overused in agitation-ridden India. It might have been worse, though. If more politicians had the courage to fast in the face of what they saw as transcendent wrong, governments might have found it impossible to govern. But too many would-be fasters proclaim their self-denial and then retreat to surreptitious meals behind the curtain, which makes their demands easier to resist since there is no likelihood of their doing any real harm to themselves. Inevitably, fasts have suffered the ultimate Indian fate of being reduced to the symbolic. What could be more absurd than the widely practiced “relay fast,” where different people take it in turns to miss their meals in public? Since no one starves long enough to create any problems for himself or others, the entire point of Gandhi's original idea is lost. All we are left with is the drama without the sacrifice — and isn't that a metaphor for Indian politics today?
FASTS, PERSONAL: The individual, rather than political, fast is another Indian institution for which there is no equivalent abroad, except among expatriate Indians. Indians starve on certain days of the week, deny themselves their favorite foods, eliminate essentials for their diets, all to accumulate moral rather than physical credit. Where a Western woman misses a meal in the interest of her figure, her Indian sister dedicates her starvation to a cause, usually a male one (think of karva chauth, when women starve for their husbands’ well-being). Her husband or son never responds in kind: he manifests his appreciation of her sacrifice by enjoying a larger helping of her cooking.
FILMS: The great Indian national pastime, an institution of such overwhelming importance that this glossary can barely hint at their impact on the national ethos. Films are the dominant and in many cases sole form of mass entertainment available to the vast majority of our people. India produces more films than any other country in the world, and these are seen several times each by people who have fewer alternative forms of distraction. Film stars are better known than most politicians, sportsmen, or writers and are the most potent symbols of the hopes and aspirations of ordinary Indians. There is no limit to their mass appeaclass="underline" several have been elected to Parliament, three have founded political movements, and two have become chief ministers of their states. (One of them, NTR, still has a temple dedicated to him in Andhra Pradesh; the other, MGR, might easily have, too, but for the inconvenient fact that he was an atheist.) For decades there was virtually no popular music in India but film music, though this is now changing. The most widely read Indian journals in any language are film magazines, and even general interest publications cannot do without a film gossip column.
Films are the nation's most participatory activity: they attract larger audiences and employ more people than any other industry. They are a perennial growth sector in periods of economic stagnation; if so many of their financial transactions were not sub rosa, films might constitute one of the largest single determinants of our GNP. There is hardly any corner of our vast land that has not been touched by that great manifestation of popular art, the film poster. In other countries, films are threatened by television, but in India the most popular television programs are song sequences from films, or movies themselves. Films, also spelled (and pronounced) “fillums,” are not to be confused with cinema, which is the exclusive domain of auteurs either Bengali or Benegali whose reputations abroad generally exceed their receipts at home. (See also Bollywood).
GANDHI: (1) A legendary, almost mythical figure, shrouded in the mists of history and the masks of textbooks, whose precepts, like God's, are cited more often than obeyed. The father of our nation, with a billion children and no followers. (2) An award-winning Hollywood film starring Candice Bergen, which won more golden statuettes than anything else ever sponsored by the Indian taxpayer. (3) A magic name that guarantees its bearer short odds of being offered the prime ministership (though it gains in luster if the prime ministry is refused).