IITs: Perhaps Jawaharlal Nehru's most consequential legacy, they epitomize his creation of an infrastructure for excellence in science and technology, which has become a source of great self-confidence and competitive advantage for India today. Nehru's establishment of the Indian Institutes of Technology has led to India's reputation for engineering excellence, and its effects have been felt abroad, since the IITs produced many of the finest minds in America's Silicon Valley and Fortune 500 corporations. Today, an IIT degree is held in the same reverence in the United States as one from MIT or Caltech. There are not too many Indian institutions of which anything comparable can be said.
ILLITERACY: Remains rife, with just under half our population unable to read or write in any of our several dozens of scripts. This may well be, as Indira Gandhi once suggested, because half our population is either too young or too old to read or write, but the real reason is that our society is not so constructed as to make illiteracy the kind of handicap it would be in the developed world. We are a particularly verbal people, reading aloud to each other in village tea shops, communicating fact, rumor, and interpretation without the intermediaries of pen, paper, and ink. But we can no longer afford the attitude that literacy is an extravagance (requiring implements to write with, material to write on, and light to read the results by, none of which is easily available in our rural areas). In today's information age, no country can succeed economically without a population that is wholly literate and that can use every keyboard it can gain access to. Allowing illiteracy to prevail is to handicap our people in a twenty-first-century race they have no choice but to run. It is true that illiteracy is not a sign of lack of intelligence: most Indian illiterates have a native shrewdness and sense of personal conviction that would put a city lawyer to shame. But it does reflect a lack of opportunity that remains a serious blot on our society.
INDIAN ENGLISH: A popular native dialect, spoken with varying accents and intonations across the country. It has not been greatly codified, its practitioners preferring to believe they speak the language of a distant Queen, even if she couldn't tell a dak bungalow from a burning ghat or a zamindar from a boxwallah. The point about this truly national language is that it has its roots in India and incorporates terms not found among the nine hundred “words of Indian origin” listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED’s Indianisms are pretty tame stuff, like jungle, shampoo, and thug, whereas the true speaker — and reader — of Indian English doesn't blink at a lathi-charge on a sarvodaya leader emerging from a pandal after a bhajan on his way to consume some ghee-fried double-roti at a paan shop near the thana (none of which would make any sense under the, er, Queen's very rules). Indians are at home with Vedic rituals and goondaism, can distinguish between a ryot and a riot, wear banians under their kurtas, and still function in the language of Macaulay and Churchill. Our criminal classes, alone in the Commonwealth, are populated by dacoits, miscreants, and antisocials who are usually absconding; if these 420s are then nabbed by the cops, they become undertrials or detenus. Indian English has its own rules of syntax (“Why you didn't come? It was good, no?”), number (“I give my blessings to the youths of the country”), usage (“I am seeing this comedy drama thrice already”), convention (we eat toasts off quarter-plates instead of pieces of toast off side plates), and logic (“Have some Indian-made foreign liquor”). After our chhota-pegs we sign chit-books; the next day we don our dhotis and Gandhi-topis and do pranam when felicitating the PM at his daily darshan. These are not merely the mantras of babus: each term has a specific meaning within the Indian context that would be impossible (and unnatural) to convey in an “English” translation. Which is why the ultra-chauvinists who upbraid us for speaking a “foreign” language don't have a leg to stand on. As far as I'm concerned, Indian English Zindabad!
INDIRA: In a land of a million Indiras, there was still only one “Indira.” Indira Gandhi's domination, not just of India but of India's consciousness of itself and of the perception of India abroad, has finally begun to fade from the public memory, two decades after the tragic circumstances of her departure from the national scene. (Even in death, she was larger than life.) She did much to transform Indian politics and to promote Indian culture and the arts, but she will sadly be remembered for the excesses of the Emergency (q.v.) and for fostering a culture of sycophancy epitomized by D. K. Borooah's fatuous pronouncement, “Indira is India and India is Indira.” As the voters responded in 1977: Not.
INFORMATION AGE, THE: The era India entered when a superabundance of fiber-optic cabling and the imminence of the Y2K scare suddenly made the country's hardworking computer geeks indispensable to the rest of the world. Today, India's young software programmers have gone well beyond the menial labor of ensuring that American computers didn't crash at the end of the previous millennium: they write original code and devise creative approaches that make the world's infotech networks buzz. Today an IIT degree adds a gilt edge to any resumé. And the stereotypes are catching up: a friend recounts being accosted at a European airport by a frantic traveler saying, “Hey, you're Indian — I have a problem with my laptop, I'm sure you can help me!” The stereotyped Indian used to be the sadhu or the snake charmer, now it's the software guru.
JOKES: A staple of the national conversational diet; it was not so long ago that most Indian magazines ran a pageful of them. Indian jokes are almost always directed at Indians, either archetypally (as in the host of jokes about an American, a Russian, a Chinese, and an Indian, in which the Indian “wins” by being cussed or obtuse or both) or sectionally (Bengali jokes about Oriyas, Nair jokes about Namboodiris, Sikh jokes about Sikhs). Jokes in Indian English are in a class by themselves because they are cheerfully bicultural and often involve elaborate (and untranslatable) Hindi-English puns. The “Ajit” jokes remain the classics of the genre, featuring lines of imaginary film dialogue that the famously dehati villain would never have dreamt of uttering (“Raabert, isko centrifuge mein daal do. Pata chal jayega ki chakkar kya hai”).
JP: The simple name by which one of India's simplest men was known. Jayaprakash Narayan was the Mahatma of 1977, but he was a flawed Mahatma. A man of insight and compassion, humanity and principle, JP stood above his peers, a secular saint whose commitment to truth, honesty, and justice was beyond question. But though his loyalty to the ideals of a democratic and egalitarian India could not be challenged, JP's abhorrence of power made him unfit to wield it. He offered inspiration but not involvement, charisma but not change, hope but no harness. Having abandoned politics when he seemed the heir-apparent to Nehru, he was reluctant to return to it after the fall of Nehru's daughter, and so let the revolution he had wrought fall into the hands of lesser men whose application was unworthy of his appeal. JP died a deeply disappointed man, but his legacy lives on in the subsequent conduct of the Indian people — to whom, in the last analysis, he taught their own strength.
KAMA SUTRA: May well be the only Indian book that has been read by more lascivious foreigners than Indians, unless one counts the works of Sasthi Brata. It is for the most part a treatise on the social etiquette of ancient Indian courtship, and those who think of its author Vatsyayana as some sort of fourth-century Harold Robbins are usually sorely disappointed to go through his careful catalogue of amatory activities, which reads more like a textbook than a thriller. Nonetheless, it never ceases to amaze me that a civilization so capable of sexual candor should be steeped in the ignorance, superstition, and prurience that characterize Indian sexual attitudes today. Perhaps the problem is that the Kama Sutra’s refined brand of bedroom chivalry cannot go very far in a country of so many women and so few bedrooms.