The Ironist's A - Z Guide To India

I-N-D-I-A. The very word encapsulates it all : magical mountains, misty mornings, mystical meanings, musical memories, white elephants, charmed lakes, entrancing landscapes, dusty evenings, colourful magicians, silent forests, and serene skies. Wave after wave of foreign invaders have descended and impiously trampled upon the consecrated body of India, firstly the Dravidians, then the Aryans, then the Kushanas, then the Persians, then the Turks, then the Moghuls, then the British, and nowadays the Microsoft-ists, and all of them without exception have utterly failed to understand Her. And this is no surprise for India does not reveal Her hallowed secrets to any but the most patient and humble Ironist who silently waits at Her doorstep every morning beseeching her to disclose Her arcane truths to him. Here comes for the first time from Irony Brothers the heart-warming story of one man’s life-long search for India, a search that you can make your own, irrespective of whether you are planning to go to India for the first time, or whether you have already been there on a number of occasions in the past, or whether you have somehow managed to survive there for your whole life.

(A) Conversation : Indians are a very homely and convivial people, and like to talk a lot even when neither party is quite sure what the topic of conversation is. If you are an American in say in the backwaters of Florida, you might be well-advised to wait for at least six weeks before asking your boyfriend, and even then somewhat gingerly, the earth-shattering question, ‘By the way, do you happen to know who your father was?’. But in India, we do things really differently. You see, we Indians are not like you solitary atomized individualized traumatized suicidal depressed and what-not Americans, we have more communal bonding, and we are closely integrated into the social fabric that holds us together. That is why we need to talk so much; for us talking is a speech-act that simultaneously expresses and enacts our mutual cohesiveness. So if you happen to meet a stranger in New Delhi, he will want to know within the first three minutes of meeting you not only what the name of your father’s credit card company is, why your mother’s shrink fancies your second cousin, why your uncle never made it beyond law school, but also why your great-grandfather had to go to Wyoming on 4 July, 1924.

(B) Marital Status : Indians are extremely sensitive on this touchy issue, and you should be very careful about disclosing your true marital status. If you are a British, European or American woman who is unmarried, you should never admit this to Indians, for they will simply relentlessly labour you with all sorts of ticklish questions such as why you are not married, when you are going to get married, whether they should find a groom for you, what your expectations from a suitable boy would be, and so on. The reason for all this is that the Unmarried Indian Woman is widely perceived throughout the country as a lethal threat to the social fabric and is arguably the single-most destabilizing factor in the Indian psyche. Indians, and more specifically the men and women of the previous generation, are at least one thousand years away from attaining the enlightenment that it is perfectly normal for an absolutely sane woman to voluntarily choose to remain unmarried : Indians just don't get it.

(C) Poverty : You will see a lot of abject poverty in India, and if you want to know how Indians manage to live apparently oblivious to the existence of the hapless pour souls, the reason is that they believe in an ancient superstition called Karma. According to this bit of necromancy, your present economic condition is a consequence of your actions in a previous birth, so that the beggar who is starving to death on the streets today is reaping what he had sowed some time back in another life-time. Too bad that nobody has given the beggar this bit of inspirational wisdom, though even if he were to receive it, I seriously doubt that it would mollify his hunger by one whit.

(D) Politeness : When you are in India, never refer to any elder by his or her first name; find out the appropriate surname and suffix it with a honorific –ji. No Indian wife, in particular, would commit the terrible atrocity of addressing her husband in this manner, and whenever she wants to talk to him she starts off with a question such as, ‘Do you hear me?’ Somehow this question never fails to irritate Indian husbands who usually reply back with remarkable alacrity and rare ingenuity, ‘I am not deaf. I am just ignoring you.’

(E) The Caste System : Sooner or later, this contentious topic will come up for discussion, especially if you happen to run into one of those Indian Marxists, and I better tell you something about this most magical of systems. Basically speaking, it divides human beings into two major groups, one the haves and the other the have-nots. (Pretty much the same story then as anywhere else.) The haves are called the Brahmins, the wise guys of India who used to be proficient until 50 years ago in reading the sacred texts of Hindu-ism, though nowadays they have also become very skilled in browsing software programs which espouse the cause of Microsoft-ism which, of course, is their new religion. The have-nots are subdivided into three smaller groups, and there is only one thing common to these, which is that they do not like the wise guys.

(F) Marriage Ceremonies : You might be invited to someone's wedding when you are in India, in which case be sure to take a nicely-wrapped gift which has a small label on it saying ‘Made in America’, ‘Made in the UK’, or, in fact, Made in Anywhere except India. Beyond that, however, Indian marriages are an extremely boring and stale affair. You will see the women with gaudy lipsticks, cheap perfume, and glaring clothes sitting down at one end groaning about their husbands, and their husbands will mill around at the other end drinking malt whisky, cracking boisterous schoolboy jokes, and laughing their heads off as if there will be no tomorrow.

(G) Bollywood : India’s national cinema industry is called Bollywood which reflects the widely-held Indian view that kissing a girl is a more reprehensible crime than shooting her down with an AK-47. This is the reason why a Bollywood movie in which a disgruntled hero valiantly mows down two women and three children in a blaze of patriarchal glory will receive a Universal (U) rating, but another movie in which he condescends to kiss his girl for three seconds will be slapped down with an Adult (18+) tag.

(H) The Indian Family : On a rough estimate, 99.9999% of Indian families are resolutely patriarchal, which is merely a technical way of saying that in India it is very much the Men who Rule. (In case you are one of those math-weirdos, the remaining 0.0001% refers to those atomized Cambridge, Harvard, Paris, and Berkeley-educated Indians who are anyways too deconstructed to require any further dissolving in the covalencies of a nuclear family.) In every Indian family, it is highly important that you know where you are ‘located’, that is, you know who you are, what you are, who is above you, and who is below you. In most Indian families, even a girl as old as 26 years will first have to ask the Big Man, her Father on earth if not in heaven as well, for his permission before she can spend her evening with her girl-friend. Most Indian parents would rather endure the prospect of a ‘Boys’ Night In’ (with the possible damage to the household furniture, carpet, and cutlery) than that of a ‘Girls’ Night Out’ (with the alleged loss of the family’s honour and all that mediaeval nonsense).

(I) Invitations : When you leave your host’s house, it is usual to be told, ‘Please come and see us again’, but this does not mean that your host really expects to meet you again the next evening. This is simply our Indian version of the Britishism, ‘Brilliant. See you around. Why don’t we meet for coffee someday?’ However, if you actually want to pay your hosts another visit, you should fix an appointment with them there and then. Now when you are finally there, you shall be offered food and drink, and it is very crucial to get this right. Always refuse to touch whatever you have been offered two times, citing all sorts of reasons such as the weather being too sultry or your tummy behaving too strangely. However, never refuse a third time, since this is considered highly offensive by most Indians.

(J) Courtesy : It is extremely rare for Indians to use words such as ‘Please’ or ‘Thank you’, not because, of course, they are rude but simply because they are too genial to feel the need for such locutions. As a famous wit wisely remarked once, it is only the extremely uncourteous who feel the compulsive need to keep on thanking other people all the time.

(K) Food : Never touch food on other people’s plates, and even if you have committed this horrible offence do not actually eat it. The reason for this is that unlike you materialistic reductionistic Godforsaken Westerners for whom food is just an encoded pattern of DNA, for us Indians, food is embedded in a dense ritual context. Food touched by another person becomes impure, and must for that reason never be touched or eaten.

(L) Time : If there is one thing that no Indian is poor enough to buy, it is Time of which there is a veritable superabundance in India. Unlike Europeans who like to buy their God instantly across the counter, Indians do not mind standing in long queues for a glimpse of their God. This is why they shall withstand all the inclemencies of the Indian monsoon and patiently remain in long rows until they reach the inner shrine of their temples.

(M) Cricket : Cricket is the only universal language that Indians understand other than Caste (for Caste look above under (E)). Cricket is to the Indian nation what football is to the British, gymnastics to the Romanians, and (perhaps) baseball to the Americans. Try to get a feel for this game before going to India lest your ignorance shocks your host into exclaiming, ‘But that’s not cricket!’

(N) Communalism : Series of ostensibly unprovoked conflagrations among the Hindu and the Muslim Indians flare up every now and then, and this phenomenon is called Communalism which must, by the way, be carefully distinguished from Communism. The difference between the two is that in Communalism human beings kill one another in the name of God, in Communism they do the same but this time in the name of Class. Not that it makes much of a difference to those who actually get killed, does it?

(O) English : If you already speak English, welcome to the club, for most sophisticated and upwardly-mobile Indians speak English more or less fluently. You should not consider learning one of the manifold vernaculars, however, which the seething masses of the Indian villagers speak, for it is highly possible that your perfectly good intentions will be misread by the largely uneducated Indian nationalists who will accuse you at once of masquerading as a new Orientalist.

(P) Mosquitoes : Mosquitoes are a characteristic feature of the Indian cultural landscape but Indian blood has somehow become immune to their villainousness. Nevertheless, they still retain a great fondness for European and American blood (which led to a notorious speech last year in the Parliament by a member of the Opposition party in which he referred to the leader of India’s nationalist party as a Grand Mosquito), and you are requested to carry the requisite anti-malarial drugs with you.

(Q) Humour : Indians have no sense of humour; it is as bland as that, and there is nothing much for me to add on this point. A cryptic German philosopher once noted that it is the mark of a great woman that she needs someone else to interpret her; unfortunately, it has become the sign of a great Indian that he requires another person to criticize him, so singularly inept are Indians at the quintessentially British art of self-criticism. In particular, you must always remember that Indians are highly antipathetic to ‘dark’, ‘grim’, ‘dry’, ‘wry’, ‘sardonic’ and ‘ironic’ forms of humour which they routinely castigate as ‘anti-social’, ‘immature’, 'stereotypical', ‘childish’, ‘philistine’, and ‘nihilistic’. As a general rule, Indians want cheerful, bright, sunny, and happy-ending Bollywood movies, and passionately condemn dark, brooding, tragic, and melancholy films, and this, of course, is the very same India where casteism, bride-burning, starvation-deaths, homelessness, dowry-deaths, and female infanticide are the order of the day.

(R) Physical Contact : Avoid at all costs any sort of physical contact with Indian women in public. It might be permissible to shake hands with an Indian woman if you are in one of the four metropolitan cities, but do make sure that you are aware of her marital status before you do this. In the case of Hindu women, this is a very simple affair, for at the time of marriage, every Hindu husband puts a streak of bright red powder on the forehead of his wife, this being his way of saying that from that day onwards her blood is as good as his. (If you want to know why blood is thicker than water, you really have to see this for yourself.) Believe me, things are really weird down there in India. I remember this time when a famous Briton wrote that there are no full stops in India. Perhaps he was right, but it is equally true that India is overcrowded with exclamation marks!

(S) Transcendental Meditation : India is, of course, most famously the land of Arcadian peace where millions of stressed-out Europeans and Americans flock to in quest of the ‘inner Self’, the ‘true Spirit’, and the ‘real Essence’. If you happen to be one of these harrowed people, here is some advice : do not go to meditate and pontificate on the meaning of life sitting down under an ancient banyan tree near some village. The people there will all too easily mistake you for a reincarnation of their old guru, and that will be the end of your Search for Your-Self.

(T) Culture Wars : The Indian mind is highly bipolar which means that it can conceptualise reality only in terms of polarised entities : either This or That, either the East or the West, either Us or Them, and either Right or Wrong. It is no wonder then that when it comes to the factious question of Culture, Indians are divided down the middle and align themselves either with High Culture or with Low Culture. The former is usually championed by the Indian intelligentsia (sometimes with Princeton, Tubingen, or Oxford degrees) who believe that the role of Culture is to ennoble the social existence of India's illiterate folk, and that it is their Godgiven kismet to preach to them on the basis of their refined education in the established literary and musical canon. The latter, on the other hand, is the stomping ground of those who equate Culture with entertainment and declare that anything and everything is cultural so long as they are having fun. The former believe that Culture is the opium of the masses, and the latter that opium is the Culture of the intellectuals. Not quite a profound distinction, but then in India hardly anything is when it comes to the Cultural Wars.

(U) Colour : Most Indians like to do things in grand style with lots of fanfare, colour, cheer, and euphoric exultation, and this is called the celebration of plurality within the horizons of unity. Mostly, however, it is the fissiparous and discordant plurality that looms large over the people, and it usually requires an impending war with Pakistan to drive home the adrenalin point of unity into their tiny heads.

(V) Education : In the good olden days, the purpose of education was to instruct the student how to attain the bliss of the Atman (roughly speaking, this is Sanskrit for what you Westerners call the 'soul'). Now, of course, that Indians have joined the ranks of the soulless Westerners, most Indian parents would rather wish their children to become rocket-scientists, software consultants, or take up some variety of that sort of mind-numbing soul-draining job where they spend their entire life-time cramped into tiny cubicles inside gigantic offices.

(W) Driving : People in India drive on the left, which does not, however, necessarily make them receptive to the political Left. As a Russian punster once notoriously declared (before, that is, he was sent packing off to the Siberian mines) : 'I must first be sure that I am on the right side before I go to the left.' Nevertheless, Indians are pretty bad at their driving, and car, bus, and truck crashes happen with alarming regularity throughout the length and the breadth of the country.

(X) Shared Life : Indians have a strong sense of mutual subsistence, and the Indian nation is, in fact, a standing tribute to what some biologists refer to as the theory of reciprocal altruism. What Westerners would see as nepotism is regarded by Indians as an act of kindness towards the nearest of one's kin with the hope that they shall receive the same help in their own life. It is this admirable ability in Indians to move out from their selfish little cores towards their relatives that has led to the establishment of powerful family syndicates in the realms of business, politics, law, and industry throughout the country.

(Y) Dress For Foreigners : You should be adequately dressed in most parts of the country, and in particular if you are a woman you might consider wearing a sari or a salwar-kameez. This will get you through almost everywhere, though there will always be the occasional snooty intellectual who will sneer at your attempts to blend in by censuring you of neo-imperialism. Take off your shoes or sandals before going into temples or mosques. Most Indians have a nostalgic relationship with the Raj, and if you are British you might have quite a gripping conversation with some of the older white-haired Indians as you ruminate over high tea, polo, elephant hunting, William Shakespeare, John Keats, and what-not. Do not, however, step on their toes with references such as 'the Jewel in the Crown', 'Rudyard Kipling, the great novelist', 'Victoria, Empress of India', and all that delicate stuff.

(Z) The Marriage System : According to 2005 census figures, 99.9999% of Indian marriages are Arranged Marriages, and the remaining fraction are Love Marriages. (Which, incidentally, goes to show why the former marriages are usually so love-less.) The most fundamental thing about all Indian marriages is that Indian men want shy and passive women. The more uneducated Indian men will admit this immediately with no qualms over political correctness, though the more educated (and especially Anglicised) ones will strongly object by pointing out that their wives are university professors, income-tax consultants, and software engineers. Do not take these Indian men seriously, however, for this is simply their way of saying that they have read some obscure article on Feminism seven years ago on the internet or that they have picked up the acceptable vocabulary from their mates in the local pub. At the end of the day, the truth remains transparently clear : Indian men want shy and passive women. If you need any rigorous proof for this, just get me one Indian woman who disagrees with me on this count, and I shall beat the living daylights out of her.