My Dog Timmy

Today I am sad. Today when I woke up and looked through my dusty window, I saw the sky awash with the pale lustre of a sad blue, heard gentle whispers of sadness in the crisp cold air, and felt shimmerings of an ancient sadness on the new green leaves of Spring. Today morning, when I saw the photograph of my dog Timmy on the desk, I suddenly remembered that it was the first anniversary of his death.

April 16, 2004 was the day when he had stretched himself out beside the black sofa and refused to wake up for his dinner. I had tried long and hard to come to terms, as they say, with his sudden death by resorting to various subterfuges. I would sometimes go out to meet my friends in the pub, and would only feel saddened by their warm cheerfulness. I would smile at their jokes, of course, not wishing to be a spoilsport, but I knew that my time with them was just a fleeting distraction that would soon end after the party was over. During the long day, I worked as a divorce lawyer with a legal firm in London, listening to countless men and women as they struggled with their own wretched pasts. I tried to convince myself that there were billions of human beings in the world whose lives were torn apart by searing pain, and that they had endured far greater calamities than my own loss of Timmy. And yet when I would come home in the evening to my flat, all my powers of reasoning would desert me at once, and I would once again feel the absence of Timmy burrowing a deep hole into me.

I would go out for morning walks in the park sometimes, and see happy little children playing around and running after their dogs. I would see dogs in people's cars, near supermarkets, beside babies' prams, at picnic parties, on neighbours' gardens, and with homeless people; and all of them would remind me of Timmy. Timmy was everywhere as the great absence that was more present to me than anything or anyone else. Timmy dead seemed more alive to me than he had ever been when he had lived with me in flesh and blood.

That is why I am sad today. And that is why this post has nothing grand to say, it has no moral for the day, no ironic twist, no conclusion to the tale, no justification for my misery, and no cheerful thought to help you get along with your own life. I can only write these lines :

Dear river of life

Flow on, flow, flow

But tonight

I shall not set

My frail boat on you.

The Memorable Animal

In the 19th and the 20th centuries, thinkers of various stripes were fond of coining their own definitions of homo sapiens; for some of them, Man was a political animal, for others, an economic animal, for a few, a religious animal, and for quite many of them, a symbolic animal. If I were to add my own to this list, it would go as : Man is a memorable animal. (How memorable this definition itself is must remain a matter on which only time can have the last word.) This is a condensed manner of saying that we human beings are a complex tapestry that is woven together out of the multi-coloured strands of what we remember about ourselves, of what we can recollect only with some effort, of what we have actually forgotten, and of what we have tried but failed to forget. The tapestry itself is constantly being woven and re-woven as we temporal beings move ahead through our lives, and in some dramatic cases it might be drastically unravelled which, in turn, may lead towards the formation of a new tapestry. Here are three types of tapestries.

Tapestry 1 : It is 4:20 in the afternoon on November 24, 1924. Augusta Philippa Slade sits at the window in her London apartment beside the Thames looking at the clandestine figures in the mist moving about under the yellow lamps. Suddenly, the boiling kettle whistles behind her in the kitchen, once, twice, and thrice. The sharp kettle-shrieks remind her of the steam train that would take her and her husband from the heat and the dust of Delhi to the cool climes of Shimla high up in the mountains when they were living in India in 1911. And now she remembers the gentle dusks in India. Her palatial mansion would be very silent at that time, and she would stand at the massive wooden door looking down into the rainy valley. The natives would be lighting their earthen lamps, and the valley would glitter with long rows of tiny lights like shining pearls on a necklace. Augusta would then feel ravaged by an excruciating loneliness, as if the silence of the empty dusk was slowly sinking into her body and was hollowing her out. She is suddenly shaken out of her reverie by her husband Lord Hilton, 'Augusta! Can I have my tea now, please? And for heaven's sake do something about that smelly dog of yours. It has been whining the whole afternoon.'

Tapestry 2 : Professor Joachim Weiszentrop goes to the British Museum to look up some old records for the next book that he is writing on how Londoners were affected by the German air-raids in 1945. He sits at one end of the South Room the entire morning, meticulously going through pile after pile of brown and brittle newspapers. And then he reads in the London Times for May 12, 1945 : 'Rosa Westerholm, aged 34, killed last night.' Professor Weiszentrop reads and re-reads those words for probably a hundred times. No, he keeps on saying to himself, it cannot be true. He is thinking of his wife Rosa Rosenbaum who died in Poland at the age of 34 before he was able to escape to England in 1942. He starts sobbing softly, and after a while, his whole body is shaken by violent convulsions. A library assistant runs up to him, 'Professor Weiszentrop, shall I call the ambulance?'

Tapestry 3 : The old archaelogist, Mr. Antoine Devereux, is in Turkey on probably the last field-trip of his life. On a glorious Spring morning when the sky is brilliantly blue and the wind is whispering in his ears, he is digging on an ancient site beside a river when he finds the desiccated skeleton of a dog three feet into the moist earth. He looks behind him and sees his beautiful black dog barking wildly and running madly after the butterflies on the bank of the river. Then he begins to think about himself. What if someday in the distant future some archaeologist finds his skeleton on some forgotten river bank?

The Holy Family

Writing in Berlin on the eve of the Great War in 1914, a German philosopher called Arthur Oberhammer had declared : 'As long as human beings live in well-integrated families, belief in God shall not disappear from Europe. Dissolving the family is the only way ahead.' I had come across this statement all the way back in 1999, but it was only this morning that its truth was driven hard into me by a group of teenagers. A friend of mine introduced me this morning to a vicar of a church in the town of Shipley in West Yorkshire, England, and when he came to know that I am a student, technically speaking, of 'Theology and Religious Studies', he asked me if I would like to talk to a group of young people who came from nominally Christian families about Christianity.

I took up the challenge, somewhat rashly it might seem, and was introduced to four girls (Edna, Pauline, Jessica, and Natasha) and five boys (Robert, Ted, Thomas, Jonathan, and John), all of them in the age group 12 - 16. I started off by telling them about how God, according to the Bible at least, has created the world, loves humanity, and desires to bring all of us towards a blessed state of communion in the new life after death. Things went along pretty fine until I had the sudden thought that as a good student of Trinity College I should also tell them something about this exalted doctrine of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, and I decided to expound it to them forthwith. So I told them that God is Tri-Personal, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Now it so happened that nobody in my audience understood the phrase 'God the Father' and stared at me with eyes wide-open. Since reading books written by atheists and other God-bashers is part of my daily bread, I jumped to the conclusion that my young friends had an issue with the word 'God'. But no, they told me, they understood pretty clearly what 'God' referred to, but they had no idea what the word 'Father' was doing there. It took me some time before I was able to unravel the mystery : it so turned out that the parents of all of the four girls and the five boys had got divorced when they were only one or two years old, and they had been brought up by their single mothers. Consequently, they had no idea what it meant to refer to God as a 'Father'.

Very good, I said, let me try a different tack now. What about God the Mother, I asked them? To this, they gave me various replies, all of which can be summarised as : 'Yuck! God as Mother? That would be horrible. I hate my mother. She is the source of all my misery in this world.'

So well, that was the end of my exposition of the doctrine of the ineffable Trinity. Oberhammer was indeed correct : the quickest, and perhaps the only, way to uproot belief in God is to dissolve the family.

Four Contemporary Paradoxes

(A) The more efficiently we are connected to people in distant parts of the world through the Net and email, the more disconnected we feel from those who are in the next room.

(B) The more we know how to do different things, the more we are unsure of precisely what we should do.

(C) The more we feel that we are able to predict the future and keep it resolutely under our control, the more we are filled with anxiety over unknown side-effects such as ecological catastrophes and nuclear fall-outs.

(D) The more we are able to save time, the more we are unsure about how to spend it.

My Niece's Wedding


When my niece, Nivedita, was 14 years old (this is the elder sister of the other niece for whom I bought, a few days ago, some bits of girly stuff; see the post on April 7), she had asked me one night to tell her a bed-time story. Thinking that at 14 years she was too old for Enid Blyton and too young for Edith Wharton, I had tried to strike a balance, so to speak, and had made up the following story for her.

In the year 1824, Emperor Albert Frederick III of the Zozenhollern dynasty ascended to the throne of the Hessian Empire, and, being an amateur horologist, summoned to his royal court watch-makers from the distant ends of Europe. Some came from Lisbon, a few from Venice, many from Krakow, one from Zurich, and three even all the way from St. Petersburg, all of them overloaded with their contraptions. The Emperor examined all of them over a period of one week, and finally declared that the watch-maker from Zurich, Franz Ferdinand Bauer, would join his court.

Bauer spent a happy first six months inspecting the various clocks, time-pieces, and watches in the royal palace, polishing up their glass and silver, and making some additions of his own choice to them. The Emperor had asked him to give him a model for a new watch never produced or seen anywhere else in Europe at the end of six months, and Bauer fully satisfied His Highness with his design for a magnificent clock truly worthy of a royal being. In this manner, Bauer spent two years at the court, producing a new design every six months. In the third year, however, the Emperor declared that he wanted a new design every two months, and as the years went by he began to reduce the time-interval gradually. First, he wanted a novel design every month, then every two weeks, then every one week, until finally one year, he demanded that Bauer produce for him a new blueprint every morning.

Bauer strove wildly to meet the Emperor's demands for five years, producing a fresh model every morning. One day, however, he realised that he was on an impossible mission, for he was trying to beat time with time, and no matter how fast he would try he would never win this battle. As the days passed by, he began to feel more and more that he had annihilated time and that he was living in a timeless Now that was stretched out in both directions into the infinite past and into the infinite future. One evening, he collapsed in the court when he was showing the Emperor another design, and returned to his home-town of Zurich a week later, a broken man. Bauer was never able to look at a clock ever again in his life.

After a few years, however, he slowly recovered and began to train some young men of Zurich in the art of making watches, and it is these men who started the noble tradition of Swiss clock-making. It is said that in honour to Bauer no maker of the exquisite Swiss clocks ever wears a Swiss watch on his hand, nor keeps any Swiss clock at his bed-side.

Nivedita, at that time, did not quite like my story, and said to me, 'How typical of you to tell me such a weepy tale! Do you have to send me to sleep in tears?' Yesterday evening, however, I was reminded in a most pleasant manner how fuzzy the dividing line between 'fact' and 'fiction' is. I received an email from Nivedita : she has become engaged to a Swiss clock-maker in Lausanne who never wears any watches, nor uses a Swiss alarm-clock, and they will be getting married on June 5 in a Catholic Church in Zurich which is the only Church there to have no clocks. To which I instinctively said to myself, 'Phew! What a relief! What would have happened if I had instead told Nivedita a story about a stock-broker in the City who is likewise on Bauer's impossible mission and is similarly out to annihilate time?'

WHY?

(1) If something 'goes without saying' why do people say it nevertheless?

(2) If money doesn't grow on trees, why do banks have branches?

(3) Why are boxing rings square?

Trinitarian Ironies

A little bit of irony centred around my college Trinity, Cambridge (UK). A few years ago, there was a report in one of the university newspapers alleging that Trinity owns shares in a company producing guns and other types of armament. A Trinitarian of the last century, G.F.Hardy (1877 - 1947) was one of the greatest pure mathematicians the world has ever known. He was a pacifist and claimed that one good thing about pure mathematics is that it can never be used to harm anybody. Sigh : Hardy would be horrified to know that today his work on the theory of prime numbers is used by governments in encrypting military secrets!

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.