I don’t understand India, but I finally understand that there is something to understand. A few years ago, a Rudyard Kipling quote adorned my apartment wall in Washington, DC:
“All India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues; shaken and consumed in the fires of their own Zeal; dreamers, babblers, and visionaries: as it has been from the beginning and will continue to the end.”
My India was Kipling’s India: a country of the unwashed masses, wondrous and unbelievable and somehow patched together with some mystical thread. Now, seeing Mumbai, southern Maharashtra and Goa for the first time in 8 years, I think this interpretation is, if not patronizing, then exceedingly lazy.
Accepting India’s chaos and mystique left me blind to the logic behind how it functions. On Goa highways, facing head-on cars at every pass seemed terrifying, until I considered a worse fate: polite traffic backed up for hundreds of kilometers on a two-lane highway. In Sawant Wadi, I wondered why everyone exposed themselves to dirt from open-toed sandals; until I realized that scorpions and spiders have nowhere to hide in chappals. Such lifestyles may not be my ideal, but they strike me as rational responses to life in a country with an overwhelming density of people and perils.
Trying to understand India has also helped me understand my family’s frustrations with the country. WiFi cut out when we were watching movie trailers on YouTube. “This is how you know you live in a developing country,” my cousin sighed. A distant uncle from Delhi related the story of how he must bribe multiple bureaucrats – from the secretary to the stamp approver – just to send a parcel abroad. “It ruins my entire day,” he spat.
These are more than just charming quirks; they are irredeemable flaws of infrastructure and governance that require attention from India’s large generation of youth.
“Bombay is so dirty and crowded now,” another cousin lamented. “It’s becoming like New York.”
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My Kaka, a brilliant man, began the story of why he moved to the States like this: “Even when I was little, I have never been able to stand the dirt.”
After graduating as a surgeon from medical college in Bombay, he attempted to open his own practice in Dombivli. However, keep patients was hard, and he was constantly pressured into referring hs patients to other networks of doctors to get kickbacks. Eventually, he threw up his hands and opted to pursue a US residency as a urologist.
In his words, “I could not stand the heat, so I got out of the kitchen.”
Here is an explanation I would not have considered – rather than having fought and emerged as the smartest and most deserving of a berth in a US residency, he was ignominiously expelled, unable to improvise his way to success like many of his peers.
My Kaki added a bookend to his story: “India really is the filthiest country in the world.”
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When my eldest Kaka repeats the phrase, “Indians are resilient people,” he no longer sounds apologetic or tired, but defiant – in spite of.
Perhaps I will replace the quote with a more noble interpretation exposited by the writer Suketu Mehta. Upon returning to his Bombay after 35 years to see what it had become, he could only proclaim: “This fucking city.”