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Enigma Of Survival

Change, continuity, pizzas, miniskirts, pride, disgust...

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Enigma Of Survival
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Similarly, I lived in the old Soviet Union, where, for all the evident rot and disillusion, the leadership spoke of a Soviet empire lasting a millennium; and no one predicted its sudden implosion. As a tributary to that, who, in the Cold War years, could have imagined that Nikita Khrushchev’s son would become, as he is today, a US ciizen?

As for events and unpredictability, I only have to remind myself that when I was first a correspondent in South Asia, I covered the administrations of three leaders: Indira Gandhi, Gen Zia-ul-Haq and Gen Zia-ur-Rahman. All died violently. My first big story in India was the death of Sanjay Gandhi; and later, I reported the murder of his brother.

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History instructs that no human enterprise is ordained or set in stone forever and unchanging. Instinct tells us that when young Mister or Miss Billion becomes an adult, India will be different, perhaps profoundly so. The new adults of 2025 might apply a searing critique to the way their fathers ran things. Forty or 50 years hence, India and Pakistan might have a demilitarised border, a common market, easy mutual access and huge financial savings that could be spent on education and clean water. Impossible... Maybe. I can only say that when I lived in Moscow I saw small countries, which had been buried under the Soviet concrete for half a century and more, rise to reclaim their freedom. From Moscow I watched as the Berlin Wall, built to be a permanent bulwark, crumbled like cake.

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It is worth remembering, too, that when India became independent, some western observers forecast the country’s disintegration. To the betting man it appeared that Pakistan, founded on one apparently uniting faith, was more likely to survive. The odds seemed stacked against India because it was an amorphous mass, beset by poverty and famine, comprising a bewildering diversity of languages, castes, religions, regions and tribes. Here was no classic nation state. Modern India and Indianness had to be imagined and invented. Nehru and India embarked on a daring act of faith.

The sceptics had good reason for their doubts. Famine was a critical problem for the first 25 years of independence; and the country was shaken by linguistic, communal and secessionist troubles. But India learnt that it was absorbent and resilient. Within its extraordinary diversity, there were always the seeds of tensions; but diversity also lay at the heart of the national idea. It was part of the evolving quality of Indianness.

When I arrived in India in 1980, Mrs Gandhi was beginning what turned out to be the tumultuous last years of her political career in which she struggled in the mire of her own making to impose her ideas of how India should be managed. In spite of the simmering political troubles, Delhi had a spacious and easygoing feel. In all its seasons there was something exhilarating about it. The Delhi air was clear and unpolluted; and traffic jams and the great suburban sprawl lay in the future. The avenue on which the prime minister lived was open and not the armed camp it later became. Mrs Gandhi was accessible and visible, not hemmed in by security men. You could see her meeting ordinary people at her morning darshans.When I went to see her once, she quickly disposed of my political questions, relaxed and started talking animatedly about the theatre in London.

The country had no proper highways to speak of-no change there-but the main roads were merely dangerous, not murderous and horrifically overcrowded. The telephone hardly worked, the laptop was science fiction. Sometimes I had to fly to a big city to telex a dispatch. I had a wonderful time travelling. I opened my notebook and let India write in it. Within reason, I was free to roam India (and to travel in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal) as I wished. Between the reporting of news events, I wrote numerous articles and vignettes describing the nature, texture and character of the country and the lives, occupations, aspirations and opinions of the people. It is a form of foreign reporting that has shrunk in much of the British press; but fashions change in journalism as in everything else.

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Although I ceased to be a resident correspondent in India after three years, I have returned on countless writing assignments. I can’t resist them. In 20 years, I have seen and reported many changes as well as brilliant spectacles and harrowing events. Between the obvious, often-reported and easily-illustrated contrasts of dazzling wealth and grinding poverty, there is a very large India in which millions have experienced significant improvement in their standard of living. There is a real pride in what India has achieved, a strong sense of Indianness. There is a pride, too, in a vigorous and properly critical press and a resolutely non-political army. But few people mince words about the failures and disappointments, the corruption, plundering and criminality of many politicians. Many times I have been told how ‘power has been passed from the horses to the donkeys’. There was barely any television when I arrived in India. Now, of course, it has a phenomenal impact and, like television in many parts of the world, is disparaged for its junk and American-style visual chewing gum.

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Recently, when I had lunch with Indian friends, we ate spicy chicken, curds and lentils. All except their 10-year-old grandson who devoured a horrible pink hot dog plastered with American mustard. That evening, in a hotel bar, I watched self-conscious girls in miniskirts, as noisy as mynahs, puffing smoke rings and trading western slang as they headed to the disco-the ‘hotel culture’ that Mrs Gandhi used to sniff at. Such things, along with glossy celebrity magazines, the cappuccino columnists, pizza parlours and rich-kid swagger, are to some minds the thin edge of an alien wedge, a cola-nisation undermining the Indian way of life. Just as in Mrs Gandhi’s day, when some of India’s ills were blamed on ‘the foreign hand’ and the bbc, there is a feeling, sometimes encouraged for cynical political reasons, that India in some unspecified fashion stands at risk from these outside influences.

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It stands reality on its head to propose seriously that Indian traditions, so powerful, so varied, so ancient and so thoroughly rooted, are vulnerable. Mass American culture will not sweep everything before it, in India or anywhere else. India will not be corrupted. It is clear to me that Indians wish passionately to remain Indian, dress Indian, eat Indian-and watch Indian in the cinema. It may be of some comfort to those who worry about perceived threats that in her recent book The Death of Distance, British writer Frances Cairncross concludes that cheap global communications and the Internet will reinforce and transform democracies. They will shift power downwards and strengthen local cultures. As Cairncross notes, tyrannies fear communications.

In any case, no living culture can be an enclave. In medieval times, people who sheltered behind castle walls and pulled up the drawbridge eventually starved. Rigid and brittle structures break. Supple ones survive and flourish. Languages advance and spread when they are adaptable, creative and find new forms; and traditions at large prosper when they absorb and process new ideas. Strength lies in pluralism and complexity as well as in faith. India’s wonderful cultures are strong enough to take what they want. And I have no doubt they will do so and remain deeply and authentically Indian. The writer Claudio Magris observed that the obsessive defence of one’s origins can sometimes be a form of regressive slavery as in other circumstances is a willing submission to being pushed around.

I have written of the pride people have in their country and its achievements as well as their unhappiness that much has been neglected in the fundamental framework of their civilisation: principally, education and water supply and electricity and transport. They are appalled by the lack of simple services. Perhaps young Mister or Miss Billion will have something to say to his/her forebears.

But I have seen, too, that if there are bad and corrupt men in politics and official life, there are many people, including politicians, who are decent, thoughtful and working to improve their India. Nations are built by such people. A friend asked me once: "What is better in shaping a nation, the optimist or the pessimist?" We debated for hours. I was in the optimist camp but I suppose the answer is that you need both. You need dreamers but you also need hard-headed and practical men and women, and sceptics, too; the flashy batsman as well as the toiling bowler.

India is both very old and relatively new; and, as I have observed myself, a modern Indianness, a modern Indian, have taken shape. Eternal India, yes; but, always, an evolving one. Identity is a quest that continues endlessly and is always open.

The Times of London
India File
Cobra Road: An Indian Journey
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