Why are we like this only?

A friend in Mysore said some years ago the one thing she thanked the mobile phone revolution for was that the men she saw on the street were better behaved. “Earlier they could scratch their crotch with one hand and pick their nose with the other,” she reported. “Now with the phone to hold they can do only one of those things.”

Is that restraint, however, worth the ceaseless phone chatter broadcast all day on our streets? We get for free private details we don’t want of people we’re not interested in.

Indians, however, have always been fond of loud noises. Crackers, bhajans, the azaan, festivals, motor horns, political speeches are all, it seems, intended to turn us deaf by our 40s — just as some of our dishes kill our taste buds, our education system destroys our grey cells and the daily spectacle of public life obliterates our moral sense.

So I’m surprised to see our newspapers carrying syndicated reports from the Western press which inveigh against the noise of the vuvuzelas. Indians would hardly sympathise with these delicate British and American ears. One writer at the 1998 Cup did nothing but complain about the cigarette smoke in French restaurants. The Americans gave us cheap plastic, motor traffic and the macho smoker. Now they have terrorists, tea-partyers and oil spills; ensuring they have enough to crib about in 2020.

Good manners have no universal code. In many cultures, a guest who belches after a meal is being polite. Now when we talk of good manners, we mean Western, ‘Anglo’ manners. Handling a fork is more significant than handling a banana leaf full of self-willed payasam. In India, it is good manners to wash your mouth after a meal. These days, after eating in a restaurant, I increasingly find I’m the only one at my table who does so. Perhaps I’m keeping the wrong company.

However: Why can’t we Indians teach our children where to spit?
If we are to lay down a pan-human paradigm, we can only state that whatever is against the public good is bad. Spitting and eliminating body wastes in the open spread diseases. The fellow who smokes should go into a corner and poison only himself. Another peculiarly Indian idea (“idea of India”?) is that to throw garbage over the compound wall is to get rid of it altogether.

Spitting in public has certainly increased since I was a child. Those were the great socialist days, when ‘public health’ had a meaning. The government invested in it. There were posters, films and mass education programmes about the dangers of spitting: “You sow the seeds of TB!” In the 60s, you could admonish a fellow citizen for spitting or urinating in the open and shame him. Now spitting is the social phenomenon (well ahead of Facebook even in the cities). In Maharashtra, it seems to be an expression of manhood. Even in Kerala, a rare state where the socialist model actually achieved something of its potential, there are no longer any dry months.

But where is public health now? Most government doctors are half-hearted. What few public campaigns there are attack the fashionable diseases. The government is abdicating its role in health — as it has in education, roads and power — to the private sector. Why should the five-star doctors care for prevention? It brings no profits. Indeed, neglecting sanitation brings them more patients.

Our country does, unfortunately, need government sponsorship to tackle civic ills. This is the legacy of the socialist state, which followed on naturally from the Raj, which was itself patterned on Mughal feudalism. This is not only a question of depending on handouts. It is also about role models. It’s a complex business.

The recent disclosure that rural India has more mobile phones than toilets made a bit of a stink. It seemed to prove that we rank sanitation pretty low. But the urban media weren’t quite sure of how to play the story. After all, the mobile is upwardly mobile, and signifies networking and entrepreneurship, both weighty words to them. It was this newspaper, two months ago, which gave us another angle. The government builds you a toilet, in much of India; but in much of India, possession of a toilet rules out Below Poverty Line status. How cute! And how acute of the rural Indian, to make the choice.
“Money has no smell,” as a Roman emperor observed when he clapped a tax on public toilets.

Since it is largely by Western codes that we rank our worth, let’s see how far behind we are on civic sense. In 1900, the rural American or Western European had many of the bad habits of today’s rural Indian. (Americans chewed tobacco, and spat, with dedication.) The average city-dweller wasn’t much better. Water closets were few. The chief reason people didn’t defecate in the open was that it was too cold. The rivers ran with sewage. In London, for instance, ale had been the preferred drink for centuries because the water was so bad.

What made the difference? With universal suffrage came universal education. True democracy cannot exist without that. Here we’re still paying lip service to education, passing laws that are not implemented. Look at the child labour act. In the West those laws were put into force, because there were enough educated people who were concerned.

A potent reason was that the elite set an example. There was an old aristocracy in Western Europe and a new one in America who adopted their style: Good breeding, good conduct (in public), soft speech. We read of how the rough diamonds of New York in the late 1800s, both financiers and Tammany Hall fixers, copied the manners of the Vanderbilts.

The ‘nabobs’ of London who grew rich on Indian trade in the 19th century aped the gentry, or married their daughters to them. The first thing Napoleon did when the dust of the Revolution had settled was to create new dukes and marquises and new liveries for the court.

The example of the elite filtered down through the urban populace and into the countryside. The elite are the successful people, the beautiful people. They’re the ones who have done well. Emulators take their business style, and with it their personal style. What example does India’s elite set the rural citizen?

I live in Lonavla, which is in many ways a weekend suburb of Bombay. The city’s rich come here to relieve their tensions. We natives are keen observers.

The first thing we notice is that the weekenders behave in ways they never would at home. In the city, residents’ associations don’t let you throw your garbage anywhere you like. (That’s another piece of ill luck for us: In the West, civic sense came before plastics.) Here the city types revel in conspicuous consumption and conspicuous disposal. It’s another way of releasing tensions. They throw loud and late parties. They drink in public. They break traffic rules.

The lumpen watches the elite closely. He sees how our politicians, cricketers and filmstars behave. He sees how rarely good manners achieve anything. Everyone lies. A filmstar breaks hunting laws, a drunken princeling in a sports car leaves behind a row of corpses. They buy off the law. A police officer hounds a schoolgirl to death and bares his teeth for the cameras.

I don’t know that we’re so unfortunate in having no aristocracy to ape, either. Whether it’s the Maharaja of Patiala’s loud-mouthedness in Punjab or the Nawab of Pataudi’s silence at the IPL, or the Scindia shenanigans, our erstwhile blue blood runs pretty thin these days. We are a big, brawling, dirty nation and there’s no incentive to change. The Indian, by and large, remains uncouth because he sees no percentage in being couth.