So Indians change lanes at will, usually without using a turn signal. Running a traffic light is not a serious event either. In the middle of all this, pedestrians run across the road with glee.
India is a commotion. In Mumbai, people dangle from the doors of the local trains for a more ventilated ride, they travel on the roof, they risk death by crossing the tracks just to save themselves the trouble of taking the footbridges. Life goes on this way.
At the heart of this condition is an important Indian character — the uncompromising practicality of the individual, an untamed form of great personal freedom and informality. Every person, irrespective of his level of education or social background, will do what is most convenient to him in the short term. All rules and systems are subordinate to the sheer force of practicality.
Practicality is a crucial survival tool in a difficult nation. Many Indians who have managed to achieve comfortable lives today distinctly remember the poverty of their parents. The history of prosperity is India’s shortest history. The full benefits of economic liberalisation that began in the early ’90s have only recently begun to materialise.
Resourcefulness when the odds are against you even has a Hindi word for it: ‘jugaad.’ In a recent column on ‘jugaad’ in the ‘International Herald Tribune’, Anand Giridharadas described a rustic Indian invention, a truck “tossed together, saladlike” from scrap and wood.
The essay was much discussed by English-speaking Indians. More than the villagers, it is the Indian elite who talk of ‘jugaad’ with fondness. They think it is cool. ‘Jugaad’ has entered popular culture in India, and a day may soon come when English papers in the country will finally stop italicising it.
But ‘jugaad’ is overrated. In fact, ‘jugaad’ is the problem.
The nation’s infatuation with its own practicality at every level has created a society that is unable to truly respect values. Values are important not because they are the rules of a supernatural force. They are important because they are good ideas in the long term.
The civil rights activist and lawyer Prashant Bhushan says that independent India did not get enough time to build the character of its society. While the value systems of Indian institutions were weak before the economic reforms of the early ’90s, the speed of privatisation in the last two decades has exacerbated the situation. It has “increased the demand for corruption,” he said.
Indians do express anger over the financial corruption of their elected leaders, but at the same time, they tolerate it as a way of the world. A revolutionary march on the streets against the corruption of politicians is unlikely.
It is not surprising then that one of the most corrupt institutions in the country is the very institution that the people of India directly create — Indian politics.
Both are same
The current union government that is led by the Congress party is caught in a scam that involves illegally underselling mobile telephony licences to telecom companies. In 2001, when the Bharatiya Janata Party was in power, its president at the time, Bangaru Laxman, was caught on camera accepting a bribe. Regional political parties do not fare any better.
India’s self-interested practicality is a cultural smog that has spread far and wide, including the high places of traditional idealism — Indian journalism, for instance. The Indian media are among the very few institutions in the country that would discuss ethics without a guffaw. But commercial considerations have deeply infested journalism, too.
In a country where the wink and the nudge of practicality triumph over idealism, editors find it hard to protect their journalistic integrity. Many of the most influential newspapers and television channels sell editorial space, some discreetly, others overtly.
But there is another form of Indian practicality, and it is not an opposing force of idealism. It is complex and unsettling. It is a way of getting on with life in the face of extraordinary circumstances — the harsh realities of Indian life that include natural calamities.
In 2001, hours after a major earthquake struck the western state of Gujarat, I visited the towns and villages that had been flattened. On the site of a collapsed building, an army operation was under way to rescue a man who was buried in the debris. As the hours went by, and the efforts seemed futile, a tired soldier told me that a relative of the trapped person had approached him to kill the man on humanitarian grounds.
In another instance, in a village near the town of Anjar, a man was sitting on the rubble of his house and trying to cut open a steel cupboard. Buried in the debris below him was his 16-year-old son. But the man was focused on removing his valuables from the cupboard. He had heard that the bulldozers would soon arrive to completely raze the fallen structure. Among his valuables, he said, were perfume bottles.