Indyeah! The beauty and the beast

Next time you visit Delhi, the capital of Incredible India, keep your ears open for one line - "Janta hai mera baap kaun hai?" ("Do you even know who my Dad is?") 

Yup! true, thats the line! It might make you wonder, there are so many people who don't know their dad here? Actually its not a question, its a moniker people here throw around to make sure the other person takes them, or at least their Dads, seriously! Incredible na :)

So whats this post about...a light-hearted (and non-pretentious) take on some observations like above which exist in India's colorful life...which has some beauty in it and some beast too... few things which most of us encounter day in and day out...but somehow recognize their true impact only when move out of this environment...Lastly a disclaimer (the value of which you will realize at the end of this post) - Not a single chinese, paki, even srilankan, or any other guy with shallow or deep grudge for India hasn't (yet) paid me for writing this! [i won't mind donations though] ;-) 

So here we begin with the beast first...

Lets start with the country's USP - Corruption - We are so good at being corrupt that everytime a traffic guy stops us, we reach for a 100 rupee note before reaching out for our license! A lean six sigma optimized process removing all "waste of time activities" like showing license, arguing over pollution certificate, etc. thus directly reaching to the end of transaction with one gandhi-imprinted document worth 100 bucks :)

Next comes our driving. The honking begins good 10 seconds before the light turns green, the lanes get violated like they dont exist, and your ever so beautiful newly minted Civic gets dented almost every month - infact every morning our roads become a playground for riders and the rage each one of them has accumulated (probably over last night's encounter, or the lack of it? :-p). To compare with, its almost boring to see driving in western cities - there it looks like dead people are driving like a robot without realizing the need to display human emotions via the wheel! So lame!! :)

Don't we love overtaking - overtake a car on the road, overtake a person entering the door in front of us, overtake to run for a seat in the bus, overtake to even get the icecream first! (we don't waste time in waiting, or maybe, its so frickin' moronic to believe in the stupid notion called courtesy!)

We drink, then shoot people in pubs and then we say 'jaanta hai mera baap kaun hai' (yes, now u get this is not spoken as a question :). So anytime you hear this phrase, you got 3 options - 1, come up with a more powerful 'baap' whose name you can throw around, 2 - merely forget confronting, or 3 - risk having a fist fight where u have no idea when the other party will get into a mood to play "shoot 'em up" tonight, with you not carrying even a kitchen knife!

We have a media which falls head over heels to cover what all shah-crook khan utters during his verbal diarrhea against the ever so eventful US process of stripping him to balls, or what script another minister has read today, rather than spend some time and resources on investigating the howdies of any big ticket scam. Sole silver lining here is our "Indyeah tv" which mostly concentrates its news on aliens and gods it sees on daily basis, sparing us the headbanging srk stories

We have an almost legal extortion system known as taxation! Argh...i knw it exists everywhere, even in the western world, but here, the funny part is that every tom, dick and harry except you, the taxpayer, sir, is a entitled to your tax money! You are supposed to sit and wonder how the jumbo govt machinery blows it on foreign trips for sarkari officials, non-existent roads and weird social schemes which benefit no ass. And if u wonder where is social security for taxpayers? LOL, probably the esteemed govt can give a simple 3-word answer - "fuck you sweety" :)

We profoundly love and embrace racism (southerners vs. northerners, bongs love to hate non-bongs, a gori is superior to dusky, sardars are always on wrong side of jokes, madrasis are eccentric blah blah...too much discrimination on too many basis points) but the hypocrisy comes to the shore when we get "real" upset when a poor shilpa shetty is "hurt" with couple of discriminatory remarks hurled by a brit on an a "managed" tv show in britain! And the rich starlet gets even richer owing to the fact that indian media showed her as a victim of racism LOL - funny fact is 99% of india doesnt even understand what was said to her!

Demand-and-supply equation is kinda screwed here most of the times, so we happily drink made-with-urea milk and bacteria-laced water and eat cabbage grown with injections, but we don't forget to make some noise when the sushi in that hip eatery doesn't taste "that authentic"

We kill people for overtaking us, or for parking in our space (sounds extreme? trust me, delhi belly can always surprise u)

We still take our scorpios and sonatas on the wrong side of the road to avoid driving 250 meters for the U-turn

So maybe, its still some time before we will reach the first 'i' of 'civilized' behavior

Genuine daily soap in India's life...or dope-driven cribbing...whatever all of above may have sounded like...but the fact is, if one lives out of india even for a very short period of time, maybe just as a tourist clicking pics in singapore, all of the above start coming to notice. The differences between here and there look so glaring that sometimes, at the cost of being branded rude, conceited, pretentious or whatever, one wonders - hasn't India become a somewhat creepy place with with little civility, little value for life, where things are mostly broken!?

Anyways, before this actually starts looking like i answered a paki's prayers to bash India head to toe, there are actually few things which i think make india work, which form the beauty inside the beast! Here we go:

Upbringing, too much study et al - Most middle class indian households give their kids a certain level of discipline, love n care. Two benefits - This creates an educated middle class whose kids are not scavenging weed every friday like in western societies (actually a big deal). Second, which is due to the focus on studies, many kids work hard and some get to become an engineer or a doc or atleast a decent graduate who can recite English. An interesting point to note here is our country's household obsession with Maths and science, which creates engineers down the line. If one notices, this obsession brought in a paradigm upgrade for an entire nation! The main theme of 80s Bollywood movies was India's angry 'unemployed' men, and suddenly with 90s network revolution of the Internet, which enabled IT outsourcing, this country saw itself ready to leverage a large math-oriented engineering talent pool which would catapult it to a different league and make India a massive knowledge driven IT economy. Though many indian IT firms don't need much of rocket science talent, but still, an engineering fresher who hasn't yet gotten a girlfriend is productive enough to earn some top dollar for the firm :). And once IT came, came along supporting jobs which rest of the graduates would absorb, and it became a relentless growth cycle. Another paradigm shift which IT revolution could have brought is - Bollywood shifted its focus from mind-numbing anger-driven melodrama to romantic dreamers which would appeal to a fresh and hopeful generation! Though Sunny Deol is still angry in his movies, but then, we all love some dig-out-handpump-with-bare-hands scenes, right? :)

Festivals - We have n-number of festivals some of which are real cool, fun and an amazing way to bring everyone together. Thankfully thats why we don't still need dad day or mom day or xyz day to make everyone and their neighbors acknowledge each other's existence.

Family - Probably the most notable difference on a serious note! New York might have maximum number of skyscrapers in the world or worlds' hippest clubs on Times Square, but its old still rely on old age homes beyond 65, its young still find it difficult to belong to their parents after 15 and those in between are too absorbed in their lives to think about anything else. In contrast, here in India, family system hasn't yet died away. So here parents have children and children have parents for a long time. It may be due to our thousand year old culture, but for whatever it is, it actually is something which adds lots of constructive value to the society. So here its cool to like your parents. Its still fine to live with them even when you have a job and probably its still cool to call a family a family. All in all, a major factor why the 'Upbringing' thing above works for India.

Looks emotionally charged, but these few things are the major glittering difference between here and there which makes India look different in a positive way, and look like the few beacons of shining light in a seemingly dark tunnel. 

So despite a 100 flaws like those listed above, India is still is the only place where family system and certain values do exist alongside MTV, girlfriends and highstreet clubs.

And that seems like an irresistible combination!!