A glossary of Indianness - the 'B' list
By Shashi Tharoor
Weekly Column "Shashi on Sunday" in "The Times of India"
April 29, 2007

Last week we initiated a glossary, which will unfold in this space during the year, of what it means to be an Indian: the assumptions and shared reference-points that constitute the cultural and intellectual baggage of every thinking Indian. I'm picking it up at 'B'.

Babri Masjid: The mosque that stood for nearly 470 years in Ayodhya before being demolished by a howling, chanting mob who never understood that you can never revenge yourself upon history, for history is its own revenge.

The Babri Masjid became the site where contending versions of history and faith fought each other over the rubble, where the very character and limitations of the Indian state were put on display for the world. Its destruction typifies a great national failure; the continuing impasse over what to put in its place reveals our talent for temporising, while the fundamental questions raised by the event remain unresolved. What could be better than a restored mosque side-by-side with a Ram mandir?

Bidis: Are, along with paan, India's most original and long-lasting vice. There are few more authentically Indian sights than a five-rupee bundle of bidis, brown-green leaves rolled around a sprinkling of tobacco and tied together with a string of pink cotton. They also represent one of India's great unfulfilled marketing opportunities. Made of wholly natural ingredients, low-tar and instantly biodegradable, bidis should prove eminently exportable to the ecology-conscious international smoking public.

If a cigarette had also those qualities it would rapidly become the brand-leader in its class. And there's no proven link between bidis and cancer, mainly because chronic bidi smokers usually die of something else first. In other words, for once we have the technology and are ahead of the competition. Is anyone in computerland listening?

Birla: Is a name attached to a number of leading Indian institutions: mandirs, planetariums, trusts, schools, clinics, institutes of technology, all of which have been made possible by a number of other leading institutions to which the Birla name is not attached, like Century Mills and Ambassador cars. (Also see Tata.)

Black money: Is the real currency of traditional Indian business, the fuel of election campaigns, the high-octane of film star contracts, the spark of real-estate deals. The vast majority who don't have any of it are condemned to irrelevance; the lack of black money is the real explanation for the relative weakness of the salaried middle-classes, with their printed payslips and taxes deducted at source.

Undeclared income is so widespread that its existence no longer shocks anyone; for all the years of liberalisation, the black economy is probably as large as the white one. If it's any consolation, this also means that all the official figures for India's GNP should be doubled to reflect reality, so the average Indian is only half as poor as he thought he was.

Bollywood: It's Indian culture's secret weapon, producing five times as many films as Hollywood — and taking India to the world, by bringing its brand of glitzy entertainment not just to the Indian diaspora in the US or UK but to the screens of Syrians and Senegalese.

A Senegalese friend told me of his illiterate mother who takes a bus to Dakar every month to watch a Bollywood film — she doesn't understand the Hindi dialogue and can't read the French subtitles, but she can still catch the spirit of the films and understand the story, and people like her look at India with stars in their eyes as a result. An Indian diplomat friend in Damascus a few years ago told me that the only publicly-displayed portraits that were as big as those of then-President Hafez al-Assad were those of Amitabh Bachchan. Without Bollywood, India would not loom as large in the global popular imagination.

Bureaucracy: Is simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art-forms. No other country has elevated to such a pinnacle of refinement the quintuplication of procedures and the slow unfolding of delays. It is almost a philosophical statement about Indian society: everything has its place and takes its time, and must go through the ritual process of passing through a number of hands, each of which has an allotted function to perform in the endless chain. Every official act in our country has five more stages to it than anywhere else and takes five times more people to fulfil. (Also see Unemployment.)

Buses: Are Indians' favourite means of transport, whether rattling along country roads taking villagers to melas or screeching through cities over laden with office-goers clinging to the sides, the window-bars, and the shirt-tails of other passengers. India knows a great variety of them, from dilapidated double-deckers to maniacal minibuses, which collectively constitute the cheapest mass public transportation system in the world. Regrettably the bus-drivers' tendency to plough into pedestrians and drive off bridges also makes it among the most dangerous.

More next time. Meanwhile, what items do you think should feature in this glossary, and why? Let me know!