M & N: Monsoon, Mother Teresa & Nehru
By Shashi Tharoor
Weekly Column "Shashi on Sunday" in "The Times of India"
September 23, 2007

Months ago we began an impromptu glossary of the shared assumptions of Indianness. So far we’ve made it to the letter M, where we pick up the thread.

Monsoon: Is not, as a Doon School student once put it, a French gentleman, but the season that sets our climate apart from the rest of the world's. Other lands have cold and fog and snow, and some tropical countries enjoy hot and hotter climates relieved by bursts of wetness, but few know the exhilaration of being lashed by monsoon rains for weeks on end, the frustration of vehicles stalled in the 180th successive year of flooded streets, the camaraderie of wading knee-deep in water with shins bared by the privileged and the proletarian alike, and, let’s face it, the relief of avoiding our responsibilities as life spirals helplessly to a halt. In our rural areas the monsoon is life-giving, the harbinger of hope for the next harvest, nourishing the parched earth, flooding the paddy-fields and filling the wells that sustain people, animals and plants. The monsoon is integral to the Indian experience; centuries ago, Kalidasa wrote these immortal lines about the monsoon - "a source of fascination to amorous women, the constant friend to trees, shrubs and creepers, the very life and breath of all living beings, this season of rains". No one who has experienced the monsoon can treat the rains of Western climes as anything but a nuisance; our rains, however, are an event.

Mother Teresa: With her compassion, her vigour and her faith, Mother Teresa brought light into the lives - and the deaths - of many miserable human beings who might never have known what it was to be touched by grace. Yet, for all her undoubted greatness, I cannot help squirming at the perversity of those Indians who take pride in her Nobel Prize, who instead of being shamed by the conditions that made the Prize possible, organised "committees of felicitation" when Mother Teresa returned to Kolkata with a Norwegian certificate clutched to her Indian passport. We Indians should actually be striving to create the kind of society that makes a Mother Teresa unnecessary.

Music: Enters every Indian ear; from the classical cadences of the sitar and the sarod to the lyrical lilt of catchy film-tunes, music is impossible to escape in India, whether blaring from your neighbour’s radio in the morning, broadcast on loudspeakers outside temples and tea-stalls all day or nocturnally available in the all-night concerts of classicians. To the undiscriminating connoisseur there is a vast range to be traversed between Carnatic and Hindustani music, morning ragas and mourning ragas, Ravi Shankar and Lata Mangeshkar. With Muslim ustads playing Hindu devotional ragas and Bollywood playback singers chanting Urdu lyrics, the music of India is the collective anthem of a hybrid civilisation. But music represents an even larger metaphor, for it sets the tone for the political life of modern India - in which, rather like traditional Indian music, the broad basic rules are firmly set, but within them one is free to improvise, unshackled by a written score.

Nationalisation: An act of socialist governance that consists of transferring banks, insurance companies, industries and other functioning institutions from the hands of competent capitalists into those of bumbling bureaucrats. The prevalence of nationalisation in the face of widespread evidence of its shortcomings, inefficiencies and failures testifies to the curious Indian credo that public losses are preferable to private profits. In other countries, this would be known as cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Nehru: Was as much the father of modern India as Mahatma Gandhi was of Indian independence. Nehru was a moody, idealistic intellectual who felt an almost mystical empathy with the toiling peasant masses; an aristocrat, born and accustomed to privilege, who had passionate socialist convictions; an Anglicised product of Harrow and Cambridge who spent over 10 years in British jails; an agnostic radical who became an unlikely protege of the saintly Mahatma. Few national political leaders have made as much of an impact on their nation’s ethos. It is to Jawaharlal Nehru that we owe the 'socialistic pattern of society', the dominance of the public sector over the 'commanding heights of the economy', parliamentary democracy, non-alignment, secularism, the electoral system, the IITs, respect for the judiciary, freedom of the press, the Nehru jacket, the Congress cap and, at several removes, Rahul Gandhi.

Nepotism: Or uncles granting jobs and favours to nephews, does not exist in India. None of our prime ministers, for instance, had uncles of any consequence.

Non-alignment: Was (and in theory still is) the basis of India's foreign policy and consists of equidistance from the superpowers, a concept challenged by both geography and reality, not to mention the lack of a second superpower to be equidistant from. Nonetheless non-alignment is still paid ritual obeisance by Indian diplomacy, which has been defined by a former doyen of South Block as being "like the love-making of an elephant: it is conducted at a high level, accompanied by much bellowing, and the results are not known for two years."