Land of socialism, Tendulkar and tigers
By Shashi Tharoor
Weekly Column "Shashi on Sunday" in "The Times of India"
November 18, 2007

Back to our ‘‘A-Z of Being Indian’’, in which we ask ourselves, alphabetically, about the shared cultural assumptions of our nationhood....

Singh, Khushwant:

If one were to single out an Indian journalist whose name has evoked instant reactions across the land for the longest time, one would not look beyond Khushwant Singh. No other man could be remembered for two achievements so different as revealing the existence of the female torso to the incredulous readership of the formerly staid Illustrated Weekly of India and returning his Padma Shri to an equally stunned President Zail Singh. <> Khushwant Singh is revered by many for making bluntness and candour respectable in a profession that thrived on euphemism and ellipsis, for teaching journalists that it was not incompatible with their trade to get up from their desks, and for showing readers for the first time that writing was meant to be enjoyed as much as admired. He is condemned by an equal number of critics for what they see as his salivating lasciviousness, his tiresomely idiosyncratic obsessions and his complete lack of either taste or discretion. No English-speaking Indian reader is neutral about Khushwant Singh: the one thing he does not do is leave his readers cold. May he live to be a hundred, and may he continue to amuse, delight and provoke well past that landmark.

Socialism:

Is the political credo of India’s left wing. It was also the credo of India’s right wing (remember when the BJP claimed ‘‘Gandhian Socialism’’ as its ruling ideology?), its centre, its ruling party and all its editorialists. You could own land, fancy apartments and cars and call yourself a socialist; the dominant principle of Indian socialism is ‘‘do as i say, not as i do’’. It’s only since 1991 that it has become acceptable in India for some people not to be socialists, but the vast majority still pay lip-service to the creed, whether or not they implement its tenets in policy or practice.

Tagore, Rabindranath:

Is the Shakespeare of the country, our greatest litterateur and a genius on the da Vinci scale, who wrote novels, short stories, plays, poems, and songs, who founded a new discipline of music (Rabindra Sangeet) and a new university of the arts (Santiniketan) and whose work, even in a poor translation, won India’s first Nobel Prize (and its only one for Literature).

Tagore towers over India’s cultural consciousness. His ‘Gitanjali’ still evokes admiration wherever it is read; his ‘Kabuliwallah’ is among the few short stories most Indians remember; and his famous poem, ‘‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high’’, inspires generations of Indian school-children long after the context of its composition has been forgotten. Tagore is also the only human being in the world to have composed the words and music to two separate national anthems, those of India and Bangladesh. Rabindranath Tagore would have won immortality in any of his chosen fields; instead he remains immortal in all.

The Taj Mahal:

Is the motif for India on countless tourist posters and has probably had more camera shutters clicked at it than any other edifice on the face of this earth. How easily one forgets that this unequalled monument of love is in fact a tomb, the burial place of a woman who suffered 13 times the pain of childbirth and died in agony at the 14th attempt. Perhaps that makes it all the more appropriate as a symbol of India - a land of beauty and grandeur amidst suffering and death.

Tata:

The dynasty that long represented the acceptable face of Indian capitalism: efficient, progressive, productive, honest, profitable and socially conscious. The Tatas gave India its first indigenous steel industry, its first five-star hotel, its first company town (Jamshedpur) and its first airline.

When Jamsetji Tata set up India’s first steel plant in the late 19th century in the teeth of British opposition, a prominent Englishman dismissed the endeavour by saying that he would personally eat every ounce of steel an Indian was capable of producing. Last year, the Tatas purchased British Steel (as part of Corus).

I am not sure which is more symbolic of the reversal of fortunes - that an Indian company now owns British Steel, or the earlier purchase by the Tatas of the premier British tea company, Tetley’s. That each sup of Tetley’s tea puts money into Indian coffers is poetic justice for which we must always be grateful to Tata.

Tendulkar, Sachin:

The sobriquet ‘Little Master’ was already taken, but Sachin Tendulkar was our sole ‘Boy Wonder’. By the time he was 14, people were speaking of him as potentially India’s greatest batsman ever, and after breaking onto the international scene as a precocious 16-year-old, he proceeded to fulfil that potential brilliantly. His records will long remain the stuff of cricketing legend, but what future generations will never know is the extraordinary weight of expectation that Sachin carried on his young shoulders every time he went out to bat, and the palpable sense of deflation that accompanied his every return to the pavilion.

Tigers:

Are India’s most significant, yet most fragile, conservation achievement. In 1900 there were about 35,000 tigers in India; by the time tiger shooting was banned under a 1972 law there were only 1,872 left, a decimation rate of 95% in 70 years.

Thanks largely to Project Tiger, established in 1973, that figure has slowly climbed up towards 3,000 again. The problem is that the tiger remains gravely endangered and conservation requires political sacrifices that are not easily made, notably relocation of villages to create tiger sanctuaries, and maintenance of adequate prey to sustain tiger populations.

Tigers need large areas of land relatively free from incompatible human uses, but how can India reconcile the agreed ecological goal of protecting tigers with the pursuit of equitable socio-economic development for the people of the affected areas? The PM’s ‘Tiger Task Force’ came up with ideas that, conservationists agree, have not yet solved the problem. Unless real political will is put behind it, India risks the extinction in the wild of this magnificent specimen of our natural diversity.