Bane and boon: Traffic & vegetarianism
By Shashi Tharoor
Weekly Column "Shashi on Sunday" in "The Times of India"
December 09, 2007

Continuing our "A-Z of Being Indian," we've reached the letter T. What are the items that are part of the cultural consciousness of most Indians?

Traffic: Is the bane of all Indian commuters. Chaos and crowds are hardly unknown elsewhere, but our extraordinary variety of means of transportation has long since outstripped the length and breadth of our roads, and the problem gets worse each month. And the constituents of Indian traffic make for fairly remarkable conditions. Only in India can one get stuck in a jam at a non-functioning traffic light amidst six Ambassadors in various states of disrepair, five Korean vehicles of assorted sizes, a Maruti almost crushed underfoot by a Tata Sumo, two minibuses facing each other both on the wrong side of the road, a tram madly if impotently ringing its bell, three buses heading in different directions with passengers dangling from the tailboards and from each other, six rickshaws, one autorickshaw with a broken silencer, a homesick cow, a small flock of goats milling about at the zebra crossing and some 300 pedestrians picking their way gingerly through the confusion. Exaggeration? It happened to me on my last visit to Kolkata.

Underdevelopment: Used to be the condition erroneously ascribed to India by economic theoreticians, who looked at some of our labour-intensive agricultural techniques and promptly concluded that we were primitive. In fact, everything in India is overdeveloped, particularly the social structure, the bureaucracy, the political process, the monetary system, the university network, the industrial base and (as Galbraith tactlessly observed) the women. Given its economic and imperial history in a number of previous Golden Ages under Ashoka, Vikramaditya and Akbar, India is not underdeveloped at all; it is, as I argued in The Great Indian Novel, a highly developed country in an advanced state of decay. Now that we are cleaning up the dilapidation and glitzy malls are sprouting all over what used to be our mofussil areas, and real estate values are going through the roof (usually before the roof is even constructed), India may soon give "overdevelopment" a whole new meaning.

Unemployment: Is a serious social evil, with the talents and skills of a vast army of ill-educated people being wasted because the economy is unable to absorb them. There are more unemployed engineers in India alone than there are qualified engineers in the whole of East Africa. Part of the problem is that a number of Indians are being educated out of a job; their learning makes them unsuitable for the work that is available. But there is also an urgent need to create more manufacturing and service industries to absorb and employ people (the entire IT industry only accounts for a million jobs in a country of over a billion people). And remedial training, to make up for the deficiencies of some of our less prominent educational institutions, is also essential: companies would have people they could hire if they were prepared to invest in training them to par. The unemployment statistics would look even worse if they took into account the vast army of those who actually hold jobs but have nothing to do in them, a form of unemployment particularly prevalent in government service and which, therefore, carries great social prestige.

UP: Or Uttar Pradesh, is a state in north India which accounts for 10% of our population, 20% of our industry, 40% of our pollution and 80% of our prime ministers.

Varanasi: Is the new(ish) name for Benares. It was also the old name for Benares, which is why it has been revived, but there is an older name still, Kashi, and that's where most South Indian pilgrims think they're going when they buy a ticket to Varanasi. It is a town that still attracts sadhus, mendicants and long-haired seekers of truth to its ghats and temples. The Ganga at Varanasi is the best place for Hindus to wash their sins away, and after what the press has revealed about police brutality in the city's jails and thanas, that may be just as well.

Vegetarianism: Doesn't have it so good elsewhere. India enjoys a long tradition of respectable vegetarian cuisine, which is more than can be said for almost any other culture on earth (Chinese being the only exception, but then the Chinese dress up their vegetarian fare to look and taste as much like meat as possible, which rather misses the point). Only in India can one attend a dinner in the certainty of not having to starve for one's principles; only in India do restaurants and five-star hotels serve buffets with separate tables marked 'veg' and 'non-veg', and only our country's airlines offer you the choice of a vegetarian meal without having to pre-book it. Vegetarianism in India, particularly if it is for religious reasons, can range from a total rejection of animal products to a refusal to contemplate even vegetables that have grown underground, though an increasing number of 'vegans' or 'eggetarians' simply don't want to bite into anything that, in its natural state, might have bitten them back.