A question with 1.21 billion answers

Cool beads of perspiration trickled down a can of Coca-Cola forming a water ring on the table. The smell of hot samosas spread through the little open air eatery as the cook brought in a fresh batch from the kitchen and placed them in a glass compartment for all to see and none to touch. As soon as the samosas made their way into the public eye, an army of people crowded around the cash counter to pay and get their daily fix of the delightful savory treat. Some shouted at the top of their voices to make their orders heard, while others just pushed and pulled through the crowd to get as close to the counter as possible. A group of American tourists took a break from enjoying the samosas and whipped out their cameras to capture yet another glimpse of chaos in this seemingly maddening country called India. “Why don’t they queue up instead of crowding the counter?” asked one American to another.

Emma Jones took another swig of her coke to wash down the spiciness of her samosa. As a doctorate student studying Indian culture at the University of Oxford and currently on her third trip to India, she smiled to herself at the naivety of the American. Her professor, Dr. Avinash Kumar, had cautioned her long ago that it is futile to try to understand India from a western world perspective. Just like the intricacies of differential calculus are of little use in understanding literature, the concepts of culture and society as formed in the west serve little purpose in understanding the enigma that is India. She had long ago stopped wondering why Indians don’t queue up at the cash counter unless forced to, why don’t they answer a question with a direct yes or no instead of rambling on and sounding noncommittal with frequent uses of words like ‘mostly’ and ‘probably’, and other such things that exasperated most of the western world. She had been rather quick to realize that there was no linear model or well-defined matrix used in the study of cultures that could capture India in its entirety.

The objective of her research work was to make an attempt at identifying the strong but invisible threads that held this land of mind boggling diversity together. By now all she had learned was that India is more than the sum of its contradictions. But how could she go about understanding an ageless civilization that has educated the world’s largest pool of engineers and scientists, yet is home to the world’s largest illiterate population? How does one make sense of a country that has a vast desert (Thar Desert) in close proximity to lush alluvial plains (Indo-Gangetic Plains) believed to be one of the most fertile regions in the world? It never ceased to amaze her how a country that had the world’s largest snow covered region outside the polar caps was also one of the hottest places on the face of the planet. It seemed like any truism about India could be immediately contradicted by another truism. The truth about India, she often thought, is that there are many truths. Multiple truths - once again, a concept that perplexed most of the linearity and standardization obsessed west.

She licked the last bits of the samosa from her fingers and proceeded to wash her hands at the banyan tree next to the roadside dhaba (café) that had now become her regular haunt. A little kid poured water from a steel jug and helped her wash her hands and asked, “Very hot today, no?” She smiled and said “I don’t mind the heat; I am used to it now.” The kid just smiled and she realized that she had spoken far more English than he could understand. It always amused her when Indians used the word ‘no’ at the end of every other sentence. “You had a comfortable flight, no?”, “The taxi driver didn’t charge you extra for luggage, no?” etc. Her favorite still remained, “Please join us for lunch, no!”

She started walking back through the crowded streets towards her hotel absorbing the sights and sounds around her. “The only way to start understanding India is to surrender to it and to embrace it with all its craziness, chaos, and inefficiencies”, Dr. Kumar had said. “As you immerse yourself in this cauldron of diverse geographies, multiple languages, different faiths and ideologies, you will start to realize that it is a society impossible to parameterize for general understanding. In India very few things are black or white and everything is sprinkled across a vast spectrum of grey where even black is thought of as very dark grey and white as very light grey”. Over the years, Emma had realized that the last statement was probably true. Indians did seem very comfortable with chaos and obscurity, something that freaked out most of the western world. They had even coined a word for getting things done amidst total chaos – “jugaad”. It’s a word that doesn’t even have an accurate English translation, simply because the western world probably never thought that it is possible to live life comfortably without standardization and predictability. But how was it that a civilization comfortable with fuzzy logic managed to produce the world’s largest fleet of software engineers who have to adopt binary logic for problem solving? “Yet another unresolved contradiction in the endless list”, she mumbled to herself as she entered her hotel room.

Once again it was the time of the day for the same realization to hit her once again – a realization of getting nowhere with her research work. Earlier she would get depressed when such thoughts hit her but off late she had started not worrying about it. One of the tasks that were assigned to her on this study tour was to maintain a journal and to capture her thoughts about India every day in one crisp sentence. She took out her journal and wrote – “Understanding India requires developing a comfort with fuzzy logic over binary logic, comfort with contextual thinking over standardized thinking, comfort with relative ideologies over absolute ideologies, and opening up to the notion of cyclic reasoning over linear reasoning.”

She closed the journal and heaved a sigh of relief. She had been working hard for the last few days and was going to a night club with some of her local associates to party all night. She promised herself not to think about work until the next Monday and started thinking about what to wear. As she counted the currency notes in her purse she saw the country’s national motto printed on it: Satyameva Jayate i.e. truth alone triumphs. “Whose truth?”, she wondered.

A question that has 1.21 billion answers if the 2011 census hasn’t undercounted us again.