Top Quotes: “India: A Portrait” — Patrick French
Politics
“He became Maharaja of Jodhpur just as India was about to become free. On the personal side, the 23-year-old intended shortly to breach protocol by marrying a European, although not long before that he had taken a sixteen-year-old princess from Gujarat as his first bride. He dealt with the tension by going off on pig-sticking hunts, but the decisions facing him could not be postponed because he was in an unexpectedly important political position. Jodhpur bordered the emerging Muslim homeland of Pakistan, and its founder, Jinnah, had asked him to break with India and link his kingdom to the new nation. Unfortunately, the prince and most of his people were Hindu. Jinnah offered extraordinarily favourable terms: the maharaja could use Karachi as a free port, purchase whatever weapons he wanted, control the railway line to Sindh and receive free grain for famine relief. It sounded like a good deal. He agreed to sign up for Pakistan. Then, as he was about to touch his fountain pen to the paper, he learned that none of his fellow Rajput princes had yet thrown in their lot with the Pakistanis and he got cold feet. He told Jinnah he would go home and think about it.”
“Any member of a community may be distinct, but the wholesale effect of involuntary group identity is stronger in India than in most other countries. This is caused by two things: the fact that, until recently, marriage outside your community was difficult and unusual, and the absence of substantive immigration. There has been no large-scale migration to India for around 500 years, since the arrival of Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur’s armies about the time the first Europeans were peopling America. Protected geographically by the sea and by the Himalayas, Indian society managed to remain intact to an extraordinary degree during the colonial period. This caused, inevitably, a measure of integration or understanding between the existing communities.”
“At this moment of surprise, Indira Gandhi’s entourage suggested she make a bid for power. The most obvious candidate for prime minister, the respected southern politician K. Kamaraj, declined to stand with the plaintive question: “No English, no Hindi. How?” Another likely leader, Morarji Desai, had too many opponents. For Mrs. Gandhi the opportunity was irresistible: a woman who had long felt unappreciated was being offered an extraordinary chance. She had no experience of governing but had watched her father at close quarters for years.”
“One of his particular concerns was the rapid rise of India’s population, which had almost doubled since independence. Notoriously, men were sterilized by a team led by one of Sanjay’s friends, the jewellery designer Rukhsana Sultana. The population controllers paraded through the streets of Delhi, drumming up recruits. In numerous cases the operation was done without consent, although the usual reward was a tin of cooking oil, a transistor radio or R$120. “All our vasectomies,” Sultana told the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, “were done in a lovely air-conditioned cellar. I and my workers had to sweat it off on the street.””
“Most voters did not see her as a “white skin”; with her dark hair and light brown Italian complexion, she looked as if she might be from a similar ethnic background to the Nehrus, high-caste north Indians. Had she been of blond northern European or black African origin, she would never have been credible as an Indian leader. In a country where skin tone is noticed, this was part of her allure. It helped too that she was called Sonia — it was a name, like Natasha, which had become popular in the 1960s during India’s love-in with Russia, and did not mark her as an outsider.”
“Voting was held across India in five phases over successive weeks, to allow the election commission to shift 2.1 million police around the country to monitor 714 million potential voters.”
“Every MP in the Lok Sabha under the age of thirty had in effect inherited a seat, and more than two thirds of the sixty-six MPs aged forty or under were HMPs. In addition, this new wave of Indian lawmakers would have a decade’s advantage in politics over their peers, since the average MP who had benefited from family politics was almost ten years younger than those who had arrived with “no significant family background.” In the Congress party, the situation was yet more extreme: every Congress MP under the age of thirty-five was an HMP. If the trend continued, it was possible that most members of the Indian Parliament would be there by heredity alone, and the nation would be back to where it had started before the freedom struggle, with rule by a hereditary monarch and assorted Indian princelings.
Already, the tendency to turn politics into a family business was being emulated across northern India at state level, with legislators nominating children and spouses. There was no reason to believe it was not also spreading to the districts. Nepotism was written into the working of democracy, as it was in other areas of Indian life, ranging from medicine and the legal profession to the media and the film industry. An advert for an investment website encapsulated this attitude, which was that even if you were self-made you would do your best to dispense patronage if you made it to the top: beside a photograph of an ambitious young man was the line: “I don’t have an influential uncle. But I will be one someday.” The Bollywood movie Luck by Chance — about young actors who try to make it on merit rather than on family connections — itself starred Farhan Alchtar and Konkona Sen Sharma, the children of famous parents.”
Economics
“John Maynard Keynes was full of surprises. Not long before the First World War, he found himself working at the India Office, without enough to do. He had recently graduated in mathematics from Cambridge, and the new job involved a six hour working day with an hour’s break for luncheon, though it was sometimes necessary to work from eleven to one on a Saturday, which was offset by two months of holiday, bank holidays and time off for Derby Day. It was a giant department of state in London — the network of offices filled 100,000 cubic metres overseeing the government of India by remote control. In one of the oddest methods of colonial administration ever conceived (the system would be reformed in 1910) India was at this time run by an executive council based in England. When he attended a committee of the council for the first time in 1907, Keynes noted: “The thing is simply government by dotardry; at least half of those present showed manifest signs of senile decay, and the rest didn’t speak.””
“Like numerous imperial officials through history Keynes had no strong interest in the country he was helping to control. It was easier to hold the prevailing view that it was best governed from a distance; although he was acquainted with some Indian students, he never himself went further east than Luxor. At this point, only 6 percent of entrants to the civil service in India were Indian, since many practical obstacles stopped them from joining. A proposal by the Indian National Congress that the entrance examination be held not only in London but in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras was rejected; one British official inadvertently undermined the idea of racial superiority when he wrote that “half the service would be Bengali” if it were opened to this sort of competition, since Indian students were “infinitely quicker” at exams than Europeans.”
“In the 1970s in an era of high inflation, failing socialist experiments and the rise of monetarism, his reputation went into eclipse as he was blamed for sins he had not committed. After the world financial crisis of 2008, he fell back into fashion. His argument that during a slump the government had a duty to spend money in order to kick start the economy (he referred to it as “magneto trouble”) was widely accepted. In fact, the earlier equation of Keynesian thinking with uncontrolled government borrowing was wrong. He regarded deficit spending (using money the government did not have, in advance of future tax receipts) more as a technical fix. He viewed risk as central to the free market, and foresaw a safer and better regulated form of capitalism.”
“It is apparent that Keynes was writing here about the family of a Bengal Brahmin student, Bimla Sarkar, with whom he was having sex. Keynes had arranged for him to be admitted to one of the Cambridge colleges, though Sarkar had already been blackballed for falling under “dangerous influences” at the university. Over several years Keynes gave him substantial amounts of money, which appear to have been prompted by an uneasy mixture of goodwill and desperation. “He is a strange and charming creature,” wrote Keynes to another lover, the painter Duncan Grant. “I don’t know how our relationship is going to end. I have had all to-day the most violent sexual feelings towards him … yet I don’t feel at all certain what feelings there are in his odd Indian head.” When Sarkar ran up debts with a muscular clergyman at his college and his family were unable to pay his fees (he had come to England without telling them), Keynes threatened to bring the monetary affair to an end and have him deported. The relationship was predicated on imbalance and incomprehension, and was indicative of the attitude of the British ruling class at the time. Keynes had been born to a world of privilege at a particularly stable moment in British history; he wore a top hat to the royal commission on Indian finance, risked his career with illegal sexual escapades and spent weekends at country houses with cabinet ministers and Virginia Woolf. Consumed by Edwardian optimism and a sense of entitlement, he could not understand how people from other backgrounds might founder or respond in different ways. Sarkar, with his chaotic finances and unformed interest in Marlowe and Shakespeare, was an enticement and an irritant.”
“India’s share of world exports grew, though slowly by comparison with China. New markets for textiles, jewellery, manufactured products, computer software and pharmaceuticals opened up, but it was not until his return to office in 2004, this time as prime minister, that trade really took off. Through the 1950s and 196os, India’s export earnings had hovered between $1–2 billion a year; by the time of the economic reforms of 1991 they stood at $18b; a decade later they had reached $45b, and a decade after that they were heading for $200b.” In a Pew global-attitudes survey in 2009, 96 percent of Indians responded positively to the question: “What do you think about the growing trade and business ties between your country and other countries?” the highest figure for any nation surveyed.”
“When war broke out, Britain found itself having to pay troops and convey them across Asia, as well as to build airfields, railways and military installations, ratcheting up debts to the administration in New Delhi in the process. When supplies of small arms or clothing were sent from India to Singapore, or Indian troops were sent to fight in Egypt, London incurred a liability to the Indian government. By the end of the war, this debt had developed a life of its own, and the money was a substantial potential asset for the newly independent nation.
In 1947, London and New Delhi discussed what to do about these sterling balances. When the prime minister, Clement Attlee, suggested they might be forgiven, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel quickly put him right: repayment of the debt to India was “Britain’s sacred obligation.” The difficulty was that the British empire had total gold and dollar reserves of £500m, and Britain’s external liabilities were nearly eleven times that amount. So even if India wanted all its money, the money was not there to get. With remarkable goodwill in the circumstances (the British delegation was led by Jeremy Raisman, who had been India’s wartime finance minister and was well regarded on both sides) agreement was reached. Amounts would be released gradually by Britain to fund Indian imports, and money was put aside to buy out British assets in India and pay pension annuities to retired civil servants. The debt would also be shrunk through the devaluation of sterling. The British government agreed to pay India a tapering sum each year, culminating in a theoretical final transfer of f72 in the 2007–8 tax year. Although it was not the full shilling, this gave India a useful advantage in the years immediately following independence and partition, an asset which would need to be carefully husbanded. By 1958, when Jawaharlal Nehru’s government implemented its second Five Year Plan to create an industrial economy, the money had all been used up.”
“Socialism, or the principle of equality, did not come naturally to the subcontinent. In a society with a system of gradation in the form of caste which extended across communities and to every aspect of life, it would have been impossible for any ruler to expect uniformity, even if the ruler had been a great deal more coercive than Jawaharlal Nehru or Indira Gandhi. Nor did Indians have any hesitation or embarrassment about wanting money, even if they were abstemious and interested only in saving. There was no suggestion it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven; materialism and religion were united. For Hindus, the worship of the goddess of wealth and prosperity, Lakshmi, was assumed, and in some cases emulated by other religions. At the festival of Diwali, you seek the blessings of Lakshmi, and at any Hindu temple it is usual to see gods and banknotes intermixed.”
“He had travelled previously in Poland, where the communist system left the shops even emptier, but the surprise in India was that nobody appeared cowed by the system. Rather, they worked around it, using ingenuity to manipulate regulations. The restrictions of the state seemed if anything to make people more entrepreneurial and self-reliant, so that the permit raj was like a stagnant obstacle rather than a threat. The tendency in India was to call the choked bureaucracy a legacy of the colonial period, but British form-filling was less pervasive and the state’s direct interference in business was lighter before independence. This seemed more of an indigenous development, something that had evolved in the way that further sites of devotion spring up around an existing shrine. The economist Kaushik Basu suggested in 1992 that the market economy in India worked in the wrong way, since:
its freedom is in the wrong domains. In some parts of India you can buy university degrees; in most parts of India you can bribe to get a driving licence and you can buy your way out if caught for a traffic offence. In these domains our problem is that of excessive marketization: there is a price at which everything can be had.
Many of the regulations for example, the law requiring a bureaucrat’s permission to sack people if you had more than fifty employees would have been positive in intent, but in their implementation they became a source of corrupt money and did more to protect poverty than to protect the poor. The restrictions on choice were in some ways attractive, with the ban on Coke and Pepsi creating odd local fizzy drinks like Campa Cola, Limca and Thums Up, with its missing “b.” The system looked stuck, in the pre-reform era, politicians took pleasure in making it impossible for foreign corporations to do business in India.”
“A follow-up report to Dreaming with BRICs by Goldman Sachs in 2007 advised that India’s position had been understated. It now thought an increased growth rate of 8 percent represented “ structural increase rather than simply a cyclical upturn” and might continue until 2020. India was racing along, with some of the fastest-growing urban areas in the world. This report made the valuable point that if these projections were correct, India would only be returning to its historic position as a major economic power: before the late eighteenth century, its share of world GDP had always been higher than 20 percent. “By the 1970s, after two centuries of relative economic stagnation, that share had fallen to 3 percent — the lowest in its recorded history.””
“These shocking figures showed that at the time of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, 17 out of every 20 people in India lived on the equivalent of less than $2.0o per day, and more than half lived on less than $1.25 per day. The levels of poverty have been dropping steadily since then, although it was only in 2005 that the effects of earlier economic reforms started to make the numbers drop rapidly. If things continued at their present rate, India should reach a position in around 2025 where less than 10 percent of the population is caught in extreme poverty, when defined as an income of less than $1.25 per day.”
Social Issues
“Loyalty is shown to the family or to your particular community, rather than to people in general. The idea that all are equal in the sight of God is Islamic, while “Do as you would be done by” is a Christian concept. In this case, Venkatesh was not seen as a fellow human to whom care might be extended; he was nobody, nothing. His incarceration, or slavery, happened in a country with democratic rights and genuine constitutional safeguards, less than a hundred miles from one of the nation’s most prosperous cities.”
“Fitteen to twenty minutes had lapsed; the sun was almost setting, Father had not turned up, nor had he sent his servant, and now the stationmaster had also left us. We were quite bewildered, and the joy and happiness which we had felt at the beginning of the journey gave way to a feeling of extreme sadness.
What were they to do? The children resolved to take a bullock-cart to the place where their father was posted, although they had no idea how long the journey mightlast. So they carried their luggage to the front of the station, where carts were plying for hire. Word had however got around that the stranded children were untouchables, and not one of the cartmen, even when offered extra money, was willing to contaminate himself by driving them. Eventually the stationmaster brokered a solution: a cartman would walk alongside his cart while the children drove it. He would receive double the usual fare. They set off. As night fell, it became apparent the cartman’s promise that the journey would take three hours was a lie. It was nearly midnight by the time they reached a toll-collector’s hut, and they were still a long way from anything that looked like a town. By now, despite eating the food in their tiffin basket along the way, the children were hungry and above all thirsty.
They were also wise to their situation. Bhimrao Ambedkar, all of nine years old, approached the toll-collector and explained in Urdu that they were Muslim children on their way to Koregaon. Could he please give them some water? The toll-collector was not deceived. He said they should have made arrangements for someone else to keep water for them. There was none to be had. At the foot of a hill they unyoked the bullocks and laid the cart at an angle to the dry ground. They were parched and desperate. Ambedkar’s elder brother suggested two of the children might rest beneath it while the other two kept watch in the darkness, in relays, since they had gold ornaments. The cartman slept elsewhere. In the morning they began again, and reached the safety of their father’s house by noon.
It is not hard to see why this experience lodged in Ambedkar’s mind. He was at an age when children drink in information about the workings of the world. Before that, he had known of his pariah status, but only in a structured environment. At school he was not allowed to touch a tap, and could only have water when a peon turned one on for him. He had to bring a piece of gunny cloth, or sacking, to class each day and sit or squat on it during lessons, while the upper-caste children sat at desks. At home, the family would cut each other’s hair and wash their own clothes, and it was not until he grew a little older that he understood this was because the barbers and dhobis, or washermen, would not touch either them or then clothes. The constraints on untouchables varied from place to place and included rules such as not being able to enter a Hindu temple, wear good-guality clothes, ride a horse in a marriage procession or sit in the presence of the upper castes.”
“We soon realized there was not a prototype Indian. People appear to have come in from places that are now Iran, Burma, central Asia, Afghanistan. This supports the idea of waves of settlers from various directions. There are many admixtures, whereas by comparison Caucasians are homogenous. India is like a melting pot compared to other Asian countries. If you trace mitochondrial DNA, it shows that women moved around and probably reproduced with other communities. Marriage within your group is more recent in India.”
“Like African-Americans in the United States, it was only when Dalits organized themselves rather than being helped by external well-wishers that things really began to change. In 20ro the activist Chandra Bhan Prasad started a private school and built a temple dedicated to a new deity, “Dalit Goddess English.” His supposition was that Dalits, being socially and educationally excluded, should learn English so as to advance. The bronze image of “Dalit Goddess English” held a pen in one hand and books in the other, and the mantra chanted at her dedication ceremony was “A-B-C-D.” Prasad believed that only by deifying the English language via the goddess would he be able to persuade low caste parents to send their children to the new school.”
“She ruled in a shockingly unconventional was, appointing Dalits to key positions in the state’s administration and police service, erecting thousands of statues of Dr. Ambedkar at pubie expense and sacking men who opposed her. Uttar Pradesh was home to many minorities, religions and sub-castes, and its history was the product of cultures coarse and refined; it had important historical sites like Sarnath, Ayodhya and the Taj Mahal, and landscape running from cold hills to hot plains. The state’s population was huge, nearly equal to that of Brazil. Mavawati had no previous administrative experience, and constitutional tradition or propriety was not her concern. If she was challenged on any front, she asserted herself with exceptional force. Raja Bhaiya, a prominent Thakur politician and gangster who kept alligators in a lake in front of his palace to intimidate the locals, was imprisoned under anti-terrorism legislation, and for good measure Mayawati confiscated his family’s properties, sealed his bank accounts and handed over the lake of gators to the forest department. To draw a New World comparison, it would be like a woman who had been born a slave, with all the fear that comes from having no redress, daring to jail a plantation owner.
A key spur or precipitant to Mayawati’s forceful way of operating appears to have been a debacle just before she became chief minister, when she believes she came close to being assaulted or killed. Realizing her party was about to pull down a coalition state government in Uttar Pradesh, angry activists from the ruling party raided the official guest house where Mayawati and other legislators were staying. While politicians were slapped, beaten and in some cases temporarily kidnapped, she and others retreated to a suite and locked the door. “Drag the Chamar woman out from her hole,” men and women shouted from outside, along with other more offensive remarks.”
“Mayawati remains terrified of assassination, and travels in a convoy of up to thirty-five matching vehicles when not touring her kingdom by helicopter.”
“When Yusuf and I had run over the railway bridge to reach the train, an extraordinary thing had happened. Marching along the main platform of Kanpur railway station came two columns of armed police, and in their midst a very tall man in a spotless white kurta pyjama. As the procession advanced, people had turned and bowed and been acknowledged with a grand wave. It was the don of dons, Mukhtar Ansari, returning late in the evening from his bail hearing. Yusuf walked past the sleeping figures, the piles of dusty boxes and the vendors carrying clay pots of water, pushed past the deferential policemen and greeted his cousin in the traditional way, with a cross between a shoulder bump, a bow and a hug. He introduced me, and Mukhtar suggested we come and visit him in the prison tomorrow, but to be sure to bring some oranges. In the topsy-turvy world of Uttar Pradesh, there was nothing so strange about seeing the outlaw striding along the railway platform, looking like a senior politician.”
“Many of the rules on pollution and food were (and are) stil followed in India, but much of the text appears specific to an antique world. So at a ceremony for the dead you should exclude a man who has shed his semen in violation of a vow, a man who allows his wife’s lover to live in his house, the sexually ‘irregular’ (including “a man who allows his mouth to be used as a vagina”) and anyone with mangled fingernails or discoloured teeth.”
“He told us he had taken a degree in commerce at Allahabad University, and worked as ground staff for an airline while stripping and having sex for money on the side. Now, as he put it, “I only do management.” He had around forty men and ten women on his books. “All the guys are in their late teens or twenties. Often people will require someone aged sixteen or seventeen, but I don’t represent them. The guys who work for me need physique, looks and height. Physique is a must. Most are from Punjab or Haryana, or anyway from the north. They look like Greek gods, but they don’t even know English. My clients are hi-fi people.” He named several, including a chief minister.
“Either they can’t get sex, or they have so much money they can make people do whatever they want. I keep the girls on my list in case the clients are bisexual and want one of each. I don’t allow bargaining. The rates go from Rs$5, 00O [$110] to R$25,000 [$550] for two hours. The rate for models and actors is higher. We have one of the best models in Asia, and for him it’s R$2.5 lakhs [$5,500] for two hours.”
Satish’s operation was virtual: it worked via phone and the Internet. He moved from club to party, making links with people and arranging the meetings. Images of the prostitutes were displayed on a photographer’s website, very respectably.”
“Most of the people in my agency are Punjabi farmers, and their families don’t have any idea what they are doing. I might have to send them to a party where the people are completely different from them, I might send them to Mumbai or to Dubai for one party. Indian guys are very in demand in Gulf countries. Last week I sent someone to Bangalore for a party.” Satish said Bangalore was India’s most “modern” city, and had a strong demand for “fair” strippers from the north.
“The first time I did stripping was with a woman I met in McDonald’s in Connaught Place. She was thirty-two, a Malayali. She picked me up and Lasked for Rs10,000 [$220]. We went to her home in South-Ex. She put me on to others. I brought four or five guys to a party she held, we all stripped and then some of the women wanted sex. No servants were in the house; she must have sent them all home. Only women came to the party, about twenty of them, and I think most were NRIs.” Non-Resident Indians — people who lived out of the country. “They were posh people, wearing designer clothes. Most of them were the kind of women who have busy husbands. It was a good atmosphere.””
“People from middle- to upper-class families will never in their lives have made a bed or had to cook or clean, and find it hard to know what to do when they go abroad. The economic boost of the last decade has engineered a propulsion in society that has changed the way people think about themselves.
The relationship between families and their retainers is altering, but important ideas of self and of social status are predicated on servitude, and on the expectation of being able to ordain the lives of others in an everyday way.
For women who pursue a professional career, this can give a lattice of support that does not exist in Western countries, where acquiring and retaining staff is expensive. You can drive if you like, or tell someone else to drive you. You can cook if you like, or tell someone else to cook. Aided by the assistance of parents or parents in-law, women are able to raise children and do a job without one making the other difficult. A business trip wil not be a worry if you know your children are with a family member you trust. Maternal guilt is less of an expectation than it is in the West, where performing the role of the perfect mother is at the higher levds of Society — a definite obligation. At present in India, HSBC, RBS, JP Morgan Chase, ICICI and UBS are all un by women, and half the deputy governors of the Reserve Bank of India are women.”
“As family structures that have been in place in India for centuries alter and fracture, and social mobility increases, household arrangements are changing. People complain it is impossible to recruit a reliable maid, and that word-of-mouth recommendation no longer works. Home loans are making it feasible for couples to set up independent households in a way they could not have done a generation ago. In the 19sos, if you wanted a home loan you had to open a bank account and pay in a monthly sum for an agreed term before the bank manager became convinced you had the “savings habit” and would process the application. From 2002, banks began to sell mortgages more vigorously, with loans of up to too percent of the value of the property, using floating interest rates. Demand grew, and most of the borrowers were young. Residential property was becoming more affordable than ever: in 2006 a house in a Mumbai suburb typically cost five times a person’s annual income, as against twenty-two times in the mid-1980s. As more people moved to two- or three-bedroom apartments, building developments and new towns and cities sprang up across India.
With the different housing arrangements came a fresh demand for servants, who were demanding higher wages. The spread of smaller households meant it could no longer be assumed that a member of the extended hamily would always be present to keep an eye on the various members of staff: Often people found themselves employing servants who had come from far away from the south to the north, or from the north to the south. In some cases they had come from outside India’s borders. Despite new forms of technology and authentication, the practical mechanisms to check who they were, and whether they were trustworthy did not always exist.”
“Every road and every village in the Kashmir valley had bunkers and razor wire and mine detectors. The troops were so deeply embedded or institutionalized that, rather than military rule, it felt like an extended army maneuver in which local members of the public were incidental. The Kashmiri economy, which had once been dependent on tourism, was now oriented around supplying the estimated half a million troops in the valley.”
“”Muslims are the most backward community in india economically, educationally, socially,” he said in English. “The backwardness is not only because of government policies. In 1947 the Muslim intellectuals and civil servants went to Pakistan. Look at who was left behind. Mainly it was the poor, the illiterate and labourers who were left, and they had trouble participating in society. Our next generation are changing. They see education as a weapon. I see people in their twenties who want employment and economic advancement, and I think that the younger generation has some hopes, alhamdulillah [praise god]. They aren’t interested in radicalizing like in other countries. In India, there are different forms of thought in Islam, but in this Indian environment most people are basically peaceful and peace-loving.” Increasingly, in his opinion, Indian Muslims were seeking a modern and secular education for their children.”
“Notoriously, India retained the “triple talag,” by which a Muslim man could divorce his wife simply by saying “I divorce you’ three times (there had even been debate whether sending the message by email three times constituted a dissolution of the marriage).”
“The dabbawallas venture had started in 1890, when Parsis who were travelling to work on the new railway system found they could not get their own food at lunchtime. As new mills and businesses opened, other social groups took the chance to have meals delivered, since there was a general caste suspicion of food cooked outside the home. The system worked in Mumbai because the trains were so crowded that you needed people to carry food on your behalf, outside the rush hour. Although the prohibitions on restaurants had largely disappeared now, it was still cheaper to bring your own food from home, and the dabbawallas service remained popular.”
“In Tamil Nadu, despite its reputation for efficiency, there was an instance of a young man being forced to marry a dog as a punishment by his community for killing two dogs, and a case of a Dalit girl having to marry a frog, for reasons no one could establish.”
“Hinduism has no set book, which means books about Hinduism will often tell you little. The religion is only practice, only what it is, and can be understood only by seeing how it is lived.”
“Take the case of the Sikh taxi driver who drives exclusively in reverse gear. It is the sort of thing anyone might do for a few minutes if their car will not engage a forward gear, but when it happened to Harpreet Singh Papoo from Bathinda, he continued. BACK GEAR CHAMPION is painted along the side of his vehicle, which he drives only backwards, despite having severe resultant neck and back pain. The local authorities in Punjab have given him a special permit to do so; he has redesigned his gearbox so as to drive at varying speeds; a flashing light and a siren sit on the roof of his car. He has become famous and wants to go to Pakistan. “An Asian champion in driving car in reverse gear at a speed of over 80 km per hour,” reported the Tribune newspaper, “he has already covered 13,000 km from Bathinda to various towns of North India to spread the message of peace between two countries.”
