Being Indian, page 12
If Indians really are such pragmatic materialists, what then is the role of spirituality in their lives? In answering this question the first thing to understand is that in India affirmation of one attribute never fully denies another. This is not a country of simple blacks and whites. Shades of grey streak the most vivid contrasts. It would be wrong therefore to infer that since Indians are material minded they are not spiritual. Religion plays an important role in their lives and, according to the latest survey by the Census of India, there are 2.4 million places of worship in the country, as against only 1.5 million schools and half that number of hospitals. What is important, however, is to understand how the spiritual tradition impacts on the personality of the people, what strengths it gives them, what weaknesses it fosters, and how it is sustained in parallel with the resilient materialism we have portrayed.
Hinduism has no organized church, no one god, no paramount religious text, no codified moral laws and no single manual of prescribed ritual. The predominant emphasis is on personal salvation, a journey in which the individual is essentially alone with his karma and his god. The absence of one universally-followed form of religious worship does not, as we shall discuss later, necessarily contribute to a liberal temperament. But it does create a peculiar mood of hope in which the individual never ceases to believe that, as a consequence of his personal and private compact with the Almighty, his destiny could one day change. The mood is not easy to scientifically define or pinpoint. Usually it is heavily camouflaged, concealed beneath the seemingly endless and mandatory demands of kith, kin, caste and community, and the constraints of poverty. But somewhere, even in the most dire straits, a Hindu will nurture a feeling that something suddenly can miraculously intervene to change the contours of his life.
It is quite common to find this motto written on trucks: ‘Milega muqaddar: I shall find my destiny.’ A sense that, out of the blue, a personal god can smile, a guru’s blessings can work, a religious donation can fructify or a ritual prove efficacious never leaves a Hindu. Hinduism sets no ceilings on divine intervention. Anything is possible. People believe that one day the wheel of fortune will turn the right way, and religion can help it in that direction. ‘Kismet ka karvat lena’, the turn of fate, or ‘Bhagya ka badalna’, a turnaround in luck, are not only common Indian phrases but also articles of faith. Astrologers proliferate, and are much in demand. In fact, as Nirad Chaudhuri concludes in his inimitable way ‘in a Hindu, faith in his horoscope was far stronger than his faith in any god or goddess or even God.’23 A very well-known—and often-quoted—Sanskrit shloka, or saying, expresses the notion that a woman’s character and a man’s fortune can never be predicted. (Triya charitram purushya bhagyam, daivo na janati kuto manushya). Good fortune, like suddenly finding a hidden pot of gold, is a possibility that can never be denied. Sab bhagwan ki leela hai: the world is but an aspect of god’s cosmic play, in which anything can happen, playfully and effortlessly, as a joyous expression of divine whim. Hindu mythology is full of stories of huts turning into palaces, and base metal turning to gold. I recall my elders often saying: ‘Na jane kis bhesh mein mil jaaye bhagwan: You never know in what form you will run into God.’
Naturally, such an attitude tolerates a great deal of superstition and ritualism. There is no rationale to what may please a personal deity, or invoke a dormant benediction. The offering of a lock of hair, a donation, a pilgrimage, a penance, a vow, a fast, an amulet, an oblation, the repetition of a particular Sanskrit chant, the feeding of monkeys or cows—anything may work to alter the apparently unalterable framework of our lives. This irrepressible faith gives to Hindus an optimism that refuses ever to fully deflate. In the direst of situations they have an emotional identification with every rags-to-riches story, and this identification is personal: if it can happen to others, it can happen to me. In this sense, Hindus do not labour under the ponderous certainties of Christianity or Islam, where human redemption is predictable in measurable ways. Hinduism, as practised, is full of the mysterious possibilities of a tropical jungle.
Hindu metaphysics constitutes a truly magnificent structure of thought. But most Hindus have no inclination for the intricacies of philosophy. They know little about the six schools of Hindu thought, and even less about the thinkers who defined them. Their preoccupation is with the ritual of religion, and the rewards it can confer, and in this pursuit they can be, within the framework of their religion, remarkably eclectic. At the Sri Bhagwati Sai Sansthan Mandir at Panvel, not far from Mumbai, a dog is worshipped as the reincarnation of Sai Baba of Shirdi. When Sai Sri Pandu Baba (as the dog has been christened) left for his heavenly abode in 1997, he was bathed in waters from India’s holiest rivers, and buried in a samadhi (grave) lined with sandalwood, to the chanting of Vedic hymns. Needless to say, the priests at the temple have found a successor to the Pandu Baba in the form of another dog, and the crowd of worshippers has not lessened. In a village near Lucknow, the grave of an English captain who died during the 1857 Revolt is widely worshipped. The Gora Baba is known to fulfil every wish of his followers, and being an Englishman he is especially pleased when offered liquor, cigarettes and meat. A prayer is incomplete without the ritual lighting of a cigarette, which is then offered along with an incense stick.
The Vedas recognize thirty-three gods, the Puranas 330 million. The Hindu has, therefore, no dearth of divinities to keep him busy. So long as they can fulfil his desires he has very little interest in understanding the epistemological nature of reality. However, certain concepts derived from philosophy, do have a significant influence in his life. Two of these, maya and karma, need special mention. All Indian schools of philosophy accept maya-vad, the theory of maya, in one form or another. In lay terms, maya is the magical power that creates the illusion that the world is real. The phenomenal world is actually a deception. People caught in maya-jal, the snares of the illusory world, think it is real. In reality, nothing exists except the ultimate being, Brahman. The rest is appearance, the result of ignorance, fleeting and impermanent, as unreal as a dream. Karma, as commonly understood, simply implies that a man’s destiny is linked to his deeds in a previous birth; good deeds bring good consequences, and bad ones bad. Death only kills the physical body. The soul, which is imperishable, continues its cycle of rebirths, changing bodies as people change clothes, until finally it merges with the Absolute.
This is a simplistic rendering of concepts that have provoked tomes of analysis by metaphysicians. But our concern is with how ordinary Indians understood them, and how they impact on our everyday lives. The belief that the world is in essence unreal, a victim of maya, does not inhibit Hindus from the full-blooded pursuit of material possessions. But in periods of adversity, when losses occur, or prosperity appears to be out of reach, the doctrine gives to failure the cushioning of philosophical acceptance. No defeat can be that great if viewed as the transient setback of an illusory world. In terms of a familiar metaphor in Hindu philosophy, the world appears to be a snake when it is actually just a rope; it cannot—indeed should not—affect you because it is not what it is made out to be. This dual appreciation of reality, in which the world both is and is not, provides the perfect peg on which to hang the burden of setback. It does not bar the pursuit of worldly assets (and it is significant that in one sense maya means wealth), but when things are not going well, it devalues the full impact of failure. If a person is a winner, he is a successful practitioner in the world of maya; if he is a loser, he can console himself that his loss did not, ab initio, have any real value.
The theory of karma also operates to insulate a person from the impact of setbacks. The travails of life are ephemeral when seen in the context of the long journey of the soul towards salvation. In such a journey, the impact of transient adversity is diminished because it acquires a larger backdrop. The sense of personal responsibility is reduced. Defeat becomes easier to accept, for there is always the scapegoat of deeds in a previous life beyond our control. The principle that we are responsible for our actions, and for their consequences—which is the enlightened bedrock of the theory—is simplistically interpreted to mean that for what goes wrong today we cannot be blamed, and for what may accrue in something as remote as a future reincarnation, we need not be too concerned. The important point is that even death cannot obliterate the possibility of another round. There is always reason, therefore, not to lose hope. No failure is final. No event takes place in isolation. The causal chain is interconnected. The ups and downs of life are part of a cosmic drama, whose final act no one has seen and none can predict. The successful could reap the consequences of their evil actions tomorrow. The defeated could have another court of appeal, beyond the control of human manipulation. The cosmic wheel is structured to take a full circle. Human misfortune is a speck on the vast canvas of time (kala). Destiny could change in later life, or in the next birth, or the one thereafter.
Spirituality thus serves Indians well in weathering periods of adversity. This is not an uncommon consequence of all religious faith, but the Hindu spiritual safety net is in many ways especially built to create reasons for solace in the bleakest of situations. The Hindu has chosen selectively from his spiritual legacy—faith in a personal deity, the devaluation of the phenomenal world when needed, and the juxtaposition of a larger canvas to suffering and setback—to create a protective cocoon around him. Certainly, the hope and resilience he displays is not warranted by the circumstances in which he and most of his compatriots are. But his religious beliefs provide the psychological ballast to stay afloat in the roughest of waters.
Few Indians are consciously aware of the strength that spirituality gives them. To believe in certain ways is a reflex for them. They rarely question or analyse their natural—and often cheerful—stoicism, in which religious faith and worldly-mindedness blend effortlessly. In some respects, spirituality is a defence mechanism. It serves to disarm the hostile invader (and India has had more than her share of these over the centuries), encouraging him to conclude that the conquered are harmless pacifists absorbed in the rewards of the afterworld. It also masks the formidable entrepreneurial and commercial skills lurking below the spiritual surface. Foreigners are often misled, because Hindus appear to be ‘other-worldly’. In reality they are not so much other-worldly as they are oblivious to anything in the world that is not of direct interest to them. A pious Hindu will take a dip in the holy waters of the Ganga seemingly totally unaffected by the filth and garbage on and around the bathing ghat. His concern is the religious ritual, and the rewards it could yield; anything outside this personal zone of priority remains perpetually out of focus. The practice of religion sanctions this self-centredness: a Hindu will be obsessed with the ritual purity of his person, but seem not to notice the filth around him. When Mahatma Gandhi visited the famous Kashi Vishvanath temple in Varanasi, he was ‘deeply pained’ by what he saw. In his Autobiography, he describes the approach through a narrow and filthy lane, swarming with flies, the loud voices of shopkeepers and pilgrims, the rotten and stinking flowers inside the temple. Nothing much has changed in the decades since then. I visited the Jagannath temple at Puri in the first year of the new millennium. The main approach to the temple was flooded. An overpowering stench of sewage pervaded the place. Huge cockroaches could be seen on the ornate garlands around the deities. There were swarms of flies on the prasad, the consecrated food meant for devotees. Stray dogs, some with open sores, were everywhere. None of this deterred or distracted devotees from their prayers.
This self-obsession, in which the obvious discordance of the surroundings makes no dent, is not a sign of spiritual transcendence, as it sometimes appears to be, but of a callous insularity. A Hindu is effectively impervious to his surroundings, and indeed to the very visible pain and suffering around him, because anything outside his own narrow ken of interest matters little to him. Islam and Christianity display more visible connections between the individual and the community. In Islam there is the Friday congregational gathering, and in Christianity the visit to the church on Sundays. There is no such institutional counterpart in Hinduism, and almost no emphasis on a need for the individual to contribute to his community within the arena of spiritual search and fulfilment. The emphasis on the self as the centrepiece of the spiritual endeavour tends to stunt the individual’s concern for the community. This insensitivity to the external environment, coterminous often with the most overt preoccupation with spiritual pursuits, has become so much a part of life that it is mostly not even noticeable to the educated Hindu. But it can come across as a startling revelation to the foreign observer. A.M. Rosenthal wrote perceptively in 1957: ‘An individual-to-individual callousness, despite India’s belief in her own spiritualism, was always part of India. No miracle has taken place. This callousness is still so strong in the country that it is the greatest danger for a foreigner living in India, for it is a frighteningly easy thing to find it creeping into one’s soul.’24
Materialism and spirituality coexist in India in ways, I suspect, that strengthen the former without eroding the hold of religion. An Indian entrepreneur is fortified by an inner world of personal faith opaque to the outsider. He is able to better withstand mishap and distress because of certain specific and unique concepts that form part of his religious beliefs. He sustains a sense of hope in the future even in affliction. He believes that the rags-to-riches story can happen to him, and is convinced that divine intervention can play a role. He is not constrained by a given set of ethics since Hinduism, while not espousing amoralism, does not have a single or unambiguous ethical centre, and accepts a moral relativism that refuses to be straitjacketed by simplistic notions of right and wrong. And his ability to be focused about goals, even at the cost of the larger good of the community, is strengthened by the individualism inherent in the practice of his religion. Spirituality, writes Ashis Nandy, is ‘hardly the overwhelming aspect of Indianness’; yet ‘there remains an irreducible element of spiritual concerns which informs the toughest materialism in India.’25 Together they create an alchemy that reinforces both. An Indian is inherently an entrepreneur and willingly a devotee, and the one is the seamless extension of the other. The perceptive Scottish journalist James Cameron, who lived and travelled in India before and after 1947, captured this rather well when he wrote:
I like the evening in India, the one magic moment when the Sun balances on the rim of the world, and the hush descends, and ten thousand civil servants drift home on a river of bicycles, brooding on Lord Krishna and the cost of living26 (emphasis mine).
Chapter Four
TECHNOLOGY
Success in the Shadows of the Past
THE RECENT EMERGENCE of India as a power to reckon with in information technology prompts the question: do Indians have some special talent in this field? What is it that makes an increasing number of citizens of the world’s most illiterate country so successful where computers and their software are concerned? Could there be something about Indian culture and society that has made the software industry grow in India by around 50 per cent a year for the last several years? Indian software exports are projected to top US $50 billion—more than the entire value of the country’s exports today—by the year 2010. Is it sheer coincidence that the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Vinod Khosla, the designer of the Pentium chip, Vinod Dham, and the creator of Hotmail, Sabeer Bhatia, are all Indians? How has it come to be that a significant number of NASA scientists, Microsoft employees, IBM workers, and Intel scientists are Indians? Do 40 per cent of the largest 500 companies in the world have back processing offices in India only because it is cheaper, or because India is, as Bill Gates says, incredibly rich in technical talent? What is responsible for the fact that Indians are behind four out of ten Silicon Valley start-ups? Why has General Electric opened its biggest research centre in Bangalore, a city most Westerners would not have heard of just a few years ago? And why does the same city now produce the chip for every phone designed by Nokia?
The very visible phenomenon of India’s providing the brainpower for some of the largest and most familiar of international corporations deserves serious scrutiny for what it reveals of the Indian personality. Are Indians ‘naturally’ good at number crunching? Is versatility at the keyboard rooted in some aspect of India’s heritage? Is it an inherent talent, or has it been cultivated in recent years? What is the role of the cultural milieu in nurturing this proclivity? To what extent are entrenched ways of thinking, and of responding, a contributing factor? What traits impede greater success, and which ones facilitate it? Has the new technology diluted the hold of tradition on those who practise it? These are questions that need to be explored, for a great many expectations now ride on the proficiency of Indians in this sector. Can the IT ‘revolution’ do for India what the textile industry did for Britain in the nineteenth century, or what oil has done for the Middle East more recently? Any claims about ‘inherent qualities’ need to be evaluated cautiously, especially since India’s profile as an IT power is still very new. My aim, therefore, is to explore tentatively, to examine a few elements that seem significant, and to lay out the grounds for a debate whose conclusions for the moment must be kept open.
In its broadest definition, information technology is a term that encompasses all forms of technology used to effectively create, acquire, store, process, analyse and distribute information. It involves the creation and management of data, including its dissemination through a network that includes both telephony and computer technology. Proficiency in mathematics and engineering, preferably—but not necessarily—specialist training in computer sciences, are assets. Given these activities, and the skills they require, do Indians have some special edge in this field?
