What Makes India Tick
By: Prativa Vaidya Bhalla
Tags: India, Writer, Culture, Asia, Writing

What Makes India Tick

Image credit: Unsplash.com

The world is intrigued by India, its culture, history, clothing, traditions, innovations and its people. There is a certain slum-dog millionaire feel to it, along with lots of eating, praying and loving.

And yet groups of people don’t break into choreographed dances at street corners like Bollywood (the Indian film Industry) would have us believe. It is a country sheltering an incredible number of people dancing to their own tune (Oops, so this is where the Bollywood reference comes from!)

Have you ever wondered what keeps this giant, many-legged beast alive and functioning?

Even though it has been ravaged, attacked, and devastated many times over throughout history and exhibits a visible lack of structure and organization, it still manages to get projected as the fastest growing world economy.

So how does it keep chugging along, rising from ruins, and often producing the best talent that the world has ever seen? The secret lies in understanding how India functions as a whole. So here goes…

3 important spokes of the wheel that makes India turn:

The Fix-It Spirit

With the number of breakdowns we have, it is a miracle how we manage to go about our daily lives. As there is no other choice, we simply brush ourselves off and climb back on the money train. No one may be coming to help so we learn to fend for ourselves.

If you are rich you get amenities, but if you are poor, the basic needs are not met — the very very basic needs like food, clean water, adequate housing, jobs, health benefits, etc.

The governments voted to power are corrupt and driven by their political greed. The promises made before an election are rarely ever kept.

Hence we are compelled to devise ingenious ways to solve our problems. This ‘fix it’ spirit is called ‘Jugaad’ in Hindi (the most widely understood and spoken language in India). This ingenuity of being able to fix your problem enables Indians to think out of the box, which people in advanced societies are less expected to do, as their smooth functioning machinery takes great care of them. Wikipedia refers to Jugaad as, “non-conventional, frugal innovation.” It is the classic Indian art of problem-solving. We are the land of DIYs and hacks, i.e., Jugaad!

A milkman in Madhya Pradesh delivers milk to a customer while maintaining social-distance. (Image courtesy Awanish Sharan/Twitter)

Our Psyche of Hope

We truly believe that tomorrow will be a better day and it is this hope that keeps us alive. We live in the present, without worrying about the future. We celebrate small victories and are an inordinately optimistic group of people.

There is no place for pessimism or brooding over existential questions. If we indulged in ‘what if’ questions, the first one to ask would be ‘why do we even pay taxes, what benefits do we get in return?’ Tough, uncomfortable questions with no available answers.

Hence we remain thoroughly engaged and entertained by our Gods, festivals, celebrations and of course Bollywood and far far away from probing questions.

Our Community, Our Backbone

No one ever leaves the other alone, whether you like it or not. We are always in each other’s businesses and loneliness is not something we are used to. Our family, our friends and our little communities hold us up, provide for us and safeguard us. It is truly incredible, what the power of human connection can do. Even in the face of absolute nothingness, you are not alone. Someone will always be there to help, a distant relative, a neighbourhood uncle, or perhaps a friend’s friend.

As we grow richer in education, thought and capital, we become more individual, linear and perhaps just a little bit alone. But the sea of humanity that makes India what it is, is just that one massive being with millions of hands and legs, holding each other up and helping each other out.

That is what makes India work, every single day — the sisterhood and brotherhood that is noticeable,

on the local trains in Mumbai, where people travel squashed together as thousands commute to work everyday.

at the tea stalls in Kolkata where people gather in the evenings to discuss sports and politics

in Navratri Festivals in Gujarat, where thousands dance the Garba, all through 9 straight nights

in different religious celebrations — the Durga Puja in the east is as revered as the Ganpati festival in the west, Onam in the south and Diwali in the north. While Eid and Christmas are celebrated all over the country with equal fervour. The delicacies cooked in each home, are happily shared with friends and neighbours. Only if greedy politicians did not play the religion card to divide and rule, Indians left to themselves would have absolutely no problem with each other.

In our fixation with the game of cricket, when entire cities come to standstill if a match is being played by the boys in blue.

Our love for food — the insane number of delicacies each region of India specialises in, needs to be a whole different blog post! While the North has the majestic tandoori and butter chicken, the South has the sublime dosa. The East has its mystical fish curries, the West has its exquisite crab curry and scrumptious dhoklas. This is just a broad and rather unfair distribution of Indian food, as the Indian micro cuisine gets infinitely more complex and detailed as you dig deeper into India. It is often said that cuisines change every 100 kilometres in India!

We are a country of remarkable contradictions and interesting numbers…

29 states

1.2 billion people

30 recognised spoken languages,

33 million Gods of Hinduism

10 major religions

38 UNESCO World Heritage

producing nearly 70% of the world’s spices

300,000 active mosques

1,500 to 2,000 movies made every year

50,000–100,000 people are fed free of cost at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the seat of the Sikh religion in India. Everyone is welcome irrespective of faith.

11,872 mm is the average annual rainfall is recorded in Mawsyngram, Meghalaya. Also recognised as the world’s wettest place on earth.

With so much to keep track of, where is the time to ask ‘what if’ questions?

We are also a country of many firsts, as the birthplace of Yoga and Ayurveda (the ancient art of medicine)and Chess. Diamonds were mined, sugar was refined and the number zero was first used in India.

“We owe a lot to the ancient Indians, teaching us how to count. Without which most modern scientific discoveries would have been impossible.” — Albert Einstein

The profusion of problems that doggedly pursue us ranges from, having the most polluted air, recording the highest number of crimes against women, corruption, inferior healthcare to longest working hours. The worlds largest democracy reels under this pressure.

India, clearly is a land of complexities, contradictions and a multitude of issues, yet there is a strange unnerving unity in this diversity. No matter how hard we are hit, we rise again, holding each other up to trudge towards a better tomorrow.