Delhi (16 page)

Most formidable of all the weapons of mass destruction in India's arsenal is Rajnikanth, legendary South Indian film star and the Indian Chuck Norris. If a million SMSs are to be believed, he killed the Dead Sea; he once shot a man just by pointing his finger and saying ‘BANG'; and when he sneezes there are earthquakes and orgasms throughout the land.

5. As this suggests,
the Elephant is a natural mimic
. Fundamentally, the other big boys must let you into the clubhouse. Perhaps the fastest way to join the club is imitation.

India has tried the odd imitative shortcut, not least to show that it is a gentle giant despite its failure to sign up to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Both it and Pakistan vie to provide troops for UN peacekeeping missions. India has also become a major aid donor in its own right.

In 2010 newspapers reported a particularly poignant tactic. Spotting that the United States has the $, the Eurozone the
, even greying faltering Japan and Britain the ¥ and £, India decided the world would suddenly realize it had arrived if it just had its own currency symbol. Newspaper columnists crowed that this confirmed India was years ahead of China. It now has its very own rupee sign, based on the Hindi letter
, Ra—although sadly my keyboard has yet to catch up with this meteoric rise.

6.
The Elephant is Slow to Mate
, as D.H. Lawrence noted. And when they do, they mate in secret at last, as the Indo-US nuclear deal suggests. For decades relationships between India and the United States were strained, the US instead favouring military-ruled Pakistan as an ally. Since the end of the Cold War this has begun to change, though the Elephant is still sensitive.

On the other hand, the Elephant does not mate for life. Its old friends, like Iran, now shunned at the behest of the US, can testify to this. And while female and young elephants are sociable creatures, the bull elephant generally is not. India is held back by its own region, where it has tended to throw around its weight. Pakistan in particular remains the albatross around India's neck—a gigantic, nuclear-armed albatross—made worse by India's heavy presence in Afghanistan. Once upon a time it may have been possible to gain international respect through brawn alone, but nowadays respectability is key. Bullying is unseemly. Instead, you should bring your neighbours to heel through judicious use of free trade agreements and dollops of aid, as India is creakily realizing.

7. For all that the affinity seems self-evident,
the Elephant may not be a natural circus animal
. Mega-events are the scarlet sports car of international relations. They're meant either to show you've recently become a filthy-rich Master of the Universe, or to stave off a mid-life crisis. (Quite obviously, the London 2012 Olympics were the latter.) In recent years they have become de rigueur for aspirant world cities. Beijing and Rio have the Olympics; South Africa, Brazil, and even Russia and Qatar have the football World Cup. With the Commonwealth Games, Delhi settled for a slightly less shiny prize: other twenty-first-century hosts include Glasgow and Gold Coast City.

It set about hosting with lovable ineptitude. I ended up in Delhi a week before the Games were due to start. Trench warfare appeared to have broken out in Connaught Place. I flew back to London from the shiny new Indira Gandhi International airport two days after it had opened, gleaming and full of Mont Blanc pens and spa goods. From the rear of the facades came the sound of frantic hammering and drilling, the odd glimpse of trailing wires. The newspapers were full of panic: a surfeit of snakes, collapsing bridges, ‘uninhabitable' athlete accommodation, Delhi belly, deserted stadiums, rampant corruption, and the extraordinary spectacle of India's own sports minister condemning the event.

On the other hand, India recovered like Dumbo, won lots of medals, and did the ceremony thing with typical aplomb. And boy is the metro good, Aunties excepted.

8.
The Elephant needs a lot to eat
. Along with China, India gets a lot of stick for its size and its growth rate—because it will inevitably guzzle increasingly more of the world's resources, and be responsible for an increasingly large percentage of the world's carbon emissions. It has taken an intransigent line in international negotiations about its right to do so, and constantly worries about where the resources will come from. ‘Energy security' is New Delhi's watchword. It lacks a large resource base of its own and is a vast oil importer, further damaging its economic prospects. Unless something radical changes, it can only grow so big.

9.
Elephants cannot really run
. While capable of fast spurts, technically their back legs can only walk. It has ‘feet of clay', heavily reliant on corruptible bureaucrats and local elites to enact policy, and founded on a fractured, unequal and democratically empowered society. Torn between populism and the financial markets, with its economy faltering, India had better pray it's like Kipling's elephant, which gained its greatest asset from the teeth of crocodiles.

10.
India is a white elephant
. Forget all of this. It may come as a shock to learn that it is totally unhelpful to think of India as a giant pachyderm. There is a story, much cited by those studying India, about a group of blind men and an elephant. One touches its side and believes ‘the Elephant is very like a wall!'; the second touches the tusk, and concludes the elephant's a spear; third, trunk = snake; fourth, knee = tree; fifth, ear = fan; through to the last, who touches the tail and thinks the elephant is a type of rope. It is the intellectual equivalent of the head bobble: all truth is relative, all interpretations are correct. Like the elephant India is, in the words of a longstanding foreign correspondent on his way out, ‘a country easier to describe than to explain, and easier to explain than to understand'.

A similar dilemma presents itself when you're sitting in a toney Delhi bar looking out at the rest of the country. Touch the tusk (viz., the ice bar) and you might be forgiven for thinking India was like Tokyo or Stockholm. Elsewhere the picture is quite different—snakes and trees and spears abound, one might say. Delhi is far from a cipher for India as a whole. The country's centre of gravity has splintered, trickling down from that unwieldy head to the federal states.

The Indian state, too, is a mirage. Divided by ministry, state, language, generation and more, with its feet of clay precariously balanced on India's divided society, under closer inspection it disappears. Nonetheless, it will always continue producing papers, of course, shrouding its disjointed form in white prolixity. And I will continue reading them, on and on and on.

7

B
OREDOM

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

—Paul Theroux

F
or the first millennium after Christ, India had probably the largest economy in the world. By 1757's Battle of Plassey the British had emphatically begun the process of its annexation. There is an old colonial school of thought that provides a simple explanation for the West's world takeover. How did 300,000 Englishmen succeed in dominating 300 million Indians for so long? Forget technological asymmetry, the Protestant work ethic, scientific culture, divergent living standards, railways and guns. Forget Indian disunity, local collaborators and hungry capitalists. Forget even the answer once popular with both imperialists and young weightlifting Indian nationalists—that booze-swilling beef gobblers will always beat abstemious vegetarians.

No: colonized peoples are simply lazier. The natives slobbed around, while ‘mad dogs and Englishmen went out in the midday sun' sticking flags on things.

This explanation was patronizing then, of course, and it looks all the more so today. The laziness theory does beg a question, though: what on earth does the PhD student do with her long sweaty days?

This question plagued me daily, especially that vast demoralizing gulf between
do
and
ought to do
. I pictured my counterpart, a more adventurous International Development student somewhere cheaper and riskier. Her life was unceasingly interesting, I was sure. She probably had a translator and her own motorbike and appropriate interview outfits. Right this second she was telling a joke to a warlord or mafia kingpin, a joke which managed to combine both cultural nuance and uncompromising ethical integrity. Over his big belly the kingpin was laughing an evildoer's laugh—
BWAHAHAHAHA
—and, shaking tears from his eyes, handing over his top-secret files.

In reality, much of fieldwork life seemed to involve waiting, watching people, musing on stuff. And then writing notes about waiting, watching people, musing on stuff. Very swiftly this settled into a routine—humans love routines, we're all budding authoritarian regimes full of arbitrary rules and rituals—disrupted only by the panic of actual interviews.

As at home, each day began with what William Gibson calls ‘Internet ablutions' (though slowly: India's IT-loving reputation is belied by its creaky internet). To email or not to email? On one hand, living elsewhere demands long lightweight butterfly-net emails to capture the new place's most colourful elements. On the other hand, these take up precious Research time and suggest you're not seizing the spirit of adventure. At intervals I turned on an email auto-responder with some smug BRB message, just for verisimilitude. My comeuppance came when at night a bird took to roosting outside my window, with a squawk that sounded exactly like ‘Email—email—email.'

Then I showered, and carried downstairs piles of paper and a notebook containing a list of books I've been meaning to read since 1998, where they would be buffeted by the fan. For the rest of the day, if there were no interviews, I would kill time until the sociable evening: sightseeing, prying hard-to-find books from precarious stalagmites in dusty shops, ploddingly buying the basics, and hoping big people would get back in touch.

What an idiot I must be to end up doing this, I meditated at least daily—the intellectual equivalent of squeezing pimples, or having a really good scratch and drawing a little blood.

The dust-filled air acted as a perpetual reminder of my failures. It seeped in through the mosquito screen to settle on my things, forming geological layers. In between sweepings, I padded dirt into regular tracks, like a zoo animal or a madwoman in a yellow wallpapered room. Fingerprints showed my weaknesses. A beer glass and my makeup bag were almost clean. The dust lay thickest on the electricity books, chalking them like corpses at a crime scene.

Periodically I checked to see what more successful humans do by way of routine—after all, their routines might be deranged, but they clearly seemed to work a lot better than mine. It was demoralizingly irrelevant to the failure-in-motion. Famous writers have glamour. When they stay in bed until noon (Keynes) or hit the booze at lunchtime (Churchill), they are demonstrating self-knowledge in the face of the tyranny of socially ordained rhythms. When they survive on vinegar (Byron), tinned meat (F. Scott Fitzgerald), amphetamines (Auden, Sartre and Ayn Rand) or cigarettes and coffee (pretty much everyone), it's a sign of commitment.

But the PhD student is not glamorous. Imagine we were to declare in the university library that we could only write on top of a fridge, like Thomas Wolfe, or surrounded by snails, like Patricia Highsmith. Goodbye library card.