A little more is a lot more

The world is more Indian than you think

There are more than 3 crore Indians settled abroad but that isn’t more. It isn’t less as well but then only numbers are never more. This summer I was in London and stayed with my son and daughter-in-law… and the two months that we spent in London have made me revise the way I thought about India! Sounds strange? Well, truth always comes in small packets of unexpectedness, doesn’t it?

London Heathrow Airport

The cold expressionless gesture was typical of all customs and immigration officials all over and as we stood waiting for her to complete her screening and hand us back our passports, we thought, ‘Well, we are going to step out into a world of grey skies and distanced, dispassionate Londoners.’ The immigration officer turned to us with our passports held in her hands, broke into the sort of warm smile that can throw you off-balance, and said, ‘Namaste. Have a great stay here in London.’

‘Namaste,’ we replied and hurried out from there towards the baggage bay. I was perplexed. What is the world coming to? Namaste? Well, only a few months later when I now read that Obama greeted Modi with a ‘Kem Cho’ during his US visit, I can understand the kind of transformation that is probably taking place. Is it India reaching out… or has the rest of the world decided to reach out to India? Whatever be the case, India is certainly visible everywhere.

Let me add right here that India now doesn’t exist anymore as a country where villains roam around in dhotis and the women walk around trees in purdah… no, the customs officials do not expect Indians to be carrying ropes that magically rise or carpets that will fly… I mean, they do look at you and may ask, ‘Are you carrying large boxfuls of barfi, sir?’ Indians are as much a part of the global milieu as it can get.

I remember an incident from 1994 when my wife was a Commonwealth Scholar at the University of York in UK. She was once asked by a local council school to come and give a small talk about India to the primary school kids there. She came back and retold me all that happened, including the questions like, ‘What is that red dot on your forehead?’ or ‘Is it difficult wearing a sari?’ or ‘Do Indian women marry without falling in love first?’ All absolutely relevant questions but those that implied how less the world knew India.

Things are a lot different now. There are many more interpretations of the bindi than even Indian women would bother to know. The pursuit of love is as intense in India as it has been anywhere else in the world. The sari has some really charmingly creative avatars and the Indian dress sensibility is quite an inspiration to the designers abroad. The world is getting more Indian than we could imagine.

Queen’s Walk, London

The place from where the world watches the Tower Bridge open at specific times was full of Indians. Nothing strange or unexpected because this is one place where you can easily brush against someone from Zulu and remain absolutely unruffled. As we ambled towards the London Bridge and then onwards towards the London Eye, I asked Specky, my wife, ‘Do you notice anything different from the mid-nineties when we were here?’

Specky paused for a while, looked around, and smiled, ‘Yes, there are more Indians wearing the sari and the salwar-suit than I noticed a decade or more back.’ This is true. If you go back in time, Indian women would go and specially shop around for jeans and trousers and coats and everything else that they had not been wearing in the normal course in India. It could be that they didn’t want to miss the opportunity to wear western outfits… but it is more probable that Indian women felt more accepted in those outfits and they didn’t want to stand out as someone wearing something that was too outlandish.

Now, in 2014, we noticed that this inclination to wear western outfits because an Indian outfit would make them appear like a novelty or a specimen is simply not there. Those Indian women who love wearing western outfits even in India would do so during their foreign trips… but the others now simply walk around in Indian dresses with confidence. This just means two things:

India and being Indian is embraced by the world.
Indians are more at ease with their own culture and way of living.

Whatever be the reason… and it is probably a combination of the two, the influence of the Indian way of life can be seen everywhere. Even on Queen’s Walk in London. However, what is more important is that we saw Indian dresses and western dresses with a distinct Indian cut and in Indian patterns and designs being displayed and sold even in the better known stores in London. Walk into Harvey Nicols, Selfridges, or Harrods and you’ll know what I’m saying. Walking into the more hoi polloi stores like M&S and others in this league and the equation still remains India-centric. This isn’t just a fad. The world is accepting the Indian sensibility and is positively enamoured by it.

In the Underground

Take a public transport now and you will realise that it is no longer easy to talk in Hindi and get away with saying something uncharitable. Well, the mid-nineties were quite the opposite. I remember we switched to Hindi when we wanted to have a secret discussion… even inside a store with the sales-person positively miffed because she was not able to understand us. Of course there was another fact quite obvious in the past decades… Indians wanted to speak in English as they wanted to believe that this was how they would be accepted by the crowds who spoke the language.

So you found Indians struggling with their P’s and Q’s and yet persisting with the language in a rather ludicrous way. Things are radically different now. The chatter in the tube or the London buses was anything but English… I could notice that babble was global indeed. And yet when I told Specky in Hindi that we were possibly lost, a very English gentleman politely asked, ‘Can I help you? Madad karoon?’ He then added hurriedly that a combination of Bollywood movies and Indians in the neighbourhood have ensured that everyone now knows a smattering of Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and Gujarati. I took a deep breath and uttered a whispered wow!

So yes, India is no longer a strange country with unacceptable habits.

What else is so Indian abroad?

Aha! Look at what Russel Peters does. He has single-handedly pulled India out of its coma of seriousness and taught us to laugh at our idiosyncrasies. I believe the fastest route into the heart of a stranger country is by making them laugh at you. Well, getting to be the butt of jokes is any day better than being despised and shunned… right? And India has entered the hearts of everyone in every country by laughing at their own funny ways of doing things.

So I discovered that India and things Indian are not just a part of the stores but are also strutting around in the cultural streets. From being wax models in Madame Tussauds to finding turbaned policemen on London streets… from doctors in the NHS to the friendly and smiling bus drivers… from actors on the stage to bartenders in pubs… you find Indians everywhere.

I think the most heartening thing that happened during our two months in London was in a hidden pub somewhere in the by-lanes behind Knightsbridge. This was ostensibly a haunted pub and the bartender was enjoying telling us the story of an army sergeant who was killed in a duel as he did not have money to pay to his debtor. As we thanked the bartender for his retelling of the story, an old American woman who was sitting in a corner with her nephews and nieces, got up and came to us. She said, ‘Look up and you’ll see currency notes from almost every country stuck there on the ceiling.’ And she was who searched and said, ‘And there I see the Indian rupee too. Indians are very helpful I must say. It was my Indian neighbour who took half a day off to drop me on the airport as there was a cab strike that day and I was stuck.’

We too requested the bartender to add our contribution on the ceiling to get the sergeant out of his debt dilemma… and walked out thinking, ‘Indians have been doing a little more to make the world a little more Indian.’ Specky, of course, had the last word as she said, ‘A little more is always a lot more. London seems so much more friendlier now.’

Lufthansa TVC