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June 19, 2009

LETTER FROM INDIA

Once-Clear Thoughts Are Clouded

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

MUMBAI — There has always been a lush, adjectival richness to foreign correspondence from India. We write of creaking bullock carts, curled moustaches, stinking latrines, sallow-cheeked farmers, smoky air, sweltering megalopolises and aching villages. We relentlessly describe.

We write about India this way because India is beautiful — not beautiful like Paris, sumptuous and elegant, but beautiful in its distillation of the extremes of human experience. To go into a Mumbai slum or a rain-starved Rajasthani village is to know how beautiful ugliness can be.

But description tempts us, too, because India is mystifying. Correspondents send home answers. India withholds reliable answers. Correspondents schematize reality. India waits for the schema, then cruelly disproves it. The temptation to write 1,000-word tone poems is fierce in a country easier to describe than to explain, and easier to explain than to understand.

I will leave India soon for America, from where I came. I have spent six years seeking to understand. Before going, I wanted to write a column saying something conclusive about India, why it matters, what it means.

But India is a place for seeking, not concluding, and here the chasm between what I wonder and know has widened with time. So I decided instead to write down the questions that still haunt me after 2,000 days here, about justice, love, culture, power, freedom — questions I hope someone abler will answer someday.

The first thing you see in India is indignity: filthy slums, boulevard defecation, puffed-out bellies. You feel shocked but also noble in your compassion. Then it becomes normal. You see that the true degradation is in human relationships, in the belief that people come in different levels of humanness. The idea is so pervasive and tempting of your vanity that, in time, it infects you, too.

And so I wonder: At what moment does a child learn her level of humanness? How did so many in this generation suddenly defy those destinies, as their parents never dreamed? How can callousness to poverty mingle so closely with the warmth that Indians rain on family? Which will change India first, the trickle-down of compassion or the trickle-up of rage?

Some of what I wonder was clear to me until India clouded it.

Indian love — family love, romantic love — once felt alien. It was not easy to spend time in giant, multigenerational households. Love meant scolding, meddling, judging, people obsessing about your eating, telling each other why their skin is too dark or their frame too thin. In romance, too, love was understated and assumed, given through sacrifice. It never aimed to fascinate, exhilarate.

Then I began to see the power of love in which it’s not about you.

Now I wonder: does love mean never taking another for granted, as it often does in the West, or is it the serene liberty to do so? Which is more of a gamble, marriage by arrangement or by love? Is love more durable when it is just the two of us or when it weaves together tribes?

Then there is the question of what you keep.

In the Davos Age, there is a formula for developing nations: low tariffs, privatization, sushi, English fluency, jazz bars, Bellinis, fashion weeks, consumptiveness, thinness, the purging of superstitions. These nations must in a decade Xerox a way of life that rich countries built over centuries.

But India is an ancient, continuous civilization, and Indians feel excitement but also pain in the dueling pressures to be someone else and be themselves: to subscribe to their astrology charts, schedule things on “auspicious days,” dance to the beats of Punjab’s plains, drink lentil soup.

Can one be “global” without being a mimic? Does the English language obliterate or liberate, disguising the caste and class of those who master it? Why is more culture flowing into India today than flowing out?

I wonder, too, about Indian power. This week, at a summit meeting in Russia, the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, stood shoulder to shoulder with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the dubiously re-elected president of Iran. Mr. Ahmadinejad might have listened to Mr. Singh: India and Iran are cultural cousins, sharing elements of language and culture. Millions of Indians claim Persian descent. India buys Iranian oil.

But this week, as Iran trampled on the values that Indians hold so dear, Mr. Singh found nothing meaningful to say.

Why, when the world sees India as a great power, does India see itself as Burundi? Beyond its own affluence, what kind of world does India want? What will it do to build it?

And what can the world’s Irans learn from Indian democracy?

I once asked Mufti Shabbir Alam Sidiqi, an important Islamic cleric, whether disenfranchised Muslims were losing faith in India and taking solace in fundamentalist ideas.

“What you have in India you have in no other country,” he replied. “In this republic there are rights. We can demand our rights, speak out. In other countries: eat, drink and shut up. Go to Saudi Arabia: you can’t speak. There is Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Dubai, Iraq, Iran. These things are nowhere. They are all dictatorships.”

Indian democracy should not work. Indians share no language. They cling to their identities. Most live below that level of middle-classness beyond which democracy supposedly thrives.

But the system holds. The coups, election theft and statecraft-by-murder that afflict much of the developing world don’t happen here. Democracy brings little to the poor, the state is corrupt, politicians lack principles and ideas. Yet those with no reason to believe continue to believe, vote, speak, petition.

And I wonder: Is India reinventing democracy — democracy designed not for colonial Virginia, but for societies like this: poor; inequitable; ethnically, religiously, linguistically balkanized; in the throes of convulsive change? Would India, if it summoned the will, be a more persuasive lecturer on democracy’s merits than America?

Then there is one more question. This one I will seek to answer — not now, but in my next and final letter from here.

Is a land with such beauty and possibility, with these vast questions still to answer in my lifetime, a land whose addiction can ever be escaped?

Happy news!

http://www.sopasia.com/awards/2009/groupa.asp

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June 7, 2009

Love in the Time of Diaspora

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

THE PRAYER ROOM

By Shanthi Sekaran

382 pp. MacAdam/Cage. $25

By now, you recognize the Indian novel. Every week, it seems, there are new additions to the subcontinent’s thriving subgenre of immigrant literature, all of them sharing a few tell-tale elements: lush language; the vitality and musicality of India’s crowded gullies; its ancient spirituality counterpoised against a crass new materialism; its émigrés’ struggles to balance tradition and modernity.

Shanthi Sekaran’s first novel, “The Prayer Room,” contains all of these familiar and sumptuous treats, all the multicultural exotica we have come to expect. But it does not contain — and perhaps doesn’t need to contain — much more.

The tale is this: In 1974, George Armitage, a young Ph.D. student from England, ventures to Madras to work on a dissertation about Indian temples. He does less research and more flirting than he expected, and ends up returning to England “on a Pan Am airliner with his new small wife beside him.”

He has, we are told, a history of regretting his purchases.

George’s new wife is an Indian named Viji, from a traditional family. They have married at the insistence of her mother, who was devastated to learn of Viji’s white lover at a time when even dinner dates were carefully arranged. Now Viji sets off, as so many Indians did in that era, to make a life with George in the West — first in England, then in suburban Sacramento.

George is a frustrated intellectual; Viji is lonely and ill equipped for a bewildering new land. It’s not a promising foundation for romance, and the trouble only deepens when George’s lecherous, tactless father crosses the Atlantic to move in. What emerges is a chronicle of lukewarm love: love that is initially coerced, then becomes a pleasant habit after triplets are born, then sputters into boredom and resentment as time wears on, driving Viji to walk out and leading both of them toward infidelity before their love finally, if tepidly, returns.

The story is simple. But, as with so many novels of the Indian diaspora, the plot matters less than the language.

Sekaran is a master of cadence, and as she displays her intimate knowledge of India, England and America, there’s jazz on nearly every page: the “first striated fumes” of a cigar evoking a British pub, Sacramento’s longing “to be a city other than itself,” a sing-song Indian accent that betrays “affection for the syllables themselves.” In India, a phone booth “keeled into the sari shop, which butted against the sweet shop, which rammed into the grungy teahouse, which crashed into the tailor’s.”

Such observations shine a bright light on the cultural collisions at the heart of this novel. Yet we slowly realize that the book is little more than the sum of its beautiful details. Sekaran’s sentences may be loose gems, but she hasn’t strung them together to make jewelry. While she treats us to descriptions of a “possibly malnourished” lizard and a “small bikini that dripped gray puddles onto the linoleum,” she never convincingly tells us what it’s like for Viji to bear the children of a man who doesn’t love her, or how she reaches the decision to leave George, or what her impressions of America are. Nor does Sekaran compensate for this lack of interior life with a corresponding exterior gaze — we don’t learn who is president at the time, what is happening in the society, what George’s academic interests are.

To be sure, “The Prayer Room” has its pleasures. But because it remains more interested in the colorful cross-cultural manifestations of human motivation than it does in human motivation itself, it goes down like a five-course repast of gelato. No individual bite is unappetizing. But nothing collects; and at the end you fold your napkin with the faint feeling that you have been satisfied but not filled.

Anand Giridharadas, a columnist for The International Herald Tribune, is writing a nonfiction book about modern India.

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June 5, 2009

LETTER FROM INDIA

Market Economics, Indian Style

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

MUMBAI — It is surreal to live in the so-called third world, in a country belatedly stumbling on capitalism, and to hear Americans, of all people, heralding its end. It feels like watching your parents fight for the first time.

Nations like this, that used to suppress money, now bow at its altar. But as tens of millions of Indians and Chinese and Russians enter the age of malls and MasterCard, they may be stunned to hear from rich lands that greed is out. It’s hollow, this capitalism. It’s derivatives of derivatives, money making money on money. Private jets are sin. Debt is dumb. Restless wanting is so pre-2008.

“To straighten a bent stick,” Michel de Montaigne wrote, “we bend it in the contrary way.” But a stroll through this money capital of India may remind capitalism’s new doubters of why they believed in it to begin with, and may warn against bending the stick too far.

On the streets of Mumbai, still in the early stages of capitalist development, one sees not the emptiness of money but rather its vitality: a power to breathe dignity into the poor, to foster social change, to spur a culture of self-improvement, even to rinse away unearned privilege.

And one sees, as well, when capitalism begins to sour: when it becomes bigger, boxier, an abstract video game for managers.

At its roots, however, the market in India is dynamism. Far from the bustle of Mumbai, in small towns and villages, people wait and wait, thumbing newspapers, gossiping, with history on pause. But in this town, there is money to make; people move constantly, selling tomatoes and shooting films and ferrying pipes with fundamentalist fervor. They do not ask if you’re Hindu or Muslim or Christian. If you want to buy, buy. If not, bye-bye.

Markets bring dignity. In most of India, the poor cower before their betters. But visit the Mumbai fish market, and see deference disappear. Time is money; fish are more valuable at 6 a.m. than 8 a.m. And so customers at the market, however well-dressed, are pushed and berated by slum-dwelling women carrying catch on their heads. If you have lived in India long enough to be sickened by servility, such pushes can inspire.

Markets quantify hope. They spur self-improvement, for what is measurable can be improved. You know how good you must be to graduate from motorcycle to car and car to S.U.V. Even as consumption loses favor in the West, it is worth remembering that accumulating stuff is a more peaceful, democratic, healthy form of tribalism than light- or dark-skinned, Sunni or Shiite, gentile or Jew.

Markets bring change. Traditional societies like this one saw time cyclically; life’s goal was to replicate lives lived before. Markets usher in linear accumulation, enabling people to build on the past and venture in new directions. Where markets have reached in India, women and homosexuals and the young have found voice. Where the preserving impulse reigns, silence predominates.

Markets, of course, are not perfect. They are bringing an intellectual narrowness to India, leaving few ideas of the good life besides self-development. With their dogma that anyone can rise, they can blind the fortunate to the plight of the suffering.

But their real dysfunction begins not when there is too much market, but when business grows detached from that original street hustle.

In India, street capitalism is slowly surrendering to skyscraper capitalism: tea stalls ceding to espresso-bar chains, corner stores to supermarkets. And so, one Excel spreadsheet at a time, efficient managers grow ever more remote from the actual marketplace and from their deeds’ human impact.

At India’s corner stores, the service is impeccable. They deliver. They take back spoiled fruit, even after a bite. Now the free market has brought big-box stores to India, air-conditioned and clean. But the staff doesn’t care if you buy. They don’t remember faces. They are all training and no instinct.

The USB port on my BlackBerry once broke. My mobile provider, one of India’s top companies, took weeks to inspect the phone, then told me I had “manhandled” it and quoted an extravagant repair charge. Then a friend told me of a man with a small shop who could sort me out. He was, unlike my provider, vulnerable to the market: he collected the phone, fixed it for a few dollars and delivered it back to me.

Likewise, Mumbai street food is consistently delicious because market forces give vendors no second chances. In the finest restaurants, where dishes can cost one hundred times more, the food is often good and often revolting. These restaurants become entrenched and powerful, and people go because they always have; the feedback on which a real market depends erodes.

The line from such restaurants to credit-default swaps is shorter than it seems. Markets bring scale; scale brings remoteness; remoteness rids markets of the nimbleness and human sensitivity that are best in them.

Now that this is plain to many, what shape might capitalism take, here or in the West?

An answer offered by these streets may be to return capitalism to its origins. In a new age of slow food and local energy grids and community gardens, perhaps we might reinvent a community capitalism: a capitalism with all the advantages of the lean, leveraged, synergized, just-in-time world that markets have made, but a capitalism whose soul remains somehow in the sweaty, throbbing, life-giving bazaar.

May 22, 2009

LETTER FROM AMERICA

Will India Lose Its Charm as It Becomes 'World Class'?

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

WASHINGTON — “But you haven’t eaten anything! Come, come, you must have something. At least take some bread. Please.”

They barely serve peanuts aboard American airlines these days. But just a few years ago, in India, it was not uncommon to encounter flight attendants who took it personally when you did not eat.

Their behavior was not that of a pre-programmed employee following a script. It was the universal response of an Indian to an Indian, a horror at the thought that someone in your charge might go hungry.

Then the Indian airline industry became what business-book writers label “world class”: it got with the global program, signing on the dotted lines of the contract with modernity.

Delays waned. Aerobridges were erected. New airlines were born.

Thinner, younger flight attendants were employed. Miniskirts replaced saris. To fly the Indian skies today is to have a perfectly modern experience.

But it is not to have a very Indian experience, because they don’t care if you eat anymore.

These thoughts stirred as I traveled in America in recent days, on a short break from life in India. Here, of course, the notion of flight attendants’ caring if you eat sounds laughable, since they don’t even serve you food much of the time. And yet it is toward this colder, more detached relationship between customer and employee that India is heading.

India has long been a jazz republic, functioning without a written score. People involve themselves in each other’s lives without regard to propriety or privacy. They insist on feeding you even when you want nothing. They insist on paying a price other than the price listed.

They pack as many cars onto a road as possible, without regard to the painted lanes. They pay as little tax as they can get away with.

If you call Domino’s after closing time, you can sometimes cajole them to reopen and deliver a pizza anyway. Everything is a negotiation; everything is improvised. Things are a “no” in India until they are a “yes.”

But a kind of modernity is coming to India, with a Western emphasis on regimentation and formalization. The flight attendants now walk down the aisles carrying out their detailed training, offering food if you want it, moving on if you don’t. A new breed of companies resists hiring the cousins and friends of senior managers; they insist on children’s educating themselves and working hard in order to inherit the family business. More and more people faithfully pay their taxes.

And yet now when I visit America, where I grew up until moving to India six years ago, I wonder if this is where India is bound: a society that is fairer and more ordered, but in which something of the warmth of improvisation is gone.

It is especially visible in customer-service relationships. In India, those relationships are often hierarchical and tinged by a blend of fear and reverence in the service giver’s eyes. But India has not yet crossed that line beyond which such transactions lose their human aspect.

Moving through America, I was struck again and again by the superficial politesse and underlying coldness of so many customer-service moments.

In restaurants, the waiters have become performers, not merely hosts seeking to tend to a guest: “May I ask if it’s your first time dining with us? Wow! Well, it’s wonderful to have you here. Can I begin by telling you about our wonderful specials?” And then the sparkling-or-still-water dilemma, and the practiced Disappointed Look when you want tap water. And the 50-percent-too-elaborate “Are you finished enjoying that?”

Language was invented to connect us, but it sometimes drives us apart.

You see it, too, when you fly. There are the airport-security officials who grimace at you with a “What? You think you’re better than me?” face when you ask them to replenish the stack of trays. Or you finish your glass of water on a flight, and now you wonder about asking the flight attendant, who is now just moving forward to the next row, for a refill. She might do it; but she might, glaring at you in the manner of a headmistress, tell you that she has to serve other customers first and that she will get to you, sir, thank you very much.

And she is right, in a way. Why should you drink twice before others drink once? The attendant’s fidelity to her training is impeccable.

But one senses something robotic at work, cutting between what are, at the day’s end, just two human beings.

And yet, with India as the foil, one can see a deeper meaning in the brusqueness and coldness. So much of this behavior seems intended to draw a red line of dignity around the individual, to declare to the world that she is somebody whom no one can push around, that no one is better than anyone else.

But which is more real, this cold dignity or India’s warm servility?

In my six years there, India has begun to go the formal way. An oversweet, artificial politesse is audible now on certain airlines and customer-service calls and in restaurants and bars. The rules, which have long existed in abundance in India, are no longer things to be broken. People seek space for themselves and give space to others.

They fuss less and less over others, including over whether they have eaten.

And one wonders whether, as modernity comes, India will lose a certain warmth, a certain tender involvement of everyone in everyone. Is the warmth that lingers just a product of this stage of history, residually feudal and agrarian and poor, a stage from which India will eventually move on?

Is destiny the barriers between us?

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May 8, 2009

LETTER FROM INDIA

In Cellphone, India Reveals an Essence

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

VERLA, INDIA — For America in the 1950s, it was the car and the open interstate.

For India today, it is the cellphone.

Sometimes a technology comes along and crystallizes a cultural moment. Not since the automobile and the American, perhaps, have a technology and a people wedded as happily as Indians and their mobiles, small and big, vibrating and tringing, Blackberry and plain vanilla. And neither India nor the cellphone will be the same from the pairing.

India now sells more new cellphone connections than anyplace else, with 15.6 million in March alone. The cost of calling is among the lowest in the world. And the device plays a larger-than-life role here than in the wealthy countries where it was invented.

Of course, in so vast a country, India’s nearly 400 million cellphone users still account for only one-third of the population.

But the technology has seeped down the social strata, into slums and small towns and villages, and a majority of subscribers are now outside the major cities and wealthiest states. The average bill is less than $5 per month, and, if present trends continue, every Indian will have a cellphone in five years.

What makes the cellphone special in India? It is partly that India skipped the land-line revolution, making cellphones the first real contact with the outside world for hundreds of millions. It is partly that with few other machines selling so briskly, the cellphone in India also serves variously as a personal computer, flashlight, camera, stereo, video-game console and organizer. It is partly that India’s relative poverty compels providers to be more creative to survive.

But it is also that the cellphone appeals deeply to the Indian psychology, to the spreading desire for personal space and voice, not in defiance of the family and tribe but in the chaotic midst of it.

Imagine what it was like, back in the Pre-cellular Age, to be young in a traditional household. People are everywhere. Doors are open. Judgments fly. Bedrooms are shared. Phones are centrally located.

The cellphone serves, then, as a technology of individuation. On the cellphone, you are your own person. No one answers your calls or reads your messages. Your number is just yours.

And yet the young Indian rebel, unlike his Western counterpart, does not rebel totally. He wants to savor his new individuality, but do so while sitting with his parents having dinner, listening to his grandmother implore him to get married. He listens, then taps a few keys on his cellphone to escape, then listens some more, and taps, and listens.

The cellphone appeals, too, because it plays into the Indian need to place people. Cellular differences today perform the role that forehead markings and strings around torsos and metal bracelets once did: announcing who outranks whom.

Small people have small phones, and big people have big ones.

Small people have numerical-soup numbers, and big people have numbers that end in 77777 or something like that. Small people have one phone, and big people have two. Small people set their phones merely to ring, and big people make Bollywood songs play when you call them.

The cellphone, in short, has made itself Indian. There are 65 times more cellphone connections than broadband Internet links, and the gap is widening. And so those who wish to influence Indians are not waiting for the computer to catch on, but are seeking ways to migrate onto the cellphone the things Westerners do online.

Indian companies have invented methods, via simple cellphone text messaging, to wire money to temples, pay for groceries, find jobs and send and receive e-mail (on humble phones with no data connection).

But the most intriguing notion is that cellphones could transform Indian democracy.

Even in this election season, Indians are famously cynical about their senior-citizen-dominated, dynastic, corrupt politics. The educated often sit out elections. But with cellphones’ becoming near-universal, experiments are sprouting with the goal of forging a new bond between citizen and state, through real-time, 24-hour cellular participation.

In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, citizens who file a right-to-information request can now check its status via text message. Anyone who has been to an Indian government office, begging men in safari suits to do their job, will welcome this service.

A number of civic groups, meanwhile, have devised cellphone-based ways of informing voters about candidates for Parliament. If you text your postal code to the Association for Democratic Reforms, it will reply with candidate profiles like this:

DEORA MILIND MURLI (INC) Crim. Cases - No, Assets 175373142, Liab 0, Edu graduate_professional

MOHMAD ALI ABUBAKAR SHAIKH (BSP) Crim. Cases - Yes (1), Assets 445015617, Liab 2489959, Edu illiterate

A new interactivity is dawning in the news media, too. Now, via cellphone, citizens are talking back to the press, creating a continuous feedback loop between reporters and the public opinion they shape. Channels solicit text messages during broadcasts to air opinions and conduct opinion polls. Comments crawl across the screen as talking heads talk.

In 2006, a court acquitted Manu Sharma, a politician’s son, in the murder of a model, Jessica Lall, even though several witnesses had seen him shoot her. This was nothing new in India. But a groundswell of text-message anger made its way onto television screens and compelled officials to retry Mr. Sharma. He was eventually convicted and sentenced to life.

Imagine the future: A young woman sits on her sofa. With a few taps, she checks that her tax return has been cleared. With a few more, she learns that her local legislator is a criminal, and she switches to the other candidate. She wires a campaign contribution by text. And then she notices on television a debate on her favorite topic, and listens to the arguments and taps hurriedly into her phone words that will soon scroll across the screen.

It is not Athens, but it would be a start: in the world’s largest democracy, government not by passive consent, but by something like a conversation.

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April 24, 2009

LETTER FROM INDIA

Big Election, Teeny, Tiny (if Any) Ideas

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

VERLA — “This time the DMK alliance is a truncated one and includes the Congress and the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK). Jayalalitha’s AIADMK has stitched up a coalition that includes the PMK, MDMK, CPI and the CPI(M). She claims she has an ‘unbeatable combination.’ With the CPI, CPI(M) and the MDMK moving over to her side, all indications are that the AIADMK will get ahead with a majority. The DMK alliance, though, may not be demolished completely.”

I know, I know. The beginning of a newspaper article should be gripping, and comprehensible at the least.

Sorry. You see, with election fever roiling India, I thought you might like a taste of the great contest of ideas under way in the biggest election on the planet.

Well, as it turns out, there are no ideas in Indian elections anymore.

So I thought I’d give you the next best thing: a sample of the nonsense that Indians must imbibe (this nonsense from Outlook, a respected English-language news weekly) as they wait for their politics to become less soul-crushingly trivial.

Most of the world ignores India until it (a) takes their jobs or (b) chooses a leader. Outsiders love its elections. The foreign-correspondent Standard Narrative is dusted off for its quintennial tour: “The world’s largest democracy is having the world’s largest election, like, ever!”

But, even as foreign reporters pour in to tell that prefabricated story, it is difficult to fight the feeling that this big, big election is in fact pitifully small. The understanding of democracy is small. The candidates are small. The conversation is small.

The quoted paragraph distills this election well: no ideology, no larger-than-life leaders, no causes, no principles at stake. Instead, just alphabets, this lot siding with that lot and these people with them — a process resembling a children’s game show, not the solemn selection of leaders for 1.2 billion human beings.

This large ritual of democracy is easy to celebrate if we define democracy in the smallest possible way. If democracy is voting every five years, then Jai Ho! But if it asks something more, if it implies a certain way of life, then we must keep the Champagne corked.

Perhaps democracy means leaders not asking you to cast votes according to your caste. Or citizen confidence in the rule of law. Or a police force that you trust will solve your burglary instead of stealing more of your stuff. Or civic enthusiasm vigorous enough that educated people follow traffic rules and even choose public service over private gain. Or empathy for the nation’s hungry other half.

Perhaps it means the democracy of the day-to-day: equality not just in a constitution, but also in quotidian human interactions: the waiter and the customer, the chauffeur and the driven, conversing rather than barking and meekly taking orders.

The candidates are as small as the definition of democracy.

There are the old-guard leaders like Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Lal Krishna Advani, the major contenders to run India. At 76 and 81, respectively, they would appear to make wonderful grandfathers, with soft laps and lots of tales to tell. But they simply cannot connect with one of the youngest populations on earth, buzzing, fired up and ready to go.

As alternatives, there are younger state-level populists like Kumari Mayawati and Narendra Modi. They have impassioned flocks, but they are small in their own way, narrow-casting to particular religious and caste cohorts, alienating others. Their broad-based appeal is questionable.

There are the so-called young MPs, but their youthful achievements are diminished by the fact that they are usually the sons of important men.

And there are the new candidates from the educated elite, who seem decent, who campaign vigorously on Facebook, but who struggle to convince anyone that they really care about latrines and rice subsidies.

But it is, above all, the smallness of the national conversation that baffles. The debate never rises above the battle tactics of who is with whom, and who ditched whom, and who said what in reply to what the other one said. The politicians, seemingly incapable of ideas, are wise not to attempt any. But the press, whose task is to challenge them, plays along, writing drivel analyses like the analysis with which I began, treating the thing like a sport, tit-for-tat, tat-for-tit, until it is time to go home.

India’s election must rank with the least ideological elections in the world. Which thinkers have inspired each party’s philosophy? What are their core principles? Why do politicians switch parties so effortlessly, without having to explain their shift in positions?

I have asked politicians these questions. It is like speaking to them in Creole, because the questions are not phrased in the only language they understand, the language of whether the ABC will merge with the XYZ to form the EIEIO.

Beyond the realm of government, it is a dizzyingly exciting moment in India, one of those rare moments in the life of a nation when everything remains to be decided, when a hundred alternative fates are possible.

What do Indians want to do with Pakistan, their nuclear-armed rival that is also like a younger sibling in rehab? What is their solution to stubborn, blood-curdling poverty? How can they balance growth and greenness? What of the old culture should they keep? What brand of capitalism do they favor, a borrowed market-is-god dogma or an approach bespoke for their situation? What values will they champion abroad?

These questions matter. They matter to Indians; they matter to the world, because every sixth human is Indian.

But they will not be answered in these coming days of frantic electioneering or, if these days are any guide, in the five years of tragic banality that lurk just around the bend.

Interview with TVO's "The Agenda"

Watching the Empire Move on

April 10, 2009

LETTER FROM AMERICA

Watching the Empire Move On

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS -- The woman reached for my ticket. I had entered the parking lot two hours and a few minutes earlier. The first two hours were free, but I had stepped just across the line into paying territory. Would she let it slide?

She appeared East African; I am an American who lives in India; I imagined that she and I might have a shared sense of the situation. I was just a few minutes over, and in our Old Countries I might have been waved through with a flexible shrug.

But not here, not in America, where there are rules to bring human caprice under control. She asked for $2, and I paid, with a feeling of sadness at the coldness of our interaction and yet also a sense of admiration for the great human accomplishment -- the invention of patterns that apply to everyone always, not selectively and sometimes -- behind that coldness.

You notice things when you come home. I grew up in America but have been living for nearly six years in India. I returned home this time in a storm of terrible words: crisis, downturn, recession. And what struck me about the gloom, coming from overseas, is that it is both deeper and shallower than most Americans think.

The crisis seems deeper because it is not, at least to these foreign-returned eyes, simply a matter of subprime mortgages and credit-default swaps and A.I.G. and Ponzi schemers.

It can seem a natural outgrowth of a way of life that jars one upon landing in America: an entire society induced to want more and more, to consume more than they earn, more than 1,000 beings elsewhere might consume; a society that has invented, for $4, a ''skinny hazelnut latte'' but has diminished the odds of the guests in the coffeehouse speaking to another human being rather than to their laptops; an obsession with perpetual movement that sometimes drowns out the question, ''Why are we doing this?''

But as I drank America in, I also could not help but feel that the crisis was shallower than Americans think: that America, which has spread these woes to the world, has special powers to escape them, powers that the countries it has infected may lack: powers of regeneration and reinvention.

Diversity is not normal. Most people in most places live and work with people who look like them, eat what they eat, share their sense of right and wrong. Back in India, even today, if you pluck two names out of the phone book, chances are that they would not be able to dine together: different notions of pollution and purity, vegetarian and nonvegetarian; different assessments of each other's level of humanness.

But, from Washington to Brooklyn to Boston, it struck me again and again how American faces don't match. They mouth different languages. They live in a thousand idiosyncratic styles. And, exposed to so many others' idiosyncrasies, they cross-pollinate and invent.

Then there is the power of creative destruction. There must always be something better, a new new thing to replace the old new thing. It is a political system that alienates the world by making an enemy called Hussein and then pivots to elect a president called Hussein.

And there is the power of democracy: not the democracy of casting a vote at regular intervals, but the democracy that weaves into everyday human interactions, a culture in which no one is thought to be better than anyone else, in which the idea of a taboo against ''commoners'' touching a queen is strange.

It is coffee shops where you bus your own cups. Important officials who drive themselves to work alone, not with phalanxes of needless hangers-on around them. A ceaseless flurry of ''thank you'' and ''please,'' which sound to foreign-returning ears like pro forma phrases, but which suggest a concern about taking people for granted, about assuming that anyone owes you anything simply because of their rank and yours.

The American superstructure is burning down. But the foundation, of diversity, creative destruction, democracy -- these things live on and will, one imagines, underpin a revival before long.

I worry far more for the developing world, for places like India, which has been mimicking the American superstructure without building an equivalent foundation, pursuing the effect without the cause.

India seems, on the surface, to have arrived. There are the requisite global luxury boutiques; restaurants that serve sophisticated food in tiny portions with something called coulis drizzled across the plate; Indian firms that make multibillion-dollar acquisitions; software companies that write code for the world; songs that win Oscars and hearts many thousands of miles away.

But perhaps it has all come too quickly, and served to crowd out the hard slog of constructing a modern society in more than name alone. Yes, India has Louis Vuitton, but how easy is it to be gay there? Yes, its companies have dazzled the world, but why do their workers complain still about the hierarchical, soul-draining work culture? Yes, it won an Olympic gold medal last year, but why has it been so hard to recast servants as people paid, not born, to serve?

Success is distracting, and it distracts one, above all, from failures. And so the result in India is a revolution that feels borrowed, without all the preceding layers on which to stand.

Today in America a whole way of life is crumbling. But, just as fast, new visions are taking hold. New notions of permissible state intervention in the economy; a new questioning of the culture of debt. As an old superstructure withers, the robust foundation seems ready to birth the eternally improbable new.

But in India, to which I will soon return, one fears that the society will succumb yet again to the empire's joke. Empires bring an alien way of life to a land; and then they leave and move on. But the colonized, cut off from the source of their own behavior, keep repeating the old patterns, which is why Indians still say ''cantonment'' and ''alight,'' long after most Britons have ceased and desisted.

Will it be the same this time around, with the arduous pupil converted to the Washington Consensus way of life in the very hour that that consensus crumbles, without the capacity to invent the next way of life, with nothing to go on but someone else's time-worn ideas?

My interview on India with Canadian television