Over a month already in McLeod Ganj. I can barely recall Britain now – please, someone out there, tell me what it’s like. Do people really shy from using their car horns, and if so only to express annoyance? Do they really have bins stationed in public places, so passers-by have somewhere to put their used crisp packets and drinks cans? Do they really have sewage systems that don’t belch their contents onto the roadside when it rains? Do they really have pavements set aside from the roads, for people to walk on without having to dodge traffic? Do they really have street lighting to illuminate towns and cities during the dark hours? Is leprosy really a medieval comedy disease? Surely not; memory playing tricks on me again; I have grown misty-eyed in my exile.
According to the people who know best, I am the guest of a rising world power, a monster economy, a fearsome leviathan just waking up from a four hundred year slumber. India, according to business leaders and politicians and other repositories of wisdom and foresight, will once again become the richest country on earth – just like it was in the seventeenth century when the Mughal Empire stretched from Hyderabad to Kabul, and Emperor Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal and staged elephant fights in the Red Fort (a step up from cricket). India’s progress will be checked only by those persistent little authoritarians, the Chinese; competition between the two Asian hopefuls has shifted from the military to the economic, or something like that.
I have discussed the soaring fortunes of India with many of the colourful types who sail within her. For instance, the leper lady who can be found each morning in McLeod Ganj at the spot where Tipa Road merges with Bhagsu Road, waving around the stumps where her hands used to be and mouthing for food from a caved-in face. Among other frivolous body parts, she has been relieved of her nose – quite an advantage in India’s urban areas, which tend to smell of urine (both fresh and stale).
She expressed great excitement at India’s 8% growth rate last year – take that America! she bellowed through her peeling lips – and told me in detail of her plans to invest her fortunes made begging at the roadside in some prime Mumbai real estate, currently valued at something close to London prices. To wish her well on her immanent rise to first world citizenship, I gifted her a tasty wedge of Tibetan bread. This she refused, because – duh – she didn’t have any teeth to chew on it with, bless her! (I should have given her porridge; note for next time.)
Furthermore, just yesterday I had a similarly animated chat with an old man who lives in a rusted metal box on stilts on Jogiwara Road – his home for over twenty years, according to the nearby street vendors. At first I couldn’t tell whether he was Indian or Tibetan, so grimed was he in the filth of two decades. Then I chose not to bother trying to distinguish – all are welcome, regardless, in the new Indian golden age. He told me of the killing he was making in the Bangalore outsourcing industry, and of all the American IT executives he’d lunched with that week at the chai stall opposite his box.
He was fortunate, he said, to be alive in India at this phenomenal juncture in history, going on to quote David Cameron, who is at-this-moment leading a business envoy to Delhi to strengthen UK-India ties: ‘India’s economy is set to overtake Britain’s in a decade, hence why I’m here to exchange grins with lots of fat greasy industry tycoons’ (more or less verbatim). Indeed, the tramp looked on me with pity, as a denizen of an ailing post-industrial nation that was fast on the way out. ‘You poor white bastard,’ he said, ‘have a biscuit.’ And a very nice biscuit it was too – Parle G, a fine Indian brand; it goes marvellously with tea, really it does.
Balram Halwai, the protagonist of Adiga’s The White Tiger (bloody excellent book; drop everything and read it), expresses India’s new national confidence in an idiosyncratic yet zeitgeist-humping manner – with a dash of homophobia served up on the side, if you’re into that sort of thing:
Now isn’t that the punchiest bit of prose you’ve read all year? (I knew the Japanese were up to something, anyhow, with their dubious little gadgets and pervy cartoons and electronic colonialism and I really could go on...) Okay, so the wilder statements of Mr. Halwai – for instance that rampant buggery is contributing to Eastern political resurgence (although the Japanese assertion remains reasonable, of course) – may not chime terribly well with our Western liberal sensibilities, but perhaps that’s the point Adiga is cleverly making: the rise of the East will not be polite, neither will it be liberal.
The confidence felt in the West at the fall of the Berlin Wall – that liberal democracy was the happy end-game of human progress, distilled in Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist neo-con tract, The End of History – has melted away. With the Cold War over, America enjoyed a decade-long honeymoon of global dominance, on a scale never seen before in human history – even the British Empire fell short, in terms of economic penetration and the ubiquity of its military bases. Until 9/11, that is, when history resumed itself and the world became ‘interesting’ again. We now find ourselves in an age where the single greatest rising power – China – is far from being a liberal democracy, and whose free-market reforms have only strengthened the clout of the Communist Party over its beleaguered populace, through an easily-won alliance between the new class of business leaders and the old political oligarchy.
The great age of liberal democracy – instilled across the globe, ironically, by the far-from-benign British Empire – is in its death spasms, and will be looked on in future centuries as an agreeable curiosity, like the penny-farthing bicycle or a regency armchair. The symptoms of decay can be found in the West itself. Even the Euro-American Left, once the beating conscience of international affairs, doesn’t know what it stands for anymore: you see them marching against Western intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan one sunny weekend, and in favour of Western intervention in Israel the next. Out of the Middle East, imperialist pig-dogs; now back into the Middle East, governments of the Good, and stand up to this nasty regime we dislike – please.
Furthermore, starved of moral certainty, they’ve retreated into environmental Armageddon cults on a scale not seen since the Middle Ages. The end is nigh, we are repeatedly told – and the citizens of the West couldn’t seem more pleased about it. Repent ye your consumerist sins now, for the end it commeth, and kit out your house with EU-approved energy saving light bulbs while you’re at it.
But then, the West lost its certainties at the end of World War Two – an epoch of history we keep turning back to, 65 years on, in an increasingly pathetic attempt to salvage a sense of national identity and moral direction. But we don’t need ‘national identity’; that’s just fodder for nationalism, and that’s nasty and kind of raaacist innit. Try telling that to the Tibetan exiles I’ve met with here in McLeod Ganj, who, under Chinese rule, have suffered a cultural genocide – over six thousand monasteries destroyed by the People’s Liberation Army, their manuscripts burnt and statues melted down to make bullets – in the name of that modern holy grail: social justice. They’re rather keen on national identity, those chaps – reactionary fools, right?
Anyhow, what am I getting at? Good question. But I’ve had fun writing this. (It’s been raining a lot recently – monsoon season, you see.) Yet I feel obliged to offer up a lesson of some sort, something you can take home, share, cherish, draw inspiration form, write on a post-it note on stick on your desk. (I should really do that more myself – write interesting stuff down on post-it notes; but I digress; it is raining very hard outside, and a monkey is pressed up against my window, staring at me.) Yet, in lieu of a nice pithy conclusion I have to come up with myself, I leave you with a quotation from the political philosopher John Gray, who captures the modern condition with such withering style I want to track him down and buy him a pint of ale (how I miss ale):
According to the people who know best, I am the guest of a rising world power, a monster economy, a fearsome leviathan just waking up from a four hundred year slumber. India, according to business leaders and politicians and other repositories of wisdom and foresight, will once again become the richest country on earth – just like it was in the seventeenth century when the Mughal Empire stretched from Hyderabad to Kabul, and Emperor Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal and staged elephant fights in the Red Fort (a step up from cricket). India’s progress will be checked only by those persistent little authoritarians, the Chinese; competition between the two Asian hopefuls has shifted from the military to the economic, or something like that.
I have discussed the soaring fortunes of India with many of the colourful types who sail within her. For instance, the leper lady who can be found each morning in McLeod Ganj at the spot where Tipa Road merges with Bhagsu Road, waving around the stumps where her hands used to be and mouthing for food from a caved-in face. Among other frivolous body parts, she has been relieved of her nose – quite an advantage in India’s urban areas, which tend to smell of urine (both fresh and stale).
She expressed great excitement at India’s 8% growth rate last year – take that America! she bellowed through her peeling lips – and told me in detail of her plans to invest her fortunes made begging at the roadside in some prime Mumbai real estate, currently valued at something close to London prices. To wish her well on her immanent rise to first world citizenship, I gifted her a tasty wedge of Tibetan bread. This she refused, because – duh – she didn’t have any teeth to chew on it with, bless her! (I should have given her porridge; note for next time.)
Furthermore, just yesterday I had a similarly animated chat with an old man who lives in a rusted metal box on stilts on Jogiwara Road – his home for over twenty years, according to the nearby street vendors. At first I couldn’t tell whether he was Indian or Tibetan, so grimed was he in the filth of two decades. Then I chose not to bother trying to distinguish – all are welcome, regardless, in the new Indian golden age. He told me of the killing he was making in the Bangalore outsourcing industry, and of all the American IT executives he’d lunched with that week at the chai stall opposite his box.
He was fortunate, he said, to be alive in India at this phenomenal juncture in history, going on to quote David Cameron, who is at-this-moment leading a business envoy to Delhi to strengthen UK-India ties: ‘India’s economy is set to overtake Britain’s in a decade, hence why I’m here to exchange grins with lots of fat greasy industry tycoons’ (more or less verbatim). Indeed, the tramp looked on me with pity, as a denizen of an ailing post-industrial nation that was fast on the way out. ‘You poor white bastard,’ he said, ‘have a biscuit.’ And a very nice biscuit it was too – Parle G, a fine Indian brand; it goes marvellously with tea, really it does.
Balram Halwai, the protagonist of Adiga’s The White Tiger (bloody excellent book; drop everything and read it), expresses India’s new national confidence in an idiosyncratic yet zeitgeist-humping manner – with a dash of homophobia served up on the side, if you’re into that sort of thing:
White people are on the way out. All of them look so emaciated – so puny. You’ll never see any of them with a decent belly. For this I blame the president of America; he has made buggery perfectly legal in his country, and men are marrying other men instead of women. This was on the radio. This is leading to the decline of the white man. Then white people use mobile phones too much, and that is destroying their brains. It’s a known fact. Mobile phones cause cancer in the brain and shrink your masculinity; the Japanese invented them to diminish the white man’s brain and balls at the same time. I overheard this at the bus stand one night. […] My humble prediction: in twenty years’ time, it will be just us yellow men and brown men at the top of the pyramid, and we’ll rule the whole world. And God save everyone else.
Now isn’t that the punchiest bit of prose you’ve read all year? (I knew the Japanese were up to something, anyhow, with their dubious little gadgets and pervy cartoons and electronic colonialism and I really could go on...) Okay, so the wilder statements of Mr. Halwai – for instance that rampant buggery is contributing to Eastern political resurgence (although the Japanese assertion remains reasonable, of course) – may not chime terribly well with our Western liberal sensibilities, but perhaps that’s the point Adiga is cleverly making: the rise of the East will not be polite, neither will it be liberal.
The confidence felt in the West at the fall of the Berlin Wall – that liberal democracy was the happy end-game of human progress, distilled in Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist neo-con tract, The End of History – has melted away. With the Cold War over, America enjoyed a decade-long honeymoon of global dominance, on a scale never seen before in human history – even the British Empire fell short, in terms of economic penetration and the ubiquity of its military bases. Until 9/11, that is, when history resumed itself and the world became ‘interesting’ again. We now find ourselves in an age where the single greatest rising power – China – is far from being a liberal democracy, and whose free-market reforms have only strengthened the clout of the Communist Party over its beleaguered populace, through an easily-won alliance between the new class of business leaders and the old political oligarchy.
The great age of liberal democracy – instilled across the globe, ironically, by the far-from-benign British Empire – is in its death spasms, and will be looked on in future centuries as an agreeable curiosity, like the penny-farthing bicycle or a regency armchair. The symptoms of decay can be found in the West itself. Even the Euro-American Left, once the beating conscience of international affairs, doesn’t know what it stands for anymore: you see them marching against Western intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan one sunny weekend, and in favour of Western intervention in Israel the next. Out of the Middle East, imperialist pig-dogs; now back into the Middle East, governments of the Good, and stand up to this nasty regime we dislike – please.
Furthermore, starved of moral certainty, they’ve retreated into environmental Armageddon cults on a scale not seen since the Middle Ages. The end is nigh, we are repeatedly told – and the citizens of the West couldn’t seem more pleased about it. Repent ye your consumerist sins now, for the end it commeth, and kit out your house with EU-approved energy saving light bulbs while you’re at it.
But then, the West lost its certainties at the end of World War Two – an epoch of history we keep turning back to, 65 years on, in an increasingly pathetic attempt to salvage a sense of national identity and moral direction. But we don’t need ‘national identity’; that’s just fodder for nationalism, and that’s nasty and kind of raaacist innit. Try telling that to the Tibetan exiles I’ve met with here in McLeod Ganj, who, under Chinese rule, have suffered a cultural genocide – over six thousand monasteries destroyed by the People’s Liberation Army, their manuscripts burnt and statues melted down to make bullets – in the name of that modern holy grail: social justice. They’re rather keen on national identity, those chaps – reactionary fools, right?
Anyhow, what am I getting at? Good question. But I’ve had fun writing this. (It’s been raining a lot recently – monsoon season, you see.) Yet I feel obliged to offer up a lesson of some sort, something you can take home, share, cherish, draw inspiration form, write on a post-it note on stick on your desk. (I should really do that more myself – write interesting stuff down on post-it notes; but I digress; it is raining very hard outside, and a monkey is pressed up against my window, staring at me.) Yet, in lieu of a nice pithy conclusion I have to come up with myself, I leave you with a quotation from the political philosopher John Gray, who captures the modern condition with such withering style I want to track him down and buy him a pint of ale (how I miss ale):
The Soviet Union has ceased to exist and Europe has been reunified; but Russia has not adopted liberal democracy. In the thirty years after his death in 1976 China shook off Mao’s inheritance and adopted a type of capitalism – without accepting any Western model of government or society. The advance of globalisation continued, with the result that America has lost its central position. The US is in steep decline, its system of finance capitalism in a condition of collapse and its vast military machine effectively paid for by Chinese funding of the federal deficit. All mainstream parties in democratic countries converged on a free-market model at just the moment in history when that model definitively ceased to be viable. With the world’s financial system facing a crisis deeper that any since the 1930s, the advancing states are now authoritarian regimes. The bipolar world has not been followed by one ruled by “the last superpower”. Instead we have a world that nobody rules.Well, that might not all fit on a post-it note. But there’s room for the final sentence. A world that nobody rules – a cause for horror or for celebration? Discuss.
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