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Dear readers.
I give you my phrase of the week. Courtesy of Rahul ji.
“We’re a beehive.”
Brilliant. Insightful. And decidedly quirky.
Here it is, once again, in its full context, sandwiched right next to an elephant. As one does.
“India is called an elephant, but we’re not an elephant. We’re a beehive.”
Just what is it with these Gandhi boys? Mango people and beehives forsooth. (Yes, sorry, I am counting Mr Vadra as an honorary Gandhi boy here, since Gandhi-ism is his USP, after all).
Such mixed metaphors from these boys. And also, while I think about it, such mixed statements on their political destiny.
Robert-ji brims with confidence: “I can definitely win (an election) from anywhere.”
Whereas Rahul-ji is more modest: “It is not important what Rahul Gandhi thinks, it’s important what a billion Indians think.”
I give up. Who can make head nor tail of such rhetoric? Must be because I am a simplistic Westerner.
To quote Rahulji once again. Though I have to say I find taking a swipe at the West a bit rich, really, considering both of these Gandhi boys are partly phoren, but let’s be magnanimous.
It is also a bit naughty, to be perfectly honest, branding all we foreigners as simplistic, when you talk in such a confusing way.
“We will win, because we are not simplistic like the West,” says Rahul.
Well, perhaps if you didn’t confuse everyone with stories about dropping mail from planes, and riding horses, and beehives and ellies, and India being an energy force that came from rivers, we might all follow you a tad better.
I found it interesting, in a sort of simplistic, phirang way, to compare such verbal muddle-headedness with the sparse, elegant prose of someone who wrote so eloquently and movingly about India, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who died the day before Rahul-ji’s speech.
I read everything the late Ms Jhabvala wrote about India, when I first discovered this amazing country, 30 years ago. On hearing the sad news of her death, I fished the books off my bookshelves and dusted them off. I bought every one of Ms Jhabwala’s books in Bombay (as it then was), and they have yellowed a little and smell decidedly dusty, which is normal after 30 years, I guess. But her prose is anything but yellowed and dusty.
And I can understand it, which is more than I can say for parts of Rahul-ji’s speech.
So, is it really simplistic West vs complex India?
Well, actually, Rahul Gandhi does have a valid point here.
Yes, India is unbelievably complex, especially when you are learning about it, and visiting it for the first time. It is precisely this complexity that Ms Jhabvala describes in the introduction to her collection of short stories called How I became a Holy Mother. Her words made a huge impression on me, 30 impressionable India-infatuated years ago, and they still ring true today: “There is a cycle that… all Westerners… tend to pass through. It goes like this: first stage, tremendous enthusiasm – everything Indian is marvelous; second stage, everything Indian not so marvelous; third stage, everything Indian abominable. For some people it ends there, for others the cycle renews itself and goes on.”
Ms Jhabvala didn’t always like everything about India, which is fair enough. Which one of us does? But when she wrote about her adopted home, she was word perfect. She saw the country and the people, and she listened to the speech, and she observed the thought processes, and she brought them all to life.
The very same noise that ‘stresses out’ Rahul ji and the newspaper stories that drive him ‘nuts’ (his words, not mine) irritated her, too. The very same things that make Rahul ji happy, made her happy, too.
So, in homage to a great lady who did so much to put the myriad faces of India into clear, lucid, eminently readable prose, I really do need a better epitaph then “we’re a beehive”. That simply will not do.
How about another of Rahul ji’s astonishing, borderline naive claims: “I went to University in 1991, and I remember, nobody thought of India.”
No, that definitely won’t do as an epitaph. It’s also patently untrue.
So, I think Ruth-ji can speak for herself, simplistic foreigner that she was: “Every morning I wake up at 3 am to the sound of someone pouring out his spirit in devotional song; and then at dawn the temple bells ring, and again at dusk, and conch-shells are blown, and there is the smell of incense and of the slightly overblown flowers that are placed at the feet of smiling, pink-cheeked idols.”
RIP to a simplistic westerner who served India so well.
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