Unapologetically Indian

Because we are like this only!

- Samit Basu

In these strange, troubled times, what we all crave is something familiar, something constant—something that will not change, however much the world around us might. And the answer to this is, literally, within ourselves. Indians won’t change. We won’t change. It’s time to take another look at our eccentricities and oddities, all those special features, even the ones that embarrass and irritate us, that make us unapologetically Indian.

There are so many things about this country that we don’t appreciate until we are far away. You learn to truly value a lot of the little expressions of large-scale cohabitation only when they’re not around you any more— the neighbourhood dog-feeder, the water-sharing neighbour, the people who appear out of nowhere to offer help and shelter when emergencies appear. We are a people who are taught fairly early in life that you’ll have to build your own support systems, because no external benevolent authority is going to look after you—so whether we evolve or not, we learn how to survive.

We often celebrate Indian improvisations and innovations as ‘jugaad’, voluntarily overlooking the fact that they become necessary because people get desperate, because systems don’t work. But, strangely, our acceptance of nonworking systems has prepared us for the interesting times the world is heading towards. What can anything throw towards Indians that we haven’t dealt with since childhood?