The new-age-flag salute: Being Indian is just a little bit more complex than you thought

BACK OF THE BOOK

Here's an old discovery: both 'identity' and 'India' have two 'I's. Here's a new one: the Indian identity market has been screeching and roaring with voices both shrieky and sober. Loudly, for some time now. Earplugs, trust me, are no relief... they make 'cosmic egg' sound like 'comic egg', and 'egalitarianism' like a diet choice.

What about books? What if Uncle Sam, say, were to pointedly scowl, "I Want YOUR ID"?

''Hota hai'' ('happens'), someone might quip, offering a phrase from Indian Foreign Service man Pavan K. Varma's Being Indian: The Truth About Why The 21st Century Will Be India's, as armament. With an image of an arm tattooed with a map of India on its cover, it can possibly be flexed to explain much of this 'functioning anarchy'. The book offers a decidedly squinty view, as Varma himself acknowledges, of the experience of being 'Indian'-based mostly on how he individually locates himself within this many millennia-old civilisation. Much of his narrative would be numbingly familiar to many of us, whether it's his Haridwar opening, or his takes on corruption, moral relativism, power craze, exclusion systems, hierarchy-ordained servility, materialism, pragmatism, street ingenuity or civilizational resilience. Yet, he frequently detaches himself sufficiently to offer insights that are indeed startling; and this, placed in the perspective of why he has written all this, endows the book with its charm. Varma's self-disclosed attempt is to make a "dramatically different" inquiry into Indianness, which involves questioning the assumption of the archetypal 'Indian' being democratic, tolerant, spiritual and peaceful. "India is much too important today," he says... "to be held hostage by this simplistic myth-making."

BEING INDIAN By Pavan K. Varma Viking PP: 238 Price: Rs 325	THE INDIAN MOSAIC Ed. Bibek Debroy & D.S. Babu Academic Foundation PP: 285 Price: Rs 495

This is a complex country, no doubt, and Varma writes of villagers in Tigri, just 100 km from Delhi, who confuse Manmohan Singh, now Prime Minister, with Manmohan Desai, a Hindi filmmaker who wowed the Indian imagination right from his first film. The book is eloquent if not elaborative (Alberuni's India is still the classic there) on India's ancient philosophy of indivisible unity, and among its high points, the one that would find the author fans is his assertion of supreme self-assurance. "Coexistence is an imperative, not an option," he enjoins.

So-how will the 21st century be India's? Here, the book seems to waffle on timing, asset unveiling, stability and much else-revealing a shocking sense of complacency on freedom, democracy, reforms, technology and the economy, which ought to be seen as works-in-progress, really. Not only is Varma overimpressed with India's software 'power', his vague attempt to trace it all-trace all of math, actually-to an age-old civilisational strength makes one wonder. Is this book going to end up as an exercise in myth exchange? Sure, the decimal system originated in India-and the parallels with Greek math are well-documented-but the subsequent quantum jumps took global effort. More to the point: doesn't India still lack its Socrates'?

In fact, the reason India could potentially prove an invaluable intellectual resource to the world is an all-inclusive one: as a secular democracy, the country could choose to maximise 'free mind space' as a broad strategy for global success in the information age.

Does this other book, The India Mosaic: Searching For An Identity, have any pointers?

Some, yes. For one, as a collection of essays on India's identity hunt published in association with the Rajiv Gandhi Institute For Contemporary Studies, the book displays far better academic objectivity. For another, it strives for balance. Sunil Khilnani, of The Idea Of India fame, uses thoughts from John Gray and others to discuss the conflict of ideas. In all, the most useful flag-to-read package is the one on education, beginning with the data-packed 'Mockingbird' essay by a researcher duo. It leads nicely up to Bikramjit De's tour de force on India's linguistic imperative. As a faculty member of Kolkata's National University of Juridical Sciences, De makes a splendid case for reforms.

Gurcharan Das' essay on 'nishkama karma' echoes some of the cultural determinism vis-a-vis business found in Varma's book-a debate that's far from over yet. The set of 16 essays, written with varying degrees of research and erudition, ends on a light note, with Madhu Kishwar on Bollywood's own idea of India.

Indeed, as The India Mosaic demonstrates, India has always had its rarefied enclaves of 'free mind space'. As for the word on 'being Indian', look up the Indian Constitution. It's clear. Yet, as Varma says, almost seeming to sigh in 'hota hai' resignation, "Centuries of hierarchic regimentation have mentally enslaved most Indians." Whether he means 'millennia' rather than 'centuries' isn't known, nor should it matter.

But while on 'slavery', and on being Indian, maybe there's this other piece of streetside graffiti one could talk about: 'Na koi banda, na koi banda-nawaz' ('nobody's a slave, nobody master').

THE PERFECT SNOWBALL By Ranjan Kapur Roli Books PP: 64 Price: Rs 250

Does Tata young's 'rebel' song have any relevance to the short or long-term prospects of the Tata brand--- any more than the effect Hilary Duff's voice might have on Hillary Clinton's White House prospects? Is the Tata-owned-Ogilvy-built watch brand Titan going to respond to FCUK Timex? Is Tata really bearish on brand Barista?

Marketers ask weird questions, and do weird things. And marketers are woolly-headed sort of people who see 'the market' as a warm heterogenous entity with throbbing hearts and pulsating minds, not something cold coming alphanumerically off a ticker tape.

Born in Lahore, brought up in Patiala and boarding-schooled in Dehradun (Welham, in case you wondered), Ranjan Kapur, former chief of o&m India, is a marketer as much as an adman. A 'suit' cum 'ponytail'; no either-or for him. He is also a sculptor-doodler. And he has written this absolutely endearing little story of a little boy learning never to let the purity of his original idea be wrecked by a reckless quest for size. Read it to your kids, and let them savour the illustrations. And once the kids doze off, do some thinking yourself. It is, in M.S. Banga's words, a "powerful parable with important lessons for business & life".