The CEO of the Sofa (O'Rourke, P. J.)

by P. J. O'Rourke

  All this took four hours, during which the seven or eight agents on duty met each hint at bribery with the stare you’d get from an octogenarian Powerball winner if you suggested the twenty-year payout option. The fellow who was recording, in longhand, everything inside our passports did take two cigarettes, but he wouldn’t accept a pack.

  None of the cases, trunks, bags—unloaded and reloaded in 105-degree heat—was actually opened, except for a wrench set. Perhaps there is one size of wrench that requires a special permit in India. The satellite telephone did require a special permit, which—meticulous planning or no—we didn’t have. The briefcase-sized sat. phone went unnoticed. (Engine compartments and undercarriages were inspected, but no one looked under the seat.) Our tire pressures must be checked, however, in case the all-terrain radials were packed with drugs. The Indian government tire gauge wasn’t working. We offered our own. We were halfway through checking the tires when we realized nobody was accompanying us. I walked around behind the customs building to take a leak and found drugs to spare. I was pissing on a thousand dollars’ worth of wild marijuana plants.

  By the time we left customs it was late afternoon. The staggering traffic and whopping crowds of India materialized. We still had 250 miles to go that day to stay on schedule. A brisk pace was required. Think of it as doing sixty through the supermarket parking lot, the school playground, and the Bronx Zoo.

  This is the India you ordinary travelers never see—because you’re in your right minds. And we didn’t see much of it ourselves. The scenery was too close to view, a blur of cement-block shops and hovels in unbroken ranks inches from the fenders. Yet my map showed open country with only occasional villages meriting the smallest cartographic type size. There are a lot of people in India, 966.8 million as of 1998. I don’t know what they want with the atomic bomb. They already have the population bomb, and it’s working like a treat.

  Nevertheless India, with a population density of 843 people per square mile, is not as crowded as the Netherlands, which packs 1,195 people into the same space. Nobody comes back from Holland aghast at the teeming mass of Dutch or having nightmares about windmills and tulips pressing in on every side.

  Poor people take up room. You may have noticed this when tattooed guys wearing motorcycle-gang insignia come into a bar. And poor people who depend on agriculture for a living, as 67 percent of Indians do, take up even more room than Hell’s Angels. If 67 percent of New Yorkers depended on agriculture for a living, someone would be trying to farm the dirt under the floor mats of your Yellow Cab.

  Everything is squeezed together in India to keep it out of the picnic-blanket-sized rice field that’s the sole support for a family of ten. Every nook of land is put to use. At the bottom of a forty-foot-deep abandoned well, which would be good for nothing but teenage suicides in America, somebody was raising frogs. The public rest rooms of Calcutta employ the space-saving device of dispensing with walls and roofs and placing the urinal stalls on the sidewalk. No resource goes to waste, which sounds like a fine thing for you to advocate next Earth Day—except, in the real world of poverty, it means that the principal household fuel of India is the cow flop. This is formed into a circular patty and stuck on the side of the house, where it provides a solution to three problems: storage room, home decor, and cooking dinner.

  Therefore, what makes a drive across India insane (and stinky) isn’t overpopulation, it’s poverty. Except this isn’t really true either. The reason for those ranks of shops and houses along the Grand Trunk, and for the cars, trucks, and buses bashing into each other between them, is that people have money to buy and build these things. And the reason for the great smoldering dung funk hanging over India is that there’s something to cook on those fires.

  I don’t know how much of this stuff you studied in that ridiculously progressive prep school of yours, but when the British left in 1947, India got itself an economy in the socialist closet, an economy in the political bag. The Indians called it the “license-permit-quota raj.” The Economist magazine once said, “This has no equal in the world. In many ways it puts Soviet central planning to shame.” Indian industries were trapped and isolated by the government. Like an aunt locked in the attic, they got strange. The results can still be seen in the Tata trucks, Ambassador sedans, and motorcycles that Evel Knievel would be afraid to ride. But in 1992, India began to surrender to free-market reforms. Imports were allowed, foreign investment was encouraged, and customs regulations were (amazing as this seems to those who have been through Indian customs) simplified.

  In 1998 the Indian economy had been growing for half a decade at about 7 percent a year. As many as 200 million people had been added to the Indian middle class—a number almost equal to the total middle class of the United States. Suppose our entire American bourgeois experience had developed just in the latter years of the Clinton administration. (Bill Clinton probably thinks that’s what happened.)

  India is still very poor. Small boys with hammers make gravel by the side of the road, an activity that must seem worse than school even to small boys and isn’t much of a vocational opportunity either. The people on the Grand Trunk looked in need, but not in wretched misery (until they stepped in front of a speeding jeep). There are plenty of flat bellies in India but few of the distended kind that announce gross malnutrition. And the beggars, whom Western visitors have been taught to expect in legions, arrive only in squads and platoons. A kid selling trinkets in Agra was irked to be mistaken for such. “I’m not a beggar,” he said. “You want to buy, you get.” Then he named a thievish price.

  What is happening in India is what happens every place where an agrarian economy changes into a modern one. The first stage of prosperity is ugly. This is the ugliness that caused William Blake, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, to speak of “dark Satanic mills”—dark satanic mills that were giving people cash, social mobility, and an opportunity to escape a hundred generations of chopping weeds with hoes. Hoeing is not as dark, maybe, as working in a mill, but it’s plenty satanic, as anyone with the smallest garden knows.

  The quaint and orderly India of old is still there, just beyond the clutter of the Grand Trunk Road. In West Bengal we visited a beautiful farm village full of amusing thatch architecture and cute peasant handcrafts. Here the handsome patina of tradition glowed upon lives that were quiet, calm, and as predictable as famine and the dowry needed to marry off the ten-year-old daughter.

  The villagers were friendly enough. But what if carloads of French tourists came into my driveway and began taking happy snaps while I was scrubbing down the barbecue grill? I preferred the chaos of the Grand Trunk.

  We were driving through the most unattractive part of India at the hottest time of year. The equivalent would be to drive U.S. Route 1 from the outlet shops of Freeport, Maine, to downtown Miami in August. Consider someone who had never been to America before. What would he think, after being Blockbustered, Safewayed, Chevroned, Shelled, Dodged, Nissaned, Wal-Marted, Dress Barned, Gapped, Levied, Burger Kinged, Dairy Queened, and Taco Belled? Would he have a good impression of the United States? No. Would he have an accurate impression? That’s another matter.

  Of course we did go to a few of the famous tour destinations in India, where international rubbernecks stand agape, getting their tonsils sunburned. (Land Rover needed PR photos with something other than wrecked trucks in the background.)

  We took a side trip into the Himalayan foothills to Simla, the colonial hill station that was the summer capital of British rule. It’s built at a higher elevation than Kathmandu. The road up is like the Grand Trunk except on the angle of your basement stairs and taking the shape of gift-wrap ribbon after Christmas morning.

  Simla is a chutney of concrete and roof tin with only a few colonial-charm leftovers. Along the Mall there’s a row of dusty British-era shops that the British—seeing mountains all around them and not knowing what else to do—built in alpine style. The parade ground has views to die for (or die of if y
ou lean against the flimsy railings).

  Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Prime Minister of India, was headed to town. Preparation consisted of someone loudly testing the PA system:

  HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO

  HELLO HELLO HELLO ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE

  SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE TEN MICROPHONE TESTING

  HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO

  HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO

  For an hour. This was the crowd warm-up. The speech must have been a dilly. Meanwhile, behind handsome batik curtains, tribal women in full native dress, with nose jewelry the size of baby shoes, were repairing the pavement.

  In Agra we went to the Taj Mahal, and I recommend you go there too. It’s an impressive pile built with public funds while a famine scourged the countryside. The Taj was commissioned by Shah Jahan to memorialize his favorite wife, who died in 1629 giving birth to their fourteenth child. If Jahan had really wanted to show his love, he could have cut back on the ginseng and powdered rhino horn.

  We had our first glimpse of the famous monument at sunset, from a heap of trash and offal on the bank of the Yamuna River. Mixed into the garbage around our feet were hundreds of miniature clay images of Krishna. These are tossed into the water by devotees upstream in Mathura, the god’s supposed birthplace. The holiness of India is impressive. The ground is littered with divinities.

  In Varanasi, to the east, we saw the holiest place of all, where millions of pilgrims descend the steps of the ghats into the Ganges, using its waters to purify themselves of sins and also to dispose of the burning dead bodies of relatives. Everybody but me made a sunrise trip to see these sacred rites. I stayed in bed, believing cremation before breakfast should be limited to toast. Besides, there’s the matter of barging in on other people’s religious ceremonies: Yo, is that the holy Eucharist? Cool! Can I taste?

  And once I got started looking at religions in India, how would I know when to stop? There are Buddhists, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Zoroastrians, Christians with a religious heritage dating back almost to the birth of Christ, and 670 million Hindus.

  I have to say I was confused enough by the material surface of India and, unlike you, I had no desire to go delving into its metaphysical petticoats. Hinduism is supposed to have 330 million gods. (Disbelieving in all of these must make Indian atheists very busy people.) There’s Brahma the creator with five heads; Vishnu the preserver with four arms; Shiva the destroyer with who-knows-how-many appendages; blue-skinned Krishna chasing cowherd girls; Kali dripping blood from her tongue and wearing a garland of skulls; Hanuman, the god who’s also a monkey; Ganesh, god of good luck, whose head got cut off by mistake and was replaced with an elephant cranium (lucky him); and so on. No disrespect meant to anyone’s depiction of deity—a pious Brahmin coming to my house and seeing a sculpture of a beatnik nailed to a phone pole (courtesy of my Catholic wife) would surely be taken aback. It’s just that frequent and lurid representations of these divinities add to the recondite obscurity of India, as do the seventeen officially recognized languages and an intricate caste system that somewhat resembles our ideas about social class except you can’t touch Gerald Levine because as chairman of AOL /Time-Warner he’s engaged in an occupation involving human waste.

  Everything in India is a brainteaser. Just getting dressed is a puzzle contest. This is how to put on a sari: Take a piece of cloth about three and a half feet wide and eighteen feet long and tuck a corner in your underpants. Turn around clockwise once. Tuck the upper hem in your underpants. Make a pleat by holding the fabric between your thumb and little finger, spreading your hand, extending the fabric around your forefinger, and bringing it back to your thumb. Do this ten times. Tuck the top of the pleats into your underpants. Turn around clockwise again, and throw everything that remains over your left shoulder. And I still looked like hell.

  Each little detail of India is a conundrum. Painted above door frames you see the Sanskrit character for the sacred meditative om bracketed by a pair of backward-facing swastikas. The “swastika” is really just a Hindu symbol for self-energization and the accomplishments of life. (The Nazis bent the arms in the other direction and swiped it for the cool look.) Nonetheless, the message over the doors seems to read, Sieg heil inner peace sieg heil.

  Which isn’t too far wrong. The current coalition government in India—the one that likes atomic bombs—is headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party. The BJP is avidly nationalistic and espouses Hindu fundamentalism, sort of like Pat Robertson with 330 million Jesuses. And the BJP believes in rigid observation of the caste system, so it’s like Pat got together with the people who do the Philadelphia social register. Or worse, because the most influential support for the BJP comes from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the RSS, a hard-line and secretive Hindu brotherhood whose half-million members wear matching khaki shorts to early morning rallies and make funny stiff-arm salutes. One RSS leader, K. S. Sudarshan, has said, “We don’t believe in individual rights because we don’t think we are individuals.”

  India—which is a little prouder of the title “world’s largest democracy” than local conditions would justify—has had icky politics before. Until recently the dominant Indian political organization was the Congress Party, founded by India’s first head of state, Jawaharlal Nehru. Congress was supposed to embody the Mahatma Gandhi ethos of tolerance, nonviolence, self-reliance, rule of law, and being a goody two-shoes (or two-sandals) nation in general. Nonetheless India managed to indulge in sectarian violence that killed half a million Hindus and Muslims, get embroiled in three wars with Pakistan and one with China, embrace the Soviet Union as a military and economic ally, and suspend civil rights, jailing thousands of members of the political opposition under Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi (no relation to the Great Soul in diapers).

  So the Congress Party had about as much allegiance to its root principles as political parties usually do. But there are worse things than politicians who say what they don’t believe, such as politicians who say what they believe fanatically. Especially when voters agree with them. A Washington Post opinion poll, taken in India after the first three A-bomb tests, indicated that 82 percent of India’s rural population and 91 percent of city dwellers favored building nuclear weapons. Not that it matters. If India tried to launch an ICBM, the missile would have to stop on its way to Karachi while a team of Indian customs agents looked up warhead exportation in a great big book.

  What brought the BJP to power is not hard to understand. The Congress Party had imploded from internal bickering in familiar egghead Democrat vs. no-neck Democrat fashion. Caste-based affirmative action—with as many as 60 percent of public jobs subject to set-aside programs—turned social animosities into institutionalized hatreds. There was corruption, always a reliable campaign theme for nonincumbents. And the BJP played upon the xenophobia that all people exhibit a bit of (me, in this letter, for instance). As K. R. Malkani, vice president of the BJP, put it, “Foreigners have been allowed to come in even with junk food.”

  However, what the BJP did, once it came to power, was strange. The nukes have no practical value. The major cities of Pakistan are close to the Indian border, and half the year the prevailing winds would blow the fallout back where it came from. Testing the nukes caused international sanctions to be imposed, India’s credit rating to flop, Bombay’s stock market to plummet, and the rupee to lose 8 percent of its value. And the BJP’s budget plan had some bomblike effects of its own. Government spending increased by 13.8 percent. Customs duties on all imports went up 4 percent. Higher excise taxes were imposed on staples such as butter, cheese, milk powder, and packaged tea. The BJP announced a policy of relying on overseas Indians to increase foreign investment in India. This is like your mom and dad relying on you, when you finally move out and get a place of your own, to help with their mortgage. Plus BJP-flavor Hindu nationalism galls India’s 105 million Muslims, 22 million Christians, 18 million Sikhs, 6.6 million Buddhists, 4.5 million Jains, and unco
untable untouchables. (Which word is now unmentionable—they prefer to be called Dalits, oppressed, and now have more reason to say so.)

  I’m afraid you’re going to find that modern India is, in many ways, an unattractive place. But things could be worse. And the BJP seems determined to make them so. This has been done before. There are ruins all over India—the result of invasions by Greeks, Persians, Afghans, Sythians, Parthians, Huns, Mongols, ancient Aryan hordes, and that modern Aryan horde, the British. Then there are ruins, not very old at all—the result of I don’t know what. In Agra I saw an enormous railroad car barn, built with handsome bricks in the ornate style that our immediate ancestors lavished upon industrial buildings. It was empty now and roofless. A monkey was perched on the broken arch over the hulking, rusted gate.

  In Calcutta, the seat of the West Bengal state government, the late-nineteenth-century Writers’ Building is crumbling and dirty although a row of large, carefully tended potted plants decorates the sidewalk below its windows. Trees, products of less intentional horticulture, grow out of the cracked Edwardian edifice of the nearby Standard Assurance and Life headquarters. Even Calcutta’s New Market, built in 1985, seems about to fall down and probably doesn’t only because—being nothing but a pile of moldering concrete in the first place—it can’t. The whole of India looks as if it were abandoned by its population a hundred years ago, and they’ve just moved back and are camped in the wreckage of a civilization.