As anyone who’s a regular on this blog will agree, I lose my cool over a lot of things.

Recently I heard some moron of a woman claim that those who chose to remain childless were being “selfish”. This same woman said that children were necessary to “take care of one in one’s old age” – and didn’t even seem to notice the contradiction.

Now I resolved a long time ago never to have any of my own, and it’s not just because I don’t like children; it’s because bringing a child into an overpopulated world perched on the brink of ecological catastrophe isn’t the smartest thing to do, in my not so humble opinion. But my own feelings or opinions aren’t the point here.

I suppose there are many valid reasons why one would want to have children – one might like children, or one might simply be following the biological urge to pass on one’s genes, or one might get pregnant by accident and for religious or personal reasons decide to keep the baby, or other reasons. But making a child because one wants to have social security in one’s old age is not one of them. Nor is the idea that not having children is somehow “selfish”. No one owes society a duty to have and raise kids – maybe in the dim distant past communities needed numbers to survive war and famine, but not now.

Let me not even begin on the subject of parents who have children just for the sake of another pair of working hands...

A child doesn’t ask to be born, and any parent who decides to create a baby shouldn’t expect gratitude of that child, either early on or when it grows up. Parents owe children a duty to provide the child with all they can to make that child a decent human being, if only as a compensation for causing it to be born. Certainly parents shouldn’t expect the child to undertake to support them. If it does, all right, but that’s not a duty.  

So call me selfish. I’d rather be selfish my way.

Some acts have consequences that may not have been quite intended, and sometimes the consequences can be both farcical and revealing.

About a month ago, the US astronaut Sunita Williams arrived in India to an entirely media-instigated hero’s welcome. The media – and, following it, the politicians – fell over her; absolutely salivated at “our” Sunita, the local girl who made good, and never mind that she has just one Indian parent (the other is Slovenian, if I’m not mistaken) – who migrated to the US and was an American citizen since well before she was born.

Well, before I get sidetracked into discussing the usual Indian practice of inventing Indian connections of anyone who makes good abroad, however remote, let me stick to Williams. She was asked to address a question-and-answer session with young people. She was expected to give inspiring quotes and fire them up with enthusiasm. Instead, and to her own considerable embarrassment, the kids regaled her with congratulations about how lucky she was to have been born to parents (sic) who had escaped India, and how the only ambition of virtually every child there was to leave India by hook or by crook.

And this is the India Shining our politicians love to project as a superpower in the making (it’s always in the making; nobody cares to hazard a guess when it will actually be made).

This is the country people literally risk their lives and limbs to leave, being smuggled in container trucks and tramp steamers from country to country until they reach the promised land (aka Amreeka – as I mentioned before, to the average North Indian, all other countries that aren’t Pakistan are America; it isn’t necessarily the United States that they aim for, it’s just that any Western country will do as long as it’s “Amreekan”).

This is the country where parents steer their children towards educational streams whose primary value lies in their ability to command employment abroad, and the children are desperately applying to foreign universities just as early as they can; and in the vast majority of cases, once they get their admission, will do almost anything to avoid returning to the nation of their birth. There are exceptions, of course, but they are relatively rare – make that very rare.

And don’t think I blame them; this emerging superpower is absolutely the worst place to expect reward for hard work and talent; from the cradle to the funeral pyre the system encourages, positively battens on, mediocrity, dullness, and conformity. Imagine, for example, a physics student - in India he can't even do research, because for all intents and purposes serious research in Indian universities has ceased, and there is absolutely no way he can get competent faculty guidance or even decent library facilities. Nor can he expect a remunerative and satisfying position afterwards. Why wouldn't he want to leave? Why would he ever want to come back?

And this also happens to be the land where the media cheer as the stock market reaches hitherto unknown heights while well over a hundred million people try and survive on one meal a day.

Sometimes the truth comes from the mouths of babes and sucklings. And sometimes it’s difficult to pretend that the truth wasn’t spoken – like when a staged interaction with your pet pseudo-Indian blows up in your face.

It would have been hilarious if it weren’t so sad underneath it all.

If you’re a regular on this blog, you’d have to be deaf and blind not to be aware of my feelings about the Great Indian Middle Class. It’s difficult even to quantify the contempt I feel for it, much less give it expression. It would probably require a book if I were to begin writing about all the things that were wrong with it, so here I can just focus on individual things.

Like, for example, the case of Geetanjali Nagpal.

Who is Geetanjali Nagpal? She's the woman in the picture.

A former model, both on the catwalk and having “graced” magazine covers, she was discovered wandering the streets of Delhi, homeless, ragged, filthy, begging for food. Fluent in English (she’s a graduate of a top women’s college, Lady Shriram’s) she claimed to be “from Mars” and reacted violently to TV cameras and microphones being thrust in her face. Do you blame her?

The Great Indian Middle Class reacted with shock and horror. How come one of them – daughter of an Indian Navy officer, even now undeniably attractive, English-speaking, educated, “decent” – how could she descend so low? The papers and the news channels were full of stories of her affairs and of her child whom her boyfriend (referred to by some papers as her “husband” – Indian newspapers also recently married Brad Pitt and la Jolie) took away to Germany. They were talking to her mother and her sister who alleged that she used to come to their house (also in Delhi) and take money, only to spend it on alcohol and drugs.  

The Great Indian Middle Class was titillated. It was also quite genuinely shocked. This sort of thing didn’t happen to People Like Us, you see. People Like Us got on camera and said suitably inane things and went to Los Angeles on holiday. They didn’t sleep in parks and temples and beg people for money – in English, at that. It was terrible, it was scandalous, it was a reflection on themselves, it had to be put right.

So the Great Indian Middle Class set about putting it right.  

So what happened to Geetanjali Nagpal? She was whisked away to a hospital, cleaned up, dressed in “decent” clothes, and is now being “rehabilitated”. It’s incredible how many people and groups are determined to “rehabilitate” her.

Meanwhile…

Hundreds, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of beggars flood India. Some are sham, with bank accounts and large houses in their native villages. But there are many others, and many of them are children, who don’t eat if they don’t beg. The Middle Class isn’t bothered about rescuing them. It isn’t bothered at the idea that they are just as hooked on drugs as the Nagpal social circle was. It doesn’t give a damn for them. They aren’t People Like Us, and they might as well be of a different species. A few years ago, an Olympic gold medallist – a member of the Indian men’s hockey team of 1980 – was discovered working as a labourer in a quarry in Bihar, breaking stones. I still remember one member of the Great Indian Middle Class having a good giggle at the photo of an emaciated, unshaven man in cracked plastic shoes, gold medal round his neck, breaking stones in a quarry. Nor does the Great Indian Middle Class get worked up over ragged, filthy kids with matted hair being forced to beg from cars at traffic lights. They're dark and rustic and not simpatico.  They do not deserve sympathy.     

Economically, I guess I’m of the middle class, but in every other way I try and stay aloof.     

A sixteen year old boy with his own car and as much money as he could want to spend, given to speeding around and spending all night on pool tables and playing video games, who boasts about it online on a social networking site, is kidnapped for ransom and then murdered.

Whom do the media blame? The parents, for giving the boy too much too early, and for not exercising any form of oversight? No. That would be “insensitive.” The boy himself, for being old enough to know better but still being criminally irresponsible? No, boys after all would be boys, and besides, it’s in bad taste to speak ill of the dead. The killers? But they were only boys too, so no, again. The social networking site? You betcha life.

If the social networking site hadn’t existed, the killers won’t have got to know him, and so they couldn’t have killed him, and so it’s all the site’s fault, right? Right!

It’s tough being on Orkut these days for the likes of me. Here in India, ever since they made it possible to join without an invitation like it used to be earlier, everyone seems to be there. Walk into an internet café and all you can see is kids, some as young as nine or ten, staring at blue screens and tapping away in incomprehensible SMSese. And they’ve made it pretty much uninhabitable for people like me who like to write English and not sumthin lyk dis.

(Incidentally, if anyone would want to know, my Orkut profile is here, but I don’t use it much any more.)

And so, since everyone and their grandnephew is on Orkut, that changed things for the rest of the people as well. This is India, remember? Anything and everything, the politicians have to get involved and the media has to pretend they know everything about everything.

Now on Orkut you can do whatever you want to – until, that is, the admin catches up with you – and make as many fake profiles of anyone you want and as many “communities” (the equivalent of Multiply groups) you want, so there are people having a high old time impersonating politicos, sportspeople and movie stars they don’t like and taking the micky out of them. Some of it is really quite funny satire. And it’s perfectly easy to get a fake profile or community removed by reporting it to admin.

So there were people mocking all sorts of stuffed-shirt Indian politicians like that appalling walking sample of venality, Mayawati, and others, and what did they do? Laugh? No. They demanded that Orkut be banned.

And I hear some guy’s been arrested for making a fake profile of Shivaji, the Maratha warrior king of the seventeenth century, who was, truth to tell, by modern standards little more than a fortified protection racketeer on a kingdom scale.  

I’m willing to take bets that the Indian government, which last year briefly banned blogger.com, will at least threaten to ban Orkut. It’s the easiest way to do things here. It shows people you’re “doing something”. It makes sure you don’t have to do something. And it’s what will automatically appeal to people who’ve never heard of Friendster or Gazzag  or Hi5…or Multiply.

Now, how about that bet?

You could give in, but there are too many issues of prestige and also financial and other reward involved, so you can’t.

So, you can’t admit the guy is right and you can’t refute his argument. Then what do you do?

One answer that suggests itself: impugn his motives, abuse him, dredge up fallacious pseudo-history, do whatever it takes, in fact, to muddy the water as far as possible so people are distracted from the fact that your own argument is failing and makes no kind of sense at all.

We’re seeing it all over the media here in India these days. The media here, as I’ve mentioned already, are utterly (with very rare exceptions) and slavishly in favour of the Nuclear Deal. But when push comes to shove, they can’t exactly pinpoint why anyone should support the Nuclear Deal. They can claim it will help in generating power, and so on, but they can’t provide the figures to support it. They can’t refute the figures the other side provides. So what do they do?

They say this is another manifestation of the Left’s “visceral anti-Americanism”.

I’ll be very, very interested to see what this government does when America attacks Iran in the very near future. Will they join in? Will they condemn it, sorry, I mean, deplore it, but do nothing else to protest? Will they make some kind of symbolic gesture, like putting the Nuclear Deal on hold? And how will the media justify the American alliance then, anyway?

I’m sure there must be a lot of fervent hoping going on in Delhi these days that there isn’t an invasion of Iran so that they don’t have to find out. At the same time, I’m sure army units are being covertly prepared to help out if America demands it as the price of alliance. They almost sent troops to Iraq when America demanded it, and that was a less slavish government than this one, after all.

Personally, I don’t see how allying oneself with a delusional megalomaniac is going to benefit us any more than Mussolini was benefited by allying with Hitler. Bush has already lost in Iraq and is rapidly losing in Afghanistan – and while those wars are still ongoing is determined to begin another, even more unwinnable, one against Iran. I’d really love to see how the media spin this as a war that is in India’s interests. Popcorn time.

Oh, but I forgot. I’m “viscerally anti-American”, so what I say or think doesn’t matter anyway.

Nowadays that tradition is about to step out of government appointments and into the military sphere.

It’s been years since the Indian Air Force (IAF) – for whom I used to work till eleven months ago – expressed the need for a multi-purpose fighter (Multi Role Combat Aircraft, MRCA, as they call it). Whether they actually need such a fighter is a different issue; right now, though, they are basically dependent on variants of the 1960s vintage MiG 21, which is in the process of being upgraded so it can hang on for a few more years. The MiG 21 was supposed to be replaced a long time ago by the Indian indigenous fighter, the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Tejas. But the LCA is so far behind schedule that it’s yet to even begin production, and it’s so far from Indian that even its engine has to be imported. The Indian Kaveri engine that was supposed to power it shows no signs of ever being made. Most damning of all, the IAF itself has obviously lost all interest in the LCA; it had been arm-twisted by the government into placing a farcical order for twenty aircraft, none of which is anywhere near being made yet, but in the meantime needed a real replacement. Meanwhile its real strength has dropped to some 29 squadrons, allegedly insufficient for it to perform its duties. That is, if you agree that it needs any new planes at all – which is a point I shall get back to in a moment.

So the Indian government short-listed six aircraft manufacturers for the contract to supply 126 combat aircraft: Dassault Aviation of France for the Rafale, RAC MiG Corporation of Russia for the MiG 35, Eurofighter GmbH for the Eurofighter Typhoon, Saab of Sweden for the JAS39C Gripen, and …very significantly … Lockheed Martin and Boeing for the F 16 Block 60 and F/A 18 Hornet respectively (both US). The cost of this contract is – hold your breath – ten billion dollars.

I wonder how many schools and hospitals that could create, how much damage to the environment could be reversed?     

I might as well say right now that in my opinion at least three of these six – Dassault, Saab, and the Eurofighter consortium – have been included just to make up numbers. No one’s even talking seriously about any of them. So we come down basically to the MiG 35 and the two American aircraft. And things get interesting at this point.

Remember this – the buying of a fighter doesn’t mean just the buying of the aircraft itself. It means the need to set up an entire infrastructure and support system, for repair, servicing, even for refuelling and so on. In order to economise, you know, nations try and make their aircraft (and other equipment) as far as possible compatible with the same set of tools and equipment. Just as you’d probably prefer to buy a car your local garage could service rather than something exotic nobody in your town had ever seen before. Get my point?

OK. So, since virtually our entire air force inventory is of Russian and French origin, all systems are configured for servicing Russian and French aircraft. Now you’d think that common sense would dictate that you stick to those manufacturers whose equipment you’re already using, whose aircraft are equipping your squadrons, whose tools you’ve stockpiled, right?

Right. If you have sense, that is.

Unfortunately, that’s precisely the sort of thing you can’t depend on in India.

And that’s why the two American aircraft are included in the list. Hell – you’d even have to get a new set of spanners to service the damned things.

And now let me make my prediction: the Indian government has already decided to select the Lockheed Martin F 16. All the rigmarole over trials and selection procedures are a gigantic farce.

Would you like to know how I arrived at that conclusion?

First. Our air force doesn’t really need any more planes of this type. We already have two highly capable multi-role combat aircraft, Sukhoi’s Su 30 MKI and Dassault’s Mirage 2000. We don’t need any more planes of this type to replace retiring aircraft simply because there is never going to be a big war again where they can be used. Wars – even bush-league wars - are incredibly draining on resources, as the US is discovering in Afghanistan and Iraq. The capitalist class that rules India these days isn’t involved in defence production enough to make any serious money out of it. So that class has no interest in going to war. Even a direct attack on India, if it ever came, isn’t going to provoke an all out war. All there might be is a lot of posturing and sabre-rattling, but, depend on it, no fighting (for example, Operation Parakram of 2001-02).

If there is a war at all, it’ll be a minor affair of strictly limited geographical area, where the Sukhois and Mirages might not even have to be used. If they are used, they would be more than good enough to do the job required.

So, since there is no risk of ever going to war again, there is no risk in buying equipment that can’t be digested and absorbed easily, that will require a separate system for maintenance, that might turn out to be unusable junk in the long term. You get what I’m talking about. The capabilities of the aircraft selected don’t matter at all, since it is never, ever, going to be used anyway.

Second. If at all we need aircraft, what we need are dedicated counterinsurgency (COIN) planes – slow flying, heavily armed and armoured aircraft of an entirely different type from the MRCA our air force is determined to procure (examples are the A10 Warthog or the Sukhoi Su 25). However, COIN planes are relatively cheap and where there is less money being thrown around there’s less chance that some of it might find its way into someone’s pocket. So, although back in 1999 (during the Kargil "war" against Pakistani troops) everyone was groaning about the dearth of COIN planes in the IAF’s inventory, nobody has mentioned them again afterwards.

Third. This government is, as I said, ruled by the capitalist class. No Indian government these days is its own master, hasn’t been for a decade and a half. Earlier it used to be the Ambani family that used to run India – and these days it’s Ratan Tata. Tata is openly pro-American and a strong supporter of the Nuclear Deal. And the Americans know very well how much influence he wields. So, when there was an air show in India earlier this year, Aero India 2007, they made sure that he got joyrides in both planes – and came down babbling about how he enjoyed the rides.

Fourth. The higher reaches of the military are absolutely rotten through with corruption and are completely susceptible to government pressure (in any case it’s only politically “reliable” officers who get to the top positions). So whatever is right for the Air Force isn’t necessarily what it will say is right for it. There’s no point saying that “this is what the IAF says is right.” I recall watching (in 2004) an American air force delegation given a free hand to tour parts of the Indian Air Force regional command headquarters here. They were allowed to photograph whatever they wanted and go wherever they wanted – even to areas out of bounds to Indian airmen without special clearance.

Fifth. If our current government has a foreign policy at all, it can be summed up in one sentence: suck up to the Americans at all costs. This is more than obvious at every stage. The government no longer even makes any serious attempt to deny it. To make the Americans happy, of course, any and all means are OK. Not so Russia or France – they are only our friends, not the Masters of the Universe (and France under Sarkozy is showing signs of backsliding, too).

Sixth. The Indian middle class couldn’t care less about what happens to its tax money (insofar as it pays any) so long as it can buy its LCD televisions and snazzed up cars. The Indian Middle Class is a topic in itself. I could go on and on…

So, the imperatives of the situation are: no big war; a lot of money going around; capitalist backing; government support; and personal pro-Americanism.

There is no reason the American planes would even be on the short-list unless they were to be chosen, for the reasons I outlined above. So, the IAF is going to select either the F 16 or the F 18.

Now, I believe we can narrow it down further. It’s going to be the F 16.

Why?

Firstly, unlike the F 18, production of the F 16 is winding down (it is no longer in production for the USAF) and jobs might be lost without the Indian order. Just as India, to please Britain, bought Westland helicopters in the late seventies so that that company got a new lease of life. The Westlands were such junk they never even got into proper service and were all scrapped. But who cared so long as India made Maggie Thatcher happy. Making Bush happy is all this government cares about.

Then, Boeing can be “compensated” by major orders for commercial aircraft, so even if it doesn’t get the F 18 order, everyone stays happy.

Naturally, there is one more “advantage” to buying American aircraft. If the Americans – as they have many times before – impose sanctions to twist India’s arm, there will be an excellent argument in favour of giving in to American demands – “or else our equipment would be useless.”

India’s defence minister, AK Anthony (a very short man who had a police officer dismissed for referring to him as “shorty” during a conversation on police radio) said the deal will be completely transparent. Right. Everyone knows how transparent it will be, with the papers and the television channels paid to support one point of view and misinformation carefully fostered. Already the right wing media refers to the MiG 21 as “flying coffins” and deliberately confuses it with all MiGs. I can assure you that you’ll find a lot of anti-MiG articles in the newspapers in coming days.

You understand that sucking up to America is all these people care about. Even if American bombs were to be raining down on Delhi, they would still be trying to suck up to Washington.

This is why any and all invaders were able to rule this country as and when they wished.

It’s the ultimate cliché. We are a nation that’s a unity of diversities.

Fine. I don’t disagree with that.

OK, so we’ve Gujaratis in the west who’re excellent at cutting diamonds and burning Muslims, Sikhs all over who make the most recognisable Indians anywhere in the world and also the most damnawful truck drivers it can be your misfortune to meet; Kashmiris with long noses and grey eyes who are trying to trade in their AK47s for the carpets they used to sell; Mumbai people who jump through hoops at the orders of an old man in a building called Matoshree, who are good at making money and who don’t know there’s a world outside their appallingly crowded and incredibly chaotic city. We have South Indians who think words like “rascal” and “fellow” are abuses and who literally worship film actors as gods, besides making good bureaucrats and computer engineers; we have Oriyas who are always being battered by flood, drought, cyclone, or all three at once; we have Biharis who spend all their time kidnapping each other and fighting over caste when they’re not stealing everyone else’s jobs; we have Bengalis who think they have the ultimate in culture (which they pronounce kalchaar) and love to moan about how the rest of the country is in a conspiracy, in their own words, to “down” them. We have Nepalis whom the rest of the nation think are fit only for jobs as doormen and menials; we have Assamese who think one can achieve success by doing absolutely nothing but lazing around; and we have the various tribes of the North East, who keep fighting each other and whom the rest of the country considers to be all Chinese anyway. And then we have the Anglo-Indians, who are always fornicating and boozing, when they aren’t genuflecting in church; we have the Parsis, who are all stinking rich and answer to names like Moneywalla and Wadia.

If I’ve left out any of your favourite stereotypes, my apologies. But I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of this one.

Anyway, the point is that this country has thousands of ethnic groups, languages, food habits (South India, for instance, is largely vegetarian, at least among the higher caste groups; in North East India vegetarianism is regarded as a bizarre aberration not far removed from mental illness; the North of the country eats wheat, the East and South eat rice), religions (Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, animist, Parsi, a vanishingly tiny Jewish minority, Jain, Sikh, and whatnot, you name it, we’ve got it), politics (everything from the Hitlerite Aryanism of the extreme Hindu right wing fringe and from Talibanic Islamic mullahs to Maoism) – the country has it all.

Is there anything, anything at all, that everyone here has in common? Some thread of unity that runs through Kashmiri separatist, Tamil priest, Assamese trader, and Gujarati politician? What binds the xenophobic Marathi who hates anyone whose name doesn’t end in -kar, the Rajasthani supporter of child marriage, the Haryanvi who gets her girl babies aborted as a matter of course, the forest dweller from Andhra Pradesh, the Naga who thinks the Bible is literally true and that the world is flat?

In a word: tokenism.   

If we Indians are anything at all, we’re fervent worshippers at the altar of tokenism. We will always settle for symbolic gestures – grandiose symbolic gestures, the more grandiose the better – rather than do anything concrete. The token in fact will be the remembered – and appreciated – in every instance more than the concrete performance. A few examples will suffice.

So, for example, Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh state is determined to build a statue to lower-caste icon BR Ambedkar which will be higher than the Statue of Liberty. If she’s got to demolish the only halfway decent sports complex her entire state has to find the land for it, well, them’s the breaks. Of course, the money involved could be far better spent building schools and hospitals for poor lower caste people, but that won’t get any votes. A statue gathering one hell of a lot of guano will. You can just hear them saying: “Mayawati hasn’t given us roads or schools or water, but so what? She’s given us a statue. This means she’s given us dignity. Who needs schools or even useless sports facilities? She’s given us a statue! Wonderful!”

So, we have a woman president. Excellent. Of course, female foetuses will still be aborted after illegal sex determination tests; if they are born, girls will still be murdered in infancy by being buried alive or given boiling milk; if they are allowed to live, they will still be underfed, undereducated, sexually abused, and married off at puberty or earlier to men often three times their age. Then they will be tortured or murdered for dowry, their health ruined by perpetual pregnancies, and if they are widowed their lives will rapidly degenerate into a living hell. But, so what? We have a woman president!

So, we have that exemplar of Indian tokenism, reservations. As I pointed out elsewhere, reservations are absolutely useless since the only people they benefit are those too rich and well-educated to need them in the first place. The vast majority of the underclass get nothing out of reservations except even more neglect and also the scorn of the upper classes, but they’ve got dignity.

So, we have Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s face on every currency note and a road in every capital city named after him. While Gandhi was a disaster in many ways, we insist on officially venerating him while specifically rejecting the few things about his philosophy that made sense: religious amity, for example, or non-violence whenever possible. Gandhi used to shield riot victims with his own body and persona. Today’s Gandhi-worshippers organise and direct pogroms from police control rooms by radio.

So we have sex education banned and works of art destroyed in the name of “preserving culture” while ancient – supposedly protected – monuments crumble to ruin and literally vanish from under the noses of the authorities. So we have the Taj Mahal SMS-polled into becoming a new “wonder of the world” while the actual Taj is eroded away by acid rain and it slowly tilts due to politician-directed damage to the Yamuna river.

So, whenever we have floods, politicians conduct “aerial surveys of the flood-affected areas” which achieve absolutely nothing except tie up valuable helicopters from the more important job of rescuing marooned people and dropping food supplies to the starving. But if the politico didn’t show himself to the cameras sitting at a helicopter window, he would be called “callous and insensitive”.

So, we have that ultimate in tokenism, a “democracy” where all that matters is for parties to win the elections. After that nothing matters except clinging on to power until the next election comes around. Fulfilling election promises? What’s that?

You get the picture.     

OK, this probably requires some kind of explanation.

Most of you will be aware that in most (but far from all) Indian cities, cows have free rein of the streets, go where they want and do what they do. They drop dung. They enter gardens. They steal from garbage dumps. They attack people and kill a substantial number every year.

I hate cows.

I don’t recall the exact number of instances I’ve been attacked by cows in the street, but I do remember some occasions…

On one, I was riding beside the driver in the front seat of an autorickshaw when a cow rammed the vehicle just next to my arm. Literally a centimetre more and my arm would have been matchwood.

On another, I was in the railway station in Lucknow and walking past a large bovine when it turned its head and quite gratuitously slammed its horn into my hand. This was just before I was about to leave for home and I spent the next two days on the journey with a hand swollen to twice its usual size, agonisingly painful, not knowing if it was broken, unable to get any medical attention.

Yet another time – last October – I was walking past a cow on a Calcutta street when it suddenly came charging at me and knocked me halfway across the street. I was immensely fortunate that this was relatively late in the evening and there was no traffic, or I could have easily been run over.

Cows on the street are a menace. I don’t know how many people are killed every day over the country because of them, but the number must be fairly substantial. I always feel amused when I hear someone fulminating of the alleged danger from stray dogs (which in fact have never even snarled at me, personally speaking, in all the years of my life) while stoutly defending the right of cows to colonise the streets.

Oh – the courts have ordered the removal of cows many times; but this has achieved absolutely nothing, because the people ordered to remove the cows never actually implement the orders unless the judiciary stands over them with a metaphorical whip – and even then the cows are quietly released and back on the streets in days if not in hours.

As I told Mike some time ago, I would support any measure, including the mass use of machine guns, to get these animals off the streets.

It’s not as if these cows are healthy and content on the streets either. They are a diseased, starving, scrofulous lot which, whipped away from fruit stalls or gardens, deprived of any semblance of fodder, meet grisly ends with intestinal canals stuffed full of polythene sheets from garbage dumps or knocked down by speeding vehicles – but as long as nobody kills them deliberately, it’s all right as far as the religious Hindu is concerned.

I guess it’s time I laid a myth here: that the cow is an animal that the Hindu worships and will not eat. Actually, historically speaking, beef was regularly eaten by Hindus and the cow was a major sacrificial animal. But, the early Hindus being pastoral people, the value of the cow in terms of milk and dung began to outweigh its value in terms of meat, so – in order to protect the number of cows from diminishing – a tradition was quite deliberately fomented of cow protection, which in time has become (if you will pardon the pun) a holy cow.

Today, cow protection, to the Hindu Right, is a political issue, on which people can be roused to fury against cow-eaters like Christians and Muslims and certain Hindu castes; the cow itself, of course, is completely forgotten in this.    

The usual reason given for banning cow slaughter is the alleged religious sentiments of the people – a wholly spurious sentiment, but carefully fostered to the extent of rewriting history to stop all mention of Hindu consumption of beef. The other reason is the “preservation of the nation’s cattle wealth” – when I hear that one, I want to laugh my ass off. It sounds just like some Masai tribesman counting his cattle and translating them into riches and power. The scrub cow on the street can – with difficulty – perhaps produce a cup of milk a day. It’s not the source of the milk the nation allegedly needs – that comes (in the case of organised farms) from Friesian and other dairy breed cows, carefully cared for, that never see the streets; and in the unorganised sector, from the immensely large numbers of buffalos, which are not let out on the streets except during herding from one place to another. Buffalos, as I can personally attest (I have been trapped in the middle of a herd) are, in spite of their size and strength, gentle beasts with no aggressive intent at all; and they are eaten all right by the cattle worshipping Hindu, even in the middle of the North Indian cow-belt, and sacrificed by the Nepali ultra-Hindu at the festival of Dussehra (The Hindu fanatics who condemn Muslims for butchering camels at Id never seem to be concerned at buffalo slaughter at Dussehra). Go figure.   

I live in a state in the East of the country; and the East, whatever its other faults, has the singular advantage of being religiously diverse and of affording minorities their space. In states like this one with a Christian majority, cow slaughter cannot possibly be banned because the people depend on beef for a very large portion of their protein needs and even the Hindu Right recognises that if they tried to ban cow slaughter here, they would lose even the small number of votes they get. 

Therefore, there are no cows wandering the streets of this town; if they did, they would be removed and eaten, and a good thing too, good for everyone;

• Good for the people, who would get cheap protein. It’s amazing that in a country with a still largely malnourished citizenry, we should ignore such a massive source of protein simply to pander to utterly artificial religious sentiments. Even if the sentiments had been genuine, they would have been an insufficient reason to ignore cows as food. But as things stand, not eating cows is an act of genocide.
• Good for the animals which are still hunted for food – birds, and deer and so on. With beef regularly available, at least some of the pressure on them would be reduced. I am always amazed at the people who would “lay down their lives” in defence of the cow but won’t lift a finger to stop poaching and the sale of venison or turtles in the open market.
• Good for the cows themselves. See, if the cows are kept off the streets, in enclosures or cow sheds or whatever, they are kept away from disease and injury and there’s at least a chance that they can be regularly fed and looked after. The cow in the West is not a “holy” animal; it is reared for meat and milk and slaughtered when its useful life is over; and all this time it is not starved or maltreated and is healthier and (if cows have the intelligence to be happy, something I doubt) happier than the “holy” cow wandering the Indian street.  

Anyway, as I said somewhere before, over the years I’ve become more or less a vegetarian by choice (though I have no sympathy at all for the professional vegetarian – something I mentioned in one of my early blogs here). But I do eat meat once in a while and the only meat I eat by choice (when I get the urge on me) is beef. It’s cheap; it’s readily available; and unlike eating any other animal, when I eat beef I’m gaining some kind of revenge on the cow (OK, go ahead and laugh, but it’s true). I did it today, too. It’s the first meat I ate in months. Went down fine.

Jim- the next time you try out a barbecue, let me know and I’ll come over.        

I thought I would be inured to them by now, but no…

Those who have been following this blog know that one of the things I return to, over and over again, is this country’s attitude towards sex education. You’d think that a country with an exploding population, rising numbers of unemployed and illiterate, an environment collapsing in on itself, rampaging crime and social tensions, might at least want to take some steps to begin to out things right?

No.

Utter the words “sex education” in India and you’ll draw forth the same knee-jerk ranting as my recent post on marriage and prostitution elicited, and from people who are equally unlikely to have actually understood the topic or what is being discussed.

In the first place, they don’t understand that sex education doesn’t mean education in how to have sex. In fact, this is lost on them, because the word “sex” has become a red rag to the proverbial bull in an India which has adopted a Victorian pseudo-morality and turned its back firmly on the past.

Secondly, of course, a lot of them don’t really care what sex education means. What the politicians want is votes, and if you have to keep people befuddled, diverted into non-issues, and ignorant to get their votes, well now that is quite fine. In fact that is better than anything, because an ignorant multitude can be more easily controlled than people who are capable of thinking and can demand some kind of performance in return for their votes and taxes.

Personally, I have never sat in a sex education classroom, and I must thank whatever passes for my lucky stars that I managed to avoid the usual hang-ups about sex that infest the Indian mind – more anon about those. To this day sex ed has not been introduced in any state in Eastern India as far as I’m aware – while in West and North India they are busy banning it. And all the while we keep reading about things like the fourteen year old girl who recently gave birth in a hospital toilet and left her baby to die on the floor (her parents had brought her in for stomach ache).

Anyone who has any knowledge of the average young Indian’s ideas about sex will have come across ideas such as kissing causes pregnancy or that penis size is vitally important or that the way to woo a woman is by annoying the hell out of her, as the average Bollywood movie used to do…of course 99% of parents in India will never, ever, tell their children where babies come from and will then blame their children when they begin following their hormones and experimenting about what feels good, without the faintest idea about the repercussions of what they are doing.  

The politicians tell the media that sex education is fine as long as it only teaches abstinence. Apart from the fact that abstinence only sex education has never worked anywhere in the world, they won’t teach what to abstain from. I mean, the crude mechanics of putting one set of genitals inside another? Perish the thought.

The sexologist Dr Prakash Kothari has given a fascinating account of some of the questions his patients ask him; such as the man brought in by his wife and mother in law because he had not – even after months of marriage – consummated it. Kothari asked him why he had never had sex with his wife. His response? Oh, he made love to her every night. Asked to demonstrate, he just turned to her and embraced her. (OK, this is not a joke. I did not make this up.) Another guy penetrated his wife and then just waited – unmoving – for the orgasm. A third moved from side to side…at least that’s what he said. I would have liked to know just how he managed it.

Going by that, even teaching in how to have sex seems essential.

Meanwhile, what is actually happening? Here is the latest bad joke:

The teacher’s union in Uttar Pradesh state – one of the few which have as yet not banned sex education – has made a demand. If they absolutely must teach sex education, they say, they are willing – under duress – to teach that condoms prevent sexually transmitted disease. But they will not teach how to use condoms properly…

This in a state with probably the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease in the country, where it’s still macho to avoid condom use, where people still think sex with a virgin will cure gonorrhoea, where few people have as yet heard of AIDS and fewer still know how it’s transmitted, and most families still produce six to eight children.   

The anthropologist Margaret Mead said, as I have talked about before, that Pacific Islanders who had sexually liberal societies with free interaction of the genders and where young people were often (till the Christian missionaries moved in) formally and ceremonially deflowered, had a lower incidence of crime, violence, and tensions than other, more warlike peoples with sexual repression. Sexual repression and violence seem to go hand in hand.

No wonder we are a sexually repressed and intolerant nation.

Among the more bizarre of the tendencies of Indians is the insistence on declaring that we’ve won all of our many wars since Independence; or at least all the wars against Pakistan.

Let’s take a look at these “victories.”

In 1947, on paper, we started off with all of the state of Jammu and Kashmir; the Maharaja of Kashmir signed over all of his state to India after Pakistani tribesmen invaded, not just the part left under his control. Yet when the fighting was over and a ceasefire signed, India was left with a shade over half the state. Is this a victory?

In 1961, we invaded the Portuguese colony of Goa and took it over within twenty four hours. The few Portuguese soldiers present, virtually unarmed and utterly isolated, laid down arms rather than offer suicidal resistance, yet the number of Indian casualties exceeded those of the Portuguese. I’d have liked to see how the Indian army of the time, malfunctioning radios, canvas gym shoes, World War One rifles and all, would have performed had the Portuguese put up serious resistance.

In 1962, following years of confrontation along the Himalayas, India sent a force into Chinese occupied territory (the Thag La ridge and Khinzemane) and unilaterally shifted the border northwards. The Chinese, who were waiting for some such provocation, invaded and in exactly a month captured all the territory they claimed. The Indian Army did not manage even to disrupt the Chinese timetable, let alone offer serious resistance. But to this day, although India can’t exactly pretend that it didn’t lose, it tries to save face by saying the Chinese did not advance further because of the strong Indian forces arrayed against them. Duh. Of course they didn’t advance any further – they had already achieved all their objectives. Why on earth would they want to advance any further?  

In 1965, India and Pakistan fought over the Rann of Kutch – a swampy marshland – in the state of Gujarat. Indian troops, by and large, dropped their weapons, food, everything, and ran away, so that the Pakistanis didn’t even have any logistical problems – they ate Indian food and shot at Indian soldiers with captured Indian bullets. Not surprisingly, this little battle is not even mentioned in popular Indian history.

Later the same year, Pakistan sent saboteurs and raiders into Kashmir, followed by troops across the ceasefire line (which is not an international boundary). In response, India invaded Pakistan, sending an armoured thrust towards Lahore. This thrust could not even capture Lahore, just across the international border, and almost undefended, because the Pakistanis simply blew up a bridge across the Icchhogil Canal. In the meantime, the Pakistani Air Force virtually shot the Indian Air Force from the skies (as even the Indian Air Force belatedly admitted in a book published last year) and the Indian Navy stayed bottled up in harbour to avoid the risk of politically harmful sinkings. And then, when Pakistan was well on the way to running out of ammunition, India negotiated a settlement and returned all captured territory. And we still claim this was a victory.

India invaded East Pakistan on November 22, 1971, and after a brief campaign captured the territory (which nowadays is Bangladesh). On the ground, a military victory, because the Pakistani troops, demoralised and without air cover, were more keen on trying to save their skins than in fighting back. Fine. But – what did it achieve? We now had freed Pakistan of a genuine albatross round its neck, and given Pakistanis a new reason to hate India; we had inevitably pushed Pakistan towards Islamic radicalism; while Bangladesh, the new nation, began hating Indians and blaming India for its woes now that it no longer had the West Pakistanis to blame. Today Bangladesh is a more unstable and dangerous entity than East Pakistan had ever been.

Seen in a long term, is this a victory?

In 1987, India sent troops into Sri Lanka with the alleged agreement of the Sri Lankan government – alleged agreement, I say, because you could hear the Lankan sinews crack with all the arm twisting. That force, the Indian Peace Keeping Force, soon got stuck in a vicious guerrilla war against the Sri Lankan Tamil secessionist outfit, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and after two years had to withdraw with its tail firmly tucked between its legs. The casualties were so enormous they have to this day never officially been divulged.  No wonder that this is another little war we studiously try and ignore.      

In 1999, India fought an alleged war against Pakistan over Kargil in Kashmir. Normal diplomatic relations continued between the nations and the international borders were perfectly quiet, and it was basically a fight between a relatively small number of Pakistani soldiers on hilltops and in bunkers, supported by artillery but with no air cover, and a relatively very large number of Indian troops with artillery and aircraft. Even so, it was only after months of fighting that a negotiated settlement imposed by Washington brought the conflict to an end, and Pakistan still occupies an important mountain on the Indian side of the boundary. Again, I don’t know what sort of victory this is. At the very least, it made Washington a player in a bilateral dispute, a lever the Americans have never abandoned to this day.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t support or advocate military conquest. But it’s also evident – or should be, anyway – that false claim of victories are dangerous simply because they make the likelihood of military adventures greater. A country that has the moral courage to admit its ass was soundly kicked on the battlefield is unlikely to want to repeat the experience unless it becomes absolutely necessary.

Naturally, however, in a nation like India, this is not going to happen, because there are too many reputations to defend and hagiographies to write. And after we lose, whether militarily or politically, the next little warlet (full scale wars are of course no longer possible) we’ll go through the same little mix of amnesia and rewriting history.

And after that, the n