Why I am not Indian

If you are an Indian in the mainstream sense, you’ve got to be into at least two, if not all three, of these things: chai, cricket and Bollywood. None of them excite me, but seeing everyone around me going mad about them leaves me feeling like an outsider.

Indians drink chai — that corruption of tea with lots of milk and dollops of sugar — as though they have been drinking it for 5,000 years. But it was only in the 1830s that the British began tea cultivation in the hills of Bengal and Assam. That’s right, the Indian and South Asian pastime — or timepass — of chai garam chai is a colonial gift. I have sat and listened to long rants of traditionalists against colonialism, the English language and Western culture, all over a cup of tea!

It was not until I became a journalist that I began to drink tea. I would go to people’s homes and offices to interview them and they would offer me tea. I would say no thank you, I don’t drink tea, and they would reply, “Thodi si? Aadha cup?” Just a little, half a cup. What part of “I don’t drink tea” do people not understand? When I would repeat that, they’d be offended. They take it to mean I don’t want *their* tea.

Ok fine, I’ll have some.

Soon, I realised that the social custom of granting fraternal dignity through a cup of tea is only to the journalist’s advantage. When someone doesn’t want to talk to you, you turn around and shamelessly ask if you can get some tea. That moment when you shame the person whose house or office you have gate crashed into. Won’t you even offer me some tea? That is how a journalist in Gujarat even managed to get Narendra Modi’s mysterious, separated wife to speak up!

Chai does nothing for me, but all you have to do is drink it. Cricket, however, is a pain in the neck and other body parts. You sit before a television screen and patiently wait for hours, for a match to build up until you reach the end, which is rarely an equal contest. When I cribbed about the hysteria around Tendulkar’s retirement, some unfollowed me on Twitter. I admit my being insensitive and I am sure it appeared idiotic to the average Indian, but please try and see it from my eyes. Someone who is not into cricket feels alien in this land. We should get job reservations. When the world around me comes to a standstill watching an India-Pakistan match, that is when I realise what it is like to be in a minority. Frustrated that no one feels for my alienation, I provoke by cheering for Pakistan but even then nobody gives me attention!

Like chai and cricket, cinema was also brought to this country by the good colonisers. The problem with Bollywood today is that it is taken far too seriously. In the India of 2013, it is easier to make a case for Kashmir to be allowed to secede than to say that Bollywood is trash. So complete is the hegemony of Bollywood over culture that dissing it would invite loud howls from people. You would be described as snobbish and unappreciative of popular culture. As if there is nothing more to popular culture than Bollywood. Ok, there is Chetan Bhagat too.

The problem is not so much with the films, which you can easily ignore, as with the marketing and hype. The marketing and advertising budgets of a Bollywood film today run into crores. Even if you are a hermit in the forest, Bollywood marketing will reach you. So all-pervasive the hype will be that not watching the film will make you feel left out — like not drinking chai or enjoying cricket on the telly. The bar is so low that film buffs go berserk over an ordinary good film like The Lunchbox and threaten to commit suicide if it isn’t India’s entry to the Oscar’s.

By the way, Indian right wing trolls commenting on the online version of this article can’t say ‘go to Pakistan’ because the same evils exist there!

Published in The Express Tribune, December 6^th, 2013.

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