Remember the wonderful dialogue between Semyon Semyonovich Gorbunkov and the house manager from the movie "The Diamond Arm"? It sounded something like this:
- Topic of the lecture: "New York - a city of contrasts."
- And I haven't been to New York …
- Where have you been?
- I was in Istanbul, in Marseilles …
- Please, “Istanbul is a city of contrasts”. What's the difference - we'll rewrite the ad!
I declare with full responsibility: if we talk about real contrasts, this conversation should be started with India.
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English tea and Victorian morality
My acquaintance with this exotic country took place thanks to Indian students who studied at the Penza University, which at that time was still an ordinary polytechnic institute. I lectured them on the history of Russia simultaneously with our students, in the same stream. The calculation, apparently, was that the Indians already know Russian and the lecturers will understand. But in fact it turned out that half of the lecture I had to read in Russian, and half in English. It turned out that some students did not understand me, then others.
And so I took it into my head to somehow show erudition and recall the famous uprising of the sepoys and how the British brutally suppressed it. And what did I hear in response?
- Yes, we owe everything to the British! They built roads, bridges, schools for us! And bad people are everywhere! the students told me with undisguised indignation. By bad people, they meant the rebellious sepoys!
That's it! … The British, in the end, left India, but … stayed there forever. The country was never able to finally free itself from its colonial past. For most Indians, a white man is always a Sahib (master). And "having business" with a white person is the height of a career for any Indian. By the way, even tea - and they still drink it in English, that is, with milk and at exactly five o'clock in the evening.
Then already one of my acquaintances, who lives in India, told me that the British "presented" this country with their own Puritan morality of the 19th century. Many young Indians today do not know in detail about the relationship between the sexes, because "educated people do not talk about it."
Indians, for example, are shocked by the interest of Europeans in the temples of Khajuraho, whose walls are carved with bas-reliefs depicting scenes of copulation. These temples are fenced, so you can't just get close to them. Moreover, these fences are made especially for tourists. The Indians themselves are shy about these temples. And it's better not to ask them about the Kamasutra! The educated Indians will be outraged, while the uneducated simply know nothing about it. Perhaps this is why the number of rapes in India is so high. Nature demands its own, but complete illiteracy in matters of sex leads to wildness in actions. And this is also a legacy of the country's colonial past.
The WHO offered to start the promotion of contraceptives in the country for free, but this idea did not work, because children for India are the main happiness and wealth. And although Rudyard Kipling in his poem "By Right of Birth" wrote about "nine and ten children" among the British in India, the same ideal exists today in Indian families. Although, at first glance, the birth rate is not that high there: only 2.47 children per woman.
Poor rich
Yet even with this ratio, more than 1.2 billion people live in India, half of whom are under 25. Every year the country's population grows by 18 million - the same number of people live in all of Australia. According to UN forecasts, by the end of 2020 there will be more Indians on Earth than Chinese - the growth rate of the PRC's population of 1.34 billion people is decreasing, its population is aging dramatically, and it is illegal to have more than one child in a family. In India, however, there is no such restriction.
Ancient Chinese wisdom says: "You need to be friends with your neighbor's neighbor." If until now Russia was friends with India for the sake of China, then, quite possibly, the situation will soon change exactly the opposite. According to the forecasts of the auditing and consulting company Price Waterhouse Cooper, after 2020, India will develop much faster than China. World Bank experts are confident that in the very near future, India will become the fastest growing country in the world and will be able to take the third place in terms of GDP after the United States and China. In terms of the number of scientific publications, it has already overtaken Russia, and this despite the fact that a third of the Indian population is illiterate and lives on less than one euro a day. But at the same time, in November 2011, the average monetary income per capita in Russia was 21069 rubles, while in India it was 1156 euros, and its economic growth was 8.5% of GDP per year!
Of the more than one billion population of the country, only 33 million people pay taxes. Less than a third of citizens have a bank account. Only 5% of Indian citizens have a passport. The bulk of Indians are employed in the shadow economy. They have no paperwork, no bank accounts, no health or retirement insurance. These several hundred million people are invisible to the state. Thanks to them, corrupt officials write off humanitarian aid, distributing only a couple of bags of rice to those in need. That is, the country almost officially lives at the expense of general corruption. So, rickshaws, for example, pay the "senior" for a seat, he pays the police, and everyone believes that this is how it should be. With all this, India back in 1975 launched its first satellite into space, tested atomic weapons, and today is officially ranked among the great nuclear powers.
It is not so easy to understand in India who is rich and who is poor. Many descendants of the ancient rajas still possess an inheritance of the same diamonds, rubies and pearls, but they cannot touch the riches under any guise. By the way, women in India still wear saris without exception. But you know what was the trendiest saree in 2008? With a pocket for your mobile phone!
How to count all Indians
The exact number of Indians is unknown, but it will soon come to an end. It is in India, where people still wear loincloths and drink water straight from the Ganges, that the government is conducting an electronic census. Since September 2010, Indians have received individual identification numbers instead of passports. Each such code is the “address” of a file in the biometric database with fingerprints and iris images, which can be used to identify any citizen.
This is the largest biometric program in the world - it covers one sixth of the world's population. It is believed that in its scope, this mega-project can be compared with the construction of the Egyptian pyramids or landing on the moon. After all, just to store this data, you will need 4-5 megabytes per person, and in total … about a petabyte (1024 terabytes) of information! But no one is afraid of either the "seal of the devil" or the fact that "you will be counted." Indians are very positive about the census, and its completion will give the state a huge increase in income.
Karma is Karma
Even when I watched the Indian films "Tramp", "Sangam", "Love in Kashmir", I got the impression that this is a fairy tale and in real life this does not happen. However, Indian students condescendingly explained to me that in their cinema everything is like in life and that they really have palaces there at every step. There are many huts, but there are also enough palaces, and such is the karma, so let it not surprise me.
Meanwhile, India cannot but amaze a European. For example, everyone has seen pictures of the Taj Mahal - the pearl of Indian architecture. But why is it always filmed from only one side, where an alley with pools and fountains leads to it? What's behind the mausoleum? And there … the river bed, in the rainy season, full of dirty green water, and in drought it is a huge pit of red clay, so it is simply impossible to photograph the monument from the other side!
Transport is a huge problem in India. Traffic jams in the center of Delhi are no less than in Moscow. But there are also specific features, such as elephants. They are used in the same way on the highways, but imagine what would happen if you find yourself in a traffic jam on a pedicab, when an elephant stops in front, which suddenly wants to recover? It is impossible to imagine anything worse for a European, but Indians only smile - karma!
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №37. Author: Oleg Shevchenko