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An Indian Nuclear Fatalism
As the foreigners flee India following threats of nuclear war, the Indians remain unfazed...
The Internet cafes are full, the newsagents run out of the national newspapers by mid-morning. And all the Westerners are to be found frantically reading the latest news and their respective country's government warnings online, or hunched in the cafes over the day's newspapers, occasionally pausing, their eyes staring anxiously into the mid-air: shall I flee from India or postpone the decision until tomorrow or next week? Compare this with the Indians in our midst, going about their business of desperately prising that day's living with the usual indifferent, unseeing, single-minded bustle, building to a seething mass of activity, coming and going, seemingly going nowhere, bustle for bustle's sake, chaos as a way of creating purpose. The Indians on holiday, meanwhile, peruse the day's newspapers in the cafes, the right leg nonchalantly hooked on the left in a gesture that seems relaxed rather than anxious, their faces tilted in wry amusement. They read about a Pakistan cruelly demonised, but beyond this blatant propaganda which is as easy to see through as a veil of water, there is a sense of playfulness - the word "nuke" is dropped in a twist of comic pun, the politicians' war rhetoric is reported with absence and unconcern, as if lifting a quote out of a fantasy novel. You wouldn't know, watching or talking to the Indians, that next month some of their relatives or friends, or their favourite restaurant or their grocery store, might be reduced to acrid and burning ash by a nuclear bomb; you wouldn't tell that we are, in Mcleod Ganj in Himachel Pradesh, only a couple of hundred kilometres from the Line of Control where battles are already raging round the clock.
"What's wrong?" the man at the Internet caf‚ said this morning after I turned away from the computer screen, shaking my head in incomprehensible distress. I had been reading the Western media's analysis; reading India and Pakistan had both psyched themselves for war and they were already thinking of the aftermath. The feeling was that war was now inevitable, a matter of when instead of if.
"You country is crazy," I said. "How could you even think of destroying oneself to destroy the enemy?"
He offered a patronising smile, as if he knew something I didn't know. "There won't be a war. It's just talk. Talk, talk, talk."
Outside, walking to my hotel, I stumbled across a fight by two rickshaw drivers. They charged at each other; they juddered a foot apart like motorists avoiding a collision; their hands gestured belligerently; they bellowed angrily. Then they fell away from each other, seemingly satisfied, but a moment later they charged at each other again. There was more shouting, more animated gestures, and some pushing and jostling this time, which quickly ended however when other drivers wedged themselves between them. For a moment their rage seemed satiated or stunned, as if they had received a blow to the head, then suddenly, simultaneously, the warring drivers flounced round and charged again. This went on and on, alternating between calmness and eruption, but it didn't seem like the men would come to any physical harm: their exchange had the qualities of an act, a dance even, a mime where each knew what was expected of him and how it should be performed. Talk, talk, talk: maybe the man at the Internet caf‚ knew something about Indian culture I did not.
The sides of the streets were teeming with people, shifting in position - ignoring the war mime of the rickshaw drivers - and it seemed now that the large numbers of Western tourists had forgotten the distressing news they had read that morning. There was the air of celebration and expectation. I asked what was going on. "The Dalai Lama has arrived back from Australia and will be driving this way shortly," someone reported. There was further news, the news of the day: the next day the Dalai Lama was holding a public audience, where he would give a talk. I wondered if he would speak about the threat of the devastating, potentially nuclear war that could erupt any minute. No, this was wishful thinking: having attended a speech by the Buddhist third-in-command the previous day, I knew that the Dalai Lama was likely to talk about how one could achieve compassion, or about the virtues of engaging the heart for a balanced and more productive achievement of wisdom.
I returned to the hotel, sitting on the terrace enjoying the view of the mountains; it was hard, amid this beauty and the vital sun, to imagine war. So. My feelings alternated between two lines of thought. From what I had seen and heard of the Indians, the comic fight and the merriment I witnessed in town, I thought that if an Indian war was anything like their playfulness and irreverence, there was no reason to be afraid. Yet, I had seen something else of the Indians that was a source of alarm in the current crisis; the Indians had a resigned and fatalistic attitude to life, an adeptness to turn despair into acceptance, ambition into futility, adversity into stoic religiosity. Surrounded by so much suffering and misery, they had become impervious to feelings of anticipated affliction; equally, they were as incapable of compassion towards another person's anguish as imagining the horror of a nuclear war. This is why they were talking about war - or, worse, ignoring it (unable to be angered by their leaders' apparent eagerness to pick a fight, who had assured their people that India would survive a nuclear war: never mind the millions dead) - as if they were discussing and occupying themselves with an important cricket game, nuclear weapons taking the quality of damn good ball throws to be reserved for a later trick in the game. This is the spirit in which they were handling things; and this is what made them dangerous.
© Victor Paul Borg
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