No ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ here in dangerous Delhi - BY THE WAY by Max V. Soliven

NEW DELHI, India – Remember that prizewinning movie, Driving Miss Daisy? There’s nobody here who could manage to drive Miss Daisy – except to shock and frustration. In fact, Miss Daisy would have died of fright within the first fifteen minutes.

Everybody drives like the wind over bumpy roads and humps (called "speed breakers", but they break your back or give you backlash). A Delhi driver – or, for that matter, reckless pedestrian – is the despair of the insurance companies. There are surely 100,000 "narrow escapes" from fatal mishap per day, so daredevil in their darting in and out of traffic are those on scooters, motorbikes, Bajaj "motorized rickshaws" (Tuktuks), motorcars, vans, and freight trucks are our Indian friends. Vishnu and the 300 Hindu deities, or Allah (there are 140 million Muslims!), or the Sikh prophets, or the fire-god of the Parsees must certainly protect them!

When we were speeding back to our hotel, our driver-guide Sanjay K. almost ran over a two-year old child who had wriggled out of his father’s grasp and spurted across the avenue, Sanjay was not discomfited. He neatly swerved out of the wayward kid’s path (almost careening into an Army lorry) without any excitement on his serene features. "No problem, Sir!" he grinned. Everyone seems used to the daily bedlam and confusion – and the noise, the dust (which cakes and covers everything with a reddish layer) for Delhi is near a desert. When the Kashmiri rug and shawl merchant displays one of his treasures, he first shakes out the beautiful cashmere scarf or shawl to flick the dust film off it and display its truly wonderful weave and color. They’ll make a musical of delicious Delhi some day, and name it Dust: The Magical.

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New Delhi is an English city, the seat of power once upon a time of the pomp and circumstance of the British Raj. The Brits ruled India for two centuries and, in a sense, had a greater impact here than those of the Mughal emperors and kings who reigned, with sword and Koran, for 800 years. If the Mughals built old Delhi’s Red Fort, with its crennelated parapets and the matchless Taj Mahal in Agra, their former capital, the Brits erected "New" Delhi to proclaim England’s supremacy over India which they boasted was "the jewel in the Crown." Sir Edwin Luytens and his rival architect Sir Herbert Baker competed to construct a New Delhi of monumental proportions, with gracious boulevards (Rajpath and Janpath) for great parades and displays of military might and British grandeur.

By far, however, Britain’s greatest gift (after centuries of looting) was to bequeath to the Indians the English language. Of course, the Indian "Hinglish as she is spoke" became the object of fun and caricature in the old days. Today’s modern middle and upper classes (their scions schooled in Oxford, Cambridge, the London School, etc., and the military academy of Sandhurst) no longer speak that stilted Victorian-based "babu English" so well satirized by the novelist Salman Rushdie in his sarcastic style – one of his books, indeed, The Satanic Verses, was deemed such an insult to the Prophet Mohammad that Rushdie earned a fatwah or sentence of "death" from the late and irate Iranian Ayatollah Khomenini. (Rushdie outlived the Ayatollah, but even today he can’t count himself fully "safe.")

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There used to be a time that it was fashionable to say, "There are no Englishmen left but the Indians." Yet, very few Indians in the bulk of the population really speak English well nowadays, but certainly the leaders and journalists of this nation do – incredibly well, at that. Nowhere is the British influence still so pervasive as in the Indian military. We witnessed that colorful Republic Day parade, so snappily did the cavalry, camel corps, infantry "tifles", and motorized units pass in review, and so many bagpipes were skirling in the marching bands that one could imagine the British Army, in traditional "red coats" was marching by. In the years in which this writer covered Pakistan and India, from Bombay (Mumbai) and Calcutta (now deceptively renamed Kolkata, even Mother Teresa would have gotten lost using that replacement title) to Chandigarh and Amritsar in the Punjab, and across the border Lahore, Rawalpindi and Peshawar, up to the Khyber Pass and beyond it to Kabul, every city had a military "Gymkhana." The military were based in "cantonments", pronounced "cantoonments", as in the old era of the British Raj. When I covered the Indian-Pakistani war, the Brigadiers (generals) shelling each other would airily tell me that their opposite number across the firing line was a "classmate" in Sandhurst.

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The Indian press is thriving. Newspaper circulation in 32 million daily. Television viewership is estimated at 300 million.

The English-language press, although limited in reach these nationalistic days, remains vibrant and strong. I’ve seldom seen such wonderful writing on the part of Asians who have English as their second language as I’ve seen in India in the past two decades.

To illustrate, just let me quote one piece from The Indian Express, which used to be one of the most prestigious newspapers when my old friend, the late Frank Moraes, was editing it in his typical fiery fashion. (He wrote more eloquently when he was in his cups, which was most of the time – perhaps Frank merrily drank himself to death!) Nowadays, The Hindustan Times and the Times of India are predominant and have most of the ads – how do the other survive?

In any event, last Tuesday, "Martyrs’ Day", honoring the great Mahatma Gandhi, one of the older journalists movingly recalled that day, on January 30 exactly 53 years ago, when he had covered, as a cub reporter, the assassination of Gandhi. Kuldip Nayar entitled his piece: "When the Nation’s Heart Missed a Beat: The Eyes of the Mahatma."

Here’s what he wrote:

"On that day, I was watching the PTI (Press Trust of India) ticker at my office when there was a flash, ‘Gandhi Shot.’ It was like missing a heartbeat. A colleague, who had a motorbike, dropped me off at the Birla House where Gandhi stayed.

All through the journey from Ballimaran to what is now called the Tees January Marg, I saw no extraordinary activity. As usual, old Delhi was congested with the pedestrians and handrickshaws and the New Delhi side uncrowded.

When he got to the Birla house, not many people had yet thronged the place. Some of them had lingered behind when there was no prayer. It seems news of Gandhi’s murder had not yet reached many of the devotees. I could spot Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Home Minister Sardar Patel and Defence Minister Baldev Sing. They looked distraught and distracted. In my presence, Governor-General (Lord Louis) Montbatten arrived and saluted the body of the Mahatma, by then raised high on a dais at the centre of the Birla House garden. ‘Thank God, he was not a Muslim either and we are broadcasting this fact," Singh added.

. . . After some time I saw Nehru rushing towards the boundary wall. All around the Birla House there was a sea of humanity, singing Gandhi’s favorite song, Ishwar Allah tere naam, or shouting, "Gandhi amar rahe (long live Gandhi!).

Nehru climbed the wall while wiping his tears. He told the crowd: ‘The light has gone off. Bapu is no more. A glory has departed and the star that warmed us and brightened our lives has set and we shiver in the dark." Nehru broke down while speaking. So did the crowd. There was hardly a person without the tragedy writ large on his face. Emotion betrayed all of them.

"I did not see Nathuram Godse, who had shot Gandhi thrice from close range. Probably he had been locked into a room in the Birla House itself or taken away by the police. But I saw a trickle of blood and some flowers strewn in the path which Gandhi had taken from the building to the place of prayer, a couple of hours earlier. Even with scores of people around, the path looked desolate.

"It may be a reflection of one’s own feelings but the atmosphere was heavy with the poignancy of sorrow. I could comprehend what the loss of Gandhi meant, I could see history unraveling before my eyes. Perhaps I was too callow, only three months old in journalism, or perhaps I had not been hardened by the experience despite the carnage of Partition I had witnessed. I wept unashamedly."

"It was as if someone from the family had departed, leaving his children lonely and orphaned. For me it was also emotional purification, a catharsis of pent-up anger which had swelled within me after knowing about the killings during the days of Partition (in 1947). Only a week earlier had Gandhi told B.C. Roy, the then West Bengal chief minister: "What’s the good . . . neither the people nor those in power have any use of me. ‘Do or die’ becomes me more than in the circumstances. I wish to die in harness, taking the name of God with my last breath."

I strode to the prayer place and stood there for a long time. It had an air of asceticism and spiritualism about it. I realised how only a few days earlier I was part of the audience at his meeting. That was the day when Madan Lai exploded a bomb behind the shed where Gandhi sat to deliver his sermons. I heard the noise but did not consider it as anything other than the bursting of a cracker because Gandhi showed little reaction to the explosion. He continued with the prayers as if nothing happened.

I recall the words he uttered at that time. Hindus and Muslims were his two eyes. Would the nation follow his voice which a fanatical Hindu had just silenced? At least for the time being I could see that the loss had fused the different religions communities, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians into one multitude of sorrow. They all constituted a nation in mourning.

When the pen is red hot it draws roses. When it is white hot it draws stars! That’s what a poet once wrote. Kuldip Nayar’s moving memoir demonstrates the best, the most heartfelt in Indian journalism. I salute him and his tribe – may they increase and prosper.