Understanding India's cultural representation: The impact of Operation Sindoor

Economic Times

07-06-2025

As Shashi Tharoor's articulation in Victorian-era Wren and Martinese continues to bowl over the civil service examinee that lies inside each one of us, I was reminded of my elucidation of 'sindoor' a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. In the hoary 80s before Operation Bluestar, when googol was just a number - 1 followed by 100 zeroes - and General Zia-ul-Haq was Pakistan's president, I went to school in a small New Zealand town called Whakatane. My mother must have dropped me off once. A classmate later asked me, 'What's that red mark on your mum's head?' Now, one of my virtues as an 11-year-old was to paint a pretty picture of where I had come from - the thriving megalopolis of Calcutta. In the course of answering many queries of a distant land in those pre-Google days, I would dress up some facts with elaborate explanations.
For instance, I told my classmates that I actually was a very ordinary student 'back home' and most young Indians of my age were quite brilliant. We also lived in large multi-storied buildings all to ourselves where house help was abundant. As you can make out, these were not really lies, but slight exaggerations to correct misrepresentations of India - especially Calcutta - abroad. In a similar vein, I had explained to my culturally curious classmate that the red mark on my mother's head - and she wore just a fine line of a comb-end dipped in sindoor - was called 'shidur' (I used the Bengali word for it) and was a streak of my father's blood that Ma freshly wore every week to signal that she owned him. I don't know what my friend made of that explanation, but she was suitably satisfied with my exposition of Indian matriarchic customs that treated married men as married women's chattel.
Explaining cultural behaviour and practices to people unaware of them is as important as explaining political action and positions to them. So, in that sense, I get what the Indian version of the Harlem Globetrotters' 14-day explanatory mission to various capitals of the world was about. It was about highlighting India's stand on terrorism following Operation Sindoor. To anyone who was listening. As a travelling exposition, though, I wonder whether it succeeded in doing what it set out to do. Now, I'm not part of the crowd that believes that taxpayers' money was spent for MPs to have a nice 'world tour'. Public money has been worse spent on matters less measurable. And this travelling gig was more than just about explaining Operation Sindoor - it was about showcasing Indians who live India and updating their image from the land of 'Ghandi' (sic), Mother Teresa and customer service line voices to something modern, modular, and muscular. But what left me scratching my stubble were two things. One, in this day and age of much more enhanced avenues of communication, having outreach teams - one of them fronted by a gentleman's whose USP seems to be speaking in impeccable Jeeves-Wooster English in these multiculti times - seemed very Nehruvian. Two, our boys and girls calmly fingerwagging in foreign capitals to no one in particular barring Indian news outlets like ANI and PTI seemed to be in a different universe compared to the thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening here in India. The venerable home minister, for instance, saying earlier this week that Mamata Banerjee had opposed Operation Sindoor to placate her 'Muslim votebank' was doubly odd. After all, Trinamool general secretary and Didi's nephew Abhishek Banerjee was part of the MP delegation trotting about Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia (the country with the world's largest Muslim population), and Malaysia as part of the Sindoor tour. In effect, our Harlem Globetrotters were globetrotting to impress us sitting here in India. Much in the same vein I would return to India just before Kapil Dev would lift the World Cup and tell my new schoolfriends - and some 40 years later, tell you, my dear reader - how I served to upgrade the image of India to a world that needed it to be updated. Elevate your knowledge and leadership skills at a cost cheaper than your daily tea. The answer to companies not incurring capex may lie in stock markets
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