India Today: The Strange Melding of East & West; Bollywood, Mick Jagger . . . And What the Heck Is a 'Super Dense Crush Scenario'?

Turkey holds title to the cliché “where east meets west” because it straddles Europe and Asia. But while shooting two episodes of “Rudy Maxa’s World” in India, I grew convinced that India is an intriguing runner-up in that category.

More than on any previous visit, I was struck by melding of cultures taking place as the “new India” assumes global center stage with China.

Unlike China, however, India is more westward looking. That’s partly thanks to the legacy of British colonial rule—in New Delhi, the massive Connaught Square shopping area could be in London save for the pedicabs and motorcabs (what the Thais call “tuk-tuks”) buzzing around the streets. And the growing outsourcing of jobs from the US and elsewhere in the west must help explain the cultural stew, too. After all, employees of those phone banks you reach when you call for computer help or reservations are schooled in such things as American sports teams and other popular topics of American conversation.

Characters in Bollywood movies deliver dialogue partly in English, partly in Hindi. Every day, the dozens of English-language newspapers are filled with up-to-the-moment gossip about Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and celebrities du jour. Shopkeepers in the crowded, old market of Jodhpur try to entice me into their stores with promises that Mick Jagger and other Western rock stars have shopped there.

(In the case of Jagger, they may not be exaggerating—the old rocker is best buddies with the maharaja of Jodhpur, a portly, serious figure who is a revered symbol of a family that ran the region for 600 years before Indian royalty there was stripped of its privileges about 60 years ago. While I’ve never met Jagger, I did interview the maharaja, and you couldn’t find two people that are outwardly more different.)

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The British tendency toward understatement is still evident in Indian life. “Rash driving” is a euphemism for hell-on-wheels motorists. (Traffic in India is something to behold, with two lane roads routinely becoming four-late roads as cars jockey for space; it wasn’t unusual even on toll roads—our equivalent of interstates—to see a tractor-trailer truck coming at you the wrong way with horn blaring.) The phrase “bold scenes” substitutes as a description of risqué scenes in movies, though in India, an actor and actress brushing cheeks qualifies as quite naughty.

Indians seem to have acronyms for everything; reading a daily paper requires a local translator because of the number of abbreviations. One of my favorite is SDC, which refers to a jam-packed bus or train, as in this line from a New Delhi paper this week: “The new trains will also have four blowers to pump in 15,000 cubic metres of fresh air—in a Super Dense Crush scenario where a 12-car train ends up carrying 5,300 passengers against a total capacity of 3,504 passengers, the significance of these features needs little underlining.”

“Super Dense Crush” is more than a descriptor—it’s apparently also an official category. Flying coach these days, for example, presents a Super Dense Crush scenario.

As India hurtles into the future with a robust economy and rapidly changing mores, there’s still the legacy you’d expect in a largely Hindu country. Virginity before marriage remains critical in most communities. In fact, suggesting otherwise can get you in hot water. Several Bollywood figures have recently come under not just criticism but also legal scrutiny for speaking frankly.

A former Miss Universe, actress Sushmita Sen, was charged last week with obscenity for “making lewd sexual comments” in interviews. Among other things, she remarked in a television interview that “no Indian is chaste or virgin anymore and having premarital or post-marital affairs is nothing wrong in society nowadays.”

She’s charged under laws titled the “Indecent Representation of Women Act” and “Young Persons Harmful Publication Act” in a court in Madras. When a couple of other Bollywood figures were charged last year with obscenity for striking a couple of, um, bold poses for an evening paper, the Tamil Murasu, a fellow actor who spoke out in their defense was slapped with a warrant for “casting aspersions on the judiciary.”
It’s a ropedancer’s game, this meeting of the traditional with the modern.

December is a perfect—and very popular—time to visit India, largely because it’s the dry season and temperatures are moderate. It is the foggy season in Northern India, however, as you may be able to tell in my photo, left, of the Taj Mahal.  For the first-time visitor, I’d suggest starting with the classic “Golden Triangle” tour of the north. Fly into Delhi and visit Agra (the Taj Mahal is worth the 2.5-hour train trip or five-hour drive), then Jaipur, and end up in Jodhpur before flying back to Delhi.

It’s easy to see India as an individual traveler if you hire a car and driver and tour guide when you arrive in India. Local travel agencies in Delhi will rent you a car and driver for about $60 a day to take you around the north. Figure on a bit more for a guide.

The crew and I were lucky to have the services of Rajesh (“Raj”) Ranjan, a delightful state-licensed guide with an MBA who managed to smooth our way into almost every site we needed to shoot—no small feat in a country filled with bureaucrats who feel the need to establish their territory when something new, such as an American television crew, shows up. (Yes, we’d secured advance permission to shoot from federal authorities, but that didn’t keep local pooh-bahs from searching for reasons to deny us access; the very diplomatic and persistent Raj eventually won the day.)

Drop raj an e-mail at ranjandl@bol.net.in if you'd like to retain his services--tell him Rudy sent you.