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ShareHemmed in by Chinese incursions and claims? Not quite ready to gift Arunachal Pradesh to the inscrutable neighbours yet? Relax, have some tea. The Brits got it right. A nice cuppa can often suggest magical remedies for impossible problems. And they picked up this trust in tea from the astoundingly insightful Bengalis, who still believe that cha holds the secret to a meaningful existence.
As an astoundingly insightful Bengali myself, I propose that if we pay a little more attention to cha we may manage to keep the Chinese at bay. Shhh... there's some trouble brewing over cha in China right now. It involves a tiny stroke at the base of the character in the Chinese script for cha, or tea. The government wants to get rid of that itsy-bitsy little stroke. The rest of China is staunchly against it. And here's our chance of paying back the Chinese.
What have they done, you ask? You mean apart from lining up missiles at the border pointing at us, occasionally bombing Buddhist monasteries in Arunachal, refusing to give people from Arunachal a visa (they believe Arunachalis, being Chinese, don't need a visa for China), giving separate visas for Kashmiris but not on their Indian passports, showing Arunachal Pradesh as their territory even in Google maps, periodically dropping in uninvited across the border for a little look-see, impishly painting rocks in our Northeast red, and refusing to admit that they are diverting the waters of the Yangtze (Brahmaputra to us) that could dry up Assam?
Well, right now they are complaining about the Dalai Lama's visit to Tawang, which hosts one of the most sacred Buddhist monasteries in the world. They are "firmly opposed", they say, to this visit, and "greatly concerned" by this elderly monk's trip to "so-called Arunachal Pradesh" (they call it "South Tibet"). Last week they were complaining about our own PM Manmohan Singh's visit to our own state of Arunachal Pradesh in similar words, registering "strong dissatisfaction". They do that every time the PM sets foot on the state. We respond by glumly reciting that "Arunachal Pradesh is an integral part of
India" and changing the subject.
We do not attempt to embrace the state or pay attention to their needs, we do not build roads or bridges in this remote land starved of infrastructure, or even educate ourselves about the region and its culture. In short, we do nothing to make Arunachal truly ours, other than holding on to a political notion and acting as an absentee landlord. It's a marvel that Arunachalis themselves still believe they are Indian. Possibly because the alternative is worse.
Meanwhile the Chinese government has also been active at home. It has proposed to make life simpler by modifying 44 characters (of the 3,500 most frequently used) in their script. Which has instantly unleashed furious opposition and made life more complicated. Chinese characters were part of their cultural heritage, snapped the Chinese and need to be cherished and protected. Unbelievably, the Chinese government backed off, at least temporarily. "If the people are opposed, we will not budge," they said this week. Never mind the meaning. The operative word here is "if".
Now here's a plan. One of the 44 characters proposed to be changed is cha. It's a minute change insignificant to the untrained eye, important I assume only to language purists and cha-aficionados. As a nation of tea drinkers, led by the cha-cherishing people of the east and northeast, we have a right to resist. We must claim that we are "greatly concerned" about this proposal and "firmly opposed" to it. We must raise a storm in a tea cup and register our "strong dissatisfaction" at such initiatives geared to upset Indo-China talks. Come on, let's be good neighbours. They visit us so often, let's at least drop in for tea.
Correction, October 26, 2009: The headline has been corrected
