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The greatest show on Earth?
If Oprah said India is her greatest life experience, it must be true. It always is, no matter how many times you leave or how frequently you return.
Her trip must have been quite different from mine, because I didn’t receive standing ovations or get interviewed by every Indian news publication every day. But she stayed for a mere fifteen days, and I was here for close to five months, so that should count for something.
Besides, the Big O herself said that you can’t see India in two weeks, because it’s the greatest show on Earth. I’m not sure if I would use that exact phrase for a motley crowd of a billion people just living their lives. But then, it was Oprah who was invited to speak at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2012 and not me, so the case rests there.
I agree with her when she said that her first impression of India was one of chaos, which she then noticed had an underlying calm or flow. But she added that there seemed to be a “method to the madness” in India.
Again, I wonder how we define madness, even if it is used loosely as in this context. It must be, as she described, the men riding donkeys and women in saris wearing helmets. Or cars running red lights and oxen drawing carts laden with steel. Or, some may think, a financial crisis that left half its population jobless or on the brink of it.
I grew up in an India that was an increasingly popular destination for Hollywood celebrities, and spent a few years as a journalist who saw closely the Indian obsession with them. Every publication went dizzy reporting and repeating their quotes and impressions of India, its people, its values. They either glorified it or criticized it, like a book open for review even by those that are barely literate.
I thought a talk show host like Oprah would be different, but hardly. But there must be something about the world’s largest democracy that allows so many viewpoints, and many more opinions.
Kinjal Dagli-Shah is a long-time Oprah fan but also a discerning journalist and world citizen, or so she likes to think. Write to her at kinjal.dagli@gmail.com.
