Easy Chair Series

Trip to India by Walter Lindsay -Part 1

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 21-91

Genre:

Track:

Dictation Name: EC245

Year: 1986

This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 245, June the 15th, 1991.

This evening Otto Scott and I have with us Walter Lindsay, one of the leaders of the Friends of Chalcedon. Walter is also a top man in the field of computers. In fact, Douglas Murray speaks of him as one of the handful of top experts in the country. And Walter Lindsay returned recently from India and I will ask you, Walter, to tell us why you went there and with whom you spent your time.

[Lindsay] Thank you, Rush. I was in India for two weeks teaching some classes to one of the companies that my company does business with. So I gave seven days of classes, technical instruction to this company’s technical people about our software.

While I was there I had some chances to take three day trips as well as... and I managed to spend two days sick in bed. That was not in the plans, but the south Indian food is renowned for being extremely spicy and bore a hole through my stomach.

And I thank you for your kind words about my expertise, although I am not certain I quite agree with that.

Let me mention a mention a couple of... a couple of my experiences in India. I had a strange feeling as time went on in India that this was a different sort of thing than I had ever been through. I was in a culture that was completely uninfluenced by Christianity and by Christian thought. And I didn’t realize the implications at the time and it was only as I came back that I began to understand what that meant.

While I was there I... first of all, my first few days I thoroughly enjoyed because I was in a nice hotel and I was in an interesting place and I have seen pictures of this sort of hotel in movies, for example. And it was fascinating and quite exciting. But as I began to have to go out and to interact with people in the culture, it... my perceptions began to change quite a bit. And I realized that my perceptions didn’t change because the culture was necessarily different. I have had chances to interact with people from many different cultures and have had very good friends. And so I have experienced different cultures. And the food did not agree with me. I think I have lived through that before and, quite honestly, it was that I began to experience great feelings of being surrounded by uncleanness, as if I were in a place that... where there was pollution around me.

Some of the things that... that led to that sort of feeling are, for example, the sanitation practices have not been influenced by Christian culture. The Bible gives certain things about washing of hands. And there they have squatties which are fine, which are these open pits in the ground where people squat when they need to relieve themselves. But there is a little bucket with a pail next to it. And so that was a change that I wasn’t... it was very different and an obvious sign that the culture is different and that Christian ways of cleanliness had not influenced that culture at all.

Another way that took me a long time to really understand was an aloofness, an active sort of aloofness. I have been around people who just didn’t see me. I have lived in large cities. And when you are in a large city as you walk down the road you don’t see people. There are too many people. You just don’t run into them. But there in India I seemed to run into an active sort of ignoring of who I was.

I began to get the sensation that, yes, they seem to believe that life is sacred and there are certain things you don’t do to living organisms because inherently they are sacred. But I personally was less than worthless it seemed, that ... that unless I was paying somebody to do something in which case they did a lot for me or if they were a beggar and wanted my money then they paid attention to me, but the interaction seemed to be based a lot on ignoring one another in a very significant way. But that was fascinating.

[Scott] Did they seem hostile?

[Lindsay] They did not seem hostile, necessarily, but...

[Scott] If you walk down a street in New York you do not catch anyone’s eye.

[Rushdoony] Well, I think one of the problems is that religiously all life is equally sacred in India with the {?} who where a mask over their face lest they swallow a gnat. They go to the extreme in the sacredness of life. So if you cannot kill cows, you cannot kill monkeys, you cannot kill man eating tigers and so on, nor even a worm. What you are saying is that the life of a man and the life of a worm are of equal worth and are equally nothing.

So given a culture like that, I think there are problems.

Now, Albert Schweitzer propagated that idea in the west.

[Scott] Yes, he picked that up. But going back to this business of feeling as though you were invisible. Is that what you are saying? Or that there was a deliberate...

[Lindsay] Disdain?

[Scott] Well,

[multiple voices]

[Lindsay] Avoidance.

[Scott] Avoidance.

[Lindsay] Let me give an example. I was standing in line in order to turn my camera in before touring a particular king’s palace at place called {?}. And while I was standing there, I was holding out the camera and you are supposed to attach a one rupee note to the camera. And the attendant would come each time and he would look at my camera and then studiously ignore it. He would not come anywhere, not acknowledge my existence. And I a man came up and pushed beside me and he knew I was there. He looked at me before he came up, but he came and kind of pushed beside me and so I pushed my chest a little bit into his back and he grunted and moved back. And the {?} seem to be a little different and I recognized it as a westerner and an outsider. I mean, you are reading things into it. But the emotions that I experienced were very much that a kind of ignoring one another as an active way of life.

[Rushdoony] Well that in personality was commented on by people who went to work with Schweitzer. Since all life was equally sacred, you as a coworker are no more personal to him than the worms he would pick up after a rain storm and take off the walk so they would not be squashed. That impersonality because it is life, not persons that count.

[Lindsay] That is how it felt.

[Scott] That is interesting.

What was your experience with the people you had to teach? How did they respond?

[Lindsay] I was introduced as an expert.

[Scott]

[affirmative response]

[Lindsay]

And so that helped them respond positively.

[Scott] Sure.

[Lindsay] One fascinating little incident that ... one woman came in on the second day of classes for... she slipped in right after the morning break and she asked a question. And this particular woman, well, the person who was next to her silenced her and then she disappeared after the next break. That was fascinating.

They treated me with... with a significant amount of deference, but they also needed me.

[Scott] Well, Naipaul in his book India: A Wounded Civilization points out the contradiction. They use computers. They use jet engines. They use radio. They use film. They have videos and they have movies and so forth. And yet they despise the civilization that has produced all these wonders and they despise the people who run that civilization, in other words, the West.

They want to use the fruits of the West without acknowledging the existence of the West and they do not seem to believe that all of these instruments or the arduously developed, so to speak, as a result of work and application. They seem to accept them as gifts from the gods to all mankind. It is a version, almost of the cargo cult, of the primitives in the South Seas. The third world—and I consider India a third world country—is a giant area where they believe in the cargo cult. We are the ones who come over in the airplanes and drop these goodies on them. But they don't want to get any closer.

[Rushdoony] Gustav Stoper in The Age of Fable in the 30s called attention to the fact that India, a place of nothing but bloodshed and conflict between groups was made into an area of peace and famines gradually eliminated by the British. And yet at the height of the empire they had only 5000 Englishmen running India. They rest they were using the local Hindu and Muslim leaders to do everything. How do they regard the British? You watch television, no doubt.

[Lindsay] I would characterize it as a mixed respect, but they weren’t very happy that the British had been there.

[Scott] I was a humiliating memory.

[Lindsay] That is a good way to put it. They were... they were proud that they had resisted the British religion.

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Lindsay] That Hinduism had survived. There was one political candidate that I remember reading in the paper who was stating that Hindu... Hinduism was here to stay because if centuries of British rule couldn’t remove it, then... {?}

I did notice that on the television on the Hindi movies that were playing that I would glance at, that they had a Muslim sultan who was shown as a very heroic figure and then a cramped crabby British general and, of course, the Muslim sultan beat the British general and the British general fled rather ignobly.

[Scott] Yes, well, the Indians beat us, you know. That is very amusing.

And Naipaul’s idea was that they at one time had a civilization which, difficult as it was, as Rush indicates, nevertheless, as far as they were concerned, answered the major problems of life. The caste system solved the problem of occupation, who does what and who rules and who does not and so forth. Then they came into contact with the West which was unable to swing them over to the West and they are in a sort of crippled condition as far as their own culture is concerned and they have not joined the new. So then he got the idea a wounded civilization. He was so criticized for that book that he has later recanted a good deal of it. But I think he was right on target the first time around.

[Lindsay] I noticed there that the people would often talk about that… how it was difficult to get certain goods there, that technology goods in general could not be imported unless they were produced in India. People had to ride very low powered motor scooters until the last few years. When an Indian company began working with Suzuki to build higher powered two wheeled cycles and that is what most of the people tend to ride there.

[Scott] They have a... they have a high tariff wall.

[Lindsay] Extremely high.

[Scott] You know that the chemical company that at Bhopal, was it, that had the accident...

[Rushdoony] Yes. Union Carbide.

[Scott] {?} Union Carbide’s plant where several hundred more were knocked out or killed, not a single European was allowed inside that plant at any time. Nobody from the company was allowed inside the plant even though cyanide or whatever it was had owned the company, owned the plant. They couldn’t go into it. It was all handled by people of India. And yet when they had a disaster it was the West that had to pay the fine.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And they sued in an American court. And we were insane enough to hear it.

[Scott] Well, an American court is insane enough to do anything.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] If they really operated sort of a charity. This is a great international charity we operate. It is not a sovereign nation. We live to help the world.

[Rushdoony] When Mark was there a decade ago, when Mark Rushdoony, my son, he found that in construction work elderly women were breaking rocks with a hammer for the concrete mixer which was a hand mixer and women were carrying concrete in pans on their head up a scaffolding several stories high. It was as primitive as could be in terms of Gandhi’s insistence that small is beautiful. Is that still true?

[Lindsay] Outside my hotel room there was a construction project and, as you said, the way dirt was moved was that very half starved men and women would have things wrapped around their heads and then they would have some sort of flat plate like thing, about two and a half feet wide and there would be some dirt put in it and that is how dirt was moved. I couldn’t noticed that very much dirt was moved in the two weeks that I was there.

[Scott] Well, they weren’t using their heads well.

[Lindsay] The scaffolding that they used was a very slowly built out of various pieces of timber that was tied together with ropes, very slowly the scaffolding came up. So I didn’t have chances to observe large construction projects, but what happened right outside my room was extremely primitive.

[Scott] That is interesting. You brought back some newspapers.

[Lindsay] Yes, I did.

[Scott] English language newspapers from India.

[Lindsay] There are enough languages from the different areas in India that if people want to do business or if they want to be read that they tend to be published in English.

One particularly interesting section that I would like to read it in sunlight here comes off of a little bit of what you mentioned earlier, Otto. It has to do with a particular man {?} who is president of some organization which is part of a water district, had political pretensions and here he is giving a speech and this is a brief description of it.

I need to mention that the region that I was in in the town of Bangalore is called {?} that is the county or the country of {?}. And this speech was given in the neighboring region of Tanil Nadu. And it was ... and that region that Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated.

[Scott] So it is in the south.

[Lindsay] Yes, it is definitely in the south.

[Scott] is it tropical?

[Lindsay] It had 122 degrees one day in Madras while I was there, but I was fortunate to be in Bangalore which is about several thousand feet above sea level and never quite broke 100.

[Scott] Ah, luck you, 122.

[Lindsay] You can imagine with heat like that there are certain water problems. And that is what this particular little section is about. Let me read it to you.

“{?} also an agriculturalist wants the judgment of the tribunal to be a precedent in future regarding water disputes all over India.”

There was a particular water dispute going on between {?} and {?}.

“Abruptly he turned aggressive and said, ‘{?} people are not doing agriculture properly. Our people in my store {?}, (forgive the pronunciation) {?} and {?} areas follow correct practices and take out three crops there. The {?} people who live in {?} correct their ways, they, too, can cultivate three crops.’”

Then the tone softened.

“‘{?} must give water to {?} on humanitarian grounds,’ he pleaded. Party workers slowly filtered in for a meeting. Within minutes {?} adrenaline shot up again. The voice rose as he said, ‘Water is not wasted here. You know how they are... you know how they waste it in {?}, but {?} use more... use water more efficiently they can raise three crops. They have sufficient water.’

“Party workers in the room nod in appreciation with {?} views. Any suggestion that the issue has assumed emotional overtones is likely to fall on deaf ears in the {?}.”

And then they mention a particular party man explained that intense emotional attachment is ... to important issues is a part of the {?} political idiom. In other words, public men in {?} tend to see emotionalism not as the opposite of rationalism, but as normal and realistic political behavior. Thus, the {?} politician freely uses the {?} water issue. It is the {?} River water that is in dispute. He uses this issue to play the gallery and to create an enemy in the minds of the masses. Ironically, though there is very little water in the imposing mature dam built in 1930 it was the most empty reservoir I have ever seen. The problem is not severe in the region around {?}. Water is easily available from bore wells and wells. Three crops are cultivated in the lush paddy fields that dot the road side and several things out of that were particularly interesting. One is very much people blaming other people and using emotionalism to play people rather than facts, emotionalism. This is an Indian newspaper, by the way that this was published in.

[Scott] Well, we are ... we have moved well into that same area. There is now a campaign on to the effect that too many people are making too much money and that they should be taxed more heavily than they are being taxed so that those who aren’t making enough money could {?}. And there is a lot of emotionalism in that issue. Share the wealth. Soak the rich and there is nothing more divisive conceivable than to rally the mob against the successful.

It is obviously almost an act of hatred against the society to inspire people in that direction. But that is what we are getting and It think, although I might be committing heresy to say it, I think that is part and parcel of the democratic process.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is what both de Tocqueville, more than a century and a half ago and {?} today are saying.

[Scott] It is to set people against one another for your own advantage.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In a stable society which is based on harmony, if there are too many poor you would expect some proposals to create more wealth, to make better use of the land, to provide more employment and so forth. But the idea of taxing one class of citizens more than another is inherently injurious besides being unequal. So the India which is already in bad condition is adding to its own problems by being pushed into what they call the democratic system. And I shouldn’t say this, I guess, but I think they did better under the maharajas and their own leaders and their own culture.

[Rushdoony] Yes and 30 years ago the two countries regarded as most likely to collapse before the end of the century and to famine and anarchy were India and Egypt because of the very great poverty in both places. And India today is showing signs, especially since the recent assassination of falling apart.

[Scott] Yes. The ... what they had before the English came was a series of countries. India was not a one country. It is a great subcontinent with a number of small countries in it, each... and occasionally they had wars with each other, but at no time did they all have wars with each other. So the wars, like wars in Europe, in Europe was a continent with a bunch of small countries. And they had wars from time to time, but not all the time.

Now the idea of a unified, centralized India really doesn’t make to much sense when you think of the differences of the culture, nor does a unified, centralized Europe, because whoever is going to pout the Irish together with the Turks is going to have to be a miracle worker.

So the whole idea of political unity overriding cultural differences, I think, is beginning to be exploded in front of our eyes.

[Rushdoony] The culture of the leaders of India is the culture of Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge. And it has no relationship to the realities of every day life in India.

[Scott] It would be as though all three of us went to school in China and came back to apply the Chinese system.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Lindsay] There seem to be some signs that ... that that is breaking apart. I am told that the people who over... who are 50 years or older who lived through much of Mahatma Gandhi’s day tend to be firm followers of a party known as the Congress Party which has been ruled by the Gandhi family.

[Scott] Right.

[Lindsay] I have also been told that those who are under the age of 40 tend to be of late firm supporters of the BJP which outsiders have characterized as the fundamentalist Hindu party. And the young people tend to say things, I am told, along the lines of, “Well, we know that the BJP candidates are making inflammatory statements, but they really don’t mean it and if they are in power they really won’t do the things that they are saying.”

[Scott] That is what they said about Hitler.

[Lindsay] That is exactly what I thought as I heard that.

So there seems to be very much a sense that... a reaction against the secularization, as it is often called in India that the Congress Party tried to promote and very much a turn to some of the candidates have said that India will never be freed until it gets back to Hindu roots.

[Scott] Well, they have, I think, nine or 10 million Muslims. That is a lot of Muslims even though it is an enormous country. It is still a lot of people.

[Rushdoony] They have a few million Christians whom they are trying to eliminate and missionaries are no longer allowed there.

[Scott] No longer allowed.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] In the name of tolerance.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Lindsay] There are... have been statements made in the political arena that Muslims aren’t real Indians.

[Scott] Muslims are not real Indians.

[Lindsay] Yes. That is what the paper reported several things... several people has having said.

[Scott] There are other sects also besides the Hindus. But, of course, Hinduism is broken into a number of different groups.

[Rushdoony] Yes. You have the Parsees with...

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] ... who are Zoroastrians. You have the {?} who are extreme Hindus. You have some Buddhists, not many. You have the Animists among the hill people especially in Bangladesh. So you have a variety of peoples and faiths. It has a great many different racial strains as well.

[Scott] You see that in the different complexions.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And it has jungles.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And it has great cities. It has people sleeping on the streets in Bombay. Somebody wrote a book. I think they called it The Heavenly City and they tried to promote the idea that those people were happy.

[Lindsay] And they also have what you talked about, about the small states that war with each other in the Cashmere, Indian troops and Pakistani troops regularly fight.

[Scott] And the Sikhs.

[Lindsay] Exactly. And the {?} or the Punjab. I don’t remember which. So I was reading in the paper... I read. I noticed that it seemed on the average about one person assassinated a day in either {?} or Punjab.

[Rushdoony] Oh, my.

[Lindsay] And it was usually... I am sorry. One person assassinated ever two days. Forgive me. And these people usually were candidates who were running for office or people who had previously held office. And so this violence that you are talking about is being carried on by other means.

I also noticed hat this sort of haggling between different states is occurring in other ways on the political front, that one particular party will do things that will damage another particular party’s chances and it is extremely over and it would be almost impossible to miss it.

In {?} they talked a lot about the law and order situation. But that wasn’t the only place with unrest. And in {?} the government is controlled by a different party than the government is, as they call it, at the center, as they call it. And so they were considering postponing the elections and doing things like that which was very illegal, apparently, by Indian law from what I could pick up. And the {?} government wanted to deploy 50,000 home guards. Must be like our national guards in the states. They wouldn’t let them do that. But in Punjab, or I forget which other state. I believe it was Punjab, they let them deploy about 40,000 home guards to run the election. So there is brazen duplicity and people doing political haggling and the most obvious of ways that are going on.

But even though they aren’t actually shooting at each other, they are doing as much as they can. And with Rajiv Gandhi’s recent assassination it is apparently extremely unindian. Some of the Indian people that I work with are. And they were actually quite shaken up because somebody going on a suicide mission maybe in the Middle East, but in India? They were really concerned about their home lands and what was happening in it.

[Scott] I wonder if the subdivisions, the governmental subdivisions what are they called, provinces?

[Lindsay] Countries.

[Scott] Countries. I wonder if the borders of these countries are ... remain what they were originally or whether the English redrew the borders, because, you know, in Africa where the westerners redrew the tribal borders, they put antagonistic tribes together.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And I just wonder if the divisions in India are each one homogenous or whether they are mixed.

[Lindsay] From what I could pick up {?}, the nation or the country language of {?} was primarily... I am sorry. I was in the state or the country of {?} and the language spoken primarily in that region is {?} and so they are... from what I could tell there seems to be a single linguistic commonness in the area and from old maps that I could see the current boundaries of {?} are roughly what the King of {?} and of previous centuries would rule over. So that seems that they did maintain some of that.

[Rushdoony] Well, divide and conquer is an old premise. And, of course, in the Baltic republics the Soviet Union has moved in all kinds of peoples in order to drown out the majority of Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians. And some of that has taken place, I understand, throughout Asia. The one country that has resisted any kind of mixing is, of course, Japan. But there have been great movements of peoples in India and the complexion of the various regions has been affected.

[Scott] Well, we know that they either cut off or drove out many of the Muslims...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...and that was the... that was at the Muslim request. Pakistan and you know how ugly it was insisted that the Muslim minority would not live with a Hindu majority, but he didn’t get them all. And the Sikhs want to break away.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because they don’t want to be under the Hindus.

And the Srilankans are engaged in an effort at Independence. So there is a ... it sounds as though they are going back to the original countries and religions. Now, as you know, in the old days in Europe as well as in other parts of the world the was one language, one church, one religion, one country, one religion. And the argument is in the Bible that a country with two religions doesn’t hold together.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That modern ... the modern world has assumed that that is not true. We have disproven it. But how... how... how old is the modern world? The modern world isn’t... really isn’t historically speaking very old.

[Rushdoony] And it is already near death.

[Scott] Well, it is in a state of... it is in a suicidal frenzy.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

Well, India, like so many of the post war countries is an artificial creation and like the African countries I don’t see how it can endure...

[Scott] As a... as a unified state.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, you know that this is a little bit off the track. Some friends of mine in the oil business tried to do business with the Iranians, the Persians and it proved to be impossible, because they could not accept the idea that both parties could benefit from the negotiation.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] As soon as... as soon as an agreement was reached they decided that the other guy was getting too much. Otherwise he wouldn’t have agreed. So they used the agreement as a basis for new haggling. And Capitalism does not fit the Persian temperament. The Persians want it all. They give you nothing. And I have the feeling I...I don’t know. Of course, there are so many different people in India I have only met a few specimens who have always—I think I have said this before—they have always given me lectures on discrimination in the West, which, I think, takes an awful lot of chutzpah. But they didn’t strike me, any of them as being too well integrated into our system of courtesy.

I mean, it wouldn’t occur to me to go to India to give the Indians lectures, but every one that I have met has given me a lecture on the West. And I would assume from that cultural difference that Capitalism would be difficult to plant. Commerce, I could see, but not Capitalism.

[Lindsay] There are some state restrictions on Capitalism that I was able to discover in talking with the waiters. For example, there is a particular kind of mango called the {?} mango which has no fibers in it, essentially. And so they serve them in restaurants and with {?} cut up and they are wonderful flavors. But they don’t grow in {?}. I am sorry, in {?} in the country where I was. So they have to import them. But importing them means that you have to pay high tariffs in order to cross state boundaries. But the government understands that hotels manage to get lots of money from tourists and so there are special deals so that hotels can move things around without these tariffs. So from what I could gather that there are some significant impediments that way that the various states already...

[Scott] Put up tariffs against each one another....

[multiple voices]

[Lindsay] ...against each other.

[Scott] Like a tariff between our states which we theoretically don’t have, but every truck driver or truck operator will tell you we do.

[Rushdoony] Well, I think one of the problems of our times is that we look at the past as primitive and we don’t appreciate what is involved in its thinking. And outside the biblical world and the Christian world you have had polytheism.

[Scott] Yeah.

[Rushdoony] Now Polytheism is a belief that there are many forces in nature and you try to align yourself with those natural forces that will be advantageous to you. But the assumption is there is continual conflict in evolution or in nature, whatever your perspective is. Darwin’s idea of the survival of the fittest is an ancient pagan concept.

[Scott] Sure.

[Rushdoony] So that it is inescapable for these people anywhere in the world outside of Christendom to see nothing but conflict as basic to life and to have a total distrust because nothing can work out to the advantage of all concerned.

Well, the biblical doctrine of the harmony of interests has militated against that and we are losing that in the West. So there is a problem in a culture like India, beaus they have had a super imposed harmony by British rule and now all the old polytheistic conflicts are coming to the forefront.

[Scott] Well, that is very well said. You know that the ... there are some observers who believe that the Europeans lost essential control of the blacks of black Africa because of World War I. The fact that Europe got into war that the white man, the Christian white people went to war with each other convinced the black Africans in black Africa that we are hypocrites. We don’t believe our own religion. And therefore they lost respect for us.

[Rushdoony] Also the French brought in African troops and used them.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And it was the African troops going back...

[Scott] ... who carried the {?} who carried the message.

[Rushdoony] ...who carried the message.

[Scott] Well, they sent us troops into German occupation territory. That was...

[Rushdoony] It was a terrible thing.

[Scott] It was done to punish the Germans.

Well, did you have a chance to socialize with any Indians while you were there? You went out to dinner a few times and did you chat about various things that were apart from the work?

[Lindsay] Yes, we did. Some of the topics that ... as we... they took me out to dinner to a Chinese restaurant every day for lunch. I couldn’t take the Indian food and I had let them know ahead of time that...

[Scott] Well, it put you down once, didn’t it?

[Lindsay] It definitely put me down. But luckily Indian doctors make house calls to luxury hotels. So that helped.

Yes, at the Chinese restaurant we had quite a few discussions. Some of the topics that they were particularly interested in were the Persian Gulf Crisis. Impact my life.

[Scott] Did it impact you? Yes.

[Lindsay] No. Personally, it... it really had almost no impact on it. Well, they were really very curious about this and I... I couldn’t understand the expressions on their faces as I talked about how it had almost no impact personally on my life. From what I am able to tell, apparently India used to buy Iraqi oil from the Soviet Union by paying in rupees. They can’t do that at the moment. You have to pay in hard currency. And so that is causing a lot of problems with trade imbalances at the moment. That was one thing they were very interested in.

[Scott] Did they have dollars?

[Lindsay] No. Apparently they aren’t allowed to have any foreign currency.

[Scott] Ah.

[Lindsay] And in the newspaper, in fact, somebody was arrested for having some.

[Scott] Really? On his possession.

[Lindsay] I believe so.

[Scott] Now that is... that is something different, isn’t it?

[Rushdoony] Yes. And were you required to exchange dollars for rupees at the set price?

[Lindsay] Yes, at the government set price and if I did not have an exchange certificate I couldn’t spend the rupees. And at the hotel I was required to pay in dollars.

[Scott] How could you do that?

[Lindsay] Traveler’s checks and plastic money.

[Scott] I see.

[Lindsay] So I had to carry that in... in...

[Scott] So there are dollars. So there are dollars in circulation.

[Lindsay] No.

[multiple voices]

[Scott] ... Thy give you change back in rupees.

[Lindsay] Yes.

[Scott] But they... they have your dollars.

[Lindsay] Yes. Interesting.

But I could exchange my rupees on the way out for the... for the same rate that I ... that I got them in the beginning without any sort of charge. So there as a little kindness that way.

Another thing that people ask me about was racial prejudice.

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Lindsay] {?}

[Scott] That is their favorite topic.

[Lindsay] And that very night after having an interesting discussion about this and I talked about some of the situation here, I found in a newspaper called The Hindu an article titled “A Separate Electorate for the Scheduled Class.” In other words, that if political affirmative action needed to be taken for the ... I forget the word. The untouchables.

[Scott] Yes.

[Lindsay] And that, in fact, the article blames political bungling for them... for the affirmative action not having worked out very well in the past and ... and had a lot of discussion about that.

When I brought this article in the guy who asked me about the racial problems in the States didn’t particularly want to talk about this thing.

[Scott] Oh, he didn’t?

[Lindsay] No, he didn’t. It was interesting. He looked at the article and didn’t say too much and kind of went on to other topics and didn’t look very comfortable.

[Scott] They called them the scheduled caste.

[Lindsay] That is what the paper says. Scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. I am not sure what it means.

[Rushdoony] Was their attitude generally unfavorable to the United States?

[Lindsay] They knew that every American is rich. That was common knowledge and even so to the point that telling somebody that something cost several times its regular value was quite reasonable because they are so rich and it is, you know, you should ask for more money.

So that they kind of liked about the Americans. Americans are very rich.

There was resentment, a bit, against the U S government among various political officials, snide comments about things about the that the CIA was doing and when US troops brought in relief supplies into Bangladesh some government officials voiced displeasure over that beaus they were just certain that the troops wouldn’t leave, they said.’

[Scott] They would stay and occupy that wonderful place.

[Lindsay] Exactly.

[Scott] How... what did they ... what... what was their position on the Gulf War?

[Lindsay] I didn’t run across much of that. But I didn’t...

[Scott] They didn’t tell you.

[multiple voices]

[Scott] They just asked you yours.

[Lindsay] That is right.

[Scott] They didn’t tell you theirs.

[Lindsay] That is right.

And they asked me enough questions that I never had a chance to ask them about their thoughts.

[Scott] I see. I see. They were working the pump.

[Lindsay] They were definitely working the pump on that.

You also mentioned a moment ago about this constant negotiation that there is no {?}

[Scott] Oh, yes, yes.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Lindsay] The area where I saw that extremely clearly was driving around. In India I rented a car and along with the car came a driver.

[Scott] Did they drive on the right hand side or the left?

[Lindsay] Well, they drove on the wrong side.

[Scott] Ok, on the left.

[Lindsay] The left.

[Rushdoony] On every side someone told me once.

[Lindsay] It was definitely every side.

[Scott] You have to have a driver.

[Lindsay] Yes. I am glad I didn’t think of trying to drive myself.

[Scott] Right.

[Lindsay] Have you ever been in a crowd where there is extreme pushing and bustling?

[Scott] I understand that is a Middle Eastern custom.

[Lindsay] Oh, it was extreme on the roads.

[Scott] On the roads.

[Lindsay] Oh...

[Scott] ...but not on the sidewalks.

[Lindsay] I was never in an extremely thick crowd. But on the roads the traffic speeds were low enough that there were the kind of maneuverings and shovings into ever nook and cranny that I have only seen in extremely busy crowds of people.

The speeds were slow enough and the vehicles small enough and there were enough scooters that they could wedge into every nook and cranny that was there.

[Scott] They have traffic lights?

[Lindsay] They had a few. And people generally seemed to obey them and if a policeman held up his hand people would stop. So they did obey the state in that way. And every driver of a two wheeled vehicle, all motorized two wheel vehicles always wore a helmet. The riders didn’t. The drivers did. But apparently there was a law about that, that people would get arrested for not doing that. But there is the... the city streets were fairly tame compared to the country streets.

Let me toss out a scenario that too many times in the three little road trips that I had were repeated. Imagine I am sitting on the backseat and there is an ox cart in front of us. So my driver maneuvers to the right in order to pass the ox cart. Well, 100 yards down the road or so approaching us on the right hand side is a brick truck. And zipping around him comes a bus or some other truck. And somehow the drivers manage to arrange it just right so that everybody accelerates or slows down just enough so that all four vehicles approach each other at the last second, within a hair breadth. They manage to shift in their lanes and manage to miss each other.

And it is entirely possible that bicyclist could have been driven off the road to be driving in the dust because he is fair game and you can push him off the road. And the thought that kept going through my mind was that if either any of the four engines involved choked for a moment or if any of the drivers wasn’t a professional, I would have been crunched. And, indeed, as we did drive around I did see two ... two heavy trucks and a bus wedged into some sort of tight squished formation where they managed to all collide. Incredible pushing. Just as you described. No harmony of interest. I can’t really remember seeing people give way to other people. Just basically pushed.

[Scott] I have forgotten who, one of my seamen friends told me that he was in a Middle Eastern city. And I don’t recall now which one. It might have been Baghdad. I am not sure. But he said people walked around pushing each other with their hands. And he said he had never been so touched so often and jostled so often in his life.

[Rushdoony] Especially as he was obviously a westerner.

[Scott] Sure.

And, of course, when I was a boy in New York everyone walked along the right hand side of the sidewalk to keep from having to lurch with one another. Lurching is a phrase of H. Allen Smith’s, you know, where you move to the right, the other guy moves to the right. You move to the left, he moves to the left and you do this two or three times. He said he did it deliberately and his record was 23 lurches until somebody else and the other guy finally fell to his knees.

[Rushdoony] There is no one like H. Allen Smith anymore.

I used to enjoy his writings.

[Scott] Well apparently in India they just push. A lot of... you say the ignored.

[Lindsay] Yes, they did.

[Scott] You were {?} side vision.

[Lindsay] Most of the vehicles, larger vehicles on the back have words painted, sound horn.

[Scott] Sound horn.

[Lindsay] So you honk your horn to let somebody know you are going to do something nasty to them.

[Scott] I see, try to pass.

[Lindsay] If you are going to run them off the road, you sound your horn. And the pedestrians, my driver would sound his horn and the pedestrians would be standing there casually and they wouldn’t necessarily even look. They just sort of moved a foot or two aside just enough to let my car pass a very close distance to them. And so that was fascinating to me. You just ignored the other car and you gave way just enough to let them pass and at the last moment.

And if you were a vehicle you just kind of... as long as you don’t hit the person you don’t give them any sort of distance that way. It was fascinating and being not used to going on the left hand side of the street my intuition was all wrong. So I would tend to walk out in the street. People would honk...

[multiple voices]

[Scott] Yeah, sure. You have to be very careful.

[Lindsay] And finally by the end I was disoriented enough and knew I was disoriented so I looked both ways twice before I took a step. That {?}

But I did see drives pass just a few inches from me several times.

[Scott] You mentioned something earlier today about the temples. You didn’t find them as impressive as you expected?

[Lindsay] In fact, more repulsive to be honest.

[Scott] Were they ... were they dirty on the outside?

[Lindsay] Yes. Yes, they were...

[Scott] {?}

[Lindsay] Quite dirty and they were covered so thickly with figures of the gods that it was just a mass of... of these figures. Let me describe very quickly what one looked like.

[Scott] Yeah.

[Lindsay] Each of them from what... each of the ones that I saw had a wall around it. And at one point in the wall or sometimes two points in the wall there would be a gate and over the gate was a vertical walls, some sort of large box like structure and then on top of that starting at about 10 feet up or so was a pyramidal structure that was steeper than most roofs that you will find anywhere. And then up at the top it was flattened. And there was a whole pantheon of various gods and various poses up there on the walls of the ... up on the walls of the little pyramid on top.

You had to take off your shoes in order to go into the temple and often times there was a mass of people surrounding the front of the temple. And they were often beggars out there begging for alms. In fact, every temple I saw had some people begging for alms at the gate. There were hawkers as well trying to sell me useless things for exorbitant prices telling me how wonderful they were. And many of them there were people outside with postcards of the various things inside. And I never actually went in one. I found as I approached the gate that was extremely disinterested in taking off my shoes and going in this place.

I was also fascinated by apparently the public piety that various people have in order to give this to the temple and how much tax money at various points had been spent on the temple that there was one temple {?} palace at a place called {?} where the doors of the temple, I found out later, were six inches thick, about... I remember them being about 10 feet high and two and a half feet wide each and apparently they are solid silver. It is an astonishing amount of wealth taken away from the people for the public piety.

[Scott] Oh, I didn’t realize that the people were taxed for the temples. There is a state religion in a different... each... each state has its own state religion. Is that the case?

[Lindsay] I do notice... I did notice that the things that people did varied from territory.... varied from area to area and that different cities have their own individual gods as well. So I don’t know if there is really a state religion, fully.

[Scott] I see, or whether there was a state religion in each of the states.

[Lindsay] I can’t say that.

[Scott] Yeah.

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is about up. Thank you all... is there a final statement you would like to make in about a minute?

[Lindsay] I am grateful to be a Christian and I am grateful to have grown up in the West and as I look around at India I am astonished to see how the various judgments that are mentioned in the Bible are all coming about, climactic things, political things, various things on the drought that I didn’t mention that are quite, quite significant. And it is falling apart and breaking apart. I am grateful to live in a society that still has some remnants of Christian culture.

[Rushdoony] Well, thank you, Walter, and thank you all for listening.