Indians and Italians

Of all places, Italy reminds me most of India. Both countries have an ancient history and are rife with monuments of glorious past. Both are fallen low by comparison with that past. Both have corrupt and inefficient governments who can’t perform the simplest tasks: organizing garbage disposal is equally beyond the means of each. Both have inefficient, complex legal systems through which cases wind for years and where most expire without issue. Both have economies tied up in red tape whose only functioning bits operate underground. Both are unsafe; in both the roman rule obtains, that homo homini lupus; in both there is a deficit of social trust.

The national character of the two seems to be similar as well: both Indians and Italians think themselves very important, lack sense of humor, love to talk and do not bother to read, with the consequence that they hold long perorations in which deliciously idiotic theories swim in the sauce of disarming ignorance. Both nations know next to nothing about the outside world.

Both nations also excel in aesthetic genius. Not by accident do Italians and Indians make some of the world’s most beautiful jewelry and clothes. Consider the debate which raged for years about Teatro Can Carlo in Naples, due for restoration. Should the restoration merely refresh the current, Sabaudian color scheme, dating to the period of reunification under the house of Savoy, dark red and gold? Or should it revert to the original design, the Bourbon silver and blue? After much debate, the Bourbons won. And when the theater is reopened, it will be clear, as it always is to all and sundry, that there is one thing Italians simply cannot do badly: beauty.