Sachin Tendulkar is idolised at home and abroad

DID YOU KNOW Every cricketer who plays for India receives a cap with a number on it, indicating his place in the list of Test players. Parthiv Patel is No. 244.

It's only a game, but without it life in India would hardly be the same. They all end up human, fallible, but at their best, they have always seemed like gods-been gods. They don't even know you, but they figure in some of your happiest memories. Tiger, Bish, Sunny, Kaps, Kiri, Azzu, Sachin, Bhajji ... intimates who feature in class-room debates and tea-stall arguments, materialise at your dining table, on the street, in your head. They come attached to a string of letters and numbers-1983. SMG. 101,22. GRV. SRT. 10-74. 281. VVS-a secret code only Indians know and use to unlock the safe to their hearts.

Mohinder Amarnath and Kapil Dev with the 1983 World Cup

India is not the best cricketing country in the world. Nor, from a stumbling start in 1932, has it ever been. But cricket and cricketers move us to degrees that defy sanity and reason. When the men in white win, they seem to redeem all of India. When they lose-damn their underachieving, money-grubbing souls-life seems more wretched, bosses more obtuse, the neighbourhood dirtier ... Only a nation of such extremes could have produced cricketers so singular in their capacity for magic, mystery and mood swings.

THE JOINT FAMILY
Unit of Strength

The Chowdhury family of Kolkata

It stays together, eats together, celebrates together, prays together, works together, even dodges taxes together with the help of friendly regulations for the "undivided family". The extended Indian family is generally melodramatic-from the Ramayan to Hum Aapke Hain Koun?-sometimes quarrelsome, and occasionally stifling.

Yet it is the basic unit of Indian society, the perennial social support system in a country where public institutions are notoriously unreliable and the population simply too vast for a social security structure of unemployment and old-age benefits, as adopted by First World nations in Europe and North America.

What is even more remarkable is that in this age of dinks (double income, no kids), of staying single, of the glories of individualism, the joint family persists. All trends point to the family-complex and joint or plain disjointed-being a bit of a dinosaur.

But unmindful of what the rest of the world says or does, unworried, unhurried, it lumbers on, taking you with it, sometimes in spite of you. Indian cinema and soaps would be totally bereft of plots if they didn't extol family ties, the incredible plot twists that stretch a family, but never quite break it beyond repair.

Business, politics, sport, small town, big city: the joint family touches all of India. And by extension of family values, espouses a Confucian respect for elders, effecting hierarchies of protocol, fiercely protecting the family gathering-birthday, wedding and death-in an eternal cycle of belonging and sharing that is almost epic in scope.

For many, the family is the most secure group imaginable, especially in this time of the divorce, of the quicksilver marriage, the time of careers that look to be reaching for the stratosphere one day, and rudely crashing the next.

In the West, that road often leads to grave despair and anxiety. In India, largely bereft of self-help groups except for a handful in metros, in times of despair and anxiety the road usually leads to the family.

For some, poverty triggers security in numbers. For others, being born into the right family is simply the best career move they ever made. Either way, you seldom lose.

INDIAN RAILWAYS
Wheels of a Nation

The largest railway in the world is also the largest employer in the country DID YOU KNOW Indian Railways has a network of 1,00,000 km, 7,000 stations, it runs 11,000 trains daily, and ferries one million passengers a day.

If anyone looked at the Indian Railways in terms of pure statistics, it would appear that it exists solely to dazzle trivia buffs: tracks of 1,00,000 km, 7,000 stations, 300 railway yards, 11,000 freight and passenger trains a day, over a million passengers a day, longest tunnel in the world, the highest station in the world, the largest railway in the world. There is absolutely no doubt about what transports India: resilience and the railways.

And like an integral organ of a body, it chugs away despite abuse by India's demanding public, and the occasional tragic outbreak of disease-accidents caused by a weakened bridge, human error of signalmen who work shifts often aided by primitive equipment for a pittance of a salary.

But despite these blips, every year the railways carry more people and freight for fares that count among the cheapest in the world from North to South (the Himsagar Express runs 3,726 km between Jammu Tawi and Kanyakumari) and East to West on three different gauges-another record for a railway of this size. Now, this gargantuan institution, the nation's largest employer with 1.65 million on its rolls, is trying to move into the fast track with better training, higher safety standards, better technology, more innovation and better service.

And when that happens, this fabric of the nation, this unparalleled engine that facilitates unity in diversity moving men and materiel round the clock, 24/7 without complaint, would have moved up that necessary, welcome notch.

CRICKET'S NURSERY
Shivaji Park

It's not even a park. It's a patch of brown, flat land about 1 sq km in area, consumed by cricket. Home to eight cricket clubs, 30 playing strips, at least 60 daily nets (coaches train children as young as five on half a stretch of pitch) and thousands of aspirations, Shivaji Park in Mumbai is not just a public playing field. It's a striving and an idea that no matter who you are, son of a tinker, tailor, soldier, bai, if you want it enough, come to the maidan and practise hard, nothing is impossible.

A Shivaji Park XI made up of Ajit Wadekar, Lalchand Rajput, Sachin Tendulkar, Sandeep Patil, Vinod Kambli, Chandrakant Pandit, Ramakant Desai, Raju Kulkarni, Baloo Gupte and Padmakar Shivalkar (a great spinner unlucky enough to play at the time of the Quartet) would be a handful for any opposition, not just any other Maidan XI. Two more India players, Pravin Amre and Manohar Hardikar, figure in the reserves.

Opened in 1925, Shivaji Park also has a couple of tennis courts, a mini-park for children and a Ganesh temple which Tendulkar still visits regularly, but only past midnight. Today, the Park may have been overtaken by other cricket academies all over the city, but remains Mumbai cricket's spiritual home. And in the sheer democracy of its chaos and competitiveness, it is a metaphor for Indian cricket itself.

LIJJAT PAPAD
Self Help Success

Lijjat has 40,000 members and sales of Rs 300 crore

India's most popular accompaniment after pickle, the papad, is also a symbol of empowerment. On a sultry, mid-March day in 1959, seven women from poor families gathered on the terrace of an old building in Mumbai's Girgaum locality and held a little ceremony. It marked the production of four packets of papads and a firm resolve to continue production-on a borrowed sum of Rs 80.

Today, the Bandra-based Shri Mahila Griha Udyog Lijjat Papad is an operation with 60 centres countrywide involving 40,000 women and annual sales of over Rs 300 crore. The cooperative has paved the way for marginalised women brutalised by poverty and domestic problems to build a life for themselves and their children with a simple motto: self-help.

TIRUMALA DEVASTHANAM
Holy Managers

Devotees queue up for the two-second darshan of the Lord Tirumala

There's a mythological tale that priests at the Lord Venkateshwara temple, Tirupati, like to relate. It's about how Kuber, the Hindu God of wealth, loaned a large amount of money to the temple's deity for his marriage with Goddess Padmavathi. "I don't know when the Lord will be able to repay his debt," says an official facetiously. The country's richest Hindu temple, with an income of almost Rs 500 crore a year, epitomises Kuber. It also symbolises superb management.

On a lean day, the Devasthanam, perched on the Tirumala Hills near Tirupati, attracts an average of 45,000 devotees, showering cash, gold and hair. On New Year's Day, numbers swell to two lakh.

The temple's priest-managers have mastered the fine art of crowd control. Each devotee is issued a wristband embedded with the time of darshan, and the temple's famous laddoo. Offerings are collected at bank counters outside the complex. And for those unable to visit, a website permits prayer and donations.

DARJEELING TEA
India's Champagne

A tea planter takes the rounds of his Makaibari estate in Darjeeling

There is this quaint, lovely exchange from Woody Allen's Kugelmass Episode:

"You want a tea?"

"No, I want romance. I want music. I want love and beauty."

"But not tea, eh? Amazing..."

Maybe things would have turned out differently if it was Darjeeling. The fact is, tea from Darjeeling estates, celebrated as the champagne of teas, is the undisputed leader, with that one geographical reference raising Indian teas to respect across the world.

About 150 years ago, Dr Archibald Campbell, a British civil surgeon, started it all by planting tea seeds in his garden at Beechwood, Darjeeling, 7,000 ft above the sea. He was apparently successful because the British government was inspired to plant tea nurseries in the area in 1847. The first commercial tea gardens were the Aloobari, Steinthal and Tukvar estates. Today, there are 86 gardens spread over 19,000 hectares employing 15,000 people and producing up to 11 million kg a year. If there was ever a crown required to stave off pretenders, a kilo of Darjeeling from the Castleton estate fetched the highest ever price of Rs 15,000 at the Kolkata auctions in 1998. The Darjeeling Planters' Association now guards that achievement by marketing its premium offerings with a special logo, Darjeeling's own.