THE UNHURRIED HINDU.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 242, 12 October 1929, Page 10 (Supplement)

THE UNHURRIED HINDU.

BEHOLD THE TAXI DRIVER. « NON-CO-OPERATION" HIS NATURAL ATTITUDE. READY-TO-WEAR FOR GHANDI. The casual traveller in India doubts whether Ghandi is really the man who started and introduced the "non-co-operation movement," because the Indians "non-co-operate" with so much grace arid natural facility that it seeros that they must have always known how to do it.

Take taxi drivers, for instance, in Bombay. You come out of a ehop in the glare of the afternoon. The sun beats down; you could probably fry an egg op the pavement. Across the broad street is a row of taxis. The street is naturally broad, -but it looks broader still in the sun. You wave to one of the taxis to come over. Nothing happens. You yell and still nothing pens. They heard you plainly enough, but they want to put you to the trouble, of walking across the street in the heat. They are "no/j-co-operating" with you, although co-operating very tightly among , themselves. One lively , taxi driver with a taste for competition could stop that sort of thing, tnit I don't believe such a creature exists in all India. If you see another taxi coming toward you on your side of the street and start hailing that one, you will hear the assembled drivers across the way speak to h;m, saying, I suppose: "We're trying to make this white devil walk across the street. Don't you spoil our game." Another street scene shows their capacity for irritating the white man by conscientiously doing nothing. The Hindus T .valk slowly in the streets of Bombay in groups of twos or threes. They will never get out of the way of a motor car, so the chauffeur has to blow his horn incessantly, which irritates the white man exceedingly, and lie has to slow down all the time, which irritates him even more. They stay in front of au approaching car, knowing perfectly well that the car will swerve out rather than strike them. The whole thing if, a great success from their standpoint.

There was an American in Bombay representing a motor car company. He was from Texas. ' He was large and powerful and short of temper. He drove his own car and had not been there long when this trick of the Hindus put him into paroxysms of rage. But ho was not to be outdone, for he knew one trick worth two of theirs. He would drive down a principal thoroughfare and at the first couple of slow-walking Hindus he met, he would slow down. As he approached thqm he would lean his. rangy frame toward them awl strike them on the side of the head with his capacious square hand. He; would then drive on: It was not long before the natives of Bombay recognised his car. When they once did he had no more trouble with "non-co-operators" blocking his path.

It is much easier for the Hindu to non-co-operate than to co-operate. The corridors of the hotels in India are full of men lying on the floor asleep. They, too, are "non-co-operators." They have either washed their two square feet of the floor or cleaned half a shoe or done their five minutes' work for the day. No one seems to work much longer than that. The rest of the time they sleep and "non-co-operate," as anyone who tries to get a bell answered will realise. No. Ghandi could not have introduced non-co-operation into India; there is too much natural aptitude for it there already.