“Indians tend never to put anything important at the beginning of their remarks.” This is from Derek Sivers’s published notes on Speaking of India, a guide by Craig Storti for foreigners who work with Indians.
Requests follow the same order, the notes say. “They never actually make the request.” The speaker describes a need and waits for the listener to offer help.
In July 2021, Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Dinesh Maheshwari and Hrishikesh Roy of the Supreme Court of India added a note to a judgment on the Delhi Assembly and Facebook. “Judgments are becoming more complex and verbose,” they wrote. “It is the need of the hour to write clear and short judgments which the litigant can understand.”
By one count, published in the National Herald, the NJAC judgment of 2015 ran to 1,042 pages and the Aadhaar judgment of 2018 to 1,448 pages.
On February 1, 2020, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Union Budget in a speech of about 2 hours and 40 minutes, the longest in India’s history. She stopped with two of its 45 pages still unread.
Her speech of 2019, at 2 hours and 15 minutes, had already broken the earlier record of Jaswant Singh.
The Panchatantra opens with a frame. The teacher Vishnusharma must teach the principles of good government to the three ignorant sons of King Amarasakti. Each of its five books has a main story, which contains several embedded stories. “Often these stories contain further embedded stories.”
The Mahabharata does not begin with its war. It begins with the occasion on which it is told. The storyteller Ugrashrava Sauti recites it to “an assemblage of sages conducting a twelve-year sacrifice for King Saunaka Kulapati in the Naimisha Forest.”
He tells how Vaishampayana, a disciple of Vyasa, first recited the epic to King Janamejaya, the great-grandson of Arjuna. The story of the war sits inside these tellings.
A mangalacharana is “a benedictory verse traditionally featured in the beginning of a Hindu text.” It invokes a deity, a teacher or a patron, so that the work may be completed without obstacles. The Mahabharata opens with one to Narayana, Nara, Sarasvati and Vyasa.
Hindu wedding invitations “traditionally begin with seeking blessings from Lord Ganesha, the remover of obstacles.” Most carry Shree Ganeshaya Namah or an image of Ganesha on the cover. According to one card maker, the families are introduced next, and the event details come at the end.
Ganesha is invoked first because, in a Puranic legend, the gods declared him pratham pujya, the first to be worshipped.
A guide for foreigners invited as chief guest at an Indian event tells them to thank the hosts first and then greet the dignitaries on the stage. “Use as many titles as possible and don’t leave anyone out,” it advises.
The same guide warns that most Indian speakers “speak extemporaneously and can go on for a long time.”
“Respected Sir, I am writing this email to humbly request you to please do the needful regarding the same.” TalkDrill, an Indian company that teaches workplace English, uses this sentence as its example of an email to fix. Its corrected version opens with the point: “I have attached the revised vendor contract for your review.”
Some sample leave applications for Indian schools open with “Respected Sir,” give the reason, and end with the request: “Kindly grant me leave for these two days.”
The alap is “the opening section of a typical North Indian classical performance.” In dhrupad it is “unmetered, improvised (within the raga) and unaccompanied.” The music site Swarganga describes its purpose: “to let the raag introduce itself slowly, before the more structured rhythmic play begins.”
The main composition, with the tabla, comes later.