Adventure Divas (15 page)

The London
Times
stated: “In seven months . . . she has made a hellish institution humane.” The “hellish” institution is now colloquially referred to as the Ashram, and the humanity and dignity she brought to India’s prison system has created a reform model that is being adopted all over the world. Bedi’s achievements in reforming the prison system are even more impressive given the male-dominated, set-up-for-failure environment in which she was operating.

Since her success at Tijar Jail, Bedi had moved on to a new role training and reforming the Delhi police force, an institution often associated with corruption. She wrote of policing: “It pains me to see the extent of hypocrisy prevailing in the police and in the administration as a whole. . . . The leadership is undemocratic. It encourages subjugation, fear and short-term results. There is no visible vision. . . . There is only one shared anxiety: protection of one’s own position by degrading the others. . . . The entire system appears to be based on money, power, influence and conspiracy of silence.”

Such brash truth-telling has gotten Bedi in trouble, but the magnitude of her successes, such as the prison reform, has made it impossible for any corrupt higher-ups to get rid of her. She’s considered by some a bone in the gullet that “can be neither spat out nor swallowed,” wrote her biographer Parmesh Dangwal. “Many attempts have been made to subdue her, but phoenix-like she has risen to greater and greater heights.”

We drive out to the sweeping, walled police training grounds an hour outside New Delhi. Within the red-brick walls I witness order unlike I’ve yet seen in India. Across the manicured acres, groups of people are practicing martial arts, women in bright white are climbing ropes, men with rifles turn at attention and practice their formations. I catch up with Bedi in a classroom, at the end of a talk she is giving to a group of managers, most of whom are looking at her with palpable awe. She has short, cropped dark hair and is small, maybe five foot five. Her khaki uniform has attached to it a name tag, several colorful bars that must mean something important, and a number of shiny stars and shapes affixed to the stiff shoulders. Atop her head sits a heavy, high-brimmed officer’s hat, like the one my veteran grandfather wore, which always represented to me some mysterious remote power.

“Hello, hello, have you been well taken care of?” she asks me, without coming to a full stop. Her second-in-command has toured us around the facilities for the last half hour. She’s clearly efficient, and her smile and eyes dance like those stars on her shoulders. “Let’s go to the range,” she says. No delicate chat over four cups of Darjeeling with Bedi. She grabs my arm and we head out to shoot guns.

Bedi, just like the hundreds of male and female trainees in her charge, must pass target practice on a regular basis. On our way to the range we slowly thread our way through a field of young women in pure-white saris, with loose-fitting white pants underneath, practicing karate moves in unison. “Haaa! Hurrr! Heee!” they yell, thrusting their arms and legs.

“They must be confident to defend themselves before they can defend others,” explains Bedi. Then, we wend our way around a hundred men of varying age, sitting cross-legged in perfect rows, wearing white T-shirts and khaki pants, exhaling in unison—“ha, ha, ha, ha, ha”—as part of their daily yoga practice. This morning, as every morning, all the officers meditated for an hour.

“Tell me more about your training philosophy and management style. What are these officers getting?” I ask.

“They’re getting equipped to be police officers, which means physical fitness, physical courage, knowledge of law, skills in handling difficult situations, but also a human
heart—
a human heart which is sensitive and says ‘I came to this profession to defend and protect, and not to kill.’ ”

Prioritizing a human heart in law-enforcement training is revolutionary, and I’d imagine it’s extremely difficult to institute.

“What was the initial reception to the meditation idea? Was there resistance?”

“No, to the meditation, no,” Bedi responds. “Because these meditation programs are not conversional programs, they’re not sectarian; it’s introspective meditation, which means you are trained to bring out the emotions within you and then observe them, through your breath. Whether it’s your addictions, your anger, your revenge, whether it’s your lust, whatever it is, it surfaces through these techniques,” she explains.

“So it’s not religious in the dogmatic sense,” she continues. “You can be Muslim, Hindu, or a nonbeliever and do this. The intellect is the wisdom which judges between one right thought and one wrong thought.”

“I love this training,” she says, nodding toward fifty men working in formations with rifles, their khaki berets all tipped alike. “But without the introspective technique, this training would be a burden of knowledge.”

“A burden?” I ask, not getting it.

“A burden because if you are a human being with a lot of knowledge and do not know how to use it, I think you are a liability. It’s very important to recognize that police training equips you with all the power.”

We arrive at the firing range. Two women officers and three men are firing off revolvers and 9mm pistols at the red and white bull’s-eye standing a hundred yards in the distance. The crew and I trot after Bedi as she surveys the range, unconscious of the camera.

“We can equip people to fire perfectly. But fire to defend or fire to kill?” she says emphatically, as much with her hands as her words. “Fire to protect or fire to murder? Which?” Bedi excitedly conveys her philosophy. “That’s his hand,” she says, pointing toward an officer, “and the hand is linked by thought to the mind.” She runs her own hand from her wrist to her head. “The mind has to be developed. This training is not just to make them good police officers, this training is to make them good human beings, because finally it’s the humanity in you which is going to be projected in your legal work.”

“Very nice work, very nice,” Bedi commends the officers, and then she fires off a few cracking, loud rounds herself. I flinch. Satisfied with her accuracy, Bedi holsters her sidearm and we walk back across the field. She smiles and nods at everyone we pass along the way. They seem to regard her with respect, but not fear. We find some shade under a tree, and continue talking.

“Why do you think people respond to you in the way they do, almost magnetically?” I ask. I, too, am beginning to feel the tractor beam.

“Because I don’t wait for them to come to me, I go to them. And I go to them because that’s my duty to do, but it’s also a source of joy to me. The warmth and compassion and concern and joy you exude, comes back. I’ve seen cold interactions, and I know they’re dull. And dullness is infectious, just as joy is,” says Bedi.

I give myself an intellectual pinch. This is the headiest conversation I have ever had with a cop. Clearly, Bedi is a police officer who makes spiritualism pragmatic, but I take it a step farther and ask if she considers herself a spiritual leader.

“Spiritual
leader
? Oh my god. Not a leader. All I can talk to you about is what kind of human being I think I am. I am not as materialistic as I am spiritual. Because I’m pretty contented with myself. What I need is more inner food, rather than external belongings. If I were to choose between a diamond ring and a beautiful book, I would pick a beautiful book. For me, a diamond ring is a waste, but a book is full of knowledge and that’s my food,” she says. Her life certainly reflects these values. I lost the plot of police training details a half hour ago, and am focused on the broader implications of her holistic approach.

“It’s not only duty. It’s a mission,” Bedi once told a reporter of her work ethic. “You are in it all the time. You have to invoke the creativity of five thousand years which is just lying dormant.”

“There’s a more visible humanitarian ethic here compared to anywhere else I’ve ever been,” I begin, “and—”

“Well, India has reasons to be both happy and angry,” says Bedi.

“What are they?”

“Happy—they’re settled with themselves; they’re contented people—”

“But why?” I press, as the notion of broad-based contentment seems far-fetched. Angst, rather than contentment, is the norm in my socio-strata. And India is famously stratified. And famously impoverished.

“Why? Genetically,” she says, with too small a laugh for me to know if she is serious.

I laugh, uncomfortably.

“Really? It’s not the three hundred thirty million deities?” I ask, half-joking, drawing on a figure I have come to consider specious.

“I think every Indian has a habit of looking for an anchor. Sometimes you look for an external anchor and sometimes you train to be internally anchored. And once you have an anchor, I think you’re very well put, aren’t you?”

“What is their anchor?” I ask.

“An anchor could be a deity, could be a god, could be a church, could be a temple, could be a parent, could be a teacher, could be a guru, could be an exercise, could be yoga. And once they are anchored and if they’re convinced, they’re settled, their search stops,” she explains.

It strikes me that most Americans spend a good forty years looking for their anchor. Anchoring early could leave you more time to jump off the boat and go swimming.

“I think
anchor
basically means where you can go if you are in distress. And you can get an answer. You can get help,” Bedi says.

“You started this by saying there’s a lot to be happy about and a lot to be miserable about,” I say, still trying to understand a fundamental dichotomy.

“Yes, a lot to be miserable about. I think Indians are looking for better governance at all levels, whether it’s civic administration, village administration, state governance, or national governance. There is an anxiety in every Indian. How do we get better enforcement of laws? Better justice? Greater prosperity? More employment? We have overriding secular tension. Overriding caste problems. Imbalance in development—if one state is rich, another state in this country is very poor, so it brings down the overall national income,” she says, listing just a few of India’s myriad challenges.

“Yesterday,” I say, “there was a rally—an anti-WTO demonstration—and thousands of people with placards were peacefully walking to Parliament in central Delhi. I would ask them, ‘Is this a protest?’ and the response was always, ‘No, no, it’s a rally.’ It certainly looked like protest.”

“By and large, India doesn’t protest. But that doesn’t mean—being contented and at ease—you don’t want progress. Yet you will not find riots; you will find people still at ease, settled down because they have their anchors. And a lot of toleration. Toleration too is a very strong Indian spirit. It tolerates a hell of a lot of nonsense,” she says soberly. “Even in the neighborhood, even within family. They think it’s duty to tolerate. If you have a deviant son, you don’t put him on the road. We don’t send out aging parents,” she says.

Gandhi promoted toleration. “Mutual toleration is a necessity for all time and for all races,” he said. But he also knew when things could not be tolerated, leading a number of nonviolent demonstrations (I would call them protests) against British occupation and other injustices. So it seems knowing when or what to put up with is part of the art of wielding power—personal, political, institutional—responsibly.

“I’ve been hearing a lot about the notion that we all have divinity within since I’ve been in India. What do you think of that?” I ask, tentatively floating a nutgrab.

“I think each one of us defines divinity the way we’re brought up, and if you’re brought up in a value-based environment, then you see divinity in another person. I was trained to look at divinity in service. Divinity in humankind. In fact, when I was taking my unit public-service examination, there was a column in the form called religion. I could have written Hindu; I could have written anything,” she says, her hand poised in the air as if she’s still holding that pencil, “but I remember as a twenty-year-old woman when I was filling in the form I wrote
humankind.
That for me stood for divinity. Every one of us defines divinity,” she said.

“What happens if there isn’t enough, uh, humility in the mix?” I ask, reflecting my theory that hubris gums up the works in everything from interpersonal to international relations (and, well, by extension, any shot at divinity).

“If there isn’t? I think we would all be animals. We would all be biting at each other,” she replies, the very few lines around her eyes now showing themselves, “because there would be nothing but a clash of egos, and always warfare. There would be no gratitude.”

The Bush administration comes to mind.

“After following you around today and talking to people, I’m convinced you have no fears. But you must. Do you have any?” I ask.

“After I lost my mother, I’m fearless. There’s no more fear,” she says simply, and warmly.

There is a hitch in the breath of the universe. Julie looks down; Cheryl’s eye leaves the lens. We all have an immediate, visceral understanding of what she’s said. I’m glad she continues talking because I have no follow-up.

“You’re afraid of something you love most, of losing something you love most, and I lost her. And I think after this there’s nothing more to lose. I loved her so much—I could still be a little girl when she was around,” says this police chief with a sparkling, open-hearted grin.

“She’s gone and it shows, you know, how everything is so transient. There’s nothing permanent. But the point is I have no more fears. How long I live—what’s going to happen to me. I think the key is what I do with what I have today. Because today is going to be yesterday and tomorrow is going to be another today. But what you
do
in that day
is
probably in your control,” she says with conviction, her eyes never straying from mine.

“So the transience makes you more invested in the moment, rather than less?” I ask.

“Yes. The transience makes me focus more, because I know it’s going to go away.”

Kiran Bedi’s leadership goes beyond the stuff of management books or celebrity charisma, and enables her to survive in an environment in which not everybody wants change. She has magnetism, as a guru might, but the power she exudes over others is mutually sustaining and endeavors to enlighten rather than control.