Incredible India

Going to Hell in a Hand Basket

Everywhere I turn, India is screaming and shouting. Mayawati has done this; Mulayam has done that; Karat is posturing as he may have done in his days at Jawaharlal Nehru University; the cricket guys are in a huge cacophony; and Bollywood is in your face. The business lot is putting out news releases about buying this or that company in the world. Gimme peace, already!

That’s why I retreat to my place in Goa and sit out late at night on my upstairs verandah, contemplating the cathedral of giant coconut trees surrounded by a curia of chickoo and mango. There is a choir sounding softly in the night; a harmony of gentle sea breezes rustling through the palms, like a quiet drizzle of rain.

For the past 28 years, I have been intimately involved in the public affairs of our great country. I thought we could do things differently. Certainly, since I came here from the United States in the late 1980s, things have changed dramatically. People are buying and doing things they never did before: toiletries and cosmetics, refrigerators, air-conditioners, washing machines, cars, houses and, in the upper reaches, designer clothes, yachts and even airplanes; in the realm of doing is the explosion of public transport, telecommunications, vocational education and computers.

India is enjoying the benefits of globalization. There are more choices, more opportunities, more hope. As I sit, contemplating the silence of my house in Goa, away from the chaos and noise in the public space, I can’t help wondering if we are getting it all wrong again. We admired but never practiced socialism; we practiced but never admired capitalism. We mixed our socialist mindset with a very stiff dose of elitism. Our recipe had ingredients of privilege, prejudice and perfidy. The concoction tasted of feudalism and authoritarianism.

Growing up in the primeval India of the 1960s, I realized that connections ruled. A reasonably talented young person from the middle class could only do what I did: emigrate. We fled socialist India to seek our fortune elsewhere, especially America. Back home, the privilegentsia dragged the country down into the abyss of poverty and pity. It became a basket case, scorned by the world. In the end, in 1991, the government was reduced to sending secret shipments of gold to the Bank of England to demonstrate solvency.

I was back in India when the Narasimha Rao government was left with no choice. In a historic budget, then finance minister Manmohan Singh scrapped the industrial licensing system. Reforms served up in that budget faced several political challenges including the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the rise of Hindu nationalism. Most subsequent measures were undertaken by stealth. Such changes went against the very grain of the culture of bribery and corruption bred by controls. Nevertheless, slowly but surely, the options for the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats declined.

Even today, there are vocal and powerful opponents of reform. The BJP stance is puerile politics. The Left is a dupe of the mandarins in Beijing. Within the Congress there are still several lobbies that feel it has tarnished the party’s self-image as a “pro poor” formation. Then are there are the “others,’ who feed off the trough of government finances: they are insidious opponents of reform.

With such formidable opposition, the government’s initiatives have been stymied except in the most esoteric areas of capital markets. The Indo-US civilian nuclear deal could have major benefits aside from the obvious ones that will bring India out of its pariah status. Sadly, it is on hold because of the Left servitude to Beijing and the infantile opposition of the BJP. Within the Congress, various mindless forces have contrived to sabotage India’s growth story because, like the wily Arjun Singh, they believe in nothing, profess only sycophancy.

The government’s botched effort at handling growth indicates the old mindsets still rule. So if there’s inflation: too much money chasing too few goods, the Congress poobahs would rather opt for the failed solution of demand management when the obvious thing to do is to remove obstacles to the production of more goods and jobs.

But no! We can’t have retail bloom; we will curtail growth in telecoms by all manner of stupidity; we will shackle financial services; we will not remove the barriers to real estate growth and continue to sabotage the crucial education system with rules and regulations set out by the corrupt and inept All India Council on Technical Education (AICTE). We seem to be going back to the starved sixties in a leaky boat whose officers and crew have no clue how to navigate in the changed economic circumstances.

So now we have choice between the devil: the loud, crass nouveau riche India; and the deep blue sea: the old scheming one in which the privilegentsia reigned supreme. With growing prosperity, India’s privileged classes, who wield more power than their legitimate bank balances, won’t have the wherewithal to maintain legions of low-wage servants: maids, bearers, drivers, gardeners, guards and assorted flunkies, all paid for by the feudal government and the rapacious private sector.

At the rate things are going, the nexus of politicians, bureaucrats, activists and fixers will have our country on its knees again, hunting for nuts and berries on the margins of the global mainstream.

copyright rajiv desai 2008

Pater Noster

Coping with Alzheimer’s

It’s been less than a fortnight since my mother died. In the interim, my 87-year old father has spent an unsettled time. In the pink of health, he nevertheless suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. His brain cannot deal with current affairs and causes him to go rambling into the past. He remembers things from the 1950s and 1960s and earlier but when it comes to the present, he is all at sea.

For partly selfish reasons, we brought him to our house in Goa against the advice of a psychiatrist. We had things to do and we needed to escape from the aura of death in our Delhi home. One airplane trip, a tour of the house and fruit-filled garden, a simple home-cooked meal, an ice cream on Baga beach and my dad seemed to perk up. He was excited by the old-style doors and windows and the antique furniture in our house; he marveled at the wells, the trees laden with guava, chickoo, mango and coconut…drinking it all in, wonderstruck.

“Very nice…just like the old days,” he kept repeating. He was struck by the waves breaking on the beach, the lights, and the music. “This is wonderful,” he said over and over again as we finally dragged ourselves away from St Anthony’s Bar and Restaurant at 10 pm. I was beside myself with joy. In the days after my mother’s death, he had drifted, anchorless without his constant companion; like Keats' knight: “alone and palely loitering.”

Now that he lives with us, I think we can light up his life with experiences he has never had in his austere existence. His only interest was travel and so the Goa sojourn opened up a corner of clarity in his Alzheimer-jumbled mind. It was a gamble to whisk him away to Goa. We were worried he might fall apart in the strange new environment. But he seems to have flowered; giving me hope that I could, in the remainder of his life, shower him with care and comfort.

The next day we took him to a supermarket to buy him toiletries. I have always known him to be a frugal, even parsimonious man. He saves things rather than use them. A few months ago at his house in Ahmedabad, I found in his closet unused bottles of after shave lotion and several shirts I had presented him nearly 15 years ago. After we reached our home in Goa, I saw his toiletry kit, which was indescribably modest including two throwaway shaving razors that were past their prime at least five years ago. That’s when we went to the store to buy him new supplies.

He was delighted to receive them and kept rummaging in the bag and looking at his new things through the car journey back home. Promptly, he squirreled them away into his suitcase. Knowing his abstemious mindset, I threw away all his past due date toiletries. The next morning and I don't know how, he retrieved his old shaving razor from the waste basket. However, my hope stayed kindled in that he has started using his new stuff; it is a minor victory in my battle to change his ways.

I am no psychiatrist but I feel that as a man alone now, he has a chance to experience new things, especially ease and choice that he long denied himself. My belief is that the new lifestyle might slow down his steady and inevitable mental decline. Nobody really understands Alzheimer’s. There have been many attempts to research and explain the disease in genetic and medical terms. In my layman’s view, it is about individuals, who have been misfits and therefore turned to simplistic views about life: their definitions of success and their existential happenstance.

The late Ronald Reagan is a classic example. He started out as an actor, never succeeded, got into screen politics, waltzed into the position of the governor of America’s golden state, California and went on to become a two-term occupant of the White House. For all the mythmaking, Reagan was never really cut out for the job and only acted the part…and that too in a B-grade performance. On his watch, certain earth-shaking events took place, primarily the implosion of the Soviet Union. He is revered today for starting a conservative revolution in the United States; his acolytes claim the credit for re-ordering the world.

Whatever Reagan did, he slipped into the personal hell of Alzheimer’s. My view is that his simplistic, black-and-white view of the world left no room for critical assessments. I can see the same happening to my father. He told my wife, “I don’t read because I did all the reading that was needed to top all my exams. Why should I clutter up my mind with useless things?” To add to that, he had no friends, no interests: literature or music or art or theater or even television, cricket and cinema. Alzheimer’s came later; his blankness dates back nearly 40 years, which is 10 years before he retired from his job as a senior government official.

The biggest tragedy in dealing with my father is we have to forget my mother. Already, he is certain that the fuss and the funeral had to do with his mother, who died 42 years ago, when he was just 45. He has no remembrance; at least not that is publicly expressed that his wife is gone, just 20 days short of their 60^th wedding anniversary.

In the 12 days since my mother went away, I have grown to be the 59 years that I am. Until April 21, I felt I was just 19.

copyright rajiv desai 2008

Funeral Blues

The Indignity of Death

"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

"Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message she is dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves;
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves."

With the words of W H Auden buzzing in my head, I sat in the hearse that bore my mother’s dead body to the crematorium. It was the twilight hour, the most melancholic time of day. I have always hated the transition from day to night and here I was staring at my mother’s lifeless body as the hearse battled Delhi’s horrendous early evening traffic. We were on Delhi’s much maligned Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridor.

Incredibly, I found myself telling my brother and my cousin that the reaction against the BRT was a knee-jerk dehati response against modernity. Already, the feeling of sublime spirituality was destroyed; my sorrow was momentarily overtaken by the slings and arrows of Delhi’s outrageous traffic. In a way, it mitigated the emptiness I felt as I looked tearfully at my mother’s lifeless form. The reality of India is such that it won’t really let you grieve or wonder philosophically about life and death.

When we reached the funeral place, I was hustled into an “office,” where a priest told me he had made the arrangements for pooja and whatnot and that it would cost 6500 rupees. Distraught though I was, it was very clear to me that I wouldn’t let my mother go with the meaningless recital of slokas by a mercenary. Instead, we had friends from Delhi’s Capital City Minstrels choir sing hymns and bhajans while we waited for a slot at the electric crematorium. The music brought solemnity and beauty to the occasion.

Inevitably, the moment came for us to let her go; she was put on a conveyor belt and rolled into a furnace. There was no dignity in the process. I felt as though I had consigned my mother to a Nazi death camp. Until then I had managed to keep my composure. That moment was traumatic and I broke down. I sobbed for the loss of my mother, to be sure; I must confess, however, that some of the tears were for the undignified manner in which my mother was consigned to nothingness.

For anyone who believes that the dead go on to an afterlife of peace and bliss, the electric crematorium suggests hellfire and brimstone. There is no spirituality in the way we dispose of our dead. It is brutal. When I saw her disappear into the furnace, I felt affirmed in the feeling that in Hindu-majority India, where there is no respect for life, to expect dignity for the dead is too much to ask.

So much for the public aspect of death; the loss of a mother is numbing. I lived with her as part of a nuclear family for just nine years in the 1950s and 1960s. Beyond that I was always a visitor and as such not bonded but close. My mother was more spirited than spiritual even at the ripe old age of 85. “I’m sorry,” she said to me the day before she died, “I came here for comfort and joy and instead you had to hassle with doctors and hospitals.”

It was this stolid worldview that allowed me to make a life for myself. For all our differences, I will never forget her determined effort to push me into language and literature even while the whole world shoved me into science and engineering.

But that’s personal. Mothers are precious but they are not immortal; to lose a mother is indescribable. Even though they may play on guilt and behave like giant pains now and then, they are irreplaceable.

"The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;"

And so with deep sorrow and wonderment, I watched my mother slip gently into the night. Thank whatever Gods there be, she had no experience of her cremation.

copyright rajiv desai 2008

Vox Populi

Aside from the two comments posted on the website, one by Chicago's Suresh Hathiwala and another by Jimmy (identify yourself, please), I've had several responses by email.

1 Rajiv Badlani, Ahmedabad:

That was very amusing, my friend.

Championing the cause of the emergent middle class as a whole is one thing, but encountering individuals from that class is traumatic for badly brought up people like you and me. We’re anachronisms in today’s India, seeking some refined ideal that has existed only in our wishful thinking.

Its not just India. Brought up as I was on Wodehouse, I wasn’t at all prepared for the reality of England in the 80’s. That was also a shocker.

Ahmedabad used to be a relatively refined place back when we were growing up. There were a few rich folks who made it a fetish to tastefully conceal their wealth. Never would they be seen in ostentatious clothes or cars; they even made it a point to never give larger gifts at weddings than their less fortunate brethren could afford.

But all that good taste clearly didn’t inspire the rest of the city to emulate them. Instead Ahmedabad has made Delhi it’s role model.

This city now vies with Delhi to show off its wealth and every wedding competes with others to see who can literally burn more money by bursting crackers and bombs in the middle of the street.

Every member of this new group of have-it-at-lasts has a chip on his shoulder about people who speak softly and in English. That is considered downright offensive. We’re clearly doing this to put them down, and they will show this resentment as aggressively as they can assuming, quite correctly, that he who shouts loudest will prevail, and by virtue of prevailing, be right.

Welcome to the new India. Fly business class in the more expensive airlines and there is a 60% chance that you will escape encountering this reality, but don’t count on it. Them guys is also aspiring to that! Maybe 2nd class in the train will be a more pleasing experience. In fact, I'm sure it will. The poor are far more graceful.

2 Siddharth Mehta, New Delhi:

Very interesting reading. I loved the title. Cannot but agree with your comments and reactions. We are certainly becoming a nation of rude and crass people. God help us.


3 Manjeet Kripalani, Bombay:

You have spoken what I have been thinking and feeling for so so so long!

We will be a crude and crass culture, and nowhere is it more evident than the low cost airlines.

I refused to travel Kingfisher, even, when I found that my fellow passengers would turn on their headsets to the highest pitch, watch the TV screen in front, and heave with loud laughter as they watched a slapstick performance that masqueraded as comedy. When I asked one of them to turn down the volume, he turned to me balefully, glared, and turned back to his screen, heaving again with laughter.

They couldn’t have been bothered, the whole plane. Disregarded the staff requests. So I try and fly Jet whenever I can, because the premium price ensures premium passengers, who know their manners and understand that good manners is just being considerate of others around you.

What we are seeing is the nouveau riche – not the Sindhi nouveau riche of yore, who wore big diamonds and had big weddings. No, they look cultured in comparison. These are the nouveau nouveau slightly riche, who have seen little money through dhanda – not professional endeavour – for the first time. They are feeling good, powerful, venal. Are they really middle class? They are aspiring riche, from being low class.

The lower classes, who aspire to middle class status and flying over using the railways, are in fact, more polite, kinder, more considerate. Like your driver and my driver, who has exquisite manners and courtesies.

4 Arthur House, Hartford, CT, USA

Air travel is the most uncivilized means of transport. Here we add short pants, tee shirts and loud talking to the mix. I liked your piece. Reminds me of an excellent George Will piece of writing.

The Vulgarians

India’s Emergent Lowbrow Culture

After a cool and relaxing week in Goa, I flew back to Delhi on a Spicejet flight. It was then that the new reality slapped me in the face. My experience on the plane made me turn monkish, in the hope I would avoid hell when the time comes for me hand in my dinner pail, kick the bucket, breathe my last, expire, die. The two-hour journey tested me so much that I forgot about my fear of flying. Even though we had a bumpy flight, my white knuckles were overshadowed by the sheer frustration I felt at the uncouth behavior of some fellow passengers.

I realized that, just in case there is heaven and hell, I certainly don’t want to go to Satan’s estate in the event I find all the crude people there that were on the flight. To that end, I have sworn to exercise more and do good turns, even if I have to drag old ladies across the street; or eat sickly sweet offerings from temples or face Mecca and bow several times a day or go to confession in a Catholic church. Heck, I am even prepared to eat health food.

Coming back to the flight, I was granted my request for an aisle seat by a pleasant staffer at the check-in counter. Not just that, I was pleased as punch to note that the middle and window seats remained empty as the doors closed. This was truly fortuitous because these low-cost airlines pack people in like sardines. I thought I would have a pleasant, undisturbed flight. I pulled up the hand rests and prepared to stretch my legs across the two empty seats once the seat belt sign was switched off.

No sooner than the doors closed, the guy in the row behind me loomed over me, gesturing at the window seat in my row. Politely, I got up to let him through, figuring I would still have an empty seat in between. He had four seats…three where his wife and two sons sat and him across the aisle. When I got up, he hurriedly blocked me and got his two sons to move into the two seats next to me while he moved across the aisle to sit with his wife.

Stunned by this display of uncouth behavior, I told him what he did was unfair. He was not conversant with English and his breath was foul so I let it go and buried myself in my book. As the plane took off and when the seat belt sign was switched off, an obese guy in the seat in front of me pushed his seat back as far as it would go, leaving no room for my legs and my book. I asked him to straighten his seat and he launched into the air equivalent of road rage. “You don’t own the airline,” he told me in his “convent” English. “If you have a problem, move to another seat. Or fly another airline.”

Taken aback by the man’s rude outburst, I kept silent and wondered at the hectoring culture of this new and crude India. He was fat and out of shape…clearly a crass Delhiwallah with black money, the type that resident Goans abhor. I asked the steward to move me to another seat. For the record, I have been a cheerleader for this upwardly mobile, emergent middle class that poses a challenge to the privilegentsia: the clutch of academics, bureaucrats and sundry others who feed off the trough of the state.

The privilegentsia proved a thorn in the side of the international community; their pretentious outlook proved offensive to many in the West and left India bereft of friends in the liberal world. But the emergent culture of 21st century India that seeks to replace the elitist lot can only be called vulgarian. Much of it is reflected in the popular culture: on television and in Bollywood films; also in the ostentatious celebration of age-old rituals like Diwali and Holi and in the re-awakening of misogynist festivals like Karva Chauth and criminal practices such as dowry.

Talk about the devil and the deep blue sea!

copyright rajiv desai 2008