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

Ruby Tuesday

Yesterdays Don't Matter If They're Gone

Forty-eight years ago, on April Fools Day, I was a stripling, just 11 years of age. That day was momentous; it sank into me that I would have to leave my beloved Bombay, my precious Christ Church Lane in the city’s Byculla Bridge, Bombay 8 precinct. It was very important not to call it Byculla, which was Bombay 27. It was our awakening class consciousness; the postal codes told the story of middle versus working class neighborhoods.

On April 27 of 1960, as I stood on the train doorway waving goodbye, I already began to miss all my friends, who were much closer to me than I ever imagined: looking back on those years, I believe they changed my worldview. They made me appreciate the vibrancy of diversity. On that day, however, I was not just tearful but envious. They got to stay behind in this wonderful slice of India while I was hustled on to a train to Ahmedabad and to a moffusil life of sarkari hierarchies and the search for more and more exclusivity.

Christ Church Lane was home to Bombay’s aspiring middle class: cosmopolitan, diverse and secure. As a boy growing up in Court Royal, a wonderful old apartment house with large airy flats and lots of balconies, the only disagreements I had with my friends were about Elvis versus Cliff versus Pat Boone. Yes, my family was the only vegetarian in the building and I, the only Hindu and Gujarati kid. My friends constantly urged me to eat meat but in the end, accepted my cultural hangup.

This was significantly different than my later experiences, where I was often put down because of my beef against eating meat. In Christ Church Lane, there was such a cultural diversity that my food habits were accepted and I was included in the community of kids playing games and fooling around each evening until the street lights came on. My friend Ruby Rodrigues, now Patrick, told me the other day that we actually had lamplighters, which I found hard to believe.

We met Ruby on Tuesday, April Fools Day. The last time I had seen her was when we bade goodbye at the train station some 48 years ago. The story of how Ruby came to be at our house to dinner that night is about the currency of nostalgia in which modern technology enables us to span gaps of time and reach out to people we have known at different phases of our lives. Ruby is the older sister of my friend Peter with whom I hung around 365 days a years from age six to age eleven.

Ruby was this sophisticated girl from the Clare Road Convent with many good-looking friends. That apart, Christ Church Lane was widely regarded as a happening place with gorgeous girls. We called all of them Diana, after the Paul Anka song, which went: “I’m so young and you’re so old…” We were innocent of sex then, only puppy love and panted after every lovely girl that we saw in the lane. It was pure romance but at a distance; we eyed them and then fantasized, forget sex or holding hands or kissing; all we craved for was a smile, an acknowledgment that we were alive.

When Carole Fraser, a green-eyed, brown-haired goddess once said hello, our knees turned to jelly and the only way we could recover is by indulging in physical horseplay, where mostly Peter and Teddy and various others jumped on each other. Because I was the smallest, I usually bore the brunt of it with a stoic grimace…it was for Carol, after all. All those years, we learned through the biblical and cowboy movies that he who is set upon ultimately wins the girl.

Ruby’s older brother Victor was everyone’s hero…he sang, danced and had an easy way with girls; plus he has a hairstyle like Elvis that was in vogue those days. He emailed me when he read an article I’d written about Christ Church Lane and set up this meeting with his sister Ruby. He called the night Ruby visited us…it was the first time we talked in 48 years. He said Teddy was in Bombay. Teddy and his brother Alan Oscar, who was my absolute icon, lived on the ground floor of Court Royal. They moved to Australia and next thing I knew the next day I was talking to Teddy at the Taj in Bombay.

Ever the skeptical writer, the been-there -done-that variety, I am floored by this currency of nostalgia. It turned out when Ruby visited that our old friends Ivan and Ingrid Arthur were there and they also knew Ruby and her family. Ivan was for many years a colleague on the executive committee of HTA (now JWT). How does all this happen? The standard response is that India has a small elite community in which everyone knows everyone by six degrees of separation.

That may be a Western view but this is something of a phenomenon. It’s not just this encounter but over the past few months as I have written about reunions and other nostalgic moments, I have had an outpouring of responses from people I knew from the various phases of my life. I feel fulfilled even though some of my best friends today are people I knew in in high school and university in India and the United States. But these are a new crop of old friends. It is a wonderful feeling to know that over the next few years I will strike up in my life, like John Lennon, renewed acquaintances with “people and things that went before.” It is a wonderful closure. Peter, Victor, Ruby, Teddy, Alan and I have led different lives since we grew up together. Now we will catch up and exchange notes. There is a sense of security and comfort and joy that life is coming to be a full circle.

copyright rajiv desai 2008

Dark Clouds on Goa's Silver Lining

Quiet Nights and Starry Skies

What can you say about the brutal rape and murder of a 15-year old girl? That she was a British tourist from a white trash family? That her mother, unforgivably, left her alone in Goa amid the raves and the drugs? That the authorities in Goa, cowed down by mule-headed NGOs, who oppose high-end tourism, have willy-nilly encouraged the backpack and drug culture? You can say all that and more. The Scarlett Keeling murder is a case that exposed the sleazy underbelly of a grimy local subculture that has grown like mushrooms around cheap tourism.

I first noticed it nearly 15 years ago. We were at a restaurant on Baga beach. My younger daughter wasn't feeling well so we decided to head back home. Seeing a cab outside the restaurant, we signaled the driver, who said it would cost 800 rupees; what's more, he actually had passengers, who were at dinner and thought he could make a quick buck while waiting for them to finish. I was struck by his greed and told him so whereupon he advanced menacingly towards me. Luckily, members of the staff of a well-known beach shack stepped up to prevent an ugly incident.

Today the situation is infinitely worse. Local service providers like cabbies, waiters and shopkeepers in the tourist spots are forever looking to fleece unsuspecting tourists; others do much worse: they morph into gigolos and drug pushers. At the extreme, like those accused in the Scarlett case, they turn really ugly: into rapists and murderers. One stream of this subculture finds it way into the real estate business and from there into politics. With notable exceptions, politicians in this sylvan haven look and behave like mafiosi; they switch parties, bring down governments and generally plunder and pillage the state.

Just consider this: between 1963 and 1990, there were three chief ministers. However, between March 1990 and the present, there have been fourteen; of them, only Manohar Parrikar has lasted a full term. Party affiliations don't seem to mean much with the new floater breed of politicians; they go where they can enjoy the perks of power. They are complicit in the prostitution of Goa, whether in real estate or crime. As they used to say many years ago in America about the Philadelphia Flyers ice hockey team: if they weren't professional hockey players, they would have been in jail. Many of Goa's odious politicians have evaded jail and continued in their corrupt ways.

The Scarlett rape and murder had its genesis in Goa's corrupt public life. Indeed, while some psychopathic thug took advantage of the 15-year-old girl from Britain, the crime took place because of the lackadaisical approach to law and order and because the Goan underworld thrives on the patronage of politicians. It's very simple: the beaches are dotted with ugly makeshift shacks manned by "owners," who could not possibly raise the 70,000 rupees or more it takes to get a license. It's all very sleazy and it has made the beach experience into a nightmare. For the 10 weeks in a year we spend at our house in Goa, we go to the beach maybe 10 times.

On the other hand, there are some wonderful restaurants and beach cafes, smack dab in the middle of the sin strip from Sinquerim in Bardez to Querim in Pernem. We try to avoid places like Anjuna, Vagator, Morjim and especially Arambhol as we might garbage dumps. Full of the detritus of the Western world and the Goan plankton that feeds off of it, these venues are where the sleaze is.

There is another subculture in Goa that is personified by Vijay Mallya's Kingfisher Villa. This is the high-flying set of Page Three People. Dark rumors have it that there are far more expensive designer drugs as well as loose behavior that stops short of rape and murder. In my book, this is no different than the lowlife exposed by the Scarlett murder. It has nothing to do with Goa; yesterday they came from Pattaya, the sleazy Thai resort that was all they could afford; tomorrow they will be somewhere else. Like Scarlett, they are carpetbaggers, looking for good times.

Meanwhile, there is Goa for the rest of us. For me, it is my sasural, a bond of love because my wife's family is from there. I have been enamored of the place for the past four decades. Ten years ago, we bought an old Portuguese villa and restored it so it became our home that we call Imagine. We now live, off and on, in our little village of Uccasaim, right by the gorgeous St Elizabeth Church. We spend as much time there as we possibly can.

Our little village has no police force and some miraculous municipal services that keep it clean and green. The church bell rings at eventide and from the nearby temple we hear strains of devotional music in the classical idiom. At night, we sit on the patio enjoying quiet nights and starry skies, listening to the rain-like rustle of swaying palm fronds and the music of silence; in the morning, we wake up to the concert of the birds.

copyright rajiv desai 2008

The Rahul Gandhi Icon

Wearing Garlands of Wilted Flowers

Rahul Gandhi has burst upon the Indian political scene with his well-publicized “Discovery of India” campaign. The name he has chosen is evocative of his great grandfather’s eponymous 1946 book; in it, Nehru introduced to the political lexicon three charged concepts: of nationalism amid cultural diversity, of indigenization to combat colonialism and of “unity in diversity,” a phrase to challenge the demand for Pakistan.

Trouble is the once-resurgent BJP exploited the divide between diversity and nationalism to advocate the chauvinistic concept of “cultural nationalism;” the Left expropriated indigenization to support and promote the corrupt and inept horror of license-permit raj and “unity in diversity” became a banal political slogan that provided air cover for cults and mafia formations based on caste politics.

This is the well-worn path of the Congress Party’s moribund ideology. There is no doubt that these ideas are well past the “sell by” date. And yet the Congress insists on garlanding Rahul with these tired old bromides. His two major forays into public policy have the makeshift look of photographs taken by a pinhole camera. To begin with, he led a delegation to the Prime Minister, asking for an expansion of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme; his latest was to seek a similar broadening of the government’s recently announced loan-waiver scheme for distressed farmers.

Noble in their intent, these initiatives nevertheless have a hare-brained aspect to them. They seem to be ill-conceived with hardly any thought given to the identification of beneficiaries and how to prevent leakages; their implementation plan has the nature of what enthusiasts of American football call a “Hail Mary” pass, in which a player throws the ball in desperation hoping someone will catch it and run it into the end zone to score a touchdown. Rahul’s push seems to be based on the Congress assessment that with populist schemes and a please-all budget, they have seized the political high ground.

As political strategy, the government’s latest moves may pay handsome dividends; in a few swift gambits, the opposition has been pushed against the ropes. Given the competitive populism that passes for politics, the government can rightly feel it has emerged triumphant.

However, the schemes will do with little for their intended beneficiary: the aam aadmi. The Congress line is that given the high growth rate, the government can afford to be generous with the “weaker sections.” Meanwhile, the government’s financial managers have, because their fear of inflation, succeeded in the reversing the growth story. The latest indices of production show a steep decline in manufacturing and a virtual collapse of the capital markets.

Analysts say the overall growth rate could come down to six percent over the year. That will reduce the amount available for populist handouts. Clearly, the schemes are unsustainable, especially if the economy tanks. I wonder if the mandarins of North Block have thought this through. Otherwise, the government’s shrewd populist move will devolve into just another time-worn ploy to buy votes with money.

Unless Rahul can shake off these wilted-flower garlands, he could find it difficult to accomplish what he let slip recently: to revive the Congress by ushering in inner-party democracy। The party has not changed much; it is teeming with sycophants and fixers, and ambitious but clueless politicians, seeking to climb a rung higher. When Sonia Gandhi came upon the scene 10 years ago, the party was tottering, rent asunder by the wiles of petty men like the late Sitaram Kesri and Arjun Singh. She stabilized it, kept the flock together and went on to victory in the 2004 election.

Things have changed now and Sonia’s cautious, “don’t rock the boat” approach has passed the point of diminishing returns. The party rank and file stir themselves only to protect their turf and privileges. As things stand, it appears that for the Congress Party, we are still in the 1960s and 1970s when only state-approved voices were heard; the rest was ambient noise to be shut out by the sound-canceling earphones of ideology. From “garibi hatao” to “inclusive growth,” poverty still remains the dark side of what Nehru called the Indian adventure.

copyright: rajiv desai 2008