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Wednesday, July 2, 2008

The Dev Anand Legend

Evergreen Optimist

As I stood there shaking hands with him when he came to receive the Dada Saheb Phalke award, the years seemed to melt away. It was as though I was in my pre-teens, having just watched Nau Do Gyarah , Munimji , Paying Guest or whichever film I first saw starring Dev Anand.

I can remember going straight into the bathroom, wetting my hair and trying to work up the stylish pompadour. Dev Anand was my absolute favourite screen personality and I religiously caught every single film he ever made.

My friends say I am an inveterate optimist, that's why I came back to India after nearly two decades in the US. The optimism has its roots in my early exposure to Dev Anand's films.

Since the late 1950s and through the early 1960s, he was my favourite hero, not necessarily because he was a good actor but because he stood for hope.

While Dilip Kumar represented the tragedy of the Indian condition, Raj Kapoor the misbegotten ideology that messed up India, Dev Anand stood for what India could be, smiling and stylish with a song on the lips.

Dev Anand represents the most modern of all creative idioms: Find talented people and let them grow. Through his organisation, Navketan, we were introduced to Guru Dutt, S D Burman and dozens of others, who entertained generations with movies and music that today are part of our memories.

About the time Dev Anand began to be recognised as an entertainer, the operative mood in Indian films was down-in-the-mouth, a victim of the colonial experience. The theme song was Duniya mein hum ayein hain to jeena hi padega, jeevan hai agar zahar to peena hi padega .

Along came Dev Anand with his worldview expressed best in the song from the film Hum Dono : Barbadiyon ka shok manana fuzul tha, har fikr ko dhuein mein udata chala gaya .

His films filled me with hope, the ultimate global value that was in short supply in India at that time.

Congratulations on the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, and thank you Dev Saheb, you instilled me with optimism about India before I reached my teens.

In the words of your immortal song: Jeevan ke safar mein raahi... de jaate hain yaadein . Indeed, you have given me, a fellow traveller in the world, a rich lode of memories, never mind your lyricist's other lines, which I have left out in the ellipsis.

from the times of india, february 16, 2004

Friday, June 27, 2008

Barbarians at The Gate

All Knotted Up

Necktie wearers of the world unite! You have everything to lose: your stripes and paisleys, solids and patterns, silks and linens, cottons and wools Heck, you stand to lose a whole lot more, including grace and elegance, style and dignity. And even more insidious, as this column will reveal, you stand to lose your personal freedoms to a bunch of fundamentalists, health fascists and faceless bureaucrats.

In the past few days, the news media have circulated reports trumpeting the steady decline of the necktie. According to these reports, fewer than six percent of men wear neckties to work any more. Consequently, sales have plummeted to just 50 million neckties annually from nearly 250 million in the 1970s.

An Associated Press reporter filed the story from New York in advance of Father’s Day, when ties fly off the racks and are presented to Dads, year after year; the famous “peg.” He sounded positively gleeful at the decline of the necktie. The piece was funny as obituaries go.

But wait, there’s more to the story. It will wipe the grins and stifle the chuckles this jocular-veined story may have evoked. It is no laughing matter for the journalist has made common cause with the three main opponents of the necktie couture. The three are strikingly different from each, united only by their hatred of the necktie.

To begin with, there’s the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose fundamentalist rulers have carried on a campaign against the necktie since 1979, when a religious revolution deposed the monarchy of Shah Reza Pahlavi. To them, the necktie is a symbol of decadent Western culture that could adversely affect their country’s pure Islamic traditions.

The Shah was condemned as an agent of Western imperialism. After his ouster, the new regime moved to purge Iran of all symbols of the West. A strict dress code was imposed for men and women alike. The necktie was discouraged as an insidious Western influence. Bands of revolutionary guards took to patrolling the streets to enforce the Islamic dress code. Even harmless barbers were warned and forbidden to entertain customers with neckties.

Then there’s the giant internet firm, Google. Its privacy lawyer took up cudgels against the necktie when he wrote to the Financial Times, asserting that the firm had “unofficially” banned the wearing of ties as part of its new privacy policy. The tie, Google’s learned counsel averred, "acts as decorative camouflage for the business suit, designed to shield the middle-aged male physique, with its shrinking shoulders and protruding paunch, from feeling sufficiently self-conscious to hit the gym."

Incensed by an article written by the newspaper’s fashion editor in favor of neckties, the Google lawyer wrote the letter nearly a year ago, just about the time when Iran’s ayatollahs were embarking on their crusade, also “unofficial,” against the tie. He went on to argue that a necktie constricts circulation to the brain. While the mullahs of Iran came at the tie from their intolerance of the West’s decadent culture, the Google official flaunted an attitude that’s become a concern in America; it’s called health fascism.

The difference between Iran’s totalitarian state and the health fascism of the emergent “nanny” state in America is just one of degree. In the former, the government wants to protect culture; the latter wants to protect our health.

That is not all. In their bureaucratic way, officials at European Union headquarters in Brussels also want to ban neckties. Mercifully, they limited their ambit to the summer season. The argument is nevertheless ingenious. They say that by not wearing neckties, men would be cooler in the summer. This would allow them to turn the temperature in their air-conditioned offices up a notch or two. The result: savings of significant proportions. They put a “green” angle on it and suggested that this would help mankind in its mortal combat with global warming.

The barbarians are at the gate. Their battering rams are totalitarianism, health fascism and global warming. Straighten your ties, gentlemen, the time has come to take the atavists on!

from the times of india june 25 2008

Thursday, June 19, 2008

My Kind of Town

Springtime in Chicago

It was unseasonably cold in Chicago for the middle of May. But then I remembered snow and an ice storm in this city of broad shoulders around this time of year in the late 1980s. One evening, I got off shivering from the El (short for Elevated), the train service that ferries people back and forth from Oak Park to downtown Chicago, just nine miles apart. In the parking lot, I found my car encrusted with sheets of ice. Using the key to crack the ice, I managed to open the door and drove home. The temperature was below freezing but I held my curses, looking forward to the scotch I would pour myself at home in a few minutes. The prospect was heart warming, especially because Prakash would soon join me to share in the experience.

Prakash and I were neighbors and saw each other at all times of the week. We were never confined to the American ritual of meeting on weekends. Mostly we sat in my yard or his, savoring the spring weather, munching on deli sandwiches or enjoying an after dinner drink while it was still light out. We did that in the winter too, sitting indoors, eating pizza or hamburgers, even devouring an occasional steak. And as days grew longer and warmer, mornings we packed our cucumber sandwiches and frozen gins, put on our whites and drove 30 minutes away to suburban Oak Brook (often called New Delhi West) to play cricket on the wonderful grounds of Hamburger University (the training school for McDonald’s, which is headquartered in the suburb).

This spring was nothing like that; just cold, though the skies were blue and the sun was shining high in the sky at six in the evening. Driving to Prakash’s house, it struck me that I didn’t miss a beat steering through familiar terrain. It was as if I never left. Despite many changes, Harlem Avenue, the main drag, remains the same. In the early days, on trips to Chicago from Delhi, I had to remember to turn left from Harlem onto Augusta Street into River Forest; all the years that we lived in Oak Park, we always turned right to get home. Nevertheless, despite remembering the left turn, my mind was distracted by the fabulous jazz on WDCB, my favorite radio station. Thus, I automatically turned right. Realizing the mistake, I turned around at the corner of Woodbine Avenue, where my house was, and drove into River Forest.

Cold though it was, I had the car window open to gaze upon street corners and home gardens that were ablaze with sweet-scented lilac and to savor the wondrous aroma of barbecues amid freshly-mowed lawns. After a Chicago winter, any temperature above freezing is considered warm. People were out jogging and pottering about their gardens. The song on the radio said it all, “Heaven, I’m in heaven…”

“Why did you ever leave this gorgeous place,” my sensible self wondered. Steering the car toward Prakash’s magnificent home, the answer eluded me. Granted, we have a wonderful life in Delhi that is often the envy of my friends in America. Our neighborhood is tree lined, where you hear birdsong in the morning, not that different from Oak Park and the neighboring River Forest where Prakash lives. Trouble is when we drive out of my compound, we are faced with the chaos of India. When I pull out of Prakash’s driveway to go anywhere, it is a pleasure to deal not only with organized traffic but courteous drivers even as my senses feast on the flower-bedecked beauty of the neighborhood.

In the early days, just after we relocated to Delhi, my trips to the Oak Park-River Forest area were always laden with nostalgia. I used to drive past our house, my wife’s Montessori school, our daughter’s first primary school and various other significant landmarks with tears in my eyes. Like Odysseus, my visits to Chicago were struggles of “memory against forgetting."

Over the years, my trips have become less nostalgic and more fun. Breakfast with my friends Suresh and Pappi Hathiwala; beer with Divyesh and Darshana Mehta, brave souls to toughed it out in India for 15 years but returned to Chicago in the end. Then there's lunch at my friend Arsen’s downtown Armenian restaurant Sayat Nova with my old buddies: Larry Townsend, Mike McGuire and Dan Tucker from Chicago Tribune, the daily in which I wrote regular columns; coffee with my lawyer friend Jim Genden and his Dutch wife, Alma, an art historian; dinner at buzzing restaurants with Prakash and Alice, my hosts and drinks with Satu and Anu Pitroda. When all's said and done, there's my comrade, Angad Mehta; to spend an evening with him is to be the company of Chauncey Gardner, the protagonist of the Jerzy Kosinski novel, “Being There.” Played by Peter Sellers in the movie of the same name, Chauncey’s TV-driven character was built around the axiom that perception creates reality.

With the nostalgia out of my system, I’ve grown to love Chicago differently…as a place to relax, engage in debate and have epicurean fun. It sometimes does play on the mind: what it would be like to move back and partake of civilized life with an edge of sophistication. I am less convinced today than 15 years ago that moving back is a not a good idea. But then, as my daughters unfailingly remind me, I am weird that way: left the land of opportunity at the peak of my life and am now ruminating on the possibility of spending my later years there. But then, this is the age when your intellectual powers are at their peak and America is more hospitable. India, meanwhile, is bereft; forget intellectual pursuits, there’s no room even for intelligence.

On the other hand, India is like Circe, the sorceress who kept Odysseus from returning to his beloved Ithaca of Greek mythology. It offers seductive pleasures such as food and spices and intense human relationships; but it makes it difficult to stay the course on your moral compass. You live with dirt, filth, corruption and venality and forget about civilization and its higher pursuits. The troglodyte writer, Nirad Chaudhuri, was insightful when he called India “The Continent of Circe.” And like Odysseus, we must live in this sinful Aeaea, where the sorceress lived, even though it is plastic and crass, and spurn the pleasures of America, the modern version of Ithaca.

copyright rajiv desai 2008

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Education: India’s Achilles Heel

Caught between Elitism and Crassness

On a recent flight from Goa to Delhi, I was seated across the aisle from three loutish young men. Clearly newly rich, they bristled with flashy phones and watches. They did not turn off their cell phones even after the stewardess made an announcement; instead, they went right ahead playing with their toys. I asked them to switch the phones off. They stared at me insolently and went into a huddle from which emerged crude sounds that I finally understood to be mocking laughter.

This is the newly emergent middle class that an open India has thrown up: crass, belligerent and reckless. It is the polar opposite of the privileged classes that presided over closed India: snobbish, full of intrigue and cautious. There’s not much to choose between the two. The new one is vile; the other was servile. While I have been a champion of the emergent middle class, I guess my view was colored by my utter disdain for the privilegentsia of Fabian socialist India. The new middle class is just as hideous as the privilegentsia. I call them the Vulgarians.

The privilegentsia was bred on elitism: right connections, right schools, Oxford and Cambridge. The vulgarian instinct is to push and shove; and when push comes to shove, to buy their way out. On the other hand, while mouthing homilies about the rule of law, members of the privilegentsia held themselves above the law. They never waited their turn for anything and without the slightest bit of embarrassment bent rules, flouted regulations and scorned the law. The emergent class of vulgarians makes no such pretence: they seem to believe everything has a price: schools, colleges, hospitals, and more worryingly: bureaucrats, policemen and judges.

During the privilegentsia raj, India had to reckon with parasitic elites, who dominated state coffers, extorted usurious taxes and provided no public goods in return. Under their dispensation, ordinary citizens were cruelly ignored: no power, no water, no public transport, no roads, no airports, no telephones, no jobs, no primary education, no housing, no public health care and no sanitation.

The minuscule middle class was virtually targeted by privilegentsia policies and in many cases, driven into exile in the United States, Canada and Britain. Those who couldn’t emigrate saw conditions decline rapidly: famines, civil disturbances, war, scarcity, suspension of civil rights under the Emergency proclamation in 1975 and finally total bankruptcy, which the forced the government to fly out its gold reserves in secret and mortgage them to the Bank of England.

Forced to open up the shackled economy, the government scrapped industrial licensing and various other controls. In the process, it unleashed animal forces that transformed India. We went from being pitied as a “basket case” to being admired as an emerging world power with a dynamic economy. With GDP growth of nine percent and more for over the past five years, millions were lifted from poverty. From being an apostrophe in the demographic profile, the middle class burgeoned and became one of the world’s sought after market segments. Global business rushed in to cater to their needs and desires; local businesses shaped up to provide quality goods and responsive services.

Sadly, the flawed education system inhibited the transformation; it achieved less than what it should have. Under the privilegentsia raj, primary education was neglected and higher education became a screening process to weed out “people like them.” Thus, the ordained ones went on to Oxford and Cambridge to return to appointed positions in the privilegentsia. The others, who had no connections in the elite segment, either went abroad to seek their fortunes or stayed behind in an irrelevant higher education system to become rabble for political parties.

On the other hand, with the establishment of the IITs and IIMs, it produced engineers and managers whose skills were far too advanced to be accommodated in the makeshift “Ambassador Car” economy. As such these subsidized elite institutions became feeders to the global economy. All the Indian success stories in global business that are trumpeted in the pink papers are outcomes of the privilegentsia’s misbegotten priorities.

With the rise of the vulgarians, education has become a commodity; something you must have to get a job. All manner of dubious institutions have sprung up to cater to these needs. With the unprecedented growth of the economy, the need for talent has become so acute that just anyone with a degree or even a modicum of education can get a job. The three louts sitting across the aisle from on that flight from Goa to Delhi were clearly among those. They probably had some education and were snapped up by some company and enrolled in an internal training program. They were like trained circus performers.

We have three types of “education.” The first was the classic Oxbridge type where it didn’t matter because you came back to an appointed place in the elite establishment. The other was a technical sort of training where you had no place in India but found a perch in multinational corporations or universities or other institutes of higher learning in the West. Now you have the third variety: of trained personnel focused on specific cog-in-the-wheel jobs.

Whatever happened to liberal values and civil norms as crucial objectives of education? Their lack is India’s Achilles heel.

copyright rajiv desai 2008

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

And Know They Love You

The New Generation Gap

It was the Memorial Day weekend in America. Observed in honor of those who served in the armed forces, the last weekend in May is widely considered the start of summer, though it is still weeks away. But “led by the festive sound of rustic bagpipes, nymphs and shepherds lightly dancing beneath the brilliant canopy of spring,” you begin to anticipate summer.

Granted you can see nymphs but you don’t really see shepherds on New York’s Lower East Side nor hear the sound of bagpipes. But then we don’t write sonnets like Vivaldi; nor put them to music as concertos as Antonio did in his masterpiece, “The Four Seasons” from which the quote is taken. Regardless, it is heart warming to see young people hanging out, enjoying themselves under blue skies, starry nights and warm temperatures.

We were “cruising the hood,” my younger daughter Maya and I. She lives in and swears by the Lower East Side. My older daughter Pia says her sister never leaves her precinct if she can help it.

And so there we were, the two of us, late on a Friday afternoon, wandering the streets, stopping at bars and cafes to drink boutique beer and admire the arrondisement. We had a reservation for dinner at a wonderful restaurant, a few meters down Orchard Street where she lives. We got there a bit early and sat at the bar.

I thought to have a martini and promptly told the bartender, who was stirring the cocktail, that I preferred it “shaken not stirred.” Everyone laughed so I was tempted to introduce myself as “Bond, James Bond.” But seriously though, how do you explain to twenty-somethings that a shaken martini tastes different than the other? I let it go because our table was ready. Now there’s news that indeed there is a difference. You can Google it: just type martini, shaken, not stirred. The study clearly concludes that a martini is better shaken than stirred.

But I digress… it’s the Memorial Day weekend and I am spending it with my younger daughter at her apartment in New York’s Lower East Side. She is my shepherd through the urban meadows surrounding Delancey Street, showing me the pastures and the drinking holes. Where we stop, mostly everyone seems to know and be fond of her, including bartenders and maîtres de.

Just so everyone understands, these are crucial relationships in Manhattan. I can remember one time; she managed a table for us at short notice at a choice restaurant that takes reservations days in advance because she knew the chef. She can mostly get served anywhere she wants in her neighborhood; plus they hug and kiss her. No wonder her sister calls her “Fluffy.”

We topped off the evening at a little restaurant to have dessert. She knew everyone there and the house served me bourbon so rare that even I, an aficionado, hadn’t heard of it. “Yo Dad,” she says to me over the general ruckus, “like it?” I was almost in tears…my little girl introduced me to a rare brand of my favorite drink. In the patois of the time, I could only think, “How cool is this!”

As we walked the streets through the afternoon and evening, late into the night, my thoughts wandered back to the time of my first visit to New York. I fell in love instantly: it was human and real, very different from the orderly, manicured Midwest where I went to school. It felt more like a world city, a polyglot of cultures; eons away from the smiley-face cities I lived in, with what Ernest Hemingway memorably called “wide lawns and narrow minds.”

A generation later, my little girl has established herself in what is indisputably the coolest precinct in the world’s most vibrant city. She laughs at my Midwestern experience of America. To her, the Midwest is unreal. “Dad, people actually smiled and said hello,” she told me about her recent visit to Chicago. She was struck by its “other worldly” air. “Look, Dad, some white dude in Brooks Brothers smart casual actually offered to take a picture” of her and her older sister as they walked in downtown Chicago. Yes, it was nice and all, she admitted but he did it even “without our asking?”

Just like I did years ago with yuppies, my daughter has a problem with “hipsters,” who are gentrifying her neighborhood. This is a new species of yuppies with rich parents. “They feel they are slumming it on the Lower East Side. They spend hours and lots of money trying to look as if they’d just rolled out of bed,” my daughter said by way of explanation. “They push off to their parents’ home in the Hamptons on long weekends,” a bartender told me in affirmation of her comment.

In her perspective, I saw much of my worldview. I was a hirsute hippie, who wore oxford shirts and penny loafers. While I bristled at the inequities in the world, I also worked hard at graduate school. I thought I knew America when I lived in distant India and found when I got there that there was a difference in the image and the reality. My biggest learning was that the cutting-edge thinking in America had more to do with purpose and commitment than with lifestyle.

On the other hand, my American-born daughter lives easily, mixing lifestyle with commitment and purpose. Nothing seems to faze her in any way; she is equal to situations in a way that I simply could not conceive at her age. She deals with Manhattan and its formidable ways as though she was born to live there; not just to make a living but a life. She took me to places that most people would never find and showed me things that are off the beaten track.

Wandering the streets of the Lower East Side, we popped into establishments that were so cool I felt like I was in a Woody Allen film. We chatted mostly about her neighborhood. She sounded not so much like a tourist guide but a proud resident of the coolest “hood” in Manhattan. On the other hand, she reminded me she cooks Gujarati khichri and Goan fish curry but mostly gets by on pastas and salads.

For me the walk around the block was an education. Not just about the buzzy Lower East Side but about my younger daughter. She is a full grown young woman making her way with great aplomb in the world’s most happening city. “If you can make it here,” sang Frank Sinatra, “you can make it anywhere.” And she’s making it in her job as a production assistant in a startup venture that does stuff I don’t really understand. All I know is she “hearts” it.

To see parts of yourself in your adult children is satisfying. My older daughter, who works with me in New Delhi, is organized and incisive and can get anything done. She is the family’s chief operating officer. I am learning from her to see things in the cold light of pragmatism. Over the Memorial Day weekend with the younger one, I found her to be a sophisticate, who is humble but purposive. She is the family wit, ready with a humorous insight and a caustic turn of phrase. I am learning from both my girls that the pursuit of cool is a major behavioral pattern in the 21st century.

This fundamental issue of cool is emerging as the new generation gap. While I admire my daughters’ state of being cool, I do feel a twinge of “been there, done that.” Poor dears: my generation defined the state of cool forever: Kerouac and Miles Davis, Dylan and Timothy Leary, The Beatles and Woodstock are the icons of cool. Deep in their hearts, they know that cool was invented by their parents’ generation. As such, they must know our cool is cooler than theirs.

But we never tell them why, instead, as the cult band, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, sang, “just look at them sigh and know they love you.”

copyright rajiv desai 2008