It’s summertime in this city of broad shoulders and the Grant Park Symphony is performing works by Mendelssohn, Schumann and Haydn in MillenniumPark, a 25-acre park built on what were parking garages and railway yards when we lived there in the 1970s and 1980s. The Great Lawn that spreads in front of the stage in the Jay Pritzker Pavilion is swarming with people, nearly 10,000 of them, savoring a picnic dinner made mostly of local ingredients and sharing bottles of wine.
What a wonderful tableau of post modern life in America: a city that enhances your life beyond the income you earn, the house you live in, the schools your children go to, the stuff you buy and the social circles in which you live! Chicago has created wonderful public places for people to mingle, surely with their friends but also with people you would not normally meet. Though the word is politically charged in India, Chicago has as such developed “communal” spaces, where people of every hue can intermingle. It is as though Woodstock had a bath and a shave and switched from drugs to wine.
There was camaraderie in the air that evening. People seemed to revel in being denizens of this great city. Everyone smiled, nodded and enjoyed the communal experience. Sure there was huge mess of tourists from other more bland parts of the Midwest. They stuck out like sore thumbs, determined to enjoy the big city. On the other hand, there were locals with an air of entitlement. “This is our city and that’s the least we expect,” their demeanor seemed to say.
We think of Chicago as our hometown. It’s our daughters’ birthplace; the city where be bought our first house. Chicago is where, in the 1970s, we launched a community newspaper that still survives; the city where we created a family of friends who are still very much part of our lives; the city where my twin careers in public affairs and journalism got started. Our particular affinity for the city is ingrained within our souls in a way no resident of or visitor to the city can imagine.
Our many Indian friends in Chicago dream fondly about their Delhi, Bombay, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Hyderabad, Bangalore or the hundreds of little towns and villages they came from. They paint India in the rose-colored hues of nostalgia, never mind that their cities (and indeed all Indian cities) are hellholes. On the other hand, we live in India and look forward to the next visit to our Chicago that becomes nicer, more exciting with each year that passes.
My good friend Ashis Nandy, India's leading social psychologist,is a leading thinker, whose critiques of the modern development paradigm have won global applause. His reasoned view is development should be on a human scale. He speaks about an egalitarian ethos, an embrace of local culture and a social system in which people can live with dignity.
Unlike most scholars in India, Ashis is an open man, ready to consider new ideas and arguments. He is not, like most Indian intellectuals, de facto anti-American, though he may have problems with the capitalist ethic and its attendant consumer ethos. He is a post modern thinker who worries about unbridled economic growth and the concomitant destruction of traditional values. It is through his eyes that I recognize that America has gone post modern in its approach to development. Urban planners in Chicago especially but also in the rest of America have learned and implemented the values of self reliance and sustainable lifestyles.
While most of the public debate in India is about American imperialism (the Left) and American debauchery (the Right), Ashis is the kind of iconoclastic thinker who would look beyond stereotypes to appreciate the urban revolution that is underway in America. And Chicago is the pioneer. It builds skyscrapers and expressways but also parks and promenades. The humane scale is there for all to see; one children’s park on the city’s newly-developed East Side is paved with a soft, cork-like material to combat scraped knees and bruised elbows.
When we lived in Chicago in the 1970s and the 1980s, India was seen as a poverty-stricken, disease-ridden basket case. Today, it is regarded as a possible engine of world growth. The Indian community in America is lauded as an accomplished minority. Fact is, though, that as India modernizes with all the attendant problems, America is in a post modern state of mind. Nobody really cares how many highways India builds or the rise of its stock market or the rapidly expanding middle class. Question is, as Chicago poses, what have you done for the people lately?
What the Indian establishment should say in response is “Father, forgive me for I have sinned.” Without a proper confessional, India will continue to flounder in confused urban development and be strangled by a vicious rural power structure.
Such dark and dire thoughts occur to people like us who care about the India project: a great democracy and a vital economy that is challenged by corrupt and inept governance. Fact is India goes its own sloppy way and there is a palace guard of politicians, bureaucrats and well-off citizens who couldn’t care less. The rest of the citizenry is left to fend on its own. Just think, in affluent neighborhoods too in Delhi and all the cities, towns and villages in India, there is no water supply, sanitation or electric power; there are no decent roads, no decent schools, no jobs; only rapidly dwindling hope. At some point, the crises may become overwhelming.
India's stark and brutal conditions stand out even more sharply seen against the post modern West. Once again, it is being left behind just when it seemed poised to catch up.
A burgeoning middle class, a slowing economy, a creeping intolerance, a terrorist challenge, and a growing voice in the world: these are the challenges and the opportunities that face the country as it prepares for the next general election. Yet the issues being raised in the campaign are largely about caste and religion; the debate is about yesterday, not even today.
The BJP is floundering over Varun Gandhi’s intemperate outburst against Muslims, afraid to alienate its communal “base” and worried about losing the new middle class support it has gained in the past decade. It went ballistic over the shoe-throwing incident at a Congress press conference and sought to revive, after 25 years, anger over the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984.
Perhaps the worst case of the BJP’s growing irrelevance is Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, who, in a recent campaign speech, pejoratively called the Congress Party a 125-year-old woman. Modi is not just the fascist shame of Gujarat; he is obviously prejudiced towards women and old people. We know that like Shakespeare’s pathetic Macbeth, he harbors ambitions of being Prime Minister.
Given his intemperate ways, Modi is a poor player like bloody Macbeth, who “struts and frets his hour upon the stage …full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Meanwhile, Gujarat, like Macbeth’s Scotland, “sinks beneath (his) yoke. It weeps. It bleeds and each new day a gash is added to her wounds.”
Commissars of the Left and bosses of various regional factions are pushing aggressively for a “Third Front” government that excludes both the Congress and the BJP. Chieftains of the various caste formations in the Hindi heartland are busy posturing over the prospect that their “Fourth Front” could emerge as a key power broker in the event of a hung Parliament. Neither front has a coherent strategy except to fish in troubled waters.
As always, the Congress maintains a stoic silence amid the din of its rivals; its game plan is to emerge as the single largest party and then gain adherents from the various fronts. Amazingly, it has never been forced to defend its record of governance in the past five years. Its economic policies have included questionable populist giveaways and timid monetary policies. Its foreign policy has been reactive and tactical in the face of challenges from all around the neighborhood including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.
More than at any other time, there seems to be a complete disconnect between politics and the new reality. The nearly 20 million new voters of 1991 vintage have grown up in an India where possibilities are endless. More important, they believe that tomorrow has to be better than today. This is in stark contrast to the generation of “Midnight’s Children.” We were wracked by uncertainty so we voted with our feet and pushed off overseas, ostensibly to study but truly to make our fortune.
Today’s children want to go to America like we did. The difference is they want to gain skills and expertise and come back home to lucrative jobs. Their worldview is different. Never mind if they are rural poor, urban slum dwellers or middle class youth. They have no patience; they want it all and they want it now. The political class simply doesn’t understand this driving force largely because it runs on a feudal ethic.
Also in evidence is a curiously cynical lethargy: not a single party has outlined a plan to deal with the rapidly growing middle class and the concomitant demands for good governance. Mindsets of yesteryear preclude the recognition of the middle class. The focus is exclusively on the poor, one segment of the population that is declining in number. This particular quirk is the single most powerful sign that the political class is out of touch with the rapidly changing demography.
Consequently, voters must decide without the benefit of an informed debate on the issues. This election is the first one in which men and women born in 1991 will cast their votes. This is a brand new generation that has grown up in an era of liberalization and globalization. Seen against the rise of a 300-million-strong middle class, it is clear that a consumer economy is taking root.
What’s worse, the media simply don’t get it. Thus we are told that Mayawati is a candidate for the top office. This is simply incredible. With the 30 or 40 odd seats she may garner, mostly in Uttar Pradesh, it is difficult to imagine such an outcome. Yes, V P Singh, Chandra Shekhar, H D Deve Gowda and I K Gujral did make it. All of them were supported on the outside by the Congress or the BJP. They ran rump governments that lasted few months.
It ain’t gonna happen with Mayawati, who wins sympathy as a Dalit woman but is nevertheless accused of milking her supporters to build statues of herself. Shamelessly, she has built herself a Xanadu-like palace called BSP House on Delhi’s pricey Sardar Patel Marg. Just because you happen to be a Dalit woman doesn’t mean you cannot be questioned on ethical considerations. It’s all very well to say that everyone’s corrupt in the political domain. But why should the same scrutiny not apply to her?
Whatever the pundits say, it is clear that neither Advani nor Mayawati, never mind the other pretenders, is about to become the next Prime Minister.
A Version of This Column Appeared in The Times of India, April 14, 2009
Res Gestae is based on the belief that because certain statements are made naturally, spontaneously and without deliberation during the course of an event, they leave little room for misunderstanding/misinterpretation upon hearing by someone else.
