India: The Bombay I Knew and Loved

The Bombay I knew had clean, quiet, tree-lined suburban streets where on public holidays, we played hockey, football and cricket. If the ball went out in the middle of the street, you ran out to pick it up without a second thought. Today you would get run over in less than a nano-second by some brat driving around in his daddy’s luxury SUV.

In the Bombay I knew, there was no cable TV. Kids were encouraged to come out and play after school. If you didn’t play sports, your peers called you a wimp. There were no fancy gyms. If you wanted to exercise, you sweated it out in your building compound or on the street, just like all the other kids. On afternoons when you had time to spare, you went to “town” to watch Kanga League cricket matches at the Oval Maidan. Today, I do not see kids playing anymore. They are too caught up with computer games and homework, no doubt.

In the Bombay I knew, there was only black and white television, on which you watched “Chhayageet” and Sunil Gavaskar making one of his interminably long test match centuries. “Another innings of dedication, determination and application”, the commentators used to intone. On the way back from school, you stopped by the local paan-waala to listen to the latest cricket score on his handy, nifty transistor radio. You don’t see too many of those anymore either.

In the Bombay I knew, you tuned into Radio Ceylon at night to listen to all the latest American pop hits.

In the Bombay I knew, there were rows and rows of lovely cottages facing the sea. You wondered what it would be like to live in one of them. They are all gone now, replaced by matchbox style high-rise buildings, where you pay the equivalent of a lifetime’s income for a quality of life that is non-existent.

In the Bombay I knew, Bandra Reclamation was one huge field, where kids played all day long in the summertime. Today the place is one giant slum.

On lazy, hot summer days, you went to Bandra Fort to sneak a cigarette or satiate your raging teenage hormones by making out with a girlfriend. In those days, Bandra Fort was almost off-limits. There were rumours of smugglers landing there on dark nights with gold biscuits and counterfeit electronic goods. People said that jackals lurked in the ruins of the fort and howled at night. Today, it is home to a five-star hotel. The smugglers and jackals (if they really existed) are long gone.

In the Bombay I knew, you went to Jude’s Bakery in Bandra early in the morning to buy kadak-pav and ate it with maska, and a cup of hot steaming tea.

In the Bombay I knew, you learnt how to drive in your dad’s old stick-shift 1974 Ambassador car. You had never heard of air-conditioning, automatic transmission, power steering or power windows.

The Bombay I knew was the most diverse, tolerant and cosmopolitan city in India. Nobody asked you where you were from. Nobody called you an “outsider”. At school, nobody asked you your religion, your caste or your ethnic background. Nobody felt superior to you if they belonged to a different community. Nobody laughed at your community’s festivals and customs. All of us were from Bombay, and that was enough.

In the Bombay I knew, you went to Parsi weddings at Khusro Baug, where old Parsi men drank Sosyo raspberry juice, ate caramel custard made in Ratan Tata Institute and quarrelled with waiters about how small the chicken legs on their plate were. Everybody had a great time.

In the Bombay I knew, you spoke either English or “Bambaiyaa Hindi” with your friends. The language, like the city of Bombay, was a melting pot of several different Indian languages. You used words like “raapchik” and “pochaaoed” (the latter was an obscene Bandra special and possibly not in use in the rest of the city). When you saw your friend coming down the street, you yelled “Aey, yer bugger” (another Bandra special).

In the Bombay I knew, you celebrated Diwali with your Hindu friends. During Durga Puja, you pretended to be a good Bengali and went to the Pujo-Baadi in Shivaji Park, mainly to eat the delicious singhadaas and sandesh. On Christmas and New Years’ you went for midnight mass with your Catholic friends (my neighbourhood at the time was predominantly Catholic), partly to check out the pretty young women who attended in hordes. On occasions such as baptisms and funerals of neighbours you knew, you dressed up and went to church. On Christmas Eve, groups of young kids would come and sing Christmas carols below your window. In return, you gave them some money to enjoy themselves.

In the Bombay I knew, there were no expensive nightclubs and discos. Setting up a party was a project. There were no cell phones, and landline phones worked only sometimes. You partied on your friend’s terrace. You hired a stereo and listened to Eddie Grant singing “Electric Avenue” at full volume. You cringed when your friend with poor taste in music suddenly played “Funky Town”.

In the Bombay I knew, you went and bought alcohol from “Aunty’s” on “dry” days. Aunty was a woman who lived in Shirley Rajan village in Bandra, and sold liquor at exorbitant prices to desperate teenagers on “dry days”. She lived on the second floor. You whistled when you got to her building, and her assistant, a little boy, came running up to you. You told him what brand of whisky you wanted and gave him the money. He ran up the stairs and handed over the money to “Aunty” who then proceeded to lower the bottle containing the beverage of your choice in a basket attached to a rope. It was a very smooth operation.

On weekends, you went out for drives with your family and dog to places like Aarey Milk Colony in Goregaon (with the traffic, slums and pollution today, this must seem unimaginable). You ate vada-pav outside Churchgate Station, had a few beers with the freaks at Café Mondegar and ate huge lunches at George’s Restaurant in Fort. If you were in the mood for a steak, you walked down to Wayside Inn on Rampart Row, where doddering elderly waiters with bad attitudes served you the best steaks in Bombay. Wayside Inn is gone and in its place is a fancy, glitzy restaurant with no character or personality.

Yes, I remember that Bombay well, the beautiful city with the sea on one side and the rolling Western Ghats on the other, easily the most important and enlightened city in India.

In light of recent events, that Bombay is gone forever. Bombay represented the mess that was India, but also all that was good and great. It was a grand experiment which showed us what we could achieve as a nation if we put all our regional and religious divisions behind us. It taught me what being Indian really meant. It taught me to judge people based on who they were as individuals, and not on what language they spoke at home or which part of the country they came from. I miss that Bombay, I miss that India.

Politics: Will the Real Rahul Baba Please Stand Up?

Imagine that you work for an old family-run firm. The firm has been owned and managed for generations by the same dynasty. Imagine also, that the firm is currently run by a matriarch. The matriarch is a very savvy, egotistical woman who projects the firm as being democratic, modern and progressive, whereas in reality, it is the opposite - traditional, autocratic and conservative. The firm has many faithful retainers like you. To keep herself in power, the matriarch brooks no opposition and often plays the faithful retainers off against each other.

The matriarch has invited you to her home for dinner. As someone who has spent his whole career with the firm, you definitely make it a point to attend. It is a signal honour, to be recognised and invited to her home for dinner. However, somewhere deep inside, you feel a sense of resentment. You view yourself as an intelligent and capable employee, who if given half a chance, would do a really great job of running the firm.

Once at the party, you mill around and talk to the other family retainers who have also been invited. You also deferentially greet the matriarch’s precocious young son. It is very clear to everyone present at the party that the son is being groomed for a leadership role, though his skills have never really been tested. On the rare occasions that the son has been given any real responsibilities within the firm, he has failed to perform. This fact is kept under wraps as the matriarch invariably finds a scapegoat when things go wrong.

The matriarch’s philosophy is simple – take credit for herself and her son when things go well, pin responsibility on others when they go badly. This deepens your sense of resentment and insecurity, but you are helpless. After all, many family retainers like you have been sidelined by the matriarch when things have not gone well for the firm. You have no choice but to bow in deference to the matriarch and her son. After all, who else can run this family firm? All your life you have been conditioned to believe that only the family the matriarch belongs to is capable of doing so.

This scenario pretty much captures the way things are run within India’s Congress Party. Sonia Gandhi rules with an iron hand. Manmohan Singh is the regent, keeping the Prime Minister’s chair warm for Rahul Gandhi or Rahul “baba” as he is still known. Rahul “baba” is now forty years old, and it is time for him to grow up.

He has been hovering on the fringes of India’s political scene for years now. The problem with him is that he appears to be well-intentioned, but has yet to demonstrate any leadership or administrative skills. He does not have any ministerial portfolio. The Congress Party carefully stage-manages his few public appearances. I can think of two or three such instances recently. The first was last year, when he went to meet the Prime Minister about the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). The NREGS was already being implemented nation-wide without Rahul baba’s help. But the Congress Party made it a point to send out several detailed press releases on Rahul baba’s meeting with Manmohan Singh. This stage-managed event was designed to show how much Rahul baba cared for the rural poor.

Another such event took place recently, where Rahul baba was photographed helping low-caste Dalit farmers build earthen dams. Here again, the press release and photographs focused on how Rahul baba’s heart bled for the poor, not what was being done to alleviate the miseries of the Dalit farmers in question. He is being projected as being well-intentioned and articulate. Unfortunately, that is not enough to govern a country. Every politician (including and especially the villainous ones), claim to have the country’s best interests at heart, and all of them say that all they want to do is “serve” the country.

There is nothing wrong with Mama (Sonia Gandhi) trying to project Rahul Gandhi as India’s next Prime Minister. This is the way “democracy” works in the Congress Party. But what the rest of the country needs to know is whether Rahul baba has the actual skills, intelligence and gumption to run the nation. His past record is not inspiring. He graduated from St. Stephen’s College in Delhi about twenty years ago. There were vague reports that he “studied” at Harvard University in the US. This means nothing, because anyone who is rich and well-connected can take a few summer classes for fun at Harvard University. The point is, he did not graduate or complete any degree at Harvard (or anywhere else).

He has never really worked or held a regular job in the last twenty years. Even within the Congress Party, he has never ever been directly responsible for conceiving or implementing any of the various public-works schemes the government has come up with. In terms of garnering votes for the Congress, his record is disastrous. He pulls in the crowds everywhere he goes, but these people never seem to vote for him. To date, every time he has campaigned for the Congress, the party has lost elections. This pattern has been repeated – in Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat and many other places. Rahul Gandhi’s presence at campaign rallies are the kiss of death (at least so far).

Before I am accused of being a supporter of the BJP or any opposition political party, let me say here that I have nothing against Rahul baba in person. The point is – I have nothing positive to say about him either, because nobody seems to know exactly what he stands for. Being blandly polite is not enough. What are his views on the economy, and reducing poverty in India? How does he propose to deal with terrorism? How does he propose to handle India’s huge environmental problems? How does he plan to tackle an overstaffed corrupt bureaucracy that feels it is not accountable to the people of India?

It is possible that Rahul Gandhi is extremely intelligent, well-intentioned and capable. If so, this is India’s best kept secret. But for the rest of us to know what he is really made of, he needs to be plain-spoken and take up a position of real responsibility within the government. To paraphrase an old rap song – “Will the real Rahul Gandhi please stand up, please stand up, please stand up?”

Politics: Don’t Cry For Me, West Bengal

I am only part Bengali, and I have never lived in West Bengal. I have visited Kolkata only three times in my life, and my only frame of reference of my heritage are ancient sepia-tinted photographs of an old, palatial ancestral house on the banks of the mighty Ganges River that I have never seen. How green was my valley. Well, I saw it when I was one year old, so that doesn’t count.

Still, I do have a soft corner for the state, and it saddens me to see how this once-mighty state is now one of the poorest and most backward parts of India. This was not always so. For two hundred years until the 1960s, West Bengal was India’s leading state in terms of industry, education and thought. The state played an important role in the freedom movement, and produced great writers, poets and intellectuals.

For a little while recently, it appeared that the state was finally making attempts to shed the stupor and anti-industry attitude that has characterised it over the last forty-odd years. The state’s Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya is that rarest of politicians – a man who genuinely believes in the welfare and happiness of his constituency. He is a Communist, but he is one of the very few political leaders in India that I have great personal regard for. I disagree with his political ideology, but heartily endorse his concern for the welfare of the people of West Bengal. Unlike his fellow comrades, he is a pragmatist who believes fervently in change and he has scant respect for long-dead retrograde Communist ideologies. He stirred up a controversy recently when he said that strikes by workers were counterproductive, hurt common people and should be banned. His Stalinist colleagues in the Communist Party were not amused. India’s communists make careers out of encouraging and sponsoring industrial strikes.

So the decision by the Tatas, India’s most respected India’s industrial house, to set up the first Nano car manufacturing plant in West Bengal was a matter of great pride and honour for the state and its administration. The Nano car has gotten a lot of attention globally as the world’s first car priced below US $ 2,500. Many hoped this prestigious project would mark the turning point for Bengal’s fortunes and end the long darkness in which the state has lived for the last forty years.

Unfortunately, that was not to be, thanks to that shrill rabble-rouser, Mamata Banerjee. Like everything in India that can actually make a difference in the lives of its citizens, the project has become the victim of politics. Even politicians supporting the project suddenly reversed gears. Witness Information and Broadcasting Minister Priya Ranjan Das Munshi from the Congress Party calling Ratan Tata’s withdrawal speech (in which squarely blamed Mamata Banerjee for the pull-out) “arrogant”. I am not sure how Ratan Tata’s speech could be classified as being arrogant. He has a right to be upset because his company Tata Motors has invested millions of dollars in Singur. Indian politicians are always upset whenever someone is honest and speaks the truth, since they are so used to lying all the time.

Three months ago, when the Communists were part of the Congress led coalition government at the Centre, this same minister was scathingly critical of Mamata Banerjee and her destructive, intimidatory tactics at Singur. At that time, Das Munshi (nauseatingly fawned over and referred to as “Priyoda” by news anchor Barkha Dutt) was all for the Nano car project at Singur. Now that the Congress is trying to ally with Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress party, suddenly the plight of a few farmers in Singur has become very important, and Ratan Tata is a villain.

That apart, what exactly is the ground reality in Singur? The truth has been obscured by political posturing, misinformation and lying by Mamata Banerjee and her cohorts. The truth is this - a total of 13,000 farmers were told to give up land for the Nano project, of which 11,000 farmers or 85% gave up their land willingly. All of this overwhelming majority of individuals and families were subsistence farmers who were living in near-poverty and realized that the Nano project gave them an opportunity to educate their children and get them skilled jobs in the industrial sector. A small minority (15%) of farmers opposed this project and did not want to part with their land. It is not clear as to whether they did not want to sell their land at all or whether they were holding out for greater compensation. Mamata Banerjee and her colleagues never gave us a chance to find out.

Once Mamata started her violent anti-Nano agitation, she was joined by many self-professed “protectors of the poor” – a motley bunch of individuals and groups who claim that they represent the poor, but whose actual objective is to keep people mired in misery and poverty. Chief among these was Anuradha Talwar, a fat, hairy aggressive woman in her mid-fifties, who looks like a frustrated housewife from Lajpat Nagar in Delhi. Once people like her got involved in the agitation, the truth about Singur was obscured, sadly forever.

Now that the Tatas have finally decided to move out of Singur, there is a sense of dismay and dismay among most residents there. Many of them were landless laborers who were depending on the plant to provide them with jobs and livelihoods. Now they have been left stranded – without either their land or jobs. Of course, Mamata Banerjee and Anuradha Talwar have pronounced this a “victory of the people” and left. Who will now pick up the pieces for the poor of Singur, now that they have been deserted by their “protectors”?

In a recent debate on Singur, a senior editor of one of India’s leading business magazines brought up an important point. Mamata Banerjee and Anuradha Talwar ferried in thousands of people into Singur during the anti-Nano agitation. These people were outsiders, brought in solely to spread chaos and destruction and prevent the Nano plant from functioning. A back of the envelope calculation revealed that feeding and housing these thousands of agitators for 25 odd days cost about Rs. 1.5 crore per day, adding up to about Rs. 40 crore for the duration of the agitation . Who was paying for this? Anuradha Talwar claimed she did not know who was footing the bill, which is strange since she was the one who organized the agitation. The journalist also went on to add that in fact, the agitation was paid for by “a leading two wheeler manufacturer who is also planning to launch a small car in the US $ 3,000 price range”. He declined to name this company, but the answer was obvious – Bajaj Auto. Rahul Bajaj is collaborating with Renault to make a car similar to the Nano at a similar price. Bajaj is one of India’s richest industrialists. However, one does not know whether he tried to sabotage the Nano car plant at Singur. Ratan Tata has also repeatedly said that vested business interests have tried to sabotage the production of the Nano car. He is not one to make such allegations lightly, so the allegation could be true.

So once again, politics has prevailed as an obstacle in India’s progress. It is sad, it is tragic. The only silver lining in all of this is that Mamata Banerjee is now rightly being vilified by the people of Singur. They have realized that she is solely responsible for their plight, and for the Tatas’ pullout from Singur. She will lose the next round of elections there. However, it is cold comfort.

Buddhadeb Bhattacharya is still determined to industrialize his state. He realizes that it is not possible for such large numbers of people to eke out a livelihood on such small amounts of land. 65% of India’s population is dependent on agriculture, which contributes only 23% to India’s GDP. This is not a sustainable situation, which Bhattacharya realises. I wish him all the best in his endeavour. We have so few politicians who genuinely care about their constituencies – he is one of them. More power to him.