India Zindabad!

The Indian cricket hype machine was taken out of the garage, sprayed all over with WD-40 and running like a dream for the start of the World Cup in March. Sadly, in spite of newspaper, TV, billboard and shopping centre babble so blanket it could keep you warm through a Delhi December night, nobody was paying much attention for about a month. World Cup yadda yadda whatever England lose to Ireland ha ha ha.

Then India got to the quarter-finals, and drew Australia. Suddenly it was everywhere: I was on an aeroplane that night, the airport apparently empty until you found the bit of the departure lounge with a telly and a thousand people around it. After we took off, the pilot gave us regular score updates: when India won, there was a round of applause, not to mention the odd whoop and holler. World Cup nonsense was finally here.

A few days later, the whole country stopped what it was doing. A semi-final against Pakistan, in Punjab of all places. It briefly crossed my mind that the tone of public discourse around that game was unpleasant, perhaps even belligerent: then I remembered what it was like in England when we played Germany in football semi-finals. And suddenly it all seemed rather restrained.

They say that love of cricket crosses otherwise impermeable Indian class divides: and while that’s true, it doesn’t mean the divides aren’t still preserved. In a hookah lounge in Bangalore, a rowdy crowd of middle-class youngsters sat at tables playing Pakistan-wicket-drinking games; outside, the autorickshaw-wallahs and labourers stared in at the big screen.

After victory in the final against Sri Lanka, Mumbai was as fun as I’ve ever seen it: every motorbike speeding past at midnight seemed to have at least five people on, waving Indian flags and screaming ‘Indiaaaaaaaa’ or just ‘wwrraaaaaaaaiiiiiihhhh’. It had turned out, to everyone’s slight surprise, that the hype was entirely justified.

Less than a week after the final, the Indian Premier League began, and what was hyperama last year met with general indifference this time around. Refreshingly, everyone in India’s put their feet up and can’t be bothered with any more cricket for the time being. It’s reminiscent of Franck Lebouef on They Think It’s All Over, not long after he fluked his way into the French team for the 1998 World Cup Final. He didn’t know any of the quiz answers, but just shrugged a big bald crap centre-half Gallic shrug, saying “I doen’t cairre. I won ze World Cup.”

Canis lupus over-familiaris, I suspect

One of the pleasures of my life in Mumbai is the thirty minutes or so that I spend every day walking to and from work, a rare privilege in a city defined by epic commutes and traffic jams. It’s a chance for half an hour’s daily pondering of the world around me, and lately I’ve been doing my mental meanderings on a number of important questions:

Does that sev puri seller’s technique of washing pots and pans in a muddy puddle really get them clean?
If I keep looking around like an owl on E, or like Chris Evans in his toothbrush days, will I get across the Nasty Junction in one piece?
Shouldn’t you be at school?
Would you mind awfully just using the klaxon a little less frequently?
And most of all, why do all the dogs look the same?



The thing that’s always impressed me most about the dog world is its variety: from the tiniest little terrier to the most massive mutt, they’ve got a diversity that would impress an Arts Council assessor. And the posh dogs in Mumbai are no different, the dogs who are walked on leads by people’s underemployed drivers range from the tiddly to the terrifying. But out on the street where there are dogs all over the place, they’re all a middling sort of size, a middling brownish colour, a middling sort of vague demeanour. All of them. No diversity at all. All other boxes go unticked.

I wonder if there might some brutal fascist dog regime that controls the streets, and has created a master race of mediocrity by exterminating all the bigger, smaller, darker and lighter dogs? There’s a great crap movie to be made, though come to think of it the generic Mumbai dog look is not too different from the evil Cardinal Richelieu in D’artagnan and the Muskehounds, so the precedent has already been set.

But I fear the truth is more prosaic and something to do with evolution. As Woody Guthrie wrote in She Came Along To Me, “All creeds and kinds and colors of us are blending / Till I suppose ten million years from now / We'll all be just alike”. The difference with dogs is they start procreating when they’re a lot younger than we humans, so the process has happened more quickly. Or, as my more concise friend puts it, “it’s cos they all shag each other innit”. Well, quite.

Travels with my auntie maggie’s remedy

Sitting room

In Jaipur for the annual literary shindig: and it’s pretty clear that this country takes the American approach to writers - treating them as celebrity intellectuals (celebrectuals?) to be fawned over - rather than the traditional British attitude of regarding them as mildly eccentric curios in corduroy and then hectoring them for something they wrote while drunk in 1973. JM Coetzee reads a moderately interesting short story and is acclaimed like he’s St Peter preaching the epistles to the apostles.

One thing that’s changed for the better since last year is that it doesn’t feel quite so much like a society gathering for the keen-to-be-seen great and the good of Delhi and their gazillions of media hangers-on. There are actually some real people this time.

But that’s not to say there aren’t still irritations: the large crowds mean that seats for events are at a premium. So five minutes before one starts you have to play this futile game of walking down rows of empty seats being told by the one person within book-bag throwing distance, “sorry, these are taken”, or worse, “sorry, there’s somebody sitting there”. (How I can look at an empty seat, and be told that there is somebody sitting there, and not question my own sanity is beyond me.)

But I’m a courteous, well brung-up person (sometimes), so I rage inwardly and sit on the grass with the schoolkids, losing my fixed Britisher-abroad polite smile only for a second to cast a withering glance at the highfalutin Dilliwallas who emerge from the powder room and park their elegant behinds on a pristine white seat with thirty seconds to spare.


Boogie wonderland

A few days later I drop anchor in Bangalore for a dance festival, rattling my way everywhere I go with an assortment of pills that would make Shaun Ryder proud. I’m experiencing a minor bout of a condition that strikes every few months when you’re in India and is best described as ‘dodginess’. So after a day of taking all the drugs I can lay my hands on, but most importantly following my mother’s sage advice that ‘sleep is the best medicine’, I feel fully rehabilited and ready to retake my place in society.

Bangalore has the best arts audiences in India, and the more difficult to sell it looks on paper, the more they seem to lap it up. Series of solo contemporary dance pieces by unknown emerging choreographers from small damp island a long way away? That’ll be a full house and rapturous acclaim, sir. Do come again.

Soniaji and Kenniji get stuck in a lift

I remember when I realised that Bill Clinton was not, in fact, the lost lovechild of Elvis and JFK. It was when I first read that his favourite musician was the execrable Kenny G. From that moment on, Bill was cool no more.

Fast forward eighteen years or so, and sometimes India sounds like Clinton FM. Yes of course there is appalling lift music and hotel lobby fodder all around the world, and no doubt old Kenny makes magnificent royalty cheques in Aarhus and Zanzibar and everywhere in between, but India seems to have particularly taken this sort of pap to its heart and gleefully allowed it to wrap itself around its ventricles and clog up its arteries with this musical cholestrol.

I’ve lived in the same flat now for over eighteen months. There are two lifts up to our floor: one is music free, the other plays Kenny G. One excerpt, about thirty seconds long, loops over and over, again and again, day after day, month after month. We've had this infinite muzak ear-shelling for the best part of two years now, with nary a hint of a ceasefire. Needless to say, given the choice, all sane flat-dwellers plump for the terribly boring, quiet lift. It’s the same on domestic flights, where they bombard you with ghastly music because apparently it’s relaxing. So relaxing that my blood pressure reaches a higher altitude than the plane.

But I suppose you can expect dull middlebrow music to accompany dull middlebrow activities like getting in a lift or going on a flight. Obviously when India wants to be classy and highbrow, it makes good use of its hundreds of years of astounding, beautiful, soul-stirring music. Or so you’d think.

Funnily enough (gratuitous name-drop alert) I recently attended a jamboree with none other than Sonia Gandhi, President of the Indian National Congress and political string-puller in-chief, along with several hundred of New Delhi’s grand panjandrums. During the lulls in lamp-lighting, lengthy speech-wittering and garland-bothering, they played a little music. It was all inane hotel lobby muzak, but one piece went on for about ten minutes, with the same thirty-second refrain repeated ad nauseam. Hang on one cotton-pickin’ minute, I said to myself in my best Arkansas Chuggabug drawl, I know that tune. Rather too well, in fact. Kenny had struck again.

Guess I know which lift Soniaji will be using when she comes to stay.