Guilt and absolution

When I first came to India three years ago, my parting thoughts were that in fifty years’ time, Mumbai would be the world’s leading city. Now? I reckon I was about twenty years too cautious.

The pace of change in three short years is something to behold (a theme I’ll return to another time). India is rising, and we in the old world are going to have to go some just to keep up.

And yet…

Every time you stop in a car or taxi in South Bombay, you can bet that within a few seconds there’ll be a tiny hand pressing against a closed window, or reaching through an open one. Often, that tiny hand will point to a deformity – usually a burn-scarred or infected limb, or an amputation. It’s a rare, heartless soul that can just move on, look away, carry on chatting about the economy, the test match, the evening’s entertainment.

But what can you do? Give them a few rupees? Very foolhardy. The tale told in Slumdog, the tale of begging gangs and children maimed for adult profit is not purely a film fantasy.

So, in your commitment to what Michael Palin confessionally called ‘middle-class guilt socialism’, you search out an charity with a good reputation and contemplate bunging them a few bob a month. Got to keep that conscience clear! (I’m rather keen on Railway Children, not least because it makes me think of Jenny Agutter and Bernard Cribbins.)

Which poses the question: how much do you need to bung them to remain a member of the ethical club, to survive the Chorlton Inquisition, to see a mutilated arm reaching towards your window and not feel ashamed of your vast relative wealth? Enough to feed a child dal and rice every day? Enough to pay for a new toilet block a month? Enough to make you actually notice it’s gone, like a financial chastity belt?

It’s a facetious, reductive game, of course. We do what we can, or in most of our cases a lot less than we probably could. And we remember that we had just as much responsibility to those kids when we lived in Manchester as we do now we’re in Mumbai.
And that there but for the grace of god go all of us.


Then when those numbers games get too depressing, you play some more. Give or take a few, there are twenty million people here. More than half of them live in poverty. And Mumbai is by some distance the richest city in India. So what will happen when government programmes, NGOs, trickle-down economics or pure bloody hard work lift people up, as, slowly, they do?

You can see the answer at the railway stations every day. Twenty million people here, and hardly space to breathe: several hundred million who’d quite like to be here.

If you think about it for too long, your head hurts.
Thank goodness for escapism...

Oh! Bombay!

The new cinema at the new shopping centre in Lower Parel is dispiritingly similar to your average UK multiplex, except the Hindi to English language films ratio is about the reverse of that in Birmingham. Oh, and the building’s not finished yet. But nobody seems to mind that.

Just before the film starts, they play the Indian national anthem and project the national flag onto the screen, and everybody stands up. I’m told they used to do that in the UK. Then randomly, half way through, they stop for an intermission. They used to do that in the UK as well. Sadly, nobody comes up through the floor playing one of these.

The most irritating thing (apart from the movie – The Reader – on which more in a moment) is the censorship. Fair enough: they don’t like sex. I can handle that. A lot of people don’t like sex. (Particularly with me, boom boom.) And the rules appear to be very clear – bums are ok, boobs are not. Don’t even think about the really naughty bits. But they could at least make the cuts with a little finesse: here they are jarring, with incidental music cut off in mid-quasi-erotic-crescendo.

Thankfully, it doesn’t matter, because the film is a fetid pile of tripe, reducing the complex, nuanced and historically crucial question of collective German war guilt to a glib semi-eroticised yarn about a boy getting his rocks off and not getting over it for thirty years, with a woman who’s a mass murderer but she can’t read properly so oh ok that’s alright then. Oh give me strength.
On this occasion, dear old Kate Winslet getting her bits out (yet again) is far from the most offensive thing on display.

Thinking about googling ‘combover’

You know you’re getting old when the recession on your hairline is bigger than the one in the economy. But in India, I really am old – six years older than the average person, apparently.

So it’s always a pleasure to hang around some youngsters’ haunt and be made to feel a bit geriatric. Blue Frog is the coolest live music venue in India, and Indigo Children one of the hottest young bands. It’s a semi-private, unannounced gig, but word slowly gets out and before long, the place is busy with kids young enough to be my own - by Gorton maths, anyway. They’re heading to the UK in May. Trust me: they rawk.