Backhand winners

A few months ago, at a point in the monsoon so wet that Fotherington-Thomas would point at it and laugh, I was squeezed in the back of a car with a renowned British poet and her charming ageing academic Indian host. On an empty road late at night in one of the posher parts of town, we bumped around like on the whirling waltzers at Braintree carnival; but on peeking out of the window it was obvious that this road with more holes than Blackburn, Lancashire had only recently been resurfaced.

Obviously this merited deeper investigation, but since my companions were professional vocabularians I realised I’d need to draw deeply on my reserves of Wildean wit and eloquence if I was fully to engage them.

“Ugh?”

“Well it’s simple”, explained the academic, his glasses almost falling off the end of his nose. “If you’re one of the local government’s “approved vendors”, there’s nice work to be had resurfacing roads before the monsoo n. But you don’t want to do it too well or you won’t get called back for more after the rains end.”
“But surely the noble representatives of the people at City Hall won’t call back a company that did it so badly the first time? Why on earth would they do such a thing?”. My naïve act was probably starting to weary by this point, so the academic just rubbed his thumb and index finger together and arched an eyebrow.
“Oh”, I said, making one vowel sound last about three seconds. The rupee had dropped.



I was reminded of this resignation to ubiquitous corruption, and the widespread maladministration it causes, as the hullabaloo over the farce of the Delhi Commonwealth Games (or CWG as they were universally known in this abbreviation-obsessed country) reached dengue pitch. None of the pathetic failings that disfigured the event were remotely a surprise to anyone who’s lived in India for half a second: but I did think they’d cover it up a bit better, and possibly not be so blatant about the waste of thousands of crores of public funds in a country with 800 million hungry people – many of whom were moved out of the city in October so as not to spoil the view. (The view for whom? The international tourists who came for Games? They didn’t seem too bothered, and I know – I met both of them. Boom boom.)

The strange thing about Delhi during the Games was the incredible sense of eery quiet: it felt a bit like the impregnation day in The Midwich Cuckoos. All the schools had closed and most people were inspired by six months of relentlessly negative media coverage to sod off away from the city for a fortnight. Result: security forces everywhere pointing guns at nothing in particular; reserved ‘CWG lanes’ on the roads proving unnecessary since there wasn’t any traffic anyway; lots of spanking new stadia and metro trains with nobody in them.

Of course, the stadia were also empty because buying tickets was so insanely difficult. I queued up for half an hour at one of the outlets near the centre of town, before being told I was in the wrong queue. As I had a white face, I was then rushed to the front of the right queue, because brown people’s time is apparently less valuable. I then came round behind the desk of the one guy with a box office computer, because he kept going to the wrong events on the wrong dates, so I thought it would be easier if I stood behind him and pointed. Most events were ‘sold out’, a phenomenon I’d previously experienced at a theatre festival, where half-empty halls could be ‘sold out’ because of the masses of free tickets distributed to government officials, none of whom can actually be bothered to turn up. When it came to printing the tickets for the few things that were still available, we had to wait for several minutes while he tried to open the plastic wrapper to get a new packet of tickets. Someone was dispatched to find someone with a pen to break into the polythene.

Hooray! Saturday night at the athletics! A chance to cheer on the plucky Brits as they finish seventh behind the Kenyans and Aussies at everything! Arriving bang on time and getting dropped off right outside the stadium, we then had to walk for three miles – no exaggeration, in shocking heat – to get to the entrance. When we finally got in it was almost impossible to find a drink of water, which of course you weren’t allowed to bring in yourself. On the track, needless to say, the Kenyans won everything.

To be fair, the next day at the hockey was smooth as you like, the only stupid planning errors being made by us, forgetting our sun cream and burning in the afternoon for two hours. The small local crowd were mostly supporting South Africa against England, on the grounds that (a) Nelson Mandela was South African, (b) South Africa had nice green shirts, and (c) South Africa hadn’t ruled India oppressively for two hundred years. But it was all good-natured and when England won, they decided we weren’t that bad and demanded photos with us anyway.


So what to make of these Games, which finally made India wash its filthy linen in public like a Mahalaxmi dhobiwallah? There’s a strong argument, most forcefully put by the ever-rebarbative Vir Sanghvi, that the mess represents the last hurrah of the gerontocracy that runs this country: undoubtedly, I’ve often noticed that the difference in outlook, attitude and approach between, say, 30-year-olds and 60-year-olds in India is huge, and far greater than in the West. It feels a bit like Britain probably did in about 1963. So perhaps it’s time for the septuagenarians in charge to board the great gravy train in the sky; perhaps it is like the Midwich Cuckoos, except that the dangerous force subverting society from within isn’t a bunch of toddlers with funny eyes, it’s elderly men hectoring us through ropy sound systems and putting garlands on one another.

But then I’m not so sure that the solution is just to blame it on the doddery: in Britain, by contrast, we suffer from a TV-inspired emphasis on youth, the guys in charge in their early forties, being mostly advised by sharp-suited tory boys in their twenties and early thirties. I’ve met a few of these and they seem to know even less about the world than I do, which is not very much.

No, I think it’s simpler than that. Cards on the table time: India has got far too comfortable with people being on the take.

When you put on an event, especially outdoors, and you work for a ‘respectable organisation’, you have to make sure you have a ‘production partner’ whose role, among other things, is to pay off any cops who wander along and find some spurious excuse to threaten to close you down.

When decent well-meaning people get rich, or more likely are born into rich families, they will happily fund their own hospitals and schools and welfare projects, but still try their best to avoid paying taxes because they think – they know – that so much of the money will disappear.

Everything I’ve seen in the last 20 months tells me that the culture of corruption pervades public administration in this wonderful, warm-hearted country, and is the single biggest factor that lets down and holds back the ordinary people of India from building a decent future in their so-called glorious new century. Nobody knows how to solve this problem. I haven’t the foggiest idea how to solve this problem. I can only hope that the sheer public insanity of the Commonwealth Games will shine a little light on the problem and lead, somehow, to a culture of zero tolerance of corruption. Until that happens, the potholes in the roads in the posh parts of town, and even the thousands of crores spent on pointless empty stadia in Delhi, are the least of our worries.