Whistling In The Dark is a new book assembling a series of interviews with Indian gay people outside the big cities, whose lives are not just illegal (albeit with a law that’s almost never enforced) but almost entirely invisible.
At the launch at the Oxford bookstore, we meet a middle-aged, working-class man talking freely of his secret double-life, completely unknown to his wife and kids. Ok, so people still live like that in the UK too, forty years after legalisation.
But what doesn’t happen in the UK is those men appearing at Time Out-listed book events in the nearest big city to their home. It’s a sign of how massively stratified this society is: the chances of news of his appearance filtering back home are basically nil. The world of book launches and the world of ordinary life in small-town India are, well, worlds apart.
The gaping chasm between the lives of India’s classes is in most ways a vile phenomenon; but perhaps one of the benefits of gaping chasms is that you can shine a little light in.
No milk today
I pop into a big shop to buy a little milk. But they don't have the one that I know is ok. This is a tragedy worse than anything devised by Sophocles. So I spend ten minutes comparing the small print on eighteen different cartons of milk looking for the sacred text: "No Boiling Required".
Eventually, I track one down, to the sound of a choir of angels singing in my head. Joy unconfined. It's amazing that when you know next to sod all about how to live in a country, and you know full well that you know next to sod all, the shrapnels you do know take on an importance of epic proportions.
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Friday, May 01, 2009
Flaccid election
Bombay voted yesterday. The first election since 26/11, part of the biggest democratic exercise the world’s ever seen, etc etc. You know the drill: rallies, placards, long lines of voters, intimidation, maybe the odd bombing, all good developing-world election fun. Except that none of it happened.
You wouldn’t have actually known there was an election in South Bombay yesterday, but for the fact that most companies gave their staff a day off so the city was really quiet. I plumped for the train home after work and had almost a carriage to myself, when normally at rush hour you get less than a square foot.
But it seems most people just took it as an extra holiday and cleared off.
You wouldn’t have actually known there was an election in South Bombay yesterday, but for the fact that most companies gave their staff a day off so the city was really quiet. I plumped for the train home after work and had almost a carriage to myself, when normally at rush hour you get less than a square foot.
But it seems most people just took it as an extra holiday and cleared off.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
On a raga tip
.
If there’s a better place to watch a gig than the Bandra Amphitheatre then I’d love to see it.
I’m sat on a ruined stone fort looking out towards the Arabian Sea. Between me and the ocean lies a crescent of huge palm trees, and the moon just about finds a gap to poke through and say hello. Occasionally I catch the reassuring sssshhhhhwwwww of a wave rolling up and over the rocks. But mostly that’s drowned out by about eight hundred young hipsters on the raked grassy banks below me, watching half a dozen brilliant musicians from Bangalore on the raised ground in front of the trees.
Swarathma, the band’s called: they’ve taken Indian traditional music and given it a riotous kick up the khyber, spiced with some Kannada politics and a front-man with the best fro-and-goatee combo since Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction. It’s as if Bellowhead and the Saw Doctors swallowed the Bhagavad Gita one night and went off on a raga tip.
There’s no place like, er, eek
Scary moment back in London last week. Making small talk with someone, chatting about my diary for the trip: “…couple more meetings on Monday and then I fly home”.
She stops me. Home? By which I mean back to Bombay? After less than two months? I wasn’t even thinking about it. But, well, uh-oh. Scary.
If there’s a better place to watch a gig than the Bandra Amphitheatre then I’d love to see it.
I’m sat on a ruined stone fort looking out towards the Arabian Sea. Between me and the ocean lies a crescent of huge palm trees, and the moon just about finds a gap to poke through and say hello. Occasionally I catch the reassuring sssshhhhhwwwww of a wave rolling up and over the rocks. But mostly that’s drowned out by about eight hundred young hipsters on the raked grassy banks below me, watching half a dozen brilliant musicians from Bangalore on the raised ground in front of the trees.
Swarathma, the band’s called: they’ve taken Indian traditional music and given it a riotous kick up the khyber, spiced with some Kannada politics and a front-man with the best fro-and-goatee combo since Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction. It’s as if Bellowhead and the Saw Doctors swallowed the Bhagavad Gita one night and went off on a raga tip.
There’s no place like, er, eek
Scary moment back in London last week. Making small talk with someone, chatting about my diary for the trip: “…couple more meetings on Monday and then I fly home”.
She stops me. Home? By which I mean back to Bombay? After less than two months? I wasn’t even thinking about it. But, well, uh-oh. Scary.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Gotta serve somebody
There’s been one big story in India for the last few weeks, and it concerns Varun Gandhi, the rebel scion of the dynasty that brought us Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, and very much the saffron sheep of the family. He’s said some nasty things about Muslims and spent a few nights in prison for his troubles.
Of course, whenever one of the Nehru-Gandhi clan so much as wiggles their toes it’s front-page news; and in young Varun, the de facto royal family seems to have found its own Prince Harry.
The row brings to mind, though, a conversation I’ve been having regularly. In India in general, and in Bombay in particular, the religious-secular society dreamed of by Mahatma is ostensibly a reality: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jews, Jains, Buddhists and Parsis seem to get along pretty well, give or take the odd communal riot when the weather gets too hot. Hindus are the overwhelming majority of course – over 80% across India – but the Prime Minister is a Sikh, the leader of the biggest party a Christian, the President until a couple of years ago a Muslim, and nobody’s remotely bothered. Think for a moment what the reaction would be if that happened in England.
But there’s one religious minority that they can’t seem to understand. We atheists are the odd ones out in India: it’s a country that equates godlessness with rootlessness. The sense here is that it doesn’t matter which set of ancient stories you live by, as long as you’ve got some. As Shah Rukh Khan – Bollywood heartthrob megastar, Muslim, and extremely intelligent human being – recently said about the Quran, the Bible, the Tora and the Gita: “same novel, same topic, just different languages. They are just translations”. Which makes me some kind of book-burner.
I was thinking about this while watching the news coverage of the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster. I was twelve when it happened, and it coincided with my only brief flirtation with religion. Just an adolescent phase I was going through… ;-)
(It tickled me to see the culture minister interrupted with a chant of “Justice for the 96” to the tune of ‘Go West’ by the Village People. Not because there’s anything funny about the cause, but because that song’s become such an all-purpose football anthem for beered-up hardcases: “one-nil to the Arsenal”, “you’re shit and you know you are”, "Jon Main is the dog’s bollocks”, etc. Not bad for a song about American gay men migrating to San Francisco in the 1970’s in search of, well, something that most football fans probably would rather not think about. But I digress.)
And of course the semi-religious memorial service was held in a place of worship called Anfield football ground, and culminated in the collective singing of that great hymn of devotion, You’ll Never Walk Alone. The greatest performance of that old song is by Johnny Cash, accompanied by nothing but an enormous pipe organ, recorded in a cathedral.
Yesterday the voting began in the general elections. It’ll take a month to complete, followed by several more weeks of horse-trading since no party is likely to get more than 30% of the seats. To the untrained eye, it seems like the national contest is between one lot who are corrupt and incompetent (with the honourable exception of the PM himself); and another lot who are bigoted, corrupt and incompetent. In Maharashtra we’re blessed with a third major lot, who are violent, bigoted, corrupt and incompetent.
It’ll almost certainly be Dr Singh, who’s 70-something, or Mr Advani, who’s 80-something, that emerges on top of the pile when the dust settles (hopefully not literally). But the gerontocracy is set to be short-lived (very possibly literally): in the Congress party, Dr Singh will almost certainly give way in a few years to Rahul Gandhi, who is young, handsome, intelligent and, oh, he’s one of the Family.
The other lot, meanwhile, didn’t have any obvious pretenders to their crown. Until recently, that is, when a young man started spouting dangerous nonsense about Muslims, got himself a very short jail term, got himself on every front page every day for several weeks, and bingo – we’ve got ourselves a contender. His rise to prominence shows the fragility of the secular consensus: but that’s the power you have when your last name’s Gandhi.
Of course, whenever one of the Nehru-Gandhi clan so much as wiggles their toes it’s front-page news; and in young Varun, the de facto royal family seems to have found its own Prince Harry.
The row brings to mind, though, a conversation I’ve been having regularly. In India in general, and in Bombay in particular, the religious-secular society dreamed of by Mahatma is ostensibly a reality: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jews, Jains, Buddhists and Parsis seem to get along pretty well, give or take the odd communal riot when the weather gets too hot. Hindus are the overwhelming majority of course – over 80% across India – but the Prime Minister is a Sikh, the leader of the biggest party a Christian, the President until a couple of years ago a Muslim, and nobody’s remotely bothered. Think for a moment what the reaction would be if that happened in England.
But there’s one religious minority that they can’t seem to understand. We atheists are the odd ones out in India: it’s a country that equates godlessness with rootlessness. The sense here is that it doesn’t matter which set of ancient stories you live by, as long as you’ve got some. As Shah Rukh Khan – Bollywood heartthrob megastar, Muslim, and extremely intelligent human being – recently said about the Quran, the Bible, the Tora and the Gita: “same novel, same topic, just different languages. They are just translations”. Which makes me some kind of book-burner.
I was thinking about this while watching the news coverage of the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster. I was twelve when it happened, and it coincided with my only brief flirtation with religion. Just an adolescent phase I was going through… ;-)
(It tickled me to see the culture minister interrupted with a chant of “Justice for the 96” to the tune of ‘Go West’ by the Village People. Not because there’s anything funny about the cause, but because that song’s become such an all-purpose football anthem for beered-up hardcases: “one-nil to the Arsenal”, “you’re shit and you know you are”, "Jon Main is the dog’s bollocks”, etc. Not bad for a song about American gay men migrating to San Francisco in the 1970’s in search of, well, something that most football fans probably would rather not think about. But I digress.)
And of course the semi-religious memorial service was held in a place of worship called Anfield football ground, and culminated in the collective singing of that great hymn of devotion, You’ll Never Walk Alone. The greatest performance of that old song is by Johnny Cash, accompanied by nothing but an enormous pipe organ, recorded in a cathedral.
Yesterday the voting began in the general elections. It’ll take a month to complete, followed by several more weeks of horse-trading since no party is likely to get more than 30% of the seats. To the untrained eye, it seems like the national contest is between one lot who are corrupt and incompetent (with the honourable exception of the PM himself); and another lot who are bigoted, corrupt and incompetent. In Maharashtra we’re blessed with a third major lot, who are violent, bigoted, corrupt and incompetent.
It’ll almost certainly be Dr Singh, who’s 70-something, or Mr Advani, who’s 80-something, that emerges on top of the pile when the dust settles (hopefully not literally). But the gerontocracy is set to be short-lived (very possibly literally): in the Congress party, Dr Singh will almost certainly give way in a few years to Rahul Gandhi, who is young, handsome, intelligent and, oh, he’s one of the Family.
The other lot, meanwhile, didn’t have any obvious pretenders to their crown. Until recently, that is, when a young man started spouting dangerous nonsense about Muslims, got himself a very short jail term, got himself on every front page every day for several weeks, and bingo – we’ve got ourselves a contender. His rise to prominence shows the fragility of the secular consensus: but that’s the power you have when your last name’s Gandhi.
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