Motor musings

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Very silly mid-off

A few days after getting back to Bombay, I’m strolling home on a Sunday afternoon with a new 999 rupee pair of trainers, my latest doomed attempt to be one of the cool cats. Right outside our block is a fairly busy road with a big flyover above; and underneath the flyover, Sunday is cricket day. There are three games going on – one in between each set of concrete pillars – with about 20 young people involved in each game.

They explain to me that they’re a proper club who play their matches on proper pitches, but this is how they practise – on a concrete strip, no more than twenty yards by fifteen, in between pillars under a flyover. It gets fun when anyone hits it over the low wall that separates the game from the road: a few catches are missed when the ball’s in the air amid the cars and the motorbikes, but then again it’s probably not a very popular fielding position.


Art like a wheel

The art world continues to boom in Bombay, with two new galleries opening in the space of a few days. Being a wine-and-nibbles whore who’ll put on the slap and turn up to the opening of a tin of beans, I’m in heaven. You can tell that the first one is attracting the glitterarti, because the little side street is packed with cars for most of the evening – and, of course, with drivers as well, doing what drivers do best: hang around waiting for that five-minute warning missed-call.

The second opening is all very nice, until suddenly we all get piled onto a shuttle bus to some mysterious ‘annexe’. The secondary site turns out to be a huge abandoned mill, so close to the sea that it smells like Grimsby. In the middle of an open space there’s a hitherto working car, half a dozen sledgehammers and about fifty art lovers, taking it in turns to beat the living foglights out of the motor. It’s strangely compelling, not least for the sight of nice respectable gallery-goers quickly turning into a violent, destructive mob. “Kill the beast! Bash him in!” and so on.


Truck festival

There seems to be a festival on more or less every day at the moment, but tonight’s looked especially fun. After yesterday’s immersion of idols in the sea for Dashera, today we’re worshipping Durga, and she’s popping up all over the place. The roads late at night are jammed with large trucks going nowhere, pumping out devotional music to a throng, some of whom are on the back of the truck, some of whom are covered in coloured water, a large goddess watching over the whole scene appreciatively. It’s all very loud and chaotic, and does mean that some young men with multicoloured faces have to become impromptu traffic cops, but somehow – as always in India – it seems to work.

Goodbye to the circus (for now)

I'm sitting in a hotel bar in Delhi, watching England get themselves out with inevitable regularity, and making 330ml of Leffe last about two hours. I've a 2.30am flight back to Blighty, which I think constitutes a cruel and unusual punishment, and hence a lot of time to kill.

And frankly, in spite of the genuine lure of seeing lots of friends and loved ones, the thought of nearly four weeks away from India - mostly for work - isn't filling me with palpitations. It's not about the clubs and the theatres and the country walks: the contrivances that constitute 'life' in the West. No, it's everyday existence that's addictive.

Today I got in an auto-rickshaw from the office to an event I was attending. On the way, with the hot Delhi air blowing in our faces and that unique only-slightly-irrational fear of imminent sudden death that you get in every auto journey, we overtook an enormous elephant. Not some tourist trap either: this was a working elephant, with a man and a big load of what looked like reeds on his back. I then cheered as we got to a red light, which was great as it meant the elephant could catch us up and waddle past us, its vast backside about a foot away from me. Nobody other than me seemed remotely flustered.

Perhaps, when I'm in Edinburgh or Manchester or Birmingham or London over the next few weeks, I'll see an elephant meandering down the road nonchalantly going about its business. Until I do, that and the thousand other daily hilarities of life mean that I'll be counting the days till I get back to India.

In the name of love

Yesterday saw the first Queer Azadi march since June’s landmark Delhi High Court decision, effectively decriminalising homosexuality in India. There were a good 2,000 people there, and it was a riot – of colours and sounds, not of the Stonewall variety. In fact the police were positively helpful, happily stopping the traffic to let the march through, which gave the activists a chance to assail the poor trapped car drivers, bus passengers and ox-cart pushers with their assorted paraphernalia. I saw an elderly Muslim taxi driver earnestly reading a queer political pamphlet, pausing only to give me a big cheerful smile.

As you’d imagine, all manner of humanity was represented: from the serious middle-aged academics to the go-go boys, from hundreds of hijras in their best saris to sloganeering lesbian activists. The swine flu outbreak didn’t dampen spirits either: in fact it was an opportunity, to create fabulous multi-coloured protective masks. A lot of people wear masks on the march anyway, because they don’t want their faces to end up plastered over flickr or the Times of India or anywhere else their families and employers might be looking.

Azadi means ‘liberty’, which is a nobler ambition than ‘pride’ I think. Pride used to be a Deadly Sin, of course (there’s an obvious cheap gag but even I’m not that sick. Not today, anyway).

But more than that, there’s an energy to the queer movement in India that disappeared long ago in the West: Pride in the UK is a bit about raising money for good causes and a lot about getting pissed or laid or both, with the politics understandably long forgotten. In India, however, there’s a fight to be won: and it feels – for the first time, I suspect – that the good guys might just be on the winning side.

The swines are at it again

Glorious colonial architecture abounds in Bombay, but I think my favourite is the BMC building, the Gothic classic right opposite the legendary Victoria Terminus. It’s one of those buildings that lifts the spirits every time you see it, another intricacy revealing itself on each inspection, a different random association coming to mind – yesterday it made me think of St Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest, the finest building in a fine city.

And I love the name Bombay Municipal Corporation – it’s got that Chamberlain-esque late-Victorian can-do civic attitude ring to it. No nonsense. Does what it says on the tin. These are the guys that make the city tick: these guys work so that we can play.

Except, that is, when they get spooked by a single new addition to the thousands of other communicable diseases already swimming merrily in our city’s human swamp. Yes folks, swine flu’s hit town, mask-sellers are making a killing, and the BMC has decided to try and shut down Bombay. They closed cinemas and theatres over the long Janmashtami weekend, asked malls to shut and generally said everyone should stay indoors. I suppose the idea is that if nobody meets another human being for three days, then those that have it will stop being infectious and those that don’t won’t ever get it. Bravo.

Except that there are twenty million people here and half of them live practically on top of one another. And swine flu has already shown itself to be practically unstoppable in countries that have far better healthcare systems and far lower population density than here. And, as luck would have it, swine flu isn’t half as nasty as any one of the hundreds of other diseases you can already catch here. All in all, the BMC are spouting nonsense.

Thankfully, they underestimate the spirit of this city: a place that wasn’t cowed by the murderous riots in ’93, or the floods in ’05, or the bombs on the trains in ’06 – not to mention the events of 26 November last year – certainly isn’t going to worry about a new germ to add to all the ones we’ve already got. The malls have been overflowing and the city’s a-buzz. It seems that India, just like the West, is a country that greets authoritarian idiocy with the raised middle finger it deserves.

The only real downside is that I was supposed to go to the theatre on Saturday, and sadly it was one of the venues that is more readily influenced by political pressure. So my play was cancelled. Gah. It would never have happened in Chamberlain’s day.