Saturday, February 19, 2011
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.
Saturday, January 08, 2011
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.
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.
Saturday, November 06, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Elephant in the room
When you first get onto the beach after fighting your way through from Charni Road station, it could be any other balmy evening at Girgaum Chowpatty, if an absurdly busy one. People queue up (im)patiently for vada pav; kids hurl glo-in-the-dark toys twenty feet in the air; chaiwallahs pour five rupees’ worth of tea into a tiny plastic cup, so full you can’t hold it without scalding your fingers.
The first visible sign that something’s different is that the beach seems to extend much further than usual, the crowds stretching out a long way into the distance. Except the masses of people furthest away aren’t actually on the beach at all: they’re in the sea, they’re slowly, almost imperceptibly getting deeper and deeper in to gradually immerse their idols, and they’re bringing a week and a half of festival to a close in a way that makes “taking down the Christmas decorations on Twelfth Night” seem pretty lame.
Yesterday saw the end of Ganeshotsav, which is essentially an epic annual birthday party for Lord Ganesha, the god of prosperity, good fortune and moral support for anybody who’s concerned that they might look like an elephant. It’s been an entertaining eleven days, with Mumbai jumping to the sound of endless tiny mobile parties. These normally involve a small van, the back doors open with a Ganesha idol looking out, garlanded with flowers; in front there are about twenty or thirty people, a few bashing rhythms on drums, the rest dancing with a delirious, spaced out expression that might be what your parents looked like the first time they took weed in 1965. Up in the cabin, next to the driver maintaining a steady 200 yards an hour, is a guy playing unchained melodies on a tiny Casio keyboard, hooked up to a loudhailer that’s got stuck on the thousand-decibel setting.
And it all ends with the enormous Visarjan or immersion day, when everyone has to find a body of water to dunk old Ganesha. Hence a few lakh people on the beach, and rather a long queue. In many areas of the city people come together with enormous collective community idols, hundreds of the Ganeshas arriving for the immersions on massive trucks and dressed up to the nines, one appearing under a giant frilly orange parasol, another being carried in what looks like a rickety wooden sedan with a large blancmange on top. Apparently the whole process takes till about four in the morning, but in sharp contrast to ordinary Mumbai life it’s bizarrely well-organised and nobody seems to mind taking their turn.
Walking the five miles home (it’s quicker than a cab) you encounter the famous Trance Ganesha inching its way up the road: four flashing coloured lights, one DJ, some massive speaker stacks, three hundred kids off their heads in a slowly-moving outdoor nightclub protected from the traffic by a couple of guys with a rope, and one happy, trippy, elephant-headed god. What a dude.
The first visible sign that something’s different is that the beach seems to extend much further than usual, the crowds stretching out a long way into the distance. Except the masses of people furthest away aren’t actually on the beach at all: they’re in the sea, they’re slowly, almost imperceptibly getting deeper and deeper in to gradually immerse their idols, and they’re bringing a week and a half of festival to a close in a way that makes “taking down the Christmas decorations on Twelfth Night” seem pretty lame.
Yesterday saw the end of Ganeshotsav, which is essentially an epic annual birthday party for Lord Ganesha, the god of prosperity, good fortune and moral support for anybody who’s concerned that they might look like an elephant. It’s been an entertaining eleven days, with Mumbai jumping to the sound of endless tiny mobile parties. These normally involve a small van, the back doors open with a Ganesha idol looking out, garlanded with flowers; in front there are about twenty or thirty people, a few bashing rhythms on drums, the rest dancing with a delirious, spaced out expression that might be what your parents looked like the first time they took weed in 1965. Up in the cabin, next to the driver maintaining a steady 200 yards an hour, is a guy playing unchained melodies on a tiny Casio keyboard, hooked up to a loudhailer that’s got stuck on the thousand-decibel setting.
And it all ends with the enormous Visarjan or immersion day, when everyone has to find a body of water to dunk old Ganesha. Hence a few lakh people on the beach, and rather a long queue. In many areas of the city people come together with enormous collective community idols, hundreds of the Ganeshas arriving for the immersions on massive trucks and dressed up to the nines, one appearing under a giant frilly orange parasol, another being carried in what looks like a rickety wooden sedan with a large blancmange on top. Apparently the whole process takes till about four in the morning, but in sharp contrast to ordinary Mumbai life it’s bizarrely well-organised and nobody seems to mind taking their turn.
Walking the five miles home (it’s quicker than a cab) you encounter the famous Trance Ganesha inching its way up the road: four flashing coloured lights, one DJ, some massive speaker stacks, three hundred kids off their heads in a slowly-moving outdoor nightclub protected from the traffic by a couple of guys with a rope, and one happy, trippy, elephant-headed god. What a dude.
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