The age of trunk calls, of black and white television, and of AIR and Doordarshan holding forth in the absence of any other option, is long gone. We are now more modern, more happy. Are we, reallyIJ
To anyone born 11 years after Independence in a middle-class family of educationists and professionals, growing up in the India of the 60s and 70s had its downsides. Outages were as routine as Indira Gandhi’s screeching tirades. Taps went as dry as Morarji Desai for days. Telegrams announcing arrivals were delivered after departures. A ‘trunk call’ from Delhi to Gurgaon meant a wait of several hours and a sore throat from bellowing over an anaemic line, only to be cut off by the operator’s stentorian ‘three minutes up!’ (while needles clacked and her colleagues soothed one another in the background: “Do seedhe, do ulte, bunthee rahiyo...”)
Music meant several hours of AIR’s ‘national’ programme of doleful sarod, elegiac sarangi or, verray-clipped accents announcing an entire afternoon of soporific liszt before the weekly half-hour pop show dedicated to Squadron leader Raj Kumar and his comrades, with greetings from Fluffy, Puppy, Bitty and Dotty in cantonments far away from the fronts. When b/w telly first came in and before we bought our own ‘Televista’, we crowded into a neigbour’s ‘imported’ living room to watch a coy Salma Sultan dimple her way through a news bulletin, a pink rose tucked behind her right ear. Then came Krishi Darshan’s daily discussion on the use of rotten tomatoes as fertiliser and suchlike; and finally the weekly half-hour Bollywood medley. There were few advertisements (except for urea), because there were few products to be coveted.
Hollywood landed at Chanakya and Archana theatres only three years after a flick had premiered overseas. The ‘latest’ album at Berco’s Melody House was a five-year-old Stones record, but it didn’t matter that Jean Junction bled blue on our sweaty legs when we trudged out in the summer heat to the CP store to get it first. Of course we hungered for levi’s, while Khadi and Swadesh were still stern, fervent virtues. We were desperate to see the world too.
But from the passport office to the Reserve Bank of India to the foreign exchange counters to the airline offices — everything and everyone did their best to discourage us (while our fur-swishing, toosh-swaddled ‘First Family’ was photographed in london, New York and all glamorous playgrounds of the world). When we did get there, we were treated like poor Indian migrants sneaking into more prosperous countries for the privilege of cleaning their airport toilets. Barking immigration officers were always amnesiac about how their own people had arrived on our shores uninvited and stayed put there for four centuries.
Flying instead of taking a train was unheard of, unless there was an urgent matter. (Though I often wondered in my later years, why people would scramble aboard the Frontier Mail with tiffin-carriers and Horlicks when they heard of ill relatives, but take the first Indian Airlines Caravelle if the latter diedIJ) There was no I-this, I-that or I-another, nor any sightings of ‘Smart’ Androids. Computers, cell-phones, underground trains and Skype featured only in the science fiction we devoured from the ‘library man’, who pulled up under a dim streetlight in our colony every evening. Huddled over his cavernous trunk of books, we would feign deep interest in Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward (the dreariest read ever) while our adolescent minds and eyes wandered elsewhere.
Back then in the past, we didn’t see the present coming. It remained a paperback illusion and the stuff that great fantasy novels were made of. We were comfortable in our lofty philosophies, small world and modest lifestyles. I think we were happy. But are we that todayIJ
From the outside, it would seem so. We now live in a real-time universe of 24/7 information and product overload and the world is wooing us: To its universities, tech-labs, hospitals, schools, space research centres — and to the high political table where the Big Boys grew so fat on opulent dining that they burst and collapsed of recession caused by excessive consumption and abundant social security, and are now groping for an antacid. They are dangling residence permits and citizenships, enticing us to join their leagues, cajoling us to take the lead in international campaigns to counter terrorism, selling us all the weapons we are willing to buy, readily enriching our depleted uranium supplies.
Presidents, Prime Ministers and industrial chieftains have begun arriving, month after month, with bags full of strategic goodies and eyes firmly on the very 1.2 billion Great Unwashed they had earlier shunned. Now take a look at our innards. Unmitigated personal abuse including threats of death and rape on the social media. Supreme asininity over — and contempt for, word play intended — court verdicts. Cash-hungry cops throwing bricks at unarmed women, overworked (and underpaid) constables falling asleep at the wheel and killing passersby. Opposition parties that wrote earlier versions of urgent land reform Bills, holding them up merely over the issue of ‘authorship’, while disgusted investors board planes home — or to China.
Nine million vehicles to 13 million citizens, ensuring that our capital takes top billing on the list of the most polluted cities in the world. Whining Chief Ministers who would much rather spend their days at protest marches than in clearing files. landfills and rivers spilling over with toxic material and e-waste, cows dying of bloat from eating plastic garbage. Fourteen-year old boys being thrown into electrified water tanks for allegedly stealing mobiles. Illegal ‘colonies’ sprouting everywhere, as also ‘temples’ and ‘mosques’ on all available pavements in a smart, jugaadi move to create prime living quarters in lutyens’ Delhi for their homeless keepers. Disastrous city planning eating up crores of taxpayers’ money to partly pocket and use the rest to build — and later demolish the same — monstrosities like New Delhi’s death-trap, its BRT. E-rickshaws being impounded while diesel-guzzling SUVs freely flourish. Women raped and mutilated for using open fields in the absence of toilets.
We have motorcyclists beating bus drivers to death, ‘godmen’ taking thousands hostage in an ‘ashram’ and opening fire, women thrashed by woman cops inside police stations, VIP bodyguards pulling triggers on toll booth boys for daring to demand money, lawyers and bus drivers on strike for months, shutting schools and delaying justice, inmates stabbing others in prisons while jailors sip rum and watch television. Plane departures held up till a nonchalant politician boards. Pregnant women giving birth on the sidewalk outside a public hospital. And Dalit bridegrooms wearing helmets to ‘shield’ the eyes of higher castes from the ‘impure’ sight of their processions.
There is no escaping it: We have become a billion-man behemoth in a state of intolerant insanities, unspeakable cruelty and all-round, wilful anarchy. We are arrivistes who will never arrive.