A wave of democracy is sweeping through our otherwise unkempt housing society. A letter states that "We have received requests from several members to permit Joint Members to be present in the Annual General Body Meeting...". The request is being considered in the "best interest of transparency and openness and to uphold the spirit of Democracy" (democracy with a capital 'D'). That said, "non - members will have to sit in a separate designated area and will not be permitted to participate in the meeting". Listening breathlessly to the inner workings of Democracy in the General Body Meeting is presumably reward enough.
What must life life be like for maids and drivers through much of India and Asia? Good enough to carry the precocious infants of their employers to and from tony clubs but asked to sit in separate designated areas? Clubs and restaurants in South and South East Asia brazenly ask employers to help ensure that their maids do not venture outside of designated areas so as not to cause 'inconvenience' to other guests. Violence against people from lower castes in India is on the rise. Two months ago four members of a community that traditionally skins dead cows were beaten up in the State of Gujarat by members of an upper caste community on suspicion that they had in fact killed the cow. In protest the community as a whole decided to stop skinning and removing the carcasses of dead cows altogether. The Times of India today carried a report that a man and his pregnant wife of the same community were beaten up for refusing to skin the carcass of a dead cow. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Maybe years from now India might get round to its version of Twelve Years a Slave, but what until then? What do the cavorting and consuming rest of us do to prevent such violence? The villages of Gujarat or Uttar Pradesh or Bihar are farther removed from the streets of South Bombay than are the streets of Amsterdam, New York or Chicago, at least mentally. A affluent Dutch friend of mine, borrowing a phrase that his Protestant father used to use, speaks of his wish to now work on "leaving behind a scratch on the surface of this planet". What measurable and impactful scratch will we leave behind?
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It's morning, time for me to go to whichever office I am working out of today. Post run or gym, post shower, I am standing in the kitchen, suited and booted, buttering a slice of toast and making a mug of cappuccino on the trusted ten year old Rancillio espresso maker. In between toast and cappuccino I make a few light taps on the iPhone to order my cab for the day, having chucked up on driving a few months ago. Kumud and the young ladies are at the dining table, Tarini getting ready for school and Mira getting ready to read in the way of university students.
Within seconds of me ordering the cab the phone rings, it's the driver asking where he has to come for the pick up. The map on his smartphone serves no purpose whatsoever. I answer the phone with a just-about-patient "aap kahan se aa rahen hain?", and the family members exchange looks among themselves. 'Dad's ordered a cab, let's see how it goes today', i.e. 'what level of volatility will we reach before he boards the cab and leaves?' My "where are you coming from?" question is not for my benefit but for his. I can see where he is but those first seconds are key to figuring out if the driver knows where he is, how he got there and most importantly, how he will get to me. Most conversations involve some arm waiving at my end, telling the man which landmark to come to etc. If I think he is well on his way and has a fighting chance of getting to me I put the phone down, finish my toast and wait for the app to ping and tell me that Azim, or Shaikh or Rajkumar Dubey has indeed arrived for the pickup. If however the first reaction is "Uhhhh, sar, uhhhh, yahaan ek building hai (there is a building here) then this man was really plucked from his bed in Bhandup and dropped from the sky into Nariman Point, and then we have a major problem. In these mission critical cases I watch for a few minutes to see in which direction he starts to drive, to see if he starts driving away from me, towards the sea for example, or if the two minute wait time changes to a seven minute wait time. In those cases my frantic arm waiving (of no use until Uber installs an Augmented Reality app on their driver phones) is accompanied by very loud "AAP KAHAN JAA RAHEN HAIN??" (WHERE ARE YOU GOING??). At these times the family keeps its head down, exchanging looks and smiles. I've gotten better at dealing with these ET Phone Home types and pressing the cancel button sooner, within the five minute window. The other day I did actually, against better judgement, board one of these cabs and the first few minutes were frustration filled as he was indeed intent on driving us into the sea. 'How did you get here??' I asked, 'do you not know anything about this city?' 'No sir', came the reply, 'this is a Vashi car', as if the City of Vashi had programmed the car to drive and he was but a helpless onlooker. Google Drive, here we come baby. Every once in a while though, there is a Ramandeep. I tap the screen and order my cab and within seconds there is a call from a soft spoken young man asking what the name of our building is. I tell him and he says thank you and hangs up, leaving me staring at the phone for a bit. Two minutes later the phone rings again, and the driver, Ramandeep, says "sir, I have reached your building and am waiting a little away from the entry gate". Excuse me?? You know where I live, you know what an entry gate is? How much weirder is this going to get? I get into the car with both my bags, juggling my cappuccino mug, without any fear of messing up the seats as Ramandeep has, in good Punjabi style, kept the original plastic covers on. "Good morning sir, where will we be going to today?" I lean back into the seats, a sense of relaxation taking over. Hundred meters into the drive and Ramandeep taps something on his dashboard and some Sonu Nigam type vague instrumental music starts to play, and I put up with it till my first call, ten minutes later. By the time I am dropped off at my destination, an hour's drive away in Powai, Ramandeep turns around and asks me to give him five stars. This man has my vote. So is Uber uber alles? Not yet, the old black and yellow cabs are a relief at times with their ability to actually find streets, but these young Indian entrepreneurs, which is what each and every one of these cab drivers is, are changing the game. Be patient ET, we'll get you home. We've been wandering the streets of Kala Ghorha, enjoying the weather and the open air art of this annual festival. The entire area was named Kala Ghorha (black horse) after a statue commissioned by Albert Sassoon, the son of David Sassoon, himself a Sephardic Jew from Baghdad who made his fortune in international trade, with Bombay as his base. The statue below of David Sassoon stands in the library that bears his name. Rhythm House, the center of music sales in Bombay for decades, is closing down. Repainting the building in bright blue and yellow didn't help, and neither did the shift back to vinyl. We bought our share of records out of loyalty. Kala Ghorha keeps springing other surprises though. There's La Folie for fantastic French pastries, The Kala Ghoda Cafe itself, The Pantry , San-Cha tea, where yours truly buys his fix of Darjeeling Tea, and Filter (which gives its address as "behind Rhythm House"), where Dad does his Christmas shopping. It wasn't quite last minute this year, I actually had a few days in hand, but what a treasure trove of cool gifts it is. Lunch was at a new place called Farmer & Sons. We're doing a bit of a plug for it here because it needs to last. It's at the outer reach of Kala Ghorha on the way to the Bombay Stock Exchange and Horniman Circle. Great oven fired pizzas washed down by sinful midday Margaritas.
I'm on the 11007 Down (Deccan Express) from Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus Mumbai to Pune Junction, a four hour train ride in the place of the three hour car drive through the twists and turns of the Western Ghats. The tinted and dirty window of the AC Chair Car provides a darkened view of garbage strewn railway tracks, of soot covered 1970s era public housing that needs to be put out of its misery and torn down, and of random clusters of railway employees gathered around a train.
India's railway minister, Suresh Prabhu, is making a name for himself by trying to restructure the railway board, monetising railway land and with the help of Japan announcing India's first bullet train, to be built between Mumbai and Ahmedabad in Gujarat. Mr. Prabhu has his own Twitter handle and staff monitoring it, and a day doesn't go by without a newspaper article about somebody having Tweeted Mr. Prabhu from a train while in dire need and having received resolution by the time the train pulled into the next station. He's looking at private sector companies to commercialise railway platforms and offer food services. Mr. Prabhu's efforts are part of this Government's attempt to jolt the system from a number of angles, to get the country to clean up after itself (Svachh Bharat), to start manufacturing goods (Make in India), to boost entrepreneurship (StartUp India) and to provide skill sets for the future (Skills India). It stems from a realisation that things are not well as they are, that you cannot lurch and lumber forward in Soviet era trains that are as likely to kill you as get you to your destination, through a combination of equipment and human failure. We're crossing Thane, girls stand in the skeleton of a Mumbai local train as it rides across the mangroves into the City, busy on their cell phones. More garbage, humans and animals compete for a spot to start the day. The resistance to change in India is huge, andI think there are two large battles going on, between groups of people but also within of people themselves.. A large swath of the population thrives on a general anarchy, on not being restricted in any way from littering where they wish to, from not stopping at red lights, from not obeying tenancy agreements, from elbowing their way to the front of the queue. The Government needs to get out of their way, until of course they need the Government in which case aggression instantly turns to apathy, jutting elbows converted to an outstretched hand. The Government has to provide me with reservations for my sub community, with handouts, with subsidized train and bus fairs. The other battle centers around the broader role of the Government itself. For more than sixty years the Government has proposed and disposed without ever having been held truly accountable in terms of its achievements. Something about India's $2 trillion economy doesn't quite add up. The amount of money ostensibly spent on roads, rail, schooling and public health doesn't quite tally with what the consumer gets in return. There is a conspiracy of the incompetent that has done very well for itself in the past 65 years. A bit of garbage and 2,000 deaths in rail travel a year is a small price to pay for being able to do what you want, when you want, on Government money. Competence brings with it a stress that many people can do without. Ask train operators in Japan or employees of private airlines in India whether their life is stress fee and they will tell you that being on time, every time is hard but gratifying work. At the launch of Startup India the Finance Minister announced that the Government of India needed to get out of the way of entrepreneurs and let them get on with building world class companies. The Government announcing that it did not know what's good for you was unique. Postscript After a business meeting in Sanpada in Navi Mumbai, less than a week after the Pune trip,_ I have the less than smart idea to take a local train to Mumbai, a "50 minute ride" according to a colleague. I am shoved and pulled in a first class compartment all the way to Andheri, at which point I discover that the train is heading back up North to Panvel. I jump out, finally catch an auto ricksha to Sea Link and a black and yellow cab to Nariman Point from there, 2 1/2 hours door to door. There are those rare days when I think that wearing a tailored Prince of Wales suit in Bombay may not be the smartest idea. This was one such day. Check out this link of what the train ride looks like at daytime. India is in a funk. People are being persecuted mercilessly for their faith, for the way they dress, for what they eat, the way they chew their food (well, I persecute people for that, but it still counts). The Indian Taliban, aka the BJP, is to blame for all this persecution. The BJP, the ultra ultra right wing party, operating out of the Prime Minister’s Office, is directing a country-wide persecution of people they don’t like. They are actively fomenting intolerance. It is so important to them to increase the amount of intolerance in the country that they have a KPI for it, a metric that needs to be achieved. Every day a junior analyst updates the Daily Intolerance Meter (DIM), counting all obnoxious and intimidating statements made by members of one community against another.
The Prime Minister follows up on these DIMs religiously, pun not intended. I mean, it’s his office, it’s not called the Prime Minister’s Office for nothing. When he’s not outside of India, fomenting more intolerance in otherwise peace loving countries such as Kazakhstan, the Prime Minister appraises himself of the DIM and jumps for joy when he finds out that it has gone up, knowing that more people are intolerant than the day before, and that by extension, more people are unhappy than the day before. Promoting unhappiness in general and among Indians in particular is something that gives the Prime Minister great pleasure. He smiles and beams when this happens. Thankfully People In Good Standing are not letting this pass unchallenged. They hold the original idea of India, the one that has held fast since independence in 1947 dear, safe and secure in the knowledge that before the Indian Taliban came to power, and barring the five years that it was in power between 1999 and 2004, there was never any intolerance. No Muslims, no Hindus, and certainly no Sikhs were ever persecuted by People In Good Standing during those years. Peace, love and happiness reigned supreme. Intimidated by the Indian Taliban, by the daily bullying of the Prime Minister himself, the People In Good Standing have looked for and found original ways in which to protest, to resist the rifles pointed at them through their bedroom windows. Scientists and artists who in the past received awards from the Government have decided to return these as a sign of protest. They have dug deep in their closets, looking for the polypropylene phallic symbol (Indian awards are northing if not steeped in tribal culture) that was awarded to them fifteen or twenty years ago. Often they found themselves assisted by their spouses to unearth these works of art, to make sure that they are indeed returned to the Government, or to anyone who will still have them. Try as they might they are often not able to return the prize money that came with these awards as the exact same Rupees can’t be found, and returning other money in its place would seem wrong, unethical, something someone from the Indian Taliban might do, but not a Person In Good Standing. Returning the prizes has led coincidentally to a brief but not unpleasant re - living of the original award receipt for many of these people in good standing. The newspapers quote their names ("Lata Venkateswaran, 1975 recipient of the State of Ooty’s Award for grammatically correct writing, returns award as protest against growing intolerance. Our correspondent in Hospeth reports”). Take that! Indian Taliban. Stars, sculptors and authors are joining the fray. Anish Kapur, sculptor, complained of the Talibanization of India, and he is absolutely right to do so. The similarities between Prime Minister Modi, the de facto head of the Indian Taliban, and his late counterpart, Omar Abdullah, the head of the original Ben & Jerry’s Afghan Taliban, are too stark to be ignored. Prime Minister Modi takes selfies when and where he can, hurtling his grinning self image into cyberspace, Omar Abdullah had one photograph taken of himself during his lifetime, and considered that to be a mistake. For the record, so did anyone else who saw that photograph. Prime Minister Modi exhorts people to protect their daughters, to not commit female infanticide, to reign in their wayward sons, and the Afghan Taliban stones women to death whom it believes have strayed from the true path. I mean, did it really take a British Indian sculptor to point out these similarities to us? Could we not have seen this with our own eyes? Shobha Dey, the author and columnist, has thrown herself on the ramparts of Mumbai, channeling the wild energy of protesting students in Paris in 1967, and has dared the Indian Taliban to ban “beautiful, wonderful productions” such as Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, staged recently in Mumbai, because there were moments of suggested intimacy between the two lead characters. That Beauty and the Beast should be banned for entirely different reasons, that two hours of schmaltz is a criminal offense in civilized societies, eluded Ms. Dey. Aamir Khan, erstwhile actor and present day body building instructor, announced in a panel discussion that his wife wondered whether they should move to another country, “for the sake of their young son” and because of the fear of the growing intolerance. Moving out of India is not easy, forget the difficulties of getting a visa, those challenges don’t apply to People In Good Standing. Think instead of the difficulty of choosing where abroad, “over there”, one would move to. Hounslow, conveniently located outside London, close to the airport, and with low overflying aircraft? Perhaps Bradford, in Northern England, with a population that is 75% South Asian. There could be no intolerance there. Or perhaps across the pond in the United States? Baltimore seems to have quietened down after the riots? St. Louis seems back to normal, and it’s not as if Indians were getting shot, it was those people wearing hoodies. I know people think that all glitterati gravitate towards central London or Manhattan, but not so our glitterati. If they had to move over there, I’m sure they would do the right thing and choose Bradford or Baltimore, just to stick it to the Indian Taliban and its leader. Take That! Mira is leaving for university tomorrow, Kumud is dropping her off to England. End of a phase of life, start of a new one. Millions of parents going through this across the world. Be well Mira, you have made us very proud.
It's the last day of Ganpathi Visarjan today, thousands of Ganesh idols being carried to the sea. The light was beautiful, photographs attached. The lady walking towards us on the street is blocking my intended parking spot, but she is looking to her right, bowing her head in reverence to the small neighborhood temple she's passing. "Move it Aunty" I mutter under my breath, "a little less praying and a little more attention to traffic". Mira and I are heading to the RTO, Road Traffic Organization, for her driving test.
Thirty to forty people stand around in clusters of four or five on this 'bustling' Saturday morning at 10.45, waiting for the head of examinations to arrive. Someone calls him and asks him ingratiatingly when he is expected to arrive, saying that people are waiting to take their tests. Shortly after the officer in charge arrives and two chairs are brought out of an ante room for him and the gentleman who called him to take a seat. They are seated on a ramp, below the ramp is a muddy track on which until a few minutes ago a gold colored Maruti Suzuki was driving up and down with what I presume must have been a trainee at the wheel. A queue of women and men (the women head the queue) is formed alongside a bus and they all wait expectantly. The gold colored Maruti Suzuki, battered and dented, pulls up. A man running the logistics of today's examination round asks a group of four women to get in the car. The lady behind the wheel, today's first contestant, gets the car into first gear and tentatively drives forward at 15 km / hour. Before hitting a tree she brakes and brings the car to a stop. The car stays in position, apparently thinking what to do next. The lady driver nudges it back into action and tries to cover the distance of thirty meters in reverse, and in doing so almost runs the car into the ramp on which the officer and his associate are seated. The fixer runs up and tells her to stop before she can do any damage, asking her to get out of the car. The lady takes her examination papers to the officer, receives his squiggle of approval and marches off confidently, shoulders back and head held high, having received validation of what she knew all along: 'I can drive baby!'. The next driver gets behind the wheel, turns the car around and drives into the opposite direction, covering what must have been at least fifteen meters. She then tries to turn the car back towards us, the expectant crowd, first gets stuck, then lurches to the left, a bit to the right, towards where I am standing but posing no threat to my life, not at 10 km an hour, and then veers away from me again, back towards the ramp. Now too the fixers draws the excitement to a close and asks the lady to get out of the car. This lady too receives a signature on her papers and walks off, though with a little less bravado than her predecessor. When it is finally Mira's turn she careens off at 25 or 30 km an hour, covering a hitherto unheard of distance of fifty meters, circling a tree, reversing to get a better turn, going forward again in a smoothish manner and driving back towards the ramp. "You need to practice your gear shifting a bit", the driving instructor seated next to her had apparently told her. We went on a Sunday morning walkabout photography tour of Chor Bazaar, the market of thieves as it's reassuringly known. I guess you walk around and see if there's anything you like or recall seeing in your grandmother's home before someone broke in and cleared the place out. The tour was organized by an energetic Bengali gentleman, part of a group of like - minded people who first started this in Calcutta. All artistic endeavors in India effectively have to be run by Bengalis. If anyone from any other community, say Punjabis or Gujaratis or Tamilians were to have the gumption to organize a photography tour or a singing contest or a painting exhibition I think people would fall off their chairs laughing hysterically before the tour, or contest or exhibition had even begun. That, or they'd start throwing things, or both. A bit of throwing and lots of hysterical laughing I think. So our designated Bengali tour guide exhorted us to "get lost out there over there ok?", by which he meant in Chor Bazaar, but he still wanted us back by 12.15, so not too lost, I guess. He also encouraged us to make the photography tour interactive by asking people if it was ok to take their picture and then also showing them the photograph, which I thought was a genuinely good idea. Must do will do shall do. Chor Bazaar is part antique mart, part artisanal centre and part market straight out of the middle ages with well - fed goats roaming around mutton street, with the Genius Chicken Center (really) deploying some not so genius ways of butchering the cooped up chickens one by one. The artisan pictured below was sandpapering a wooden table. One table takes him an entire day and he seemed at peace with it. Lunch was at Café Leopold, back in our neck of the woods, our manageable chaos.
A deer darted across the front of our car when we drove out yesterday. Today I started my day by walking out barefoot, biting into a fresh plum and photographing the Tuscan countryside. We are surrounded by silence, save for the chirping of birds and the clanging of sheep's bells. The Tiwari's annual summer run from Bombay has begun.
I've been wondering why I write less and less in Bombay and I think that it's a combination of not being able to step back enough from daily events and not being surprised enough by them, after precisely five years in the city. When I see a cow being chased down the sidewalk by its owner I wonder about the spot that it's going to occupy (is this the 'in front of the kids' school cow' or the 'outside Mantralaya, the seat of Government cow'?) and not why there is a cow being chased down a sidewalk. My bride, given to profound questions, asked me why it is that we lead a "non stop full on life" (there's Bombay English for you) for fifty weeks in the year and then go to the other extreme of a nature filled TV - less life for two weeks, and why there can't be more of a balance. It was the first full day of the vacation, we were lying by the pool and so, stumped by the question, I fell asleep. Stepping back requires time for reflection, not running around in a non stop full on city from Colaba to Parel to Powai to Juhu and back to Nariman Point, all in one day. You can of course 'write' in the moment itself, and Twitter is the ultimate 'writing in the moment' tool, for twits and tweets alike. The Dutch use it to complain that a bus is five minutes late, Americans and Australians use it to post photographs of themselves running onwards to greater health and Indians use it to fire public salvos against enemies which can only be answered by equally public salvos in return. One of the top trending Twitter hashtags in India right now is #MainBanaUllu (I've been duped), a way for Indians to post their frustration at having voted for a particular political candidate. The cacophony of Indian news, political protests, the scandal of the month and the release of the latest blockbuster (Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Salman Khan's saccharin dipped movie) continues unabated. The combined marketing apparatus of Indian polity, big business, news channels and Bollywood is so very effective at getting its message out to every nook and cranny of India that there isn't a forgotten part of the country. Forgotten from a development point of view perhaps, but no relief from non stop full on messaging. The crickets here in Val d'Orcia really need to stop making so much noise, I can't think. My mother sent me an apron for my birthday, because she said "it had my name on it". I've been looking for a tag since yesterday but can't find it and am beginning to think she may have meant it as a figure of speech.
My eldest daughter, acting as a benign teacher, corrected my written French. My youngest daughter claimed that I didn't look any different than I did in my wedding photograph taken twenty three years ago. My bride gave me a Pink Floyd album as a present, on vinyl, a medium which anno domini 2015 is as vibrant as the recipient of this fine gift. My friends and family from around the world sent their wishes via FB and encouraged me to not just make it through the next fifty years but to make them interesting. My wife (same person as bride, see above) drew a post retirement picture of us showing her lying on a bench, reading a book in Goa and me frantically running, with a few remaining strands of grey hair blowing in the wind. With wishes, gifts and projections such as these it's easy to feel loved while staying grounded. |
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October 2022
Btw, the banner photo was taken from our holiday home outside of San Gimignano at 6.20 am. What light! It lasted all of five minutes.
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