Nehru once described India as “a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads”. It’d be hard work finding an apter description. The myriad reinventions of this majestic country over thousands of years tell a fascinating tale, from which a vibrant, modern yet troubled nation has emerged to confuse, scare and entice the intrepid voyager who dares – to the raised eyebrows of his acquaintances – to “do India”.Mark Twain mused similarly: "So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked." And a close friend of mine solemnly informed me that India stands for “I’ll Never Do It Again”. After a mere week, I think I can profess this tongue-in-cheek witticism to be utter rot. I will, without a doubt, do it again.
It’s hard to put one’s finger on why. Without any condescension at all – because these are fabulously generous and warm-hearted people – it might be the childlikeness of the Indians. The film industry – centred here in Mumbai – produces, in this city alone, 900 films per year, or almost three a day. There can’t be many people in the West unaware at least superficially of the reach and reputation of Bollywood. But flipping channels on the telly – as everywhere – offers revealing insight into the nature and values of a people. Producers and programmers and advertisers understand their audience – it’s their job, after all – and India television is replete with a bizarre mix of singing, slapstick, and the obligatory bout of sobbing every few minutes. My host and friend here – a remarkable and articulate man named Russel, about whom I’ll say more later – puts it thus:
“You must understand that emotion is a very important thing for Indians. We cry together, we laugh together. Most of the time we sleep in the same room all together. And expressing ourselves is who we are”.
This is evident everywhere you look. In the human cauldron that is India's urban street, everybody shouts to everybody else about every possible thing. Hands gesticulate wildly as people barter and push and sell their wares. On the telly and in the innumerable Bollywood offerings which litter the hundreds of channels, the stories are easy to follow for the non-Hindi speaker, such are the exaggerated gestures, the cringeworthy crying scenes over the latest my-life-is-over tragedy such as Boy not desiring Girl as Wife, or the tiresome need to break into poorly-synched song every six or seven minutes. When they’re not singing or crying, the actors (and I use that term generously) gaze wistfully off-camera like a Days of Our Lives parody, without any discernible parody. Otherwise, they seem to slap each other in the face a great deal and run around at high speed. The Indians admire all things British – that much is clear (Jade Goody excepted of course). It’s a shame they’re under the misapprehension that Benny Hill and the Carry On films represent the pinnacle of comedic sophistication. Just like the prevailing wisdom here that the best solution to any administrative problem is to add another couple of layers of bureaucracy. Because that’s what the British would’ve done, of course.
All of this is ‘childlike’, but I honestly mean it in the best possible way and I trust no offence is caused. The films that studiously avoid any bad language or risqué scenes; the belief that even in a movie concerning profound and serious issues it’s permissible to break into song at the drop of a hat. The way not only the children on the street but the adults, too, greet a stranger with a Cheshire grin and are desperate to know from where he comes, what he thinks of India and what it’s like to travel so far. This is an innocence you don’t see in Europe or the States or even in South East Asia. It's a really nice feeling.
I’ve been joined for my five weeks in India by a splendid Englishman named Matt, whom I met in Istanbul and whose itinerary converged nicely with my own. Matt – as well as being black, a feature that elicits curiosity and astonishment everywhere we’ve gone in Turkey and here – is also 204cm tall. Which means that although I talk to his navel when we speak, the Indians are practically rubbing noses with his kneecaps. In Turkey, shouts of “Big man!! Black man!! Basketball!” would ring out in every street we passed through. And the exact same is true here. But the Indians are warmer, more affectionate, more tactile than the Turks and we’ve drawn a crowd everywhere we’ve been. A walk through the markets in Chembur saw us mobbed by textile traders, all of whom entered into sudden and noisy competition to see who could produce a pair of jeans long enough to accommodate his stupendously long legs.
The thing is, they weren’t particularly trying to sell us anything. I’ve travelled enough to recognise it when I see it. But these ten or so men were so delighted to see a man of such unusual proportions in the flesh, we found ourselves in a frenzied scrum of tape measures, reels of cloth and a barrage of gleeful questions. That is, until one particularly forward young chap saw fit to push to the front of the crowd, point to Matt’s groin, and with a preceding reputation of black men evidently in mind, asked him about the size of his equipment. Which would’ve been fine until he reached out (well, reached up, actually) to grab a handful – presumably for the purpose of comparison with his his countrymen (for those wanting further research on this subject, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6161691.stm). We bade a hasty farewell.
I tell this story just to illustrate my point – that there is something very childlike about the people here, as if in
Eden before Eve listened to the counsel of the snake. As I said before, I spent a couple of days staying with a man called Russel and his family, an experience which a thousand guidebooks and tens of interviews with academics or journalists could never replicate. Russel is 34, and lives with his wife Usha, his mother and formidable matriarch Elsa and his sons Kenford and Danny – eight and two respectively. Their house is like so many in India, two rooms with toilet facilities shared with a bunch of neighbours, and slim mattresses which get thrown on the kitchen floor at bedtime. The family all sleep together, they always eat together. To conserve water (heavily rationed by the city of Mumbai which cannot cope with a population that has doubled to 16 million in the past quarter century) they sometimes bathe together. Living with a family like this is the definitive travel experience – you can learn more about people in a couple of days like this than you would in a year of hotels, restaurants and taxis.You see first hand the shortcomings of the nuclear family – the importance of having uncles and aunts and particularly grandparents around as you grow up. You appreciate the importance of meal times as a communal experience, an opportunity to bond and laugh and share news. You come to understand the pride that comes with being aspirational and driven, in being able to provide well for your children,
to give them opportunities in life which your parents and their parents and theirs before them were unable to do so. Russel, who works as a systems integrator for a company – whatever that means – never completed university. He hated his father since an early age because his father married at 43 and inadequately prepared for the consequences of that. So by the time Russel and his brothers needed support to take on further education commensurate with their obvious intelligence, his father had retired with nothing. And India is not a place where you can just support yourself if you wish to study past high school. And so Russel has paid for his brother to study in the US, and paid for his father’s considerable medical bills in the final years of his life. But watching him work incredibly long hours, return home and find the energy to play with his children, love his wife and talk to his mother, I was struck, once more, by the fact that some people in this world really are to be admired. Although he earns a pittance by Western standards, h
e is determined to make sure that his boys – both smart as buttons themselves – will have the chance to keep the social climb going. He has pulled a middle-class life out of the scattered detritus of misfortune and inopportunity, helped his brother to do the same, and still welcomes travellers from around the world into his home and refuses to accept anything in return.Russel is Christian, and met Usha – Hindu - when he was sixteen and she twelve. They fell in love and – in his words – ‘courted’ for seven years, which consisted of five minutes per day at the bus stop together. In a move which I find utterly bewildering (as I do all things connected with religion), she began the complicated process of converting to Christianity, and they married. He went to Muscat in Oman for a while to make a better living, but they couldn’t bear being apart and he returned back, and they had Ken and Danny. What I find moving about this story is the honour and simpleness of their courtship and the profundity of a love that waits seven years of a few snatched minutes per day in order to have a loving family full of generosity and ambition for their children.
This is not a uniquely Indian thing, naturally. I wouldn’t claim that all Indian families are supportive, caring and welcoming any more than I would argue all French, Australian, German or Welsh families were loveless, detached and unhappy. But the fact remains that – religious and cultural reasons notwithstanding – the divorce rate is very, very low here and most people remain close to their elderly parents. There’s a lot we could learn. The disconnect of the western nuclear family model which produces maladaptive and angry teens, brattish kids, pre-nupped marriages and torturous yearly gatherings contrasts starkly with my time here so far. Russel, Usha et al live in something between a slum and a housing estate – former stables and barracks for the pre-independence British cavalry which has morphed into a heaving, cramped community of thousands of families living on top of each other. Children sleep regularly at one another’s houses every night. Food and various provisions are shared and swapped. Tuk-tuks and motorbikes speed through potholed and dusty alleys four feet wide. And all of this backs onto the eighteenth hole of the President’s Golf Club, where the greens and fairways are irrigated around the clock while the shantytown has its drinking water rationed, and India’s growing number of millionaires and billionaires are meekly followed around the fairways by caddies waiting to be thrown a few rupees.
There’s only so much you can say about social inequality in any place. You can describe the abstract juxtaposition of obscene wealth and obscener poverty – but it only says so much. It can’t really paint the picture. You can take photos – which do paint a picture – but the image is always subjectively filtered through the mind and the lens of the observer. There’ll always be a contrary tale to tell.
Or you can give some raw numbers - like the fact that it’s possible to pay four days’ worth of a rickshaw driver’s average salary on a cup of coffee in a swanky hotel – which would be like a £300 cappuccino in London. Numbers are cold and detached and they don’t tell which is the greater injustice – the criminal expense of the coffee or the criminal salary of the driver. So, permit me a few statistics instead.
In 2007, there are 41 million registered cases of diabetes, expected to double in the next two decades. India has surpassed South Africa as the country with the highest number of HIV cases (5.7 million) – a figure probably grossly conservative, and in large part due to Indian men’s unwillingness to wear condoms and women’s (particularly prostitutes’) inability to enforce their use. I posted the BBC story about Indian men and condoms above rather facetiously, but it may hide a broader problem to be addressed. Moreover, human rights groups estimate there are 60 million child labourers. 350 millions Indians live below the poverty line. The population growth rate exceeds the economic growth rate, and although the middle class is swelling, the average annual wage is US$710 per year and up to 400 million Indians live on a dollar a day or less. And despite the massive urbanisation with characterises all parts of the developing world, three quarters of Indians still live in rural areas, where income is a quarter that of city dwellers.
This last point is a question I have posed to a variety of people here – to students, to a kindly Hindu priest I met who was recovering from typhoid at the hospital where I stayed on my second night, to the traders and to Russel and Usha: As people flock to the megacities from rural areas, does their standard of living actually increase? Or perhaps more accurately – because this is closer to the subject of my book – what happens to their quality of life? Because observing the wretchedness of life for the urban poor, it’s difficult to conceive of a life with significantly less. Thousands upon thousands of people sleep on the pavement – some of whom have presumably come to the big city with grand dreams which have fallen tragically flat. And this is in the richest, most cosmopolitan and dynamic city in the country – the financial and commercial capital of a nation that’ll one day be a superpower.
Perhaps I’m being hopelessly naïve. Perhaps my scepticism at why anyone would leave a rural village only to struggle for a shanty life in a polluted, overcrowded, disgustingly congested city like Mumbai comes from being yet to see what rural Indian life is like. Russel – originally from a small town in Gujarat – assures me this is the case. Life in a rural area, he says, is beset with enormous financial costs compared with urban life, and the idealised peaceful village life I imagine isn’t a reality at all. The Indian rail system – the biggest employer in the world, by the way – is so advanced, so widespread (thanks in large part, it has to be said, to the colonial British) that there’s no village in India truly untouched by urbanisation. Cable TV and mobile phones are everywhere but salaries are lower and costs are higher. According to Russel and at least one economics undergraduate I interviewed, it’s the trappings of relatively affordable western luxuries which draws people to the cities.
It’s disingenuous to think that cheap mobile contracts and MTV account for this enormous migration. But their point was that India is not – as I’d suggested – like China, where people leave behind a rudimentary agrarian life to make their fortune in one of the twenty or so cities with over ten million inhabitants. Rather, village life in India has become a prohibitively expensive, poor, smaller version of urban life – and both standard of living and quality of life are relative concepts. The shantytowns which line the fence of the golf club – and which are periodically torn down by the local government only to pop right back up again – may be poor and dirty, but they’re a step up from life on the street and village life too. This is something I find hard to accept, and the coming weeks will reveal much, much more.
Beyond the poverty and the unfairness, beyond the simple and uncomplicated stories of love and family bonds in the movies, you can absorb so much more here. You sense the pride that accompanies having a job and making a living – the truth that so often, when you try to tip a merchant or vendor a few extra rupees as gratitude for his courtesy and goodwill, that tip is refused with a look of embarrassment. Or the fact that when I brought gifts to Russel and his family as thanks for showing me the city, feeding me and generally making me feel at home, the response was one of sheepish discomfort rather than unfettered gratitude. Or the taxi driver who, when seeing that Matt and I were sweating in his sweltering cab like cows being led to an abattoir, stopped to buy us bottles of cold water and would not accept a penny. These people, these open, friendly, generous and, yes, childlike people are the most wonderful part so far of this wonderful country. They hav
e curious cultural affectations such as a side-to-side, up-and-down, figure-eight head-wobble (which I’ve coined the “Stevie Wonder”) that can mean ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘maybe’ with no obvious way of discerning which. The children gather round demanding that you play cricket with them. And despite most Indians tolerating hardship that we should never and will never know, they smile and engage you with their eyes, knowing full well that you carry in your wallet a month’s worth of their salary and worked much less hard for it.The weeks to come will tell me how much of this is specific to Mumbai. All the guidebooks and everyone you speak to will tell you that Mumbai is to India as New York is to the US or London is to the UK: big, cosmopolitan, and completely unrepresentative of the country as a whole.
There’s too much more to say. The perplexing choice of the Indians to, when selecting a car on which to model their taxis, choose an Italian model which rusts faster than it drives and breaks down on average every 75 metres. Or the Hindu festival earlier this week during which married women fast for the day to give thanks to and for their husbands (it goes without saying that there’s no corresponding festival in which the men fast; it was men, after all, who invented the festival in the first place). Or the endemic corruption. Or the artificially low unemployment rate brought about by having men in uniform standing around everywhere with nothing at all to do. Or the fact that recent and rapid economic development means that everyone owns a mobile, but nobody has ever had a landline.
There’ll be time for all of this – but for now, I’ll sign off by recounting that on my second day, while travelling to the hospital where I was put up by a physician I met, I saw a deaf man and a blind man crossing the road together. It reminded me, naturally, of Gene Wilder and Richard Prior in “See no evil, Hear no evil” – the blind man listening for sounds and signing to the deaf man, and the latter guiding the former through the traffic. And it occurred to me, for perhaps the hundredth time that day – as it has every day of this journey – that if everyone showed that sort of solidarity with one another, the world would be an even more extraordinary place than it already is.
“I’ll Never Do It Again”?
What crap.
No comments:
Post a Comment