FDI in Retail: Political blunder?

Prafull Bidwai's piece below is interesting. I feel persuaded to post this response because as far as I can recall in the past twenty years the decision to allow FDI in retail may easily be the one decision that has been implemented against the most widely shared political sentiment. That in itself makes me wonder if there is a viable mechanism for people to have their voices heard, other than through elections.  Because by the time elections take place the consequences of these decisions, positive or otherwise, would any way have been set in motion. Any talk of reversing such policy by any political party is just wishful thinking. Worse still, it smacks of political gimmickry.

I have been following this thread on FDI in retail with fascination, although I have occasionally yawned at some of the arguments that have been put forth.  The arguments in favour of FDI are especially amusing, coming as they do from distinguished economists with all their intellectual firepower and their overarching, even if sometimes ostensible, concern for maximizing welfare.  The tragedy is that the decision that has been made perhaps is not based on any of the arguments that have been advanced for or against FDI but by considerations of political expedience.  The events of the past three or four years tell us clearly what makes for political expediency in our country.

So I add to this chatter my own two paise worth, knowing fully well that whatever we say may not matter one bit and that the economics of rent will decide the outcomes and the rentiers who haunt the streets and bylanes of Lutyen's Delhi will decide what those outcomes ought to be.

Reading through the comments on this thread I experience a sense of déjà vu, a nostalgic throw back to the animated debates that took place around the reforms of 1992. I am reminded of those days because never since then have I seen such a broad based interest in any single economic development as the current debate on FDI in retail.  I say that based on the numerous developments that I have followed in these past twenty years, on the back of the reforms of 1992.  Given the extent of debate that this topic has generated I would like to this juxtapose this decision with the reforms of 1992.

As a manager in an emerging industry in 1992 I had the good fortune of being on the pitch where the match was being played; although my place as a rookie was on the stands, somewhere in the back and roughly around mid-wicket.  In other words one merely get to see the ball whizzing past at right angles to where one was seated, without getting a good sense of line or length.  But being on the grounds gave a good sense of the air around the game and the mood on the stands.

Many of us industry managers received the news of reform with much trepidation.  We could say for sure that the world would not be the same any more.  But we did not know if it would be for the better.  Most of the people I knew felt that the dirigiste economic paradigm prevailing at that time had failed.  Life for nearly everyone, except the few that profited from the dispensation, was difficult to say the least.  There was a sense that things could only get better.  So there was a sense of anticipation when the reforms were enacted, although it was mixed with some apprehension.

In the initial years the sense of well being that many Indians gained from the reforms outweighed the pain that those that did not gain would have suffered.  That is clearly my impression.  We got to enjoy better pay, more jobs, wider possibilities of goods and services to choose from, many new industries emerged, many Indian companies went global and so on.  At a global level there was a sense of pride and achievement that Indians could compete globally in a few industries at least.

Sadly, the experience of the past few years would suggest that these gains and blessings have not been unmixed.  They have come at a serious price. While we turned over much of the business that the state was conducting to the market, it appears that we did not have the law and order and political / governance apparatus to ensure that the withdrawal  of the state did not automatically set right many of the ills that the reforms set out to. No matter whether the CAG got his figures right or not, what he has revealed beyond any doubt is that post reforms plundering has gone on an unprecedented scale. We may all get our few minutes of entertainment watching the live coverage of a few netas being paraded in and out of jail; but the stolen wealth is lost forever, with all of its attendant economic consequences. 

One could quibble that plundering on this scale is recent and that it was after many years after reforms were initiated.  So, one might argue, that the plundering cannot be attributed to reforms. On a similar vein one could argue that it is wrong to attribute the inestimably grand larceny to the free market paradigm. To my mind these are lame arguments that do not deserved to be dismissed as even academic. It is the enormous potential for prosperity that was unleashed by the reform process, without adequate regulatory and constitutional safeguards, that allowed a few unscrupulous operators to pocket a disproportionate share of that prosperity.

In short, as it happens with many major events in history, the impact of the reforms on Indian society can be ascertained with some degree of accuracy only with the passage of time, with the benefit of some historical remoteness. The instances of abuse that have been recently brought to light make one want to be careful in one's enthusiasm about the positive effects of reforms of 1992, or at least the way we went about it. I am not suggesting that not having initiated the reforms would have been better.  But the reforms needed to take into account the larger context in which those changes were being wrought.

We are not alone as a nation in this learning.  There is a fair bit of literature that describes and analyses how the former Soviet Russia may have run ahead of its social and political context in turning to a market-centric paradigm. Absent essential mechanisms for ensuring law and order and personal safety and enforcement of property rights and contracts, economic activity in that country suffered grievously in spite of having a much larger stock of high quality human capital, a much larger stock per capita of a variety of natural resources and in spite of not being burdened with some of the problems that we suffered – and continue to suffer – from such as a large population, high population growth rate and stark social and economic inequality.

Net net, a narrowly viewed and short sighted economic view of a political issue can sometimes lead to regrettable outcomes. If I recall right the current PM is famous for having once remarked that you cannot divorce economics from political realities.

I believe that the matter of FDI in retail has to be viewed in the light of the experience with reforms. There are two important lessons of relevance from that experience.  One, hasty economic decisions can lead to poor political actions.  Two, politically sensitive matters are far too important to be left to economic technocrats and vested interest groups, especially if they are from a school that is prone to believe sincerely that Rs 32 is adequate for daily subsistence.  A more rounded view is required on such matters.
The current decision on FDI does not seem to keep those lessons in mind. There is little in the conversation that addresses the impact on those that will be adversely affected by this decision.  Even if one were to assume that those traders and middlemen are people who have been shortchanging consumer interests, as some opinions in this thread seem to suggest, as stakeholders in this democracy they have a right to have their concerns addressed. The livelihood of many local traders and shopkeepers is sure to be affected. I would suspect that the human costs here could be more serious since we do not even think of how to make these people economically productive, an essential part of any debate that one sees in situations that involve large scale labour displacements such as in the case of redundancies caused by developments in technology and globalization in the western world.

Harbingers of these situations have already manifested themselves in some of the cities where many small retailers have become landlords by literally shutting their shops and renting out their stores to mobile phone companies and so on.

Numerous arguments have been advanced for and against FDI in retail in this thread.  I will not revisit all of them here.  But two of them appear to be especially amusing.

The first of these is that if foreign investors do not do it anyway Indian capitalists and business families will, as seen from the entry of numerous large business houses into "organized" retailing. That argument has been quashed by assertions that the impact may not be the same as Indian businesses may not have pockets as deep and they may be reluctant to invest in distribution infrastructure and so on. But the amusing part is this line that we anyway made one mistake in allowing Indian business houses to set up large retailers. Let us now see if we can set right that mistake by compounding it with another.  Soon we might fall back on the Nixonian theorem: If two wrongs don't make a right, try a third. And I shudder to think what that third might be: Capital adequacy norms for starting a retail business? How about Rs1 crore as a minimum to start? All in equity!

The second is even more quixotic.  It goes as follows:  Why do we make so much noise about FDI?  It is not going to impact Indian retailing after all.  Indian retailers are far too innovative and adaptive to be washed away by the advent of foreign retailers. And that is not just the idle view of some academic.  It is a view that was echoed by a minister in a recent interview to a leading national daily.  That makes this argument dangerously specious too.

If it is of no consequence to anyone why is the Government allowing so many thousands of many hours to be wasted on a development that is of no consequence? That smacks like the many red herrings that parents throw at their credulous children just to hush them up.

Time and again, since we embarked on this journey of reform, without thought and preparation, we seem to have allowed the interests of the common man to be compromised. We allowed foreign investment into real estate although indirectly and with many strings. But all that the flow of this sizeable amount of capital seems to have done is created assets that have been meant mainly for the elite and the wealthy - upscale apartments, glitzy malls running on subsidized diesel, fancy office towers and so on. For the ordinary man, at Rs30 lakhs or more an ordinary apartment is way beyond reach. We opened up the securities markets. And all that it seems to have done is to benefit a few thousand families in a radius of a few square miles. That is not my view. That is the published view of one man who was at one time suspected to have been involved in questionable trades himself.  And if that is not enough the markets are routinely punctuated by one scam or another, the problem that reform of securities market was supposed to address. And for all that I am not sure what all of that has done to the common man.  So much so the PM was reported to have once remarked that the state of the securities market was not important enough to affect his sleep or something to that effect. FDI has been steadily liberalized across sectors. And now there is a view that is emerging that all of that has led to investments and growth that did not lead to the expected number of jobs, if any.

All of these are bound to have their social consequences. As people who call the tune we will all have to pay the piper.

Some time last year I was listening to a mature group of students from a leading French business school who were on a tour to understand India. Some of them noted that the level of tolerance of the Indian was remarkable compared to the level of inequality that was apparent. They contrasted it with some of the Latin American countries where the poor are a lot less understanding, making them unsafe places for the wealthy. As I heard them speak I could not help recalling an observation that has struck me in the past fifteen years or so. When I was a student, we lived in independent houses as well as apartments. There were no security guards in any of those houses. Security was essentially a fetter that bound VIPs. Today, even in the most modest apartments, one of the largest common costs is the cost of security. It is another matter that in spite of that expenditure personal effects get routinely robbed, car stereos are routinely stolen, houses are routinely burgled and once in a way residents are physically harmed or even killed. How long will it be before all of that is more commonplace? With the FDI in retail we may have given yet another fillip to this unhealthy possibility.

I cannot help imagining what C Rajagopalachari would have said in a situation like this:  Vinaashakaley, vipareetha buddhi.

Usha's The Chosen

My reading has been on a decent trot lately.  In less than two weeks I completed reading Usha's The Chosen.  Don't laugh.  That is brisk reading by my standards. 

Reading one of Usha's books has been on my mind for many years, long before she won the Vodafone Crossword award.  More than a colleague she has been a friend and I have been curious to see how she writes.

The plot in The Chosen is quite different and a lot more involved than the plot in Adiga's WT.  I will end up comparing these two although I am not sure that is appropriate in any way or for any reason.  Adiga and Usha write different genres of fiction.  I do not know what to label them; but I can sense enough of a difference to make that distinction.  The only reason I compare them is that I read Usha soon after I finished reading Adiga.

For starters, I narrated the plot in WT in three sentences or so in an earlier blog.  Usha's story would take a lot more real estate.  It reminds me, in parts, of the Bollywood classics of the nineties like Hum Dil De Chuke Hein Sanam, Taal and so on:  Lots of characters that weave in and out of the story, rich in narrative detail, tonnes of melodramatic romance that seems to go on for a little too long for the comfort of an unromantic churl such as me.  That last bit is in sharp contrast to Adiga's plot where romance is primarily consists of his characters, men and occasionally women too, indulging in the primeval biological urge of man,  in wham-bam-goodbye-ma'am (or goodbye man) style.  Usha's characters are eternally in foreplay, I would say, at the risk of sounding risque. I had almost begun to think for a while after reading WT that this may well be the essence of man-woman relationship after all.  It took me a while to come out of that cynical reverie.

The story in The Chosen goes somewhat like this.  Nagaratna (Nagu) and her mother are cast away in Bangalore by the tides of misfortune that wash away Nagu's father into an untimely end.  Studious Nagu completes her BCom, takes up a job in Vidyalaya, a school that is different in that it tries to provide a spiritually orientated education to the kids of well heeled parents who, I presume, would like their children to grow up as genteel citizens in spite of their wealth.  Nagu's decides to work as an administrator at the school in preference to a more mainstream job in the same garment factory as her sister in law. That is just one of her many early attempts at not wanting to belong to the middle-class life styles and aspirations of the joint family that she grew up in. 

Usha portrays skillfully the many nuances of a lower middle income community in the Bangalore of the late nineties / early two thousands although in my opinion she is off by a few years in this view.  I suspect that the city and its very middle class sensibilities had been run over by then by the immigrating parvenus of the fashion and technology world, with their swinging, drug and drink laden culture of rave parties and wild sex that they brought to the city with them. I absolutely loved Usha's presentation of the strange irony of an institution that peddles a spiritual upbringing, in which the iron knuckles of Miss Pandit,wrapped inside the velvet gloves of exhortation of self improvement and self development,typified in letters sacking the various teachers,put down petty egos and politics with ferrous firmness.

The school is a project of a spiritual institution on the west coast of Karnataka. As an employee who works closely with Miss Pandit, Nagu gets entwined in the other world that would appear like a natural extension - the ashram.  But somewhere in Usha's delivery that fusion does not come through smoothly enough.  Again, I enjoyed Usha's description of life at the ashram, complete with intrigues and mysteries. Now, those may be what I saw them as.  It is possible Usha did not intend them to be so. One gets a sense of how the peace in the spiritual peace in that ashram can be quite brittle, even vulnerable.  How the overall atmosphere of serenity could well be the happy coincidence of a number of individuals aspiring and struggling to come to terms with the numerous personal battles that they are fighting within themselves.  And of how all of that spirituality, like American healthcare, is only for those who can afford it in the form of a sizeable financial deposit.  But for those who can afford, the ashram is very egalitarian in its dispensation of its spiritual
largesse, seemingly admitting people without any pesky KYC style questions about where and how they made their pelf - as in the case of the hardnosed sweatshop owner Vasant.

And then, while working in the school, Nagu experiences incipient romance, which to my mind happened rather too abruptly. But it drags on like it often does in Indian movies or in the Mills and Boon novels that my sister used to borrow when I was in college and I used to devour surreptitiously for fear of embarrassment.

Caught inside this vortex of a romance she does not know what to make of, the highly aseptic world of pine windows with taselladed curtains exclusive silks, and arty dance programmes by men and women in tumescent clothes at the ashram that seemed to be willing to beckon her and the power that she enjoyed at the school that came with the proxmity that she seemed to enjoy with Miss Pandit, Nagu seems to be well and truly detached from her lower middle income roots and its realities that she would have loved to but had not managed to break off completely.

And then one day this bubble, this chimerical world of glass that she had allowed to envelop her suddenly crashes.   She is let down by the man she thought was madly in love with.  Miss Pandit, the high achiever dumped her as she scrambled out of the school without so much as taking leave of Nagu, to save her own claim to the higher stakes of the leadership of the ashram.  And Nagu is left to the not so tender mercies of a new management of the school that in a sardonic twist types out the same letter, sacking Nagu from the school, that she had earlier typed out to six others.

That leaves Nagu. all of twentyone, with little worldly experience, not belonging to either of the world that she wanted to belong to or to break away from.  Meanwhile her friend had been happily married to one of the men whose romantic interest in her she had disapproved of and spurned, while the other man who seemed to be willing to wait for her in spite of her numerous rebuffs had moved along slowly in life to be able to eventually buy a car, albeit used.

Usha's mastery of the art lies in her skills as a raconteur.  She demonstrates great virtuosity in presenting detail that reads like a pen portraits, something that Namita Gokhale points out in her review, although in places it appears that she may have brought in some of those details just because she felt it had to be there even if she may not have been sure it was needed.  Her imagery is flawless, something that I find missing in many contemproary Indian writers. I only wish the style was a little easier on less literate folks like me.

Her story has many more characters than Adiga has.  But every most of them add to the plot, barring a few "extras" like Dhana, Sylivie or Vijay who do not even titillate me, let alone enthral.

At a broader level though one wonders if all the story about Nagu's past in Gubbigudi could have been narrated in just three pages.  I am sure Usha intended to carefully develop her Nagu out of her beginnings in Gubbigudi.  If she did, I seem to have missed that evolution.  As an indolent reader who loves parismony with the written word I would have liked to miss those few extra pages and been perfectly happy with a 280 page novel instead of the 320 in the edition that I read. And that I guess is what makes me see some sort of a Freudian association with the Bollywood classics of the nineties.

Since I started comparing with The Chosen with WT, it may be in order for me to close with this final point of comparison.  Adiga's Ashok Sharma aka Munna and the many sleazeballs of Darkness that populate the story make you sit up fuming at the depravity that they spread across the country, including in my beloved Bangalore. The characters and settings of Usha's novel leave you with a nice languorous feeling, quite like the nice fuzzy drowsiness that overpowers one after a hearty meal of good bisibelahulianna and basundi. One feels lullabied into a hope that the ashrams in the real world will offer some real solace to the embattled soul in a world torn by greed and conflict, like the greenery that the residents of Muttu had helped grow in the red and rocky barrenness of Kavalkot.

Usha:  If you ever read this review, I would like you to know that after reading The Chosen you have turned from a friend I like to a friend I admire too.  I shall waste no time reading your other novels.  I say that not in the tongue in cheek manner that Benjamin Disraeli is supposed to have responded to his writer friend.  So please keep writing more of them.  So that there is hope for souls like me who turn despondent about the future of Indian writing after working through pulp like Seven Point Nothing, or whatever is the title of that book was that was made into a campus based movie.   
 
Nanni. Namaskaaram.

Adiga's White Tiger

After an extended drought I have resumed reading, Masha Allah.  I started with Aravind Adiga's Man Booker winner, White Tiger. Adiga's story is simple, perhaps not too striking or strange for those of us who have had a reasonable dose of Hindi movies.

The story is about a poor boy who flees his village somewhere in the Hindi speaking Northlands to become a driver in Dhanbad and migrates from there to Delhi.  Eventually he kills his employer, steals his money to start a taxi business with the that ferries employees of call centres to work and back.  The story is one long imaginary monologue between the visiting Premier of China and the main protagonist who starts with Mannu has his name and finally rechristens himself as Ashok Sharma that goes with his new status as an "entrepreneur".  Along the way he retains the epithet that a visiting education official conferred on him, White Tiger, for the rare wit and intelligence that he impressed the visitor with.  And in between all that, the story moves along like an Adoor Gopalakrishnan movie, with some painstaking attention to detail that can be at times painful to an average reader.  For example water buffaloes wallowing in a village water body is not exactly romantic anymore to Hindi movie-goers.

Which makes one wonder whether Adiga was following in the footsteps of Danny Boyle and his slumdog millionaire, showcasing indigent and indolent India to the sensitive West that is eager to the hear about the misery of Indians.

This is not intended to be a book review.  I am a little too late in the day for that.  In any case I am not competent or trained to review works of art.  These are just random thoughts that crossed my mind as I read the book.  For those who are looking for a proper review ,here is a slightly different one that I found interesting. http://zapreneur.com/the-white-tiger-and-the-rooster-coop/ekhassen/

So here is what I do not fancy about the book. 

Clearly, the style of writing is different from typical, well crafted English prose.  Adiga seems to think that an English novel does not have to conform to the canons of robust prose that people like Somerset Maugham dwell upon at length.  Far from being elegant, the prose turns coarse at places.  And Adiga's similes do not always come across as analogous to the situation he is trying to bring to life through them.  Adiga is not alone in that.  That seems to be a besetting problem with many a  contemporary writer, including the much celebrated Chetan Bhagat of Five Point Someone fame.

Adiga could well argue that this is an Indian writing about an Indian story and the language has to reflect the milieu.  But then some of the nuanced thoughts of the protagonist appear to be out of synch with his background, although Adiga would like to present him to us as one of those street smart, if not intelligent, rustic lads who would have been a smart man of the world, but for the unfair deal that life had dealt him.

Second, Adiga makes no direct case for the protagonist turning a murderer.  In fact Adiga reveals a certain dark kink in the latter's persona, where he thinks nothing at all of betraying people around him, for his own surivival, as he does with a fellow driver in the household or neglecting his family back in the village, so that he may enjoy the fruits of his toil by buying himself such fineries of the city that his meagre salary would allow him to enjoy before he finally turns a full-fledged killer.  Or for that matter when he buys his way into the fleet operation business by dislodging incumbent or he buys himself out of the hands of justice when one of the vehicles in his fleet kills an innocent youth.  Mind you, the need for resorting to unfair means for sustenance is long past by then for the protagonist.

If Adiga has any intention of presenting the protagonist as a victim of the social or political system, I suspect he has not done a fool proof job.  Mannu, alias White Tiger alias Ashok Sharma, has this strong streak in him to get ahead in life at all cost - costs to others account of course - that I believe that he would have led a life full of deceit, even if he had not been at the bottom end of the food chain in Laxmangarh.


Now, I have had a few conversations with a few people whose opinion and judgement I respect on the kind of character that Adiga has created.  One of them said that the story "leaves no hope for morality". Another said that it "exoticises crime, violence and unethical behaviour". Personally, I do not share these views.  I think morality is too much to expect of someone who has been at the poor end of the spectrum and who has been constantly exposed to how the only way to break out of that Continent of Circe like morass is to  play the game by the same rules as the ones the successful play by:  Deceit and Violence.

And here is what I like about Adiga's story.

It presents the crudity of life in Darkness which many of us can relate to.  The last time I saw a version of this life, that was as unflattering as Adiga's presentation, was in the Devgan-Patekar starrer, Apharan, that left me deeply disturbed for many days.

The graphic detail of the bribing of politicians, the social exploitation of the less powerful by the more powerful in the political hinterlands of Darkness, the filthy inequity that coexists side by side with the ostentatious and venality of Delhi,  the misery and squalor that thousands, if not less millions of under privileged immigrants have to go undergo so that the well heeled in Delhi may continue to lead their well heeled lives of opulence, where the market metaphor is bastardised in a strange and surreal way as unscrupulous contractors keep the flow of below market wage earning labourers from regions such as Darkness - all of these are tragically consistent with the accounts that reads of in the press and hears from personal accounts.  I like to forget the three years that I spent in Delhi precisely because of this depressing hypocrisy that I saw among the people I worked with and in whose midst I lived.

If the labour market had well functioning instituions that ensured that all labourers earned enough to pay for their basic needs of food clothing, shelter, education for the family and healthcare, the middle and higher income brackets may perhaps abuse the formers' economic deprivation less and in the process learn to be a lot more self reliant rather than have their second driver wipe their jogging sweat off their faces.  In laying out this surreal life Adiga raises hopes for a political future for my comrade friends.

The other aspect of Adiga's story that resonates with a worry that has been bothering me since the mid nineties is the annihilation, by the huge waves of immigration,  of the genteel Bangalore that I came to as a student in the early eighties and lived and worked in the late eighties and early nineties.

Dont get me wrong.  I have always chosen Bangalore over Chennai where there are many more of my ilk - Tam Brahms - because of the cosmolpolitan nature of the city.  It is the Medina of the Tam Brahm. (Now that is a poor metaphor, indeed, but I shall stay with it a fortiori.) 

The beauty of Bangalore pre-nineties was that all those who came to the city transformed themselves into Bangaloreans.  They would all become just as genteel as the other Bangaloreans whose signature line is "Ootta aayitha?"(meaning, Have you had your meal?). Everyone turned into a Bangalorean, in other words.  Whenever friends of mine have told me that Bangalore unlike Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai or Delhi does not have a personality, I have always disagreed.  I have argued back that its personality is defined by its genteelness.

Somewhere in the mid nineties, I feel that changed, thanks to the "software boom".  Many of the new wave of immigrants are like Ashok Sharma.  Instead of melding into the social character of the city they bring the hall marks of the worlds they come from, turning the city a patchwork of bad behaviour from the worlds they come from.  The genteelness of the past seems to have more or less completely given way to the world view and way of leading a life and doing business of the likes of Ashok Sharma.  It shows up in the road rages in the city.  It shows up in the poorly maintained neighbourhoods, even as the insides of their plush air-conditioned apartments remain well appointed thanks to the influx of below market wage earning, live-in domestic help and personal staff from their home towns. 

A lot of the economy and the political levers, one hears from friends from the front lines of commerce,are now passing over to these new citizens.  The genteel citizens of Bangalore are rarely to be seen in the "page three" style events that seem to define social life in the New Bangalore.  It is another matter whether the Old Bangalorean would subscribe to that life style.  While the traditional Banaglorean has always been a bit of a westerner, fond of his evening drink, his English play or movie or game of bridge in the afternoon, I doubt if he would ever have been comfortable in partner-swapping rave parties. 

Society pays a price for these transitions.  One reads of crime and social flare-ups that one would have rarely heard of some twenty five years back.

So every time a crazy SUV careened through bumper to bumper traffic to beat their deliverable deadlines I used to wonder and moved down some unsuspecting pedestrian or cyclist or two wheeler rider I used to curse the social cost of the outsourcing - globalisation economic duo.  Adiga, with his profound insight, suggests to me that it is likely that there is an Ashok Sharma behind some of those unfortunate markers of the New Bangalore.


Nanni.  Namaskaaram.

Route No 23 A

I have been an odd man in many ways.  I was a self styled misogynist; yet women always intrigued me, even if it was in an asexual way. The less they noticed me the more I wished I would be chased by them.  At one point I was afraid that I would soon be an afflicted soul, a la, Mungeri Lal of the Haseen Sapne fame.

And then suddenly something happened.  I was thrown into this large and impersonal whorl of people that was known as the City of Madras.  Out of sheer desparation over my political activism and the resulting academic crisis I faced in Trivandrum  my father enrolled me into a college that was known for breeding slaves:  Loyola College.  The students of Loyola were known as the Slaves of Loyola, in contrast to the Princes of Presidency.

Loyola college was a long bus ride away from where I lived, the Central Government Staff Quarters at Besant Nagar.  Home to one of the best beaches in south India and the free spirited movement of Annie Besant, the place seemed to be designed for youthful romance, with its avant garde air about it.  Hear this: Rukmini Devi Arundale chose the neigbourhood of Besant Nagar to set up her liberal Kalakshetra Academy, which cocked a cultural snook at the Tamil orthodoxy of Bharatanatyam.

Top that ambiance with a cosmopolitan community of middle class teenagers, raised all over India, as their parents got transferred every three years. Many of them, especially the women, took to the arts, hoping to follow their civil service parents in their bureaucratic footsteps.  I guess you get the picture now:  It was a perfect setting for a seventies style romance - even for an unromantic philistine like me.

23 A was one of the most colourful routes for getting from Besant Nagar to Loyola. It serviced three of the best women's colleges of Madras that packed in a heavy fire-power of some of the prettiest and the brightest women in the city.  And it connected the most promising among the upcoming residential neighbourhoods of the city:  Indira Nagar, Tiruvanmiyur and then the more traditional hot spots such as Alwarpet and Luz Church Road. 

R - let me just refer to the subject as that - boarded the 23 A to Stella Maris every morning at the same time.  Clockwork precision and punctuality were just one of the many hallmarks of her solid character that I would discover over the next two years.  With a patent jhola filled with books and with thick glasses, R did not conform to your idea of the head turning, traffic stopping beauty.  But even at first look it was difficult not to notice the self assured confidence she exuded, presumably arising from her brilliance, her sense of purpose and the easy contemporariness of her world view that she wore about her so lightly.

And yes, the general impression that she conveyed of a woman who was not looking for a mushy bus-stop romance gave her the added charm of a challenging romance that was difficult, yet so worth taking a crack at.  Notwithstanding all that, if I did not take the same bus as R everyday, I guess I might not have had a story to tell.

But the bus was not all that there was to it.  Over time, our paths crossed more often.  At the local temple where I was desparately derisking my bet on the IIMs.  At the Theosophical Society where I went looking for books to prepare for the civil services that I never made it to.  At the Soviet style ration shops where the long queues levelled all middle class families, no matter whether they were Class I or Class IV employees of the government.  And not the least of all, the  numerous debating competitions in the local colleges, where R was a regular fixture, unlike me.

Interest quickly turned into inquisitiveness as I figured out that R was reading Sociology, was always either the first or second in the class, was a Vaishnavite by faith and the only child of a well respected officer in the Audits and Accounts Service,who had brought her up to be a woman of independent thought and opinion.

Weeks rolled by as I engaged in this unrelenting pursuit of knowing more about R, her antecedents and tastes.  The more I heard, the more I liked every bit that I heard.  Under normal circumstances one would surmise that was the start of a well researched and rational romantic episode, if ever there was such an oxymoronic possibility.  

Three or four months into life as a Loyola student, the desire to develop an acquaintance with R grew.  Our paths now crossed even more often, by design - by my design as you might have guessed. I attended debating competitions as a member of the audience, even if the parochial debating club at Loyola would not nominate me to represent the college.  For a similar reason I started timing my meetings with Lord Ganesha . My family was puzzled that they no longer had to push me to the queue at the ration shop. 

As the weeks, months and all of two years rolled by I was an authority on R's reading interests, her sartorial preferences, the number of different bags she carried to college, the select set of people she would acknowledge on the road or elsewhere, the number of circumambulations she offered at the temple, of her slightly fidgety mannerisms as the wait for the bus made her restless. 

And alas, one day, quite like a Malayalam art move it all came to an abrupt end.  My course at Loyola was over.  I was soon to leave for Bangalore in what was a decisive turn in my life, the start of a destiny with the institution that I realised much later shares a date of birth with me.  Quite like the nitwit hero in Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Kodiyettam I moved out of the world of 23 A, not having spoken a word to R, with a heart full of memories and unsure feelings.

As I look back at those years and the years thereafter, R was not the only woman who had caught my fancy.  There was an M at the Sion Koliwada bus stop in Mumbai who made me learn Marathi in the hope of building a conversation with her some day.  And there was an MG who made me read Auden, Keats, Burns and Shelley in the hope that I may have enough in common to talk about - until she eloped one day with a classmate of hers.  All these still-born acquaintances had one thing in common:  They were all silent art movies that left a strange stirring in the heart that one does not know to describe. 

I have never understood love.  So I cannot claim to have experienced it.  I have always found romance a foolish pursuit. I have even scoffed at people who give up so much else that is valuable, like family, career, home and so on to pursue a call of the heart in the name of romance.

But then there are these episodes which leave me wondering what it was that made me that invest so much of my energy in knowing more about those women. Was it that thing they call love and I just did not know it?  Or, was it just another one of my fancies to win a coveted trophy simply because the women looked so difficult to win over? 

Now that I am happily married by God's Grace, thanks to what was a perfectly rational decision between two sets of parents I guess these questions are no longer relevant.  Except when I experience a fleeting interest in a Poorna Jagannathan in her Delhi Belly role as Menka.  Luckily, these fleeting crushes do not sustain the way my interest in R, M or MG did.  I quickly dismiss them as a case of middle-aged male menopause, a peccadillo that is unbecoming of the husband of a devoted wife and father of twin boys.

Nanni. Namaskaaram.

Letting go...

You may wonder why this post comes right on the back of the earlier post.  The reason lies in my lethargy.  "Clinging on" was written quite some days back as I thought of the many successful people that had passed through my life.  But then I never got down to posting it.  I guess it does not matter.  This is after all my private space.  I write when I can, when I wish to.

And the one thing that I saw common to all of those successful men and women was this extra-ordinary desire to move on, every day, every moment.  With a great sense of anticipation of some important destination that they had locked into their auto-navigation system, often behaving like memory-less beings wherever the situation called for it.

And this piece is being written as I look sometimes wistfully and sometimes emptily through the wet windows of the second class coach, as the dangling creepers lining the face of the laterite walls outside caress the sides of the rattling coach.  For some strange reason the swaying delicate creepers and the dirty and rain washed coach reminded me of the helpless, delicate and lachrymose heroines of our  movies who have to subject themselves to filthy, yet powerful men who thrust themselves upon the woman with all their rugged coarseness.

This is has how it has been, every time I boarded a train to leave Trivandrum.  It has always rained, as if it was part of the city's customary farewell package to me, with the clouds adding to the O' Henry-esque gray within me and without.

The difference this time though was that I had decided to make an earnest attempt to leave an important part of me behind:  The longing to go back and call the few friends from the past that I had been trying to keep up with. 

The friends were all from my school.  They were part of the past that I was trying hard to cling on to.  Some fifteen years back I had reached out to them for the first time after many years of absence from Trivandrum.  It was part of my slow realisation that the race for corporate success did not excite me any more.  And in the style of the Beatles, I wanted to get back to where I once belonged. 

There was much warm requital from many of them.  I was overjoyed at the response of my friends. I felt like the proverbial prodigal. 

But soon, with every passing trip, their eagerness started fading away.  As did the numbers of people who would return my phone calls or who would be interested in meeting up.  Finally, one or two remained, who would make an attempt to keep up and meet.  And then disappointingly enough over the past three trips I  realised that even those faithfuls seem to have started getting weary of it all.

As I thought about my numerous attempts to go from clutching on to memories to clinging on to people and places, I realised that there was something amiss in the whole experience.  Somewhere I seemed to have missed the possibility that my desire have been one-sided.  The requital may not have been as enduring as I thought it was going to be.

And so I realised the significance of what I had heard in many a spiritual discourse:  The importance of letting go.  I realised I did not have an answer to why I had the desire to cling on.  But I knew the time had come to let go.

With a sad deliberateness I pulled out my antique mobile phone and started deleting a number of phone numbers from the rudimentary contact list I had put together over the past twelve years or so.  My heart felt heavy, even after I had deleted all those numbers.  But somehow I knew it would pass.  Those men who gave those discourses ought to have known.

Clinging on...

I have a great desire to cling on to my past, especially that of my childhood.  I fondly remember my days as a young boy in Trivandrum and Ernakulam - the schools I went to, the songs I heard, the houses I grew up in, the joint family in which we were all raised, the black humour of my school mates and so on. 

It is not because it was a period of unmixed joy.  On the contrary, nearly all of these settings had enough unpleasantness that I would not want to cherish. As an extremely sensitive boy it did not take much to cause me hurt. Not the least of all the sadness of those days is the precipitous and rapid fall from being a nearly invincible academic rival across the entire state to a nearly failed student -  if only I had collected my grade at the end of the first year of college, which I never did.

And that makes me wonder why I wish not to let go of much of that past in Kerala. 

In sharp contrast, I am quite happy to forget nearly all aspects of my life in Madras, except for the fact that those were the only two years that all five of us lived together as a family.  And of a certain fellow passenger on whom I showered mute admiration for the two years that I took a bus to Loyola College.  More about that strange affair in another post, where I nearly spoke my mind to her more than two hundred times, but never did.

So it is that I still wear a single dhoti and sleeveless banian, as I did as a young boy in Trivandrum.  My idea of religion still consists of going to a Kerala style temple and worshiping in the Malayali tradition. I still watch Malayalam movies from that era.  I cannot seem to like any film music better than the songs of Yesudas and Jayachandran from that time.  The most memorable monsoons to me are those where the rain water rushed in one torrential sweep down the open sewerage in front of my grandfather's house in Trivandrum, leaving me wondering how long would the water take to find its way into the emaciated and nearly extinct Kili river that I had been told it would eventually flow into.

So it is that every time I go back to Trivandrum, hoping to see vestiges of those days and events that I love to cling on to.  And then I realise sadly that every thing I turn to has changed - from the roads to my school classrooms to the British library, the YMCA sports club...Not to mention the people who have all bowed to mortality, even as I hoped that someday I would walk up to them and say, Do you remember I was in your English class? Or, do you remember that incident where you caught me flying paper rockets inside your physics class? Just as much as I wanted so much to say to the late Narendra Prasad, who fought with the Principal that he (the Principal) withdraw my suspension order and be allowed to stay.  But I never did speak to Prasad because he suddenly went to sleep forever, with his many unspoken sorrows that gave him an aura of mystery.

Why do I wish to cling on to those memories?  Why do so many of us want to cling on to the past - even though we know it is costly to do so?  Even though all the examples of worldly successes we see around us tell us that the key to getting ahead in life is to move on?