A Colossal Wreck (47 page)

April 5

My big evening in Calicut, sponsored by the extremely militant Bank Clerks’ Union. There’s a full house, I’m glad to say, with Muslim clerics front row right, Hindu fundamentalists, secularist leftists, Christians of various stripes. Kerala is a third Muslim, a third Hindu, and a third Christian, the latter faith having been brought to the Malabar coast in 60 AD by Thomas the Doubting Apostle, no doubt plaguing the navigator with anxious questions.

The meeting is chaired by the local member of the federal parliament, Veerendrakumar, an energetic man in his sixties who also controls
Mathrubhumi
. I let fly for an hour on the topic of the war in Iraq. It seems to go down well. Sainath speaks too, reminding the audience that back in 1916, when the British invaded Mesopotamia, their force was mostly Indian soldiers, most of whom were captured by the Turks and died in forced labor building railroads.

April 6

We drive north back to Wyanad, back to St. George’s Battery for a last night, winding our way up to 3,000 feet in the Western Ghats. The next day, with Sudhi at the wheel of the Ambassador, we set off north again into the state of Karnataka, northeast through Mysore to Bangalore, hailed by the Friedmans of this world as India’s prime
rendezvous with the future, where the cyber-coolies toil night and day in the huge call centers.

The
Hindu
’s classifieds tell the story: “Call Center Placement based US/UK, req’d for Chennai and Blr, Sal up to Rs 1800/m, age 17 to 29.) Any degree, walkin.” “ACDA of Chennai wants to hire Part-time faculty to teach Accent Neutralisation and American Accent.” Later come the matrimonial classifieds: “Hindu Parkaakulam, Moopanaar/Udayar 23/167, B.A. Fine Arts, doing M.A. MASSCOMM, good-looking, wheatish complexion, girl from well-to-do family in business seeks well settled groom in business. Early marriage. Send horoscope/photo.” And on down the packed columns to: “Karkatha Pillai 30/MCA/employed in TNEB seeks employed guy of same caste.”

These were all from the Tamil section, with others allocated to Marathi, Bengali, and “Cosmopolitan” where we find “K–, 33/155/ fair MNC innocent divorcee. Brahmin 35–38 preferably Hyd/Abroad without encumbrances,” plus an e-address @yahoo and a box address at the
Hindu
in Chennai. Sainath says such references to innocence—frequent in the matrimonial classifieds—are intended to convey the fact that the advertiser is still a virgin. Since some of the male matrimonials also mention innocence in divorce I’d assumed this meant simply that the advertiser was claiming to be the injured party.

These matrimonial ads aren’t on the fringe of the national culture, but in its dead center, as is the poor situation of Indian women overall. Most Indian marriages are arranged, from poor up to wealthy families. Of course there are love marriages and these days some Indian women find a way out of the parental pressure to marry via prolonged stints of education abroad in the US, UK or Australia.

Bangalore may be the modern face of India, but it’s paralyzed by traffic. Nothing moves. International businesses are having to relocate into the hinterland. There is, so our host Ashwin Mahesh tells us genially, no central traffic authority. Ashwin, ex-NASA researcher, educated at UW, then with a stint at NASA’s Goddard Center under his belt, returned to India to run a fine, public-interest website, india-together. From the sixteenth floor of South Tower, where he and his wife live, we are well situated to review the grid-locked traffic.
Ashwin has already modeled some ideas for traffic relief which are under consideration.

April 7

Chennai. Here I am on the coast of Coromandel. At last a city with the feel and pace of an older time. We go to the guesthouse of the Asian College of Journalism. I give a talk to the students. Then off to a terrific Chettinad restaurant, though in my order I foolishly include curried partridge, which is disappointing as all partridges have been for the thirty-four years since I ate a good one, braised in whiskey and cream.

I drive around with Ashwin, who’s come from Bangalore to visit his parents. We drive through the Theosophy Canter, the sanctuary of Annie Besant, also of a banyan of international repute, though now dying. Then we pace about on what is officially classified as the third longest beach in the world. There aren’t many women, and no one in bathing dress. The great tsunami of last Christmas washed in over this beach and about three-quarters of a kilometer inland, with a total of forty lives or so lost in all of Chennai.

April 8

We go down to a heritage center south of Chennai called Dakshina Chitra, which is really good, with excellent reconstructions of vernacular Indian architecture of an earlier time in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Looking at the wooden buildings reminds me of how much Indian architecture of the past fifty years is truly awful.

I distinguish architecture here from landscape. Indian landscapes, whether rural or urban are certainly what one might call “thick,” just as most American landscapes are “thin.” In India, from a foot in front of one’s nose to the horizon, there are infinite medleys of planes and perspectives. There is no thin air, no emptiness. There’s the street life, the endless small shop displays and signage, the billboards above, the animals, the stalls, the cars and buses overtaking each other at sixty miles an hour.

The overall effect is endlessly inspiriting, with palette after palette of tumultuous greens, blues, yellows, pinks, and reds deployed on saris, racks of clothes, aging advertisements. Anyone tired of an Indian streetscape or country road is truly tired of life. But the architecture itself is mostly drab cinderblock.

April 10

I give a talk at the Asian College of Journalism on the war in Iraq. There’s a fine turnout and many questions. N. Ram, the editor in chief of the
Hindu
, which sponsored the event, is unable to attend, with the rather good excuse that he was meeting the Chinese Prime Minister, Wen Jibao, touring Bangalore and Chennai that week.

The
Hindu
, circulation a million plus, and now Sainath’s home port, maintains decent standards and reminds me somewhat of the London
Times
thirty years ago, when a salvo from the editorial page could alter the contours of a whole political battlefield. Ram invites Sainath and me to drop by his house in Chennai the next day, and we do so. When we arrive, his charming wife says that he cannot be with us for a few minutes because he is finishing his editorial on Chinese-Indian relations. She says this with a tinge of gravity, of reverence for the solemn rite of editorial composition that takes me back to the distant years in the ’60s when the presses at the
Times
would be held while the editor in chief, William Haley, wrestled unrighteousness to the ground in the “first leader,” as the prime editorial was called in England in those days. These days editorials count for nothing in the US. Few read them except for press secretaries and lobbyists. They have no weight.

In due course Ram emerges from his editorial labors, looking weighty, and treats us to an interesting disquisition, which I correctly assess to be the burden of his impending editorial, on the evolution of Chinese-Indian relations since the late 1940s. Then he shifts to a description of his shock when he attended the reunion of his class of ’68 of the Columbia Journalism School last year: at a meeting to discuss the burning issues of the day he heard not a word of condemnation of the US invasion of Iraq, so rose to his feet and denounced it
himself. He said there were several hisses from other J School grads. It was bracing to find a newspaper editor—probably India’s premier editor in terms of political clout—talking like that; bracing too to hear later that in his younger days Ram endorsed a strike at the
Hindu
and was promptly exiled from the paper’s premises by his father, then the newspaper’s boss.

April 11

Back to Mumbai. Sainath’s friend Sudarshan invites me to APNE-AAP, a foundation he runs, in Kamathipura, Mumbai’s red light district along the Falkland Road. The foundation has some rooms in an old school, and these are now filled with cheerful kids. The idea is to give children of prostitutes a chance to get out of the life, get some education, get a chance. It’s the dearest dream of the prostitutes, many of whom haven’t much hope of living past thirty-five, taken off by AIDS or TB. The women working at the drop-in house get the prostitutes ration cards, take them to hospital, run savings accounts for them—over 200 when I was there—where they can squirrel away ten rupees (25 cents) or so a day for their kids.

Without such help the prostitutes get turned away by hospitals and kindred bureaucracies. Already there are 150 kids who’ve graduated, and sixty-five currently in attendance. Only one graduate has gone into her mother’s line of business. I like the atmosphere, mercifully free of social worker sanctimony. APNE-AAP’s staff, Manju Vyas, Preethi, Diplai, and Bimbla, are all in good spirits and very impressive.

We walk over to a huge old brothel built by the British a hundred years ago for their garrison. Back then the prostitutes were Tibetan or Japanese. These days they’re from Nepal or Bangladesh. The middlemen procuring the girls from their parents get 20,000 rupees or more from the madams. The rooms in the brothel are about ten foot by ten foot, with two tiers of beds and families of four or five cooking and chatting. When a customer shows up and forks over his 50 rupees they presumably stand outside. The girls greet us in friendly style and some of them covertly slide over their 10 rupees to the APNE-AAP
women, out of sight of husband, or pimp, or madam. It costs residents 50 rupees a day to rent a bed. Five rupees buys you a bucket of water. Electricity costs 150 rupees a month.

After an hour or so I bid them adieu and go off to the Royal Yacht Club to read for an hour or two before Sainath and his wife Sonia throw me a farewell dinner.

As we wait for friends to arrive, Sainath reminds me of the bit in Tacitus’s
Annals
where he describes how condemned people were recruited to serve as candles at Nero’s parties: “they were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as nightly illumination when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle.” “What sort of sensibility,” Sainath broods, “did it require to pop another fig in your mouth as one more human being went up in flames?”

And by the same token, Sainath asks, what sort of indifference has it required for India’s rich—and the very rich in India are the among the richest on the planet—to disport while millions starve not far off, and thousands of peasants kill themselves, some of them less than fifty miles from Mumbai where much of India’s wealth is concentrated, and where “theme weddings” costing millions have been the rage? Last year an Indian steel billionaire, Lakshmi Mittal, and his wife Usha promised their daughter Vanisha a spectacular wedding. They cashed the promise by renting Vaux le Vicomte and Versailles in France for the nuptials. The six-day-long wedding bash cost over $80 million and was attended by more than 1,200 guests including leading Indian industrialists and celebrities from the Bollywood film scene.

Just as interesting, I remark to Sainath, as the festivities and excesses of the rich is the mindset of the policy makers, the intellectual formulators of neoliberal policies that they well know will cause terrible suffering. What processes of self-exculpation insulate them from a policy (say, the planned shrinkage of India’s small farmers by 40 percent), and the execution of that policy, inflicting terrible privations and early death on millions?

April 29

Weather can wipe out cities forever. It’s what happened to America’s first city, after all, as a visit to Chaco Canyon, northeast of Gallup, NM, attests. At the start of the thirteenth century it got hotter and by the 1230s the Anasazi upped and moved on. As the world now knows, weather need not have done for New Orleans. There are decades’ worth of memos from engineers and contractors giving budgets for what it would take to build up those levees to withstand a Force 4 or 5 hurricane. The sum most recently nixed by Bush’s OMB—$3 billion or so—is far less than what the Pentagon simply mislays every year, without even taking the trouble to convert the appropriated cash into cruise missiles or boots.

For much of its post–Civil War existence New Orleans was always a pretty desperate city, despite its boast of a few years ago that it had the highest number of millionaires in America’s fifty largest cities. I remember that in the year that G. Bush Sr. accepted his party’s nomination in the Superdome in 1988 some 26 percent of the inhabitants were below the poverty line and 50 percent could be classified as poor.

The scarcely suppressed class war in New Orleans was what gave the place, and the music, its edge, and why, at least until now, the Disneyfication of the core city could never quite be consummated. Barely had the hurricane passed before Speaker of the House Hastert caught the Republican mood nicely with his remark that the city should be abandoned to the alligators and Barbara Bush followed through with her considered view that for black people the Houston Astrodome represents the ne plus ultra in domestic amenities.

Music and street food are what anchored the city to its history. On any visit, you could hear blues singers whose active careers spanned six decades. Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown finally left us last week at eighty-one. I heard him at Jazzfest this spring, and though the Reaper was at his elbow, Gatemouth Brown still fired up the crowd. “Goodbye, I hate, I hate to leave you now, goodbye. / Wish that I could help somehow. So long, so long, for now so long. / I pray that I return, return to you some day. You pray that it shall be just that way. So long, so long for now, so long.”

May 2

A highlight of the New Orleans Jazzfest was the tribute to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, courtesy of Marcia Ball, Tracy Nelson, Mairia Muldaur, Angela Strehli, and special guest Irma Thomas. They were all strong, but Irma Thomas blew everyone away with “Beams of Heaven.” Not a dry eye in the Blues tent, including her own.