India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (33 page)

My recollections of those working at Benares’ famous Manikarnika Ghat come back far less sharply. I have vague visions of a gaunt, bearded man carrying logs up the crematorium steps, dropping them beside a smouldering pyre and then silently returning below for more. I’ve an image of another man, sad and faceless, perhaps shrouded in a headscarf, keeping the burning embers alive with the prodding of a stick.

It is these men – the stagehands of the deathly saga, not its protagonists – who had stirred Rajesh’s empathy. It was their untold story that he described with such vivid, compassionate eloquence.

And so it is with trepidation that I continue with my question, unwilling to sound facetious or disrespectful, but compelled to ask all the same.

‘. . . Yet in order to change perceptions, people will need to actually see your films, right?’

Rajesh merely smiles and acknowledges the logic. Of course, he’s thought about that, he says. He knows documentary-making in India isn’t commercially viable. He’s aware his audience will only ever be limited. But what is he to do?

‘I’ve wanted to make films since I was ten years old. I used to bunk off school to go to the cinema. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. And it’s now all I do. I’m not an activist. I’m not a philanthropist. I’m just trying to address the issues that concern me in the best way I know how.’

Film-making is his vocation. I understand and respect that. It’s the tirelessness with which he pursues his craft: it’s that which I can’t quite fathom. Has he not thought about going overseas? He has a commitment to India, he says. ‘It’s no good being somewhere else. You have to be in the current system if you want to correct it.’

Perhaps I look unconvinced or maybe he feels a burden to share. Either way, the gentle, soft-spoken film-maker sighs once
more and then, in whispered tones, starts slowly describing his past.

His mother died when he was thirteen. His father . . . well, let’s just say, he grew up from then on with his uncle and aunt. In December 1989, aged twenty-one, incursions by militant Kashmiri nationalists forced him to flee his homeland. In total, more than three hundred thousand Indians, mostly Pundits, packed up and left. Most went to neighbouring Jammu. Rajesh headed for Delhi, to a refugee camp.

‘Close to where we are now,’ he says, pointing out of the window, across the highway. ‘The conditions were subhuman.’ Twenty-seven families under one roof. Two toilets between one hundred people. He lived there for eight years, working part-time as a technician for All India Radio.

I look in the direction of his pointed finger but can see only shops and flats. ‘No, further off,’ he says. ‘But it’s gone now, anyway.’ Eventually, he moved to Mumbai. He hoped to land a job under a well-known director, ‘to gain some experience, you know’.

As with struggling acting student Naval, he soon discovered the loneliness of being a ‘nobody’ in India’s film capital. He ended up at TV Today, a production house, trotting out meaningless half-hour shows for the Hindi news channel Aaj Tak. He returned to Delhi. A decade of corporate videos, travel shows and ‘stupid films to survive’ followed. It wasn’t until his mid-thirties that he managed to direct what his calls his first ‘meaningful’ film.

‘What was it called?’

The Floating Lamp of the Shadow Valley
, he says with a note of wistfulness. ‘It’s about a nine-year-old boy on Dal Lake in Srinagar. He’s a boat boy.’ A boat boy? A ferryman, the film-maker clarifies. His name is Arif. He rows passengers across the lake.

Rajesh had spotted him one day on his flat-hulled canoe and followed him home, to a wooden shack on the lake-side where he lived with his mother, sister and three small brothers. ‘He alone kept that family of six.’ His father was absent, an ex-militant in the clandestine war for Kashmir.

It struck me that, as with his film on Benares, the story revolves around a fatherless boy. Was that an important theme in his work? Rajesh mulls over the question. How families interact fascinates him, he says quietly. He grew up not knowing what fatherhood was. He still doesn’t. His voice grows almost inaudible.

‘No one knows this.’ He stops, collects himself. Knows what, I wonder? I try and fathom what might be coming next. ‘My father . . . my father was a spy.’ The words emerge slower and more deliberate than ever. ‘He was caught.’ The tip of his finger presses hard into the wooden table top until it grows crimson around the quick. ‘For seventeen years, he was incarcerated in a Pakistani prison. The nation, this nation, forgot about him.’

As my mind processes the revelation, Rajesh wraps up his story. His father was eventually released in a prisoner exchange, he explains. He now lives in Delhi. With you? No, not with him. Somewhere else. He’s a broken man. The two see each other, although they have no real relationship. His father has tried to gain some sort of legal restitution, a regular state income at least, but he lacked the money for the lawyers’ fees. ‘So you see, I can’t give up.’ Making films, ‘sensitising people’, as Rajesh puts it, is not only what he does. It’s
who
he is.

Arjun is altogether different. He’s an ideas man. He’s also a relentless, first-class strategist. He knows what he wants and has a savvy sense of how to get it. Tall and broad-chested, he is a product of India’s best schools and the country’s highest social grooming. Arjun’s wife’s aunt is married to the Raja of Patna. ‘She has a palace,’ he’d said as an aside. As for his family, his land-owning lineage is written into the fertile soil of Uttar Pradesh. In his early thirties, he has the confidence of someone born into privilege, of someone who can talk of ‘our ancestral home’ without a hint of irony. A friend in the British diplomatic service had put us in touch. The two had met in Germany, at a global youth leaders’ summit.

I liked Arjun from the start, mostly because he was the antithesis of what he could have been. Generous-spirited, modest and
unapologetically idealistic, he disabused me of the worst stereotypes associated with India’s social elite. He’d studied welfare economics, not finance. He worked for himself, not a large corporation. And, above all, he cared passionately about the destiny of India, his homeland – both for its people and its natural environment.

We’d met at the five-star Imperial Hotel, a revamped British-era relic with exquisite Victorian art on the walls and foxhounds on the bar-mats. The corridors were full of Indian gentlemen in brass-buttoned blazers and the kind of well-heeled tourist who travelled the world in a Panama hat. From the soft-carpeted splendour of the Imperial, we’d moved on to the Press Club of India. A complete contrast, the journalists’ clubhouse was an earthy joint full of sweat and boozy laughter. Located close to Parliament, the low-roofed refuge kept its affiliates happily fed, watered and within stumbling distance of evening press conferences.

Sitting in the dusk-lit courtyard, drinking a beer and nibbling on masala chips, Arjun had revealed the roots of his eclecticism: how his father was Hindu and his mother Sikh (he himself read the Gita but felt drawn to Buddhism), how his parents had been born in East Africa but had migrated back to India, and how a commitment to change ran in his blood.

His father (now deceased) and uncle both enjoy reputations as pioneers in wildlife cinematography.
Shores of Silence
, a film made by his uncle, Mike Pandey, prompted a nationwide ban on the hunting of whale sharks. The film-making pair helped win protective sanctions for a host of other native species, including the Indian elephant, the Indian vulture and the humble horseshoe crab.

Arguably their most significant legacy comes through
EarthMatters
, a weekly television bulletin about environmental issues. In India, it runs on public broadcast television in twelve different languages. It goes out in localised formats to another fifty-five countries around the world. Its impact – the programme has spawned two thousand ‘eco clubs’ and generates over five
thousand letters per week – earned his uncle the title of ‘Hero of the Environment’ in
Time
magazine.

Arjun has inherited his father’s passion for India’s rich cultural and natural heritage. He is not the older man’s clone, however. For one, their characters are dissimilar. His father had, he remembers, enormous patience. One of his best-known documentaries depicts a lone tree on a deforested hillside in Jharkhand. He filmed it every day for a year. Arjun, in contrast, is manically active on numerous fronts. A film on tiger conservation, a website on India’s primary health risks, a hidden camera exposé about e-waste and a regional network of community radio stations were just some of the projects he’d mentioned to me last time.

Arjun’s hyperactivity reflects the youthful spirit of his generation. It’s also a symptom of the times in general. In his father’s youth, people fished in the Yamuna River. Today, industrial waste and raw sewage have robbed Delhi’s main watercourse of all life. The time for patience, Arjun feared, had passed. ‘India may well become the next superpower,’ I remember him saying. ‘But what good is it if we have no drinking water?’ It’s not just environmental degradation that has sped up. Technology has accelerated too. Twenty years ago, a trunk call to Mumbai had to be pre-booked and routed through an operator. For today’s mobile-phone millions, it’s there in the press of a speed-dial button.

With last orders called, I’d asked Arjun if he had a guiding philosophy, a maxim that brought direction to his numerous ideas and copious energy. He’d answered vaguely at first; something about ‘making an impact’, about leaving India a better place for his daughter. Then, almost embarrassed, he’d mentioned ‘Gandhiji’s Talisman’.

Coined towards the end of the Mahatma’s life, the short phrase used to appear at the front of every schoolbook. ‘It’s just a simple thing,’ Arjun had said. Growing up, he and his classmates used to ‘hack it’. As an adult, it came back to him differently. What does it say? Picking up the bill and pushing back his chair, he’d suggested that I look it up.

Afterwards, I had done so. The Talisman represents a plea
for all Indians to think of the wider collective before themselves. When in doubt, the Father of the Nation advises, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him with control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?’ His mention of the Talisman is one of the reasons I’d like to see Arjun again.

This time round, we meet at his office. His company, 24 Frames, is housed in a windowless basement along a residential street in the capital’s downmarket Chittaranjan Park area.

‘Rent’s cheap,’ he says, as he unlocks the door and shoves it with his shoulder. His uncle’s offices have a fish tank in the roof with twenty koi carp. Arjun’s has an arthritic fan and a damp problem. Yet it’s his own venture and its success or failure rests on him alone.

Judging from the extensive to-do list on the whiteboard beside his desk, the environmentally minded media executive has clearly lost none of his zeal for work. Short films, ‘docos’, press releases and various media campaigns are sketched out in hurried marker pen. ‘New projects?’ reads the penultimate entry, as if he didn’t already have enough on his plate.

The final addition to the list anchors Arjun in the real world: ‘Bills pending’. To keep afloat, he takes on a range of purely commercial projects to cross-subsidise his other interests. 24 Frames is a ‘for-profit social enterprise’, in Arjun’s words, a very modern, very New India concept.

He opens his laptop to fill me in on his latest venture. A sticker on the reverse of the screen rears into view. ‘24 Frames: Empowering Visual Communication’, it says. He loads up a track by Swaransh Mishra, a young music artist. ‘Smoking is like hanging yourself,’ the unlikely first line rings out to a boom-box beat. The lyrics continue in a similar vein. ‘You grow tired, but your cough doesn’t.’ The song forms part of an anti-tobacco campaign that
Arjun is spearheading. Smoking kills millions of Indians every year, he insists. ‘Many have absolutely no idea of the risk.’

The anti-smoking song is currently playing ‘on FM’. It comes with an accompanying video, released on YouTube, depicting a happy smoker who ends up in a hospital bed. It sounds like a license for a lawsuit. But Arjun doesn’t seem overly concerned. He’s persuaded Agnee, an Indie pop band, to record another track for him. He’s working towards an album. ‘Once the tunes get on the radio, they create a life of their own,’ he says, his eyes sparkling at the thought. His roll-out strategy also includes a tie-up with iTunes, a series of ring-tone downloads and a competition for school bands. Anti-smoking messaging on matchboxes form part of his plan too, although he’s yet to resolve how to action the idea. ‘We’ll run it through social media,’ he says, jumping back to the band competition. And the prize? ‘A slot on the album, of course.’ It will, Arjun is sure, be ‘absolutely huge’.

As with Rajesh, Arjun has anticipated my question before I have the opportunity to ask it. His tactic for getting his message out is straightforward: take each and every media form, new and old, and, as far as funds permit, exploit them to the full. The mainstream press won’t run stories like these, he says, referring to his various projects. It confirmed my existing impression of the media.

‘The tobacco lobby has an enormous budget. We don’t.’ Yet Arjun remains a staunch believer that information can create the ripples of change. ‘All it takes is a small nudge to give rise to an awakening.’ I’m struck by his use of the term, a carbon copy of Ashish and Vivek’s thinking.

I think back to our last meeting and the dire picture that Arjun had drawn of India’s environmental predicament: forests being stripped, rivers being dammed, water courses being polluted, industrial waste proliferating and greenhouse gases escalating. Isn’t it too late? It’s never too late for anything, he insists, an optimist to the end. Indians have a deep respect for nature. ‘It’s there in our scriptures and folk stories.’