India – No Problem

For the Love of Rickshaws

gorah — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:39:19 +0000

Anyone visiting India quickly discovers it would take a lifetime (probably several, although I believe that can be arranged) to fully understand the endless intricacies that make up the country’s social hierarchies.
But there is one social group you quickly learn to place at the lowest of the low. At least, you do if your friends and acquaintances are to be believed.
‘Oh, god, they’re such bastards.’
‘Scumbags.’
‘Dishonest nonsense fellows.’
‘Arak-drinking, gutka-chewing cockroaches.’
Ah, yes, cockroaches. And yet a strange breed of cockroach: a bright yellow one with wheels that endlessly farts its way around Bangalore.
We’re talking about rickshaw drivers, of course. So maligned, and so casually, that a newspaper article recently began with something along the lines of ‘While we all agree that rickshaw drivers are the very lowest of the low…’ as if their abjectness were a done deal in the collective consciousness.
Alas the poor rickshaw driver. Being a bleeding heart, I instantly took exception to this and collected vignettes that showed the humanity of my four-wheeled, farting friends. I watched them in their unnatural habitat of smog and pulsing metal, deities swinging from their rear-view mirrors, paintings of fabulously mustached film stars on the backs of their vehicles. I watched bloodshot-eyed, unshaven drivers drop their heads into their hands in gridlocked traffic. I saw them give directions to 4×4 drivers and receive not a word of thanks.
Yes, I was beginning to amass quite a collection of sympathetic vignettes of rickshaw drivers. In my mind, they were fast becoming four-wheeled saints, ascetics, carrying the great burden of affluent Bangalore’s sins – carting passengers’ fat arses around on lavish shopping trips, or bringing them home from late-night barroom debaucheries.
I always tipped well.
(‘There you go, my poor, misunderstood fellow.’)
I felt benevolent and well adjusted.
But these were early days, you see. India has a remarkable ability to assimilate you into its hierarchy. You will not float above, with your feint smile, forever.

The change came quite abruptly. One day, Kaveri flagged a driver and told him our destination. He turned away and drove off without a word. There seemed to be contempt in his reaction. As if the words Cox Town, Brigade Road or Malleswaram were the gibbering nonsense of the insane.
It happened again and again. On one occasion, outside our apartment, we attempted to solicit the attention of a whole line of drivers, yet each turned or drove away without a word.
‘Cockroaches,’ said Kaveri. (She likes winding me up.)
‘Outrageous!’ I replied, desperately hailing rickshaws at the roadside, my arms flinging and saluting like a man indeed gone quite mad.
Other things happened. Things I soon learned were the usual things.
‘Brigade Road,’ I said.
‘100 rupees,’ said the driver. An outrageous price.
‘Put it on the metre,’ I said.
The driver grinned at this and looked me up and down. I had said something impossibly silly, even for a gorah.
‘No sir,’ he said, still grinning.
I might as well have ordered him to climb the rigging and hoist the mainsail.
I was getting the idea.
‘Cox Town, please.’
They drove away.
‘Meter,’
They drove away.
Rickshaws always drove away. But never with me in them.

So my attitude changed. For a short period, a prissy tone entered my pleases and thank yous, as if I was showing the cads how to correctly behave. I began to tip with aggressive extravagance. They took the money. And the thank you.
And drove away.
I began to understand there was not the merest hint of insult in their attitude to me. Just a complete indifference to my existence if it was unlikely to furnish them with the necessary rupees.
If the distance was too short, they drove away. If the traffic was likely to be too heavy at a given time on a given route, they drove away.
I began to accept this. I began to see them not as men, but as yellow shiny things on two wheels. They drove me or they drove away. I felt not a hint of thanks or resentment either way.
I even learned to raise my voice and abuse them. On one occasion, late at night returning from a train station, a driver argued with Kaveri over a fare. It was some trifling matter of a few rupees. I bellowed at him. I read out his serial number – it is printed clearly in the back of all rickshaws – and threatened him with the police. I was carried away and thought I was doing a wonderful job defending Kaveri’s honour.
She looked shocked.
‘It’s just a game,’ she said. ‘You should relax a little bit.’
I paid the rickshaw driver. He drove away.
All was beginning to be as it should be. I was no longer bending the ears of dinner party hosts about the noble, deep humanity of rickshaw drivers. Our friends breathed a collective sigh of relief. I settled into being a passenger, a commodity, and accepted the rickshaw driver as the provider of a service.
To put it in another way, perhaps in Indian terms it was his dharma to drive and mine to be his passenger.
Rickshaw drivers never spoke to me and I never wondered about their lives.

Then, one day, stuck in traffic on Mosque Road, a driver leaned over his shoulder, handed me his mobile and grinned.
‘Read this.’
It was a very, very poor joke, something about wives and mother’s in law.
‘Very, very funny,’ he said.
It was very, very not funny. And yet I was so delighted that this man, with spontaneous good will, had shared a brief moment of his life with me I wanted to get out, take the handlebars, put him in the back and take him for a ride.
I wouldn’t even put it on the meter.
I told Kaveri. She was underwhelmed. She was not in the least bit likely to open a bottle of Cava at this breakthrough in rickshaw driver/passenger relations.
And yet other things happened.
A young driver drove me to Cox Town. Quite suddenly, he began to sing in a very high voice, regularly looking over his shoulder – and blithely ignoring oncoming traffic – to see if I was enjoying the performance. I was. Enormously.
On another occasion, I tipped a driver as he dropped me at the corner of Commercial Street and he mumbled ‘thank you’. Usually drivers examined my tips with disgust, as if the notes in question had been put to the nefarious uses to which Westerners are known to put small squares of paper.
But he said thank you. And he smiled.
I was jubilant. I might have asked him if he wanted to hang out, you know, go to the cinema or grab a chai or chaat but he was gone, rattling off into the honking, smoking Bangalore maelstrom, never to be seen again.
Something was happening and I didn’t know what it was. I talked to Kaveri about it. I posited elaborate theories. One of these was rather good and had something to do with the Westerner, so oblivious to the intricacies of caste and class, helping break them down to the mutual benefit of all. Everyone behaved differently because of his naivety.
I believe the pressure cooker might have gone off just as I was summing up; in any case I don’t think Kaveri got my drift.
‘Perhaps some people are nice and others are not so nice?’ she said, spooning Khitchdee on to plates as I held the pan.
It was a good point. A damned good one.
‘And perhaps it’s hard to be nice when you work all day and half the night in Bangalore traffic,’ she said.
Another good point.
‘But what about the fact that rickshaw drivers seemed nice at first, then unpleasant, then intermittently nice again?’
‘At first it was all new and rosy, then the scales fell from your eyes, then you found your balance. It wasn’t as bad as it seemed.’
Brilliant.

And so, as everyone knows, articles about rickshaw drivers by liberal-minded types must inevitably end with our four-wheeled hero triumphant, our cockroach on his back flipping himself onto his wheels, as it were, and farting off into the sunset (or yellow haze – we are in Bangalore, after all).
So it brings me great pleasure to inform the reader that the newspaper article that began with an aside about the general dastardliness of rickshaw drivers, went on to describe a heartwarming episode involving a gentleman leaving his laptop in a rickshaw and the driver doggedly tracking him down and returning it the next day.
And a good time was had by all. And they shared a drink and a few frames of billiards while the gentleman’s wife prepared a slap up dinner.
Well, not quite. But the grateful gentleman did reward the driver handsomely with 1,000 rupees.
And then the rickshaw drove away.

10 Things You’ve Got to Love About Bangalore

gorah — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:28:06 +0000

As every hack writer knows, there’s no easier way to knock up 1,000 words than by writing a nice long list. So here’s my ten reasons to love Bangalore. However, just in case this brings out a nasty case of regional pride in any Bangalorean, rest assured I’ll be following up with ten reasons to get thoroughly cheesed off with Bangalore. And, as every hack also knows, waxing lyrical on things you don’t like gets the creative juices flowing like nothing else… But to start, here’s the lovely things.

1 The Corner House Ice Cream, Residency Road. As a good traveller in the 1990s, I religiously avoided ice cream in India on the premise that eating anything uncooked in the Subcontinent would kill me. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that eating ice cream from The Corner House not only didn’t right me off, it had me gushing with enthusiasm at a rum and raisin that was good as anything I’d tasted in my native Cornwall, England. This is the most spectacularly creamy and tasty ice cream I have ever eaten. And if you vomit, after eating it, they give you a family-sized tub for free!*

* I made this last bit up.

2 Pecos, near Brigade Road. This pub is dirty, dark, noisy and stuck in about 1974. It’s also a refreshing antidote to the swathe of pubs in Bangalore that have about as much charm as an airport lounge at 3am. Pecos is, quite simply, a legendary Bangalore venue where no one fawns over you with a rigor mortis, bullshit smile, but slops up another pitcher of Kingfisher while you float away on an inebriated haze listening to Leonard Cohen, Dylan, The Stones… you get the picture. The beer is, allegedly, watered down. The atmosphere certainly isn’t.

3 MTR, Lalbagh Road. The last time I went to Mavalli Tiffin Rooms (MTR), I waited for over an hour to get a seat, then waited another 20 minutes in my seat, then got served my dessert before my main course. I vowed to never come again.
By the time I’d eaten my nine savoury dishes, plus puris, savoury rice, plain rice, dal and three different desserts, I vowed to come back the following day – assuming I could waddle from my apartment to a passing rickshaw. Be patient, love thy morose, ladle-sloppy waiter – for he is serving you the finest thali in the whole of Bangalore.

4 Blossoms Bookshop, Church Street. A great bookshop, in my opinion, should not only have pretty much any book you could ever want to lay your hands on, it should also make you work a little to find it. This sums up Blossoms, the finest bookshop in all of Bangalore. Wade through Autobiography searching for David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon and you may well stumble across famous tomes from Hollywood B-listers, esoteric tracts from spiritual seekers and some randomly misfiled book on the wonderful healing powers of turmeric. If this is all too much for you, you can enquire of the staff, who will dig out not one but three copies of the work in question, with the nonchalant air that suggests it is perfectly obvious to any sensible reader that Niven will be filed next to Churchill because they shared a cab during the war. Bask in Blossoms for an afternoon among the randomly filed mountains of fiction, biography, spirituality, Indian history. It’s about the journey, you see, not merely the destination.

5
Commercial Street. I’ve waxed lyrical on the virtues of Commercial Street elsewhere on this blog, but nothing can quite beat dipping into the back lanes of this district of town at sundown, and wandering whole streets of fruit, meats, or tea vendors as the call to prayer from the Mosque warbles over an orange sky.

6
Malls. Where is the ‘real’ India, asked Ms Quested in EM Forster’s Passage to India. If she were around today, she would surely say the malls of Bangalore, because for many of the urban middle classes, they are the heartland of their aspirations, the shiny, dirt- and beggar-free land of milk and honey… I mean money. You can knock them if you like, you can want Indians to be far more spiritual and ‘Eastern’ than they want to be, but the truth is Bangalore’s malls are the shiny, glittering towers that represent the pinnacle of modern middle-class living. And, god, yes, sometimes they’re a welcome break from the chaotic, noisy streets.

7
The Climate. Bangalore: the air-conditioned city. Okay, that’s a bit rich coming from a town stained the yellow of a rollup smoker’s finger from chronic pollution, and choked by the pungent bowels of a million farting rickshaws. But, despite this, there is some truth to the claim. For Bangalore is on a plateau elevated above the sweaty depths of South India, and thereby enjoys a temperate climate usually somewhere between 70F and 80F. A recent trip to Chennai, where lifting my soup spoon had the damp patches growing under my floaty white top, confirmed to me the virtues of this uncommon climate.

8 Malleswaram. The flowers, the fruit stalls, the juice bars, the bookshop, the candyfloss sellers and, on occasional afternoons, the touching sight of a troupe of blind men and women, holding on to each other in a long line and singing for their supper as they walk down the street. Malleswaram is a jewel of a district in Bangalore, a place with the atmosphere of a gentle, gentrified fun fare. Such a shame that it also encapsulates the parochial snobbery and conservatism of the caste system, with its nose in the air brahmanism. But a beautiful district all the same.

9 The BJP. The BJP is a right-wing, quasi-fascistic organisation that wants India for the Hindus. But it’s more than that. It’s also a political party with a rare and refined sense of humour. For drive around Bangalore and you can’t fail to spot the numerous billboards of BJP members wearing gut-wrenchingly funny moustaches. You want handlebars or bushy caterpillars? You’ve got it! Nothing says chauvinistic buffoon like these beauties and you have to put your hands together and thank the BJP for their magnificent contribution to the Bangalore comedy scene.

10 Kaveri. Call me an old sentimentalist – or even a mentalist if you’re cynical about matters of the heart – but I came to Bangalore not for the climate, the food, the bookshops or even the BJP, but for the love of a woman. So the best thing about Bangalore is Kaveri. And you’ll have to take my word on that.

11 It’s about time I opened up this blog a bit (I mean begged people to contribute something) so please feel free to add your 11s, 12s and 13s to my list.

Note: This article appeared in the blogs section of India’s Deccan Herald newspaper. Below are the readers’ comments. A mixed, interesting bag!

Tarale Seena Says:
December 4th, 2009 at 5:38 pm #8 should add Gandhi Bazaar. Go visit the place during Ganesha/Gowri festival or Ugadi and it’s a veritable feast for all your senses.

#9 Dude, go visit North India and see all the buffoonery from other parties, mustaches are not reserved for the BJP alone!
Now, what fun is this article if you didn’t add some photos, please!
Anirudh S Says:
December 4th, 2009 at 6:07 pm For a small town boy from Kerala with a rather round figure, Bangalore’s main attraction has been its variety of food So that’s #11 for me. You should try the street near ShivajiNagar Basilica where there are hole-in-the-wall restaurants where you get tasty North Indian food.
Srikanth Says:
December 4th, 2009 at 6:19 pm VV Puram Tindi Street!!
Hope you did not miss it Mr Philip!

The dosas, pav baji, bajjis, manchurians, ganesha fruit juice centre, the VV Bakery itself.. Wooo!! I’m already on a flight to Bangalore!!
Srikanth Says:
December 4th, 2009 at 6:26 pm VV* -> VB
tabitha Says:
December 4th, 2009 at 7:25 pm You forgot the colourful flowers allround the year!!!!!!
cant swap this city….for any other top 10 cities of the world…
that much i love to die in this city………
Veena Says:
December 4th, 2009 at 7:58 pm Love DVG road [Gandhi Bazar]
Jay Says:
December 4th, 2009 at 8:33 pm Clarification: The Climate. Bangalore: the air-conditioned city. It was so before this IT boom that enveloped the city. The city of the past which is not long ago was city that a good cool air, lots of beautiful flowers and very unique culture that was blend of west and east.
red shift Says:
December 4th, 2009 at 8:47 pm 3 words….Davangere Benne Dose
rags Says:
December 4th, 2009 at 11:23 pm i want to know if this i a current article or a copy paste from a deacade old piece…

weather…in Bangalore is not AC anymore..its like a perpetual heater…

hence i am confident ..this article is fake.
. Says:
December 5th, 2009 at 1:56 am Philp,

Coming to Bangalore as a guest, how about having some manners while describing your host?

Don’t try to preach us about caste, Brahminism, etc. We know all too well how you guys treated us (as slaves) when you came in as guests (remember East India company) few hundred years back, and looted billions of dollars (today’s value) from us.

BJP doesn’t want India for Hindus. It wants India for Indians. Do we ever try to interfere with you? So, if you know it properly, say it, else keep the silence – it is really golden. I’m not from BJP.

Indians are too fascinated by the white skin, and tend to take anything told by them very easily..
thammaji vasudev Says:
December 5th, 2009 at 5:22 am Well, Martin

I mused with interest your write-up.
Being journalist and a hack as you say, you have a way to express your ideas and thoughts.

Your English heredity (I presume) and Bangalore connection somehow seem to echo your love of British Raj sentiments and era.

Here is my “ten-cents” worth in a line-or-two only to add to your blog, not to “critique” the content.

First of all greetings from my home in the beautiful desert metropolis in way-west USofA, and today’s beautiful climate here (only around Christmas! season) reminds me of how similar it used to be in Bangalore some 60 years ago during my childhood and growing-up days there.

I relate to some of these 10 “Things” you mention, as well as many of mine imprinted in my memory of Bangalore as such.
Not to mention, such images flash-back only remind us of the memory snap-shots of bygone days (at least for me).
I have seen every nook-and-cranny of this town during my hay days, you name it I have experienced it. Those were the days my friend.

I could rewind and “memory dump” my stuff, but may be some other time and some other place.
Keep in touch. I hope to keep trail on your blog.

Regards,

“From a Indian Diaspora in America to a British expat journalist”

~thammaji vasudev~
thammajivasudev@gmail.com

PS: I am proud of my birth “Brahminic” heritage which runs very deep in my veins. Besides, being a lucky “Malleswaram” guy I am even more fortunate for having lived and educated there during 40s, 50s and 60s.
S. Says:
December 5th, 2009 at 8:19 am @ The above comment

There is some truth in (8). There is no point getting back at the author with what his an ancestors were involved in. We’re just talking about the present, and anyone who has been in Bangalore long enough will know that Malleswaram is a haven for conservative mamis with children abroad in US and the likes. All said and done, no offense to anyone, but it’s a general observation.
S. Says:
December 5th, 2009 at 8:21 am *what his ancestors
prashanth Says:
December 5th, 2009 at 10:24 am can i know more more about bangalore
vivek Says:
December 5th, 2009 at 11:50 am the words that u just spoke Mr. Philip about Bangalore are 100% true…. and i stay in malleswaram and i know how correctly you have mentioned it… Bangalore rocks…:)
Radhakrishnan Says:
December 5th, 2009 at 6:48 pm Bengalooru is a special place in India…there is no other city that can come close to our beutiful garden city….I mean talking about the 60’s and 70’s…the people, weather, vegitables, fruits, flowers and I still remember my ride on bicyle to National college was more fun passing through maharanis, vishveswarya, corporation, visveswarapuram circle…of course Malleswaram was always the center of activities..Janatha hotel dosa or malleswaram Breeze for chatting with friends…lived in Bengalooru for 45 years and still the nostrilia lives fresh…not forgetting all those beautiful girls….
DR.Suresh Says:
December 5th, 2009 at 10:12 pm I am also from Malleswaram and amazing thing is most of us have gone thrugh the same experience of living in bangalore and enjoyed it.
All of us have opinions and over all I do agree with the the author and move on as Bangalore lovers.
Satish Says:
December 6th, 2009 at 9:09 am Bengalooru is not complete without ‘Brahmins Coffee Bar’ at Shankarapuram and VV Puram ‘Gulkhan’. Jai Kannada Naadu
Koli Keranga Says:
December 6th, 2009 at 9:14 am How can there be a mention of everything except Vidyarthi Bhavan, DVG road, Jaynagar Complex.

The pub culture, Commercial street are surely great and iconic for visitors & the latest generation alike but for the natives from S.Bangalore, there is a lot more enjoyable sights and sounds around Natkallapa circle, DVG road especially during important festivals.

For people who have made some hits on the author, British Raj etc, take a step back and focus on the point in question here…Namma Bengalooru.

-Kitty
lakshman nichani Says:
December 6th, 2009 at 2:07 pm another Martin,that makes about 5.
Bishop Cottons School,Russel Market,Gosha Hospital,Cubbon Park,Bangalore Palace,Iskcon Temple,Vidhana Souda should be on your next blog.
My the way go to Ibrahim Sahib Street,I was born there!!!!
Joseph Says:
December 6th, 2009 at 10:05 pm Having born in Bangalore and lived there for three decades, I can tell that it has dramatically changed in the last decade alone. The real changes started in the late eighties. But one thing that has not changed is the climate, it is much hotter now, but the mornings and evenings seem as pleasant as ever. I consider Bangalore to be paradise, despite all its shortcomings, and you could say I am biased.
K. R. Venkataramaiah Says:
December 6th, 2009 at 10:45 pm Vidhana Soudha, the Chief Architect (B. R. Manikyam )of which was my visiting professor at The University College of Engineering ( now called Visweraiah Engineering College ) during 1955-1956, is the best monument built to reflect Indian architecture, is a must for any tourist.

Lalbagh is a most beautiful garden in the ” Garden City ” – Bengalooru.

Security Guard Wanted: Bangalore.

gorah — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:37:50 +0000

MUST HAVE HIGH BOREDOM THRESHOLD AND ENTHUSIASM FOR SUBORDINACY

In a tall, silver building in the IT Corridor of Bangalore, a young man sits at the end of a long, dark corridor. Next to him is a fire door, and his single duty is to ensure no one uses this door unless there is a fire. There are no fires and so he sits, in full regalia, guarding this door all day, while the creative minds of the Bangalore IT industry engage themselves in solving the endless complexities of life in the 21st Century.
A friend of Kaveri’s told me about this young man one night in the pub. I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I imagined his stifled yawns, the games he’d play, the thoughts that would skid over his mind, the memories that would repeat again and again; the attention he’d pay to the rattle of keyboards or female laughter from the offices beyond, the idle interest aroused at a cockroach running along the ceiling.
And he is just one man among the thousands of bored security guards of Bangalore, guarding dark corridors, shopping malls, building sites, apartment complexes and private residencies.
Nowhere else in the world have I seen so many of them. When you go to the supermarket, they collect your bags before you go in. In the supermarket they shadow you, standing at your shoulder as you fill your basket. When you go out they check your receipt is stamped by the cashier. And these are the most fortunate of security guards, for they are actively doing something, however apparently menial.
Most are doing very little at all. Like the man in the corridor. Or the gangs of men at our apartment complex.
They slouch in groups of three or four at the entranceway, bored but never fully relaxed, always ready for the obsequious grin or salute. Down below in the shadows of the car park, they stare at walls or watch me pass; up on the rooftop they sit, cap in hand, looking out over the city, their eyes tracing the flight of a solitary kite in the evening sky.
One might consider it an easy job, but it isn’t. They are always waiting. And waiting for something they do not want to arrive. You can see it on their faces, the anxiety and the boredom. They are living in those little empty spaces we commonly experience for a moment, between doing things. And they are living in these spaces all their working day.

Is it so bad to be bored in India? I read yesterday that one third of people here live on 20 rupees (about 25-30p) per day. And they will dig ditches, shift earth on their heads and generally work hard for those few rupees. Security guards don’t work as hard as that. And I’m sure they earn more. In fact I’d imagine, for some families, having a son as a security guard is a step up, a point of pride.
And there is a real need for security in India. Theft and burglary are common. Few middle class people live without a gate and a guard at the entrance.
Kaveri says it never used to be like this. There were gurkas at the school gates, security at prestigious institutions, but never these scattered legions. But then they came. More and more of them over the last few years, growing in number with a growing middle class who could not keep pace with a poor and hungry class who grew at an even faster rate. They are gratefully employed to stare at walls and shift from foot to foot and find quiet corners to yawn in.
No, no one can doubt the need for security in a country of such breathtaking, and casual, inequality. And so it goes that a generation of men stand and sit away their lives.
And yet this is not the whole story. Because one can’t help admire the genius with which the Indian middle classes inflict subservience on these men in hats and brass buttons. There is a point, often, when security shifts in meaning and you realise that the guard is not merely there to secure you from thievery, but to secure and consolidate your superiority. With his fixed grin and his salute, he is not only protecting you from crime, but being lower than you so you may feel higher and swell with wellbeing.
It is an equally sedentary, deadening role.
As for the young man down the end of the long dark corridor: what is he but a shadow to the VDU glare, the thing you are not so you may remind yourself better what you are, where you stand in the hierarchy of human beings in shiny prosperous Bangalore?
It’s all very earnest of me, of course. I wonder how long it will be before my squirming unease at the grin and salute from our apartment security guards will give way to my own grin and facetious salute, as I feel grateful for their bored hours, secure with security, and thankful to them for reminding me of my great height, my sure footing above the depths below.

Driving in India – the Insanity and the Ecstacy

gorah — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:04:56 +0000

I’ve started driving. For several weeks, I watched Kaveri at the wheel as she negotiated potholes, rickshaws, motorbikes, zombie pedestrians, herds of goats and, of course, cows. It always amazed me that she could find a route through this madness and we could come away unscathed.
Then I watched her tailgating one day, her hand firm on her horn, before impatiently squeezing the car into a gap you’d do well to get a pushbike through at walking pace.
‘You’re one of them,’ I said.
‘One of what?’
‘You’re an insane Indian driver.’
‘I’m Indian and I’m driving, if that’s what you mean?’ she said, hurtling towards the moped stopped at traffic lights, jamming on the brakes and screeching to a stop just inches behind the back wheel. There were five people on that bike. Mum, Dad, kids, baby on the handlebars, its eyes black with kohl. A whole family. Out for a potentially lethal jaunt.
‘Look at the baby,’ said the potential murderer. ‘So cute.’
‘You almost killed it,’ I said.
‘You drive then.’
So I got behind the wheel. It was one of the most thrilling experiences of my life. With much cajoling from my fellow drivers, in the blare and screech of horns, I joined that great orchestra of Indian traffic. I learned the rules. There are very few of them. You may drive the wrong way up a road, pull out from a side road on to the main road without looking, drive without a helmet, drive drunk, talk on your phone while riding your motorbike, and carry all your family and a few of your neighbours on a small moped. None of these are a problem. Not really, for if there are rules about these things they are rarely enforced. And when they are enforced they are quickly forgotten about in a handful of baksheesh.
But there are two very important rules you must observe. The first, from biology, is survival of the fittest. In other words, get the hell out of the way of that bus hurtling towards you. He is bigger and therefore intrinsically right; you are smaller and therefore wrong. The second is from physics: nature abhors a vacuum. Every space in the road shall be filled. And if you leave the sniff of a gap between you and a vehicle in front, a moped will come nosing in, beeping and squawking and trying to edge through. Even at 50 miles per hour you must be so far up the arse of the car in front you can see your own eyes staring bloodshot and insane in his rear-view mirror.
All the time, of course, you must lean on your horn, though this is not so much a rule as one of the joyful expressions of selfhood – ‘I am here, happy and honking on this wonderful pot-holed, exhaust-choked earth’ – every Indian driver learns to appreciate.
It is a fast learning curve, full of milestones. I remember negotiating my first cow. It was lying in the middle of the road, drooling, as if it were in the lush green valleys of Kashmir and not the honking dusty streets of Cox Town. I remember stopping in a busy main street in Frazer Town for a shepherd and his herd of goats. And I remember lurching the wheel to the right when a motorbike came at me head on, the unhelmeted (obviously) driver blithely speeding wrong way up a one-way street. It was a crucial test. And it wasn’t so much the lurching away from catastrophe that was proof of my passing out with flying colours. It was the aftermath. Following this near-death experience, Kaveri and I said nothing. Then, after a minute’s silence and some idle gazing at life on the streets, we looked at each other and, in a moment of recognition, burst into laughter. The unimaginable had become everyday for me. Mundane and worthy of no comment. It was a milestone.

Another milestone came a couple of weeks later, during Divali. We took a rickshaw to Shanthi’s – Kaveri’s mum’s – apartment, in Malleswaram. This is a swanky Brahmin (high-caste Hindu) neighbourhood, all fruit markets and flowers and temples. And, incidentally, people scowling at the sight of me and Kaveri together, because as beautiful as Malleswaram is, it is also a deeply Conservative part of town. Anyway, Diwali was warming up and the crackle of bangers and the deep boom and flash of atom bombs erupted from every alley.

The hallway to Shanthi’s front door was lit with Divali lamps. At the door, Shanthi and her friend Sandia performed a ceremonial puja, which involved anointing us with crimson powder and showering us with rice. Inside, the house shone with lamps and candles.

Now this probably all sounds traditionally Hindu, but the truth is Shanthi only dabbles in such rituals and pretty soon we all decided it would be a good idea for me and Kaveri to pick up some beer.
So off we went, me driving Shanthi’s car, Kaveri directing, into the increasing madness of Diwali. I had felt pretty competent driving up to this point but, like a video game, driving in India now reached a new, higher level of complexity. As well as the cars, mopeds, cows, dogs and pedestrians, I had to contend with the firecrackers and bombs erupting in the road before me. Kids lit them, grinning, perfectly timing their detonations just as our car approached. I quickly learned to judge the detonations, accelerating over a just-lit banger to safety, slamming to a halt well back from fuses that bristled and fizzed with an impending explosion. This sounds like fun. It isn’t. Indian fireworks are nothing like anything I am used to. By comparison, British fireworks are the crackle of bubblewrap. If British fireworks are a visual and aural experience, Indian fireworks are a whole body one. You do not merely hear them, you feel them. Through your chest, your teeth, shaking your eyeballs in their sockets.
We trawled the streets, amid crackles, explosions, flashes of blinding light and clouds of drifting smoke. At a promising-looking store, I pulled over, jumped out, and, aware that time was ticking by and dinner was ready to be served, ran full pelt to the entrance.
‘Beer!’ I shouted over the crackles and bangs. ‘I want beer!’
It occurred to me at this point that an overstimulated Westerner shouting ‘beer!’ would not necessarily go down well in a conservative Hindu neighbourhood, during a major religious festival. Particularly as this swaggering, thirsty Westerner, was sporting a vermillion puja mark on his forehead.
I was right. A small crowd of men looked daggers at me, shook their heads and continued chatting.
But we got the beer somewhere else and, despite this glaring faux pas, on the way back, swerving amid the cows, pedestrians and explosions, I caught my grinning, pujad head in the mirror and reflected that I was beginning to go native. And it was the driving that was doing it. The metaphor is obvious, of course, but I had been a passenger for my first month, an observer, and now I was in the thick it, bumper to bumper with India, slapping cows asses from my window and honking joyfully, proclaiming my tiny existence in the great farting, squawking, belching Indian night.
And yet I had a lot to learn. It would be some time to come, surely, before I’d follow Kaveri and pull out onto roads without so much as a glance at traffic coming towards me. You can’t learn that blithe, joyful disregard for impending disaster; you must know it, over long years.

And nothing illustrated the mere novice madness of my driving like the insanity of Shanthi at the wheel. After a beautiful dinner of chapatis, dals, curds, curries and rich buttery sweets, she offered to drive us home. I cringed as we hurtled down the steep streets of Malleswaram, towards frail, stick-legged old men pedalling bikes, our bonnet inches from shunting them 30 feet in the air as Shanthi either slammed on the brakes or jerked the wheel at the last moment and flew past. As for pedestrians: elderly women, pregnant women, children – none were safe from the hurtling inevitability of her right to career on through. I began to suspect she aimed at people, She certainly aimed at cars, veering towards the centre of the road at oncoming traffic, the whole journey like some neverending game of chicken.
And the most remarkable thing of all was that she undertook the whole trip in a state of serenity, a small smile upon her lips, her glasses perched nonchalantly atop her forehead, as we discussed Alan Watts and other Western interpreters of Eastern metaphysics. And surely there is no better example of a total faith in karmic inevitability than her leaning over her shoulder towards my back seat to make a point about legendary guru Paramahansa Yogananda, while stepping on the gas and speeding forward into traffic and hapless pedestrians.
As we got out of the car, I thanked Shanthi profusely, cringingly. Not so much for the ride, as for the improbable gift of a life still intact.
Is it possible that there is some divine intervention on the Indian roads? Yes, pedestrians are mowed down every day, buses career over cliffs killing dozens (‘mishaps’ the papers quaintly call such accidents). And yet driving on the Indian streets, I am amazed not to see, on every corner, fountains of blood and old men hurtling through the air, rickety pushbikes close behind. Perhaps I will never drive like an Indian. Perhaps it is only the truly faithful who drive with such abandon while I, meekly, agnostically, crane my head left and right, tortoiselike, before pulling out into the chaos.

Bangalore – Behind the Neon

gorah — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:38:47 +0000

You do not need to visit the deserts, plains or Western Ghats to see the full romance and diversity of India. Sometime you can take just as great a journey by seeking not the wide empty spaces, but those inner spaces, the narrow streets and alleyways of the urban scene.

Kaveri is away. She is in North Karnataka meeting temple prostitutes, for an article about HIV in the state. (Incidentally, we had dinner with prostitutes and hijras recently, during her research, but that is another story and I’ll cover it later.) So I was in Bangalore alone and decided to use the time well and go out and explore. Superficially, Bangalore is what it’s hyped up to be. The Cantonment area of town – the former British barracks, around Mahatma Gandhi Road and Brigade Road – is all throbbing neon and Levi stores and Pizza Huts and bars and ice cream parlours. And yet you don’t have to delve very far behind the billboards and neon to discover a different Bangalore.

Tonight I went to Commercial Street, a Muslim and Tamil Hindu district. Commercial Street itself is a typically neon drag of Levi’s and Wrangler shops. And though there are traditional textile and carpet shops between the Western brands, and rickshaws choking the roads, and women in saris and full burqas amid the jeans, there is still a golden consumerist glow about the place, a throbbing neon promise and all the wallet and purse-fluttering excitement of pristine, gleaming stores. I ate a masala dosa for dinner at Woody’s on Commercial Street, a restaurant that is a local institution with its wood and pot plants and old school charm. Then, continuing a bit further down Commercial Street, I dipped away into one of the smaller lanes. The street appeared to sell nothing but ladies’ bangles, all lit up in purples and golds and vermillions by bright striplights. The next street was all shoes. The one after that saris. There is almost something obsessive-compulsive about the way the ware in streets in this and other traditional neighbourhoods are grouped together this way. Already I felt a very different atmosphere from the rosy world of choice and cosmopolitan consumption of Commercial Street.

A little further in and the streets began to get darker, the ground underfoot more uneven, and I was in a rapidly changing world. On Commercial Street, sterile-looking, glass-fronted clothes stores are opened by doormen. Here, each shop is a little box of light, a little cell open to the street. In one, a tailor whirred away against a brilliant turquoise backdrop, in another a man sold framed prints, gaudy and golden, of Hindu gods; the next was a domestic residence, a pristine, red-oxide-floored little cell lit by a flickering television. And so on. Oddly enough, one of the little portals was a temple, a hole-in-the-wall affair with an impossibly long passage down the end of which a pot-bellied priest, in lungi, stood before an idol dripping with gold. I stood at the entrance to the temple, transfixed. The scene was like something at the wrong end of a telescope, a tableau so far away and yet so sharp and fluorescent in the night it seemed unreal. I considered going in, then decided against it because, for foreigners, visits to such temples involve a tedious financial transaction dressed up in spiritual ritual. The priest in question becomes a vendor, just like anyone else on the street, his willingness to solicit money from Westerners depressing in the house of a religion that allows no converts. In India, at least as far as I can tell. you are a Hindu or you are not: there is no question of converting you. Your money, on the other hand, has no caste, so welcome my friend, you are most welcome.

I went further. Soon I was walking into the heart of the Muslim quarter, the call for prayer beginning as I walked down a muddy lane of vegetable stalls and men in pristine whites leading enormous goats. And then on to the meaty heart of this neighbourhood, a heady, stifling district of raw meat hanging in holes in the wall on one side of the street and, just a little further down, people eating at roadside stalls. It seems to me only natural to feel desperately sad at the site of shivering chickens in cramped cages watching others being plucked and skinned before their eyes. A little further up the road a huge goat was tied by the neck to a post with only inches between neck and post to spare. It was outside a butchers’ jammed with swinging carcasses. His fate was too close to him: his nose pushed up against it.

From my impressions, Muslims in India are tolerant and unthreatening. (At least towards humans.) Even the most intense-looking young man in pristine whites and beard or the gnarliest old grey beard with cane barely give me a second glance as I walk around their neighbourhoods. Why do I mention this at all? Because without a doubt the symbols of the Muslim world – the crochet hats, the burqas, the beards, the melancholy call from the mosque at dusk – have become symbols that arouse suspicion and fear. And yet I feel less judged and more invisible here amid those apparently edgy symbols than in any Hindu district of town. In Malleswaram, for instance, a brahmin (high caste) Hindu area, where Kaveri’s mum lives, I am stared at and looked up and down whether I am with Kaveri or not. By the look on some people’s faces, I could be strolling through their puja room and not down a public highway. But as I walked further into residential alleys of almost complete darkness, among kids laughing and tumbling and fighting on piles of cement, stepping over sleeping dogs and crossing the bridge over a fetid river so rank I speed up my step to get away as fast as possible, the only thing I feared was my ability to find my way out again.

And yet in moments, I was out of this little slum I’d stumbled into and in Russell Market. This is an institution in Bangalore, a dark, covered market punctuated by pools of dazzling, striplight-illuminated colour – flowers, vegetables, fruits, pomegranates cut open into segments and shining like rubies. And soon after Russell Market I find my bearing again and I’m back into… Could you call it civilisation? It’s not that I think so simplistically or sentimentally as to see the traditional streets as civilised and modern Commercial Street as some carbuncle on Bangalore. It’s all more complicated than that. But in seven weeks here I’ve already seen changes. This is the fastest growing city in all of Asia. A whole street of trees is known to disappear virtually overnight, leaving a naked world of tarmac and dust behind. Maybe I needn’t worry. India has dealt with Mongols, Buddhists, Portuguese, French and the British and survived. Even the narrow streets I walked through tonight were built by the British, according to a Muslim gentleman I shared chai with in a small tea shop. Only built in the 1950s, apparently. And yet they looked ancient. India has a knack of making things look impossibly old. Maybe soon, the latest wave of gaudy, plastic store fronts will peel and flake and soften and fall slightly askew and become something other than just another international brand on another international street. Maybe that’s too much to hope for, I don’t know. Maybe it’s not to be hoped for at all. In any case, despite the rapid changes I have a suspicion that behind the neon another India will be going on just as normally, just as narrowly and pungently and idiosyncratically, for some time yet to come.

Pressure Cookers and Elvis Presley

gorah — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 05:08:05 +0000

Evoking the sights, sounds and smells of India has always caused me anxiety, because as soon as I begin to describe the cocktail of piss and incense, the rattle of rickshaws or the man with the cart sky high with colourful plastic pots, I get the creeping sense of cliche that takes every sensual epiphany I experience and turns it into something hackneyed. I feel as if I’ve read it all before. And I probably have.
So thank God for Whitney Houston. Because in the apartment just opposite us, an eccentric Hindu lady is right now pottering about and belting out that American warblers version of Amazing Grace. And Whitney in India has inspired me – I never thought ‘Whitney Houston’ and ‘inspired’ would sit together in one of my sentences – to write a few words about the very different sounds that make up domestic apartment living in India. This is an India remote from the world of Vedic chants and tablas, but an exotic one in its own peculiar way.
You cannot describe apartment living in India without talking about the pressure cookers. At breakfast, noon and evening, the air is full of abrupt hissing sound like a snake being stepped on by a stiletto heel. I had no idea what this noise was all about at first. I was too busy being happy to see Kaveri. But one day, while I loitered about the kitchen watching Kaveri make khitchree (a rice and dal dish often cooked in the Indian home), I experienced the full force of the pressure cooker letting off steam and jumped away from the pot as if an angry snake were inside. The noise is incredible: from our own kitchen and from our neighbours’. It shoots out from balconies, it rattles down corridors – I thought I would never get used to that wicked, sibilant hiss. And then gradually, as days passed, I began to associate the fragrant smell of rice and stews with that hissing, and it became the reassuring sound of domesticity, the advanced notice that in a few minutes down the corridor will come northern chana masalas with their pungent tomato, ginger and garlic aromas, or southern sambars with the homely (if a little sulphurous) smell of pulses and asfoetida.
If pressure cookers are nerve-rattling, at least at first, another constant in apartment India is simply perplexing. Because everywhere, inside and outside, the air is full of irritating electronic ditties. It seems a nation that in ancient times brought us the stillness of meditation and quietly observing the inner workings of the mind cannot now fill up a water jug from the electric water purifier or turn on the washing machine without a jingle to keep it occupied. As for the vehicles in the car park below, it goes without saying it is criminally dangerous not to reverse without the sound of tweeting birds or jingle bells. I have got to know the tunes intimately. Most are shiny and irritatingly optimistic but one, curiously, is in a minor key, a sad, mawkish affair full of regret at how things might have been. It sails into the apartment like clockwork at 10.30am each morning and reminds me that the world is full of sorrow. If Leonard Cohen wrote car-reversing tunes, he would have written this one.
Some of these tunes go on for longer than is reasonable. I am starting to believe that some of my neighbours drive around the car park backwards for hours on end, so constant are the jingles, so relentless, it seems, is their delight in them. And standing in the shadows, watching them, are another breed of noisemaker, a cousin to the reversing tunesmiths: men who grin with delight as they lock and unlock their cars with electronic keys to a symphony of croaking, farting and strange burping noises.
Later in the evening, when the cars are finally put away after a mini rave of reversing and locking, when the pressure cookers have hissed their final khitchree and the water purifiers have entertained for the final time, our India apartment block becomes quiet. There is a delicious innocence about our complex, about Bangalore as a whole, in fact, in the late evening. A country that is surely louder than any other in the world – where every street is a cacophony of rickshaw and bus horns and engines and shouts – becomes virtually silent and puts itself to bed at a sensible hour.
And so to bed. Perhaps the sound of a pigeon on my ledge, the burble of frogs in the courtyard or the distant scream of a kite high in the sky.
I nod off.
Then wake up with a start to the sound of a brittle, sharp whistle. Yes, a whistle, a proper shiny silver one, blown with the puffed-cheek enthusiasm of a trainee games teacher. Blown again and again.
‘It’s the watchmen,’ said Kaveri, laughing as I sit bolt upright in the bed. ‘He blows the whistle at night to let everyone know it’s safe.’
‘But he woke me up’
‘When we were kids we were told they were scaring away evil spirits.’
I listened to the watchman, whistling everyone awake to tell them it was safe to go to sleep.
‘We thought they were very brave,’ said Kaveri.
He might be brave. But one day soon someone will go downstairs in their pajamas and chase him around the complex.

And yet there is that other Indian too, tantalisingly close, just beyond the gates of the complex. (A complex, incidentally, which by Indian standards is remarkably subdued and quiet.) All through the day, we hear the gentle beep and rattle of rickshaws, the sound of the train coming through town, its haunting, mournful horn evoking long journeys across an immense, mythic landscape: the deserts, the plains, the Western Ghats, the palmy coast. Up high in the sky, circling, its wings spread like outstretched fingers, a kite screeches; somewhere on a distant street a pack of dogs howl.
And just over the way, on the opposite balcony, Elvis wants to be your teddy bear.
Yes, thank the Lord for my neighbour with her Whitney and her Elvis, her Jim Reeves and her Cliff Richard. She saves me from waxing too lyrical about India, of falling – too deep, at least – into cliche.
But what in God’s name will save me from her?

Great Encounters with Indian Bureaucracy: Phone and Internet (Part 3)

gorah — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 05:37:55 +0000

But, to be honest, despite all the adventures, my work was suffering. And Airtel were no nearer to fixing the connection.
Finally, we heard from Airtel that their service was not currently available in our building. This news was delivered with an emphaticness matched only by their earlier assurances that the Internet connection would be no problem.
While I delivered long, beautifully worded polemics that got to the heart of the failure of Airtel customer service, Kaveri did a bit of research and decided BSNL was our next best option.
I was not encouraged. BSNL is the government provider. It evoked images of India pre-1991, that crucial date after which market liberalisation came to the Subcontinent. It suggested an organisation of dusty ledgers and bureaucracy that made Airtel, complete failure or not, seem the model of efficiency.
We visited their offices on Commercial Street. Fittingly, it was tucked up a dark dingy staircase behind a shiny Vodaphone mobile phone shop. The office was all wood, sepia-coloured files and lazy fans. Men sat around with that air of chronic underemployment and inflated self-importance that is the speciality of government employees the world over. Yellowing piles of paper sat on dusty desks. The aroma of chai filled the air.
Self-important or not, the staff were polite, and a distinguished looking chap with a foppish fringe, sharp cheekbones and a pair of delicate specs perched on the end of his nose rolled out the usual no problems with the air of someone who has politely and elegantly disappointed customers for years on end. I took some comfort. Not so much in the possibility of our getting an internet connection (that seemed far too much to ask), but more in the fact that the impending failure would be carried out with a little culture, a touch of flair.
All seemed to be going to plan. Apart from the cultured bit. Kaveri was called by a flustered and irritated BSNL employee who could not decide which local exchange should deal with our connection. It seemed we had committed the unforgiveable sin of falling between two administrative districts; and he wanted to know what we were going to do about it. I had a few helpful suggestions and told Kaveri to tell him we would dig up the frigging apartment complex and shift it a few feet if that would help.
It wouldn’t.
I continued to sweat in my dusty internet cafe, amid coital grunts, temple bells and rickshaws.
One day two friendly BSNL men came and fiddled with a huge nest of wires in the corridor outside our apartment.
Weeks went by. Kaveri again evoked the image of the stranded Raj bureaucrat. She told me that the life expectancy of an East India Company Employee was two or three monsoons. ‘But that was a long time ago,’ she added.
Then, a couple of days later, we got a call to tell us our Internet and phone were working. Naturally, I assumed by working they really meant not working and never would work.
And yet it was working. With pathetic delight – as fruit sellers barked and rickshaws growled and temple bells clanged in the potholed streets outside – I literally jumped for joy as I hit the Google homepage. Then I ran around the apartment composing an impromptu song (quite a good one, actually) about the need not to fret because we had the internet. (It rhymed and everything.)
Then I took the phone from Kaveri and thanked the man on the other end.
‘No problem,’ he said.

A few days later, looking back on the madness of those first few weeks, I realised it was at least 50 per cent my madness. It was true that there was a gaping discrepancy between the slippery slick marketing of Airtel and their performance: there was no denying that day after day they promised to come between 9am and 6pm and that they never turned up. It was also true (uncomfortably true for me to acknowledge, because it is a stereotype) that many people in India will not disappoint you with a no, but instead reward you with an even more disappointing – in the long-term – yes. (Or no problem.)
But it was also true that BNSL quietly (well, mostly) and elegantly delivered. And that if I could have taken back the frustrated ranting that bent poor Kaveri’s ears so, I would have.
The fact is, things work in India, but they just work differently. And they take quite a bit longer to arrive. Whether it be the purchase of a mobile phone contract or a train ticket, one learns to wait patiently and await the verdict of a higher bureaucratic power.
Finishing this piece, I have to admit I felt awkward about this summing up. It is so easy, as an uncomprehending Westerner, to roll out the usual observations about Indian bureaucracy. Even marvelling at India brings up some hoary cliches about intensity and chaos and raw humanity. I am learning. I am constantly trying to shake of the superficial impression, to know India better. These are early days. It is all very confusing.
I actually broke off writing this piece and spoke to Kaveri about my impressions of bureaucracy. I said something half-baked about how, in India, the process is as important as the objective. She listened, quietly brewing tea, while I banged on about how fortunate I was to have seen so much of the Indian streets while waiting for our Internet connection. I finished up with a question: ‘Do you think that in India there is something particularly crucial about the journey, about the things to be discovered on the way? Is this a crucial factor in understanding India?’ I asked, triumphantly. (I have a tendency to get overexcited by ephemeral ideas; I buoy them up with enthusiasm because I know they will soon come down.)
Kaveri smiled. She was silent for a moment, searching for a little tact.
‘I don’t think people here think so philosophically,’ she said. She shrugged. ‘I think it’s just inefficiency.’
I am in flux, you see, caught between my frustrations and my liberal romances. Kaveri meanwhile is the realist. Waiting patiently.
And yet despite the frustrations and then the feeble, discredited philosophy, I can’t regret my little forays and adventures during those first few weeks. In fact, looking back, I would not have exchanged a working internet connection for any of it.
Perhaps, in India, there is a little bit of the no problem in all of us.

Great Encounters with Indian Bureaucracy: Phone and Internet (Part 2)

gorah — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:03:15 +0000

The funny thing is, when I wasn’t telling Kaveri about how incompetent her fellow countrymen and women were, I was having a wonderful time. And, I have to admit, this was partly down to our lack of phone and internet connection.
Every day I hurried down the beautifully landscaped gardens of our apartment complex and out on to the tatty street, my laptop bag over my shoulder. With one step past our gate I was transported from a pristine, glossy world of dark green leaves and ambling, underemployed security guards, into India – full power. The throaty rasp of rickshaws filled the air; packs of dogs scratched their genitals or hurried around, unseemly teats swinging as they went; cows ambled about, eyeing up tasty bits of cardboard to munch on; venders pushed carts that looked like they were made from bits of old 1970s bicycles and shouted themselves hoarse about the virtues of their coriander or limes.
Everyone, everything, sidled and weaved, as if orchestrated by some unseen hand. In fact, as I said to Kaveri’s friend only yesterday, the chaos is so perfectly choreographed there is a beauty about it, as if just before you step into the street a director has called action and a well-rehearsed dance begins.
The Internet cafe itself was opposite a church and a temple, which were squeezed together under one corrugated roof, their iconography and vibrant colours so similar only a cross on the former and trident on the latter distinguished them. Outside these religious institutions, and with alarming regularity, two fluffy white Pomeranians shagged away. Meanwhile, just outside the internet cafe, a farmer milked a herd of cows amid the chaos of rickshaws, mopeds and cycles while the chap at the reconditioned mobile phones shop shouted at yet another customer who complained about his dodgy goods.
This is what went on outside while I sat in the internet cafe and downloaded client briefs about kitchen cleaners and omega 3-fortified breakfast cereals. As for the internet cafe, it was coated in dust and cobwebs. A bank of modems looked like it had not been touched for 1,000 years. The internet was some ancient technology here, as old perhaps as the Hindu Vedas.
And my visits to the Internet cafe were just a part of my office adventures into greater India. Tasks that were trivial and unremarkable back home became significant, transformational. A search for A4 paper on a busy street ended, after an epic journey amid hooting horns and gaggles of goats and chickens, with a furious round of haggling with a photocopy shop proprietor over the price of 200 sheets.
A work call to London (about, ironically enough, a new range of Indian cooking accompaniments) took place in a small ISD phone booth inside a shack selling earthenware pots and plastic Ganeshes. An ancient lady with long white hair and a vermillion sari sat on a stool counting a huge wedge of money. It was hard to concentrate on my conversation about mini papads and authentic chana masala. It was hard to care.
Incidentally, after that call, I bought a lovely big clay pot for 50 rupees. Buying clay pots was not on the agenda after phone calls from my home office in Cornwall. Usually, what followed my calls back home was a long sigh and a trudge down to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee.

THE FINAL PART WILL BE UP IN A COUPLE OF DAYS. THANKS FOR READING.

Great Encounters with Indian Bureaucracy: Phone and Internet (Part 1)

gorah — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 06:46:08 +0000

I spent much of my first four weeks in India telecommuting from an internet cafe in a tatty district of Frazer Town, Bangalore. And often next to young men who had a great enthusiasm for pornography. It was all on account of my first encounter with Indian bureaucracy: namely my attempt to get an internet line and phone connection up at home. And while, at the time, the grunts and groans of fornication inside that dusty, sweaty cafe, and the sound of temples bells and rickshaw horns from the street beyond, were a distraction, I don’t regret the fact that it took four weeks at all. It was invigorating, somehow, to be forced out of my cosy apartment and on to the Indian streets every day. I learned a thing or two about fortitude; and about my arrogant impatience towards the way things are done here.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start with some arrogant impatience.
This is how it works. First, you see some lovely air-brushed, billboards of people enjoying Airtel, one of the top Internet service providers. In indian advertisements, people are inebriated by technology. Their eyes are glazed, their mouths curled into shit-eating smiles. It is as if, with that technology, nothing else matters, that they could lie in their own faeces, grinning and content.
Next, feeling a bit tipsy at the thought of a high-speed internet connection, you visit the shiny Airtel office and hand over your money. It all seems wonderfully easy at this point. When you are handing over money in India, everything, as the cliche goes, is ‘no problem’. In fact, when you raise your trivial concerns – such as will the connection work, will it blow up my laptop etc – you are waved away with a no problem so gentle and reassuring and dismissive of your fears you feel a bit of a bounder, to be honest, in bringing it all up.
And yet, once money is handed over and your frustrations begin the meaning of this ‘no problem’ takes on a different hue. In retrospect, you realise that the reassuring ‘no problem’ held no relation at all to your queries or the ability of the provider to set up your internet service. It merely meant the man at the desk found it no problem whatsoever taking your money off you.
Days later (many days, in fact, after the date the service was due to start) you give Airtel a call, a friendly reminder that the connection was no problem to set up at all. They, in reply, will tell you again it is no problem, despite the evidence to the contrary.
Now you are beginning to understand the full power of the ‘no problem’. More than just some cheap trick to relieve you of your money, it a talisman of a word in which everything magically becomes okay. Drivers yell it as buses career over cliffs, dying men release it at their very last sigh, even hobbling, scabies-ridden dogs bark it in the night.
And internet providers say it. Relentlessly.
Because trying to fix the problem is not their first response. The first response is to pretend everything is okay. That it is no problem. From now on you will have the curious feeling that all your frustrations and anxieties will be rolled up into a little ball and binned, and that the individual responsible will go off to make a nice cup of chai and have a bit of sit down.
This is the point at which you start to shout down the phone. (Or, rather, shout down the earhole of your girlfriend, who then shouts down the phone, because no one in India can understand your English.)
After you have a good shout, the company sends a couple of young chaps around. They stand very close together and giggle when they think you are not looking, probably because you are a Westerner and an Indian living together. Then they tell you the reason your connection is not working is because you gave the company the wrong address. Your partner shows them the correct address, written on the form they have brought with them. They eye it suspiciously, as if you scrawled it while they were not looking.
It goes on. Every day Airtel promise to come to sort the situation. Definitely. No problem. Every day they do not arrive.
Kaveri told me I was like a bureaucrat from the British Raj, stranded in some dusty outpost, waiting for the arrival of the railways. It was an image loaded with meaning. She did not care to elaborate.

PART TWO, WHICH INTRODUCES A WELCOME NOTE OF OPTIMISM, WILL APPEAR IN A FEW DAYS. THANKS FOR READING.