the world forgetting by the world forgot

A few days ago I was having lunch with a friend in the office when a bird flew past us. A noisy miner. I don't know how it managed to get in through the revolving doors but it was hopelessly disoriented, confused and, possibly, panicking. It kept flying around and every couple of minutes would fly straight up, mistaking the glass for the sky, and bumping into it and falling back down. It was a wretched sight and we didn't know what to do. The security personnel either didn't mind it or didn't know how to get it out, so it was condemned to be stuck in there until it injured itself or lay down exhausted, and someone could pick it up and fling it out. Ofcourse, like any self-respecting bleeding-heart liberal my heart pined for it, for a few minutes until I went back to my desk- out of sight, out of mind. That incident happened when I was midway through Siddhartha Deb's The Beautiful and the Damned, and it seemed like the perfect metaphor for the lives he was writing about. 

In the film Piku, Deepika takes Irrfan saab around Kolkata on a sight-seeing trip imposing onto places her personal connection with them. At one point she finds a shopping mall where there was an old single-screen, to which were attached fond memories, and is surprised and disappointed with the change. To which his character replies, "लोग शायद इसीको डेवेलपमेंट कहते हैं |". It is a stunning line that conveys way more than it should. It could only be uttered by a bourgeoisie, someone who is capable of noticing even massive change only with respect to how it impacts his feelings. I identified with it so much. 

The people Deb writes about in this magnificent, invaluable book though are impacted so fundamentally and violently by what we would call modernity and development, that they feel lost and tormented for years if not decades. Their lives so quickly and brutally picked up and cast away into the vast maw of the capital-industrial machine (though the word machine feels impossibly meek to describe the vastness and hunger of this amorphous, but unbearably heavy, entity we call Industrial Modernity) that their sense of self, family, community, tradition and culture, everything that makes life meaningful, bearable, occasionally enjoyable, is shredded. This, this thing snatches away their humanity and treats them as nothing more than nuts and bolts required to keep this waves of 'progress' running. I have begun to understand the importance of economic growth (thanks in no small part to Amit Varma's The Seen and the Unseen) but it is not only ridiculous to lazily assume that this is a net good (even if it were what about all the bad?) but that this is the only bloody way to improving the human condition.

I have been fortunate enough, over the last few years, to read, and occasionally watch, incredible social portraits of the effects of modernity on Indian society

• Butter Chicken in Ludhiana - Pankaj Mishra
• Maximum City - Suketu Mehta
• A Free Man - Aman Sethi
• Capital - Rana Dasgupta
• My Seditious Heart - Arundhati Roy
• Shanghai - Dibakar Banerjee
• Leaving Home - Jaideep Varma
• Dreamers - Snigdha Poonam (to read)
  

and to that stellar list, I must add this book. Deb's incisive prose is sharp, strong, deep and poetic, and I had to pause after each of the 6 chapters because it was too much to bear. In contrast to almost all the other works I've cited above, except possibly Roy, it is direct in its indictment of the Indian elites for their greed and collusion in the incredible human suffering. It is easy to say I haven't felt as much shame and anger from reading a book in a long time but only my actions will tell if it really has had an impacted or if its just self-signalling. I'd like to believe that the feelings were real. Deb is a master prose stylist, I was underlining entire paragraphs, and marvelling at his ability to see through all the layers of distractions and get to the heart of the matter.

Briefly, the subjects are as follows:

• Introduction: After painting a broad picture of the changes spreading across India in the mid-2000s- the rise of the Hindu far right, the glamour of the BPO jobs, the exploding urbanisation- he spends time with Abdul Jabbar, a man who runs an NGO in Bhopal for victims of the gas tragedy and tries to capture the reality of a large section of poor, marginalised Indians who have to fight not only with rich corporations, but also the state, for justice.
• The Great Gatsby: I first read this essay in The Caravan many years ago and loved it. Arindham Chaudhuri, at that point in time, was huge and while I always had the suspicion that he was a fraud, Deb's incredible essay not only painted the socioeconomic milieu in which he was operating and gaining such success, but also used his story to convey the cultural shift in the country with regards to notions of success, wealth and an individual's dharma, subsequently even calling out people like myself for our snobbery and condescension.
• Ghosts in the Machine: In which he tries to understand the transformation of Bangalore into the Silicon Valley of India by following a couple of software employees. The return from US but a desire to build a mini-US there, the unmoored-ness waiting to be compensated by New Spirituality, the desire to see Software Engineering as Brahminical in its pristineness and abstraction ignoring the messy materiality in which IT operates, the desire to use technology for greater good that is quickly undermined by corporate and political vested interests. He also understands fairly quickly that the growth story in India wasn't as much about software efficiency as it was about real estate, financialisation, crony capitalism, and broken promises of politicians.
• Red Sorghum: In which he contrasts the increasing richness of Hyderabad with the poverty of surrounding Telangana districts- the farmer suicides, the destruction of older, rural lifestyles, the inequality in development creating a schizophrenic sense of two different worlds less than a hundred kilometres apart. I found this particularly hard reading because I grew up in Hyderabad during this era, had atleast a passing knowledge of the political and economic changes, but no one around me seems to have acknowledged the fact that the rise of one and the fall of all others were interrelated.
• The Factory: He spends time in a TMT factory interacting with workers, mostly migrants from the East and the Northeast, and tries to convey the harsh lives of these men. This was again a tough piece to get through because for once the manipulating factors weren't abstractions like information technology or neoliberal policies, but rather old-school oppression, uprootedness and dehumanising physical work.
• The Girl from F&B: About the life of a particular Manipuri girl who works in the hospitality sector in New Delhi. Deb uses her story to talk about the hundreds of thousands of people from the Northeast who come to mainland India (his phrase) in search of better opportunities and how they're treated as different ("..in the pejorative language commonly used in Delhi for all Mongoloid people - a Chinky") and discriminated against.
  

I want to offer a taste by quoting a few lines:

• And when the writer needs the stories of people's lives, those narratives that insert recognisable, human shapes into large but abstract conflicts, he or she depends on people who have a sense of their own trajectories and who are willing to impose form on the chaos of their experiences and memories. -On how a writer sets out searching for stories
  
• But the glamour was irresistible when combined with his middlebrow characteristics. He was one of the audience, even if he represented the final stage in the evolution of the petite bourgeoisie.. distilling down for them that cocktail of spurious tradition and manufactured modernity. -Reg Arindham Chaudhuri's Leadership Seminars
• ..invisible for the most part in the social landscape, they are considered safe people, productive at work, conservative in values and unlikely ever to raise difficult questions about race or inequality. -Reg NRIs considered the model minority
• ..where Western men in khakis accompanied their Indian co-workers on a hesitant sampling of the food court version of native cuisine. -On gora corporate employees traveling to their Indian workspaces
• He was alternatively opinionated and nervous, making random statements that seemed to have no point to them.. in a long rant that was perfectly articulate in flow if incoherent in thought. [Next to this line, I wrote, "OMG Aditya, be careful"] -About a young, frustrated man who spent a little too much time on rightwing message boards
• The simplicity of the surroundings as well as the idealism it evoked seemed intensely familiar, until it brought to me, in a sudden, unbearable wave of nostalgia, my childhood and a time in India when many middle-class households had been like this, animated by literature, art and politics, and where people still lived in a community and believed in social justice. -During a meeting with an old Telugu Marxist in his middle-class, book-lined house late into the night as his granddaughter slept on his lap
• ..leaving farmers to function in the best way they could in the free market with its syndicates, price volatility and speculation. -On the effects of the Naidu-McKinsey approach
• When I put these different fragments together, I got not a whole but a bewildering, cubist image. -On trying to understanding the workings of a factory by interacting with people in various roles
• It was utterly masculine in atmosphere.. the barracks were shorn of the softening aspects of the worst slum, from the liveliness of the children playing to women talking with each other. In a slum, there would have been colourful saris hung out to dry, the smell of cooking that was more than just functional.. -On the living quarters of the factory workers
• Yet Delhi as an imperial capital was also a postmodern, millennial city where Esther traversed different layers of history everyday on her way to work. -The other side of the celebrated adage, "India lives in the 12th and the 21st century, and all the centuries in the middle, simultaneously"
• In the West, with its long excess of capitalism, it might be possible to scoff at luxury brands. They had been around so long that they had lost some of their meaning. But in India, luxury brands still possessed power. -On reflecting on his own nervousness for entering a Paul Smith store in an upscale Delhi mall

At the end of one of Prof. Mehta's Justice lectures, I remember writing to myself that one of the primary duties of education is to de-invisibilise the invisible. In that sense, this is a supremely edifying and eye-opening read. Since moving to Australia 5 years ago, every Indian visit has opened my eyes to complexities, injustices and travails that people face there. However, reading this book has peeled further layers to show the ruthless, harsh conditions in which people live. It is one thing to imagine and theorise on the stunning power of Big Capital and Big State and Big Technology; Something else entirely to see the impact on millions of lives (the loss of older forms of knowledge, the lost cultural practices, broken social bonds, major psychological shifts) that these manifest. 

In an old The Seen and the Unseen episode, a guest tells Amit Varma that he doesn't feel like a citizen of a country, or a state, or even a city as much as the citizen of a particular village or a mohalla. I now understand better what he means. We are embodied beings, able to move only slowly and thoughtfully in the quarters of our actual geography, but we don't use the same caution when creating big theories and selling grand narratives based on them. Maybe those of us who wield that power (granted by money, social status, technical skill etc.) would do better by being more circumspect. This book will help that cause.