Charminar and more

Shadab’s near Charminar is crowded despite the fact that it is way past lunch hour. We are eating sumptuous mutton biryani accompanied by raita and a typical Hyderabadi delicacy called mirchi ka salan. The two other people with me sit back and heave a satisfied, coital sigh.

I order for chai and sip it down. It is bland, without the tangy taste of masala that accompanies chai, had from the roadside. P slurps down a creamy lassi, heaped with cashew nuts, almonds and pista green ice-cream. The lassi tastes more like a picture-perfect version of the falooda. The place is plastered with pictures of lassi, falooda and paan.

As we walk towards Charminar, distinctly visible from a distance, we are accosted by local hawkers, wanting to sell us brassieres, undies, bangles and bags. What takes me back to Mumbai’s Colaba, however, is one man who offers to clean A’s ears. I am sure; Lonely Planet will have some strange entry for the lonely traveler. I have always felt that the book is far too conservative for a backpacker.

There are tiny lanes that work their way into the heart of the old city. We climb on top of the much scribbled upon Charminar and wonder at the giant clock made by a Mughal company.

The camera ruined a lot of things, just as it opened an entire world where emotions co-mingle with technology. While it can never replace painting or writing that were born out of the human agency to utilize its faculties, it has put an end to the wild imagination of rural writers as demand for rustic poetry and hymns dries up.

A rather big family, dressed in traditional finery, takes photographs in front of the Char Minar. I remember asking someone whether there was any similarity between the Nawabi and the Nizami culture. The lady from Lucknow shook her head vehemently, in an attempt to disabuse me of that scandalous notion. The old part of Hyderabad is charming with its faded, old-world charm that has no hope for redemption.

Pulling down the Charminar would be a scandalous idea for a lot of people, including the people who inhabit the upper echelons of the geriatric ward but it has become nothing more than a scribble pad for reminders of love.

PS: This post was written when I first came here. I was looking through my files today and suddenly stumbled upon this piece. Interesting, how things have changed since then. Regardless of that, I still maintain that the Charminar must be pulled down, if only to allow that side of the city some breathing space.

The importance of being right and relevant

The country effectively does not have an opposition party today thanks to the ridiculous antics of the so-called mature right-wing intellectuals of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). This is an interesting point in India’s political scene because it is time for the country to determine whether it wants religion-based politics or issue-based politics. Interestingly, most elections in India these days are won/lost on the basis of issues like roads, power and water. In that sense, the BJP and RSS’s brand of politics was already redundant. So is the case with most other parties that support the saffron brigade or are a part of it. The Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, for instance, is already waning even as the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, Nationalist Congress Party and the mother of them all, Congress itself, increasingly occupy the political space, left vacant by the Shiv Sena.

While the recent events in the BJP indicate a split along the party lines, an important cause of this situation has been the absence of a succession policy within the BJP. The other national party in India, Congress does not have any such problems at present but there is only so much time that Sonia Gandhi has to unveil her plan for her son and the party.

A few years ago, I had done a dissertation on the Swatantra Party, a political party that was started by C Rajagopalachari in Madras along with a bunch of other progressive, liberal individuals such as Minoo Masani and Piloo Mody. The interesting aspect of this party is that when it first started in 1959, it espoused the cause of industry in an otherwise controlled India. One must remember that the India of that time was very different from the India of that, in that firms had to wait in queues outside Government offices or grease a few palms before they could get their much sought after licenses. In fact, Dhirubhai Ambani of the Reliance group made potloads for himself thanks to this intricate mesh of regulations.

Firms in those days, used to hire people only to do the running around for them in the so-called corridoors of power’. So the Swatantra party won 18 seats in the elections of 1962 (the third lok Sabha), piggybacking on the sudden pull-out of support for the Congress. This was the highest number of seats that any political party other than the dominant Congress and the Left had won in Indian politics at the time. It emerged as the main opposition in four Indian states–Bihar, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Orissa. Most of these states had some history of feudal ownership and so they took to the party like fish to water.

Chakravarti Rajagopalchari, who founded the party, died in 1972 and like the fate of today’s BJP, the Swatantra Party was left floundering. It suffered from acute lack of leadership and an inability to scale up quickly. Political parties are not dissimilar from companies/ventures that fail hopelessly if they are unable to capture the mass market at the right time. The Swatantra party experiment ended in 1974 when the party got merged with the Bhartiya Kranti Dal, led by the chameleon-esque Charan Singh.

The reason I bring this up at this point is to highlight the opportunity for a political party to emerge and capture the mass base at the current time. One of the reasons the Congress came to power in the last elections, barring of course, all the issues and platforms that our much-hailed political commentators have already waxed eloquent about, is the absence of options for the Indian people. On the one hand, they have the Congress party, a monolith of a party but one that shows some semblance of character and willingness to institute reform, and on the other hand, the BJP, hopelessly mired in its own succession battles.

India was not ready for the Swatantra Party the last time around but this time as the clamour for reform heats up, could that be the solution for a country where a majority of the people will soon be children of post-license Raj India?

The train slips into Hubli even as I am shaking off the last remnants of sleep from my eyes. I read ‘Hubli station cabin’ and suddenly realize that this is it. I jump off the train fearing that it will take off to wherever it is that the train must go to, with me in it.

The funny thing about this train is that it seems to have traversed a great deal of distance. Yet, the only thing I know about it with some degree of certainty is that it has come from Kacheguda, close to Secunderabad. Each compartment of the train carries the name of a different destination, from Yestwantpur to Vasco-da- Gama. I am secretly glad I got off at Hubli.

My first glimpse of this place is the white columns of the station. Coming from the land of the august CST station, white columns in any building put me off completely. Just then, I run into a woman with a mask around her face. I realize this is swine flue land and like the people in Saramago’s ‘Blindness’, people here are paranoid about catching the flu.

This is my first visit to Hubli but I have been to these parts before. My mother studied in Dharwad and my father’s family still lives in Belgaum. As a child, I attended the thread ceremony of my cousin in Dharwad. Those were different times because the place was full of trees and I remember feeling sad about leaving that place as I sat in the bus to leave.

There is something odd and charming about C because he is not your ordinary white man. His mother is Australian and his father is Indian and so he claims that he missed India when he wasn’t here. C has been working for some time in India’s hugely controversial development sector. We are in Hubli to meet the people from the Deshpande Foundation. The foundation was started by Gururaj ‘Desh’ Deshpande to develop North Karnataka, a region that he grew up in. The facility is remarkable both for the way it is built as also the fact that it has become the beehive for entrepreneurial activity and research in the region. The place radiates energy and often gives the visitor the feeling that he/she is at a space station.

Development is a funny business because people know exactly what they should do but no one knows the perfect way of going about it. While India’s social sector needs more qualified and organized people, it definitely does not need a bunch of consultants, insensitive to the needs of the local region and the market. The challenge essentially lies in connecting local business to the market but there are a whole lot of petty problems along the way.

We went to Akshaya Patra today, a facility funded by the Deshpande Foundation alongside the Infosys Foundation and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). This facility feeds over 2 lakh kids in the Government’s mid-day meal program every day. It is remarkable in every respect but more so because of the clock-work precision that the Akshay patra foundation has achieved in churning out these meals and maintaining the standards at the same time.

They have a store room where the rice is cleaned and stored in silos. Once that is done, it is washed on the second floor of the facility. The idea is that gravity will help the rice to flow down without deploying additional energy to do it. Rice is then transferred through chutes into giant cookers on the first floor where it is cooked for about ten minutes. At the same time, the vegetables and dal are mixed in another section of the facility. The vegetables are sourced from places around Hubli and are stored at the facility for a day before being used to cook food. Finally, on the ground floor, the cooked rice and dal are packed into containers and sent off to schools within a 100 km radius from the facility.

Most places I visited were trying to do things differently. For instance, the Agastya International Foundation was started to promote science education in an interesting and interactive way especially among rural children. I was amazed at how poor my knowledge of science was when I found myself fumbling with these basic experiments related to force, energy and optical illusions.

The BAIF development centre is another instance of India’s development sector trying to do things differently. BAIF does research into drought proofing techniques for sustainable livelihoods and has introduced multi-cropping in the region so farmers can hedge their risks. Moreover, farmers in the region have also begun to produce vermi-compost and sell it in the market.

I keep wondering about how sustainable agriculture is and why certain people should be condemned to cultivating crops, even if they want to shift to some other occupation. Perhaps, collective farming is a way out. BAIF has organized the local farming community into a federation called the Maha Sangha that sells the produce in the open market. ITC has also begun to buy the farmer’s produce but in the true spirit of corporate India, is not being really fair to the farmers, in the process. Mr Bulla of BAIF told me that perhaps the Maha Sangha should get into partnerships (legal agreements) with the corporates so that both parties get a fair deal.

Snippets from life.

Tiredness washes over me like the sudden downpour, both unexpected and surprisingly comforting. I am a fool to be surprised by such things as tiredness. Yet, washing my hair today felt good. I have short, black hair that is trying to decide whether it wants to grow further. I think it is just wondering whether I will get it chopped off again. I have done it too many times in the past.

As a kid, I wanted to have long hair, the kind that reaches to your waist and moves along with you. I grew up on stories of my mother and grandmother who had long, thick hair, a symbol of beauty in traditional Indian society. In comparison, I have short, black hair and a face that seems to want to move in all directions, all at once. That was the other thing about childhood. I had a vague idea in my head that pressing my finger against my cheek would induce a dimple and so I spent painful hours doing just that, to no avail.

I had a lot of vague and absolute ideas about prettiness, sexual love, marriage, God, religion, hair, trust and contracts. As you slowly and painfully discover that it is not worth the tears that were shed over it or the endless number of rose petals that were destroyed in the process, you decide that it is a function of convenience. I hold no illusions about any of these ideas now because most of them are irrelevant to your existence, the way you lead it every day. Yet, every now and then, you meet someone who is so deeply in love with life and people that you begin to question your notions again. The only problem, this time, is you are convinced that you have changed enough and you begin to look for the “catch”.

A lot of young people between 22 and 26 years are at their cynical best. It is either that or I seem to have met a fair majority of them but when 30 people of the 35 that you know are cynical, dispassionate or some combination of the two, then you are inclined to believe in the previous statement.

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I spotted Nestle’s dairy whitener at the local supermarket today and it brought back to me the time I bought an entire packet just to binge on it, as an 18 year old. My finances were meager at that point (not to say, that I am a well-off young lady today, but just that I can afford certain things now. Nestle dairy whitener, for instance. ) There was, something very fascinating about powdered milk because it tasted good and funnily, enough it stopped tasting like medicine. As a 22- year old in Chennai, I developed a taste for milk that I had lost earlier to Nestle’s dairy whitener.
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I have realized that a lot of times you do not perceive yourself as an adult even though the world around you does. I mean, I can still remember a lot of the things I did as a 10-year old. Human beings are brought up on the notion that age is a function of your memory. When you are very old and ready to nod off, for the final time, you remember your childhood more than your middle age because you do not wish to believe that you are old. As a result, you do not remember anything of what happened between then and now.

A lot of young people I know do not remember anything from their childhood because they are too busy creating fresh history. However, every now and then, there are moments, when tiny things from childhood come back to you, causing a sharp stab of pain and nostalgia at what you left behind. I know, I sound super sappy, at this point but trust me, I am smiling.

The house

A long time ago, I lived in a house in a land where the sun rose on the wrong side. It was a different house, in that it had psychedelic, stained glass windows all over. Stained glass is pretty in a lovely, stoned kind of way and has been one way people have succeeded in ensuring the mysticism inside churches. If God is the focal point of everything sublime, supreme and beyond human cognition, then why do we need beauty, sublimity and supremacy inside a church or a temple to make that point? In any case, most of it is lost on most of them.

Be that as it may, this particular house had a brown roof that sloped downward. Weeds grew between the tiles and sometimes attracted dogs and even snakes, we were told. Often, I went there to sit by myself, to look at the moon and count the stars in my limited patch of the sky. The sky could go on and on and yet end suddenly depending on how you looked at it. The mind has a way of getting distracted just when you want to look at the sky, size it up, take it in and revel in its munificence.

I buried my face inside the velvet moss that had grown irreverently on a moist stretch of the roof. Some realizations steal upon you at the oddest of moments—when you are sitting on the crap pot after a bad night or when you are trying to jolt yourself out of your comfort zone or even when you are sitting in a marketing class and thinking about the opportunity cost of being present in the here and the now.

Those were different times, horrible and fascinating, all at once. I was in love with someone who claimed he was looking for happiness and continued to hold on to his unreal hypothesis throughout the time we were together, which was not all that long. So visits to the roof were often to understand and decipher the grand plot that I knew I was losing without understanding why.

Inside the house, there were carved figurines, in keeping with the kinky, mystic look. The house had been built by a singer/dancer and she had rented it out to us. The big jackfruit tree in the backyard had a mind of its way because one day there was no jackfruit and the next day there was one. It was like the tree itself was hiding behind the corner just to surprise the inhabitants of that mystic house with jackfruits.

Inside the house, it was dark, all the time because the light refused to penetrate through the canopy of unwanted vegetation that had grown around the house. The inhabitants of the house ran around the house, naked and reveling in their individual pleasures. Many a man would have wished to be in that house, for that is the stuff fantasy is made of.

My favourite place in that house was the wooden table in the kitchen. The kitchen was dirty as the leftovers in the fridge stank till our noses bled. The spoilt milk collected in the sink, inviting flies, ants and other sundry insects. I felt alive in the kitchen, not because of all the life in the kitchen but because of the absence of human presence there.

I always went to that room, after a hard day, to feel the all-consuming exhaustion of the alcoholic or the prostitute after a sinful, orgy-filled night. Yet I never felt any in that filthy kitchen.

Exhaustion creeps on to you, when you least expect it.