Strange how this enveloping can become something your soul starts needing.

Early mornings at BBH are so addictive. A short trip from home, a quick trot up two floors, push open the glass door and you enter a space of whiteness, filled in every corner with reflected sunlight, glinting off trees swaying in the morning breeze. Automatically, my breathing gets slower, calmer, as I embrace the rituals of routine. Fill my cup with hot water, dip a tea bag from a set that was replenished before I walk in, glance at the headlines on the newspapers neatly placed on the wooden table; open up my aluminium notebook and start writing to people millions of miles away or a shout away and smile into the screen.

The periodic glow of joy from every sip of chai that I made just the way I like it, and then waiting for repeat sessions through the day.

Eddie Vedder on the cover of Time, 1993. He never wanted to be on the article and hated the magazine for putting him on its cover. 

Amongst the pleasant sadness and acoustic happiness of Indie, do you remember the anger and pain that Pearl Jam and Nirvana captured for us? That we held so very dear as the poems that represented us, the “Eighties Babies”. That we reserved for the tape deck of the car, or when we had slammed the door of our room shut, trying to block out the world outside.

The purity of the emotions of our teenage years probably never fully returns. As soon as it peeps out, our self-conciousness brushes it aside. As soon as we are wondering if we should return to when the car we owned mattered less than the music that played inside it, the dishonesty of our current comfort and materialism tells us our ‘cool’ has a different identity. And that we can never go back.

It is in a rare moment of quiet, that I remember those warm evenings, when our generation, blessed as it is to be a cusp of a post-war era, and a globalised one – was torn apart from inside, while there was utter calm on the outside. We shared our values and our beliefs only with a few messiahs who understood. We did not believe in peace. Nor in war. We did not participate in any apocalyptic event, nor were we creatures from a digital, hyperlinked age. But we were angry. And we stayed that way. And now we are belligerent young adults, making choices that the baby boomer does not accept, and more self-conscious and guarded than those born after Windows 95.

The cassette tape, Pulp Fiction and Nike are our totems. Not the muscle car, or the bell-bottom. We saw WordStar come and go, but we remember to respect a command prompt terminal when we see it. And it is time we started knocking on the doors of power, who did not understand the world after The Beatles & The Doors, and never will, and took it back from them. Like we dreamed of, in those angry hot days of 90′s summer. When we believed in ourselves more, and the system not at all.

I have had an extremely privileged upbringing. I was the eldest born of my generation, a boy with all his digits intact. Like most Bengali’s, I grew up on a diet of ancestral pride and achievement, where I was to be next in a long line of male achievers, and their strong-minded but house-bound wives. All amplified by green-liveried, shotgun toting, pot-bellied bodygaurds who opened doors for me, drivers who would take me everywhere, and a constant coterie of people fussing around me about everything. 

As I grew older, and my father’s way of life overtook those of my grand-parents, things evened out more. I still had many of the things kids from big cities would kill for, but the ‘household’ became more sane. Just one cook, one young child to run around the house doing errands.

I was having dinner with someone who also watched Downton Abbey the other night. And he spoke of how the English looked on the days when life was simpler, when everyone knew their place and role in the world with nostalgia. And I didn’t say much then, mainly because I did not know where to begin, but I have been unable to forget that. 

It is true of course. They do look back at it with nostalgia. As do the makers and watchers of Mad Men. Anyone who tells you that these are reflective brooding works which aim to sensitise us to the times is deluded. All those diffuse glows, those perfect clothes, those beautiful people, the way they wrench and tug and linger at every emotion, every moment. If this is not nostalgia, what is?

I do not look back with nostalgia. Not because I am alone or holier than thou. I am a part of a small minority with a majority opinion, which carries the guilt of its domination and hegemony, and hopes someday to find a better way to deal with it that he or she does currently. Inside, I wear a starched dhoti, a white kurta with crinkled sleeves and gold rimmed glasses, and I hate it when people touch my feet, or open doors for me or take away my plates when I am done eating. While I sit at the table and burp. As Shiv Visvanathan says, I am my own case-study. A bahralok who loathes and loves being himself, both at the same time. Hoping to teach and instill in his child values different from his own. While he himself cannot be progressive enough to tell the help to go, to let him find his own shoes, to polish them on his own. Because would he not be serving them a greater cruelty? 

I know the textbooks and the statisticians do not account for it, but the wages of domestic help is grossly underrepresented in our country. In every city and small town I have been to, domestic help eats most if not all their meals while at work. And this is by for the best set of meals they could have hoped for. Apart from the fact that most large establishments also provide what is the old Raj concept of the outhouse to the badi. Not to mention help during times of medical emergency or death. And the taking care of the next generation through job recommendations, or just taking in the son or daughter when the old retainer is too old to work. There is an entire economy at work and it not unique to India, or England for that matter. 

But there is a dark side and not just the sociological one. There are few people in the world who know wear power lightly or well. And we are in a brave new world where few are tethered to the old values of gallantry, chivalry and humility. So while we learn to be agressive, entrepreneurial and individualistic from the West, we refuse to change how things work at home. 

Thus the bai jokes. A poor woman, who is the bread winner of her family, working in the intimate setting of our home, while we wait for our Dominique Strauss Kahn moments, ever the agile predator – even if most of us stop at feasting our eyes on captive meat, clad in the stuff of the sweaty, stained pulp magazines of youth, that we stuffed into our school bags or in the school bathroom. While enough of us are bold enough to step across that social threshold and relive the lives of our ancestors, who could stop a low caste woman on the road and ask her to reveal herself.

Class. It is the most ancient, most fetid quicksand civilisation invented. We cannot live without it. I couldn’t. Even if I took all my trappings away, I would find ways in which to justify to myself why another is superior or inferior to me. We inhale it and exhale it all the time. Sometimes the wretched inherit the Earth. But when they do inherit it, it is only the power which changes hands. Nothing happens to the Earth. 

But what worries me is not us Indians. We know what we are. We are not hypocritical about it. We quote Manu, and the sense in letting traditions take charge. We understand how things work and we use caste and quotas and the accident of birth to the maximum advantage. My generation has decided to take on the sanctity of religion and its silos, but one thing at a time we say. 

It is the West that surprises me. Why would you look back on 1912 or 1950 with nostalgia, unless you were not a woman who had benefitted from change, unless you felt perfectly manicured lawns justified keeping the gardener in his place. Or gilded cages. Or that child labour to be OK. Or that there is something romantic about using women as office furniture, to be lounged in or replaced as and when we please. 

All entwined.

Pinpricks of tears,

Hit out

From a shared subconcious,

How I hate this ageing,

How I hate this dying,

How I hate this finiteness of everything,

Every place,

Every world,

Every emotion, every tear.

Why are we so fragile,

When we think we are Gods.

We always hear about Indian streets and stairwells. How both are lined first with dirt, and then with spit, then peppered with bits of paper, foil and cigarette stubs. But no-one talks about the utter lack of fresh paint. If you happen to step out of the little islands of Malabar Hills, Parsee Colony, Diamond Garden, or Pali Hill, it would be impossible for you to not see what I mean. 

The walls of our buildings blend so well with the neighbouring slums and shanty’s, with their splattered satellite dishes, faded curtains and dirty utensils all up for display. And as I walk by all of this, what disturbs me more than a little is that the only buildings which seem to be rebelling against this sea of neglect are little orange painted temples with golden bells, or grey marble Jain temples and mosques.

Obviously God is God because he believes in the concept of a clean home both within and without. 

So here we are. In a city which the MMRDA has forgotten, using proximity sensors to keep noisy autorickshaws from scratching our shiny Audis and Porsches, closing our hearts and minds to how ugly a once beautiful city has become. With streets which suddenly collapse into pits casually fenced in by yellow tin strips. With a majority of its people forced to sleep, eat and watch TV in conditions my middle class mind can hardly grasp. With the police fast becoming the only visible face of any form of government or command structure. With a populace trained to be inured and endure. 

Have we lost hope? Is that it? Do we not want to paint buildings that are typically always in danger of being torn down? Are we tired of being defeated each year by the monsoons? Are we too poor to afford paint?

Why are our villages so clean, and our beloved city so fucking dirty? Why, why, why?

Bombay was not like this. I know it wasn’t. And it was just as crowded, just as hard-up, just as chaotic. All this construction is so pointless. We dig out the earth, and put it back on the walls of the buildings we erect. Or we just leave it there, to settle into peaty grime. For everyone to collect bits of, like prasad. Yes, this grime and filth has become the prasad of this city’s people. Shunned only by its places of worship. 

Before any reform can happen it is still-born. Before we can even think of moving forward we move backwards. Of course the Housing Society can decide who resides in it on the basis of your religion. Or your maritial status. Or what you cook. How dare you even suppose otherwise? Did you think your grand Constitution, would manage to prevent this dark ghetto mentality, avoid this fostering of communal hatred? 

Did you actually believe that someone out there wants a more efficient city, and therefore phased out that ridiculous relic – the Fiat Premier Taxi? Why? So that less jams happen? Signals move better? People reach on time? If you care so much about all that, just take the local train. Or buy the aforementioned SUV and block out all the road rage. 

I always laugh at people who attempt to categorise an entire city through a singular concept. Mumbai is different for every person who lives in it. For me, it is impossible to capture in one idea, or one post. I just know that it has stopped being the city I once loved. 

Or maybe I have just stopped loving it. Who knows with these things.

Fine cotton and leather,

Warm blankets, new tablet,

Soft skin, new hearth,

Old bombs, old refugee tents,

New dictators, old ways,

Old terrors, new tech,

Old borders, new guns,

Cold hearts, warm blood,

Cold streets, warm hearts.

All at the same time.

Why do I say “any film”? I could have said, “any modern substitute for books today”. I could, but film is also symbiotically linked to that unique phenomenon of our times: the online review ratings scale.

I have no issue with film critics. They help popularize films and bring dimensions to an experience that may otherwise be just be a viewing. The good critics (and there are very few) are honored by the film fraternity as people who understand film and contribute to its interpretation. But Manhola Dargis does not go about like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes reducing commercial art to a rating point.

What does 10/10 mean anyway? Or 1/6? And its not even a “Films by Coppola” rating scale. Its a broad, “I cover everything rating scale”. The viewer’s inherent need for: “Will it be worth my time and money”, has been used to spawn an entire ecosystem of ratings, endorsers for those ratings and the fallout of ratings for films on popular websites. But all said and done, people see them as barometers of what to watch or what to leave for DVD. And if you have time on your hands, chances are you will ignore the rating and go watch that Tom Cruise movie just for the special effects.

But the increasingly commercial, increasingly transactional gaming industry does not stop at that. Game pundits extensively review all kinds of games. Its a prolific output. Games of every genre, on every platform – its as if the game is incomplete if it hasn’t been reviewed (and if its a big franchise – hasn’t been previewed). Here too, game trailers keep teasing you on YouTube for months on end. What is different from the film industry is, however, the ratings system. A review doesn’t count if you haven’t rated it out of 10!!! And if you want to earn true street cred for your review, break the game down further – gameplay, graphics, “presentation”, sound, “storyline” and so on and so forth. And then, at the end of the year, you HAVE to bring out a top 10 and worst 10 games of the year, and set out little mini-tasks like best graphics, best gameplay, best pftt…

We make a huge deal of how we have finally managed to break out of the old “Big Boss – Bigger Boss” approach to games because we transformed them into “sand-boxes”. And then we missed the point altogether. When are we going to let this industry breathe a little bit? When are we going to stop falling into the same traps 20th Century businesses fell into – of churning out stuff that we think people want, when actually they are waiting for you to blow them away? I don’t want a Fifa every year. I don’t need a Modern Warfare every year. Don’t kill yourself selling stuff you know will sell when you do so much better.

And when the odd developer does get it: When they make something the world has never seen before, don’t reduce it to absurd levels every fucking day by giving it rating points on graphics, gameplay and voice. And then comparing that with a completely different game and saying the latter trumps it on all counts.

Because the point you fools, is not that Assassin’s Creed did not introduce dramatic facial expressions, a totally cool interface or beat every graphics output out there this year. The point is that they helped bring an extremely complex science fiction narrative to a close, while giving you hours and hours to do everything that you loved about the franchise in the first place.

Because every Harry Potter book is not rated on a 10 point scale and then ranked on sentence construction, character de-lineation and reader delight every fucking time it comes out. Because what drives the commerce is the art. And if you keep reducing the art into measurable little boxes and numbers, you will end up in the same place my current proffesion has. And I don’t want a second life which mirrors my first.

End of rant.

So imagine how transfixed I was when I was standing in front giant stones hewn by people 3000 years ago, staring into the very gates that Homer’s Greeks had found impossible to break through. And then as the guide unravelled the stories of these walls as we walked around them, touching them, feeling the interlocks of the gigantic stones which had stood against everything Nature and Man had to throw at them – absorbing the fact that these walls were from a later period of Tory’s history, and the city had been first settled over 2 millenia back. Only when I stood in front of old brick homes which were now home only to bees and ants, and archeologists dare not touch them lest they crumble to dust, did it sink in that I was in a truly ancient land. As we walked around the hill ruins, the wind kept battering us and the guide told us about how these winds were the reason Troy was such an unparalleled city. It used to be a port city, situated in a bay that ships used take shelter in before moving on. Those same winds were buffeting the hills and plains of craggy beautiful modern Channakale, home to ancient Trojan aqueducts, Gallipoli, picture postcard clock towers, cobbled streets and Kahve shops. And it was these winds which when they curved around the stones to sweep across your face, carried the whispers of old hearths, echoes of children’s laughter and the screams of dying soldiers.

It was in our very first port of call that I realised why this country was home to the Fertile Crescent. A land very hard to describe in words, because it rests between continents, between adjectives, between Myth and History. Ours was mostly a road trip in German built luxury buses on 4 lane expressways and intersections, but it was just as much a small pilgrimage by two lovers of humanity to old watering holes full of myth and legend. And in the old ruins of Roman and Greek ruins of cities of the erstwhile Asian provinces, we felt the majesty and power of Man’s story. Walking down marble causeways, past Corinthian columns, into a theatre which houses 25000 people – words are of little help.

Those experiences of grandeur and hubris in Ephesus & Heirapolis  also prepared us for the utter sadness and emptiness that filled us when we saw a lone column bearing testament to having once been a part of an ancient wonder of the world – The Temple of Artemis. A single lone column, over-run by wilderness, as Angor Vat once was, only there is nothing left to discover or behold there anymore.And again, in the Hagia Sofia, where we had to imagine the grandeur of the greatest Church in all Christendom, because the vagaries of time and religion have left it little more than a hollow shell.

But it was the story that probably has not been told enough, or a lament that few poems have captured that moved me the most. It was in the surreally beautiful village of Goreme, Cappadocia. We were visiting what, like everything else in Turkey, has been turned into a fanatically preserved museum: The Open Air Cave Museum. But this museum was in fact a vast monastery. Filled with cave chapels and churches that a persecuted people had hewn out of solid rock. The lament of a people driven to live just like in prehistoric times; lives full of the stories of the Bible, thinking of each legend, each character, and using that to survive and prosper against all odds. Living in times which led them to paint on the rock with true devotion and fervour. Such fervour in fact that I have not experienced something so sad and beautiful at the same time, anywhere else. A place of such spiritual power that it stays with you for days after.

The phallic shaped fairy chimneys of volcanic rock make for dwellings and picturesque hotels in Goreme village just a few kilometeres away even today. Except now we have air-conditioning, and heaters and electricity. Making it a major tourist destination. For all the wrong reasons.

There are some things that guide books, Wikipedia, history lessons and most guides do not prepare you for. And for that I am truly glad.

In this country, it is so easy to idealise the past and our agrarian roots. I grew up with this rhetoric, being a Bengali. Of the greatness of Tagore, of the days of the Bengali freedom struggle, of the days when the bhadralok learned English and became  a barrister, but also wore the dhuti, ate on the floor, and touched his mother’s feet before leaving home each morning.

There is much to deride about modern India. We know the words: corrupt, consumerist, inequality, inhuman, rape, exorbitant, overly-rapid, erosion.

I could easily sepia-gold tint these photographs and they would transform into beautiful symbols of a nostalgic idea of Kolkata. Of a Kolkata in touch with its humble roots, where neighbors know each other, where hot food is made for every meal, where everything is sacrificed at the altar of the child’s education, where the simple pleasures of life mean so much…

But in these streets where I help sell hair oil, is there more than this? Is there a similarity to the chawls and slums of Bombay? Are we then, walking around in a city where there is the Bharat, but no sign of India? No sign of a growing corporate meritocracy? No sign of increasing per-capita incomes and widening horizons? Is it a city stuck both with the good and bad of complete middle-class idyll? But what of the BMW’s we see on the streets, and the Fortuners and Range Rovers which just went past. What about Tolly, and Inox? Where are those pictures?

Those who love Kolkata, and understand it, no doubt take beautiful pictures of its people and places which haunt us.

No-one can hope to correctly or accurately capture enough of a city like Kolkata in a poem, post and sometimes even a book. But as a humble observer, in city after Indian city that at least I visit, I find much that disturbs me, and little that brings cheer. Maybe its just me.