Random Restaurant Review

At the risk of sounding frivolous, I’d like to settle a long-standing debate on where one would obtain the best steak in Bangalore and consequently experience the best in fine dining. This is not the Anthony Bourdain variety of steak; served on a wooden plate with a little gutter on the outside for the blood to run in to. Or the smothered-in-pepper-sauce meat and taters that passes for a steak at Miller’s or the Only Place or in an establishment of more recent vintage: Yoko’s Sizzlers. I’m talking about a well-cooked, herb infused, lemon zest-tinged piece of fine meat - the sort of Kobe prime that Cypher sinks his teeth into in the Matrix. Obviously, this hitherto unavailable gastronomic treat would be accompanied by a sublime pinot noir, possibly one from Australia.

This debate was put to rest when the Taj Residency decided to shut down the Jockey Club and called in Steven Liu from China to take over the kitchen at a new restaurant with the rather unappetising and bovine-skewed moniker: Graze. While the Taj Residency is possibly the last place in Bangalore to get into a spiffy, hand-tailored Kilgour two-button and take a dolled up date to, Steven Liu and the food he puts on your plate at Graze make up for all the glamour the business hotel on MG Road lacks.

Obviously, I tried the place with a bunch of male friends before I ventured to foist my post-30 persona on a doe-eyed 20-something and ask if Saturday at 8 would suit her fine.

Here’s the thing about steak dinners on a date. While it’s all very well to slobber over your meat in the company of men, when it comes to a dainty woman whom you’re trying to impress enough to be asked upstairs for a post-prandial cup of Columbia’s finest (for those of you that think the finest produce to come out of that South American country is cocaine, I urge you to try the coffee first), you have to delve into the meat, not devour it. Also, the steaks they serve at Graze, or at least the rib eye I had on my date, are by no means Kobe beef. Yes, they are tender and wonderful, but they don’t by any means drop off the plate like a countess in a corset on her days’ seventh fainting spell. So, I gingerly worked my fork into the tender meat and pausing to sip the pinot noir, spoke to the vision in front of me about how, in Japan, the cows that become fine Kobe beef are first massaged, fed beer and made to listen to Beethoven’s Fifth.

But before Liu served up the steak (I don’t recall what my date ate, but judging by her waistline, I’d wager she gorged on three raisins and half a cracker) he put forth a proposition: foie gras with brioche and peppered pears. The foie gras was rich and with the pear, had all the poise and beauty of a Saurav Ganguly cover drive on one of his better days. How did it get that way? Liu says almost everything in the restaurant, including him, is imported. The wines – there are over 200 of them – come from virtually every wine-producing nation in the world, the olive oil from Europe, the steak from New Zealand and the post-meal rum I had, the golden-hued Pyrat, from the Caribbean.

Of course, there are those on the other side of the debate that will tell you that just because the steak at Graze is so damned good and they import the finest ingredients from across the world, it doesn’t make it the best steak in town. There are other things that constitute a fine dining experience: the atmosphere, the liveried waiters, the gurgling fake brook, the abstract expressionism on the walls, the tribute-to-Corbusier furniture and so on. But I contend that despite its unexceptional interiors and business hotel tag, the Taj Residency, at least with Graze, has fashioned the best fine dining restaurant in Bangalore. Also, I’d like to silence these bothersome naysayers with another bit of evidence. After Graze, on our way back, I was asked upstairs for a post-prandial cup of, if not Columbia’s, at least Coorg’s finest. And needless to say, a lot more was had than just coffee. So there.

Unfortunately there’s a bit of a deal-breaking post-script to this article. And unfortunately it doesn’t feature the talents of the remarkably gifted Steven Liu. You see, Liu packed up and left a couple of months ago and a new chef from Australia has taken over. The menu has changed considerably, and though I haven’t been back since, die hard Graze addicts still swear it’s the finest restaurant in town.

A Personal Islam

Play: The Undertaker
Playwright: Loy Saldanha
Director: Preetam Koilpillai
Player: Abhishek Majumdar 

My former boss, MJ Akbar, editor-in-chief of the Asian Age, apart from being a prodigious scholar on Kashmir in particular and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in general, is prone to quoting Urdu couplets at gatherings both formal and informal. In my limited interactions with him during my days as a reporter at the Asian Age, I’ve heard him quote the poet Mirza Ghalib at an editorial meeting held a day after our offices were ransacked by an enraged mob and much later, a few lines by Jahangir at a party held just after his book, Kashmir: Behind The Vale, was released. Those last lines in Pharsee, were Agar Firdaus bar ru-e zamin hast. Hami asto. Hami asto. Hami ast. The emperor Jahangir reportedly spoke those words when he first saw Kashmir. Exclaiming: ‘If there were Paradise on earth. It is here. It is here. It is here.’ Akbar used those lines as a forceful preamble to his description of what has become of Kashmir since the emperor first uttered the words.

Many years after that party, I heard those lines again; on stage at the Alliance Francaise in Bangalore last week. A dark, crouched figure, couched in loose, dirty garb spoke them, and this time, they seemed as a means to blaspheme Jahangir’s sacred memory of Kashmir. However, Abhishek Majumdar, who spoke those lines, and who plays The Undertaker in Loy Saldanha’s play of the same name, used the irony to predicate a deep personal betrayal rather than proclaim a political statement about the state of affairs in Kashmir or, consequently the state of Muslims in the troubled valley.

The Undertaker, who, in a period of less than an hour, lays bare his childhood, his youth and the turmoil that  has shaped and defined his adult life, uses poetry often, and often to good effect, to construct for the audience, what he sees as a life of betrayal – betrayal by his father, by his mother, his friends, his lovers, and in a sense, by the religion he has so devoutly practiced.

The script, which, according to the director Preetam Koilpillai, differs significantly from the original, exacts an almost free-form performance from the actor. Though it has loneliness, dementia, impotence and rage as the ingredients that shape the central (and only performing) character on stage, it doesn’t really abide by a structure of a beginning, middle and end. Majumdar, who is both intense and arresting, switches back and forth between his childhood and the present while narrating his life as a man who has taken on the profession of burying the dead. During this narrative, he questions his father’s motives as a man charged with raising him as a boy, his German lover who seems to consume his already weakened personality, the corpse in the mortuary, and ultimately, in the final compelling moments of the performance, his God. He ends his performance with Urdu poetry, words that are his own: ‘Malik musafir se pooch raha, kuch hairan se nazar aate ho. Guzarte hue shahron se kuch pareshaan se nazar aate ho. Musafir malik se pooch raha, kyun bezaar ho maula. Yahaan se duniya dekho Allah. Har malik mamooli hai.’ (‘The Maker asks the traveller, you appear surprised by what you see while passing through these cities. The traveller asks the Maker, why do you appear disappointed with yourself. Look at the world from here. Where every God is ordinary’).

Conversations in autorickshaws

In August, on my way to Brunton Road, I had a ‘Falling Down’ moment – that event in the movie where Michael Douglas, trapped in an hours-long gridlock, loses his mind to road rage and begins a terrifying rampage. Though my Falling Down moment didn’t result in the loss of life or bodily harm, it caused me to make the most impulsive decision I’ve made thus far. Stuck in the traffic jam, I yanked out my cell-phone, rang a car dealer friend of mine and with barely controlled fury, asked him to meet me instantly and find a buyer for my car.

Since then, I’ve been car-less in Bangalore and because this city has nothing efficient by way of a mass transport system, have taken to traveling by autorickshaw. Nothing can give you a sense of a city than an autorickshaw driver’s rant. His world-view, tempered by conversations with the hundreds of passengers he ferries and by the sheer extent of the area he covers, is crucial to developing an opinion about the city you live in.

Two aspects of my travels in Bangalore’s autorickshaws have greatly helped shape my views on the city. The first is my ability to speak street Kannada competently (which means a liberal dose of the coarsest invective you can imagine) and the Regional Transport Office’s move to introduce driver identification details in rickshaws. The first aspect is a no-brainer – you append an ‘anna,’ ‘guru,’ ‘swami’ or ‘boss’ (pronounced ‘baas’) to your destination and give the driver a cultural or linguistic identifier, making conversation easier. Of course, the conversation becomes easier still and far more interesting if you merely state your destination and the guy, as is the norm these days, confirms in Hindi: ‘kidhar?’ and you, with a tinge of regionalistic pride, reply: “yakkanna, Kannada barodillva?” (what’s the matter brother, can’t you speak Kannada?”

The driver identification details, unfortunately, work only for passengers that are intimate with the city. The card bearing these details give you, among other things, two crucial bits of information: where the driver lives and when he obtained his drivers’ license. The first always serves as an opener; distance from the center of the city being a great way to start a conversation. For instance, on Friday, the rickshaw I was in was from Somanahalli, on Kanakapura Road. So, I began with: “Dinaglu asht doordinda barthira neevu?” “You travel such a long distance everyday?” And of the identification card says the driver received his license in say, 1982, you begin by reminiscing about a city that once was bereft of one-ways and, inevitably, the ‘outsiders.’

I have used autorickshaws as a means of transport for over 15 years now and, perhaps as a part of my first editors’ edict to engage with the people who literally transport a city, have always sought to strike up conversations with rickshaw drivers. But it’s only over the past three years that a blistering anger has crept into the conversations I’ve had. Much like the urban, English-speaking Bangaloreans I wrote about a few weeks ago, the Kannada-speaking rickshaw drivers, have begin to direct the invective and incendiary rage towards the immigrant, Hindi-speaking population of this city. A couple of weeks ago, on my way to dinner, I flagged down an auto near JP Nagar and a few minutes into the ride, began a conversation with the driver, Ilyaz. His identification card said he lived in DG Halli and that he’d had a license issued to him in 1980. Ilyaz began the conversation with a single word. “Software?” he asked. I replied in the negative and he fell silent. A few minutes later, he asked me again in Hindi: “Kya karthe hain aap?” “What do you do?” I said,” Barithini. Patrakartha naanu.” “I write. I’m a journalist.” By this time, we were near the Dairy Circle and in the midst of a mammoth gridlock. Over the next 20 minutes, Ilyaz let loose. Such was his fury that I feared he might stop the rickshaw at some point and goad me into joining his violent rampage against “those bastards from North India.” Ilyaz, who belongs to the Autorickshaw Driver’s Union of Bangalore, said just about everyone was disgusted with the way this city had degenerated. In Dakhni Urdu, he told me, “Inho, chinaalke, Dilli se aathi saab. Aaku ham sub ka gaand maarthi. Cheel daalna saab sabko. Aap dekhna saab, ek din bomb phatega Bengloor main. Maiheech lageyaga bomb.” (“These people are sons of whores. They come here from Delhi. They come here and screw us in the ass. We must skin them all. Just you watch, there will be an explosion one day. And I’ll be the one to plant the bomb.”)

Though he later admitted that he had come close to physically assaulting a few of his passengers who were from the north of the country, Ilyaz did say he would never actually refuse a northerner a ride in his rickshaw. He had a daughter in school and a son in college. When we reached our destination, Ilyaz apologized for his tirade, but not for thought process behind them. “Main Bengloor ka hoon saab. Musalman hoon, par yaheech ka hoon. Jab Cauvery ka lafda huva, main bhi maara ek do ko. Ab different hain. Ab who Tamil logan bhi hamare saat hain. Ab lafda hoga to un logon ko nahin chodenge saab. Main jaatu. Khuda hafiz.” (“I am from Bangalore. I may be a Muslim, but I’m from here. When the Cauvery riots happened (in 1991) I beat up a few people. But now things are different. Now the Tamilians too are with us. If there are riots now, we won’t leave those (North Indians) alone. I’m going now. May God be with you.”

A Convenient Truth

A few months ago, a designer friend of mine – not designer, like sling-backs; though I know those too – group-mailed her friends, urging them to stop whatever it is they were doing at that moment and go buy a copy of former US Vice President Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. She said it would be the one act that could save a planet in peril. Be The Change, she commanded. Single Malt Swiggers of the World Unite, she implied. Like many Indian cabalists, she’d sunk her hooks into a fad that was at least two seasons old, and which came packaged in blue, white and red. Like Pilates, high-fiber bread, acid house, sushi, Jeffery Sachs and sub-Saharan Africa, climate change had become the cabal’s dernier cri. Green was the new Black.

Everyone copied on that mail saw the documentary and everyone on that mail (as the actress Shabana Azmi describes the average Indian urbanite) had lengthy, heated and terribly uninformed discussions on climate change, green house gases, melting polar ice caps and how chic a Honda Prius would look in their four-car garages.

Then, a polar bear and a Hollywood actor happened. A few issues ago, Vanity Fair, which pretty much goes with where Hollywood’s going at the moment, put a white furball called Knut and the actor Leonardo Di Caprio on the cover of their Green Issue and my designer friend and her ilk imploded with new-found virtue. They e-mailed, forwarded and IM-ed the green cause down a thousand parched throats. This was better than fur or Tibet or all those totally cool monks back in Myanmar. This was the whole damn world they were saving. So, with a half-informed idea and a fully formed cause, they sent out their messages again. They asked me to stop flushing the toilet. They asked me to shower fewer times. They told me to change all the light bulbs in my apartment. I’m not sure I was asked to do this, but I went ahead and set some money aside for a fine Marwari filly, just in case I would be expected to ride horseback to work.

But the patent stupidity of this new cause became amply clear when people who didn’t know their nuts from the NIFTY began to talk about Personal Carbon Trading. It was at a bachelor’s party, before the serious drinking began, that a photographer came up to me and explained the ‘beautiful simplicity’ of carbon offsets. “It’s very simple dude. You cause the emission of a certain amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. You know, with your car and all the fuel you burn? All you do is put some money into a carbon trading fund that then puts your money into green initiatives. Like planting a thousand trees in Canada.” This was absurd. Instead of asking me to cut down on fuel consumption or use public transportation or car pool, he was telling me to buy my deliverance by getting someone to plant coniferous vegetation in British Columbia? But then, there is nothing even remotely sexy about public transportation or car pooling. Not when you have a four-car garage and probably cause the expulsion of a few ounces of carbon dioxide merely trying to figure out which car to take to the office in the morning.

I’m not for a moment suggesting that you stop caring for the environment or that climate change isn’t a cause for concern. But look at how Al Gore and his loyal flock of do-gooders is approaching the problem – make it trendy, make it marketable, tag an Oscar on to it, get Bono and Bob Geldof to make it cool and weigh seriously on your carbon credits.

Now consider at the facts: Al Gore’s documentary, which serves as one of the principal sources of information for the new green evangelists, says that at the current rate of global warming, 630,000 cubic miles of ice in Greenland will melt into the ocean causing a 20-foot rise in sea levels by 2100. But if you compare those figures to a scientific study conducted by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, you’ll find that the medium-range scenario at the current rate of climate change is a rise in sea levels of between 8 and 17 per cent by 2100. Or, take for example satellite data published in Science magazine in November a couple of years ago: Greenland sheds about 25 cubic miles of ice every year. That’s 0.4 per cent of the island’s total ice melting into the sea per century.

This is hardly anything new. As Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist points out in his new book Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, sea levels have risen by a foot since 1860 and we’ve seen little of the environmental catastrophe that Gore and his buddies predict.

None of the arguments I’ve heard at bars or parties or at cafes over the last few months are predicated by any of those numbers or scientific data. None of the solutions point to realistic ideas; like strong carbon taxation systems or legislation mandating significant reduction in carbon dioxide emissions combined with sizeable budgetary allocations to developing viable emission-reduction technologies or alternative fuels. That’s because none of those propositions are sexy or chic.

But I, for one, have had it. The next time someone mentions carbon footprints, I’m going to plant my footprint on his backside.

The Sapad Brigade

Every Thursday, at around noon, the Sapad Brigade assembles in Koshy’s Restaurant on St. Mark’s Road. Two aspects – food and a table in Koshy’s bind this shape-shifting mass, whose members come and go. The Sapad Brigade counts as its members television producers, writers, marketing consultants, restaurateurs, alternative healing therapists, photographers and artists. It’s a shape-shifting mass because the sheer breadth of professions its members pursues makes consistent weekly attendance virtually impossible.

The table that the Brigade prefers is the last one in the row to the left of the restaurant’s entrance. It offers a complete view of the various clusters in Koshy’s – the gays and lesbians in the far corner, the lawyers near the cash register, the first-rung politicians and their cronies on sofas against the wall and the journalists, actors, writers, artists and other social detritus in twos and threes by the wood-clad columns.

For about 30 minutes, the Brigade talks about the food that is to come – on this day, mutton chops, raagi mudde, kheema gojju and Ceylon paratha at Ramanna’s Military Hotel. The group breaks up into two and heads for Yediyur, near Basavangudi. It’s the first time at a military hotel for the three women members of the Brigade. At Ramanna’s, a dingy, smoky restaurant frequented by sub-inspectors of police and real estate goons, the presence of women is a rare occurrence. The staff quickly clears up the long stone bench in the kitchen and insists that the plates be replaced by tableware reserved for special occasions. The Brigade begins to order. Being as vociferous as it is, the group orders pretty much the entire menu – at the end of an hour and a half of eating, the Brigade has notched up a bill of about 1600 rupees - this, in a place where a complete meal for two costs no more than a hundred rupees.

At about 2.30 in the afternoon, the Brigade heads back to Koshy’s full of stories of the meal and the meal itself. Over coffee, texture, taste, flavors and ingredients are discussed. Then, before the group disbands for the day, the next week’s meal is finalized – biriyani specially cooked for the Brigade by an elderly Muslim khansmah from Frazer Town or hummus and pita bread at a new middle-eastern restaurant on Koramangala or perhaps a trip to the dreaded Mudde Madappa, run by a cantankerous old man who will just about stop from whacking you behind your ear of you don’t finish your food.

Though the Sapad Brigade took root in several hour-long discussions between, among other people, it’s two principal members – the producer Adarsh NC and the restaurateur Prem Koshy, it’s origins lie in the idea that forms the basis of a food guide to Bangalore by the actor and event manager Ajit Saldanha. About six years ago, Saldanha wrote Sapad Raman – a guide to the best restaurants in Bangalore. Saldanha worked with the premise that the best doesn’t necessarily mean the best liveried establishment, but one that carefully considers every ingredient that goes into a meal and one that holds the dedication to consistently well-cooked food as its unchanging principle. So it came to be that Sapad Raman formally introduced English-speaking Bangalore to Siddappa’s, one of the finest breakfast places in town, run by a family of temple-caretakers and located in the temple the family serves. And it pointed the way to Maratha Darshan, then a hole-in-the-wall on Queen’s Road, primarily serving comfort food to Congress workers and government employees. Saldanha’s book, while a definitive guide to the city’s finer food establishments, was also a documentary of one of the many sub-cultures that feed Bangalore’s soul. It described nostalgia for slow-cooked, non-production line fare and the purveyors of that fare. It spoke for a tightly-knit community of people who would go the length to find a fantastic meal.

Though the Sapad Brigade by no means uses Saldanha’s book as a guide – many of the establishments listed in Sapad Raman have either shut shop or changed addresses – the doctrine that guides the two is the same. It’s the credo that sets this sub-culture apart from the mass-production tenet that drives most of Bangalore. At the Sapad Brigade, the choice is never between fries and potato wedges or Fillet-o-Fry and Zinger Burgers. Here, the prospect of a well-crafted meal is not sullied by a boring wait at a Byzantine line, but tinged by a barely-repressed anticipation.

Bangalore is bad business

Last week, during lunch with a Dutch businessman who has lived and worked in India for 12 years and a young professor at the prestigious Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, the topic of Bangalore as a feasible base for business came up. The Dutch entrepreneur, who has spent a significant amount of time in this city working with the preserved foods industry began with a long rant against former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda and his son, the former Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy. “I’ve been around, doing business during the SM Krishna administration and also during this mockery of a coalition government. How these people (Gowda and Kumaraswamy) have treated businesses and businessmen disgusts me,” he said. “I visit Bangalore often (he lives and works in Dindigul) and frequently speak to businessmen and entrepreneurs about the costs of doing business in Bangalore, and off late, have been hearing the same thing: it just doesn’t make sense for people to set up new businesses in this city. In fact, Hyderabad and Chennai are talked about as preferred destinations,” he added.

Though he doesn’t profess an intimate knowledge of Karnataka politics, the Dutch businessman follows closely developments that directly affect his bottom-line. “It became very clear to us, in the business fraternity, that Deve Gowda had decided to deliberately undo what the previous governments had put in place when he disbanded the Bangalore Agenda Task Force and later took on corporates like (Infosys Chief Mentor) Narayana Murthy. Doing something like this just to prove that you are pro-farmer is ridiculous. He could have carried on with his pro-agrarian policies while continuing with developmental work in Bangalore and allowing existing and new companies to flourish. Instead, he put roadblocks all along – with the NICE Corridor, because it would hurt his personal interests; with granting land to IT firms, because he wanted to underscore his anti-urban agenda… the list is endless,” the businessman said. According to him, what the former coalition government has achieved with its policies is to put doubt in the minds of entrepreneurs and multinationals looking to invest in the city. “These guys seemed to be more interested in taking out protest rallies and washing their dirty linen in the streets than to pay attention to quickening projects like the Elevated Highway project linking the Electronics City to the city. If you compare the state of affairs here with that in Hyderabad, you’ll see a huge difference. (Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister) YSR Reddy might be opposed to (former AP Chief Minister) Chandrababu Naidu’s pro-Hyderabad stance, but you don’t see him deliberately sabotaging works undertaken to attract investments to that city,” he said.

The professor from the Indian School of Business, who splits his time between New York and India immediately agreed. “That’s one of the main reasons why Bangalore is losing its sheen in the international community. I hear this very often at conferences I attend and during conversations with prominent investment bankers. They talk about Bangalore in the past tense: when the going was good and the reforms were in place. Now, I would be embarrassed to bring someone who wants to invest a few million dollars in India to Bangalore. Look at the sad state of the infrastructure. The coalition government seems to think no one outside India is looking at the farce that’s playing out here. But what they don’t understand is that many multinationals – Cisco, Dell, Microsoft, Toyota, Oracle – have serious sums of money invested in this city. And when they see a government squabbling like this and shooting itself in the foot, they naturally interpret it as a sign of complete immaturity. That’s when they start looking at cities like Chennai and Hyderabad as more professionally run cities to locate their businesses in,” he said.

The professor also has a more personal reason to examine the decay of Bangalore closely. Early next year, he will move back to India to help set up businesses and study the viability of various funds investing in new businesses. “If, for instance if Soros Fund Management, which has recently started looking at India as an investment destination very closely (Chairman of the Fund, George Soros, visited India for the first time in December 2006, to look at investment opportunities), were to decide to come to Bangalore, I can guarantee you that with the sort of governance and petty politics going on, they will have no choice but to look at another city,” he said. “When I decided to move back to India, Bangalore was my preferred choice. I have spent a considerable time here and have watched the city grow. But now, when I visit this city, I see everything’s gone to the dogs – you have terribly planned flyovers, you have no efficient means of public transport, every aspect of infrastructure in this city has deteriorated. With all this, not only will I hesitate to advice my clients to invest money in Bangalore, but am actually considering setting up base in Hyderabad,” he added.

A City Enraged

There is a car I often see on Residency Road on my way to work. By dint of coincidence, it appears the car is almost always turning into Convent Road when I pass it. This affords me only a view of the back of the car. This car, which is all but nondescript in a city of over 2.3 million vehicles, represents the first open English language vocalization of Bangalore’s rage. On the back of this car, displayed in full view on the bumper, is a sticker that reads: “Bangalore’s Full, Go Home.”

While at first it may seem a frivolity to assume a bumper sticker captures the zeitgeist of an entire generation, it may turn out to be far more revealing if you examined the process of how the sticker got there in the first place. For starters, the sticker is not available on the market – you can’t walk into Car Castle on KR Road and ask the guy behind the counter if he has the ‘Bangalore’s Full’ sticker in Day-Glo – so it would appear that the person who put it there went to the trouble of having it customized to his needs. If indeed that were the case, it should be apparent that the anger the sticker represents is not only the consequence of time, but of thought. It took physical shape because over time, the quotidian annoyances of casual run-ins with unfamiliar faces and foreign tongues grew into a significantly darker sentiment: one that has as its bedrock, a clash of cultures. 

That this anger is an expression of a cultural conflict, as opposed to confrontations over, say, basic economic needs, is a trait unique to the urbane, English speaking Bangalorean. This is not the distillation of fears that the outsider is eating away at jobs, or that when a local worker lines up to get in on a construction job, he finds the line populated by faces that seem to have migrated overnight from beyond the Vindyas. The rage that those four words on a bumper sticker represent is created more from the abrasions left by unfamiliar languages, customs and practices than by disappearing performance bonuses or rapidly accumulated pink slips. 

How real is this rage? In my mind, it is real and immediate. The only reason why it doesn’t appear real or immediate is because, being the anger of a relatively elite class of people, it has yet to metastasize into a larger, political agenda – one that organizations like the Kannada Rakshana Vedike have claimed their own in representing the indigenous working class. But that’s not to say it is muted or irrelevant. In what I see as an alarming movement, discussions about an invasion of the others, the dilution of what was once uniquely Bangalore, the abhorrent vulgarity of a people unused to sophistication or niceties are increasingly the norm amongst people I once thought were Libertarian to the marrow. 

Consider these three instances from my recent memory – involving a career woman, who is single, a senior marketing executive at a software firm and a very talented musician. All three were born and raised in Bangalore and have memories firmly entrenched in relatively ‘old’ Bangalore pin codes: Malleswaram, Indiranagar and Jayanagar. They belong to a generation that thinks in English and curses in Kannada. They are post-graduates and aesthetes, know their Derrida from their Neruda and are intimately conversant with not just other Indian cultures, but with many global traditions. The first instance of an expressed anathema occurred during dinner with the marketing executive. He drove into the city from the International Tech Park and was visibly irritated with the traffic and noise. “I know I have this company that I work for to thank - for the car, the driver, the apartment and all that. I know we did 40,000 crores in software exports last year. I know all this has helped create jobs for all those guys in their white Indica taxis. I know this is progress. But you know what? I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. I’d much rather not have any of this. Seriously, I don’t want the car or the driver. I can do without McDonald’s and Inox. If these people with their loud jokes and their ‘hanh ji’ and ‘behen chod’ and cabbage breath would just pack up and go back to Jat Land, I’d be happy. I don’t have an identity left anymore, man. I don’t know what it means to be a Bangalorean anymore,” he said. And not a single one of those words was without hatred. He really, truly meant everything he said.

Like bumper stickers, number plates of vehicles have long been identifiers of culture and belonging for Bangaloreans – ‘it’s a KA 05 plate, he’s from south Bangalore’ or ‘KA 03… looks like she’s an Indiranagar girl.’ And that identifier has quickly become a racial slur. In the second instance where the rage of a city was expressed, the musician friend of mine introduced me to a whole new term from the lexicon of hatred. The conversation that night was about Bangalore’s architectural identifiers and how Bangalore Central, the mall, stands for everything that’s wrong with the influx of ‘the outsiders.’ Before it became a glass and steel mausoleum to consumerism, Bangalore Central was Victoria Hotel – verdant, calm and a Sunday lunch fixture for many Bangaloreans. Now that it was a mall, created to service the needs of ‘the outsiders,’ it had come to represent to my musician friend, all that was wrong with the new Bangalore. “Just look at them,” he said, pointing to the hundreds of Saturday shoppers at the mall. “Ten years ago, we’d have been sitting there drinking beer and talking cricket,” he said. “But now, these DL 3Cs have come here and ruined everything,” he spat, instantly turning the number plate identifier into a racial slur that has become a part of the city’s vocabulary. 

I didn’t really want to include the third instance of Bangalore’s bigotry, given as it is rather frivolous, but on second thought, because it has a social context to it, I decided to leave it in.  About a month ago, a career woman friend of mine asked me out for drinks to celebrate (and later bemoan) her recently acquired single-status. After the first three whiskies quelled the celebratory mood, she suggested that I find her a man so that the natural order of the universe could be restored. As is the norm with these things, I scrolled through my phone book and came up with the name of a witty, handsome and successful DJ who had recently moved to Bangalore from Delhi. “Do you want to see me spend the rest of my life in misery?” she asked, ignoring my attempts to list the man’s virtues. “How could you think I’d even want to be seen with a Northie?” she asked, adding, rather tangentially, “And what the fuck is he doing here anyway? We have tons of DJs of our own. He should just go back to Delhi and play his Bhangra at Elevate or something.”

These were merely three instances from the recent past. I’d wager every single one of you that reads this piece has encountered similar instances on several occasions – instances where rage, bigotry, elitism and a petty form of jingoism jostle for space with learning, intelligence, sophistication and tolerance. This is a Bangalore that only wants to live in the moment, steadfastly refusing to look at a past that has seen a stream of settlers come in from various cultures to make this city their own. Instead, this Bangalore veers towards failed multi-cultural models, where every single cluster of traditions is clannish and suspicious of the other. Where each petty ‘us’ refuses to yield and dissolve into the larger, more inclusive ‘we.’ 

Indeed, I wouldn’t be half surprised if, in the not-too-distant future, you could walk into Car Castle on KR Road and buy the ‘Bangalore’s Full’ bumper sticker off the shelf. 

Mammaries of the Welfare State

For those of you that are familiar with the work of Upamanyu Chatterjee, the title of this post should bring back memories of one of the worst books ever written by an Indian, or for that matter any writer.  But I thought I’d use the name anyway, since it so aptly summarizes what Reuben has said in his recent post on micro-credit. Reuben and I usually don’t agree about most things, but I’m completely with him on his attitude towards the Nagammas of the world.  I’m using an extract from what he said before expanding on a few of the points he’s made:

I think the fundamental problem with the thought process is the conflation of real entrepreneurship with micro-entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs of the Nagamma variety are forced into entrepreneurship because they have no other alternative. In other words, survival becomes entrepreneurship. That does not mean, however, that Nagamma possesses the skills required to be a real entrepreneur. True entrepreneurship is a specialized skill which requires a very high degree of risk-appetite, and I’d argue that less than 1% of the population have these skill sets and risk appetites…>

There is no point imagining this small guy sitting outside is somehow going to become the Starbucks of the chai business in India. Miracles do happen, but not with the regularity required to solve the problem of employing the poor in India. In other words, what needs to grow is the formal sector, which alone has the scale to absorb people in large numbers with reasonably paid jobs…>

While I fully agree that much like the Stree Shakti  endorsed by the government, simply showering micro-finance on the Nagammas of the world will cause more harm than gain, I do believe that micro-finance will work if:

1. You bolster it with skills-training, knowledge-transfer and marketing support.

2. You abandon the notion that the Nagamma in question is the real entrepreneur sitting at the heart of your success story.

Take for instance the case of ten women I met while in North Karnataka at the beginning of the year. These women had time on their hands after their husbands had left for work and their kids to school. They had money saved away in the bank as part of the Stree Shakti scheme they were under, but didn’t really know what to do with that money or their time. It happened by accident that a bunch of students from the National Institute of Fashion Technology were holidaying nearby and met with these women. As bananas were a staple crop in the area and the women were conversant with creating paper out of treated banana fiber, the NIFT students asked them if they would like to learn how to make banana paper lamps. This was a couple of years ago, since then, students from NIFT visit the group regularly and share with them new designs and techniques in lamp making. These are then distributed through a network set up, in part by the NIFT, to various retail outlets across the country - FabIndia being one of them.

Though this merely illustrates a series of happy accidents leading to a solitary success story of ten women in a small north-Karnataka village, it also indicates the possibilities of a scenario where micro-finance when bolstered by training, access to infrastructure and marketing networks leads to the creation of a robust entrepreneurial environment in areas that have never even attempted to work outside of the agricultural framework.

Hollywood in Bollywood

The NYT has this interesting piece on how major studios from Hollywood have started making masala blockbusters in India.

With international revenues increasingly important to the conglomerates that own the major studios, Hollywood wants to tap into India’s market. But indigenous films captured 95 percent of Indian box office sales in 2006, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. The figure is identical for domestic pictures in the United States, but just 35 percent in France, 33 percent in Japan and 12 percent in Britain, according to 2005 data published by two scholars, David Waterman and Sang-Woo Lee.

“There is no country on the planet, other than India and the United States, that approaches that level of domestic business,” Andrew Cripps, the president of Paramount Pictures International, said by telephone from Los Angeles. And so Paramount, too, is contemplating Bollywood productions.

Walt Disney has partnered with an Indian studio, Yash Raj Films, to make animated movies. Their first film, “Roadside Romeo,” scheduled for next summer, is a parable of Indian inequality, featuring a dog abandoned by rich owners in Mumbai and forced to brave its hungry streets.

In addition, Warner Brothers is developing two Bollywood projects, including one song-and-dance smorgasbord, according to Richard Fox, a Warner vice president and the head of its international division. In a telephone interview he said the studio would seek to earn a majority of its Indian sales from Bollywood productions. It plans three to six movies annually in the coming years, all with Indian talent.

India After Gandhi

The miracle that India is still one seemingly cohesive nation, not teetering on the brink of collapse is a fact that is almost never articulated or debated by the people I know. After all, what are the chances that a nation of 14 official languages, 28 very disparate states and hundreds of factions and pressure groups will surivive as a secular state? Ram Guha, in his exceedingly well-researched new book India After Gandhi , among other things, attempts to answer this question. The obvious danger of composing the recent history of a nation, as Guha says in his foreword, is that for most people reading it, memories of the events described and interpreted are fresh (or at least recallable). This retelling of a living history is far trickier than describing an ancient past that is more-or-less entrenched in public memory as the truth. In his review of the book, Amit Chaudhuri begins with this recent-ancient dichotomy:

It’s in the nature of nations to be addicted to their own histories. Older, pre- national communities, one imagines, occupied themselves with mythology. The secular nation, agog, rehearses its history, the very reasons and outcomes of its existence, to itself. What’s common to both activities is the endless familiarity of the subject-matter to the audience. It’s safe to assume that very few people in a group of devotees listening to, say, the Indian epic Ramayana being read out would not have heard it before. It’s equally prudent to assume that almost all the Indian readers of Ramachandra Guha’s capacious history of democratic India would be familiar with a great deal of the story. What is it, then, that gives myths and national histories their appeal?

Guha also recognizes the dangers of packing in too many anecdotes, given that researching for a history of 60 years ago would provide even the least interpid of historians with tomes and tomes of trivia. To avoid sounding like a blowhard know-it-all or worse still, Guha weaves in trivia as stated fact, as opposed to those tiresome ‘did you know’ references that historians often make.

But the biggest triumph is Guha’s clever ‘what would have been’ propositions. As Chaudhuri puts it: Similarly, a “What if?” animates Guha’s reconstruction of the past 60 years of Indian history. Since 1947, the possibility of disaster has taken the form of certain questions and crises: “What if India were to disintegrate; or to become a totalitarian society; or a military dictatorship; or a Hindu state?” All these are scenarios that appeared plausible, at one time or another, to both the Indian and foreign observer. Guha tells us what happened elegantly, sometimes doggedly: but it’s by constantly implying what might have, while disavowing it with the professional historian’s gesture, that he brings his copious material to life. Guha’s book reminds us of what some other recent studies of India have been getting at, but without this civilised single-mindedness: that it’s not just the story of independence that’s worthy of being counted as one of the great triumphal stories of 20th-century world history; that the survival and perhaps the flourishing of free India counts legitimately as another. Once this fact is acknowledged, its political and cultural consequences, I’m sure Guha will agree, need to be viewed with suspicion.