“In the Bay Area there were quite a lot of Indian stores, Indian newspapers, Bollywood films. I met a lot of south Indian engineers at first, but then I thought I needed to be a little more active. I met doctors, African-Americans, writers, Mexicans, journalists. It was a new world for me. I realized then that not everybody in America was rich, and the blue-collar workers can have a tough time. In 2003 I lost my job and returned to Bangalore, where I met my wife. She’s an embedded-systems engineer, from a similar background to me. When I returned to the U.S. in 2006 I knew I only wanted to work for a big company, because I needed more security now I was married. I went to Yahoo! to establish products for them, and now I focus on ideation, on ideas. The very first thing you see on the Yahoo! homepage is me.”
It was, historically, an extraordinary cultural migration for a young Kannada-speaker to have made, but in an interlinked and rapidly altering world, Mack’s alien background was no disadvantage. His upbringing in middle-class 1980s Bangalore gave him a talent that dovetailed with the needs of contemporary America. His family or home life in California, eating south Indian dishes like upma, idli and sambar for breakfast with his wife before driving to Sunnyvale in his Acura TL, reflected his global position.
“The first thing I did when I got this role was to commission ethnographic studies—in the U.S., in India, in Brazil. What is your check-in routine? How do you use the Internet at different times of day? It varies in each country or society. In the early morning it might be emails or social networks, at noon you might be more relaxed and looking at links, in the evening your behaviour has completely changed. Our ideation team has to capture all these different behaviours and build designs around them. So now you see lots more non-Yahoo! properties on the homepage. You can add your own links to sports, a newspaper, whatever sites you visit. You can check Facebook or eBay through your homepage. We are pushing it on to mobiles too. I am working to embed Yahoo! applications on televisions, so that when you’re watching TV you can project what’s on your handheld on to the screen. You can chat about the game or whatever a politician is saying in his speech, you can look at photos or check emails on the side of the TV. We always work on the principle that an idea will be possible. We say: ‘Don’t worry if it can’t be done. The technology will follow.’ ”
From the way Mack spoke, it seemed as if his angle on the world, which grew out of his Indian cultural background, was a perfect fit with Silicon Valley.
“My favourite inspirational quote is: ‘When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.’ I feel involved in the cultural life here. I always ask a lot of questions. I am asked to speak about my work as a designer. In some ways, we would live a more sophisticated life in Bangalore. You can have a driver and a nanny there, which is hard to afford in the U.S. I find some people here lead very simple lives. They don’t have much money, they are conservative, they’ve never been outside California. I’ve noticed the Indians here become a lot more conservative too. They start going to Hindu temples, which they would never have done at home, and attending community stuff and south Indian cultural events. They say things to me like, ‘Mmm, you have a daughter, you need to be careful.’ Once their kids hit their teens, they want to get them out of America. There was a big fuss when some children came home from a playground saying, ‘Papa, can I see the Last Supper painting?’ A Christian organization had been doing a playground puppet show, featuring famous religious pictures. People were very angry about it. I wasn’t bothered, I was like, ‘Sure, let them look at the painting.’ I think every experience is worth having. But our future will be in India. In three or four years, we will return to Bangalore.”22
Ramappa had managed the move from the village to the city. A short, composed man, he grew up in the 1940s on land close to what is now Bangalore airport. A few years younger than Venkatesh, he otherwise had a similar background: his father and uncles were day-wage labourers who were paid in rice or ragi (millet) according to a local barter system. His parents owned nothing but a thatched hut, and could not afford to raise cattle. They were Raju Kshatriyas, which in this regional setting meant they had inferior status. In north India, the Kshatriyas were a powerful group, traditionally part of the warrior caste, but here they had little. Only three families in the village came from the Raju Kshatriya community, while nearly all of their neighbours were Gowdas, who owned land. Like Venkatesh, Ramappa was near the bottom of the pile, but not as low as the Dalits, who lived in a kheri, or lane, of their own, away from the other houses. He could reasonably have expected to pass his entire life as a landless day-wage labourer.
Ramappa did something extraordinary as a child: he enrolled himself at a nearby primary school. His parents thought this was an odd thing to do, but were not concerned as they had the traditional Hindu respect for learning, and he was too young to work properly in the fields. The difficulty came when he wanted to go to secondary school, encouraged by a teacher, and his parents refused. Who would pay the fees? It would mean a ten-mile walk each day, five miles there and five miles back. Ramappa held a trump card: the school would waive the fees because he had been recommended as a good student. Since he was an only child, his father needed his labour, and a battle began as Ramappa tramped doggedly to school each day.
At sixteen he passed his SSLC, the Secondary School Leaving Certificate, and wished to go to college. His parents refused, absolutely. So he did something rash, and in retrospect out of character: he stole money from a stall where his father sold bananas and paan—betel leaf parcels of areca nut paste and slaked lime, for chewing. Then he travelled to the big city and enrolled for a bachelor’s degree in commerce. It was the early 1960s.
Would he make it? Bangalore was a cacophony, and everything was new. It seemed to be packed with busy people and motor vehicles, though in fact it was a well-planned city with market gardens, parks, water tanks and shrines. The population was growing rapidly and new buildings were starting to spread across the stretches of green, displacing the shimmering champak and gulmohar trees. Until now Ramappa had gone barefoot. He realized he would have to learn how to wear shoes or chappals. What else would he need to discover? He reached a cousin’s house and stayed there until his father and uncle caught up with him. After an epic family argument which he still does not like to discuss—after all, he was a thief and a disloyal son—it was decided Ramappa would not be forced to come home. For a monthly rent of Rs25 he took a room lined with asbestos sheets which had enough space for a bed and a secondhand Phillips bicycle, on which he could cycle to college.
“I took my meals there,” he remembered. “I had a small kerosene stove. There was no bathroom. I was almost sleeping under my bicycle.” He spoke in English in a strong regional accent, a “y” sound stuck to words which started with a vowel, “Y-I” for “I.” This sort of life, renting a space so small there was barely space to sleep, was common enough among people who moved to cities in an effort to better themselves. In the classifieds section of newspapers in Pune in Maharashtra, you could still find “cotbasis” adverts—meaning you rented a bed to sleep in for a certain number of hours, and nothing more: “Available accommodation for day shift working women/girls on cotbasis near Rajiv Gandhi IT park Hinjawadi, call …”
The take-off point for Ramappa, the moment at which his studious dreams developed a real chance of succeeding, was when he was talent-spotted by the Raju Kshatriyas of Bangalore. This was probably the single most important factor in determining his destiny, and matches the experience of other unlikely achievers of his generation across India. In the state of Mysore (now Karnataka), the Raju Kshatriya community was a minority with few graduates and no representation in politics. Some had joined government service, and a few were starting to make money as small industrialists or contractors. They wanted to advance, collectively. So Ramappa, a bright boy from a rural background, was considered worthy of assistance. He was given a free room in the house of a community leader and became the secretary of a students’ support association call
ing itself the Raju Kshatriya Hari-Hara Sangha (Hari-Hara being a combined form of the deities Vishnu and Shiva, implying they were not sectarian). He was helped too by a local custom called “varaana,” which has now almost disappeared, whereby more prosperous households would offer a regular weekly or daily meal to young students who were getting started in the world.
So in a larger context, Ramappa had three significant advantages over Venkatesh: he grew up on land that produced food, he was clever and motivated, and he came from an extended caste community that was able to help him once he reached the city.
His struggle was by no means over. Ramappa qualified as a lawyer and joined an office as a junior. “I had no income. I soon realized that unless you came from a lawyer or judge’s family, you got no briefs. Most advocates were Lingayats [a small but powerful caste] or Brahmins. I realized that mere intelligence did not count in this profession. So I opened an office and put out a sign: ‘M. S. Ramappa, Advocate, LLB, LLM.’ I was scarcely able to make both ends meet. I struggled for ten or twelve years. I would have become a judge—I have no doubt—if I hailed from a majority community. But everything works on a patronage basis, and you need backing from local politicians. So for years I was struggling away until, in 1975, I decided to become a lecturer. I was given a readership in mercantile law at a government college. My wife was earning a reasonable salary as a teacher. She was from an educated family in our community, and since I was hell-bent on studying and doing well, her parents had been happy for us to marry. Without the support of my in-laws, things would have been hard. We lived in their small house, and by the 1980s I had a part-time professorship at the university, teaching mercantile, company and insurance law.”
Professor Ramappa’s success had depended on a challenge to paternal expectations, but he was also an instinctive conservative (he had supported the Emergency, before recanting) who was worried by the social changes that were now taking place in Bangalore. “You get sons,” he said to me, “who earn three times as much as their fathers and become bold with them, doing as they like and speaking without respect. People are not so courteous now. If I wanted to tell my father something, I would say it to my mother and she would inform him. We don’t display wealth here in southern India. It’s not like the Punjabi culture. Look at the message of the Ramayana: a man should have only one wife, be obedient to his parents, respect his teachers, honour his older brothers and always speak the truth. People in the southern parts of India are peace-loving, and the communal situation is better than in the north. We have a certain passivity. I mean that in a good way; I don’t want it to change.”23
When I went to visit Ramappa at his residence—we had already met a few days earlier at Koshy’s coffee house—he was dressed in a crisply pressed pale blue shirt and a dhoti. He was formal without being reserved, and like many people in India he was content to chat openly, although he felt strange to be asked about his life in such detail. The sides of the path leading to his front door were decorated with rangoli, symmetrical designs done in chalk or colours by the women of the house at daybreak, which gave a sense of older times. A Sony television was on in the sitting room. I noticed that although Raju Kshatriyas have no caste restriction on eating meat, the family were vegetarian. So Ramappa had come full circle: as a child his parents would have been too poor to buy meat, in his middle years he was able to eat it, and now he and his wife had become pure vegetarian like their Bangalore neighbours, eschewing even eggs.
In the city, which was changing so fast, with children earning big salaries and behaving in very different ways to their parents, the household had a solid and old-fashioned feel. Ramappa’s journey had been exceptional, this barefoot landless labourer’s son who had become a university professor. Today, such a leap could still be executed, but only with a similar dose of ambition and good fortune. The Indian state would not help you in times of trouble: that job fell to your family and community, and if they were unable to offer immediate support and protection, you might end up anywhere, even chained in a quarry near Mysore.
The answer to the question “How many generations would it take to turn a junior Venkatesh into a software engineer?” was, in this case, only one. Ramappa had a son who was a successful computer scientist and a nephew working in California who said to me proudly: “The very first thing you see on the Yahoo! homepage is me.” Mack.
PART III
SAMAJ • SOCIETY
9
THE OUTCASTES’ REVENGE
DR. AMBEDKAR has a story about a journey he made as a child. It took him nearly fifty years to bring himself to write it, which is not surprising when you learn what happened. He had been born to a disadvantaged community; the year was 1901; his mother was dead and his father was posted as a government cashier some distance from Bombay. Ambedkar and his siblings had been living with their aunt, but it was now decided they should be sent to join their father. “Great preparations were made. New shirts of English make, bright bejewelled caps, new shoes, new silk-bordered dhoties were ordered for the journey,” he wrote.
“The Railway Station was ten miles distant from our place and a tonga (a one-horse carriage) was engaged to take us to the station. We were dressed in the new clothing specially made for the occasion, and we left our home full of joy but amidst the cries of my aunt who was almost prostrate with grief at our parting. When we reached the station my brother bought tickets and gave me and my sister’s son two annas each as pocket money, to be spent at our pleasure. We at once began our career of riotous living and each ordered a bottle of lemonade at the start. After a short while, the train whistled in and we boarded it as quickly as we could, for fear of being left behind.”
Ambedkar’s words give us an anticipation of trouble; we feel the riotous living might end badly. The children reached their destination in the afternoon. Everyone else went on their way, walking confidently out of the railway station, but because of a miscommunication their father was not there on the platform to meet them. After all the excitement of the journey, they were unsure what to do. The stationmaster approached:
“We were well-dressed children. From our dress or talk no one could make out that we were children of the untouchables. Indeed the stationmaster was quite sure we were Brahmin children, and was extremely touched at the plight in which he found us. As is usual among the Hindus, the stationmaster asked us who we were. Without a moment’s thought I blurted out that we were Mahars. (Mahar is one of the communities which are treated as untouchables in the Bombay Presidency.) He was stunned. His face underwent a sudden change. We could see that he was overpowered by a strange feeling of repulsion. As soon as he heard my reply he went away to his room and we stood where we were. Fifteen to twenty minutes elapsed; the sun was almost setting. Father had not turned up, nor had he sent his servant, and now the stationmaster had also left us. We were quite bewildered, and the joy and happiness which we had felt at the beginning of the journey gave way to a feeling of extreme sadness.”1
What were they to do? The children resolved to take a bullock-cart to the place where their father was posted, although they had no idea how long the journey might last. So they carried their luggage to the front of the station, where carts were plying for hire. Word had however got around that the stranded children were untouchables, and not one of the cartmen, even when offered extra money, was willing to contaminate himself by driving them. Eventually the stationmaster brokered a solution: a cartman would walk alongside his cart while the children drove it. He would receive double the usual fare. They set off. As night fell, it became apparent the cartman’s promise that the journey would take three hours was a lie. It was nearly midnight by the time they reached a toll-collector’s hut, and they were still a long way from anything that looked like a town. By now, despite eating the food in their tiffin basket along the way, the children were hungry and above all thirsty.
They were also wise to their situation. Bhimrao Ambedkar, all of nine years old, approached the toll-collector an
d explained in Urdu that they were Muslim children on their way to Koregaon. Could he please give them some water? The toll-collector was not deceived. He said they should have made arrangements for someone else to keep water for them. There was none to be had.
At the foot of a hill they unyoked the bullocks and laid the cart at an angle to the dry ground. They were parched and desperate. Ambedkar’s elder brother suggested two of the children might rest beneath it while the other two kept watch in the darkness, in relays, since they had gold ornaments. The cartman slept elsewhere. In the morning they began again, and reached the safety of their father’s house by noon.
It is not hard to see why this experience lodged in Ambedkar’s mind. He was at an age when children drink in information about the workings of the world. Before that, he had known of his pariah status, but only in a structured environment. At school he was not allowed to touch a tap, and could only have water when a peon turned one on for him. He had to bring a piece of gunny cloth, or sacking, to class each day and sit or squat on it during lessons, while the upper-caste children sat at desks. At home, the family would cut each other’s hair and wash their own clothes, and it was not until he grew a little older that he understood this was because the barbers and dhobis, or washermen, would not touch either them or their clothes. The constraints on untouchables varied from place to place and included rules such as not being able to enter a Hindu temple, wear good-quality clothes, ride a horse in a marriage procession or sit in the presence of the upper castes.
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