India

by Patrick French

  “We went to visit Mobutu in Kinshasa and stayed in a house that had beautiful cutlery and dishes, and fridges full of champagne, but there was nothing at all to eat. He sent us to his ancestral village, and the plane had to land on a runway with goats and cows wandering around. Naked children were walking by the side of the road. We found there was not much in Mobutu’s village except a farmhouse with a disco or nightclub attached to it. Swami laid some bricks to do a havan, a fire ritual, he put some wood and ghee, took some incense, broke lots of coconuts, chanted some hocus pocus.”

  Although Shankar was dismissive of Chandraswami, he was not a sceptic, and respected those with what he saw as spiritual power. “Some years ago a ‘vastu’ guy, someone who advises on these things, came to our house on the recommendation of a friend. I said, come and have a drink, and told him I was a bit stuck on some things in my life. He asked to see the kitchen. The positioning of the fire and water in your kitchen is important—the cooker and the sink. He said immediately, you have to change where the fire is, so we had the kitchen broken and made it another way. Things became easier after that. He never charged any money, and I never saw him again. He just drew the thing out on a sheet of paper—that was it. I had a couple of large projects I was working on, and after that the money just started pouring in.

  “Last year I was told I needed to wear a Burmese ruby for good fortune. I wore it and felt like I was having a heart attack. I consulted another guy, and was told my sun sign was being ramped up much too far by the ruby.” He lifted his hand. “Now I wear an emerald on my little finger, and a diamond on another finger.” For Shankar, the swami was insufficiently qualified. “He was not a learned man and didn’t know about Hindu traditions. Swami was able to make people beholden to him, and he had extraordinary charm. He would say some nonsensical mantra, or normal dialogue in Hindi as if it was meant to be a prayer. To those people, who didn’t know the language, it sounded like a mantra. He might say, ‘Danger coming, I do prayer for you.’ At the time, people wanted to hear all this, and to believe him. He would say that he could feel a vibration in the earth and could see your village, or some such thing.”24

  • • •

  Dileep Kumar was born in Mylapore in 1967 to a teenage mother and an older father. The father had raised himself from the slums by writing music for Malayalam and Tamil movies, and taught his son how to sing and to play the harmonium at the age of five. When Dileep was nine, his father died—the boy believed from some form of black magic, because melted wax and bird feathers were found in the house before his death. He had no choice but to support the family and turned up to recording sessions to play a keyboard twice his own size. At first he was employed as a favour to his late father, but by the time he reached his mid-teens he was gaining a reputation.

  Dileep had an additional skill: he knew the inside as well as the outside of a keyboard, and could mend any electronic instrument. (His father’s father was an electrician who in his spare time composed bhajans, or devotional songs, to sing at the temple.) His method of working was different from other people’s, and he refused to follow the hierarchical conventions of the Tamil music scene, turning up to formal events wearing denim. At school in Chennai, where learning was highly regarded, Dileep was a failure and was often rapped on the knuckles with a ruler by his teachers. He took to composing ad jingles for radio and played in a band called L. Shankar and the Epidemics.

  His break came in his early twenties when Mani Ratnam asked him to be the musical director of a new film, Roja, about a woman whose husband is kidnapped by Kashmiri separatists. A bizarre pattern of behaviour started to show itself around this time. Dileep Kumar had always spoken little, but now he said almost nothing at all, and did not mention the Roja commission to anyone. He set to work, doing things his way. A singer might receive a call in the middle of the night and be asked if she would sing a song immediately over an Internet link. A musician might finish tuning up a sitar and find himself dismissed from the studio, since the recording was already in the bag—Dileep wanted the sound of tuning. He might use a practice version of a song because it contained more passion than the more accurate version. A sound engineer might be summoned to record Dileep singing (although he had stopped calling himself Dileep by now) because he had awoken from a dream with divine inspiration. All of these snatches of sound were woven together using novel technology and turned into extraordinary soundtracks, together with freshly composed music influenced by anyone from Bach to Andrew Lloyd Webber, from swing to pop, from Qawwali to Carnatic music. He was scrupulous about giving credit to his collaborators.

  Roja was a hit, and so was the young composer. His family had always been heavily superstitious and concerned with numerology, and now a Hindu astrologer named Ulaganathan told him he would become world famous if his name was prefixed by the letters “A” and “R.” Together with his sisters and mother, he had recently converted to Sufi Islam, believing the rules of the faith would give him a mental discipline Hinduism could not. He was also concerned that the Hindu deities his father had worshipped had been turned against him by those who wished to do him evil. So Dileep took a new name and a new faith: he would be called Allah Rakka (or A. R.) Rahman.25 From then on, everything he did would be oriented around his profound devotion to god. Although he was an observant Muslim, always following the call to prayer and washing in the prescribed way, A. R. Rahman’s new religion contained elements of his old, complex, superstitious Hindu devotion. He said that music could not be forbidden by Islam because it brought forth “good thoughts” and was a route to the divine.

  As he grew famous, he turned his home into a cross between a recording studio (reputedly the best in India) and a sacred place. It was filled with pieces of new electronic equipment, in which he took a detailed technical interest, garlands, rosaries, and charms his mother gave him. Bookshelves were lined with electronic keyboards. Much of his time was spent in prayer or alternating between prayer and composing. Visiting musicians sometimes had to wait for days before he was ready to see them. At all times, he had a candle burning in front of his console and a track of Islamic chants playing on mute. His spare time, when it happened, was used for visits to dargahs, Sufi shrines, where he would sleep on the floor alongside other pilgrims.

  In 1995 his mother chose a bride for him, Saira, and after a single meeting, they married. A. R. Rahman’s mother remained the most important person in his life. Despite marriage and children, his life continued in the same devotional way.26 When this short, unexercised, slow-moving man—the “Mozart of Madras”—stood on stage to receive two Academy Awards in 2008 for Slumdog Millionaire, he looked as if he was in a different mental place to anyone else in the theatre. Dressed in a casual black kurta and coat, he gave praise to god in Tamil, thanked his mother for coming all the way to America with him and told Hollywood’s finest in his casual and diffident way that he had not been so nervous since the day of marriage—a remark that would have had a completely different cultural implication for most of his audience. “All my life I’ve had a choice of hate and love,” he said. “I chose love, and I’m here. God bless.”27

  To use a phrase now forbidden to historians, some traits seem like an expression of national character, and are specifically Indian. Reading the country’s often vivid press, it feels as if some things happen only in India. If you ask about this, people will say, “We are like this only”—implying everyone else should get used to it.

  Take the case of the Sikh taxi driver who drives exclusively in reverse gear. It is the sort of thing anyone might do for a few minutes if their car will not engage a forward gear, but when it happened to Harpreet Singh Papoo from Bathinda, he continued. BACK GEAR CHAMPIAN is painted along the side of his vehicle, which he drives only backwards, despite having severe resultant neck and back pain. The local authorities in Punjab have given him a special permit to do so; he has redesigned his gearbox so as to drive at varying speeds; a flashing light and a siren sit on the roof of his car. H
e has become famous and wants to go to Pakistan. “An Asian champion in driving car in reverse gear at a speed of over 80 km per hour,” reported the Tribune newspaper, “he has already covered 13,000 km from Bathinda to various towns of North India to spread the message of peace between two countries.”28 For Harpreet Singh Papoo, driving exclusively in reverse gear is a mark of difference; it is his reputation.

  Arun Pathak was another character who had no embarrassment. A man from the north who had trouble holding down a job, he found he was able to gain popularity or attention by attaching himself to public causes. When a controversial movie was being filmed in Benares, he tied a large stone to his foot and jumped into the Ganges. In a campaign to close down liquor stores near holy places, he climbed to the top of a 300-foot water tank and doused himself in gasoline, threatening to strike a light and jump. He gained a written assurance from the authorities that his campaign would be taken seriously and climbed down. He has ended up as a politician with the BSP.29

  Other aspects of behaviour were bizarre and had no apparent explanation. A colour magazine called The Pseudo Truth was sold at bookstalls. It had the publicity slogan “The pragmatic echo of graves” and contained articles about Norway, the law, mobile phones, “Charles Lamb—a gigantic personality” and Hezbollah. There was a feature with the headline “Zorba in Greek—new flavours of old urn’s dew.”30 Each time I read it, I felt a little more baffled. Then there was the entrepreneur who made “eye-catching furniture” from used car and tractor tyres; and the Konkan railway engines that were really Tata trucks with train carriage wheels attached; and the animal welfare board which launched legal action against Vodafone for making a pug run “fastly fastly” behind a bus during a TV advert, as if this was the worst piece of animal cruelty they could find in India.31 Another singularity was the creative forms in which language was used. Not long ago, an essay written by an applicant for the civil service in Bihar began to circulate (and he is rumoured to have passed the exam):

  The cow is a successful animal. Also he is quadrupud, and because he is female, he give milk, but will do so when he is got child. He is same like God, sacred to Hindus and useful to man. But he has got four legs together. Two are forward and two are afterwards. His whole body can be utilised for use. More so the milk. What can it do? Various ghee, butter, cream, curd, why and the condensed milk and so forth. Also he is useful to cobbler, watermans and mankind generally. His motion is slow only because he is of asitudinious species. Also his other motion is much useful to trees, plants as well as making flat cakes in hand and drying in the sun. Cow is the only animal that extricates his feeding after eating. Then afterwards she chew with his teeth whom are situated in the inside of the mouth. He is incessantly in the meadows in the grass. His only attacking and defending organ is the horn, specially so when he is got child. This is done by knowing his head whereby he causes the weapons to be paralleled to the ground of the earth and instantly proceed with great velocity forwards … The palms of his feet are soft unto the touch. So the grasses head is not crushed. At night time have poses by looking down on the ground and he shouts his eyes like his relatives, the horse does not do so.

  This is the cow.

  Behaving in a spectacular way in order to draw attention to a cause was respectable. In 2006 I was driving from Delhi to Alwar in Rajasthan when the traffic stopped. I walked past buses which had disgorged their passengers on to the road, and lorries packed with gigantic wheat-filled sacks which burst out at the top like muffins. Finally at the head of the line of traffic, I saw the obstruction: a jagged line of tractor tyres set across the highway and weighed down with flat stones, around which sat about a hundred women in close formation, each woman dressed traditionally in a long skirt, with the ghungat, or veil, pulled demurely over her head. To the side stood men and boys, idlers, chatting, scuffling and joking. The women would not move until the state government reconnected their electricity supply, which had been cut off because the village had not paid its bill. The police arrived, full of swagger, wearing metal helmets, only to realize it was women alone around the tyres and stones, and that it would be culturally impossible to drag them away. After a couple of hours, the additional district magistrate arrived, a young man in jeans and wraparound shades who looked out of his depth; he read various petitions and agreed to reconnect the power.

  Dr. K. Chaudhry, a 76-year-old retired medical practitioner, became a global Internet sensation by singing 1,400 cover versions of famous songs and posting them on YouTube. With a backdrop of a dingy curtain and a strip light, he could be seen performing “Hotel California” and “Dil Deke Dekho,” sometimes accompanied by his grandchildren sitting on his lap. His most popular song was “Beat It,” which had gone viral with an alternative title given to it by a viewer: “The Real Killer of Michael Jackson—(he was surfing the Internet late at night and this song killed him).” He had appeared via a webcam link on TV channels around the world, and a Dr. K fan club had started in the United States. At the inaugural dinner, he appeared live on screen and told his fans: “That cannot be described just as a sentimental relationship between a man in Delhi and some hundreds in America. That is a carry-forward relationship from some past lives.” In his lack of pretension, his industry and his refusal to be fazed, Dr. K was an Indian type. The technology writer Sree Sreenivasan has suggested that Indians approach social media sites “with great passion” because they allow them “to do two things they love: Tell everyone what they are doing; and stick their noses into other people’s business.”32

  “I am never satisfied with the status quo,” Dr. K told me, sitting in the living-room of his house on the outskirts of Delhi. He had an old Dell computer, with a separate speaker topped by a webcam. “I get the lyrics on the screen, put the speaker between myself and the lyrics and start to sing.” He showed me how he did it. “I can record twelve songs a day. I’ve translated Mike Jackson into Hindi. Until I had a legal problem, ‘Beat It’ was getting 3,000 hits a day in Hindi and English on YouTube. After I went on G4 TV, I had 400 comments and fifty phone calls in a single day. That was the busiest day of my life. I had to do so many interviews. Most of my fans are in Canada and Pakistan. I have a dozen clubs in America. At first I called myself Dr. Krishen Chaudhry, then I was told my name was too long for marketing, so I am ‘Dr. K.’ I have one fan club in Singapore. They are all airline pilots, and most are Indian.” As well as singing, he had created astrology software and written medical textbooks. “I also have an Internet mall, selling many things, which makes me $300–400 a month.”

  “Do you want hot or cold?” asked his son Kapil, who had joined us. I opted for cold. He turned on a fan. Since Dr. K’s retirement from medical practice, another of his sidelines—the selling of diagnostic equipment—had been taken over by Kapil. “He revolutionized blood-testing techniques,” said the son, taking a ballpoint pen from his shirt’s top pocket while inspecting his mobile phone. “We manufactured one calorimeter using Fotodiox—a new kind of sensor—rather than a photovoltaic cell, which converts light to distilled voltage. It was done for the first time by us, here in India. We have had more than 10,000 installations. That’s why I’m surprised to see his diversification from that line to this.” He indicated his father and the webcam. “He has had success abroad with his singing, but neighbours don’t praise him.”

  “When I was eleven,” said Dr. K, “I wrote a lyric and sang it in the temple. I’ve always liked to sing, but I was told my singing was bad. Neighbours don’t praise me.”

  “It’s a little bit like our diagnostic products,” said Kapil grimly. “They can be easier to sell in southern cities than in Delhi.”

  Was Dr. K upset by the negative comments that were posted on his web videos? “I say this: praises please me and abuses amuse me. Without taking criticism, you can’t improve. They spend some time with my songs. Using rude language is their culture.”

  “Vulgar language is worldwide,” said Kapil.

  The house was in a r
esidential suburb of Punjabi Bagh, an area allocated to migrants from Pakistan after partition. Over time it had become prosperous, as the refugees did well. Dr. K had been forced to leave Pakistan when he was three years old. “Since childhood, I have been working seventeen to twenty-one hours a day. I can remember the refugee camp, I can remember a diver holding a pitcher of water. My father died of diarrhoea in the camp. He had four wives, because he had property and needed an heir. We were given a little land, and I had to walk to school, with no guardian.”

  He gestured out at the street, indicating the neighbourhood. “These Punjabis, they worked very hard after partition.”33 Dr. K had no fear of failure. On one of his websites, he had written: “I am known across the globe for multiple diverse activities. If one becomes a total flop, I have others to boast of.”

  In the past, singular stories from India—dabbawallas, reverse-gear driving, Dr. K—had only entertainment value or a local relevance, but Indian methods were now extending to other parts of the globe. Nandan Nilekani, who was the inspiration for Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, spoke of “the Indian way of working.” He was referring specifically to the software industry and to the practices developed at Infosys, but the concept extended to other industries too. “This means breaking down big software projects into chunks that can be tackled simultaneously by many groups worldwide, and then drawing them back together to create a single product.”34 The notion of innumerable people working together towards a common purpose corresponded with what the dabbawallas were doing. It depended on a high level of cooperation, cohesion and assumption—assumption that your remote colleagues were not thinking or acting in a way that conflicted with your own work. With many Indians now working in foreign countries, and particularly the U.S., cultural methods were transferring. Unlike the Chinese, Indians were experienced at dealing with people with different cultures and languages. Even in remote parts of the country, you expected to interact and do business with those who followed different customs.