The Beautiful and the Damned

by Siddhartha Deb

  We were meeting at a shopping plaza just across the street from where I lived at the time, an odd mix of multinational franchises and run-down shops that was especially popular with young people who worked at call centres. Nambiar led me up the stairs to an Italian restaurant called Azzuro. It was quite empty: the call centre workers preferred the kathi roll stand around the corner or the T.G.I. Friday’s outlet across the square, and it was too early for the Western expats and upper-class Indians who liked the place.

  Nambiar was a regular at Azzuro. The waiters knew him, as did the woman who ran the restaurant. He took off his sunglasses, ordered with a flourish and began telling me about his career with Planman. He had been a student at IIPM Delhi, joined the company on graduating and been put in charge of the media division almost immediately. He was twenty-three years old. Sutanu, whom I had met at the very beginning of my involvement with Arindam, was junior to him in the hierarchy of the company.

  Arindam had put considerable thought into sending Nambiar to meet me. If his primary business was churning out management graduates, he had sent me his finest product, glistening and confident, someone who could compete effortlessly with the MBAs from IIM. Nambiar’s shaven head shone in the bright afternoon light coming in through the windows as he spoke about how he had negotiated with Foreign Affairs about bringing out an Indian edition (and although the effort had been unsuccessful, he had apparently impressed Foreign Affairs with his presentation, according to a friend who worked there). He didn’t know much about the content of the publication and didn’t think journalism was very interesting, but he liked marketing. He had travelled around the world with Arindam, and in a few weeks he would be leaving for Oxford, where he would do an MBA. When he returned, he expected to work at Planman again.

  I asked him about Arindam’s conspicuous consumption, and he was delighted to give me the details. ‘The car?’ he said. ‘It’s a Bentley Continental four-door. Actually, he got it because of me. We were in London, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and I saw a Bentley parked outside this restaurant where I was having lunch with friends. I had one of them take a picture of me leaning on the hood of the Bentley with a glass of champagne in my hand.’ He laughed, waiting for the image to be fully processed in my brain. ‘It looked so cool, you know? Then I went to see Arindam at the Ritz, where he was staying. I was showing someone else the picture on my laptop, and he grabbed the laptop from me, looked at the picture, and said, “What kind of car is that? I’m going to get one.” ’

  Arindam had another Bentley in Bombay, as well as a Jaguar Sovereign. His wife, Rajita, drove a Porsche. Arindam’s mobile phone, a birthday gift from his wife, was a Vertu.

  ‘You don’t know what a Vertu is? Look it up on the Web,’ Nambiar said encouragingly.

  I asked him if he could describe Arindam’s office for me.

  ‘Let me think,’ he said. ‘I’d say it has a nightclub in the daytime look.’

  We laughed at this. Nambiar’s laughter had a double edge to it, containing the knowledge that he himself was too sophisticated to make such a mistake but also revealing his admiration for a man who had the money to flaunt his taste, no matter how questionable. He described for me the main chamber that had a fluorescent red leather couch curving around the wall, the shelves filled with management books and magazines. There was an anteroom to one side, containing a treadmill, a television and a pull-out sofa where Arindam’s son, Che, sometimes slept in the afternoon. The office floor had blue granite tiling, and the building itself had tinted blue glass. From the windows of Arindam’s office, Nambiar said, it was possible to see the Ernst & Young building on the left.

  It sounded quite recognizably like Arindam’s office, and very much like his house, which had been written up in the pages of the Hindustan Times a few weeks earlier:

  No wonder, then, that from wall colours to concealed lights and from artefacts to Swarovski crystals, everything is blue in the Chaudhuri residence. While Renaissance paintings adorn the walls, a sparkly floor stone in dark blue is quite a novelty … The Chaudhuri residence may not have 132 rooms like the White House, but within its own confines, it is a reflection of identities both homely and attractive, modern and trendy.

  What gave Nambiar’s description a touch of virtual reality was the fact that Arindam’s office no longer existed. It had been closed down for violating zoning laws and survived only in the images created so expertly by Nambiar.

  When I asked for the bill, the waiter said that it had already been taken care of by the manager.

  ‘She’s my girlfriend’s mother,’ Nambiar said.

  ‘That’s really too bad, because I was hoping to treat you.’

  I told the waiter to bring me the bill, insisting that I would pay for lunch.

  The waiter smiled and disappeared, while Nambiar looked surprised. I said something about journalistic ethics, but I could see that this made no sense to him. I was beginning to lose my temper, and I wondered why I was losing my temper. Who would really care if I let Nambiar’s girlfriend’s mother pay for lunch? Who would think that my honesty as a writer had been compromised because of this? Yet as I cornered the waiter again and forced him to bring the bill, I felt that I was beginning to lose my own self in this world of appearances and aspirations and that paying the bill was the only way I could return to steady ground.

  After Nambiar had left, I walked around the shopping complex for a while. I came often enough to the shopping complex, sometimes with my two-year-old son. There was a group of street children who hung out near the fountain choked with rubbish, one of them a girl of ten or eleven with a baby in her arms. There were other forms of life surviving in the cracks of the marketplace, like the puppies that lived with their mother between the fountain and the cigarette shop and were given scraps of food by the vendors and security guards. My son was especially fond of the puppies, and a vendor asked me why I didn’t just take one home. ‘It’ll make your son happy,’ he said. ‘And at least one of these dogs will get a good life.’

  But I didn’t think of any of this then. I thought instead of Nambiar’s confidence, and looked at myself in a shop window. I wondered why I didn’t have a suit, designer sunglasses and car keys. I wondered why I wasn’t making money at this time in India when moneymaking opportunities seemed to be everywhere for the asking. I was an aspirer, finally, oblivious to anything but my own inchoate desires, filled with a sense of victimization as well as a trembling awareness of opportunities that it was perhaps not too late to capitalize on. ‘I don’t like an image of me that isn’t me,’ Arindam had told me early on, anxious to clarify his essential self. And here was I, not liking the image of me that was me.

  These thoughts stayed with me as I walked back home, but eventually they gave way to other considerations. I often wondered, in the years that followed, if the papers would some day carry the news that Arindam’s empire had collapsed. Until that moment came, though – if it ever did – the advertisements would keep appearing, offering a background rhythm as I made my way into other lives and other stories. When I saw those advertisements, I would peer closely at Arindam’s face, as opaque and unfathomable as ever, and I would wonder whether I had ever known the man at all.

  1 One lakh is 100,000. A crore is 100 lakhs or 10 million.

  Ghosts in the Machine: The Engineer’s Burden

  An earlier incarnation — supplying happiness — low context and high context — Special Economic Zones — the million-dollar house — the Nanopoet — the Gandhi computer — what the Master said — a fascist salute — caste in America — the stolen iPhone

  1

  A society does not usually change direction with a sudden jolt. It alters course in incremental amounts, running small, secret simulations of experiments that achieve their full-scale elaboration only much later. Its project of transformation contains repeats and echoes, and it is always possible to trace earlier versions of an organization, a phenomenon, or even a person. That is what I began to think after m
y encounter with Arindam, when a niggling feeling of déjà vu started to take over, as if I had met an earlier version of him somewhere, and whose source I finally traced back to my first job, in the early nineties, in Calcutta.

  The position had come to me after some hard years in the city, when unsuccessful job applications and humiliating interviews were punctuated with one-off ventures that paid little or no money. In a city that still contained the black-and-white corridors and alleyways tunnelling through the films of Satyajit Ray, I had been a black-and-white protagonist sweating rage, obsessively counting the change in my pocket to figure out just how far I could travel on a bus, or cursing the man who had called me for an interview and then cancelled the appointment without explanation. It was a relief to leave all that behind when, soon after my university examinations, I found work that involved travelling across the eastern flank of the city, past the tanneries of Chinatown and the mountainous Dhapa landfill, where sections of garbage set on fire sent up volcanic plumes of smoke, to a two-storey house in south Calcutta.

  Not too long after starting my new job, I entered the house one day to find my boss doing push-ups on the floor. He had taken his tie off and rolled up his sleeves, and as he dipped and rose on the concrete floor, the employees stood around in a circle, counting off loudly. I had come in late, and he finished soon after I entered, sweating slightly from the Calcutta humidity and the exertion of a hundred push-ups, but otherwise none the worse for wear. As he buttoned and knotted himself back to his usual suave state, he challenged those gathered around to do better than him. He was rewarded with embarrassed laughter, which is probably what he wanted. The people in the room were computer instructors, shallow-chested geeks who couldn’t have bettered his effort and would never have dreamed of competing with the man who employed them. They were grateful for their jobs, which involved giving lessons in data entry and computer programming to young people who weren’t very well educated and didn’t have much money. When the instructors weren’t in the classroom, they were usually brandishing thick manuals at each other, muttering arcane phrases like ‘Foxpro’ and ‘C++’ that signalled their involvement with a mysterious, incomprehensible world.

  Because the company still exists, its advertisements prominently visible in Calcutta, I am not going to name it or the man who owned it. But even with a fictitious name, I can picture Indranil very clearly, a well-built, light-skinned megalomaniac who combined business management flair with a hustling instinct. He had worked as a marketing man for a large multinational, and you could see the corporate touch in the ties he wore and the crisp English he spoke on the phone. But he also had the street-smart ways of a neighbourhood tough, and this had helped him muscle his way into the computer education business.

  This was the early nineties, still some way from India’s technology boom, but there were already dozens of private institutes offering computer courses for people who had failed to get into engineering colleges. Indranil had carved out his niche in this competitive business by targeting people who couldn’t afford the fees charged by other institutes. Like Arindam Chaudhuri, he too was cashing in on aspiration, but unlike the guru with a ponytail, he had to make his courses really affordable. This might have been one of the reasons why Indranil’s computer centres always had an even more makeshift air than the IIPM campus, as if they were the outposts of some mildly disreputable business that could be dismantled at the slightest whiff of trouble.

  The computer schools were located inside nondescript houses in mostly residential neighbourhoods. They had none of the neon lighting, soft carpeting and attractive female receptionists to be seen in the upscale institutes around Park Street, but that did not bother the young people who showed up for the computer classes. Their shabby clothes crumpled from long rides in crowded buses and trains, the heels of their slippers worn unevenly from pounding the city streets, they would have been ill at ease at the more expensive institutes. Many of them lived in the run-down suburban settlements scattered around Calcutta, or in the polluted township of Howrah, just across the Hooghly river from Calcutta, and it was apparent that they struggled to put together even the fairly modest fees charged by Indranil. Yet they had received just enough education to make them unfit for work as maidservants or bus conductors. In a few years’ time, they might well descend to that level, but as they wandered around clutching notebooks and photocopied sections of computer manuals, they were still aspirers, dreaming of office jobs that would give them a semblance of middle-class life.

  The instructors hired by Indranil weren’t that much more secure, although perhaps a notch or two above the students on the class ladder. They were people whose certificates from the more reputable computer institutes had cost them a lot of money, and they were now trying desperately to earn back that money. Since there weren’t too many jobs as yet for people with computer skills, many of these graduates inevitably found themselves regurgitating their knowledge back to others, often for very long hours and rather poor pay.

  The combination of underprivileged students and insecure instructors meant that although Indranil had a flourishing business, few of his students found work after finishing their courses, which is where I came into the picture. Indranil had decided, in one of the sudden insights he was prone to, that the students performed badly at job interviews because they couldn’t speak English. Their computer skills were sound, he said when I first met him. The problem was, metaphorically speaking, that they hadn’t learned to zip up their trousers after taking a piss. I had been hired to redress this problem by creating a ‘module’ that would teach the students ‘spoken English’.

  I didn’t know what a module was or how one might teach people to zip up their trousers. But I needed money and the 2,000 rupees Indranil paid me every month seemed like a lot, even if the ‘part-time’ position he had spoken of when offering me the job evolved into sitting around waiting for him from eight in the morning till eight at night, writing the occasional advertising copy for his company, and putting up with odd rituals like Indranil’s practice of having lunch in the staff office with the female instructors while all the male employees wandered around the streets like disbanded soldiers.

  It was in the course of all this that I got my first exposure to computers. Although Indranil himself didn’t know how to use one, he had asked an instructor to give me lessons to make me a better fit with the culture of his company. One afternoon, a chubby-faced instructor took me into an empty classroom, his usual smile giving way to suitable gravitas as he scribbled:

  8 bits = 1 byte

  1,024 bytes = 1 kilobyte

  I wrote this down dutifully, but when he began drawing a computer on the blackboard, I suggested that it might be more useful to go and look at an actual computer. ‘What if you press the wrong button?’ he said, and between his refusal to diminish the mystery of computers and my reluctance to play along, the lesson came to a swift end. Instead, I borrowed a DOS for Dummies (‘1,024 bytes = 1 kilobyte’) from another instructor and began trying my luck on the machines in the computer lab. Eventually, I abandoned DOS machines altogether and started dabbling on a black-and-white 386 that ran Windows, where I spent most of my time drawing grinning skulls that created some perplexity among students and instructors engaged in more worthwhile tasks.

  It occurred to me that I was behaving badly, but I didn’t know what else to do. There was little I could talk about with my faux-engineer colleagues. They were decent people, generous to help when I crashed the computer, hard-working and deferential towards authority, intelligent and socially awkward. I found them a little sad, with their twelve-hour shifts and their submissiveness towards Indranil. I have no doubt they found me sadder still, especially when I left the company after a couple of months.

  Their time would come soon enough, though, when the West got caught up in a growing panic about the Y2K bug, which was expected to create mayhem when the new millennium began. The panic created jobs for people with computer skills and, from the
mid-nineties onwards, the United States began issuing tens of thousands of H1B visas to Indian engineers, even as American companies started setting up offices in India where people worked late into the night to stay in sync with US time. The Y2K bug failed to have any discernible effect, but it was followed by a dot.com boom that also required people with computer skills. When that petered out, there came the back office jobs being ‘Bangalored’, or outsourced, to India.

  These phases had transformed the sort of people I worked with at Indranil’s company, turning them into the globally recognizable figure of the Indian engineer, a mobile professional who is at home in cubicles everywhere, from the back offices of India to the body shops in the West. The instructors I had known were insecure figures, anxious to hold on to their jobs and in awe of Indranil; even though he had no knowledge of computers, he was the boss running the show. In the years since then, engineers have become bosses. They have become a new breed of capitalists, creating ventures like Hotmail (which Sabeer Bhatia sold off to Microsoft in 1997 for $400 million), or building vast Indian companies like Infosys (one of whose founders, Nandan Nilekani, was elevated into sainthood by Thomas Friedman in The World Is Flat) and Satyam (whose founder, Ramalinga Raju, created a huge empire of software, construction and real estate in Hyderabad). These companies were so successful that by 2006, the information technology sector in India was earning about $25 billion annually, much of that from exports.

  In the West, in spite of provoking the occasional backlash from people unhappy about their jobs being outsourced, Indian engineers are perceived as model minority citizens. Clustered into the suburban ghettos of places like Edison, New Jersey, and invisible for the most part in the social landscape, they are considered safe people, productive at work, conservative in values and unlikely ever to raise difficult questions about race or inequality.