India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (18 page)

Prasanta is not one to mince his words. Our short conversation clarified just what India’s swimmers are up against. At the time, India had only two heated pools of competitive size (the Commonwealth pool in Delhi was still not finished): one in distant Assam and one in Pune. Neither is well maintained. Australia, in contrast, has more than fifty. As for the Bengaluru centre, it’s closed for half the year. The water is too cold to swim in.

Last winter, Sandeep and Virdhawal trained in Spain during the off-season. They hope to go again this year, but they need a government grant. Though promised, the money has yet to materialise. There is no similar training budget for Para swimmers. Nor does the reservation system, which earmarks jobs in publicly owned companies for top sportspeople, have a category for disabled athletes. Prasanta’s applications to the national swimming federation and his provincial sports ministry have also come to naught. To keep him going, a business contact in Kolkata has loaned him some money. He has to pay him back with any future prize money that he may win.

Although swimming is particularly badly funded in India, competitors from almost every sporting discipline face financial hardship. The winner of the Mumbai marathon, for example, had to spend the night before the race on a hostel floor because he lacked the cash for a hotel. It is no coincidence that the country’s top-performing athletes come from wealthy backgrounds. Olympic marksman Abhinav Bindra is a prime example. He trains at a private shooting range built by his millionaire father on the family’s thirteen-acre estate. Tennis greats Vijay and Anand Amritraj, badminton champion Prakash Padukone, chess Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand and billiards ace Pankaj Advani all
credit parental support for their success. In Prasanta’s case, ill health has prevented his father from working for the last decade.

After the meeting, I‘d called Nandan to thank him. He’d asked how I’d got on. I told him what I felt: how inspiring Prasanta’s dedication was and yet how mystifying it was that anyone should choose such a course. Nandan had agreed. Excepting cricket, sport seems like a thankless option in India. That’s why so many talented youngsters drop out. Those that stick it out generally fall into one of two camps, Nandan had explained: those rich enough to afford it, and those so poor they have little else to lose.

It was then that he told me about Sourav Shah. The fifteen-year-old swimmer is the latest addition to his Foundation’s books. Like Prasanta, he too is from Kolkata and he too learned to swim in a lake. If I was ever in Kolkata, I should look him up, Nandan had advised.

Several months later, I find myself passing through the Bengali capital. Recalling Nandan’s suggestion, I contacted him again and asked for Sourav’s details. I called his father and set up a meeting for the next day.

The Shah family lives in a single, cramped room off B. T. Road in the north of the city. Nine feet square and shaded by a crumbling block of government flats, the room has space for a large bed, a steel wardrobe and little else. Sourav sleeps on the floor. He is an only child. That is fortunate. The floor area could not accommodate a sibling. His orange Vodafone swim shorts are hanging from a string attached to the room’s only window. A framed photo of him rests on the sill. He’s a good-looking kid, with a wide, even-toothed smile.

Pinaki, Sourav’s father, was there to greet me. Thin as a bird, he walks with a severe limp. ‘Polio,’ he’d said good-humouredly, tapping his withered leg. With similar cheer, he’d apologised for the lack of space. Times are tough. He runs a tea stall on the footpath near Shyam Bazar. After rent and food, there’s little left. He’s sorry too: Sourav had to go out. He went to the hospital. No, no, he was fine. The swimming authorities required him to take some medical tests, that’s all.

Pinaki was evidently proud of his son and talked animatedly about his prodigious talent as a swimmer. He told me about his punishing training schedule: up at four-thirty a.m. every day, an hour and a half by bus to the pool, two hours swimming, back home for breakfast, then the same in the afternoon. What of school and friends? He had little time for either, Pinaki admitted. It was regrettable. But what could he do? Sourav wanted to represent his country. What troubled his father more was his diet. ‘He needs extra food.’ Even with Pinaki and his wife going without, the tea stall didn’t cover three square meals a day. They’d applied to the provincial government for a sports scholarship. A decision, they’d been told repeatedly, was ‘pending’.

I looked around the spartan room. Thoughts of the hardship that lay ahead came to mind. Was it really worth it? Pinaki merely repeated his son’s ambition. He believed the boy had the talent. He’d pointed to the tiny television in the corner. ‘The London Olympics in 2012. I shall watch him on this.’ It would require hard work, he’d acknowledged. And sacrifice. ‘You may have ambition in mind, but without these you cannot get.’ They were the price of success.

Pinaki gazed at the floor. A look of sadness crept over him. The tea vendor was under no illusions. For his son to become a champion swimmer, he knew he’d need more financial support. ‘If this is not coming, it will be very difficult for him. I think he cannot continue.’ He’d never tell Sourav that, of course. He spoke with a deep, almost guilty remorse, as though by expressing the truth he’d somehow betrayed his son’s dreams.

I got up to go. Pinaki rose too. He seemed anxious, keen that I shouldn’t leave on such a note. He wanted me to know that Sourav was an ‘honest boy . . . a good boy, determined’. He opened the heavy wardrobe door and rummaged through a drawer at the bottom. He re-emerged holding a bulging plastic bag. ‘Look at these.’ He laid out the contents on the bed: newspaper reports, race certificates, winners’ medals.

I leafed through the pile of memorabilia. For a moment, neither of us spoke.

Then Pinaki broke the silence. The evidence of his son’s potential, splayed across the patchy bedspread, had given him a new resolve. ‘Sourav’s first chance is to be a good swimmer. We don’t have any means, so if he can succeed then he might be able to build himself a future. His opportunity to enter business or government service is very little. Sport is such a thing that it can bring a man to the top. Only this.’ He hesitated, before repeating himself again. ‘Only this.’

Instinctively, Pinaki knew the truth of Nandan’s observation. His boy had nothing to lose. The son of a lame tea wallah, Sourav must have known it too. Why else did he rise before dawn? What other reason did he have to sacrifice his schooling, his friends, his youth? Of course, swimming is not cricket. Wealth and fame do not necessarily wait at the top. Prasanta is proof of that. Still, the outlook at the top beats the view from the pavement. Of that, both father and son were in no doubt.

Back in the pool, the starting whistle goes. Prasanta is a fraction late out of the blocks. Kicking his legs in tandem, his head is the last to emerge from under the water. Two across from him, in the middle lane, is world-record holder Matthew Cowdrey. He’s one of three Australians in the race. His bobbing yellow hat begins to pull out in front of the chasing pack. By halfway, he has a lead of more than a yard. Powering along beside him, his legs kicking fiercely, speeds Simon Miller. The two of them inch further out ahead. With ten metres remaining, first and second place look set.

The real race is on for third. There are three in the running. Each is enveloped in a churning swell of their own creation, three white foam shapes streaking through the water. In lanes two and three charge the other Australians, blasting into the home straight neck and neck. On their shoulder, clawing at the water with every ounce of energy, comes Prasanta.

The crowd is on its feet. I’m up there with them. Screams of support resound through the stadium. ‘Come on, come on.’ ‘Go, go, go . . . gooooo.’

Austin edges ahead, then Cochrane, then Austin. Prasanta hangs in there, striving, battling, contending. The trio enters the
last five metres. The final wall nears. The Kolkata-born swimmer kicks madly. A final spurt. An arm outstretched. A desperate lunge for the finish.

And then it’s all over. Thud, thud, thud: three healthy hands collide in unison against the pool’s end wall. Who pipped who? It’s impossible to judge. Eight panting swimmers emerge from under goggles and hats. Arms rest on the plastic lane dividers. Cowdrey and Miller have bagged gold and silver. But who took bronze? Every head in the pool swivels round to the digitalised scoreboard at the starting end. The crowd’s gaze follows. Five or six tense seconds pass. Then individual names and stop-clock times begin appearing, flashing up one after the other on the computerised screen like flight numbers on a rebooted departure chart.

MEN 50M FREESTYLE S9 EVENT 120

TISSOT RESULTS

1 COWDREY MATTHEW AUS 25.33

The yellow-capped Australian punches the air ecstatically. Whoops from the crowd. The winning time is followed by the two letters, ‘WR’. World Record. Cowdrey has just reinforced his status as the fastest one-handed swimmer on the planet.

2 MILLER SIMON ENG 26.70

The camera hones in on the runner-up. He’s turning to congratulate the record holder. The St George flag on the back of his white cap temporarily fills the screen.

3 KARMAKAR PRASANTA IND 27.48

The home spectators explode in joyful celebration. Prasanta’s clenched fist shoots defiantly out of the water. One twentieth of a second separates him from Austin, two tenths from Cochrane. The son of an unemployed Bengali taxi driver has secured third place. The bronze medal is his. India has its first ever top-three finish in a Commonwealth Games swimming event. Prasanta has entered the history books.

A few minutes later, at the other end of the pool, a troop of Punjabi soldiers marches in goosestep towards the flag posts. They look glorious in their elaborate headgear and waxed,
handlebar moustaches. The three medallists step towards the podium. The bleached white gloves of the soldiers pull at the guy ropes. Above them, unfurling in the windless stadium, the Indian ensign appears to view. It’s crisp and new and greeted with a surge of ecstatic cheering. Back at the podium, a former air marshall of the Indian Air Force slips a ribbon over Prasanta’s bending neck. He waves his good hand and then joins the applause for his fellow medal winners. Music strikes up. We rise from our seats. The anthem may be Australian, but the joy in the terraces is quintessentially Indian.

India has a new hero. Sourav has a role model. And Rahul, at last, has a good-news story from the Games.

Seven years previously, Indian delegates had travelled to a swanky resort in Jamaica to persuade the Commonwealth Games presiding committee to permit them to host the Games. They showed slides of gleaming malls, futuristic airports and five-star hotels. India was on the up, they argued. Its rise was unstoppable. Its time was now.

In the end, the Games proved the lie. The much-maligned preparations revealed a side of India that the country’s administrators would rather keep hidden. The nation’s upbeat public branding hides a less flattering reality. Short cuts still vie with central planning, chaos still undermines systems and graft still challenges honesty.

The truth of this was not lost on everyday Indians. It wasn’t just Rahul and his editorial peers that damned the authorities as ‘inefficient’, ‘callous’ and ‘corrupt’. Their barbed criticisms echoed the feeling on the street. India’s leaders had let the country down, disgraced them on the world stage. ‘Incompetence Raj’, joked the
Wall Street Journal
. ‘Shoddy’, mocked
Time
magazine.

The day after Prasanta’s victory, I took the new metro line out to the site of the Games Village to meet with him again. We talked about the race and his plans for the future. His sights are set on the next Olympics. After that, he’s not sure. If he can, he’d like to set up a dedicated training academy for disabled swimmers. Before I left, I took a picture of him holding his bronze medal.

Several months later, I return to the photograph. In the background, a concrete pedestrian bridge rises in the air. Its concourse is crowded with people coming and going from the newly inaugurated metro station. Below the bridge runs a dual carriageway into Noida, Delhi’s business-oriented satellite town. Construction tape and bollards line the road’s edge. Cars are passing. There’s also a rickshaw and a bicycle. In the middle distance, a hotchpotch of roofs jars against smog-smeared sky. The overcast tones merge with the yellowing grass, short and brittle, which spreads across the foreground. In the centre of the frame sits Prasanta, his expression proud and hopeful, his medal sparkling.

The image brings clarity to the opposing visions of India. Order alongside disorder. Hope against helplessness. New beside Old. And positioned in the middle, people such as Prasanta, aspiring for something better.

Arduous training and self-sacrifice are the price Prasanta paid for his piece of the New India dream. Millions of others are heading to the mall for a taste of the same.

Rahul Ravindran chomps methodically on his popcorn. He is a young man of precise habits. One sweet. One masala. One sweet. One masala. He slurps on his Sprite.

Meanwhile, in the celestial realm, a bearded Zeus (alias Liam Neeson) is debating with his evil brother Hades (Ralph Fiennes) about the fate of Ancient Greece. The arrogant earthlings have turned their backs on the Gods. They must pay. Argos is given ten days to serve up the sensuous Princess Andromeda in propitiation. That, or the monstrous Kraken would be unleashed on the city state. Annihilation pends.

Rahul takes another slurp.

The citizens of Argos are in luck. A demi-god is lurking in their midst, the muscle-bound Perseus (Sam Worthington). So off our hero heads on an explosive journey of slaughter and special effects to save his people.

Just as Worthington finishes off a pair of gigantic pincer-snapping scorpions, the lights come up. The packed cinema hall collectively stretches and gets to its feet. The sudden curtailment of the film marks an old-fashioned interval. The harmonised shopping-aisle chords of a popular Hindi film track play out over the digital Dolby Stereo sound system. A sizeable proportion of the audience shuffles to the door in search of refreshments.

The film’s subject-matter has got Rahul thinking. He turns to
me in his seat. ‘I am an atheist, you know.’ Even in contemporary India, this remains a startling confession. The Hindu computer programmer stopped believing when he was seventeen. His family are devotees of Sai Baba. The way he sees it, though, life doesn’t offer much in the way of a higher purpose. Each man must become master of his own fate. As for immortality, genomics represents our best chance in his opinion. Have I been following developments in bioprogramming and artificial intelligence? I should. It’s very exciting. And had I seen
Matrix
? Personally, he found it very inspiring. In fact, it’s fair to say that it is his favourite film of all time.

A trailer for the latest Shah Rukh Khan movie flashes up. The Bollywood superstar is cast as a US émigré who defies all odds to reunite himself with the Latino love of his life. Rahul is rapt. The clip finishes to the sound of latecomers retaking their seats, laden under Cinemax’s veg snack ’n’ drink combo. Soon it’s back to Greece and our hero Perseus slaying more mythical creatures, each uglier and fiercer than the last.

The cinema idea had been mine. Oberon Mall in downtown Kochi had just inaugurated a brand new multiplex. Demand is high. The newfangled four-screen cinema is the first of its kind in the entire state of Kerala. We plump for the Sunday matinée. Rahul had booked the tickets online. With our printouts in hand, we had neatly circumvented the lengthy queues at the box office. The air-conditioned hall smells of new car interiors. It is a far cry from the cinema experiences I recall from my first visit to India as a teenager. The high-density foam seats are brightly buffed and devoid of rat nibbles. Sticky stains of indeterminate origin have yet to mark the carpeted floor. In short, we are enjoying the classic mall experience: clean, sanitised and free of riffraff.

Argos is, predictably, saved and we are free to go. Red neon strips zigzag along the floor. We trail the largely male audience to the ‘exit’ sign. Outside, the queue for the next showing of
Clash of the Titans
has already begun. The artificial light in the atrium is momentarily blinding. We stand on the edge of the crowd a while,
allowing our eyes to adjust and the images of high-pixel violence to dissipate.

‘Wanna grab something to eat?’ Rahul suggests, his accent muddied between the India of his birth and the America of his dreams.

‘Sure,’ I agree, ‘but can we first take a quick look around the shops?’

I am keen to check out the mall and was hoping Rahul might act as my guide. We had met a month or so before at an entrepreneurs’ networking event. He’d come to tout for business. From the office in his bedroom, the young programmer had developed a complex software package for the real-estate market. His invention would help property developers save a fortune off their advertising costs, he’d told me. He just needed a backer.

Rahul’s black shiny polyester shirt and matching trousers had made him stand out among the crisply dressed businessmen. He had done up his top button in place of a tie. On his feet he wore a pair of scuffed Nike trainers. His top lip was etched with an uneven, sprouting moustache. Acne blemishes clustered on the upper ridge of his cheekbones. To the unkind eye, Rahul looked like a man who worked from his bedroom.

We had chatted briefly after the presentation. Rahul turned out to be amiable, entertaining and, most interestingly for me, at odds with himself. The self-trained programmer had just dropped out of college. At twenty-one, he saw his future clearly. It didn’t involve staying in Kochi. He’d go to the US, obtain a Green Card, earn his millions, marry an American (preferably blonde and buxom) and live happily ever after. He was pursuing his dream with a vehement single-mindedness. He speaks almost exclusively in English, dropping into the vernacular only as a concession to his mother. The usual pursuits of a young Indian his age hold no interest for him: he claims to loathe cricket, he ‘never ever’ watches Bollywood films and he abhors Hindi music. As for food, his preferred diet is Chinese or American. All he seems to retain of his Indian roots is his vegetarianism.

When it comes to his social life, it is predominantly an online
affair. His friends fall into one of two categories: fellow programmers from technical chatrooms, or fellow gamers from multi-player sites like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars. Most live abroad. He talks with them via Skype. His contact list currently stands at seven hundred and fifty-seven. His best friend is a techie from Alabama who supplements his computer habit by dealing low-level narcotics. The two used to hack together. They have never actually met.

We leave the fourth and uppermost floor where the cinema is located and head down to the level below. The rectangular box-shaped building is structured around a central oval atrium. Railed balconies encircle each successive floor above, creating the effect of an open chimney flue running up to the ceiling. Escalators zigzag like an untidy chain of window-cleaners’ ladders from top to bottom. Security staff stand around idly. A troop of female janitors in uniform red saris with white polka-dots mops the floors with robotic disinterest. Only the man welcoming shoppers at the entrance seems to be approaching his job with any gusto. He is dressed as Mickey Mouse.

The layout of the mall is prominently displayed on a colour-coded notice board by the escalator. The plan indicates a total of sixty-five branded stores over a three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand square-foot floor space. International brands such as Nike, Lee, Sony and Puma drum for custom alongside less well-known domestic competitors. My attention is drawn to the latter. Most are new to me: Infocomm computer accessories, Zapp! kidswear, Smart Opticals ‘eye fashion’.

What is immediately striking is the desire of the local retailers to sound – well – not very local. The more international (and non-Indian) their branding, the logic appears to run, the more alluring their products. Depressingly, repeated consumer surveys endorse such thinking. If it’s foreign, it’s ‘cool’. If it’s ‘made in India’, it ain’t. So the Oberon houses clothing stores with names like Bits Indiana and Planet Fashion, a childrenswear shop called ‘Gini and Jony’ and a make-up store evocatively entitled ‘Cosmetic Island’.

From Rahul’s sloping shoulders and resigned gait, it is evident
he is not an over-eager shopper. Neither am I. To his relief, I suggest we keep the tour short.

We embark on Level Three. ‘The Man who Sold the World’ by David Bowie is playing faintly over the mall speaker system. It seems a fitting choice as we pass Frizbee, a toy store stocked with enlarged teddy bears and a child-sized Lamborghini. The identikit outfits in Mantra, Lamoda and Anarkali keep us moving on. Rahul tarries a while outside HP World. Though a Dell man himself (‘I know the district manager’), he likes to keep abreast of what the competition is up to. ‘A laptop is NOT enough,’ a poster advert in the window informs us. This surprises me. Laptops remain a luxury item in India. But take HP at its word and if it hasn’t got a built-in scanner and printer, it’s simply ‘not worth the Rs 39,990 you paid for it’.

For the integrity of our research, I feel the need to cross the threshold of at least one store. We opt for a high-street clothing outlet on Level One. It belongs to Reliance, the giant Indian conglomerate. The company’s consumer arm covers everything from supermarkets and mobile phones to bathroom fittings and footwear. Most are on show in Oberon.

I head to the area for men’s fashion. Neutral colours, humdrum lines and an inordinate amount of beige chino trousers dominate. Mid-range labels like John Player, Terrain, Pan American and Dockers are each given a corner to tout their lookalike wares. I move through into the teenagers’ section. The same theme is repeated there, only in two sizes smaller. Racks of T-shirts are organised under brand logos like TeamSpirit, Naomi, Lilliput and Forever 17. A pubescent mannequin is wearing a white round-neck from the newest of Reliance Trend’s collections. The words ‘I have a boyfriend on
S
ale. He’s cheap,’ are emblazoned across her pert, plastic chest.

As we navigate our way back up the escalator, a teenage boy of around fifteen or sixteen years old passes us. He’s going down as we’re going up. Rahul’s head turns a fraction. I wonder why. The boy looks to me like your archetypal mall rat: branded T-shirt, baseball shoes, three-quarter-length shorts and hair painstakingly
gelled to look scruffy. I turn to watch as he descends, puzzling over what caught Rahul’s eye.

‘You can tell he’s lived abroad,’ Rahul says.

‘How?’

‘The way he dresses, his hair, the way he walks. He’s definitely lived overseas. Gulf mostly likely. Loads of people in Kerala go to the Middle East to work. Isn’t it obvious?’

It both is and isn’t. Most of the teenagers in the mall are dressed in Western clothes. Plenty also gel their hair. But closer inspection reveals some clues. Every other teenager in the mall is wearing trousers, not shorts. Their haircuts are short at the neck and carefully combed, not loose and scraggy.

Rahul spells out other differences too: the way he is talking loudly, the swagger in his step, the belt round his hips not his waist, and the fact he’s with two girls.

Aha, so that was what had grabbed Rahul’s attention. The opposite sex was a considerable preoccupation of my programmer friend. Girls – at least, available girls – are thin on the ground in Kochi.

‘Look around. How many girls do you see? Hardly any, right? And those you can see. Who are they with? Their parents, right?’ says Rahul, motioning to the packed walkways of the mall.

It is true. A typical mall on a Sunday afternoon in Europe or the US would be heaving with young people, boys and girls – and few, if any, with their parents. In Oberon, the foreign boy and his cohort is the only example to be seen.

‘You’ll hardly ever find girls just hanging out in a mall,’ Rahul complains. ‘Their parents won’t let them. If they do, they have to go with friends and have to go home at a set time. To bring a girl to a mall is still a big thing in Kerala. And anyhow, ninety-five per cent of these guys’ – he waves his hand towards the scores of young men lounging over the railings at every level of the mall – ‘wouldn’t have a girl to bring anyway. If you see a couple together, they’ll either be married or from North India. And it’s just not the done thing to go up to a girl in a mall in Kerala. When her family is there, it’s a big no-no. And if she’s with friends, well,
that’s intimidating. And, anyway, it’d just be weird. Of course, in the US, it’s different. There you can just walk up to a girl and ask for her phone number.’

Rahul’s obsession with America colours his perspective. Nothing in India could ever be quite as good as the promised land across the Atlantic. I fear disappointment might be lurking for him should he ever make it to Nirvana.

We reach the ‘Full Circle’ food court. Rahul heads straight for the Krispy Chicken counter. In case the name was in anyway ambiguous, a placard by the till spells out ‘No pork. No beef’. Faithful Muslims and Hindus can gorge without guilt.

Rahul orders a veggie burger with french fries. The waiter hands him a plastic contraption designed to look like a small detonator. ‘It’ll light up when your order is ready,’ he advises him. I pass down the line of fast-food counters. All palates are catered for. Dosa Express and Rasoi Indian Cuisine cover local fare and attract an older clientele. Noodle King and Arabian Treat meet the growing appetite among younger diners for Chinese and Middle Eastern food. Papa Milano wraps up the gastronomic world tour. As a house special, the Italian pizzeria offers a ‘MacCheese’: a bowl of macaroni with real American cheddar-cheese sauce. A long queue of hungry adolescents dissuades me from waiting to try it. I double back up the line and order a tikka sandwich from Krispy Chicken. I am duly issued my own detonator.

The food court’s four hundred and twenty places are almost entirely occupied. We find an empty half table next to two university-aged men. Standing beside the adjacent table is a middle-aged man dressed in a cotton shirt and mundu, the Keralan equivalent of the lungi or dhoti. The long sarong is made from a single piece of plain woven cloth. It ties around the waist and, when not folded up to the knee, is left to fall down to the floor.

The gentleman is casually holding up one of the garment’s corners with his left hand. The action produces a flap, as if a sudden gust of wind had darted under the hem and caused the cloth to billow. A double-turn of the mundu ensures his lower half remains
covered and his modesty intact. In the man’s right hand, he carries a mobile phone. He is speaking Malayalam in bossy, insistent tones. He is not the only man dressed in a mundu. I saw several others on my tour of Oberon, including a couple of younger men. But their numbers are few enough to be noticeable.