The Age of Kali (25 page)

‘I detest subterfuge and hypocrisy,’ she said. ‘I live my life openly, and in my writing I describe what really happens in this town – I tell it how it is. My attitude exacts a price.’

‘Is it just Bombay that’s the problem?’ I asked.

‘No. I love this town. At least here I can live on my own terms. I wouldn’t be able to function anywhere else.’

She shrugged her shoulders: ‘I don’t think Shobha Dé would be allowed to exist anywhere else in India. Another city,’ she said, ‘would have crushed me.’

BANGALORE
,
1997

It was ten a.m., and customers were tucking in to Colonel Sanders’ Bargain Bucket Breakfast Burgers in the gleaming new Kentucky Fried Chicken in Bangalore, when ten burly farmers walked in, prised the ice-cream freezer up from the floor, and hurled it through the plate-glass front window.

As customers and staff looked on in astonishment, hundreds of rustics dressed in Gandhian homespun poured through the breach in to Colonel Sanders’ Indian flagship and began hurling furniture around. Others used chairs to shatter the strip-lights and air-conditioning units. Heavily built village wrestlers ripped the fans from the ceiling and the tables from the floor, while a couple of cowherds attacked the Pepsi machines and chip-friers. The cash till was smashed and the contents sprayed with tomato ketchup. Buckets full of Finger-Lickin’ Chicken Nugget Combo Meals were scattered over the road and trampled in to the dust by some elderly village patriarchs who had taken up station outside. Wading through the sticky quagmire of Pepsi, batter and shattered glass, the farmers announced that they were marking the anniversary of the assassination of the Mahatma by launching a ‘second freedom struggle’ against ‘the invasion of India by multinationals’. Then they shouted a few slogans denouncing the ‘non-veg poison’ served by the Colonel and praising the virtues
of ‘good
masala dosas
’, before vanishing in to the crowds outside.

It was not the first time the Karnataka State Farmers’ Association had taken a somewhat assertive stand against what they perceived as an invasion of foreign companies intent on wrecking Hindu culture. The organisation first hit the headlines in December 1992, when it attacked the US agribusiness giant Cargill Seeds. Maintaining that the company was putting India’s seed producers out of business, and (rather more far-fetched) that the company had signed a secret agreement to set up slaughterhouses as part of an international conspiracy designed to wipe out India’s cow population, five hundred angry cowherds stormed in to the Cargill office and tossed filing cabinets out of the second-floor windows. In the street outside they made a bonfire of the files, on to which they tossed Cargill’s computers. Early the following year a Cargill seed-processing unit in a remote Karnataka village was reduced to ruins by a busload of yokels armed with crowbars.

Nor were the farmers the only protesters. On 1 October 1996, the All-Karnataka Youth Council decided to celebrate Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday by ransacking the newly opened Bangalore Pizza Hut. The Youth Council lobbies for businesses in Karnataka to operate in the local Kannada language, and the attack was a protest against Pizza Hut’s refusal to translate its logo in to the local script. In the event, a full-scale wrecking of the restaurant was narrowly averted when, after a tip-off, a truckload of armed police turned up, bayonets fixed. After this the windows of Pizza Hut became a regular target for nocturnal stone-throwing attacks, despite the deployment of a permanent armed police guard.

Normally these sorts of Hindu Luddites might be dismissed as just another example of India’s incurable eccentricity, a modern manifestation of the Mahatma Gandhi syndrome. Yet the fact that the protests took place in Bangalore made India-watchers sit up. For although since 1947 India has had an understandable fondness for protectionist isolationism, the one place you would
not
expect to find any such introversion was Bangalore, which has long prided itself, with some reason, on being the most cosmopolitan city in India.

Bangalore, for example, was the one town which never removed the British statues from its parks: to this day Queen Victoria, Empress of India, still gazes out benignly over the mêlée of rickshaws and Ambassador cars snarled up at the city’s principal roundabout. With its wonderful parks and botanical gardens, tree-lined avenues and old colonial clubs, Bangalore has always seemed to be a world away from the chaotic muddle of so many Indian cities. Once a favourite retirement destination for blimpish ex-servicemen and elderly tea-planters, it has recently reinvented itself as ‘India’s Silicon Valley’, South Asia’s flagship town for software and high technology. The place still basks with satisfaction in Bill Gates’s much-quoted (though possibly apocryphal) remark that ‘After the Chinese, the South Indians are the smartest people in the world,’ which the intelligentsia of Bangalore understood to be specifically referring to them.

Moreover, Bangalore is now home to a growing number of highly-skilled Indian businessmen and computer engineers who have made their money abroad and decided to settle back home. In conversations about India’s future, just as Bihar is sometimes presented as a vision of where India could be heading if everything went wrong, so Karnataka, and particularly the area around Bangalore, is held up as what the country could be like in twenty years’ time if everything went right.

Hence the alarm when signs began to appear that even Bangalore was not immune to the lawlessness and unrest that plague the rest of India. Clearly, something very odd was afoot. It was also something very significant. For if such agitation could take place in a city as cosmopolitan and Westernised as Bangalore, what would be the effects of economic liberalisation elsewhere in the country? After years of hungrily embracing all it could of Western junk culture – imported jeans, disco music, Pepsi, MTV – was the Indian worm finally beginning to turn?

It seems a little strange now, looking back after the Asian crash and the economic disappointments of the late 1990s, but when the liberalisation of India’s economy began in 1991, there was a real wave of international excitement. India suddenly seemed to be on the point of a spectacular economic take-off.

Not very far to the east, the Asian ‘tiger economies’ were growing at a sensational rate, and many observers believed that India was set fair to follow in the tracks of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Already, it was pointed out, India was the seventh industrial power on earth; and out of its population of nine hundred million, so it was claimed, over a hundred million had incomes and lifestyles comparable to the average European. Sniffing a new market about to open up, Western bankers and industrialists began flocking in droves to set up branches in the Indian business centre of Bombay, whose real estate quickly doubled in price. Even Sotheby’s moved east.

Since then, however, the enthusiasm has waned dramatically. The reforms which were started with such gusto in 1991 had more or less run out of steam by 1994, leaving many of the country’s biggest economic problems still unsolved. As this became apparent, analysts began to be less ambitious in their projections for India’s prospects: ‘We’ve all come to realise that India, far from being a tiger, is in fact a lumbering great elephant,’ I was told by one Western diplomat. ‘India is a huge country, and it moves very slowly and ponderously.’

‘India’s main difficulty,’ says Kito de Boer, the director of the Indian branch of the international management consultants McKinsey & Co., ‘is that Nehru went to Cambridge at the time Fabian socialism was the dominant ideology.’ That particular British
legacy, he maintains, was every bit as damaging as any plundering of the country by wicked imperialists that may have taken place in the preceding centuries. Britain’s parting kiss to India, believes de Boer, left the country floundering in a Fabian quagmire of uncompetitiveness, protectionism and big government, a legacy which it may yet take decades to shake off.

‘At Independence in 1947 this huge agrarian nation set off in a burst of enthusiasm led by LSE-trained economists who planned a semi-Stalinist economy based on steelworks and five-year-plans. India’s hugely inefficient public sector is still larger than the private sector, and it continues to lose money hand over fist. Most of the nation’s money is not being spent on things which will make the next generation wealthy – schools, roads and so on – but on subsidising loss-making public industries: the government currently spends as much on subsidising oil prices as it does on health and education combined. In 1950 India had the strongest economy in Asia. Now it has one of the slowest-growing and most uncompetitive. And while other countries in Asia roll out the red carpet to attract investment, India has a tendency to roll out the red tape.’

Statistics back this up. In 1950 India had a 2 per cent share of world trade; fifty years later that slice has sunk to 0.8 per cent. Even Vietnam attracts more foreign direct investment than India. China, which should be India’s closest rival, currently attracts nine times as much foreign exchange.

Yet for all this, there are visible signs of change, particularly in the south and west of the country, where the great bulk of foreign investment is now being channelled. Here, after forty years of attempting to be self-sufficient – forty years of shoddy goods and shortages – everything is suddenly available: German cars, Japanese computers, American jeans, even imported disposable nappies (unknown in India as recently as five years ago). Where ten years ago there was only one abysmally boring black-and-white state-run television channel, there is now a cacophony of over forty glossy satellite channels offering everything from CNN and
Baywatch
to Channel V, a home-grown Indian version of MTV which plays an
odd mixture of Anglo-American rock music and Hindi film songs: one minute it’s Madonna in very little but a cast-iron bodice, the next it’s Amitabh Bachchan in flares chasing Rekha round a 1970s Bombay rose garden.

Equally, the raucous but slightly monotone Indian press of the 1980s has given way to a startling variety of glossy magazines, some covering the Bombay catwalks, others holding forth on the best way to surf the Internet, others still offering the new rich advice on which model of Mercedes to choose. There is even an Indian version of
Cosmopolitan
bringing the female orgasm to the newsstands of South Asia for the first time.

In some of the favoured areas, growth is very fast indeed; and nowhere more so than Bangalore, which has almost quadrupled in size in the last twenty-five years. Since Western software companies started arriving in the city ten years ago – attracting in the process a wave of highly skilled expatriate Indian software engineers to return home to work for them – the Bangalore streetscape has altered beyond recognition. The city now has the only supermarkets in the subcontinent, and a shopping mall modelled, so proud Bangaloreans will tell you, on one in Los Angeles.

‘These are luxuries unknown even in go-ahead Bombay,’ said one student who offered to show me what he claimed was ‘India’s first all-glass elevator’. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘Bangalore is our model town. It is number one place for comfort in India.’

One aspect of this is the dazzling variety of pubs on offer, most of them bizarrely themed: some are dressed up as pseudo-Wild West saloons, others as wannabe NASA space stations. There is a Baskin Robbins, a Wimpey, and of course the Pizza Huts and Kentucky Fried Chicken parlours, which despite the attacks are both in great demand. Notwithstanding the undeniable excellence of Bangalore’s own South Indian cuisine, the siren call of Kentucky Dippers, Zinger burgers and chicken tikka pizzas has proved irresistible. Every day returned Indian expats form long queues outside the Pizza Hut, patiently waiting as long as two and half hours to be served. Once inside, you find yourself surrounded by baseball
hat-wearing computer nerds speaking in uniquely Bangalorean Indo-American accents.

‘Actually, Meera, this ain’t nothing at all compared to Pizza Hut we are visiting in Santa Barbara. You can’t get real pepperami here. And there are no fries …’

‘Tarun, have you seen
Mission: Impossible
? Really cool movie, yaar?’

‘Yaar. Actually not bad. But Tom Cruise: what a
schmuck
! I am thinking Brad Pitt is much better.’

‘Hey, Naveen, have you heard? Sunil has a preview of Windows 98.’

‘Wow! But I thought Sunil was an Apple-freak.’

‘Actually no. He has a new Pentium Compaq with 1.4 gigabytes of hard disk and thirty-two megabytes standard RAM.’

‘TFT?’

‘TFT
and
MMX.’

‘Golly! I must be looking …’

The same Indo-American hybrids can be found in abundance at Bangalore’s silicon nerve centre, Electronic City, which lies fifteen miles along rutted roads from the town centre, out towards the Tamil Nadu border. Here the most successful of the home-grown software companies is Infosys, which seems to be entirely run by Indo-American Brahmins. On my visit the finance director had just returned, smeared in sandalwood paste, from offering a ten-hour
puja
at his ancestral temple in Goa, but this did not stop him rolling out a series of state-of-the-art spreadsheets showing the company’s ever-growing profit margins and expansion plans. The old Brahminical astronomical disciplines and learning, he explained, trained the mind to understand mathematics and computing; the old learning had formed the seedbed for the new.