Understanding India

By

Bhawani Cheerath Rajagopalan

 
Mother Pious Lady – Making Sense of Everyday India by Santosh Desai
Harper Collins, 380 Pages; Rs 399

An intriguing title for a book. Coming as it does from a columnist, advertising and marketing professional, you know this is just a teaser. The book is a collection of articles by the author carried in the column ‘City City, Bang Bang’ of the Times of India and in the Brand Equity supplement of the Economic Times.

Santosh Desai takes us through the pre-liberalisation India. What it meant to live and grow up in those years. For those of us who had a taste of life in those decades it’s an interesting journey back to shortages, austerity, restraint, and low key lifestyle of the middle class. For Gen-Next the book is a peek into a scenario they will never know because our economic reforms have really pitch-forked the burgeoning middle class into a lifestyle where consumer is king, there is no licence Raj, and life is lived on a faster track!

The highpoints of the book in these times when the line between good literature and journalism is getting blurred is that it falls in the ‘Journalism is Literature in a hurry’ category and makes interesting reading. A sentence in one of the chapters goes thus, ‘Looking back, one is struck by how little material was used in creating such a rich and satisfying experience. Scarcity, when pooled, seemed to transform magically into an abiding sense of plenty.’ Paisa vasool, says the author, was another major element in every activity – be it a film, the price of vegetables, or the hair clips one buys after devoting much time and lots of energy to bargaining.

It was both interesting and amazing the manner in which the little pleasures of life came from – watching Chitrahaar in homes which had television, and it mattered very little if you knew the owner of the television, or popular tastes created by Antakshari, and Vividh Bharati, or the family outings astride “Hamara Bajaj” (please note, families were yet to get into the ‘Hum do hamare do’ mode).

It is not that all of the nearly 400 pages have been devoted to the pre-liberalisation days. Desai’s narrative follows up with the coming of age of the post liberalisation India – eating out, mobility for girls in lesser towns with the arrival of lighter, cheaper two wheelers, Maruti on the roads, the Indian nightie becomes a formal garb as does the salwar-kameez!

There is a chapter titled ‘Badges of Modernity’ – ‘My parents never once told me that they loved me,’ begins thus and concludes, ‘but as our sense of separateness gets formed more firmly, we will need more bridges to communicate to our loved ones. More greeting cards, more gifts on birthdays, and perhaps, more celebrations of Father’s Day and Mother’s Day.’ What transpires between these two sentences is the new mode of expressing love (!) and it also speaks to us how the market has taken over this tender emotion with gimmicks like cards, and ‘Days’ dedicated to parents to remind us where we came from.

At the end of it, what does the author feel –is it the India of ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ or is ‘India Shining’? The truth as he sees it is closer to the latter. ‘The good news perhaps is that the India story is real but that it is about the middle, not the top…the light we see today is of a million matchsticks that are flickering in unison. And that is good news.’ By breaking up the chapters into small readable pieces, mostly below a thousand words, this book has the added charm of not demanding continuous reading, but you can take your pick, go back and forth and remind yourself of ‘the good, the bad and the better’ of India.

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