Terrorism and Diwali

A short post I've written for the Comment Factory on the terrorist situation around Diwali. Click here

To watch one of our Times of India webcasts from fashion week (and here some of the cheesiest voiceover in today's online media) you can click below:

Building Harmonies

I had the unexpected pleasure today of recording a jingle for an Indian TV advertisement. It is strange to think that those perfectly polished, orchestral swells and haunting ooohs and aahs that add a ridiculous amount of ether to family cars or building societies are produced here, on the outskirts of Delhi, in a little flat covered with trinkets and Buddhas and pictures of various gurus. We have to take our clothes off before coming in the door. “I’m not eating seafood this time of year,” says Indraneel, the producer. “It’s a superstition I know, but I’m trying this new horoscope thing.” He sits madly tapping away at a file on LogicPro, while downstairs kids in ragged t-shirts play underneath washing lines. A girl sits on a mattress in the dark corner, eating daal from a small bowl, her face lit by the LCD of her macbook pro. I later find out that she is the marketing department.

The ad is for an Indian construction company. Small girl sits on her living room floor, has a eureka moment, draws a sketch of a building. Proud mother comes and sees it, gives her a hug, they look out the window and bingo! There is a beautiful highrise, ready to house more upwardly mobile Indian families like themselves. I begin to wonder why, with so many incredible, vibrato-and-pitch-perfect Indian vocalists at their disposal, they want such a flaccid, white, folksy vocal as my own. But the voice of India’s progress is still not Indian: the white face (and voice) is still the yardstick that says you’ve made it to the first world.

Around this area, where the dusty smog begins to welcome you from Rajasthan into the city area of Delhi, huge skyscrapers push up into the air like concrete and glass stalactites. The giant neon Samsung, RBS and Nokia logos sit atop them, rivalling the bright Diwali lights for sky space. A huge billboard advertising Bacardi Apple is framed in front. On it, five white twenty-somethings are holding hands and running through the lush green grass, laughing. The woollens they wear are completely inappropriate for the Delhi heat. A mile or so from the cluster of highrises is a shopping mall with a Marks and Spencer and a Debenhams. After shopping for underwear and twin-sets, you can pop to Pizza Express for a well-deserved Neopolitana and a glass of Chardonnay.

Of course, it’s not just Western companies that dominate middle class life here. Some Indian companies are marching at the front line too. Tata, India’s second largest company, makes everything from cars (it owns Daewoo, Jaguar and Landrover) to steel, to tea (Tetley’s), to telecommunications. Tata also owns some of the most ridiculously sumptuous hotels in India, and across the United States. Once manufacturing starts on it’s “people’s car”, set to retail at just over £1,000, the company is set to make the automobile affordable for millions. And to add millions to it’s own company value. But even Tata has an Indian twist: it’s owner, Ratan Tata, reportedly lives a modest life and gives almost all his money away. The Tata group has opened schools of science, social work and performing arts, as well as hospitals and research institutes.

But the gap between rich and poor, despite the example of groups like Tata, is still enormous. And while India’s businessmen follow the white ideal, those mired in Indian housing estates cater to their whim. As I stare out of the makeshift recording studio, beyond the screen that shows mother and daughter in their shiny marble kitchen, I can make out the silhouettes of the kids and the washing lines. And then I turn to the microphone and start singing.

Wednesday 22nd October

“I know you writers,” says the man in the government travel agency. He has spent the last ten minutes trying to persuade me he is Italian. I have barely seen anyone look more Indian. “You are not honest.” He chuckles. “John Simpson,” he says, “he came to my house many times. I told him, ‘you are not honest.’ Michael Palin too. He came to my house many times. Not honest.”

This from a man who, last time we came into his office, charged us double for a car to Jaipur. I tell him this and he chortles.

On the way out, one of the other workers in the office opens the door for me. “Where are you going?” he smiles. I explain to him that I am going to a coffee shop around the corner to wait for a friend who's driving me out of town to a recording session. He walks alongside me. “I know you,” he says. I’m not sure he does, though to locals here one blonde white girl looks much like another, and I’m also sure that he’s not walking me down the road just to see if I get safely to my destination. Next thing I know he’s in the café, sat at the table beside me, ordering a cappuccino. I’m beginning to latch onto the fact that Connaught Place’s plethora of coffee shops only stay in business because of Indian men who cajole female tourists to come inside and keep them company over a latte.

One of the best things about India is that with time to spare, there is always someone who wants to talk to you. When all you want to do is sit and be alone with a book, it can seem like one of the worst. But Rajesh is friendly, and only slips the odd innuendo into conversation. He is also keen to tell me about his adventures in Australia, and does the accent too. He twists his mouth like a yawning lion as he attempts it. “We wid gaw for a bi-a at the bich, mayte” he says. He also tells me (quite rightly) that English people are only friendly after a few drinks. He went to Britain once: to Manchester, he says. I console him accordingly.

“You must come home to Kashmir with me next month,” he says. “It is the most beautiful place. It is cold,” he chuckles. “But I will keep you warm.” He gets out a photo album and shows me pictures of Srinigar: snow-capped mountains, people fishing in clear blue lakes, and women making pashminas out of mounds of soft wool. There's a snap of the inside of his houseboat, adorned with red paisley throws and gold patterned chairs. It reminds me of a seventies brochure for luxury caravan holidays.

“Kashmir is so beautiful.” He stirs his coffee and stares into the distance. “And everyone wants a piece of you,” I say.

“We just want a piece of ourselves,” he answers.

Kashmir has been pulled apart by adjoining powers since 1947. China, India and Pakistan all claim a piece of it, and neither recognise the other’s possession. It’s been the site of wars and violence for over sixty years. The last threatened war between India and Pakistan was in 2002. Kashmir has been the subject of a conflict that has brought the world to the edge of nuclear war, taking the earth as close to its destruction as the Cuban Missile crisis. The Indian army patrolling the region possesses the right to kill, arbitrarily arrest, or confiscate and destroy property. India claims Pakistan is funding mujahadeen. While the powers wrangle over territory, or otherwise agree to disagree, Kashmiris remain the forgotten subjects of occupying forces, the sufferers of disappearances, torture, and all kinds of extrajudicial treatment. Altogether, an estimated 70,000 Kashmiris have died, and another 10,000 are missing.

But Kashmir is the last thing on the world’s mind at the moment. Other hotspots just over it’s border cause a more prescient threat to Washington and London. Today, the world’s media celebrated the fact that a trade route has just reopened there between India and Pakistan. It puts a sticking plaster on the conflict, but in reality the world is still ignoring a gaping wound. Trade is still only permitted one day a week, telephone lines are still barred, and the movement of people across borders is still severely restricted. Drivers delivering goods are expected to drive a few miles into the country, drop their load, and come straight back again. It’s a gesture that is easily taken back. And free trade cannot atone for lives that are still being broken.

The Christian Science Monitor today reported that the number of orphanages in Kashmir is growing because between 60,000 and 100,000 of its children have been left parentless by the conflict. Though violence has abated recently, the country’s young scars have still to heal. And it looks as though they may remain open for at least another generation.

“We are a peaceful people,” Rajesh says, and suddenly all promises of whipping me off for a romantic weekend lie at the wayside of his mind. It’s a phrase so often used by inhabitants in areas of conflict. This time, looking at his pictures of local crafters, families and fishermen, I realise that for the vast majority, it really is true.

Back at the government travel agency, Rajesh’s ‘Italian’ friend is still persuading tourists to visit this “paradise on earth.” What’s there not to like after all? In the summer, you can trek the mountains or swim in the lakes. In the winter you can ski in one of the region’s resorts, or go snowboarding. Just mind you don’t bump into one of the Pakistani-funded Mujahadeen, or the 600,000 Indian troops that have license from the government. They shoot to kill.

...In search of tigers

Today we go in search of tigers. Rathambhore National Park is about four hours’ drive outside Jaipur, along a dirt road that gently jostles you past small villages and remote petrol stations. Most of the route, our car is virtually bumper to bumper with freight lorries that are painted on the outside with multicoloured designs and covered with tinsel. They look more like a circus troop than containers that ferry all kinds of commodities across the country.

We arrive at Rathambhore around 10.30 am, just in time for the end of breakfast at the local hotel, the Angkor Resort. The dull dining room is full of the buzz of khaki clad, middle-aged, heavyweight Europeans, mostly German and Dutch. They are all pink from a morning on safari, and tuck into their breakfast of rubbery toast and powdered egg omlettes. There is something here that takes me back to the soggy camping trips of my childhood.

Eventually, we book in for the afternoon trip, and since the jeeps have already been taken, we buy tickets for a 20-seater canter, for ‘tourist price’ obviously, and not Indian. The canter is an ex-Indian Army vehicle, which should have been reassuring, though judging by the emission fumes when the engine starts our initial conidence may have been misplaced. We get there early to reserve the back seat, and eventually the rest of the vehicle is filled with young Indian men, jostling and elbowing each other, joking and ready to see tigers. A stern woman in a khaki uniform, and blue shawl, stands up at the front, and gives them a stern look. They fall silent.

The ride through the National Park is like riding a juggernaut without a seatbelt. It probably wouldn’t have done its MOT for a while either. We are thrown from our seats into the air. Our teeth chatter with the vibrations. I’m sure it isn’t doing our internal organs much good either. Every so often I am whacked in the face by the prickly branches of a tree we happen to be speeding past. I notice that the passengers in front of me have dried leaves and twigs in their hair too. The vehicle takes us down some narrow dirt tracks. Once, I peer over the side to see the rear wheel less than an inch away from the edge of a yawning chasm that drops several hundred metres. I decide not to do that again.

It’s always a lot of fun on safaris to play the pointing game. This involves pointing in any general direction, and watching the entire bus stand up at once to look at said imaginary object. It also works every time you raise a camera to your face. Today, it seems to be the turn of the guide to play this game as, every so often, she gives the signal for the driver to cut the engine, we roll a few metres down the path, and then wait as various sounds are detected and analysed. One, our guide assures us, is the sound of the deer warning for the presence of the tiger. A light banging is detected. I realise it is one of the guys in front kicking the edge of his seat. Then, the rustle of ferns: the child in the front seat is playing with his crisp packet. This repeats itself several times. We realise that no tigers will be found today. We wonder if any tigers have ever been found. But we have almost three hours left to be jiggled through a empty forest, and so we make the best of it.

One of the young Indian men in front of us has detected the American company. “Obama will come!” he says, assuredly. “And when he comes there will be tigers then! They will bring them in cages if they have to!”

Several times we stop by a meadow full of deer, and the Indian passengers excitedly grab their cameras and snap away. We shrug: deer are, if not an every day occurrence for us, not an endangered species. In fact, the look we are giving them is not far off the look Indians give us when we squeal and point at an elephant or a camel on the road. No tigers for us today, and it is now that we realise: there was enough wildlife for us outside, for free.

Sunday 19th October 2008

There’s something to be said for only really knowing a city by walking through it at dawn. There, you’ll find the people who doing the jobs that make the city function, and the ones that clear up everybody else’s mess; the ones who know the city itself, rather than its visitors. This morning in Jaipur, women pick their way through piles of grey detritus, as flocks of black birds swoop in spirals overhead. A man urinates against the wall. One women groans under the weight of a sack she pulls underneath an LG electronics sales billboard that reads, “Life is Good”. Gone are the vibrant saris of the street scene the day before, and in place of the red evening light, the sky is grey.

But soon, the streets in the centre of town will be bustling with tourists and the colours they expect, and the hiked prices they don’t. It’s easy, after a while in India, to get ground down by the constant swindling of anyone with a white face, not least when you are living here. The tourist has the privilege of oblivion, and moreover the ability to brush off the affectionately-termed ‘white tax’ with the reasoning that it’s not much and they-need-it-more-than-me. But after a while, the paranoia sets in that somehow these clever fawning salespeople must really think you are stupid. And they may well be right.

There are the rickshaw drivers who charge at least twice as much (we have accepted this as the ‘white transport tax’); the shop owners who repeat the same phrases (‘just looking madam’, ‘good price, this is fair,’ ‘which country?’); the street men who work on commission to befriend you and take you to ‘their uncle’s shop’; the price list at tourist venues that brazenly display two prices (one for tourists, and one for Indians). You slowly get to realise that every white face is a) rich and b) gullible.

This evening, after a five hour drive, the straw broke the camel’s back (if it was a Jaipur camel, it would have already been pulling a considerable load). It was 10pm and we hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Famished, we fall out of the car and into a scene of mayhem: a huge faux-castle, straining at the leash with carnival rides, women in saris whirling to tabla beats, stalls with sweets and food, people painting with henna, people reading palms, people giving head massages. Everything was so contrived, it was like the Eastern Zone in a theme park. There had been a sign on the gate, “Do not encourage tips,” and we soon discovered why. As soon as we stepped into the compound, a small weasly man scurried out of the shadows and ripped our food coupon from us, scurrying off to get our food, despite protestations that we could do it ourselves. He appeared again two minutes later, with two trays of five or six brown paper bowls, each containing a different coloured sludge, four slices of cardboard naan which were made slightly less dry by the shiny butter they were dripping in, and some dubious rice dotted with suspicious looking black things. We hoped they weren’t squirming. After persuading him in broken Hindi that we had paid for five meals and not three (he shook his head vigorously) we were forced to grab our ticket back off him and go ourselves. He remained, looming in the shadows, scowling,watching us eat. When the others went to explore the cultural shows, he and a few friends came to circle around, asking me ‘which country?’ and I, weary, sleep-deprived, and having been jiggled up and down on a dirt road for a total of eight hours that day, made a swatting gesture with my hand and let me believe he was Australian. He made a hocking sound, and offered me a spoon, which he first wiped with a grubby thumb.

“Let’s get out of this place,” said Karsten whose 30th birthday celebration this was supposed to be. And all of us agreed. Though we’re not entirely sure whether he meant the fake castle, or a wider geographical area. We got back in the car with our driver, who mentioned that he would slap on an extra fee for our excursion that day.

And so this morning, the women on the street pick among the rubbish and search for something that they can keep or sell. We sit in our air conditioned car, looking up from our books to stare. This is the other option for the street sellers, and I wonder how important honesty is in the grand scheme of things, whether merchants all over the world have their own way of decieving to stretch their money-making potential. It’s just that here, it happens at the shake of a salesman’s hand, rather than in a corporate boardroom.

When you see the glint in the eye of the man who offers you ‘good price’, and a small child clutching a bunch of balloons skips down the road after you, you might finally come to a realisation: at the end of the day, much like the rusty rides at the Rajasthani theme park, it’s all a game. Besides, you’re welcome to join in.

Saturday 18th October 2008

We’re speeding through the morning roads, somewhere in the middle of our the five hour car ride to Jaipur. A silence cuts through the people carrier we ride in; those who snooze mumble softly and those who don’t stare transfixed to the road. We pass countless shanty stalls peddling crisps and tea and paan to rickshaw wallahs and truck drivers. We pass toll road booths, where children clasping cans have congregated to beg from motorists. There are monkeys traipsing in their humpbacked crawl by the curb, roadside restaurants topped with rusty coke signs, and gyms advertising ‘body bilding’ classes.

After a few hours we stop at one of the optimistically-named ‘resorts’: a step up from the cafes, which sell cups of chai almost guaranteed to leave a cockroach in the bottom along with the tea residue. Here, however, we saunter off in search of caffeine and cigarettes. A couple of rounds of toast are ordered, smeared with what is loosely termed ‘jam’. Indian jam never declares its allegiance to any kind of fruit in particular, presumably because it contains none. Instead, this neon-coloured gloop is sugar and red food colouring melted down into lumpy syrup. This morning, however, we’re grateful for it. Also on the menu are baked beans on toast and omelettes. The bread comes without the crust sliced off, and the waiter does not flinch when we ask him to hold the sugar from our drinks, a sure sign that this is not a place run for the Indian customer. And looking around, there are more white faces in this café than we have seen in three weeks in Delhi.

Jaipur sprawls for at least a hundred kilometers before the city walls loom. Cafes and roadside stalls still call themselves after the city here. But it’s a bleak landscape: flat scrubland, above which looms the occasional grey mountain, a repetitive scene which serves only to remind you how large this country is. It’s the Nevada of India, with coke stalls where casinos should be. As in Nevada also, there are more hotels by the roadside than would ever have clientele to fill them, and it leaves the wide eyed traveller wondering how they ever pay their overheads. This strange world is something never seen by the thousands of tourists who fly in every year.

But suddenly, these Potemkin Villages disappear and we pass through the huge pink arches of Jaipur. Immediately, the roads are filled with rickshaws and bicycles and camels pulling carts loaded with firewood (here camels are beasts of burden, rather than the showpieces they are elsewhere. Cows, being holy, have it a lot easier in Rajasthan). The women here wear saris brighter than those in Delhi. they create a cacophany of colour: yellows, greens, blues. Even the old wrinkled faces that peek out from beneath them are radiant with their vibrant reflections. Everywhere there are roundabouts; and in the centre of them are miniature village hubs where men sit and talk as the traffic whizzes by. The streets are bazaars selling bags and turbans and saris and pashminas to tourists for three times their worth. And all this against a backdrop of buildings that are uniformly, and bizzarely, pink. They look like Cinderella’s palace atop a child’s birthday cake.

The whole city was painted pink in 1876 by the Maharajah, Ram Singh, to welcome the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII). These days, when Prince Charles visits, he brings his own personal chef, since he can’t stand the food. Though he and the current Maharajah (who went to Eton, but not with Charles) are now great polo buddies. Though Maharajah-Windsor relations may have changed, the city still remains pink.

When later we ventured back out into the city to do some shopping, we were surrounded by swarms of men beckoning us into their shops, assuring ‘best price’, and all of them taking the time to whisper warnings in our ear. “This other man works on commission,” once says, “do not speak to him – you can trust me.” “You can just looking, not buy,” reassures another. “Best price, madam, I assure you. You can look around and come back – you’ll see.” And no amount of pleading can convince them that you do not need a pillowcase or a bedspread or a sari or a string-puppet. “You take as presents,” they say, even though you explain you’re not going home for months.

And everybody asks, “which country you from?” It’s not considered impolite in India to ask anything, and when another seller (who is busy spreading saris before me despite my protestation) offers to sell me a hat for 500 rupees, he next asks me which religion I am – for I cannot be none. I shrug and say that I am Catholic, even though I haven’t taken communion for years. He breathes a sigh of relief. “Me too!” he says. I offer him 300 rupees. “No, then you are my Catholic friend and you can give me 1,000!”

It’s the hard sell, the desperation to grab tourist rupees before someone else does. And even though you know you are being ripped off, somehow even the buying is fun; shouting multiple refusals to the man following you down the road with a hand drum, while ignoring the jewellery seller who has sent his nephew to persuade you back to his stall, as simultaneously you have some fly-encrusted pistachio brittle thrown in your face by an old man. Under one of the pink arches, a man lies inexplicably naked, while a car screeches to a halt as five goats wobble across the road.

We head up to the Amber Fort around four o’clock and our driver struggles with four kilometeres of switchback roads. But once at the top, the sunlight reflects off the orange stones, and falls behind the city sprawling below. As the darkness settles, and the Muslim call to prayer echoes off the walls, the twinkling lights spread out as if the stars have fallen on the ground. We all take in a quick breath.

“I hate to say this,” says Neil, “But it reminds me a lot of Los Angeles.” And though he meant to spoil the moment, in a sense he was right.

Before us are Jaipuri’s residents, all two million of them. And this is Jaipur: like L.A., chaotic, noisy, and full of things that sell for far more than they’re worth. It’s just that this city is a hell of a lot more pink.