Viewfinder

No, We Can’t

This is the 28th installment of Viewfinder, my weekly column for Yahoo! India, and was published on November 11.

Barack Obama’s visit to India has made him such a huge celebrity here that it’s a wonder he hasn’t yet been asked to appear on Bigg Boss. I can imagine the housemates being given a task: ‘The President is coming, prepare for the president’s visit.’ So they get all set to greet Obama: Veena Malik puts on her best make up and pouts in front of the mirror, Dolly Bindra personally supervises the making of special gaajar ka halwa with secret ingredients, Ashmit Patel and Hrishant Goswami trim their eyebrows again, Shweta Tiwari puts on a finely-tailored, figure-hugging anarkali churidar kurta, and choreographs a dance for herself, Manoj Tiwari composes and practises a Bhojpuri song written specially for the occasion, Mahabali Khali practises punching through walls to impress the president, Sara Khan decides that she will try and call Obama ‘Pops’ so as to cuddle up to him, and they all line up in the garden as the moment nears. The gates swing open. Pratibha Patil walks in.

Okay, this is unlikely to happen—as unlikely as our country is to ever throw up a politician quite like Obama. A few months ago I was invited for a television talk show to discuss “Who is India’s Obama?” I couldn’t participate because I was busy at the time, but I found the question ridiculous. For a political figure like Obama to rise in India would be as unusual as growing palm trees in a snowfield. India’s political system would never allow someone like Obama to rise, and would disincentivise entry in the first place.

Consider how Obama climbed the ladder in politics. He wasn’t from a privileged background or a political family: he worked as a community organiser in Chicago in the 1980s, and then graduated from Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the Harvard Law Review for a while. He worked as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for a few years, and wrote an acclaimed memoir. Given that background, you’d have expected him to stay in academics and write more books, maybe even winning a Pulitizer along the way. (He’s a very fine writer.) But he saw a different calling for himself.

It might have been idealism that motivated him to join politics, but he also possessed the pragmatic street-smartness without which you can’t rise in that profession. He networked superbly in the local political scene and built a base for himself. (Interestingly, poker was a part of his tactical mix, as James McManus points out in this article in the New Yorker. For more on the role poker has played in American public life, I strongly recommend you read McManus’s magisterial history of poker in America, Cowboys Full.) But Obama’s rapid ascent in national politics was not a result of backroom wheeling-and-dealing, but of the power of ideas. He came on the national scene when America, tired of the Iraq war and the growing partisanship in politics, was ready for a change. Obama, a thinker of much nuance, was also a speaker of great clarity and eloquence, and galvanized a nation with his words alone. Despite being criticized for his lack of managerial experience, he also ran perhaps the greatest political campaign in American history.

Now, can you imagine a similar career graph for a politician in India today? America is the most meritocratic of all countries, and their politics is truly democratic, which is why they have an incumbent president whom pretty much no one outside his city had heard of just ten years ago. India, on the other hand, as I have written before, has a feudal political system, and none of our parties are internally democratic in the true sense of the term. All our promising young politicians are scions of political families who have been handed an inheritance. The time is past when someone like Obama could emerge on the scene from nowhere and rise to the very top in Indian politics through the force of his ideas. An Indian Obama would be a professor at a business school, a top manager in a multinational company, an acclaimed writer with a modest income—or he would simply have gone abroad, where the opportunities are far greater.

Obama’s visit hasn’t prompted any self-reflection in our political elite or our media, though. We gush over him, we get orgasms when he praises India or disses Pakistan, but we don’t think a little harder and realise that what Obama says about India not being an emerging nation any more is just sweet talk. We are still a backward, emerging nation, and this is amply reflected in the poverty of our political landscape, where Ashok Chavan and Suresh Kalmadi stand for the quintessential, typical Indian politician. Can India produce an Obama in this kind of system? No, we can’t.

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Needless to say, my admiration for Obama doesn’t necessarily translate to support for his policies. While it’s heartening to see a politician who doesn’t speak in platitudes and is capable of intellectual depth, Obama inherited an enormously difficult set of circumstances, and I find aspects of his approach to the economy somewhat dubious. (Indeed, when it comes to expanding the role of government in America, there isn’t much difference between GWB and BHO.) That said, even Lincoln and Roosevelt, it could be argued, were not confronted with two problems quite as complex as this economic crisis or as nebulous as the war on terror. But that’s a subject for another day.

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Speaking of young politicians, check out England. Their prime minister, David Cameron, is 44 years old. His deputy prime minsiter, Nick Clegg, is 43. The Chancellor of the Exchequer (their equivalent of a finance minister) is the 39-year-old George Osborne. The leader of the opposition (and of the Labour Party) is Ed Miliband, who turns 41 this December. In contrast, Indian politicians in their 50s are often described as “young and upcoming”. It’s crazy—but perhaps a dysfunctional system deserves senile or our-of-date leaders. Such it goes.

Traffic Lights and Potholes

This is the 27th installment of Viewfinder, my weekly column for Yahoo! India, and was published on November 4.

It’s absolutely freaky, the shit that happens in the USA. A few days ago, my friend (and renowned former blogger)  Manish Vij lodged the following complaint online about a traffic signal (reproduced with permission; I’ve changed road and city names):

“The traffic signal on [AB-CD] Rd. at [XY] Dr. needs to be adjusted for traffic at night. The last five nights, the signal for through traffic on [AB-CD] has been red for up to 2 minutes when I’ve hit the signal between 1 and 4 am. It’s especially odd because [XY] is a small street which T intersections into [AB-CD], and even during the day rarely has more than a handful of cars turning left onto [AB-CD].”

Within two hours—yes, two hours—he got the following reply in his email inbox:

“Hi Manish,

The signalized intersection at [AB-CD] Rd. and [XY] Dr. is on a recall timing because of the recent construction of the new ramps some of the traffic detector loops have been cut. We have scheduled them to be replaced soon after the ramps at the intersection are all complete.

Thank you,

[Name here], P.E.

Associate Engineer

City of [AB] – Public Works”

In other words, he made a complaint to the local government, as a common citizen, without going through any contacts or other such loops, and actually got a reply the same day. That’s just crazy. Can you imagine that happening in, say, Mumbai? If a local traffic signal is malfunctioning, or neighbourhood garbage isn’t being cleared as regularly as it should, or the road outside my house is full of potholes, I wouldn’t have the slightest clue about where to go to complain. And if I did know where to go, I wouldn’t bother wasting my time for something that is merely a minor irritant for me, because I know that my government does not consider itself accountable to me. And there is not a damn thing I can do about it.

(On a tangent, if I did complain about potholed roads, I would be laughed out of whichever decrepit government building I lodged my complaint in. Everyone knows why Indian roads have potholes: so that they can be repaired, which means more commissions and kickbacks for everyone concerned. The government servants who look after our roads are incentivised, in a system where corruption is the norm, to build (or repair) roads badly so that they need to be repaired again soon. Rinse and repeat. For the common man, the roads are the point; for our government, the potholes are the point. The roads are merely the means to an end: the destination is the potholes.

Okay, end of bizarre parenthetical roads rant.)

What causes local governance to be so inept here when compared to the US? Well, firstly, it’s the incentives within our system of government. Our government is top-down and centralized. For example, it’s Sonia Gandhi in Delhi who will decide who becomes chief minister of Maharashtra, not local party workers driven by local concerns, and accountable directly to us. In an ideal system, government would be local at its core, like the Panchayati Raj kind of model, where we elect our local officials based on our immediate concerns, and their incentives are aligned towards servings us well—a sentiment that then travels upwards. But, as I wrote in an earlier column, ‘Politics and Inheritance’  there’s no inner-party democracy in India, and no local accountability (though tools like the RTI are a big step forward.) Our parties are effectively competing mafias. Consider the recent Adarsh Society scam, where a chief minister was found to have dubious dealings, and the party is still hunting around for a clean replacement. Well, here’s stating the obvious: There isn’t one. Politics in India is inherently dirty business, and you can’t rise to the top here without playing by the rules of that game.

The biggest cause for the state of governance in India, though, is our own attitudes. After I wrote in my last column that our governments believe they exist to rule the people, not serve them, my friend Vinay Suchede wrote in to elaborate: “Something that has irked me is the media itself uses phrases such as ‘Cong rule, BJP rule, Cong-ruled state, BJP-ruled state etc’. It promotes the notion that we are subjects and that we are ruled.” That’s a good observation, and illustrates that despite our managing to be rid of the British empire in 1947, we’re still not quite independent. We still have rulers, we still have royalty, and as long as we do, we will have potholes on our roads, garbage on our streets, and problematic traffic lights. And those are the least of our problems.

Kindle Your Children

This is the 26th installment of Viewfinder, my weekly column for Yahoo! India, and was published on October 28.

Growing up, I was a lucky kid. My father was an avid reader, and his collection of books numbered in the thousands. It wasn’t a surprise, then, with books all around me, that I became a keen reader as well. At an age when other children dream of being astronauts or movie stars or cricketers, I wanted to be a writer. And I wasn’t just reading Enid Blytons and Hardy Boys—at age ten, I discovered a book called The House of the Dead, thought the title indicated a thrilling read, and embarked on my first foray into serious literature. It happened to be written by a dude named Dostoevsky, and while it didn’t contain the ghost stories I expected, it got me hooked. Dostoevsky was my first favourite, and I admit that looking back on it, I find it a bit freaky that I read all the major Russian novelists at age ten, and all of Shakespeare as well. (I liked Titus Andronicus more than Macbeth, so it’s fair to say that my tastes weren’t all that refined.)

My reading habit ebbed and flowed over the years. From a weird-ass, serious geeky kid who read a lot, I turned into a rebellious teenager who wore torn jeans, listened to alternative rock and didn’t read all that much. But one thing didn’t change: the desire to be a writer. After college, I wandered into copywriting, then into writing for television, then journalism, then blogging, and then after years of procrastination that I blame on my half-Bengali genes, I finally wrote my first novel a couple of years back. None of this would have been possible if my dad hadn’t been such a collector of books, and if serendipity hadn’t started at home. Forget the fact that I am a writer: I’d be an entirely different person if I hadn’t been the kind of reader that I was. My life would have been diminished.

As it happens, I have become a bit of a book collector like my father was, and while he lived in large, spacious bungalows all his adult life, I have lived in relatively small apartments in Mumbai for much of mine, and the thousands of books I own have created a major storage issue. The bookshelves are overflowing; all the beds with storage space are filled with books; there are three cupboards filled with books; the tables and sofas in my living room overflow with them. So it’s a surprise that I held out for so long before buying my first Kindle.

One reason I didn’t buy the Kindle earlier is that I like the feel of books in my hand. (Not so much the much-touted smell of paper, because years of sinus issues have ravaged my sense of smell.) Also, I used to think that I wouldn’t like the Kindle because one can’t read off a computer screen for too long. However, on using a friend’s Kindle, I discovered that the E Ink technology that the Kindle uses replicates the look of print on paper almost exactly, and is easy on the eyes. (No backlit screens and all that.) Also, the marketplace, which was once a bit limited, has now expanded, and book prices are quite affordable: often cheaper than you’d get in a real bookshop, and when it’s not, the premium is worth it in terms of convenience and storage space. So I’ve gotten myself a Kindle 3, and I love the machine already: it’s lighter than a paperback, can contain thousands of books, and the look and feel is just wonderful.

But I’m not writing this column to evangelize the Kindle as a device. I’m writing, instead, because while browing the online store, I remembered my privileged childhood. I bought a handful of books on my first day with the machine, but the vast majority of the hundreds of books I downloaded in my first few hours with it were free. Every book published before 1924 is in the public domain, and therefore free to download. So there I was, reliving my childhood, downloading Dostoevsky and Turgenev and Dickens and Shakespeare and Mark Twain and even some of Agatha Christie and Wodehouse on my Kindle—for free. In half a day, I put together a collection of books that must have taken my father years of perseverance and saving up to compile. To me, that is a matter of great wonder.

For someone who doesn’t like children very much, and chose long ago not to have any himself, I will now have the audacity to give the parents reading this piece a word of advice: kindle your children. The biggest thing you can do for your kids is open up the world to them, and reading is a great way of doing that. One can’t force kids to read, of course, but merely having books around the house is often enough. (Most avid readers I know picked up the habit that way.) The Kindle—or any other ebook reader that you prefer—saves you a lot of trouble and makes it easy to put a world of books at your kids’ disposal. So here’s what I suggest: gift your kid a Kindle, load it up with a library of free classic books, and set up a one-click payment system through a debit card with a monthly budget so that your kids can buy a reasonable amount of books themselves, regularly, without your supervision. Give them the power—and set them free. There is a good chance that, 30 years later, they will thank you for it. And, thanks to the wonders of technology, it will take you far less effort than it took my dad.

Politics and Inheritance

This is the 25th installment of Viewfinder, my weekly column for Yahoo! India, and was published on October 21.

One of the defining images of Indian politics of recent times came a few days ago in Mumbai when Aditya Thackeray stood on a stage at a Shiv Sena rally, drew a sword out of its sheath, and held it aloft. He had just been handed his inheritance—not the sword, but a political party. His grandfather Balasaheb Thackeray had just launched him in politics, and told the world that the Shiv Sena would now belong to him. (Not in so many words, of course: he asked SS supporters to ‘bless’ the young man.) And thus, a political party in the world’s largest democracy was handed over.

With a couple of exceptions, this is the fate of almost all Indian political parties. They are feudal and are run by dominant families like family-owned firms—which some might consider apt because the business of democracy is, after all, a business. The Congress is owned by the Gandhis: Rahul is almost uniformly considered to be a future prime minister, and most of their young leaders are themselves children of prominent politicians (there is no other way to get to the top on your own steam). But even here, there is a heirarchy, which is why there is no way Jyotiraditya Scindia or Sachin Pilot or Milind Deora is considered a future PM the way Rahul Gandhi is, because, like a kind of caste system, the heirarchy of families within the party percolates through generations.

Most regional parties are also like this. In Tamil Nadu, it is understood that after M Karunanidhi passes on, the DMK will pass on to one of his children. In Andhra Pradesh, Jagan Mohan Reddy reacted with shock and horror when the state Congress wasn’t handed over to him after the death of his dad, the former chief minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy. (It was like his dad died and suddenly some random stranger started living in his family home.) From Mulayam to Akhilesh, Narayan to Nitesh, Jaswant to Manvendra, Indian politics is one long family soap, with plenty of drama and predictable outcomes. (Indeed, think of the Congress as a saas-bahu saga, and there you have it, the last 45 years.)

I don’t have an issue with politicians’ children taking up their parent’s profession. Anyone should be free to enter politics, and the kids of a politician would have such an early and constant exposure to that world that their interest in it is quite natural. (Besides, power is intoxicating and addictive, a factor that would not feature in most other professions.) My issue, rather, is with the way our parties are structured: despite being players in a democracy, none of them are democratic themselves.

A political party should ideally be a democracy within a democracy. In the US, if you want to run for election as a Democrat or Republican, you first have to win primaries within the party. Even if you are from a royal family of politics, you need to get out in the political marketplace and convince the members of your party that you have what it takes. You need to be clear about where you’re coming from ideologically; you need to discuss policies in concrete terms; you are under public scrutiny, held accountable for your words. Even George W Bush and Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy weren’t handed their party on a platter: they had to go out and get the votes.

Well, over here, parties don’t have primaries, and are run by insiders in proverbial smoke-filled rooms. Rahul Gandhi or MK Azhagiri or Uddhav (or Aditya) Thackeray do not have to campaign for votes within their parties and win party primaries—they are anointed, not elected. By saying this, I am not knocking them, but the systems they have inherited. Politics should find its expression from the grassroots up, but instead we have top-down politics, with all our parties—and therefore every government—believing that it exists to rule the people, not to serve them. Political parties, for all practical purposes, are competing mafias, battling for the spoils of power and the right to take hafta in a particular neighbourhood. The Thackerays are not all that different from the Corleones.

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To his credit, Rahul Gandhi has made the right noises, spurning positions in government even as he speaks of introducing inner-party democracy in the Congress. His mother had also chosen to relinquish the prime minister’s seat, and for that, they have my respect, and the benefit of the doubt. But here’s the thing: despite his being such a prominent politician, a probable future PM, we know next to nothing about what Rahul believes in or stands for. What are his views on economic reform? What does he feel about greater fedaralism and smaller states and more local self-governance? What are his recipes to tackle the many ills that ail our society, from poverty to corruption to (the lack of) universal education? What does he think is the most likely practical solution to the Kashmir problem?  In the US, he would have to spell all this out in some detail, in TV debates and otherwise. Here, barring a few bromides and soundbytes, he has offered little.

How odd it is that in this political marketplace, we, the consumers, know so little about the products and brands we have to choose from. To a large extent, the fault is ours. We need to be more demanding of the people who take and squander our taxes. But our daily lives have enough to occupy us, and apathy comes easy. Isn’t that so?

Such a Wrong Journey

This is the 24th installment of Viewfinder, my weekly column for Yahoo! India, and was published on October 14.

You have to feel sorry for poor Rohinton Mistry. A few years ago he cancelled a book tour in the US because on its first leg, “as a person of colour he was stopped repeatedly and rudely at each airport along the way – to the point where the humiliation of both he and his wife [became] unbearable.” This was in the aftermath of 9/11, with racial profiling in full swing and Mistry, brown and bearded, having the wrong kind of looks. Still, he could have consoled himself with the thought that the US isn’t where he’s from, and he would never be treated that way in Canada, where he lives, or in Mumbai, where he was born. Right?

Ah well. While Mistry in person hasn’t been harrassed, his Booker-nominated book, Such a Long Journey, was recently withdrawn from the Mumbai University syllabus because of a protest spearheaded by Aditya Thackeray, the 20-year-old grandson of Bal Thackeray. Thackeray Jr., who is being launched in politics as the head of the Yuva Sena, a youth wing of the Shiv Sena, reportedly instigated the student wing of the party, the Bhartiya Vidyarthi Sena, to launch a protest against the book. The reason, according to the BVS chief, was that the book “uses extremely obscene and vulgar language in its text and also makes anti-Sena remarks.” The university’s vice-chancellor, presumably not wishing to be beaten up by Shiv Sena thugs, duly took it off the syllabus.

Thackeray Jr. justified his decision in an interview to Mid Day saying, “It is a question of people’s sentiment and India is a very sensitive country. There is a man (Balasaheb Thackeray) who has millions of followers and the author insults him purely on the basis of his own opinion and not the facts. That is where the problem lies.” Watch the video of the full interview on that page, it’s fairly amusing—and also quite scary. When Thackeray says, “You can’t just abuse someone,” it’s not just the immature voicing-off of a random 20 year-old kid, but a portent for the future, from the inheritor of a political party that uses intimidation and thuggery as its political weapons of choice. True, it is not the only party doing so—but it is the primary party responsible for what my friend Salil Tripathi, in an excellent column published today in Mint, calls “Bombay’s decline into Mumbai.” This is what we are becoming, and these are the people who will take us there.

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The Sena does not have a monopoly on intolerance: instead, it is actually written into our laws, and in our constitution, neither of which respect free speech. (I’ve been writing about this for years, for example in my old piece, ‘Don’t Insult Pasta.’) The Indian Penal Code, framed by the British in colonial times, contains a number of laws that make giving offence a crime, and throttle free speech. For example, there’s Section 295 (a), which makes it a non-bailable offence to “outrage religious feelings or any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.” There’s Section 153 (a), which seeks to punish “any act which is prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony between different religious, racial, language or regional groups or castes or communities”. There’s Section 124 (a), which prescribes life imprisonment for anyone who “by words or expression of any kind brings or attempts to bring or provoke a feeling of hatred, contempt or disaffection towards government”—something that any critic of any government could be accused of.

The constitution, framed not by the British but by the freedom fighters who got us independence, cops out when it comes to free speech. While Article 19 (1) (a) pays lip service to it, Article 19 (2) lays out “reasonable restrictions” such as when it applies to matters such as “public order” and “decency or morality”, matters which are, of course, open to interpretation. I’d love it if we had something like the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which contains no such caveats—but sadly, we don’t.

Adults should not run around complaining about the words of others. Even in school, the kid who ran to the teacher demanding that the boy who called him a monkey should be punished was laughed upon by everyone. But in our public life, it has somehow become quite okay to complain that someone who has offended you should be punished. If giving offence is a crime, then free speech is impossible, because anything you say can potentially offend someone or the other. And people who take offence so seriously are demeaning both themselves and the entities on behalf of which they are getting offended.

If Bal Thackeray is indeed such a great figure, then why should the words of one Rohinton Mistry bother him? Are any of our religions so fragile that they need to be protected from the criticism of mere humans? God, if He existed, would no doubt be exasperated by the things humans do on His behalf. “Am I so powerless?” I can imagine him asking. “Am I so petty? Jeez, you humans suck. Stop this videogame already.”

My fellow Yahoo! columnist Nitin Pai coined a term a few years ago that I find very apt: Competitive Intolerance. It’s become a rising trend in politics in recent years, especially in Mumbai, where the Shiv Sena and the MNS, with their warring Thackerays, are constantly finding grievances to complain about. These have nothing to do with the state of public services or infrasructure or poverty or any of the urgent issues that should concern us all, but silly things like mere words in a book. Like, really, come on.

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It, of course, remains a lasting matter of shame that India, the world’s largest democracy, was the first country in the world to ban The Satanic Verses. Until that ban is reversed, do not tell me that India is a free country. We accomplished part of the job in 1947—but much remains to be done, in so many different areas. Sadly, most people don’t care. Do you?

The Pursuit of Friendship

This is the 23rd installment of Viewfinder, my weekly column for Yahoo! India, and was published on October 7.

Money can’t buy you love—but it can rent you friendship. I was taken aback yesterday by an interesting report on the BBC website about how “friend rental services are launching in more and more countries.” The report focuses on one such service named Rentafriend, which was originally launched as a “a friendship-cum-social networking site, designed to take advantage of the fact that nowadays people often live far away from where they grew up and work long hours, leaving limited time to meet new people.” It is “explicitly stated” on the site that it is “not … a form of escort or dating service,” which the report bears out.

To use the service, you need to sign up, pay a membership fee, and browse for a friend who you’d like to hang out with. You then rent their time, paying for all expenses incurred while you’re spending time with them—like buying them coffee or tickets to a movie. Then, when the meter runs out, you bid them goodbye—or maybe take an appointment for another hangin’-out session.

At one level, this seems weird and pathetic. How sad does your life have to be if you need to rent a friend? And yet, there is clearly a market for this, and it is not hard to see why. You could move to a place where you have no friends, and no social outlets for making new buddies. You may want to chat and hang out with someone without invisible strings attached, the pressure of needing to fit in or be interesting, or the subtle social tensions that dog most of our interactions. After all, if there is nothing unusual in paying for sex, why should it be so weird if we pay for ‘friendship’? In a world where nothing lasts forever, and everything sometimes seems contrived, what’s the difference between friendship and ‘friendship’?

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When I read the BBC report on my netbook, I was sitting in front of my television, the volume on mute, waiting for a commercial break to get over and for Bigg Boss to resume. I don’t watch much television, but every year, I religiously follow Bigg Boss. This does seem rather low-brow of me, but I have a rationalization for this. Pundits say that the purpose of art is to reveal the human condition, and in my view, few things reveal it quite as well as a bunch of disparate people shut up in a house for a few weeks, away from the rest of the world.

Sure, they know there are cameras around them, and they are performing for the cameras. But we know they know this, and their carefully constructed artifice is as revelatory of their true nature as the cracks they carelessly leave. As the weeks go by, and they get used to their new environment, we see more and more of the people they really are—and find that our celebrities, whatever they may be celebrated for, are as petty or vapid or insecure or mixed-up as, well, us. That’s the human condition.

Since we’re on the subject, it’s also interesting to see how friendships form inside the Big Boss house. As in the outside world, inmates are drawn to people of similar social backgrounds or interests, and form alliances based on strategic considerations and conveniences. But it’s a zero-sum game, and you only win if everyone else loses. The real world isn’t like that, though we sometimes treat it as it is. So would a friendship you build on a show like Big Boss be as genuine and long-lasting as, say, one that you form in your office? If not, why not?

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While I was waiting for the Bigg Boss commercial break to get over, reading that BBC story, I also had the Pokerstars client running on my machine, and was waiting for a Pot Limit Omaha Hi/Lo Sit & Go to get started. I play much more offline than online these days, though, and the people I spend the most time with, therefore, are fellow poker players. Most of them do not share any of my interests or obsessions (except poker), but I think I can safely say I’ve made a few new friends among them. That is a bit unusual, because we meet in a zero-sum environment, for the sole purpose of taking money off each other, and spend most of our time together trying to deceive the other person, and to make them believe our lies. Unlike in other social interactions, though, this is explicit. Still, cash games at the stakes I play can get intense and personal, and there is an uncomfortable edge to some of these friendships. It’s a whole new dimension.

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Who says men can’t multi-task? While I was waiting for Bigg Boss to resume, the Pokerstars Sit & Go to begin, as I read the BBC story, I had Facebook open on another Firefox tab. As of now, I have 846 Facebook friends—and I admit that I haven’t met many of them in meatspace. It could be alleged, as William Deresiewicz does in this superb essay on friendship, that I have allowed Facebook to turn my friends into “an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public.” According to Deresiewicz, Facebook turns friends into “simulacra of my friends, little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.” When we leave a status update on Facebook, he adds, “we address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud.”

I get his point, but I think he addresses a straw man. I use Facebook quite a bit, and I don’t believe that I, or any Facebook user, takes the ‘friend’ part of ‘Facebook friend’ too literally. (It’s just a term we use, and we could easily say ‘Facebook contact’ or ‘Facebook connection’, except that that chaps at Facebook used ‘friend’ to begin with, which is warmer and, well, alliterates when used in conjunction with Facebook.) Facebook friends haven’t replaced our meatspace friends, but added a new dimension to our friendships (and other social relationships), by giving us an additional way to stay in touch with what’s happening in our friends’ lives, and updating them on ours, without having to email them and ring them up individually. Given our typically busy lives, and the clutter of information around us, this is a useful service.

Also, I don’t think any of us are any less social because of Facebook. If I feel like going and hanging out with friends at a cafe, I do just that. I don’t say to myself, Hey, screw the cafe, let me sit at home and put status messages on Facebook instead. Who does that? Nobody. Straw man.

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Once this article is published, I shall post a link to it on Facebook and Twitter. Now tell me, in a pre-internet age, would I take Xerox copies of this article and hand them out personally to each of my friends? I don’t think I would—and if I did that on a regular basis, they would be justified in not wanting to be my friends any more. There are limits even to friendship.

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And here’s a possibly related piece: Society, You Crazy Breed

Let’s Talk About Sex

This is the 22nd installment of Viewfinder, my weekly column for Yahoo! India, and was published on September 30.

Location: A small preview theatre in South Mumbai. Characters: Five members of the Censor Board for Cinema in India, and a young bespectacled man, his brows furrowed, looking younger than his years despite streaks of grey in his hair. They are watching a film called Lunch, Snacks aur Dhokla.

The film is centred around the instinct to eat, and the desire for food that is an undercurrent in all our social interactions. Through the film, hidden cameras show people engaged in the act of wanting to eat, plotting about eating, dreaming of food and, in a scandalous five-minute scene, two characters actually sitting at a table and eating food. It is a provocative sequence: two people, alone together with their desire, shamelessly, repeatedly, keep thrusting food into their oral orifices, and then chewing, chewing, chewing.

So far, the censors have been tolerant. Barring the occasional small change, such as asking that a clearly racist putdown of black coffee be chopped, they haven’t been demanding. But at the end of this bold scene, they ask for the film to be paused. The censors whisper among themselves, so softly that the director can practically hear his racing heartbeat. Finally, the chief censor asks the director to step forward.

“This is too much,” says the safari-suit clad optician. “We cannot have this scene. You must cut it.”

“But I’ve applied for an ‘A’ certificate,” says the director. “What’s wrong with it if only adults see it?”

“Our society is not ready for it. Even our adults need to be protected from themselves. We know what’s good for them, trust me. Cut that scene.”

The director swallows his pride, forgets all his logical arguments, and begs. This works. The censors allow him to keep half the scene. Five minutes becomes two-and-a-half minutes of raw, unrestrained, uninhibited eating. It is more than the director could have hoped for 20 years ago—but that’s poor consolation. He gets home just in time for dinner and, while having sex, starts crying.

*  *  *  *

The scene above is my reconstruction of what the film-maker Dibakar Banerjee might have gone through when the censor board saw his film Love Sex aur Dhokha, based on my friend Rahul Bhatia’s report in Open magazine. The only difference is that I’ve replaced sex with eating. This is a significant difference, and turns the scene at the censor board from one that is routine and expected to something surreal. And yet, in my view, it is absurd that this difference should exist.

Sex and eating are both acts that are central to our existence. We are hardwired for hunger and lust.  These are the primal instincts that drive us, and are at the heart of all our motivations. And yet, our attitudes towards them are so different.

We eat openly, and talk about food openly. It is not socially unacceptable to ask a friend of the opposite sex if she has tried the seafood risotto at the new Italian restaurant down the road—but ask her if she’s tried the reverse cowgirl position, and you’ll get some strange looks, especially if there are other people around. We can ask people out for dinner—and yet, not ask them casually if they’d like to have sex with us. (Though the former is often intended as a prelude the latter.) We have to find roundabout ways of getting to the point. (In evolutionary terms, the only point.)

We might admire foodies for their taste and discernment, but we look down on a woman who ‘sleeps around.’ (Indeed, the word ‘slut’ is a pejorative, which is so WTF.) We don’t talk about sex openly, and in some cultures more than others, feel embarrassed by public displays of affection. Most bizarrely, in an Indian context, we censor the depiction of sex in our movies, even in those certified for adults alone, as if we became a nation of more than 1 billion people by kissing with our lips closed. It is absurd—as absurd as the scene that begins this piece.

*  *  *  *

Thankfully, literature does not have to deal with the restrictions that film-makers face. Those battles were won long ago, and it is not uncommon for a mainstream novel to feature detailed and evocative descriptions of all kinds of sexual acts, with a straightforward frankness that most cinema, even in the West, cannot match. I say ‘thankfully’, because of a recent assignment I’ve just taken up: I’ve been asked to put together Electric Feather 2, Tranquebar’s follow up to Electric Feather, the groundbreaking anthology of erotic fiction from South Asia, which was edited by the novelist Ruchir Joshi. I’m excited by the task ahead of me, not just from the point of view of enjoying erotic writing, but also from a literary point of view.

The Indian subcontinent is a sexually repressed region which is just beginning to stumble towards modernity. This is a land where the 19th century coincides with the 21st—and they often share a bedroom or a head. Sex is one of the major fault lines in our society, and a literature that attempts to capture these times will, at some level, have to enter that territory. An anthology of erotica from the subcontinent is, thus, much more than a chance to create a naughty collection that you can read in the loo: it is a serious literary project than can aspire to make contemporary readers sit up with the shock of recognition—and readers a hundred years from now to say, ‘Ah, so that is how it was.’

I’m already approaching writers I admire for submissions to the anthology. And I’m also open to new voices, or voices that I may simply not be aware of, in my ignorance. So if you are a writer and think you’d be interested in contributing, do write to me at amitblogs[AT]gmail[DOT]com.

*  *  *  *

It’s a little ironic that I should be editing this collection, because I find writing about sex immensely hard—only partly because of the absurdity of the act itself. As a fiction writer, I try to keep my writing at a minimal and functional level. I don’t have a taste for baroque, expressionistic writing, and I also do not like writing that shows a fetish for description. Given that writing about sex is usually descriptive, and often lushly so, I tend to skim over those bits when they pop up in books. The subject is such that you have to be pitch-perfect when you attempt it, and that makes it very hard. No wonder so many otherwise great writers have performed so ineptly at writing about sex, as a glance at the past shortlists of the Bad Sex Writing awards would demonstrate.

That said, I’d rather have the writers in this anthology overreach instead of holding themselves back. As in sex itself, if they avoid self-consciousness and just enjoy themselves, it should work out okay.

Not My Festive Season

This is the 21st installment of Viewfinder, my weekly column for Yahoo! India, and was published on September 23.

I write these words in my living room as a cacophony of drumbeats assails me from the streets outside. This is not an accompaniment of my own choosing: for the last hour, I’ve been listening to my iPod to keep the noise away. Sarah McLachlan, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, John Mayer, AR Rahman and Monsters of Folk have all tried their very best, but there’s only so much music one can listen to, and I can’t take the bloody drumbeats any more. “Go, thee, to the sea,” I feel like proclaiming, “and drown thee, just for me.”

It is not that I have anything against Ganesh Chaturthi per se. Ganesh Chaturthi was turned into a mass festival by Lokmanya Tilak for a reason: as Wikipedia puts it, “to bridge the gap between Brahmins and ‘non-Brahmins’ and […] generate nationalistic fervor among people in Maharashtra against the British colonial rule.” It seems that “the festival facilitated community participation and involvement in the form of intellectual discourses, poetry recitals, performances of plays, musical concerts, and folk dances.”

Well, where are the intellectual discourses, poetry recitals, performance of plays? For the common man, such as me, the festival is an endless array of disturbances, especially on Visarjan days, when hordes of people troop to the sea with their Ganesh idols, banging drums, blasting music, blowing whatever those local vuvuzela thingies are called. Besides the traffic being disrupted, the noise is deafening. Local laws prohibit public gatherings from playing music at night at a fraction of the decibel levels these blokes churn out, but where there is religion and cultural nationalism, what good is the law? If I take a procession down the street on Beth Orton’s birthday playing “Central Reservation” at half this volume, the cops will come and dunk me into the sea.

I don’t want to pick out just Ganesh Chaturthi: I’m an equal opportunity festival basher, and disapprove also of Holi (with its socially sanctioned hooliganism) and Diwali (with its severely polluting firecrackers, which once used to trouble bronchial ol’ me, though I’m no longer assailed by those issues these days). My issue is not with festivals per se, though, but the way they’re celebrated by some people. (Also, in the case of Diwali, one does see hazaar shopping, and for an evil capitalist consumerist like me, there is nothing better than the smiles on people’s faces after money well wasted. The women also dress up quite prettily, serving a reminder of how Indian women are so much better looking than Indian men—not a matter you will find me complaining about.)

It’s not just the festivals: any occasion of celebration in India, be it New Year’s Day or winning a cricket match, brings out the worst in many people. No doubt sociologists would have theories on the repressed Indian (male) masses letting loose at every chance they get, and there might well be socio-economic factors here, but I’m not going to pontificate on all that here. (Also, you might think I’m an elitist, trying to drown out the Real India [TM] with my noise-free Bose headphones, while farmers are dying in Vidarbha.) All I want is for the noise to end so I can get on with my life, and living near the sea is no longer a nuisance. Until next year.

*  *  *  *

Don’t you think there is something terribly poignant in hordes of people who live sad and sordid lives taking idols of their deity every year to the sea, dunking them there, continuing with their sad and sordid lives for 12 more months, without the divine intervention that should logically follow the dunking, and then rinsing and repeating? I know it could serve as a metaphor for the larger pointlessness of things, but isn’t this particularly pointless? Do these guys not get it? There’s no one up there, duh.

That said, modaks are okay. There’s always a flip side.

Overstepping the Line

This is the 19th installment of Viewfinder, my weekly column for Yahoo! India, and was published on September 2.

If you’re a cricket lover, the last week hasn’t been a good one. You can scarcely say, though, that you had no inkling. We’ve been through a matchfixing scandal before; some of the culprits got off easy that time, especially in Pakistan; much shadiness has surrounded Pakistan cricket for quite a while now. The incentives have been all wrong, and human nature is human nature. And the cat had grown too big for the bag.

What is tragic about last week’s events, though, is that they involve a boy. Mohammad Amir is 18. He was marked out for future greatness at 15. He was playing international cricket at 17—remember what you were up to at that age, and how callow you were. Amir must have been in awe of his senior team-mates, and of this new dreamlike world he was catapulted into.

It has been argued that the authorities should treat him leniently because of this, and because of his sublime talent. Ramiz Raja has said, “He is 18, with an impressionable mind, and if he has been keeping bad company, it’s possible he could have been drawn [into wrongdoing].” Geoff Lawson, his former coach, has this to say, “The first time I met Mohammad Amir was when he was 16, coming to an Under-19s camp. He comes from a small village near the Swat valley and was delayed by three hours because the Taliban had closed the highway. That doesn’t happen in this country. […] I will never condone any form of fixing, but we should consider that a cricketer might not be thinking of personal gain but of getting money to buy a generator for his village because they don’t have electricity.”

I share the sympathy for the boy—but his punishment, if indeed it is confirmed that he is guilty, should be based not on what is good for Amir, but on what is good for the game. Cricket has had enough of match-fixing, and to recover and maintain the sanctity of the sport, the ICC (and the PCB) must make sure that they set the right incentives. A past generation of cricketers got away easily with their wrongdoings. We can set it right now. A life ban for every player even peripherally involved with these happenings will send a message that even a 12-year-old won’t be able to ignore in future. It might then be clear that the risks of match-fixing outweigh the rewards. As Sambit Bal wrote on Cricinfo, “Mohammad Amir must either stand tall or never bowl a ball again. Nothing in between is acceptable.”

*  *  *  *

While it easy to condemn Amir’s actions, it is harder to stand on judgement on the boy himself. Given his humble background, his impressionable age and his questionable team-mates, he was doomed as soon as he stepped out on the field in Pakistan colours. Cricket, some purists say, builds character—but in such circumstances, how could Amir have found nobility or rectitude? Amir’s talent is magical, but we do not live in a fairy-tale world, and the boy is human.

And really, which of us can afford to be self-righteous about this. There is not one adult person in this subcontinent who has not, at some time or another, partaken in an act of corruption. Perhaps we’ve bribed a traffic cop, or given chai-paani to our local electricity guy, or slipped a hundred buck note to a low-level mandarin while getting our first ration card in a new city. Some of us might have misused the privileges available to us at our workplace, convincing ourselves that the infraction was so trivial that it did not matter in the larger scheme of things—just as a couple of no-balls here and there might have seemed to Amir when he first started down this road.

I’m not justifying Amir’s actions—if it is confirmed he is guilty, that should be the end of his playing career. I’m just saying that some of the moralising and self-righteousness seems excessive to me. As a species, we are petty and prone to jealousy and resentment, and we love it when the mighty fall—witness the delighted collective schadenfreude around Tiger Woods’s recent misfortunes, much of it from men whose loins ache when they think of Woods’s adventures. I see shades of that in much of the moralising around me.

*  *  *  *

And then, of course, there is the lament of the true cricket fan, robbed of his innocence yet again. (Like, what suckers we must be for that to happen again and again?) This is beautifully expressed by Prem Panicker, also Yahoo! India’s managing editor, in a post on his blog, ‘We know it’s so, Joe.’ Such it goes.

*  *  *  *

Let me also direct you to ‘No Cure for Corruption’, Yahoo! columnist Mohit Satyanand’s superb take on governmental corruption in India. I agree with his bleak prognosis. Corruption in India is deep-rooted, and almost impossible to eradicate. The problem here isn’t with a few crooked individuals, but with the system itself. To put it simply, corruption in government is a consequence of two things: One, government has more power over the common man than it should, and we know that power corrupts; Two, there is not enough accountability in an opaque system of government.

If the government gets out of those areas of our lives which it has no business controlling, the scope for corruption is reduced. An example of this is the telecom sector—once it was impossible to get a telephone connection installed without bribing a low-level MTNL operative, but after the sector was opened up to competition, well, who needs MTNL? Sadly, like a tentacular Cthulhu-like entity, the government still controls too many areas of our lives, and duly takes hafta.

Besides reducing the role of government to what is essential—law and order and suchlike—we could also make it more accountable by making it more local. The more decentralised government becomes, the closer the common man gets to actually having some influence on those who are supposed to be his servants. More accountability, more transparency, less corruption.

But again, if smaller government and decentralised governance are keys to reducing corruption, who are the only people in a position to make it happen? The people within the existing system, that’s who. And which way are their incentives aligned?

It’s an endless over of no-balls, that’s what it is.

Urban Planning—A Short Story

This is the 18th installment of Viewfinder, my weekly column for Yahoo! India, and was published on August 26.

Let’s take a break from serious column writing this week. Here’s a short story I wrote a long time ago that has just been published by Rupa as part of a collection of Indian short stories, Why We Don’t Talk. It’s called ‘Urban Planning’, and features, in a side role, Abir Ganguly, the narrator of my novel My Friend Sancho.

‘The commissioner will see you now,’ said Gaitonde, the secretary of the municipal commissioner of Mumbai, to Abir Ganguly, the journalist from The Afternoon Mail.

Ganguly walked into BR Sharma’s office. He walked up to his desk and offered him his hand. BR Sharma pretended to look at his mobile phone. ‘Sit down, Ganguly,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Sir, I need to ask you a question about the recent move of the Mumbai Stock Exchange from Worli to Vashi. I need to know if your office authorised it.’

‘Well, yes, we were told the stock exchange is moving, and we do not have a problem with that. We were told it will relieve pressure off the city center towards New Mumbai. That is a good thing.’

‘Well, sir, I am just coming from Vashi. From the stock exchange building.’

‘It’s ready already? The new building? How is it?’

‘The new building is the old building, sir.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The new building is the old building. The stock exchange has shifted, but not from one building to another. The Mumbai Stock Exchange building itself has shifted to Vashi. From Worli.’

‘The building itself? How is that possible?’

‘That’s what I’m here to ask you sir.’

‘So what is in Worli? Where, um, the building used to be?’

‘Sir, there is a Sulabh Shauchalaya there, and half of a public park. They used to be in Vashi.’

‘How can this be?’

‘That is what I am asking, sir?’

‘I will see for myself.’

*  *  *  *

BR Sharma got into his Ambassador with the deputy commissioner for urban planning, S Lokapally. ‘Bahubali,’ said BR Sharma, ‘Do you have any idea what is going on here?’

‘Sir, my name is Lokapally.’

‘Lokapally?’

‘Yes, sir. Lokapally.’

‘Ok. Lokapally, do you have any idea of what is going on here?’

‘No, sir.’

*  *  *  *

The ambassador stopped at where the gate of the Mumbai Stock Exchange used to be. There was a crowd of curious people being shepharded away by police. BR Sharma’s driver got out of the car, sprinted round to BR Sharma’s door, and held it open. BR Sharma got off, grabbed the belt of his trousers and, in an authoritative way that made it clear who the boss was, hauled it up by an inch. He really did need to go to the gym.

Oh, and the building wasn’t there.

As Ganguly had said, there was a Sulabh Shauchalaya and half a public park, with half a bench at one corner of it.

‘I have never seen anything like it before,’ said BR Sharma.

‘Neither have I, sir,’ said Lokapally.

‘Veeravalli,’ said BR Sharma.

‘Sir, my name is Lokapally.’

‘Lokapally,’ said BR Sharma, ‘I want to get to the bottom of this. Institute an enquiry. Set up a committee. I want to know how that building got from here to there without our permission.’

‘Yes, sir.’

*  *  *  *

Later that evening, the municipal commissioner, the police commissioner and the home secretary were ushered into the chief minister’s office.

‘I want to know, how this can happen?’ asked Raosaheb Mohite-Dholepatil, the chief minister.

‘It is most worrying, sir,’ said BR Sharma. ‘I think this is a law and order issue. Our police is supposed to guard our property. How come none of the policemen saw this happen?’

JP Fernandes, the police commissioner, bristled at this. ‘Urban planning is the direct responsibility of the municipality,’ he said. ‘If a building moves from Point A to Point B, the municipality is responsible. Had I been asked to provide forces to defend any of the buildings in the city, I would have done so. Mumbai’s law and order is the best in the country.’

‘The best in the country, my foot,’ said BR Sharma. ‘Now a building has gone, tomorrow the whole of South Mumbai will move to New Mumbai, and your policemen will be sitting on the kattas putting oil on their paunches.’

‘Now now, Sharmaji,’ said JP Fernandes, ‘this is most unwarranted. Why don’t you first keep your buildings in their place?’

Raosaheb Mohite-Dholepatil stepped in. ‘Calm down, men. This is not the time to fight.’ He turned to Pravin Deshmukh, the home secretary. ‘Pravin, the inquiry committee will take some time to give their report. But the press is hounding us for answers now. What are we to tell them?’

‘I have an idea, sir,’ said Deshmukh. ‘Let’s tell them that we ourselves shifted the building from Worli to Vashi. We will say that it was a planned move by us, which saves on construction costs. We will be enigmatic about how we shifted the building, and will say that we cannot reveal our methods, it is a state secret. And we should guard the new location of the building, to make sure that nothing happens to that.’

‘Good idea,’ said Raosaheb Mohite-Dholepatil. He turned to BR Sharma. ‘I would like you to speak for us at the press conference. And Fernandes, I want your forces guarding the Mumbai Stock Exchange round the clock. Okay.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the two men said together.

*  *  *  *

BR Sharma waited until the flashbulbs stopped going off. Then he read out the statement prepared for him by Deshmukh’s secretary, Vincent Lobo. Then he asked for questions.

Ganguly, who’d had his ear to his mobile phone until a minute ago, popped his hand up.

‘Sir, can you tell us if the municipality plans to shift any more buildings in this manner?’

‘No. I mean yes. I mean yes, I can tell you that no, we will not shift any more buildings for now. One is enough.’

‘Well, sir, I have just got news on my cellphone that the Air India building has shifted to Mahim.’

‘What?’

‘Yes, sir. The Air India building has shifted from Nariman Point to Mahim. It is now in the middle of the road at the start of the Mahim-Bandra causeway. In its place in Nariman Point, according to what my colleague just told me on the phone, is a traffic signal with a bird on it.’

‘A bird?’

‘Yes, sir. A bird.’

*  *  *  *

Raosaheb Mohite-Dholepatil was pacing up and down when BR Sharma entered his cabin.

‘Varma,’ said Raosaheb Mohite-Dholepatil. ‘Here you are.’

‘Sir, my name is Sharma.’

‘Ok, Sharma. Look, these bloody journalists are hounding me, and my press officer will get an ulcer like this. And the PM has been calling, and I don’t know what to tell him. I need an explanation. I need this matter sorted out. Should we conduct a puja?’

‘Sir, I’ve already set up one enquiry commission. I’ll set up another one.’ This was unprecedented in terms of efficiency. Two enquiry commissions looking into the same thing? Amazing.

‘And what will your enquiry commissions do, ask the buildings why they moved?’

‘Sir…’

‘I know all about your bloody enquiry commissions. I want answers. I want to know how a building can move from here to there. And did nobody see it? Mumbai never sleeps, Mumbai never sleeps, we are told. Well, somebody must have seen the building shifting. Find him!’

*  *  *  *

Three hours later, BR Sharma and Raosaheb Mohite-Dholepatil met again, this time in the police commissioner’s office. ‘We have a witness,’ said JP Fernandes. ‘He is waiting in the next room. He says he was staring at the Air India building when it moved.’

‘Why was he staring at it?’ asked BR Sharma.

‘What else could he stare at? Have you seen the other buildings there?’

The three men walked into the next room, where an old man in a dirty white kurta-pajama sat on a chair. His hair was ruffled. He clearly hadn’t bathed in many days, and the police inspector with him, Inspector Waghmare, held a handkerchief to his nose. (His own nose.)

‘So tell us the details now,’ barked Fernandes. ‘What did you see?’

‘Sir, I was sitting at the paanwalla opposite the Air India building, just about to put a paan into my mouth, when I heard a loud thud. I looked at the building. It was shaking.’

‘Shaking?’

‘Yes, sir. And then a lighting bolt appeared and hit my paan.’

‘A lightning bolt? Your paan?’

‘Yes, sir. And then Goddess Laxmi, the goddess of wealth, appeared before me in a silk Banarasi saree with lots of gold jewellery. She wore a red bindi on her forehead. She had a Rolex watch on her wrist. She had a twinkle in her eye.’

Raosaheb Mohite-Dholepatil looked at BR Sharma. BR Sharma looked at Raosaheb Mohite-Dholepatil.

‘She told me,’ the witness continued, ‘that all my good deeds had finally borne fruit, and she was going to make me rich beyond my wildest dreams. She was going to give me a prime parcel of land in South Mumbai. The plot that was behind her at that moment, in fact.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I said, but Deviji, there’s a building there.’

*  *  *  *

BR Sharma’s phone rang. It was his secretary. ‘Sir, Mr Lokapally says that the enquiry commission is gathered in the conference room. They are waiting for you.’

‘Let them wait,’ thundered BR Sharma. ‘I am the municipal commissioner of Mumbai. Let them wait. And, er, have you organised samosas?’

‘Yes, sir. The samosas are on their way to the conference room.’

‘I’ll be there in a minute.’ BR Sharma hitched up his belt, smoothened his shirt, patted his paunch consolingly, and headed towards the conference room. The samosas were already there, and many of them were being eaten.

‘You are here!’ said BR Sharma.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Lokapally. ‘We were waiting for you.’

BR Sharma grabbed a samosa and looked around the table. He was bad at names, but he knew what they all did. There was an architect, a civil engineer, an urban planner and the head of the Mumbai Stock Exchange at the table.

‘Tell me, gentlemen, what do you make of what has just happened?’

‘Sir, it is not possible,’ said the civil engineer.

‘What is not possible?’

‘Sir, the building shifting like that. It is is not possible. You see, buildings have deep foundations, and they cannot just…’

‘But it has shifted,’ BR Sharma exclaimed. ‘What do you mean it is not possible? It has happened.’

‘We should deny it, sir. We should deny it repeatedly, and after a while, people will forget about it.’

BR Sharma stared at him. Yes, that was the standard practice in public life. But not for something like this, surely. He turned to the architect.

‘Architect,’ he barked, ‘tell me, what do you think?’

‘Sir, it is too early to say. I agree with my esteemed colleague here that it is not possible…’ – he clearly hated his esteemed colleague – ‘but the building has shifted, and the matter must be examined. And we shall examine it. We are the committee. In fact, I suggest we constitute a fact-finding mission to Japan. I volunteer to head it.’

‘Why, have any buildings shifted there?’

‘No, sir, not like this. But their architecture is advanced. Their buildings are made to be earthquake-proof. Maybe if the stock exchange was made with that technology, it would not have moved.’

BR Sharma knew this was ridiculous. Junkets were good, junkets were healthy, but not at a time like this. He turned to the urban planner and asked him his opinion.

‘Sir, the shift is poorly planned,’ he said. ‘If I was carrying out such a shift, I would not have left half a bench in Vashi and brought the other half to Worli. We must find out who is responsible.’

BR Sharma sighed. He looked at the head of the stock exchange, whose name was SK Gindotra, he now remembered. Gindotra had been a classmate of his in school. He used to play badminton.

‘Gindotra, what about you? What hypothesis do you have?’

‘These samosas are damn good, Sharma,’ said Gindotra. ‘As for what hypothesis do I have, I have none. I don’t know how the damn building shifted. There are limits to my knowledge, and I accept that with great humility. But I do know this: you government people don’t have the slightest clue about what is happening. You are running around like headless chickens, and I am enjoying the sight. I just wish my bloody commute was suddenly not so long.’

BR Sharma looked at Gindotra, and a wave of affection rushed through him. Yes, the samosas were good.

*  *  *  *

Outside, the media wallahs gathered.

‘This is Ashok Brihanchaputlakumar from New Bharat TV,’ barked one young man into a TV camera. ‘We are gathered outside the municipal commissioner’s office in Mumbai – but who knows, we may suddenly find that the office has disappeared and is in Delhi now. No, dear viewers, I am not joking. All over Mumbai, buildings are going from one location to another. The Mumbai Stock Exchange has shifted from Worli to Vashi. The Air India Building is now in Mahim. No one knows how this has happened. No one saw this happen.’

Now he began to wail.

‘Is this the coming of kalyug? Is this a plot by Pakistan? Is this a plot by the CIA? The government owes us an answer, and we at New Bharat TV will get you an answer. We will wait here until BR Sharma comes out, and we will ask him some hard questions. For you! We will do it for you! For the nation! Our great India! We want answers! Aaaaanswers!’

At this point, Ashok Brihanchaputlakumar had an epileptic fit and passed out.

‘Sir,’ said Lokapally inside the building. ‘A reporter seems to have fainted outside.’

‘Go out and make sure he is taken to the newest hospital,’ said BR Sharma, ‘wherever it is.’

*  *  *  *

That evening, BR Sharma sat in the loo. If the chair in his office was his seat of power, the commode in his loo at home was the seat of peace and calm. No one could disturb him here.

But he wasn’t at peace now. Why were these buildings moving around like this?

The art of government, he had learnt early in his career, is the art of confidence. A government servant may not be in charge of a certain situation – but he must pretend to be. The public looks to the government to control the economy, to maintain law and order, to make sure everything in its cities and towns works. Often, governments may have no control over these things – and little understanding of them. Still, people have blind faith in governments, and if that faith is broken, all is anarchy.

So when a crisis comes, you need to signal to the common folk that you are in command, and are taking action. Make statements in the press; institute a committee; issue a show-cause notice to someone; or, if nothing else works, distract the media by raiding a dance bar. Do something.

BR Sharma had once been part of a committee that was investigating rising prices in Maharashtra. Among the nine members of that committee, eight had different theories about why prices were rising and how they could be countered. BR Sharma did not have an opinion on this matter. There were too many factors involved in such phenomena, and as long as Mrs Sharma did not complain to him about why onions were 25 rupees a kilo, he really didn’t care.

That committee didn’t actually end up doing anything. But the government said a committee was at work, thus showing that they were fixing the problem – and the next year, monsoons were good, and prices came down. The committee patted itself on the back, and went for lunch to the Taj, where BR Sharma had seven golden-fried prawns followed by half a sushi platter. He had a stomach upset the next day and did not go to work, because of which Mumbai stopped running, suddenly confused about what to do.

Now, again, there was a big problem and the people of his city had turned to its municipal commissioner. And BR Sharma didn’t have a damn clue about what to do. If this matter wasn’t sorted out quickly, people’s trust in government would disappear. Like a child who learns that there is no Santa Claus, the people of Mumbai would lose the faith – and they would never regain it.

BR Sharma made a face. His nutritionist had been right, he really did need to have more fibre in his diet.

*  *  *  *

The next morning, traffic was slower than usual. The road down Mahim Causeway that led to town was blocked because of the Air India building, and the load on alternative routes was immense. BR Sharma had foreseen this, and had reached office at seven-thirty, before the rush hour traffic became really bad. He had tossed and turned all night, and his eyes were red.

At 9.30, his mobile phone rang. He looked at the caller ID. It was Abir Ganguly, that damn reporter.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello, Mr Sharma. This is Abir Ganguly. You won’t believe this, but I am at Madh Island.’

‘Ganguly, you are calling me to tell me you are in Madh Island? What am I supposed to with that information? Why is it important to me? I am fed up of you!’

‘No, sir, this is important. It’s like this, five minutes ago, I was on my way to Worli. Now I am in Madh Island. That is because the Bandra-Worli Sea Link has now become the Versova-Madh Island Sea Link.’

BR Sharma gulped. Had he heard correctly? Was he dreaming?

‘Yes, sir, I kid you not, the Bandra-Worli Sea Link now connects Versova and Madh Island. And I really would like your quote on this matter, sir? Has this also been planned by the government? Why weren’t commuters warned about it earlier?’

‘The monsoons,’ said BR Sharma. ‘It must be the monsoons.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ said BR Sharma. ‘Look, I can’t comment on this till I set up an enquiry and we get more information on this. But I can tell you one thing off the record?’

‘What?’

‘The next time a building moves, please do not call me. Assume that I already know. I am the municipal commissioner of this city. I know everything.’

*  *  *  *

At noon, BR Sharma was in Worli, at the exact spot where the Sea Link used to begin. (Or end, depending on whether you lived in South Mumbai or North Mumbai.) With him were Lokapally, JP Fernandes and Raosaheb Mohite-Dholepatil.

‘I think we are ready,’ said Raosaheb Mohite-Dholepatil, looking up at the nearest street light. ‘Varma, switch it on.’

‘Sir, my name is Sharma.’

‘Sharma, switch it on.’

‘Mahakali, switch it on.’

‘Sir, my name is Lokapally.’

‘Lokapally, switch it on.’

Lokapally spoke into his phone, and the street light came on. The four men stared into the sea – as did their 40 or so minions there, who would not have dared to look elsewhere while their bosses were looking in that direction.

‘Nothing happened,’ said Raosaheb Mohite-Dholepatil.

‘Yes, sir,’ said BR Sharma.

‘This is the beauty of science,’ said Raosaheb Mohite-Dholepatil. ‘Now we know what does not work.’

He turned around and walked away. He had been told that just before the Sea Link disappeared, one of the streetlights there, which had been on a few hours longer than it should have been, had been switched off. Light off – Sea Link gone. Correlation – causation. So Raosaheb Mohite-Dholepatil wanted to see if turning the light back on would bring the Sea Link back. No such luck.

‘If a hen had laid an egg here just before the Sea Link vanished,’ said JP Fernandes to BR Sharma, ‘I wonder if our honorable chief minister would have tried to push the egg into the hen’s arse. What do you think?’

‘I don’t know. But I do know this: If there was a hen here this morning, it’s no longer here. It’s disappeared.’

*  *  *  *

From there, BR Sharma went home for lunch. There was nothing to be done. He had set up another committee that morning, but he was confident nothing would come of it. He had read all the newspaper reports on this subject, but none of them had the slightest clue of what could have caused this.

Some commentators were putting forth theories that pushed forward whatever agenda they believed in. Swami Ramdas said that God was punishing Mumbai for its immoral ways, and for its tolerance of homosexuals. TV Iyengar said that while the specifics needed to be examined, this was surely the fault of unbridled capitalism. MS Azmi blamed global warming. Ravikiran Sabnis said that this proved that government had failed, and that markets would fix this. And Govind Joshi said that this was all the fault of allowing migrant labour into Mumbai.

They were all mad. BR Sharma wanted to line them up in front of a wall somewhere and shoot them with a water pistol. Just like that.

‘I heard about the Sea Link on the news,’ Mrs Sharma said. ‘This is so strange. Are you all right?’

‘This is like you running off with the driver,’ said BR Sharma.

‘With Prem Singh? Why would I run off with Prem Singh?’

‘No, not you literally, and not Prem Singh literally. I mean, a guy thinks his life is just fine, then one day his wife runs off with his driver. All his certainties are shattered. He loses faith. This is like that.’

‘But have you seen Prem Singh’s face? He must be earning so little. Why would I run off with him?’

‘It’s an analogy,’ said BR Sharma. ‘Don’t take it literally.’

‘You are very disturbed. Why don’t you stay at home today and not go back to work? You need to rest.’

‘I think I’ll do just that,’ said BR Sharma. He had already put his phone on silent. He glanced at it: 279 missed calls.

Mrs Sharma set the lunch out on the table. Baingan ka bharta. Dal. Some chicken curry from last night. Chapatis. Rice. BR Sharma looked at the food and thought, how lucky I am. This was a good meal. He had a good life.

But he didn’t have an appetite, and after one-and-a-half chapatis, went to the bedroom to nap.

*  *  *  *

In his dream, he woke up to the sound of waves. He went to the window, and found that his house was in the middle of the sea. He ran around the house, to all the windows: they were surrounded by water. Mrs Sharma sat in the living room, knitting.

‘You know, I’m missing my kitty party because of this,’ she said. ‘My mother was right: I should not have married you. You are good for nothing.’

‘Your mother said that?’

‘Maybe not. But she should have. Now see where you’ve gotten us. Do you even know where we are?’

BR Sharma looked out of the window. No, he did not know where they were. But he could see the sun setting in the distance. He looked at his phone. No signal. They were stuck.

And in Mumbai, he knew, where his house had been, there was now a pool of salt water. He could imagine Lokapally standing outside it, dialling his number furiously. Oh, how he wished the phone would ring now, so he could pick it up and say, ‘Lokapally, Lokapally, I remember your name!’