Book Reading and Intellectual Debate.

(15 Aug ’10)

            This was my first Book Reading cum discussion at a very up-market home in Mumbai. I’ve been for readings at the British Council, at Crossword, book launches in rented halls, open forums all. This was over Sunday lunch, everyone was stylishly turned out, articulate, westernized, certainly not the sort struggling for a living. I wondered, when they talked animatedly (no agitation here) about the religious divided amongst the educated middle class and the masses and so forth, whom they represented.

The author discussed and present with his latest book was Salil Tripathi. But this article has nothing to do with him or his work.

He read from the book. Then began the we versus they debate. It was interesting to note how intolerant they themselves were towards those they considered intolerant. I’m sure anyone who might have wanted to make a point in favour of regionalism or Hinduism or Islam might have been shut up or shooed away. No real democracy here.

‘We’ were the thinkers, the intellectuals, the secular, moderate, liberal, civilized folk. ‘They’ were the fundamentalists, the BJP, Bajrang Dal, Shiv Sena, anti-‘minority’ types. Then the conversation veered towards who exactly ‘they’ were. The experts here, none with an income of less than 3 lakhs a month, my guess, then proclaimed that the workers, the lower classes, were the trouble makers, but it was the middle classes, you know, the college-educated types who are so, well, backward in their thinking. I listened. I, an atheist, live in an area that has the Shiv Sena and the Maharashtra Navanirman Sena headquarters, which has in the past witnessed grave riots and is always manned by police, making it today a safe neighbourhood.

The more ‘we’ talked about freedom, the more I realized that living  in a locality where everyone dresses and talks alike, is a ghetto, no matter how phenomenal the cost of property in it. In my building, so close to the ‘fundamentalist’ buildings, I wear jeans and skirts, my next-door neighbour pulls a ghunghat over her face and yet, we’re neighbourly, we help each other’s families in a spell, receive couriered packages for each other, small but definite ways to live and let live and in no way feel threatened. We have the predominantly Catholic Portuguese Church area to our south and the Muslims live as they have done for over a century near the Mahim Dargah to our north.

In my building, the salaried educated rub shoulders with traders who have slogged it up the hard way from their villages to Mumbai and beyond. We don’t have a link language. No, not even Hindi, where elders are concerned. Some have told us they would prefer a pure vegetarian building, but we eat our meat and fish regardless, and everyone’s ‘adjusted’. But for survival, everyone gets along. It’s not morality, it’s practical. Everyone’s busy earning a living. They actually do go to vote. They raise a ruckus if something goes against their grain: they’ve been fighting tooth and nail for a cleaner beach, a quieter Shivaji Park and the senior citizens are taking the insurance company to court for not behaving themselves.

In contrast, those present at this talk were unlikely to get involved in community ‘Ganeshotsavs’. They would certainly not permit Ambedkar’s followers to flock by the lakhs anywhere near their buildings. The very middle-classes they were talking about actually allows a lot of things to happen which the upper-end may never permit near them.

There are areas, colonies, the debaters continued, where people don’t want others of another caste. I’m more than certain that non-English speaking, foreign accented, nylon-sari and rexine footweared women wouldn’t be welcome in the buildings of those present there. Class replaces caste.

All the children present spoke English, only English. If they spoke their mother tongue, it was still not the language of their thought processes. They studied Liberal Arts in the US and did projects with NGOs like The Civil Society or some such, which were ‘think tanks’, you know, for the country. They discussed healthcare in Cuba, the Singapore model and were glad that India wasn’t going the China way. Then back ‘we’ steered the conversation to religion, the politicization of religion, the way the masses treat religion, what is it that makes the educated middle-class so narrow-minded, why technically qualified people like doctors and engineers don’t have a wider vision…  I wondered, as I sat there, what if we asked the cooks and the servants in the kitchen what they thought? Perhaps they would have given us an answer.

I came away relieved. I was like a fish out of water there. They were well-read, with degrees gathered from different parts of the world, well-placed, hugely confident, eager to cite and demand their rights, owners of farmhouses that have flaunted regulations, people who will fly only business class, and pay good money to find loopholes in the IT Act…. I prefer the staid, untravelled, stretching the budget acquaintances I spend my days with… there’s something very real, very earthy, very Indian about them. They are the ones who voted Indira Gandhi out of power, who have trashed the fundamentalist parties, who have squashed riots and got on with their lives after bomb blasts and floods. They have neither the time nor the inclination to airily voice their views and yet not vote nor participate in morchas. I’m glad I belong where I do. I might have been miserable in an ivory tower.

Maybe there’s something wrong with me.

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