Tuesday 20th February 2007: IRMA and Bhavnagar

Skipping lightly over my last morning in Ahmedabad, save to say I spent most of it in a grotty but amusing shopping complex buying a few necessities, next in line for relation is my visit to IRMA. The only way of getting there was on a crowded local bus which broke down halfway through the journey, forcing all the passengers to relocate to another crowded local bus. We passed through the unappealing-looking town of Nadiad, in the middle of its Shivratri celebrations, which featured the longest and most varied religious procession I have ever seen.
   Arriving in Anand, after a little confusion in trying to contact Arun, I got a rickshaw direct to the college gates, where I was greeted by Arun and Lalita. We went into the extremely peaceful and pleasant modern campus – all tasteful concrete, spartan lawns and palm trees – and joined Deepak and others for some tea. It was lovely to see them again and they were all jubilant at having finished their exams, scarcely a quarter of an hour before my arrival.

Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA)

Although Lalita had initially suggested a visit to a restaurant where we could get a “superfluity of Gujarati food”, in the end we joined the entire year group for a trip to an extremely swish cinema to see Eklavia, the latest Amitabh Bachchan hit. As a film it was nothing particularly special, although my enjoyment was enhanced a little by Lalita’s  running translation. However, I did enjoy it for the simple, surprising reason that it was filmed in Devigarh! There were a number of shots of a souped-up Delwara, the hillside “improved” by a series of non-existent chhatris (cupolas) that I guess were constructed out of polystyrene, or something similar, rather than simply computer graphics. That notwithstanding, it was very bizarre to see a place I had only recently left with such mixed feelings towards paraded in front of the nation on screen!
   Later on, Jatra, the post-exam “fest” (to borrow from hip Indian-journalese) began in earnest, with a run round the campus led by a student carrying a burning torch. This culminated at a grassy mound, where there followed a series of talks from several teacher-alumni, mainly about what a marvellous time Jatra was, how one should enjoy it to the full, maybe break a few rules creatively and, most importantly of all, never, never sleep. This was followed by “Grind”, the college disco, just outside the canteen. I joined in with alacrity, and got to meet a few more IRMAns, before heading to bed at two in the morning.

 "Grind"

   The next few days were a feast of organised and highly competitive fun, a world away from the kind of post-exam celebrations I have been brought up on. IRMA has nine blocks (A – I) and every event was in the form of a competition between the blocks, ultimately leading to an overall Jatra winner. I was staying in I-block, but as I assumed the role of Arun’s guest I was claimed by F-Block and, to an extent, C- Block, Lalita’s block. In reality, I maintained a strict impartiality and didn’t actually participate in any of the competitions and in fact acted as one of the judges for two events – “Mock Rock” and a fashion parade. Mock Rock required blocks to act out the role of a rock band to the backdrop of a Western rock song (lyrics required to be in English). No instruments were allowed, so everything had to be represented by props – amusingly-shaped polystyrene guitars, buckets covered with cloths as drums, some quite impressive cardboard keyboards and some hilarious microphones. Best of all was the sight of Manish, a second-year from Bangalore and a truly nice guy, mouthing into the silver foil-wrapped end of a long pole that bobbed up and down behind him during his energetic head-banging routine.
   The panel consisted of me and two of the professors, one of whom, a Tamil, was a veteran of many Jatras as both teacher and a student and consequently liable to preface his remarks with “In our day we used to...”. We had to judge on various criteria, including overall look, props, choreography and co-ordination. D-Block won hands down. Out of the nine entries, seven featured Death Metal music, which is perhaps a disturbing reflection on the tastes of the cream of India’s youth. One was called “Highway to Hell” and charted a course “from addiction, through destitution to eventual death” which sounds terribly funny in a posh Indian accent…
   The fashion show was equally entertaining, involving Brazilian carnivals, “Colours of the Rainbow”, a piece called “Death and Addiction” and plenty of others. “There is always some element of doubt” whispered the Tamil professor to me, “as to whether this is a fashion parade or a dressing-up contest!”. It started not long after 9pm and after several rounds and many cups of tea brought obligingly for the panel, wound up at 1.20am! Other events included a controversial tug-of-war, which almost turned into a real war due to some confusion between F-Block and I-Block, and “Mock Press”. This latter had the most highly charged atmosphere of all. Each block had to provide a celebrity and a three-person press panel. The press panel of one block interviewed another block’s celebrity and overall the blocks were judged according to various criteria, of which the chief seemed to be the amount by which their celebrity could make the audience rock with laughter.
   Celebrities included Bal Thackeray, the founder and chief of the right-wing Maharashtrian Shiv Sena party; Himesh Reshamiya, a singer famous for his nasal tone (replicated by his impersonator tightly holding his nose and singing the opening of one of Reshamiya’s hits); a Bollywood star whose name I forget; and two versions of Lalu Prasad Yadav, the ex-Chief Minister of Bihar, always considered a buffoon, but now revered as a saviour in his new incarnation as Railways Minister (and recently caught in a controversy after his parents-in-law were fined for not having railway tickets). Throughout the performances the audience shrieked with laughter and cheered and even, in the case of one poor impersonator of Jayalalitha, the former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, started jeering “Boring! Boring!” There seems to be a distinct lack of basic respect in some situations that I’ve noticed all over India which is at odds with the extremely deferential, hero-worshipping sort of respect that is so common in
other situations. I cannot really imagine this sort of dressing down happening at a similar event in an equivalent university in England (and we’re talking top end here – maybe Oxbridge or one of the London colleges). Far more likely would be an embarrassed silence. In this case, apart from the questions being uninteresting, and the girl not being a very good actress (and perhaps not very popular?) the problem was probably due to the fact that most of the audience was North Indian, and
apt to view the South almost as a separate country and was probably unfamiliar with the politics and culture being sent up in this act.
   Most successful of all the acts was an A-Blocker called Priti, who parodied Rabri Devi, Lalu Prasad’s illiterate wife, who became a puppet Chief Minister of Bihar for some time. Although I couldn’t follow anything she said, her imitation was clearly excellent, because everything she said brought the house down – “She’s too good!” the girl next to me shrieked. Of course I’d have loved to have had the linguistic and cultural wherewithal to really understand this, but the atmosphere alone was exhilarating. After the acts were finished and the judging done, Priti was asked to give an encore, so she came up, made some more (evidently spot on) Rabrisms, and then asked for her husband to join her. “Which one?” everybody screamed as both the Mock-Lalus came up onto the stage. “Kaun banega Rabri-pati?”  (Who’s going to be Rabri’s husband?) somebody asked, in a rather clever play on “Kaun banega crorepati?” , the Indian version of “Who wants to be a millionaire?”.
    Although Arun acted as my principle host, and I was often introduced as his friend, I spent a lot of time with Lalita as well. I really wish I had time to get to know her a lot better, as she is one those rare individuals who don’t fit in any of one’s preconceived ideas of human types. She seems to come from another mould altogether from the “traditional” young Indian women I have met and, although aspects of her character reminded me in weak, unspecific way of certain friends in England, she cannot be glibly be explained away as “Westernised”. She is not conventionally beautiful, far less so “pretty” in the familiar Indian shy, serene or sophisticated models, but she is ebulliently alive – humorous but often a little cross, or at least vigorous, about something. When I think about her, I can’t honestly remember a time when she seemed entirely at peace and relaxed, although she gives off a sense of being comfortable with her own body that is attractive in its own highly original way. This manifests itself particularly in an unusual degree of tactility with her friends of the opposite sex, including me. We would often sit with our arms around each other which, common enough in an Indian male-male or female-female context, is extremely unusual (as far as I have observed) between boys and girls who are no more than friends. In Lalita’s case, the friends she seems to attract and surround herself with tend to be male. There were several IRMAn guys who I suspected fleetingly must have been her boyfriend given the closeness apparent between them, although I later learnt that this was not the case. I was glad to see that, away from the context of Udaipur, her friendship with Arun still seems to be one of the strongest of all. She also has a close, and I suspect volatile, friendship with the delightful Manish, a long-haired, proudly South Indian, second year from Bangalore who, despite looking like a model environmental activist, told me he wanted to work in a multi-national in Bombay or Delhi once he graduated from IRMA.
  I would have liked to have seen more of Deepak and Dhanwant, but I managed at least one reasonably long conversation with each. I paid a visit of homage to Karan’s room on the first evening, although he is too clever not to have realised that this was more out of a sense of duty than a genuine desire to spend much time with him. Away from the irritations of daily life with him, I wanted to try once more to like him, but ended up coming away with more of a sense of pity. He seems unhappy, and the others told me that he keeps himself to himself. They claim that everybody tries hard to include him, but it is not hard to see that he induces the same feelings in others as he does in me, and once they set in, it is difficult to override them and pay anything more than lip service to this idea of inclusion. I remembered how he told me in Kojawara that he had never formed the kind of friendships in IRMA that he had in his beloved hometown of Dehra Dun, accusing the IRMAns of immaturity. He assured me that my visit had had “some lifting effect” on his mood, but I find that very difficult to take seriously.
   Of the new IRMAns I met, most notable were Manish, who I have already mentioned and Pandikumar, Arun’s neighbour, a bubbly, likeable 20-year old who was the youngest student on the campus. Also Anjali, a lovely Keralite who roped me into judging the fashion show, and who Lalita insisted was trying to “woo me to get chocolates from London” [23]. All three were part of a relatively small brigade of South Indians, who, while all part of different friendship circles, seemed to have a strong sense of community among them. One morning Manish and I breakfasted on dosa from the canteen together, and he explained how it had taken collective action by the students from Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh to get South Indian food served a few times a week.
    Broadly speaking, almost all the students at IRMA came from the predictable well-off middle class backgrounds and spoke near-fluent English as well as Hindi (and in many cases, at least one local language as well). All seemed to have laptops on which they watched DVDs and listened to downloaded music. Campus dress seemed to be t-shirts (often an IRMA t-shirt) and jeans, with the occasional skirt or salwar kameez for the girls. I spotted a bottle of wine in one of the girl’s rooms (“Even we girls must let our hair down at times” explained Anjali with a smirk) suggesting that campus
life, in many respects, is reasonably similar around the world.
   A number of the people I met were from Gurgaon and the more I hear about the place, the more it intrigues me. Until recently it was a little more than a village just outside Delhi, but in the last ten or fifteen years it has attracted the kind of investment possible in the newly trade-liberalised-post-1991-economic-reform India and has mushroomed into a sort of barometer of India’s economic climate. Not least it has overtaken Bangalore as the “Call Centre Capital” of India, and there is even a book by a Chetan Bhagat called One Night @ the Call Centre about the night God calls a call centre in Gurgaon. More interesting than its feeble plot is the world it portrays – young, modern and thoroughly urban Delhites with relationship issues, divorced parents and depression, who drink alcopops and go clubbing but still eat dal fry and quarrel with guilt-tripping aunts in the bathroom queue about family and marriage.
   One suitably trendy Gurgaonite I spoke to – spiky hair and expensive clothes – referred to it as a “township”, which in India means a planned town, so generally the luxurious opposite of the Soweto-style townships of South Africa. Apart from affluent apartments, Gurgaon apparently abounds in multiplex cinemas, stylish restaurants and clubs, so that these days Delhites are going to Gurgaon and nearby Noida for their nightlife rather than vice versa. This is bolstered by the fact that Gurgaon is in Haryana state, where drinking laws are more relaxed than in Delhi Union Territory. Multiplexes – whatever they are exactly – seem to be another indicator of economic growth, on a par with fly-overs. If a city has multiplexes and fly-overs, then it is on the way up. Ludhiana, in Punjab, is apparently brimming with multiplexes and according to a prospective IRMAn I spoke to (up for interview, and enjoying Jatra in the process) it is well on the road to becoming India’s next metro city! This is largely due to the money coming in from the vast Ludhiani NRI (Non-Resident Indian) population in Canada.

 "Organised and highly competitive fun"

*

Leaving Anand and the privileged campus life of IRMA with a slight pang of sadness, I travelled on to Bhavnagar, in Saurashtra, the main belly of Gujarat. The prime motive for visiting Bhavnagar was to see the nearby town of Palitana, which boasts a hill in its vicinity, Shatrunjaya, that drips with Jain temples. Getting up the hill was a slog in the heat of the day, but just about worth it for the temples, which collectively form one of the holiest sights of Jainism. I looked at the wood rather than the trees since, while there were some impressive individual specimens, the real magic of the place is the impression it gives as a whole. The day wasn’t very clear and the views were not as spectacular as they might have been, although the endless flatlands around Palitana, receding into the haze, were quite something.

 Palitana

   Bhavnagar itself I found grimy and dispiriting at first, but warmed to considerably after a little time. The old town is far dirtier than Udaipur or Jodhpur, but underneath the grubbiness are attractive houses, many with wooden balconies. There is an immediately obvious “locked-in-time” feeling in the smaller streets and even in the few bigger roads, which, unlike Ahmedabad’s Relief Road, do not bring modernity into the heart of the old town.
   During my stay I grew partial to a beverage called “Chilled Boost”, a preparation of ice, milk, sugar and a powdered caffeine-based drink called Boost that I bought in a little shack presided over by an affable Muslim who seemed to regard his wares with considerable affection. Thus boosted, I made several forays into the life and thoughts of the town. Two features seem especially noteworthy. Firstly, the preponderance of supari (betel-nut) cutters, sitting outside their shops with big metal slicers that looked like they meant business, speedily converting a shiny betel-nut into a pile of slivers. While I assume this practice is not restricted to Bhavnagar, I can truthfully say I have never seen it before. Secondly, the Hindu iconography I saw on some temples had clearly been borrowed from European church sculpture, including a figure with angel wings, and a Durga that looked suspiciously similar to the Virgin Mary. I would be fascinated to find out more about this tradition.
   Modern Bhavnagar seems scarcely more connected with the world than the old town – such cyber-cafes, concrete blocks and fancy restaurants as there appearing rather lost in the prevailing atmosphere of parochiality.

*

A couple of news items from the last few days are worth discussing briefly. A few days back, the Samjhauta Express, a train running from Delhi to Lahore was set alight, gutting two carriages and leaving a number of people dead. Most of the people on the train were poor Muslim families who couldn’t afford the flight or the more expensive cross-border bus. They were either Pakistanis coming back from visiting family in India, or Indians going out to visit family in Pakistan. The fact that they were poor and Muslim has been made much of by the press, and a lot has been brought to light on the terrible condition of the train and the ordeal these families had to undergo to get onto the train in the first place.
   Current opinion is that this was a terrorist act, undermining the “Indo-Pak” peace process, perhaps specifically triggered by the Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri’s visit to India which began yesterday. Nobody is sure whether this is the work of Islamic extremists or Hindu extremists or any other groups, although so far the peace process doesn’t seem to have been affected greatly. Kasuri’s visit is still going on and the Samjhauta express is still running, albeit with heightened security. We’ll
see what happens in the next few weeks. So far, I’m not sure how far the incident has made its way into the international press.
   Other news headlines concern the deteriorating political situation in Uttar Pradesh under Mulayam Singh Yadav, with murmurs of the possible imposition of President’s Rule. There are even suggestions of splitting the state, such as the rather Dilipish “To Reform UP, Trifurcate it”. Another amusing headline about a very sad incident in today’s paper reads: “26-year old had died on the spot after another ST bus ran over her, absconding driver was latter nabbed”.

Footnotes:

[23] Everybody was very taken by the fact that I was shortly returning to England to work in a chocolate shop.