Gosh yes, I’m thinking back to the heady days when I would blog regularly, fired up with the latest thing to stimulate the ‘muse within’, a newspaper report or conversation with an Indian friend maybe, some small roadside tableaux observed on the way home from work etc. These days however, the muse is sadly silent and this has helped me to understand how difficult it must be for people like newspaper correspondents who simply have to deliver the goods week after week. I take my hat off to them.
Having said all that, it’s the monsoon, I’m stuck indoors with only the World Cup on the telly and so I turn to writing to keep me from going mad…………
So where, exactly is the focus of my attention these days eh? Being in India it is probably not that surprising that it’s work, with all the manifold frustrations and trials that working with people who speak English but don’t understand my version of it ( here, ‘Yes’ really can mean ‘No’), in an economic environment where reducing margins and increasing competition fuel a single minded ‘cost saving’ culture and where the combined monsters of truly pathetic infrastructure and massively overbearing bureaucracy make everything soooo slooooow that sometimes I want to scream ( Hey, maybe I should, maybe it would do me good). But we’ve been here before huh? And that particular lode is pretty much mined out, so I’ll move on.
Being in India in the Monsoon, and in the Western Ghats during the strongest monsoon for eight years means that rain intrudes ( quite literally) into one’s life on a daily basis, rain and a myriad other forms of moisture related hassles. Mud, for example, is fairly high up on the list as the roads turn to rivers of mud spiced with pot holes , actually pot chasms would be more apt as whole lorries can disappear into some of them. Leave something lying around for more than a few minutes and it tends to become green and furry, clothes become damp whilst hanging in the wardrobe and one never feels completely ‘dry’.The effect of the lowering dark grey clouds on the already-not-particularly-
Mumbai is surely the fly-tipping capital of the world and I’m not talking about the occasional load of builder’s rubbish and a broken fridge or two behind a hedge on a quiet lane, despicable as that is, no, I’m talking about an organized ( laughably illegal) business that sees queues of lorries dumping anything from bio-medical waste to old chemical drums on pristine mangrove or straight into rivers. This is one of the businesses run by the mafia/politico axis that is omnipresent in India. These are serious dudes as well, you don’t mess with them, the police are in their pocket and any interference merits a bullet in the head so people just look the other way, the environment’s pants already anyway and so what harm does a few more thousand tonnes of crap matter? The results though, are the ‘iconic’ pyramids of rubbish that line the sides of roads everywhere here, in towns it is the pavements that are often used, with any sign of paving long since buried under broken sheets of plasterboard lovingly entwined with old syringes and decaying plastic bags. All this is then garnished by a pretty dusting of old fag packets and the small empty plastic bottles of cheap hooch so guiltily drunk by many Indian men.
And this brings me to India’s love/ hate relationship with Ethanol: Almost universally consumed ( by men at any rate) and yet universally condemned, it is widely advertised in the most gross manner, the usual, nineteen seventies approach being used with virtual guarantees of women, wealth and power emanating from these nasty little bottles of cheap whiskey and rum. The ghost of Ghandi stands impotent above everybody, as a reminder that alcohol consumption is bad, naughty, unethical, anti-religious, frowned upon, unhealthy, technically illegal and an all round Bad Thing, which makes its consumption associated with an almost catholic guilt , with surreptitious behavior, with ‘secrets’ and with a general condemnation by ‘right thinking, god fearing, upright citizens, whoever they may be and wherever they may be hiding. Bars are considered ‘bad’ places that nobody would like to be seen in, particularly women, and so are tucked away, but almost always heaving with men going about the serious business of getting drunk. After the glitzy advertising hoardings the most common face of alcohol consumption in India are the rag clothed drunks collapsed in the streets and the drifts of small plastic liquor bottles that gather in gutters. It is a ‘hidden vice’ here and in complete contrast with China where the consumption of alcohol is done in an open and celebratory manner. Drink in India is not generally drunk for pleasure, for the taste or for the enjoyment of social situations, it is done in an almost furtive manner and it is done with the sole aim of becoming intoxicated.
The only chink of light is the growing appreciation of wine by the moneyed middle classes, it’s somehow not seen as ‘Bad’ like beer and spirits but a rather refined behavior to be cultivated given sufficient disposable income. Interestingly, despite wine being made in India for several thousands of years, it is surprisingly not well understood. Perhaps it’s because of the difficulty of matching wines with Indian cuisine. One regularly sees hilarious articles in the ‘lifestyle’ sections of the newspapers on ‘how to drink wine’ and, just occasionally I observe people in restaurants trying to display these new found skills to rather amusing effect…. I have offered wine to a number of middle class friends who ask ‘how’ it should be drunk, can it be mixed with soda? Should it be ‘knocked back’ like a spirit? Quaffed like a beer? What sort of glass should it be drunk from? Interestingly most of them say ‘I like this very much’ on first tasting, but that maybe because I’m offering them ‘the good stuff’! My feeling is that in India the view is that its not as effective for getting drunk as spirits and is not thirst quenching like beer so what’s the point of it?
There are things I quite admire about the Indians approach to the law. Its seen as just another set of made to be ignored rules that are occasionally wheeled out to pursue some politician’s agenda or to garner a bribe. And if just about everybody flouts the law on a daily basis then the attitudes to it become, well ‘relaxed’ at the very least. We in the UK are pretty uptight about the law in may respects, and we obey it blindly the majority of the time. The Indian attitude tends to look at the law as a minor inconvenience in getting on with life. The result? Well, a kind of anarchy where the rich get away , quite literally with murder and everybody suffers from corporate greed, carnage on the roads, lazy and irresponsible service providers, advertisers telling the most enormous porkies, a lazy, incompetent and corrupt police force etc etc, but life goes on…. And many people think it is us who are the stupid ones, stupid for blind adherence to rules, stupid for not acting independently etc etc. Personally every visit to India makes me appreciate the fine judicial system and polite, hard working police force that we enjoy at home!
