TWO
Ambition
We rang the doorbell of the old apartment on Carmichael Road. There was the pitter-patter of a servant’s footsteps, a glance through the peephole, and then the door flung open as we entered. The servant retreated, back flush against the wall, as if to make himself invisible. My parents and sister were in town, a few years after my arrival in India, and we were having breakfast at a friend’s home. The servant escorted us into the living room. Our hosts walked in; we chatted for a time, then moved to the dining room. Breakfast was omelets and toast and coffee, served in the Indian way: we ate as the servant scampered back and forth, serving. We raved about the coffee that the family trumpeted as the servant’s specialty, and he nervously, hesitantly accepted our praise.
We returned to my apartment, at which time I realized that I had forgotten to return a mattress we had borrowed from the same friends. I rolled it up and went back. I rang the doorbell. Our friends were no longer home, but the servant was around. The peephole opened, revealing a skeptical, wary eye. “Who is it?” he barked with a new hostility in his voice. I thought that my identity was obvious to him, so I spoke only of my mission: I had a mattress to deliver. The door opened, but this time with no back against the wall. With impatience on his face, he continued his barking, commanding me to place the mattress over there, quickly. He had switched to calling me “tum” instead of “aap,” the more respectful form of “you.” I was puzzled and gently amused.
Then it hit me. He didn’t recognize me. He assumed that I was a deliveryman, perhaps because I had changed into a T-shirt and shorts, perhaps because most respectable Indians would not carry a mattress themselves. As he grimaced and waved for me to leave, I locked eyes with him and reminded him of our breakfast a brief time earlier. And then I witnessed a metamorphosis that I will never forget: he shriveled before my eyes from master to servant. His erect body deflated; his shoulders slouched; his head bowed down; his eyes reclaimed their unthreatening docility; his flailing arms returned to his sides. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. OK, sir. Sorry, sir,” he muttered in rhythmic succession. A few seconds earlier, he had been the man and I the boy, in the Indian way; now he was the boy again, begging for my forgiveness, hoping I would tell no one, terrified, reverent.
I had a privilege that morning that I never knew before or afterward. I saw the truth of what it means to be Indian, an ordinary Indian, not a foreigner like me, not an educated elite. I had felt impotence and then omnipotence in the same minute; I had gazed up from, and then down into, the Indian abyss. For the Indians around me, it was the calculus that governed life: Am I his sahib or is he mine? Who should shout at whom? Whose body must apologize for its presence and whose must swagger? Whose eyes must stay down? Who can use “tum” and who “aap”? Who must hide his hands behind his back and who can gesticulate with them?
The only anomaly that morning was that an Indian had made a mistake in this calculation. It was a mistake Indians rarely made. There was no more urgent knowledge in India than the knowledge of one’s place, and to commit such an error with any frequency was to risk one’s survival.
* * *
To my childhood eyes, the starkest difference between America and India was always servants. In America we spent a fair amount of time rinsing our own plates and loading the dishwasher. We mowed the lawn and trimmed our own hedges. We mounted ladders to replace lightbulbs and spent Saturdays assembling IKEA furniture. My mother cooked hot dinners night after night and drove my sister and me everywhere we needed to go. It was the American way of life, and it all seemed normal, even inevitable, until our vacation journeys to India.
There we encountered a new kind of human: the servant. This was not a housekeeper or cleaning lady or chauffeur. Such words belong to someone treated as a professional, hired to turn up, perform a discrete task, and leave. The servant, unlike such professionals, lived in his masters’ home, usually had family far enough away as to consume little of his time, ate his masters’ food, and responded to their every shout, day or night. He was trained to sublimate his own sense of time to that of his masters, to know the precise moment to bring them tea in the morning or to serve them dinner during their favorite soap opera. And, because he came from the countryside and had few connections, he had little choice once hired but to stay.
These servants, I began to observe, were not people who just happened to have fallen into this work and whose children might just as readily rise out. Servitude was almost genetic. Servants had different physiologies, looking younger than their years from hunger until their late teens, then older than their years under the strain of wrenching work and a lack of medical care. They carried themselves differently, stooping before their masters, hands behind their back, fear and worship in their eyes. They agreed with whatever the masters had to say. Masters ate vegetables and meat at dinner; servants’ plates were covered with rice and lentils. At first, I cringed when the lower-caste sweeper woman came to my grandparents’ home in Delhi and scuttled on the floor in a permanent, self-deprecating squat when she cleaned; then, like anyone with enough hours in India, I, too, stopped seeing her. When the nanny who raised my mother returned to Delhi many years later to offer a final farewell to the family, she sat beneath us on a stool as we all sat in bed, even though she was in her eighties, even though she had come on the belief that she would soon die, even though we, like so many Indians, told ourselves that she was not a servant but was “family.”
The hierarchy that seemed so new to me was, of course, a very old fact of the world, from European feudalism to American slavery to Russian serfdom. But in India it was inextricable from the institution of caste, which for millennia had ordered Indians to lay bricks if born bricklayers, to skin cattle if born cattle skinners, to preach if born priests, and to do these duties without complaint or protest, knowing that the reward in a future life would be proportional to one’s degree of acceptance in this one. The caste system stacked the cattle skinners below the bricklayers and the bricklayers below the priests, and ensured that the designations were reflected in family names. In theory, anyone from a low caste could hop on a train, cross over to the other side of the country, and launch a new life where no one knew his caste. It is testimony to the fierce psychological power of caste that this kind of “passing,” as anthropologists call it, was taken up by so few Indians.
But in modern India caste was no longer what it once was. Untouchability, the heart of the evil, which dictated certain castes to be so low as to be impure and untouchable, had been outlawed before my parents were born, and over the course of their youths India had taken long strides toward dismantling the regime. The country had set aside millions of government jobs and university seats for the lower castes; its laws were used to punish and deter acts of “casteism”; its democracy had gradually made space for the leaders of the trampled, such that many Indians now asserted their low-caste status as a badge of solidarity and pride. In the villages, less touched by these changes, caste endured: many still knew and cared who was who, and many still performed jobs related to their caste. In the cities, when riding on a bus or working in an office or hiring a servant, in my parents’ time and certainly now, people were often unaware of the caste of those they dealt with, and they often didn’t care. But even in the cities, below the surface of polite conversation, life was easier or harder for many because of caste. What endured of the caste system, then, was not the rigid classifications themselves but a shadow of the theory behind them: an intuition in the Indian mind that humanity is tiered, that some are born as masters and others are born to serve them.
In the new Indian hierarchy, a waiter in a restaurant might be a Brahmin and his customer an untouchable: that much, at least, had been shaken up. But the customer will still speak to the waiter in the way their roles—if no longer their castes—have traditionally required: snidely, dismissively, without empathy. And the waiter will listen and absorb and smile and bob his head in the way that servants have always done.
It was this diluted, casteless regime of caste that I discovered upon moving to India. In the elevator at McKinsey’s office in Bombay, I noticed the men to be of two heights. There were the executives and the deliverymen. The executives were a foot taller, on average. Their faces seemed fuller, their features better formed. They were without limps, body lumps, or skin discolorations, for they had the means to treat such things. The deliverymen were darker, more deformed, worn down by their own histories. They had bowlegs, lazy eyes, misshapen fingers. Because they were mostly just bone, their feet and hands were large for their frames, giving them the proportions of skeletons more than living men. And, of course, it was not just the deliverymen, but their brothers and sisters everywhere. The lowly police constable directing traffic, his waist the circumference of a rich man’s thigh, a man of the law projecting no authority and inspiring no fear. The waiter in the elegant restaurant, his tuxedo too loose for his undernourished frame, bowing and groveling and overdosing on the word “sir” as he serves. The helpers in the restrooms in five-star hotels in Bombay, saluting as you approach the sink, turning on the tap, squeezing soap into your hands, dangling a towel and saluting again and muttering, “Right, sir. OK, sir. Thank you, sir.” The servants in the posh apartments on Nepean Sea Road in Bombay who work inside by day and sleep in the outside hallway by night, never trusted, men who clean the toilets within but are not permitted to use them.
In encountering these scenes as an outsider, my first reaction was a mix of revulsion and pride: revulsion at the degradation all around and pride at my own marvelous sympathy. In watching the apologetic waiter or scuttling sweeper, I would tell myself that, where I come from, I would never treat anyone like this. Maybe I was right. But Indians would always tell me, when I put it to them, that I didn’t understand, that there was no choice here, that I was being idealistic. And then time wore on, and what once repulsed me slowly became normal, and then it slowly became my own. I found myself lapsing into the attitudes of old India. For the first time in my life, I had my own, part-time servants. Our relations were warm and professional. I gave them overall instructions but left them free to make decisions. I learned about their families and joked around with them. But over time I also felt myself becoming more dismissive, more ready to snap at their mistakes or to deem them slothful or forgetful. First I stopped turning my head to give my maid eye contact when thanking her for doing a task for me; then I stopped thanking her at all, just nodding or grunting in the smug way of the privileged. I began to harden, to become ruder and less patient with those who served me, to omit apologies and expressions of thanks.
After getting a haircut one evening, I hailed a taxi in downtown Bombay. I got in, but when I stated my address the driver refused. I needed him to turn right under the Kemps Corner bridge, but it was time for his shift change and he had to get the car to his night driver, who was in another direction. He asked me, politely, to find another cab. I knew that there were few out at rush hour. It was hot and muggy. I felt the frustrated anger, deepened by heat, that so often comes in Indian cities. So I refused to move and insisted, and he argued and raised his own voice, and I raised mine further and bullied him; finally he turned right under the bridge and wove himself into the traffic jam that he knew would come if we followed this course.
Now he said nothing further. And in the new silence I heard the small, glowing machine on his dashboard that was playing the Gayatri mantra, a simple Hindu religious chant asking for guidance from divine wisdom, repeated over and over, cyclical and soothing as a lullaby. I had screamed at the man. The horns now screamed at him. The night-shift driver would surely scream at him. His mother might scream at him later that night. For now he had only those gentle, lilting words, and their ability to remove him from the present moment, a transcendence essential for surviving in a world like his.
I felt a sudden pain in my chest, the pain not of this one indignity he had endured but of what must have been many gathered years of them. It came from seeing him as a person, and from realizing that he had been less than that to me a moment earlier. Now that I saw him so, I felt like crying. I saw that my own deed was only one of so many ill deeds he had borne. I had exposed a chasm that was too terrifying to explore. And in that moment I saw more clearly than before the source of the Indian callousness. It was that the chasm is too deep. How many are you going to save? Ten? A thousand? A million? You see that look in the eyes of the powerless, blank and simple; it yearns for your approval; you know how far one kind word from you would go. And yet something compels you not to say it. The dependency scares you, as a needy lover’s demands scare you, for it suggests a bottomless pit of giving that will devour you if you give in just slightly and allow yourself to care.
And so he retreats into his world, defeated, and you retreat into yours, ridden with guilt. And then you tell yourself: don’t cry for him. Indian shit, more than other shit, flows downward. It was the lesson I had learned after the mattress incident that morning. Just as you have them, they have someone, too. You lose your temper at the taxi driver. He has his wife to beat up. She has her daughter-in-law. That woman has the sweeper. The sweeper has a wife. The wife has a daughter-in-law of her own. And so it goes, humiliation leading to humiliation, master to servant, master to servant, all the miserable way down.
You drive past dark slums or through aching villages, and you ask yourself: If this were your world, how would you break out? Against the idea of your unworthiness, would you have the energy to rebel? How much rage, how much calm, how much grit would it ask of you? How would you do it?
How?
* * *
I found an answer in Umred, a speck in the dead center of India, a small town of fifty thousand. To get there, I flew from Bombay to the rapidly growing city of Nagpur, where a glimmering new airport was being built, and then drove on a bone-shaking highway away from that islet of order. The sense of life’s preciousness, having already diminished from Bombay to Nagpur, eroded further from Nagpur to Umred as highway machismo became progressively deadlier. Drivers began to linger in the center of the road even when there was nothing to overtake; and, when there was, they hooked violently right and then violently left just before a head-on collision with the oncoming vehicle. A 1 percent chance of death became a tolerable level of risk in these parts. The disposition of living and dying became a matter for God’s hands, not the hands on the wheel.
The city fell behind and the plains opened wide. Roofs of corrugated tin held down by rocks appeared. Men ferrying clusters of twigs and burlap-bagged produce on bicycles drifted left and right as they scaled hills for which their spindly legs were no match, their labor at once harder and less efficient than in the city. The ground yellowed and dried by the mile, declaring ever more loudly its craving of the monsoon.
Umred was bigger than a village and smaller than a proper town, still in transit from the rural to the urban world. It began as a market serving the oceans of surrounding farmland. Remnants of the rural life still lingered, transposed strangely to concrete streets. It remained possible to raise cattle in the heart of Umred. Clumps of manure and hay lined the roads, flattening day by day under the weight of buses. Farmers in knotted white turbans, perched high on tractors, sputtered into town to run errands from their villages not far away. In fact, for the visitor, Umred had an unsettling tendency to vanish. Stroll down its main thoroughfare, turn onto a side lane, walk three blocks, and, without warning, the town would disappear and the farms would swallow you. Umred came and went just like that, a flicker of civilization.
In the teeming bazaar, under the blazing sun, the languid salesmen stood at their roller carts, hawking Hindu devotional videos, frilly panties, and cheap, fraudulently branded electronics. There were few sales to be made. Across from a row of fruit sellers, seven cobblers squatted idly, with no shoes to mend. It seemed not to have occurred to any of them to squat somewhere else, away from six rivals. At a taxi stand not far away, potbellied drivers in look-alike Ray-Bans milled around, puffing on cigarettes, waiting for their seven-seating four-by-fours to fill up with a dozen sweaty bodies before departing for the next town. There was no urgency. If it took an hour to achieve the desired economies of scale, then you waited an hour. Umred was used to waiting.
But there were hints, visible not just in Umred but across India, of a new restlessness, of a new yearning to break fate, to pursue a vocation not one’s father’s, to die other than where one was born. It was visible in the makeshift advertisements pasted all over town for hole-in-the-wall “institutes” and “academies” and “schools” that taught saleable skills, mostly software programming and spoken English, to the young. The ads promised that, for a few thousand rupees, you could pick up a skill and get a job out of town, away from your family. A poster commending cell phones showed a beaming pilot talking on one, playing on that oldest small-town fantasy of the wide world beyond. Another ad used a Caucasian model to promote a skin-whitening lotion from Ponds, as if to whisper to the gullible: “You can be rich and successful and, yes, even white!”
I had come to Umred to write about a riot. A few months earlier, power blackouts that millions of passive rural dwellers across India had suffered silently for years had suddenly triggered a violent backlash here, with police jeeps and a government building burned to their frames by an angry, untamable crowd. I had spoken with many in the town, and a theory emerged: it was a small town in the middle of nowhere, dusty and underwhelming and dead, but it had begun to dream, the townspeople said again and again, because of satellite television, because of migrant cousins with tales of call center jobs and girlfriends and freedom in the city. Once Umred contracted ambition, blackouts tolerated earlier became intolerable.
“Electricity is essential to ambition,” an energetic young man named Ravindra had told me that day, “because I need it to do my homework, I need it to listen to music if I am a dancer, I need it to listen to tapes of great speakers, I need it to surf the Internet. But I cannot, so people get angry. They have bigger expectations, but electricity is becoming a hurdle on their path.”
Until that day, my principal gauge for change in India had been physical. The metropolises were changing physically, dramatically and swiftly; the small towns were inching forward, with perhaps a new mall here or a new call center there; the villages were barely moving at all. It was a way of seeing India that simplified the chaos, and it guided many chroniclers of this new India. What I discovered in Umred that day was that little had to change in the physical world for a revolution to have taken place. The revolution could be a simple idea, like the one expressed when Abhay, one of Ravindra’s friends, was told that in Bombay the electricity never stops. “Why?” he snapped, sitting in the hole-in-the-wall sporting goods store that he owned. “They’re humans in Bombay but we’re only animals here?”
Growth had scarcely come to places like Umred, but the longings created by growth elsewhere were spreading. I remember the precise moment when I received this insight from Ravindra. We were sitting in a tiny restaurant that specialized in the region’s fiery saoji cuisine. Quarter plates of mutton and chicken were strewn across the table. Ravindra and Abhay were offering examples of the little things that were changing in Umred: young men surfing online for wives, farmers’ sons deserting the farms to work at a bank in a nearby town, young women going to fashion school, a deluge of students signing up for English classes. But it was not these facts that arrested me. It was the mention of a local pageant.
“I see Fashion TV on television, Miss India contests in the big cities,” Ravindra said. “So I thought, Why can’t we have that also?” And so he had organized, some months earlier, the first-ever Mr. and Miss Umred Personality Contest, which seemed to be half about physical appearance and half about the communication skills that were the new rage in small-town India. I didn’t know whether to believe him. There was no train station in Umred, no shopping center, but there was a pageant? He saw my puzzled, delighted expression. “We gave them a crown,” he reassured me. “It was plastic, but it was good.”
The town and the image of that crown stayed with me. Some months later, I happened to call Ravindra to check in with him. By a strange coincidence, I had reached him on the very day of the second annual Mr. and Miss Personality Contest, for which he was frantically preparing. He invited me, somewhat whimsically, to join them that evening. I decided to pack a bag and drive to the airport that very hour, buying a ticket over the phone in my taxi. I didn’t realize at the time that I would learn more about the new ambitions and new impatience, more about the spreading hunger of servants to become masters, from Ravindra than from any of his contestants.
* * *
The twenty-two contestants for the Mr. and Miss Umred Personality Contest sat anxiously on white plastic chairs at the front of the gymnasium. The eight women were dressed as if for their own weddings, with gold decorating the center partings of their hair, clunky necklaces on their necks, and sequined saris in pink, green, and orange draped around them, pinned with white laminated contestant-number tags. The men had taken their inspiration from Bollywood gangster movies, with leafy collars drooping over the lapels of their ill-fitting suits. Their belts, the belts of the Indian underclass, were too long for their waists, traveling all the way around their backs, such that two belts would have furnished enough leather for three men.
The pageant began with the talent contest. Some of the contenders, most of them engineers from local colleges, sang; some danced; others told jokes. All of them seemed to plagiarize television, which was their main portal to the world. The pouts were lifted from Fashion TV, the breast shimmying from Channel V, the joke timing from The Great Indian Laughter Challenge on STAR One. The question-and-answer segment was next. The contestants took turns coming to the front of the stage and facing a panel of conservative local graybeards, who seemed determined to keep the pouting and shimmying in check with their nostalgic questions. One contestant had to reassure the crowd that she would dutifully cook after marriage, even if she won the contest. Another was goaded about her decision to answer the question in English, then grilled as to whether she spoke Marathi, the regional language. These were among the other responses:
Female Contestant Number Two, an electrical engineer, said, “My aim in life is to become a newsreader.”
Female Contestant Number Four listed among her hobbies decorating her room and making friends.
Male Contestant Number One said, “I follow the Darwin’s principle: the survival of the fittest, that the one who is fittest will survive. That is why I have come to this contest.”
Male Contestant Number Three declared, “My aim is to become the ideal son of my parents and to be a good engineer.”
Male Contestant Number Fourteen told the judges, somewhat puzzlingly, “I love Hitler’s book most. I’m a big Hitler fan.” (When I asked Ravindra about this later, he shrugged and blamed the quality of local education: “Actually, we do not have any details about Hitler.”)
After a catwalk round, which involved the perplexity of men and women who were probably not allowed to have lunch with a member of the opposite sex strutting down a ramp, it was time to crown the winners. The judges whisperingly reached their verdict and came onstage. (I had been designated the “chief guest” of the ceremony, being an out-of-town guest. This had required me to give a brief speech in English, a language that most of the audience did not understand, and now I was onstage, too.) One by one, the contestants came to thank us, their hands touching our feet. The two winners were announced and handed their prize, which was six hundred rupees each and a gold-colored tiara. Mr. Umred, too, wore a tiara. Two banners on the stage declaring the name of the contest were removed and, reimagined as sashes, were tied around the winners’ torsos.
* * *
I realized as I watched Ravindra that night, dressed in a crisp white and purple shirt and a dark tie emblazoned with the crest of a family not his own, that he had made himself Umred’s ambassador of escape: part motivational speaker, part revivalist preacher of the gospel of ambition. When he established the Mr. and Miss Umred Personality Contest, he was not bringing a new idea to Umred so much as giving expression to an existing idea. What he had understood was that the young craved an exit, and he had built a personal empire that gave them the means to leave.
Everyone knew Ravindra. Everyone, regardless of age, called him “sir.” Later, when he drove me around on his motorcycle, he repeatedly risked our lives by lifting his hands to offer people he knew on the streets a greeting of clasped hands. To reach Nagpur or Pune or Bombay, you had to seek his advice, learn English from his English academy, learn roller skating from his roller-skating academy, reach into his network of contacts, compete in his pageant, learn to dress and think and enunciate like him.
And I began to wonder: who was this man, seemingly descended from a higher place and bigger things, who had made it his business to give a bleak town in the center of India a way out?
On the day after the pageant, Ravindra took me to a restaurant called Uttam, which, in the small-town Indian way, served every kind of Indian cuisine except the local cuisine. Children were waiting tables. I had spent the morning meeting some of the contestants in his pageant, who had oozed praise for their guru Ravindra. But now, as he began to tell me his own story, I realized how wrong I had been: the truth about Ravindra was that he had swept into Umred not from above but from below, from hundreds of the Indian gradations below.
He was born in a village called Bhiwapur, a half-hour drive and many social light-years from Umred. It was one of hundreds of thousands of such villages in India, trapped in an earlier age. His family lived in a small house with three rooms, concrete walls, an outdoor latrine, and a thatched roof. They had had no land to cultivate, just a small yard with some anemic trees. His father worked as a coolie, loading foodstuffs on and off trucks. His mother was a farmhand. Neither parent had advanced past the fourth grade, and they spoke Marathi, the local language, but not Hindi. “We are daily wages people,” Ravindra said, betraying elements of the old Indian thinking that he hadn’t wholly shaken: daily wages as social identity, not economic circumstance.
He grew up eating the kind of meals that I saw my relatives’ servants eating: plates heaped with rice, covered with watery lentil dal, with a small dollop of chutney on the side to lend piquancy and sometimes a thin piece of roti. From time to time, the family splurged on eggplants. In the winters, the air on the central plains would cool, but when Ravindra and his siblings—two younger brothers and one younger sister—were children, there were no blankets, only sheets, and these were too small to reach from neck to feet. They bought their clothes secondhand from the village bazaar, making them poor even by the standards of the poor. They never possessed more than a few hundred rupees in savings, barely enough for a one-way train ride to a neighboring state.
Ravindra’s family lived in a particular area of the village, a mohalla, a ghetto, whose significance would have been lost on a young boy. But as he grew up, he learned that his mohalla was reserved for low-caste laboring families like his. Their caste, traditionally tasked with crushing oil seeds, stood some rungs above the untouchables. And, because they were not untouchable, they were considered too well-born to benefit from the special preferences and spoils that untouchability now brought, but they were still laggard enough to qualify for some, belonging as they did to the bureaucratic category of “Other Backward Classes.”
Having grown up in relative privilege, I always wondered how the idea of inferiority first imposed itself on those who had not grown up so. For Ravindra, it was noticing at school that the Jaiswals and Agarwals and Guptas, the children of merchants and shopkeepers in the village, bought two-rupee ice creams at recess, while his mohalla friends bought the fifty-paise kind. It was realizing that, when guest speakers came to the school, the children of daily wages people were rarely chosen to introduce them. It was being told at the wedding of a big man in Bhiwapur to wait until the “guests” had eaten. “You come afterwards,” he remembered being scolded. It was waiting in queues all the time, for free food from the temple, for his mother’s weekly wages, the line coming to signify for Ravindra all the impotence of poverty.
He used to watch his classmates roar into the school yard on the backs of their parents’ motorcycles. He did not even have the two modes of transportation below motorcycles on the Indian staircase of affluence: the bicycle and plastic sandals. He wore no footwear until the ninth grade. “Whenever I saw other people wearing expensive shoes and socks and slippers, I used to get very angry, and I felt very bad,” he said. “Why am I not getting all these things? Why only I don’t have all these things? And at that time I decided that I will earn great money, and I will remove my poverty. I considered poverty as a disease.”
This was not the old Indian orthodoxy: for Ravindra, the world was not illusion, maya; it was not enough simply to do one’s duty and do it well and be satisfied with what God gave. “I just believed that we all are equal human beings, so why do we have differences, as far as social status is concerned, economical status is concerned, social recognition and honor and respect?” he said. “What I used to believe every time is that if one person is getting something big, better, and best, that should be my right.”
“Most Indians don’t think like that,” I interrupted.
“They don’t think like that,” he said. “They just want to compromise: it’s OK, we’re having sufficient things; let’s be settled. But—I don’t know—right from the beginning, I had great anger of my poverty. The generations after me will not live this kind of life—that’s what I decided. I will change my destiny. I will be good. I will be rich.”
In the eighth grade, the village school held a public-speaking contest. Ravindra had never stood on a stage before. But now here he was, with hundreds of people sitting below him, watching. He spoke for five minutes; the crowd applauded three times. He discovered that night a power in himself that he had not known: to connect, to inspire, to cut into people’s hearts with his words. And, having contracted his thirst for money through its absence, he now felt the first flush of respect, of being somebody in a sea of nobodies. “I felt that I am something different, I am something special,” he said.
His speech, which won the prize, was about the impact of television on society, and by that time a new television bought by the family was having a great impact on Ravindra himself. He would spend hours each day watching He-Man, Spider-Man, and Batman, piously balanced with the Hindutainment of the Mahabharata and Ramayana miniseries. I had grown up with Indian parents transplanted to America who regarded television as a threat to our minds and to the onward transmission of Indian values. We were barely allowed to watch it. But in Ravindra’s world, deep in small-town India, television was seen differently, even by parents, as a force of liberation.
“TV is the very hi-fi form of everything,” Ravindra said. “It’s the extreme level of ideas, where they show you everything at top level, so that certainly gives you motivation. On TV you see the things of world-class standard. When you see some person on Discovery catching anaconda, you are looking at the best person in the world for catching anaconda. On TV we never see the strugglers or something like that; we see the people who have achieved what they wanted to be.”
But, for all his dreams, Ravindra was just another village kid who didn’t have connections and didn’t speak English, the language of success in the India that was beginning to flourish in the 1990s. At the end of tenth grade, he decided to enroll himself in an English-language school in Umred, the nearest town, even though he didn’t speak English. He and the others from the villages sat in the back of the classroom, gaining fragments of vocabulary and grammar day by day, learning by immersion.
He graduated and moved on to a college in Umred, choosing commerce as his major. But he was working after school to support his family back in the village; the strains eventually became too much, and he failed his second-year exams. He was kicked out. In my parents’ India, that might have been his story’s end: there were no second chances then; there were no other routes. Diplomas were the only currency. Knowledge was the rampart that protected the well-born from the rest. In an earlier age, that had meant confining Sanskrit learning to the priestly castes; in more recent times, it had translated into massive public investment in elite colleges and universities—such as my father’s Indian Institutes of Technology—and the utter neglect of basic schooling for most Indians. Even today, the quality of college instruction at all but the best institutions is miserable, as I learned by sitting in many classrooms myself. And so if you were like Ravindra, you were probably not getting a very good education to begin with, even before an unforgiving examination system cut you loose.
But the ambitions stirring below had created a market for a new breed of middle-class finishing schools. They catered to young people born into the lower orders, filled with dreams but shut out by the old system. The schools were often single-room institutions, taking cash only, with dubious teaching methods. One I came across in Bombay offered diplomas in aviation, hospital management, medical transcription, French, German, Arabic, shipping and logistics, hospitality, and fashion. Another taught everything from early childhood care to interior design. But the most common subject was English. It was not the archaic English curriculum of India’s schools and colleges, with Shakespearean sonnets memorized and not understood, the guru talking down to his disciples. It was spoken English that could be used in the workplace tomorrow, language the quick and dirty way. It gave students the idioms, vocabulary, and placeless accent that would render your lowly origins untraceable in a land where so much could be deduced when you opened your mouth.
Ravindra coated himself with one finishing school skill after another, learning everything from the work of electricians to desktop publishing. One of the schools sensed his talent with people and hired him as a teacher, paying him 360 rupees a month. Another school soon poached him for more than double that amount. He began to sense, once again, that he was more than just an achiever. People liked him. They listened to him. Students sought him out for advice. With the finishing school cult spreading, the company was opening branches in the villages, including in Bhiwapur. Ravindra was sent to manage a school there. He had left the village as the boy who ate last at weddings; he returned as that loftiest of Indian creatures, a teacher, and, better still, a purveyor of new-economy skills. He was earning 1,800 rupees a month now. He had become a big man.
On his twenty-first birthday, in September 2002, he bought a motorcycle. It was the first motorized vehicle owned in the history of his family. He drove it from the showroom to his home and took his mother for a spin around the village. “She didn’t say anything,” he recalled. “She just cried. And she said, ‘Take care of the bike.’ ”
But Ravindra was restless. He felt obstructed in Bhiwapur, as if his long adventure had merely deposited him back to where he began. He found work in Nagpur, a further step up the urban ladder from Umred, at a travel agency that sold something called the “Five-Year Family Amusement Package,” an all-inclusive combination platter of weekend getaways and religious pilgrimages and amusement park tickets. The package cost 100,000 rupees, about $2,000, for a family of four. Customers would come into the agency’s office, curious about the product but needing persuasion. A staff of persuaders, which Ravindra joined, would seek to sell the product, earning a 4 percent commission for every sale.
It was Ravindra’s first real contact with successful people—merchants, lawyers, doctors, people who could afford to buy a vacation package. And he quickly realized a value in his customers beyond the commissions they brought.
Ravindra’s past, his traditions, the lessons of his parents—these offered no preparation for the man he wished to become. In most countries, at most times, the gulf between the generations is narrower. One might break from one’s parents, pursuing a different vocation, living in a different place. But you eat the way they eat—with your hands, or with a fork and knife, or with chopsticks. You drive a different model of the same machine they drive. You wear differently cut versions of the same garments—pants and shirts and skirts, or kurtas and saris. You construct your own identity, or so the mythology goes, and yet not every component of that identity needs to be created from scratch. But a usable past was not one of Ravindra’s luxuries. Everything that he wanted to become had to be carefully, calculatingly borrowed from someone else. And so a client who walked into the travel agency, thinking that he had come for a presentation, was actually offering himself to Ravindra as an exemplar of possible traits. Ravindra was an anthropologist, then an actor, observing and then mimicking.
One day, as he sat with colleagues on a tea break, a fancy car swerved into the parking lot. A middle-aged man got out with his wife and two sons. “They were so smart, handsome,” Ravindra recalled. “Their car was so fantastic. They had very expensive opticals—goggles—on their faces, all four. And I saw that family: my God, they looked so rich. They looked so rich. I stopped taking my tea, and I was just staring at them.” Seeing them stirred a fantasy in his mind: what would it be like to be them? The images flickered in his mind: “I am going to some big hotel. I am coming out of my car. I have big sunglasses. I’m with my wife and my son, with my family members. A waiter is coming out. He’s taking my key. He is parking my car.”
By a stroke of luck, the family was assigned to Ravindra. He made his presentation over an hour and a half. They were enchanted, and they bought the package. At the end of the presentation, the man, impressed by Ravindra’s demeanor, said to him, “You have that spark. What are you doing here?” He slipped a business card across the table.
But Ravindra said he never called the man, as a consequence of his anthropological researches. He saw an underlying pattern in the successes of those who came in: they had succeeded by working for themselves, not for others. No one could scream at them like the truckers screamed at his father and the landlords screamed at his mother; no one could tell them when it was time for them to eat. They had not just money, but also a degree of control over their lives, of autonomy, that would have appealed to a boy from Bhiwapur. “They were entrepreneurs,” Ravindra said. “That was the word which really impressed me—entrepreneurship. If you have something of your own, you can really be a leader of your life, you can really go much more ahead than anybody else, and that really gives you happiness.”
This idea of control intrigued me. What did he think of the idea, so prevalent in India, of kismet, of fate?
“The new generation does not believe so much in fate,” he said. “They have come to know that all rich people have become rich because of their hard work, not by their fate.”
“In India,” he went on, “many people believe in God and they think that, ‘OK, if there is something written in my destiny, then it will happen.’ They don’t make it happen. But now the new generation is getting changed. Mumbai, Pune, and big-city people, people like me who think more on skills and practical orientation in life—they don’t depend on destiny. They plan their lives. They have their goals to achieve. If I plan properly and execute it nicely, then I will get what I want.”
He also rejected the idea of karma, that one is born into a particular station in life because of one’s good or ill deeds in past lives. “Many Indians believe in a rebirth system, but I believe that life is only a one-time chance,” he said. “You have to give your best.” He said that the “prejudice” and “false beliefs” of the old religion were breaking: “Now we believe in progress and results, and for that you just need hard work—no other thing. All that is superstitious thing.”
There was a strange stew of philosophies here: progress, results, opportunity—the language of business—blended with a Marxist critique of the dulling effect of religion, garnished with the vocabulary of American self-help culture. He said that his favorite book was Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, with its tale of the writer’s poor childhood in Missouri, his contemplation of suicide, and then his discovery of a talent for public speaking. “I have read that twenty-eight times so far,” he said. “Whenever I feel nervous or depressed, I open that book.”
The travel agency shut down in 2004. Ravindra decided to return to Umred to become its local Dale Carnegie, to start a finishing school of his own. He set up roller-skating classes and an event-management firm, but the heart of his work was a spoken-English academy that became a port of embarkation for Umred’s restive young students. It offered ninety hours of classes over forty-five days for just 1,000 rupees, the cost of a fancy meal in Bombay. The students trickled in at first; then the trickle gathered into a gush, and before long Ravindra was arguably the most important and well-known young man in Umred.
“Seeing my past, when I go in flashback, I really think that, ‘My God, this is really unbelievable. This is like a dream,’ ” he said.
Toward the end of my visit, after hours of conversations, I came back to my original question. Yes, he had come from the villages. But he had grown into one of the brightest, most articulate, energetic people I had met in small-town India. He could go anywhere, make it big. Why was he still here? He brimmed with potential and had risen so far, so quickly, and yet it all seemed to me to have culminated in this rather dreary, mediocre setting. It made little sense: a man with so much verve and drive, a man wholly his own creation, who now wanted nothing more than to be the biggest man in little Umred.
I asked him one day if he was ever tempted to leave, as so many of his disciples were.
“No, no, no. I am not going to leave this place. I am getting everything here, no problem,” he said. “One fear is there always in my mind. We can make much more money in Bombay, but it’s such a crowded place. No one recognizes you. No one talks with you. No one takes interest in you. It’s like a robot life: get up, wake up, get in the trains, get in the vehicles, go to office, come back.”
And buried in those words was an idea that I had not seen, that was not easily seen when you come from where I come from. We are all running from something, and Ravindra was running from being a nobody—not just a poor man but less than a full man. And, after his long, wind-tossed odyssey, Bombay or Delhi or Bangalore would be a cruel port of arrival, restoring him to the very hell of anonymity from which he had come.
* * *
A year passed after that visit. One day, as I meandered in a department store in northern India, my phone buzzed with a text message from Ravindra:
Sir, last couple of months are full of achievements 4 me. My 2 skating kids represented India in international skating comp in Belgium. It ws my greatest dream, turned into reality. I ws busy in passports, visas n other formalities. Nw im going 2 Hongkong 4 international Skating Championship as India team manager on sep 26. My life is transforming rapidly this time. My faith on my abilities raised. Its rising time 4me. My image is getting new shape. Im proving n improving at personal, social, family n financial areas nicely. At present im contributory english lecturer at 6 dif school n colleges. Im constructing my new home also.
The man never stopped. And in the time since the pageant, he and Umred had lingered in me. They had given me a new way of seeing India, a thread that seemed to connect so much else of what I was seeing. I had begun to see self-invention as a theme of India’s unfolding drama. It was an idea that resonated with me, naturally, because of my own family’s story: the story of parents who left India to reinvent themselves and then had a son who found his own new beginning in India. Everywhere I went in India, I saw the layers of humiliation and repression, the culture of masters and servants, under siege. It was the unintended consequence of degradation: so much energy, passion, and talent had been locked in the Indian tiers and shaken over and over again by want; the impossibility of rising had only intensified the hunger to rise. And now the society had begun to feel like an aluminum can on the verge of explosion.
I saw it everywhere: in the growing confidence of my maid, her talking back, her taste for fancy watches and shoes that would have seemed unthinkable to her mother, her enrollment of her children in an English-language boarding school; in the airline worker who, when I asked, “How are you?,” smiled and patted me on the arm, a democratic touch between blue collar and white collar that would still be rare in the small towns where flight attendants were recruited; in the younger waiters, working alongside their older colleagues, who looked me in the eye and told me plainly that my choice was actually not that tasty; in the women working in factories in southern India who had become the primary breadwinners, leaving the children in the care of their idle, drunken husbands back home. And now Ravindra, the shoeless son of a porter, the one who ate last at weddings and sat in the back rows at school, was the manager of the Indian skating team, was going to Hong Kong, was teaching at six colleges, and was building a house. I had to go see him again.
We met at the same tea stall where we had first been introduced, in Umred’s Bypass Square. It had been a year and a half since my last visit, and I was excited to see him. He came on his motorcycle, looking more muscular and adult than I remembered. He seemed, to my delight, to treat me more as a peer and less as a “sir,” though he still called me Mr. Anand. As if to defy the heat, he was dressed in a silk shirt with green and blue diagonal stripes and a vast collar, over black polyester pants streaked by a strong pinstripe. He ordered two cups of tea from the owner, whom, of course, he knew well. Well-fed flies buzzed everywhere, jumping from the pakodas to the jalebis to the vat of brewing tea.
He gushed for a time about how wonderful it was that I had come to visit, and I praised him in return and told him how much his story had moved me. And then he wanted to get down to business. Life was moving in Umred, and there was a long list of developments to report.
The construction of his new home, where his parents and three siblings would eventually live, had begun on the outskirts of Umred. He had moved his parents from Bhiwapur to a rental property in town until the construction was complete. Their days in the village were over. His siblings were doing well, if not as well as he, working variously as a karate coach, a technician for a phone company, and a clerk at a local building firm. He noted some changes in the town since my last visit: he pointed to a black-and-yellow elevated concrete divider that now bisected a large road; he mentioned a new shopping center. He had also become considerably more plugged in: he showed me his new cell phone, a Nokia N91, and he had bought a laptop, his “long-awaited dream.” He was already plotting his next moves up the consumption ladder: first a BlackBerry, then a van.
The money for all these things had come, I gathered, from a change in his financial picture. The English academy continued to do well, but it was his roller-skating classes that had taken off. Roller skating was, in fact, gathering speed as a major pastime in small-town India, part of the new frenzy for competitions of any kind. Ravindra had signed a lucrative deal to be the area’s exclusive distributor of a brand of high-end skates that he recommended to his students. Meanwhile, he was becoming known in Indian roller-skating circles as a serial groomer of great skaters. One day, he got a call from the Roller Skating Federation of India. The group knew of his skills as a teacher, the man on the line said, and they wanted to appoint him manager of the Indian national roller-skating team. Should he accept, he would be leading the team to Hong Kong for a global competition within weeks. He accepted and went on that trip, marveling at the skyscrapers and the armies of people dressed in coats and ties and dresses.
As he delivered this update, Ravindra received a phone call. It seemed, from the blend of swagger and nervousness in his voice, to be a call of love. The last time we had met, I had asked Ravindra about his romantic affairs and had been surprised. For all his daring, he was a dutiful Indian son on the question of marriage. Forget love: he would marry a woman to his parents’ liking, chosen by them with the family’s interests in mind. It was so across much of the society: young people bold and mutinous in matters of status and hierarchy, yet wholly willing to submit in this other sphere.
When his call ended, I asked who it was.
Giggle. “That was my best friend, Sunita.” Giggle.
“Best friend or girlfriend?”
“No, no, best friend, best friend.” Giggle. “Maybe girlfriend.” Giggle.
Well, this was new. He said that she was leaving town in a few hours, and I asked if we could meet her. We drove to a school, just outside of town, where she was the supervisor of teachers and he was a lecturer in English. On the way, he told me that they were friends, not boyfriend-girlfriend, but that he was “willing” and that maybe it would happen someday soon. Sunita was also an aspiring trainer and public speaker; she, too, emceed events like the pageant.
“Since we are coming together by means of this profession, she is getting much popular, she is getting improved, her personality is getting much fragranced—she said many times to me,” he said. He described her in the language of self-help books that had become a dominant language for him and for so many Indian strivers. “She is getting very much PR,” he said. “She gives all credit to me for that. She says, ‘You’re in my life, and that’s why there are so many changes occurring.’ And I always say, ‘You deserve it. I’m just the medium, maybe.’ And she always says, ‘You are the best motivator I’ve ever had.’ Since I have been in her life, she has been very positive; she has started thinking differently.”
We walked into the school and into the principal’s office, where she was sitting along with the principal. She was short, pudgy, pretty, with boxy metal-framed glasses. She was dressed in a white salwar kameez with printed flowers. She was the second-ranking official at the school and Ravindra was just a guest lecturer, but I noticed that she called him “sir.” As Ravindra, the principal, and I made conversation, she stayed silent. When the principal gushed to me about Ravindra’s galvanizing effect on Umred, she grinned quietly.
I accompanied them on an errand of hers, to print out and mail some forms. They both got out of the car at the post office and asked me to wait. A few minutes later Sunita returned on her own. She got back in the car, offering no explanation. I sensed that she wanted to talk. She was leaving town in a few hours, so I thought I would cut to the chase. What was her relationship with Ravindra? Were they just friends or boyfriend-girlfriend? She instantly became shy and retreated into herself. But then something in her stirred, and she said that she liked him very much but that it was complicated.
They had met in the computer institute where he used to teach; she was one of his students. They had fallen out of touch and then come into contact again. She was enchanted by his lectures at the school where she taught. “As a person, I like him very much,” she said. “Caring. Hard worker. He has a helping nature. I don’t take his name—I call him ‘sir’—because I met him first as a teacher.”
When I asked if they had a future together, she demurred at first. Then she chose to answer once again, as if realizing the back-channel diplomatic possibilities that I offered. She had thought about marrying him, she said, but he had never spoken of any feelings for her. Her mother, meanwhile, was opposed to the notion. They were from the same caste and even the same subcaste. But there is always a catch in India: they were not from the same sub-subcaste. They were, alas, the descendants of oilseed crushers of different varieties. This could be overcome, but it would require some labor, so Ravindra had to make up his mind.
Love, like tennis, is not a sport for three. But I promised Sunita that I would see what I could do.
* * *
On the outskirts of Umred was a restaurant called Machan, whose village theme, including the terra-cotta oxcart in the muddy courtyard, suggested an anticipatory nostalgia for the world now evaporating. Ravindra and I ordered the peppery plates of chicken and mutton that we had eaten together on my first visit. During lunch, Ravindra took call after call, struggling to peel his eyes from the Nokia screen. And yet in another way he showed a sensitivity that was rare in India. My driver was sitting at another table in the restaurant, and Ravindra repeatedly made sure that a waiter was taking his order, that he was getting what he wanted, that the food was enough and to his liking: an empathy born of having known the other side.
I asked him about Sunita, and suddenly it was as though he were describing another woman.
“She’s my first love. I never had such kind of feelings for someone before,” he said.
I asked how he knew that it was love. “I used to share everything with her,” he said. “If I don’t talk with her one day, I just feel very much different, maybe something missing. She takes care of me; I also take care of her. We share good news, bad news, sorrows.” Sometimes, he said, she calls him at midnight, from under her bedsheets, just to say good night. “The one day I don’t go to school, she always calls me: ‘You didn’t come today? What’s the problem? Everything OK?’ If I don’t send her some message, she asks, ‘What’s the problem? You didn’t send me message.’ ”
A moment later, he added, “I’m thankful to God that He has put that love feeling in my heart.” But then he suggested that it was her indifference that worried him; he didn’t know if she felt the same. But I suggested that it might be the other way around. How was she to know of his interest?
With the prompting of my question, it seemed to dawn on Ravindra that Sunita may have been dropping hints for some time. “Many times she talks about marriage—in general,” he said, reflecting as he spoke. “She says, ‘I will not get a good husband; I don’t know what kind of husband will I get.’ Then I ask her, ‘What kind of husband do you want?’ So maybe she wanted to tell me her expectations through that.” He was now listening to himself as carefully as I was listening to him.
“I will get married in two years,” he said, rather abruptly. “It’s planned already. That’s the age of thirty. At that time, I will have many things: my house, my vehicle, a couple of international tours.”
But how and when did he intend to reveal this plan to her?
“Obviously, I will tell her,” he said. “I will just tell her that I love her and that I would like to marry her—after completion of my home. That is the most important priority and responsibility at present for me.”
“But you can tell her before also,” I said. “You don’t have to marry her now, but you can tell her before. Otherwise, she’ll get married to someone else.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Giggle.
“Why are you so fixed about two years from now?” I asked. “If you love someone, wouldn’t you put that first?”
“There are so many goals, and I have my sequence set. I believe that you should get right thing at right stage,” he said.
This obliviousness to Sunita and her needs was strange. Ravindra was in other ways so acute and insightful and empathetic, so sensitive to the little signals that people gave each other. But I saw, too, that love was just another item in his checklist of success.
“In two years, I would have become national trainer of the Jaycees,” he said, referring to a local civic organization for which he led training workshops. “Now I’m zone trainer. This year I’m going to qualify for the national trainer, and I’m going to be first person from whole Umred region to qualify for that exam. So I want to get married with maximum accomplishments under my belt. My wife should feel better about me, that she is getting married to a man of accomplishment.”
And the lessons of success in other spheres were applied to romance: “What I believe is, if you want something by heart, really truly, you will get it. That is my experience so far. And I think this will be true for this incident also, as far as the marriage part is concerned. We have many things in common. She is also very public; me, too. I just like to talk; she also. She’s also in Jaycees; me, too. She also has good looks; me, too.” And he giggled some more.
I wanted to see the house that was sucking Ravindra’s attention away from Sunita—his priority, as he had said. He had given the house a name, as if it were a British estate: Rajkamal, a blend of his father’s and mother’s names. It stood outside town on a vast ground that resembled an empty trailer park. In the scattering of finished homes, the washing hung outdoors and animals wandered outside.
The house was at this moment a structure of drying concrete, with bamboo scaffolding everywhere. There was a living room in the front, a kitchen-cum-dining-room, a master bedroom with an attached bath, and a second bedroom without one. In a suspension of his filial piety, Ravindra mentioned that the master bedroom “hopefully” would be his. He said he had carefully planned the width of the house to leave enough space for a driveway, one that could fit a “four-wheeler.” An Omni van from Maruti Suzuki was his next priority down the line—after the house, but before Sunita.
We climbed to the roof. Water was dripping from the still-curing concrete. He walked from one rectangular pool of liquid to the next. In the fields around us were piles of rocks and other unfinished homes with metal rods poking needle-like into the sky. In front of us was a Hindu temple. “So this is my dream home,” he announced after a moment’s silence.
In that moment, he somehow reminded me of my own immigrant parents and their long journey, with the singularity of his focus and the simplicity of his longing, for dignity and his own small palace and some quantum of control in the world. And yet he was an immigrant not between lands but between the worlds of his own land, between a world of servants and a world of masters that were in many ways further apart than the India my parents left and the America they found.
His success was careful and sequenced and incremental. It was a gradual evolution in his mode of transportation: bare feet, then flip-flops, then shoes, then a motorcycle. It was sleeping outdoors and then indoors, on a charpoy and then on a bed, in a shared room and then in a room of his own, under a sheet too small to cover his legs and then under blankets when he needed them. Success was a refrigerator, then a TV, then a stereo, then a video player. It was a cell phone that just made calls, then one that could store hundreds of numbers, too. It was knowing nobody and then accumulating hundreds of numbers to store. Success was a streak of small victories, each nudging Ravindra further away from the world into which he was born.
* * *
Ravindra had become famous because of his motivational teaching. But I had never seen him teach. His duties had multiplied since my last visit, and he now lectured at several local schools and colleges. (Ever aware of power gradients and resistant to being a supplicant to another’s graces, he made a point of noting that the principals had reached out to him: “I’ve never given any application. Everywhere they have called me, by knowing my abilities in outer world.”) I went to see him teach the next day, first at the high school where Sunita worked, then at a polytechnic college.
He was a commanding figure in the classroom. His personality filled the air and the students’ eyes were fastened to him. There seemed to be little daydreaming going on. He paced around the classroom, only a decade older than his students but, unlike them, a man of his own making, at peace in his skin. They sat before him in their half-sleeved shirts and ties and white tube socks and black shoes, listening raptly.
The first class was ostensibly in English communication; the second was in DLS, as Ravindra called it—Development of Life Skills. But all his classes were really just different versions of what was now known as the “personality development” curriculum in India, which taught everything from how to pronounce words to what to wear to an interview, from how to work in teams to how to build self-confidence. It was what the call centers and high-technology firms insisted on: they claimed to receive too many résumés from brilliant engineers who could not string together a coherent sentence, could not work with others, could not make a presentation, could not calm an angry customer. It was what I had seen even at McKinsey in Bombay, where the astounding cerebral powers of my colleagues were rarely matched by their social skills.
Indeed, the very idea of a personality, of unique selfhood, felt like an alien imposition on the traditional Indian world. Hinduism had always cultivated a sublimation of the self, aimed at realizing moksha, or liberation, through transcendence and renunciation of the material world, which it saw as illusion. But, more than that, it was the social fixedness of Indian life that had limited the usefulness of a compelling personality. Your station in life was said to be determined by karma. Your position in the family was determined by your gender and birth order, not by your artistic skills or manners. Your early peer relationships in traditional households were with cousins more than friends, which meant that you didn’t face the pressure that young people faced in the West to become appealing to others: you didn’t have to lock down a distinctive niche on the social free market. Your marriage was organized by others, based on family reputation, not your charm. Within a clan, individual members were seen as interchangeable, as when my grandfather’s family, foiled in their attempt to marry him to the woman of his choice, turned to the next daughter in the same family, my grandmother. In the corporate universe, your boss would treat your “senior” at work (as he was invariably called) better than you simply because he was your senior, and there were few rewards for a better workplace personality, for speaking or presenting or networking in an exceptional way. Indians were, in a sense, not self-made but other-made, and the system of social incentives traditionally led people to put other pursuits ahead of standing out in the crowd.
Ravindra, like the students he taught, was in revolt against the old fixedness. But, once that revolt was complete, a man could find himself utterly alone. Under the traditional system, such a man may have been low-born, but at least he had a domain of certainties. He knew which foods were his foods. He knew which things his people considered to be polluting and which were thought to be clean. He had a language that may not have let him work in Bangalore but that was at least securely his. He had a way of gesturing and an accent and a wardrobe tested by time. And so when he chose to strike out as self-made, he would need—even before a job and a house and a car—the rudiments of selfhood. He would need a personality.
In his personality classes, Ravindra was a teacher of a kind that I had never seen in India: a democratic one. He was funny. He was plainly in charge but not a monarch. He asked the class to clap when a student took a risk to speak aloud. He encouraged student participation. He was straight out of a self-help book: empowering, giving feedback, motivating, enabling. He was not the sage guru, dispensing pearls of wisdom from up high, who had so confined Indian learning.
Ravindra’s mission seemed to be to draw the students out of themselves. He called on them to participate, to try creating sentences out loud. One girl summoned him to her desk so that she could whisper her answer first and minimize her social risk. He offered the class an acronym, JAM, which he told them was a common expression in English—though one I had never heard of—to request “just a minute.” Then he went over the difference between “affirmative” and “interrogative” and “exclamatory” sentences: the affirmative was a basic sentence, like rice without cumin, he said; the exclamatory was the kind of remark he uttered—“Wow!”—when he first saw the sea, in Bombay. And one could sense he knew that much of his value came simply in dropping the word “Bombay,” leaving it to crackle as a dream in his students’ minds.
In the DLS class, for college students, he fired up his motivational energies for the students, who were in their late teens, a light black fuzz darkening the boys’ faces. “There is always gap at the top,” he said, and it took three things to get there: knowledge, attitude, and skill. Here Ravindra taught watered-down versions of MBA precepts, but the ideas were applied, in line with his own self-obsession, to the students’ personalities.
Today’s lesson was SWOT analysis, by which business executives around the world assess a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats within a competitive industry. But here in Umred, SWOT was part of the relentless cultivation of the self. “SWOT is the method by which we can evaluate ourselves,” a lanky teenage boy stood up to say when Ravindra asked for a definition. And I had a sense, from this and earlier visits to Indian finishing schools, of a whole generation’s being trained rather than educated, with nothing to which to apply their frameworks. They knew nothing about industry, art, history, literature, science. They would one day be little more than the sum of their self-help ideas.
Ravindra and I drove to Nagpur later that night. I was flying out in the morning. We made conversation in the car, but I could feel myself tiring somewhat of his talk. His total absorption in achievement was grating on me. Then, as these thoughts were simmering, he broke the silence by asking, “Sir, what are your suggestions for me?”
It was a request for feedback: a foreign corporate practice crudely imported into this setting. I thought for a moment. I thought of the narrowness that I had begun to see in the midst of these burgeoning aspirations. The idea of Umred that had come to me at first was of ambition, energy, self-invention: the restlessness that I had known in my own America. It was an idea of hope, at war now with the old degradations. But, precisely because those degradations ran so deep, emancipation would come only to those with a terrifying singularity of purpose. Ravindra could not afford to learn a less practical kind of English, could not afford to spend time understanding the woman he loved, could not afford to take a vacation, could not afford to read books other than motivational tracts with seven tips for solving this or that.
But there were now thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Indians who were making this bargain and adopting this focus. And they were liberating India, undoing what to me had always seemed its most unpardonable fact. But I wondered what kind of country they would make when there came to be enough of them to change its essential character. They were loyal to their families and yet so cut off from the broader Indian inheritance. The past scarcely inspired them now; it was little more than a set of family rituals, ceremonies to be performed. Their heads were filled with SWOT analysis and ways to win friends and influence people and JAM, not with the tolerance of Ashoka, the poetry of Kabir, the universalism of Tagore. The best sellers in the bookstores they frequented tended to answer questions of “how,” not of “why.” They were all motion and no reflection, fabricating themselves without reference to history. I wondered if, in rejecting all that was unseemly of the Indian past, they would also eliminate much that was good.
Sitting in the car now, with these ideas washing within me, I chewed on Ravindra’s question. I weighed the relative merits of candor and tact. I knew that he relied on my advice and took it seriously, and that I was perhaps the only person who would tell him this. So I chose candor. I told him that my suggestion would be to have a well-rounded idea of life, to pursue interests other than his own success, to be humble, to keep space for friends and family and love.
And I realized, even as the words poured out, and in the moments of silent incomprehension that followed, how empty and out of tune they must have sounded. When you come from where I do, love and leisure and broad reading and a well-rounded mind are vital parts of living, not luxuries. But where he came from, it was remarkable simply to have surfaced fully human, to have shut out all the voices telling you who you could not be, to have listened instead to your inner voice, whispering at first, then rising with every proof of its veracity. Ravindra did not have the luxury of losing focus, of chasing a wider vision: because if he did, the world of degradations that he had escaped would be delighted to have him back.
* * *
Some days after leaving Umred, I received a text message from Ravindra:
Bad news! Sunita denied my love. Her parents r fixing her marriage with some1 else. I think she is unwilling 4 this. Bt cant resist against family.
That trip she had taken out of town had been for an engagement. When she spoke to me in the car, in secret, it was perhaps a last, hopeless attempt. She had given him the opportunity, and now she was gone. She refused even to talk to him now. He begged me all day to call her, which seemed like a terrible idea. But he said that his very life was at stake and that he needed my support. So I called. Her answer, in five words, resolved all ambiguities.
“I love my family more,” she said simply.
They had said more to each other through me or with their thumbs tapping tirelessly at their phones than they had ever dared to say in person.
“You’re the kind of friend who is difficult to forget,” she had once texted him.
“I miss you very much here,” he had replied.
And this went for the whole of Umred, not only the two of them and not only for potential lovers. When Ravindra showed me the thousands of text messages he had stashed in his computer, sent and received, they seemed to brim with borrowed emotions: trite proverbs, made-up sayings, quotations from people they scarcely knew, such as Abraham Lincoln. Ravindra and his friends were in their late twenties, but these messages seemed to belong to hyperemotional children.
IF YOU FIND YOUR SELF IN A DARK ROOM + VIBRATING WALLS AND FULL OF BLOOD, THEN DON’T WORRY. YOU ARE AT SAFE PLACE, YOU ARE IN MY HEART!
LOVE is 4 LIFE. LIFE is not 4 LOVE. LOVE may fail in LIFE. LIFE should never fail in LOVE. So dnt spoil LIFE in LOVE. But dnt 4get 2 LOVE in LIFE!
Ice is a cream, luv is a dream, bt frndship is ever green. Dont mak frnds b4 understanding, & dont break ur frndship after misunderstanding.
F’rank
R’ecovers
I’nsults
E’motions
N’ose cuts
D’edications
S’entiments
these all happen wth FRIENDS
Ninety percent of the messages appeared to be forwards. It was as if they had so much to say to each other, and no language of their own in which to say it. The past offered no instruction for the lives these young people were living. A new day had dawned, and with it a new idea of human relationships, relationships not of hierarchical authority but of democratic amity. There had been no time for these new relationships to develop, and they had not yet gained their own vocabulary. There was so much raw energy but no context, nothing to guide it. And it was strange to see Ravindra, with all that he had seen and done, behave on his phone like a little boy.
So it was with him and Sunita. He had nothing more than his self-confidence to offer. He had come so far and planned so thoroughly, but he had never realized that he might inform her of these plans. He did not understand that she felt confused and adrift. He was his own man now, self-made and not other-made, and was, in a sense, oblivious to the ways of his society. He had not realized that one had to lay the Indian groundwork: declare intentions, speak to the parents, and burrow in gently. In his meticulous planning, it had not occurred to him that a woman, unlike an exam, is not conquered simply by willing that you get her. I had urged him to say something to her, give her a sign. And he had sent more and more of those messages. But on the occasions when she called back, he was formal and upright and proper, as if the man sending those texts did not own the voice she now heard.
Now Ravindra would suffer for a time. But then he would resume the great project of his life, which was the project of himself. He would continue down the path of becoming everything that India once told boys like him they could not be. And yet my thoughts on that afternoon kept returning to a message that he had sent me some months earlier, before the latest events could be foreseen:
“Life sometime becomes so selfish that it wants everything. And while trying 4 everything we miss something that is worth everything.” Hello Anand Sir, hw r u?