The End of Karma
As I sat in the audience at Santa Clara University (at an event hosted by the American India Foundation and the Commonwealth Club of California), listening to the soft-spoken, very articulate Somini Sengupta, I was struck by the parallel trajectories of our lives.
Both of us, Americans, born in India but who had led vastly different formative years. Somini migrated to America at eight years old and grew up in a re-created India, an idea of India fashioned by her parents — the most vital piece of which was Ma Durga who arrived at LAX from Calcutta in all her Plaster of Paris glory and was duly worshiped every fall with ululations and blessings from a Brahmin priest.
In stark contrast, I grew up in the upper middle class suburb of Juhu in the city of Bombay now re-christened Mumbai (I stubbornly cling to the past and refuse to call it by its new moniker). My life was a bubble — highly westernized, attending parties and possibly the only ululating I conducted was at the disco at the Taj. Life was a whirl of private parties at sea-side villas and treks to Rang Bhavan for rock concerts with a little bit of swotting thrown in, come exam time. We would sway to Madonna crooning ‘Like a Virgin’ and to the just released “Purple Rain” by Prince on VHS tapes obtained from our uber-hip and well-traveled friends.
It was a glorious time even though India had not opened up after being forced by the IMF to institute reforms — because, we teenagers, in our small wealthy enclave had created our own version of a modern, hip India. It’s not as if I was unaware of the stark contrast between the haves and have-nots, of the two India’s; It was just more comfortable to ignore it.
When I moved to the US for graduate school, my to-ing and fro-ing to India started. This is where our paths converge — Somini had been doing this since she was a pre-teen and her cognitive dissonance of growing up in two worlds paid off when she became the first reporter of Indian descent to be appointed the New Delhi bureau chief of the New York Times.
I started my travels as an adult. And with age and having my own children awoke the dormant realization that so much more can and should be done to alleviate the lives of the millions of children whose potential goes untapped everyday. By the mid-2000’s, India’s young were seen as its crowning asset but with the most formidable challenge yet — to create jobs for the 10 million people who come of age every year!
India achieved freedom at midnight on August 15, 1947 but now the generations of children born after the economic reforms of 1991 are chafing and clamoring and hollering for their place in the sun. These are noonday’s children and Somini Sengupta in her book “The end of Karma” presents selected portraits of this most-transformative, aspirational generation.
“The post-1991 generation had been led to imagine it could re-write its destiny, that it could shake off the karma of past lives…In the coming years, India can thrive because of its young. Or it can implode. Or both. There’s little time left”.
The very first person we are introduced to is Anupam Kumar, the son of a lower caste rickshaw driver growing up in the slums of Gaighat,Patna, the most feudal, backward state in India. His goal from the moment of birth was to outrun his destiny. Somini chronicles the life of this golden child, born of barely literate parents, where the driving force shaping his destiny is his mother — who never discouraged his wildest dreams, never clucked her tongue when he talked about conducting research even when she had not the faintest clue as to what it meant She fanned his ambition while simultaneously swatting away the mosquitoes on humid afternoons.
Despite the lack of electricity or teachers who could barely read the text-books being taught, Anupam managed to ace the IIT entrance exam and instantly become an Indian icon. All this was made possible because of his indefatigable mother, Sudha who had studied up to class 6. The fact that she could read was what kept her hustling to get her children the best possible education under the circumstances. Despite the social challenges of loneliness, a lack of English speaking skills and a disastrous freshman year at IIT, he pulls through and ends up getting his MBA from IIM, Kolkata and a job in the financial sector in Mumbai.
Anupam’s story is the exception. He is a prodigy who succeeded despite the hurdles the State had thrown at him such as failing schools and clinical malnourishment. His is a story of sheer grit in the face of poverty and of the important role that having a semi-educated, plucky mother played in determining the course of his upward mobility and carving out his own destiny.
We then meet Supriya, a well-off, stay-at-home mom who lives in the concrete jungle of Gurgaon and her maid, Mani, an adivasi from the hinterlands of Jharkhand. This story explores Supriya’s psychic awakening and the collapsing of walled gates to peek into the lives of others much less fortunate than her. Supriya lives in the exclusive enclave of Central Park, a gated community with access to its own power, water and sewage disposal.The diaphanous veil that shields Supriya from utter misery is lifted when she gets pulled headlong into a search for Mani’s abducted niece, Phoolo who has been dispatched off to a family in Delhi to work as a maid as part of a trafficking ring. It is indeed ironic that Phoolo, who lives in a village without toilets, water or power, has a mobile phone that can be charged only at one store connected to the power grid on the highway. This is where she gets accosted and later abducted to be sold to the slave trade.
It is even more ironic when I hear Mukesh Ambani, resident Indian billionaire (in an interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN) talk about how imperative it is to get every villager a mobile phone and connected to the internet by 2018. How about giving them electricity in their homes first?
We delve further into Supriya’s rising awareness of the dehumanizing effects of caste and segregation, that still exist today however much we may want to deny or ignore it, of servants who eat from separate utensils, sit on the floor, and on the wet grass in the parks of Xanadu-like enclaves where the benches are reserved for the water bottles of their charges. We also encounter the author’s uncomfortable forays into the world of feudalism when she is referred to as “memsahib” (colonial term for upper class lady of the house), where she is tempted to say her dad is a “chowkidar” (doorman) when asked about his background and when her 3 year old daughter starts distinguishing between “didis” or nannies and upper class moms just by glancing at them. As she later concludes, America is highly unequal but the psychic cost of living in India is much harder. “It requires an entirely different calibration of compassion and it’s lack.”
Next, we encounter the Maoist Guerrilla insurgency in Chhattisgarh and West Bengal. In the late 60’s, Somini was introduced to the rebellion via her uncle — a bearded , Bengali engineering student who went underground to aid the rebels. He would surface occasionally for some creature comforts, a bath and some fish and to reassure his family that he was still alive and also to teach Somini some revolutionary nursery rhymes. Fast forward to the mid-2000’s — the rebellion had blossomed to be far deadlier and more damaging, evidence of how devastating it can get when young people are promised much and given little.
We meet an array of youngsters — Rakhi, an ex-guerrilla squad commander who had planned executions and also killed suspected informants with machetes — now a witness under police protection, Manher the orphan who was forced to join the Maoists at gunpoint and rebel leaders like Markam and Kishenji. The foot-soldiers of the movement were young men and women from the jungles, mostly the adivasis who for generations had been cheated in free India. These young people were also aspirational, but they chose a different path. They too charted out their own destiny fueled by rage and anger.
Somini, impressively, goes into the Abujmarh forest with her crew to meet Gopanna Markam, a Maoist commander with the People’s liberation Guerilla army (PGLA). The interview is revelatory— we get a glimpse of their life, how they helped villagers negotiate higher prices for their crops and their recruitment and military tactics, and of their lucrative extortion schemes and taxation ‘rebel tax’ policies, not unlike the FARC rebels of Columbia.
The Maoists were aided in their cause by the villagers who had seen little improvement in their lives 70 years after independence. This rebellion flourished during the age of India Shining, of India, Inc. — the golden period much touted on the covers of many magazines though the very bottom — the under-soil — never benefited. The rebellion was concentrated in the central and eastern states, the states with the most natural resources of coal, bauxite, uranium and timber and also the highest concentration of the nation’s most wretchedly deprived people. It was a ‘perfect storm of inequity, incapacity and greed’.
Narendra Modi, the most aspirational politician of our generation, came to power on a wave of Hindu rage and dissatisfaction with rampant corruption by promising pro-business policies and ‘good days ahead’. Ushering him in were people like Shashi, a computer programmer from Texas who re-located to Bangalore and set up an American-style Superpac to digitize the entire voter base of 800 million people. Using social media, Shashi helped Modi crowd-source ideas for his biggest speeches telling crowds what they wanted to hear. This biggest exercise of political data mining paid off. Modi and the BJP won a resounding victory and came to power in 2014. Shashi used the internet to rouse Modi’s supporters. Instead of going door to door, this youth-army was the firewall — they would harangue journalists, bloggers and all Modi critics by going after them online. Most troubling of all was the rising intolerance towards Muslims, the beef eating bans, attempted conversions of Christians and Buddhists by the RSS (a right wing party) , and public lynchings of people on just the mere suspicion of possessing beef prompting the very worried Central Bank Governor, Raghuram Rajan who warned of a severe economic fallout from rising intolerance.
Juxtaposed against Shashi is Ankit, the poster child of noonday. Young, upper-caste, Hindu with BJP supporting parents, he grew up with utter disgust for politicians having seen his father and his politician friends conspire to get their candidates elected on the basis of caste, stolen ballot boxes and bribes of liquor and cash. His ambitions of studying in the US were summarily thrown to the winds after his encounter with Arvind Kejriwal, the leader of the AAP (Aam Aadmi Party) or the People’s Party. The AAP and their anti-corruption platform swept him and many of his generation into a fervent rebellion against politicians and their thievery. The biggest challenge facing any politician in India today is to quell the dissatisfaction of noonday’s children, to provide jobs and to curb crime, all of which will require immense patience. Will the current generation be willing to wait?
The Facebook girls — Rinu and Shaheen, both denizens of Palghar on the outskirts of Mumbai — find themselves unlikely candidates and major actors in the drama unfolding in “The Paranoid State”, the tussle between free speech and the promotion of national security and the squelching of dissent. They were arrested under the obscure Section 66A of the Information and Technology Act. Shaheen for making an offhand comment on Facebook questioning the need for the city to come to a grinding halt following the demise of Bal Thackeray (the head of the goon army, the Shiv Sena or as described by the writer Suketu Mehta “the man most directly responsible for ruining the city I grew up in) and Rinu for liking that comment.
Nothing enraged the internet generation more than their arrest and the resulting revolt caused the Government to quickly tweak the offending law before the Supreme Court struck down several provisions ruling it unconstitutional. India has to strike a very delicate balance between the easily hurt sentiments, the lack of tolerance and the horrific strife that can follow and the right to freedom of expression.
The kerfuffle du jour involves stand up comic — Tanmay Bhat. He made the cardinal mistake of mimicking and poking fun at two legends of Indian popular culture via snapchat — cricketer Sachin Tendulkar and the “Nightingale of India” Lata Mangeshkar, singer extraordinaire. As expected, the outrage, twitter trolling and backlash has been raining fast and furious between his supporters and detractors. Prodded by political parties, the Mumbai police says it is consulting legal experts and will contact Google and YouTube on blocking the video.
Free speech is so vital in making India a powerhouse of culture — from music to literature, from art to films. India is second only to the US in asking Google and Facebook for user information and of course, to operate in India, Silicon Valley companies have to abide by Indian law.
The Honor killings of Monica and her husband Kuldeep by Monica’s brother highlights just how primitive and reactionary certain communities tend to be, specifically in North India. Their offense was in daring to love and elope despite being from different clans. Wazirpur, just outside Delhi, is a town that grew rich recently on the basis of land ownership. The children of Wazirpur grew up lazy and aimless and idling their time away without having to earn a living and completely supported by the rents that their parents got for their land. When Monica strays from the fold and asserts her independence, other girls follow and are met with an untimely death, shot and killed by their own brothers. Honor killings basically are just part of the fabric of the ongoing subjugation of women and of contempt for girls who break the rules and take charge of their own destiny.
Currently there is a ban on homosexuality today in India affirmed by the Supreme Court and cheered on by the BJP. The AAP has, at least, sought to appeal to young Indians saying that Gay people should not be hounded by the law. Gay rights, ultimately, is the final litmus test for the limits of freedom — ‘to choose who you are and who you love’.
The last profile is of a spunky, outspoken girl, Varsha, a dhobi’s (washerman’s) daughter. She is a dreamer who wants to rise and study and dance and become a policewoman. She has the same aspirations as Anupam the prodigy we met first. The only difference is that Anupam had a fierce, dedicated mentor in his mother whereas Varsha has a papa who loves her, is her ally but also her biggest obstacle; he will not let her fly. His fear is understandable given the precarious status of girls near Gurgaon. They could get attacked, raped and killed and if they reach for the stars, they may have difficulty getting married. Varsha has all of noonday’s aspirations and she pushes and studies and scores high in all the exit exams, all this while making chappatis for her family and washing, ironing and delivering clothes for the family business. Girls like Varsha are educated, but to get into the workforce, they need to learn a marketable trade. The boys are in the same situation too — the term “Precariat ‘ a play on the word “proletariat’” by Guy Standing (a University of London Economist) describes it well. These young men, the by-products of a global economy are loping around, dissatisfied, jobless or working on multiple odd jobs without land or a social safety net and living precariously on the edge. The only power these men have is to kick the women and girls around them.
This was poignantly essayed by the late Jehangir S. Pocha in his seminal article “Pity the Rapist” in The Huffington Post.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jehangir-s-pocha/india-rapist-pity_b_4732927.html
“It is young men nursing these powerful but inchoate feelings of frustration, inadequacy and resentment that wander the streets at night, looking for thrills, or just a way out. They are the amoral men emboldened by the virtual absence of law and order who gang up and goad each other to prey on women and children. Having never been treated with any consideration, they show none, and having only learnt to get by grabbing, they grab the closest, easiest thing — sometimes a five-year-old, sometimes a 50-year-old, sometimes a friend’s daughter, sometimes a stranger. “
In this book, Somini has tried to show the resilience, determination, despair, obstacles, yearnings and hope of a young India. From their generation, we could get something extraordinary, maybe a life saving drug, a song that will blow our minds or an environment-saving invention that will spew less carbon into the atmosphere.
You could be sitting on your couch in Palo Alto thinking: Why should I care, I am out, I have exited, I can ignore this. But bear in mind — India is a story that will shape the world in the years to come. The lack of the most basic education of India’s most ignored children will cause horrific after-shocks. By 2022 India will become the world’s most populous nation and also the world’s youngest. While the rest of the globe grays, India will come of age.
Somini and I are both daughters of privilege. We had the incredible luck of being born into the right families. After the halcyon days of my teens, as is inevitable for most, I have faced hardships and despair along the way. But there was always hope and the many silver linings available only to someone fortunate enough to have a good support system of family and of state. When I see the excessive molly-coddling and frenetic hyper-parenting of kids by their upper middle class parents, the copious effort that goes into packaging their offspring from birth for the most exclusive schools, the right extra-curriculars, the padded resumes and the perfect internships in a desperate quest for a high-octane, sparkling future, all I see is a generation trying to chart their children’s destinies, instead of allowing them to find their own.
If we can channel even a modicum of that dedication and money and direct it towards the selfless people and organizations and NGO’s (American India Foundation, Pratham, Akshaya Patra, Akanksha, Borderless World Foundation and many more) doing all the groundwork, we could ensure the stability of this behemoth population that is set to take over our world.
Our children will be okay. We need to worry about the rest.
This is a review/opinion essay.
