by Hari Kunzru
Guy Swift, thirty-three years old, UK citizen, paper millionaire and proud holder of platinum status on three different frequent-flyer programmes. Guy Swift, twice Young British Market Visionary of the Year and holder of several Eurobrand achievement awards. Guy Swift, charter member of a Soho club, a man genetically gifted with height, regular features, sandy-blond hair which tousled attractively, relatively inactive sweat glands, clear skin and a cast-iron credit rating. For two years he had lived with the reputedly unattainable Gabriella Caro, voted the most fanciable girl in her class every year of her studies at the International School of Fine Art and Cuisine in Lausanne. He had the number of the door-picker at the Chang Bar on his speed dial. You would have thought he was untouchable.
Guy’s seat had eight different parameters, all of which could be adjusted for his comfort and well-being. The airline had provided a pouch of toiletries, a sleeping mask and a pair of disposable slippers embroidered with their new logo. He rifled through the pouch, ignoring everything but the slippers, which he turned over and over in his hands. A recent trend report had hinted that the airline was about to break the taboo on yellow-accented greens in the cabin. But the slippers and accompanying items were still presented in the conservative blue colourway. Was this, he wondered, a failure of nerve?
‘More champagne, sir? A drink of water?’
He took a glass from the smiling female attendant, unselfconsciously bathing in the soft-porn ambience of the moment. Mentally he noted the experience as a credit on the airline’s emotional balance sheet. He enjoyed the attendant’s android charm, the way this disciplined female body reminded him that it was just a tool, the uniformed probe-head of the large corporate machine in which he was enmeshed. He (or rather his company) was paying this machine to administer a calculated series of pleasures and sensations. Respectful of its efforts, he had for the last four hours been sitting as immobile as a hospital patient, relishing them one by one. The heft of china and glass, the frogspawn dampness of a miniature pot of eyegel.
The flight was well into its nocturnal phase. The cabin lights had been dimmed. His fellow passengers had put aside their complimentary copies of the Wall Street Journal and settled into various states of trance. They fell within the standard demographic, these first-class people, balding business pates anaesthetized by meetings and conference-centre hospitality, glossy retirees occupying the stewards with long lists of requests. He settled a pair of headphones into his ears and pressed play on his current favourite personal soundtrack, a mix by DJ Zizi, the resident at Ibiza superclub Ataxia. Zizi, who bestrode the Uplifting Ambient scene like a tight-t-shirted colossus, had chosen to call his mix ‘Darker Shade of Chill’. It was, Guy thought, a good name, because although dark, the music was still chill. Breaking surf, feminine moaning and fragmented strings were countered by foghorns and echoing piano. DJ Zizi was comfortingly committed to the centre ground.
The music trickled into Guy’s brain, slowly clearing his mental space like an elderly janitor stacking up chairs. He had a sense of angelic contentment. Here he was, existent, airborne, bringing the message of himself from one point on the earth’s surface to another. Switching his laptop on, he tried in a half-hearted way to compose a mail to Gabriella, but, confronted by the blank white screen, he could think of nothing to say.
*
Some way below him, in one of the newer sectors of the North Okhla Industrial Development Area (acronymically known as Noida), there was more to communicate. Horn Please. Bye Bye Baby. Maha Lotto. Dental Clinic. Everyone wanted everyone’s attention, and they wanted it now, from the State Bank of India to the roadside proprietor of Bobby’s Juice Corner. No. 1 in afford-ability Inconvenience Regretted. Lane Driving is Sane Driving. Sunny Honey. Suitings Shirtings. All the action of Noida fizzed through Arjun’s sensorium without leaving a trace. Love’s Dream. Horn Please. Aishwarya Rai, on a schooner, whatever that is, some kind of boat, in Sydney Harbour. Or Venice. On a schooner in Venice…
Horn please?
Despite his father’s frequently vocalized suspicions, Arjun felt he was in no danger of confusing his daydreams with reality. His desires expressed themselves as images of a world which appreciated the importance of the principles of prediction and control. Reality was Noida. The gap was too great.
The promotional literature called it the ‘new industrial fairyland of the nation’. In the mid seventies the Uttar Pradesh state authorities had realized that the area on the east bank of the River Yamuna was rapidly becoming a de facto suburb of Delhi. Farmland was giving way to a chaotic sprawl of factories and shanties. The government started a programme of compulsory land purchases, and, amid corruption and speculation, the displacement of many people and the enrichment of a few beyond their wildest dreams, they zoned a huge grid which promptly exploded with life, generating a city of half a million people in less than twenty years. Shopping malls, multiplexes, temples and stadia jostled for position with hectare upon hectare of new twenty-storey blocks, built in every imaginable variant of discreet low-cost modernism.
The bus dropped him on the corner, and he picked his way through building rubble and piles of unlaid sewer pipe to the gates of the BigCorp Industries Housing Enclave, soon to be renamed H. D. Kaul Colony, after the company’s managing director. Greeting the chowkidar, who was hunched over a transistor radio following the cricket, he made his way across the parched lawn into the stone-clad body of Tower No. 4, Gleneagle House. No. 18 Gleneagle House was Mr Mehta senior’s greatest source of personal pride, the chief perk of his Move. The leap from government service (whose values had been so eroded over the years) to the private sector had paid off. The Mehtas were no longer the family of a small-town administrator but modern people, participants in the great Indian boom. The apartment was proof. It stood for The World, with which his son appeared to be disastrously out of touch.
In real life, Arjun just stared at his feet when his father lectured him. In his head he issued fluent rebuttals. In many respects his daydreams were superior to Noida. Noida was upheaval. A properly organized daydream had formal coherence. It could respond to commands, reconfiguring itself according to well-understood operations. Outcomes could be built in as required. Obviously the preferable choice.
But dreaming was penalized. If you ignored the world, it tended to ignore you back. Though he held several class prizes and was once a runner-up in a national computer problem-solving competition, Arjun’s certified honours were not as impressive as they ought to have been. He had scored badly in the IIT entrance exams, a failure which his disappointed teachers put down to ‘lack of focus’ but more accurately was due to focal misdirection, the star comp.sci. pupil having got obsessed during the crucial revision period with constructing a database of his all-time favourite films of the 1970s, searchable by name, cast, director, box office takings and personal critical ranking. As a consequence of his passion for cinema, his (entirely genuine, non-bazaar-bought) higher education had been conducted not at one of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology but at North Okhla, a middle-ranking school which had the compensatory advantage, felt more keenly by his mother than by Arjun himself, of allowing him to live at home while he studied.
He was still at home two years after graduation.
‘Mummy? Mummy?’ He bounded into the hall, almost knocking over Malini the maid, who was carrying a glass of tea.
‘Oh, sorry, Malini. Ma, are you there?’
‘Yes, Beta. Come through. I’m only resting.’
He flung open the door to his mother’s bedroom and gave her the news.
‘Mummy, I’m going to America!’
He might as well have said prison or be trampled by horses. Letting out a groan, she buried her head in her hands and burst into tears.
It was to be expected. As an Indian mother, Mrs Mehta’s prime directive was to ensure that her first-born son was never more than ten feet away from a source of clean clothes, second helpings and moral guidance. She expected to have to rele
ase her child eventually, but only into the hands of another woman, whose family tree had been thoroughly vetted and whose housekeeping could be easily monitored from the vantage point of a chair in the living room of No. 18 Gleneagle House, into which the girl would naturally move. America, unhandily located several thousand miles away, was known to be populated by females who would never dream of starching a collar, and whose well-documented predilection for exposing flesh, drinking alcohol and feeding ground beef to unwitting Hindu boys was nothing short of an international scandal. Hardly the place for her beta, her unmarried 23-year-old baby.
Arjun, who felt he did not really understand emotions as well as he might, made the gestures you make when you are trying to comfort someone. Disconcertingly, when his father came back from the office he started to cry as well. ‘My son,’ sobbed Mr Mehta, ‘America? Oh, my son.’ Even Malini was at it. At least Priti, his younger sister, seemed unmoved. She was hopping up and down behind her father’s shoulder with impatience. ‘What about my news? Is no one even vaguely interested in what happened to me today?’
For a long time Mr Mehta had been unable to feel altogether optimistic about his son. Something about the boy emanated muddle, and if thirty-five years of line management had taught him anything, it was that muddle is prejudicial to career success. News of a job in America was most affecting. His joy was augmented by the thought that finally he had got one back on his brother-in-law. Arvind, the sala in question, was the owner of an aggregates firm, with a contract to supply gravel to the Gujarat State government. He and his preening wife lived in what could only be described as a mansion in one of Ahmadabad’s most exclusive colonies. They had dedicated a statue at a local mandir; there was a photo of them standing next to it, with some sadhus and a minister. Their unappealing son Hitesh had for some years been employed by an artificial-flavourings company near Boston. For as long as Mr Mehta could remember it had been Hitesh this, Hitesh that. Hits is topping fifty k. Hits is team-leading a push for a new minty-fresh aroma. And all the while his own fool of a boy never seemed able to keep his head out of filmi magazines. But now Amrika! God be praised!
Of all the Mehtas, the one with the best excuse for crying was Priti. She loved Arjun dearly. It was good he had finally stopped being such an idiot, but her parents were only going bananas over him because he was a boy. Why should he get chucked on the cheek for every fart and belch, while she made her way in the world with the bare minimum of encouragement? Since she had passed her communications degree, all her parents appeared to want was to marry her off to the first all-four-limbs-possessing boy who wandered through the door.
As it happened, Arjun was not the only one to have a new job. But did anyone care? Did anyone even notice? Finally, after her parents had phoned almost everyone they knew with her brother’s news and her father had put the receiver down at the end of a particularly gratifying call to Ahmadabad, she got to tell them.
‘What do you mean you’ve never heard of DilliTel? They’re only the most dynamic call centre in the city!’
She explained the New South Wales connection, how she would be ‘in the hot seat’, providing service and support to customers of one of Australia’s biggest power companies. Her mother asked why she needed a job at all. Wouldn’t she rather stay at home? Her father frowned over his spectacles, grappling ineptly with the fundamentals of modern telecoms.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘You mean they call on the telephone here, all the way from Australia?’
‘Exactly. These big companies find it cost-effective.’
‘Cost-effective? It must be like throwing money down the drain!’
‘Daddy, they buy capacity. The customers don’t pay. They don’t even know they are calling abroad. It’s such a great job, Daddy I’ll receive training in Australian language and culture. We all have to be proficient in vernacular slang and accent, and keep day-to-day items of trivia at our fingertips.’
‘Trivia?’
‘Sporting scores. Weather. The names of TV celebrities. It adds value by helping build customer trust and empathy. As operators, we even have to take on new Australian identities. A nom de guerre, the manager calls it. What do you think of Hayley?’
‘Namda-what?’ spluttered Mr Mehta. ‘Now look here, young lady, what all is wrong with your own good name?’
Her mother nodded in agreement. ‘Beti, I don’t like the sound of this at all. It doesn’t seem decent. Why can’t you tell these Australian fellows to call you Priti or, better still, Miss Mehta? That would be so much nicer.’
Priti had been trying her best. The tears would not stay in any longer.
‘I don’t believe it. I do something good and you throw it in my face. I hate you! I hate all of you!’
‘Don’t you talk to your father like that,’ snapped Mrs Mehta, but she was chastising her daughter’s departing back.
Mr Mehta looked towards God and the ceiling. ‘This is what comes of too many TV channels. MTV, lady fashion TV, this, that and what all TV. No daughter would have spoken to her father in such a way when we were having Doordarshan only.’
‘She’s turning into one of these cosmopolitan girls,’ said his wife. ‘I think we should find a boy for her sooner rather than later.’
Mrs Mehta went off to poke a ladle into Malini’s dal. Mr Mehta turned back to the business section of the Times of India. Arjun quietly slipped into the corridor and knocked on his sister’s door. When Priti did not reply, he turned the handle and went in. She was lying on her bed, her face buried in a pile of pillows. He perched beside her, trying to devise a strategy to cheer her up.
‘There there,’ he said, and patted her shoulder. A muffled voice told him to go away. Obediently he stood up and was about to leave when the voice changed its mind. Priti’s face was red and there was a string of snot hanging from her nose.
‘Well done, Bro,’ she said.
‘Well done, Sis,’ he replied. She swung her legs off the bed and for a long time they sat together in silence. At the beginning this was comfortable, but questions were preying on Arjun’s mind, and finally he felt compelled to speak.
‘Do you think you’ll have to acquire facts about surfing or is it restricted to team sports?’
Priti looked at him. It was the kind of look which usually meant he was wearing mismatching clothes.
According to Guy Swift: The Mission, a summary of aims and ideals which its author had sometimes found occasion to distribute as an A5 spiral-bound document, ‘The future is happening today, and in today’s fast-moving future the worst place to do business is the past. I strive to add value by surfing the wave of innovation. I will succeed.’ He had always liked the Skywalkeresque note of the last sentence, and the Force had indeed been with Guy Swift: The Mission. As a written text it had helped its author win contracts and assert his authority with new clients. As a seminar it had once even led to sex, with a McKinsey analyst who had a thing about PowerPoint presentations. In three short years Guy had grown Tomorrow* into an agency with an international profile. GS:TM had undoubtedly played a role in that success.
Tomorrow* was, he liked to say, different from other agencies. It produced results
In a glittering career Guy had raised awareness, communicated vision, evoked tangible product experiences and taken managers on inspirational visual journeys. He had reinforced leading positions and project-managed the generation of innovative retail presences. His repositioning strategies reflected the breadth and prestige of large portfolios. His communication facilitation stood out from the crowd. Engaging and impactful, for some years he had also been consistently cohesive, integrated and effective over a spread spectrum.
At the heart of GS:TM lay a philosophy (or, as Guy preferred to put it, a ‘way’) he had synthesized from a study of the great marketing masters. He called it TBM, which stood for Total Brand Mutability. During his twenties he had dabbled in the youth sector, helping the agency he worked for to develop the well-known CAR triangle, whose three corners are
Cool, Attitude and Revolution. Having helped to sell an unknown quantity of sporting footwear, alcopops, games consoles and snowboarding holidays to CAR-starved under-thirties in Britain and Continental Europe, he had experienced what he described as a personal epiphany, the realization at a full-moon party in Thailand that his future lay in the science of ‘deep branding’, the great quest to harness what in GS:TM he termed the ‘emotional magma that wells from the core of planet brand’. ‘Humans are social,’ he would remind his clients in pitch meetings. ‘We need relationships. A brand is the perfect way to come together. Human input creates awareness and mines the brand for emotion. In a real way, the more we love it, the more powerful it gets.’
For Guy, love was the message. Love the brand and stay ahead of the curve. Much of GS:TM was devoted to the nature of the curve and the crucial importance of adopting a forward position in relation to it. Even so, the document’s 800 bullet-pointed words and Hokusai Wave intro-graphic left much unsaid about Guy Swift’s personal relationship with the future. In certain places – on moving walkways, at trade shows, in car showrooms – he felt it was physically connected to him, as if through some unexplained mechanism futurity was feeding back into his body: an alien fibrillation, a flutter of potential. Heading, say, towards the Senator Lounge at Schiphol Airport, he would feel it coming on, a chemical lift that would grow as he checked in, blossoming into full presence as he stepped through the dimensional portal of the metal-detector into the magical zone of TV monitors and international-marque goods. Surrounded by people on their way to other places, he would feel cocooned in the even light and neutral colours of a present that seemed to be declaring its own provisionality, its status as non-destination space. Then it was a time to grab things: a bottle of Absolut Citron, an open-face prawn sandwich, a magazine. Like the objects buried with ancient kings, these items had only a temporary purpose: to help him get from where he was to where he was going, to ease his transition into the next world.
