India in Love

by Ira Trivedi

  I wonder if their parents suspected something, since they spoke on the phone all the time.

  ‘We spoke at night mostly,’ clarifies Ankur. ‘This was the most exciting. We hid under the blankets and talked on the phone till our phones ran out of battery,’ he says with a grin.

  In the end, it was the cell phone that had incubated their love which finally gave the two lovers away. Arpita’s cell phone with messages from Ankur was discovered, and she was sent to her brother’s home where she was locked away till her family decided what to do with her. Arpita knew they would kill if her they came to know that Ankur was from a backward caste, so she escaped, fleeing with Ankur from her hometown in Haryana. Ankur and Arpita first went to Madhya Pradesh, where they got married, and after two months on the run, came to Delhi.

  Harsh and Sanjoy know that Ankur and Arpita’s is a lost case. A match between a Rajput and a Dalit will never be accepted in the world that they come from. They are just giving the lovebirds a place to breathe, to rest, and to plan for the future.

  We talk of cities where Arpita and Ankur can run to. They don’t want to stay in Delhi, they don’t like it here. I tell them that there is more to Delhi than just the shelter and there are lots of opportunities for two young people like them. To me, it makes the most sense for them to stay here. They insist that if they stay in Delhi their families will find them. They cross their arms over their chest and stubbornly stare down at the floor. ‘No, we can’t stay here, we will go to Mumbai,’ they say.

  They tell me that even in the anonymity of a big city, staying invisible is close to impossible. But Mumbai is a difficult city, a city with so many people and little space. What about the countryside? Doesn’t that seem like an attractive proposition? There Arpita, armed with a degree in economics, can teach at a school. Perhaps Ankur who comes from a family of farmers can farm. I remember him telling me that he feels passionately about farming. They grimace in disgust. The countryside! Why would they go there? That is where they came from. It is a place of horror and atrocities, of khaps and of families who kill. But Mumbai is a place of hope—the city of dreams. And right now it seems like it is only dreams that keep these young lovers going.

  ♦

  The young people who I met at the Love Commandos speak endlessly about the future. They don’t talk about the bucolic past, about the families, relatives, and friends they have left behind. All they want to do is talk about tomorrow—of new cities, new lives and new plans. They are excited to make new beginnings in the new India they have heard about and watched on television. They appear to be in love, but at times I wonder—how much time have they actually spent with each other? They have shared stolen moments through windows and cell phones, but not much more. Now these young couples are taking on the world, with just themselves to rely upon. And if they have fallen so suddenly in love, what is to stop them from falling out of love? And what will happen then?

  ‘YOU ARE BANGALORED’

  After my exposure to the love revolution as seen at perhaps its bleakest, in the experiences of couples trapped in small towns and communities which are flailing around trying to reconcile traditional ways and the onrush of modernity, I decide it’s time to see it at work in another setting—the hyper modern workplace of the IT and BPO sector. Bangalore, India’s IT city, seems the place to see this side of the sexual revolution at work. Bangalore was once a sleepy town, remarkable only for its excellent weather and popular as a retirement town. Over the past few decades, it has seen a stark change, becoming India’s IT hub, with its population increasing five-fold, as young people from across the country have flocked here to work.

  When I get to the offices of the company where I am doing my interviews, I feel I could be in the grounds of a five-star resort—the office buildings are set amidst manicured lawns, fringed by palm trees, and new-age sculptures. Security is tight, there are at least ten uniformed guards checking credentials, but when I get past them, I’m suitably impressed by the hundreds, maybe even thousands of young men and women I see walking to work purposefully with their backpacks along the broad, spotlessly clean roads.

  At the offices of the company, a BPO firm, senior manager Partha greets me warmly. He is tall and well-built, his sculpted body showing through his t-shirt. He is handsome too, with skin that glows with good health, and long black hair that he has gelled back—hardly the stereotype of a geeky engineer. Partha has been working at the company for the past three years, though he has been working in the IT sector for fifteen. The office is sparsely populated and Partha explains that the full work force of the office never arrives at any one time. They operate in various shifts, and employees have the freedom to choose their timings. The first shift begins at 7 a.m. the last at 7 p.m., and the guys who work this shift usually finish at 5 a.m. He, being a manager, works regular hours—9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

  Partha and I go to his office to talk. There is a bicycle parked outside the office door, and a pair of sneakers under his desk. Iron Maiden and Pink Floyd posters festoon the walls, along with a picture of him completing a marathon. He tells me proudly that he is a fitness freak, and that he bikes ten kilometres to work and back home every day. ‘Bangalore is an amorphous place. If you are young, you come here to get an IT job. You are paid well, you make friends, and most importantly, you have freedom. People come from all parts of India, they speak different languages, they look different and it is easy to assimilate here,’ he says.

  All through my days in Bangalore, I observe that what he says is true. Work spaces, like the company where he is employed, offer anonymity and the ability to lead a life free from family and societal pressures. In a place like Bangalore, all of Coontz’s four factors are relevant, and this inchoate new culture is what makes Bangalore ideal for the love revolution to take root in.

  I ask Partha about the culture of love and marriage in the world of IT. He explains to me that love is as much a part of the IT world as coding. Falling in love at work, then marrying that person with or without the approval of families is a common story here. In fact, love and marriage was almost part of the package deal in the IT world. Most young employees come here not only to get grand salaries, but also to find a boyfriend/girlfriend, have sex, hopefully followed by marriage.

  But there was also another side to this IT culture. While on the one hand there were those who sought out the edgy lifestyle it offered, there were others who found it difficult to cope with. ‘The culture here is difficult to handle, especially for people who come from traditional backgrounds, which is most of the crowd here. They are engineers, they have done nothing but study their whole lives, their mothers bringing food to their tables and their fathers disciplining them. They come here, and this open culture is at times too much for them.’

  Suddenly he becomes serious and asks ‘Did you see the news of the suicide this morning?’

  I have indeed seen the news of a suicide in Whitefield, an IT Park area. A young IT professional, an employee of Hewlett Packard, was found dead in his car. Though the police have been vague about what happened, a suicide note was found in the car that indicated heartbreak.166

  ‘This kind of thing happens here all the time.’ says Partha. ‘A lot of people can’t deal with this sudden change in lifestyle.’

  What Partha tells me is not far from the truth. The medical journal Lancet declared in a 2012 report that suicide has become the second leading cause of death among young Indians, and that suicide rates were higher among well-educated young people from the more prosperous southern states. The study’s lead author declared, ‘young educated Indians from the richer states are killing themselves in numbers that are almost the highest in the world’.167

  There are other instances of suicide that come to my mind. Last year, Amit Budhiraja, a thirty-year old software engineer working for Infosys in Bangalore smothered his twenty-eight-year-old wife, also an IT professional, and then killed himself. He left a suicide note, admitting to killing his wife because he suspected her
of having an affair with a colleague. To make the situation worse, several people left comments on a Facebook page saying that death was an appropriate punishment for a cheating wife.

  ♦

  What about the rumours of hedonistic sex in the IT world? More than one person had told me that so many employees have sex in the offices of an IT giant (with a holier than thou public image and pious utterances from its top management) that its plumbing regularly backs up because of all the condoms that are flushed down the toilets. I am curious to know if these rumours are true. Partha is hesitant to answer this question, and once again confirms that I am not recording this conversation, as requested. ‘I can’t tell you for sure,’ he finally says. ‘If you do a sex survey here, they’ll be paavam kuttis (pure innocents). They’ll pretend they don’t watch porn, but they watch a lot of it, especially at night because people work 24/7 and have high-speed internet connections. People watch so much porn that I have to monitor it closely. We’ve had to put laws in place which say that people caught watching porn on company computers or on personal devices will be thrown out immediately.’

  As Partha and I chat, Roshika, one of his colleagues, pops into the office. The gregarious Roshika is dressed fashionably in hip-hugging jeans, a tight t-shirt and a pair of trendy flats. She is carrying a fashionable pink Adidas backpack and has a pair of sunglasses propped up on her head. With Partha’s permission, I quiz her about life in Bangalore. Roshika, who is twenty-eight, is happy to talk. She tells me she moved to Bangalore six years ago from Coorg, and that she loves it here, primarily because she is a shopaholic and the money she makes working in the IT industry allows her to indulge her addiction. She is single and lives in an apartment that she shares with two other girls. She speaks a lot about her friends, she tells me about her flatmates, both of whom work in IT and are single. They too, she says, love to shop.

  She also likes to party, but as per government rules everything in Bangalore, including night clubs, pubs and restaurants, shuts at 11 p.m. The government gives ‘moral’ reasons for this curfew. In a fast-changing city, the government is desperately trying to hold on to the past. ‘These stupid rules really suck,’ grumbles Roshika. ‘It wasn’t like this before, but this new government is really silly. By the time we go out it is almost 10:30 p.m., so our party scene is lousy. The most exciting part for us is getting ready and wearing the clothes that we buy.’

  Does she have a boyfriend?

  ‘A boyfriend? No way,’ she grimaces and then adds with a grin, ‘I am single and ready to mingle. I don’t want to be tied down with a boyfriend, especially not one of these jealous, possessive types. No way.’

  What about her parents, are they pressuring her to get married?

  ‘I don’t want to get married right now, so my parents are going to have to deal with it. I’m independent, so it doesn’t really matter what they think.’

  I ask her how often she goes back to scenic Coorg. I imagine it must be pleasant to escape the city and visit family there. She just shrugs and looks away. ‘I go sometimes, for festivals and stuff. But I don’t really like to go back there. It’s so boring, there isn’t anything to do.’

  From Roshika’s reactions to my questions, it doesn’t seem as if she is on good terms with her parents. According to a study on the lives of IT workers, ‘The new youth subculture, with its supposed consumption-oriented and “fun-loving” lifestyle, is regarded as disreputable by the conventional middle class—giving rise to inter-generational and social tensions.’168 I can imagine that Roshika is in a similar sort of situation.

  When Partha leaves the office for a moment, Roshika opens up about work. ‘I work in financial planning. I love my job, but the crowd is boring. It’s okay in marketing and advertising but finance sucks. I do love my American counterparts though. I think they’re cool.’

  Roshika tells me about her recent trip to New York for a training session, her first time abroad. ‘I’m a big Sex and the City fan, and I’ve always wanted to visit Manhattan. The first thing I did was to take the Sex and the City bus tour. I only had two days there but it was absolutely amazing.’ She adds, ‘The shopping was divine.’ I ask her about dating in the office. She tells me that the company has a young crowd, lots of people are straight out of college, and the average age here is twenty-four.

  ‘They just want to show off their love lives to everyone. You see people holding hands and cuddling during lunch breaks. They just try to be cool, but they are not really. If a girl wears a sleeveless shirt to work they give her a bad look,’ says Roshika self-reflexively tugging at the sleeves of her own shirt.

  Roshika is keen in her observation. According to statistics 51.7 per cent of urban men think girls who dress provocatively deserve to be teased. Surprisingly, 33.7 per cent urban women think so as well.169

  ‘All the men wear jeans and sneakers and carry a backpack, and they think they are the coolest. That’s the typical IT crowd.’

  Partha takes me for lunch to the cafeteria upstairs. Just as Roshika had told me, there is a sartorial standard for the men—they are all dressed in jeans, shirts and sneakers. The women display more variety, some wear ‘western’ attire—jeans, skirts, pants, others are in salwaar-kameez, no one wears saris. Over lunch Partha introduces me to a young woman named Priya. She is in her twenties, and is dressed in a plain salwaar-kameez. She is plump, plain-faced, and her most distinctive facial feature is a lazy eye. Partha bids me goodbye, and tells me that Priya has an interesting story to tell.

  ♦

  When Priya moved to Bangalore for work there were some things that she vowed she would never do. She was never going to change her name to something more fashionable and easy to pronounce. She was never going to put on airs (her father used to call them ‘city airs’) and dress in pants and shirts, though her 5’9” slender frame allowed for that. She was never going to change her thick south Indian twang for an American one, not even when she was made fun of, not even when people had trouble understanding what she was saying. She was never going to forget her family and how much she loved them. And most of all, she was never going to have a ‘romance’ with the boys that she met. She was not interested in a love marriage and though she had studied in co-ed schools, she had never spoken to any boys.

  After graduating from a small college in Tamil Nadu with a master’s in Computer Science, Priya secured an internship with a multinational BPO in Bangalore. In her twenty-four years, Priya had never left her home state, and to live in Bangalore was a thrilling proposition. She had not expected to stay long though—she knew that her strict father would never allow it. An astrologer had told her father that Priya would not marry till she was twenty-six years old, and her father thought it best for Priya to get some work experience rather than to twiddle her thumbs at home. In his mind, a little bit of work experience could only improve Priya’s prospects for marriage. Little did he know that life in the IT world of Bangalore would forever change the direction of Priya’s life.

  In Bangalore, Priya kept all her promises. Staying away from love though was harder than she had imagined, especially in the big, lonely city where everyone seemed to have a life outside the office. Priya had grown up in a large family, around lots of cousins and friends, and here she was desperately, painfully lonely.

  Six months after she started work, Priya received a Facebook friend request from a colleague who worked on her floor. In his message he said that he liked her, thought she was very pretty and that he wanted to get to know her. This frightened Priya who had never been ‘proposed to’ by a guy. Men seldom paid much attention to her. She was dark-skinned and plain faced. Priya was curious about this man, but she had vowed to follow her father’s rules that prohibited her from speaking to boys. Though she ignored her suitor, this incident confused her. Was she the type of girl who got proposed to, dated, and maybe even fell in love? Her father definitely didn’t think so, but a small part of her did. She decided to resist the advances and blindly follow her father like she h
ad done all her life. But her suitor kept pursuing her, on email, Facebook and through hand-written notes. He told her that he loved her, and that he wanted to marry her. Priya was deeply disturbed by this unsolicited attention, but she maintained her calm and told him that she could only be friends with him, because her father was looking for a husband for her.

  The more she ignored him, the more he persisted. The Psycho, as she called him, followed her around, emailed her, and sent her notes, flowers, and chocolates. He got her mobile number, and called and SMSed her incessantly. Things got complicated when the Psycho’s mother called Priya and asked her to marry her son. She told Priya that her son was frustrated and that he wasn’t coming home to visit because of her. She even offered to call Priya’s parents to arrange the marriage.

  After the mother’s phone call, Priya was greatly distressed, but she had been trained to be disciplined, to suffer quietly even when things were going badly. She would go into the bathroom and cry, and pray that it would all be over soon. Priya was afraid to tell her boss, because she thought he would think less of her; she was afraid to tell her parents because they would blame the entire incident on her. Finally, when she simply couldn’t handle the harassment anymore she confided in a colleague, her older brother’s friend who was working in the company. He immediately took her to HR.

  HR told Priya that cases such as hers, of infatuation, were common. A study conducted in 2011 by the Centre for Transforming India found that a startling 88 per cent of female workers in the country’s growing IT and outsourcing industry experienced sexual harassment on the job.