Once I entered the granite-floored lobby, I could no longer smell the dirt. Stuffed black leather armchairs were distributed along the lobby, with a few potted palms to break up the pattern of man-made material. There were people reading newspapers or tapping at laptops, and no one gave me a glance when I sat down to wait for Chak and typed out some notes. It was a low-context society inside the office complex, just like America, and no one would bother me as long as I had gone through the proper security procedures and stayed within my designated space.
I remembered how when we had gone to the neighbouring office park during our first meeting, Chak had stopped on the way back to the car, seemingly transfixed by what he saw. We were standing on a central reservation, a mild breeze blowing at the tufts of palm trees. Neat grids of concrete lay all around us, holding up the buildings of steel and glass, and not many people were visible. ‘This could be anywhere,’ Chak said. ‘It could be Arizona, where I worked in an office park that looked just like this. That’s the world standard we’ve brought to India.’
Unlike Arizona, the low-context technology hubs of Bangalore existed in conflict with the high-context society all around. Chak was conscious of this. He lived, in his own words, in a ‘gated community’. The same was true for his office, self-contained with its cafeteria and recreation facilities. If he wanted a change while having a coffee or a meal, he went to one of the franchise outlets in the business park next door. The only time he interacted with high-context India was when he travelled between his two nodes of work and home, jostling through traffic that was, in his mind, heedless of all rules other than the one of every man for himself.
I got to see both high-context and low-context India every time I went to meet Chak. I travelled southwards through Bangalore, a journey of over an hour that took me across stretches of the city that existed in discrete historical segments. I began in the close-packed, colonial neighbourhood of Benson Town in the north, where small grocery stores slept on the corners once the rush-hour traffic died down. A third of the way on my route, I went past the cricket stadium of Cubbon Park and entered central Bangalore, where the coffee houses and bookstores suggested an older, cultured urbanism. Then the city got taken over by long stretches of walls and forbidding gates that belonged to HAL. This was military-industrial Bangalore, where the state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Limited manufactured – independently and in collaboration with Americans, Israelis and Russians – combat aircraft, attack helicopters and unmanned drones. From the road, nothing of HAL’s facilities was visible apart from the name, which tolled in my head and brought to my mind the computer HAL created by the scientist Dr Chandra in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, a computer that eventually goes mad because of the conflicts created by human greed. It seemed it would be only a matter of time before my experience of Bangalore became a story about a mad computer and a Dr Chandra.
As I came closer to Chak’s office on the Outer Ring Road, I passed the area around Bellandur Lake, where fishermen and villagers were in retreat before the technology companies. The road ran straight, past air-conditioned franchises mixed in with smaller, local establishments (‘Mangalorean Food Veg and Nonveg’, ‘Andhra Style Cooking’). Everywhere there seemed to be construction and ruin, hard to distinguish from each other, one pile of stone and brick being rubble while another represented raw material for new buildings. The sun reflected now not just off the water of the wetlands, but off glass that appeared in shades of blue and grey, held together by aluminium latticework and encased in blocks of concrete and marble. There were brick walls embroidered with iron posts, some of them surrounding the finished sheen of a software park but also often encircling what was still field and scrubland.
The enclosed spaces, seemingly so neutral, exemplified the essential conflict between high-context and low-context society. The conflict wasn’t about technology. Instead, it was over land – that necessary, rudimentary, unsophisticated and finite thing on which the organized rationality of the office parks and their modern features (‘high-end OFC connectivity’, ‘24/7 100% back-up power’, ‘high-security arrangement’) were being built.
This struggle over land in Bangalore has received little attention, except from a few journalists like Sugata Srinivasaraju in Outlook. Srinivasaraju had written about the area of Bellandur, and how farmers there rioted in 2002 over attempts by Infosys, Bangalore’s best-known technology company, to acquire their land at rates well below the market price. The anger of the farmers had been partly over the fact that Infosys wasn’t buying directly from them but through the government, which had determined the prices at which the plots should be sold. But their agitation was also about how there would be no role for them in the technology parks even if they received suitable compensation for their land.
This kind of collusion between the state and private companies has been exacerbated since 2000 by the government’s policy of setting up Special Economic Zones, or SEZs. Hoping to emulate China’s success in creating export-friendly manufacturing zones in Shenzhen, the Indian government had by 2006 approved 200 such SEZs throughout the country, offering tax breaks and exemptions from labour laws in areas that were effectively defined as foreign territories. Even as I was in Bangalore, farmers in Nandigram, West Bengal were protesting against the attempt to establish an SEZ on their fields – they eventually succeeded in stopping the project – and there were similar protests happening elsewhere in the country.
The argument in favour of the SEZs and technology parks (which also received tax exemptions) was that they would generate employment through their factories and outsourcing offices. The displaced farmers would be converted into industrial workers, which was a necessary part of the process of becoming fully modern, especially since agriculture is nowhere as good at generating profits as factories and technology companies. While the software industry in India had produced, in 2006, $25 billion while employing just over a million people, the agricultural sector employing 400 million people had produced just $150 billion. This contrast makes quite clear which sector is better at generating wealth, but there is always the question of what is to be done with the 400 million who cannot become software engineers.
This superseding of the traditional by the modern was visible everywhere as I walked around the Outer Ring Road, taking in the straight lines of the technology parks and the perfect circles of satellite dishes networking the companies with offices in the West. There was a stretch of land right next to Chak’s office complex, protected by a security barrier and guards, with a small sign that declared it to be an SEZ in development. Beyond that was the village of Bellandur, its huts hardened into crooked concrete structures ranged along a narrow alley. This was where the construction labourers congregated, gathering around a tea stall that stocked the basic necessities, from batteries to cigarettes, and where the bench was made of a plank balanced on bricks, perhaps one of the most common sights in India. Sometimes, if I was early for an appointment with Chak, I sat at the stall to drink tea. The working-class women who passed by, looking tired but still possessing graceful little touches like the strings of jasmine flowers wrapped around their hair, seemed like relics from the past, as did the little girl who appeared one day to ask for money and then vanished into the recesses of the village.
4
One evening, Chak took me to see his new house. We drove out of his office complex and turned into the SEZ next door, riding along a dirt track that stretched out towards a vast expanse of rock and green scrub. There was a large pit to our right, the foundation for a building, while on our left there was a row of grey towers, surrounded by reversing trucks and loaders dumping sand. Groups of small but sturdy-looking teenage workers came off their shifts, dressed in mud-splattered clothes and walking past a sign that proudly proclaimed ‘Child Labour Not Permitted’.
There was no way to tell what the buildings were for, except for one that had a sign for Honeywell, a US company that was setting up a ‘research, development and
engineering unit’ in Bangalore, apparently with the purpose of producing engines for Indian Air Force strike aircraft. I pointed at the largest building I could see and asked Chak if he knew what it was for. It was going to be a five-star hotel, he said, part of the Shangri-La hotel chain. The hotel was owned by the Adarsh Group, an Indian company, but it would be managed by a Hong Kong-based concern owned by a reclusive Malaysian-Chinese billionaire called Robert Kuok. When complete, I found out later, Hotel Shangri-La would include 469 rooms, 276 service apartments, and ‘a separate spa village complex designed as a sanctuary within the hotel’, which meant that a fake village would replace the real village that had existed here. As we left the hotel behind and Chak pointed out a row of five towers that would be apartment buildings, I began to wonder why so much of the SEZ was taken up by housing and hotels rather than factories, and why the government was giving tax breaks for what was essentially private property for the affluent classes.
We reached a section at the end, cordoned off by walls of corrugated tin. There was another guard here, a man in a grey raincoat and black rainboots hurrying to open the gates. Chak drove in, shut off the engine and got out. I followed him and found myself standing in the middle of an American suburb.
The road was straight and geometrical, stitching together houses fronted by perfectly aligned lawns and garages with roll-down shutters. Black wrought-iron lamps had been planted at regular intervals along the pavement, accompanied by palm trees that had not yet grown to their normal height. The double-storey houses, their sloping roofs topped with red tiles, were mostly unfinished and unoccupied, although a man working for a biochemical company had moved into the house next to Chak’s. The developer, Chak said enthusiastically, enforced a uniformity to the houses so that the property values could be maintained. All the houses were required to have sloping roofs and red tiles. The lawns in the front couldn’t be fenced off, although an owner could put shrubbery around the back lawn for privacy.
Chak’s house had not yet been painted. There were slabs lying around it, pieces of yellow granite from which workers had been cutting out small bricks to create a finish for the walls – a touch of individuality specified by Chak, and approved of by the developer. Chak unlocked the front door and took me to the high-ceilinged lobby.
‘What do you think?’ he said.
I made appreciative noises. Even in its unfinished state, the house stood for something. It suggested a completeness of existence, ranged around comfort and modernity, and I could connect it easily with the American suburbs I had seen and that Chak had lived in.
His vocabulary too reflected the domesticity of those no-longer-distant suburbs. There, to the right, was the ‘master bedroom’. That was a ‘walk-in closet’. He led me to the back of the house and stopped in the middle of an open space, with windows looking out to the lawn and the biochemist’s house. ‘This is the kitchen.’
There was a marble-top counter in the middle, with burners. Above it was a strange contraption bolted to the ceiling. I stared at it for a while until some hidden nugget of memory made me say, ‘That’s for the exhaust.’
‘Yeah,’ Chak said. ‘The stuff for the kitchen was imported from Italy. Everything from the marble down to the smallest fittings. You can’t get things of this quality in India.’ He took me towards an L-shaped counter with a row of brown cabinets running above and below. ‘See how this works,’ Chak said, grabbing one of the cabinet doors. ‘It doesn’t slam if you push it back.’
He demonstrated its working for me, giving it a hard push, watching the mechanism slowing the door down until it closed with a soft, sucking sound. I began trying out the drawers under the counter, pulling them out and giving them varying pushes, sometimes soft and sometimes hard. It was satisfying to see how they all closed at the same pace, and how snugly, no matter how much or how little force I applied. Chak and I started laughing, slightly hysterical in our appreciation of the Italian material.
‘You can’t get this quality, even in America,’ he said.
We went up the stairs, along a passageway where Chak planned to create a library. There were three bedrooms on this floor, each with their own bathroom. The rooms were for his two daughters and his son. ‘If he ever comes back,’ he added.
‘Is there a question about that?’ I said.
Chak laughed, but he didn’t answer the question.
We went downstairs again, crossing the lobby and standing to the right of the main entrance, where the sitting room would be. He had bought the plot three years earlier, and in two more years his house would be complete. ‘Things take time in India,’ Chak said, ‘but they get done. The value of the house, when it’s completed, will be at least one point five million dollars. It’s worth one point three million dollars now.’
‘Really?’ I said.
‘Easily,’ Chak said. ‘There’s this other guy whose house is unfinished and is smaller than mine. He sold his for six crore rupees, which is one point three million dollars, so I can get at least that much.’ He beamed at me. ‘I couldn’t imagine that even when I was living in America. India is where it’s all happening.’
I could see how real the $1.3 million house was for Chak. It stood for more than just the value it represented, the intelligent investing it exemplified, or even – as I would come to think more than a year after I stood in that house with Chak – the way in which it was part of the struggle over land, of gated communities for the elite and a global speculative frenzy over housing. Later, I would see places that were half-finished, where the money had run out, but I didn’t know this at the time. As I stood in Chak’s house, I could only see the energy that had gone into creating the turmoil visible through the rain-splattered windows: the rubble, the skeletal hulks of buildings and the mounds of earth on which workers clambered like yellow-helmeted ants. The floor we were standing on was uneven, coated in a lumpy plaster of Paris that had been laid down to protect the marble surface, a discarded newspaper at our feet. But to Chak and to others like him, the house was the beginning of a process that was unstoppable, that was even, in some ways, natural. It was a taming and ordering of the landscape by laying low context over the high. It would be possible, in some years – or maybe it already was possible – to put the Walkman on in India and ignore the maid coming in to do the cleaning. The newspaper flapped under my feet. When I looked down, I saw Arindam Chaudhuri’s face, round and glossy, staring up at me.
5
There were other forms of shutting oneself off from the world. A few days after seeing Chak’s house, I met up with another engineer who worked for an American technology company. His name was S. S. Prasad, and I had been introduced to him by a friend who said that Prasad was a poet as well as an engineer. I would find him interesting, she said, as long as I could convince him to talk to me.
S. S. seemed willing enough to talk when I called him. I got the sense that his ambition as a poet was involved in this decision and that he was perhaps thinking, in a modest way, of some sort of publicity for his work. We met up one afternoon at a Barista café on Church Street in central Bangalore. Dressed plainly, telling me right away that he usually never went to cafés like Barista because that seemed like a waste of money, S.S. came across as a measured and earnest 28-year-old. Although he was slightly built, he seemed very solid to me, finished in a way that made me think that S.S. at eighty-two would not be remarkably different from S.S. at twenty-eight.
Like Chak, S.S. was a Tamil Brahmin who had grown up in Madras. His had been a similar middle-class upbringing, and his journey towards becoming an engineer seemed to partly have been a matter of eliminating things he cared about, from cricket and television shows to Carnatic classical music. He had moved to Bangalore a few years earlier, and he was quite settled, married, with an apartment and a car. The same habit of thrift that made him avoid expensive cafés also determined that he used his car very sparingly, so that even though he had to come a long way to meet me, he had taken a bus.
S.S. had got married two years earlier. His bride had been selected for him by his parents, who had looked among relatives for a suitable match, comparing horoscopes. S.S. didn’t think this was unusual in any way. ‘The temple has always been in my ambience,’ he explained, and an arranged marriage was part of that ambience. It was part of his Hindu cultural inheritance, as were the sacred texts of the Vedas, in which he found both scientific rationality and an advanced aesthetic sensibility.
S.S. had attempted a similar synthesis in his own writing, although when he started writing poetry, he was mostly just trying to capture his ambience, including that of the temple. He had chosen to write in English, for which he’d trained himself by methodically reading other Indian poets also writing in English. He had attended a poetry workshop, and his poems had begun to appear in small Indian literary journals. S.S. later emailed me some of these poems, and when I read them, I liked them for the snapshots they provided of his world, with some sharply observed details.
Yet these poems of S.S.’s, important though they were for him, took second place to the form of poetry he claimed to have invented. These consisted of ‘nanopoems’ that brought together the realms of engineering and poetry. S.S. wrote the nanopoems in a binary language of zeros and ones, and what made them special was that he inscribed them into the computer chips he designed at work. The chip design was part of his job, the nanopoems were not, but his employers were aware of what he did and were quite encouraging about it.
‘There’s a lot of space left on a chip after you put in the circuitry,’ S.S. said. ‘I fill in some of that emptiness with a nanopoem.’
In writing poems in the binary language of mathematics, S.S. was echoing – unconsciously or consciously? I never had a chance to ask him – the efforts of an Indian writer from 200 BC called Pingala, who had created the first known description of a binary numeral system in an attempt to describe prosody. The nanopoems S.S. wrote were, however, singular in that they were invisible to the naked eye. When I asked S.S. who he imagined his reader to be, he replied, ‘An engineer at the other end.’ Somewhere in the United States, an unknown engineer would be checking the chip design when one of S.S.’s poems would appear suddenly under the microscope, a part of the chip that had nothing to do with the efficient, functional circuitry that made the chip work. The testing engineer could decide whether to let the poem remain, and if he did, the design would be sent back to Asia, to a manufacturing facility in Taiwan. It would then get replicated in every single chip with that particular design, a poem with a print run of millions that would be read by no one other than the solitary, anonymous engineer.
The Beautiful and the Damned Page 11
