India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (8 page)

Once, he said, he would have leaped at the opportunities. He always assumed he’d work abroad, at least for a while. But now he was reconsidering. He’d started thinking it would be silly to leave India. Europe and America were the past, he said. The future was in places like Bangalore—in cities that heaved with ambition and entrepreneurship and opportunity.

“This is where it’s all happening,” Harsh said, pointing around the room. I remember bright colors on the walls and the furniture, and the silver surface of a serving counter. I remember the sun pouring through the windows, lighting up a corridor on the table between us.

Harsh leaned into that corridor. He told me, with light on his face, that everywhere in this city, people his age were building high-powered careers. Many were getting rich. They had their own apartments, their own cars, and some even had chauffeurs. He knew he could have all of that. Anything was possible.

“Whenever I think of leaving India, I remind myself: ‘I can make it here,’” he said. “This is the time to be in India. I can make whatever I want of myself.”

He asked me where I lived. I told him. He asked how long the drive was from Auroville to Bangalore. He laughed. He asked: “But why would you want to live so far from the action?”

Harsh was confident, very confident. That’s what I remember
most about him. I remember thinking he was maybe a little too confident. His faith in the future was self-congratulatory, his self-assurance bordered on arrogance. But of one thing, he was right: the action was in the cities.

I didn’t end up taking a job in Bangalore. I chose to stay in Auroville. My wife and I built our house there, and we had our children there. The house was by a forest, at the edge of a canyon that filled with muddy water and cacophonous frogs during the monsoons. It was a good life. I thought of the canyon like a moat—it kept the world, the roar of motorcycles and cars, the disruptions of commerce that were tearing at the villages, at bay.

Change in the villages around me felt complicated. Modernity in the countryside was layered with ambivalence. The present carried all the baggage of the past. It was hard to disentangle the old from the new, and harder yet to separate the positive from the negative.

The cities were so much simpler. In the cities—and especially in metropolises like Bangalore and Chennai, Mumbai and New Delhi—there was little ambivalence about wealth and development. Like Harsh, the cities were self-confident, brash and unshakably optimistic. The twenty-first century had come to them like a party, a celebration of the nation’s potential; they embraced modernity unhesitatingly.

Gandhi famously wrote once that the soul of India was in its villages. That was still true when I was growing up, when
the pastoral world around me—the hand plows, the windmills, the bicycles, the catamarans and bullock carts—contained all the charm and simplicity (and the backwardness) of the nation. Cities were little more than dusty, unhappening centers of business and government.

Now the center of gravity was shifting. Although around 70 percent of the population still lived in the countryside, they were migrating by the millions to the cities. A study I read predicted that between the turn of the millennium and 2030, India’s urban population would increase by around 300 million people—roughly equivalent to the entire population of the United States. That same year, more than 70 percent of the nation’s GDP would be generated in the cities.

India’s traditional agricultural economy was becoming a relic. Cities—with their software parks and service-sector jobs and armies of young, independent workers—were building a new economy. Cities were chaotic, messy, and to my mind often unlivable. But they were also dynamic and euphoric. The Indian political scientist Sunil Khilnani called them “bloated receptacles of every hope and frustration”; cities were crucibles of a new nation.

I lived in the countryside. And I loved the countryside. But my
first few years back in India, I spent a lot of time in the cities. I traveled around the nation. I visited New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad—all places that had flourished in recent years, metropolises transformed by new money. I visited smaller towns, too, places like Cochin and Panjim and Madurai,
where the gold rush was just beginning, where the buildings were less sparkly but the streets just as clogged and the sense of opportunity as palpable.

I spent most of my time in Chennai, the nearest big city to home. I would get up early in the mornings, drive up the East Coast Road, the sun still soft, its reflection diffused across the ocean, and wander around all day. I had a few friends in Chennai; I made up errands. Mostly, I was directionless. I came to Chennai because I wanted to feel connected. Being in the cities made me feel like I was part of something.

Every time I drove up Rajiv Gandhi Salai, Chennai’s technology corridor, I saw a new software complex, each bigger and shinier than the last. Sometimes I watched as the excavators dug up the earth and the cranes lifted a glass panel above the coconut trees, and I would feel a rush of excitement, a stirring in my heart. “This is the new India,” I would think. “A new country is being built, brick by brick, before my eyes.”

In the Park Hotel, a hip, flamboyant place near the center of town, I hung out in the Leather Bar and drank mojitos and martinis. A DJ in black spun music (too loudly, I thought) at his table. Well-dressed, cosmopolitan men and women leaned into each other, touching, sometimes doing more.

I spent many days in Spencer Plaza, the largest shopping mall in Chennai, a hulking red building on one of the city’s main roads. The old wings of the mall were dowdy; their souvenir shops and cheap jewelry stores were throwbacks to an earlier era. But the new wing sold Nike and Reebok and Nokia, and the young men and women who passed through its corridors, texting and trailing large shopping bags, were decidedly of a new era.

These young Indians were like no Indians I had ever known. I didn’t see myself in them; my generation never had the casualness, the comfort with consumerism or easy modernity that they seemed to possess.

It was on one of my visits to Chennai, during my aimless wanderings
around the city, on an interlude between malls and bars and software parks, that I met T. Harikumar, or Hari. He was twenty-seven years old. He was the friend of a friend, a man named Leo. They had recently met in an online chat room.

Leo and I went out to dinner one night. I started talking about India’s new generation. I said that I didn’t get them; sometimes, I told Leo, India’s youth made me feel like a stranger in my own country. Leo suggested I meet Hari. He introduced us, Hari and I spoke on the phone, and we met a few days later in a coffee shop up the road from Spencer Plaza.

The coffee shop was a comfortable place, with soft music, strong air-conditioning, and thick glass that kept out the heat and dust from the road. Chennai could be oppressive, especially in the summers, right before the monsoons, when the air was pregnant with rain but the streets still brutally dry. The coffee shop was a welcome oasis.

Hari and I started meeting there regularly. We’d meet in the afternoons, before he started the evening shift at his firm, a multinational business that outsourced research to India. He would order coffee, maybe a piece of chocolate cake. I usually had tea. We’d lean back in synthetic leather chairs, watching the
autorickshaws pass outside in a blur of yellow, and Hari would tell me about his life.

He was from Tindivanam, a market town about 120 kilometers south of Chennai, not far from Sathy’s village. Hari’s father ran a small provisions store there; he was illiterate. Hari’s mother worked as a clerk in the local court.

Hari grew up with his parents, his brother, and his two sisters in a rented single-bedroom apartment in Tindivanam. The apartment didn’t have a television, telephone, or fridge. His father cycled to work. Hari said his mother’s family had once been wealthy, but her father drank and gambled their fortune away. When Hari was a boy, his grandmother would walk with him in the villages around Tindivanam and point out pieces of land that used to belong to their family.

Hari left home at the age of seventeen. He studied for a business degree at a college in Chennai. He didn’t much like his college. It was full of rules; it felt like a jail. But he liked living in Chennai: it was a world away from Tindivanam. I knew Tindivanam. It was a crowded, dreary place, with vegetable vendors that encroached on the roads, blocking the cars and buses and trucks that idled in black clouds of exhaust. I knew the town mostly as a traffic jam on the way to Chennai.

Hari interviewed at more than a hundred companies when he graduated from college. It took him six months to find a job. Finally, after he got an interview through a friend, he was offered a position at the company where he now worked. It was a good job, with reasonable hours, and good pay. Three years into the job, he was earning 15,000 rupees a month—more than either of his parents made after twenty years of work.

When Hari called his parents to tell them he’d found a job, he expected them to be overjoyed. They’d invested a lot of money in his education. They’d been worried that it was taking him so long. But then, when he told them, they didn’t say much. His father just handed the phone to his mother. She said: “You are earning more than us, but be careful. You’re still young. Don’t spend it all.”

Hari wasn’t offended; he knew it was their way. He told me about a time, shortly after he’d started his job, when his parents visited Chennai. They came to see how he was doing, and Hari wanted to impress them. He wanted to show them how he might live one day. So he took them to an expensive hotel for a meal.

They went to the hotel in a white Ambassador car. Hari sat in the front, with the driver, and his parents sat in the back. The restaurant was crowded, and Hari could see his parents were a little uncomfortable. They were humble people. His mother had grown up in a hut; his father had worked at construction sites to support his parents and siblings.

When Hari had invited them to dinner, his parents were worried because they didn’t have anything to wear. Hari bought them some clothes—a blue shirt for his father, a green sari for his mother, made from the finest Bengal cotton. Now, at the hotel, he held his mother’s hand and he told his parents to relax. He told them not to feel intimidated. Without acknowledging that they were, they smiled at him.

Hari later told me: “They were very new to this. I had to guide them through the buffet. I told them, ‘This is good for you,’ ‘This is bad for your health,’ ‘This is too spicy.’ I explained it all to them. I told them what they were having. My mom only had fried rice and roti, and then some dessert. But my dad, he tried everything. I told
him, ‘This is how you do it, how you eat this,’ and he tasted everything.”

After dinner, in the car home, his parents complained about the evening. His mother said the food lacked taste, it wasn’t spicy or salty enough. His father said it was too expensive, a waste of money. But, Hari said, even while his mother was complaining, she gave him a look that was full of happiness. She said something to him; he wouldn’t tell me what it was, but he knew his mother was overjoyed that her son had taken her out to a nice dinner.