India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (9 page)

Later, he heard from one of his sisters that when his father got back to Tindivanam he went around town boasting about the evening. He told everyone that the food was delicious. He talked about his new clothes and the car in which they’d driven to the hotel. He said the atmosphere at the hotel was wonderful, so calm and peaceful. It was the first time Hari knew his father was proud of him.

Hari had lots of plans. He was always taking calls from headhunters
, negotiating for a higher salary, considering new job offers. Like so many young Indians I met, he had great faith in the future. He felt he was living in the right country at the right time, working in the right field—what people called India’s ITES sector, or Information Technology Enabled Services.

“Life is full of opportunities. I can do whatever I want,” he told me one of the first times we met. “I work in IT. It’s for me to decide what I want to do, and then just do it.”

“You’re lucky,” I told him. “Do you think your parents had the same opportunities?”

“Maybe not the same,” he said. “But opportunities are always there—in any country, any generation. It’s up to us to see them, grab them, and make something of them.”

It was sometimes hard, amid all the talk about new jobs and opportunities, to know what Hari really wanted to do. He talked about starting a clothing store, a fast-food chain, and occasionally a hotel.

Hari’s ambition was large, but I felt it was vague, undirected. It seemed motivated less by his specific circumstances than by a general mood in the country—a mood that exalted entrepreneurship and the entrepreneur’s lifestyle, that venerated capitalism and wealth accumulation in the same way India had once venerated public service or spiritual renunciation.

We were surrounded by fabulous rags-to-riches stories. We heard and read all the time about India’s rising population of billionaires, about the way the founders of Infosys, India’s best-known software company, worth billions of dollars, had started in 1981 with just a few hundred dollars of investment. These stories had seeded themselves in the country’s imagination; they were part of an emerging national mythology.

One of Hari’s goals was, indeed, to be an entrepreneur. He had seen others do it—he had seen them raise capital, acquire customers, get rich. He had seen people around him buy cars and houses and take foreign holidays. He wanted these things for himself.

For a while, he was shopping around a business plan he had put together with two friends for a fast-food franchise. They figured it would take 57 lakhs, about $120,000, to get it off the ground. It was a lot of money. Hari talked about it for a bit, and then he moved on to other ideas.

Another one of Hari’s dreams was to be a fashion designer. He talked a lot about fashion. He berated me for what he felt was my poor choice of clothes. He was especially disappointed by my inability to color-match. He obviously spent a lot of time (and money) on his own appearance.

He wore pretorn jeans, dark sunglasses, and tight, brightly colored T-shirts. He was often in the city’s shopping malls; he was always up on the latest deals. Almost all his clothes had an imported designer label. He wore an earring, and often had what looked like a carefully cultivated stubble. He was tall, with delicate eyes and an angular face. I thought he was quite handsome.

I saw a picture one time of Hari from his Tindivanam days. He must have been about sixteen. He was skinny, dressed in cotton pants and a baggy shirt. The shirt was untucked; it hung down to his thighs. He had a thin, pencil mustache. His hair was oiled to his scalp.

City life had been kind to Hari. In the picture, he looked like a country boy.

Hari had a wide circle of friends. He was gregarious and generous
, and people liked him. I met some of his friends. They were mostly in their twenties. They all worked in some kind of technology or outsourcing business. Like Hari, they were hardworking, ambitious, and self-confident. They were part of what India called its “demographic dividend.”

The demographic dividend was a remarkable feat of alchemy, really. It referred to the nation’s large population of young people,
a result of high fertility rates. Those high fertility rates were for so long considered a liability, one of the main reasons for the country’s backwardness. Now, suddenly, they offered hope. In comparison with the aging economies of Europe and Japan—and even China—a much larger share of Indians were of working age, and thus potential contributors to the nation’s economic output.

A lot of India’s hopes rested on its youth. They offered a pathway to what politicians and the media kept calling “economic superpowerhood.”

At the same coffee shop where I met Hari, I met Nikhil, who worked as a programmer for a software company on Rajiv Gandhi Salai. His skills were in great demand. Over the course of a coffee one afternoon, he received several calls from headhunters. “Everybody wants me,” he said, laughing.

In Adyar, one of Chennai’s more upscale and pleasant neighborhoods, I met Peter, another friend, who told me about his dream of starting an online public relations firm. He’d recently attended an advertising conference in New Delhi. He believed there were fortunes to be made in the industry. He planned to make a fortune.

Outside Chennai, in Sholinganallur, a once-nondescript suburb that had in recent years been transformed into a neighborhood of young technology workers, I met a woman named Selvi. She was twenty-one. She lived with four other women in a two-bedroom apartment. They all worked at the same call center, a company that handled credit card queries for American customers.

I met Selvi through her landlord, a man named Murugan. The first time he took me to see his tenant, I told her I had recently returned from America. She said she knew something about
Americans. She spoke to them on the phone every day at her job; she wasn’t impressed.

The men flirted with her—“They call me honey,” she said, raising her nose a little—and the women sometimes shouted at her. She tried her best to help them, she said, but often, they seemed more interested in berating than listening to her.

“I used to have very high opinions of Americans until I started mingling with them over the phone,” she said, when we’d known each other for about fifteen minutes. “Now I think they’re rude. Rude, and also quite stupid.”

Selvi was opinionated. She told me she was “independent-minded,” a trait she got from her father, a businessman who had fallen on hard times when he got into a dispute with his partners.

She had a thin, bony face, and eyelids that sat heavily on narrow eyes. She was short and slight and dark; her neck was wiry, almost emaciated.

Selvi had moved to Chennai just a few months before I met her. Like Hari, she was from a small town, a village really, in the hilly western part of the state. But she was rawer, less adjusted to city life. Most of her friends were still in the hills, in or around the village where she’d grown up. She had never really planned to move to the city. But she was ambitious, and her parents were ambitious for her, and one day, when she heard about a job fair being held in a town about four hours from her village, she skipped class and jumped on a bus.

She went on a whim. She didn’t know what to expect; she wasn’t even sure what job she was applying for. When she got to the job fair, there were about a thousand applicants, split into groups of fifty, waiting in a hall. Eventually, Selvi was taken into a
room and played cassettes of Americans talking in strong accents. A woman said: “Hi, Johnny, how are you doing?” and Selvi was supposed to tell her interviewers whether the woman had been addressing someone named Joannie, Johnny, or Jenny. There was a lot of talk on the cassettes about shopping at Walmart, and credit card transactions.

Selvi said she understood only about half of what was said on the tapes. But she did well on the second part of the interview, where they asked her what her motto was in life. She said it was: “If you rest, you rust.”

She got the job. It was a big deal for her. She would make 10,000 rupees a month, and she would be moving to the city. Some of her relatives weren’t thrilled with that prospect. They were worried that her “character would get spoiled.” They told her about women who had moved to the city and gotten involved with men. One aunt told her the story of a young woman who was recently murdered in Bangalore. She, too, had worked for an outsourcing company, and there were rumors that she had been romantically involved with her murderer. The aunt warned Selvi that “the city will divert your mind.”

Selvi was confident that wouldn’t happen. She said she would remain “faithful” to her parents. It was true she was different from her aunts, and from her mother, who had never worked outside their homes. But she told me she was “very pet” to her father, by which I guess she meant that she was loyal. “I know that my father wants only good things for me,” she said. “Whatever he says, I’ll go with it. He will never do something that is not good for me.”

When Selvi’s aunt came to see her before she left home, she reiterated her warnings about city life. Selvi told her: “Auntie, don’t
worry. I am a good girl. I am strong. I know where I come from. I may have more opportunities than you did, and I want to take them. But I will always be true to this place.”

Selvi worked the night shift. She usually got home past midnight
. She would be tired, hungry, in need of a shower. Often, there was confusion over the two keys she shared with her roommates. Selvi would be locked outside, frantically working her cell phone until she could find someone with a key.

One time, two of the roommates were locked out all night. They waited, sitting around the corridors of their apartment block, wandering the children’s playground and the pathways of their sprawling complex. They tried to get a neighbor to force the door. Finally, at six-thirty in the morning, they got into an autorickshaw and went to their landlord’s house.

They asked him for a spare key. They asked for some tea. They asked him, too, if they could use his bathroom. The girls were too modest to go to the toilet at work; they’d been holding it in all night.

I generally visited Selvi late in the morning, around eleven. She would just be getting out of bed. Her eyes would be puffy, and her hair would be unkempt, hurriedly bundled. But she always made sure to dress up for me, even when it was clear she hadn’t found the time to shower or brush her teeth.

I felt the dressing up was a form of reserve, a way of keeping me at a distance. We met only at her apartment; she refused to meet anywhere else. She was friendly and polite, a little formal.
She’d ask if the neighbors had seen me. She wanted to know if the security guard had asked what I was doing with her.

Once, she told me about going to the beach with her friends, hanging out by the water and buying cotton candy, and I told her I would love to go with them sometime. She got nervous. She said she’d have to ask her roommates, and also her “uncle,” a distant family member who was acting as her guardian in the city. She never mentioned it again, and neither did I.

She seemed to be enjoying city life. She and her roommates hung out in the shopping malls. They watched the crowds, maybe bought some clothes or costume jewelry. On weekends, she often went to the movies. But first, she always telephoned her mother, even if it was in the middle of the afternoon—not to get permission, she said, but to let her mother know where she was going to be.