Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

Ramesh’s father worked in the government bureaucracy in a small town in Rajasthan. Ramesh was stifled by the conservative, parochial world of his childhood, and it was with a great sense of occasion that he departed for Delhi to study for an MBA. After that he stayed in the city, drifting through administrative jobs with newspapers without any particular sense of purpose. When he began his career in advertising, it was like a shot in the arm.

“I only figured out who I was when I landed up in advertising. Before that, it was a ten-to-five job and at five o’clock you packed your bag, went home and spent the whole evening sitting around with your family. In advertising, I go home at one o’clock in the morning. Sometimes I don’t go home for two or three days. I keep a towel and a toothbrush in the car. Because my work is so exciting.”

Ramesh seems ridiculously happy. I have rarely met anyone who finds the world so entirely positive. And he credits it to his work, which he speaks about almost as a kind of discipline of the soul.

“The only way you can be effective is if you start living those brands, if you become those brands. It is like Buddhism. It enters every part of you, it takes over your personal life as well. I explain my brands to my parents, my wife, my friends. It almost pours out of me because I carry my brands inside me.”

When she became pregnant with their child, Ramesh’s wife wanted them to leave Delhi and go back to where their families lived. But he could not do it.

“I felt very disturbed there, I couldn’t find any peace of mind. So I convinced my wife to stay in Delhi. Otherwise I would have suffocated. It was difficult for her. She expected me to be around, and I was coming back every day at midnight. It took her a long time to reconcile herself to that. I took small steps to make her understand, just like an advertising campaign. I used analogies. When she was pregnant she used to complain about my working hours. I said, ‘Look at your situation. You have a life inside you. I have that every day. I feel that pain every day with my campaigns. I know the kind of happiness that comes when you see that life emerge from you.’ So then she understood, and now she is happy about what I am doing.”

There is no doubt that Ramesh was working hard. But a lot of his time was also going into relationships with colleagues.

“We’re a team of twelve people and we’re very close. We stand up for each other. If any of us has a problem in his personal life, we all stand up for him. We all work hard and it’s one for all, all for one. When something good happens at work, we all go out for drinks and celebrate as a team.”

Young people like Ramesh were rapidly converted to the two universal drugs of corporate capitalism: caffeine and alcohol.

In the early 2000s the most visible new consumer development was probably the new café chains, which could hardly build outlets quickly enough to absorb the young people looking for a place to be out. Cafés allowed very different kinds of conversations from home or office, and at weekends they were packed with happy chatter. Compared to bars — which implied alcohol and late nights — cafés were a relatively innocuous reason for young people from conservative families to breach the boundary of the home, which represented, for many such families, the dividing line between the wholesome and life-affirming — inside — and the corrupt and poisonous — outside; the new conviviality of coffee bars gave many young people a different, even opposite, sense of things. And like every other Indian metropolis, Delhi, which, being in the north of India, had no particular historical relationship to coffee, was suddenly awash in the stuff, its smell filling every shopping mall and office block, brown liquid pouring into the veins of this new sleep-deprived generation — who, as often as not, did not drink from a cup but, like their American counterparts, sucked at a sealed and odourless container, as if they nestled at capitalism’s plastic breast.

But after office hours, many of these people did need something more intoxicating. Private hesitations about alcohol evaporated widely during this decade, even though many young people chose not to tell their parents exactly what they were up to. In the early 2000s, groups of young people drinking openly together in bars still looked strangely forced: girls sat on one side of the table, giggling with each other, while boys tried to look unconcerned, and glasses of beer sat uncomfortably in everyone’s hands. But this passed quickly as the new culture of work and socialising imposed its own narcotic rhythm. Women, too, ignored the page of ‘mocktails’ that were intended for them, and for many people of both sexes alcohol became essential to getting through the stressful tussle of work and family. Bars proliferated absolutely everywhere during the decade and they were full every evening with professionals — these re-engineered human beings of twenty-first century India — working off steam.

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In bohemian circles, young people were going through an even more wholesale questioning of received values and structures. Most of the people I met when I arrived in Delhi had been living away from their parents since their late teens. This was not usual in north Indian middle-class families. In many cases it had required significant courage to make this move, and years later it had still not become accepted: those parents never visited the apartments in which their offspring carried on such illegitimate lives, often they did not even know where their children were living, or with whom, and in their own circles they felt obliged to invent excuses for their absence from the family home. Only marriage could redeem this situation; but rather few of these people seemed to marry. Many of them had been pushed out of their parents’ house in the first place by this unwelcome pressure. Their desire to do creative work — the kind of work for which their parents often had little sympathy or comprehension — was only a sub-set of their more general ambition to re-create life itself. Creativity was all: not only as a professional asset that resulted in creative products, but also as the guiding principle of lives that were directed towards a wholesale re-imagination of ethics, sensibilities and relationships. Many of them had grown up watching their parents in unhappy marriages, some of them had seen child abuse and violence go on unpunished behind the closed doors of the family — and there was a widespread sense that the outer forms of north Indian respectability had become hypocritical and bankrupt. In choosing to do artistic work — thus flouting the risk-averse culture of their families and potentially foregoing the material rewards for which, in the expanding post-1991 economy, their talents should have readied them — in choosing unconventional lifestyles — living away from home and putting their emotional faith in new, elective families — they were conspicuously attempting to reproduce as little of their parents’ ethos as possible. They lived out improvised kinds of romantic relationships, they began to build a gay scene — and they devoted extensive thought and discussion to the question of friendship. Having come from backgrounds, often, in which family was all and friendship only a provisional and opportunistic affair, many Delhi artists and intellectuals sought to re-imagine friendship as a more absolute and primordial kind of bond.

Some of these people had grown up in Delhi, some had not. But for all of them, Delhi in those years offered the equation of easy incomes and cheap living that is essential to artistic communities everywhere. People who could write arrived from all over the country, and indeed from many other countries, to earn money from the new magazines and newspapers so they could work, after hours, on other projects. Artists secured injections of cash by doing graphic design for the burgeoning advertising industry, filmmakers by working in TV news — at a time when new channels had twenty-four hours of programming to fill and a severe lack of people who knew anything about cameras. Some funded their lives of frugality and alternative sexuality by lending their creativity to the extravagant wedding parties of the city’s rich. Delhi’s world-class universities and research institutes were another powerful magnet for bright young people: they too offered forms of employment compatible with the dissident life, as did the capital’s foreign embassies and cultural centres.