FIRST, THE warm-up. The MC comes on and introduces the opening act. The comedy crowd in Delhi takes the conventions of stand-up seriously. As many as six open mike nights a week, lots of professional shows and a great ton of interest — stand-up is hot right now. Hence the embarrassing Tata Docomo ad with Ranbir Kapoor against a brick wall. It’s a weekday night at the International Diner, a south Delhi restaurant. The postage-stamp stage area has been empty 45 minutes. It’s hot, verging on sweaty, but the 100-odd audience is cheerful. A bit smug, even. They have seats because they came an hour early. Those standing at the back try to catch a waiter’s eye before the show starts.
And here comes the opening act. Young Abish Mathew is small, boyish and strained. Only one out of every three lines work. The crowd is generous and responds kindly to his nervous air. They laugh a little harder.
Abish leaves. Here comes the headliner. Paaaaa-pa CJ! Lots of international gigs. An agent in England where he earned his chops. Does the Edinburgh festival every year for the lark and a bit of money. Has a great story about getting almost knifed after performing in a Birmingham mosque. Beat thousands to the final round of the Last Comic Standing show in Las Vegas. Papa CJ is the biggest we have yet.
Papa CJ, 34, is very slender and has an energy forcefield like a superhero. His long hair is sprinkled with grey and his face is an arresting mix of cunning and sweetness. He announces upfront that since this is just an open mike gig (and not a professional evening, though that doesn’t mean it’s unticketed, just that the finish is rough), he’ll be trying out his worst material, his rawest lines. He’s holding a sheaf of papers and peeks occasionally. Within minutes the unmistakable patina of the headliner shines through. Set-up. Delivery. Boom! Set-up. Delivery. Boom! The crowd brays happily. If you’ve ever told a joke, you know there’s a moment in the telling when the universe hangs in balance. With Papa CJ, that anxious moment never comes. When the occasional joke is fluffed, he is relaxed: “That didn’t really work, did it? Will make a note of it.” And even that makes the nowpliant audience laugh.
But Papa CJ’s true power lies off-script, in his creating instant humour in his audience. His front row usually consists of the brave and the innocent because they are sure to be skewered. A pretty girl and her plain boyfriend come in for a lot of pokes. Papa CJ’s wife Neha is in the back taking photographs. She’s also set up a video camera in front to record audience reactions. (Not her husband, you understand.) Like some comics, Papa CJ makes fun of his audience. But when his 45-minute segment ends, the room is a warm, intimate bath of love. His mysterious gift seems to be in knowing where to stop and leave his poor subjects with silly grins on their faces. In making the back row strain forward half-wishing, half-afraid they’ll be the next victims.
He talks about treading this thin, thin line. “In London there was this female comedian performing with a largely Asian audience and she went after a really old white couple in the front row. Asked the woman, ‘When was the last time he gave you good sex?’ The comedian was booed off stage in 10 minutes. It was pointless, you know.” He is disapproving. She clearly didn’t get how the game is played.
Here is how it is played. Papa CJ was recently invited by some corporates to their CEO’s birthday. Papa CJ roasted him all night long. All manner of lines crossed here. The executives watched in awe as social protocols were busted. The CEO lets loose his power corsets a bit and gets aforementioned silly grin. And young Papa CJ, who in a previous life as a MBA-wielding corporate trainer would have killed for such shoulder-rubbing, went home smug. His pocket full of business cards of the high and pin-striped mighty.
Papa CJ wields power from behind his mike and enjoys it — there is a lip-smacking satisfaction about it. But no malice. And perhaps this is why the audience laughs. When he addresses the audience singly or en masse as ‘f**kers’, it’s an affectionate caress from an old pal. It doesn’t have the shock value of the motherloving, sister-loving expletives of many stand-ups. “It’s too easy to get that laugh,” shrugs Papa CJ. He doesn’t like easy. He once went on stage and wickedly described Indian standup comedians’ crutches: “Bengali comedians make Bong jokes, Punjabi comedians make Sardar jokes. Some cricket. A bit of politics. If you’re in your 20s, Facebook and Google jokes. If you’re in your 30s, marriage jokes.” The aftermath? “The guys supposed to come on after me were like: ‘Bastard, what do we do now?’”
He loves Indian audiences, he says. “Afterwards, 60-yearold men come up and tell me some long, filthy joke and say I can use it in my next show. I love middle-aged Indian women. They laugh openly. They don’t look around to see who else is laughing.” Papa CJ careens away from any truly provocative material. No religion, for instance. It would be interesting to see whether in a few years he’ll rock you back on your heels, but for now it’s more vigorous massage than right hook. He has a big nationalism shtick, both on and off stage. “I come from the land of the Kamasutra and I can screw you more ways that you can count,” he often signs off with a strut and a toss. The only discordant note is his distinctly American faux hip-hop name, given all the ‘I’mproud- to-be-Indian’ routines. He sternly refuses to reveal his real name. Perhaps it’ll give away where in India he comes from. Like Rumpelstiltskin, he knows it’ll give someone somewhere power over him.
HERE WE are in the second segment. Another 45 minutes but nobody is complaining. Papa CJ is even better than before. His audience is super lubricated and adoring, like masochists longing to be whipped. A teen pierces the haze after an off-key joke and says: “That one didn’t work.” Papa CJ replies instantly: “Then you are not helping, f**ker. Hear that silence? That’s you.” The audience laughs. “Hear that laughter? That’s me.” Everyone explodes.
He is pure, distilled confidence, the source of which is a bit misty. He didn’t grow up a wisecracker. Telling jokes to friends is not the same as stand-up, Papa CJ will tell you contemptuously. Perhaps it comes from his affluent tea-plantation background, you might surmise after much teethpulling. What is openly offered: Lawrence School, Sanawar and an Oxford MBA. Earlier in his minimalist but gilded Delhi apartment in a gilded Delhi neighbourhood, he had said, “I live simply.” He is being sincere and perhaps relatively accurate.
Perhaps the confidence comes from individualistic and white-knuckle sportloving parents and grandparents. Perhaps it’s because he loves his job — travelling the world with his wife, making people happy and getting paid for it.
Perhaps it’s come from his early grind in the cut-throat stand-up scene in England that involved single-meal days, long commutes to obscure towns and hanging around drunkand- hungry for five minutes on stage. Then driving back and going to bed at 4 am. Every day. For two years.
So when he scoffs at Indian stand-ups who call themselves professional after 10 shows, it makes sense. Being a know-itall is an occupational hazard in stand-up, but Papa CJ’s patriarchal air is unbreachable. He’s done his time, f**kers.
IN THE third of the four sections of The Beautiful and the Damned — The Factory — the author speculates on why a young migrant describes his chronic illness merely as ‘pain’: “Given the lives that migrant workers lived, someone like Pradip had no choice but to abandon the nuances of illness for a broad, catch-all word. The same was true when it came to the story of his life, which was often empty of descriptive detail and rendered in thick strokes.” Two hundred pages in, one worries about Deb’s ability to interview people. Compassionate and earnest though he is, he does not hesitate from assuming the poor man is unable to describe his life with colour or metaphor. Perhaps, honey, he was just not that into you.
Deb’s essays set out to tell the truth about New India and work hard at it — over five years, taking on everything from the bizarrely litigious Arindam Chaudhuri to Andhra Pradesh farmers to Bengaluru software engineers to Delhi waitresses. Long interviews, close observations and accidental encounters all feed his explorations. This is the kind of ambitious project non-fiction readers long for. Alas, it isn’t enough to just leave Delhi to become Ibn Battuta. Indian readers are not as cloistered in their socio-economic class as our writers, and you are likely to be baffled by Deb’s stating of the obvious. Why is it that when we’ve just got rid of the italics-strewn madness of Indian fiction, we’ve to now deal with the determinedly sulky alienation of our non-fiction?
Deb largely animates his subjects with that old party trick of ‘discovering India’ — easy juxtaposition and easier paradox. He skates over religion, sex, love, prejudice, rage, terror leaving you with ghosts. You’re also likely to be annoyed by Deb’s easy assumptions. He believes a Maoist union organiser when he says his Infosys employee daughter is fine with his radical politics. (He doesn’t ask her opinion.) In Bengaluru, when he annoys software engineer and poet SS Prasad, his contrary-minded subject says he doesn’t know what global warming is. Deb believes him. That this quixotic man who integrates poems in binary code onto computer chips and hopes they’ll be found by a future archaeologist doesn’t know what global warming is.
Deb is a little surprised that a Bengaluru auto-rickshaw driver knows how to use the iPhone he finds. He forgets his earlier expositions on the greasy pole of social mobility in New India — that you can be in a computer course today and be a bus conductor tomorrow. This is a particularly vexing class blindness since this chapter is an exploration of how technology has changed us. (Also: Wouldn’t Ibn Battuta have heard of an electronics grey market?)
The book is logjammed with formulations such as Priyanka Gandhi, “the heiress apparent of the Congress Party, a woman descended from a long line of prime ministers, part Indian and part Italian”. Or “He was a Dalit, or an untouchable in the taxonomy of the caste system”. Or “Bhagat Singh, the Indian socialist hanged by the British”. Or “the sacred texts of the Vedas”.
You have to struggle through the fog of defamiliarisation Deb deploys. Here’s a small but distracting example. Deb is waiting for the district collector of Nizamabad in his home office. He writes: “It was a large room, with rows of empty chairs facing the collector’s desk, as if he was in the habit of giving lectures or performances from the desk.” I paused here for several minutes. Is Deb making a small joke? It couldn’t be that he doesn’t know why a government officer would have a bunch of chairs facing him. Has he never witnessed the trapeze act of simultaneous audience-granting babus do across India? The reader is as lost as she’d be if she tried to ‘get’ India by reading the meticulous petticoat wearing Victorian chronicles.
DEB IS such a prim participant observer that when he’s moved to nostalgia by a pillion ride in a rainy small town, you feel more bad for him than for poor, battered India: “There were no cafes where I could hide my loneliness behind a cup of coffee and an open laptop... There was no escape here except through human relationships.” But mostly, he restrains from any sentiment. His is the joyless tone that’s often mistaken for detachment. Pity, because as wracked and broken by tragedy as India is, what it isn’t is morose. Suddenly, you realise how the ‘thick description’ of academic writing, the baffling memoirs of IAS officers and the amused knowingness of dyed-in-thewool journalist P Sainath have been more fruitful engagements with the subaltern’s interiority than this book. Perhaps because they didn’t take themselves so seriously.
Being tight-lipped and dispassionate might assure the reader of your good intentions, but as Bernard Williams said: “Amateurism is not heroism.” Deb will send you running back to the louche Suketu Mehta with his wonderful ability to bring the wooden puppet into glorious, perverse 3D. Here is a Suketu Mehta bargirl — no listless, moping figure — “And the girl rolls up all the windows of the taxi and opens the door of the cage and all the birds fly out and fill the small dark taxi with their energy and their music. She laughs with delight and asks her man to play a game with her: Catch the birds. They reach out with their hands to grab the birds, who are small and quick, and they have to wave their arms wildly about even to touch them. As the girl and her ardent suitor reach out to catch a bird, they sometimes, accidentally, can’t help touching each other… Half an hour later, the door of the taxi opens and half a dozen or a dozen dead birds are thrown out on the road. If there are any remaining alive, they fly out over the great dark sea, free at last.”
The Plot
Mahatma Gandhi wrote two letters to Adolf Hitler addressing him as “My Dear Friend”, suggesting he mend his ways. All manner of narratives could have addressed this historical Ripley’s Believe it or Not item. The one chosen is college-circuit drawing room tragedy. Gandhi walks about. Hitler rants as the Reich collapses. Indian National Army (INA) soldiers run about hungry and angry. Eva Braun tries to Make the Best of a Bad Situation.
-10 For Being An Unintentional Parody. But plus three for having greater ambitions than Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey, the historical blunder freshest in our memories.
-5 For Letting Nikita Anand As Magda Goebbels talk in English. This cast pretending to be German was weird enough without Nikitaji asking her troubled husband (Nalin Singh) in penetrating accents: “You mean traitors?”
-8 For The Badly Patched Plot Strand about INA officer Balbir (Aman Varma) missing his wife, remembering their Happy Holi times and their disagreement about Gandhian ways
+5 For The Astonishingly Retro Soundtrack full of clanging emphases and maudlin strings. Thankfully, Bollywood has done away with the orchestra-as-metaphor.
+10 To Neha Dhupia for playing a fun-loving Eva Braun who smokes, dances and sort-of kisses Hitler without looking stupid.
+3 For the line:Eva Braun tumhari saali hai. It may inspire a David Dhawan film.
-5 For Hitler’s Sudden Discursion on Marxism, capitalism and national socialism. It has the strange twang of King Henry telling Thomas More that his ideas are too utopian.
-5 For The Inexplicable Couple saying goodbye (fatally) next to an unmanned cannon. Where are they and why are they the most idiotic cannon fodder ever?
+10 For The Crazy Maggi Noodles Interlud with the arrival of the Goebbels children and the woman who chirpily offers them “phataphat khane ka intezaam”.
+5 For The Scene In Which Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s architect, apologises to Hitler for not following his orders to destroy all the infrastructure. This scene gives you a hint of the ambition with which this film was conceived.
+2 For The Boring Bureaucracy of the wedding.
IF YOU are addicted to the British tabloids, you will know that between 2002 and 2007, British confessional columnist Liz Jones and husband Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal had a very public courtship, marriage and break-up. Jones’ widely read Sunday column had a blow-by-blow account of everything that happened in her love life. During the marriage, Nirpal told curious journalists: she’s a writer, who am I to tell her what she can’t write?” After the split he spilt, “Of all the problems that have plagued my marriage, the issue that has most bothered me, and been the most constant, was the one Liz never mentioned in her columns: the columns themselves. I hated being written about.” After the split, Jones too wondered aloud in her column whether she should have written about her relationship. In 2011, Jones continues to have Murdoch’s England in a frenzy — now about who her new boyfriend, only known as The Rockstar, is. The difference is that now anyone with an understanding of narrative can construct and offer readers the same addictive shots of voyeurism, anger and bitterness. On Twitter.
Now you might say you use Twitter only for political news and cricket updates. Never mind, what comes below will probably happen to you sometime soon. Just stay online.
Twitter is not Facebook. Sounds obvious,right? Twitter is not Facebook because it liberates you at various levels and the first one is the liberation from your Facebook shackles of friending/ - unfriending and liking, and all the parents and children and schoolmates you ran away from all these years. It is just you, your spray can and the empty walls. It is the wild, wild west of the IRC chatroom days, but shinier. You are as big as P.Diddy. Your parties are as important or as sucky as P.Diddy’s. Your party did not happen unless it happened on Twitter.
When the hashtag #ihadanabortion began trending, many feminists in antiabortion countries debated: Is this Twitter trend trivialising a major life choice? Is it provocative? Is being provocative necessary to push prochoice politics online? To choose whether to thus tweet, whether to support such hashtags, is a choice that can only be made from thinking on your feet, from some non-herd thinking. This is systemically difficult, considering that #hashtags are meant to create herds.
There is something about Twitter. People like to call it micro-blogging but Twitter bears as little resemblance to blogs as a Vespa in outer space does to the Titanic. Twitter is nippy, agile and gets in there. It is happening under the table, on the phone while you are on a date (another bitch #FML). It is happening on the table, on the phone while you are getting a wax (Mmm. Hot wax. Cool knife. Hot girl. I am getting wet #secretpleasures). A lot of tweets strain towards these two ends of the spectrum — either self-glamourisation or self-pity — best characterised by the hashtag #FML (F**k My Life). The self-pitying tweet has also acquired a sub-genre with a slightly politically incorrect name — White Whine, or problems that only privileged people tweet about: “Wish people would stop getting hit by trains and make my journey so much harder.” Or: “My second maid hasn’t come to work today.” Or: 14 tweets to complain about a one-time rush-hour commute.
Mostly your loins are girded into allizzzwell cheer to deal with modern life, but Twitter can make you dizzy in unguarded moments. Why are nice people you know or think you could know posting things like “I hate my boss”, “My colleague ruined my presentation”, “I knew my colleagues would struggle to eat sushi. That is why I ordered it. Stupid f**ks”? The self-confessedly chilly Jammu & Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah bursts out: “A young man was shot dead in Sopore yesterday for no apparent fault of his. Where the hell are all the irate voices? Bloody hypocrites.” A friend says she’s working late and can’t meet you, then promptly tweets every moment of her wild evening out. A teacher tweets: “Have three Asperger boys in S1 class: never a dull moment.”
Privacy is a fraught word, full of small print and million-dollar lawsuits. Intimacy, on the other hand, is a terrain we have to rapidly resurvey. Who are you intimate with? What demands of intimacy can you make from your casual friends and loved ones? If you slag off, your colleague on the office whiteboard in a fit of rage, you may even be fired. On Twitter, though, nobody seems to know the rules.
There is some hazy acknowledgement that rules of social engagement are changing, have changed, under our feet. What is really going on? What is it about Twitter that makes otherwise-conventional folks promptly lose their manners when they log on? Why does there seem to be no social cost to tweeting?
IF ONLY she had known it — Liz Jones’ columns were proto-Twitter. The boyfriend is downstairs hanging out with his friend. I am upstairs crying into my pillow. It’s my birthday and he’s dumped me. And so on. Snappy, conflictridden and oh-so-gloriously indiscreet.
A few years ago, I discovered myself on my former housemate’s Twitter timeline. There, among some great recommendations of music and meal descriptions that would do Anthony Bourdain proud, was… me. What my housemate thought of me, my attitudes, my boyfriend, how we were engaging her in domestic servitude, my tardiness in getting the gas cylinder refilled and much, much later, near the end of the downward spiral — how I had stolen her books. OMFG. Her version of my life was being broadcast to the world, unchecked by any social restraints, 140 characters at a time.
As Trollope said, who is there that abstains from reading that which is printed in abuse of himself? I spent several delicious and hair-raising hours reading my housemate’s past rants on Twitter. These particular tweets about ‘the flatmate’ in the next room went back six months. (Little did I know then, there were already many popular Twitter accounts exclusively for airing hatred of roommates.) I confronted her a month later to ask why she didn’t rant about me in a non-public space — if you must do it online, I suggested delicately (and naively, as it turned out), perhaps you could do it on a Twitter account set to private. She replied with complete sincerity that she merely thought of Twitter as another blog where she could write whatever she wanted. The truth is that I myself was unconvinced of the inappropriateness of it all. What I was convinced about was: if my housemate had printed leaflets about me and plastered them all over the city, I like to think she’d have been censured by her friends and mine. (An unexpected side-benefit of the whole thing turned out to be my friends’ hilarity when I mentioned my bewilderment… they still call to ask sweetly: Have you refilled her gas cylinder? Have you returned her stolen books? Why don’t you go back to living together?).
What is Too Much Information? Can too much of it expose you to social discomforts? The lines seem to shift online all the time. A member of a surgeon’s team excising a cancerous tumour from a patient tweets: “Dr Rogers is saying because the tumour is so large he may have to do a radical (total) nephrecnephrectomy.” Which could be educational — or panic-inducing — for the poor family waiting outside… who have nothing better to do than catch up on Twitter.
Here is the thing. Most often, your name is on your Twitter account. And anonymous, secret accounts are notoriously not very secret or very anonymous. Sooner or later, the subject of your micro-rants is going to read them. Or be told about them. Sometimes it’s astonishingly soon, since your subject is also tweeting from the next desk. It seems unlikely that these intelligent people assume that they are “getting away” with it. Probe a little, and you get the sense that actually there is no desire to “get away with it”. You tweet because you want it to be read.
A friend, a young Mumbai professional, provides a hint about what might be going on. “I don’t feel confident expressing my disagreements or conflicts with people anymore,” she confesses. “So when I’m angry with them, I post indirect allusions about it. Then usually that person calls me up and indirectly asks about it.” There is a power play, she acknowledges, in making the other person work for it. Face-to-face confrontations in our increasingly American, increasingly politically correct world now come with the ugly epithet of ‘drama’. This woman isn’t confident enough to bring up her grievances. Her friend, who suspects she’s being tweeted about, isn’t confident enough to openly air her suspicion. So is Twitter merely a tool for passive-aggression rather than a lowering of our social guard?
It’s difficult to quit Twitter, regardless of what part of your personality you display on it. You’ll miss the acupuncture comfort of your tweets being published a moment after you thought them up, and of the so-prompt replies. You’ll miss the hypersocial sixth sense gained from the grain-by-grain of information that others supply you on Twitter.
These granular advantages are the final click of the handcuffs. They are at the heart of the conspiratorial silence outside the world of Twitter. Tweet all you want, tweet whatever you want, but once you log off you must not hold what you wrote or read to your — or my — chest. This isn’t about breaking social norms, it’s about creating new ones. And the biggest faux pas in this shy new world is: When you meet someone in the flesh, you must not acknowledge that you remember all those naughty details about them that you harvested on Twitter yesterday. We are all swinging together in this bird-blue masked ball, all of us with our pretty, tiny masks that don’t hide anything. It is the price of admission.
As for the jealous scolds waiting for their turn at the witching hour, they might take heart in the fact that every public tweet, ever since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, is being archived digitally at the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
THE DELHI launch of Granta’s feminism issue — The F Word — took an unprecedented, iconoclastic course. All four panelists including sole contributor from India, Urvashi Butalia, what is the right word now… dissed the book for leaning heavily towards the experiences of the straight, white female. After reading the book, one is inclined to think that the panelists were being polite.
Granta has suffered from a faint greenness around the gills for a while but this issue is positively comatose. It must take a special skill to put together 21 pieces of feminist writing (fiction, poetry and essay) from around the world without a single one that is polemical, destabilising or maddening in its impossible moth-to-flame-like desire for justice. Compare this to Greer’s collected works The Madwoman’s Underclothes that runs the gamut from sappy through fabulous to enraging, the gut-wrenching heartbreak of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, the fuzzy, prickly poetry of any Jeanette Winterson novel or the straight lines of Naomi Wolf’s Beauty Myth. Or the anachronistic shock of any piece from Women Writing in India. (hello, Volume 1.) Or the sharp-elbowed, online pointiness of the ladies of Feministing.com.
Let us sample some of the wares in The F Word. AS Byatt and Franscine Prose retrace their awakening to gender and political consciousness. Being Byatt and Prose, these pieces make tolerable reading even though they are template. The usually funny Helen Simpson has an outrageously tacky piece of role-reversal fantasy in which men lie awake in claustrophobic marriages to violent, farting, belching women. Julie Otsuka and Urvashi Butalia both have gentle, contemplative pieces animated largely by the unfamiliarity of the worlds they describe. Butalia writes about the legendary hijra Mona Ahmed and her ability to be man/woman/mother/father all at once. Otsuka (writing in the rarely deployed first person plural) tells the story of Japanese women and children labouring in the farms and small towns of early 1900s America — an excerpt from her forthcoming novel The Buddha in the Attic.
Perhaps this book feels like a letdown because we always need the shock of defamiliarisation for epiphany — religious or political. Take the unexceptionable excerpt from new Ghanaian author Taiye Selasi’s coming-of-age novel Ghana Must Go. After reading the excerpt you may look forward to her novel but you are bound to feel sympathy for critic Stephen Marche who once wrote, “Every time I receive a copy of a new novel about growing up Russian or growing up Portuguese or growing up whatever, I have the same desperate thought: Can’t we all agree we’ve written this book before and that we don’t have to write it again?”
Caroline Moorehead’s compelling piece describing the gallant sisterhood in the concentration camps will not make Simon Schama cry again for a moratorium against Holocaust novels (as he has this week) because this is a true-life story by an able historian. Instead one might want to add a coda to the moratorium suggesting that editors with vast resources look further afield for examples of female solidarity. It isn’t as if civilisation has run dry of courageous women or murderous intent towards courageous women.
Denise Riley once wrote: It is not possible to live 24 hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one’s sex. Gendered self-consciousness has, mercifully, a flickering nature. This last adjective for an on-again, off-again illumination is the kindest thing you can say about this book.
