The Liberals

By Hindol Sengupta

  'The Liberals tells us the story of an India in transition from a very personal vantage point, one that is full of cheeky intelligence and delicious insight. Hindol Sengupta has given us lots to think about and even more to chuckle about'- Santosh Desai 'Here is an account of Manmohan's children, the Gen Next who have the world as their oyster ... Hindol Sengupta's droll memoirs at such a young age will echo in many a young person's mind. Hindol speaks for India's future and a funky future it is too!'  - Meghnad Desai 'An engaging personal tale of the post-reform generation told with spirit by one of its children' - Gurcharan Das 1991. The year the Indian economy opened up to the world and unleashed a billion desires and dreams. But who are these restless dreamers? This is a very private story of a very public middle-class consumption revolution. From proselytizing American schools in Calcutta to Page-3 parties in Delhi and television studios in Bombay, The Liberals brings to life unforgettable characters spawned by the needs of the world's largest democracy. Communist Bob Dylans jam with murderous villagers, girlfriends give lessons in capitalism, TV stylists snarl over white shirts, Amar Singh talks about love and Akshay Kumar about what it takes to be the boy next door. Through it all, Hindol Sengupta lives to tell the tale of GDP rising. This is the autobiography of liberalization, entertaining and immensely relatable, and an insider's account of finding one's place in a newly liberalized India.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jul 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9789350299586

Hindol Sengupta

Hindol Sengupta is the author of definitive books on the Indian luxury industry. He is the founding trustee of Whypoll Trust, India's only open government trust. He is senior editor at the Indian edition of Fortune magazine.

Book preview

PROLOGUE: PER CAPITA HOPE

We live in a time captive to restlessness. We have lived in such times for twenty years.

But for the first time in two decades, one can almost hear the palpable fear: is this 1991 once again?

What is it about 1991 that scares us so? Is it the bankruptcy, the debt, the economic disaster, the pledging of gold for dollars?

In order to understand why we are scared to go back to 1991, why 1991 is our national bogey-year, we need to understand what the opening up of the Indian economy, the transformation from a socialist to market-driven model of governance–liberalization–has really meant.

What do you think of when you think of liberalization? Money? Malls? More airlines? Better airports? Brands and goods that you had never seen before?

Do you ever think of hope?

Like fear, hope is also about our mind. The greatest gift of liberalization is that it gave us hope. It is true that the goody bag of open markets did not spill on to many laps, that is, in many cases the rich got richer, the poor poorer, but there is one thing in common between most people who have lived in India for the last twenty years: they all got a bit of hope that they too could become something more, something perhaps they, or their parents, never thought they ever would.

In this relentless rise of per capita hope lies the success of liberalization, and if the Indian miracle is to sustain, it will only be through this per capita rise of hope.

In politics, social engineering refers to the creation of a voter base by reworking social groupings and promising benefits. Often, these are notional benefits, meaning they have more to do with psyche and emotion than material gains. Some of the finest practitioners of this brand of politics are politicians like Lalu Prasad Yadav, who ruled Bihar for fifteen years on the promise of swar aur swabhimaan (voice and self-respect) against the upper-caste landlords, and Digvijay Singh who was so busy constructing intricate vote banks in Madhya Pradesh that he forgot that vote banks also need roads, water and electricity.

Politically, social engineering has an equalizing effect. It has a democratizing multiplier effect. It is no secret that when a Yadav comes to power in Bihar, or a Dalit like Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, their caste-mates, tormented by Brahmins and Kshatriyas for ages, feel empowered and emboldened.

Twenty years of economic growth and the unshackling of the licensequota regime have had the same impact on the larger Indian society. If you look around, in middle-class colonies and homes, there are constant complaints that ‘servants’ are not what they used to be (in fact, the word ‘servant’ too has become politically incorrect, the proper phrase being ‘domestic help’). Drivers don’t stay forever and demand a raise every year (if not every six months). Maids want Sundays off and at least one month off every year. There is no loyalty, we cry, no sense of service any more. This is the servant class, we complain, they are completely untrustworthy.

But this is the social engineering of hope.

Our parents were content to remain in one job for most of their, if not their entire, careers. Ask an earlier generation and they will tell you that they were satisfied; they were less fickle, less materialistic, even low maintenance.

But there is more to that than mere self-effacement.

Overwhelmingly, they lacked hope. Hope that there was something better, confidence that there was something else that they could do, aspiration that things could and would easily change.

Liberalization brought that hope. We not only want better, but we are certain that better is on its way.

Economically, we are not going to go back to 1991. As the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Bimal Jalan, has argued, India is a different country today. Our companies are resilient, many of them world class, our banks sturdy, our cash reserves stout, if not overflowing.

But the problem lies in that hope.

Sustaining that hope will be our biggest challenge. The age of deference is over. We are now firmly in an era of restlessness, driven by the incessant hope of betterment. That, if anything, is the legacy of the twenty years since 1991.

Hope is now ingrained in our system and we shall never go back to the age of carefully structured social systems of economic deference, which simply means that your maid and driver will never again be happy with whatever you give and be devoted for a lifetime because humne aapka namak khaya hai. Their grain has altered.

The question now is: can a slowing economy rein in hope? It is as much a political, even moral question, as an economic one.

I recall an interesting conversation with Santosh Desai, the renowned brand consultant and social commentator. I have been reading his column in The Times of India for years.

Times were bad but Desai was cheerful. We discussed canvas shoes and chalk. It was something we had in common. We both know the joy of rubbing white chalk on ‘keds’ before PT class. It is part of the experience of going to anglicized schools in India. When in doubt (that the keds were clean), one rubbed white chalk. Whitener was available but sometimes it ran out, sometimes it was expensive. Chalk was cheap and easy to use and the keds held chalk quite well.

We grew up on basically two kinds of footwear: black shoes and white keds. The shared experience of rubbing chalk stretches across middleclass India through the 1980s and ’90s. The Americanized sneaker came much later. By the time I was leaving school at the end of the ’90s, we had started to recognize the swoosh, though few could still afford it.

The relevance of scratching white chalk on canvas shoes is mostly lost today, especially in our bigger cities, but in that experience lies myriad details and a metaphor for how India has irretrievably altered, and why in spite of the thumbs down from rating agencies there is no going back to 1991 any more in this nation of new self-awareness.

According to Desai, twenty years of open markets have changed our vocabulary from hamare yahan pe aisa hi hota hai (this is how it is among us) to aaj kal aisa hi chal raha hai (this is how it is these days). He called it the samaj (community) versus samay (time) difference.

The key to understanding this is to comprehend that in my parents’ generation, we didn’t have and we mostly didn’t know what we didn’t have. Now, even if we do not have, we know what we do not have and we want it, at any cost.

We are no longer a product of our communities. We are a product of our time. It is a very different thing, a completely altered mindset, as different as cheese, say, from chalk.

We are no longer, and will never again be, happy with only two kinds of shoes.

We now know better.

That sociological shift is more continuous and indelible than any economic downturn. There has been a sociological alteration of what we want and that is irreversible. This means that in spite of the dark clouds, there will be what I would call self-motivational demand in India which will be fairly indestructible. This zeal to make ourselves better is the defining force today in India and will be so at least for the next decade.

Short of a financial or climatic disaster, it is impossible that this desire will slow down, no matter what the Sensex says.

1

DELHI: THE SOFA

The professor from St Stephens College arrived, without warning, at 11 p.m., and left sixteen minutes and twenty-three seconds later, having expressed explicitly his disappointment.

‘You cannot live here,’ he said.

‘This …’ He paused and turned his head upwards.

‘This is just not the right place. It is too …’ Here he stopped and it seemed like a full stop, the ‘too’ seeming weighty and having a feel of permanence, finality.

But he continued, ‘Too middle class, too Punjabi.’ His eyes trailed the trajectory of a cucumber peel that our neighbour, known only as Sonu’s mother, flicked onto the street.

He took a few steps towards his parked white Maruti Zen. The car was one–as he had earlier explained–among the three he owned.

A few loafing Mukherjee Nagar flies, fat on peel, wafted drunkenly by. The professor looked sadly at the flies, my first-floor flat and me.

He knew, even before I did, that I would not be able to pay 60,000 rupees to be an international debater. It was goodbye to the Commonwealth Debating Society. I would not go to a Commonwealth country and debate. My debating skills would have to remain Delhi, and Delhi University, bound.

The professor had arrived, uninvited and unexpected as mentioned, waking up my mother who had almost fallen asleep but who rose to the occasion and offered him tea. He ruthlessly said he would have some.

As my bleary-eyed mother set the water pan on the gas burner, the professor shifted uncomfortably on the cane chair and asked me pointed questions about what I wanted to do after college.

As he got into his car, he said, ‘Do something, get a sofa.’

It was the autumn of 1998, the autumn of my discontent, and I was in Delhi, starting college, tired, confused, lonely, poor, and desperate (the adjectives weighed heavy) to prove something to someone. Anyone.

My father had been transferred that year from his almost lifelong devotion to the Calcutta Metro Rail to the new Delhi Metro Rail. He was relieved, thrilled even. It was his last opportunity to save his son from the dreaded Calcutta culvert.

For the last two years of school, the high school years of Class XI and XII, my mother was convinced that I would land up at the culvert: that vagabond, rascally, up-to-no-good place infested by up-to-no-gooders. The culvert, my mother’s nightmare, was the concrete slab at the edge of the street, between poky apartments we called flats. On the culvert, ratty boys scratched their crotches, whistled and whimpered, learnt how to smoke, and became men before their time. The culvert was a set of adjectives.

Like the stock shot of an Indian Airlines aeroplane taking off from an indeterminate airstrip in old Hindi films, the culvert was a metaphor for abandoned dreams, mounted without heart in concrete.

My father said the culvert was the final destination of all those destined to live off their fathers’ government pensions. In those days, everyone seemed to assume that everyone else worked, or had once worked, or wanted to work, in government jobs.

My mother said the culvert was the hangout of every lowlife who wanted their mother dead, presumably of the shame of a crotch-scratching son. Sometimes my mother muttered that when the mothers of such culvert cads died, of shame, they, the culvert cads, would eat their dead mother’s heart. She meant it metaphorically, I think. Girls never went near the culvert boys. (Actually, a few girls did, but they were, said the ever-twittering gaggle of neighbourhood aunties, the female versions of the culvert unworthies. Ms Unworthy. She-rascal. It was rumoured, though never openly, that they even did things on the culvert during loadshedding!)

Now this could not be verified since no one had ever seen what happened on the culvert in the darkness of a loadshedding. But it was dark. And the girls were there. With the rascals.

They were, snorted the aunties, doing things.

The culvert was the ugly bowl of unemployment. And my parents claimed that I was headed there.

In those terrifying high school years, or what we called Class XI and XII, I had become that peculiar untouchable, ‘The Once-Upon-A-Time-Good-Boy’.

The days of General Proficiency prizes–these had made my mother solemnly proud since they were announced even ahead of the First in Academics prize–were over.

Swinging between numb and itchy, forced to study science when my heart was, shockingly for my parents, in the for-girls humanities, I was flunking exam after serious exam. In a class full of caterpillars about to blossom into engineers and doctors, I suffered amidst grunts and hiccups the melancholy solitude of the hormonal poet.

I was also, to the forehead-slapping disgust of my mother, in love. As much in love as any seventeen-year-old. Bus-chasing-ly, rain-waiting-ly in love. Want-to-run-away-ingly in love. Defy-the-world-and-have-deafening-sex-but-with-no-penetration-before-marriage-ly in love.

Among the many kaleidoscopic visions of hell for a parent, a lovesick son at seventeen is particularly Dante-ian.

And horror! My ever-spying mother found out that the girl, my girlfriend, so to speak–although somehow, even in those arousing years, we never really used the term–usually got better marks than I did each and every time.

With psychic accuracy, every time I brought back a red-lettered marksheet, my mother mentioned how my girlfriend was getting better grades. I never knew how she knew.

In a brutal lesson in competitiveness, a sneak peek perhaps into the impending sofa-judging world, my mother argued that my infatuation ought to inspire better marks.

Her favourite line: ‘If she really likes you, she should tell you to study and get better marks!’

And then, with telling import: ‘Will she feed you if you flunk?’

This was part of the Class Act: my mother’s elaborate, exquisitely detailed, vigorously modulated rant on the nuances of Being Middle Class.

What is caste? In those years, I never heard about caste, never understood it. No one I knew, or recall, ever spoke about caste.

But class, though. Class was a different thing. A different game. A different ballgame, as I later learnt to say in Delhi, altogether. There was no escaping from class.

My first identity, explained my parents, was that I am middle class. Being moddhobitto, they said, defined everything. It was a social marker. A lifestyle and a mindset. A badge. Stripes. Tail feathers. Polka dots. Horns.

Modhobittto was who I was before I was anyone. Before I was me.

Bengal has a well-defined class structure. Along with moddhobitto, there is also uchcho moddhobitto and nimno moddhobitto, upper middle class and lower middle class. The Holy Trinity. The Father, Son and Holy Ghost of societal faith. The Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh of daily tandav.

All our lives were governed by class. By its intangible rules, its wispy regulations, its shimmering pillars of politeness, courtesies and disenchantments. Who we were. What we did. Where we went. What we studied. What we wore. How we travelled. Where we holidayed. Class decided everything.

Life, according to my parents, was a struggle to stay within your class, a struggle to rise above it, and a battle to never fall below it. So we the moddhobittos worked to rise to the uchcho world and battled to evade the slip to the nimno nether regions.

As a boy, I knew little of Karl Marx, but I was living every day with the class struggle.

In the Book of Middle Classism, bad class was the original sin.

So, by the time my Class XII (or school-leaving) examinations ended, it was clearly time for me to leave Calcutta. My parents wanted to end my association with the city and the people I knew in it. In fact, so did I.

Delhi was to be my new start. Not my new play–my folks had decided that I had had enough of play–Delhi would be work. Hard work. My Dull Boy days.

And here we were. In Delhi. Being told that we ought to have a sofa.

When the professor told us we must have a sofa, it felt like the unkindest cut. The sofa had such a volatile significance in the life of my parents, and by extension in mine, that its reappearance in this distant land was startling.

The apparition of forgotten adultery at the silver jubilee of a marriage.

The sofa was a signpost.

Along with its tarty twin the Dressing Table, the Sofa archly pointed to what my mother never had, what my father could never provide, and each of the missed turns, blind alleys, crunchy brakes and stubborn gears of a foggy lifetime.

The sofa was loaded with status anxiety, sex and the dishevelled non-charms of their moddhobitto city life.

The resurrection of the Sofa and the Dressing Table was Calcutta Redux. Not a good sign.

This book is the story of the sofa that was never bought. The class struggle that we fought (fight). The Dressing Table that was not to be. All that we saw. Everything we see. And what happened in between.

How I escaped the culvert. What a miss!

2

BOMBAY: BIG-CITY BOMBAST

Walking through a crowded lane of Dharavi, Samuel says: ‘Bhaiyon, bhaisaab, eh bhaiyya, please to be clearing. I am saying with folded hands do not crowd the lanes. Do not stand around. Eh chutiya! You not understand or what, maderchod, gaand pe laath maarun kya? Haat saale, haat, go, go!

‘Brothers,’ he adds, ‘we are your friends. You and I are friends, but don’t crowd around! Just fuck off!’

It is something he does, he said, on most mornings, but today is a special performance for the camera.

He is willing to do retakes. Behenchod. Ok? Harami. Gaandu.

This is the only way to save Dharavi for the people of Dharavi, once upon a time Asia’s largest slum, says the forty-three-year-old Maharashtra Navnirman Sena activist.

‘No place for us, men,’ Samuel coughs out the words, his Adam’s apple nervously forming speed breakers. The silver crucifix around his neck rises, falls.

‘Every morning, men, every morning these buggers are coming here, standing around, blocking the way. Insulting women. All frustro fuckers! No culture. Complete identity crisis! See all the lanes jammed!’

We are in the muscle market of Dharavi, tiny bylanes filled with young, and not-so-young, men who wait, generally lounging about sullenly, waiting to be hired as daily wage labourers.

They come from all sorts of places, but most of them are from the eastern and northern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh–black holes, part of the bimarus of India.

They come seeking jobs, fleeing fatigue. They come to feel needed, even if it is by cleaning streets and soaking dishes and collecting garbage and washing cars. They come to become one of the faceless millions. One step up the faceless millions ladder. The loafer Rameshwar of the small town is here, as is the jaunty grocer’s boy Raju.

Every day, these dirty lanes that track between endless sweaty shanties and topped-up garbage dumps fill with contractors looking for men to build and break bridges, build and break buildings, build and break pavements and roads and dilapidated homes and multistorey misfits.

Bombay needs men to constantly tear it down and patch it up again. This is the bazaar for such men. But Samuel, who came to Bombay as a ten-year-old from Kerala with his father, who found a job at a country liquor bar, does not like this role-playing. Out-of-towners, he complains, are ruining his city.

‘Why these buggers cannot stay in their states?’ Samuel asks, digging his nose angrily. He speaks a curious mix of tingling Bombaiya Hindi and east Indian ghetto English as far removed from his native Malayalam as Dharavi is from the backwaters.

‘They have no idea, you see, they are always changing names, becoming someone else. Some of them become terrorists,’ he suddenly whispers. I can see the bloody veins in his eyes. The edges of his eyes are yellow, and match his tobacco-specked teeth.

According to Samuel, he and his political party, the xenophobic Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), led by the caustic and cacophonic Raj Thackeray, are leading the fight against such bad influence.

‘They stand around, tease our girls. They are rapists and they don’t speak Marathi!’ The way Samuel says it, the last is by far the greatest offence.

So Samuel and his men go around every morning, requesting the men not to stand around blocking the lanes. Heckling and threatening, they clear up the lanes and, they claim, make them safe.

It is the summer of 2007 and Bombay is in flames for Mumbai. The myth of globalized, cosmopolitan Bombay is bring shattered as MNS hired hands go north-Indian hunting. And ensuring everyone says Mumbai, not Bombay. Raj Thackeray wants to teach the men from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh–the bhaiyyas–a lesson in being a good Mumbaikar.

There is public thrashing of Bihari taxi drivers. Shattered glass, running men. Blood. Crowds of screaming men. A bullying leader. Police stations. TV orgasms.

I, a Bengali from Jamshedpur and Calcutta and Delhi, and yet with no city that is quite my own and no Marathi words quite in me, am out with a camera to report the story through the eyes of an MNS worker. I meet Samuel.

And here he is, threatening wormy, muscled men who spit rub the sheen off Bombay every day, giving me lessons on identity.

He says he started his work–clearing the lanes every morning–after the people of Dharavi complained to him about harassment from the Biharis.

He uses ‘Biharis’ as a generic term for all north Indians.

‘Eh babu,’ he tells a young man with a wispy moustache standing near a tea stall drinking, curiously, a Thums Up cola at 8:18 a.m., ‘Eh kitni baar re? Ha? Hazaar baar … but no listen. Haath jor ke, haan, haath jor ke, begging, begging …’ He looks at the camera. The cameraman scolds him–don’t look into the frame!

‘Please re, please re, you are my brother yaar! Kyun yeh chutiyapanti!’

I ask him if the sudden burst of politeness is for the camera. He seems genuinely insulted.

‘Not at all! What are you saying?’ Samuel almost shouts. ‘We are always polite. We have always been polite. We always try to explain, we always try to understand the problems, adjust, but sometimes what to do? No one understands only!’

But aren’t these guys doing the same thing that his father once did?

‘Paappa also got hammered, men, why these buggers get away?’

Samuel is a curious case. He is part of a racist party that is an off-shoot of the original militant outsider-ousting party, the Shiv Sena, started by cartoonist Bal Thackeray.

Thackeray and his Sena, named after the Maratha warrior king Shivaji, rose to infamy by leading street wars against south Indians in Bombay to cleanse the city of ‘Madrasi’ (after Madras) influence and businesses. Down with the lungiwalas. The Sena saw itself as leading the indigenous fight in the same way that Shivaji had fought the infamously intolerant, violently proselytizing Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.

In two decades, the geographical origin of the villains had changed from the south to the north, and in 2007 Thackeray’s estranged nephew Raj was leading his street fighters against the north Indians. In two decades, the target had changed from Madrasis to Biharis and the erstwhile victims, people like Samuel’s father, had become perpetrators.

Who does Bombay belong to? That too had changed.

‘That was different,’ reasons Samuel, ‘Now we are not the outsiders!’

Why?

‘See,’ Samuel reiterates his favourite theme, ‘we don’t have identity crisis! We know this city. We are from here only. We are part of it, we know everything. This is our life. This is our city now. These boys don’t know who they are. Identity crisis, men, identity crisis. They are nobody in this city, wanting to very fast become somebody and getting violent. No identity. No peace.’

Now, I know all about identity crisis.

A few months before I met Samuel, I was Chandan Das, slum dweller, since 1995, in the mud splat of sea-facing Bombay called Dharavi.

I lived there with my mother and father, my wife and two children.

I had a ration card proving that I have been living here since 1995. The ration card means that when this sweaty, sin city of sweltering slums, this ever-changing statistic of grime, this tarty, topped-up garbage dump, this vomit of vote-bank politics is redeveloped into sky-rises and fountains, malls and multiplexes, I will get a 225-square-foot flat on one of the world’s most expensive real estates–Bombay city centre.

I paid 15,000 rupees to turn from Hindol Sengupta, television reporter, to Chandan Das, slum dweller. Fifteen thousand rupees = ration card.

It is the summer of 2007, and I am discovering the Great Indian Slum Scam. It’s a simple sleight of hand. And it’s all about identity.

Dharavi is a festering, flamboyant spit blob in the city of eternal vomit, endlessly regurgitating dreams, passions and people.

It is the oxygen tube, the land lifeline to the gasping film and financial capital. The newspapers call it a goldmine.

The core idea to redevelop is not the land, the measurement or the pricing–it is identity.

Central to Dharavi redevelopment is providing homes for the thousands who live there in endless, undulating, often tidy, always sweaty, shanties bordering garbage dumps.

By law, each slum dweller must get a 225-square-foot flat, but only those who have lived there for a certain period of time can claim them.

Paul, another Kerala-born Dharavi Catholic, was my spiritual guide to seamy Dharavi. He was my ration card readier, my instant solution man.

He explained that everything hinges on identity. The builders must show that they are building homes for the authentic slum dwellers, people who have been living there for a decade. Only then can they get to demolish hutments and build real estate.

Like Samuel, Paul’s family roots could be traced back to Kerala. Like Samuel, Paul had political ambition. Like Samuel, Paul believed that he too has been fighting for identity.

‘When the buildings come up, we are not going to be here,’ said Paul. ‘That’s what the builders want. That’s what the rich also want. That we should disappear. But this is our space. It has our name on it, our identity. So the best way to remove us is to make us disappear. Give new names, fake names. Everything can be done.’

The politicians do not care as long as they get a cut in the billions of rupees that such redevelopment will bring. But their vote banks must remain undisturbed. People in sky scrapers do not vote–they might light the occasional candle at a candlelight vigil, but they do not vote–but people in slums do.

But, if you kick out slum dwellers and do not give them flats, they won’t vote for you. So begins the elaborate Great Indian Slum Scam. It’s all about identity.

1. Create fake slum dwellers.

2. Register people who are dead.

3. Register people who don’t exist (like Chandan Das).

4. Register flats in the names of fake and dead slum dwellers.

5. Register fake votes on fake names.

Everyone wins.

The politician gets his votes and his money. The builder shows that, on paper, flats have been given to ghost slum dwellers, and therefore not only gets the land, but also gets to sell the flats in the black market.

It all begins with a fake identity.

As Paul said–identity is everything.

As Samuel said–identity is the difference between peace and war.

Standing on the terrace of a building where the lift worked only one way–to the top–squinting in the autumnal mid-day sun in a city where autumn never comes, Magsaysay award winner and lifelong slum activist Jockin Arputham asked the critical question.

‘Who am I?’

I am,’ he said, I suspect answering for both of us, ‘the eternal immigrant.’

Behind him, stretching endlessly on the ground, are the hutments of Dharavi, often reduced to orgasmic magic realism by foreign magazines, morbid in their role playing of captive, breathless imagination. Bombay for Hollywood.

A breathless assistant lunged into the frame. There was a power cut and the lift had stopped working both ways. The assistant had had to run up seven floors.

He handed Arputham, from a tiny pouch, the sugar level meter of the chronic diabetic.

‘At home everywhere, and yet my identity defines my home and my home is identified by my identity,’ said Arputham, expertly pricking his finger.

‘Identity, you know,’ said Arputham, turning his head towards the huts below, ‘depends on where you stand. Distance can be dreary or dreamy.’

And I thought: Which side am I on? At what distance?

It depends, as must everything else, on whether I am in the north or the south of the string of islands that is Bombay.

(You notice, of course, that I say Bombay and not Mumbai. The truth is that it has remained Bombay for outsiders like me. We who say Bombay are in a minority. Although, even in this, there is perhaps a north-south divide.)

In south Bombay, it is Bombay. In north Bombay, beyond the sea shrine of Haji Ali, beyond the textile mill-turned-turntable hubs of Lower Parel and the wine bars of Worli, it is perhaps mostly Mumbai.

To understand this, you have to understand that most Indian cities have a north-south divide. The south, almost always more prosperous, with that solid bar of snootiness–an ever higher per square foot rate than the north.

Inch per inch, the south beats the north in sheer money value in almost every city. This means other tales in other cities, but for the moment, let’s not leave Bombay.

In south Bombay, it is always Bombay. Poets and bankers, CEOs and TV anchors will tell you how this is cosmopolitan paradise, complete with its own sexy-at-sixty agony aunt Shobhaa De.

In the bazaars and old buildings of Parel and Dadar, in the suburbs of Kalina and Kandivili, ask the average Maharashtrian, and he will tell you of Mumbai.

In Thane and Bhandup, Malad and Goregaon, Borivili and Vashi, even the north Indians will tell you that yes, it’s Mumbai, but it’s also their city.

I live, partly at least, in north Bombay. My tiny apartment is tucked away in the quaint Catholic village of Amboli in Andheri West (you have to qualify ‘West’, since West versus East is another uppity divide which the West usually wins), near the soap opera starlet haven of Lokhandwala and Oshiwara and a stone’s throw from that Mecca of Bollywood strugglers, Yashraj Films.

I like to call it Bombay. I have a natural affinity for the idea of a land of cosmopolitan cavorting–after all, that is my world and that is why a non-Marathi-speaking Bengali can find and retain a job there–but the truth is, I sometimes see why so many average Maharashtrians support Thackeray.

It shocks me–a bit like the guilt I felt when I discovered in Class V that I loved the fair-skinned Ms Mathew who taught us English–but I do.

But let me tell you a story about how I first understood this discomfort.

It’s a story that begins with the word ‘bhaiyya’. It means brother in Hindi, and is used across north India to address everyone, from relatives (literally, brothers) to shopkeepers, drivers, handymen–anyone.

In Bombay, it quickly causes offence. Almost every Maharashtrian driver, if called bhaiyya, snaps back that he is Marathi and not, repeat not, a bhaiyya.

My apartment is in the heart of the village of Amboli, and is fairly cut off from the stream of traffic and public transport that makes up most of Bombay.

It provides a rare sense of isolation and quietude, complete even with early morning bird twitter in this cacophonic city, and was one of the main reasons why I bought it.

But my neighbour, Mrs Rangnekar, is unhappy. A widow for two years now, she does not have a car. Arthritic knees make walking half a kilometre to the main, bustling road for an auto-rickshaw a traumatic affair, and her children visit only once a week.

And she usually has to go only to the market or the nearby temple, both so close that the meter never reads more than twenty rupees, but far enough to be an excruciatingly painful walk.

For years, Mrs Rangnekar never had a problem. Unlike in most other Indian cities, Bombay’s auto-rickshaw and taxi drivers are scrupulously honest and never turn down a customer, no matter how short the distance and how low the fare. It is the only place in India where bleary-eyed drivers pull out wrinkled fare charts at 2 a.m., charge the exact fare plus night charges, and return one rupee when handed a ten-rupee note on a nine-rupee fare.

‘Used to be,’ said Mrs Rangnekar, crinkling her nose in disgust.

‘That’s how they used to be. Now! Ha! All these new people bring Delhi culture here!’

In Delhi, I have seen the combined might of the transport authority, the police, the traffic authority, the government and a sharp chief minister fail to get auto-rickshaw drivers to travel by meter.

In Delhi and Chennai–as in most other cities–fares are arbitrary, drivers obnoxious and harassing, and sometimes even criminal. It is unheard of for drivers to travel on meter in Delhi after 9 p.m.

In Delhi, old-timers will tell you that with Sikhs exiting the trade, travelling in autos and taxis have become more and more of an unpleasant chore.

Mrs Rangnekar says the same about Maharashtrians in Bombay. ‘As long as most of them were Maharashtrians, there was no problem. But now these fellows will not go short distances, demand money all the time, won’t go by meter. It’s terrible!

‘They are not like us,’ scowls Mrs Rangnekar. ‘A Marathi driver will be nice to an old woman like me. They