A Guy Growing Old in a Country Growing Young

By Desmond Macedo

In a country where 50 per cent of the population is younger than twenty-five, what does it mean to be old? Ask Dan Mullagathanny. Not that Dan is old. He is only forty-nine. Anywhere else, he would be in his prime: ripe for the big promotion, ready for the big responsibility. If he was already married, he could have started an affair. If he was having an affair, he could have ended it and gone back to his wife to reflect on his foolishness. But in India, with youngsters all around, he is ageing faster. There are no jobs for him. And why would there be when his employers can hire two twenty-four-year-olds -- smarter, more ambitious, more 'with it' -- for the age of a forty-nine-year-old? In trying to woo girls, he becomes a storehouse of their secrets, and the most he can hope for is a polite platonic friendship. He cannot decide whether to be on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, and he cannot understand why he should say 'given the fact that' when he can more easily say 'since'. India is no country for old men. Will Dan make himself count or lose his voice here? A funny-sad story about being a misfit in a rapidly changing world, A Guy Growing Old in a Country Growing Young is compelling satire that asks important questions with an unusually light touch.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Dec 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9789351368229

Desmond Macedo

Desmond Macedo is a copywriter with several years of experience in agencies like Ulka, Lintas, Ogilvy & Mather, MAA and Contract. He lives in Pune with his wife, whom he helps in a home business and writes in between. Their son works in Dubai. This is Desmond's first book.

Book preview

A GUY GROWING OLD IN A COUNTRY GROWING YOUNG

DESMOND MACEDO

CONTENTS

1. RISE OF THE NEW ENTREPRENEUR: THE RAGPICKER

2. COP SLAPS GIRL. GIRL. SLAPS HER BACK

3. NEW LIMITS

4. YOUTH PREFER JARGON TO LANGUAGE

5. TOO MANY ALTERNATIVES

6. DEMOCRACY WORKS BEST WHEN THE ELECTORATE IS EDUCATED

7. DON’T ARGUE: TAKE YOUR MONEY AND RUN

8. THE HIERARCHY ON THE HIGHWAY

9. BOTTOM-UP COUNTRY

10. DAN GETS A NEW MEMORY

11. BOTTOM-UP COUNTRY: A REPRISE

12. A COUNTRY WITH AN IDEA

13. THE DEAD END

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

1

RISE OF THE NEW ENTREPRENEUR: THE RAGPICKER

Dan Mullagathanny never saw any garbage when he was young.

Nobody discarded anything to produce any garbage. The packaging of the few products available then wasn’t discarded either. The cardboard box of a new pair of shoes, for example, was used to store pencils, rubbers, sharpeners, pens, ink bottles, gum bottles, etcetera. Or holes were punched in the box and a kitten stored in it. As the kitten grew up, it would learn to use the cardboard to scratch its claws against and sharpen them.

Any corrugated cardboard packaging was an excellent insole for shoes that were somewhat loose. It also served as a comfortable mat to squat on or spread under mattresses of spring and wooden beds to preserve them. The mattresses themselves never turned too old to be discarded. The cotton inside was beaten and fluffed up to make it comfortable again and again. If the mattress were filled with coir, tufts of it were pulled out to scour utensils with, while the cotton in a cotton mattress would’ve gone on to make pillows, and the pillows gone farther to make cushions that would be used as pillows whenever there was a shortage of pillows, which would’ve been opened up again to make a mattress whenever there was a shortage of mattresses.

Since there was always a shortage of something or the other, things were always being made into something or the other.

Old liquor bottles were used to store cooking oil, honey, kerosene, phenyl, turpentine, lubricants, or used to grow money plants in, cuttings of which were carried away to other homes in old bottles filled with water. From there, after they had grown luxuriantly, cuttings in old bottles would be carried farther. The same money plant twirled around the family’s friends, relatives and acquaintances, tradition dictating that money plants always be shared if they couldn’t be stolen, and that’s how old bottles also went around. People would borrow kerosene or cooking oil if they ran short of either, so around went the bottles, again. Some even borrowed hooch, though, more notably, some lent hooch. Borrowing and returning kept people, bottles and things going round and round in a well-balanced circle.

The card-sheet packet of a tube of toothpaste would be torn into strips along the four folds and used as bookmarks by people in departments like accounts to separate sections in their logs; college students used them to separate subjects in their foolscap exercise books; clerks in schools used them to separate classes in their registers; grocers used them to separate credit lists; and in the recipe book of a housewife the strip had the responsibility of separating fries, curries, chutneys, vegetable foogaths, pulaos and European and Anglo-Indian stews, or else there would be a pork vindaloo tasting like a bland European stew, resulting in grumpy faces at the dining table. No card-sheet strip could then separate one grumpy face from another—all faces look alike when food tastes awful—and the dining table would begin to wobble with people sitting at it uneasily, so it would be sent back to the furniture store that dealt in second-hand furniture on hire and exchanged.

Old clothes went through several stages of reuse, both within the family and outside. The father’s clothes went to the eldest son, then to a younger sibling, then right down to the youngest, and then to the street children from nearby hutments who wore them day in and day out till they were cut into square pieces and made into a patchwork quilt for the family at night, that in time would become a snug bed for their dog, and then a rag held taut between the jaws of two dogs playing outside their huts every morning. The mother’s clothes followed a similar route, and Dan had seen patches of his mother’s and father’s clothes on the same quilt. Children’s school uniforms that they outgrew were handed down to other younger children of the same school. They used to be officially told not to discard old uniforms but to hand them over to the school. Nor did they look at it as charity, rather a practical thing to do with their old uniforms. Few things ever stayed in the same place. While the children went on to higher classes every year, the uniforms went down to lower classes.

Some old clothes were used to dust furniture and mop floors. Some became rags to wipe bicycles and motorbikes. And the driver of the school bus would use the rags to wipe his windscreen every morning. Old bed linen was stitched into bags to carry rations, vegetables, groceries and tiffin boxes. Sometimes they were stitched into school bags. When they got too threadbare to hold anything, the dogs took over. Old linen was also used to light wood and coke stoves and coke irons, the ash from which was then used to scrub utensils. Effective, because they would sparkle.

A pillow case was a readymade bag to carry home the rations. If anyone arrived at the ration shop with one bag short, someone would lend him one. The pillow case was dusted after the grain was emptied out of it, or rinsed if it was used to carry flour, and slipped back on the pillow.

Old newspapers had several uses. Shopkeepers used them as paper bags. Students used them to cover text and exercise books. At home, they were spread on the floor and above them went the mattress for the night. Newspapers tend to clean window panes very well. The paper packets that came from the grocer were collected and used to carry dry lunch to school and work. Dry lunch is a term used in India for food that has no gravy, like sandwiches, chapattis and a vegetable dish, or scrambled eggs. After the meal, throw the packet in the dustbin. Girls growing up also used these packets to carry and dispose soiled linen.

People never threw away anything made of paper, cloth or wood until it was reused.

Even personal style was reused: see what everyone wore and wear the same. All the menfolk had an off-white shirt and dark trousers, both made of terylene. An option was a light blue shirt with dark blue trousers. Not a coincidence that some years later this would become the staff uniform at automobile factories and courier companies. Quite likely, the courier would have phoned the factory to ask which set they were using and accordingly used the other.

People didn’t concern themselves with the environment. The word was unfamiliar back then. They just looked at how things could be reused. A lot of this activity was actually recycling, another word nobody knew back then. And a lot of it was a necessity. People hardly had spare cash to buy new stuff. Shoes were taken to a cobbler to be re-soled several times with layers of old car and two-wheeler tyres. Old car and truck tubes were used to ferry water, and bootleggers used them to ferry hooch. Old bicycle tubes worked well as elastic cords to secure goods on bicycle and scooter carriers, like a bag of grain from the ration stand.

Darning clothes and soldering leaky kerosene tanks of pressure stoves were established niche trades. ‘Second-hand furniture on hire’ was an instance of unique reuse, several times over. Borrowing and returning stuff, too, seemed to be an early form of recycling.

Nehru, the architect of the Public Sector Undertaking in India, didn’t encourage private manufacture that would have generated more jobs, better salaries and consumption that would’ve produced garbage because he didn’t think private enterprise was suitable for India.

Until the ’90s, India had beautiful environs for the oddest of reasons.

In April 2013, when Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar was accused of links with arms dealers, he rubbished the allegations as ‘baseless, scurrilous, unfounded and ludicrous, with the sole intention of besmirching my personal integrity, reputation and competence’.

Dan Mullagathanny wondered if anyone could have got away with such affluent and well-heeled vocabulary just twenty-five-odd years ago. India was a socialist democracy. Any use of such vocabulary would’ve been allowed purely on a quota basis. ‘Ludicrous’ would’ve been banned anyway for extravagance since there was already an equivalent permitted: ‘ridiculous’. As for ‘besmirching’ and ‘scurrilous’, they would’ve attracted heavy import duty.

Likewise, multitasking would’ve been banned in socialist India. No one would ever have been allowed to do several jobs at once because then some people would have the unfair advantage of shirking several jobs at the same time whilst the rest of India was allowed to shirk only one job at a time, socialism dictating that everyone should be equally lazy. No one was allowed to be lazier than the other.

Then came the ’90s, and India became a free economy.

Overnight private enterprise boomed. Indians started buying more and more packaged goods so more and more stores came up, followed by malls, since shopping was