Children of the '80s

Tue, Nov 3 05:59 AM

In the multi-storeyed complex in the government colony I lived in during the late '70s, I would follow friends of mine in chanting a taunting poem to a sardarji on the ground floor. We hated him for he refused to let us play in his spacious green lawns. So we hid behind the hedges and chanted rhymes making fun of him, his turban wearing ways, words that made no sense but were meant to mock. It was our way of getting back at this crusty bearded, turbaned man who kept to himself and everyone out of his garden. The bunch of us, a gaggly group all seven-eight-year-olds, took pleasure in leaving chalk mark drawings on his black Fiat, in ringing his doorbell and running away before someone answered and of course there were those verses we chanted, peering through the hedge which looked into his window, deriving cruel, childlike fun as he turned a vague, incomprehensible gaze towards us.

Thirty years ago, ours was a disparate group. Some of us were children of government servants, and some came from the servants quarters discreetly tucked away behind our apartments, terribly dank one-room windowless places. It was an egalitarian world, though we never thought of it that way. It was but natural that Lakshmi, the maid, would take our old clothes (there was no other use for them) for her children, and though in the evenings we would return to our separate homes, there were times when we would join our friends outside, in the event of a sudden power cut, and sing songs under an open still star-filled Delhi sky. We cracked jokes too — at everyone else who was different, the Bengalis, the Madrasis, even the English, especially their obnoxious Test team that managed to beat us in the tour of 1979.

It was a time that will never come back, different from our parents' generation and those that will follow us. We were one of the post-independent generations and the dream of a new India as imagined by those early leaders was still fresh and raw. In Delhi, the city we lived in, there was no difference except that one was more rich and the other poor. In school, my classmates came from all over, and we learnt the same things — that India lives in its villages, that Hindi is the national language, Punjab is the richest state, that M. Visweswaraya helped build the Krishnasagar dam, and dams were of course the temples of modern India. Yes, we knew we were a poor country but we were catching up — with space vehicles, our industries, our railways and, of course, the Asian Games.

It was from the early '80s that this openness became boxed in with several constraints — of fear, suspicion, the idea of difference and hatred. As news from Punjab filtered in, Khalistan and those fighting for it became a word we dreaded. We spoke of it in fearful excitement and every one with a turban took on a sinister aspect. And when peace did finally come, it came with a price. A prime minister killed first, and then one of the leaders who had signed the accord, and then more than 300 passengers who perished in the Kanishka disaster over the Atlantic Ocean. Assam was far away, but the photographs brought home the news of the deadly Nellie massacre. Those killed, I learnt, were variously called outsiders, foreigners, illegal migrants from Bangladesh, Muslims. Difference began to have an ugly, murderous face.

But all this was still far removed from our cities. It was five years later, in 1989 when we, every one of us, would begin to see ourselves as different, separated from the other, each one of us shaped by our own ever narrowing identities, where everyone else became a rival, a competitor, a suspect, and also enemy.

My first year in college was a time of attending rallies, demonstrations, marches against then-Prime Minister V.P. Singh, the Mandal Commission report, and those who were now the "Other Backward Classes" — those who, thanks to more quotas promised by the report, would snatch away from us our jobs in the civil service, and who would simply by a circumstance of birth claim a dream of life and ambitions many of us had taken for granted.

When college finally reopened for classes, walls and boards bore other sinister signs, splashed across the university walls. "Be proud to say we are Hindus." A mosque in Ayodhya stood for everything that was divisive, weak in our history. It became a symbol of our collective weakness in the face of invaders. Our history made up of benign, brave, benevolently despotic kings and emperors now became one where annihilation, humiliation, defeat was common and now, as a chariot ran around the country leaving blood and rioting in its wake, was the time for a reassertion.

It was a period of not just moral bankruptcy but also fiscal and economic. But the latter had to be urgently dealt with; figures and statistics were truths of a kind that have never lied. The opening up of the economy occurred almost simultaneous to our generation's stepping into adulthood, a time to make career choices. It was a time when a degree in management became more attractive, offering an avenue not limited by quotas, where merit served as keyword.

A decade later, as India's first post-Liberalisation generation, we've been witness to changes sweeping and radical: epitomised by fancy luxury cars, satellite television, branded clothing, fast foods and, of course, the ubiquitous mobile. For us 25 years since 1984 does not mean Operation Bluestar, a prime minister's assassination, or the terrible anti-Sikh pogrom; it denotes instead a quarter century since Maggi noodles arrived. We live now in our gated worlds, moving in our limited circles, consciously ignoring the gap between rich and poor. We are fiercely protective of our own defined, carefully crafted identities judging everyone by name first, and trying hard to ignore and failing to deny the physical markers that make up the identity of the "others" who are not "us".

We live in an India where our differences now make us, where we can only call ourselves Indian after checking off all the other labels we have come to wear around us the last two decades.

Kumar's latest novel is 'In the Country of Gold-digging Ants' (2009)

express@expressindia.com

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