Essay
Lopsided India
Ambani Home
(This is the concluding segment of this essay, the earlier part of which appeared last week. --- Editor, Book Reviews) Mayawati's excess can seem proportionate, even justifiable, when compared to the brazen displays of India's new billionaires. The Indian steelmaker Lakshmi Mittal, we're told, managed to hire the palace at Versailles for his daughter's wedding. Not satisfied with local camels, another magnate imported giraffes from South Africa to a north Indian industrial town for his own daughter's nuptials. And then there's the much-remarked-upon 27-story residence, with three helipads and nine elevators, erected in Mumbai by Mukesh Ambani, who, according to Forbes, has a fortune of $27 billion. French interviews a telecom billionaire named Sunil Bharti Mittal, in whom he finds a philanthropic ambition and potential worthy of a latter-day Andrew Carnegie, but he never really gets close to the new rich or a convincing analysis of their impact on Indian life and society. Much the same can be said of his presentation of India's frightening lower depths. It's not hard to find outcastes or lower-caste Indians living at bare subsistence, far below anyone's idea of a poverty line. There are estimated to be some 300 million of them, roughly a quarter of the population. But French finds only one, following up on a lurid newspaper article about an indebted quarry worker who was put in chains by his employer (an example of the "horror stories" to which he says foreign correspondents are addicted). Two other lower-caste figures he introduces turn out to be a law professor, who started off in life as son of a landless laborer, and the professor's nephew, now living in Silicon Valley as a software engineer. These, it need hardly be explained, are stupendously atypical examples of the new social mobility that has suddenly been loosed on the land. The nephew thinks of returning to India. "In some ways we would lead a more sophisticated life in Bangalore," he explains. He instantly defines what he means by sophistication, this offshoot of a landless laborer: "You can have a driver and a nanny there, which is hard to afford in the U.S." Anand Giridharadas, a second-generation Indian-American journalist born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, doesn't travel nearly as far as French into the subcontinent's past or present but, in a book that's 100 pages shorter (and could easily have been briefer), he manages to dig considerably deeper into the psychology and circumstances of the "new kind of Indian" we've been hearing about since Naipaul. In this younger writer's account drawn from family visits in his childhood, followed by a prolonged residence in Mumbai as first a corporate consultant, then a journalist this new Indian is at once more self-confident and less Westernized in the sense of being freer from hand-me-down colonial models. Viewing the changes through the prism of the families his parents left behind in India, Giridharadas sketches pictures of cultural reinvention and loss that will be more or less familiar to anyone who has read a few Jhumpa Lahiri stories. The personal narrative provides a useful point of entry but becomes repetitious; his forays into the actual India are more likely to be remembered. Giridharadas finds in the new India "quiet refusals to know one's place," to be pinned down by the old signifiers of caste and status, the old Indian "boundedness," by even geography. He's not merely finding new words for the "mutinies" Naipaul described a generation ago. He succeeds in evoking these new Indians, most strikingly in the case of Ravindra, a self-created motivational speaker who overcomes humble village origins through close study of Dale Carnegie. He never wore footwear till the ninth grade, but he has now read "How to Win Friends and Influence People" 28 times, he says. "I will change my destiny," vows Ravindra, who gets his start staging "personality contests" in a small nondescript town called Umred near his village in the center of India, a town too small to have a train station but big enough to have had its conventions shaken, if not exploded, by television and the Internet. One of the contestants for the plastic tiara that comes with the title of Miss Umred is asked what she hopes to become. "My aim in life is to become a newsreader," she replies in English, which Giridharadas calls "the language of success in the India that was beginning to flourish in the 1990s." She probably picked it up at what he calls "middle-class finishing schools," describing a sort of low-rent Berlitz for the slightly dislodged, aspiring masses. The pleasure of Giridharadas's portrait of this striver is that he doesn't just descend on his subject for a single opportunistic interview but returns again and again over a period that seems to cover a few years. Soon Ravindra has started one of those makeshift academies on his own, offering Umred's awakened youth not only English but courses in "personality development" what's now sometimes called "personal branding" in listings of American extension courses so they can learn how to present themselves at a job interview, perhaps at a call center where successful candidates go on to field orders and complaints from American villages, towns and cities. From Umred and Ravindra, "India Calling" swings back to Mumbai and the billionaire Mukesh Ambani the conceiver and lord of the 27-story mansion with hanging gardens whom Giridharadas pursues with the same admirable persistence and curiosity with which he went after Ravindra. The young provincial becomes in this telling an Ambani acolyte and wannabe. Reliance Industries, the empire over which the tycoon presides, is portrayed as a state within a state, with its own intelligence service, fixers and emissaries, all rooted in the sort of personal give-and-take relationships and obligations that drive trading in an Indian marketplace where insider trading is the name of the game. These are values not taught in any business school. Ambani, sent to Stanford University by his father, a trader who became an empire builder, left without completing his MBA. He didn't feel he needed it to run an expanding business in India. I was reminded of an evening a couple of years ago on the rooftop terrace of Mumbai's Intercontinental Hotel, where I found myself seated near a large group of spirited and stylish young Indians with American accents, gossiping and drinking Cosmopolitans. I couldn't tell whether they were visitors in transit or expatriates in the land of their parents. The terrace we inhabited seemed as the sun sank into the Arabian Sea to be afloat somewhere between Mumbai's Marine Drive and Tribeca. India, meanwhile, was down below, just an elevator ride away. (Abridged) Joseph Lelyveld is a former correspondent and editor of The New York Times. His latest book, "Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India," was published in April.
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