Nothing Particular

Michael Kinsley in Time Magazine writes about the US House of Representatives voting 414-1 against the use of genetic information by prospective employers or insurance companies assessing would-be customers. Equality and non-discrimination are good, he feels,

‘But how far should we take it? … Is it unfair that Yo Yo Ma can play cello better than I can? Or that people hire Frank Gehry instead of me when they want a beautiful building, or that Warren Buffett is a better stock picker?’

These differences in ability, Kinsley argues, are mainly due to genetic traits, otherwise known as talent - they are gaps that might be minimised through hard work, but never entirely bridged. He goes on to suggest that much of the credit for what we are goes not to us but to our genes, or to our upbringing (in other words, our parents).

It is hard to deny that some people are more gifted at some things than others. Nor can I plausibly claim that my parents had no influence over me - quite to the contrary. But all this is beside the point. The argument against genetic discrimination can be put in two ways as follows:

1. The pragmatic argument

What is pertinent when you are selecting someone for a job is: is he or she likely to deliver? That likelihood is the sum of inherent talent and external factors, like how hard the person has worked, how motivated they are and so on. Going by talent alone could possibly lead to poor results. Those who know me will hardly be surprised if I give the example here of Rahul Dravid. A test of batting genes would show him in a very poor light as compared to, say, Yuvraj Singh; yet he is one of India’s test cricket greats.

2. The fairness argument

Pragmatism notwithstanding, opposing discrimination is basically about fairness. Reading the previous argument, you might very well have pointed out that the prospective employer is not so foolish as to use only the genetic test: they would look at that in conjunction with past performance. Fine. The principle at stake, though, is this: you can’t penalise a person for what they have no control over. If a person has decided to compete in a certain field, the only thing you may judge about them is their overall performance, not what part of that performance was due to talent. In fact, to extend Kinsley’s analogy about parental upbringing being similar to one’s genetic inheritance, discrimination on the basis of genes would be similar to saying that only the sons of noblemen should go to university and occupy high office.

To sum up: of course one must encourage diversity and excellence. But to dissociate excellence from effort would be unfair and unwise.

Sundararajan had accepted long ago that he would be shifting, but only now did it really begin to sink in. When the oldest of his books had been carted away, his home would truly be bereft. He began to follow in his mind’s eye the paths that his various books would take. He imagined his early paperback editions of Narayan’s Malgudi novels wedged in among the usual fare in the Indian Writing section at the young man’s bookshop. The non-fiction would most likely collect dust in a hardly-visited section of the shop, perhaps on a different floor, dignified and kept afloat by the sale of computer-related books. The Ponniyin Selvan set would sit in the token three-foot-wide shelf labelled ‘Vernacular Literature’, along with a handful of Tamil, Telugu and Hindi books. Only a minuscule fraction of the shop’s visitors would even glance at this shelf.

He tried to remember where he had acquired all those books in the first place. There had been a time when buying a book was an unimaginable luxury. One became a member of a lending library, or went and hung around the Connemara library. This latter shared its name with a five-star hotel, but conditions here were anything but posh. In the years when he had aspired to qualify for the civil service (he did not know exactly why he had this ambition), he had frequented it and seen there several other hopefuls swotting up arcane facts and figures in the race to make it through the hallowed portals of government service. ‘He is in service’ was a great compliment; ‘he is in government service’ greater still.

Sundararajan never made it. Instead, he acquired a lifelong belief that true knowledge was to be gained by wide and self-directed reading. When he finally managed a job as a clerk in a local bank, he found that the acquisition of knowledge in this manner was made much more comfortable when one had a salary, however modest. He developed the habit of buying a book every Friday evening. Once he was done for the day at five thirty he would gather his papers in an oblong aluminium briefcase and walk down Mount Road. He would walk past Spencer’s, the red brick building on the left, imagining row upon row and crate upon crate of lemonade and mango juice bottles stacked up inside. Cars, auto-rickshaws, cycles and green corporation buses jostled for space and tried to out-honk each other. On the right were a couple of colonial-era buildings that were beginning to show signs of wear; further ahead, office workers and tradesmen thronged a famous Biryani-selling establishment. Walking at a leisurely pace, Sundararajan would arrive at Higginbothams, where he would spend a thrilling hour examining the latest arrivals. On days when he found nothing of particular interest (or nothing within his budget), he would scour the second-hand bookshops on Kennedy Street.

He kept up this habit for years, come rain or shine (it was more often than not the latter). When the bank employees’ union struck work for greater benefits and received no salary for several weeks, Sundararajan bought fewer provisions than usual and walked home from work to save on the bus fare, but the amount he had set aside for his weekly intellectual excursion remained the same. Living in a joint family before his marriage, his obsession with books attracted frequent comment from a variety of relatives.

‘Dei Sundar! What exactly is all this stuff you keep buying?’ an uncle once asked him, looking, with what Bertie Wooster would have described as a jaundiced eye, at an assortment of Wodehouses, Conan Doyles, and translated Premchands.

‘Books,’ Sundararajan replied, being literal-minded at times. ‘Yes, but what do you get out of all this stuff? Instead you could save up your money and buy a two-wheeler. Or put it in a fixed deposit’ - he said this with relish, pronouncing the word fix-ed - ‘and after some years you could even purchase or build a house.’

‘I do quite well without a two-wheeler; the green buses are good enough for me any day. The only wheeler that interests me is A.H. Wheeler.’

‘What is that?’

‘The bookshops you see at railway stations. But never mind. As for a house, of what use is a house without the books that make me feel at home?’

‘Pah! This is what happens when we send you fellows to college. Either you become wastrels or you come home spouting some philosophical nonsense. But you will realise when you grow older.’

He reached the locality fairly easily. It was a cluster of quiet, leafy streets with mostly independent houses of varying vintages. Here and there a car – as often as not, an Ambassador or a Fiat – stood quietly, parked just clear of a gate, windows rolled down, driver snoozing. Naresh had to stop at an istri vandi, a mobile ironing service, to ask where Fifth Cross Street was. The man, filling his iron with coal and sprinkling water on a formal shirt, gave him directions that confused as much as they enlightened; but they were good enough to get Naresh to his destination.

Old No. 35, New No. 43, Fifth Cross, must have been at least fifty years old. The paint covering the outer walls was blackened by grime in several places, and there were large patches where it was chipping clean off. Between the small, creaking metal gate and the front of the building was a small patch of garden: a row of Ashoka trees, tall and unbending, formed a screen along the wall, while further in, a coconut tree arched gently over the top of the house.

He walked up to the veranda, which was closed off by a patterned iron grill that had a door in one corner. A middle-aged couple sat on an old sofa. Naresh asked for Mr Sundararajan.

‘Sundararajan? Yes. Upstairs,’ said the man, pushing a pair of thick glasses up his nose. He pointed to a staircase at the side of the house, winding its way up along one wall to a door on the first storey. The ground floor must be rented out, Naresh reasoned. But now that Sundararajan’s family had decided to sell the house off to a builder of flats, Naresh wondered where the tenants downstairs would find themselves in a few months’ time.

‘Hello, sir, come in,’ said Mr Sundararajan, as he opened the door. ‘Please.’ He stretched his arm out towards a sofa in the living room.

Naresh left his sandals at the door and made his way towards the sofa. At the far end of the room was a small dining table with two wooden chairs; on the wall adjoining it leant two metal folding chairs of the kind Naresh had not seen for at least ten years. There were a few prints of waterfalls and countryside scenes, and a Tamil calendar of the sort where each day has its own slip of paper, to be torn off when the next day arrives.

‘What will you have? Juice?’ the old man asked, sitting down in an armchair across from Naresh.

‘Oh, nothing, sir. Please don’t bother.’

‘Are you sure? Tea-coffee? Ice water?’

‘No thank you, I’ve had my evening coffee already,’ said Naresh with a polite smile.

‘Alright then. Let me show you the collection.’ He walked over to a corner of the room. Two teak-wood cupboards stood side by side, like twins clad in identical clothes and standing at attention when an esteemed aunt or uncle has come to visit. The similarity ended there, however. The shelf on the right was clearly reserved for recent and often-used books. Several of them were familiar-looking orange-spined paperbacks. There were a few dictionaries in English, Tamil and Sanskrit, an almanac and a railway timetable. Mr Sundararajan did not look up train timings on the internet. ‘These are the books I’m going to keep,’ he said, pointing to this shelf. ‘The ones I want you to look at are in the other cupboard.’

The cupboard had sliding glass doors of the kind that had baffled Naresh when he was a toddler trying to get at the toy vehicles in his cupboard at home. Each corner had a small wedge-like depression where you were meant to hook your fingers and pull the door. As a rule, the doors would not slide smoothly; and if you did manage to move them, you found, when you had closed them to, that the two handles now faced inwards instead of towards the corners of the shelf. Sundararajan pulled open his doors with a practised movement, and immediately Naresh’s nostrils were tingling with the familiar smell of unrestored old books; the smell that signified to him the coming of a weekend of work, mouth and nose covered with a handkerchief to keep out the dust and bits of paper.

He could see immediately that this was the collection of an avid reader. Not only were there the usual books on law and the civil service, but also a varied selection of authors, some famous and some who had since faded into 0blivion. There were several old Penguins, with the green, blue and orange bands that signified different genres; the light-coloured middle bands of their covers had yellowed and browned with age. There were also hard-bound volumes with golden or silver lettering. Some books had been covered with brown paper, title and author’s name scribbled with a ball point pen on the spine. Naresh took out a few books at random. He first opened each one gently, and when he found that the pages were intact and not crumbling, gently fanned them with his thumb to see whether there were many loose pages. Having scanned the titles, Naresh made a quick estimate of the number of books. Between thirty and forty books on each of the six shelves; around two hundred books in all.

‘What do you think?’ Sundararajan asked.

‘It’s a very interesting collection,’ Naresh said. ‘Certainly many of these would fit right into our fiction section. The atlases and the books on geology I would be able to buy too, but I couldn’t offer you too much for them. They don’t sell all that well.’

‘Do you know what you might be able to offer in all?’

‘I can’t say exactly until I have made a full list, sir. But as a rough estimate, I would say about seven thousand rupees.’ In Naresh’s experience, the average book sold at Connoisseur for about seventy-five rupees. He was willing to pay thirty-five for each, in addition to which he would spend five or ten rupees’ worth on each book to restore and label it.

‘Seven thousand. Hm… That’s a lot of books, you know. I have collected them over forty years. And you won’t find some of those books very easily.’

‘I understand, sir. It’s never easy to dismantle a library you have built with so much care. But then I’m constrained by what I can sell the books for.’

For Naresh, this was the most difficult part of buying books for Connoisseur. Sometimes you got sellers who cared two hoots for the books they were selling you. But more often than not, they were people who cherished books, but had come to a stage in their lives when it no longer made any sense to keep their libraries. They had no space for them any more; they were not using them often enough; they had nobody to give them to. A voice within told them that the books should go to someone who would use them. Naresh hardly felt like negotiating prices with this sort of seller. He knew that money was not their sole motivation. Nor was it for him; but he had to make a living, at the very least.

The old man looked out of a window for a while before turning to face Naresh.

‘Alright. You may make a catalogue and give me a final estimate. I don’t really mind about the price. I just want to know that the books will be well handled and not thrown away or used as waste paper.’

Naresh nodded. ‘I will send someone from my shop tomorrow, sir. He will call before he comes. Hopefully we can finalise it tomorrow, give you a cheque and transport the books.’

Sundararajan walked him to the door. ‘You know,’ he said. ‘I have occupied this house for the last forty-five years. I don’t know what life will be like in a seventh-floor apartment in a Mumbai suburb. No space for all those books, they told me. I suppose it will just be TV.’

At nine in the morning, Naresh got on his motorcycle as usual and rode the five kilometres to work. He parked, fished out a swelling bunch of keys, and jogged up the steps that abutted the narrow road. He bent, unlocked the metal shutter, and heaved it upwards: unbearably heavy for the first moment or two, it then slid up quickly, the top end curling up around the support overhead, accompanied by a sound like that of clattering hooves. Naresh smiled slightly; just as the chirping of birds and the creaking of water pumps signified dawn, this sound signified the start of a fresh day at work at Connoisseur – the grandiosely named bookshop he had set up three years ago.

He switched on the lights, went to his desk in the corner, and set down his helmet and satchel. He inhaled deeply. The smell of books, fresh and musty, filled his lungs. He sat down and scanned the shelves as if by reflex, and made a mental list of specific tasks for the day. He would need to speak to the retailer about that fresh lot of —: it was enjoying great success of late, people walking in all day specifically to buy this title. He would need to make a trip to Surajpur, where a pensioner was dismantling his library before shifting to his son’s house in Mumbai. He would need to do something about the fan in the poetry section, which was agonisingly slow when it at all functioned, causing poetry-lovers to sweat profusely as they looked around the shelves, wondering if the marginalisation of verse was not being taken to greater extremes than necessary.

“Hello, Naresh,” said a lanky young man, as he arrived a few minutes later. As one of Naresh’s ‘assistants’ (though Naresh sometimes winced at the hierarchical connotations of the word), Santosh was one of the constants in the modest world of Connoisseur. While Naresh was the dreamer, the one who liked to come up with ideas, the everyday running of the bookshop owed much to the efficiency of Santosh and a small group of part-time employees.

“Any news on the Surajpur collection?” he asked.

“Yes, I think I’ll go over this evening,” said Naresh.

“Okay. I can go along if you like.”

In a while customers began to arrive in a trickle. Business as usual.

The rumble of the auto-rickshaw would sound first as it entered the compound, and as it circled the large elevator chute that rose to where a series of corridors intersected in mid-air four floors up, the dry, crunchy sound of its horn would pierce the stillness of the morning. He would rush down the stairs, socks in hand, hunt for his shoes, slip them on, and run to the dining table, where his mother stood next to a bowl of cereal and hot milk, insisting that every last flake and every last drop be consumed. He wolfed down his breakfast, sticky and porridge-like now, his heart beating, praying that Rickshaw Uncle would not honk another time before he was ready to rush out. When he finally flopped out, school bag hanging from one shoulder, water bottle dangling by its strap from the opposite hand, his heels jutting out of as yet unlaced shoes, he was glad that he was the first to be picked up on this route, so that the other boys were not around to see his invariably clumsy start to the day.

Like an embroiderer’s needle, the rickshaw traced out an intricate route, stopping at five or six different houses and housing societies, at some of which two or three boys got in at a time, making the journey all of a sudden noisier and much more crowded. The smaller or thinner boys invariably sat on the little wooden plank that was attached to the iron bars that separated Rickshaw Uncle’s section of the rickshaw from the boys’, facing the main seat. On cold, windy winter mornings, one of the boys would bring a blanket that everyone would share, if not entirely equally. On such days the most prized position was ‘up’: one of the boys would climb up to the horizontal board just behind the backrest of the main seat, knees drawn up towards the chest, savouring the warmth until the rickshaw hit a pothole and one or two strands of hair got caught, for an instant, between the rickshaw’s synthetic hood and one of the iron bars over which it was drawn. Rainy days were equally challenging; on days when the water came lashing in at a wind-driven angle, Rickshaw Uncle would unfurl the tarpaulin screens that were suspended at either side of the rickshaw, and the boys would hold their noses theatrically as the screens, damp, began to emit a gradual stink.

The conversation, naturally, depended on the time of day. In the mornings, the boys were often subdued. Hair combed, ties neatly in place and shoes polished, most of them were preoccupied with the day ahead. Those who had games or swimming in their timetable for the day would be in sports uniform. To one boy, however, the youngest of the lot, the day of the week meant nothing whatsoever. He would climb in, hang his waterbottle on the rickshaw metre along with everyone else’s, and begin to narrate his latest joke: ‘There be’s a man…’ The mood was considerably lighter in the afternoons. The day having started early (if not bright), school gave over by early afternoon. Ties were now loosened and swung all over the place; shoes were scuffed up; bags were lighter by the contents of a snack box. Some of the boys ate sliced guavas leavened with a mixture of chilli powder and salt. Others ate samosas, bought at the canteen, or ‘bullseyes’, black and white striped peppermints.

One by one, the boys were dropped off at home, some of them running off with a war whoop and some trudging tiredly towards home and a meal that could not hold a candle to salted guavas and bullseye candies. Just as he was the first to get on, he was the last to get off. ‘Be early tomorrow,’ Uncle would say to him sometimes, kindly. ‘Always aim to be ready ten minutes before I arrive. That way it won’t be difficult.’ On other days he would go off on little monologues, as if he sensed that now was the time he could talk without every remark becoming fodder for a joke. He threw out the odd reminiscence, and sometimes made general philosophical comments. Then it was time for the last stop. Inside, a hot lunch of rotis, dal, rice and vegetables: outside, the sound of the rickshaw, and another school day, fading away.

The historian Ramachandra Guha has argued in a number of places that mainstream Hindi cinema is an important part of the glue that holds together the diverse elements of India. When I first encountered this position, my immediate reaction was to smile and pass it off as a romantic exaggeration. After all, it would not take the harshest critic to point out that with a few exceptions, much of what the establishment known universally as Bollywood churns out every year is kitschy, uninspiring, even regressive. Surely, something as inane could hardly be credited with performing such a lofty function.

But the more I think about it, the more seriously I take the proposition. Just this week I was chatting with a friend in Pune. Our conversation went roughly like this:

SELF: I really like this song [I had been listening to it lately] - Humne to dil ko aapke kadmon pe rakh diya / Is dil ka kya karenge ye ab aap sochiye.

FRIEND: I think I’ve heard this song.

SELF: Then: Hum aap ki vafa ki kasam kha rahen hai aaj / Kaisi vafa karenge yeh ab aap sochiye. I love the rhythm and the symmetry. 

FRIEND: Hm.

SELF: I have not been able to find the lyrics and other details online.

[Friend rummages around the internet, and, with his superior search skills, finds out that the film is Mere Sanam (1965), the lyricist Majrooh Sultanpuri, and the music director O.P. Nayyar - he of the loveable smile, he whom we used to refer to as Topi Nayyar because of his habit of wearing a hat in all situations.]

SELF: Thanks. By the way, do you know what aetbar means?

FRIEND: Don’t ask me purist meanings like this. Tell me the context and I can try.

SELF: From the same song: Chaahat ka aetbar hai, kitna hasin khvab.

[A discussion ensues. Friend searches around and proposes that aetbar = acceptable. I insist that it cannot be an adjective, because it is preceded in the sentence here by the possessive preposition ka; it must be a noun. Then I indulge in flights of fancy, wondering if it is a case of free syntax for poetic effect, which might explain an adjective being placed in that position. Suddenly, Friend pipes up.]

FRIEND: Trust. Aetbar means trust. That’s it. Stamped and verified.

SELF: You seem to have great trust in this source.

FRIEND: I am sure.

SELF [happy that it turned out to be a noun after all]: Yeah, it seems to make sense.

[Note: I still do not know if this is the meaning. My friend might treat this as lack of aetbar (if aetbar is the word I'm looking for) on my part, but I would still like to look it up in a dictionary.]

End of Act One. Before I get carried away by the dramatic quality of this dialogue, let me return hastily to my main theme, which is about Hindi cinema uniting Indians. My friend and I hail from different parts of India and speak different languages at home. True, I spent four of my school years in his city, but I did not know him then, and in any case we lived in very different worlds. So what is it we talk about? Apart from puns and wisecracks, for which we share a penchant, two topics dominate our conversations: cricket and old Hindi film songs, both of which Guha has mentioned as unifying factors in India.

In his ‘Epilogue: Why India Survives’, which concludes his latest major work, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, Guha puts it succinctly. ‘[C]inema does not merely provide Indians with a common pantheon of heroes’, he writes, ‘it also gives them a common language and universe of discourse. Lines from film songs and snatches from film dialogue are ubiquitously used in conversations in schools, colleges, homes and offices - and on the street.’ Further, according to Guha, films have done for the Hindi language what official policy could not - ‘made the Hindi language [italics in original] more comprehensible to those who previously never spoke it or understood it. When imposed by fiat by the central government, Hindi was resisted by the people of the south and the east. When conveyed seductively by the medium of cinema and television, Hindi has been accepted by them.’

Perhaps, after all, we should take the masala movie seriously from time to time.

Jade Theatre stood at the mouth of Peak Road. It was where an ever-busy flyover, named after a politician but routinely identified by the name of a film studio that had been located in the area, sloped gently downwards and merged with the city’s central road. Every car, bus, autorickshaw and bicycle that used the flyover in the northward direction would have to decide its course when it reached Jade Theatre. The road split into three at this point. The two rightmost ones led to semi-residential localities; the one that led straight on from the flyover became Peak Road, widening as one went north, flanked by trees and elegant colonial-era buildings, some in good trim and some crumbling, and ending up in a melange of shopping malls and office buildings.

Jade Theatre was a landmark. You said ‘One Jade’ to the conductor when you got into the bus at the other end of the city - or you asked ‘Will it stop at Jade?’ Nobody from Rakesh’s generation had ever actually been in the theatre, which was now defunct. His mother recalled going there decades earlier, when it had been a functioning theatre - in the local sense of the word. No plays were staged there; instead films were screened. It was a ‘cin-ma theatre’. Rakesh’s mother would never forget the time she had watched a continuous screening of a slick English thriller. You bought a ticket and walked in at any time, she said, and watched the movie from whatever point it was at; you then sat where you were, and the movie started all over again, so you could watch the part you had missed. It occurred to Rakesh that of all the ways to watch a movie, this was not the one he’d pick first, but apparently it had created waves at the time.

Jade was the bus-stop where he hung out with his friends after school, waiting for one of the many public buses that might take him in the direction of home. Tucked away in an alcove across the road was the theatre itself, its name running across its windowless facade in cursive letters. Behind where the boys stood was a row of mammoth hoardings advertising the latest Tamil films, so striking in their lack of aesthetic sense that they figured in a prominent encyclopaedia as an unfortunate emblem of the city Rakesh loved. The mouth of Peak Road was abuzz with activity. The air was shrill with the honks of automobiles and the revving of their engines, and the shops abutting the road sold all manner of things, ranging from electrical appliances and hardware to general provisions, from bicycle parts to ‘Saivam’ or ‘pure vegetarian’ food. As Rakesh sat on the iron railing with chipped yellow paint under the roof of the bus-stop with his friends, sheltered partially from the unforgiving near-Equatorial sun, he could be guaranteed of at least one bemused-looking traveller coming up and asking whether bus 45J or 78A or something else stopped here. Before answering, he would sigh and wonder why it was so difficult to look up at the rim of the shelter, where the route numbers were painted in black letters on a once-bright yellow background. Buses would now arrive from Peak Road in twos and threes, the boys straining to make out the route numbers in the distance, until all of a sudden, just as they were deep in conversation about yesterday’s cricket match or Michael Whitney’s antics on the the latest edition of the Australian TV show Who Dares Wins, the 15A would materialise. A mass of people would spring forward like termites from the woodwork and rush to the entrances in the front and the back. Rakesh would tighten the strap of his schoolbag, bend to pick up his sticky lunch-bag, cursorily nod to his classmates, and make a dash for it.

Jade Theatre was demolished recently. But schoolchildren, office-goers, petty traders and sundry other citizens still ask for bus tickets to Jade, and wait at Jade for their return journeys after a hot day’s work.

To those who have already - or always - had the insight which I am about to describe, this post might seem so obvious as to be silly. Nevertheless it is worth describing, because some others may have shared my hitherto incomplete understanding of the word ‘arguably’.You often hear the expression ‘arguably the world’s greatest writer’ or something of the sort. While it is instinctively clear that the speaker is saying that the person in question is the world’s greatest writer, you might understand the ‘arguably’ as denoting the feeling that this claim might be questioned by some others.

There is much talk nowadays about global warming and energy saving, but little conscious action to reduce unnecessary consumption. Sydney’s one-hour blackout (see this article) this weekend in what was dubbed “Earth Hour” is a commendable, if only symbolic, gesture.

Waking up early in the morning can be quite an effort for most of us, but the rewards are considerable. Sitting up and allowing the mists of the mind to clear away as the sky turns imperceptibly from dark to light, soaking in the absolute quiet, and feeling (if only from behind a glass window) a part of nature: the stuff of poetry.