Commutiny Media Features

by Arjun Shekhar

“White Tiger.” These words were emblazoned on the side door of a cream Maruti Van along with a close up image of the face of a black and white tiger. It was a soporific Sunday afternoon in October. The Delhi weather was balmy and the sky clean for a change; it deserved a breather after the onslaught of Diwali. We’d just finished a huge meal in an eatery in Kailash market. There had been no beer but the mud pie had brought on the laziness of a sluggish river gorged with silt.

The van was parked in a narrow side lane, blocking pedestrians and cyclists in usual Delhi style while it unloaded bundles into a shop. The words didn’t wake me up or anything but they did make my curiosity, dragging its feet far behind us, to hurry a bit. As it caught up with me, I looked up at the shop’s name and sure enough. The same logo and the same words. I walked in to the tiny hole in the wall. Clothes festooned every inch of space. They were stuffed in the side cupboards, they hung on every inch of wall space, they were draped on hangars dangling from hooks in the ceiling, they were piled up high on the counter except for a narrow slit in the middle.

I peered through it at a thin bespectacled man of fifty or thereabouts, busily tagging the new arrivals. “Dry Cleaners?” I asked him tentatively.

The man looked at me as if I was a lunatic. “Hmph!” He said in Hindi and went back to his work.

In Delhi you still came across shopkeepers whose idea of a customer interface was them playing robbers to your interrogating cop. It was as if they wanted to avoid talking to you in case they spilled where they’d stashed the loot.

“Do you know Arvind Adiga?” I switched to Hindi to get a better response.

He turned out to be even more taciturn than I expected. Maybe it was just the soporific afternoon. Or it might have been my line of useless questioning in which he saw no profit. As a reply, all he did was put up his hand near his face, and shake it like he had delirium tremens or something and then went right back to his tags.

“Arvind Adiga”, I soldiered on, “wrote a book by the name of White Tiger and won the Booker Prize for $ 50 million or something.”

That got him interested somewhat. He dropped the clean clothes to the ground and came to the counter (the place was so small, he just had to turn around). “We have been in this business for fifteen years. People may have taken our name but we are still the best. Look mister we are taking no more orders right now.”

“Why is that?”

“Over the last month or so we’ve had a flood of customers. I don’t know what’s happened but I’ve had more customers in one month than I’ve had all of the last decade.”

I recalled the clip on TV of a smiling Arvind wearing a spotlessly clean Tuxedo (as if he was promoting this hole in the wall) at a glittering ceremony in London. A young man who’d “slit open the underbelly” of India and served our innards like oysters to go with the white wine of the guests gathered to felicitate his stupendous effort. They’d made him a rich man for bringing poverty out of the real world and making it virtual; a set of representations and ideas they all could discuss without really having to be there. Poverty cooked up in symbols deserved praise. It saved time and effort and the pain of wallowing amidst the villages and slums of India. This way they could acknowledge, even applaud the other India, without getting their suits dirty. Even White Tiger, the dry cleaners, wouldn’t be able to soup up your coat tails if they trailed in some of the open gutters of Delhi’s slums.

Stepping back into the October sunshine, I wondered how two words written by a US returned young man had changed the lives of the shopkeeper in Kailash colony. In the morning I’d read in the newspaper about how the same two words had changed the life of a forgotten white tiger in the Delhi Zoo, who had hordes of visitors since that fateful night in London a month ago.

The episode at the dry cleaners restored my sagging faith in the power of the word somewhat. You see, of late, I’d been feeling that the entire Homo sapiens’ crisis was actually a crisis of language. Just what our species selected for eons ago for survival in the evolutionary story was proving to be our nemesis in the end. Stories, our prime mode of communication, were, I felt, so limited in their ability to represent reality. They snatched reality from its universe and re-presented it virtually. And without the context, I believe, the story lost its original meaning, if it had one in the first place.

Take the photo of a sunset I took in Goa years ago. When I look at it now, I am flooded with the romance of the evening and memory has smoothened away all those sharp edges: the hunger pangs in my stomach that evening, the penniless urchin bugging me, the sand chaffing my crotch, and the fight with my wife I had to go back and resolve. All gone. In the story of the “beautiful sunset” as retold by the photograph years later.

To me, the story of the “beautiful sunset” is no different than what George Bush told the world about Iraq or what Alan Greenspan told us about the success of a “self interest driven economy.” If not outright lies, they can certainly be classified as intentional deceit because the universe was conveniently airbrushed out of the story.

Let me dwell just a bit on the latter, with sincere apologies to my readers, because I know it’s been done to death. But I need a story to explain my story. In hindsight when the story of the financial crisis is told, it’s easy to attach cause to effect. The linearity and simplicity of it all leaps out at you shorn of the context of reality of the time and moment. The villain of has been named: the sub prime housing mortgages.

But when it was all unfolding, the packaging of sub prime mortgages as a financial derivative and selling them to institutions and individuals across the world was hailed as a supreme effort of capitalism. You’d sold the bad loans (packaged with some worthy ones) to other people who didn’t know the entire story. The financial algorithm used by the bankers didn’t throw up the risk but in their heart of hearts the sellers knew that the bad eggs would come to hatch. “But not in my backyard,” they thought and went ahead, risk and all. They used persuasive words to symbolically/ virtually depict the bad eggs as golden ones, hooking the greed of speculators around the world. In fact the words were so persuasive that the sellers (read Alan Greenspan) claim they were fooled by their own spiel.

Spin has a way of knocking back your own stumps if you fool too much with it. Now everybody talks of the ‘real economy’ being sucked into the vortex of the spin created by the virtual (financial economy) and suddenly the US, the spin manufacturers themselves, are hit by the worst economic crisis whose genesis was in the Great Depression. I would call the source of this one the Great Expression. You can’t blame Bush or Greenspan or label them as the villains of the catastrophe because in reality it’s a crisis of language. Inherent in the format of persuasion, of creating a pitch, a selling story, is the airbrushing of a large part of the universe that it’s couched in. It’s not possible to re-present the chaotic, non-linear, hyper linked reality in a straightforward story. Surely we need to invent a new way to communicate if we are to get beyond this crisis of confidence. Nobody ‘trusts’ words anymore. Politicians, admen, corporates and other tricksters better not have any doubts that their deception will come home to roost like it did for Bush, Greenspan and the Lehmanns.

Is it just a coincidence that this lack of faith in words comes in the age of The Great Expression? Every Arjun is expressing himself; the babble of words has never been so thick and fast. We are collectively throwing our views and stories into the public domain through books, newspapers, television, blogs, and emails like never before thanks to the self-publishing and broadcasting ability of the Internet.

So, I persuaded myself that my broadside on language was a story of sorts and decided to talk to my wife before publishing it in the world. She was on the computer when I walked into the room. She was replying to an email. On the sidelines she was chatting to two people in two separate chat boxes. Her Face Book home page lay minimized waiting to be invoked in case someone pinged. I took a chair and sat down waiting for her to look up.

She didn’t. So I prised my way through all her preoccupations and said “You know dear I feel words don’t mean a thing.”

“How can you say that?”

Before I could begin to put forth my thesis to her, the hand phone rang. “I’ve got to take this one,” she said. While I waited to regain her attention, I counted the six communication interfaces she had open. After a while I sighed and got up, motioning to her that I’d come back later when she wasn’t buried under a quilt of words to talk about my thesis with her. She didn’t notice my departure. That’s when I vowed to write it down and “express” myself lest I die in my sleep, my voice unheard.

But before I could really get down to writing it up, the episode with the dry cleaners muddied my thesis somewhat. And then the very next day this pretty young TV journalist jeopardized the entire thing by her emphatic utterance, “Words are everything!”

This happened at a ‘baithak’ I attended wearing my social activist mask. It had been organized as an interaction between electronic media and social activists working on youth development. It was a small, cozy affair, just ten of us at someone’s home chatting on a Sunday evening. We were discussing how to have more responsible youth programming. No commitments. Just a listening space to understand each other better. But I noticed most of us were talking more than listening with yours truly at the forefront of it all. After I’d eloquently expressed the need for more responsible youth programming, with some pretty spiffy statistics I thought, the journalists told me not to waste my words since I was talking to the converted. They said they were convinced of the need but they had major constraints: their medium was market driven hence the stories had to be “interesting”. Social issue stories were too heavy. No one watched them they were convinced.

With that, the evening was kind of deadlocked. One of the journalists asked us if we could give an example of the stories we’d like to see on TV. An activist talked of an inspiring case study of a young man called Ashish who’d come to Delhi from his village, done pretty well for himself but then gone back to his village to do organic farming and community development.

“Who’ll watch such a boring story? What’s so inspiring about it? So many NRI.s are coming back from the US to serve the country. It’s become common to go back to your roots.” The prettiest of the journalists spoke up.

The activist tried again. “You know his village Amethi doesn’t….”

“Amethi did you say? Now that’s interesting.”

“How did it suddenly become interesting?”

“We can do a parallel story of Rahul Gandhi who is also from Amethi along with Ashish. Two boys around the same age who have gone back to their village. One in a helicopter, the other in a bullock cart.”

“Just the word Amethi turned the whole thing around? Amazing.” I couldn’t make out if the wonder in the activist’s voice was tinged with sarcasm or not.

“Words are everything,” the young journalist shot back.

All of us looked chastened because she did have a point. The activist could have his story and the journalist could sleep more fulfilled.

So where does that leave my theory? I guess I better shelve it for a while. Maybe I need to contemplate it a little more. In any case, who’s going to listen to it? Listeners are a rare breed in these expressive times.

Meanwhile, I came across another book that’s been doing the rounds for the last six months. It’s slowly becoming a huge hit because in some ways it predicted the current financial crisis. The hypothesis in that book is to “expect the unexpected”.

“But doesn’t that make the unexpected, expected,” you might ask.

I told you so. Words don’t mean a thing.

Anyway, the name of this bestseller is “Black Swan” and it’s given me a great idea. Why don’t I change the name of my daughter to Black Swan? Seeing the success “White Tiger” bestowed upon the laundry and the Delhi Zoo, I can bet her name will generate a lot of attention. Maybe it might even draw those TV journalists to my doorstep. I can slip in my story into the national media then. Hmmm…

I think I’ll chat about it with my wife. One of these days. Can someone please recommend a good private chat room?