I’m bummed out.

Last night, I went for dinner with four very smart people. Not rocket scientist smart or maths wiz smart but knowing what the score is, making the connections and understanding shit smart.

I barely said a word all evening. Occasionally I thought of a feeble pun or insightful observation of the sort that I could pull off it was just me and one of them, but with an audience of four, there was no chance I was going to say a damn thing unless I was absolutely certain it wasn’t entirely daft. Very intimidating this stuff.

An example:
Smart dude 1: Wasn’t MN Roy in Mexico with Trotsky?
Smart dude 2: No, no, wayyy before Trotsky. He founded the Mexican Communist Party.
Smart dude 1: Oh yeah, Then he had a falling out with Lenin.

Whaddafux? How the hell do you people know all this stuff, man?

If it sounds lame, that’s only because I haven’t given any context, so don’t get all self-righteous and begin feeling good about yourself. You pale in comparison to these fellows as well dude.

As I heard them go on, all the while spooning what I thought was good ol’ aloo but turned out be fucking baingan, I toyed with the idea of never reading non-fiction again. Or the papers. Or anything apart from pulp, really. What’s the point? These guys, none of whom burn brain cells on as regular basis as I do -– or at all -– know far more than I ever will. So why bother?

In the course of writing this, I looked up this MN Roy fellow –- nothing elaborate, just wikipedia -– and landed up reading the entire thing and wondering how and why I’ve never heard of him before. I encourage you to go to the site and check it out. It’s quite fascinating.

Suddenly all the cynicism has gone away. Man, this is not how this post was supposed to end.

How fucking left-liberal/agnostic (wishy-washy) of me.

For the record, I nicked the image from some chick's MySpace page. The image originally linked to something called Dia


UPDATE: It has been brought to my attention that we studied MN Roy in school. Pretty much everyone I have related this story to has said "You don't know MN Roy?"(right after they expressed astonishment at my inability to differentiate between two completely different vegetables). Look, I'm sorry, I don't. Get over it.

“Will we fly? Will we swim? Will we get richer? Will we find space? The 1990s are upon us and a new decade must mean new trends, new people, new happenings. The ’80s seemed like years of indefinite change, years without a proper description, but it could be that we are still too close to them to tell. The ’90s surely will be different […] Here, we take a look –- sometimes irreverent, sometimes serious –- at what the coming decade might offer.”

So begins Bombay magazine’s January 1990 cover story. Predictions included “The mega boom at the stock exchange will have more shares spiraling upwards”, the political heavyweights were predicted to be Sharad Pawar and Bal Thackeray, cinema was meant to get more sophisticated, the media business was set to explode (but it was also optimistically hoped that it would “become more serious and committed”), and Hafeez Contractor was forecast to be “building his futuristic monoliths by the dozens”.

Shirley Bassey's "History repeating" just came up on iTunes. Creepy.

At a symposium called “Bombay –- the next 150 years” organised by the Times of India, RK Laxman said “the sewage, the flooded railway tracks, the uprooted telephone cables will still be there” in the next 40 years. That was 17 years ago.

I was at the Times of India archive last year researching some shit about the early 1990s and everything in the papers then sounded exactly like it does today. We were all whining about precisely the same things, Bush was president, there was a war in Iraq, Bombay was a mess, people were bemoaning the trivialisation of the media. I don’t get it. I realise the French came up with all that Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose bullshit, but it’s still pretty hard to come to terms with the fact that nothing really changes. We have the external indications of progress -- more money, greater choice for consumers, a large middle class, a thriving economy -- but at the most basic levels, things haven’t changed at all. We still have poverty and malnutrition and overburdened, crumbling even, civic infrastructure. What the fuck man? What's the fucking point? It's been nearly two decades -- 16 years of an open economy and much cashflow, but what does that all mean?

It means you now pay five times as much as you used to to watch a film, it means you're treated like a terrorist every time you attempt to step into a cinema hall, it means that India has finally figured out what makes the west the west and has gone full-throttle towards a culture of consuming. The way the capitalist system works is growth. Companies can't continue to make the same amount of money year after year. If their profit projections don't go up, their stock falls. So every day, every company is trying to convince us that we don't have enough. We need to buy more. We need to consume more. We need to help their growth, spur the economy, keep money flowing. We need to do our national fucking duty by going out to giant steel and glass boxes and buying clothes and groceries and pre-packaged food so that India can be like the countries we try so desperately to emulate. Go shopping. Do it for India.