A 3-Sided View of things

We have a vague notion about it, but probably don’t realise how bad the situation has become. The fact is that you really don’t get to know about important events that happen around you, even in the city where you live, stuff that actually may concern and be of importance to you. The fact is that we all live in our bubbles of our creation. And these bubbles often become echo chambers, bouncing around the same thing again and again.

What makes for headlines nowadays is a strange combination of human bias + inclination, at best judgement, machine algorithms, what’s popular on FB, WhatsApp, Google.

Lets take this morning as an example. TOI, HT, Indian Express (otherwise a paper that takes the effort to have a nuanced opinion on many issues), Google news, NDTV: all carried on about the famous hug, the no-confidence drama and assorted biased narratives from both sides of the political divide; about Wriddhi’s mysterious shoulder injury; updates on various crimes across the land against women & minorities; about how the monsoon is wrecking Mumbai (twenty years ago the monsoons brought flood havoc to UP & Bihar, nowadays it seems to be all about Hindmata, Parel & high tide woes in Maximum City).

On June 11 Mumbai went on a high security alert, after a satellite phone signal was found to be gallivanting across parts of South Mumbai. Read more here:https://tinyurl.com/yc8oba5d. It reads like a sequence from 24! With a sequel to follow: the phone remains at large, it seems.

Now, the question I ask – and hopefully many of you who aren’t entirely satisfied by what you receive in your WhatsApp & FB feed, will also – is, what can we do about it? Here are my notes to self:

a. Go beyond Google news: don’t depend on a machine to feed you news.
b. Stop watching news channels – English, Hindi, languages, the whole lot. All of them are peddling rehashed, opinionated rubbish. They aren’t chasing the news, they are chasing stickiness of eyeballs that will lead to higher TRP’s.
c. Stop reading TOI & its suited sibling, ET, beyond a glance at the headlines. They are ok for width, don’t count on them for depth.
d. Delete anything that comes your way on WhatsApp. Look carefully at what you click on your FB feed.

And what should you be doing? Seek & read better quality newspapers, online & offline. Ones that are committed to investing behind a news desk, talented and committed journalists. Start paying for your news. Don’t be shy to pay a premium to hear the unbiased, unvarnished version of what is happening around you. It will keep the membrane of your bubble a little thin and porous.

It is really worth it. It will keep you sane.

Paris is synonymous with cafes. They are (seemingly) all over the place and represent a certain identity for the city. Apparently their numbers are coming down, slowly but steadily; but unlike the almost-extinct Mumbai Irani cafe, you can still find them everywhere. Almost at all corners in the main part of the city and along sidewalks.

All Parisian cafes have similar menus – they serve beverages of all manner (alcoholic, bubbly, caffeinated) sandwiches, pizza, pasta, burgers (that was a surprise, as Pink Panther 2 had left me thinking the French looked down on that very-American creation) and desserts. This fare is fairly uniform and after a few visits, we got quite ski of finding croque monsieurs and madames staring at us everywhere. Some had a range of crepes available as well, with the monopoly of making the crepes solely in the hands of south asian types, which left me wondering if they were the chaat wallahs of India and Pakistan who had left our shores for the far stronger Euro?

But you don’t go to a Parisian cafe to eat, or for that matter to drink. Of course you do, but that’s not the main deal. You go there to take a pause, to take a moment to observe life (and hence the particular seating style of chairs facing the pavement and not each other), to feel its pulse, to dial down, to take a deep breath, to connect with a friend, with your soul mate or just with yourself.

The big cafe chains have missed this totally and got it mostly wrong. Many aren’t picturesque enough, encourage the quick in-and-out and have many distractions in the form of wifi, music, TV that actually take you away from making that connection. Given how much thought they take in defining their positioning, I wonder why they don’t aspire to have at least a few cafes with such an atmosphere?

A few hours later, at ~ 7 pm, we are at Le Cavalier Cafe, waiting on our respective tipples – beer, mojito, Lait demi creme – watching Argentina play Belgium. The evening culture of the cafe is now on display – buzzy, heady yet, as always, full of life.

I liked Prasoon Joshi’s poem. ‘Is baar zakhmo ko nahi bharoonga…’ because we can’t afford to let ourselves heal. Because when we do, we forget all that we promise in our hour of grief. It’s happened so many times before – the Mumbai floods, the numerous other terrorist attacks that have happened on this city & even after all the failures in infrastructures that we endure. 

Right after each event we, especially the educated higher income elite of this city, vent our spleen about all that went wrong during the event – corrupt administrative systems, political feebleness, the chalta-hai attitude that prevails, the logic of political enfranchisement & vote banks that has left our city to be orphaned by its users. We are astute thinkers, emotionally exploring every aspect, passionately arguing about cause & effect, which is the reason why we are so well placed across global management cadres; but alas, we soon forget what we have analysed & concluded. 

Is it our culture of philosophical resignation to what-will-happen-will-happen that is to blame? Could be. Leaving it to fate & surrendering yourself to what will happen next is the popular way how many Indians deal with anger & strife. 

But this is a false view of how to deal with anger & the resultant stress. There are two ways to deal with anything that unsettles you & makes you angry; one is to steel yourself & be disciplined in handling the negative emotions that overcome you. This is undoubtedly a difficult path to take. Consider how calmly the NSG handled the situation, dealing with the situation at hand & no doubt blocking out everything else. This was certainly not any in-born talent but a result of years of disciplined training.  

The other way to deal with it is to surrender yourself to the emotions that engulf you. Mostly this is interpreted in a defeatist sort of way & a rationalization that this is a consequence of fate & destiny. However surrender means is that we should accept what has happened & prepare ourselves for the future so that a similar event does not repeat itself & we don’t go through the same cycle of anger & negativity. 

This is not what we do. To get rid of the negativity someone will declare that things must return to normal as soon as possible. Offices must open, stocks must be traded, cricket matches should be played, beer must be drunk. 

How insensitive have we become? 

Do we make time to reflect upon what has happened & to draw lessons from it? Don’t we need time to mourn this senseless tragedy, to introspect? 

Here are the list of things that I can predict will happen over the next few days:

1. The BCCI & Lalit Modi will announce the next cricket junket. All of us will concern ourselves with selection ‘blunders’, broadcast fees & rejoice over the majestic on-drive that Sachin hits. 
2. The stock markets will go up a hundred points & the Economic Times will have a smart aleck headline on it (sample their headline from Friday – ‘Quantum of Solace’). It will be hailed as a ‘testimony to the spirit of Mumbai’. 
3. The BJP & Shiv Sena will call for a bandh to protest against this attack. Narendra Modi & Bal Thackeray will make inflammatory speeches from Shivaji park. 
4. That upholder of maharashtrian masculinity, Raj Thackeray will launch another agitation against ‘outsiders’ who are actually responsible for everything under the sun. 
5. Our newspapers will continue to spew out inane supplements, giving air-time to assorted socialite floozies, glorified peacocks & the party circuit. 
6. The news channels will organise a round of live candle-light marches at each of the attack sites. The anchors will raise the temperature by inciting & invoking emotions of the audience, putting on air sound bytes of grieving kin, and worse, by ignorant but indignant south-bombay types who will offer simplistic & naïve solutions that are so impractical. 

Its time we put an end to this. We have to keep this feeling alive in our minds, fresh, so that we force those who are supposed to do something to prevent such things, actually do so. 

Its time to stop watching cricket, its time to switch off that news channel. Let the logic of TRP’s spell out how we feel. 

Its time to boycott the politicians who will call bandhs or try to distract us with their petty & trivial agendas. 

Its time to make sure that we do something this time. 

How? 

Ask the politician who will come asking for your votes inside a 100 days time what he/she has done to prevent this from happening again. I find it appalling that we don’t have a single leader among the political class, someone who will stand up & tell us that ‘yes, I will make sure that this does not happen again’. All we see are poker-faced men who mumble about passing the buck. If this was a company we would call it ‘externalising’ the problem & not taking ownership for your job & the person would be given the sack immediately. While this was not surprising to see from the old bandicoots who pretend to be political leaders, it was distressing to see the young blood too assume a similar posture (see Milind Deora mumble away on TV). Ironically the first real statement of apparent leadership came from the much maligned ‘foreign’ politician – Sonia Gandhi, who said that ‘we can no longer sit back and let these attacks overwhelm us’. Unusual you would think? Not really, we Indians love to argue & pontificate, but are not so hot on execution; its not surprising that she is only one who chose to say something like this while all the other desi bandicoots keep silent as they lie low in the safe knowledge that the public will move on to the next titillation. 

Can we spend just 5 minutes everyday for the next 100 days thinking about this tragedy? Refresh ourselves by looking at the photos & videos from the past few days? Think of the kin of those killed, maimed, seriously injured? We need to channelize our anger constructively so that we don’t have to go through this again & again & again.

I feel attacked. I feel disturbed. I haven’t slept enough the past 3 days. I am in far away Singapore, a safe haven in today’s anytime-terror world; yet I feel as if I’m still in Mumbai, India. 

I have many thoughts to dwell on – the attack, the perpetrators, the sheer insanity of it. But there is one that hovers in my mind, almost like a background to my whirling thoughts these past 3 days – The Taj. 

To a lot of foreigners, outside those who’ve actually stayed there, it may sound like just another hotel. They don’t realise what the Taj means to me & I’m sure, to so many others in India & in Mumbai specifically.   

The Taj at Colaba is in my mind, the first & foremost Indian architectural wonder. Unlike all the British raj built structures like the Rashtrapati Bhavan, VT, India Gate, Victoria Memorial or the many splendid buildings that were passed onto us, this one was built by an Indian to (kind of) show the bird to the Brits. 

The interesting thing is that I don’t recall reading this or learning about it from anywhere.  When I grew up, it was a different era; India went from self-imposed autarky to suspiciously sniffing liberalisation. Further, I went to school in Delhi, steeped in babu-dom & the shadows of government buildings everywhere. I learnt of another big city called Bombay, a place that my father went away to for half the week on work. A place that didn’t have winters, where it rained a lot, where people went to work on trains & relaxed at the beach on weekends, where they had a hotel called the Taj. 

Appa always stayed at the Taj or the Oberoi. Though he liked both, the clear favorite was the Taj. Once, after eagerly browsing through the splendid photographs of the Taj magazine he brought back, I remember being completely awed by its architecture, the domes, the spires, the jutting-out windows with perches for kabootars. It didn’t feel like as if anyone actually stayed there – it looked like a splendid cross between a musuem & the Rashtrapathi Bhavan (ok ok so one person stays there, but that’s not much!). To partly confirm this & to partly show off my new found knowledge I asked – ‘Appa, do you stay at the old Taj?’ 

He stopped what he was doing, gave me a broad grin & said ‘No, not every time. I go on business trips every week, the old Taj is meant for a luxury vacation’.  

‘But have you ever been inside’, I asked, slightly disappointed. 

‘Of course. I’ve even stayed there a couple of times, but its very expensive’

Cut to many years later, I started working & was to make my first trip to Bombay (yes it was still called that then, & yes I’m that old!) & got to know I was to stay at the Taj. Being fresh plankton in the corporate food chain, I was doubling up with someone in a room in the ‘new’ wing. It was pretty snazzy, mind you & I did walk to the old wing & gazed at the wide staircases, smelled the old wood, chandeliers & the carpets. But I always felt as if I’d missed something in life by not staying there. 

Over the years, I never got to stay at the Taj as a guest. I moved to Mumbai & have been to the Taj on numerous occasions. I’ve been to the restaurants, the disco, the coffee shop, the various banquet facilities attending company conferences, even the business centre. I have a particularly fond memory of a birthday celebration at the Sea Lounge. But I’ve never stayed in the old heritage wing. 

Until twenty days ago. 

Being now based in Singapore, I needed to stay in a hotel on my most recent visit to Mumbai. In the intervening years since my one & only stay at the Taj new wing, 2 small events had happened; Bombay became Mumbai & I had struggled up the corporate ladder to become a respectable vertebrate. 

Alas, the Taj was yet unreachable for me to stay in. However this time I was accompanying a ‘blue-whale’ of my company & since he got to stay at the Taj, so did I. But again, it seemed, at the new wing.

But being the accompanying fish to a blue-whale has its advantages; I was upgraded to the heritage wing 2nd floor. And that too a harbour-facing room. You should have seen me – I was grinning from ear-to-ear & excitedly messaged the wife & a few of my friends. 

I still recollect vividly walking along the wide central staircase, into my side of the corridor, looking down & up the strange but elegant ‘well’ that separated it from the row of rooms opposite. My room – 246 I think – was magnificent; a four poster bed, mirrors encased in white, a tiny enclosed balcony that jutted out for a stunning view of the harbour. Next morning I awoke to a surprise – sunrise in Mumbai! Having always stayed in the western suburbs, I have only seen sunsets & always assumed that one never could see a sunrise in Mumbai. I felt blessed. 

Breakfast was at the Sea Lounge, bringing back memories of the day not-so-long-ago when I sat in celebration with my wife, on the very table in fact. 

Writing this, I suddenly realise so many odd things that happened on that visit that I never remembered until now. For dinner, I wasn’t sure what Jim (the big man I was accompanying) would like to eat. So I got a list of all the restaurants at the hotel – the Zodiac Grill, Shamiana, Golden Dragon, Wasabi & Masala Craft. Earlier, charged by the sunrise, I took a walk along the Gateway promenade, down to Radio club, turned towards causeway, passed Leo, Mondy’s, Regal & back. Over the last 2 days, I feel as if I’ve done this route in a dizzying mix of blurred camera images, satellite maps in news reports, & heard these very restaurants as sound bytes, pictures & news reports. Ironically, despite all the excitement around this trip, I didn’t carry a camera. 

And to top it all, on that very trip, I got to know of my new role that would mean no more trips to Mumbai for now; it was as if the grand old hotel was telling me ‘I let you in once, young man, but its not going to happen again too soon’. I’m grateful. Many years from now, when my son asks me if I have stayed at the heritage wing of the Taj, I too can say ‘yes I did son’.

Where do we go from here?

To say that the Taj is ‘iconic’ is too small & mild; it means far more than that & somehow the term does not do justice to it. In my profession, its the fashion to term anything & everything as an iconic brand, therefore diminishing the stature of some things by associating the same term to them. eg, would we call the (other) Taj as just iconic? Similarly with the the Taj at Colaba.  Its got a certain aura about it, an aura of contrasting textures; grand, awe-inspiring yet comforting, solid. It seems to say, ‘I have stood long before you came here, & don’t worry, will be here long after you have gone’. Its a legacy. Mine, yours, ours.  A legacy & a symbol of the society we want to live in. The terrorists have struck at this, our legacy. It has trembled, crumbled in some places, groaned but has stayed on its feet, keeping its promise of being there for us. 

Now its up to us. We need to stay sane. We need to stay calm & think objectively, with clarity. We need to make sure that never again do we have someone mock & threaten our legacy in this or any other manner. 

On my way home. After a lengthy stay in a few square miles in NJ. Its been quite eventful, weather wise.

I landed to ground frost with temperatures hovering around the 5 celsius mark. This was ‘fall’ or autumn as they say elsewhere in the northern hemisphere; ‘sharad’ in the hindu calendar.

It felt as if the temperature fell taking the cue from all the leaves.

And a week later it snowed.

I have rotten luck with weather. I visit a place & soon after I arrive, a few records weather-wise will be broken. eg, I was in London in March & it snowed for the first time in 50 years over Easter!  And last week, it snowed in NJ during Halloween after 36 years! And to further make things interesting, in both instances I was at career turning points, in a manner of speaking. I’m reminded of ‘Signs’ – maybe everything is connected in some way; we are blind to the signs & what they mean.