Monday, December 20th, 2004
In search of Kaveri amma
Swades is a film that will do every Indian proud.
The film is comfortable in its Indian skin, never mind if the colour of its skin is brown. It captures the dichotomy of a nation where some people live in the dark ages (without electricity) and others are scaling the pinnacles of global excellence. It is about how the bright India can lead the dark India into the light.
A Newsweek special issue on Leadership (December 2004) features Nandan Nilekani of Infosys. The magazine calls him “the CEO most responsible for India’s rise as an outsourcing power.†Here is one of the points Nilekani touches upon in the interview “The fruits of tech development cannot be limited to a few people in the tech industry. In a democratic society you can’t have a situation where a bunch of guys make dollar salaries and the rest go on living in misery. You just can’t have an ‘enclave economy.’ People who have benefited financially in a big way definitely need to give back. I draw the parallel to America in the early 20th century when business barons like Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller and Henry Ford gave large parts of their wealth to philanthropy. At a critical juncture in history they established not only that wealth is important but also that wealth has to be recycled into the system. That is part of creating social democracy.â€
The protagonist in Swades is Mohan Bhargava (played by Shah Rukh Khan), an Indian boy who comes good at NASA. He reaches for the stars but realises that he yearns not for a mouthful of sky but a fistful of home soil.
He puts in for two weeks’ leave, hops an Air India flight to Delhi and goes straight to an old people’s home in search of his nanny, Kaveri amma, who is more a mother than a nanny to him. It turns out Kaveri amma has moved out of the old people’s home and left a forwarding address.
The quest leads onward to a village called Charanpur. Here, Mohan finds Kaveri amma, finds love, finds his inner voice. The purpose of Mohan’s visit was to find Kaveri amma and take her back with him. But things pan out quite differently, leaving Mohan in a bind where two roads lead into a wood and he has to make his choices.
Every Indian has a story to tell about the time a dollar salary beckoned and how he or she responded to the situation. Here is mine.
I started my career in advertising in mid 1987. Right through the eighties, Dubai was the city of gold for Indian ad folk. By the end of the eighties, a lot of talent, especially from creative, took flight to Singapore and Hong Kong. This was a stepping stone to London or New York. Indian talent was not taken very seriously then. A stamp of approval from South East Asia eased the passage to London / New York considerably.
When I received my first job offer from Dubai, my jaw dropped. They were paying more than ten times my Indian salary. Even considering the modest packet I was making, it was a lot of money. However, the creative opportunities in Dubai were limited. Singapore and Hong Kong, on the other hand, seemed to be making a major impact at international award shows. The money wasn’t bad either.
In late 1990 and early 1991, I had three offers from Singapore and two from Dubai but did not consider any of them. I was living with my granny at the time. My parents and my sister had moved to Baroda for a few years. I chose to stay back since there is no ad scene in Baroda really. Granny stayed back with me.
I never brought up the offers with granny or with my parents. I didn’t even discuss them with my friends. I was way too attached to granny and didn’t even go out for weekends with friends since I didn’t want her to be alone at night. It was bad enough that she was alone during the day. She had the option of living in Baroda or with her daughters in Mumbai. But she chose to be with me and I with her.
If I had any second thoughts at all, they were banished the day a neighbour called office to say granny had had a fall. She was on her way downstairs from the first floor to the ground floor neighbour’s house to take a phone call. We didn’t have a phone at home then, so whenever there was any matter of importance, relatives would call the neigbhbour’s line. Not wanting the line to be on hold for too long, we would inevitably tear down the stairs.
I left the office at lunch time and took the loneliest train ride of my life, got home, saw granny badly bruised, sat by her side, told her not to worry, all would be well. It took her two days to recover. During that train ride, I made up my mind that I wasn’t going anywhere. I even stopped taking calls from overseas head hunters after that.
Seven years later, a stroke claimed granny. One of her happiest living moments was when I told her I was travelling overseas on a shoot. (My parents were back in Mumbai by now.) Travelling overseas was (and still is) a very big deal in middle class India.
I was only going for two weeks then. I don’t know how she would have reacted to my working overseas for good. She would have put up a front, I know. Perhaps even I would have. But deep inside, we would both be quietly unhappy about the choice we made.
Or, as the song goes, Yeh woh bandhan hai jo kabhi tut nahi sakta.
Granny didn’t live to see India become the services hub of the world and one of the preferred destinations for foreign institutional investors (calendar 2004 alone has seen an inflow of over $ 8 billion). E mail and SMS have made the world a smaller place. More and more Indians are travelling overseas on short work trips or holidays but fewer and fewer are considering staying on overseas.
A number of movies have been made about the Indian diaspora. Yash Chopra and Karan Johar make a certain genre, Gurinder Chadha makes another genre. Shekhar Kapur, Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta have an unabashed Bollywood influence. They all dance to their own drum, make their own point, find their own audience.
What distinguishes Swades is the universal chord it touches.
We all have our own Kaveri amma. The one compelling reason that keeps us back or tugs at us to return. I have a friend in Boston who wants his children to grow up in India. I have a friend in Vancouver who longs to see her sister and nephew in Delhi more often. I have a client in London who wants to make a difference in India and is planning on shifting back in a couple of years.
Being a global Indian is no longer about creating little Indias in Southall and Jackson Heights. It is about creating a global impact from India. Like the director of the film, Ashutosh Gowariker, whose last film won an Academy Award nomination for best foreign language film. Or its music director, AR Rahman, who works from a studio in Kodambakkam in South India but has composed for Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Bombay Dreams, which debuted on London’s West End and travelled to Broadway. Or its lead star, Shah Rukh Khan, who made the TIME magazine Asian Heroes cover. The magazine said that on the strength of his following alone, Shah Rukh Khan is probably the world’s biggest movie star.
As I stepped out from the hall after watching Swades, all these thoughts swirled in my head. But uppermost in my thoughts was granny.
Her name was Kaveri.