Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

Four

At the first party I went to in Delhi, I saw a couple smooching, and I asked myself, How can anybody do that in the open? It was a shock to me. But it was nice. I understood what sort of opportunities there were for me here. I could have an unconventional youth and an unconventional career.

— Ramesh

The advent of the corporation unleashed powerful new energies into the lives, especially, of young people. After 1991, the entire capitalist infrastructure needed to be built, and there was exciting work to be found in every domain. As the capital of Indian journalism, Delhi played host to an explosion of new newspapers, magazines, TV stations and advertising agencies, and young people with degrees in subjects hitherto considered useless, such as English literature or history, now found themselves running companies, commanding high salaries — and working extremely hard. Their parents, who had often worked in government jobs requiring not more than forty hours of their week, looked on in bewilderment as their offspring returned from the office at 11 p.m. only to receive further telephone instructions from sleepless bosses. Nor could these parents comprehend the nonchalance with which their children leapt every year or so from one job to another, driving up their income each time. They had grown up in the belief that avoiding risk was the most important principle, and that if you found a good job you kept it for life. But these young people seemed to be drawn inexorably towards the desecration of the status quo, as if the receipt of capitalism’s true blessings depended on it.

Many young people stayed late in the office not only because they had to but just because they liked it. It was an era when the corporation often seemed to be life-giving in a way that the family was not, and many of them turned to it for entirely non-professional needs, including, simply, a place to be away from the family home. The corporate mission was new and heroic, and could provide collegial relationships that seemed intrepid and profound, and young people spoke often about how their parents or spouses did not understand what they did which meant, now, who they were. In those early years of corporate euphoria, the corporation often became a kind of family of its own, and young executives began to develop a kind of affected corporate-speak that was intended to mark them out as separate from the ethos of their blood relatives. They no longer had a reputation, they had a brand. Things they did well were core competencies. They did not wonder, they brainstormed. Their DNA came from the corporation, whose traits they attempted to adopt more and more as their own.

This energy, with which such people sought their sense of purpose from the new institutions of global capitalism, had much to do with the withering of previous ideals. Such corporate enthusiasm could often be observed most powerfully, in fact, in the very families that had most whole-heartedly embraced the earlier ethos of frugality, service and nation. Many of those families had ended up feeling deceived, for when the system lost all its drapery in the 1970s it seemed there was nothing beneath save the struggle for power and money, and it no longer felt so easy to disdain those who cherished such things. In the wake of the high-minded Nehruvian vision were many disappointed middle-class people, and one legacy of this was the discrediting of ideals themselves. Many of those who came of age in the 1980s and ’90s ridiculed their parents for believing in abstractions, and they embraced the principle of profit with relief. It was a new reality principle, and they remade themselves eagerly around it.

Ramesh’s father worked in the government bureaucracy in a small town in Rajasthan. Ramesh was stifled by the conservative, parochial world of his childhood, and it was with a great sense of occasion that he departed for Delhi to study for an MBA. After that he stayed in the city, drifting through administrative jobs with newspapers without any particular sense of purpose. When he began his career in advertising, it was like a shot in the arm.

“I only figured out who I was when I landed up in advertising. Before that, it was a ten-to-five job and at five o’clock you packed your bag, went home and spent the whole evening sitting around with your family. In advertising, I go home at one o’clock in the morning. Sometimes I don’t go home for two or three days. I keep a towel and a toothbrush in the car. Because my work is so exciting.”

Ramesh seems ridiculously happy. I have rarely met anyone who finds the world so entirely positive. And he credits it to his work, which he speaks about almost as a kind of discipline of the soul.

“The only way you can be effective is if you start living those brands, if you become those brands. It is like Buddhism. It enters every part of you, it takes over your personal life as well. I explain my brands to my parents, my wife, my friends. It almost pours out of me because I carry my brands inside me.”

When she became pregnant with their child, Ramesh’s wife wanted them to leave Delhi and go back to where their families lived. But he could not do it.

“I felt very disturbed there, I couldn’t find any peace of mind. So I convinced my wife to stay in Delhi. Otherwise I would have suffocated. It was difficult for her. She expected me to be around, and I was coming back every day at midnight. It took her a long time to reconcile herself to that. I took small steps to make her understand, just like an advertising campaign. I used analogies. When she was pregnant she used to complain about my working hours. I said, ‘Look at your situation. You have a life inside you. I have that every day. I feel that pain every day with my campaigns. I know the kind of happiness that comes when you see that life emerge from you.’ So then she understood, and now she is happy about what I am doing.”

There is no doubt that Ramesh was working hard. But a lot of his time was also going into relationships with colleagues.

“We’re a team of twelve people and we’re very close. We stand up for each other. If any of us has a problem in his personal life, we all stand up for him. We all work hard and it’s one for all, all for one. When something good happens at work, we all go out for drinks and celebrate as a team.”

Young people like Ramesh were rapidly converted to the two universal drugs of corporate capitalism: caffeine and alcohol.

In the early 2000s the most visible new consumer development was probably the new café chains, which could hardly build outlets quickly enough to absorb the young people looking for a place to be out. Cafés allowed very different kinds of conversations from home or office, and at weekends they were packed with happy chatter. Compared to bars — which implied alcohol and late nights — cafés were a relatively innocuous reason for young people from conservative families to breach the boundary of the home, which represented, for many such families, the dividing line between the wholesome and life-affirming — inside — and the corrupt and poisonous — outside; the new conviviality of coffee bars gave many young people a different, even opposite, sense of things. And like every other Indian metropolis, Delhi, which, being in the north of India, had no particular historical relationship to coffee, was suddenly awash in the stuff, its smell filling every shopping mall and office block, brown liquid pouring into the veins of this new sleep-deprived generation — who, as often as not, did not drink from a cup but, like their American counterparts, sucked at a sealed and odourless container, as if they nestled at capitalism’s plastic breast.

But after office hours, many of these people did need something more intoxicating. Private hesitations about alcohol evaporated widely during this decade, even though many young people chose not to tell their parents exactly what they were up to. In the early 2000s, groups of young people drinking openly together in bars still looked strangely forced: girls sat on one side of the table, giggling with each other, while boys tried to look unconcerned, and glasses of beer sat uncomfortably in everyone’s hands. But this passed quickly as the new culture of work and socialising imposed its own narcotic rhythm. Women, too, ignored the page of ‘mocktails’ that were intended for them, and for many people of both sexes alcohol became essential to getting through the stressful tussle of work and family. Bars proliferated absolutely everywhere during the decade and they were full every evening with professionals — these re-engineered human beings of twenty-first century India — working off steam.

• • •

In bohemian circles, young people were going through an even more wholesale questioning of received values and structures. Most of the people I met when I arrived in Delhi had been living away from their parents since their late teens. This was not usual in north Indian middle-class families. In many cases it had required significant courage to make this move, and years later it had still not become accepted: those parents never visited the apartments in which their offspring carried on such illegitimate lives, often they did not even know where their children were living, or with whom, and in their own circles they felt obliged to invent excuses for their absence from the family home. Only marriage could redeem this situation; but rather few of these people seemed to marry. Many of them had been pushed out of their parents’ house in the first place by this unwelcome pressure. Their desire to do creative work — the kind of work for which their parents often had little sympathy or comprehension — was only a sub-set of their more general ambition to re-create life itself. Creativity was all: not only as a professional asset that resulted in creative products, but also as the guiding principle of lives that were directed towards a wholesale re-imagination of ethics, sensibilities and relationships. Many of them had grown up watching their parents in unhappy marriages, some of them had seen child abuse and violence go on unpunished behind the closed doors of the family — and there was a widespread sense that the outer forms of north Indian respectability had become hypocritical and bankrupt. In choosing to do artistic work — thus flouting the risk-averse culture of their families and potentially foregoing the material rewards for which, in the expanding post-1991 economy, their talents should have readied them — in choosing unconventional lifestyles — living away from home and putting their emotional faith in new, elective families — they were conspicuously attempting to reproduce as little of their parents’ ethos as possible. They lived out improvised kinds of romantic relationships, they began to build a gay scene — and they devoted extensive thought and discussion to the question of friendship. Having come from backgrounds, often, in which family was all and friendship only a provisional and opportunistic affair, many Delhi artists and intellectuals sought to re-imagine friendship as a more absolute and primordial kind of bond.

Some of these people had grown up in Delhi, some had not. But for all of them, Delhi in those years offered the equation of easy incomes and cheap living that is essential to artistic communities everywhere. People who could write arrived from all over the country, and indeed from many other countries, to earn money from the new magazines and newspapers so they could work, after hours, on other projects. Artists secured injections of cash by doing graphic design for the burgeoning advertising industry, filmmakers by working in TV news — at a time when new channels had twenty-four hours of programming to fill and a severe lack of people who knew anything about cameras. Some funded their lives of frugality and alternative sexuality by lending their creativity to the extravagant wedding parties of the city’s rich. Delhi’s world-class universities and research institutes were another powerful magnet for bright young people: they too offered forms of employment compatible with the dissident life, as did the capital’s foreign embassies and cultural centres.

And life, in the 1990s, cost little. Houses in the most tranquil parts of the city had often been built with small apartments on the roofs intended for servants. This arrangement reflected an earlier, more paternalistic relationship between wealthier families and their domestic staff — but outlooks had changed and this relationship had turned balder with the years: now the city had such an abundance of poor migrants from the countryside, who were lodged in slums so conveniently close to affluent neighbourhoods, that the rich could cheaply buy any services they needed without having to go to the trouble of accommodating servants and taking on responsibilities for their families. (Often, they also campaigned for the slums near their streets to be demolished; sometimes it actually happened and they were astonished and outraged when their maids then stopped turning up for work.) Instead they could turn those servant quarters to rent. In those days, these rooftop apartments, too small and inconvenient for a family, but often endowed with dreamy terraces that were perfect for smoking dope on in the winter sun, went for about $50 a month — an amount that people with marketable skills could earn easily, and with time left over — and they filled up with young men and women wanting to be on their own and to live a creative life.

By definition, such people were a sub-culture, unrepresentative of the city as a whole. Part of the very reason why they thrived in Delhi, in fact, was that no one was interested in them. The very apathy of the middle-class city, its culture of indifference and looking after one’s own, allowed people whose lives had always been excessively monitored and commented upon to discover in its self-absorbed enclaves a precious kind of freedom: anonymity.

But many of them were possessed with great energy and talent, and as they rose to visibility and influence, they took on disproportionate significance in the city’s culture. They were, as one prominent artist from among their number puts it, Delhi’s ‘bastards’: people without position or lineage who staked their lives on a different kind of future and, in many cases, came out on top. People half a generation younger looked up to them with respect and adoration, because they had added a whole new range of feelings and possibilities for life to an all-too formulaic city, and they had helped to make this barren place of bureaucracy and immigrants into twenty-first century India’s cultural centre.

• • •

Manish Arora* is now a successful fashion designer, but when he came to Delhi in 1991 he had no idea what he wanted to do. All he knew was he had to get out of his parents’ house in Bombay and live on his own.

“Living alone was not a very common thing in the family I come from. You lived with your parents until you got married. It was a big deal even to express that I might want to study in Delhi.”

“Was it about sex?”

“I’d been having sex since I was thirteen or fourteen. That wasn’t a problem. I suppose sex became easier when I came to Delhi. But that wasn’t the reason. I was seventeen, I was studying commerce in Bombay, and I wasn’t very good at it, I wasn’t happy. I happened to see an advertisement in the newspaper about this institute in Delhi — the National Institute of Fashion Technology — and I thought, ‘Why not apply?’ My cousins were in Delhi: they sent me the form and I went along for the entrance exam, not thinking at all about what I was doing. I turned up and there were hundreds of applicants and they all came with lots of equipment for drawing and painting — and I had just a pen in my pocket, that’s all. I didn’t even know the exam lasted for seven hours. I remember running to a public phone in the break to tell my mother I was still alive.

“Afterwards, they invited me to Delhi for an interview. Even then I didn’t think much about it. My parents didn’t either: ‘It’s an excuse to go and meet his cousins.’ And even after the interview, I never stopped to think I’d be selected. But when I got back to Bombay, a letter was waiting for me, offering me a place. In those days there was only one campus and they took just thirty students a year from all over India. So I was very happy. But even when I began, I didn’t take it very seriously. I failed the first semester. But at some point in the middle — I don’t know what happened, but it struck me: I’ve found the right place. And then it all began.”

One has the sense, looking at Manish’s clothes, that they are the product of a mind that is preternaturally free. They are vivid and outré — they have something of the circus, Bombay kitsch and Pop art — and they bring you in touch with fantastic joy. But they are cut, embroidered and finished with the precision of a miniature painting: Manish is also a traditionalist, and the brilliant use he makes of longstanding Indian techniques shows how deeply he has absorbed their discipline. This balance of freedom and constraint generates in him, it would appear, a ferocious productivity: alongside his own brand, Manish Arora, he designs a sportswear line, Fish Fry, which is manufactured by Reebok, and innumerable one-off collections for other companies.

Recently, his undertakings were multiplied when he was invited to become creative director for Paco Rabanne in Paris. It was the first time any French fashion house had given creative control to a designer from Asia: the fact that this one looked to Manish to revive its long-flagging fortunes said much about not only his own originality but also the changing relationship of French fashion to the world. Manish now lives between Paris and Delhi.

“Even though they’re now in Mumbai, my parents are actually from Punjab. Both their families came across at Partition. My father’s been working in Mumbai for forty years but they haven’t absorbed a single thing of the city: they’re still like anybody’s parents would be in a small town in Punjab. My mother has never left India. They are very naive.

“I am their only child, so it’s very important to them that I’ve become successful. Now they don’t mind that I’m not married! All is forgotten suddenly. That’s one reason I have to keep doing well so they are charged about me. But they don’t have a clue what I do. They’re just happy to see my picture in the newspaper. They don’t know I have a job with Paco Rabanne, for example. They just know their son has a job in Paris, which is good enough for them. You understand now — they’re that kind of parents. They don’t even know who Paco Rabanne is. And in a very nice way. I’m very happy it’s like that.

“But I had horrifying moments when I was a child. My parents didn’t get along and divorce didn’t exist in my family — it still doesn’t in the kind of background I come from. You fight but you live with each other your whole life. Of course now they’re old so it’s all become fine but my childhood was ruined. So that was one of the reasons why I left Bombay because I was disturbed mentally as a child. I loved Delhi because it gave me freedom from all that, and great friends, and a place to work myself out.”

Manish cackles with ironic laughter to deflect such solemn talk. He is a small man — we look eye to eye — and there is something about his pointed face, which tapers into a grey goatee, something about his jaunty rising eyebrows and deep-set shining eyes, that gives him a faintly diabolical air. You feel that his confidence derives from the fact that he has at some point in his life marshalled great forces of self-sufficiency to get through.

“But I think today I could say that’s why I’ve tried to do what I wanted to. If everything had been fine with my family when I was a child, maybe I would have been the most boring person today. I would just be doing some stupid business and I’d be married to a woman to hide the fact I was gay. But no: I wanted to leave, and I give that a lot of credit for what I am today. Because I told myself deep inside that I want to get out of this whole thing and be proud of myself. Maybe the fact I was lacking attention from my parents is what drove me to seek attention from everybody else. Which means: doing well in your own field so that you get appreciated. You can be greedy like that. Sometimes you can work hard only to be appreciated. And maybe that’s why I’ve never been interested in money. What I need from life is people constantly telling me that I am great at my work. And that I’ve genuinely earned it — not because I acted in one movie and became an overnight hit. I guess that’s what I live for. Because I didn’t get much appreciation as a child.

“Another very drastic experience I had in Delhi was in my twenties. I was totally obsessed for years with one person. I would have done any damn thing to be with that man. To the extent of crazy things. It was not a little crush: it went on for five or six years. My friends told me I was blind, I was obsessed, but it just went on. It was horrible. And suddenly — I don’t know what happened to me — I got out after five years and I looked at the rest of my life and I said, ‘Wow. Now… ’ You know that kind of moment? You need to save yourself. These things forced me to be successful, to want something far more than money.

“I don’t need much money. I don’t have kids to invest for. As long as I can meet my friends, I’m happy. I am not the kind who wants fancy cars. The typical Delhi male — straight or gay — just wants to have the right car to drive into the hotel and park at the porch and get out of it with everyone looking at him. He buys his Porsche just for that moment. Maybe I’ve spent too much time in France, but I don’t care about that. In Paris you can walk into a famous artist’s party and there will be the richest and the poorest people, all at the same level. Nobody gives a damn. Or you can be very rich and still ride the oldest scooter because you love it. That doesn’t exist here. Here, if you have money, even if you don’t like a car you’ll buy it because it is meant to be the best. I love that about France. They don’t just value you for the money you have. Here they ask you straight away: ‘What do you do?’ It’s the first question they always ask you.”

As one might expect, Manish works like a man possessed.

“I live for my work. I believe in that and nothing else comes in between. I’m completely focussed. So that gives me opportunity to take care of the whole business of fashion, not just designing. I have the time to do all that. In Paris, being a designer is a job. It’s a job, like being a lawyer. In Paris I wake up at 6.30; I work from 8.30. I carry my own clothes: I carry boxes of clothes in the Metro. Can you imagine a designer here who would carry his own clothes? Here the designers think they’re superstars. They forget their job, which is to make better clothes every season. It’s a job. It’s fucking hard work. Just because you’re in the Indian newspapers all the time, you don’t forget, you don’t act like a star. Have you seen how much the newspapers write about fashion designers? Don’t they have anything better to do?

“India has not become fashion-conscious. No one knows about fashion. No one knows enough about themselves to be conscious of what they want. All that has happened is that people now have money and they are aware of brand names. When you meet people in Delhi who are supposed to be the fashionistas or divas: they have the right products in their hand but they know nothing. It is not like Japan. Even there, fashion is not so old but people understand fashion. Ask a woman in Delhi why she carries a Louis Vuitton bag, and she’ll tell you that’s the bag you’re supposed to carry. Ask a woman in Japan, and she’ll tell you the whole history of Louis Vuitton.

“But when I started out in Delhi, this ignorance was helpful. Now I’m in Paris so much I feel I started out in the right place at the right time. I was working in Delhi as an assistant to well-known Indian designers, and everyone was quite naive. I learned everything by doing it because I didn’t know anything. For example, I didn’t know — it’s very stupid but it’s true — I had never seen Interview magazine until my clothes were on the cover. I didn’t get intimidated by magazines because I never saw them. My naivety has worked in my favour because I always have so much more to learn. A guy in London already knows everything when he starts and it’s more difficult for him to do his own work and prove himself again and again. If I had been in London, maybe I’d be burned out by now.”

He takes out his laptop and shows me a video of his latest show in Paris, which was organised as a magic show. He explains how the show is put together: how a collection is conceived to cater simultaneously to buyers from Europe, America, Asia and the Middle East. His sentences begin, “I know you’re not interested, but… ” — and he goes on to explain materials and textures, how this was sewn, how that was designed on a computer and laser-cut. He talks about the clothes he made for Lady Gaga.

“I wish my parents could understand what I do. But that’s the problem with many people I have in my life: I’m growing so fast because of my experiences that no one else understands. The kind of knowledge I am gaining every day is making me so mentally rich, it’s making me so sharp, it makes me able to deal with every situation and every kind of person. I designed 200 stores for Nespresso: imagine dealing with a coffee company for eight months. I’ve watched them making Mercedes cars. It’s amazing how much you learn. I’m surprised every day at my life. Every day. Paco Rabanne can’t believe my enthusiasm: they’re surprised by me because growing up here you’re used to everything, you know? Nothing is a problem. I can listen to the opinions of ten people and convince all of them and still do what I want. Two years ago I would not have been able to do that. It’s come from working with brands like Nespresso where they have restrictions and policies and dos and don’ts — it’s all made me so polished that I can handle anything now.

“I still tell myself: ‘Fuck! I’m the designer at Paco Rabanne!’ I feel like that — why shouldn’t I share it? It’s a great feeling. It’s amazing that I can feel like that. Of course I have to work like a bitch. But I’m ready.”

His friends have been calling him for a while. He is awaited elsewhere.

“I don’t love Delhi as I used to,” he says. “Ten years ago I really loved it. Perhaps I wasn’t so aware of what was going on. But nowadays you open the newspapers and it’s terrible, the things that happen here. I’m flying back to Paris tomorrow night, and I can’t wait. But I’ll tell you one thing about Delhi: the gay scene is amazing now. There’s a party every night of the week, and people are out there in hundreds and thousands sometimes. When I came here there was none of that. The only way gay men could have sex was to fuck horny taxi drivers who had left their wives back in the village. There was no way of finding other gay men. Only straight men who were sexually frustrated. They went to the park in Connaught Place where frustrated truck drivers waited to get their cocks sucked. But now it’s easy to meet gay people. There’s no other city in India with a scene like Delhi, and I would say it’s better than many cities in the west. My boyfriend is from Bologna: there are more options in Delhi today than in Bologna to go out to gay parties or gay bars. And now that it’s legal, people are more confident. There are young men in those bars who can’t afford to be there but they save all their money to go because they think they have a right to it. It’s amazing.”

Manish is ready to leave. He tells me, by way of rounding up, that I dress terribly and advises me to get a makeover. I’m slightly rueful. I made a bit of an effort to meet this fashion designer.

As we pay the bill, I ask him if he has found the appreciation he was looking for.

“I have a fan in Tokyo. I love Tokyo: it’s the place where people are the most different from the rest of the world. My biggest fan is from there. She is crazy. She literally breathes for me. The minute she learns I’m sick, she starts crying. Anywhere I do a show, anywhere in the world, she will fly from Tokyo just for one day to see it. For her last birthday I was the surprise. They flew me down just to be there at her party. She is what a real fan is. If there’s somebody who loves me in the whole world, it’s her.”

It has been said that there are some who need to be loved by one person, some who need the love of many, and others who need to be loved by the entire world. But even when you fall into the last category, it seems, it is in the attentions of a single individual that the love of the multitude becomes manifest.⁶