No correspondence
Who says one man can’t make a difference? It took only one man to turn me from a faithful reader of the New York Times to someone who looks at all their articles with the kind of suspicion generally reserved for … I dunno, pap smear tests. This one man has had his articles on the front page of the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times more than twice. Among the 200-odd articles he has written since joining the International Herald Tribune in 2004, I’ve read only those which he wrote while being the Tribune’s India correspondent. His observations included how mobile phones were “paving a secret passageway for the young around deep-rooted barriers to premarital mingling” and that feminists in India actually want the life of arranged marriages and being barefoot and pregnant. Reported pieces insisted that riots were replacing hunger strikes as forms of protest, that India saw Mukesh Ambani as the new Mahatma Gandhi and now. The writer’s name is Anand Giridharadas and thanks to him, all I read of the New York Times is the Arts section. But, unfortunately, in the world of e-mail, you can run but you cannot hide. As a friend wrote while forwarding the latest Anand G forward, “I am now going to be forwarded this article 20 times by Indians living in the US thinking there is something groundbreakingly new in it.” As a service to my friend (and because I just cannot take Anand G’s moronic and frequently inaccurate writing any more), here’s why the Letter from India deserves to be thrown in the trash along with the letter from Citibank offering you a super platinum credit card.
First, Exhibit A: the picture accompanying the piece. Not only do we get a picture of underprivileged kids, possibly from some event where they were lined up to give the roses in hand to the Chief Minister or Sonia Gandhi, the photographer even managed to get a stray dog in the frame thus harking back to the country’s colonial history which includes signage like “Dogs and Indians not allowed.” Atta boy, Punit Paranjpe of Reuters (Anand G informs me “atta boy” is how the elite in India speak so I’m just trying to conform). Now if only the caption didn’t read, “In cities, middle-aged graduates of leading colleges struggle to get their children into the same schools.” Because these are not children of graduates from leading colleges. However, they do fit the description that Anand G gives us of top scorers of exams whose pictures are printed in newspapers: “routinely scrawny and dark-skinned, drawn from the distant suburbs and villages”. It’s just disgusting that copy like this gets past any editor.
443 words and I haven’t even got to the first word of the article.
*deep breathes into brown paper bag* Alright, here we go.
“In India, a shift to meritocracy uproots old elites.” As opposed to the rest of the world, where a shift to meritocracy actually ossifies the elites into place? This is perhaps the most annoying thing about Anand G’s writing when it isn’t shallow and inaccurate. He tells you things that are applicable to almost any time and place but he pronounces them as though they are searing insights into India. This headline could work for an article on India at any point in time – when instead of the minor royalties, the leadership of the Independence movement was taken up by the upper middle class; when the convent and foreign-educated upper middle class were given a run for their money and status by those who studied in “vernacular”-medium schools – particularly in the past 20 years. The rise of that ever-shifting thing called the middle class meant that people from my father’s generation were breaking the ceiling and going to posh colleges. Not just that, reverse snobbery kicked in. Being anglicized earned you mockery from an intelligentsia that was fiercely proud of being “vernie”. Quietly and often not so quietly, this country – like many others – has changed hands many times.
But looking back at history and doing some research would possibly cut into the time spent nursing a bloody mary at Indigo. Plus, it wouldn’t let you write this paragraph describing what was apparently the life of India’s elite until globalisation struck.
Old-guard elites asked traffic cops, “Do you know who I am?” before speeding away. They filled their homes with servants and used them almost as performance art, their servility part of the status-boosting décor.
There are a lot of people who speed away from traffic cops with that line – the Chief Minister’s son, the actor’s brother, the actor himself, the Police Commissioner’s wife’s driver – and most of them are “sons of the soil”, as one used to call them. I haven’t the faintest whose house Anand G has been to but using “servants” as “performance art” is a gorgeous turn of phrase so full marks for that. The fact that he’s calling domestic help “servants” is as much an indicator of how he sees them as how they are supposedly treated.
When they gave directions, they relied less on landmarks than on others in their small world: “You know Anju’s house? Take a left after that. Rohan’s place is on the right. Cross it and take a left at Bunty’s sister-in-law’s.”
Well, that’s what people tend to do when they have shared landmarks. Unless you’re Anand G who looks for the place he’s going to on GPRS.
Aside from bursting a few hundred blood vessels while reading the article, the other reaction that I have is of sadness. Considering how wide the gaps are between the different economic strata, the leftist in me would love it if Anand G’s proclamation were true, that elite Indians were sending their kids abroad to escape India because “their children are unable or unwilling to compete in an increasingly fair society”. Sadly, that’s bollocks. Studying abroad is hugely aspirational. For most of us, it’s an unrealisable dream because we can’t afford it and we don’t think we can qualify for scholarships - because we’re not smart enough, because we don’t seem smart enough, because we or our fathers don’t know anyone in the interviewing board. The ones who study abroad are still considered the lucky ones. Here’s the change that has happened in the 15-odd years: it’s not only the elite who get lucky. Some put in their savings, others go with educational loans (I finally paid mine off last week, woohoo!). As my friend pointed out, “If the elite is trying to escape us, the last place to go is to the US. Statistically, most of the elite come back to India because they miss their servants, whereas people like me fill up Jersey/Freemont.”
It’s only near the end of the article that I finally realised why Anand G is so pissed off at the elite. He didn’t get membership into the clubs that are the last strongholds of the Anglicized. Because they might be the “noveau pauvre” (another fantastic turn of phrase), but they’re still the coolest cats in the south Mumbai circles that Anand G frequents but he wants to be able to say “chap” and “atta boy”, and let’s not forget how cheap the G&T is at the Willingdon and Bombay Gym. Then again, he may not need the membership watching servile performance art in Verla (it would be so banal to say Goa, wouldn’t it?).
on Sunday, February 1st, 2009, 1:01 pm in Anand Giridharadas, India, International Herald Tribune, Random, Rant › 
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This one is ham-handed, but he’s done some great stories in the past.
So, no hat tip to asparagus, then? :)
i’ll respond later; but ah, visceral vitriol is so refreshing sometimes :)
atta boy. isn’t that the logo of the pillsbury company?
I agree with all your critiques, but the main problem seems to be that he met a few people from old South Bombay elite families and extrapolated from their experience to all of India (a frequent problem for foreign correspondents, though surprising when it happens in India, where these dudes have access to all the info they could want in English - I guess it’s sheer laziness). I and several other people I know from the kind of background he’s describing did go to good schools in the US as an alternative to college in India because we didn’t have 90+ percent and because it was trendy (you could say it was escaping the competition in a way) but you’re right - many of those who had family money came right back.
The elites that his lesson really applies to are what Jug Suraiya calls the PLUs (”people like us”) whose social standing was based to a great extent on cultural capital - education, speaking English well, etc - and who could rely on their family background/English education to get a job at an MNC or in the government. That class (to which my parents belong) is the one that faces the greatest competition from arrivistes, and sniffed at the new colleague whose English was not as good, or who was not comfortable at a company cocktail party, or whose wife didn’t have any conversation (of course, the PLUs still sell their cultural capital giving remedial English and ‘personal skills’ training to execs who didn’t go to elite schools). Anjali Puri covers these issues in Outlook from time to time, see here and here.
But the ones who have old family memberships to Willingdon and the Bombay Gym are a different class, and if Anand G had spent enough time getting to know Bombay, he’d see that. And the line about people getting away with throwing the “do you know who I am” line to Bombay cops…well, he’s clearly confusing Bombay with Delhi.
It was great fun to read. Eye poke to the rich! Up with the poors! Down with the fat light skinned urban elite!
The whole thing is clearly superficial, but considering how thorough the gloss is it’s hard not to be entertained. Good guys winning, bad guys losing, india shining, india shining!
I have read this and some previous articles by Anand G, and agree that while some of what he writes seems real, he does have a tendency to go over the top at times.
In fairness to him, he probably isn’t responsible for the headline. That’s the IHT’s home office. Headline writers have it easy: all they need to convey the central message of a 1000-word article in 8 words, and provide context in addition. That’s why it begins with ‘In India…’ because that’s all the context the IHT reader would need. OK just kidding (but only just). Context and nuance and fine distinctions - only the insider would care enough about - but she probably knows the story anyway. What the IHT reader needs is the view from 30,000 feet, especially since that’s where he’s at when reading this anyway.
BTW, people should check out his blog for a lively discussion. Ruchi Gupta and others make some good points re: this article.
also his line abt Willingdon having more western-style-dressers rather than indian is false. I spend enough time at Willingdon and the average age there is late-40s and the women (of that age group) are mostly in salwar kameez or sometimes even lovely saris.
As far as clothing is concerned, everywhere, from small town India to the major urban centres, there is a trend towards western clothes. If you just travel around these places with your eyes open you can easily spot this trend.
and i guess all those toughass JEE and PMT entrance tests to IIT, AIIMS etc are cracked by sons of ministers and daughters of corporate honchos? bah. why doesn’t he go talk to just a few IITians of his father’s generation and the later ones (the same ones who ask for directions at Radha’s house) and learn that most of the IITians get admitted not on basis of whom do they know but what they know. Faux British accents are of no help in these entrance tests if your grasp of molecular arrangements is shaky.
I come from UP and I know of enough towns / villages / families in that cow-belt zone which are economically and socially middle class (or lower) but have moved up because their kids have gotten admission in prestigious Indian Univs which have allowed the kids to achieve corporate success.
Maybe Anand G just doesn’t know the meaning of ‘meritocracy’.
Thank you anonandon for your analysis. I couldn’t agree more!
TC, the people who got into IIT etc were always a very limited bunch, and yes, that’s true meritocracy - what I think has changed is that people like my father, who was able to live the genteel MNC exec life with his St Xavier’s degree, would today not be given the time of day as a youngster applying to those same MNCs because a hundred ambitious MBAs now want that same job, and the letter of recommendation from your uncle who is a CEO at a neighbouring MNC no longer does the trick. But as anonandon rightly points out, that’s an ongoing process in all societies as education expands and old elites give way to new ones.
I think medicine is probably one of the fields where the old elite feels most threatened by the new, especially because of reservations. But because medical schools all require “capitation fees” and connections still work to get you into a good school, the old elite can buy/connect its way in even while straight-facedly complaining about all the unqualified OBCs in medical schools these days.
I have said this in the past about Anand’s and Somini’s writing in the times and I will say it again, most of their reporting on India is sub standard. Thankfully Somini will not be writing for the times any more.
Anon,
I agree with everything you say about Anand and also can someone please point me to his writing that they consider great.
So, what’s the deal with having someone whose parents are from India write about India, only? Doesn’t it seem like the NYT likes to match it’s bylines by ethnicity, or something? Identity politics, what have you wrought? And, how can I get in on the action? Kidding!
Oh, and sometimes it seems like Amreekan desi blog world is totally Mumbai-centric. As someone who has never been to Mumbai, and whose raised in India parents never went anywhere near Mumbai, either,, I just have to say: is this like how New Yorkers think they are the center of the world? Oh, well, given what’s happened recently I think we can all give the Mumbaikers some love. They deserve it.
Not sure what your post is complaining about, as even some of the commentators above are making AG’s point (as did the friend you cite at the end of the piece who also claims that elites use the word “servants” apparently.)
Is there a changing of the composition and tastes of India’s elite? Yes. Has this happened before in India’s history? Yes.
About 80,000 Indians went to the US alone to study last year. Not a huge number in terms of the population, but int’l degrees still carry a certain cachet among India’s wealthy, as a box you “have” to check and perhaps in some cases it’s a fear of competition for IIT spots or simply favoring the quality of int’l institutions that is the incentive for wealthy kids to study outside of India. Many of these kids return to India to enjoy the lifestyles they were accustomed to, and also for their own business reasons (picking up the family industry or because that’s where a good job was now located). They’re not all going to Ivy League schools and lots are, rightly or wrongly, getting some financial aid from these schools.
A lot of the social clubs ARE changing too. Cash flow in is a huge problem, as are widening membership rolls without a corresponding fee structure or leadership. Money plays a huge part, and the potential growth of NRI influence is also something India is grappling with, and is a more complex issue than is manageable in an IHT column (see the slow train to India finally granting dual citizenship, aka PIO to OCI to …)
The rise of India’s middle class comes across as more pronounced in the last 15 years, in large part because of the sheer visibility of it, because of India’s economic liberalization, and changes in the laws that give more people more opportunity (whether this is meritocracy can be debated elsewhere). But the Indian middle class is still, after all, pretty small (again, in terms of India’s population). The number of spots in India’s IITs is tiny too in that vein. The point of what AG is getting at is that India IS dealing with these changes, so let the guy write about it. Changes to the glass ceiling in the past were about what they are today: changes in the power structure. That’s why these issues are so emotional. Everyone’s got their own story — that is of course a greatness of India — so let them tell it.
btw, after years of reading Tehelka and Outlook and local Indian media as well, I’m convinced the NYT is a great paper. Worth reading more than just the Arts section.
–About 80,000 Indians went to the US alone to study last year. –
Citation needed. 80,000? Sounds way too many.
“routinely scrawny and dark-skinned, drawn from the distant suburbs and villages”
I could excuse rest of the article, but this line just grates.
Sorry, the number is now closer to 94,000.
http://newdelhi.usembassy.gov/pr111708.html
“Sorry, the number is now closer to 94,000.
http://newdelhi.usembassy.gov/pr111708.html”
Thanks for the link. That is crazy! And they reserve only 20,000 for people with US university degree. Soon there will be an ugly fingerpointing by MS/PhD guys saying Wipro/Infosys guys took all their H1Bs. And then there will be a sub fingerpointing by MS/PhD working in Microsoft/Intel saying MS graduates working for consultancies took all their H1Bs.
They took our H1Bs …
FSOwalla - speaking of clubs changing, when I was in Calcutta about 15 years ago, the Big Social Change that people talked about was that wealthy Marwari business families were being ‘allowed’ to join the Saturday Club, Bengal Club, Tolly Club, etc. Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana also traced the rise and new-found social confidence of provincial elites. This has been going on for a while, and is obviously not simply the result of pucca-brown flight to Amrika.
The only difference I have seen at clubs is that companies are buying corporate memberships to places like Delhi Gym/Bombay GYM and Willingdon as individual memberships are not available or are too expensive.
I don’t think it is only the “elite” have memberships to these clubs, a lot of my friends, whose parents were retired armed services personnel have memberships to these clubs.
Just as the most interesting puns are inadvertent, the most interesting ironies are in the things people take completely for granted. Pre-independence, Armed Services had plenty of ’status’ in (British) India. Colonels and above were certainly considered ‘elite’ wherever they happened to be. Now their relative status has declined so much that people use the fact that retired Armed service personnel belong to a club as proof of its egalitarian character! The Outlook article SP had linked in speaks to another aspect of this issue. (In Pakistan, the pre-Independence status of the Armed forces continues, with, shall we say, mixed effects.)
As an aside, military academies in India (NDA, IMA, etc) today have a great deal of trouble attracting young men of the ‘right’ caliber - Pakistan has no such problem.
Umber desi, IMO there’s a big difference between Bombay Gym/Willingdon and any other clubs, incl the Calcutta clubs, Delhi Gym, etc. The Bombay clubs have a much higher entry barrier, so you pretty much have to be from old old money or be very senior at an MNC/bank these days to get a corporate membership, whereas back in the day a middle manager could get a membership as a job perk. Delhi Gym and the Delhi/Cal clubs generally are much more open to ex-military folks.
to be clear I wasn’t talking to retired armed services personnel pre-independence.
Sp,
Point taken, I don’t know much about Bombay GYM other than what I hear from friends but I always thought it was similar to Delhi GYM and same with the Tollygunje Club (?) in Calcutta.
let me just take a moment here to talk about the delhi autonomous points system of admission into school, a huge counterpoint to anand g’s rather neat little thesis. basically, your parents gets points for their poshness, profession, higher education, alumni status, and sometime for how close you live to the school. if parents are elite, educated at all the right places, or generally well-heeled, the kid gets into school (so for instance, if you’re a BA or BS, your baby’s not getting into springdales or mothers’ or sardar patel or other such so-called good schools). if not, baby gets to stay in playschool for some more time or go to a sub-par school.
this idiotic system is nothing but a continuation of the old boys/old girls’ network. whereas educational institutions the world over award priority to students who are the first in their family to attend school or college, schools in delhi will do anything to keep the non-’pukka’ kids out. for instance, the times of india today quotes a west delhi school principal: we don’t want to have too many kids whose parents are small businessman, since those families don’t tend to care much about studies. such students bring our results down.
now, those scrawny kids he saw getting into IITs and med schools are mostly just upper- and lower- middle class kids. only he can’t tell because they don’t dress like their south mumbai or south delhi counterparts because they are too busy swotting. the truth is that very few downright low-income kids make it to elite schools and universities (especially those who can’t benefit from reservation), mostly because they’ve been kept out of functioning schools in the first place. even high-income north indian girls in class B,C towns are being kept out of the quality educational system in large numbers;. giridhardass’s account neatly explains what he has observed, but his observations are too limited in scope to generate a comprehensive account, an account that is quite beyond his easy platitudes.
any delhi club worth having membership to IIC, IHC, or Gymkhana is very hard to get into; maybe you have to have what they call ‘pauwa,’ or ‘jack.’ next year, i will be old enough to not count as a dependent at IHC — which my parents got into because my dad was prescient enough and both of them are academics. there is no way IHC would take my parents or anyone middle-class like us now, including ex-army people (unless they are high profile for some other reason). as far as IIC goes, the high median age is a deterrent for young people to apply anyway. but even if one does apply for the cheap snacks and the sometimes nice programs, i doubt many would qualify without elite connections. as if being old money makes you more likely to appreciate culture or be good company or more avant garde or whatever silly characteristic these clubs are looking for.
what a bunch of bs.
sort of related article about how resume-boosting internships were bought by parents for their prep school kids in the US on Slate.
My personal opinion is that AG’s articles bring a whiff of fresh air and a new perspective to the intl media’s reporting of India. While ofcourse, what he portrays is not the only thing happening or happening at the scale that he is suggesting. But atleast in the middle/lower middle class the aspirations have raised. Wether they can make it or not, the ‘Hindi or Vernacular’ medium section of the population is desperately trying to compete, and with India’s limited industry vis-a-vis its population, there is bound to be some churn. I agree that this has been happening even earlier and will probably continue, but maybe due to the media exposure and greater awareness, the scale of this churn is increasing.
BTW this article goes well with this song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYaBSrnDNSs
wow, weak. this post was incredibly petty, and certainly no different from how elites are used to dissing people who call them out. and it’s a good thing most of you know how to write and speak english better than your lower middle class counterparts in the iits; while they’ll be ensconced in labs plugging away at the latest hit or miss discovery/invention, you and your representatives will always be able to deflect attention from the truth. while the writer does go over the top at times, his theme is a valid one.
and tc, he doesn’t mention anything about the iit’s; if these old elites could gain admission in the manner people like my father and my cousins do, then there would be no article to write. and boo hoo for reservations: maybe y’all should spend your childhoods studying like the rest of us. if anything, anand g’s article points out that those who couldn’t hack these truly meritocratic tests had to go abroad since they couldn’t compete with the lower middle class workhorses whose work ethic eventually led them, without money or connections of their own, to a land where their kids, abds like anand g were able to more readily experience values those IITians always hoped for….merit, true merit.
and yes, anonandon, as an abd myself, i really understand that in india, anand g, another one of us, would want to gain admission into an elite club with a western-style bar *sarcasm*. woop de doo. i would know, having experienced exactly what he wrote about in kolkata’s elite clubs, and no, i wasn’t rejected; in fact, i didn’t even have to apply to enter. this post revealed much more about you than it did the flaws in anand g’s article.
I don’t quite understand the point of the stream-of-consciousness rant above, but would like to state for the record that I believe increasing competition - whether in the opening up of elite clubs, or schools, or whatever- is a bloody good thing for India. I just see some flaws with the cases Anand G uses to make his point, because I know those Bombay Gym people and they are among the few insulated from rising competition and meritocracy, and there are lots of other institutions, such as colleges, corporate offices, etc where he would have had a better case.
It seems to me people are conflating several separate developments, somewhat like Anand G.’s article itself does. The Willingdon/Gymkhana/retired Army officer status discussion is about social status, and perceived social status. There’s a separate discussion to be had on the issue of ‘Is the IIT-IIM combine truly promoting meritocracy or is it just credentialism in another guise, importing the Ivy-League mentality to India along with the consultancies, the investment banks, the white-shoe law firms, and the multinational globetrotting mindset?’ That the Willingdon/Gymkhana ‘issue’ is even an issue at all shows that the old superficial elite ‘marks of arrival’ still seem to matter, at least to some people in the supposedly new elite. But the second issue seems more important to me. The Government has recently doubled the number of IITs, and increased intake per IIT, and plans to do that once more, so that there will be about 25-30 IITs soon. It is also encouraging the IITs to diversify their course offerings into the Humanities, and all the IITs already have Business Schools. But until fairly recently - late 80s-90s, the 5 IITs had extremely tiny intakes relative to the need - just about a 1,000 coming in every year to all 5 combined - versus now about 8,000, and headed soon toward 20,000 combined. In those days it was well known that the IIT entrance exam was essentially a lottery except for maybe the top 100 of the 1000, who truly stood out. It was even worse with the IIMs, the three (ABC as of then) being well known for their arbitrary interview process. The justification for government-funded business school (just think of the irony) is non-existent. At least institutes of technology have high capital costs (but even there, both Birla and Tata were able to fund first class institutions privately). What I see is happening today with the IIT-IIM combine is an attempt by influential segments to create an artificial Ivy League pseudo-credentialist government-funded aristocracy for themselves, who want first (only) crack at the best jobs, yell themselves hoarse with ‘meritocracy’, shout down all others, and say to hell with the inherent contradictions.
Huh? Why is that? I thought it was just about your entrance exam score and therefore more meritocratic than lottery…though having ended up with a grader halfway across the country who gave a high mark of 80% in our entire class for the ISC, I know what it’s like to feel standardized exams might as well be a lottery…
It was much less ’standardized’ back then, and they deliberately pitched it so high that virtually all of those in the bottom 80% were getting in on scores in the chance range. The idea was to screen out, not screen in, and transparency wasn’t anywhere on the cards. Even now, the IITs have been caught out in inconsistencies over the algorithm used for generating the overall cutoff scores for entrance. Here’s the bottom line: 20-25% of those who got in were really good. Of those that got in and graduated, it was only the top 20-25% who ever made it to the US. Obviously there was some overlap in the before and after cohorts. Many of the other IITians later found themselves as police officers (IPS) or bank officers (SBI, RBI etc). In other words, not too different in the end from the average Joe who went to the local college for a BA/BSc. Making that observation doesn’t take anything off the achievements of the top 5% of the top 25% who truly shone, mostly in the US.
i don’t think it is possible that anand g has been writing for the IHT since 1991…i met him ten years ago when we were both about 18. my guess is he’s been writing since graduating college (2004ish). not an excuse but might explain the sophomoric/naive prose a little.
love your blog btw
My bad. It’s supposed to be 2004, not 1991. I’ve no idea how I managed to type 1991 for 2004. BA, thanks for pointing that out and having the patience to trawl through endless ranting prose.
I think he also did a stint with one of the big-name consulting firms before starting to ‘write’ write. And BTW, 2004 was probably the height of the ‘outsourcing’ movement that these consulting firms had started. By golly, were they ever going to make India anew, these consulting firms all by themselves. That’s probably why a mix of hopeful optimism and a tendency to instantly magnify and project forward the tiniest noticeable trend so thoroughly infects his writing. Some of his articles are just elaborations and ‘human interest sidebars’ to what would otherwise have been business briefs, such as the one on the ’supply chain’ for fresh vegetables on their way to the Bombay housewife’s kitchen.