Anita Nair
Receipent of Orange price for fiction for 2008 (UK) for the book Mistress
I am a rather old fashioned person. Someone who will wait patiently in a queue, any queue even as everyone else either jumps the line with total disregard for others like me waiting there forever and a day. Someone who expects a contrite smile, if not an apology even as a fully laden supermarket trolley is pushed into my spine; exactly at that point where I have a slipped disc. Someone who says please even as I call in a much over due old debt. And as if rubbing salt in my own wounds, I feel compelled to throw in a ‘if you don’t mind that is’. Someone who feels dressing up to go to a concert or a play is a mark of respect to the performance. Someone who can only watch appalled as young Turks bulldoze through life with a ‘do you know who I am?’ set to their shoulder and expression.It occurs to me then that assertiveness is the new manners. You take what you want and never mind the please and thank you, right and wrong.
I shudder. I really do. What scares me about this new world we inhabit in is that to slip into courtesy is to brand oneself a definite loser. Someone not with it. In this new universe that we are fashioning for ourselves, nothing is sacrosanct and everything is dispensable.
Ours is a world where we race from day to day; speed being the essential factor of living. At traffic lights, our honks screech our impatience. As we sit in cafes sipping our frozen macchiatos, our phones dictate to us where to go, what to do and how to get there… Our gardens pop up overnight and we have a million causes to support and not a moment to spare to watch paint dry or grass grow. We tattoo our biceps with ‘a good man is a good for nothing man’ and flex our muscles. We bustle about playacting life rather than living it. We seem to outgrow our past even as we live it…
So what then is the aspiration for young India? The new writing emerging celebrates this need to get on and get on quickly…There is little time for introspection or for even questioning the validity of our ambitions. If somewhere a faint echo of a need to celebrate life rather than possess it resonates, it is quickly hushed in the clamour for success.
Our young men and women are doing better than they ever did. World over, their talent and brains are being recognized. Their acumen sought and fought over. There is much to be proud of. Why then a certain hollowness? A certain fatigue, ennui and disenchantment? All of which is perhaps more appropriate for the middle-aged corporate India?
Is it this lack of rootedness that makes us yearn for that morning hour with M.S. Subbalakshmi’s Suprapatham? Or, why we put our children in gurukula schools, or seek restaurants with food cooked just like in our mother’s kitchen?
Some days I feel like grabbing young India by its shoulders and saying: wake up and smell the coffee before it is all memory and bitter drugs…
