Delhi (9 page)

At the day's end, Abhinav said, ‘We will talk, Lidge.' (Zs are borrowed from Persian and Arabic, so now and then you find a Hindu who says
bajaar
not
bazaar
, and who calls me Elijabeth.)

‘Yes, yes!' This was a break, I could feel it. ‘I have so much to ask you about ultra mega power plants!'

He pressed something into my hand, and I beamed at him.

‘I can tell you are lacking direction, Lidge. Look at this,' he wiggled his eyebrows suggestively, ‘and we will talk.'

What? He headed for the exit, then turned dramatically, wearing a messianic look. ‘I will make you
student cum entrepreneur
!'

I looked down. He had handed me a CD in an aggressively orange case. Despite the obvious hints to the contrary, I clung to the belief that it contained vast insights into the world of natural gas, and played it that evening.

Uh-oh. The only gas was metaphorical. It appeared to be a business motivation CD. While the others had shunned the research leper, Abhinav had come over all Mother Teresa and decided to save me from my own sad fate.

I idly googled the company. After a couple of brief detours—Google at first helpfully translated the company name into ‘BBW', the ‘big beautiful women' who tickle a certain type of internet inhabitant—I found it. Crikey Moses. It turned out that, again like Mother Teresa (if Christopher Hitchens' excoriating
The Missionary Position
is to be believed), Abhinav sought to get a little something himself out of his charitable act.

The company looked to rely on a classic ‘multilevel market' scheme (obviously I won't say ‘pyramid' or ‘Ponzi', not at all) in which the top tier accumulates vast wealth from the efforts and hopes of a constantly rotating lower membership. Like a warped version of Avon, the bottom stratum must try to sell overpriced health food and cosmetics to their friends and family—and are encouraged to buy a big chunk themselves. The only way the system makes profits is by continuing to expand, bringing ever more sellers into its orbit and sending ever-greater profits upstairs.

But the company's biggest product was exactly the CD I was listening to: it sold
motivation
. Pre-packaged, gold-plated, Jesus-infused motivation.

The CD continued playing. Its cover showed a grinning middle-aged Indian-American couple; the married couple is the ideal business unit, I learned, obviously with the woman as primary homemaker. The couple looked motivated. You could see it in their teeth.

They dispensed positive thinking and a dollop of evangelical Christian rhetoric as though stacking a dishwasher. The pair had started out at the bottom too, they informed me, but had prayed a lot and taken out loans and worked twenty-three hours a day. Their rise was God-given, because God loves cold hard cash, but humility was not a virtue they took seriously. The inevitable victory was described with relish and a healthy dose of greedy materialism. To paraphrase only somewhat, ‘Look how rich we are! Don't be a loser. Don't you want to be rich like us?' The wife described their cars—five! six! seven!—their beautiful house, their five-star lifestyles. Work hard, think big,
believe
, and all this could be yours. Who wouldn't want to be like them?

Weirdly, that wasn't the only time my interviewees dispensed well-meaning motivational advice to me. Others tried to convert me to Zen Buddhism and an expensive three-daylong, thirteen-hours-a-day forum. Setting aside what these recruitment efforts said about my own networking style, there was clearly something interesting going on.

In CP's pavement bookshops, too, self-help was everywhere. Spread across the slabs were American classics and more recent populist pseudo-psychology. There were feel-good spiritual healing texts from wealthy Indian-Americans and meditation tracts from religious gurus. There were innumerable volumes by Osho, which I first thought was a corporate brand but turned out to be a twinkly-eyed guru with a huge Gandalf beard. The ‘rich man's guru', he littered his texts with jokes and sexual innuendo. By his death in 1990 he had accumulated a giant Oregon ranch, five private jets and become allegedly the world's single largest collector of Rolls Royce cars. His American followers renamed a town after him, and under a rogue lieutenant carried out the United States' first-ever bioterrorist attack in 1984.I think it's fair to say you couldn't make it up.

Together the books promised ‘Six Ways to Make You a Leader', to influence people, to make you popular in eight or ten or twelve steps. (They all seemed to involve a lot of lists.) More than anything, they promised ways to get rich quick. Tellingly, the Hindi version of
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Kaun Banega Crorepati
, is still running and has spawned multiple regional language versions as well as
Slumdog Millionaire
. There were other genres too, sandwiched between chick lit. They promised muscles and makeovers, ideal husbands, the joys of sex, the deciphering of women from venus. ‘Entrepreneurship' seems to have a very real currency.

Could these teach me to be a decisive researcher (and to control Kamala)? I felt my mind pulping beneath the pugnacious clichés: seize the day, embrace the now, learn to love yourself, feel the fear and do it anyway. It was the same language my interviewees used, full of tipping points and black swans. In the twenty-first century you can be whoever you want to be if you try hard enough, so the myth runs. Money is more fungible than ever, and on the internet nobody knows you're a dog. We are all of us in a constant process of fashioning newer shinier selves.

It seemed Delhi, like me, was on a mission for self-improvement.

Around Hauz Khas Village, the grubby fashionista heart that overlooks an old royal lake and some serene ruins, the elite returnees all have big dreams too. Their keyword is ‘start-up', like booting a crotchety old computer. Everyone has one or wants one; everyone's in the perpetual process of beginning things.

‘I have a start-up,' one recent returnee told me, punctuating his American-accented sentences with lazy swirls of his beer bottle. He was casually dressed and bling-free, expansive and charming with the Cheshire cat smile of an American teen drama. He was fond of making a gesture that looked like overturned stool: two fingers and a thumb made a semi-circle in the air, as though twisting a very small plum from a branch. It was distracting, because I'm sure Tony Blair used to do something similar when he was about to start lying.

The Returnee kept waving to new entries—‘that's my old classmate from [insert nonchalant Ivy League college reference here]'. Not for nothing does HKV sometimes try to call itself ‘the Village'. Its icons are international—currently Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The new entrants were instantly recognizable as an Indian take on that international brand, hipsters. A plethora of articles have attempted to define the Indian hipster; just as many argue he is a white elephant. You might think Indian returnees have a leg-up on their white counterparts. Many of the men are already skinny, multilingual, and vaguely metrosexual. The rooftop bar even dispensed hummus and indie music to make them feel at home. The uniform is remarkably similar everywhere: plaid shirts, vintage T-shirts, skinny jeans or shorts, MacBooks in satchels, Palestinian scarves, heavy-framed glasses. (Confession: I was also wearing at least two of the above.) The
Hindustan Times
claims, though, that the Indian hipster would have waited in line for the opening of Delhi's first Starbucks in February 2013, something that would have the Williamsburg crew choking on their organic hibiscus soda.

It is now compulsory for the hipster aristocracy (obvs as
true
hipsters they shun the label) to put the boot into Hauz Khas Village, claiming it's gentrifying too fast to be really credible and expanding too fast to survive. Further down the narrow road cars queued with painful slowness to dispense them at a barrier. The place swarmed under the night sky. The alleys below were a crumbling mass of scuffed bricks and signboards, the narrow unpaved lanes barely able to support the weight of canvas-clad feet. The authorities have threatened several properties with demolition and fines. Admittedly it can be pricey and slow to access, and you see the same people every time. But the rooftop bar was all mood lighting and clean wood. Lower down you find great cakes, artsy memorabilia, and earnest leftwing books. For now it's still just about likeable.

The Returnee had worked for a prestigious international consultancy. ‘My parents just didn't understand why I gave it up! But I spotted a niche—there is always a niche in India—and I was sick of being a drone. I wanted to work for myself.'

He paused to drag on a cigarette and wave to some more new entries. A live world music band had wandered on. One straddled a cello, another wielded an oud, the stumpy fat-bellied Arabic lute. The straggly-haired singer was warbling so loudly that the Returnee had to shout the final words.

‘But really I'm here to
give something back.'

Elite Indians of my generation are very different to the previous lot. Firstly, they've embraced the corporate sector to an extent unimaginable to the old Nehruvian elite. Secondly, they can actually imagine returning to India for good. Not for them the safe world of state employment or the permanent relocation to Texas. At long last, India's ‘brain drain'—to NASA, Silicon Valley, and beyond—may be transforming into an elite-educated ‘brain gain'. Thirdly, they are secure enough to think outside the profit box, confident they're employable the world over. Along with the rat race, they're just as likely to be found studying postmodernism, running non-profit organizations or doing a stint for ‘Teach for India', the subcontinent's new equivalent of the huge American scheme. In fact, they are indistinguishable in many ways from my British-born Oxford classmates. They're just more confident—and more optimistic.

For the less well off, success is similar but perhaps less radical. Defining the ‘middle classes' is difficult in any country. This is all the more true in India, where data on income is often sketchy and only 2.5 percent of people pay income tax. Sometimes the middle class is defined not by its income but by its conspicuous consumption, especially of white goods: television, fridges, scooters, cars, computers—all common dowry components.

Alternatively, you might spot the middle classes according to their future plans. The aspiring middle classes nurse a cult of the ‘three Es': education, English-speaking, and entrepreneurship. It's there in the English-laden signboards, the roadside ads for computer lessons, the surfeit of business cards.

The first step is to move to the city and send your kids to school. Twice a day our road played host to a parade of SUVs. Chubby kids clambered in and out, into a school decked with computer labs and Hogwarts-style inter-house competitions. There is a range to suit all budgets. At least a third of Delhi children attend private schools or top-up state education with private tutoring; a 2011 Credit Suisse survey suggested Indians typically spend 7.5 percent of their income on education, ahead of the Chinese, Russians and Brazilians. Aspiring parents, even the very poor, save up to ensure that some of their children, especially sons, can escape the government system. The cheapest schools cost only a handful of dollars a month, and many lack official recognition. The teachers earn considerably less than their state-employed peers—though they're more likely to show up.