Destinies, dynasties, and upstart pickpockets

We left Bhubhaneswar the next morning. We headed towards the Andhra Pradesh border, to cross over into Vishakhapatnam. Under our helmets, and constantly under the duress of the brutal heat, both Rohan and I silenced into our shells. But, I once again noticed the coloured cables of Reliance. They started to line our route once again.

While riding towards the Andhra border I saw something that excited me. A board read “Operation Kuchhapa, RushiKulya.” I persuaded Rohan to take a detour to check out this site that was the mouth of an estuary where the precious Olive Ridley turtles washed up to lay eggs. Olive Ridleys are a much written about rare species, and there was much anxiety for their survival. Enough to launch several well funded projects. Rohan rode our Bullet through some very narrow ridges in the dried up fields till we reached the place, a longish riverine beach. But there was nobody around. We had asked the villagers in the area to guide us to the project site that was announced on the highway to Vizakhapatnam. When we did, the loneliness and general lack of inhabitation once again aroused our bladders.

We were still in some sort of dilemma about what to do next, since I was the one excited about Olive Ridley turtles, while Rohan was the one excited about mileage and when we would reach Vizakhpatanam. Then, a tall shy man came seeking us. We were surprised. He walked to us, and said he was Rabindra Saha. He was the local man on the site who was involved with the project of saving the Olive Ridleys. And he said that due to an unexpected eventuality, the winds that were to herald the arrival of the Olive Ridleys for their annual mating, egg-laying and disappearing act had been postponed. So no candid photography of mating Olive Ridleys.

Saha seemed the typical Orissa youth. Excessively modest, almost defensive. We chatted him up. He had a series of amateur photographs with him in two albums. We flicked through them and saw the entire process of mating, laying eggs, hatching, and the confoundingly touching ritual of the tiny newborns marching into the sea. Few survive long enough to be adults in the sea. He also told us, that they had set transmitters on three or four of the turtles as a part of their experiment to track their travels.

Out of the three, one was last tracked to Colombo in Sri Lanka. The scientists, Saha’s masters, had also tracked one to Madagascar. Then they lost track. The third transmitter never responded.

Inevitably, Saha discovered that Rohan and I were not the world’s most obsessive environmentalists seeking to stake all to ensure that the Olive Ridleys survived and flourished. We started chatting a little more. He said that he had worked with Narendra and Rajendra Bedi in the Himalayas. He had assisted the master wildlife photographers and film makers with wildlife films in the Himalayas. The Bedi brothers are the Spielbergs of wildlife photography in India. When he mentioned his real brush with fame, I was astounded that he would risk so much for the turtles. Or he should wait this long to drop names that would have got any set of urban eyes rolling up in disbelief. And to think, he was proffering that most prized part of his career with such modesty, as to be almost apologetic.

Orissa itself in many ways was like Saha. Too modest to be assertive, too rich to hide its own current penury. The state’s current chief minister is Naveen Patnaik. He is the brother of the author of Karma Cola, Geeta Mehta. He is the son of the state’s legendary chief minister Biju Patnaik. Though he is the ruler of Orissa, he does not know the language of the state, Oriya. And yet, he won the elections easily.

Orissa seemed to have hypnotised itself into castration. How else can one explain a state with a very modern leader, a foreign educated leader, even his distance from his roots do not come in the way of his winning popular elections. It was another case of the Indian people’s love, faith and touching trust in dynasties. Naveen was another legatee who walked into the state and was promptly crowned with his dead father’s political legacy.

But Naveen himself is as much at sea as any contemporary non-native urban would be in Orissa. His leadership is not as astute or savvy as his bytes to national English television. He is closed in among some senior bureaucrats, and either unaware or unwilling to see that the people on the streets and villages of Orissa do not see him. He is the anti-thesis of Laloo Prasad Yadav, Bihar’s cherubic and imperiously clownish chief minister. While Patnaik is hemmed in by his trusted kitchen coterie, probably drawing up grand plans to reinvigorate Orissa, Laloo Prasad Yadav spends some months in jail, plants his wife to mind his chief minister’s chair, and every now and then bursts into the countryside to do a jig here, or pull a prank somewhere else.

Laloo, without any plans for upliftment of Bihar will remain a political force for sometime, while Patnaik, with all his planning and perhaps even a vision he keeps strictly unpolluted by populism, is unlikely to be a political force in his own state for long. Ironic, for when we crossed Orissa’s border we had stepped into another zone of assault; another variation of the mini theatre where Indian regional identities, destinies and politics clashed, steamed, cauldroned, and fought off an incomprehensible future with the bold choices of compulsive gamblers.

We crossed over to Andhra Pradesh.

A state so overly renowned for its World Bank-International Monetary Fund darling, son-of-the-soil chief minister. Chandrababu Naidu. Naidu did not have the blessings of an aristocratic family like Patnaik did, though he did belong to the first family of recent Andhra Pradesh politics. He was the estranged son-in-law of a demigod matinee idol who was crowned chief minister of the state. And, he was not the favourite either. But after some not so elegant skirmishes, and a fight off with the not-so-popular second wife of NT Rama Rao, Naidu became a begrudged candidate who found himself the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh.

But then on, the story took a most dramatic turn. Naidu, over the years, became known for his zeal for development, modernisation, and hitching his state’s economic wagon to the Information Technology star. He learnt the tricks of the trade, not in hallowed B-schools, but in his single minded focus on the uplift of the state’s profile. Soon, Naidu was the favourite of a whole lot of the thalidomide offspring of the Washington Consensus. He grasped the idea of modernisation, and its short cuts on the cyber highway very fast.

He invested heavily into IT. He converted Hyderabad, the state’s capital into the capital of Indian IT. He cranked up futuristic skyscrapers in the Nizam’s Hyderabad, cleared the bureaucratic red tape for IT heroes, and eventually notched up the reputation of being a tech savvy, development friendly and above all visionary young leader.

The irony is very marked. Naveen Patnaik, with all his foreign education and blue blood remains the clueless chief minister of a poor state, while Naidu, a street smart Johnny-come-lately into politics itself, has upstaged every other regional leader into international spotlight for above all else, his grasp and intuitive understanding of the modern world.

It is not funny, this contrast. Though Bill Gates would gladly meet Naidu, even seek him out, the chief minister still had a very diffident, halting familiarity with English. Not surprisingly, Renuka Chowdhury, an articulate lecturer turned politician under the influence of the iconic NTR, who later defected from Naidu’s party described him with typical feminine audacity as a man with the looks of “a bus stand pickpocket.”

The two states bordering Orissa seem to have hemmed in Naveen Patnaik. In the North, Bihar was being run disastrously, though thoroughly, by a man riding only on charisma and rhetoric. In the South, Andhra Pradesh was being run by a man only on the strength of earnestness and the chutzpah of the pickpocket. Both these neighbours have only heightened and made more starkly visible the political and economic bankruptcy of the blue blooded, highly educated chief minister’s own state.

Bihar seems to have booked all the slots on the 15-minutes of fame band of India’s national consciousness, while Andhra Pradesh tops or is in the top bracket in most graphs of technical and economic indicators, with prized access “to decision makers” of the international corporate world.

This sense of a moral, cultural and economic limbo that hung like a recalcitrant mist over the vast graveyard of history that was Orissa, repulsed me. It was, however, not the repulsion of the foreign tourist. It was more the uncomfortably jerky revulsion of a part-stake holder, making it a profoundly superficial act of churlishness. While we biked out into Andhra Pradesh, I felt Orissa was in need of some shock treatment. Even a parochial party much like the ultra militant Shiv Sena, constantly walking the tightrope of democratic existence with civilian militancy, or the emotional Tamil nationalism of the Dravidian parties. Somebody somewhere needed to jolt Orissa into attention. I do not think there is much scope to call for Oriya pride and galvanise the people there. Oriya pride is a pathetically drugged ghost. It will never be awakened. If at all, it will only be pushed and thrust into moans and jerks suggesting life. But that life too is a very vegetative one.

The last resort might be to give the Oriyas an enemy, a common enemy. A potent and strong cause that will unite the Oriya people against something, because they were too defeated a people to be awakened by a rhetorical call to “arise, awake, and stop not.” To me, a pitiable tableau of this impotent and vacuous concept of grandeur was played out by long- haired children at the dance maestro Magoni Das’s residence. They sang, a little- too- dated rendition of one of the many hot- housed lyrics of nationalism during the Kargil skirmish with Pakistan, though the song being performed itself was expressly in honour of our visit. It ended with a warning of retaliation by the “Oriya braves.”

In all probability, the VHP is the party that might do it; provide the Oriyas with an enemy. Again, they might dilute the Oriya identity into a nebulous “Hindu nationalism,” and merely recruit the state and its passive people into the monkey army the organisation has been raising to herald their version of Hindu India. In all probability, they would re-enact their “Gujarat model” in Orissa.

There too the contrast was visual drama. Gujarat is one of the country’s richest states. When that state bought the ideology of Hindutva and the VHP’s extremism, the powerful business class were venture capitalists putting their money on an ideological horse.

They were merely out to put gestating money on an excitable horse. Even if they lost, it would not affect anything in their life styles. If Orissa did indeed slip into the VHP camp, it would be one of the poorest state’s people collectively taking a last desperate gamble. If Orissa slips, it will be because of its vulnerability. For lack of choice. It would be much like the state’s tribals embracing Christianity; they were merely choosing between the devil and the deep sea. If they survived their first choice, their second choice was their destiny. Much like Kafka’s parable Before the Law.

As in Sambhalpur, my first stop in Orissa eight days ago, and now when I was leaving the state, my fears coagulated into the image of that sparse man, Dara Singh, who torched a middle aged missionary and his two young children inside the jeep they were sleeping in.

We glide into Vizakhapatanam as the evening sun slouches away, and when we enter the port city, it is a revelation. After Bubhaneswar, we had been travelling through parched landscape. There was greenery, but not overwhelming. Besides, the road was snaking through vast expanses of dry land patched with shrubbery. The heat did not let the mind or the eye suck in too much pleasantry from the patches of faraway green. Besides, there was no drama in the landscape. It was neither the lush green of picture postcard landscapes, nor did it have the harsh majesty of the unforgiving, relentlessly earthen browns of a Jehangir Sabavala landscape. A constantly tiring body and a pair of eyes under twin assault from an unforgiving sun and dust mingled with dense smoke of occasional diesel trucks left the senses capable of recognising only extreme horizons. And the land disappointed on both counts. The senses refused to recognise a more graduated subtlety.

Vizag, as the city is better addressed by most, hardly punctured this vast, semi-barren landscape of the highway with its citylights on the horizon. As it darkened, we were apprehensive that the milestones were lying. Or we were misreading them. But eventually, when we were gliding into the city, we realised that it is almost hidden from the highway. As if a valley had purposely concealed the city from travellers on the highway. Much like Sambhalpur, though there we had the misfortune of having to ride into that town when the street lights were off.

The travelling had exhausted both of us. The cash lost at the Dhaba had started to pinch. We did a quick rain check, and discovered that we could either cut through to Hyderabad, move on towards Bombay through Maharashtra’s southern districts. That would be the shortest route back home. But somehow, somewhere I felt that route was not right.

I felt that a tour on the bike should have at least a mildly exciting trajectory. “Biking through India’s eastern coast”; or “Cutting through Central India, the heart of the sub-continent.” Though we did slice the Indian sub-continent in half by cutting through the dead centre, it was done in the hurry of avoiding the possibly perilous riots in Gujarat, therefore not quite an aware and responsible decision. It was more the result of an aware and self-preserving non-decision.

So when we started off from Bhubaneshwar towards the sub continent’s Eastern slope along the sea, a blurb popped into my head “On the Bullet along India’s eastern Coast.” Not the best motorbike tour, but it suggested a “best of the day” effort of a wannabe blurb writer, on a bad day. Or head towards Madras.

Both some distance. And money was draining. When we pooled the money we realised we had just enough money to reach either one of these cities. There were friends in Madras, but not safe bets. One, they may not be in the city. Second, constantly growing trellises of new relationships might have made a particularly intimate friend a distant, and perhaps, a chancy patron. The only filling station for our fast depleting hope looked like Bangalore.

I had a couple of very casual but close friends in Bangalore. They were not long standing and constantly nourished friendships. But, a bonding I was willing to take a chance with. Besides, there was also a friend’s friend who was also a friend in Bangalore. So, we decided to book our bike and ourselves into the next train to Bangalore on arrival at Vizag. The only impression created by the two hour, late-night visit to Vizag was that it was extraordinarily populated by well-lighted stores, and a lot of ATM machines. It is not without merit that so many of India’s business magazines tote up Vizag as one of the upstart metropolises, because the arterial road of the town is choked with ATM outlets of all the banks and credit cards in the country. Vizag is quite a mini-Bangalore.

This word ‘mini’ is such an Indian favourite. The town of my schooldays, Vapi, was called “mini-Bombay.” Citizens in Vapi were proud to call their town that. And with good reason. Vapi with a huge migrant population, was as much a small town cosmopolitan centre as could be. But there was another, significant shade of difference in mini-Bangalore and mini-Bombay of the seventies and early eighties.

The only thing common between Bombay and Vapi was a mixed population. In the Vizag-Bangalore comparison there was more, the Internet. Bangalore has had a reputation for a benign early- to-bed and early-to-rise cosmopolitanism till the tail years of the eighties and much of the early nineties. But in the late nineties, the city leapfrogged over the rest of the country by riding the software wave.

Many important companies, especially the posterboys of software revolution in India, Infosys and Wipro, are based in Bangalore. Till then known for a mild and hospitable Kannadiga nature, with a flourishing trading class of Punjabis, Sindhis and Marwaris. In fact, Rajasthan Patrika, a Hindi newspaper from Rajasthan has its only edition from outside the state published from Bangalore.

This difference in the general ethnic mix, though still governed by the famed southern conservativeness, was Bangalore’s cosmopolitanism till the advent of the nineties. But since then, the software boom had brought waves of youngsters from all parts of the country streaming into the city. A significant chunk of young, educated, stylish and independent English speaking population expanded and remodelled Bangalore’s cosmopolitanism. It had increased the bandwidth for cosmopolitanism in Bangalore.

So when Vizag was called mini-Bangalore, it was this new element that was reflected. There was a steadily increasing inflow of the educated migrant young from other states that were adding and redefining Vizag. And yes, the one bar and restaurant that was open late night and was not a “Family Bar and Restaurant” served the best fried prawns in Andhra Pradesh. However, neither Rohan nor I can remember the name of the place. And in all probability, neither will any foodie with a byline in any newspapers in the city. So thoroughly unhappening was the place, unlike its fare.

So, early the next morning we loaded our bike onto the train and set out for Bangalore. Since we had booked ourselves into the railway waiting room just above the station, we were in time to reach the packers who strung up some padding over the petrol tank and the handle of the Bullet. The law required that the tank be emptied, or at least be near empty. In the interests of pre-empting a fire in the train, I guess.

Rohan, immediately struck up a conversation with the men who were to pack the vehicle. In Vizag, as in many Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka towns, Hindi works as well. Besides, India has perhaps the biggest network of polyglots along the country’s railway lines. That explains Rohan, with his Bombay Hindi, communicating perfectly well with Telugu speaking coolies to the get done what is universally done in India, getting a better deal by crook.

After finishing the form-filling routine when I stepped out and down from that mezzanine office, Rohan was walking away with the coolies at the other end of the railway platform. They were wheeling our steed off into the luggage compartment to load it. He was deep in conversation, and I stayed put to watch from afar, since I had our belongings and our seating arrangement was in a bogie that was far from the luggage compartment. Eventually, the cozy talk burst into minor fracas, or so I thought from about 200 metres away. Not violent, but more akin to the contained chemical explosion of sodium in a laboratory jar.

After that, Rohan was smiling and so were the coolies. All this is in mid-shot, lenswise speaking. They had made friends again, I saw from this from a distance, and my partner turned back. He beamed at me his 100 kilowatt, lopsided grin embedded with his 32-strong set of gleaming teeth, visible evidence even from this far. He had managed to keep the tank sufficiently filled above the permissible limit, he had managed to haggle with the coolies to sell the petrol he had to empty, and then paid them only Rs 50, claiming grinding poverty.