Friends,
It is late evening where I am. I've worked a long day, done 45 minutes of rigorous exercise, but I'm not hungry for dinner, not at all. A little while ago, I remembered the last time I felt like this. It was many, many years ago when awaiting the results of very large scale board or entrance exams.
Not a mere world cup sporting event, no... while we can abandon ourselves completely to the excitement of cricket in the moment, there is yet something within me (at any rate) that retains a broader awareness that cricket is just a game. Tonight is like a morning many years ago, waiting for one of those moments on which your entire life would turn, shoulder-to-shoulder with crores of others who, like you, had invested their hopes, labour, time and wealth into a trial of colossal significance.
To pass the time until counting actually begins, let me tell you a story. It's a true story. This happened about a month ago, when I got a rare peek at the crumbling foundations of a shadowy empire.
A close relative of mine received a Padma Award, and in the last week of April, I flew to New Delhi for the ceremony.
Arriving in New Delhi after 16 hours in the air was strange enough. Every other time I've flown into India, Jet Airways has unfailing provided every passenger with an immigration and customs form to fill out prior to landing. Not this time. We were told: sorry for the inconvenience, but no forms are available.
What to do? I marched through the endless corridors of IGI terminal 3, carry-on in tow, and arrived at the Immigration Counter. But to my surprise, no one there was offering any forms to fill out either. I waited my turn in the unusually fast-moving line. At the counter, the official cursorily glanced at my passport and stamped it. There was no expectation, it seemed, of the form that I always hand over to Immigration when arriving in my home country.
Things got stranger. I asked outside customs: do we need to fill a form to get through? No, not at all, not unless you have something to declare, came the answer; otherwise you can go.
I walked out into the blistering Delhi night, fully aware of two things. First, apart from the stamp in my own passport, the Government of India had no record whatsoever of my arrival in the country, what flight I came in on, what date, where I intended to stay... nothing. Secondly, my carry-ons could have been filled with a million dollars in cash, or however many kilos of RDX, heroin, Bibles, take your pick. And nobody responsible for enforcing the law would have known a thing.
This, at a time when elections were already in full swing. I have never flown into Delhi before, so I hope someone can enlighten me if this is normal there.
I was driven to Ashoka Hotel, ITDC, and checked into my room. The Ashoka is one hell of a weird place. There is exactly one simpering sitar-and-violin orchestral tune, probably composed by All-India Radio's in house staff, that constantly... I mean constantly... plays on the PA system. It is inescapable... at the reception, in the lobby, in the corridors, in the elevators, in the coffee shop, everywhere you go this tune is playing through the speakers day and night. Inside the rooms you see a strange portmanteau of hurried excess fallen to hopeless decay. There some obviously expensive chrome fixtures that control the electrics, ornate fittings in the bathroom, a personal fridge and tea-kettle, a flat screen SAMSUNG TV... and only about half this stuff works. It brought to mind the Commonwealth Games... vast amounts of money, some of it spent on outward appearances of sparing no expense while the rest was pocketed, and nothing left afterwards to stop the quick decline into disrepair and rot.
The next morning, jet-lagged out of my brain, I accompanied the awardee and some other family members to Rashtrapati Bhavan.
I will say this. The White House has nothing, nothing whatsoever, on where the President of India lives. It was, after all, constructed to overawe even the wealthiest and most aristocratic of our princes. Once we rolled in through a heavily militarized side-gate, the great sandstone edifice sprawled everywhere... 5 whole acres of built-up area, surrounded by even more acres of Mughal gardens laid out in perfect, manicured symmetry. We climbed up a long flight of marble stairs, each the breadth of a cricket pitch; behind us towered the dull pink shaft of the Jaipur Column. After a series of pat-downs and metal detectors, we shuffled through a yawning archway into the cavernous Durbar Hall, its great vault shaped in a likeness of the Sanchi Stupa.
Inside the Durbar Hall were government servants. So many, many government servants. There were perhaps 20 rows of seats for the guests, and at least 25 ushers in pale grey safari suits, bumping into each other as they tried to show you to your seat. There was at least one major-domo wearing a full suit and tie whose sole job it was to usher people to the bathroom. Right to Employment, I thought. Then there were of course, more people in pale grey safari suits who were not unctuous and pot-bellied but wiry and steely eyed... putting those guys in plainclothes couldn't have fooled anybody. In addition there were guards in full ceremonial uniform of the Jaipur Lancers, stone-faced, standing by each of the naves and alcoves that ringed the Durbar Hall. Scarlet banners embossed with the seal of Bharat in gold hung, perhaps 30 feet long, from the walls around. The panoply was impressive, but I had to wonder... if they had only half the number of government servants there, not only would the ceremony have been more efficiently run, but they'd probably have needed only a quarter of the security detail.
Then, with a blast of fanfare, a dozen more Jaipur Lancers marched down the aisle, each over six feet tall. Barely visible through the column was the nut-brown head of someone who seemed a child in comparison. The Rashtrapati had arrived.
The ceremony went off slowly and unremarkably, though of course I was happy for all the awardees, and particularly my family member.
It was the reception afterwards that was most interesting. It took place in the Ashoka Hall, separated from the Durbar by an immense interior courtyard and several expanses of broad, carpeted steps.
I am not a Dilli Billi. My family and I are many light-years away from that set, or even from the cocktail-party circuit in our hometown of Mumbai. So it was extremely odd for us to be in this room full of people where every fifth or sixth person you looked at was someone ordinarily visible, to the likes of us, only on television screens or newspaper images. It wasn't impressive or awe-inspiring, just very fundamentally weird.
The Rashtrapati was there, of course. He is a tiny, tiny man... not even five feet tall is my guess. During the ceremony, he stood on a raised platform that hiked him up perhaps eight inches relative to those he was pinning medals on. He was a gracious host, and personally went around greeting each and every awardee and all their guests, even me, with a namaste and a large, gap-toothed grin. Jet-lagged as I was, the experience of seeing Pranabda up close was surreal. I noticed, too, that while his thinning hair is all grey, his eyebrows are startlingly black.
There is a certain way that the Delhi elite have of comporting themselves at social events. People with a glass or hors-d'oeuvre in hand will look at you over the shoulder, out of the corner of their eye, size you up for familiarity, see if you are anybody they should be bothered to acknowledge or talk to... then, dismissing you quickly for a nobody, they will neatly swivel their torso and neck away as if to make it appear that they hadn't noticed you in the first place.
I got this sort of sidelong glance from a Sikh military officer in dress greens. Shamelessly, I continued to gawk at him after he swiveled away. It was only after reading his shoulder insignia that I realized this was Bikram Singh. Not a very impressive sort, for all the ribbons sprouting from his chest.
Shuffling past the garden door was another Sikh, shorter, with an unmistakable blue turban. I have to tell you, that pagdi is immense. It is at least twice the regular ratio of pagdi-to-Sikh that we are generally accustomed to seeing. And on Manmohan Singh's brow, the turban seemed to weigh a hundred kilos. He shuffled by like a creature coccooned in his very own ethical frame of reference, almost unaware of where he was going or who was around him. His jaw was set in some sort of general-purpose grimace, perhaps an attempt to look sociable. Behind his glasses, the eyes were unseeing slits. As I watched him, his palms and elbows would sometimes jerk up, mechanically, in a namaste to no one in particular. I think that had been a hard morning for Dr. Singh... he had just found out, from a bellowing press corps, that his own brother had joined the BJP. I wonder, if he had read half the things I have written about him over the past ten years, whether that mummified expression on his face would have changed at all.
Turning around, I saw that my mother was actually conversing with an elegant Punjabi lady in a floral pink sari and gold-rimmed glasses. She didn't look fancy at all... no jewelry to speak of, and she projected no attitude of being anything but the sort of pleasant "auntie" you might see your mother or sister chatting with at a wedding. It was only later that I realized this lady was Manmohan Singh's wife, Gursharan Kaur. Whatever I may think of Manmohan Singh and his government, I have to say that Gursharan Kaur was a very down-to-earth person, at least in a social setting, with no "First Lady" airs whatsoever. She appeared at least 10 years younger than her husband, and in a much calmer mood.
In sharp contrast to the gloomy figure of the Prime Minister was Sushil Kumar Shinde. This guy is a consummate politician. The expression he wore on his face can only be described by this:
Looking like a criminal tomcat with his gleaming bald head and his stout bulk crammed into a beige bandh-gala suit, he bobbed around the reception, effusively greeting some guests (fellow Dilli Billis and select political awardees) while utterly ignoring others. If he was worried at all about how the elections were going, he showed no sign of it.
It was all getting too unreal for me, so I decided to concentrate on the food. I had been looking forward to the food for some time... after all, you would imagine Rashtrapati Bhavan sets the highest table in the land, no? Unfortunately, it was not so. I've eaten better at many weddings. There were: very ordinary samosas, even more ordinary veg sandwiches, a watery paneer shashlik, halfway-decent chicken tikkas, and for desert an anar-bhog as well as a "nut brownie" (basically a sponge cake with a tiny fragment of nut buried somewhere in each slice). I guess the Commonwealth Games really drained the budget for this sort of thing. Either that, or the caterer (probably retained for a handsome retainer-plus-kickback by Sushil Kumar Shinde) reaped one hell of a profit from the event.
The government servants were still everywhere... uniformed bearers who couldn't manage to keep the limbu-pani glasses or the coffee/tea carafes filled, and dozens of grey-safari-suit guys who milled about doing absolutely nothing at all.
As we drove away from this bizarre event, I couldn't help thinking that I'd glimpsed the last days of a stagnant, dysfunctional regime at its very heart. There was a lassitude here, a sense of going through the motions while fully understanding that no matter what you did, it couldn't possibly have any significance. A helplessness, a stultifying indifference radiated from Manmohan Singh like a beacon, brighter than his starched white kurta; like paralyzing afternoon heat, it enervated everyone around him, the entire apparatus of his government and all its hangers-on. The sense I had there was the feeling you had going to a government-owned bank in the bad old days when they were all nationalized... nobody cared, everybody behind every desk knew fully well that whatever service they did or did not provide, it wouldn't make any difference. In fact, the only difference was that in the banks, the Prime Minister was a photograph in a frame. Here the Prime Minister was not a photograph in a frame... but he might as well have been.
And that's my story. Count on!
Traitor eating Lion hopefully. 
He was eager, even desperate, for some change that he could not quite explain.