Book review: The Beautiful And The Damned

The Beautiful And The Damned: Life In The New India
Siddhartha Deb
Penguin/Viking
253 pages
Rs499

In recent times, there has been no dearth of ‘India’ books that use easy generalisations as building blocks to construct a portrait of the nation that bears as much resemblance to reality as dieting does to starvation. The white man has been kind enough to bear some of this burden of explaining India to Indians, with a host of ‘India correspondents’, biographers, historians, and NRI coconuts (brown outside, white inside) taking a passage to India, and taking a passage out with a book that has ‘India’ in the title.

In the past couple of months, however, two remarkable books have broken this trend of macro-pontification with their micro-reportage. Aman Sethi’s A Free Man was one. Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful And The Damned, which released in India this month, though in an amputated form, is the other.

Deb’s book comes adorned with a pink paper necklace. The necklace bears a message for the reader: “The first chapter of this book has been removed in accordance with a court order.”

Arindam Chaudhuri, the head of Indian Institute of Planning and Management, whose grinning face has bludgeoned its way into public consciousness by virtue of sheer advertising power, was the subject of the excised chapter, titled ‘The Great Gatsby’.

As Deb observes in a note appended to the book, “There is a sad irony to the fact that a book about contemporary India, while available in full in most of the world, appears only in partial form for Indian readers. But that in itself says something about the state of affairs in India these days, where critiques of the powerful and wealthy, no matter how scrupulously researched, are subject so often to intimidation.”

Indeed, a deep sadness pervades the multiple narratives through which Deb seeks to present his impressions of 21st century India. He meets Indians from across the social spectrum: NRI entrepreneurs seeking security in million-dollar houses built on farmland-turned-SEZ-turned-residential real estate; farmers bankrupted by seed dealers who are themselves victims of forces unleashed by the free market; fresh-faced village youth who join a steel manufacturing sweatshop, and are reduced, in a matter of years, to shriveled, dried out shells of the men they used to be; a middle-class girl from Manipur who dreams of ‘making it’ in a city that barely acknowledges her claim to ‘Indianness’.

Deb’s prose has the transparency of a glass of cold water. It is refreshing, without being distracting. Sample, for instance, his description of workers in their ‘barracks’ at a steel factory near Hyderabad: “The men appeared shabby and their bodies looked worn out by the work, shorn of flab without being muscular. Some of them carried pots of water to go behind the barracks for a shit. Others pumped small stoves to get the fire going for their evening meal. There was no hint of domesticity about the food being prepared, nor any sign of pleasure. They chopped the vegetables mechanically, smoked a cigarette or a beedi, and urinated into the gutter.”

Perhaps the saddest story of all is the one you won’t find in the book — that of Arindam Chaudhuri. On the surface, his is a self-made success story of new India: starting off as a middle-class youth with one small business school set up by his father, Chaudhuri today is an enormously wealthy man presiding over an empire that traverses education, media, publishing, films, and public relations. Or so it seems. We can’t be sure, because we are allowed to have only Chaudhuri’s word for it. Indeed, what Deb does, and does well enough to piss off Chaudhuri, is to lay bare the pathos of this success story.

In what ought to be the defining quote of the book, Chaudhuri informs Deb, “I don’t like an image of me that isn’t me.” In a curious twist of irony, it transpires that Chaudhuri, the successful tycoon, is no more successful than the successful projection of an image of success. If his image crumbles, his entire business model and success story, both of which rest on this carefully constructed persona of Chaudhuri as an uber-successful businessman, might begin to unravel. Hence the intimidation through defamation suits, and the millions spent on advertisements to prop up Brand Arindam.

But what kind of success is this — one that is entirely image-built? There is a word in English for an image that has no basis in reality: ‘mirage’. As Deb observes, Chaudhuri’s “was the face of the new India.” His story, which is also the story of contemporary India, is about the victory of appearance over reality. It is the story of how appearances give rise to aspirations, which, when they fall short of realisation, give birth to another regime of appearances.

Reality itself is banished from such a world, by a court order if necessary. To enter reality, one has to go into exile. It is perhaps sadly fitting that in such an India, there is no place for a story like the one Deb seeks to narrate.

It is a truism that India after economic reforms is not the same country it was pre-liberalisation. A small minority that has benefited from it, and happily dominates the media, does for India what Chaudhuri does for himself — project a mythology of success, especially to moneybags abroad. This writer has personally met foreign investors who, taken in by the hype, land up here all excited to be a part of the ‘India story’, and then experience a series of emotional states that must be familiar to students who end up in B-schools promoted by fast-talking ‘visionaries’.

Remove the beautiful wrapping that is Shining India, you get Rotting India. The beautiful and the damned are not two Indias; they are two ways of seeing the same India. Do not miss this book.