Comment

What does Afzal Guru, the man sentenced to death for the attack on India’s parliament, Kiran Desai, the Booker prize winner, the hijabans referred to by Blair as being signs of Muslim separatism, or me, unshaven, and travelling in a first class compartment from Bandra to Churchgate with a torn gym bag, have in common? We are all part of the great identity game, a lot of which is played out in the media, with spectacular winners and losers.

‘Identity’ is a wrestling match in which society can pin you down brutally.

If you want to be seen as being from a village, or from among the urban poor, you dress like Medha Patkar, or if Muslim, then you wear a hijab — that’s fine, but it’s another thing if you don’t want to but are identified, like a cockroach suddenly exposed, and zaalim samaaj reaches for that shoe. Kiran Desai seems to have the most play with her identity: to Rediff she can say that she is a Delhi girl, to The Guardian she says she is uncomfortable everywhere (meaning also that she can’t be held down by That Question).

Afzal Guru loses the identity game every day. He is convicted, sentenced to death, awaiting a decision on clemency. But there are so many questions that have been unanswered, which the media have not asked, since they really identify him as Kashmiri, Muslim, male of a certain age, and therefore, a terrorist. Afzal did not at all have a competent defence in the trial — many commentators have admitted this — the evidence against Afzal went unchallenged and hence the Supreme Court in the appeal looked at the same evidence. Three of the others charged, who had better lawyers, have been acquitted of conspiracy. It’s fair to say that the crucial trial Afzal has lost is in the media: every time his story hits the headlines it is accompanied in all the papers by that one picture of him. You have seen it. And you see it again (right) here.

There should be something like an identity index which is a rating for individuals marking the number of public identities they can hold. On a scale of one to ten, Kiran would be a ten and Afzal zero. I see a future where the young, and not that young, will be encouraged to get a good grade on the identity index, just as they are encouraged to be good in math and English and in Internet savviness. There will be tests which will advance your ranking: Can you get into the mahurat of Khosla Ka Ghosla at Cinemax in Andheri without passes? Can you pass as a global Indian when looking for a flat in Bandra — landlords trust you more — and appear local, not NRI, when buying an airline ticket and checking in (NRIs are charged more).

At the Park Hotel off Connaught Place in Delhi, where the bar is patronised by young professionals from call centers, I realised during the course of an evening that the hip — dancing-to-the-DJ-belted tunes — had never left India. It didn’t hit me how much one doesn’t anymore need a missionary school education, or an American liberal arts education, as passports to social mobility until a South Bombay friend said she had started seeing a guy who works in a BPO and lives in Malad. She had met him at Totos in Bandra.

So now to me riding a train post 7/11, with a worn out gym bag (I had a game at Bombay gym, I needed to get there in 45 min from Bandra). It was the fag end of rush hour, and in the first class compartment everyone had shaved that morning, some sporting the odd moustache of course. I wasn’t aware of all this until I realised I was getting a multiple number of looks. In my T-shirt and faded jeans I was looking like any number of those men hanging around Lucky Restaurant, who I think cool, like Amitabh out of Deewaar.

Anyway, clearly the look I was sporting wasn’t cool in this first class context of white collar men, so I ejected out of Deewaar and went straight into a Shah Rukh mould (i.e. not-angry-at-the-world Man), took out my cell phone, called a girl, and said rather loudly: “Hey babe, guess what, I am taking a walk on the wild side.” They may not get the reference to the Lou Reed song, but clearly my speaking in English, addressed to a female, helped. Three faces turned away and one turned his ear to hear.

Email: r_ansari@dnaindia.net