Adventures in Correspondentland (27 page)

In South Asia, politics did not just intrude on sport, the two were indivisible, and not for 14 years had the Indian Government allowed the national team to embark upon a fully fledged tour of Pakistan. Cricketing ties had been severed completely after an attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, which India blamed on Pakistan-sponsored militants, and thus the Pakistani Government, and the two sides had not met anywhere on the subcontinent since the beginning of the new millennium.

From the speed at which the 33,000 tickets sold out – there were riots in Karachi when they first went on sale – to the queues for visas outside the Pakistani embassy in Delhi, the pre-tour atmospherics – or mood music, as diplomats often call it – were encouraging to say the least.

On match day, fans transformed the terraces of the ground into a subcontinental fiesta. Rather than the usual face-paint
nationalism, Pakistanis turned up with the flags of both nations daubed on their cheeks. Many carried aloft banners with messages such as ‘We Wish Friendship Forever'. Someone had sown together a massive flag combining the Indian and Pakistani colours, featuring the slogan ‘One blood'. Exceptionally beautiful Karachi women, wearing tight-fitting white T-shirts and oversized designer sunglasses, and carrying ripped-off Louis Vuitton handbags, found themselves sitting next to exceptionally beautiful Indian women in precisely the same get-up.

Most remarkable of all, perhaps, was the reaction to Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, the scions of India's most famous political dynasty, who appeared in the stands joyfully brandishing the Indian tricolour. This in a city that their grandmother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, had bombed during the 1971 war. In years past, the Gandhis would have run the risk of being lynched. Now, though, they were received like idols. It was almost as improbable as watching the Bush twins turn up for a football match in Baghdad to a standing ovation.

To crown the day, the cricket was superb as well, with the drought between the two countries ending with a freakish cloudburst of runs, the most ever scored up until that time in a one-day international. Chasing a gigantic winning total of 350, Pakistan's flabby captain, Inzamam-ul-Haq, scored 122 off 102 balls – a characteristically nonchalant innings greeted in the stands with chants of ‘
Aloo, aloo
', or ‘Potato, potato'. Needing a six off the final ball of the match, however, the home side just fell short.

After the match, we adjourned to a rooftop barbecue joint overlooking the port, where open stoves were lined with Seekh, Reshmi and Afghan kebabs, and the walls adorned with
photographs of the owner greeting General Musharraf, whose bouffon looked even more magnificent than normal. Kicking back with a non-alcoholic mocktail, I felt that Karachi had the carefree air of the Riviera, although the women were arguably more stunning.

What we had seen that day was Pakistan's often silent middle class asserting itself much more strongly. They were people who wanted to dress well, to eat in fashionable restaurants, to have the latest mobile phones and to match India's fast-rising living standards. The problem they were up against, however, was that violent nihilists wanted to shape the country's future and expressed themselves much more forcefully.

Our trip to Karachi, a city that the writer William Dalrymple pithily described as South Asia's Beirut, offered proof of that as well. In the run-up to the cricket match, the Pakistani police had turned Karachi's National Stadium into a citadel, encircling it with armoured vehicles, troops and sharpshooters, such was the fear of a suicide-bomb attack. As an added precaution, various decoy convoys fanned out from the Indian team's hotel in the hope of foxing militants who might be waiting in ambush for their coach.

Our hotel and theirs, the Sheraton, had been bombed during the New Zealand cricket team's last visit in June 2002, an attack that killed 11 French engineers and three Pakistanis. Next door was the US consulate, an outpost so heavily fortified that it resembled a cliff-top gun emplacement ready at any moment to repel an invasion. Twice since 9/11, it had been hit by jihadists, ranking it third on the list of America's most dangerous embassies or consulates, after Baghdad and Kabul. Only days after the cricket ended, it was targeted again, when militants tried to detonate a van loaded with 200 gallons of liquid explosives that was parked
outside (which made sense of our precaution never to open the curtains in our hotel rooms, since they overlooked the consulate).

The host to a wave of anti-American protests since 9/11, in which US flags and effigies of George W. Bush were torched with paraffin, Karachi performed a dual role for al-Qaeda. It was a key recruiting ground and a frequent target.

Also close to the Sheraton was the street corner where the
Wall Street Journal
's South Asian bureau chief Daniel Pearl had been abducted in January 2002. Nine days later, he was butchered by his captors, who hacked off his head and cut his body into ten pieces – an execution that they released with grotesque pride three weeks later as a beheading video entitled ‘The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist – the Jew Daniel Pearl'.

Pearl's successor at the
Journal
became a good friend and followed the procedure, whenever he was on the road in Pakistan, of regularly ringing New York to assure his editors of his safety. By now, however, all the foreign journalists in the region were much more risk averse in the face of al-Qaeda's barbarism. Again, this made Pakistan infuriatingly difficult to cover, because it was so difficult to get access to the key players: the jihadists themselves. Correspondents usually show a wilful disregard for the strictures of health and safety, but in Pakistan they truly were a matter of life and death. The beheading videos had made us pause.

As Karachi always reminded us, Pakistan was a country with a seemingly never-ending list of problems: the threat from al-Qaeda, other Islamist militants and more recently the Pakistan Taliban; the lawlessness of its tribal regions, where the writ of Islamabad did not extend; the dysfunction of its politics, where corruption was endemic and assassinations were routine; the regular bursts of sectarian violence between the majority Sunni Muslims and
the minority Shias; a little-reported nationalist insurgency, which Islamabad claimed that India was bankrolling, in Balochistan, the country's largest province.

Under that sort of buckling pressure, the state should probably have failed. Yet Pakistan had this extraordinary ability to absorb whatever crisis or calamity befell it, and then to muddle through. However intense the national convulsion, however dire the warnings that it was staring into the abyss, whatever the fears that its nuclear weapons were about to fall into the hands of militants, Pakistan somehow withstood the shock waves. Just.

Flying into Islamabad to cover the latest bombing or political crisis, I was always slightly amused by the in-flight announcement aboard Pakistan International Airlines as we made our final approach: ‘We will be landing in Islamabad in five minutes,
Insha'Allah
[God willing].' Admittedly, I would have preferred something more definite. But also it provided an essential clue to understanding the country down below. In their earthly lives, many Pakistanis seemed reconciled to living in an unending state of crisis and often were inclined to defer to their leaders as a result, whether they be elected prime ministers or military dictators. At times of crisis, this compliant, unquestioning faith had strong adhesive powers. It helped keep the country from falling apart. For all its manifold problems, Pakistan was as Allah intended it to be.

In the slums of Mumbai, where the stench of diesel oil and human excrement putrefied the air and stung the nostrils, we could smell the old India and see the new. We had flown in from Delhi to meet Hermat, a young father who sat almost motionless for hours on end in front of a colour television tuned to one of the 24-hour business-news channels, watching transfixed as a fast-moving ticker covered with corporate hieroglyphics raced from right to left across the bottom of the screen.

Every quarter-hour, the channel replayed a jingle in which a thumping bed of Bhangra music was overlaid with the words ‘Indian Dream'. In his cramped, barely furnished shanty, Hermat was living out his own. With his tiny baby daughter in his lap, a cup of chai in his hand and a ring-bound brochure for the latest Initial Public Offering, or IPO, on his knee, he kept a constant check on the value of his share portfolio. Given the skyward trajectory of the Bombay Stock Exchange, it was rising with each infrequent blink of his eyes.

‘I saw lots of people making money out of the stock market,' he told us. ‘Now I'm doing the same.' Outside his open door, neighbours watched in wonderment, with looks of compliant faith that were reserved normally for holy men and doctors. Each
of them had entrusted Hermat with small amounts of their own money and were waiting to see how quickly he could turn a profit. With India in the throes of a revolution of rising expectations, the feeling was now commonplace that tomorrow would be better than today. And here we were witnessing the oddest of oxymorons: a newly gentrified slum. In a country where hope had always fought a running battle with despair, even the poor were daring to dream.

Always a land of jolting disparities, never had they been more pronounced. The new collided with the old. The rich accelerated away from the vast majority of the poor. The beautiful averted their gaze from the wretched. And, rather usefully for the purposes of television, often the contrasts could be captured with a simple tilt, pan or zoom of the camera lens. Just down the road from Hermat's shanty in Mumbai, we filmed jetliners gliding in to land at the international airport, and then tilted down to the corrugated shacks just metres from the runway that lay on the fringes of Asia's largest slum.

In Hyderabad, the mirror-glassed citadels of hi-tech Cyberabad sat atop a hill, their satellite dishes angled upwards, while a Third World shanty occupied the valley down below.

In Calcutta, you did not even have to adjust the camera to catch in the same frame a chauffeur-driven Mercedes or BMW overtaking a rickshaw propelled by a willowy human puller.

At any major junction in any major city, you could film street urchins with hands outstretched and heads tilted pleadingly, then slowly pan across to the traffic jam of newly imported cars, with electric windows firmly shut and passengers peering implacably ahead. Useful as this particular footage often was, we used it sparingly. After all, we were often the ones sitting in the
air-conditioned comfort of the BBC's fleet of four-wheel drives, with the glass unopened and the beggars blithely ignored.

In covering India's transformation from a near socialist economy to a fully fledged capitalist one, we operated out of a bureau that stood in stubborn defiance of these fast-paced times. Located on the top floor of an art gallery run by the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society, with a sumptuous view of the pillared rotunda of the Indian Parliament building and the turrets of Lutyens' presidential palace just beyond, it was the kind of newspaper-strewn office in which you half-expected to see Graham Greene hunched over an Underwood typewriter or Ernest Hemingway sucking on a cigar.

In the absence of a water cooler or vending machine, a squadron of waiters spent the day ferrying trays of lukewarm water, chai and coffee from the kitchen to the newsrooms. In the absence of a lift, a team of porters dressed in pale-blue uniforms lugged our television equipment up two spiralling flights of stairs.

Three delightful receptionists manned the entrance, huddled together in a glass-fronted cubicle that looked like a soundproof booth from a 1950s quiz show. Inside, they answered the phones, sorted the mail into the wooden pigeonholes ranged behind them and sifted through all the bureau gossip.

Finally, there were 70 or so journalists, from the English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Tamil language sections, who were crammed into a space that could comfortably accommodate about a third of that number. Theoretically, the overcrowding could have been worse, for there were 22 official Indian languages in which we feasibly could have broadcast. For years, we had been trying to move to new premises, but, on a matter of high principle, we refused to pay the mandatory bribes demanded by our prospective new landlords.

The correspondents' offices had the feel and musty smell of miniature museums, for over the years they had accumulated relics and artefacts from trips around the country that nobody had the courage to throw out. To do so not only felt like vandalising a heritage site but also ran the risk, in this most superstitious of countries, of being recklessly inauspicious. On arrival, then, I inherited a scale model of a steam locomotive mounted in a Perspex display case, an assortment of craft items from Nagaland, a leather-bound collection of budget estimates that appeared to stretch back to the days of Nehru, and, the collection's
pièce de résistance
, a metre-high chrome and plastic trophy that looked like it belonged in the hands of the Punjabi police department's weightlifting champion or, if not, his close runner-up.

What made our bureau feel even more antiquated was that the offices downstairs housed an Indian outpost of General Electric. Inside its boardroom, American executives had negotiated one of India's first major outsourcing deals, unleashing a white-hot technological revolution that had transformed vast tracts of the country. But it had not yet percolated through to the floor above. As a result, our stories on ‘Before and After' India were compiled in an office that fitted neither description. It came from an entirely different epoch.

Still, modern India was all around us. Along with an Old Delhi and a New Delhi, a futuristic Delhi had risen up on the fringes of the capital in the newly developed suburbs of Gurgaon and Noida. It was there that we headed to cover the most modish story of the day: the headset-clad young Indians who manned the phones at outsourcing centres, all of whom received crash-courses in British culture in order to sustain the subterfuge that they were situated in, say, Stevenage or Hull.

Covering the full gamut, from Posh and Becks to Robbie Williams, from
Eastenders
to
Emmerdale
, I fear these master-classes said more about the decline of Britain than the rise of India, but they also illustrated how business-processing outsourcing, or BPO, was revolutionising the subcontinent. With British and American times and temperatures displayed permanently on their computer screens, young Indians were forced to show greater interest in the rest of the world. And the rest of the world had been forced to show a greater interest in India.

As well as being partisans of progress, most of these young Indians were fierce patriots, determined that India should regain its rightful place. The widespread presumption was that, by mid-century, the country would have become a global superpower rivalling America and China. The downside was that they had to work through the night in sync with their American and British clients, feign Western accents and even Anglicise their names in order to achieve it.

If the kids manning the call centres were the infantry in India's march towards greatness, the field marshals were the corporate tycoons, or the modern-day maharajas, as everyone had taken to calling them. Many had the showmanship and panache of their aristocratic forbears, and rarely needed much persuasion to show off their fabulous wealth.

For a profile on one of India's most swashbuckling businessmen, Subrata Roy, the head of the entertainment, real-estate and financial-services conglomerate Sahara, which sponsored the Indian cricket team, our producers thought it would be a terrific idea to film him playing cricket on the oval of his 100-acre Lucknow estate. What they had in mind was a gentle knockabout that, after editing, would probably make up at most about 30 seconds of the feature.

Roy, though, had a much grander production in mind. He put on a full-scale match under floodlights, for which he flew in a planeload of Bollywood lovelies and former Indian cricket stars, including the World Cup-winning captain, Kapil Dev. And I have a feeling that the finale of the game was stage-managed so that he would hit the winning run.

As if to prove that even the super-rich were impossible to stereotype, however, other Indian tycoons were much more frugal in their tastes and far more unassuming. Perhaps the greatest extravagance of the bespectacled N. R. Narayana Murthy, the founder and chairman of Infosys, the info-tech giant, was a classical-music collection that included the entire works of Mozart on 176 CDs. As for the country's richest man, Azim Premji, the chairman of Wipro Technologies and ‘the Bill Gates of India', for years he had been driven around Bangalore in a Ford Escort, which he eventually replaced with a Toyota Corolla. Premji was also a Muslim, another sign of how the business world was disregarding time-honoured prejudices and hierarchies. The caste system finally faced a serious challenger: the flourishing meritocracy of India Inc.

New hierarchies were fast emerging, which were usually determined by spending power and commonly linked to one's means of transportation. What Indians drove, or were driven in, had become a telling social pointer. At the lower end, the Honda Hero motorbike had long been a sign of upward mobility. Now, though, the Maruti hatchback had become the gateway car for the middle classes.

For the rich, there were subtler gradations. A vehicle shipped from Europe trumped a Japanese import, but such were the advances in Indian automotive engineering that both could be overtaken by the top-of-the-range Tata Safari, with walnut
panelling, smoke-tinted windows, a back-seat snack tray and an ‘Aroma Ganesh Frame', a fragrant neck cushion fashioned in the shape of the elephantine Hindu god that ensured the vehicle was both ‘fresh and blessed'. At the flash-cash end of the market, the super-rich could afford Lamborghinis and Maseratis, though it is hard to imagine cars more unsuitable for roads strewn with people, rickshaws and cows. The ridiculously super-rich could go one better. Whenever venturing out onto the roads, a millionaire in Pune ordered his chauffeur to drive behind him in one of his lesser European models, say his Porsche or BMW, so that no one would run into the back of his Ferrari.

Being able to afford air travel was another social indicator, and, naturally, whether you turned left or right on boarding the plane. Often, as I nibbled my way through the samosas, oblong pizza slices and stale cheese-and-tomato sandwiches in a departure lounge lined with glass-fronted fridges, I would wonder whether the upper tiers of the caste system would ultimately be replaced by two broad categories: business and economy.

Your destination was also germane. Having the economic wherewithal to leave the country was a sure sign that you had truly arrived in India. New money brought new bundles of contradictions and paradoxes. Consumerism had become so rampant, for instance, that in many quarters it actually came to be expressed with less ostentation. Fridges had become so commonplace that status-conscious families no longer felt the need to show them off in their lounge rooms and relegated them to their rightful place in the kitchen.

Always, there was the temptation to report that the love of money was making India less sacred, but we did not succumb. Long before US television evangelists started preaching the gospel
of prosperity, Indian holy men emphasised the compatibility of spirituality and commercialism. A BBC colleague offered a deft summation. ‘Contrary to the belief of many Westerners, India is not a profoundly spiritual country but a proudly materialistic one,' he wrote. ‘The object of most religious practice is to ensure material success.' A strong piece of analysis, and penned, it is worth pointing out, in the 1950s. Then, as now, religiosity was often regarded as transactional, an insurance policy against failure and a down payment on success.

In any case, modernity usually came with traditional religious trappings. On the opening day of the new financial year, the first investment made by a stockbroking house in Bombay's financial quarter was to pay a few hundred rupees to a Hindu priest, who brought work to a halt by performing pujas on the floor in the middle of the office. Similar rituals played out on the forecourts of car showrooms across the country, as families had their new Marutis consecrated with marigold chains and the engine daubed with the Hindu swastika.

Now, it was possible to download the Nokia mobile-phone jingle in a holy ringtone, although places of worship still tried to prohibit their use. ‘Please switch off Mobile Phone' read a newly minted sign at the entrance of the gold-domed Sikh temple, or gurdwara, in Old Delhi. Yet few pilgrims took any notice. Modern-day Indians were still prepared to put up with countless indignities, from water shortages to regular power outages, but they baulked at being denied the use of their mobile phones.

Much of our time was spent chronicling the changes that were overtaking India, and occasionally we witnessed them unfold dramatically before our eyes. Back in the shanties that flanked the runway at Mumbai Airport, we had heard it was
demolition day – part of a slum-clearance program that provided a useful illustration of how far India was prepared to go in its unswerving march towards the future. Mumbai was determined to become Shanghai, and for an image-conscious city the slums surrounding the airport were not only an ugly eyesore but also a sorry advertisement. As a result, they were the next on the list in a slum-clearance program that had already razed some 70,000 shanties to the ground.

With the yellow bulldozers already rumbling through the nearby streets, the Jadhav family had been given ten minutes to gather up their lifelong possessions and leave. Bharati Jadhav, the matriarch of the family, was dressed immaculately in a copper-coloured sari with a ruby-coloured tikka on her forehead, while her bespectacled husband wore pressed slacks and an ironed shirt. By Indian standards, they could hardly be described as impoverished, but, like hundreds of thousands of upwardly mobile working families in Mumbai, the only place they could afford to live was a tiny shanty, which they shared with their three children.