India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (2 page)
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Authors: Akash Kapur
The East Coast Road has changed. Twenty-five years ago, when I
was a child growing up at its edge, it was a potholed tar road that meandered across the South Indian countryside, cutting through rice fields and coconut plantations and sleepy fishing villages. The views were stunning—a rippled ocean, the gray waters of the Bay of Bengal, shimmering under the harsh coastal sun.
Sometime in the nineties, government contractors descended upon the road. They surveyed neighboring fields and farms, they bulldozed surrounding huts. Villages were cut in half, families were uprooted. Hundreds of ancient trees were brought down. Activists protested, but they were told the social and ecological disruption was the price of progress.
By the time I moved back to India, in the winter of 2003, after more than a decade in America, the country road I knew as a child had become a 160-kilometer highway. Politicians extolled it as a
model for modern India—an ambitious collaboration between government and private companies, the kind of infrastructure the country needed to develop its economy.
The surface of the East Coast Road is now a smooth mix of tar and powdered rock. The road is adorned with dividers that glow in the dark, signs for emergency services, and toll counters that light up the night with their halogen lamps and bright metal booths. Some of the rice fields remain, and the views are still beautiful. But much of the countryside has given way to the promised development—beach resorts, open-air restaurants, movie theaters, and scores of small tea shops catering to the tourists that throng the road on weekends.
At the top of the East Coast Road, outside the city of Chennai
, the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, tourist attractions lead into urban congestion. Traffic is denser, the crowds swell off the sidewalks and onto the streets, and the ocean breeze is obstructed by tightly packed shops and office buildings.
The East Coast Road joins Rajiv Gandhi Salai, Chennai’s technology corridor. The change here is even more striking. Twenty-five years ago, Rajiv Gandhi Salai was itself a country road, a little-used path that carried tourists from Chennai to the seaside town of Mahabalipuram. Like the East Coast Road, it was bordered by farms and plantations; well into the nineties, when the software and outsourcing companies began setting up shop, you could see the occasional tractor, maybe even a bullock cart, on the road.
Today, Rajiv Gandhi Salai, also referred to as the Old
Mahabalipuram Road—as if to distance it from the present, to demarcate it as a relic from a different moment in the nation’s history—is a showcase of the new India. The farmland has become fertile terrain for steel-framed and glass-paneled office buildings. These buildings house the technology companies driving India’s economic boom—the Yahoo!s and PayPals and Verizons that have rushed into the country over the last couple of decades, but also local upstarts like Infosys, Satyam, and Wipro that have for the first time put India on the map of global business.
Employees of these companies—men in tightly tucked shirts and khakis, women more likely to be dressed in pants than saris—swarm to work in the mornings, jamming the highway with their motorcycles and scooters. At noon, they break for lunch on well-maintained gardens, expansive lawns adorned with transplanted palm trees, like something out of Southern California. These are the foot soldiers of India’s surging economy; with their confidence, their enthusiasm, their willingness to work long hours, they are driving the emergence of a new nation.
It was to this new nation—this country where rice fields were giving
way to highways, farmland to software complexes, and saris to pants—that I returned in 2003. I was coming home, but in many ways it was to a home I didn’t recognize anymore.
I landed in Chennai on a December morning. It was just before dawn. The sky was a dark blue, the air was cool but heavy. I remember being surprised by the humidity.
Outside the airport, amid the touts and baggage handlers, the
commotion of a crowd whose crush I had almost forgotten, I caught an air-conditioned car. I was going to Auroville, the town where I had grown up, about a three-hour drive from Chennai.
I took the East Coast Road. In Chennai, I crawled through congested streets where traffic had once flowed easily, and I drove past the towers of Rajiv Gandhi Salai, their cubicles lit up even at that early hour. Outside the city, with the ocean gleaming on the horizon, I passed through the urban sprawl of gated communities and plotted-out fields.
In the village of Kadapakkam, about an hour and a half from the airport, I stopped for a coffee in a tea shop by the side of the road. The owner of the tea shop was a skinny, garrulous man. He stood over a kerosene stove and told me about his life. He said he was born poor, the son of a landless laborer. The road had changed everything for him.
He talked about the taxis and buses that stopped in at his tea shop, about the new house he had built, about the motorcycle he had bought himself. He talked about the private school where he sent his children.
He talked and talked and then, while he was talking, an older man sitting in front of me, a customer, interrupted. He told the owner he was wrong; the road had ruined many lives. He spoke about families that had lost their houses to government acquisition, about all the development that had spoiled the area, about the accidents.
Just last month, the customer said, a boy, the relative of someone he knew, was run over and killed outside this village.
Their conversation turned into an argument; a few others joined in. I listened for a while, and then I turned away. I was
jet-lagged, still taking in the familiar yet strangely unfamiliar sounds and smells of my childhood. But I heard enough to know that I was with the owner: I welcomed the change. I found what was going on in India exciting, even intoxicating.
In America, I had been living in New York. I loved New York—
loved the nightlife, loved the parks, loved the diversity of the city—but increasingly, I had found life there stifling. America, I felt, was in a kind of fog. The war in Iraq was turning sour, the economy was sputtering. The country was depressed, consumed with forebodings of decline.
India was so different. India was emerging from its depression, a centuries-long misadventure of colonialism, poverty, and underdevelopment. Now, on its way to what was surely a better future, the country was giddy, exuberant. Bookstores were filled with titles like
India Arriving
,
The Indian Renaissance
, and
India Booms
. Newspapers and magazines regularly ran surveys showing that India was the most optimistic country in the world.
In America, my friends were worried about losing their jobs; they held on to what they had. But in India, people I knew were quitting their jobs, casting aside the safety of well-established careers for the excitement—and potential riches—of starting their own business. Every other person I met dreamed of being an entrepreneur; they were willing to take a bet on the future.
It was as if my world had come full circle. I had grown up between India and America, the son of an Indian father and an American mother. I always considered both countries home. In
1991, at the age of sixteen, I moved to America in search of better education and more opportunities. Like so many before me, I was escaping the economic and social torpor of India—the austerity imposed by the nation’s socialist economy, the fatalism and bureaucracy that blocked all creative impulse and even a hint of entrepreneurial energy.
The India of my youth felt cut off, at the edge of modernity. When I boarded that plane in Chennai, trading the heat of coastal South India for the bitter winters of boarding school in Massachusetts, I felt like I was entering the world.
Now, twelve years later, India was at the center of the world. It was India, with its resurgent economy, high savings rates, and young, educated workforce, that beckoned with the sense of a brighter future; it was India that offered the promise of a country and an economy on the upswing. Einstein once wrote of America that its people were “always becoming, never being,” but it was in India now that I felt that sense of newness, of perpetual reinvention and forward momentum that I had felt when I first moved to America.
Almost half a century ago, R. K. Narayan, that great chronicler of Indian life in a slower, less complex time, traveled through the United States. In a book he later wrote about his journey, he noted the apparently irreconcilable gaps that separated the two nations. “America and India are profoundly different in attitude and philosophy,” he wrote. “Indian philosophy stresses austerity and unencumbered, uncomplicated day-to-day living. America’s emphasis, on the other hand, is on material acquisition and the limitless pursuit of prosperity.”