On a bus ride to the aircraft at Ahmedabad airport was a group of four loud and excited Gujarati-speaking men with a 10-year-old boy in tow, clearly from small-town Gujarat. Remember the bygone days when people wore suits and ties to get on a plane? They wore traditional weave kurtas and shawls with narrow pants, embroidered mojris and ear studs with great confidence, not self-consciously trying to become invisible in a sea of Western attired men. The child had a fashionably chic haircut and dispelled any doubts about the demand for or supply of latest Bollywood fashions in small-town India.

On the tarmac, as we were waiting to board, a selfie and photo op rush began among several very diverse passenger groups. Hats off to IndiGo, an airline which seems to know when to indulge its customers and when to get tough with them. Except for a few amused smiles, nobody batted an eyelid or looked embarrassed over their “uncool” behaviour.

In fact, “be yourself” without any worry of “log kya sochenge” seems to be the new cool. I guess in a society where electronic self projection is the norm across socio-economic strata, what people will think is a strange question.

Now for the food. A familiar sight at the airport is the row of kiosks with all kinds of Western and Indian food. Despite data on the broadening of the young Indian palate, the kiosks with idli, samosa, cheela chaat and masala chai are always the ones with the longest queues—eat your heart out, sandwich bars! It’s the same on aeroplanes too. The box of almonds now has a stiff fight with the box of makhanas, and it’s a toss-up between Maggi Masala and upma for the preferred light snack of the “just add hot water, wait a bit and eat” variety. Green tea, though, seems to have busted out of the foreign food box and is now a full-fledged biological sibling of masala chai.

India is a young country and we see that from the crowds at the airport. Add the young population and early-to-bed and early-to-rise culture of Tamil Nadu, and you can see the result in the long queues to enter the airport even at 5 am.

All of us SoBo—i.e. South Bombay—types also need to notice that bright children and well-informed parents still talk to each other in the vernacular despite ubiquitous English medium education and the topics of discussion are the same as those we hear in English-speaking families: Whose picture is that on the wall? Why is it here? How does this plane fly? Why are we in a bus?

Airport security affirms what we always suspected—that we haven’t yet figured what being “gender friendly” actually entails. So, yes, separate security channels that have female security officers do make it more comfortable for female passengers.

But the body screening booth has a curtain that needs to be manually opened and closed each time a passenger enters. Female security officers end up doing a far more physically (and needlessly) demanding job than their male counterparts. I have asked female officers why they don’t ask for better designed booths so that this curtain opening and closing activity is eliminated, and they all had the same answer: that they asked their supervisors, who are men, and they didn’t do anything about it.

Interestingly, the number of female pilots is on the rise, and today, no one on a plane registers any surprise when passengers are told that it is an all-woman crew or when a female voice from the cockpit tells them to fasten seat belts in scary weather conditions. Aren’t we Indians confused about gender equality?

What I find most interesting is how you can tell the character of cities apart based on the traveller profile at the boarding gate. My favourite is Coimbatore. South saris, twinkling diamond nose rings and veshtis as expected, and many people whom you would expect to see at a National Centre for Performing Arts play or literature festival, going to an Isha Foundation event or to their second homes in the Nilgiris.

You also see foreign businessmen (not the corporate suit-wearing kind) on their way to Tiruppur, and vacationing middle-class families and groups from all over India speaking a medley of languages, travelling to Ooty.

Also visible in full force is young India, slogging late nights and early mornings on their mobile phones, all so comfortable with global business phrases delivered in varying accents.

And we do seem to have become a weekend culture. With our airports jammed with young people on Friday nights and Monday mornings, I guess long-distant relationships are on the rise.

Flying business class can now help you short-circuit the security check queue, which was earlier only the prerogative of government or political big shots.

The market economy is indeed here in all its avatars.

Rama Bijapurkar is a Consumer India watcher and author of ‘We Are Like That Only’ and ‘A Never-Before World’.

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Alyquee Padamsee died at the age of 90. (Source: directordhruv/Instagram)

They just don’t make ad men like they used to. The charismatic Subhas Ghoshal, the charmingly intellectual Subroto Sengupta, the visionary people magnet Prashanta Sanyal. And now, joining that list of ad men who have died but will live forever, through legends about them, is Alyque Padamsee.

To say that he was brilliant, impossible, dazzling, utterly his own person and the definer of Indian advertising is an understatement. Like he said in his one-line ad brief for Surf, “Always the champion, never the challenger”. And no-one could even come close to challenging the pedestal that he occupied—the world that he strode like a colossus.

Advertising leaders of his generation revelled in their distinctiveness from the rest of the mere mortals in the world of marketing or business. Unlike subsequent generations, they never aspired to be suits. They pursued their passion as purists and the money followed.

Revisiting some memorable plays by the theater veteran

Lintas was my first job. A 20-year-old graduate from IIM Ahmedabad, from a sheltered Army childhood, I had never set eyes on an ad man until Subroto Sengupta came to teach us advertising. Lintas came recruiting that year. They took six of us, the first MBAs they had ever recruited, in an experiment to put left brains alongside the right-brained ones.

On the first day in office, I saw a man in cowboy boots, jeans and a Stetson. Thunderstruck, I asked someone who he was. They pointed to a huge poster on the wall drawn by the uber talented Imtiaz Dharker, showing his back with a line that said “Alyque’s back”.

I think he had returned from a sabbatical of some kind. The same evening about 6 pm, the peon took a call at the reception and said on the intercom, “Mr Padamsee, Mrs Padamsee is on the line”. He came out thundering, visibly irritated. “Which Mrs Padamsee you idiot, there are three of them.” (including his mother).

It was with equal elan that he gave us account executives (AEs we were called) work in addition to our day jobs. I was the AE on a client’s wife’s Ikebana exhibition and my classmate on his play Tughlak. The message was that our narrow world needs broadening. He also insisted that we see a Hindi movie often and we had to submit the ticket to the company for reimbursement, and I was pulled up once for not having gone to the movies.

From Lalitaji to the Liril girl, here’s a look at popular ad-filmmaker Alyque Padamsee’s creations

Thus began our journey into consumer insight—of the consumer as a whole person, not just as a buyer of the XYZ product—and of understanding that brands existed in the broad worlds of customers, not in the narrow ones of product categories

That’s the insight that enabled him to give us the Liril girl and Lalitaji, one who luxuriated with abandon under the waterfall, and the other, everybody’s sensible wife and mother who said: “Surf ki khareedari main samajdhari hai”.

My friend Shiva Kumar, then with Levers, remembers how no one wanted to run the Lalitaji ad (I can believe that this was hard for a company that was obsessive about communicating “washes whitest”). But there were no alternatives available (I am sure Alyque with his utter conviction made sure of that) and so they ran the campaign without showing it to the chairman. Later, the chairman’s wife saw it and told him what a superb ad it was. The rest, as they say, is marketing history.

He is more recently credited with Emami’s Fair & Handsome, a cheeky and successful swipe at the Mecca of marketing, Hindustan Lever.

He also knew the consumer’s pulse and he made us researchers really work hard especially if we were delivering bad news: “Are you telling me that of the many people who drive past that hoarding each day only 5 per cent have seen it? I think you need to reverse the headings on your columns” (seen ad/not seen ad). He told what consumers could be made to think — he could never be accused of having read a research report and listened to it.

This is just one vignette of how Alyque navigated client-agency relationships. A naturally adversarial one, legends like Alyque on one side and the late Shunu Sen (marketing head of Levers) on the other could bring out the best in each other, hugely respectful of each other though not always kind to one another.

I remember being at a presentation to Hindustan Lever when Alyque and Shunu were both digging in their heels over a campaign being presented. Suddenly Alyque limped in great pain across the room (in the Lintas office), grim-faced and reached out for a bottle of antacid (that I bet had been placed there in advance) and dramatically drank some.

He limped back, slowly, commanding the whole room’s attention, sat down and said, “Shunu, you were saying?” Shunu, meanwhile, had also climbed down and while I can’t remember exactly, I think the campaign got sold after some more discussion.

He also kept the agency side’s morale high, unlike the latter-day attitude of “he who pays the piper calls the tune”. I remember going to another meeting with him, the client was unpleasant, peeved about something the agency didn’t do, refusing to look at what we had for him that day. “Okay, let’s pack up,” said Alyque and stunned, we left the client’s office, our self-esteem intact, Alyque our hero and our determination to prove the client wrong in his assessment, at an all-time high. Not for nothing was Lintas in those days called “Actor & Company”.

He had idiosyncrasies galore and was called God in Lintas. We researchers at Lintas had a GGTM scale and we would argue if he was God’s Gift to Marketing, Management or Mankind—in his reckoning and ours. Several golden greats get dated. Alyque never did. Because he was as curious as he was opinionated about the world and more energetic than anyone I ever knew.

I ran into him a few years ago and in conversation said, “You look tired”. He thundered at me, “Harassed, maybe, tired never”. I hastily withdrew my words. Till the last time I met him, he would grandstand irrespective of whoever was present and say to me, “Hi trainee”. Coming from anyone else it would have been patronising. Coming from him, it was like a benediction.

Rama Bijapurkar is an independent market strategy consultant

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My reply is that setting this up as an “all or nothing” issue will make us not notice the considerable gains that have already been made or the never-before foundation we now have that we can build on.

Here is the sad truth. If you randomly pick any Indian woman who has stepped out of her home into the wider world of work, be it four or 40 years ago, there is a good chance that she will have a story of experiencing gender-based harassment in the workplace. Of being at the receiving end of behaviour from men in positions of power or co-workers, which made her life miserable. It breaks my heart (though it doesn’t shock my mind) that even so many decades after my generation entered the workplace, the situation remains pretty much the same. Now #MeToo has appeared on the scene. “What does your generation think of this”, a lot of you have asked me.

When I say “thank God for the courageous women who have put themselves at risk and ‘come out’ to make the world better for all of us”, many of you respond with frustration and despair: “But what’s the point? It will just lose steam, fade away and things will be back to usual; and the really powerful men will never be named.”

My reply is that setting this up as an “all or nothing” issue will make us not notice the considerable gains that have already been made or the never-before foundation we now have that we can build on. Remember what they say about money? That the first billion takes a long time to come but the next billion comes in a fraction of that time. I guess it takes the hindsight of being so much older than you to even see the inflection point that #MeToo is, and I hope you will see it when I tell you the story of my generation in a minute.

What gains? The legitimacy of the #MeToo movement is here to stay. I haven’t seen a furious public backlash against it as may have been expected given our male-dominated workplaces. I also believe that with this new social media weapon that anyone can access, the age-old workplace tactics of conspiracies of silence or other ways of intimidating and shutting up those who speak up will not work as easily as earlier.

Yes, the intensity of the movement, like all movements, will have its peaks and troughs but the “cut through” nature of the new weapon to fight harassment by publicly calling out people who sexually harass is here to stay. No more struggling to get the office officialdom to take note, leave alone act; no more running around the police and courts with huge time and money costs; and no more “each to her own” isolation or having to hunt for other victims who are willing to come forward.

Will it ever get to the really powerful men? The fact that it could get to them is the power of this weapon. Will action against powerful men actually happen? We have seen from experience in America and here (though it’s early days for us) that action has happened in some cases while others have managed to get away, though with severely dented reputations. Yes, some people may care about their own or other people’s dented reputations and some may not. But nothing we do can make this world perfect. It can only make our situations better; and saying not having it all is having nothing at all, isn’t right or sensible.

The biggest permanent gain is that #MeToo brings about a dramatic change in the attitude with which we women will approach sexual or any gender-based harassment henceforth. The shift is from “it’s my fault (that such a thing happened to me)” to “it’s my right (to not have such things happen to me)”.

My class of 150 at business school had around eight women. Many big reputed companies would come on campus and scarcely bother to hide their policy of not wanting to hire women, and interviews with women candidates often bordered on the frivolous. I remember an early job interview with a not very well known company where the all-male interviewer panel watched in amusement as one of them said “Oh so you write and do crosswords? Let’s see how good you are. What is a four-letter word for intercourse ending in ‘k’?” My sense of self-preservation kicked in and I scrambled in my head and came up with “talk”. They laughed and I was relieved. Please note, Gen Now readers, that it did not occur to me to say “What a ridiculous/offensive/ awful/double entendre question to ask, how dare you”, or report it anywhere. I eventually did not take that job, not because of how they behaved, but because instead of the advertised role, they offered me a more “womanly” one since they were an engineering company and didn’t want to take chances. It isn’t that I was docile by nature. Far from it. But why didn’t I raise the decibel level of protest then and in several other more mortifying incidents over the years? Because I didn’t believe that I had the right to not be treated this way.

I was told repeatedly, and I believed it too, that women like me were the infiltrators trying to force our way into the men’s world, and “bad things” were bound to happen to women who “broke the rules” and “lived dangerously”. As a Chilean woman of my generation once told me at a conference, “These (how we get treated sometimes) are taxes that we have to pay for stepping out of our homes”. The mantra was simple. Take care of yourself, don’t put yourself in harm’s way, dress conservatively, change jobs or make career sacrifices to avoid people when you get signals that are uncomfortable, and above all don’t speak about it because everyone will say that it was probably your fault — not necessarily because you did something to bring it on but because you didn’t do something to get out of harm’s way.

So dear Gen Now, the world has changed and we now know that we can unapologetically assert our right to be treated as people not objects; and to be treated with dignity, courtesy and distance. And that it’s up to him to behave well; not up to me to not bring out his beastly side. That is a huge gain and one that #MeToo has made clear. Let’s keep building on this and not let our disappointment of not getting the ideal outcome blind us to the fact that now, at last, we have the will and we have the way.

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Friends sent me Sheryl Sandberg’s Facebook post, which I read with tearful resonance, like so many others around the world. Hit with a tsunami that erased my life as I knew it from the age of 20, I still yearn for, as she puts it, ‘Option A’ (her late husband). I admire her for being able to share coherently her innermost thoughts and feelings of the first month without Dave. I know that she has young children and the hard work of raising them ahead of her. As I sit down to write this exactly four months after Ashoke passed away on February 11, I am grateful that I am not young and my days of heavy lifting, be it professional, societal or familial, are behind me.

I have learnt these past few months that everyone has a life story to tell and collectively these stories help you accept what life is, in all its surprising twists and turns, more than even the best satsangs or bhajans can. It did surprise me though that I knew so little about the life stories of people I have interacted with over the years. Maybe it was because I never sat still for so many days, mind switched off, heart switched on, emotionally wide open. I heard stories of lots of people who had miraculously survived touch-and-go health crises with ordinary medical aid and lived to tell their tale; and then there were an equal number of stories of those unlucky ones like my own, who got to the best hospitals and had the best care that money could buy but still didn’t make it. Hearing about the randomness of it all took away some of the exhaustion of asking oneself and others all the time “was there something else I could have done, should have done, that would have saved him”.

A friend with four siblings, all very well placed and wonderfully well adjusted, told me about his widowed mother who raised them from a very young age, in very difficult financial circumstances by doing sewing and knitting piece work jobs and yet enabled each of them to follow their dreams. Another friend who is phenomenally successful both at work and as a homemaker told me how her father had suddenly died when she was so much younger than my daughter is today and, listening to her, I felt just a little bit less tearful that my daughter will not have her dad around to share the many moments of glory and joy that I hope she has ahead of her. My teacher told me how, after his father died, he was taken from the village by his brothers and set up to live alone at the age of 13 in one room in a nearby city, so that they could keep an eye on him as they had touring state government jobs. He cooked for himself, went to school and studied on his own. Why did they do that, I asked surprised. So that I could get a proper education, because my mother was illiterate and there were no men at home to keep a watchful eye lest I get into bad habits. There is no big deal about being alone, he gently told me. And I thought that was more reassuring than the “how will you manage” concern that also came my way.

I also remember being insanely jealous when I heard my nephew chatting late into the night with both mama and papa about his work and the antics of his little son. They were a cosy trio like we used to be but never will any more. But then my 85-year-old godmother told me that she was just a few months old when her mother was attending to her in the crib while her father, sitting in the same room, silently slumped in his chair and died. My neighbour’s maid tells me that she lost her 22-year-old son who drowned in the ganapati visarjan. I am surprised because she always bows before the ganapati idol in our corridor. I ask her how she finds it in her to do this and she says but what other protector do I have? Some of my friends tell me that each one’s grief is special to him or her. There’s no relative scale, it doesn’t become less because someone else’s situation was worse. I don’t know, I am still thinking about that, but yes I have often found myself many times these past few months ruefully remembering the saying “I cried that I had no shoes until I saw a man who had no feet”.

Sheryl Sandberg says that the question to ask is “how are you today”, and not a blanket “how are you”. And that is exactly right. There are good days and bad days and no real triggers for them. On good days the world looks OK and you tell yourself that this too shall pass. On bad days, the very idea of going about life and living is so overwhelming that the tears just don’t stop. Since you don’t know which day will turn out which way, you warily enter the day with surrender and exit it with either relief that it is over or gratefulness that it was not a bad day. And you learn to take each day as it comes and allow yourself lots of slack in case you may not feel up to facing the world. Friends understand it completely when you say “if it’s a good day I will come over, if it’s a bad one, please excuse me”.

I am lucky to live in India in my troubled time and I would not choose to be anywhere else for all the money in the world. At the end of the day, it is a bonded, affiliative close-knit society and I pray that it will stay this way when my daughters’ generation gets to be my age. People reach out with genuine affection, care and concern and are not afraid to say “I am sorry for your loss” or “it is God’s will” or “can I come and sit with you today”. Professional colleagues extend helping hands in so many little and big ways that it makes the idea of going back to work less daunting. There is a steady stream of friends and batchmates — his, mine, ours — coming from all over the country or writing in from around the world to share a moment and share a memory. It reminds you of the ‘we that we were’ at various stages of our lives and adds splashes of laughter to the torrent of tears.

The bread man, the paperwallah, fish market lady, liftmen and watchmen at the office or home, the neighbour’s dhobi all stop you in the street and express their sympathy. Till something like this happens one is annoyed with this human crush in one’s life. But when you are down and out, you are thankful for it. Their theme is invariably “jo hai, so hai. Ab kya karenge, challaana hee padega himmat se”, and their practicality is comforting.

So I guess it is indeed what it is, and it will take as long as it will take for time to dry the tears, and for the emotional fog to become less dense and so there’s nothing left to do but to wait it out and ride it out and cry on bad days and smile on good days and try not to go down the spiral of self-pity by asking why me, why him, why now. Because there are no real answers to such questions.

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I can’t wait to go into vanaprastha, that stage in life when you are entitled to say “what goes of your father” to household stuff and live in a zen world. Where you don’t have to do collective bargaining for all manner of decisions — what to eat, where to holiday, what colour to paint the walls, should the dog be allowed to sleep on the bed, should bedsheets be vibrantly patterned or in boring pastels and so on. In order to prepare for it, I have been taking a vacation all by myself, once a year, where I live untidily, wake up early to watch sitcoms and not worry about being slothful, and have cereal, toast and egg in the evening because quite simply, it is a much more pleasant time of day to enjoy a leisurely breakfast.

I have forever fantasised about getting old and becoming my own person again and running only my life, for me. One of the fantasies had me living on the top floor of a sprawling bungalow with the rest of the family living downstairs; entry was not with prior appointment, but by invitation only. I did manage the not-so-sprawling bungalow which I built with my brother. His explanation of what the legalese “share of undivided property” actually meant made me change my mind quickly. He said: “If you plan to dig a grave for yourself on this property, remember that for every square inch of it that is yours, there will be another square inch of it that is mine.” I do love my brother very much but the thought of sharing alternate square inches of my sunset years with him did not provide me any sense of calm.

So I hunted some more and started building a little cottage near a jungle in the middle of nowhere, for my vanaprastha. It’s called Shangri-La. Of course, it will have an internet connection and a satellite dish and the cell signal — all human interaction would be digital unless I desire otherwise. The rest of the family sniggered and is still sniggering, albeit a little more enviously, as the cottage is now nearing completion. They are placing bets on whether I will actually end up managing to live there in isolation. I have my secret fears as well.

I remember going on one such vanaprastha training holiday to Ladakh many years ago. I told my daughter, “Maybe I will find a Buddhist monastery and stay there, because running this house and coping with all of you makes me want to run away.” She was young enough to be distressed at the thought of home with no mom in it, and she asked her dad worriedly whether mama would actually carry out her threat. He said, “Don’t worry, she has too little discipline, she won’t survive a monastery for more than 10 minutes”. I was miffed when I heard this. It so happened that I did visit a lovely monastery in Ladakh, and as I was on the terrace at noon admiring the view, the gong went off and I ignored it. An old monk came up the stairs and bolted the terrace door that led to the stairs. I panicked, shouted to him as I saw him go below that I needed to get out. “Wait till 3,” he gestured.

The thought of being marooned on the terrace of a monastery for three hours, with no food and not a soul in sight, had me in tears. A toothless young boy in ochre robes saw me on the terrace shouting frantically and he came up, unlocked the door and let me out. I didn’t tell anybody at home or even remind myself of this story for many years. But now I believe that I am older and wiser and emotionally ready to walk my talk.

“What will you do if Modi wins?” I had asked my husband, before the election results. “Take vanaprastha,” he promptly replied. “Where?” I asked suspiciously. “In Shangri-La,” he responded cheerfully. Then my daughter messaged me and said the endless television talking heads yelling at each other and the reruns of hectoring speeches and the Facebook posts from NRIs, who suddenly wanted to be a part of the voting action, were wearing her down. She ended with, “And can I take vanaprastha with you in Shangri-La?” I think if they are all headed that way, it makes sense for me to stay on in grihasta. As we used to say during my days in a market research agency, “market research is so much fun, if only it weren’t for the clients”.

Rama Bijapurkar is the author of We Are Like That Only and A Never-Before World: Tracking the evolution of Consumer India

I have fantasised about getting old and becoming my own person again and running only my life, for me… entry not by appointment but by invitation only

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Market research shows that this constituency is very concerned about what impact it will have on the governance of the country, rather than the impact it will have on the Sensex.

A family that votes together is bound to debate endlessly.

Election stress hit our household too, despite us being south Bombay types who are supposed to be unconcerned with them.

SUMMARY

A family that votes together is bound to debate endlessly.

Election stress hit our household too, despite us being south Bombay types who are supposed to be unconcerned with them. (My favourite from a list floating online titled 10 Reasons Why South Bombayites don’t vote is: “What? No valet parking?”). Actually, it isn’t true that they are unconcerned. My informal market research shows that this constituency is very concerned indeed, perhaps not about what impact it will have on the governance of the country, rather what impact it will have on the Sensex.

 My daughter came to Mumbai from the city where she lives, so that she could vote for the first time, having been away in college during earlier elections. Along with her came a whole lot of lectures on liberalism and why mom should read the entire article in that magazine before bursting into outraged, indignant ranting. “And have you read the next para” was her signature tune, every time I reacted to something I was reading. I thought to myself spitefully, that had she read the whole page or even the next paragraph of my numerous letters to her in the past, she may have turned out better. The usually reticent spouse added to my stress by turning loquacious. He, who has always held his peace, even when his dog was straining at the leash to attack the neighbourhood kids, now was busy telling everyone who asked and didn’t, about the fatal flaws of each party and interspersing it with rude remarks about “all you Hindutva types” or “all you Shiv Sainiks”, or “all you poor, deluded AAP gullibles” etc. We may irrevocably have lost a few friends.

He advocated, somewhat illogically, the case for the known devil, over the unknown entities, and tempers rose over whether an incompetent team leader was better than a supposedly competent lone ranger. We eventually woke up on election day, and in a rare, we-forgot-how-to-do-this act of family togetherness, we went to vote. All the way, my husband was telling us how to vote, though to his credit, not who to vote for. He explained the sequence of steps, how to operate the electronic voting machine, carried the BMC notices of where we could find our names in the voters’ list, but refused to hand it over to us individually, thus remaining in control over his little community. Unfortunately, even as we entered the polling booth, we knew we would cancel each others’ votes out, and vote in three utterly different directions. Of course, no one asked and no one disclosed who the other voted for, and we all just looked at each other suspiciously for the rest of the day. And, sadly, it was my finger that had an unsightly messy spread of the ink mark, in contrast to the neat sharp ones they both had — an indicator of my cluttered thoughts and un-strategic voting, I would have been told, had I been stupid enough to ask.

My driver told me that he was really sad that elections in his village and in Mumbai were on the same day. In the last elections he had voted twice, once in each location. “What about the mark on your finger,” I asked him. “Oh that,” he replied airily, “it can be removed with oil”. I tried to clean up my finger and make the vote mark look a bit more stylish, but apparently, you have to coat your finger before getting the ink mark on it. My housekeeper said she needed to travel to her village and vote. Go ahead, we told her, and she said that parties were sending transport to the city to take them home to vote. She said that they had all learned from the last occasion, when the parties, having got their votes cast, had not bothered to drop them back. Besides, she said, this time we also asked for better vehicles. And no more reliance on promises, she said. “We said show us what you can do before the voting day”, she told us. So the temple and the road to the village got repaired. My husband has been very perturbed since then, about how we urban voters have no clue on how to participate in an election.

Perhaps, the last word on the matter will go to the Mumbai taxi driver who informed me that every single candidate supported by a prominent political leader would win. How is that possible, I protested, his party doesn’t have so much clout. Well, he said, they don’t have to all belong to his party. Some of his candidates might be in the BJP, some in the Shiv Sena, and some in the Congress. Very democratic, eh?

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A FAVOURITE STORY told by the sales manager of what was in the old days known as Lipton Tea went thus: an elderly lady walks into a kirana shop in Chandigarh and asks, “Lipton di chaah haigi (Do you have Lipton tea)?” The shopkeeper grins broadly and say, “Behenji, lipatna hai to lipto. Mainu ki frank painda (Lady, if you want to hug, then do so. What difference does it make to me)?” Lipton, when pronounced as it is sometimes in north India as “Lipaton”, sounds like lipatna, or hugging. And chai when pronounced as it often is as “chaah” is the word for desire.

I thought of that story, because now we have the very English brand name Tetley in our midst. And when I went to a shop in Delhi and asked for it, the shopkeeper nodded and yelled to his assistant, “Ek packet titli chai dena maaji ko (Give a packet of butterfly tea to the old lady).” He had Indianised the brand name thoroughly and it was titli or butterfly in Hindi. I swallowed my mirth and horror at having been elevated from “behenji” to “maaji”. Kirana shop owners and vegetable vendors leave you with no illusions about your age. Beti becomes didi becomes behenji becomes maaji and then, your arthritic knees will not allow you to come to the shop; so there’s no need for the next level of salutation.

I then asked for bottled water and the brand he had in stock was Qua, sold in a stylishly shaped bottle. And he said, “Yeh lijiye maaji, kuan paani” (Kuan means well in Hindi). Qua bottled water was probably positioned as an “affordable Evian” for discerning, modern consumers, according to the brand brief written by the brand manager and faithfully executed by his ad agency. But it became “well water” in the hands of the Delhi shopkeeper.

My housekeeper has a knack with words too. She asked me about the sar-naam (head name) of my visitor. “There is naam and sar-naam,” she said, and explained the intricacies of community identifiers. She also said that there were two kinds of deliveries, normal and “scissor”, making the scissoring gesture with her fingers. Again, a wonderfully apt name for caesarean, which is about cutting open.

When trying to agree on a name for our Labrador puppy, we went down the entire alphabet and finally looked like we all agreed on Zak, I have often wondered though why upper-class pets are called by western names, Whisky, Brandy, Patch, Bruno, Cocoa and slum and stray dogs are called Raju, Sona, Ravi, Kalu.

My husband, who specializes in “what could happen that you haven’t thought of”, said that none of the hired household helps and dog walkers would be able to pronounce Zak, the Z being a difficult sound. I reminded him then that we lived in Mumbai and Maharashtrians are very used to the Z sound. They pronounce words like maaza (mine) and zhaval (near) with great ease. They all say “freeze” for fridge. “Not like you Andhras,” he retorted. “Your father used to say ‘jeero’ for zero and your doctor friend says “zeens” for genes.”

Anyway, having come to end of the alphabet, we stayed with Zak. And he now responds to Jhaack or Jake more willingly, than to Zak, because he spends more time with the household help than with us.

Our previous dog was called Prince. I cringe at the unimaginative name but no one in the family is owning responsibility for it. He came home when my daughter was 12, and though she denies it, I think it was her idea. He also had a second name. Gusting. Because I thought all dogs are disgusting, but father and daughter thought otherwise. So that which was not disgusting was gusting. The household helps fell in love with him and called him Beans and Dusting.

My brother-in-law named his dog Tai-Pan, and I was most envious that we had not been so imaginative. But I was gratified to see that in Gurgaon, he was called Fry Pan. An incongruous name for a handsome Alsatian.

My friend has a bull dog called Samson. And then he got another one that he called Ludwig. I asked him how his household help managed with the name. And he said, “Oh it’s easy they just call him Laddu.”

Rama Bijapurkar is the author of We Are Like That Only and A Never-Before World : Tracking the evolution of Consumer India.

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IT’S CONVOCATION time again and as the invitations start coming in, I feel that familiar lump in my throat. At the institute that I am associated with, the convocation takes place on the weather-beaten but majestic, red-brick Louis Kahn Plaza that has seen over 60 batches of bright-eyed young men and women “walk the ramp”, so to speak, in their fancy dress robes, on top of the world, even if just for today — because tomorrow they will be at the bottom of the heap of the real world! Their mixed emotions of anticipation and trepidation are so palpable, it makes me nervous just to breathe in their vicinity. And I really empathise with the bemusement on their parents’ faces, laced with pride, at this new avatar of the offspring that they are yet to get to know. My heart goes out to the graduating PhD students, whose slog at last comes to an end, but they still need to figure out what the market for their knowledge is in the “just do it, don’t think too much” world of business.

And I always watch most nervously, as the young women walk across the increasingly pitted and scarred brick floor of the plaza, unpractised in the art of managing sari, robe and high heels, all at once. I pray with a fervour, please don’t let them trip, their batchmates will be reminding them and each other of it even when they are all old and doddering. I speak with experience — when I was at the institute, our group, running short on time and long on laziness, filled up some of the questionnaires ourselves, sitting in the canteen. For our efforts, we ended up with a C or a D and the matter ended there. Except that I then went on to join the market research industry. As luck would have it, one of my clients, 20 years later, was my batchmate and, worse, one of the project group members too. He waited with a wicked smile till I had finished my proposal along with my team and then, with a straight face, he said, “We are very concerned about the quality of data collection. Could you tell us a little bit about where you personally stand on the subject?”

As they file by the dais, I wonder which of them will blaze trails of what kind — I have seen successful CEOs, people who have given it all up to run social enterprises or go into politics, people who have gone into government or academia; and I love the 25th reunions, when they all regress to the loud noisy days of the dorm, and when all are equal, and when teachers, both favourite and unfavourite, are remembered.

I am only a part-time, one-term, one-course-a-year teacher, though I have been at it for over 25 years. Each year, as my flesh gets weaker and the preparation harder, I swear that I will quit — but my undoing is always seeing a beaming face at an airport or elevator saying, “Ma’am you taught me”, and the sheer pleasure of hearing how well their life journey has progressed.

I wonder though if I made the kind of impression on them that some of my teachers made on me. One of them, a wonderfully smart but totally awe inspiring lady who taught us maths, showed up once at my hostel room at night, waving a paper of mine, saying, “You are otherwise so bright, please explain to me why you turn in work like this.” And proceeded to walk me through every line of the problem. Another one, who taught me and who I teach with, has given up a lifetime of weekends dealing with project groups at their argumentative best, wearing them down using the most exhausting Socratic methods, until they saw the light or at least agreed to go back and reflect a little.

One of my teachers used to say that the best guru dakshina a student can give a teacher is to surpass him. He said that by that token, his students had repaid him many times over. And yes, that is my story too, and that’s why I have a lump in my throat every convocation.

Rama Bijapurkar is the author of We Are Like That Only And A Never-Before World: Tracking the evolution of consumer India

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I DESPERATELY wanted a place of my own that opens out to the outdoors. I lived most of my life as a “concrete jungli”, a phrase coined by my armyman brother after witnessing a command mother-daughter performance, when my one-year-old and I visited him in small town Assam. For the better part of the trip, every night my daughter would look at the sky and say “ite”, and we had no clue what it meant. Until it hit me one day that she was saying “light” whenever she looked at the moon, because the Mumbai child had not seen the moon thus far, and worse, her parents had not realised it either. It wasn’t visible from our window (only other buildings were), the car park was indoors, and exhausted Mumbaikar working parents never took the one-year-old for a stroll at night. When she was a few years older, she used to say, “cow ke paas jaake watermelon leke aate hain”, because the chap who sold them came in a bullock cart (and milk came in plastic packets). I never bothered to explain otherwise. It was too much effort. We were a true-blue concrete jungli family.

Two decades later, I yearned for quiet. And space. And green. So despite sniggers from the rest of the family, I hunted for something that could salve my deprivation but fit my budget. I actually found it, thanks to a wonderful friend T, who located it and agreed to build it for me. The first bit of concrete jungli behaviour showed itself when I kept asking for larger and larger windows so that I could have a better view. Puzzled, T pointed out that the whole property was mine, so why didn’t I just step out of the house whenever I wanted to take in the view? And then a terrifying reality sank in. I had signed up for the exquisite mountain view in front of one length of the rectangular property but had not noticed that there was a jungle bordering the other length. I asked T whether any animals would come into my property. Being a seasoned jungle man, he was cool as a cucumber. Elephants, bears, maybe bison, he said. “Can’t we fence the back?” I asked, quaking with terror. He replied, “Then where’s the fun?” My normally unhelpful spouse asked me helpfully, if I thought barbed wire would be strong enough to stop elephants. I said I would add tube lights on top of them (and then, of course, it would be as bright as my bedroom in Mumbai at night with the neon lights streaming in).

I tried explaining to T that I had paid up for the view in front, not for the animal “fun” that lay at the back. “We will see,” was his laconic reply, and we continued the business of building the house. He told me that the jackfruit tree in the middle of the property would be a big draw for the animals. “What do we do then?” I asked anxiously. He looked puzzled. “Nothing,” he said. “When you see an elephant, don’t let it feel threatened by you.” “How do I do that?” I asked. He said, “If you see it in front of you, just retreat and don’t move forward in its direction.” “And if it comes from behind me?” I asked. He said patiently and matter-of-factly, “Elephants are big animals, you will hear them coming, don’t worry.” I asked if any of the workers had actually seen an elephant or a bear. “No,” he said, “but there’s plenty of dung to prove they come visiting often.”

Since then, I have had several discussions with T on fencing the property. Somewhere along the way, he agreed to it and we worked out the kind of fence and what it would cost. When it was all done, I went to see it — and found that he had built a fence in the front, which overlooked other tea gardens, but not at the back, which adjoined the jungle. Looking mildly surprised at my outrage, he said, “But I think the two-legged animals are more dangerous and now we need to protect the building material and the glass windows. The four-legged ones are harmless, I thought I told you that.” Clearly, I am the concrete Jungli who doesn’t “get” the jungle. But I need to give it a try, if for nothing else, to stop my family sniggering at more of mama’s madness.

Rama Bijapurkar is the author of We Are Like That Only and A Never-Before World: Tracking the evolution of Consumer India

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My husband has a home renovation fetish. He itches to break down walls, paint them, alter window heights and enclose balconies. I am not enthused by the whole process. I have a theory that painters take as long as they do because our homes are more comfortable than theirs and there is a dis-incentive for them to finish their work. They get paid on a daily rate, and they certainly enjoy a nice afternoon snooze alone in the room that is being painted, get tea and cold water twice a day, or more if they ingratiate themselves with the household help.

I walked into the house yesterday to find all the pictures taken down, and a happy husband telling me that the painters would arrive tomorrow. I protested violently that I hadn’t been consulted, to which he said I had been, and that I had said “yes”. This probably was true, but it must have been done the way children do it — when mom says you can go play in the rain if your dad says “yes”, they skip over to dad, and ask an innocuous set of questions and dad, reading the newspaper, mutters annoyed, “Yes, yes, yes… now go out and play.”

Catching me at the dining table at my computer, with my cellphone ringing, and the pressure cooker whistling, he must have said “The house really needs painting, doesn’t it? We must get it done, don’t you think, before it gets too hot? Do you want to meet Rajat bhai (the contractor)?” I must have distractedly said “Yes, ok” to the first two and a vehement “No” to meeting Rajat bhai. He is the best ever contractor and a great dispute arbitrator, but I have learnt by now that when he recommends something with a gleam in his eye, saying “Kya first class dikhega yeh”, it’s a disaster waiting to happen. He also provides helpful advice like “Backside paint karo, acha dikhega.” We lived in an identical flat above our present one. When that house was getting done up before we moved in, I had delegated to both of them (cleverly, I thought) the tedious decision about locations for plug points. They put their heads together and came up with this — when you were leaving your bedroom, the only way you could now switch off the fan was to clamber across the bed, fully dressed, shoes and all. They placed a single plug point at waist height near the dining table, my favourite working place, such that my computer wire blocked the way to the bar area; so for several years, I had palpitations, as the head of the house followed by the hound of the house, made their way to and fro. When we moved to our present flat, I implored Rajat bhai to place the plug point out of harm’s way. He did put one at floor level on the other side, but thoughtfully left the old plug point exactly where it was.

Being a creature of habit, I still use the original plug point and spend many an evening guarding my precious computer from man and beast. Rajat bhai and my husband faithfully replicated all the flaws in the old flat as if their sense of well-being depended on that. It reminded me of the joke about the man who married a second time and no matter what wonderful things his second wife served him at breakfast, he would shake his head mournfully and say, “Not like what my first wife made”. Accidentally one day, she burnt the toast and ruined the coffee. Her husband beamed and said, “Exactly like my first wife made it”.

So finally what colour will our walls be? Having been married to each other for ever, we know that white is the only colour that enjoys consensus. White cupboards, pelmets and door frames match the white walls. “Doesn’t it feel like living in a hospital?” asked a friend of mine. Then she added thoughtfully “I guess you are no better than he is. Your entire wardrobe is made up of many shades of mud and cow dung.”

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