80s in India

I'm feeling totally crabby today. An exercycle I had my eye on got sold even before I reached the seller. Then I got one of those scam emails pretending to be from Paypal and I fell for the scam. Then realized that one of the sites I have had been down for almost a month and the hosts had done nothing to fix it. So I dashed them off an email to get their act together or else... Oh who am I kidding, what can I do? I've already paid them a year's subscription.

I tried watching the Grammys but even that didn't seem fun. Not as I remembered them.

I grew up in Jamshedpur, a small town whose economy revolved around the iron and steel industry. Deprived of the fast pace of larger towns, the Grammys were this glam event that we looked forward to the whole year. At least we did, the relative few of us who went to missionary schools and learnt to speak in "propah English".

We were told that our pronunciation and enunciation were what separated us from those scruffy ruffians who were apparently raised by wolves and went to schools like Thakkar Bapa Primary School. Thakkar Bapa was an Indian freedom fighter, I learnt years later, but at the time we had a rather poor opinion of him - tainted in assocation with the school he lent his name to. The school was a crumbling building, the walls were festooned with obscene graffiti and political slogans, and there were about a 1000 children crammed into the grounds under the trees. The school building itself had only a couple of rooms.

We were a class apart, lucky enough to get an English medium education. We were never allowed to forget that by our Anglophile teacher Ms. Nergis, who taught us English and history. We were told to listen to BBC for news, as well as to pick up the correct way to speak the Queen's language. The Voice of America was a distant country cousin, not half as good as the BBC, but better nevertheless than any of the other programs in the 25 or so official Indian languages.

Television happened to India in 1982, when India hosted the Asiad Games in Delhi. Jamshedpur got its own TV tower in '84 but there was only one house in my neighborhood that owned a set.

A few months after the station started broadcasting, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her own bodyguards. Suddenly there was a flurry of TV buying in Jamshedpur. Maybe this was because the Gandhi clan was the most photogenic clan that had ever ruled modern India, or it seemed as if the last tenuous link to the Gandhis and Nehrus of the freedom struggle was broken. Maybe it was a touching tribute to the iron-willed lady herself. But there were huge sales that October. Those who did buy the sets generously converted their homes and gardens into public viewing places.

Each evening we religiously went for our TV watching, but the Information Minstry had deemed it inappropriate that anything even remotely entertaining be broadcast. All evening, long-faced musicians in dark clothes played their plaintive melodies. The instruments varied, the announcers changed, one mediocre musician left only to be replaced by another. But the captions remained the same. [i]Shok Sangeet[/i] they read - Tragic Music. This continued for the official 2 week mourning.

A few months later came the Grammys. Into our world came these singers with hairdos as tall as the headgear of guards at the Buckingham Palace, who warbled about "lerve" and let it all hang out. We dreamed of whizzing around in jalopies, ice cream cones in hand, in leotards and cropped tops and "doing it" - whatever "it" was. Our hearts beat with those goodlooking hunks. We idolized Cher and Tina Turner, The Bangles and Pet Shop Boys, and it seemed to us as if life was one pop song after another. The Information Ministry started broadcasting shows with names like "Pop Music", "Eurotops" and "Top of the Pops". The shows ran for an hour, on Sunday evenings, sandwiched between the Hindi and English news bulletins.

Yes, the Grammys happened to us when we were younger, and left us with words and longings way beyond what Ms Nergis had intended. When I went back to Jamshedpur last year, I learnt she had started her own school. I pitied the poor souls who would be battered with her emphasis on all things English. She left me with a sense of Western superiority and a skewed view of Indian history that it personally has taken me years to get to the other side of. I wonder how she's explaining Charles and Camilla to her kids.