‘When the directive came that “China’s chairman is our chairman”, I became very angry, and went to see him. I said, “If the Chinese start coming I will be one of the first with a gun in my hand to stop them.” On that topic he immediately kept quiet. But I think that the personal equation we had built up since 1968 – he had stayed in my house, and we had had long discussions – that equation snapped. Later I wrote him a letter. It was a long letter, full of theoretical backing to things I opposed. He didn’t reply. At that time the killings had started. The party had moved underground, and all communication was cut.
‘That was how I left the movement. From 1970 to 1972 I was involved with a parallel organization. We were mainly doing propaganda. We were hunted by the police. We had to hide from both sides.
‘The first policeman was killed in Calcutta in early May, 1970, in a bomb attack. After mid-1970 the action became more general. Traffic policemen were being killed, because they were easy game. There was a funny side. The traffic police were issued arms. The Naxalites snatched the arms, so the traffic policemen chained the arms to themselves. Simultaneously there began the killing of informers.
‘And when you start killing informers, then you really open the can of worms. You do not refer to his class – you cannot refer to his class, because he has to be within your own ambit to be an informer. Again, with hindsight, I also see that there were no attacks against big targets, the big industrialists, the big landlords.
‘And further divisions appeared in the Marxist-Leninist camp. More groups left. By 1973 the Marxist-Leninist camp was divided into 20 factions. The police and their gangs had killed several thousands. By 1973 the movement – that phase of it – was finished.
‘I came out of hiding in 1972. The police knew about my break with Charu Mazumdar. The last time I was questioned in detail was in 1972. My great luck was that my last arrest had been in April 1970 – before the first policeman was killed in Calcutta. Then I had gone underground.
‘I am doing nothing now. I think in some ways our country has more respect and honour in the world than at that time. From beggars we have become borrowers. I am exercised by the gap between rich and poor, exercised by the lack of patriotism amongst the power-brokers, exercised by the number of industries going sick. And I am exercised by the fact that borrowers generally end up begging.’
Debu didn’t tell me about the end of Charu Mazumdar. That I heard from someone else. He was arrested in Calcutta in 1972, and died soon afterwards. He was an asthmatic, and when he was arrested he had a tube of oxygen with him. He must have suffered continuously in the damp and heat of Bengal.
Ashok’s first story had been about his attempt to get into marketing. His second story had been about his marriage, his break with the past. His last story was about his life in advertising, and his sighting of the Calcutta boxwallah world, just when that world was about to disappear, giving way to the cruder, richer business world of post-independence India.
Ashok said, ‘My first experience of the Calcutta boxwallah was when as a trainee account executive in an advertising firm I was taken to my first client meeting, and was introduced to this very senior executive in the marketing division of the company. The man was portly and appeared to be quite jovial. He was smoking an imported brand of cigarette, and – this was the middle of May, which is something in Calcutta – he was wearing a suit. His office was air-conditioned. The general atmosphere was of a man in a plush office with a leisurely approach to life.
‘He appeared to be in no great hurry to discuss the business in hand. We were going into all kinds of trivia about life in general, the cricket series, a little office politics. All kinds of things were being talked about from 11 or so until 12 or 12.15. And then there was this long pause, and it seemed almost a pity that we had to set aside the general discussion.
‘My boss broached the subject of business, and this was gone through with great dispatch. I was just observing; I was only a trainee. The business side of things was finished in a quarter of an hour. It was now about 12.30. Lunch was looming. The client asked my boss if he had a luncheon engagement. My boss said no. The client said, “Perhaps we ought to discuss a little more business over lunch.”
‘My boss instructed me to run to the office and take out an IOU for 500 rupees, and join them at a five-star hotel. The client wasn’t inviting us – it wasn’t known for clients to invite advertising agency personnel to lunch. The lunch was to be on us. I suppose I was quite excited at that moment. I had heard a great deal about client entertainment, but I hadn’t done any, or been part of it, at that time. The lunch that day started at 12.45 and finished at 3.30. Everybody was happy at the end.
‘This way of doing things went on till the early 70s. The big companies had more or less a monopoly in their respective fields. They didn’t have to sell. They merely allocated. There was never enough to meet the demand.
‘That’s changed now. There are a lot more companies making the products, and companies are having to battle it out – to meet production volumes, to place them in the market, to persuade the customer. So all of a sudden companies had no room for people who merely dressed well, could talk to the boss’s wife, could play a round of golf, and hold their drink. The country itself had started setting up business schools. To a large extent they tended to be textbook American models, and this created problems for companies. But these institutes enabled companies to get a shortlist of candidates. It became a status symbol to recruit an MBA.
‘People who in earlier days would have gone up the ladder now began to flounder, because they didn’t have the talent to hold down their job. Whereas, before, office life was a pleasant interval between the company apartment and the club house, now, in my firm, if I want to rise, I have some sacrifices to make. For example, I might have to travel 20 days a month. If you’re an all-India organization, you can travel to monitor what’s happening in the field. You’re also doing it because your colleagues are doing it, and it can be seen as a sign of your commitment to your organization.
‘In the old days, if an executive went to the wedding of, say, the niece of a dealer, that would have been seen by the dealer as a most enormous favour, and the executive would have been suitably rewarded by the dealer. Today the executive goes to that wedding to keep in with the dealer. So the whole thing now changes. These dealers most of them speak Hindi, and the older social accomplishments – speaking English, dressing well, playing golf – no longer matter. If you’re travelling 20 days a month, and you’re the sales manager, you’re spending all those days in the company of the dealers and your field staff, and almost every evening is a fairly heavy drinking evening.
‘I can’t say that when I started I had any idea that marketing would be the way it is now. But in my company I am specifically on the advertising side, and this gives me creative satisfaction. Social graces are still a bonus for an executive; they can add sheen to an executive’s profile. But what the executive is really expected to have are qualities of a hard-nosed entrepreneurial businessman which is the kind of man he is dealing with. In his company he has to be a sophisticated communicator; and when he is sitting in a poky little dealer’s shop somewhere he has to speak a different kind of language. He is probably drinking tea out of a dirty tumbler and yet that dealer probably makes infinitely more than the executive.
‘Traditionally in India the dealer network is a very potent force. They’re a breed apart. They may even be different from dealers in other countries. To a very large extent people in the dealer community have not been educated. But they are naturally talented at making money. They take pleasure in making money, and more money. It’s a family business, handed down from generation to generation. They will sit from 10 to 10 at night in their little shops and think nothing of it – that’s their life. They keep rolling the money they make into more and more profitable ventures. And they like to show that they have money. The dealers’ houses might have chandeliers and wall-to-wall carpeting, quite unne
cessary, imported TV colour sets, and curtains and cushions in the most garish colours.
‘But these people are important to companies. So you have these sophisticated organizations with their trained manpower from management institutes, who then have to learn to deal with people who are semi-literate but extremely savvy when it comes to money matters. We need them more than they need us, at this moment in our country’s development.
The strength of a dealer’s shop or “counter” – that is how it is referred to: So-and-so is a good counter or a poor counter or a reliable counter – comes from his having been, or his family having been, in business for generations. He knows what his market will take.
‘The targets are worked out on a counter basis for each town. We might say of a dealer: “He’s a good 500-TV-set counter, and I must get him to sell 200 of mine.” That’s the kind of thinking that’s taking place in an executive’s mind. And once he returns to his base city or town, with his head muzzy with too much drink and travel, he’s on to his computer, feeding it with all this information. No sales manager worth his salt can be found without his strips of Alka-Seltzer – they all have stomach problems – along with their calculators. They’re drinking till 11 or 12 at night, and they’re up again at 8.30 or 9, to face the new day.
The boxwallah of the bygone era was really, typically, a shallow fellow, interested in appearances and the good life. We’ve swung the other way today. Professionally, the executive today is superior to his counterpart of 15 years ago, but his development as a human being is retarded. He is becoming more of an automaton. He physically has little time to think about anything except the turnover and collection targets for the month.
‘If I had known that marketing was going to turn out to be like this, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to go into it when I was young. I’ve turned down requests from the company to move into direct selling jobs. I don’t want to pay that kind of price. I prefer to stay on the advertising side. And I don’t have to do the extra things the sales executives have to do – going to the airport to meet this boss and that boss and take them home and spend an evening with them. I don’t have to do that at all.
‘Life is hard now for the executive, and the city of Calcutta adds to this pressure, by offering so little in return to a person who’s putting in so much effort. After a hard day’s work you can find yourself stranded in a car for hours on end, and when you return home there is no power. There are generators, but they make a dreadful din, and are limited. Apart from visiting one of Calcutta’s clubs, if he’s fortunate enough to be a member, an executive has little choice of places to go. He cannot go out walking because the pavements and the roads don’t allow it. The parks are overcrowded. Most of these parks are infested with rich young men and women who take their cars and turn up their car stereos and eat all evening – junk food from hawkers – and throw the litter around.
The infrastructure of the city is crumbling. The drainage system is perhaps the worst in the world. In the monsoon, major areas of the city are waterlogged for anything up to 72 hours at a time. One year the water never drained away. Carcases of animals appeared, and we were afraid of an epidemic.
The only section of people here who seem to be thriving in Calcutta are the Marwaris. They came from parts of Rajasthan a couple of hundred years ago. They thrive by being middlemen, buying and selling. This is what they were good at, and they continue to be. They were never known for cultural or technical skills. And they just grew as a community. They have been the only ones, in the last 15 or 20 years, who are able to buy properties in the posh areas where previously only the rich Bengalis or expatriate executives lived. They have participated in the property boom. Today in these areas you have multi-storey buildings coming up – one more nail in the coffin of the city: more cars, more sanitation problems, etc. – with the Marwaris themselves occupying most of the apartments.
The other aspect is that some of the very rich Marwaris keep buying up companies after buying just enough shares to gain control. And so a number of old firms are now in the hands of Marwaris. Most of them do not nurture or invest in these companies. They strip the assets. They are quite happy to let the company become more and more sick. It is also true that in the earlier era the British didn’t bother very much about growth. Their main concern was repatriation of a certain amount of profits in foreign exchange to the parent company, and most British managing directors came here for a short-term period of three or five years.
‘At the other end of the spectrum you have the red-flag-waving unions constantly playing cat-and-mouse with the management. The union leaders themselves don’t do any work at all. The unions represent what ultimately the true Bengali is like: he is indolent, doesn’t want to work, but he wants something for nothing, and he must protect his dignity at all costs. He will publicly despise the Marwari trader, but he wouldn’t be able to do the same job himself.
‘We put in a great deal of effort. We draw a monthly pay cheque. And for people like us, who are not businessmen, we feel that the city in which we live must offer us something in return. We must at the end of the working day have more than the prospect of just coming back home. You can’t go to any cinema house, because most of them have poor sound systems and virtually non-functioning air-conditioning systems – they don’t renovate them. I haven’t been to a cinema hall in Calcutta for five or six years.
‘I have told you how as a young man I longed to break into the world of marketing. I have done that, and I can say that professionally I have done well. But that profession hasn’t turned out to be what I thought, and now I feel that those of us in Calcutta who are in the middle between the Marwaris and the trade-union Marxists – the executive class, who used to be an influential part of the city – are slowly being squeezed out of existence.
‘The fact is that the problems of Calcutta are of a magnitude that cannot be endured. My wife and I feel now that we won’t see improvements in our lifetime. We feel we should be trying our luck somewhere else, and saying goodbye to Calcutta.’
My own days in Calcutta had been hard. When I had first come to Calcutta, in 1962, I had, after the early days of strain, settled into the big-city life of the place; had had the feeling of being in a true metropolis, with the social and cultural stimulation of such a place. Something of that life was still there. But I was overpowered this time by my own wretchedness, the taste of the water, corrupting both coffee and tea as it corrupted food, by the brown smoke of cars and buses, by the dug-up roads and broken footpaths, by the dirt, by the crowds; and could not accept the consolation offered by some people that in a country as poor as India the aesthetic side of things didn’t matter.
My feelings went the other way. In richer countries, where people could create reasonably pleasant home surroundings for themselves, perhaps, after all, public squalor was bearable. In India, where most people lived in such poor conditions, the combination of private squalor and an encompassing squalor outside was quite stupefying. It would have given people not only a low idea of their needs – air, water, space for stretching out – but it must also have given people a low idea of their possibilities, as makers or doers. Some such low idea of human needs and possibilities would surely have been responsible for the general shoddiness of Indian industrial goods, the ugliness and unsuitability of so much of post-independence architecture, the smoking buses and cars, the chemically-tainted streets, the smoking factories.
‘Everybody is suffering here,’ a famous actor said at dinner one evening. And that simple word, corroborating what Ashok had said, was like an illumination.
For years and years, and even during the time of my first visit in 1962, it had been said that Calcutta was dying, that its port was silting up, its antiquated industry declining. But Calcutta hadn’t died. It hadn’t done much, but it had gone on; and it had begun to appear that the prophecy had been excessive. Now it occurred to me that perhaps this was what happened when cities died. They didn’t die with a bang; they didn’t d
ie only when they were abandoned. Perhaps they died like this: when everybody was suffering, when transport was so hard that working people gave up jobs they needed because they feared the suffering of the travel; when no one had clean water or air; and no one could go walking. Perhaps cities died when they lost the amenities that cities provided, the visual excitement, the heightened sense of human possibility, and became simply places where there were too many people, and people suffered.
Calcutta had had a left-wing or Marxist government for years, and I was told that the money nowadays was going to the countryside, that the misery of Calcutta was part of a more humane Marxist plan. But things are often as they appear, and it is possible that this is one of the ways cities die: when governments are dogmatic or foolish, killing where they cannot create, when people and governments conspire to frighten away the money and the life they need, when, in a further inversion, the poetry of revolution becomes its own intoxication, and Marxism becomes the opiate of the idle people.
Perhaps when a city dies the ghost of its old economic life lingers on. So, in Calcutta, old firms with famous names are taken over and their assets are broken up; and people invest in real estate, since people always have to live somewhere; and there is an illusion of an economic life. Every few days, in a further illusion of activity, there is a political demonstration; and idle young men, morose and virtuous-looking, take their red flags and slogans through the self-perpetuating misery of the streets; and money and ambition and creativity go elsewhere in India. Without the rest of India to take the strain, the death of Calcutta might show more clearly, and Bengal might show as another Bangladesh – too many people, too little sanitation, too little power.