February 9, 1998

The USA is no longer simply the foreign hand, it's getting to be the mind, body and soul as liberalisation, brands and TV shape much of how urban India speaks, dresses and just is.

By Sudeep Chakravarti, Nandita Chowdhury and Stephen David

You're not male, you're a guy. You're not female. You're a guy, too. You never ever get angry, you "lose it". The verb "to chill" isn't about feeling cold, it's the way to relax, as in "You're losing it, guy. Chill." You don't meet for lunch, you "do lunch". You don't exercise an option, you "go for it".

You never have a plan, but an "agenda". If you're popular and in demand, you're "hot". If you've found a way to fashionably stand out, or react, or be, you're "cool". So, if you're hot, you're cool. If you're cool, you're hot. If you think the United Kingdom -- or some parts of it, anyway -- is where English is spoken and the wisdom of the millennium still wafts from, you are, to put it mildly, "out of it". And if you can't make something work, your ass could be grass. From what you say to how you say it, from what you view to what you wear and from what you eat to how you work, the US of A is on top of the mind, around your body and trying to find a way to get deep into your soul.

Most obviously, it shows in the way a large part of urban India -- pre-teens, teens and yuppies -- speaks, dresses and behaves. Take this exchange at the entrance of Ghungroo, arguably Delhi's most "happening" discotheque, at 2 a.m. The pseudo-American greeting, accompanied by high fives, goes like this. Entrant No.1: "Heyhowyoudoonman? (How are you?)" Entrant No. 2: "Doonfine, doonfine. (Fine, thank you)." Entrant No.1: "Let'scheckouttheactionman. (Shall we go in?)" Entrant No. 2: "Cool. Tonight'sreallyhappening, man, right? Right? (Good idea, my friend, sounds like fun)." The two gentlemen shimmy their way in, wrapped in tight Levi's jeans and black Lee Cooper shirts, instantly swallowed by a 20-something crowd which clones their speech and attitude, and American brand names.Ramesh Naik, a 21-year-old humanities undergraduate in Bangalore, gets off the phone with an "OK, sari, let's touch base at PH nale 4 p.m.". Sari is Kannada for OK, and nale for tomorrow, but PH is for Pizza Hut, 'let's touch base' a phrase derived from a baseball term, now meaning, 'to meet'. Why? "Why? Because America is a cool place, things American are cool. The best music, movies, basketball and tv programmes are from that country."

People like Naik have actually been to the States, thanks to relatives, and can be understood for their excess. But most of those who thronged Rex cinema on Brigade Road, Bangalore, to see Men In Black (MIB), a Hollywood hit essentially about two sassy men in smart black suits and sunglasses trying to stop evil aliens from destroying earth, haven't been anywhere near the promised land.

Next to the Rex, there are three crowded shops called American Corner. None are near corners, and sell cheap non-branded sandals and shoddy jeans. It gets as random as that. Kannada film producer Nandakumar wanted a hit. So he wove a plot around a movie to be shot in America and called it America! America!! "The word America has a positive connotation," he says. "I thought audiences would love to see a film shot in America." They did -- it was one of the biggest Kannada hits of 1997.

At an informal teenage party at an apartment on Napean Sea Road, Mumbai, friends of Nikhila (15) and Divya Palat (18) lounge around in what can only be called brand names. All of the teeny-boppers, without exception, are wearing DKNY (Donna Karan New York) shirts, Reebok or Nike floaters, Levi's hipsters and chewing Wrigley's gum. At school, says their friend Shraddha Kapoor, "Ninety per cent of the students have some American brand name, real or imitation, on them."

What you see is what you've got to get. A 200 by 25 yard bit in Delhi at the Basant Lok plaza has crowds spilling over at some of the biggest American names. Among them, a McDonald's, a Nike outlet -- the company's go-getting "Just Do It" slogan has already spawned a successor; people sport "Just Did It" T-shirts -- Baskin Robbins parlour, a movie hall that showcases Hollywood movies, a T.G.I. Friday's restaurant, and a Levi's showroom.

The rave is reflected in Teens Today, a popular magazine launched last year by Living Media India Limited, the publishers of india today. It has an agony aunt section called No Probs, and an interview page called Rappin'. In a page called Sez You, Gaurav Raj Verma from Ambala City goes on hyperdrive with teenage love/lust/longing for a girl called Dipannita Dutt. "I'm crazy 'bout ya, U R my Meg Ryan ... I'll be waitin'."

it's quite likely this Americo-Neanderthal wooing will work because, as editor Ameena Jayal says, "It's how the kids are. They are Indian, but the slant is very American." For today's children, English style and idiom in particular can seem boring and restraining, she says, and the magazine's usp reflects it. "British is dull and propah," echoes Anshul Pathania, 20, a Mumbai college-goer. "America is happening."

Whatever. But that's the truth and it has spread far beyond the hold of the metros and mannerism. In Patna, "Lee, Jeans That Built America" hoardings created a stir, and some clubs and restaurants have replaced Ghulam Ali and Pankaj Udhas with Michael Bolton and Air Supply. In Bhopal, a city in which Union Carbide and anything American was a dirty word 13 years ago at the time of the gas leak tragedy, American brand name jeans are the ultimate statement for many middle class children, some of whom prefer Kellogg's cereal to traditional paranthas for breakfast, swear by TNT Cartoon Network and American major league basketball. A growing generation of youngsters has learnt to wear even its cricket caps backward, dress baggy, soak up from American TV shows, and Bollywood stars who copy street fashion from the States.

The trend runs deep elsewhere, too. At a major Delhi-based polyester fibre company, senior executives are jokingly called Citizen K by others. Because when they talk pay, perks and what they spend on in thousands of rupees, they sound like a pack of software wizards trying to come to terms with enhanced metal purity: 30k for that Sony stereo stack, 50k for a stock market punt and 75k for a Club Med holiday.

The joke isn't on Citizens K; they think they are deadly serious and successful and treat the anti-banter as pure envy. Other management-related events aren't jokes, either. If any organiser worth his pitch wants to book up a seminar with hungry management hopefuls, forget it if the draw is an Oxbridge don. Instead, think Tom Peters, or Jack Canfield, author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, or even Deepak Chopra, the Indian-born attitude guru who has USA certification.

The change is quick, uptempo, often necessary. Frooti, a successful Indian brand of juice, recently repositioned itself as Yo! Frooti to try and keep up with the times. The Allen Solly range of menswear wasn't getting too far till it pushed the very American casually formal concept of Friday Dressing. Even the holiest of the holies, cricket and polo, the two mainstay British legacies -- besides English -- in India, have been brushed with that most American of touches: spangled, mini-skirted cheerleaders, the price of sponsorship. This is America on-line, where anything, even the remotest link, goes. Take the young Sikh gentleman strutting around Delhi's Connaught Place ("Oye Jassu, tussi ki haal hai?") wearing a University of Notre Dame Fighting Irish sweat shirt that declares: "IMAGE. Talk The Talk, Walk The Walk." His friend Jassu's T-shirt has a simple message upfront: Guess Jeans, USA.

Though the jeans he wears are Wrangler, it's no guess or mystery. Liberalisation has brought a rush, but getting hip with Americana, such as it is, ain't -- isn't -- new. When Shammi Kapoor made like Elvis, puff, pout and poise, he'd throw in more than a little rock 'n' roll and twist on the side. He'd throw in casual cool. Even as the CIA was being rubbished as the "foreign hand" in the '70s, there were large numbers trying to turn a little stretch in front of Elite cinema, near New Market in Calcutta, into a patch of Brooklyn after seeing John Travolta swing in Saturday Night Fever. There were those whose opening line was "I'm a Deadhead, how about you?"

That was then. These days, a person anywhere on the income strata can be touched by Americana, from crowds in north India soaking up the laughs and action in a Hindi version of MIB or Speed 2, or farmers in the south sowing Cargill seeds.

Increasing numbers of emigrants and students to the US have sent home signals of the American dream, as have thousands of professionals snared by the booming software industry. A culture of a kind has developed in the past few years with open season on satellite TV. The Bold and the Beautiful, talk shows, MTV and Channel V. Rap is a rage in half a dozen Indian languages. South-east Asia opened up to Americana at least a decade before India did, but here, because of the common thread of English, it has gone beyond aping fashion.

It worries people like Pramod Navalkar, the Shiv Sena's conservative culture minister in Maharashtra. "There's no need to keep away from American culture, it's part of the world. But in embracing it, people tend to cross limits." Navalkar mainly cites eating out and consumer spending as wasteful American-style crazes.

Also, it isn't that there is no culture clash among savvy urbanites. There are still enough young Indians like 27-year-old Bangalore designer Venita Vohra, who will try her hardest not to go for American brand names just for the heck of it, and derides those who "drive past an airport and pick up an American accent". Amlan Dasgupta, a professor of English at Calcutta's Jadavpur University, a left-leaning bastion, is scathing. "The inability to articulate in correct English is made up with Americanisms." But these gripes are far behind the frenzy -- good, bad or ugly.

Because in India, the US talks big, bigger than any other nation in other ways as well. It's India's largest trading partner, its biggest investor and business collaborator. Top US coporations are entrenched here, from General Electric to General Motors, from Citibank to Coca Cola, from Microsoft to IBM. They have brought a work culture as distinct as the Japanese, only less formal. American universities in general and a few in particular like Harvard, University of Pennsylvania's Wharton business school, or Massachusetts Institute of Technology are hot draws for instant recognition in a global business environment. "Today's generation has not really been bitten by the Oxford or Cambridge bug," says A. George, a retired professor in Bangalore, a some-time aspirant. "Those days it meant a lot to be UK-returned or brought up in the English way of living. That is passe." People, he says, have embraced the spirit of America more than any other country's.

So even as Dasgupta stresses Americanisms as a sign of inadequacy, corridor conversation outside his class carries on in a way where Yo! has outpaced another Americanism, Hi!, students talk about "checking out" lectures, seriously discuss the latest veejays, allow that "Meggy's a cute babe" and that there isn't much "juice" left in Windows 95.

One of the most popular comic strips for corporate types is Dilbert, a snap-happy, dry look at corporate America. If casual-formal approach to dressing is gaining currency -- as is the ubiquitous dollar, but that is another story -- so has a similar approach at work: casual as far as style of working and office behaviour are concerned, and formal as far as aggressive professionalism and nerve-jangling delivery schedules are concerned. "I'm all for this Uncle Sam culture at the workplace," says Nirvic Guha, a quintessential yuppy and general manager with MAA Bozell Communications, an advertising hot-shop. "Today's managers are more into deal-making the American way. Now we're talking productivity."

And after delivering, you party, period. Unwinding gleefully in a post-deal, post-week afterlife where tequila slammers aren't just fashionably welcome but "fu**ingcrazyman". And when you travel out after a few shots of the potent Mexican cactus distillate, you don't simply take a left turn, you "cut a left here, like". And India meets America and careens along somewhere, everywhere.
-- with Nandita Choudhury in Mumbai, Stephen David in Bangalore and bureau reports

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