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STYLE Sab Chalta Hai In our march towards modernity we are still at the tadpole stage of evolution, a bit of fusion and oodles of confusion. By Madhu Jain It was one of those summer dos in Delhi's Gatsbyesque farmbelt where the glow on faces was more a measure of the weather than well-being. Mrs Newly-Arrived from Chandigarh, resplendent in a shiny deep turquoise and parrot green polyester salwar "suit" and a De Beers solitaire, looked at my brown and beige handloom saree picked up at a Vishwakarma sale with a puzzled expression. "That's nice. Cotton? I don't know anybody who wears cotton." "Well," I muttered, angry at being taken for a bechari behenji, "I don't know anyone who wears anything else in summer." It's advantage polyester. No sweat. Our lady from Chandigarh wants to be modern. And modern today is getting to mean western, man-made and spanking new -- whether it's clothes, house or food. Even accents. The march to modernity is westward. In this quest for "modernity" we are still at the tadpole stage of evolution: not quite firmly ashore and up on our legs in the brave new globalised world where Rule Britannia has long ceded to Uncle Sam. The British, according to analyst Udayan Patel, influenced Indians by being here: "They organised life for us: city space was altered, as was men's clothing. However, there was a divide between work identity and family identity. You had two different worlds with two different emotions." We led split lives. Today the middle-class Indian is tuned into the American way. The Yankees have not come -- they don't need to be here physically. But their culture has made its way -- over the thresholds, piggybacking on their movies, music, food and fashion -- into Indian kitchens, bedrooms and even bathrooms. Adds Patel: "The Americans have become the rulers of aspirations. They determine the domain of desire: what's in, what's cool, what's modern." However, the baggage of prejudices and traditions, like the tadpole's tail, slows us down. But we try. Those already ashore beckon us like sirens into a world in which the only constant factor is the zap. The Veejays have become the taste and style gurus. Hey guys, they say, and the R's roll off the tongues in mint Transatlantic accents. Never mind if they've never stepped out of India. Their body language, in some sort of visual esperanto, shrieks 'sock it to 'em'. The Big F ice-cream ad says it all. Clothed in lycra or in any of those hi-tech synthetics which mould their lithe and gym-sculpted bodies like cling foil they, along with the newsreaders, models, starlets and starlings and assorted beauty queens are the new taste dispensers. Nothing Indian about them you would say: From Mother India to Miss India, nay, Miss World, it's been quite a haul. The broad earthen pitcher figure of fertility now whittled down to perfect 10s -- according to global specifications of beauty. Hold that picture. Rewind. After a few sentences the Yankee accents of those veejays and deejays suddenly droop to half mast. Which Vorld are they living in? The Ws come out as Vs, grammar goes for a spin and the good old desi, non-plu accent keeps appearing. Women still can't talk the talk or walk the walk: most of them, other than the very young, still look awkward in skirts, jeans and tights: the attitude wasn't imported along with the clothes. It took Japanese women more than a generation to drop the kimono walk and grow longer legs. It has yet to happen here. Similarly, our buildings have yet to come out of the ugly-duckling stage. cpwd monstrosities scar the landscape. Impersonal, grey, institutional buildings which came up after the 1950s. It was, says architect S.K. Das, "all about monumentality and collectivised expression. We became prisoners of the Soviet style but then went straight to the post-modern, bypassing the modern". Modernism has left Indians goalless. We now have, what architect Gautam Bhatia calls, "a hokey kind of internationalism, an absence of ideology". Says Bhatia: "Architecture now goes with coalition politics, you can have a bit of everything." So, cityscapes resemble a smorgasboard of styles: a Spanish hacienda next to a Rajasthan palace next to a minimalist Scandinavian house with thick-glass-and-pine floors. A latter day Kubla Khan even commandeers a Japanese garden for his Heinz-style house with its frozen icecream cake-like elevation. A pizza with a sarson ka saag topping. Anything goes. I swear I saw matar paneer, pasta and a dollop of caviar merging in one plate. Restaurateur Lalit Nirula calls it the "butter chickenification" of the Indian palate. Butter chicken came to be in the '60s in a Delhi restaurant: a customer wanted chicken curry which had run out. Unfazed, the chef grabbed some tandoori chicken, whipped up a sauce out of tomatoes and butter and bunged in the chicken and a fistful of masalas. Thereby creating a dish which would forever alter our palate. Subtlety died with fast food in the fast lane. So it is with Indian taste. But out of this fusion/confusion may finally come a more self-assured taste. Even modernity. "Modernity comes from a certain act of forgetting," says social anthropologist Shiv Viswanathan. "Pop culture does not want a baggage of memories." Put in some folk art, stir in some street kitsch and, voila, there may be quite a cool new dish. "Architecture now goes with coalition politics. You can have a bit of everything." |
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