Monday 29 June 2015

Emergency Conundrum: Some Faultlines Remain

With Emergency completing its fortieth anniversary, newspapers, blogosphere and social media were riddled with stories recalling those dark days when the country teetered close to becoming a permanent banana republic. The recent statement by BJP patriarch and Emergency survivor L K Advani that it could happen again spiced up the issue.

During those infamous nineteen months, the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's son, Sanjay Gandhi, was running the country as extra-constitutional authority and all forms of dissent were ruthlessly suppressed. All governmental institutions such as police, judiciary began to act to his bidding and press too, barring few honourable exceptions, got into kowtow mode.

My memories of that period is quite vague as back then I was not even in high school and my newspaper reading had not graduated beyond comic strips and cricket scores. Moreover I never came across anyone personally who went to jail or even had to undergo the infamous forced sterilisation. My awareness of Emergency was mainly retrospective, something I gained through conversations with elders and by reading Decline and Fall of Indira Gandhi a book by D R Mankekar and Kamala Mankekar.

The only thing I remember of that era is that during our visits to cinema halls, we had to sit through those tedious news reels, produced by Films Division, which prominently featured Sanjay Gandhi, V.C. Shukla and Ambika Soni. Those news reels would make us believe that the country should be grateful for this fantastic trio, who are working tirelessly to make India a developed nation. I seriously think that those documentaries played a stellar role in eroding Congress party's goodwill and subsequent rout in 1977 elections.

Another instance was when the Jaiprakash Narayan's movement had started gathering steam, somebody broached about the newly formed Janata party in our Maths class. Our usually gentle Maths teacher (who used to patiently correct our glaring trespasses in Algebra and Geometry) got a little worked up. She was sceptical about the movement and said it would bode ill for the country. She observed that Congress was such an old party and has done so much for the country, whereas these people cannot be trusted. She cited the example of long standing ruler of China Mao Zedong, who died around that time, and how that country had entered into a period of turmoil.

However history did not pan out the way our Maths teacher would have liked. After the fall of Congress government a rash of reports on Emergency excesses such as illegal detention, police torture and deaths and forced strerilisations started coming out of woodwork. Our newspapers and magazines, which got unshackled from censors, began reporting them assiduously. To cut the long story short, in the intervening 40 years the country had some close calls with its unity and integrity, but the dreaded 'E' word was never evoked. Probably the shock defeat in 1977 acted as a deterrent; still any future adventurism cannot be ruled out. 

Veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar, who valiantly took on the might of the government high-handedness through those dark days, recently said that Emergency cannot be imposed now as the Constitution was changed after 1977 and it is almost impossible to impose it. Though the Constitution may have been made Emergency-proof, other fault lines remain more or less untouched.

The police, bureaucracy, judiciary and the press remain as malleable (if not more) as they were during the Emergency and inspire little confidence. Post-Emergency, the numerous scams all these departments got embroiled in reveal that the rot has only become more deep and the erosion of credibility has been phenomenal.

Hence for a future ruler with dictatorial aspirations, it is a case of glass half-full. He or she only needs to work around by whipping up sentiments such as majoritarianism or militarism to bring about Emergency like situation, without its Constitutional trappings. The rest of the institutions will fall in line without much ado as they did in 1975. Hence the people of the country cannot afford to forget Emergency and let their guard down.


Also Read: Bangalore Beat 

Friday 12 June 2015

Tattoos, Goatees and Male Vanity

The other day I happened to visit a well known college in the city to finish formalities regarding my daughter’s admission. There was a half an hour session to brief both the children and parents about the rules and regulations to be followed. 

The lecturer was making a Power Point presentation with a large Educomp screen in the background. When it came to dos and don’ts regarding dresses, girls were instructed to avoid wearing tight fitting and short sleeved dresses; jeans and coloured hair too fell in the list of don’ts. "Remember this is a co-ed college and hence everyone has to stay within one’s limits," was the cautionary observation by the lecturer.

However what surprised and amused me was the next slide regarding the dress code for boys. The forbidden list was much longer than that of girls, reflecting the long strides accomplished by the male grooming industry since my college days in 1980s.


Like girls, boys too were prohibited from wearing jeans and cargos. But the forbidden list also included tattoos, piercings on the body, gel on hair, sporting a goatee ...


Probably if such a list of don’ts was created during my college days, it may have just included wearing jeans and long hair. Those were early days of TV and Bollywood was the ultimate style guru. And having hair long enough to cover the ears was in vogue, thanks to Amitabh Bachchan. As the superstar’s stranglehold over box office tightened, so did the popularity of this hairstyle.


Calendars with pictures of Big B adorned friendly neighbourhood barber shops and almost everyone wanted barbers to shape their hair accordingly.

Shampooed and blow dried hair was the norm. Hence even traces of coconut oil or any other hair oil was considered a major fashion infraction. Gel was totally unheard of. Though Brylcreem ad used to appear in some newspapers and magazines (TV commercials were in their infancy), it had positioned itself as a product that gives an ‘orderly’ look to scruffy hair, without being oily. Spiky hair was almost unheard of, sometimes sported by b-grade comedians to show their ‘dehati-ness’.
 

Goatee those days was sported by mullahs and orthodox Muslims and hence enjoyed a very low cool quotient. Apart from full beard, the only option those days was the French beard, popularized by some yesteryear cricketers.
 

Tattoos were again considered very downmarket and confined to religious symbols, and tattoo artists were holed up in small stalls housed in busy markets with instruments of dubious sterility. In movies it was used as prop, but never as a fashion statement.
 

In Deewar we had Amitabh Bachchan getting branded with infamous tattoo ‘mera baap chor hai’ in his childhood. In lost-and-found Bollywood potboilers of Manmohan Desai kind, tattoos and birthmarks played a vital role in reuniting estranged brothers in the final reel. Tattoos of snakes, mainly cobras, were sported by the villains such as Amrish Puri and Bob Christo on their brawny arms to look more menacing.
 

Piercings were totally unheard of in the 80s. In the 90s it did catch the fancy, but even then those who were intrepid enough to come within earshot of piercing gun, risked being branded as gays.
 

The interim decades witnessed tectonic shifts in fashion, thanks to satellite television, MTV and internet, which gave rise to concepts such as metrosexual men. Even Bollywood was forced to fall in line with Aamir Khan sporting a soul patch in Dil Chahta Hai and Salman Khan’s middle parting in Tere Naam.

One of the early casualties of this trend was the friendly neighbourhood tailor, as customer preference shifted towards readymade and branded clothes. He either had to shut shop or get subsumed as supplier to garment units.
 

The other casualty was the barber as he had to either diversify into a new age salon or shut shop as men’s grooming was now no longer confined to haircuts, shave and tel maalish. It quite literally deals with matters from head to toe - hair cuts to pedicures.

In fact male grooming has now become so elaborate that it has almost caught up with their female counterparts in terms of vanity, which since time immemorial had been a female preserve.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat