On the Delhi Metro

As the grey train hurtled towards me on that gloomy day, I stood still and waited in anticipation of what lay in store for me aboard. I felt muscles twitch as a general air of uneasiness spread around me. Soon, the grey train opened its doors to us and exclaimed, "HUDA City Centre." My fellow passengers ran helter-skelter and sought desperately to seat themselves. Confused, I read the bright green signs that urged me not to sit on seats reserved for women, the elderly, and physically challenged persons. I wandered down to the next compartment. It was almost empty. I wondered why others didn't join me. Perhaps there's nothing like the warmth of humanity in winter.

In two minutes, we were at the next station, IFFCO Chowk, and in another two minutes, at MG Road station. Office clerks, call center employees, college

students, housewives, children, and senior citizens scrambled in through the doors to find places to sit. I pulled out a book and pretended to read. On my left sat a couple eager to know each other better. This quiet, brooding call-center employee sat listening to his partner's endless explanations for what she perceived as her inadequacies. "You know I feel my English and Hindi are worsening here in Gurgaon. I really did speak well in Bara Banki." Hmmm, muttered her boyfriend. "You know I don't really drink. It was just that one time when my Assamese flatmates forced me to drink and I got so drunk that I puked all night. These Assamese girls do it every week. I just don't know how they manage!" Hmmm, muttered her boyfriend again. "I hope you don't believe all the rumors about me in the office. They're all lies." Let's go, he said this time, the station's here.

"Guru Dronacharya," the announcer screamed. What a delicious irony that the ancient Mahabharata tale about Gurgaon has found favor with the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation in 2010!

In walked Old Father Time himself through the gates. Dressed in a yellow silk kurta and a Nehru jacket, Father Time smiled and seated himself next to me. "Where are you going?" he asked. "Patel Chowk," I replied. "Long way to go, my boy. These coaches are old, you see, but the new ones they've got will be faster and smoother without the jerkiness we have now." Hmmm, I responded, wondering how he knew about the DMRC's plans. I suppose my laconic responses put off the old man. So he began talking to a rotund gentleman who seemed intrigued by the tidbit about the new coaches. "Bhaisahab, there is no hope for us Hindus nowadays. See how the government equivocates when it comes to terrorism. They didn't even want to hang Afzal Guru." Bhaisahab concurred: "And now they speak of Hindu terror. What a travesty!" That comment clearly struck a chord. It promised to pave the way for a long discourse on minority appeasement and Hindu insecurities in contemporary India. But nothing of the sort happened because a young, bespectacled man in a skullcap and sherwani stood beside us. The joys of Indian secularism!

If you look outside from the window of your metro coach

on the Delhi-Gurgaon route, you will discover much that had been hitherto hidden. Greenery everywhere with only small shanties breaking up the verdant landscape. Hardly any people to be seen in this bustling metropolis bursting at its seams. The orderliness of the armed forces inside their residential colonies. The opulence of farmhouses that are exposed now to the public eye. And the elegance of the Qutb Minar towering over Mehrauli. Thereafter, we are creatures of the dark in the underworld. Who knows what's happening above us? A mosque had been demolished that day, in fact, and Mathura Road and its vicinity were jam-packed with cars. But we couldn't know that inside our metro compartments. What we did see and know, however, is that we were packed together with a motley bunch of human specimens with different colors and smells enveloping us. The rough-and-ready manner of democracy, Indian-style.

Aboard the Metro, we were left to decide whether to offer seats to ladies and older people.

Every time someone offered his seat to a lady (not often!)he seemed positively pleased with himself. The elderly were not so lucky. They had to request seats, explaining that they had a long distance to travel, and even then, sitting could not be guaranteed. When an old lady came in at Jorbagh, ostensibly after cleaning some posh houses there, no one bothered when she asked for a seat. She deserved a seat under two of the three categories of the "abnormal" (old and female), but she apparently did not know that the unwritten class dynamics of Delhi had permeated underground into the Metro too. Unwritten also meant unspoken since no one offered an explanation for their rudeness: they simply looked away or continued talking as if they had not heard the woman at all. When I offered my seat to the lady, a young student with his ears plugged to his I-Pod threatened to shove his way ahead of her. I had to physically block his way to let her sit. Everyone looked displeased. An unwritten, unspoken law of the city had been broken.

Another such law concerns women. The DMRC has recently extended North India's zenana culture into the public transport system of the future. A reserved coach for women essentially means segregation. It is quite obvious that the majority of women will choose to avoid getting

their butts pinched or breasts grabbed in the other coaches. But with the new reserved coach for women, the "normal" passengers (male, aged 15-60 years) can rule the roost elsewhere and ignore the bright green signs that dare to impose a kind of civility in the early days of the Metro. Butt-pinching and breast-grabbing are now perfectly acceptable in three-quarters of every Metro train. Indeed, they are vital to maintaining the new zenana culture: "segregate, or else we'll, molest you" is the message to women.

On my way back, two call-center employees sat beside me all the way to Gurgaon. They seemed less-than-thrilled by their jobs. But they were even less thrilled by their friend Raghu, who seemed to them to be engaged forever in long telephonic conversations with his girlfriend. "What's there to talk to these bitches? They're good to fuck now and then after work. And it's great on the weekends. But there's nothing really to talk to them about." His misogynist co-worker agreed heartily: "I don't waste my time like that. Better to go out drinking with your buddies. Or stay home playing video games. These bitches are so demanding: if you get talking to them, they won't let you do anything else in life." This is how the "normal" passengers of the Metro are expected to behave. The misogyny of the streets is normalized now as it gets braided with the zenana culture of the old courtly elites. This is the culture of neoliberalism: selective appropriation of cultural pasts to reinforce existing power equations.

But neoliberalism is not simply trade liberalization and privatization,as many are wont to believe. The Delhi Metro is a dramatic statement by the Government of India in an era where the rotten core of private sector corporations has come to the fore like never before. Leviathan, too, can be efficient and profitable as it builds critical infrastructure and breathes life anew into the city. The state, as entrepreneur as well as regulator, is the new face of neoliberal reforms in India. If M-NREGA

is its most visible face in rural India today, the Delhi Metro is the blueprint for urban transformations in India today. Move over, Narayan Murthy and the BATF. Metro coaches are awash with public sector advertisements for yoga and naturopathy from the Health Ministry and mobile and internet plans from MTNL and BSNL. The state continue to enforce the writ of the law throughout the metro station. If you spit or travel without tokens, be prepared to pay a hefty fine. If you enter the women's coach forcibly, be prepared to be pulled out by a cop policing the gendered borderlands between the coaches. And don't urinate on the platform or clamber atop the train! The government hopes to impose a distinctly bourgeois civility on those whose notions of morality are characteristically different. It is not clear yet who or what will prevail.

There is no doubt that the Delhi Metro is the best thing to happen to the Capital for decades. Delhi lacks the planning apparatus of Mumbai or Bangalore. It is a segregated city that offers innumerable opportunities to the new migrant even as it blocks off many others. The Metro re-engages the energies of young aspirants to middle-class rank and privilege. It brings the city together in unprecedented ways, yet re-inscribes older prejudices of gender, age, and class in a neoliberal garb. In the stations and trains, the democratic populism of the streets battles the neoliberal moral order directed by the government. Little wonder then that the mall-going India Shining public shies away from the Metro: it is too plebeian for their tastes. And yet their college-going children may well end up sweating and scrambling beside less-privileged passengers who look and smell so different from them. In this tortured, tortuous way, the promise of the modern city comes alive and the century-old legacies of the colonial capital threaten to fall apart.

What's Wrong With My Generation?

In the fall of 2002, I started college in Grinnell, Iowa. I opted for a liberal arts education over a specialized degree in economics at St. Stephens', Delhi, because it promised to open up an intellectual universe that encouraged learning for learning's sake. Over the past eight years, however, I have tended to harbor mixed feelings on what I see and experience on campuses. As I have enjoyed and profited from the company of outstanding teachers and peers, I've nonetheless found myself at odds with so many others. My generation invented Facebook and made it a runaway success, but it lost something along the way. We can stay in touch online with friends and family, but we have lost the art of conversation. We can write computer code or blogs, but we have lost the pleasures of penning a persuasive argument. We read emails and news articles all day, but we have lost the joys of reading books that open our minds to hitherto unknown worlds. We seek power and profit or pleasure and expressiveness in all we do, but we lack a sense of purpose. So what's wrong with my generation?

Perhaps it's wisest to begin with introspection. How many of you write every day? No, I don't mean emails or post-its! I mean writing to yourself, your friends or anyone else who cares to read. By writing, I mean expressing oneself in a creative yet disciplined way on a subject that matters to you. That takes out most blogs, twitter and Facebook updates, essay assignments, and grant applications. And when you do write, do you reflect long on a word or strive for succinctness? Or has writing (or typing) merely becoming a kind of expressive act on the one hand and a chore on the other? Most importantly, do you enjoy writing? Do you usually complain of writer's block or do you get thrilled at the prospect of penning down your thoughts in a structured way? If we consider the average person born between 1980 and 1995, I think, the answers are pretty straightforward: either writing is a necessary evil required in college and beyond or it is a purely expressive act in which anything goes. Of course, there's no "right" response here, but isn't it worth pondering what our responses today might reveal?

In the spirit of that question, let's consider reading. What do you read? Emails? Newspapers and magazines? Harry Potter? Dan Brown? Jared Diamond? And why do you read? Simply because you need to check the news and your inbox? Or because fantasy worlds appeal to you? You might say it's impossible to find time to read for pleasure nowadays; there's just so much work to do at home and at work. Fair enough, I'd say, but you do watch TV, surf the Net, spend hours on Facebook, and so forth. Surely, you could read for pleasure now and then when you get the time. And when you do read, would you read slowly like we sip wine? Or would you skim through the pages of a novel much like you'd down a beer in a jiffy? Lastly, if one were to ask you to recall what you read, what would you remember? The plot, the characters, and the author's turn of phrase? Or merely that it's something about the world of wizards or the mischief of the Catholic Church? Again, for those of you born between 1980 and 1995, I am not so interested in what your specific answer might be, but in the overall patterns we can start to discern here.

Broadly speaking, I find there are two sets of responses: Utilitarian and Sentimentalist. The Utilitarian sees reading and writing as means to some worldly end. It might be grades, jobs, grants, or just name-dropping at a social gathering. Formal education in schools and colleges is, as economists say, an "input" that serves to produce the finished product: an industrious, rational self-interested calculator who minimizes risks and maximizes benefits. To speak of learning for the sake of learning before such a person is to invite ridicule and scorn. Wake up to the 21st century, they yell, and get yourself a Master's in some technical subject so that you can earn a six-figure salary within the next five years!

On the contrary, the Sentimentalist sees no pleasures in industry, rationality or calculation. These are far too bourgeois-rational for, say, someone deep into Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. They say: let's save the planet, stop making war, organize concerts for starving Third Worlders, and lead authentic lives. The world is bereft of goodness and kindness, they argue further, so we must dream and express ourselves online and offline to our friends. Art is expression; words are expression. Academia attracts such people en masse because it offers healthcare benefits and a stable middle-class life without hard work. Joblessness also attracts such people en masse because it is the lot of artists and hippies to revel in the slings and arrows of bourgeois society. But if one suddenly stop a sentimentalist to ask about reading and writing, one should expect mumbles and incoherent phrases. Conversation, after all, is not to be expected of someone who knows that anti-war protests and Habitat for Humanity are the hallmarks of the authentic life.

College and graduate students overwhelmingly fall into one of these two categories. Or sometimes even in both? Arguably, the finest example of my generation is Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. If you know anything about him or saw the fictionalized account of his life in The Social Network, you'll know what I'm talking about. Here is a person who is exceedingly smart and ambitious, much like our Utilitarians on campus, but his relationships with his friends are notably shallow and his speech resembles monologues rather than conversation. But he is also a creator, an entrepreneur, someone who avidly reads ancient Greek philosophy and advocates Stoicism in a money-obsessed age. He could be any of your restive nerdy/geeky friends from college, except that he's the world's youngest billionaire. But he doesn't converse, read or write much beyond what's minimally required of him. And it doesn't prevent him from doing well for himself!

If you've read until this point, you might have guessed what I'm talking about. It is not that my generation has mastered non-verbal communication or their auditory skills as substitutes for reading and writing. They have instead opted for shallowness and superficiality. What is true of your peer in the comparative literature doctoral program is also quite true of your banker friend on Wall Street. Education is a means to an end. In other words, the Utilitarian must try to maximize his job prospects by writing and reading minimally, and the Sentimentalist must simply re-affirm her naive moral convictions in what she reads and finds. Vast worlds are shut off for these blinkered individuals. It is not merely the pleasures of the mind that are out of vogue, but an experiential understanding of the world around us. It is now possible to study economics or politics without paying attention to the homeless people on the streets. It is now possible to protest against the US war on terror while retaining Bush-like stereotypes of Muslims as intolerant, irrational, pre-modern bigots. It is now possible to earn a lot of money or hold many degrees without a clear sense of purpose in life. It is now possible to socialize without listening to others. It is now possible to love without affection, live without values, and learn without passion.

Something is very nearly lost forever in our world: intellectual depth and moral seriousness. You cannot expect someone who drinks fair-trade coffee at Starbucks to earn "good karma" to be anything but shallow and superficial. Everything is a means to an end: relationships, knowledge, clothes, speech, food. But what good is such instrumentalism, whether it is Utilitarian or Sentimentalist? Can it help us understand the world and ourselves better? Can it help us change our world ever so slightly by our actions? Can it make us better human beings? None of these ends require a higher education degree. Indeed, there might be much to learn from those who are less fortunate than us economically and educationally. But how can a well-schooled upper-middle class teenager today take someone less privileged seriously? Our social inferiors are either to be despised or pitied, depending on your ideological convictions. The world is, as VS Naipaul wrote famously, what it is, so my generation simply choose to extend their middle-class privileges in corporate, government or academic spheres. Restive yet unmindful of what is missing, they affirm their commitment to cynicism and moral flippancy. Now where do we go from here?