Diwali:1,000 Bottles Of Pepsi, Roulette and Delhi Police

My memories are Diwali in Delhi are as colourful as the celebration. As a student of Delhi University, I celebrated this festival with gusto and on one memorable year with 1,000 bottles of Pepsi, a roulette wheel and the Delhi Police.

The catalyst for this adventure was an amazing man called Chintu Chawla, proud resident of Rajouri Garden and entrepreneur extraordinaire. Like many Sikhs, he made the best of friends and the worst of enemies. Despite his outwardly aggressive Delhi persona that involved charismatic tirades of Punjabi abuse that would have made Laloo Prashad blush, he was big-hearted to a fault and wept every time we had a chicken slaughtered. Despite his habit of loudly threatening drivers that cut him off with dire sexual consequences to their next of kin, I sentimentally remember him threatening to kill me if I swore within a kilometre of Bangla Sahib, the great Sikh temple of Delhi.

I had been fortunate enough to be befriended by Chintu in Sri Venkateswara College when I was still struggling to spell it. I soon found out, before the days of Twitter or even mobiles, that he was a human social media hub and knew everything that that was going on in West Delhi. To a supernatural extent. “Nirula’s at D-28 were raided last night by the ITO. They had 3 crores under their mattress!”; “My cousin’s bhabhi’s grandfather owns three illegal rifles and last week shot a monkey!”

Chintu not only knew everything that happened, he desperately wanted to be there when it did. That meant long laughter-filled nights jumping off and on the Mudrika (Ring Road bus) or if we were lucky, in his family’s temperamental Maruti 800, chasing down the latest Old Monk and water get-together or in this case, the latest high stakes Diwali “Flash” game.

Twenty years later I can very clearly remember Diwali flash parties at the Chawlas. Even then the joint family was an institution under attack, but the Chawlas had gallantly swum against a strong tide of change, and a matrix of relatives lived in a huge house in D Block. Diwali would see the lounge filled with enormous Sikhs, constructed with stiff Patialas and paddling pool sized servings of butter chicken, jealously nursing their two dealt playing cards. They looked like a range of the Himalayas with two dwarfed checker-patterned billboards on the side of each mountain.

Punjabis are a jovial lot but when money is involved, there can be an sudden air of intense seriousness and uncharacteristic silence. The tradition of gambling during Diwali was no exception. It was a very serious business indeed, with little eye contact between poker faces, just a flurry of suspicious side glances and nonchalant throws of money into the pot.

This mesmerising meditation would be broken by truly violent eruptions of cheating accusations and heart-stopping drama. Not for the faint hearted! On my first few visits to the Chawlas I thought they were suffering an almighty ongoing row and confided this to Chintu who doubled over laughing and said, “ Nei yaar, that’s how Punjabis talk only!”

Chintu may have had a protective instinct for condemned chickens, but I soon found this didn’t extend to his fellow man. Diwali night in the streets of Rajouri garden is to relive the Lebanese civil war, on a bad night.

It is beyond description. India has not heard of occupational health and safety, and her fireworks are not the effeminate crackers of my youth. They really should be stored in ammo dumps under armed guard.These annually claim thousands of fingers and under our command, made enormous holes in aluminium billboards advertising VIP underpants.

Skyrockets were designed to be fired vertically, but West Delhites find a well-intended horizontal launch very satisfactory, and in the direction of a neighbour’s face, infinitely more satisfying! Multiply that by a thousand neighbours, slash combatants, and you have some idea of the ferocity the celebration evokes. The exhausting swing of my emotions from an instinct of self-preservation, fighting a strong impulse to dive head first in to the ditch, and the wonderfully liberating experience of firing kilos of gunpowder at young families. 

In hindsight, I can see why Chintu is such a good survivor. Though we nearly didn’t survive the following year’s Diwali.

Chintu, naturally entrepreneurial, had heard on his amazing radar that people were making a small fortune in the Diwali fairs selling the new multinational soft drinks. Thick as thieves, we pooled resources and in no time we were riding in a truck, the proud guardians of 1,000 bottles of Pepsi.
Setting up our stall in Green Park mela, it didn’t take long to realise we were in deep trouble. We had been duped into believing we would have the monopoly, and our prices plummeted from a level that would have seen the proceeds purchase a year’s supply of Old Monk from the Army Canteen to a level that would have seen a year’s supply of ruthless ridicule.

We hadn’t even dented the skyscrapers of Pepsi crates which formed a towering backdrop to our depressingly quiet stall, in a furiously busy fair. That night we barely slept as we nervously pondered how we were to sell more bottles, and I had never slept on Pepsi crates before (because we couldn’t risk any bottles being stolen). It was a tricky manoeuvre as we hadn’t sold more than six crates and we were dangerously high off the ground.

The next day, despite his deep reservations, Chintu listened to me and we made a clowns face with holes for eyes and a mouth to charge punters to take a chance at throwing a ball through and claiming a Pepsi as a prize.

This was reminiscent of my later business decisions. I clearly should have seen that establishing a game, where our fiscal survival was dependant on Indians not having any cricket skills, was not sound. We got rid of quite a lot of Pepsi, but it was next to free. Cricket guns with seriously strong throwing arms consistently found their mark and in no time the hardboard clown, to their great delight, was firewood.

Then Chintu looked dangerously preoccupied, genius was in motion. As genius is a slip away from madness, we found ourselves at a toy shop buying a miniature roulette table.

Incredibly, we moved the supplies to Lajpat Nagar where we slept again on the crates and I have a very clear memory of wrapping myself up against the swarm of mosquitoes in a cloth street sign for woman’s unmentionables in Central Market, and drifting off to the calls of the night watchman as he made his rounds.

The roulette table was the hit of the fair and we didn’t know where to put the bundles of cash that were being thrown at us. Chintu had had the courage to give the wrong odds without our customers knowing any better. We could see ourselves hosting a party to end all parties in no time at all.

Then as I greedily looked down at the glorious piles of crumpled notes ready to sweep yet another avalanche into our money box, I only just missed having all my fingers broken.

A lathi (truncheon) was brought down with such force on our table that the roulette wheel flew into the air, closely followed by Rs 100 notes and the grasping hands of their owners. A Jaat constable who looked like a well-made public building screamed a string of abuses that even Chintu, though now open-mouthed and decidedly paler, couldn’t help feel some admiration for it’s colourful delivery.

Chintu trembled, “Bhaisahib, please come to the side and we can work this out!” The cop erupted, “Do you think I am dishonest cop?” We all shook our heads furiously, indicating ‘no’.

“If I take money, I take it front of the people!”

Twenty years on Chintu lives in Torronto with his beautiful young family. It’s a joy to phone my brother and remember those cherished days. It’s with sadness I won’t be able to wish him Happy Diwali with a big Punjabi hug.

You can take the boy out of West Delhi but you can’t take West Delhi out of the boy. For that I am very grateful because for some he was the worst of enemies but for me he always made the very best of friends.

India Emerging, Australia Submerging.

The Australian Governments main defence in the sacking of 1000 BlueScope workers was that this was a painful symptom of an ongoing economic transition. But this transition is been treated as a magically vague happening and not explained for very strong political reasons. Australians don’t want to hear that India and China are fast becoming their economic superiors.

For the Government to fully explain the implications of this ‘transition’ would be political suicide. To enlighten the electorate that Australia has been reduced to a quarry for booming Jamshedpur steel furnaces would make Gillard’s chances of reelection impossibly even more remote.

The Australian public is simply not ready to take on the reality that the United States is no longer our obvious choice for snuggling up to in a new Asia Pacific. With our Uncle Sam looking increasingly senile how long can Australia unquestioningly endorse American policy and as Professor White of ANU says, ‘turn around, point up to the US and say ‘I’m with him.’

Australia is an obedient ally of the States. I don’t belittle that in the unhinged lefty sense. If it wasn’t for the US, Australia would have predated it’s Asian destiny by many decades. We forget how many 19 year old GI’s died in malaria infested Papua jungles ensuring a resource starved Japan didn’t set up shop in Newcastle.

Australia will be forever grateful and of course culturally identify more with her North American cousins. But the US’s faltering economy and her ditzy expeditions in the Middle East have exposed a shrunken dog with a deafening bark.

The US economy has proved shockingly fragile. The myriad of reasons given to why it can’t shake it’s unrelenting string of crisis are unconvincing. Few are brave enough to talk of the elephant in the room. The US doesn’t produce it consumes.

This model has been enthusiastically taken up by Australia. 25 years ago, 20% of Australian GDP was from the manufacturing sector today that is halved. Only one in 20 Australians are involved or connected to the manufacturing sector.

Our economy is overwhelmingly service based. We have become latte servers and pizza deliverers. We serve one another in a closed loop with the assistance of coffee machines and pizza ovens all made almost exclusively in China or India.

This is of course globalization. Where you are rewarded for your competitiveness not your country club. Where as a lefty I take an eccentric view.

I believe that globalization is more beneficial to countries that have been excluded form the world’s economic engine. Strongly tempered with the West taking advantage of the sickening reality of child labour exploitation and the virtual non existence of labour law implementation.

For the West could not have seen the writing on the wall. They could not have foreseen how the well India and other Asian giants have risen to the challenge. They have embraced globalization with a rabid enthusiasm.

This has left countries like Australia, who dreamt that their products were infinitely superior and would find new massive markets, looking non plussed. They never dreamt that they would become the market.

Australia’s economic position can now be equated with pre independence India. Gandhiji would lead huge rallies burning Manchester woven clothes made from Indian raw cotton. Gandhiji saw that the paralysis of the Indian economy stemmed from India exporting her raw materials to be almost exclusively processed in England then insultingly imported back into India to be purchased by her then British ruled masses. Not unlike Australia exporting raw materials like coal that is then used to make steel in India that is then imported into Australia at a massive added value.

Australia’s economy rests treacherously heavily on this model. 90% of the diamonds from Australia’s Kimberley mine find their way to Indian traders who polish the stone s in centres like Baroda. Again adding a massive value to a resource that was sold in Australia at a fraction of it’s final Mumbai showroom price or indeed it’s Sydney showroom price.

Australia has all but resigned to the reality she cannot compete in manufacturing. She is still a force in innovation but I feel this century will be characterised by India and China shedding their well deserved nicknames of copycats and show the world they have a also have a strong creative spirit with future ground breaking research and development.

This new Indian innovative spirit may break Australia’s back. For if an Asian laboratory with increasingly huge budgets, searching to solve over reliance on Australian resources, finds a steel substitute, Australia will be banished to an economic wilderness. The demand for coal and her own steel manufacturing would plummet. In an age of windmills and macbooks the whole process of steel manufacturing seems medieval crude and is begging to be replaced by a new competitive material.

With these future prospects Australia will have to decide whether to keep snuggling up to Uncle Sam and be a detached quarry or partner with India and become once more competitive.

Twitter And Facebook India's New Democratic Institutions?

With the London riots has the Indian Government appreciated that the new social media under the furiously texting thumbs of the barely literate is a frightening adversary? Will this new social media be relegated as just another form of limp political expressionism in India’s democracy or actually be a threat to the democracy?

With the historical cases of cabinet corruption there has been much discussion in the Indian media over the so called failure of India’s democratic institutions. The twitter sphere was set ablaze by youth thoroughly repulsed by Raja and Kalmadi’s ill gains and often tweets pleaded for Government to be more democratic. But democracy has not failed in India, India has failed in democracy. For 60 years it has embraced the philosophy far too enthusiastically and is drowning in the blessed thing.

Indian democracy has seen the birth of hundreds of institutions in a plurality that would have left Plato gob smacked. The Indian democracy complex now has the look and feel of a post war computer that was the size of a three bedroom house and took an afternoon to balance your cheque book.

If you have enjoyed the company of Delhi’s pseudo intelligentsia you will have a clear understanding of this diatribe. You will have ridden the acronym mail, Delhi’s hopelessly complicated mocktail circuit.

You will attend a seminar at the I.I.C. about the misdeeds of the I.M.F. then nip other the road, past U.N.I.C.E.F., to the I.H.C. to a discussion on the C.A.G. You will then feel robbed because you didn’t have time to go the H.T. at the I.T.O. to give your article on the C.W.C.

This is a marked point of difference to North Africa that was set ablaze by activists exploding on social media after been violently constrained for years.

To voice your democratic right in India is possibly far too easy, with far too many avenues. The instinctive reaction of any political crisis is to form yet another committee or dusty red bricked institution.

Many of the academics who attend these never ending talk shops are brilliant scholars. When I watch a NDTV panel discussion I am always impressed at how far more in depth, as compared to an Australian TV panel, the debate proceeds. There is no scarcity of brilliantly eloquent, if not slightly bewildered, intellectuals.

But this beehive of higher thought is in conjunction with the Brahmanic curse where the intellectuals that fleet between these multiple forums largely do not connect thought with action. Carrying embryonic ideas to full term and implementing the thousands of schemes that have been excitedly consummated by the heat of the overhead projector is not their bag.

Ironically this involved, very academic, relationship with democracy has instilled a paralysis. A matrix of pressure valves that emasculates any head of steam.

As the Arab world and the UK have experienced, Blackberry messenger and Twitter does not only vent rage it focuses that intense rage into a social changing blinding light. The perfect opposite effect of India’s democratic institutions.

Treasonous tweets and Facebook status updates are not diluted by coma inducing committees and Parliaments. They are not censored by the very well hidden ethics of contemporary media editors. These short explosive slogans are out in the world in a Mumbai second. Unformed and mutinous.

‘Flash Mobs’ is the phrase of the month. Where a crowd of hundreds or indeed thousands of disaffected mobile phone users assemble ready for what is almost exclusively anti social behavior. This is of interest to law enforcement agencies but it also should be of utmost interest to India’s political elite.

For what institutions did the youth of London attack? Westminster and St Pauls? No. They attacked Footlocker and Debenhams. They didn’t attack the radio stations and broadcast a political agenda they smashed high street shop windows and looted sandshoes.

This was is the new paradigm. We are not citizens we are consumers. One in three under 18 years olds in the UK are officially in poverty. They are too young to vote but not too young to be disenfranchised consumers. Young people that have been programmed into believing they are hopelessly inadequate without the latest accessory.

Capitalist society has created such a overwhelmingly powerful illusion that consumers are ready to go to even murderous lengths to keep up with the Sharmas. This is where India has to pay focused attention.



The mobile is the 21st centuries Kalashnikov. A weapon that can help form a flash mob in minutes. In the Indian context a flash mob could mean hundreds of thousands of rioters not the few hundred that have England in a tail spin.

For six months ago Hindi was rarely seen on Twitter. Now it is increasingly more common. It is an obvious sign that an all powerful media is no longer in the hands of gymkhana groupies and in the hands of a far more representative cross section of the society.

And the more India experiences economic progress the deeper mobiles will penetrate down the rungs of the social economic ladder. These Kalashnikovs will increasingly be in the hands of people who have been largely excluded from the economic miracle.

This mobile owning underclass will not give two samosas about the latest acronym institution or this weeks drafting committee. They will demand a Mercedes and a Macbook within a broadband instant with a murderous passion that will not have the faintest whiff of democracy.