India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (12 page)

Enclosed within an emporium of his company’s household brands, Guruvaiah is in his element. For fifteen minutes, he talks to me about ‘product verticals’ and discount schemes, about temporary price reductions and freebie offers. ‘There’s a honeymoon offer on Rexona at the moment,’ he says at one stage, pointing to a stack of the market-leading soap brand. The job lot comes with a free ballpoint pen.

‘And as for quality . . .’

He takes a step further into the cramped stockroom, running his hand over a shelf of packaged detergents as if they were gold-bullion bars whose intrinsic value was self-evident. ‘Domex.’ The word leaves his lips in the hushed voice of the reverent. Unlike Phenol, the main competitor, Domex removes stains as well as killing germs. ‘Phenol has a pungent smell too, which Domex . . .’

Srilatha peeks around the door, breaking off Guruvaiah’s description of the detergent’s winning odour. ‘Tea’s ready.’

Gratefully, I retreat from the Aladdin’s cave of personal-care products and take a seat in the entrance room.

I motion my appreciation to our host for the tea. She smiles appreciatively. ‘It’s Taj Mahal.’ The words serve as music to Guruvaiah’s ears. ‘Premium, you know,’ he says with a knowing nod, before taking a long, luxuriant sip himself. ‘Aaaaah.’ I am back in the television advertisement again.

Prahalad’s theory has one fatal flaw. The Last Mile. The logistical muscle of a company as large as Unilever now puts regional towns within its reach. All those trains at its disposal, all those trucks, all those warehouses. India’s many thousand villages are another matter. Situated down bumpy roads and dusty footpaths, they lie beyond standard transport hubs and distribution networks.

That’s where Srilatha comes in.

She and thousands like her are the Avon Ladies of rural India. Armed to the hilt by the Anglo-Dutch consumer giant, they go door
to door, hawking the companies’ wares. It’s the British and Dutch East India Companies merged and miniaturised for modern times.

Guruvaiah calls the vending conscripts ‘direct-to-consumer sales distributors’ when he remembers, and ‘Shakti Ammas’ when he does not (‘Shakti’, or ‘empowerment’, being the name of the programme, and ‘Amma’ being Hindi for ‘Mother’). The company recruits them from women’s self-help groups, which operate in one form or another in almost every village and hamlet across the country. To gain the women’s buy-in, Unilever gives them a cut on every sale.

On cue, Srilatha picks up my empty cup and replaces it with a hard-backed accounts register. Her full profile and that of her catchment area is detailed on the front page. Guruvaiah encourages me to look over it.

Name of Shakti Dealer: Kadem Srilatha

No. of family members: 4

Name of village: From Cholleru

Name of Block: Bhaugiri

Name of District: Nalgonda

Name of self-help group: Sri Pragathu Mahila group

No. of group members: 30

No. of groups in the village: 33

Village population: 3,000

No. of households: 1,000

No. of outlets in village: 05

No. of schools in village: 2

Distance from RD point: 86 km

Name of Supply RD: Santhoshimatha Agencies

Phone number of RD: 9885886175

Phone number of RSP: 9949310223

‘That’s Regional Distributor,’ Ravi says, pointing to the letters ‘RD’. ‘And RSP. That’s me,’ he adds for clarification. ‘Regional Sales Promoter.’

Guruvaiah beckons Srilatha to take me through the remainder
of the ledger. She bustles forward, her wide hips and rose-patterned sari combining to necessitate short steps. She runs her finger down a narrow column of carefully handwritten numbers, her purchase summary for the last six months.

On the next page are details of Srilatha’s Homes Sales Tracker. Listed one below the other are the names of her individual household customers. One hundred and seventy of them in total. Diligent pencil marks chart her weekly visits and her clients’ expenditure: ‘26.00Rs’, ‘17.50Rs’, ‘56.00Rs’, and so on. Larger numbers are recorded beside the two retail outlets that she supplies in Cholleru. Neither belongs to Praveen.

The quantity of data must be keeping a team of marketing analysts very busy back at Unilever headquarters. The numbers also reveal the sheer scale of the operation. Guruvaiah’s patch alone covers eight districts, with close to one and a half thousand Shakti Ammas. Their total turnover hovers around sixteen million rupees every month. And for each Shakti Amma, Unilever has the name, date and point of sale for every sachet, bottle and packet sold. Calculate that for thousands of saleswomen in tens of thousands of villages and the Bottom of Prahalad's Pyramid suddenly looks a very profitable place to be.

Profitable for Hindustan Unilever, for sure. But for the Shakti Amma too? Looking back at Srilatha’s sales register, I ask about her profit on each sale. She is about to explain when Guruvaiah cuts in. ‘For Home and Personal Care, we give eight per cent on detergents and ten per cent on personal products. For Food and Beverage, there’s a three per cent discount. So in total, for stock worth forty thousand rupees, say . . .’ He pulls out his mobile phone and types the numbers into the calculator function. ‘. . . three thousand two hundred rupees per month.’ This is, by Guruvaiah’s estimation, ‘very big money’ for a housewife sitting in a small village. A touch crestfallen at the interruption, Srilatha merely nods her agreement.

Her husband, Srinwas, an employee in the local explosive factory, enters the lobby area from the main room of the house. He has a placid face and soft, pale eyes. His rounded belly and crisp ironed clothes speak of a contented life. He is holding a piece of paper. It is his daughter’s report card from her English-medium school, paid for from his wife’s earnings. He hands it to me. ‘Score: 552/600.’ The happy couple shares a proud glance.

The Unilever rep insists the strategy is a ‘win-win’. It’s a phrase that I’ve heard repeatedly over the years in my day job covering corporate-responsibility issues. As with many clichés, the original idea behind the phrase is sound enough. In this case, it’s not just sound, but attractive too: the idea that companies can go about making their profits, while making the world a better place. Social Capitalism.

Only more often than not, there’s a catch. In the case of ITC and its e-choupals, it’s straightforward. In exchange for helping the farmers, the company gets first dibs on their harvests. In this instance, it’s more discreet. The Shakti programme ultimately aims to flood the dusty roads of Cholleru with consumer goods. What next? There lies the catch. Relentless advertising. A rush to buy. The need to have. And all for what? So that shareholders many thousands of miles away can continue to collect a healthy dividend?

Guruvaiah sees things differently. Shakti is the star in Unilever’s Corporate Social Responsibility crown. This isn’t cigarettes or fast-food pap that they’re foisting on India’s rural poor. It’s daily ‘essentials’. Toothbrushes, instead of neem sticks. Shampoo, rather than carbolic soap. Disinfectant, not sponge and water. People are now healthier and cleaner, their homes germ-free and perfumed. In fact, studies show that diarrhoeal deaths have dropped thanks to the use of Lifebuoy soap, Guruvaiah points out. How many? ‘Lots,’ he says.

Nor are the products being ‘forced’ upon the buyer, he adds. It’s simple supply and demand. Yes, villagers might receive complimentary dental care, paid for by Unilever. Yes, they might be sent away afterwards with a free tube of Close Up toothpaste. But, no, they are under no obligation to buy. And, anyway, in my country, I have the choice to purchase from a wide range of products, do I
not? Yes. So why shouldn’t the citizens of Cholleru? Do they deserve less?

Srilatha rises from her seat. She has her afternoon rounds to begin. Guruvaiah suggests we join her, ‘to gauge consumer demand’ for myself.

And so, a few minutes later, we are calling on Satyamma and Suyalu. An elderly couple, they live on the neighbouring street. Suyalu had spent his working days scrambling up and down coconut trees to make toddy, a country liquor popular across southern India. Now frail and old, he can barely lift himself out of his armchair. His wife ushers us in.

The bare, one-room house is starved of light and furniture. A picture of Sydney harbour hangs above the back wall. Below, a Videocom television stands on a rickety table. An old-fashioned air cooler the size of a small cupboard chugs rhythmically in a corner. Srilatha lays out her wares on the single bed for want of a table. Satyamma’s thin, arthritic fingers pick out an assortment of items: toothpaste, talc, detergent, soap, shampoo, tea bags. It’s just enough to push her over the one-hundred-rupee mark. Ravi duly throws in the ten free sachets of Colour Plus.

‘Are you happy with the products?’ I ask, suddenly aware that it’s the kind of set question Guruvaiah would ask.

The old lady crooks her head. She taps her left ear. Srilatha repeats the question into her other, good ear. The words register and her crinkled forehead scrunches into a crinoline frown. She picks up a Vim dishwashing bar. ‘Before,’ she says emphatically, ‘we washed our dishes with ash.’ Enough said. Politely, she ushers us out.

It’s difficult to argue with such logic. I’m not one to eulogise rural life, to fossilise a community in the name of protecting their cultural authenticity. It is their choice what to take and what to leave. Yet, I wonder where it will all stop. Are Barbie Dolls an ‘essential’? Or SUVs? Or shopping centres? They are to some. Are they to India’s villagers? Not now. But they could be soon.

Mahatma Gandhi would have railed against such a future. For India’s Great Soul, the rustic village personified the non-materialistic,
harmonious world of which his teachings and dreams were filled. Yet the course seems set. Rural India marks the last retail frontier, a succulent mango ripe for the eating. The bottom of India’s pyramid is simply too lucrative for marketers to leave it in peace. US consumer goods behemoth Procter & Gamble is, Guruvaiah informs me conspiratorially, already hatching its own version of Shakti. Several Indian firms are already a step ahead. The poor man’s Nano car from Tata Motors marks one such example. Godrej Consumer Products is flogging a mini-fridge for the same market niche. The list is growing fast.

We return briefly to Srilatha’s front room. Immediately, Ravi and Guruvaiah begin thumbing through her accounts ledger. Both recognise that sales of food and beverage goods are low. They discuss the matter, but conclude little can be done. Rural consumers still prefer to shop for their staples at the local market. There is a lurking suspicion of branded foodstuffs. Plus the price tag turns people off. Unilever’s signature wheat powder, which Indians use ubiquitously for chapatti and rotis, costs twice as much as the market-stall equivalent. The Anglo-Dutch consumer giant spends more on advertising than any other company in India. But consumers remain inscrutably discerning, the poor more than anyone. This very Indian attribute comforts me. As the tide of consumerism laps the shores of Cholleru, it could be the one factor that keeps it from drowning.

Appearing once again from the back room, Srinwas approaches my chair. He is carrying an old shoe box. Would I like to see some reading glasses? Srinwas too tries to supplement his income. A charitable outfit providing low-cost spectacles visited the village the previous year. The explosives worker offered his services as their local distributor. I take a pair. They would make a good present for my mother. ‘How old is she?’ Sixty-three, I tell him. ‘No, too old, I’m afraid. Over fifty and they won’t do any good.’ He takes the glasses back.

Is he naturally honest, I wonder? Or is it that I’m a guest in his house? Or that he instinctively reacts to what’s evidently a bad deal? Whatever the case, he sacrifices the sale and I am left grateful
and impressed. And also relieved that it is his wife, and not him, who is the main salesperson of the household.

His sale opportunity gone, Srinwas offers me a cup of tea. ‘No thanks,’ I say. ‘Juice?’ No really, I insist. ‘Water?’ He’s persistent, though, I’ll give him that. ‘It’s PureIt filtered.’ Okay, then, just one glass.

Entrepreneurship, industriousness and enterprise are not ends in themselves. They feed off the promise of a return: the creation of a successful business, a leg up the ladder, the prospect of a better life. Two decades on, India’s economic reforms are gradually making good that promise. Opportunities are emerging. Dreams are rising. India is entering an Age of Aspiration.

Naval greets me as I alight from a rickshaw off Ram Mandir Road in Goregaon. It is just after lunch. The sun is high and the neighbourhood still. We are at the end of Mumbai’s metropolitan train line, deep into the interminable suburbs of India’s most populous city.

An urban dairy spills onto the roadside. The pastoral fragrance of mud and cow dung sweetens the more objectionable excretive odours of this sweating, overstuffed metropolis.

‘Follow me,’ the young man says, guiding me along a muddy road between two unfinished apartment blocks. He won’t say anything more until we reach his room, as if he’s scared his words might be snatched on the breeze and lost to him. The road opens into a muddy scrubland populated by hulking, multi-storey creations of concrete and cement.

This is the Projects. It is unfathomably ugly.

I follow Naval as he picks his way around the muddy edge of the social-housing compound. Ahead, three boys play cricket with a bald tennis ball and a strip of balsa wood prised from a packing crate. Behind the bowler’s arm, at the clearing’s perimeter line, lies a roadside market. A man is selling scrawny chickens cooped three to a cage. I look up at the rain-stained building above him. The paintwork runs black like smudged mascara
under all the windows, as if the sills themselves are weeping. Each tiny flat has a balcony enmeshed behind wire. Clothes hang pegged to the metal grilles. Their bright colours help differentiate the flat owners from the market vendor’s chicken. The difference is primarily aesthetic. In terms of relative space, a fight still exists as to who is better off – man or bird.

Behind the first building loom another two identical monsters. Square-jawed and immovable, they spend their days glaring angrily at one another across a dark, sunless corridor of no man’s land. We cross beneath, running the gauntlet of food scraps and dirty water cascading down from upper windows.

The first of the two housing blocks, ‘No. 15’, has no door. Naval steps off the stepping-stone pavement, which wobbles in the mud, and he ducks through a rectangular opening. The acrid stench of urine makes my eyes sting. Mixed with damp in an unventilated space and cooked through the Mumbai summer, it turns positively poisonous. I clasp my hand over my nose, an involuntary reaction of which I’m immediately embarrassed. I keep it there all the same.

Unperturbed by the smell, Naval approaches the lift door beside the stairwell. A pair of unearthed wires protrudes through a round hole where the ‘Up’ button used to be. Naval tries fusing them together. The naked ends hiss on contact, like the spiteful bickering of two fractious cobras. He raises his gaze, waiting for a mechanical juddering somewhere up the lift shaft. Silence.

Shrugging his shoulders, he turns to the stairs and we begin the long plod up to the seventh floor. The steps are caked with dirt and discarded sweet wrappers. A surface layer of flattened cigarette stubs creates the impression of a mottled carpet. Running up each corner of the stairwell is the splattered red stain of paan spit. It sticks to the wall like tar, dark and viscous as ox blood. Even the piss of the late-night drunks won’t wash it off or water it down.

Each floor brings its own smells and noises. Fish curry. Arguments. Fried pakoras. A plaintive lullaby. Garlic and ginger. A radio. Children playing. Steaming pilaf. A TV music channel. A kettle on the boil. It feels as if we’re heading into the innards of
a living organism, like an Indian version of
James and the Giant Peach
. Only Block 15 is no ripened fruit. It’s a rotting carcass.

‘A biscuit?’ Naval asks, breaking his silence as we enter his room.

I had met Naval earlier in the week. A student at the prestigious Actor Prepares training academy, he is one of tens of thousands of star-blind youngsters who flock to Mumbai with the dream of becoming the next megastar.

In India, Bollywood is bigger than God. Rich, beautiful and sprinkled in stardust, its modern-day heroes are omnipotent and omnipresent. Their lifestyles feed dreams. Their allegiances win elections. And their latest hairstyles shift shampoos. In short, they are marketing manna, the perfect commodity for aspirational New India. Every youngster – even the most strait-laced – secretly wishes they could be them.

The idea of actually learning to be an actor is comparatively new to India. The entry tickets to Bollywood success have traditionally been looks (macho for men, curvy for women) and contacts (it helps if one, or preferably both, of your parents are recognised film stars already). The gossips would add a third: ‘the casting couch’, a not-so-subtle euphemism for sleeping your way to the top. That is all changing – or so Bollywood’s PR machine would have you believe. India’s tinseltown, they say, is becoming more democratic. With the spirit of the times, it is opening its arms to nobodies with genuine talent. On the back of such promises, professional acting schools are cropping up all over town. Cinema acting is a trade that can be learned, the academies insist; not a vocation to be inherited. In India’s fame-crazed youth, they have an audience only too ready to listen.

The evening class that I attended had been a no-nonsense affair. Two hours of Camera Work 101. Suraj Vyas, a jobbing thespian of imperial bulk, had taken the class through the basics of panning, tilting, low angles, high angles (‘always use this for the gods’), tight-closes and close-ups. He picked Naval as his guinea pig. Trapped in the frame of the teacher’s digital video camera, Naval’s pained face was transposed onto the classroom monitor. Massively
enlarged in the process, he looked every multi-pixel bit like a billboard passport photograph.

‘This is my friend Mr Sony. Most of you are terrified of me, right?’ the commanding voice of Mr Vyas boomed.

The class sniggered. Naval shrivelled.

As the Actor Prepares instructor waxed on about the need to be ‘comfortable with yourself’ and ‘naked before the camera’, I studied Naval on the monitor. The longer the camera rested on him, the more he wilted. His narrow shoulders hunched an inch, and then another. His jaw slackened. A glistening pinball of sweat appeared on his forehead. He looked anything but comfortable.

The corpulent Mr Vyas, in contrast, seemed to derive a masochistic pleasure from his student’s squirming. ‘Why are people scared of the camera? It’s not because you think you look bad. It’s because you think that other people think you look bad.’ To his credit, Naval didn’t look bad. As faces went, his was regular and unremarkable. Fulsome lips cloaked an assembly line of healthy white teeth. Thick eyebrows framed two oval, syrup-brown eyes. Unblemished, sculpted and in symmetry, it was the weaker for all three.

Eventually, the man behind the camera snapped the lens shut. ‘This friend of mine, Mr Sony, is inspired by Gandhi. Why?’ (Mr Vyas was a master of the rhetorical question, every motivational speaker’s favourite trick.) ‘He doesn’t lie. He will show you only what you show him.’ His audience lapped up the concluding piece of pop philosophy. All bar Naval, who was glugging air in pint-sized gulps. Free from the camera’s asphyxiating grasp, unconcealed relief washed over him. Would that it were nonchalance.

At the end of the class, a short, stocky student wandered up to me. His biceps bulged against his shirtsleeves. I took notes as we spoke. He told me his name was Srinvas. He was twenty-seven. A gym instructor from Bengaluru. Any acting experience? A few print ads. Dabbled in student theatre. How’s he paying the course fees? Personal savings.

His classmates observed me writing. Was I a journalist? Would
I be writing an article? Yes and no, I replied in truthful sequence, hoping a touch of ambiguity might dilute their lust for publicity of any kind. It didn’t. Immediately, I had a queue of hopefuls wanting to give me their details. First up was Ajesh, twenty-one. Lived with parents in Mumbai. Father, a Marathi theatre actor. Acting ran in his blood. Then Ravi, twenty-eight, from Meerut in Uttar Pradesh. Lawyer. Tejas, also twenty-eight, a network administrator for The Corporation of India. Next up Santyam, twenty-nine, from Gujarat. Owned an HR consultancy offering soft-skills training for outsourcing firms. Short films and adverts, so far. Just landed a role in a low-budget feature film with a first-time director. He’s to be a pimp who tricks rural girls into prostitution. He was there to pick up experience.

Feeling like the school’s registrar on Day One, I kept on scribbling. Name, age, home, hopes. It was a barren formula with little rhyme and no reason.

‘Naval,’ a halting voice said. ‘Twenty-five years. Resident of New Delhi.’ There was something in his thin, fragile tone that caused me to lift my eyes from the page. Hidden beneath its apparent temerity, difficult to detect yet discernable, lay a stoic determination. Spunk, my Raj-era grandmother would have called it. I looked up to see the young man from the close-up.

Naval blinked. For a millisecond, licks of brilliant orange flared in his eyes, a Catherine wheel of sparks lighting those dark pools of molten brown.

I was intrigued. Would he have time to talk another day, I asked.

And so I find myself in the Projects.

Surrounded by the outside world, Naval somehow looks smaller. In the classroom, on the screen, all the drama-school students are giants of a kind. Even someone as slight of build as Naval. Yet here in Block 15 he is dwarfed by reality, a small fish cast out into a pestilent ocean.

I take my shoes off and follow him into the one-room apartment.

The space measures about fifteen square feet. It owes its decoration to the original builders. Four walls of crumbling plaster. In the corner opposite the door stands a set of low concrete shelves. They comprise the kitchen. There is no cooker and no fridge, just a single tap and a plastic washing-up bowl for a sink. A large plastic barrel like a compost bin is wedged against the wall. A bucket for ladling is perched on top. Next to the kitchen are two cubicles with squat toilets. The additional lavatory seems excessive given the space.

The room is entirely devoid of furniture for sitting, resting, working or eating. The only concessions to comfort are two straw reed mats that lie like lonely beach towels on the floor. Pride of place is given to the television, which is propped up off the floor on two brick-shaped speakers. The cardboard box in which the speakers came sits beside them, as if the purchaser is scared of breaking the bond between product and packaging. The box is not redundant, however. It is spewing dirty socks.

Naval invites me to sit. I find a spot on the tiled floor with my back against a bare wall. My British muscles aren’t supple enough to adopt the cross-legged lotus position into which Indian limbs seem to fall so effortlessly. I slump down a fraction to avoid banging my head against a scraggy scar of flaking concrete. A botched wiring job runs the entire circumference of the one-room apartment and acts as an accidental skirting board.

Naval approaches and sits opposite me. A washing line stretches across the room above him. He brushes aside a shirt cuff that is obscuring his line of sight.

He slides across a plate of brown, sugar-sprinkled biscuits. I take one. It tastes stale. Looking for a distraction as I work the glutinous sludge around my mouth, I ask where his belongings are. He points to the corner. Two small suitcases made from reinforced plastic are parked side by side. They look dejected and lonely, like orphaned baggage abandoned on an airport carousel. One has two pairs of folded trousers and a shirt resting on its travel-worn casing. The other is furnished with a couple of thick blankets and two cushions. He points to the first.

‘I have two shirts only,’ he says, tugging at his salmon-pink
T-shirt. ‘This one, and one more. The other is too big, so not so very good.’

The door opens. A young man in jeans walks in. He is surprised to see us. ‘Namaste,’ I say in what I hope sounds like a friendly voice. Naval brokers a quick introduction and the two share a few perfunctory words. He leaves immediately, creeping out with the exaggerated caution of a mime artist. I cannot conceive what Naval must have told him.

‘That is Mr Shilabhadra,’ he explains. ‘A very good man, a very nice man.’

A year Naval’s senior, Mr Shilabhadra is his live-in landlord. The acting student rents a corner of the floor at one thousand five hundred rupees per month. Mr Shilabhadra is an actor himself, albeit out of work. He has two other tenants. One is a camera assistant. Naval doesn’t know what the other does. He keeps, as Naval puts it, ‘antisocial hours’.

I ask how he came to find the place. The answer is convoluted. His narrative is constantly stopping and starting. At one moment, the words are spilling out in a verbal cheese-grating of manic sentences. The next, he is having to drag out each laboured word.

This is the order of events as I understand them. It begins with his arrival in Mumbai. He came from Delhi by train, though to which station he can’t be sure. He then went directly to the Actor Prepares office. He got there by suburban train, bus and on foot. In which order, he can’t quite remember. He had his suitcase with him. That much he knows because it kept knocking painfully against his calf as he walked. The month-long course was already into its second week. The administrators let him enrol all the same. They accepted the duress of his journey in lieu of an entrance audition.

He had two phone numbers in the city. Both were given to him by a Mr Dev, an acquaintance from Delhi whom he met in a train station. Or was it the metro? The first number belonged to a Mr Sharma. He answered Naval’s call on the first try. Any friend of Mr Dev is a friend of his, the voice said. Come stay. Hold on for a text message with the address. Naval duly waited. The SMS never
came. Despite repeated attempts on Naval’s part, Mr Sharma never answered his phone again.

‘I feel nervous now. I have no knowledge about persons in Mumbai,’ Naval recounts, impersonating his own anguish with an effortless empathy that would have won Mr Vyas’s applause.

Naval tried Telephone No. 2. This time he met with more success. Mr Shilabhadra said he could stay two nights.

‘When was that?’ I ask.

Naval thinks a while, counting out the time on his fingers. ‘Ten days ago.’