Okay, this is slightly autobiographical. The health part appears late
in the article.
Back in 1997, I was a fresher at Geoff Malone's main office in
Singapore. Geoff was the founder of the Singapore International Film
Festival, a collector of Saab cars, a member of the jet set, a friend of
the Sultan of Brunei and his younger brother, and a multi-millionaire
architect with two offices in Singapore, and one each in London,
Melbourne, Sydney, Brunei and perhaps a couple of other places. The
office where I initially worked was on the top floor of Orchard Towers
at the top of Orchard Road.
It was the most sought out office in Singapore as far as young graduate
architects were concerned, and the interior was more glam than major
corporations like RSP or DP, or the oldest office in town –Swan and
McLaren– all of which I had seen when I had visited them for interviews
a few months prior to starting work. Their biggest source of income was
from multiplex cinemas, which they were designing all over Asia.
Work was all I did in Singapore, and during my year there I never tried
to visit Sentosa Beach or other major attractions which were not
architectural in nature. In fact I did not realise during my time in the
Lion City that Orchard Towers (which I often used to exit at around two
in the morning) had many delights to offer. Such knowledge would have
rendered needless that expedition to Hindu Road and the lane between
Desker Road and Hindu Road in Little India one night, to unburden myself
of a 27 year old weight. (That is if you don't count being on the
receiving end of an older child unburdening himself when I was 3 or 4
years old, at the edge of Ring Road in Delhi, not far from the present
day Nanakpura SPUWAC). I blame the writers of the Lonely Planet
Singapore guidebook for this latter part; and my bookish outlook on the
world.
Incidentally Little India was the seediest part of S'pore, perhaps
deliberately so. Chinatown on the other hand was very picturesque. I
distinctly remember wondering less why I had to run from that
transvestite when she/he/it tried to make me sodomize her/him/it after I
mistook her/him/it for a woman, and more why this first and unpleasant
experience had to be on a road called Hindu Road. Why could they not
call it Lee Kuan Yew Street or Confucianist Street, for example? I also
remember that the footpaths in Little India were extremely narrow, and
hardly walkable unlike the rest of the city. Perhaps this had a role to
play in the recent riot by South Asians in that area.
Geoff Malone International was very Singaporean, with ethnic Chinese
workers competing for supremacy with white employees from UK and
Australia; and Filipinos doing most of the draughting and whatever
designing the mostly semi-competent white employees would let them do. I
was the first Indian in the mix, and was a graduate of an elite school
of architecture from Delhi. Although I was not competitive by the
standards of my school (SPA), the Singaporean environment showed me that
I was pretty good. Being good at your job does not always translate into
being successful at it. Office politics was intense, and the glass
ceiling was unbreakable. A recipe for dissatisfaction.
We used to consume a lot of stationery in that office, and the vertical
blinds were not perfect. I had put up an empty carton of larger (or at
any rate longer if not wider) than A-zero size paper / foam /
block-board / something on the practically full height glazing behind my
station to prevent reflected glare on my computer screen. Around this
time there was some coverage of Arundhati Roy in some magazines, perhaps
Asiaweek or (?) the Far Eastern Economic Review, or even Time or
Newsweek. They all were published from S'pore if I remember correctly.
It was the early days of the internet and even hotmail was a new
service, so there was no question of having access to Indian papers
there. She had published her novel and it was all the rage in the
literary world. I perhaps did not read it then, but I photocopied all
those pages with Arundhati's photos on them and taped them to the carton
behind me.
The redoubtable in some respects James DeSoyres –the lead architect on
most of my projects– saw her pics and said something about her cuteness.
I was simmering due to the discrimination, and was not very articulate.
So I replied that she's not a cute girl, she is a senior architect. As
an immediate afterthought I said that she's going to win the Booker
Prize this year.
Let me explain the background here. Arundhati graduated from SPA six
years before I joined it. She was cute, no doubt. In fact as late as
2006 one of her batchmates who was my teacher said that many of his
batchmates had started to look like grandmothers by then, but Arundhati
looked young. As far as the Booker prize goes, I knew that this was
India's golden jubilee year so the jury would not be able to resist
making a symbolic award. It was convenient / serendipitous that
Arundhati released her book that year. It was eight years in the works,
just like Joseph Heller's magnum opus, and structurally too it copied
Catch 22. Later on when I did try to read Arundhati's book, suffice it
to say that I realised that it was not really unputdownable. If she is
to be judged by that effort alone, then she is perhaps in the same class
as Salman Rushdie –whose contrived prose is also certainly not top
quality tunch maal– in my humble opinion.
This does not mean that I think that Arundhati is not a serious talent.
Her auctorial oeuvre is fairly spread out, and she has a penchant
for going out on a limb to create something. She wrote the movie "In
which Annie Gives it Those Ones" (1989), a movie about life in a college
of architecture. This was the first humorous and slightly exaggerated
cinematic treatment of a small group's rigorous and demanding time spent
in a top class professional degree college in India as far as I know. It
came years before others thought of doing the same for colleges giving
medical and engineering education. I am referring here to Munnabhai and
the three idiots (no no, not Chetan, Aamir and Rajkumar). Incidentally
Arundhati's movie also had one of today's superstars –Shahrukh Khan– in
perhaps his earliest movie role, though he did not appear in the initial
credits.
I remember that we first year students were making measured drawings in
the early part of 1989, and went one night with many other students from
SPA to Connaught Place and the neighbouring area. We went there mainly
to see what we call Arundhati's movie. It was being screened at Max
Mueller Bhawan. She must have been in the audience somewhere, and must
have been happy to see the audience reaction. I was very satisfied with
the movie at that age, and saw it a few more times later. It is
conceptually interesting, extremely good for a first effort made with a
low budget, and would not have remained a cult movie had architecture
been as popular a field as engineering. Doordarshan merely gave her a
late night slot if I am not mistaken, perhaps for this very reason. (It
can be seen on youtube for free because she sold it to Doordarshan to
make some money out of it, and DD doesn't care.)
It is to Arundhati's undoubted credit that she made a pioneering effort
with this movie. Her extremely powerful first cousin Prannoy Roy used to
sell his work to Doordarshan too, and later on was tried and acquitted
for charges of corruption in this regard. But I am not sure if he has
had any role to play in her success. Her mother said in a 2002 interview
that she and her children were never contacted by her husband, who
is/was also Prannoy's uncle, after they got divorced. Arundhati too has
been in a short lived marriage like her mother. She was married to
Gerard DaCunha, another alumnus of SPA who went on to achieve great
success. He designed and executed nrityagram for Protima Bedi
–with just one drawing, he told us. He created a powerfully
expressive campus which is normally considered to be in the same league
as Rukmini Devi Arundale's Kalakshetra. Arundhati left him and later
married Pradeep Kishen, a filmmaker. They worked on a few movies
together, including the one mentioned above.
After the success of the God of Small Things, Arundhati bought a house
in Chanakyapuri in Delhi and appeared to fade out. She reappeared on the
scene with an article in Outlook when the Bomb was exploded by India in
May 1998. I had come back from Singapore by then, and remember talking
to my friend Valentino Chongthu the guitarist from SPA. He told me that
everybody was very happy in the hostel with the nuclear test, and he had
never seen so many people so happy together for so many days before.
Valte was saying what everybody could see everywhere one went those few
days. But wet blankets like Praful Bidwai and Arundhati wrote against
the tests, and were covered extensively. Some people say that they were
covered by the pro-Congress sections of the media, but she is pretty
much everywhere.
I never bothered to read Arundhati after the self-defeating article she
wrote against the nuclear tests, so I cannot tell how far she has
managed to develop her craft. I met her once at Green Park market in
Delhi. She was eating a Sambar Dosa in a restaurant, and one of my
juniors from college was with her. I told her about my Singapore talk
with DeSoyres. She just smiled a lot and said nothing if I remember
correctly. Probably she had grown tired of attention from fans by this
point.
By now you must be wondering what this has to do with your health. Read
on and you will know.
The academic year in India starts after the summer vacation like almost
all countries. Arundhati's unit had shot the movie in the summer of
1988, just before I entered the school as a fresher. The unit had
organised a number of murals and graffiti. One message which comes to
mind today was written on the urinal wall on the sixth and top storey.
It said, "Please do not throw cigarette butts in the urinals, they get
all soggy and difficult to light up." This is gross and funny at the
same time, but it gives an insight into the Indian system whereby you
can buy one cigarette at one time, and even share it with friends. You
cannot do this in every country, so you should be thankful that you are
in India. Remember this and buy only one cigarette every time you walk
to the local cigarette seller if your marital litigation has driven you
to smoking.
Also, look at this sorted woman! She went from a privileged background
to relative deprivation, but made all the right relationship decisions.
She dumped –or distanced herself from– those who did not
need her or those who suffocated her, and embraced those who needed her
wholeheartedly. She had her mother before her as an example, and you can
follow her example even if that involves you rejecting her. This is the
key to keeping your mental health good, and as free adults you have the
power to do this. She pursued success with the weapons which she had,
and stopped chasing it after achieving it in reasonable measure.
Marvellous, simply marvellous. You can do this in your career as well as
your personal life. It will lead to happiness. I bet that Arundhati is a
happy woman. You should emulate her and become a happy unit too.
mehnat.IN