“I wish my parents could understand what I do. But that’s the problem with many people I have in my life: I’m growing so fast because of my experiences that no one else understands. The kind of knowledge I am gaining every day is making me so mentally rich, it’s making me so sharp, it makes me able to deal with every situation and every kind of person. I designed 200 stores for Nespresso: imagine dealing with a coffee company for eight months. I’ve watched them making Mercedes cars. It’s amazing how much you learn. I’m surprised every day at my life. Every day. Paco Rabanne can’t believe my enthusiasm: they’re surprised by me because growing up here you’re used to everything, you know? Nothing is a problem. I can listen to the opinions of ten people and convince all of them and still do what I want. Two years ago I would not have been able to do that. It’s come from working with brands like Nespresso where they have restrictions and policies and dos and don’ts — it’s all made me so polished that I can handle anything now.
“I still tell myself: ‘Fuck! I’m the designer at Paco Rabanne!’ I feel like that — why shouldn’t I share it? It’s a great feeling. It’s amazing that I can feel like that. Of course I have to work like a bitch. But I’m ready.”
His friends have been calling him for a while. He is awaited elsewhere.
“I don’t love Delhi as I used to,” he says. “Ten years ago I really loved it. Perhaps I wasn’t so aware of what was going on. But nowadays you open the newspapers and it’s terrible, the things that happen here. I’m flying back to Paris tomorrow night, and I can’t wait. But I’ll tell you one thing about Delhi: the gay scene is amazing now. There’s a party every night of the week, and people are out there in hundreds and thousands sometimes. When I came here there was none of that. The only way gay men could have sex was to fuck horny taxi drivers who had left their wives back in the village. There was no way of finding other gay men. Only straight men who were sexually frustrated. They went to the park in Connaught Place where frustrated truck drivers waited to get their cocks sucked. But now it’s easy to meet gay people. There’s no other city in India with a scene like Delhi, and I would say it’s better than many cities in the west. My boyfriend is from Bologna: there are more options in Delhi today than in Bologna to go out to gay parties or gay bars. And now that it’s legal, people are more confident. There are young men in those bars who can’t afford to be there but they save all their money to go because they think they have a right to it. It’s amazing.”
Manish is ready to leave. He tells me, by way of rounding up, that I dress terribly and advises me to get a makeover. I’m slightly rueful. I made a bit of an effort to meet this fashion designer.
As we pay the bill, I ask him if he has found the appreciation he was looking for.
“I have a fan in Tokyo. I love Tokyo: it’s the place where people are the most different from the rest of the world. My biggest fan is from there. She is crazy. She literally breathes for me. The minute she learns I’m sick, she starts crying. Anywhere I do a show, anywhere in the world, she will fly from Tokyo just for one day to see it. For her last birthday I was the surprise. They flew me down just to be there at her party. She is what a real fan is. If there’s somebody who loves me in the whole world, it’s her.”
It has been said that there are some who need to be loved by one person, some who need the love of many, and others who need to be loved by the entire world. But even when you fall into the last category, it seems, it is in the attentions of a single individual that the love of the multitude becomes manifest.6
Five
Two sisters who had locked themselves inside their Noida residence for the past seven months and were living in inhuman conditions were rescued by the local police on Tuesday. The sisters, both in their forties, were rushed to hospital, where the condition of one of them was described as critical owing to severe malnutrition and dehydration.
Both sisters have PhDs and were until recently successful professionals. They are said to have fallen into severe depression after their father, an army officer, passed away a few years ago. The sisters also have an estranged brother living separately in Delhi. He and his family reportedly had no contact with the sisters for the past four years. The death of the family’s pet dog a few months ago is said to have aggravated their depression. The sisters had lost their mother much earlier.
A doctor in the hospital said, “The sisters arrived in an extremely emaciated condition. The elder sister was unconscious and suffering from internal and oral bleeding. The other sister is very disoriented in terms of time and space.”
— News item, April 20117
In the older centres of the global market, observers felt they knew exactly what all these developments in far-off India meant. The technology companies, the cafés, the mixed-gender groups of professionals drinking after work, the alternative lifestyles: Americans recognised it all immediately as — America. Knowing publications such as the New York Times ‘explained’ to their readers how the landscape of the rising Asian giant was, through the spread of cappuccino drinking, rapidly becoming just like their own. ‘How India Became America’8 went the title of one such article:
Recently, both Starbucks and Amazon announced that they would be entering the Indian market […] As one Indian newspaper put it, this could be “the final stamp of globalization”. For me, though, the arrival of these two companies, so emblematic of American consumerism, and so emblematic, too, of the West Coast techie culture that has infiltrated India’s own booming technology sector, is a sign of something more distinctive. It signals the latest episode in India’s remarkable process of Americanization.
Cold-War suspicion between India and the United States was laid exuberantly to rest in March 2000, when Bill Clinton made the first state visit to India of any US president since 1978. His tour came at the peak of the Nasdaq’s technology-fuelled boom, and Clinton was quick to acknowledge the contribution Indians had made to this extraordinary period of American capitalism. “Indian — Americans now run more than 750 companies in Silicon Valley alone,” he said, singling out for tribute tech godfathers Vinod Khosla, who had graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi before going to Stanford and co-founding Sun Microsystems, and Vinod Dham, who had studied at the Delhi College of Engineering, migrated to the US and masterminded the development of Intel’s Pentium chip. But the president added, “We’re moving from a brain drain to a brain gain in India because many are coming home.” India, he said, citing the successes of companies such as Infosys, is “fast becoming one of the world’s software superpowers, proving that in a globalised world, developing nations not only can succeed, developing nations can lead.”9
Clinton’s benedictions resembled those, not of a drily detached superpower, but of an emotional older sibling. America and India shared, after all, so much of their DNA: America, too, had won independence from Britain, albeit 170 years before India; and the fact that the two countries now enjoyed such close business ties stemmed in part from the language they both inherited from this history. Both were democracies; both were extremely diverse and found their unity in a liberal constitution. And both seemed to display the same inborn predisposition towards free enterprise. In a statement that could have been a declaration of the indispensability of brotherly love, Clinton concluded, “A lot of our future depends upon whether we have the right kind of partnership with India.”