Delhi’s Press Club never fails to register. The food remains good; the best items have by now survived for decades. Thankfully nobody has tried to repackage the menu. The booze, of course, is highly affordable, though one wishes that along with being a watering hole the club also provided with sufficient vigour the platform for public discourse which is really its unique franchise.
The wonder is the place still survives. Many successful scribes, upwardly mobile or arrived, keep away from it. It’s a bit tacky, they say. There is a sprinkling of old timers who, in manner and loudly uttered opinion, really belong to the sixties when the media was king and being able to call the club your own was a privilege.
Affordable good food and booze apart, what really draws me to the club where I try to sign the register, so to speak, during a Delhi visit is the default option in life and living that it represents. It is such a great meeting place for odd bods which offers hope that there is a place in emerging India too for them.
When the sun came out after days of chilling fog, I eagerly went to see if you could still sit out on the lawn. You could but the grass, never luxurious in the best of times, was totally gone. The quintessential old man was there at the next table narrating to his somewhat starry-eyed guests how the battle to have a detailed report on paid news and get it circulated in toto and not the few-pages summary was won. There was also the old hand who used to handle press liaison for a chamber of commerce, consciously placing next to his glass the latest copies of two popular political magazines. And, of course, the old old faces who seemed to have held on to their modest positions in old old stables.
The slightly down and out Delhi Press Club is really a symbol of the media and one of the few places where odd bods could make good. If your school and college results were distinctly mediocre and you had neither the inclination nor the resources to go for an MBA, but had somehow managed to acquire a decent familiarity with the English language and what was happening around the world, then chances were you would have entered upon a newspaper career. Today journalism schools have taken away a lot of the entry space but the odd bod still can ask to take a test and walk in.
The distinction between odd bods and regulars was brought home sharply to me recently by a young novice at the India office of an American consultancy. There were two types among youngsters at her office. One was rich people’s kids, able to pay their way through a good management school, very focused. The other was people like her whose ability to think on their feet had got them through a succession of interviews despite the missing MBA. She proudly said she could get along with people across groups.
Does a society need odd bods? The Europeans seem to have opted out of the race to succeed long ago, with their desire for leisure and short working weeks. The Americans who were supposedly still striving to create wealth have recently been administered a rude shock by the results of a test administered by that rich man’s club, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, to youngsters across countries and cities which measured their knowledge of science, mathematics and ability to read. The toppers are students from Shanghai and the Americans come somehow around 15th to 31st. The UK and France also score poorly. If today’s toppers will rule tomorrow’s world, then it belongs to China.
But are rough and ready answers the right ones in the long run? Take the case of Japan. Not so long ago Japan was considered unstoppable. And Japan had the same education system that is being assiduously adopted by China’s elite cities and schools — rigorous learning oriented to getting into the right pre-schools which, in turn, will open the door to the right schools, colleges and jobs. Discipline, long hours at studies, intensive coaching and perfecting responses and techniques were the hallmark of the older Japanese system, followed first by South Korea and now China.
But look where Japan is going? It is floundering and the best symbol of that is the travails of Sony, once the leitmotif of Japanese innovation and unstoppability. Japan is today in the throes of self-doubt. Not only is its economy mired in stagnation for a decade and more, the absence of cohesive politics has led to its humiliation in boundary disputes with China. The Japanese, whose unique strength lay in the way they prepared for everything, typically floundered when confronted by the unpredictable.
Where does India figure in all this? It is a peculiar hybrid. The IT success is attributed to an aspirational middle class pursuing capabilities and skills the way the Japanese had done earlier and the Chinese do now. But there is another India too which thrives in chaos and which has a good number of odd bods. There is no place for the latter in today’s China whose people have traded political freedom and the right to be different for the pursuit of wealth through hard work and discipline.
My kind of India is, it should be clear by now, one where there is enough space for everybody — achievers as well as odd bods. That is why I like to spend most of my time in Bangalore and love to visit the Delhi Press Club which is marked by people who have not come to much but appear none the worse off for it.
