Sunil Sethi: The wimps of this world

AL FRESCO

All said and done there is something unabashedly wimpish about Rahul Mahajan. You may feel sad, sorry or shocked at what he was up to but there is something that grates, as much about him as what he represents. "Bigdey ghar ka bigda beta," (spoilt son of a spoilt family) remarked a commentator pithily on television the other day. It sounded like a line from one of the interminable saas-bahu serials, staple viewing in millions of homes, but perhaps it was lost on the speaker that the men in the soaps are mostly wimps, too. Living in joint families, they emerge as weaklings with no professional direction or emotional ballast. They don't seem to be driving the action in the drama, content in their roles as hangers-on, while the family elders usurp the main plot.

Why are there so many Rahul Mahajans in our midst? Sons of rich and famous fathers like Manu Sharma, Vikas Yadav, Sanjeev Nanda, Jagat Singh, and Aditya Khanna, whose chief claim to fame has been to decorate the front pages with stories of alleged involvement in things relating to notoriety or crime, deal-fixing, drug abuse and murder. Is this the result of too much privilege and a repudiation of all the advantages that money can buy? Or simply case histories from an embarrassment of riches?

In a wonderful short story titled "The Rich Boy", tracing the decadence and boredom of the idle young and rich against the backdrop of the Depression era, the novelist F Scott Fitzgerald once remarked that the rich were different because they "were hard where others soft, and soft where others were hard". What he meant was that immured from outer realities the rich are sometimes unhinged by their private reality.

Indian family life, with its baggage of hidebound tradition, adds to the troubles of the Rahul Mahajans of the world. Most young men in their age-group have long moved out of their family set-ups and are well on their way to independent lives built around careers, mortgages and stable sex lives. Many of them may be the sons of political or business leaders but they have successfully managed to forge independent paths for themselves.

The notorious ones are incapable of breaking the umbilical or throwing off the parental yoke and the joint family system. Well into their thirties, they can't hold down jobs for long or establish mature emotional relationships. Like the shadowy, often spineless, young males in the TV dramas, their lives are attached to their fathers' careers and the domesticated world of women and private secretaries.

In the real world, it is invariably the sons of businessmen or politicians who end up as class acts in bad behaviour. One rarely hears of daughters trapped in oil-for-food scandals, shooting bartenders or snorting coke in Jacuzzis with champagne bottles in hand. It's probable that they wouldn't have the opportunity. But it's as likely that they wouldn't be so outrageously wimpish.

There is an inadvertently funny scratch card that the Indian Airlines catering service is offering passengers with their meal trays these days. It asks: Which of the following airlines did Rajiv Gandhi work for before he became Prime Minister? Scratch and you get the answer. But it's doubtful that Jet Airways will be offering such a card about Rahul Mahajan. He also worked as a pilot but not for long. Soon he had hitched on to his father's bandwagon. What could have been a case of the father nursing political ambitions for his son turned out to be the sins of the father coming to haunt the son.

More to the point is the type that Rahul Mahajan represents: lost, desperate cases whose lives it will hard to rehabilitate. It's a lesson that leadership summits don't teach: don't let your sons hang around the house for too long. It is what the wimps of the world do.