Generation Ex

“Thirty Five years – And this nation still cannot get enough of Amitabh Bachchan”, Papa said, as we stared into the large hoarding. The megastar was now peddling some health tonic that straightened out his joints and doubtless, gave him the verve to play the brooding patriarch in another twenty Bollywood blockbusters this year alone.

“When we got married, one of the first movies we went out to see was Zanjeer. When you were four, we went for Amar Akbar Anthony. I remember you could hardly sit still in the fight scenes.”

The story had been told many times in my family. I had to be held down by two people lest I fall off my seat during the fight sequences. My mind went back to my own introduction to the Amitabh magic. It was during Shaan, the scene where he is tipped over into the pool. A large, plastic crocodile plods along, its inanimate, gaping mouth tamely open. I was hooked. So was a generation of movie-goers before and after my time.

Actually, my time never ended. The late eighties – the heroes that it threw up, the ideas that it spawned and the style that it ushered in. It is amazing the grip that this culture has taken on the Indian Geo-political identity. The sportsmen, the actors, the politicians and us.

In the late eighties, a young man celebrated his passing out of college by stabbing himself in the stomach with a decidedly dubious looking dagger. He then rolled over a mountain-side and settled beside a plump, fair and dead girl. He planted a light kiss on her lips before giving up the ghost with a light jerk. He still rules, playing a college brat, just out of college and directionless, almost twenty years later.

Around the same time, came a young man who could hit a straight drive that could race to the fence 75 yards away. Thousands of cricketers try that shot all through their careers. Most of them manage a trickle past the bowler. A few get it past mid-off. This man got it past twenty-thousand international runs. He can still hit a few, even as the debate intensifies around his true stature in the cricketing pantheon.

While all this was happening, a serial was made in India on the lives of a circus troupe, the trials it goes through and its occasional triumphs. Few may even remember Rekha Sahay or Renuka Shahani play didi-type roles in these serials. One name stood out – he is still outstanding. The amazing thing about him is that my mother loves him as much as my daughter does. Go figure.

At the same time, a young man who grew up in Manila became India’s first world champion in an individual sport. He still rules. ELO ratings say he is third but everyone knows that in lightning chess, he has no peers. In the entire history of the game.

There is an old story at Flushing Meadows. Two cleaners come one morning to the Central Court to find guts and entrails strewn across the surface. They begin to pile up the bloody remains into their buckets and one mumbles to the other, “It is always like that. Jimmy Connors plays his guts out and we have to come and clean up later”.

Most Indians, weaned on the sight of Sandeep Patil’s underarm throws from the fence in the last over of a match or a portly Ashok Malhotra ambling across the pitch for a lazy single, no matter what the ask, could never relate to this story. Till a young man, wearing his country colours, pumped himself to slay competitors far higher ranked than him, on nothing but patriotism, adrenalin, his audience and a little bit of talent. Before he came on the scene, tennis was something two South Indian families did in Madras. After him, the deluge. Legend has it that he was conceived in the ’72 Olympics, by his sportsmen parents who were representing India at the highest sporting arena in the world. Few can doubt that this is true.

Despite the highs of the nineties, the fact remains that it began on a deeply sad note for all Indians. Another young man, young by the standards of his profession any way, was blown away into pieces in a remote town in Tamil Nadu. His past had caught up with him, indeed India’s past had caught up with it. Years of meddling in regional politics without a clear stance had cost the country dear.

The country was on the verge of bankruptcy. A simple act of borrowing against gold reserves was turned into a melodramatic scandal of selling the family jewelery. Apparently, we could buy just about a week of imports and our petrol bunks were to run dry by Thursday. We were down to our last billion dollars.

The pouting prime minister of the day appointed a former governor of the central bank to manage the country’s finances. Stock markets rose to dizzy levels, shrugging off disturbances in the middle-east amidst clamours for, and counter-clamours against, reservations in all sections of Indian society. The turbaned former-governor was seen everywhere, with his sheaf of papers, his mumbled phrases sounding positively oratorial compared to his prime minister’s pregnant pauses that never came to term. He still runs the country.

Is it really 15 years? Did my time ever end?

I believe that one of the reasons the spirit of the late eighties and early nineties have such longevity is that an extra-ordinary group of men and women were thrown up in so many different professions. They were all people of had a deep sense of personal vision. They had a sense of their proper place in history, which was never distorted by an artificial worry of their place in society. They did not follow anybody’s steps. Indeed, they mostly navigated in uncharted waters, mapping out the territory for others to follow.

Shah Rukh Khan wanted to be SRK. Shahid Kapoor wants to be Shah Rukh Khan. The results are there for all to see. Same for the Sehwags, Pramod Mahajans and Bopannas.

The other thing is that these people were right. Their success is just a vindication, not really important, that they lived by the right standards and hopefully so did so many of us, their contemporaries. A philosophy of talent, hard work, moral courage and a total lack of fear of the world is what made them so successful. They believed that India could be a world-beater, than an Indian could be the best in a profession and that profession did not have to be Kabaddi or carpet-making. I gleamed in satisfaction, even if all I was doing was writing software for banks.

Papa took his eyes off Amitabh Bachchan, a smug smile on his face.. Against the wall stood a poster of Mughal-e-Azam, “now in colour”, while a remix version of Mere-Piya-Gaye-Rangoon wafted through the FM radio of the pani-puri wallah.

“Did my time ever end”, asked Papa as we turned around to return home.