The show must go on...

What is it about Indians that we are never ready or willing to retire?

Over the last few decades, politics has become a young man’s game in the West. Tony Blair was 43 when he became Prime Minister of Britain. Bill Clinton was marginally older at 46 when he was inaugurated as President of the United States of America. Barack Obama, the next Democratic President of the US was 47 when he was sworn in. David Cameron was 43 when he took over as Prime Minister of a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in the UK.

Small wonder then, that some doubts have been expressed about whether Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner at the next Presidential poll, is past the age of being a player. She will be 69 in 2016, and if she wins two terms, she will be 77 by the time she is ready to retire. And that, say political observers, is simply too old.

Contrast this with Indian politics. Our two-time Prime Minister Manmohan Singh turns 81 this September, so you could be forgiven for thinking that retirement would be on his mind. Not a bit of it. As he recently declared in one of his all-too-rare interactions with the press, he is not ready to call it a day quite yet. If the UPA won the next General Election, he would be happy to serve under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi.

But why blame Manmohan Singh alone? At a venerable 86 this November, L.K. Advani is still not ready to walk into the sunset. Having suffered from the ‘always the bridesmaid, never the bride’ syndrome through his last few decades in politics, Advani wants one last chance to walk down the aisle as the main attraction. And even though the BJP has announced Narendra Modi as its prime ministerial candidate, Advani persists in hanging around the fringes just in case opportunity for that final fling at power presents itself.

Yes, I know that attitudes to age – and the respect accorded to it – are very different in India than they are in the West. There, they equate youth with vigour and value it accordingly. Here, we see an equivalence between age and wisdom and venerate both. But even so, nursing political ambitions at the grand old age of 80+ is beginning to seem a little absurd to most of us.

But the more I think about it, it seems to me that this is not just about politics in particular but about our character in general. There seems to be something about the Indian psyche that just cannot contemplate the thought of retirement.

Take our cricket stars, for instance. None of them wants to go out in a blaze of glory. Instead, they stick around as the magic fizzles out bit by bit and there’s nothing left but sheer weariness as we see them hovering at the edges, mere shadows of the stars they once were. Yes, I know, you’re thinking of Sourav Ganguly, who took years to retire: first from one-day cricket, then Test cricket, then first class cricket and finally the IPL (I am a bit hazy on the details; it all took so, so long). But even the great Sachin Tendulkar is playing to much the same strategy, rolling out his retirement plan in slow motion, as everyone speculates as to whether his 200^th Test will actually be his last.

If Sachin or even Sourav had been Australian, they would have retired at the peak of their game, not when their fans were getting piqued by their lack of performance. Adam Gilchrist retired from Test cricket when he was still on top form. Ricky Ponting said goodbye to his Test career the moment his performance started flagging. But not so our Indian stars. They hold on for dear mercy, squeezing in one more series, one more tournament, one more endorsement deal…

Movie stars are no different, really. I am not suggesting that they need to retire from acting as they age, but surely it is not too much to ask that they recuse themselves from playing the young, romantic lead – especially when the girls they are harassing into submission could pass off as their daughters? But no, the audience is expected to suspend its disbelief as 40-something actors try and pass themselves off as college kids.

So, what accounts for this peculiarly Indian disinclination to move on? Why do our politicians, our movie stars, our cricketing superheroes, all cling on for dear life, having to be dragged away from centre-stage kicking and screaming?

I have to confess that I am baffled. This is the country that gave us the concept of four stages of human life. Brahmacharya: when a man leaves home to be educated and leads a celibate life. Grihasta: when he marries, starts a family and assumes his worldly responsibilities in the world of Maya (illusion). Vanaspratha: when he renounces the world to live like a hermit. And finally Sanyasa: when he concentrates on spiritual matters in an attempt to attain Moksha (freedom from the cycle of rebirth).

Alas, in the India of today, nobody is willing to let go. And Maya trumps Moksha every time.

No laughing matter

Why has all the wit and humour disappeared from Indian politics?

Did you catch President Barack Obama’s rousing performance at the White House Correspondents Association dinner last week? In case you missed it, here are some of the highlights. Speaking at the roast, where Presidents are traditionally expected to skewer their critics – all in good humour, of course – Obama decided to take on Donald Trump, the latest in a long line of Republicans to cast doubts on whether Barack was really born in America (and hence, whether he is really entitled to be the President of the United States).

Referring to the fact that his birth certificate had finally been released by Hawaii, Obama chortled, “But no one is prouder to put this birth certificate issue to rest than Donald and that’s because he can get back to the issues that matter, like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell?”

As Trump tried to raise a tight smile from his seat in the audience, Obama went on to poke more fun at the tycoon’s bid for the American Presidency, showing a video of the ‘Trump White House’ with gold columns and bikini-clad girls in the fountain.

As I watched Obama’s performance I couldn’t help but wonder (yes, I know, that’s a bit Carrie Bradshaw, but what the hell!) why we can’t muster up the same kind of wit and joshing humour in Indian politics. Our politicians conspicuously lack the light touch that Obama demonstrated to demolish his putative opponent in the Presidential race. And certainly, none of them displays the same kind of rapier-sharp wit (or has the speech-writers to do it for them).

It wasn’t always like this. Many decades ago, the legendary Parliamentarian Piloo Modi was celebrated for his quick wit and scintillating repartee. On one occasion when the Speaker had reprimanded the members for using unparliamentary language in the House, Modi insisted on referring to Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed – then a government minister – as ‘Mr Ruddin Ali Ahmed’ throughout the day’s proceedings. Needless to say, he brought the House down every time he said that.

The late Rajiv Gandhi, too, had a nice line in witty repartee. I still remember watching his first press conference in America as Prime Minister, when he was asked a question about the Khalistan movement, then at its peak. Rajiv smiled, looked at the group of Khalistani supporters at the rear of the hall and said, “I would like to remind my friends at the back that when there was last a Sikh kingdom, its capital was in Lahore.”

Mani Shankar Aiyar, a close aide of Rajiv Gandhi in those days, was also a master of the acerbic put-down. The story goes that he once attended a function at his old college, St Stephen’s, along with another political colleague, K. Natwar Singh. As they were leaving, both of them were asked to write in the visitor’s book. Natwar Singh wrote: “Everything I am today, I owe to the College.” It was Mani’s turn next. So, tongue firmly in cheek, he wrote below this: “Why blame the College?”

In a sense, this was a legacy of our British colonial past. Just as the British had left us with a Parliamentary democracy, they had also bequeathed us the art of pithy one-liners perfected by them down the centuries. Who can forget Sir Winston Churchill’s legendary put-down of his political rival: “An empty taxi drove up and Mr Attlee got out.” Or, my personal favourite: “Mr Attlee is a modest man with a lot to be modest about.”

That tradition still thrives in Britain, where politicians attack each other with humour and sarcasm rather than abuse and insult one another. David Cameron, for instance, inaugurated his spell as Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons by announcing: “I want to talk about the future.” He then turned to Tony Blair and added: “You used to be the future once.”

Unfortunately, we have lost that tradition of cutting humour in India these days. Now, we have invective rather than wit, bile instead of humour, and abuse in the place of repartee. Gone is the lightness of touch that our politicians showed in the past. Gone is the gentle good humour that often characterised parliamentary debate. Instead, we have the sorry spectacle of our leaders going at each other with a venom seldom seen before on the nightly chat shows on television.

Debate these days has been taken over by derision, with every politician vying with the other to come up with the most inventive insults. The only time wit makes an appearance in our Parliamentary debates is when the finance minister or railway minister make some very laboured jokes when delivering their annual budget. Otherwise, the House remains a humour-free zone, with nary a one-liner in sight.

If you ask me, more’s the pity. All of us lose out when humour and wit cease to have a place in our public life. And yes, it’s no laughing matter.

Is privacy dead?

Or is it just that nobody respects it any longer?

Okay, even if it makes me sound like something of a cliché, I must admit that I enjoyed reading Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s sometimes self-deprecatory sometimes self-indulgent account of the time she spent in Italy, India and Bali, recovering from a traumatic divorce and a rebound affair gone bad. But as the movie version, with the ever-lovely Julia Roberts in the lead, hits screens all over the world, I can’t help feeling a teeny-weeny bit sorry for the erstwhile Mr Gilbert aka Michael Cooper.

Surely it’s bad enough to suffer through a bad marriage and an acrimonious divorce. But then, to have all those private details of your personal life become public property through first a best-selling book and then a blockbuster Hollywood movie – well, that must be a very special kind of hell to suffer through.

Of course, Cooper is now re-married and has the children (two boys) that his first wife was so loath to grant him. But surely it must rankle that he will forever be known as that feckless so-and-so who chased Gilbert for every penny he could get out of her, even – wait for this – a share in all her future earnings.

Yes, though Gilbert is a bit hazy on the reasons for her divorce in the book (did she fall out of love with her husband; did she fall in love with someone else; we don’t quite know) she is generous enough to share the details of her divorce with her. So, we know that her ex-husband fought her every step on the way, laid claim to the marital home, asked for lots and lots of money, etc. etc.

Now, here’s the thing. The truth is that almost everyone behaves badly in a divorce – especially if they don’t want one in the first place. In fact I can’t think of many people whose behaviour in these circumstances would stand up to scrutiny. But not everyone has their financial wrangling brought into the public domain in so spectacular a manner. So, yes, I do feel a bit sorry for the first Mr Gilbert (especially since he failed to get a slice of his ex-wife’s rather fabulous future earnings and his own personal memoir, Displaced, was cancelled by his publishers because it wasn’t revelatory enough).

You could say, of course, that this sort of stuff is par for the course; it comes with the territory when you marry a writer. After all, isn’t that what writers do? Don’t they all mine their own lives for a good story to tell? And in Gilbert’s case, her life was the story.

Well, I guess so. But surely, anyone in a marriage – or any kind of relationship, for that matter – should have a reasonable expectation of privacy? Everyone should be entitled to keep their private lives private, to keep their personal life to themselves, if they so choose.

And yet, how do you accomplish that when everyone around you seems to be in such a confessional mode? Forget about celebrity sportsmen like Tiger Woods and Wayne Rooney who have to deal with mistresses/girlfriends/escort girls selling their stories for massive amounts of money. Even ordinary folk these days tend to deal with a break-up by venting on Twitter or starting a blog recounting their heartbreak in every excruciating detail. It matters little to them that they are not just invading their own privacy but also of their partners.

And this sort of compulsive over-sharing has become near chronic now. Just look at the recent slew of political autobiographies to hit the market. Peter Mandelson’s The Third Man and Tony Blair’s The Journey are just the latest in a series of books that show scant respect for the tradition of keeping political confidences. Private conversations are recounted verbatim, personal correspondence is quoted liberally, and everything that was off-the-record is placed on record without the slightest trace of embarrassment.

Needless to say, not everybody is happy with the consequences. Alastair Campbell was incandescent with rage when Cherie Blair revealed in her autobiography, Speaking for Myself, that he had once dismissed her hair stylist as “only a f__king hairdresser”, even writing in to newspapers to deny ever having said so. Cherie, for her part, sent in a legal notice to Peter Mandelson for quoting from a letter she sent him after his exit from the Cabinet in which she vented against Gordon Brown (“My only consolation is that I believe that a person who causes evil to another will in the end suffer his returns.”) Which, frankly, is a bit rich coming from a woman who cheerily recounted private conversations with everyone from Princess Margaret to the Queen in her own book.

While the art of the candid political autobiography is yet to come to India – somehow I can’t quite see A.B. Vajpayee or even Brajesh Mishra recounting their difficulties with L.K. Advani with the same reckless disregard for political niceties – a confessional culture is certainly creeping in. Journalists think nothing of tweeting about off-the-record encounters with ministers. Actors share candid details of their relationships with fans on social media networks. And even ordinary folk are getting in on the act, sharing private details in public spaces.

So, is it fair to say that privacy is dead? Or is it just in terminal decline, waiting for a miracle that would bring it back to life?

And do you think that miracle will come about in our time?