If Manhattan wears black
and England is grey, then China is red.
Red is the theme coming off the jetway at Beijing airport, an enormous airport
with acres of stainless fixtures and designer stores. Not a brazen hussy red, neither the dark crimson that
suggests an obsession with the past, but a sanguine statement of strength and
vitality for a nation at full gallop, a Mao Little Red Book Red (banned in the
India of the 70s, but we had a copy anyway), not a red splattered with abandon,
but one of effective restraint; enough to impart just a dollop of tension,
paired at times with a bright deep yellow. The last time I was this close to China was 1962, when my
mother—pregnant with me—fled the border town of Tezpur as the Chinese marched
into India. But those times are long gone, and today I witness nothing but unfailing
politeness and friendliness. A
lady at the counter asks me where I am originally from. She then smiles and
tells me that she finds Indian women very beautiful. With no other Indians around, I, of balding crown and
graying beard, feel compelled to accept some indirect responsibility and find
myself thanking her.
I have some Thai food at Beijing
airport. It tastes as bad as the
Thai food in Thornwood, except that this one had expletive inspiring quarter
inch slices of chillies (the red kind) that added one more layer of torture to
this complex dish. I decided to
stick to Chinese fare while in China.
I had escaped an
impending storm in Westchester that would go on to lay 6 inches of snow where I
live, a second storm in a matter of weeks, bringing to mind the Hindi saying,
that when the Lord gives, He delivers till it perforates the roof. A limo ride to Newark with a driver who
lectured me on Latin American writers while waving a copy of Vargas
Llosa for President in his hand, was followed by a grueling 14 hour flight
to Beijing. A two hour flight then
brought me to Nanjing, followed by an hour long drive through fog infested
roads where the driver lost his way multiple times, till—after the third
time—he set aside his machismo and pulled out a perfectly working GPS system
from a small plastic package. Peace
arrived late at night in the form of a beautiful conference center and resort
with a quiet lakeside room and forbidding mountains in the dark beyond.
The next evening I travelled
to Shanghai on the bullet train.
It is one thing to see impressive infrastructure in a small country, but
seeing it tackled at the enormity of scale that China presents boggles the
mind. Like Tokyo, Seoul and Dubai,
Shanghai follows the tradition of the grand Asian super city - mile upon mile
of skyscrapers, serpentine flyovers, and enormous buildings that impose their
magnificent sense of indestructibility with hunks of steel and glass and with
the hubris of a city in its prime; these are beacons of civilization sucking
the population out of the rural hinterlands like some giant capillary force driven
machine of humanity. Looking out the window from my hotel in Pudong, I see other
common elements of a large Asian city: a grandly lit river with barges and
cruises, a well-kept promenade and a park along its banks. I see a Prada at one corner and a Rolex
store on another block. This is cosmopolitan
Asia’s one weakness—a fanatical obsession with Western luxury brands among the
affluent. Most likely originating
in India’s princely past, this obsession resurfaced in Japan, and today appears
to embrace any Asian economic segment as soon as it crosses the threshold of a certain
level of economic development.
In the morning I cross
over from one side of the river, Pudong, to the other, an older embankment
called the Bund that is lined with stately old buildings in the European
style. How incongruous this
Urdu-Persian word sounds today in the midst of the center of commerce in China!
Yet it stands as a reminder of the
cosmopolitan nature of old Shanghai. One of the pleasures of walking around in Shanghai in the
Bund and Nanjing Road area is to suddenly come upon entire small blocks full of
charming one and two storeyed old buildings and narrow alleyways segregated,
intact, from the encroaching construction. These are the remnants of old
Shanghai: greying yet dignified counterpoints to the present and the future, scattered
exclusions from the near total metamorphosis of this city. Each building is different, each with
its own twist, multicolored clothes hanging on a clothes line, a ramshackle
bookstore here, a quaint shop selling tea there, a bit decrepit perhaps but
full of soul; places that remind me of the back alleys of Esplanade in
Calcutta. The Bund’s soulmate is Calcutta, and decades later when Calcutta will
be able to afford to fix up its old buildings and mansions, I would imagine
that it will look something like the Bund.
I cross back into Pudong and return to
my hotel walking along the banks of the Huangpu. Vendors from the Central Asian regions of China are hawking
street food wearing Muslim prayer caps. Their equipment consists of a modified
bicycle with a coal grill built into the pillion. Smoke and the familiar smells of kebabs and naans rise in
the air. I have my camera with me
and people on the streets have generally been co-operative. A quiet. older kebabwalla is selling
kebabs and when I ask him about being photographed, he waives me off furiously
with rapid shakes of his hand.
He does not want his sense of dignity pimped.
For years, Shanghai was
the only city after which a word existed in the English language. To be Shanghaied meant to be tricked
into an undesirable circumstance.
Today there are two more members to this club. To be Bangalored is to lose one’s job to outsourcing. And Californication refers to the spread of California’s (and by
extension today, the West’s) mindless urban development style or its sex and
violence driven entertainment culture. Today California is getting Bangalored
and one might argue that both Shanghai and Bangalore are getting
Californicated. In other words, some
might say that the East and the West are mutually Shanghai’ing one another!
