Me, Myself, Middle Class

Yesterday an ex-colleague told me about a very happening newspaper appointing a certain person- lets call him Mr X- to a very senior position there. My only reaction was ‘great choice’. My ex-colleague found the response a bit surprising since I all along never had much of an opinion about this Mr X. But you could look at it in the same way as most drivers never have a good opinion of their seths. A streak of jealousy perhaps.“Come on what has happened to you? You really think this chap is good?” this ex-colleague asked me.Of course I said. Look at everything that he has and tell me how he can go wrong there? I asked this ex-colleague.“What does he have?” he insisted.“He is not middle class, bloody middle class like me so what are his chances of going wrong anyway” I said and added that at the end of the day that is the greatest asset you bring to the table. And sadly yours truly, the ex-colleague and another very senior and extremely talented reporter we weaved into the conversation were all just that – bloody middle class.Mr X was a smooth talker, you could never know if he knew his onions but he definitely showed he knew the entire grocery market damn you. He spoke with a twang that you get when you go to the elite public or boarding schools. Now this includes saying ‘skedule’ instead of staid ‘schedule’ with the ‘sch’ the same as in ‘shit’. If you tell anyone that your favourite musician is Michael Jackson, you get slotted as bit of an upstart and it gives away the game but if you say you love listening to Brothers Four or say Rosemary Clooney and her Italiano Mambo - just some of the fabulous songs on the Ipod of a colleague-, then that is class. And your pedigree needs no introduction anymore into the rarefied air engulfing the top offices of the new age economy where middle class is nothing more than the stench of an open sewer.
I have seen so many attempts made by people to get away from that cursed phrase all their lives that sometimes that is in itself a life.
A friend from small town Jamshedpur did such a fabulous job of it that almost a decade after we left school and met at Marine Drive, I could place no bits of memory I had about her growing up in Jamshedpur to the person standing in front of me.
Her lips were a seductive shade of brown- aided of course by lipstick- but that she said was to hide lips gone off-colour with all the cigarettes she lit up through a tough day. Her prim business suit and the skirt just inches above her knees made it a great sight for several of the all-guy gangs that come to Marine Drive from middle class places like Virar. Her hair, a salon frizzy, had light streaks of blue that gave it a nice glow in the yellow light that bathed Marine Drive. Her voice had turned husky probably with all the cigarettes or simply with time. After all I had last met her when she was 15 and now she should have been around 28, the kind of age where a lot of working girls start turning into women, and the sari comes out of the cupboard more often to be worn seductively at office parties. The voice at that age also achieves varying degrees of modulation as is required to beat a tough day at office when just work might not suffice in keeping your name out of the wrong logs maintained of the rat race by bosses
She had come along with some colleagues for a business conference to Mumbai, were all put up at the Oberoi and when she handed me her card later, I got to know that when compared to me- just a reporter at a city newspaper- she had run the race as a sprint and not like a marathon as I had and still did.
The middle class uncouthness in me couldn’t resist telling her that she had changed. Changed for the better or the worse is best to avoid because you can really never be sure about these things. The butcher might love the stench of carcasses because that for him is money in the cash box.
“Ya I have” she said. “It took me some time. But yes today I am not the person you ever knew. Am I happy, I don’t know but if you are living a life fast enough to never think about it, I guess it just doesn’t matter,” she added. I guess she was right. She acknowledged she at most times of the day felt she was not good enough for the job she was holding but yes the attitude which made her say so had long gone. In a world where it doesn’t matter how much you know but how much you show you know, our girl had all of it covered perfectly.
When I suggested to her friends that we could go to Gokul for a drink- and talk about old times- she looked at me, then her colleagues – all of them the perfect shirt crease and gelled hair and scrubbed face types- and said, “Binoo, so middle class man”. I looked at my baggy pants, my Rs 200 Jockey T-shirt and my Rs 250 Bata floaters and allowed my case to be rested in her favour.
Another example I remember is when some top marketing guys of a hugely successful newspaper went to meet a top railway official whose English is dodgy and his choice of shirts and pants a reminder of his genteel upbringing in north Bihar. The meeting ended with the marketing hotshots realising that the Indian bureaucracy is probably the only place where you need not be as suave as Shashi Tharoor- never mind the bungling- to be somewhere at the top of the rung. The man used his head to calculate all the figures thrown at him by the marketing suits and then sent them packing saying the Indian railways- because of an animal called the Central Bureau of Investigation and because of a human tendency to get jealous- offered no free lunches to corporates who could very well pay.
So there you go. Middle class gets you only till the middle like the station in life I find myself in, and then you wait for the tide to take you wherever the tide plans to go...