City of Sperms:

About a village called Delhi

June, 2009. Open Magazine

Like a rich man's son, Delhi is a beneficiary of

undeserved privileges. That is at the heart of
Bombay's contempt for Delhir
By Manu Joseph

He is a large amiable boy who smiles at breasts as if

they are acquaintances. He suspects he is good looking,
and he probably is, especially when he is quiet. A pretty
white girl walks into this London pub and he nudges the
elbow of a friend. As his eyes follow her to the far
corner, his face assumes a sudden seriousness. He then
takes her pictures with his phone camera. He tries to
meet the eyes of any woman in the pub so that he can
flash a smile. He has heard that white women are
broadminded. "I like to hear white women scream
under me," he says. A Bengali sitting beside him says he
must become a midwife then. Everybody laughs. He
stares at the Bengali who is a much smaller man, and he
slaps him a few times. Others now rise and try to drag
him away. He growls, not metaphorically but really
growls. And he says, "I'm a baaad guy, I'm a baaad guy."
He is, of course, a jat from Delhi whose matrimonial ad
had once said, accurately, that he is from a good family.
He has travelled the world. He studied briefly in the
First World, even. There are thousands like him in
Delhi, the natural habitat of a kind.
Delhi is a vast medieval town of indisputable botanical
beauty, spectacular red ruins, Sheila Dixit, and other
charms. Its women, rumoured to be high maintenance
as if there is another kind, take so much care of
themselves that one would think the men are worth it
(but they make a gesture that suggests puking when
asked to confirm). Space is not compressed here.
Everything is far from everything else. There are real
gardens where you do not see the exit when you stand at
the entrance. It has sudden small parks that in Bombay
would have been called, 'Chhatrapati Shivaji Mini
Forest'. Homes have corridors, and they are called
corridors, not half-bedrooms. Yet, Delhi has a bestial
smallness of purpose.
Those men there who drive the long phallic cars,
sometimes holding a beer bottle in one hand, there is
something uncontrollable about them. Even for a man,
it is hard to understand their mutation. What is the
swagger about? What is the great pride in driving your
father's BMW, what is the glory in being a sperm? And
what is the great achievement in stepping on the
accelerator? It is merely automobile engineeringpress
harder on the pedal and the car will move faster. Why
do you think a girl will mate with you for that? It is
somehow natural that the contemporary version of
Devdas, Anurag Kashyap's Dev D, would be set in Delhi,

where a man can debase himself because life does not

challenge him, he has no purpose, whose happiness is a
type of sorrow. This motiveless Delhi male, you can
argue, can be found in Bombay too, where not all BMWs
are hard earned. But that's not very different from
saying Bombay, too, has bungalows.
Like a rich man's son, Delhi is a beneficiary of
undeserved privileges. That is at the heart of Bombay's
contempt for Delhi. Bombay is a natural city, like all
great port cities of the world. It was not created. It had
to arrive at a particular moment in time, it was an
inevitability caused by geography, shipping and shallow
waters. Bombay eventually earned its right to be a
financial force through the power of enterprise, which
created a system that allowed, to some extent, anyone to
stake a claim at wealth through hard work. That culture
still exists. It is the very basis of Bombay. That is the
whole point of Bombay.

But Delhi as a centre of power is an inheritance, a

historical habit. An unbearable consequence of this is
the proximity of easy funds for various alleged
intellectual pursuits which has enabled it to appropriate
the status of intellectual centre. It is a scholarship city, a
city of think tanks, of men who deal in discourse,
debates and policies. And of fake serious women who
wear the sari the other way and become leftists, nature
lovers and diurnal feminists.

Delhi, often, confuses seriousness with intelligence and

humour with flippancy. People will not be taken
seriously here if they are not, well, serious. There is
much weight attached to the imagined sophistication of
talk, of gas. It is a city of talkers. There is always The
Discussion. When you are in Delhi, you have to talk, and
then they talk, and they appear to be solving an enigma,
they seem headed towards achieving some revelation.
But then, you realise, they were peeling an onion, an act
that leads to more peels and at the heart of it all, there is
nothing. Delhi is an onion. It is a void-delivery device.

Of course, all this is a generalisation, but then

generalisation is a form of truth. One of the most
repulsive images I bear in mind of Delhi is a scene in
JNU, when Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez
delivered a special lecture. It was like a rock concert and
Chavez, who is a scion of the same imbecilic philosophy
that once destroyed the great economies of South
America, was the star. As students pumped their hands
in the air and cheered him for his anti-capitalist calling,
I looked at their faces. I knew those faces. They were
from homes that once profited from India's socialist
corruption, and then from Manmohan's revolution.
They were hip. They would, of course, later join MNCs
and chuckle at their youthful romanticism. That
moment in JNU was despicable because it captured a
meaningless aspect of Delhi's fiery intellectuality, and
also laid bare the crucial difference between
intellectuality, which is borrowed conviction, and
intelligence, which is creativity, innovation and original

analysis.

It is for the same reason that the greatest misfortune of

Indian journalism is that it is headquartered in Delhi.
Needless to say, like in any other city, Delhi has
astonishingly talented editors, journalists and writers,
but there is a Delhi mental condition which is incurable
a fake intensity, a fraudulent concern for 'issues', the
grand stand. Readers, on the other hand, have many
interests today apart from democracy, policies and the
perpetual misery of the poor. But the Indian media,
based in Delhi, refused to see it until recently and very
grudgingly, when The Times of India proved it. It is not
a coincidence that The Times Group, the most profitable
media organisation in India, is based in Bombay. It is
not a coincidence that the game changer came from
here. In Bombay it is hard to convert air from either
side of your alimentary canal into cash. You have to do
something here. You have to work. It is appropriate that
the National School of Drama, with its phoney distaste
for money, is in Delhi. And commercial cinema is in
Bombay.

It must be said though that in recent times Delhi has

become somewhat more endearing. This is partly
because of Bombay's own degradation and its loss of
modernity, and partly because of a remarkable cultural
irony. Bombay's films were increasingly becoming
pointless because, like Delhi has those silver sperms in
BMWs, Bombay's film industry, too, suffers the curse of
the privileged lads whose fathers were something. As
actors with no real talent they could still survive, but
some who did not look so good could do nothing more
than remaking movies about love and parental
objection. Then two things happened. The flops of the
brainless boys from the film families gave opportunities
to talent that had arrived from all over the country,
including what is called North India. They were waiting,
and when they got a chance they created a new kind of
commercial cinema in which Bombay was not
necessarily the focus. That resulted in the startling
revelation here that Bombay is a culturally
impoverished, rootless setting compared to Delhi. What
films like Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Dev D have
achieved as hilarious, poignant and self deprecatory
narrations of the North Indian way of life, has changed
Hindi cinema, probably forever. So Delhi is being seen a
bit differently in Bombay, with some affection too.
Though, the best thing about Delhi will always be its
winter. When there is this mist. And you do not see its
people.

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