The Contender Who Would Not Compete

I try to write a sensible post, one suited to the sensibilities of sensible people, and almost immediately something inside me throws a wrench into the machinery, not a discreet little Allen key but a great municipal crowbar, the sort used by men in dusty shirts to pry open drains and expose the private digestive system of the city.

This is a recurring defect.

The intention is always noble. I sit down like a civilized mammal, prepared to make a careful point. A balanced point. A point that could be safely read by someone in a blazer. I imagine a clean paragraph, sober and useful, walking upright on polished shoes. Then some ancient imp in the engine room of my personality pulls a lever, and out comes a sentence wearing a fake mustache, carrying a brick, and asking whether national glory can be exchanged for a functioning footpath.

I do not know where this creature came from. It has been an inconvenient passenger all my life.

The problem is not that I lack admiration for achievement. I admire achievement enormously. I admire bridges, satellites, vaccines, databases that do not collapse, public toilets that can be entered without a legal waiver, and trains that arrive before the passenger loses faith in linear time. I admire engineering, discipline, science, logistics, repair, and the unromantic heroism of someone who checks the wiring twice. If anything, I admire civilization too much, which is why its decorative substitutes irritate me.

Watching grand national spectacles on YouTube now has a peculiar unreality to it. It is not quite participation. It is not even spectatorship in the old sense, when a crowd stood somewhere and smelled the dust, sweat, incense, exhaust, roasted peanuts, and anxiety of being alive together. It is more like watching someone watch someone else watch a film about a nation admiring itself in a mirror. The flags flutter. The music swells. The camera finds clean roads, clean walls, clean faces, clean angles, clean slogans. The whole thing glows with that sterilized optimism beloved by official videographers and people who have never had to argue with a gas cylinder deliveryman at 9:30 in the morning.

I know I am supposed to feel proud.

Perhaps I do.

But pride, if it is to survive adulthood, must learn to coexist with inspection. Otherwise it becomes not pride but perfume over damp plaster.

India has a magnificent talent for being almost there. It has been almost there for so long that “almost” has acquired the dignity of a constitutional category. We are up-and-coming, rising, emerging, accelerating, aspiring, transforming, leapfrogging, unlocking, scaling, disrupting, digitizing, formalizing, globalizing, and occasionally inaugurating. We are a civilization, a market, a democracy, a demographic dividend, a spiritual engine, a software power, a geopolitical counterweight, a startup ecosystem, a sleeping giant, and a waking tiger, depending on which conference badge one is wearing.

This is impressive language. It has muscle. It enters the room doing push-ups.

And yet the ordinary citizen often lives inside a more dented grammar. He wakes up to a water supply problem, a billing problem, a paperwork problem, a road problem, a noise problem, a health problem, a school problem, a police problem, a landlord problem, a power problem, a corruption problem, a family WhatsApp problem, and a problem so mysterious that it has no name but has been pending since 1998. He is told the country is rising. He looks at the lane outside and wonders whether the country is rising vertically, because the road appears to have sunk.

This is not cynicism. Cynicism is laziness wearing dark glasses. This is closer to a tired form of pattern recognition.

After large national events, the purchased organs of public enthusiasm often begin to sing in perfect formation. Grades rain down from the sky. The nation has arrived. The world has applauded. The ancient civilization has reclaimed its rightful place. The future has been delivered, gift-wrapped, stamped, photographed, and uploaded. The citizen is invited to stand under this confetti and feel historically refreshed.

The biological citizen, however, that stubborn carbon-based inconvenience, must still buy medicine, pay school fees, find work, tolerate noise, nurse his parents, dodge traffic, bribe nobody yet somehow get things done, and maintain enough emotional hygiene not to scream at a bank app. He has no studio lighting. He has no chyron. He has only the daily audit of his nerves.

This is where the grand narrative and the lived sidewalk begin to quarrel.

I do not mean that aspiration is fake. Quite the opposite. Aspiration is one of the realest things in India. It sits in coaching centers at dawn. It rides buses with a backpack on its knees. It studies English grammar under tube lights. It learns Python from cracked phones. It stands in visa queues. It saves for one extra exam form. It leaves villages, rents rooms, eats badly, sleeps badly, hopes extravagantly, and sends money home. If you cannot see the nobility in that, you are probably dead and merely continuing for administrative reasons.

The trouble is that aspiration is often harvested by spectacle before it is honored by structure.

The country says, “Dream.” The system says, “Bring photocopies.”

The country says, “Innovate.” The local office says, “Come after lunch.”

The country says, “Be world class.” The street says, “Mind the open drain.”

This produces a national psychology of permanent imminence. Something wonderful is always about to happen, provided one more committee, one more scheme, one more summit, one more app, one more election, one more reform, one more leader, one more sacrifice, one more slogan can be inserted between the present inconvenience and the promised radiance. We live in the vestibule of greatness, forever wiping our shoes before entering a room whose door keeps moving.

In this, I recognize myself with some discomfort.

I too have been almost there. Up-and-coming. Promising. Capable. On the cusp. A dark horse, if the horse were middle-aged, underfunded, sleep-deprived, and suspicious of motivational quotes. I have carried inside me a crowded little republic of ambitions: things to build, write, explain, repair, launch, prove, salvage, and redeem. Some were sensible. Some required only discipline. Some required youth, money, institutional cover, immaculate timing, and a billionaire’s indifference to loss. Unfortunately, Elon Musk has already executed several of my more theatrical plans, while the remaining ones appear to require his funding, his lawyers, his launch facilities, or at least his ability to treat a failed experiment as a Tuesday.

This is a vexing discovery to make near fifty.

Near fifty, the morning has a different sound. It no longer arrives like an invitation. It arrives like a clerk with a file. The body is still functioning, but with annotations. The mind is still ambitious, but it has started asking for written justification. One wakes up with the distinct impression that time has become less like a river and more like a contractor who took the advance and left town.

So I tell myself to hurry.

Hurry up and write the thing. Hurry up and build the thing. Hurry up and become useful in some new way before history files me under “miscellaneous educated man, mildly promising, no further action.” Hurry up before the world changes again and the latest revolution arrives wearing a headset, speaking in venture capital Esperanto, and offering to automate whatever scraps of identity I had been using to introduce myself.

But hurrying is not the same as moving. This is one of middle age’s nastier jokes.

The young can confuse motion with progress and sometimes get away with it because the body absorbs the accounting error. The middle-aged cannot. They know that activity can be theater. They know that busyness can be fear with a calendar. They know that ambition can become a private Ponzi scheme in which tomorrow is always expected to repay the debts of yesterday.

Writing exposes this fraud quickly.

A blank page is an honest little devil. It does not care that one has suffered. It does not care that one has ideas. It does not care that one has been misunderstood by fools, delayed by circumstance, undercapitalized by fate, and spiritually nibbled by rodents. It wants a sentence. Then another. Then a third that does not embarrass the first two. It is a mercilessly practical object, the page. In a country of speeches, it demands evidence.

This is why writing irritates and saves me.

It irritates because I cannot hide inside generalities. If I say India is improving, I must ask: for whom, where, how, at what cost, by what measure, and compared with what previous disgrace? If I say India is decaying, I must ask the same questions, because decay too can become a lazy romance, especially among those who enjoy sounding tragic from a safe distance. If I say I am trying, the page asks what that means after lunch. If I say I am blocked, the page asks whether I am blocked or merely unwilling to endure the ugly first version of thought.

No wonder people prefer slogans. Slogans are sentences that have been relieved of their duty to think.

The temptation, always, is to become more acceptable. To sand down the edges. To remove the adjective. To euthanize the expletive. To appear broad-minded, constructive, nationally mature, emotionally hygienic, and ready for panel discussion. I have attempted this several times. Every time a savage phrase presents itself, I try to escort it politely out of the room. The world, I tell myself, is better off without another man snarling into the wind.

This is probably true.

Yet there is another truth. A sentence sometimes needs teeth because the thing it describes has claws. There are conditions under which politeness becomes collaboration with nonsense. There are moments when the correct tone is not anger exactly, but refusal: refusal to let decorated language smuggle away plain injury; refusal to let public relations replace public reality; refusal to pretend that survival is the same as development because a drone shot looked handsome.

The trick is not to become rude. Rudeness is easy. The trick is to become accurate without becoming dull, funny without becoming evasive, furious without becoming stupid, and personal without asking the reader to babysit one’s wounds.

This is more difficult than it sounds. Civilization usually is.

Somewhere between the grand speech and the private grimace lies the usable truth. India is not a failure. India is not a miracle. India is a vast, contradictory, overburdened, ingenious, cruel, funny, exhausted, inventive, sentimental, predatory, generous, noisy, half-repaired machine operated by people who often have no manual and no spare parts but possess an astonishing ability to improvise with wire, prayer, software, tea, and mutual irritation.

It can launch things into space and fail to protect pedestrians from open holes.

It can produce world-class engineers and then make them wrestle with forms designed by a committee that feared clarity.

It can speak of ancient wisdom while poisoning rivers with modern efficiency.

It can generate unicorns, unpaid internships, exam factories, spiritual influencers, brilliant doctors, broken hospitals, dazzling mathematics, fraudulent coaching ads, devotional songs, digital payments, and a man on a scooter transporting an object so physically improbable that Newton would have resigned.

To love such a place honestly is not to praise it continuously. Continuous praise is not love. It is either employment or fever.

Honest love has a measuring tape. It checks the foundation. It notices cracks. It asks why the paint is fresh only on the front wall. It does not confuse the brochure with the building.

The same applies to the self.

There is no point writing heroic autobiographies about resilience if the day is mostly held together by caffeine, resentment, browser tabs, unfinished plans, and a chair that has begun to understand your spine too well. There is no point pretending to be a serene thinker when one is often a small weather system of irritation, vanity, fear, memory, and digestive uncertainty. There is no point claiming to have transcended ambition when one still secretly wants the world to notice that one existed and was not entirely negligible.

This, too, is biological life.

I have wanted to be many things: builder, writer, systems thinker, entrepreneur, commentator, useful man, dangerous man, decent man, perhaps even a man who could wear linen without looking like an escaped patient from a humidity experiment. Instead I became a mixture, like most people do. A little competence here. A little failure there. Some stubborn knowledge. Some wasted years. Some insights too late to monetize. Some scars that are not noble enough for memoir but too instructive to discard.

And still, the wish remains.

To write something true.

To build something that works.

To find a way of speaking about India that is neither flag-waving nor sneering.

To find a way of speaking about myself that is neither self-pity nor advertisement.

To admit that the country’s pothole and my own stalled ambition may not be the same thing, though they sometimes feel like cousins meeting at a wedding and recognizing the family nose.

That pothole outside the house has become, in my mind, a small civic philosopher. It waits without hurry. Governments change, slogans change, apps update, summits conclude, leaders wave, anchors shout, and the pothole remains, deepening its argument. It does not debate. It does not issue a white paper. It simply exists, collecting rainwater and the occasional curse. It is the perfect monument to the difference between announcement and maintenance.

Maintenance is where dreams go to become serious.

This is the part spectacle hates. Spectacle loves beginnings. It loves launches, unveilings, declarations, ribbon-cuttings, dashboards, portals, foundation stones, and acronyms polished like brass. Maintenance asks who will clean the drain six months later. Maintenance asks whether the data is correct, whether the nurse has been trained, whether the road will be repaired after the first monsoon, whether the grievance number is answered by a human being or an abyss with hold music.

Maintenance is unglamorous because it cannot be easily photographed. But civilization is mostly maintenance. So is a life.

A person is not saved by one grand decision. He is saved, if saved at all, by repeated acts of unglamorous repair: sleep a little better, read a little more carefully, apologize when required, exercise before the body files litigation, finish the paragraph, pay the bill, delete the stupid sentence, keep the useful sentence, resist the cheap applause, resist the cheaper despair.

A country is not saved by adjectives either. It is saved by institutions that work when nobody important is watching.

That may be the real grievance hidden under my satire. Not hatred. Not even pessimism. Just an exhausted longing for things to work without requiring theatrical self-hypnosis. A longing for competence that does not arrive dressed as propaganda. A longing for ambition that can survive contact with accounting. A longing for pride that does not demand the surrender of eyesight.

So I return to the page.

I try again to write a sensible post, sensitive to sensible people, and immediately the unsensible part of me begins tapping on the pipe from below. It has objections. It has jokes. It has evidence. It has a suspiciously detailed memory of potholes. I let it in, but not all the way. One must not give the madman full editorial control. One must also not evict him entirely. He notices things the civilized tenant misses.

Perhaps that is the bargain.

The public world will continue to manufacture radiance. The private world will continue to supply invoices. India will continue to be almost there, and somehow also already ancient, exhausted, newborn, brilliant, shabby, holy, fraudulent, tender, and impossible. I will continue to be nearly ready, nearly disciplined, nearly reformed, nearly polite, nearly done.

The contender who would not compete.

The dark horse who misplaced the racecourse.

The citizen trying to love his country without being chloroformed by its brochures.

The writer trying to remove the unnecessary adjective, failing, and discovering that the unnecessary adjective was load-bearing.