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Between cows and malls

German writer Georg Martin Oswald tells BAGESHREE S. that he is fascinated and intrigued by the multiple faces of the city of Bangalore

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST Georg Oswald: `Post '70s there is a worldview that goes: `I am here to earn more and not to save the world.' PHOTO: K. GOPINATHAN

Georg Martin Oswald saw and felt all things foreigners who land in India regularly do. He was shocked to see "real live cows!" on a four-lane road. "Unperturbed, just as you see them at home in lush green meadows. Cows lying around on the urban motorway like this would prompt a major police and fire brigade operation," the German author writes in bewilderment in his online diary entry.

But Oswald — who spent three weeks at Max Mueller Bhavan in the city as part of Akshar, a writers' exchange programme — also chose to veer off the beaten track, go to unlikely places and explore unlikely things. "I didn't read up any `India in 14 days' sort of book before I came. I decided to make a go at it without preparation, just experience it. Every day has been a little story."

And quite a baffling variety of them. He ate Indian food all the days of his stay despite friendly tips, and "his tummy has been quite fine". He was especially bowled over by "the restaurants with three letters for name" — good old MTR, of course. And has been thinking about how an actor like Rajkumar becomes a "simple man's idol" and even bought a CD of his songs.

To market, to market...

The highlight of Oswald's stay, however, was his visit to the chaotic City Market where he got separated from Dayaprasad Kulkarni — his friend, philosopher and guide during his stay here — for a few minutes. Oswald talks animatedly about what it was like to be "the only obvious westerner" for miles around. "They were not anxious about this freak foreigner. Some ignored and some were playing with me." The traffic and crowds may be baffling in Bangalore, but he reasons: "We shouldn't forget it's a city that has grown from two million to seven million. There probably haven't been too many examples like that since the beginning of mankind!"

His next destination was the mammoth mall in Koramangala, the glowing new pride of the city. That sure was familiar, a piece of the West. But it was also an initiation into the world of stark contrasts, between what lies within and beyond the automated doors. "It's almost offensive. One wonders if this is really the most important thing to be built."

Not that it happens only in Bangalore, though the contrasts may hit much harder here. "The riots in France, for instance, just proved that there is a huge population in Europe that feels out of sync with everything around. In Germany, the Turkish population has remained alienated for decades." Contrasting worlds of ugly wealth and uglier poverty exist in all neo-liberal economies. "Post '70s there is a worldview that goes: `I am here to earn more and not to save the world.' But it's a taboo to say that."

One reason why his book All That Counts (the only one of his novels available in English translation) became a success was that it not only dared state this bitter truth, but also illustrated how it works by laying bare the ruthlessness that defines the corporate fabric. A world where all that a man needs to survive are in opposition to all things that define him as human — love, sympathy, trust and fellowship. "To say it's all about the survival of the fittest in business is only a short step away from saying `that's the way we run our society'. We don't agree with it on paper, but it's evident in everyday living." Oswald, a corporate lawyer by profession, should know best the workings of this world.

The big crisis of the protagonist of the novel Thomas Schwarz, a deputy manager in the Department of Foreclosure and Liquidation in a big bank ("... that means: chaos, nervous breakdown, asylum, suicide, murder."), is his inability to connect with his own human side. He is unable to do so even when he loses his position of power in the brave new world of business and lands in a position he has always considered "the other". In a rather Hollywoodish turn of events, he ends up in the world of crime, which is only a more boldly stated face of the ruthlessness that marks the dealings in the corporate world.

It's only at the end of the novel that Schwarz begins to wonder if he is anything beyond the corporate trappings he has always been caught in. He ends up in Monaco where no one knows him and no one really wants to know anyone with no money. And thinks: "In the end that's why this will be the easiest place in the world for me to rid myself of something I've never had anyway: an identity."

Oswald reflects on all the things that we desperately hang on to mark an identity in a neo-liberal world. "Cars, bikes, the places where we shop, the houses in which we live... We connect identity with these things and invest them with great meanings in our social life. I saw at the mall that there is even a brand that goes by the name `Identiti'!"

Interestingly, the question of identity — of the city vis-à-vis those who live in it and vice-versa — was a much debated one at the panel discussion held in Max Mueller Bhavan on the last day of Oswald's stay in Bangalore. Panelists (Girish Karnad, C.K. Meena and Dilip Da Cunha, besides Oswald himself) debated a range of questions with the audience: are we trying to force a singular identity on a city that has always been marked by divides and multiple identities? Does the city's lack of identity make it a liberating space? Is this "lack of identity" argument only a bogey fashioned by outsiders to make themselves comfortable in this space? Are we all like the proverbial five blind men trying to figure out the shape of an elephant? Who on earth has seen the elephant? Is there an elephant at all in the first place?

Oswald comes from Munich where the city's identity is all laid out on a platter and set ready for consumption — beer, Oktoberfest and all things glamorous and touristy. But if we are struggling with the undefinability of our city, Oswald has a problem with the homogenised, defined nature of his. "Believe me, it's very annoying when you live there!" he said at the discussion.

The greatest thing Oswald will carry back with him from here to Munich might perhaps be just this — a sense of a city and a culture that defies pat definitions.

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