And it wasn't just importing recycled PR handouts of Western celebrities. JS didn't just make space for, it created a dizzying number of Indian artists and writers.
M. J. Akbar and I made our debuts as writers in the same issue of JS back in 1967. Writing for JS meant sharing space with the likes of editor Desmond Doig, journalist, mountaineer, and dandy; Dubby Bhagat, a general's son who delighted in knocking down every stereotype you might have been tempted to assume about him; Bhaskar “Papa” Menon, who wrote a brilliant column called “Bounder” and became the first JS contributor to go off to New York to work (and write) for the United Nations; Anurag Mathur, who wrote very serious short stories that didn't prefigure the hilarity of The Inscrutable Americans; Sunil Sethi, who reported from and on Delhi with the easy sophistication later known to legions of television viewers; or C. Y. Gopinath, earnest, bespectacled, and erudite, an editor's and reader's favorite. And, of course, the remarkable Jug Suraiya, who in those days had to be read with dictionary in hand, since he loved words nobody else had been inclined to use in print before, and who acquired a fan following nationwide that has since grown (and grown up) with him.
And JS’s eclectic subject matter was similarly nurturing of desi talent. The singer-actress Asha Puthli was first hyped in the pages of JS; so were tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, dancer Swapna Sundari, cineaste Shyam Benegal, and the model-turned-beauty-queen-turned-movie-star Zeenat Aman. Simi Garewal wrote an advice column; Raghu Rai and Sondeep Shankar took pictures of everything; the wonderfully named sisters Papiya and Tuk Tuk Ghosh offered witty insights into all sorts of subjects (they were so prolific that many readers suspected they were the figments of the JS staff's fevered imaginations, until in 2006 came the tragic news that Papiya, by then an eminent historian at Patna University, had been murdered in her home in that lawless city). They rubbed shoulders (or at least column inches) with the likes of Jatin Das, whose paintings JS vividly depicted well before he went on to national prominence as one of our great modern artists (not to mention father of the lovely and talented Nandita). Or King Jigme Singye Wangchuk of Bhutan, who, as a teenage monarch, gave JS the exclusive scoop on his coronation (accompanied by the lush photography JS was known for and which was not yet widely practiced in the country outside the somewhat stodgy pages of the Illustrated Weekly of India).
Nostalgia is a middle-aged affliction; it attaches importance to the memory of experiences that mean little to the majority who did not share them. So writing about JS is a little self-indulgent. The magazine died young, folded while still profitable by the Statesman’s chief honcho C. R. Irani after a quarrel with Doig, who passed away soon after of a heart attack. It barely lasted a decade, and anyone leafing through a back copy today (if one can be found) is bound to find it quaint, with its dated 1960s lingo and its calibrated air of cautious rebelliousness, celebrating youthful freedom but within sensible bounds.
And yet JS’s achievement lay in giving a generation of young Indians the sense that they mattered; that their concerns, interests, fantasies, and creative outpourings had a place in our society; and that they could, through the simple fact of the circulation of a magazine, link themselves to a network of other young Indians across the country who shared these concerns and interests. In so doing, JS expanded, for many of us, the world of the possible. And it encouraged us to go out and make those new possibilities happen. There has never been a substitute for JS, and amid today's plethora of diversions for India's young, there probably never will be.
15. Wholly Holidays
I WROTE THESE WORDS IN NEW YORK ON A GOOD FRIDAY, when, I am pleased to say, most employers observe a holiday. But I had just come across the postman downstairs and retrieved my mail. “You don't have the day off?” I asked somewhat incredulously. He shook his head. “What about Easter Monday?” Not that either, he responded. As a postman he gets just six days off a year, mainly on secular occasions like Presidents Day, and two weeks’ leave. I thanked him and retreated to my apartment, suitably humbled by the Protestant work ethic.
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Of all the various ways of measuring the relative underdevelopment of nations, from GNP tables to the Human Development Index, I once suggested that the most useful one that I could imagine constructing would be the Holiday Index. Whereas America, with its paucity of holidays, would score poorly on the Index, I think we in India would do pretty well on it. But that's not necessarily a good thing.
Festivals and melas—mass gatherings of people united around a common event — define our need for escape, and I sometimes suspect that India has more of them than any other country. A look at the government of India's official list of holidays also suggests that we are also entitled to take more time off than any other country in the world. Indians contemplate a calendar that offers a choice of forty-four official holidays for a variety of religious and secular occasions, ranging from Independence and Republic Days to Id-e-Milad, the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed. Whereas Western dictionaries describe secularism as the absence of religion, our secularism favors a multitude of religions: the birthdays of Guru Gobind Singh, Guru Ravidas, and even Maharishi Valmiki are legitimate excuses to have a day off, as are the ascensions of Buddha, Christ, and Mahavira of the Jains. Going a step further, we have the Hindu festivals of Mahashivaratri and Ganesh Chathurthi, in honor of the gods Shiva and Ganesh, respectively. Throw in the Parsi New Year and the Shia Muharram, and you can see how secularism has deferred to religion, to the benefit of the indolent of all faiths.
But the secular harvest festivals of Dussehra, Onam, and Vaisakhi are celebrated, too. And the birthday of that eclectic spiritualist Mahatma Gandhi. Deepavali, our festival of lights, may not be entirely secular, despite all the godless gambling it encourages, but Holi is just a Dionysian spring festival and Raksha Bandhan a nondenominational day of brotherhood: we can take them off, too. We flock in our millions to the Kumbh mela and other religious gatherings; we overflow the maidans for our regular Ram- lilas in every little town.
And when it comes to holidays, who needs an occasion? Add to all these official tamashas the 104 weekend days, annual leave, casual leave, compassionate leave, and sick leave, and it is perfectly possible for a government employee to work just one-third of the days on the calendar and legitimately collect a full year's salary. And I have not even counted days lost due to strikes, hartals, bandhs, lockouts, and the like. Or the “unofficial holidays” that are taken in every office around the country when there is a cricket Test match or one-day international on television, and people report to work in body but focus their minds, and as far as possible their eyes, on the distant pitch.