Shakespeare, who had a thought for every issue and an epigram for every thought, pointed out, “If all the year were playing holidays/To sport would be as tedious as to work.” (Henry IV, Part I, Act 1, sc. 2, for pedantic readers). But he hadn't met the Indian holidaymaker: our capacity for celebration is truly undimmed by repetition. Had old William seen the enthusiasm with which our youths spray colored water on female strangers or the lakhs thronging our melas from Pushkar to Prayag, he would undoubtedly have agreed that age cannot wither, nor custom stale, the infinite variety of our holidays.
So India, I suspect, would ride high on the Holiday Index. I wonder how Bangladesh or Burkina Faso would fare. My wholly unscientific theory is that the poorer the country, the more holidays it gives itself, and the more festivals it conducts. Productivity might suffer from so many absences, but part of the problem is that we are not producing all that much anyway when we work, so that we don't lose all that much when we don't.
But wait a minute — perhaps I am being too materialist here. Is it that we are poor because we have so many holidays, or that we have so many holidays because we are poor?
Festivals and melas are the holiday events of the poor. The rich have no shortage of opportunities to enjoy themselves by themselves, whereas the poor have few outlets and pleasures other than communal ones. For an Indian villager, a day at the local mela is his opera ticket, tennis tourney, and beach vacation rolled into one — and in celebrating it he experiences some of the happiness that Thomas Jefferson told rich Americans it was the duty of government to allow him to pursue.
So poor countries — or at least countries with poor people — need more holidays and public festivals to give people the chance to amuse themselves than the rich ones do. Perhaps we should leave our holidays intact, after all.
16. Memories of a Bombay Childhood
IF THERE IS ONE INDIAN CITY that epitomizes much of what I'd like to think I stand for, it is Bombay (Mumbai, as it has recently been renamed), which used to offer a hospitable home for the kinds of ideas and initiatives (though not always the politics) that I value. Thriving, energetic, and resourceful, it was an advertisement for the free enterprise culture I advocated from my schooldays; its citizens rubbed shoulders with one another in an environment that largely transcended the man-made divisions of caste and religion that I despise; and the air was redolent of a cosmopolitanism more eclectic than anywhere else in the land. My own recollections of the city, urbs prima in Indis, involve these very issues.
I spent more of my childhood in Bombay than anywhere else. We moved to the city not long after my second birthday and left it (for Calcutta) just before my thirteenth, so my memories of Bombay are inevitably tied up with my schooling there. This took place in the squat red-white-and-blue building, opposite the Cooperage Stadium, which housed Campion School.
Campion was, like its eponymous Elizabethan martyr, a Catholic institution, one of many through which the Jesuits fulfilled their considerable talent for educating the privileged of the third world. It was a not wholly successful vocation, for the Jesuits were uncomfortably elitist and the elites enthusiastically Jesuitical. But perhaps because of its academic limitations, Campion encouraged the idea that there was more to school than studies. It offered a variety of extracurricular activities that helped you to find yourself outside the classroom even if you had lost yourself inside it.
So it was in Bombay and at Campion that I first acquired a healthy regard for imagination and innovation, and for the hard work that went into developing both. There was a flourishing school magazine to which any wielder of words, however young, was encouraged to contribute. Campion also got its students quickly involved in the pleasures of debating and speech making: we were all taught to elocute, with excruciating precision, from an early age, and one of my earliest experiences of an interschool debate was of being primed, at the age of seven, to interject from the floor in a contest of my seniors with their insufferably superior counterparts from Cathedral.
Above all, Campion instilled in its boys a love of the theater. There were frequent opportunities for participating in what was called (with no pun intended) interclass dramatics; and the school offered, in an inspired and wholly unprecedented coup, optional after-class instruction in drama from one of the most talented, vibrant, and experienced figures of the Bombay stage, Pearl Padamsee — a small, bouncing bundle of barely repressed energy who transformed several classloads of self-conscious, awkward schoolboys into confi-dent, compelling actors and directors. Pearl's classes were great fun, but they also led to bigger things — not just drama competitions at school but to extravagant public productions in overflowing Bombay theaters where people with no connection to Campion paid for standing-room-only tickets to watch us perform.
I loved my theater years at Campion, which sometimes taught me about matters that had nothing to do with the theater. One of the more memorable footnotes to my experiences on the school stage occurred early in my career as a Pearl protégé. I was a ten-year-old representing the sixth grade in an interclass theatrical event at which the eighth grade's sketch featured Chintu (Rishi) Kapoor, younger son of the matinee idol and producer Raj Kapoor and later to become a successful screen heartthrob in his own right. I had acted, elocuted a humorous poem and MC'd my class's efforts to generous applause, and the younger Kapoor was either intrigued or disconcerted, for he sought me out the next morning at school.
“Tharoor,” he asked me at the head of the steps near the toilet, “what caste are you?”
I blinked my nervousness at the Great Man. “I–I don't know,” I stammered. My father, who had shed his caste name for nationalist reasons in his student days and never mentioned anyone's religion, let alone caste, had not bothered to enlighten me on such matters.
“You don't know?” the actor's son demanded in astonishment. “What do you mean, you don't know? Everybody knows their own caste.”
I shamefacedly confessed I didn't.
“You mean you're not a Brahmin or something?”
I couldn't even avow I was a something. Chintu Kapoor never spoke to me again. But I went home that evening and extracted an explanation from my parents, whose eclectic liberality had left me in such ignorance. They told me, in simplified terms, about the Nair caste, to which we belonged; and so it is to Chintu Kapoor, celluloid hero of the future, that I owe my first lesson about my genealogical past.
The other incident connected with my Campion acting career that has remained in my memory is of performing in a Christmas play. It was called The Boy Who Wouldn't Play Jesus and had been written by an American with a social conscience, Bernard Kops. The play was unusual in several respects, including that it was meant to be performed by schoolchildren; the cast were to portray themselves rehearsing a Christmas play. All is good-natured chaos until the hero, a good hamburgers-and-root-beer American kid, decides that, as long as there's so much suffering and injustice in the world, he won't play Jesus. So he leads the cast off the stage and into the audience, collecting funds for — remember this was a 1960s American play — the hungry children of Bombay.
So here we were, privileged Bombay kids, performing The Boy Who Wouldn't Play Jesus (with me in the title role). The play was written to be easily adapted to any group of children, for they were all to use their own names and “be themselves,” but Pearl took the adaptation process a stage further. We too would protest injustice and suffering by refusing to play Jesus; but the issue that roused the Indian cast of Campion's Christmas play, that prompted them to walk into the aisles shouting slogans, would not be India's starving but Vietnam's.