A Conversation with Amitabha Bagchi
Amitabha Bagchi: There is definitely a sense that Arindam picks up certain incidents from his life and analyzes them over and over again. In that sense, he is no different from anyone else, I think. It could be that the way he structures his analysis is somewhat similar to how mathematics is done. Often he makes and accepts a hypothesis and then has to abandon it later when some new information appears, or when his deductive machinery is able to detect an inconsistency within it. Having lived surrounded by computer scientists and engineers all my adult life, I can say with some certainty that this is the method they apply not just to science and math but to everything else as well. And being a computer scientist myself, this appears to be the most natural way of going about it to me too. But then I also feel tempted to try and find a hole in that approach and try to hypothesize what alternate approaches to making sense of our lives might look like. No luck so far.
The whole book is about the formation of a particular kind of upwardly mobile Indian middle class masculinity. The negative pressure created by competitiveness is offset by the nourishing camaraderie of the intensely male environment.
Ashima Sood: Yes. You know I was wondering about that. The IITs represent, in modern India, a very special system of values, and one that is, if not patriarchal in the usual sense, at least ‘masculinist’. Can you comment on some aspects of this value system as they appear in Above Average? The male bonding, the competitiveness, the backstabbing, and also what we have been talking about, the whole emphasis on fundas, or fundamental principles/concepts versus nuance? I also can’t help but wonder if women, or if you like, the yin, will ever have a place in this system?
Amitabha Bagchi: The whole book is about the formation of a particular kind of upwardly mobile Indian middle class masculinity. The negative pressure created by competitiveness is offset by the nourishing camaraderie of the intensely male environment. Chetan Bhagat senses this too when he says that his book is all about friendship. He is referring to a male-male friendship which is forged to great strength in a high pressure environment. IIT has that effect. I know a lot of people who are very close to their friends from school, but male IITians inevitably count other male IITians amongst their closest friends, even decades after graduating.
Women do have place in all this, but their roles are often stereotypical ones. At least the roles these young men are willing to give them. I can't foretell the future but my guess is that when the numbers of women increase in a place like IIT they will probably overhaul this masculine culture completely. That is if they don't buy into it.
Ashima Sood: Is there a hint here, perhaps, that Arindam’s socialization as an IITian prevents him from prioritizing his romantic relationship with Aparna? And what does that say about relationships between men and women in a society that values the IIT model so highly?
Amitabha Bagchi: To the educated middle-class boy work is more important than anything else. That is simply how he is brought up. Relationships are downplayed, treated in a stiff upper lip sort of way. Not really the thing one talks about around the dinner table. Does this mean that Arindam is emotionally stunted compared to Bobby who can give freer rein to his desires? Probably. But that's not really the point, it's more an attempt to see the ability to express emotion as a class attribute. In some sense it is my attempt to understand why Hindi movies are so melodramatic and so popular at the same time.
Ashima Sood: But I'm also interested in how the IIT emphasis on 'success' plays into this.
Amitabha Bagchi: Dated IIT guys and lived to tell?
Ashima Sood: Well, there is a tendency to calculate emotional investment in order to minimize vulnerability.
For the most part, I have stuck to simple but grammatically correct English with yaar thrown in here and there to syncopate the dialogue as needed. I've used Hinglish or grammatical variations only when they've had something to say about the narrative or the character's state of mind.
Amitabha Bagchi: Well, the way I see it, an intensely competitive environment forces you to develop some kind of emotional self-sufficiency. And once that self-sufficiency is developed it becomes a security blanket which is hard to give up. That's my theory for why a lot of my male friends in their twenties either marriage was just something that needed to be taken care of. And the ones who didn't go that way ended up playing the field aggressively.
But I want to say that this phenomenon I am talking about isn't restricted to IIT guys. It's very much there in men in their twenties in other cultural settings as well. I think it's part of the general notion of competitiveness which is built into the idea of masculinity.
Ashima Sood: That’s why Neeraj seems so refreshing. He is such a compelling character. How do you see him evolving through the book?
Amitabha Bagchi: Neeraj's roots in the Hindi speaking middle class - and a dysfunctional part of it at that - and his fantastic capabilities come together to create a strange trajectory. He wants success just like the others, he just wants it with a passion that the others can't match.
Ashima Sood: He's from the milieu of Ram Karan in Akhil Gupta's novel An Obedient Father, in some sense?
Amitabha Bagchi: Yes he is. And it is probably to escape that milieu that he stops at nothing
When you drive in Delhi, no matter how fast your car, you go only at a limited speed because of traffic. And so, sometimes when you're driving at night or on the highway you speed unreasonably, just because you can. Neeraj is like that. He comes from a place where no one gets anywhere so when he is in a situation where he can get somewhere he aims for the Turing award.
Ashima Sood: But despite all that, he does value human connection ...
Amitabha Bagchi: Which is an amazing thing about him.
Ashima Sood: How do those two seeming opposites come together?
Amitabha Bagchi: He doesn't see the contradiction and maybe, for him, there is no contradiction. Maybe it's only looking at it from where we are standing it appears to be a contradiction.
Ashima Sood: Yes, that difference is so interesting. And yet, at one point, I think, Arindam wonders why he did not go to Delhi University where he would have been among upper middle class people like himself and presumably more comfortable. One of the things that this book does very well is reveal the IIT as this site of upward mobility and tremendous social churning. Would you say that the IIT is, in some ways, the great equalizer? How does the prestige of IIT, its great meritocracy, interact with the non-meritocratic world outside? Can it, in any way, cancel them out?