3:2 Debate Is Life, The Rest Is Just Prep-Time. Chapter 1

This is part 1 in a series of 4 parts. Scroll up for later parts....

In the north of our country, storytelling is not just a way of life but also one of its basic necessities. A man may have no qualification, no job, no woman, he may be penniless but he’s never really poor unless he’s out of stories, at least not up north. Anyone who’s been there will know what I’m talking about. Come sundown, the towns and cities retire from their bustle and scatter into little groups. In these groups they narrate tale after yarn after anecdote, the stories being rooted equally in fact, fable and hearsay. Around their fireplaces they gather, and listen wide-eyed. The lady of the house serves an unending stream of tikkas, kebabs and pakoras. The grandfathers tell tales from the partition, the grannies stories from the Mahabharata and the dads recount old Tendulkar lore from the nineties. The mommies do their bit with the story of how Mrs. Sharma next door hasn’t fed her family anything but khichdi ever since she had her second child.

One might wonder what business these people had doing any of this when they could be watching Ekta Kapoor’s gems on TV or surfing the internet mindlessly, just like the rest of the country did. One might ask what sense it made to spend every evening doing something so utterly unproductive and useless, especially in the midst of a recession.

Without offence to anyone, the questions are laughable at best. As anyone with even a slightest sense of the Indian north will tell you, this ritual is not optional and storytelling is not a choice for the people to make. Such a way of life is pre-ordained by the land and its rich history. The more logical will tell you that this is how things inevitably are when a region is so gloriously encumbered by hundreds of intermingling cultures sprouted from all parts of the last 5000 years. They will tell you that when there is a tale around every nukkad and a legend surrounding every mohalla, then no other way of life is preferred. Nay, not preferred, possible. No other way of life is even possible.

Many of you disbelieve me I’m sure. You think I exaggerate. So did many of my friends in college, especially the debating ones who thought they could argue against this evidence. Then the epic Delhi trip happened and they never doubted me again. This is a story from that land of stories.

3:2

We were a motley group of six, travelling to Delhi for the same reason we always did, to debate. Turns out most of the good parliamentary debates in the country happen in Delhi. Ever so often you would find us aboard a low cost airline or a train headed to Delhi to try our skills at some national debate. To be honest, we were minnows at these competitions, historically disadvantaged (no seniors had ever been good at this and therefore we had no-one to coach us) and educationally challenged (engineering doesn’t help much with debating, and we were often up against law schools). Yet we participated often, and practiced eagerly, in the hope that we would, one day, some day, far in the future, perhaps, maybe, hopefully, God willing, amount to something at a national debate. To complicate matters, the institute didn’t pay a penny for all this travelling, in fact they didn’t even approve of us skipping lectures and labs to attend these debates. If that wasn’t enough, our debating society wasn’t granted official recognition by the cultural council either. Damn, they didn’t even let me mention it on my resume.

But we still debated, risking attendance, cajoling professors into letting us miss that one lab, adjusting marks for that one quiz, passing us this one time. We still debated despite getting severely clubbed by the competition on each occasion. There was something noble about it, not giving up at something you really wanted to be good at, despite biting the dust so many times. And there was something innocent in the way Suddu, at the beginning of every trip, still believed that this would be the one where he would finally “get it with a girl”.

Anyway, this time around we were there for the Premchand Debate, Hindu College’s national debate. As always, we dreamt of breaking. For the uninitiated, “breaking” in debating terms refers to making it past the league stage of a tournament, into the quarterfinals. Few teams from our college had ever broken at any debate, and none at Premchand.

[The airplane taking us there was oddly asymmetrical. It had three seats on one side of the aisle and two on the other.]

As soon as we landed in Delhi, we began to see representatives of the storytelling culture. These people are everywhere. They seem to be ordinary citizens performing ordinary tasks but in truth they are the appointed upholders of the tradition of storytelling. The ones dressed as taxi drivers tell unending tales of “fuel price hike” and “having to come back empty” and “how the poor man suffers”. The ones pretending to be bathroom attendants sing ballads of how the government forgot to pay them and how tips from good Samaritans were keeping them alive. Then there is always the one who is dressed as a software engineer fallen on hard times. He tells a good tale and is the chief of the storytellers. To listen to his story you have to pay with your baggage, though you’re usually unaware of this little detail till the narration is over and you look behind you where your bags used to be.

In Delhi, storytelling isn’t a mere pastime, it’s an industry.

[The cab that took us to our accommodation had a weird set of headlights. More accurately, there were flashlights attached to the front where the headlights should have been, three on one side and two on the other]

To be continued....