There was a magazine in Bombay (now Mumbai) called ‘Imprint’ in the 1960s and 1970s. Those were the days of Congress hegemony and the rise of Indira Gandhi. The magazine had invited articles from its readers on the subject, “What life will be like in India in the 70s.

I decided to participate, wrote the article and sent it before the deadline. It remained dead eversince. It was not published. But, to my utter surprise, a couple of days back I chanced upon the article in a scrap book of my Bombay days. The pages had turned yellow with age and turned brittle.

It was like an old man meeting his old flame of college days. Pleasant surprise and eager to talk of the old times, go back in time and relive those wonderful days of youth. Such was my elation, I sat down to read it 54 years after it was written. My handwriting was not as bad as it is now. At present when I write, I myself won’t be able to read or decipher it. I leave it to God and a particular DTP operator to deal with it. Let it be.

As I began to read it, I realised that much of what I had visualised or predicted for the decade, 1970s, had come true. At one point I had written, ‘So the seventies will see a period of social unrest and economic set back leading to political chaos.’ Well,  let me recall: Congress split, Indira Gandhi’s triumph, Bangladesh War, JP Movement and his launching of ‘Total Revolution,’ Allahabad High Court Disqualifies Indira Gandhi as an MP in an election petition against her, declaration of Emergency in 1975, Janata Party comes to power in 1977 election and the return of the Empress Indira Gandhi back to power as PM… what an epoch-making decade 1970s was!

I seek the indulgence of my readers if they find what is not palatable to them, find my perception or prognosis not in consonance with their political, social, religious or economic ideas in this article. After all, it was written 54 years back and when I was under 30 years of age. Here we go:

Dear Editor,

Your fabulous question, rather a thousand rupee question: What life will be like in India in the 70s.

To begin with, the same sun will rise in the East and set in the West; the same moon, despite being violated twice by four men, will light up the nights; seasons will come in their turn (for they do not defy the law) and there will be rains and rainbows. So, in the seventies our life with nature won’t be any different. But with ourselves? Let us see.

If life be an ‘attitude’ — in a definitive sense in this particular context — thinking shapes it. Because thinking is expressed and communicated primarily in printed words and also because:

In the beginning was the sound

Sound begot word

Word begot speech and writing.

Hence, let me begin with writers.

If we don’t take them seriously, life in the seventies will be saner and sensible for us. This is because Indian writers, that is, journalists, novelists and essayists will continue to write in minute details about fashionable, unqualified (but with inherited wealth) persons who take to politics or occupy high government position in the External Affairs Ministry and get entangled in some sort of adventure (may be foreign policy or a colleague’s wife) that are inconsequential by themselves and do not deserve to be recounted in any forum.

Since newspapers are going to be, as usual, part of our lives in the seventies it is necessary to know how it will be. I will simply quote the Editor of the 130-year-old humour weekly ‘PUNCH’, Mr. William Davies: “Today’s journalism consists largely in saying that Lord Jones is dead to people who never knew that he was alive. I always tell my reporters to let their sense of the ridiculous guide them.” So in the seventies an attempt will be made by the writer to make us look ridiculous. They will insist on proving their point of (blurred) view with a great output of verbiage that will find ourselves with more words around us than wheat.

We will be brought eye-to-eye with King’s English (whatever it means) brewed and bottled in England, full of flourish and rhetorics. They will dismiss the advice of Sir Walter Raleigh that ‘a good writer can get his effect in words known to every Policeman’ saying that after all they are not writing for Policemen. Worse still that some writers will continue to show off to us their vocabulary and their knowledge of Greek and Latin by lugging in these words in good measure while writing in English… like for example Nirad C. Chaudhuri. Result: In the seventies when we read Indian newspapers or books written by Indian authors we will keep a dictionary by our side. But all of them will find publishers.

This is not all. These purveyors of food for our brains will have a great subject to write about — SEX. Like the Church which simultaneously battles against material suffering and preaches the ideal of poverty, the pen-pusher while deriding sex with the zeal of a crusader will in actuality extol it that by the time the decade is out we will be having our own versions of ‘Che’, ‘Hair’ and ‘Oh, Calcutta’. All this will make authors and critics controversial which will be welcome, for they will rather be attacked and become famous than be ignored and damned forever. This will bring in a fresh crop of phoney writers who will be carefully careless in their dress and behaviour and who while biding their time for success will also act as tough touts and sycophants to their lucky seniors for a living. (To the reader, I suggest a few visits to ‘Samovar’ at Bombay’s Jehangir Art Gallery for a minor proof in this regard).

Seventies, will see the publication of Jana Sangh’s daily ‘The Motherland’ to ‘project its views correctly’ and every Hindu will be enlightened as to whom India really belongs. It may be a revelation for non-Hindus or a reminder of what they already know. So, there will be more communal riots. ‘The Motherland’ will condemn the riots and appeal for communal harmony so also the leaders of the minority communities. But in truth it will be like the opinion Johnson delivered as to the reality of ghosts — “All argument is against it, but all belief is for it.” What then?

India, which has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, will build a nuclear bomb and will also put a satellite into orbit. With these modest achievements, the militant Hindu Nationalism will          be further bolstered.

In the Hindu pantheon will be seen the icon of the sacred cow raised to the status of a ‘Goddess’, at a safe distance from the ‘Lingam’, the phallic symbol representing lord Shiva.

What will the family life be like in the seventies? We will be hard put to find wives with the two important qualities which Demosthenes said are essential in a wife: ‘A faithful house-guardian’ and ‘a fruitful mother.’ Since the seventies will belong to the ‘Now People’ the husband and wife relationship will be founded on the principle of each other’s happiness. One way of bringing happiness home will be wife swapping — both for pleasure and self-promotion. This, of course, will keep the institution of marriage on its traditional foundation because, as Somerset Maugham says, ‘Marriage can only maintain its authority if extra-conjugal relations are not only tolerated but sanctioned.’ And for sure in the seventies with wife-swapping it will be sanctioned de facto.

As for being a ‘fruitful mother’, the red triangle will be an agreeable hindrance. It will also help preserve her vital statistics so as to be a great success in the hedonistic game of wife-swapping.

With some upstarts, whose tribe will increase, the wife will be a show-window. She will proclaim to the world the wealth and position of her husband. A status symbol, bejewelled and bedecked  like an eternal bride.

And these upstarts who will have sprung from the putrid cabbage heap, like fungus, will talk only of kings and jets as though to the manor born and nothing about the cabbage.

No woman, like Caesar’s wife, need be beyond reproach; but she will have to be either beautiful or sexy or both.

Thus, then, will evolve a depraved permissive society with burgeoning bastards masquerading as sons of so and so.

The teenagers will seize the present, caring tuppence to morrow, even as little as they may. They will attempt to stop the Time and will not give up. They will do it with the alibi of an antique pocket-watch hung round their neck as a pendent. The watch will be dead and beyond repair. And lo! They will have stopped the Time. The maya cult will begin.

Like their fathers, they will make their private lives a mere selfish calculation of expediency. They will place pleasure and ‘actions’ before everything else (including studies). They will thus destroy all honour and chivalry. Young men will go about sowing wild oats on virgin lands, fertile lands and on foul lands. Boys and girls will seek the warmth of love not in whispering sweet-nothings but in one another’s arms. Gonorrhoea or ‘clap’ will be as common as the common-cold and will be discussed in public over a smoke of ‘pot.’

They will simply make every-thing a mess for themselves that an elder-statesman (if we happen to have one) will simply gasp and say: ‘There is a generation gap.’

There will be no inhibition in buying contraceptives (Nirodh or of any other brand) which will become one of those articles of convenience we buy every day. In fact the whole family will need it. The children will play with it and use it as balloons.

Seventies will also be a decade of unmarried women. An aging woman’s secret. Her age. But Time will betray her. Not even the cosmetics can hold her beauty any longer. She will no longer be attractive from the front. But the house has a back door. So in keeping pace with the seventies she will fling open the back door with hipster saree. The beautiful, attractive back will reveal itself down to the groovy region of her bottom. And then the deluge! A generation of bottom-pinchers will prowl around.

One significant change in the consumer society will be the elimination of the consumer’s poverty of desire by our Ad men. So, as desire to acquire goods and services increases, there will thus arise a need to find ways and means to satisfy that desire. So the rat-race will begin. There will be boom in the production of luxury goods.

Advertisers will have not only stimulated industrial production but also raised the living standard of the people. Socialism in the seventies will thus make its first economic progress; though  paradoxically not with the help of Mrs. Gandhi’s socialist government but with the help of the ‘capitalist’ instrument of advertising.

However, basic Indian character will not change. Success, even in the creative field, will continue to be a matter of whom one knows rather than what one knows. Respect for a fellow man will continue to be accorded for what he has in his pocket rather than in his head. Manager-employer who has risen to the level of incompetence will continue to ‘recognise genius, resent it, and feel compelled to destroy it’ or will recognise genius, exploit it and then discard it. The net result will be that in the seventies India will become a nation of mediocres.

Possession of refrigerator, an Indian car and ownership-flat will cease to be the status symbols for the rich. Instead, an imported car, air-conditioned-flat and acquaintance with film stars or reigning politicians and the ‘now thing’ TV will become the status symbol. As for the Indian farmer, with the yet-to-come mirage of a Green Revolution, he will have to be content with his Nirodh and the transistor.

Being supposedly a peace-loving country, we did not have any social or political revolution after independence. But we did have two revolutions, more in metaphorical sense. One, of course, was the much-vaunted, ‘Green Revolution’ on the agricultural front and another was the much-advertised ‘Yellow Revolution’ on the butter front. In the seventies one more revolution (in the real sense) will take place on the communal front.

In this new active revolution, people will seek guns for butter. This social upheaval, coupled with the ill-balanced and artificial economic boom due to investment in the production of luxuries at the cost of necessities, will widen the hiatus between the haves and have-nots. From now on, large scale poverty and starvation will lead to mass protests on the streets and communal hatred. Men can fight better with empty stomach. So the seventies will see a period of social unrest and economic set back leading to political chaos. Many ‘progressives’ in the establishment will listen to ‘Radio Peace and Progress’ for peace and encouragement. Thus there will be brief love-affair between Russia and India. But, before this love-affair leads to its logical culmination, Uncle Sam will come with his dowry. And, of course, between love and money, India will choose the latter.

Epilogue

What I have said above, may have the prognosis of an astrologer, bluff of a politician, presumption of an economist, exaggeration of a writer and the sanctimoniousness of a Saint. But all the same, it is my view of our life in the seventies, not from the ivory tower or the pulpit but from the side-walks with my feet firmly on the ground, head steady on my shoulders and view unobstructed and clear.

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