While we were busy at Back Post...

With all of the haps and mishaps in and around the REC campus, it was easy to lose sight of the goings-on around the world.

These were the rambunctious nineties, you know. There were just so many twists and turns to the tale, bedecked by a litany of explosive events and emotions, and enacted by awfully colorful personalities, that I wouldn't know where to begin.

Just some years ago, Indira Gandhi, the Great Indian tinpot democrat, was tragically shot down by her bodyguards - in what some would characterize, as her karma catching up with her. Those were dark days. There were no TV programs for thirteen days...can you imagine?

Through much of the eighties and nineties, India struggled to find a national leader of Indira's stature - the prime ministerial baton passed eight tenuous hands in less than ten years, presenting a nonstop political spectacle. Alleged farmers, failed pilots, superannuated bureaucrats, economists, anarchists, septuagenarian career politicians; all tried their hand at the wheel

- and some even slept on it - pushing us further backward.

1991 and 1992, will take the cake for being the worst years of the nineties, all-around.

In mid-1991, India was embroiled in a "balance-of-payments" crisis - an obscurantist way of saying, "we were totally screwed"! Our foreign exchange reserves had touched rock bottom, allowing us barely three weeks of imports.

It must have been insulting. We, apparently, had to air-dash two hundred plus metric tonnes of gold as guarantee to European banks, so that they could lend us money.

Rajiv Gandhi had just been assassinated by Sri Lankan militants that led to further political instability for years.

His bosom buddy and Bofors bedfellow, Amitabh Bachchan, wasn't faring any better. His movies were tanking, he was neck-deep in the Bofors bribery scandal, Rekha had married someone else, and did I mention, his movies were tanking?

Small solace for Bachchan (or was it?) that, Rajnikant, his southern comrade, the dark-n-flamboyant-conductor-turned-sambhar-superstar (as magazines in India characterized anyone from the South; throw in some regionalism and xenophobia, sprinkle it with upper-class culinary contempt, and bake and ferment it into six hyphenated words that will elicit a few laughs from Greater Kailash and Cuffe Parade; if I had made it big, I would have been called the "'Ayyayyoo'-Idli-hogging-South-Madras-engineer" or something like that)...where is my sentence?! Let me start all over. Rajnikant was rising to the zenith of stardom, essentially remaking all of Bachchan's yesteryear hits.

In the fickle world of sports, the pathetic nineties had just started. The honeymoon from the World Cup and Benson & Hedges WCC victories of the eighties was decisively over, right after that last-ball six from Dawood Ibrahim's future sambandhi.

The Indian cricket team changed captains as frequently as the country changed prime ministers - Kapil Dev, Srikanth, Vengsarkar, Shastri, Azhar...all came and went; often facing unceremonious exits. The Aussies, the Pakis, the Lankans, and the BCCI tormented the players and a billion other countrymen.

The less said about other sports the better. We blanked the medal tally for the third time in a row at the 1992 summer Olympics, precipitating a national crisis and a billion lamentations on print that destroyed half of Finland's forests.

Indian litterateurs weren't having a great a time on the field, either.The Ayatollah of Iran had issued a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for the undecipherable "Satanic Verses", forcing him into hiding till he materialized in Mylapore one fine day, and married Padma Lakshmi (Idly-podi-hot-Malibu-based-Iyer-model).

The Bombay blasts and the ensuing riots, Advani's rath yatra and the rise of the right wing, the Babri masjid demolition, the Harshad Mehta scam, and the other events, kept us all on the edge of our seats. And this was just the first few years in the 90's!

By the time, we graduated from college in 1993, there was not much to look forward to. The nation was in a political cauldron, our finances were weak, the job scene was bleak, scams were breaking out at the frequency of soora thengais in a Madras temple...

Well...not everything was bad, though.

1991, also, marked the year when things started to turn around - most will say for the better. Two reluctant leaders from the Congress party, PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh, took the reins of governance and paved the way for economic recovery through bold measures and shrewd political moves. The India that we knew would change for the foreseeable future. Coca cola, Dominos pizza, satellite TV, junk food, and call centers, captured our imagination and put us on the path of hyper-growth (especially, of our waistlines).

In early-2017, India's foreign exchange reserves, which caused us much angst in the nineties, stood at a healthy three hundred and sixty billion dollars, rising from an abysmal six hundred million in 1991 - a five-hundred fold increase, since that fateful day when we pawned our belongings to the Bank of England, that led to Winston Churchill rolling in his grave - or the opposite of that - wagging his finger, saying "I told you so!").

In sports, Sachin Tendulkar, had debuted as a chubby, curly-haired, sixteen-year old, and would capture the imagination of a country, desperate for heroes, for the next quarter century. "I have seen God. He bats at number four for India" Aussie great, Matthew Hayden, would wax eloquent on the Little Master.

During the college years, we lived through a uni-channel, monochrome, Doordarshan situation. All that changed within a couple of years, when the cable boom brought the world to our living rooms. The rest as they say is "Saas bhi kabhi bahu thi".

So, what do you remember about the happenings during college? Events? Politics? Leaders? Sporting heroes? Movies?

Interested in reading my other blogs?

How about my ode to old Hindi film music? Which is here --> THE GOLDEN AGE OF HINDI FILM MUSIC.

The first episode is HERE.

Or my eulogy to one of the greatest playback singers of India? SP BALASUBRAHMANYAM.