The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [143]
23
What It’s Really All About
With longer and longer gaps between films I’ve been able to spend more time on the other pleasures in life – the family, friends, my garden and cooking are just some of these, but one of the greatest has been travelling. I’ve been all over the world on location and seen some wonderful places (and some bloody awful ones, too), but when you’re working you can’t be as relaxed about sightseeing as when you’re on holiday. So with a less hectic schedule, Shakira and I have been making up for lost time. It’s been a chance for us not only to revisit our favourite spots, but to explore some new ones, too – and one of the most exciting for us was the trip we took to India in 2005.
Like everyone else, I had pre-conceived notions of what India would be like, both good and bad. I thought I would be outraged by the extraordinary wealth of the few and the grinding poverty of the many, but it wasn’t like that – well, it was in some respects, but in others it wasn’t. Yes, we saw examples of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, but this was a country in which many of the richest people really do have a sense of caring for their poorer neighbours and it’s a country on the move, with a burgeoning middle class, a highly educated workforce with tremendous IT skills, and a real sense of enterprise.
We were travelling in august company. With us was the President of Iceland, Ólafur Grimsson, and his wife Dorrit, both friends of ours, who were there on an official visit, and also Irina Abramovich, the ex-wife of Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club. It turned out that my claim to fame in India is as the husband of Shakira – although I did hear a rumour that they have remade Get Carter and The Italian Job in Hindi, so maybe the next time I go I will have achieved some status of my own.
Because we were with such a high-powered group, we were treated like royalty. Our first dinner was in the penthouse suite in the Taj Palace Hotel in New Delhi as guests of Mrs Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Congress Party, and the following day we were invited to have tea with the President, Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. His palace, which had been built by the British, was unbelievably grand and stood at the end of an enormous boulevard. All I could think of as I gazed at it was what confidence, insanity and conceit the British must have had to build such pompous edifices to an endless future, surrounded, as they were, by some of the poorest people on the face of the earth. Society in India has changed for the better since those days, but buildings like that still look out of place to me.
The President himself was particularly interesting to me on two counts: first, he was a Muslim, despite the fact that only twenty per cent of India’s population is Muslim, and second, he was a scientist who had played a major part in India’s nuclear missile programme. After tea he showed us round the enormous rose garden. It occurred to me that it occupied a huge amount of space in such an overcrowded city and, perhaps unwisely, I pointed out the injustice of it. He smiled at me innocently. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The British built it.’ ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Of course.’ I was put politely in my place.
The following day we had tea with the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, and got another surprise: he was a Sikh, the first non-Hindu