By Shalini Seth
Which is the real India? The one that arrives
on your doorstep in colorful supplements, or the
one that carries its daily bread in those same scraps
of paper?
“Say it’s only a paper moon.
Sailing over the cardboard sea —
But it wouldn’t be make-believe,
If you believed in me.”
Tennessee Williams, A Street Car Named Desire
When India opened its door to liberalization
and business boomed no one realized that the one
thing to get sold-out totally would be rose-colored
glasses. If the Queen visited an Indian city now,
instead of during the British raj, the Rajah wouldn’t
paint the house walls pink, like that of Jaipur,
but present her instead with a pair of tinted glasses
instead — Raybans or Gucci rose-hued.
That is the color of India today, for those who
can afford the Raybans, that is. Everywhere you
look there are these new layer of people with two
feet above the ground and noses up in the air. Swank
cars with kids clamoring for money outside them,
newspapers that have suddenly acquired what is known
as the Page 3 – invisible all these years — now
filled with gold and the beautiful, films that exist
in a bubble world, clothes that would make you feel
at home in the United States, but quite out of place
in the crowded, chaotic local trains, all spell
a whole new India, which, at a closer glance, does
not seem quite all there. What is inducing this
euphoria that proclaims that all is right with my
world? That I am okay and if you are not, you are
simply not there. In an age when you are not sure
what gender God is, who is it in the heaven that’s
making things all right?
Is it the cars with their AC cocoons – a sudden
deluge of them, or is it the great Indian middle
class, coming into its own with its sheer numbers,
in an era when the only king is the consumer. Everything
in India has come in a boom — where it rains it
pours, from beauty queens to luxury travel, and
where it doesn’t rain (that is most of India this
year), it’s a drought.
It’s a denial of reality, psychologists say. With
a government that is perpetually hung, and has to
be resurrected every two years instead of the prescribed
five, with appalling poverty that makes people commit
suicide because there is no source of livelihood,
as happened in Andhra Pradesh recently where more
than 200 desperate and bankrupt farmers killed themselves.
It is reality that takes a thick skin to live through
each day – even in a country that has grown up on
a heavy dose of fatalism and celebrates one festival
each day of the year.
Celebration Time:
But there is something to celebrate. For a miniscule
minority that seems to be getting richer, just the
fact that one is not part of the poor is reason
enough. They have all joined the party, luxury cars,
ten types of cosmetics, restaurants that are opening
up in every street corner, dotcoms that appear and
disappear everyday. One thing of which there seems
to be a surfeit is money. And it is disposable.
With games that promise to make you a Crorepati
in an hour, being rich is in. It’s the latest fad
for some of us.
Shrines Of The New Gods
The atmosphere is charged like an ostentatious Indian
wedding where it is inauspicious to talk about things
that are not quite all right. The spending of money
has been a well-known feel-good binge. Now it has
acquired a name: shoppertainment. “Shopping is not
about buying necessities anymore, it is about pampering
oneself,” says psychoanalyst Anupam Sinha. And shopping
combined with game plazas and food centers, instead
of a chore has become an acceptable pastime.
Consider sheer numbers. In the next two years India
is likely to have over 22 malls. Crossroads in Mumbai,
Spencer Plaza in Chennai and Delhi’s Ansals are
the leaders of the pack. Predictions say that more
than 20 developers will invest over Rs 1,000 crore
to set up these sleek leisure and shopping centers.
With brands like Christian Dior, Prada, Dolce &
Gabbana and Armani and status-signifiers like Tiffany’s,
Versace, Mont Blanc, Piaget, Nina Ricci, Daks Simpson,
Aquasctum, Burberry’s, Cartier and Tiara entering
the Indian market, these malls are seen as worthy
shrines of the new Gods.
Here Today,
Elsewhere Tomorrow
The euphoria started with the golden boys of our
age. With start-up legends in Silicon Valley like
Vinod Khosla or Sabeer Bhatia, Rakesh Mathur or
Ram Shriram, the popular chant was “why not me”?
Today there are more than 23,000 India-specific
sites and more than 100,000 domain names registered
by Indians. While the Internet boom may be going
bust, people are not worried. It is a simple philosophy
of making hay while the sun shines.
“It’s all about money and the sooner you realize
that the better it is,” says software engineer Rahul
Srivastav to his friend who is pursuing the softer
option of social work. Rahul himself, thin, casually
dressed, son of a government employee hardly conjures
up the image of a budding millionaire, despite his
red cell phone and brand new Santro. Yet, in less
than a year, his personal worth could touch the
magical six figures. “Stocks are the lottery of
modern times, otherwise I would be working all my
life for the future,” says Srivastav.
History was made by Infosys chairman N.S. Narayanamurthy
who kept just 7.7 per cent equity to himself and
distributed the rest to the public and employees.
With Infosys giving stock options not only to the
favored techies but to driver Kannan too, soon receptionists,
office boys, secretaries and even workmen joined
the rich league. According to a Nasscom estimate,
some 10,000 infotech sector employees have been
vested with 18 million shares in 151 companies that
might be worth Rs 12,000 crore at current market
capitalization levels.
It seems like the feel-good socialism is finally
here – at least for the 10,000 odd individuals.
It is their reason to celebrate
While the MNCs placed their trust in India and its
buying power, the film industry discovered greener
pastures overseas.
There is an unmistakable videshi influence. The
India in this new cinema is all greenery and sarson
ke khet (mustard fields), with a belle to match.
Never mind that vast stretches of India are facing
drought and death.
That is not what the misty-eyed NRIs remember when
they think of home. Cinema is packaged to look like
an ad film. A college looks like it is set in Riverdale
of Archie comics. Remember the one in Kuch Kuch
Hota Hai? Heroines are all straight out of matrimonial
ads, walking advertisements for “Indianness” and
the audience from a distance of seven seas is certainly
lapping it up.
The NRI market is now a territory by itself. The
usual price in Britain works out to about Rs 1,000
per ticket; the lower tiers cost almost Rs 250.
Subhash Ghai’s Taal made it to the top 10 in Britain.
Concedes Yash Chopra, producer of Mohabbatein which
had maple leaves imported for its Gurukul set in
an English castle. “Overseas market gets more than
what one or even two Indian territories generate.
Indians abroad, though they emotionally bond with
Hindi films, are exposed to high-quality films and
our films have to be made with them in mind.”
Our designers not only dress up some Hollywood stars
at the Oscars but are also responsible for creating
looks for Bollywood heroines.
A Paper World
The world has become smaller, they say, a mere global
village. It is the power of information and information
in itself is power. Media in this new village has
acquired the status of a prophet. Post independence,
India was a politically aware country. A journalist
was someone who, by definition, was one of the first
ones to know about the depletion of the ozone layer,
and just a step away from the total revolution.
Today, total revolution is sanitary napkins with
wings. “It’s meow-meow journalism,” says Shobha
De, the founder editor of glossies like Stardust
and Celebrity and one of the hi-society columnists.
Glitzy color supplements like the Hindustan Times
City and Delhi Times in the capital and Bombay Times
and the numerous Times Pluses in Bombay, to quote
a few examples, are devoted to supplement celebrities.
Now they even list the parties that one must attend
in the city. Clearly, they are addressing a readership
of the very faces that grace their pages. The reason:
the supplements heavily boost circulation and generate
advertising revenue.
No Coins For The Other Side
Is there another side to the coin? Indeed. Over
40 million youth across the country — most of them
educated up to the high school level and above —
have entered the new millennium with an updated
version of the old problem: joblessness. In the
euphoria that surrounds the so-called mainstream,
unemployment is stale news. Experts say that the
40 million figure merely accounts for job seekers
registered with employment exchanges till the end
of 1999. The actual figures are much higher.
While some in the cities have washed their hands
in the proverbial behti Ganga (running waters) of
easy money, there simply isn’t enough to go around
in the one billion plus country. Higher education
is no longer a guarantee for a job and the stories
of post-grads working as peons are still common.
Educated unemployment in urban areas is estimated
to top 20 million.
In Kerala, where 91 per cent of the population is
literate, the rate of unemployment is the highest.
For a population of a little over three crore, it
has nearly 4 million unemployed educated youth.
Where It Does Not Pour
There were 2000 brands of packaged mineral water
in India at last count.
But Ragi, a housewife in a village three hours away
from Bombay, walks more than two miles, to fill
water from the one sq.ft. muddy hole that is left
of the river. She waits for the mud to settle after
the others have filled water in small containers,
a little at a time. Even as Bombay runs its water
parks and car washes and most affluent suburbs enjoy
24 hour supply of water, nearly 12,000 villages
in the state are facing acute water shortage.
After the devastation caused by the earthquake,
Gujarat is facing a drought. In Andhra Pradesh,
18 out of a total of 23 districts (17,431 villages)
have been declared drought-hit by the state government,
affecting nearly 18,000 villages. In Rajasthan,
23,406 villages are affected.
Cyclone hit Orissa, which was battling water, now
cannot find it anywhere. In the Erasama block, which
was the worst hit by the cyclone, sweet water is
not available even at a depth of 1,500 feet. In
Madhya Pradesh, the entire Nimar and Malwa region
comprising Dewas, Dhar, Jhabua, Mandsaur and Ratlam
districts are under a dry spell. Jhabua, which borders
Gujarat and has similar climatic conditions, is
the worst hit.
Across huge stretches of India, but skirting the
cities that live in a bubble, spread over 12 states
— especially Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh
and Andhra Pradesh — close to 100 million people
are caught in a continuing drought cycle. Women
wake up at midnight to trek 5 km and more, to a
well and wait till dawn with no guarantees of water.
Almost every tap, well, dam, rivulet, pond, river,
is dry. Sometimes after hours of digging there is
only foul-smelling, muddy, brackish water to be
found. Not fit for cattle to bathe in. But the dying
can’t be choosy.
Water riots break out and some women sport cuts
on their foreheads from flailing steel containers.
There is no fodder for cattle, and the poor watch
their only source of livelihood die. Farmers have
lost their land and have turned laborers. Laborers
who worked on their farms just beg. And death is
constantly hovering close by. In Andhra Pradesh,
as a farmer descends deeper into debt he walks into
his fields with a bottle of pesticide and commits
suicide.
In a country where a city suburb boasts of 20 new
restaurants, all of which are doing well, starvation
is a strange way to die.
A Death Wish
There are other ways of dying. One discovers that
the suicide rates spiral across the country, claiming
a little over 100,000 lives in 1998. According to
the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) more and
more Indians in their prime — 15 to 29 years and
30 to 44 years — are taking their lives. Unlike
the West, where the suicide rate is usually higher
for the elderly, seven out of 10 Indians who commit
suicide today are young or middle-aged.
The reasons are varied but related — poverty, stress
or inability to adjust to a society in transition.
The yawning disparity between ambition and achievements
is leading a host of young and the middle-aged to
the edge. Fame and money, dropped so easily in some
laps are set as yardsticks, which cannot be met.
Increasing casualties among the productive sections
of the population affirms the thesis of socio-economic
stress.
Bangalore, the first of India’s cities to boast
of a pub, is a classic instance. A NIMHANS team
carried out psychiatric evaluation of 2,651 cases
of suicide and 1,550 of those who attempted to end
their lives between 1996 and 1999 in 12 hospitals
in the city. The study found that a staggering 79
per cent of them were in the prime of their lives
— 52 per cent in the 15-29 years group and 27 per
cent 30-44 years old. It also revealed that more
women and children were ending their lives, especially
among the migrant population (from rural to urban
areas), their work-related stress and interpersonal
troubles accentuated by a paucity of social support
networks. Researchers call it cumulative effect
of various problems — unemployment, economic privation,
disharmony in the family, and in some cases, alcoholism
too. Sociologist Gita Shah, of the Bombay based
Tata Institute Of Social Sciences, attributes the
rising rates of suicide among the young and the
middle-aged to Bangalore’s speedy transition from
a sleepy pensioner’s paradise to a bustling infotech
hub.
Amitabh Seth, professor of psychology, feels aspiration
levels of the young, inspired by success stories
in the southern Indian infotech boomtowns like Bangalore,
are peaking. “People are in a rush.”
It’s a rubber band reality in which the ends have
snapped and no amount of stretching is going to
make ‘em meet. But then, who cares, for:
“It is a Barnum and Bailey world.
Just as phony as it could be —-
But it wouldn’t be make believe,
If you believed in me.”
— Tennessee Williams, A Street Car Named Desire
