Superstar India

by Shobhaa De

  The guys ask the bartender, ‘Which is your most expensive whisky?’ He loves, no, adores, such chimps. He mentions an indecently-priced single malt. ‘Very rare, sir,’ he says, turning the bottle round and round. ‘Double pegs, yaar,’ the guys order. ‘And… don't forget the Pepsi and ice.’ The bartender winces visibly, as he adds a cola to the priceless malt and piles on the ice cubes. The farmer is immensely chuffed as he yells, ‘Cheers, Pappe,’ and knocks it down in one gulp. The evening has just begun. ‘Royal Salute’ is next. It's actually the cola he loves. So what? Have money. Will waste.

  ‘Value?’ What's that? Rich India laughs at the suggestion. ‘Our grandfathers had to worry about such things… to prepare for famine, drought, epidemics or war. We have no such problems. Modern methods, technology… what are they there for if we can't use them? Our forefathers were insecure… some of them were refugees. But we aren't in that boat. India rocks, man. It's a rocking country. Are you going to the Shakira concert? Kya hips hai!’ Shakira's hips don't lie. And our lips don't lie either! Today, we are daring to articulate passions our grandparents never did… never could. If I'd told my grandmother that a ticket to Shakira's gig in Mumbai was as high as 3,200 bucks, and that it was a sold-out performance, with countless teenagers grooving to the Latina sex goddess's tracks, she would have slapped me lightly, tapped my wrist and said, ‘Kaaye? Hatt!’ in a voice that suggested complete disbelief. So would my mother, who'd run the house for around that much cash per month. But we had fun. And I'm not talking about a situation a hundred years ago. Has so much really changed in forty years? You bet!

  Another thing: As a teenager, always strapped for those extra twenty bucks (come on, teenagers have special needs!), I had to apply (virtually in triplicate!), well in advance, if I was to get my hot little hands on that extra cash! But under no circumstances could I help myself to the money, even if it was lying under my nose. I never opened my parents’ cupboards or dug into a wallet lying on a shelf. I knew where the emergency funds were, but there was no question of touching those notes, even if I had my own kind of emergency. It's different with my own kids. They blithely open my handbag and ‘borrow’ whenever they feel like it. Of course, I'm kept in the loop and informed about the missing notes. But that's another story. They don't wait for me to sanction these borrowings— small amounts, generally (and mercifully). But it's the attitude.

  Am I to blame for this laxity? I guess so. Maybe I'm too lazy to abandon my writing to go dig for a couple of hundreds… maybe I don't really care if a few notes are missing. See? Despite my upbringing, I too have succumbed. My attitude to money has undergone a radical transformation. I see it as a functional tool, not an end in itself. My cardiac functioning is more important to me than tracking missing currency. I am far more casual about expenditure these days, and feel I have no right to keep lecturing my kids since my own lifestyle is not exactly Gandhian. I splurge… I indulge. At times, I die of old guilt (Damn! Conditioning raises its ugly head!). At other times, I tell myself smugly, I've earned the right. I work like a dog. I pay my own bills. So who's there to tell me what I should do with my earnings? The old mantra (save, save, save) which defined our society, has been replaced by a new one—spend, spend, spend. I am no angel, no exception. I figure, this is my life… if I don't enjoy the fruits of my labour now, then when? This is a common refrain. Who am I fooling? Me!

  Check out travel sites and you'll see the record number of Indian tourists haring off to exotic destinations—Brazil, Norway, Argentina… the farther, the better. I have been on a few luxury cruises myself, and can't wait to grab another. Do I tear my hair out contemplating a grim future? Do I spend sleepless nights thinking I'll be in dire straits at eighty-plus, if I don't put away every extra rupee right now? Hell, no! I've become an American in this regard… that too, without social security to fall back on. Chill, I say to myself, during rare anxiety attacks. You are not your mother. You are doing okay. You have enough.

  ‘Enough’ is a dangerous word, though. Who defines ‘enough’? Relative and open to interpretation… that's ‘enough’. Well, in my book, enough is enough. I will not stress myself out tabulating its exact worth. I've become philosophical and fatalistic (like Americans?). And I feel so much better about myself. It was a conscious decision, taken after much internal debate. Am I doing the right thing? Heck, who knows? But there's a certain challenge, I've discovered, in letting go of remembered neuroses. It's no longer about how I should feel—it is what I do feel. Huge difference. I remember talking to film-maker Mahesh Bhatt many years ago. Sensing my nervousness about a project, he said, ‘We spend too much of our time during our most productive years saving for the future, saving for our old age, saving to provide a better life to our children… by the time we make good money, we are too old to enjoy it. So… in effect, we slave all our lives to enrich the next generation.’ Made perfect sense to me.

  In a way it freed me. The obsession with ‘saving for a rainy day’ persists with some Indians despite the new urge to splurge. Many of us secretly continue to hoard. Much of our advertising is based on this psychological premise. We spend our adult life preparing for some undefined disaster that awaits us in the not-so-distant future. We are perpetually preparing for doomsday. We behave like there's no good news ever. The day we make money, we start fearing we'll lose it. This sometimes makes us stingy and small-minded.

  Of course, we tell ourselves we are anything but Uncle Scrooge's distant cousins. In our eyes, we want to believe we are generous and large-hearted. ‘Look at those Americans… forever counting their precious dollars… forever converting currency.’ And yet, Indians behave in the oddest way when they go to America themselves. Even the wealthiest Indians develop a strange complex and hang on to those greenbacks like someone will snatch them away. It's a little less pronounced, now that we all carry wads of plastic in our wallets. Besides, the dollar itself is in the doldrums. The Indian rupee is crawling up—slowly but surely. But the fear of some financial calamity hitting us is omnipresent.

  We pass on this paranoia to our children. They don't get it. Like their yankee counterparts, they believe in conspicuous consumption—and wastage. Go to any shopping mall or multiplex theatre, and you'll see overweight kids walking around stuffing their faces with junk food—most of which lands up in the garbage. If we grew up getting the maximum mileage out of our clothes (we had to hang onto them till they fell apart), today's kids follow the wear-and-chuck pattern. Nobody wants to be seen in last season's jeans. And there's no use arguing that denims are denims and how different can one pair look from the next? (‘Ma… don't you ever see the important details—like the pockets?’) If we lecture to the next generation that we are doing all this for them—scrimping, saving, planning—they laugh: ‘Keep it up.’ But they don't appreciate it. (Isn't this an age-old wail? I can't bear to repeat it—but here I am, doing just that!)

  Middle-class parents start planning for their children's future from year dot. The savings mania is thus justified. ‘Munna must become a big man… not remain a clerk like me,’ say glum fathers, who in turn blame their own fathers for not saving enough. ‘Had my father planned his life better, I could have gone abroad… and become someone!’ this lot says bitterly. Never mind the fact that the father may have sold a tractor to send his duffer to a good school—a really good school—but in India.

  Perhaps it's in our genes to feel it's Apocalypse now. We all live with that sneaking feeling ‘The End is Near’. But instead of making us fatalistic, this fear turns us into misers. We laugh and say knowingly, ‘Of course we can't take it all with us… but it's better to be prepared for the worst.’ This worst-case scenario paralyzes our joyous moments. But despite that awareness, we are total duds when it comes to disaster management. We give up. We surrender. Which is why those poor farmers hang themselves, weighed down by debts that appear so tragically small to others. They can't deal with the shame or loss of face. Because ‘debt’ itself invokes a deep-seated feeling of dre
ad. Debt and dread go hand in hand.

  But developed nations live on debt. The so-called mature economies think nothing of borrowing heavily and forgetting to pay back. Taking loans is considered a healthy part of doing business. Sometimes, the trick backfires, but most times, a Big Bully using a Big Stick (guess who?) can extract big bucks out of a smaller country like Mexico.

  At a meet on globalization in New Delhi, Professor Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate (economics), provided a startling perspective on how heavily America borrows from ‘underdeveloped’ nations that end up subsidizing all those impressive plans that frequently stall other, equally impressive, ones in far-flung countries because the money has run out. Money never seems to reach those who need it the most—on both a macro and micro level.

  It's the same story in nearly every state in India when monies earmarked for vital developmental projects do the disappearing act with such regularity, nobody's really surprised. Earthquake relief, floods, epidemics, drought, terrorist attacks, communal violence—there's no shortage of disasters here. No shortage of funds either. But nobody ever seems to see the colour of that money. During national emergencies, in particular, everyone gets in on the act— from corporate biggies to snot-nosed schoolkids. Relief operations are launched on a massive scale. One can spot well-meaning citizens pinning flags on strangers in return for a donation—anything from a few coins to larger notes is welcome. Students feel involved, important and patriotic for those few short months, as they go from door to door asking for money, clothes, medicines for, say, the Prime Minister's Relief Fund. Newspapers carry stories and images of sacrifice and generosity; movie stars and cricketers join in, too. Everybody is caught up in a nationalistic frenzy—food-grains, clothes, cash pile up in rat-infested godowns. Months, sometimes, years, later, a nosey reporter chances upon the rotting goods and a few red-faced ‘saviours’ provide weak explanations. There it ends. Oh—the money is rarely traced. And nobody asks.

  Strange, how heartless we can be and have been during calamities. Generous and giving on one hand, cruel and avaricious on the other. Nobody is spared, not even corpses. I really don't know of any other country (Venezuela? Brazil? Turkey? Are you listening?) where scavengers rush to strip dead bodies of whatever there is—ornaments, cash, anything of even the smallest value, sometimes before the body is cold. I've heard of villagers scampering to mutilate bodies of air-crash victims before the arrival of fire brigades, often tearing earrings and rings of a person who may still be alive, or chopping off hands to get to the gold bangles around the wrists. One cannot say it's dire poverty alone that makes people behave in such a barbaric fashion. It is something far graver, and one can see it in the gory mythological stories that detail similar gruesome acts committed by vindictive gods, sadistic demons, thwarted lovers, rejected sons, desperate wives. Nobody thinks twice before launching a grisly attack on innocents. We not only endorse but condone whatever we believe can be easily justified. There are accounts of boiling oil poured into eye sockets to extract confessions, of rival kings being hacked limb from limb, infants being flung to their deaths or beheaded in the presence of their weeping mothers. Mel Gibson should read our history books for fresh inspiration!

  I find it strange that our notions of ‘self’ are so far from the horrible truth. We think of ourselves as peace-loving, God-fearing, docile people, who've been put upon by marauding invaders. We believe we are essentially calm, spiritual, evolved, superior, patient and wise. But none of these is true. There is nothing to suggest we are any more ‘spiritual’ than the next person. Hot-tempered and shockingly ill-mannered, we are amongst the world's most accomplished rip-off artistes. An Indian mob out to lynch someone can compete with Idi Amin's henchmen.

  Watch scenes of rioting in any corner of the country (oh, come on, all you have to do is switch on your TV set at prime time any day, every day). See the expression in the eyes of the rioters? Those murderous mobs are not unemployed, disenfranchised, desperately poor slum-dwellers venting their frustration. Often, they are office-goers on their way home when they get caught up in a ‘situation’! Once they're in it, they turn into blood-thirsty animals as they pick up the nearest stone to hurl at random—never mind if it strikes and blinds an innocent bystander. The same people set alight public transport, private cars, shops and residences. An inexplicable madness takes over as they rush from locality to locality, burning and killing strangers without qualm.

  I have met these people. In Gujarat. Right after the Godhra tragedy. I have talked to them at length, trying hard to figure out what drives them to commit such heinous crimes. The people I spoke to were educated professionals—mainly chartered accountants, doctors and engineers. They were there with their wives and children, dressed in shiny suits, eating rich food from heavy thalis. There was not a trace of shame in their eyes as they tried to convert me. ‘You don't live here… how would you understand what we've had to put up with for so many years… centuries? Now, we've had enough. Those people must be taught a lesson…’ Seeing me distraught and speechless, they exchanged looks and laughed, ‘Madam, you will go back to Mumbai… but we have to stay here… with them. Unless we chase them out, we will be dead ourselves. It's simple—either we kill them or they kill us. There's no other solution.’ The men continued to eat jalebis, while the women nodded in agreement and fingered their flashy jewellery. ‘Our wives and children are not safe with them around. It is better this way—once and for all, the matter will be settled and they will leave us in peace.’ But where would all those thousands of displaced Muslims go? ‘Pakistan,’ came the chorus, followed by a wicked chuckle.

  *

  Sigmund Freud spent a lifetime wondering what women want, and came up with a blank. Most sociologists feel ditto when it comes to providing an answer to another zillion-dollar question: What do Indians really want? The obvious answers are ‘Freedom’, ‘Democracy’, ‘Money’, ‘Education’. All these sound boring as hell, plus, I wonder if those are really what today's Indian wants. ‘Money’ is by far the unchallenged numero uno requirement, but the other three have little meaning, since they're a given. An old friend raising a twenty-year-old daughter came to see me the other day. He mentioned how our generation were told we'd have to wait patiently for rewards… whatever those would turn out to be. Work hard for the exams. Slog away, swot, swot, swot. Compete like crazy. Await results. Phew! First class in hand, work some more. Swot some more. Apply for a ‘decent’ job. Keep your fingers crossed. Land the job. Continue slaving. Wait for promotion. Keep slogging. Spend fifteen years or more in the same job. Get bored. Get restless. Marry sometime in between. Produce children. Hang in there. Grow middle-aged. Grow a paunch. Lose hair. Lose patience. Lose temper. Give up! End of story. End of life.

  But that's not how it works today. Kids want it all. And they want it now. And they don't all want to work that hard, either. It's about having ‘chill time’, ‘personal time’, a ‘life plan’ that includes frequent holidays. Kids want to ‘hang’. And they want to ‘connect’. Mainly over the Net. No personal contact—or very little. No emotional investment. Or very little. Just lots of stimulation and virtual relationships that include virtual gifts ($1 for a pair of sexy thongs) on Facebook. Thrilling, or wot?

  On the Face of It

  I was with my daughter Arundhati, asking her to take me through ‘Facebook’, the craze of the moment amongst the young. She was hesitant, but not completely hostile. Good sign. ‘It used to be very exclusive… by invitation only… but now, everyone's on it,’ she ventured. That's when I discovered the one-dollar thong. ‘You mean you pay forty-five rupees to send a tiny image of a gift to someone?’ ‘That's the plan,’ she answered cheerfully.

  As I scrolled down, staring hungrily at images of her friends having the best time in Miami/Acapulco/New York/Rio during their spring break, I found myself blinking hard. These were young, hip, intelligent, affluent Indian students studying at some of the top B-schools in America. They kept their grades up, even while le
tting their hair down on weekends. They had their priorities figured out and were all set to take on the world. Some of the girlfriends had boyfriends, but many galpals were determinedly single and making the most of the opportunities their parents had provided. They had ‘adapted’ wonderfully well, as I could see in the party pics. The revellers were out of a Benetton ad—all colours and shapes. It was a ‘we are the world’ kind of Kodak moment. I found myself feeling left out. That could've been me! I whined. It's forty years too late! And I thought of the options ahead for all those happy kids, living it up in far corners of the world… sharing their lives so generously (and instantly!) with friends and strangers across the globe. They'd all be back in a year or two. And they'd all ‘adjust’ once more—like well-greased springs.

  In fact, one of the albums on ‘Facebook’ featured a traditional nikaah. The young bride-to-be is amongst my daughter's oldest friends. I'd watched her blossom into an international girl-about-town, thanks to her parents who'd encouraged her to discover her potential, explore life, live it to the hilt. And here she was—coy, demure, ultra-traditional—ready to marry a man picked by her doting mother and father. The lovely photographs said it all. She looked ecstatic, dressed in a conservative lehenga. Her husband-to-be looked impressive—neatly-trimmed beard, headgear, long jacket—exactly the same clothes as his father and grandfather had worn to their own weddings, and were sporting on this occasion all over again. The same girl had also posted other pictures of herself, dancing at various trendy clubs, sunbathing in Jamaica, clad in an alluring bikini. There were no contradictions in those dramatically different images, although it was hard to believe they featured the same girl. And yet, for anyone looking for a split personality, or evidence of hypocrisy— sorry—you're wrong. Both aspects of her life are valid and sincerely lived. Strip away the lycra swimwear or the elaborate lehenga, and you'd find a well-balanced, modern woman, aware of her many roles and not being forced to sacrifice one for the other. ‘Facebook’ was what I needed to get all the images to merge and make perfect sense. Silently, I blessed her progressive parents who'd been farsighted enough to offer their daughters the kind of exposure they could not have dreamed of for themselves. In their own way, the parents had prepared their girls for this very day, when they could slip effortlessly into the new world order, without compromising on old-world values.