A few weeks ago, I had come across a young white Briton at a hotel’s restaurant. We exchanged e-mail addresses and I had a chat with him last week. He was back home after a four-month long tour of Asia and Africa. Instead of being happy to be back home, he gloomily said: “God, nothing has changed! ABSOLUTELY nothing!”
At the time, I didn’t quite get it. What did he mean by saying “nothing” had changed? What did he expect to happen while he was away? A revolution or something?! But looking back, I think I know what he meant. He was presumably referring to the predictability in the British life, its somewhat dull “sameness” in contrast to the so-called “vibrancy” of the Asian and African countries he had been to…
It was the response of a typical well heeled western tourist who, while trying to escape the regiment routine of daily life, is so often seduced by chaos, tension and unpredictability of less organized societies that their own people despair of… Sometimes, they try to become parts of those societies, which the locals find terribly patronising…
V. S. Naipaul had had some pretty harsh words to say for this kind of white western traveller. His Biographer Patrick French quotes him as saying that the western liberals seek out such places in order to confirm their own security. Attacking “foreign Indophiles” in an interview to The New York Times, he said: “How tired I am of the India-lovers who go on about ‘beautiful India’ – the last gasp of a hideous imperial vanity!”
I know people who never stop speaking nostalgically of the time they has spent in India and go on and on about how “wonderful” and “lovely” it is… But try asking them whether they would like to trade places and the most likely answer will be an awkward smile. The fact is that all of us feel more at home on or own turfs, regardless of however much we may try to admire another country from a distance. Gabriel Garcia Marques has written that the very smell of Columbian food still makes him homesick…
But I am digressing… Coming back to the predictable and dull “sameness” of British life, I was again reminded of that young man I met… Despite the frothy headlines, the news agenda in Great Britain had barely moved in the previous weeks except that Labour party had got a mauling in the elections: Prime Minister Gordon Brown was still “struggling” to get a “grip” on things; pollsters and commentators were still undecided whether Labour had finally run out of steam, Tory leader David Cameron was still said to be in a “rebellious” mood over one thing or another, the tabloids were still obsessed with immigration; and the royal family still looked none the worse for all the recent controversies…
In contrast, in India, during the same period there was hardly a day when you felt that a conversation was in the danger of flagging for want of a “sexy” opening gambit. Whether it was Priyanka (Gandhi) Vadra’s meeting with her father’s alleged assassins in jail; or the new phase of sycophancy in The Congress; or the BCCI’s newest tamasha – every single day there was at least one scene that something was happening and even if it eventually might not have amounted much in the end…
Two British tourists I ran into at the airport a week ago – while pleased to be escaping the Indian summer heat – said they would miss its “energy” and planned to return “soon”. They marvelled at India’s “transformation” since in the 1980’s when, as one of them remarked, it had “the Third World written all over it!” They did complain, though about India’s “primitive” infrastructure and public services saying that they had a “nightmare” trying to look to book train tickets because all the computers at the station were down. “They (the people at the counters) just threw their hands up and said they couldn’t do a thing,” one of them said.
Eight years ago, the country was in first flush of its post-liberalization phase. And although there was a lot of breathless chatter that, eventually, India had turned the corner and gung-ho commentators were already advocating a more “muscular” foreign policy to go with its putative new status; the popular mood was largely sober and innocent of pretensions.
Besides, the economy had yet to open up fully and it was hard to find too many visible symbols of a competitive free market: Air India was still the country’s only truly international airline; the retail sector was still overwhelmingly ‘desi’; and Maruti still defined the automobile market…
Eight years on, India – at least urban India, which represents the country’s public face – looks a different place altogether with glittering new malls, roads chock-a-block with foreign cars, a proliferation of new suburbs with plush and fashionably expensive tower blocks; and the consumer boom set to get through the roof…
“New” money is everywhere and the urban middle classes are living it up like there will be no tomorrow. To a lay observer, guided only by the anecdotal evidence, it would seem that the white collar urban Indian never had it so good. In Delhi, I noticed a distinct change in the lifestyles of my own family, friends and acquaintances. Families which once had no cars now have more than one; air coolers have made way to heavyweight air conditioners; a single computer household is now a rarity with some families boasting of an individual computer for every member; more and more people are sending their children abroad for higher education; and dining out is a elaborate affair…
At some point, a typical dinner party conversation in Delhi is likely to turn to one of more of the following issues: problems of parking; the relative merits of new car models; plans for the next foreign holiday; argument over the best eating joint in the city; or how the desi marks and Spence is peddling the old stock…
The younger generation – young professionals with their allegedly five-digit incomes, cosmopolitan attitudes and a taste for “good” life – is leading the consumption revolution. Unlike its cash-rapped and debt-ridden British counterpart, India’s Youngistan is plush with money and is flaunting it. Besides, the exposure to western lifestyle, coupled with the purchasing power to finance it, has led to conspicuous exhibition of acquired taste so that the nation of tea-drinkers is now hooked on to Starbucks coffee; children brought up on the virtues of vegetarianism are tucking into mega ham sandwiches at Subway; and expensive imported wine is now the new preferred drink on the cocktail circuit…
Yet, beneath this sparkling new India, there is still a whiff of the old India Naipaul so provocatively and rudely described in his An Area of Darkness… For one, public manners remain appalling. It is not just about forgetting to say “Sorry!” or “Thank you!”; but about motorists spitting out paan from cars; about not even letting pedestrians cross the road even at a zebra crossing; about a complete disregard for basic courtesies; and about defying rules meant for their own benefits.
And the worst offender is the new bling-bling elite – the so-called “Global Indian.” It is the man in Gucci shoes and Calvin Klein goggles, who is more likely to bulldoze his way through a queue, insist of using mobile phone where he is NOT supposed to, park illegally and behave rudely in public.
There is a new arrogance around which at an Indophile Briton told me he found extremely upsetting. “I don’t recognise this brash new India,” he said…
There is also a creeping insularity that comes with the idea that we are now big boys and don’t need to know about the other countries, especially those who are not in our league. One young man thought he was wasting his time reading about what was happening in Darfur or Somalia. “Why should I?” he shrugged.
Indeed, much of the coverage of non-western world in the Indian media – particularly in the regional press and electronic media – consists of the sort of frivolous “offbeat” stories that were once the staple diet of the India-based western journalists and that infuriated us so much when we were still in the junior league.
Such insularity not only smacks of a misplaced arrogance but goes against our grain – a people with a long tradition of seeking knowledge. Besides, such an attitude can easily turn into hubris.
