I'm different from you

At a recent upper middle class urban dinner party, a general discussion was underway, as is usually the case, on how far we've advanced

At a recent upper middle class urban dinner party, a general discussion was underway, as is usually the case, on how far we've advanced. Not the people dining, but the nation at large. Arguably, like all rapidly developing economies, we spend a lot of time discussing where we are. It usually begins with sentences like, "Three more sea-links and we'll be Singapore" or, as a stock analyst added, "In five years, a crore will be nothing. Everyone will have it. You'll see." (I'm not an economist, but a crore having no value seemed to me to be slightly optimistic, given that 600 million people get by on Rs 4,000 a month.)

Rich countries don't do daily socio-economic analysis. If you're already rich, you don't have to think about your country; it can take care of itself. You can think about your sexuality or discuss with your shrink if "your mind is in a good space" (whatever that means). Rarely will someone at a middle class American dinner party say, "Hilton built a new 5-star hotel in Shanghai -- what a great day for America" whereas someone at our dinner parties will, (and with cause), say, "Taj is making India proud in New York with The Pierre." When there's sudden prosperity in a single generation from a nation of vast poverty strung along on IMF grants to an economic powerhouse demanding things at G20, everything, from a corporate merger to an Oscar for sound engineering, is seen as a national victory. If your country is in a good space, your mind will follow.

These conversations usually start when we've exhausted the other three topics that enter all upper middle class dinner chats under the guise of national analysis -- The size of the new Ambani home, if Rahul Gandhi is single and The Bachchan family intrigues.

At the dinner table I was at, someone began, "Only if the Maoists stopped their thing, we could just transform the hinterland into Germany, man", to which an NGO lady said, earnestly, "All this economic boom is for the educated elite. It's worse for the disenfranchised because earlier they had nothing. Now they have nothing and they have to see BMWs driving by. We have not progressed. We have just made the middle classes live in a bubble of endless consumer goods," to which her NGO husband (they come in pairs, wearing Fab India) added, equally earnestly, "All these new fancy apartment buildings outside cities that advertise butlers and indoor tropical gardens and waterfalls, most have no water or power or drainage. My friend in Noida bought a penthouse in a building called Utopia Gardens, but most nights, he gets his driver to drive him around all night while he sleeps in his Honda. It's a Delhi summer and there's perpetual power failure. His driver was hospitalised after driving for five nights straight. What 8 per cent growth is this?" A prominent muscular male fashion model summed it up as follows, "How can you say India hasn't changed? OK, there may not be water or power or whatever, but we now have Zara."

To this insightful gent, everything that India's modernity meant -- ideas, infrastructure, social empowerment, could be summed up in one thing -- a new brand.u00a0

I wondered then, what it meant to others. And the answer seemed to be, exclusivity.u00a0

Everywhere, when posh acquisitionsu00a0 come up, foreign brands, flats and entertainment, the central philosophy seems to be that if you think you are just like everyone, it's not for you (there's a mall in Delhi where the toilets have a bouncer.u00a0 Clearly, the wrong sort has no right to urinate).

The idea that whatever we may have been, this new money will seclude us, create our own air-conditioned world, from where we observe but do not participate in what can be loosely termed, regular life. Our government has, in whatever way it knows best, always talked of inclusive growth, so the Porsche buyer and the homeless man rise together, the former to two Porches perhaps, and the latter to a home, clean water and education. It cannot happen if the central idea we buy into is not just that we want to live better but we want to live better away from the rest of us. Paris, London and New York did not happen because people said, if you are rich enough, I will make you feel like you live in Stockholm. It happened because people said, this is ours, together.

Anuvab Pal is a Mumbai-based playwright and screenwriter. His plays in Mumbai include Chaos Theory and screenplays for Loins of Punjab Presents (co-written) and The President is Coming. He is currently working on a book on the Bollywood film Disco Dancer for Harper Collins, out later this year.u00a0 Reach him at https://www.anuvabpal.com/

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