Grotton
Recipe for a successful shirt: Cotton, full sleeves, light, plain or discreetly funky, no stiff scrapey collar, no shimmer, no shine, no iridescence, no tags and toggles, cuffs that don't feel like handcuffs. Such a shirt can have a long happy life from brash youth to comfortable middle age and ultimately retirement as a duster-cloth. Useful and well-loved to the last wipe.
Problem: No such item available at any reasonable price. Here in my third-world country, a nice, normal cotton shirt costs from $20 to $100. That's for one shirt. In a first-world country, you can buy really nice shirts at $10 each.
This is the new consumerism of India: Many chain stores, small variety. The shelves have to be full and colourful; the stores have to give the illusion of size and comprehensiveness. Actual content (quality and depth of range) will come later. If everyone carries the same stuff, the populace will have to buy it.
I was sitting in a mall food court sipping a green apple mint juice (medium size, $1 -- fifty rupees) with my father (cuppa cardboard tea, $0.55, twenty-five rupees), and he said, this is all maya. Above us, some men were fixing the glass roof and watching all the oblivious eating. In a rich country, the trickery is not quite so obvious, as the illusion is nearly all-pervasive. It's harder to see around the edges.
Maya follows you everywhere in Delhi. It is a city where power is money, where business, political, media and NGO entrepreneurs take pride in the quality of their illusions. I don't insist that people in decades past were more innocent or more grounded, although I suspect that they were. But the eagerness, the inability to see anything but the illusion, among children and adults -- this is frightening. The making of children into shoppers, this is disastrous. Children are acquisitive by nature, but why should a dubious three-year-old be told by her parents that those shiny red slippers really suit her, they're very cool, others are wearing them, they look good on her?
And this furious hunger for 'lifestyle' is not even leavened with intelligent cynicism and self-critical humour. Someone cool should be telling us that it's not cool to be nothing but cool. Plenty of people are thinking about the future of India -- economists, so-called defence analysts, so-called urban planners, of course politicians. Nobody cool is thinking about the future of Indians. Nobody knows, and nobody investigates, what it means to be Indian.
We have, or will soon have, most of the forms of a rich society. But not all of us, and not at the same time. Will somebody else be doing our thinking for us then?
Problem: No such item available at any reasonable price. Here in my third-world country, a nice, normal cotton shirt costs from $20 to $100. That's for one shirt. In a first-world country, you can buy really nice shirts at $10 each.
This is the new consumerism of India: Many chain stores, small variety. The shelves have to be full and colourful; the stores have to give the illusion of size and comprehensiveness. Actual content (quality and depth of range) will come later. If everyone carries the same stuff, the populace will have to buy it.
I was sitting in a mall food court sipping a green apple mint juice (medium size, $1 -- fifty rupees) with my father (cuppa cardboard tea, $0.55, twenty-five rupees), and he said, this is all maya. Above us, some men were fixing the glass roof and watching all the oblivious eating. In a rich country, the trickery is not quite so obvious, as the illusion is nearly all-pervasive. It's harder to see around the edges.
Maya follows you everywhere in Delhi. It is a city where power is money, where business, political, media and NGO entrepreneurs take pride in the quality of their illusions. I don't insist that people in decades past were more innocent or more grounded, although I suspect that they were. But the eagerness, the inability to see anything but the illusion, among children and adults -- this is frightening. The making of children into shoppers, this is disastrous. Children are acquisitive by nature, but why should a dubious three-year-old be told by her parents that those shiny red slippers really suit her, they're very cool, others are wearing them, they look good on her?
And this furious hunger for 'lifestyle' is not even leavened with intelligent cynicism and self-critical humour. Someone cool should be telling us that it's not cool to be nothing but cool. Plenty of people are thinking about the future of India -- economists, so-called defence analysts, so-called urban planners, of course politicians. Nobody cool is thinking about the future of Indians. Nobody knows, and nobody investigates, what it means to be Indian.
We have, or will soon have, most of the forms of a rich society. But not all of us, and not at the same time. Will somebody else be doing our thinking for us then?
posted by frantyck at 11:39 AM
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