Economics and the Great Indian Dream

It was an unbelievably muggy evening in the city, something which has become more common of late, maybe there is some truth to this whole global warming affair after all. I was walking out of this mega-retail shop, the thing which stacks everything from pins to Porches. The same kind which has already wiped out your tricycle-vegetable-vendor man who comes out calling every morning and which is threatening to wipe out that very symbol of local community living - the road corner pottikadai. Digressions apart, as I walked out of the shop towards my vehicle, an old man shuffled up to me. He had his hands full of various types of Agarbathi packets, and from his forearm hung a sack-bag, which had more of the same packets. He looked terribly worn, and his left eye was clearly not serving him any purpose anymore, a long-ignored cataract having taken its toll on the eye. He walked up to me, and held out his packet.
"Sir, please buy one packet of Agarbathi sir. I came straight from Kodambakkam in the morning, haven't even had lunch. Please buy one packet sir, there's been no sales at all yet."

I hurriedly shook my head in the negative and got on to my scooter. I couldn't even being myself to look at that face again - the sallow skin with the beard gone white, the out-of-use eye, the frail body and the bag full of agarbathis dangling from the emaciated forearm. As I drove away I thought about my instinctive 'no' to the old man. There was no valid reason for me to do so, and I'm sure I could have spared ten rupees for one packet. It would've probably got his first meal of the day- at 6 in the evening. And yet I had not given him 1/20th of what I had spent in the shop just a minute ago. I nearly ploughed into the back of a truck on my way back, thinking about the whole thing.

This is not an isolated case. The boy-younger-than-me who'll be cleaning up tables at the local eatery, the platform vendor of handkerchiefs whose last sale was probably weeks ago, the man with polio whose affected leg dangles uselessly about 6 inches of the ground as he hobbles around at signals, with his outstretched arm... all images which are seared in a mind which also reads everyday about 9.5% growth and the rising middle class and the emerging superpower and all else. Where did it all go wrong?

In my simplified version of things, there are two levels that every man aims for - subsistence and luxury, in that order. In the new 'young and dynamic' India, while the transition from subsistence to luxury happens rapidly, efforts to raise people to basic levels of subsistence seems to have got left behind. And it's not as if every person who had his subsistence assured is scaling the first barrier either. There's still a substantial majority for whom it's a struggle to stay above the poverty line, but they just manage to. Those who don't, well, The Forgotten. It's not the rich-poor divide that I'm referring to. It's more like the 'can act rich'-'can just survive'-'why should I live?' divide that seems to be the divide in the India of today.

People earn more, but do more people earn more? Sure, there's a lot of things which have come up targeting this new high-income families- facilities that rival any world-class establishment, quality of services (note, this is usually mainly entertainment, or shopping) that we wouldn't have dreamed of even five years ago, so many other things. And with these places getting as many patrons as they do, it's easy for us to live under the self-deluded impression of us being a nearly-developed nation. But, as said before, the quality of your local bus service has not reached world standards. Southern Railway is still not Eurorail. And I'm not even thinking about comparing roads, lighting and other infrastructure.

I'm probably meandering but there just seem to be so many knock-on effects of the increased spending and luxury-craving lifestyle that a very few concentrated pockets of our country is witnessing today. Since when did we start buying Popcorn by the bucket?! Or dropping a 4-year old to her school which is barely 2 kilometers in a 3.5-liter, turbocharged SUV? And then bringing the monster back home with only the driver in it, till it's time to go pick up the kid, who'll probably fit in-between two people on a Scooty Pep, again. Or blindly flush around 120 bucks an hour (or whatever the bowling rates in your city is) to go and knock some big sticks with one big ball regularly on weekends? I know the great Indian dream is to eventually reach the great American dream, but that is simply not sustainable in our country. In fact, word is coming out that it's not sustainable even in America, but they of course just need to go into an oil-rich country and bomb the s*** out of them and they're good for a few more years for oil.

I agree people earn the money and they spend it as they please. I don't even think it's fair of me to say that people should maybe show a bit more prudence before they splash their wads around the next time, but I'll say it nevertheless. Demand-driven inflation will first hit the 'just surviving' section first, and soon we'll see some of them drop off below the line. Maybe your leaving the car and taking the two-wheeler or, if it's by any chance possible, public transport to work for one day will not bring the inflation from 4% to 2%. But it might bring it to 3.9999999999995%. And I think we can take that, for starters.

As Mahatma Gandhi said- Live simply, that others might simply live.