I frequently relate the story of the last time I was in Kolkata--in 2004--after a pause of 5 years. I saw some interesting developments:
One of my cousins tells me that even the potato vendors on the streets of Howrah have cell phones. My grandmother watches her serials on cable--with an enormous number of channels in English, Hindi, and, to some extent, Bangla, to choose from. A new mall in central Cal has been built, complete with Pizza Hut, an overpriced department store called Pantaloons, and a music store where you have to check your bags with an (armed?) security guard outside.
Shopping at the mall made me think of a few things: What happened to the people who lived there before? I've been to essentially the same enterprise--perhaps in more developed form--in Mexico City and New Delhi. But what does it signify that a Western-style mall was constructed in the middle of one of the few Lefist bastions of India?
Well, Pankaj Mishra - he of New York Review of Books, n + 1, and his new book Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond - goes into some of these issues of perception, reality, and contradiction in his latest op-ed in The New York Times, "The Myth of the New India":
Since the early 1990's, when the Indian economy was liberalized, India has emerged as the world leader in information technology and business outsourcing, with an average growth of about 6 percent a year. Growing foreign investment and easy credit have fueled a consumer revolution in urban areas. With their Starbucks-style coffee bars, Blackberry-wielding young professionals, and shopping malls selling luxury brand names, large parts of Indian cities strive to resemble Manhattan...
But the increasingly common, business-centric view of India suppresses more facts than it reveals. Recent accounts of the alleged rise of India barely mention the fact that the country's $728 per capita gross domestic product is just slightly higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa and that, as the 2005 United Nations Human Development Report puts it, even if it sustains its current high growth rates, India will not catch up with high-income countries until 2106.
Nor is India rising very fast on the report's Human Development index, where it ranks 127, just two rungs above Myanmar and more than 70 below Cuba and Mexico. Despite a recent reduction in poverty levels, nearly 380 million Indians still live on less than a dollar a day.
Malnutrition affects half of all children in India, and there is little sign that they are being helped by the country's market reforms, which have focused on creating private wealth rather than expanding access to health care and education. Despite the country's growing economy, 2.5 million Indian children die annually, accounting for one out of every five child deaths worldwide; and facilities for primary education have collapsed in large parts of the country (the official literacy rate of 61 percent includes many who can barely write their names). In the countryside, where 70 percent of India's population lives, the government has reported that about 100,000 farmers committed suicide between 1993 and 2003.
These are horrible facts, but, honestly, booya! Triumphalism of any kind is annoying, but particularly when it's used to cover up real poverty, debt-related suicide, and massive displacement and the importance of addressing them. Mishra does a decent job of starting discussion that both acknowledges some of the economic advances that India, on a national scale, has made in the past 15 years while at the same time rearticulating something we have all known for many years but has recently gone by the wayside: the vast majority of over one billion Indians are still extraordinarily poor, regardless of what's going on now in the way of trends. His concluding line is perhaps his best:
Many serious problems confront India. They are unlikely to be solved as long as the wealthy, both inside and outside the country, choose to believe their own complacent myths.
Read the whole article in the New York Times while it's still up.
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this is an excellent post saurav! and I totally feel you on the
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At least this begins to call attention to the things that I keep seeing popping up all over Google News about illiteracy and poverty in Pakistan and India both--but this news rarely makes the NYT Op-ed section, bravo Pankaj Mishra!
Instead we're inundated with news about call centers, mangoes, technology and elitist Delhi nightlife!
Thanks vlc. In some ways, those individual news reports are much more valuable because they create a cumulative sensibility among people who read the news...like you :) But for those of us who rely on other opinionmakers to feed us our opinions, Mishra is not the worst one to rely on :)
Vat are you guys talking about...this is India Shining and globalization is the global remedy for all of the world's poverty!! Who doesn't want to chit chat on their cell phones as they sit in a Pizza Hut, munching away? In time, the poor, the farmers, those who live in the countryside, the displaced, and all of the other "unfortunates" of India will one day be strolling in Western style malls, even with basic needs like drinking water, sanitation, medicine are lacking.....*
*NOTE: I am being sarcastic.
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Saurav, this is a great post.
What pisses me off even more than Time running stories on India Shining is how far affluent Indians have invested themselves in this one-sided view.
I went out with this guy and we ended up watching born into brothels and he exploded after we walked out. He had never expressed even a remotely political opinion for the entire time I'd known him and suddenly he went off on how there's some sort of conspiracy to make India seem poor and underdeveloped. He couldn't come up with anything to answer to the fact that there are still real problems that can't be dealt with by giving cell phones to all. Just that they didn't need to be talked about in "public."
Moral of the story: Ask for a political opinion profile before you agree to go out with someone :)
There are those who will simply continue to believe that the problems which afflict India as well as South Asia (or for most of the world) will be cured with globalization and the "free market", and somehow the negative things will disappear with time; or, they seem to mentally sweep under the rug the blatant and glaring reality. Perhaps because their wealth and privelege allows them to.
Sleepy:
This, my friend, is the first criteria for assessing a future potential significant other :)
How'd you get him to go in the first place? Or maybe it was like me not knowing that "Life is Beautiful" was a holocaust movie when I went to see it... boy did that take a surprising turn...
Saurav:
Agreed. I was pleasantly surprised that he bothered to distinguish between the violent Naxalite/Maoist uprisings and the more established non-violent Communist parties. His take on the 2004 elections was pretty durned superficial, though:
This whole notion of "The Economy" is one that I find completely perplexing in the American context. If "The Economy" is doing well, everyone seems satisfied with their lot in life - not really asking what "The Economy" is doing for them as individuals and families. If "The Economy" does well, then apparently all Americans are faring well. Not many people question how "The Economy" distributes the wealth it generates.
Not so in the 2004 Indian general elections; the BJP-led coalition, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), masked "The Economy" behind the phrase "India Shining" and demanded that the voters re-elect them based on the economic boom which India experienced under its watch. But this wasn't enough for the Indian electorate in the end - particularly in rural areas - because voters bothered asking the question, "How is India shining for me?"
The NDA did a lousy job of distributing the wealth generated by the booming economy, and if Congress doesn't watch out, they might be turned out in the next election for the same reason.
"How’d you get him to go in the first place?"
I don't think he really knew what it was about and I sold it kinda hard. The other option was to see Bride and Prejudice and there was no way I was about to waste a friday night paying to see Gurinder Chadda defile Jane Austen's memory. That would have been depressing :)
Bride and Prejudice was pretty dismal. I actually enjoyed the BBC epic-length version of Pride & Prejudice (despite myself) but that was ONLY because of Colin Firth. He totally made the series.
NOTE: I am being sarcastic.
Desi Italiana:
I love you. LURVE you...not in a scary stalker way, but the meticulous way you explain everything you write :-) Good luck with your thesis, Vivek told me it's due v soon!
Vivek:
so fully agree with Pride and Prej. All true fans of Austen, and hot white men with sideburns (well that would just be Colin Firth), will know that the BBC version is the only one that does the story justice. Not even Keira as a skinny Lizzie in the movie came even close. As for Bride and Prej, well, it made me cry with tears of...pain. Much as Mistress of Spices did. Or maybe that was the magical chillies.
Sleepy:
so, so true.
All:
(since we're passin the roti on the left hand side I can feel comfortable saying this) - I agree too that Mishra is very brave to speak of India like this, especially at a time when we've got things like the Time cover parading us around like the new Argentina.
Oh if only we had our own Chavez and not the Free Market Turbanator.... *sigh* we can only hope that one day we will have our own revolution that will not only not be televised by not cell-phone-ised either.
Dear all,
you are so lefty-style intelligent, I think I'm in love (probably in the scary stalke-kind-of-way). And I think we should usurp the media Rang-de-Basanti style
If you think going out with conspiracy-theory-to-make-india-look-poor guy is bad. Try going out with India-is-evil-and-Pakistan-is-the-epitome-of-all-that-is-right-with-the-world (and-Hindus-are-not-evil,-just-everything-associated-with-them-and-India-is) guy. Eeek...I could go on for forever and ever and ever. now THAT was a bad experience.
Yes, it is due today. According to the thesis timeline, it says that the rough draft is due "July 7, 2006". Since there is no time indicated, I take this as meaning "July 7, 2006 before 12 am midnight of July 8, 2006". So that still leaves me a whole clear 10 hours. I'm on page 44 (page limit is 50 pages); I've still got to fine tune the technical stuff and write the conclusion. Then I am done.
good luck italiana!!!
You should read some of the other issues that go into defining societal well-being or economic growth as a function of GDP (which is basically what "The Economy" means, unless people are pointing to stock market indices, which are even more skewed against priorities I imagine we might hold). This isn't purely political, but also an analytical point--it's absurd to try to understand most things about, say, China on the basis of a single measure (economic growth rate as measured by GDP or GNP).
Jane Jacobs has a great series of books that argues for a reenvisioning of economics from the standard nation-focused model to one that makes a bit more sense if you actually think about the real world--or at least is a possibility--which is to look at how economic growth works, what role cities play, what role dead-end activities like military bases play, etc. It's quite intriguing if you're interested in critiquing the role of nationalism in economic analysis. I think the best book to start with is cities and the wealth of nations, though you could probably read any of the books from death and life of great american cities onwards until she gets really broad in Dark Ages Ahead.
There was also a recent discussion on rhinocrisy of the failure of GDP to take into account any number of things.
On an aside, I've started exploring Immanuel Wallerstein, whose whole corpus is about how you can't understand national economics (or foreign policy or anything else) outside the context of what he calls a single world-system.
I saw five mintues of that the other day, and when I saw Indian paan-wallahs and Aiswharya singing in accented English to Bollywood tunes, I almost threw up. Just sing in Hindi and put some goddamn subtitles up. Anyway, I quickly changed the channel, somewhat sad. I couldn't even get to the movie.
I don't know a damn thing about Bride and Prejudice, but Pride and Prejudice was a fun film.
In other news:
Bollywood's Munna Bahi MBBS (which I thoroughly enjoyed) is getting a Hollywood re-make, featuring Chris Tucker. Gangster MD, check it out
Judging from the numerous comments posted on PTR today, it looks like you guys have some extra, peaceful and calm time, where you are not mad stressed, furiously trying to make the deadline.....lucky you, I am jealous.
And sad :(
Actually...I'm avoiding a ton of work. NOTHING to be jealous of!
yeah, likewise.
DONE.
DONE.
DONE.
DONE.
Bas, khalaas.
DONE.
Don't be sad, I was pulling an allnighter last night and had to keep on commenting randomly so I wouldn't fall asleep :) But I'm glad you're done!
And Colin Firth, especially the part where he gets out of the water. yeah.
And Viva La Calle, your story definately trumps mine. But for added style points, did your guy say "that's that only kind of movie you ABCD girls like?" I've rarely felt the need to smack someone that bad.
Nice post.
This editorial is the most e-mailed on NYTimes.com, mostly because it addresses real issues, something the Indian government is good at suppressing in the western media. The article even seems to predict a revolution of some sorts by the Naxalites, but far more realistic is a radical shake up of the existing Congress-led coalition at the next general election.
There should be more attention paid to practical solutions, instead of just bemoaning the fate of the rural poor. The Indian government is very good at making token gestures while ignoring the underlying social problems that cause the poverty. That is exactly what they did after the Tsunami, I was there and watched how the government chased away all forgeign NGO's, but neglected to provide the displaced people with the means to live. Without efforts at reform at a grass roots level, restrictions on child labor and universal education, it doesn't matter how many multinational corporations move in, we will never advance as a nation.
Awww poor people pulling all-nighters, empathise fully with you guys. But hey, it's all over now! :-)
It's good to know I'm not the only one who uses blogging to procrastinate the day (and night) away.
And that Colin Firth Lake scene...oooh...I bought the whole DVD and would wade through the whole 5 and 1/2 hourse of the miniseries just to find that wet white shirt moment. Mmmmmm...
Also as an aside for the Munna Bhai thing, my next door neighbour in India wrote the script! :-) I haven't seen it but can't wait for the Blaxploitation version.
Dark Knight, v true about education, but I think there are so many interests that are against giving the majority of Indians a real education that it's going to be v hard. I remember seeing a news article on people wanting to bring huge retail and supermarket chains into India (more than there already are, that is) which would kill so many people's jobs.
I'm so glad Pankaj Mishra wrote that article. Now I have a new thing to love him for other than for discovering Arundhati :-)
uff, I'm so sorry I opened this thread up for the objectification of such a brilliant actor...
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