Making the ultimate Statement

In the weekend section of the paper some days ago, I saw a small headline which caught my eye. It said Make a Style Statement', and it wa...

In the weekend section of the paper some days ago, I saw a small headline which caught my eye. It said Make a Style Statement8217;, and it was accompanied by a picture of two cups, a ceramic platter, and perhaps a couple of mugs, arranged on a wrought-iron stand.

Presumably it is this collection of things which constitutes the Statement. I am interested because this is standard phraseology in those papers which represent the elite consumer. You are asked to Make a Statement with your trousers, or with your hairstyle, or to Show the World Some Fundamentals, via your shoes.

That the elite consumer is frivolous does not need saying. But the little phrase I am speaking of encapsulates many things about this consumer, and the world which surrounds her. And since we are trying to ensure that all of India enters this world, it is worth looking at the phrase.

For a start, it is interesting that arranging your cups and saucers, or anything else for that matter, no longer appears to be something that you do for yourself alone. In the earlier world, you arranged your home that particularly private space so that it was orderly or functional; so that you felt like spending time in it; so that the look of it gave you pleasure. If visitors came in and shared the pleasure, so much the better 8212; but the purpose of the whole exercise was not the visitor.

Now, it appears, the purpose is in fact the visitor, or rather, a sort of invisible Viewer who is required to be struck dumb by everything, even in the innards of your kitchen. Indeed there seems to be an assumption that there will be more than one viewer. Because a Statement, after all, is not usually made in front of a single person. A Statement is made before an audience, and generally commands great attention. Public figures make statements in parliament; it is not for nothing that the word is linked to other words like statesman8217; or state8217;. Behind it, in other words, there is gravity on a large scale.

And here we are Making Statements in our kitchens with our two cups and one plate. There is obviously nothing wrong with arranging crockery; I arrange it endlessly, in compensation for not being able to do anything else in the kitchen. But I have never been able to fool myself either that the world was watching, or that it would make the slightest difference to it if it did.

But the new consumer culture fools itself with precisely this. The resounding emptiness of globalised India is the emptiness of a condition where you do nothing for its own sake, but only to be seen. Or rather, to be Seen. It is a condition where you are forever performing to an audience which does not exist.