The Government has survived, and India has gone back to watching its favourite TV soaps. The trust vote debate, after all, was a welcome break from the daily dose of aggrieved women in joint families. Because, for the vast majority of Indians, it was just an enjoyment reality show. Today, for a very significant part of the nation, the primary aim in life is entertainment. Something fundamental changed, the year an NCAER consumer survey found that the first consumer durable young couples were buying was no longer the refrigerator, but the TV.Amusement-seeking behaviour now cuts across all demographics. Our children are ignorant of Indian history — or any history for that matter — but are living-breathing wikipedias on Akon and Mylie Cyrus. But why only children? A top Hindi film star carrying the Olympic torch through the streets of Delhi, when asked who started the Olympics, guessed gigglingly: “Hitler?” Poor thing, she forgot to wiki. No one anymore knows the difference between “it’s” and “its”. And if the two had any hope left of not being confused constantly like lost-and-found twins, the SMS jackboot crushed it. Our general knowledge extends to knowing there are several Indians in the Forbes top 10 billionaire list, and all this, coupled with the belief that we are the hottest IT nation in the history of civilisation, makes us all, to use writer Michael Lewis’ memorable phrase, “big swinging dicks”. We are rocking.In the Western media, a company like Infosys and Wipro is always referred to as an “outsourcing company”, not as a “software company”. There’s a big difference.Hardly any TV channel or newspaper (other than The Indian Express) tried to explain the nuclear deal. What we got were biased rants. But those smart media people had correctly figured that we lacked the attention span to be able to deconstruct the deal. Rants, on the other hand, are entertainment. How many of us made any effort to understand what it was all about, other than ask the next clueless person: “What do you think, it’s good for India?” Maybe only Prakash Karat read all the documents in detail, underlining and margin-noting, but that would be like Ponting as reviewer of Ganguly’s autobiography.Meanwhile, the poor of India now know how the rich live, and that’s giving politicians the heebie-jeebies. Till the end of the 20th century, the poor knew that there were a lot of rich people in India, but had only vague notions of how rich they were and how they blew their money. Now nearly everyone owns a TV set, or has access to one, even if it’s in a shop’s show window. They watch the dresses, the gilded staircases, the imported cars, and they realise what they don’t have. They see malls bulging with manicured shopaholics, and want to be in their stilettos. Rising literacy has ensured that many more Indians can get to know that someone gifted his wife a Rs 250-crore plane on her birthday. So who do the poor blame for their plight? They blame the politicians (The fact that they blame politicians, and not the rich is something someone like Karat will never know). So, they keep voting governments out with merciless regularity.Because no democratic government can fulfil the sort of aspirations the impoverished Indian harbours in his heart, within five years. And the rich don’t vote anyway. Their lives are unaffected, whoever runs the government. They have built their own infrastructure, and the only discomforts they haven’t yet found a solution to are traffic gridlock, and the monsoon floodings of our cities. But then, every time Mumbai goes underwater, or there’s a terrorist attack on the city, we, like Pavlov’s dog, start applauding the spirit of the Mumbaiite. Presumably, Mumbaiites give high fives to one another, and go back to their derelict homes and read inspirational texts.And we rock on. We are spending more money on looking good than ever before, we are more spiritual than ever before: swarms of gurus, Chinese arcana. Our iPods are working, our next holidays are being planned; the men ponder ponytails, the women where the tattoo should be. And one day we will be very old, and proud that our middle-aged kids call us “Dad-o”, and we will think: It has been a good life. A significant section of today’s poor will also be doing much better. A couple may even be owning multiplexes and partying with vapid models. And then we would have one day amused ourselves to death.Word limit over, so my rant ends. Hope it was entertaining. Thank you.Sandipan Deb, former Editor of The Financial Express, heads the RPG Group’s forthcoming magazine venture. sandipandeb@yahoo.co.uk
