Indian and entitled: Our gimme, gimme, gimme culture

Reading Urvashi Butalia’s essay about the “ferocious sense of entitlement of India’s elites” for the New Internationalist I was reminded of a story a friend shared recently. (Read the full essay here.) It was the gala opening of the IPL in Kolkata. He was queued up at the ticket counter in the sweltering heat to pick up his tickets. The line was already hundreds long. The counter was showing no signs of life even though it was 10 AM. Suddenly a man drove up in a Mercedes and rushed to the front of the queue saying he had to push to the front because it was not “a safe place for his car”. It’s a small story, an amusing anecdote really, hardly “ferocious.” And in this case the elite doesn’t get away with throwing his weight (or his Merc’s weight) around. “He was told by a student to go to the back of the queue or shove his car up his rather large backside,” shared my friend on Facebook. But it is a story we can all relate to because we see this culture of entitlement everywhere everyday riding rough-shod over anyone who gets in the way whether it’s people waiting in a queue or pavement dwellers sleeping on the sidewalk or blackbucks minding their own business. Butalia’s essay points to several studies in the US that demonstrate that the richer you are, the less empathetic and altruistic you become. The vagus nerve responds to emotional inputs. The vagus nerves of poorer people were more active when shown pictures of starving children than those of richer participants. The same for heart rates when richer and poorer people were shown pictures of children with cancer, a disease that afflicts rich and poor alike. University of California researcher Paul Piff found that the fancier your car, the more likely you were to cut off other drivers or cruise into a zebra crossing even if a pedestrian was on it. Studies like this have not happened in India where the rich have gotten richer, and wealth and power and impunity are tightly enmeshed writes Butalia. While that is true, it’s not like the rich are a breed apart here. In India, the good old Maruti Zen and the fancy SUV are both hurtling into the zebra crossing oblivious of the person actually trying to get across the street on foot. It’s just that the SUV can do more damage than the tiny Maruti although in India the vehicle most likely to mow you down is probably an overcrowded lurching bus. “The culture of taking” that Butalia is talking about is not limited to the top of the ladder here. Those at the top, of course, can take much more. Indian billionaires’ share of the national income has gone from less than 1 percent in 1996 to 22 percent in 2008. It’s led to ostentatious consumption from a paan masala which proudly advertises itself as the most expensive paan masala ever to Subroto Roy’s sons’ weddings that reputedly cost Rs 552 crore. As @anandraman tweeted upon reading Butalia’s essay “the higher the monkey goes up the tree, the more of its ass you see.” [caption id=“attachment_695472” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Everyone wants more and more. However in the new India, the markers of status have become far more slippery. Representational Image. AFP[/caption] But we are all aspiring up that tree, no ifs and butts about it. A culture that was always obsessed about how much the neighbour was making has now also been freed from the old socialist embarrassment about ostentatious wealth and the Gandhian emphasis on austerity. “The year 1991 removed the stigma associated with the pursuit of wealth,” Pavan Verma writes in Being Indian. “More importantly, it made policies congruent with the temperament of the people.” A culture that was always obsessed about money, now has been freed to flaunt it instead of just hoarding it. The respectability of selfishness and greed after the Industrial Revolution fascinated 19th and early 20th century writers like Charles Dickens and Sinclair Lewis observes Pankaj Mishra in the New York Review of Books. But for their contemporary successors, Mishra writes “(a)pparently unalterable and ever-present, the ruthless mechanisms and built-in injustices of capitalism no longer provoke the same degree of shock, revulsion, or fear among writers.” Or at least until financial meltdown of 2008 pushed some writers to look under the lid of big capitalism in the west. It was left to contemporary Asia, think White Tiger, to evoke “a literary vision of capitalism red in tooth and claw.” Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire examine the “deeper perils and fantasies ” of that growth story. High growth, write Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari in Churning the Earth – The Making of Global India has been “demand-deepening (within the wealthy and rich classes), rather than demand-widening (cutting across classes).” But it’s not just the rich in the new India. Everyone wants more and more. However in the new India, the markers of status have become far more slippery. The golden oldies like family name, the missionary school you went to, your grandfather’s degree from Cambridge don’t count for that much. The entitlement Butalia talks about is “ferocious” precisely because we now have a society that’s still hierarchical as it always was but the competition for the top spot on the ladder, or that seat in a prized school, is far more fierce, with murkier rules. And the only way we have learned to deal with that class anxiety is to consume ever more. As my colleague Lakshmi Chaudhry writes in Open Magazine:

The hyper-inflated and conspicuous consumerism of the past two decades has taught us money is king, but it has also raised a new and alarming question: how much money is enough? As in, how much money ought we to have in order to ensure our sense of superiority, and therefore wellbeing?

We don’t know the answer to that question. But we sense that the answer lies more in a “culture of taking” instead of a “culture of sharing.” The big corporation might want to remove an entire shantytown to build a mall. Or it could be an upper middle class neighbourhood collectively ousting the only roadside tea stall that served all the maids and drivers in the area, as Butalia describes. It’s the same impulse. We now take Indira Gandhi’s populist slogan of Garibi Hatao literally to heart. As in we want to physically Remove the Poor (especially from our backyards). The sense of entitlement is not confined to a building like Atilla or Salman Khan’s SUV though it is convenient to think so. It’s far far more pervasive and implicates us all to varying degrees. Entitlement itself has become an aspiration for ever growing numbers, the ultimate gated complex we want to live in. It is the Number 1 reason one wants to get filthy rich (or even middle class) in rising India.