E
leven is a lonely number. Especially if you-know-who is celebrating thirty. Yet, India in 1995 was an innocent land unaware of WTO tariffs or Swiss cheese or electronic voting machines. The Hindutva-wallahs had no idea that an Italian novice would be running rings around them and if any cricket fan, read 1.1 billion, had been told that ladies with cleavage visible would be quizzing Muttiah Muralitharan about the intricacies of the "doosra", he would have produced a loud laugh. The cliche about a country in transition does not apply to India because India is transitioning at the speed of the Toofan Express.In 1995 I was unemployed, some believed unemployable. Besides becoming a bad-tempered, middle-aged bachelor, I was spending too much time gossiping at Delhi's India International Centre where the capital's intellectual unemployed hang out. Since then, I have acquired a wife and a dog. Both are indigenous. If you ask me who is more important in my life, my wife or Editor, I will ask you to call me next week.
Our eleventh anniversary special looks at the tectonic and the trivial. India is the second-fastest growing economy on our planet and there is little doubt that we are acquiring all the virtues and the vices of an economic superpower. Middle-class India has become self-confident, assertive and consuming goodies it could previously neither afford nor access. It has also become more self-centred and selfish.
Here is a cautionary, personal tale. Last Saturday I decided to go out for a meal. We chose a non-vegetarian South Indian restaurant in Delhi's quintessentially middle-class Defence Colony. My wife said we would get a place easily as it was the last day of navratra. Defence Colony, astonishingly, resembled a houseful mela. Our chosen restaurant was handing out slips. We were 19 on the waiting list. We stood outside on the pavement. Once we went in, it was like a Roman banquet. India's middle class was eating and drinking as if there was no tomorrow.
The following afternoon Amma came as usual. She is 70-plus, skeletal, jolly and presses my feet briefly while giving my wife a full massage. She is a widow. Her son is an out-of-work alcoholic, her daughter (to be married in November) is hospitalised with water in her lungs. Amma supports them all. On Sundays she has lunch with us, collects some money and goes to another house to do massage. She is Mother Courage.
Last Sunday she looked devastated. The jhuggi she had lived in for 30 years had been demolished. I asked her where she had left her belongings. "They are lying beside the nala," she replied. Everything Amma possessed lay scattered in the open air. She accepted the tragedy with resignation.
This is also India, an India which the pink papers, breathless over the 8.9 per cent GDP growth, never mention. Amma, and millions like her, are not even a statistic in India's giddy rise. I am not a Naxalite or Luddite or anti-reform, but last week's images—the restaurant in Defence Colony and Amma's homelessness—are also an Indian reality. What is Outlook doing to help Amma? Not much, except present her story to you. Again. And again. And again.
From 1995 Outlook has been attempting to showcase our republic, warts and all. We are proud of India's achievements and ashamed that millions of its citizens live in unspeakable poverty. Along the way, we have offered readers an open, debate-provoking, liberal journal. I know some of you disagree violently with our editorial stance. Your feedback informs and educates us. However, I doubt whether we will change in any significant way. Not while I am around.