All Glitter, No Gold

THE most expensive pair of canvas shoes I'd ever worn before I started working cost Rs 20, were luxuriously cushioned, branded Power, and paid for by the university for which I played. Last week, with the sun toasting Delhi's winter drowsy, I sauntered into a shoe sale and picked up a pair of cut-rate Reeboks for Rs 2,000. I know Shaquille O'Neal wears them. Satellite television informs me so. I would have preferred the brand association of Air Nike, which are endorsed by the ethereal Michael Jordan. But they cost upward of Rs 4,000. On the other hand, newspaper reports tell me that the Government has been busy cauterising emotions with another feel-good lie about our poor. Apparently not 19 per cent, but 40 per cent live below the poverty line. This plimsoll of misery, beneath which everything sinks, is determined at a little less than Rs 3,000, annually. In other words earn more than Rs 3,000 in a full year, and you've swum clear.

The million mutinies of the '80s appeared to have been subsumed in 1996 by a consumerist forest fire that raged in the shopping malls and snaked through our living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and the parking space outside. Of all the uneasy revolutions—class, sex, gender, religion—colouring our lives at the moment, this one predominated yet was the one that made us the least uneasy. That was mostly because we had our faces pressed up against the show windows so hard that no lateral vision was possible. Only the glint of tinsel caught the eye. Only the ring of cellphones sounded in our shirt pockets.

There's nothing terribly wrong with any of this. We all have an unguilty right to the pleasures of life. And there is something to be said for a world of choice. But there was a kind of insistent vacuity, a whimsicality about the sort of lifestyle choices that appeared to dominate. High urban India where grand decisions are taken and the engines of the economy thrum was shrill with the temptations of globalising. Nokia or Motorola, Astra or Cielo, Levi's or Lee, MTV or Channel V. Even as the embellishments of life, the twirls in the turban, increased, the actual quality of life became more suspect. The power situation deteriorated; sinister diseases like dengue resurfaced and raged; the crime graphs kept rising; and the roads became a metaphor for our lives: shiny, multi-coloured, cluttered, ruleless, aggressive, accident-prone, draped in smog.

If the roads were a metaphor for our lives, television became the environment in which we lived. Though the telly revolution began in India in 1990, it was in 1996 that it ceased to be a climatic occurrence that buffeted through our rooms sweeping in new programmes and channels, becoming instead a steady mountain drizzle which surrounded us all the time, not intimidating us into inaction but dulling our energies nonetheless. Indians ceased to engage with it feverishly, and telly shows were no more the popcorn of conversation.

But at the same time a point of no-disengagement was reached. Courtship was over. Matrimony was on. We had plugged firmly into a key global socket. Murdoch was the electrician helping us. Planet India.

Nothing epitomised our increasing obsession with the stupidly superficial better than the Miss World show. A third-rate boring parade, with virtually nothing at stake, it developed into a copious public debate commandeering newsprint, telly time and government attention. In the process, an icon of our time, Amitabh Bachchan, peerless avenger of our cinematic imaginations, cut himself to man size, attempting to avenge nothing more than the numbers on his bottomline, seeking the stirring dialogue that would give a floozy commercial enterprise the aura of glorious nationalism. In between he reduced himself to a music video star. Can't imagine Dilip Kumar doing it. But then in 1996 everyone wanted everything. In globalising India, maximising one's brand equity carried the finality of a vedic mantra.

So it rained entertainment. Cricket became prime-time amusement. In 1976 six one-day internationals were played. In 1996, India alone played about 30. And then there was the endless hoopla around films, music videos, live events, concerts. And, absurdly, fashion shows and beauty contests abounded. In Planet India, our hunger for glamour bloomed wildly like a hothouse flower. Unlikely places like Bhatinda and Kochi held Miss City contests, and a tribe of mini-skirted Lolitas veejayed breathlessly, substituting coquetry for knowledge. Ruby Bhatia asked Shekhar Kapur why he always made musicals like Bandit Queen. Kapur goggled. Bhatia bashed on. As did Karishma Kapoor, prancing to the top of the heap on two wonderfully exposed legs.

Nike, denim, legs, music: in Planet India testosterone saturated the air.

There were moments of real achievement. Leander Paes' bronze, Arundhati Roy's novel, Shyam Benegal and Deepa Mehta's films, the Colonial Cousins' music, Azhar's Calcutta century. But everything was taken over by the din. You could scarcely see anything for the confetti.

There were Nikes but few sporting highs; there was Miss World but also sati worship at Deorala; there was Seagram's scotch but also starvation in Bolangir; there was Michael Jackson in Mumbai but also killer wolves in Pratapgarh.

In Planet India the din and confetti can only grow. But we need a dash of unease to help us mature. In 1996 there was very little. Next year, let's hope, we can step back a pace from the show windows.