There is a side of Delhi that's very hard to miss while walking around town: I sit in my auto rickshaw on my way to work in the morning, a car the size of a tank speeds past me plowing through scooters, rickshaws, Suzuki Marutis, cyclists, beggars and school children. The monster almost catapults the rickshaw to the gutter. The surroundings are sprayed with red paan spit and before you even realize what happened, the echoes of Bhangra music and Punjabi cusswords fade out in to the traffic.
In the imagination of Indians elsewhere than in the national capital region, Delhi today often seems to appear as an epitome of power and corruption - a nihilistic den of vices run by corrupt politicians and gangsters inhabited mostly by migrants in search of a quick buck with nothing to lose. Whereas Mumbai is often associated with money (in terms of Indian stock market and entertainment industry etc.), Delhi in India is all about power and status.
Much like Russia earlier, as a country with fairly short history of free market capitalism, India, and especially Delhi, has seen it's own emergence of an upstart class who have fairly recently become millionaires and aren't shy to flaunt their wealth. Being loud, arrogant and flamboyant is what they are best at. Whereas in Russia many got rich quick through oil trade, in India it has been all about land.
The video above encapsulates the mindset perfectly. It follows rich kids during their ordinary day. These are sons of wealthy landowners from Delhi, who have made it their business to let everyone know that they now stand on top of the social ladder. For them, showing status equals carrying guns and having security guards follow them everywhere (although no-one really threatens them), getting an exclusive phone number like "0001" and driving the biggest car available on the Indian market, usually a Mahindra Scorpio or a Hummer. They spend their days doing nothing living on the money their parents made by selling land, and they are proud of it. What strikes here is the panache and blatant shamelessness of it all, they seem to be completely oblivious to the ridiculousness of the whole setting and seem to never get bored of their lifestyle of clubs, malls and swimming pools, all payed by their dads. I've been told several times that when people elsewhere ask "Don't you know who I am?", in Delhi it's "Don't you know who my dad is?".
Since independence, India's austere socialist economic policies had limited the possession of capital to a very limited layer of society. The license and quota Raj, as the bureucratic economic atmosphere of post-independence India is often referred to as, allowed only the most headstrong and stubborn to gain licenses and thus make their fortunes in fields such as telecommunications, mining or steel. As a result of that, dynasties of wealth such as the Mittals or the Tatas were born, deepening a gap between a wealthy English-educated elite and huddled masses of people living in an India that was "an isolated and dour place of limited opportunity", where "the country was straitjacketed by its moralistic rejection of capitalism, by a lethargic and often depressive fatalism" as Akash Kapur writes in his column, as he comments on the recent surge of consumerism and idolization of American culture in India.
This so-called old money of Delhi accumulated vast amounts of wealth, got educated in the best universities of the world and thus consolidated its position as the cream of society. Since money had existed in these families for a long time, there was no need to prove anything to anybody. Their societal status was unquestioned and relationship with money was nonchalant, extravagance was a marker of poor taste. Furthermore, as mentioned above, former elites grew up in a socialist country of limited prospects, where frugality was a necessity. The new rich of today live in a frantically consumerist country crazed with easy access to material wealth.
The English-educated upper-middle class and upper class of Delhi with their Oxford or Harvard-returned children have during the few decades found themselves marooned in their own city, sequesterd by a completely different crowd. As Rana Dasgupta on his essay on the new rich of Delhi quite aptly puts it,
"The Indian economy of the turn of the twenty-first century has been far too explosive for the tiny English-speaking class to monopolise its rewards. In fact they have not even been its primary beneficiaries. Their foreign degrees and cosmopolitan behaviour prepare them well for jobs in international banks and management consultancies, where they earn good salaries and mix with people like themselves. But they are surrounded by very different people – private businessmen, entrepreneurs, real estate agents, retailers and general wheeler-dealers – who are making far more money than they, and wielding more political power. These people may come from smaller cities, they may be less worldly, and they may speak only broken English. But they are skilled in the realm of opportunity and profit, and they are at home in the booming world of overlords, connections, bribes, political loopholes, sweeteners – and occasional violence – that sends their anglicised peers running for the nearest cappuccino. Over the last few years, provincials have become Delhi’s dominant economic group, with many millionaires, and a few billionaires, among their number, and networks of political protection that make them immensely more influential than those who have got rich on a salary."
The 1991 economic reforms that aimed to liberalize the Indian economy marked a watershed in Indian history not only as an economic but also cultural paradigm shift. Doors were open for social mobility, social stratification of Indian society started shifting from caste to class. As prices of real estate skyrocketed downtown Delhi, the dusty plains and farmlands surrounding the national capital region became so sought after that they practically became worth crores almost overnight. Landowners realized that they were sitting on a fortune and leased their farmlands further for companies that required space for their corporate headquarters near the capital region. Satellite cities with office buildings and exuberant malls like Noida and Gurgaon emerged. Former poor farmers became millionaires. People who were used to a simple life all of a sudden had the world in their hands. Access to material wealth was no longer a matter of education.
And soon enough, Delhi nightclubs and bars, places that used to be inhabited by the anglicized upper class were suddenly buzzing with mostly Hindi and Punjabi speaking offspring of rural landowning castes and gangsters, waving their guns at the DJ telling him to put down his progressive house collection and turn up Bollywood item numbers like Sheela Ki Jawani and Munni Badnaam. Should he of she fail to do so, he might get shot, but the culprit would still walk free because he happened to have the right connections. Much to the old elite's chagrin, opening of the market has enabled upward social mobility to perhaps slightly less refined strata of society and thus also given them access to power. With money comes power and with power comes freedom.
A recently published article in the Hindustan Times commented on this emergence of new upper classes pointing out that people who have gotten rich so soon, still seem to be going through a phase where they emulate the lifestyle of the upper class, but are still not entirely comfortable with a life of luxury:
"Nikhil Khanna of Avian Media, who once wrote a society column and continues to keep a watch on the well-heeled, says the chaos is driven by consumerism. "Car companies such as BMW and Audi are holding classes to teach people how to drive these cars. People who have the money to buy them but don't know how to drive them - it's a metaphor for what's happening to the city."
