Mundane inequality

Few days ago, going to work in the rickshaw as usual, I was passing the entrance to the crammed alleyways of the Nizamuddin basti, the Muslim village, when I noticed that something had changed in the usual scenery: right next to the entrance had been erected a vast advertisement by Diesel Jeans. In a notably Muslim-dominated area, the ad featured several topless men and women wearing nothing but jeans looking jadedly at the passers by. Right below the ad there was a man taking an early morning shower with a garden hose, beside him were naked children playing and a woman trying to start a bonfire. The ad had been erected to a level where a regular pedestrian would not see it right away, as it was slightly above the head. It was designed to reach the glimpse of a person riding a vehicle, especially one where the driver would sit relatively high, such as an SUV. The nonchalant gaze of the mostly white models would never reach the beggars sitting below them, or even the paanwallah facing away from the board. The advertisement dominated their immediate surroundings, but served no purpose to them.

The extremities of Indian economic inequality never seem to cease to amaze the foreign traveller coming to India. Exposure to it is unavoidable and it sends any fresh-off-the-plane westerner on an instant guilt trip, while the Indian listens to the shocked foreigner's lament quietly, almost amused. ”Oh my god, the poverty is just shocking!”. 

For some, it's too much. A friend recalled an anecdote of a young girl who was staying at hers as a couch surfer armed with a suitcase full of sanitary products to give to poor people she would see on the streets. After a first few days she locked herself into the guestroom and sat there sobbing after having seen too many beggars to her liking. 

V.S.Naipaul summarized the weltschmerz of the westerner painfully accurately in his book "An Area of Darkness", a work written in 1964 has not lost a single bit of its relevance to this day:

"India is the poorest country in the world. Therefore, to see its poverty is to make an observation of no value; a thousand newcomers to the country before you have seen and said as you. And not only newcomers. Our own sons and daughters, when they return from Europe and America, have spoken in your very words. Do not think that your anger and contempt are marks of your sensitivity.

You might have seen more: the smiles on the faces of the begging children, that domestic group among the pavement sleepers waking in the cool Bombay morning, father, mother and baby in a trinity of love, so self contained that they are as private as if walls had separated them from you: it is your gaze that violates them, your sense of outrage that outrages them. You might have seen the boy sweeping his area of pavement, spreading his mat, lying down; exhaustion and undernourishment are in his tiny body and shrunken face, but lying flat on his back, oblivious of you and the thousands who walk past in the lane between sleepers' mats and house walls bright with advertisements and election slogans, oblivious of the warm, overbreathed air, he plays with a fatigued concentration with a tiny pistol in blue plastic. It is your surprise, your anger that denies him humanity.

But wait, stay for six months. The winter will bring fresh visitors. Their talk will also be of poverty; they too will show their anger. You will agree; but deep down there will be annoyance; it will seem to you then, too, that they are seeing only the obvious; and it will not please to find your sensibility so accurately parodied."

In other words, overly emotional accounts of encounters with poverty have the danger of carnevalizing and thus dehumanizing the poor, depicting them as some uniform group of people that dwell in their wretched existance with no prospects of a better life. After staying for a bit longer in India, something happens to you: Much to your surprise, you indeed find yourself bored of backpackers' teary-eyed accounts of their encounters with ”realities of life” during their Indian experience. It is an uneasy feeling and you do not forgive  yourself easily for feeling that way, but you begin to justify your newly discovered numbness to poverty as recognition of your own limitations as an individual. The legless woman shivering, wrapped in every rag she owns on a winter morning greets you as you pass her in the rickshaw every morning in the same intersection. The girl in her dirty and torn flowery dress taps on the darkened car windows. They all become your daily landscape.

As for the Indians listening to the cries of the foreigners, they have seen it all, maybe even too much. It is true that the economic reforms of early 90's have multiplied the size of the middle class and thus lifted a notable amount of people out of poverty and opened windows of opportunity beyond cultural barriers, such as in the case of Dalit entrepreneurs. However, for the more well-off of the Indian society, poverty still seems to remain an uncomfortable truth, an ugly stain in the shield of shining new India. For example last year Indian and foreign media channeled the public outrage when the Delhi authorities, with their idea of a "world class capital", were resorting to questionable measures while trying to hide the beggars from the international guests. The government may chastise its people of the situation by calling the state of affairs "a national shame", but the general middle class public seems to rather shut its eyes from the whole situation. Pavan K Varma for example, in his book "the Great Indian Middle Class", is rather hard on his countrymen:

"The poor have been around for so long that they have become a part of the accepted landscape. Since they refused to go away, and could not be got rid of, the only other alternative was to take as little notice of them as possible. This myopia has its advantages: the less one noticed, the less reason one had to be concerned about social obligations; and the less one saw, the less one needed to be distracted from the heady pursuit of one's own material salvation. To get on in the world one had to restrict one's canvas, where all the discordance of other people's needs and conditions was best shut out." 

" For the burgeoning and upwardly mobile middle class of India, such poverty has ceased to exist. It has ceased to exist, because it does not create in most of its members the slightest motivation to do something about it. Its existence is taken for granted. Its symptoms, which would revolt even the most sympathetic foreign observer, do not register any more. The general approach is to get on with one's life, to carve out a tiny island of well-being in a sea of deprivation"

Such a mindset may partly come from political disillusionment. Tepid interest in social reforms may partly be due to the fact that educated middle class Indians seem to have very little faith in politicians and government, whom they mostly regard as corrupt babus and gangsters. Unwilling to deal with such crowd, they remain more focused on minding their own business, beggars or no beggars.