Author: Rama Bijapurkar
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: November 28/, 2010
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/cross-connections/717036/0
Introduction: In the markets of touristy Jaisalmer, you find, not economic
trickle-down, but the global culture trickling down.
Driving from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer through
the stark empty road with open spaces on either side, and no visible economic
activity for miles and miles, my husband asked in a worried tone, every 10
minutes, "How will trickle-down ever get here?" Until we got to
Jaisalmer and saw the main street, which looked a lot better than Warden Road,
Mumbai, where we live. All the hotels were lit up like the big buildings of
Mumbai on Maharashtra Day and Independence Day. So what's the occasion, we
asked our escort. No occasion, he replied. It's just the tourist season. "But
do you have enough electricity? Are there power cuts?" I asked, fresh
from dealing with power cuts and inverters in my mother's house in Hyderabad.
None at all, he replied. Earlier there were, but now there's plenty.
We stayed in a charming boutique hotel with
a great view - but marketing hyperbole had obviously not trickled down here
yet, so they called it a "mid-range" hotel. Had they replaced the
Lux soap with a green transparent bar, they would have been all set for the
label! But what really blew our minds was the encounter we had with local
musicians, who were the dinner entertainment at the hotel. (S)he was the drag
queen, a superb dancer with a troupe of gifted musicians with traditional
instruments. When she balanced a flaming sword on her head, I involuntarily
shuddered and said "be careful" in English. She looked me in the
eye and said, in polished accents of Indian English, "Don't worry, I
will." In fluent English, she later explained that the sword was from
Egypt, used by belly dancers, and she had modified it to be able to add the
flame "in order to go with the folk music effect"!
The table next to us had Australians and as
she chatted with them, we figured she had been all over the world. At the
end, she asked the assemblage of foreign tourists, "Are you guys on Facebook,
MySpace? You can keep in touch with me there."
The tour guide spoke English with a strange
European accent though, much like some of our well-travelled corporate big
shots. He then said that he spoke French fluently, learnt it from tourists
by writing the words and the pronunciation in Hindi. He couldn't read and
write the language, he said, but he could speak it well. We then discovered
lots of little kids in the markets who spoke Spanish, Italian, European-accented
English, but couldn't read and write in any language, including their own.
We figured that in a "we are like that only" manner, trickle-down
had happened, only it wasn't the pure economic trickle-down that we were searching
for, but global culture that was trickling down. And equally, the global Indian
was being born, only not in the way we assumed it would be, and with many
global Indian stereotypes.
NRIs are definitely one. Another is what my
anthropologist NRI friend Arjun labelled as the RNI (Resident, Non Indian).
RNIs are increasingly being seen among young Indians, identifiable by their
westernised clothes, coloured hair and foreign-accented English, and the absence
of any visible connect with Indian aam aadmi culture or mindset. They are
also being seen in the corporate world, especially the worlds of finance and
IT, where the belief is that the world is actually flat, and all mankind lives
and thinks the same way - since profit calculation is done the same way. I
worried that maybe this was an early indicator of the emerging de-culturised
global Indian, and that I needed to re-think my belief that the average Indian
will always be a "this as well as that" amalgam, like cyber aaratis
and computerised horoscope casting.
I agonised over it and the more I looked around
me, including the Jet Airways hostesses and their accented Hindi (another
NRI friend said that this was the only country he knew where we mispronounce/
foreign-ise the names of our own cities), the television hosts, the young
women executives at presentations, and so on, the more right he seemed to
be. Then I went to the Mahalakshmi Mandir and saw the really handsome Labrador
police sniffer dog with a big tilak on its forehead. His beaming young handler
informed me that it also loves to eat prasad and does a very nice namaskar
when led into the sanctum sanctorum, before doing its job of sniffing for
explosives. The young lady cops were wearing trousers but had sneaked flowers
into their hair for the festival season.
I often get asked by companies planning to
enter India whether Indian consumers attach greater value to products of non-Indian
origin. I tell them that once upon a time, "imported" was a powerful
label that signified quality and uniqueness and hence status. But, now, consumers
are agnostic of the origin of things, as long as the quality is good. Besides,
we think everything we like is Indian, anyway. Like Chinese food and the English
language.
- wearelikethatonly@expressindia.com
