[A-List] The Fantasy of Endless Consumption

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Sudhanva Deshpande

http://www.zmag.org (December 25 2007)


Almost suddenly, the lower middle class has become a subject of Hindi films.

Consider the film Ta Ra Rum Pum. A racing car driver falls in love with,
and eventually marries, a pianist, the daughter of a rich businessman.
The hero is profligate, spending lavishly on parties and other luxuries.
But this is not a problem, because the hero keeps winning every race he
enters and because he buys everything on credit.

Till, one day, he runs into the evil driver at a race, and has a crash.
He loses ten races on the trot, and is finally sacked by the team he
races for, which promptly employs the evil driver. The installments
begin to pile up, and eventually, the couple lose all they had.

Till the utterly predictable happens: the hero gets back to the race
track, beats evil driver, salvages his name and career, and eventually
moves back into the same fancy house he and his family had to vacate an
hour earlier. This time, with the pledge that he will not buy things on
credit.

The film itself is terrible. But sometimes, it is more fun to look at
what a film could have been. Every narrative is pregnant with other
possibilities; whether the end is tragedy or farce could well depend on
which Marx wrote the screenplay, Karl or Groucho.

Ta Ra Rum Pum is a fantasy. It is a fantasy because it tells us, in the
end, that our consumption need not be financed by debt. This is of
course ridiculous, as anyone who has salivated at the latest plasma TV
or a three-bedroom apartment knows. What used to be thought of as
consumer durables are no longer so durable - the latest music system, or
car, or refrigerator muscles out models released barely a couple of
years ago.

In an earlier day and age, the middle class' craving for consumption was
satisfied by foreign trips, and by dowry. No more. No more do you have
to wait for a rich uncle to return from London or Dubai with flashy
goggles, a Walkman, and a bottle of Johnny Walker. No more is extortion
through marriage the only way to acquire a Bajaj scooter of dubious
fuel-efficiency. Not that these avenues, benign as well as benighted,
are no longer in use. Just that these are no longer the only ones
available. Your bank calls you on Diwali-eve to give you a pre-approved
loan of half a million rupees. What for, you ask. The call centre
employee at the other end is incredulous: "You mean don't want to buy
anything?"

Debt servicing becomes a critical part of the monthly budget. Some cope,
some don't. Those who do, trapeze from one high-paying job to the next
higher-paying job. Consumption has to be kept up. The only way to do so
is to ensure that you don't hang around in the same company too long.
This is of course the very opposite of what our fathers and uncles
believed in. In those Five Year Plan days, you joined a company and grew
with it. Today, though, if you want to keep up with servicing your debt,
fidelity to job is anathema.

Companies evolve all sorts of ways to retain employees. Perquisites and
paid holidays are what the upper end of the spectrum get. At the lower
end, things are murkier. After courts ruled that companies cannot coerce
employees to remain by making them sign bonds, companies - especially in
the IT sector - make potential employees pay for getting jobs. You pay,
say, forty or sixty or eighty thousand rupees at the time of joining,
and the company pays you your salary, plus, say, two thousand rupees per
month - this is from the money you paid at the point of joining. Forty
thousand divided by two thousand is twenty - so you are compelled to
stay with the company for at least twenty months. As soon as those
twenty months are over, though, you are ready to move to another job.

Whatever else you may or may not do, though, living without debt is not
an option. Be forever unsatisfied, Shah Rukh Khan tells us: do not be
santusht (satisfied). The size of the moneyed middle class may be a
matter of dispute, but the survival of corporations, and of consumer
capitalism itself, depends upon the ability of corporations to draw more
and more people into the web of consumption, whether they can afford it
or not. Accordingly, the middle class - or, more precisely, the lower
middle class - is suddenly thrusting itself into our imagination, via
films and television.

The film I began with, Ta Ra Rum Pum, becomes interesting for this
reason: it actually depicts the experience of the lower middle class,
lusting after consumption but unable to service the resultant debt.

The career of the most interesting screenplay writer currently working
in the Hindi film industry could be explained by this fact, that he is
able to capture the experience of the lower middle class. I am talking
about Jaideep Sahni, and his filmography includes Company, Bunty aur
Bubli, Khosla ka Ghosla, Chak de India. Company, a story of a lower
middle class Bombay boy who rises to become a gangster; Bunty aur Bubli,
a story of two small-town lower middle class kids and their adventures
on the margins of illegality; Khosla ka Ghosla, a story of a lower
middle class family struggling to get back the plot of land they have
sunk in their lives savings to buy; and Chak de India, a story of a
lower middle class hockey player who fights, along with a bunch of
mostly lower middle class girls, to redeem his reputation as a patriot.

The lower middle class of Jaideep Sahni's films is very different from
the middle class of the old Basu Chatterjee-Amol Palekar films, largely
because the nature of the middle class itself has changed, along with
their attitudes, perceptions, aspirations and frustrations. That much is
obvious enough. What is not so immediately obvious is that while Jaideep
Sahni's middle class is upwardly mobile - or at least aspires to be
upwardly mobile, using means fair and not so fair - the world they
inhabit is, in the end, a world of fantasy. It is a world where a family
has to neither sell its old house nor take a home loan to buy a new one,
or a world where India can achieve sporting success on the world stage
purely on the basis of grit and determination.

But the relationship between the upper and lower middle class is not
without its own tensions either. The upper middle class have only
disdain for the lower middle class. One recent film explores this
tension quite pointedly: Bheja Fry, a take off on the French film Le
Diner de cons. The premise of the film is simple: a bunch of wealthy
friends get together every Friday and invite an "idiot" and make fun of
him. The "idiot" obviously does not realise he is being made fun of.
What Bheja Fry is able to depict beautifully is the utter disdain that
the upper middle class has for the lower middle, its callousness, its
self-centeredness, and its complete inability to see anything from the
other's point of view, even if the other happens to be your own wife.

Yet, this lower middle class still has to be drawn into the cycle of
endless consumption. In one sense, that is the great drama being played
out on Indian television as well. Consider the so-called "reality shows"
and "talent hunts". There is nothing "real" about them at all, nor is
the purpose of the shows to hunt talent.

But that is not the point. Look at the individuals you see on these
shows: most of them are from smaller towns, and most of them belong
resolutely to the lower middle class. It is critical that this class be
dished out the fantasy of unimaginable fame and unimaginable riches,
even if that fantasy is to last merely a moment. In its ephemerality, in
fact, the fantasy mimics the act of consumption itself: the moment of
consumption is the very moment of utter boredom, the very moment when
one has to start looking for the next moment of climactic release, the
next moment of fantasy.

It is only fitting then, that the instrument of drawing the lower middle
class into the fantasy of fame, riches and endless consumption is the
ubiquitous mobile phone. The illusion of "reality" is made possible by
the mobile phone, by the act of "voting". That the act of voting is
simultaneously an act of consumption (you have to first buy a mobile
phone, then you have to buy a pre- or post-paid plan, then you have to
vote, for which again you pay) is neither coincidental nor trivial. The
only reality in the reality shows is the reality of consumption. And who
takes part in this reality of consumption? Overwhelmingly, it is the
lower middle class, otherwise hidden from public view in cities like
Solapur or Siliguri or Silchar.

To draw the lower middle class into the cycle of endless debt is
critical, because that is the only thing that will sustain the endless
consumption of the wealthy.

One final point about Hindi cinema. The fact that these kind of films
are being made today is directly related to the multiplex boom. Only the
multiplex, with its higher ticket prices per seat as well as with its
multiplicity of screenings, makes possible the margins that enable such,
relatively small budget and somewhat offbeat films, possible. In turn,
the multiplex is itself made possible by the middle class's increased
ability to spend on ephemeral consumption. And the multiplex, which
originated in the affluent sections of our metros, has now moved to
other areas as well: to the less affluent sections in the metros, as
well as to non-metros. In other words, the condition that makes these
films possible in the first place - the multiplex model of revenue
generation - is also predicated on the very phenomenon the films reflect
- the drawing of the lower middle class into the fantasy of endless
consumption.

_____

Sudhanva Deshpande is an actor and director with Jana Natya Manch, and
works as editor with LeftWord Books, New Delhi. He can be reached at
deshsud@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-12/25deshpande.cfm


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