How to milk the poverty cow

Maverick: How to milk the poverty cow

By Farzana Versey

Covert February 16-28

She picked up a broom to sweep away imaginary dust. The industrialist’s wife who was with her promptly demanded another broom and started swiping the ground. The lady who started it is a White woman, a certified poverty seeker, do-gooder. Had she been any other colour, our Mrs Big Businessman would not have touched that broom.

We are pretty sick of the humhog millionaires making a noise about some film which is showing us in a bad light. Little do we realise it is how we have been selling ourselves for years. For us ‘below the poverty line’ is a tourist destination; every celebrity is given a round of our malnourished, malady-stricken society before they can return with their sanitiser cleaned hands and open the door to a world of 22 degree air-conditioning and a dance for charity shindig.

Let us not blame the outsiders for using our skeletal people with bulging eyes and tummies smiling the smile of helplessness as they elevate struggling to an art form. We sneak in these images of snot-filled noses and broken limbs and bloated carcasses near every monument, bling bangle and holy river.

What is the purpose behind tour operators doing a ‘Beyond Bombay’ (not Mumbai) and a ‘Reality’ outing? Why is it so important to take a foreign visitor to see Dharavi and the work being done there? How many people travel to see locals work, unless they wish to buy Belgian glass or Swiss cuckoo clocks? Do we market anything that says ‘Made in Dharavi’? Then why make it into an exhibitionistic arena and blatantly refer to it as slum tourism?

One report mentioned, “Breathe in the smells of Colaba Causeway, grab a beer at Leopold Cafe and inspect the infamous block of lock-up cells at Colaba police station. Let the hustle of Tardeo market tear past your window, take note of the Shiv Sena headquarters in Dadar and try to get a bit role in a Bollywood film.”

I have visited Holocaust memorials and have to admit that it is purely a voyeuristic exercise to watch the rooms and photographs. The difference is that it is history and we can respect the gravity of the situation aware of its distance.

Must we make a spectacle of our people living lives of deprivation? You might well ask what my objection can be when we have beggars at every traffic signal and emaciated cattle roaming the streets.

This is our reality, and there is no shirking away from it. But we are not making them into poverty mannequins where people can window shop and check out the wares. Those selling these cities of grit and grime images compound the insensitivity by claiming that they are showing the India of a few best-sellers written by some Australian who did time in prison, an expat who did his Manhattan take on Mumbai and those who have capitalised on our slums. One wouldn’t be surprised if the Booker winning novel’s cutting through the swathe for a firang market becomes the new tourist trap. How about a tour of Gurgaon with a former rickshaw-puller turned businessman, a rags-to-riches story of exposing the overdone underbelly?

A fallout of all these let’s hang out of the local train and smell the excrement and then sit in some streetside foodstall is that the eateries up their ante; a small seafood joint is now a pricey place. It continues to play the low-class act to cater to its avowed purpose of being simple. A five-star hotel in Chennai has introduced “authentic Nair tea” for “those who are rich and famous and can't be seen sipping tea from a glass tumbler at a roadside stall”.

This is bringing the streets to the fine-tuned ambience of luxury. It becomes a mockery, not a taste of India.

An ad being aired by the tourism department consolidates this view when poor guides and taxi drivers are reprimanded for taking advantage of the guests; no one seems to realise that tourists can also be other Indians. Apparently, they don’t count, unless they pen three-word odes on heritage sites about how Pinky loves Tinku for which they will be ticked off.

If they were slumdogs, then the marketing guys might have condescended to wag their tails for them.

The golden mean and the go-betweens

Maverick: The golden mean and the go-betweens

By Farzana Versey

Covert, Feb 1-15

It’s time for ideological palm-greasing. The very same industrialists who were weeping over terrorism a couple of months ago are now propping up Narendra Modi as the leader at the helm.

But, are we sitting in judgment only because we are talking about prominent people, when we are well aware that bribery is a part and parcel of everyday life – even our own?

Why must we get so uptight and upright over such backing, when we are a country of middlemen? Have we, even in our daily lives, got things done without the services of a well-wisher, a balancing force?

If today you know of some obscure people, it is because they have paid to become known. As P.T.Barnum, the public relations biggie, said, “The bigger the humbug, the better the people will love it.” So, the wannabes get to hobnob with the cream of society, many of who are of doubtful merit, and the impression given is that, look, we believe in equal opportunities, we don’t care about who is who. Few are honest as an advertiser was in one of our respected financial papers, when he stated clearly: “Wanted person experienced in the art of ‘lubricating’ top executives in banks.”

Isn’t this a regular occurrence? Can any of us get any work done without paying for it in cash or kind? Does the middleman not make life somewhat easy, just like the blackmarketeer at a cinema hall, the helpful peon at a government office whose only demand is chai-paani and the high-ranking official, who miraculously provides water in drought-prone areas because the private sector, which he publicly claims to hate, provides him with a brown paper packet?

Why get into this serious area of moral accountability? Births, marriages and deaths, all need someone to make the passage clear.

Social workers are go-betweens of another kind. They act as buffers between good and evil. They also get catapulted into the forefront of a movement or sit in air-conditioned offices of corporate honchos, sipping herbal tea and demanding donations.

Demanding has become a normal practice. If you are a beleaguered soul seeking justice or merely have a case in the courts, the black-robed ravens swoop down on you. The ‘names’ charge a neat 50,000 rupees for a one-page consultation. Some straightaway ask for a cut if it is a property matter.

Real estate agents are another bugbear. Forget what they promise you. Just watch the gleam in their eye as you sign on the dotted line and they get their two per cent commission.

The doctor sends you to a specialist; the specialist parcels you off to a bigger guy; the cut at the end could be in lakhs. While the general physicians have to make do with weekly luncheons that pass off as conferences, the ones with fancier degrees get all-expenses-paid trips abroad sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. How does it affect you? Your friendly doctor will insist you use those medicines which might be infinitely more expensive.

The media cannot be absolved. It is the most in-demand profession. Hacks who have managed to re-word a press release a few times on a certain topic are called experts and invited on junkets to hold forth on the subject. Academicians enjoy similar elevation, based purely on the number of footnotes in the paper they present.

God has not been spared. When you go shopping for a guru or a saint, you are looking not so much for solace as for a nice middleman. Everyone knows that the Real Thing is somewhat confusing, an abstraction, and understanding this entity can get time-consuming, besides taking a toll on your brains. So you deposit your searching soul at the feet of a holy one and leave it to him/her to pass on your messages, requests, and complaints to God. Along the way you drop some money into a donation box or sprinkle ghee into fire or slaughter an animal, depending on what you are told to do. This is not to appease any Higher Power, but to make your earthly messenger feel that something is being done.

When two sides have a dispute, it is the ‘agents’ who get away, pleading quite truthfully that they are merely caught in the middle.