AGAINST THE GRAIN
Tie for a crore, car for five
C. RAMMANOHAR REDDY
H. SATISH
A display of wealth or evidence of a market for luxury goods?
"GREED is good". These words, immortalised on the screen in the 1987 Hollywood film, "Wall Street", appropriately described the U.S. of the 1980s, when the acquisition of wealth and profligate consumption were highly valued. As we climb the ladder to developed country status, as we are told we are doing, those words can well describe the attitude of upper class Indians in the first decade of the 21st Century.
There now seem to be enough Indians who have the money and want to flaunt it by acquiring the most outrageous kinds of products. Whatever then does one make of two recent news reports? One, of a tie for men that is on sale for Rs. 1 crore and, the second, of the Maybach car that can be had for a mere Rs. 5 crores? Manufacturers and importers are confident that there is now a market in India for what are called "luxury goods", but are better described as products that are a vulgar display of extreme wealth.
The tie, which has 261 diamonds that give it its fame and price, is the more notable of the two products. Unlike the Maybach, the tie is not imported, but wears a "Made in India" label. And unlike the Maybach, which is not the most costly car in the world, the tie is said to be the most expensive of its kind. One can only say, "Wow, another first for India." The diamonds in the tie weigh a total of 77 carats, which are more likely to pull down a person's neck or perhaps even strangle him than make a man look all elegance and class. And as the product goes on display from city to city, I am puzzled why women models are wearing this tie meant for men. The 5.5-litre Maybach, we are told, can go from zero to 100 km/hour in just 5.4 seconds and comes with a 600-watt music system. If one feature does not get you killed on Indian roads or run over pedestrians who have no safe place to walk, the other can make your eardrums burst. The Maybach also comes with "aircraft-type" reclining seats and electronically extendable foot rests. But I wonder if this money is better spent on an aircraft itself. There must be planes that can be bought for less than what the Maybach costs.
The vulgarity implied in the prices of these two products is obvious, but here, just in case, is just one set of statistics. India's average per capita income is now Rs 22,000 a year. That means the total income of a family of five would be, on the average, Rs 1.1 lakh a year. So our own diamond-studded tie costs 100 times as much as an Indian family can, on the average, expect to earn in a year and the Maybach costs nearly 500 times as much the annual family income! This is gross inequality, plain and simple.
What does it say about us as a society that we still have the world's largest number of under-nourished people (214 million in 2001 according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation) and yet have fellow citizens who are potential buyers of the world's most expensive tie! We are now told by the new intellectual leaders of the times that the problem in the past was that Nehruvian socialism frowned on the creation of wealth. If only we had encouraged the acquisition of wealth in the first four decades after Independence, we would not have 214 million under-nourished Indians among us in the 21st Century. Yes, there was a fair amount of hypocrisy about the austerity of the earlier decades. Upper crust wealth was perhaps only a shade less important in the 1950s to the 1980s than today. In the absence of too many avenues for conspicuous consumption, all the wealth (mostly illegally acquired) used to be converted into gold bars, stashed away in Swiss bank accounts or just kept as cash in trunks. In that sense, there is now a greater element of honesty in the display of wealth. May be, but only the insensitive Indian will not feel deeply embarrassed by such astronomically priced articles of consumption as are now available.
By the way, if the Rs. 1 crore diamond tie and the Rs. 5 crore Maybach are too expensive for you, do not worry. You can still buy ties for just Rs. 15,000 or luxury cars for between Rs. 1.67 crores and Rs. 3 crores. That is competition in "India shining" for you.
E-mail the writer at crr100@eudoramail.com
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