The Elephant, the Tiger, the Cellphone... and the Billionaire

Those are the hot news items from my homeland, India, lately, although the nation's priorities do not necessarily seem to be in that order (at least zoologically speaking). So let's start backward with that list as well, shall we?

Yesterday morning driving into campus I caught a brief snippet on NPR at the end of their report on Forbes magazine's latest list of the world's billionaires: Four out of the top 10 billionaires in the world are now from India!! Amazing? Or about time that this long slumbering "tiger" woke up and stretched its claws, and got its due? And its not just those top four - Forbes' list has a whopping 53 Indian citizens on the list putting the country in the upper bracket in number of billionaires as well, I suspect!

Meanwhile, what of the other 1,129,866,101 people in the country (as of Sep 2007)? Well, at least some of them, a handful of cricket players, also struck it rich recently when they were put on the auction block for the first ever "draft" by franchises of the new Indian Premier League (aiming to be like the English Premier League of soccer). And you wouldn't be too far off in guessing that some of the above mentioned billionaires happen to own the franchises that bought some of the new cricket-playing millionaires. I don't know which of these two groups of rich Indians is celebrated more and which has caused more hand-wringing and angst - I suspect it is the latter on the part of those old-school cricket lovers lamenting the loss of the "soul of the noble sport" at the hands of filthy-rich philistines! The billionaire businessmen (and they are almost all men, of course), meanwhile, may be more a source of pride for the globalized Indian.

Even as the top brackets of the Indian wealth pyramid grow fatter, they still leave behind a huge number of people on the bottom in the dust - quite literally! Is there / will there be a significant trickle-down? How much of this new wealth is spread out in pulling up the median and bottom ends of the income distribution as opposed to widening the gap between the rich and the poor? And how much of the new wealth is a result of American jobs heading over to India?

That last question was addressed (briefly, but entertainingly per norm, given the "frame") earlier this week by Shashi Tharoor, the erstwhile Under-Secretary-General (and candidate for Secy-General) of the United Nations, when he was interviewed by Stephen Colbert. According to Tharoor, outsourcing has brought only about a million jobs to India - that's not too many drops in a bucket of over a 1.29 billion people, is it? But Tharoor, for the most part, appeared to be with the cheerleaders of the new India Rising (see the video below to judge for yourself)!



One might hope that his new book for which he sought the Colbert bump, "The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cellphone", has a more subtle, balanced analysis, at least going by some of his previous writing. At least one review gives mixed feelings on that score, however, while discussing Tharoor's list of the top ten areas of vulnerability for India:

Before the final chapter, Tharoor lists ten areas of vulnerability that are “dangers to India’s future.” While I was dismayed that energy crisis and environmental degradation were omitted, it is difficult to argue with Tharoor’s Top Ten, ranging from “The Threat to Pluralism” to “Neglecting the ‘Software’ of Human Development.” However, there is a missed opportunity for this section to have closed with the powerful sentence Tharoor invoked in an earlier essay on the challenges of literacy: “If I had to pick the one thing we must do above all else, I now offer a two-word mantra: “Educate girls.”

Energy and the environment not among the dangers to Indian's future?! Not even in the light of global warming? How can someone who might have become the UN Secretary General think that squeezing a billion and a half people into a landmass a third the size of the US and pushing them on an economic growth trajectory aiming for the American standard of consumerism not also bring along serious environmental and energy crises? Are the dominant cultural "frames" of economic growth, productivity, and globalization so powerful that even serious thinkers like Tharoor are unable (or unwilling?) to grok the seriousness of our environmental problems? Boy, does that make the task of bringing about a steady-state (as opposed to constantly growing) economy that much more challenging?

So where does all this economic boom and boosterism leave the real elephants and tigers? You know, the actual flesh and blood zoological sources of these ever proliferating metaphors? Even as their numbers flourish in metaphor, the real creatures are faring worse than ever (click here for the latest status report for tigers), jostling for space and resources amid the rising India, which seems intent on repeating the mistakes of the developed nations that sacrificed their own environment and biodiversity at the altar of economic growth and productivity. That a poorer country than the US, with 3X the population occupying 0.3X the landmass nevertheless still has room for such megafauna as elephants and tigers (while the US went about systematically wiping off their megafauna for decades before realizing the consequences and working now to bring some of them back) is something I used to be, and indeed still am, proud of, but am no longer sure that source of pride is going to last another generation! As I contemplate the enormity of the task for those few of us who want to question and change the dominant economic discourse towards a genuinely sustainable future for the foreseeable future with enough room for the real elephants and tigers amid a happier humanity (albeit with fewer billionaires and fewer homeless), I'm remembering an essay by Eduardo Galeano I read shortly after arriving in the US for graduate school right around when the seeds of India's current economic boom were being planted through neoliberal economic policies supported by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In "To Be Like Them" addressed to his fellow Latin Americans, as well as all from the global South, Galeano wrote:

Can we be like them?

Such is the promise of politicians, the goal of technocrats, the fantasy of the helpless: The Third World will become part of the First World, it will become rich, cultivated and happy--provided it learns how to behave, and does what it’s told to do without smarting off or raising any objections. A destiny of prosperity will reward the good behavior of the destitute, in the final chapter of History’s soap opera. We can be like them, proclaims the great neon sign standing on the road that leads to the development of the underdeveloped, the modernization of the backward.
But what is not possible is just not possible, and besides--as bullfighter Pedro el Gallo used to say--it’s impossible. If the poor countries were to rise to the level of production and waste of the rich countries, the planet would die. Our poor planet is already in a coma, severely poisoned by industrial civilization, and squeezed nearly dry by consumer society.

And he ended the essay thus (this was written in 1991):

The West is living the euphoria of triumph. After the fall of the Eastern block, the alibi is all set up: there it was worse. Was it worse? I think we should rather wonder if it was radically different. In the West we see justice sacrificed in the name of freedom, at the altar of goddess Productivity. In the East we saw freedom sacrificed in the name of justice, also at the altar of goddess Productivity.
In the South, it’s not yet too late to wonder if this goddess deserves our lives.

That was written nearly two decades ago, but no one, certainly among the powers that be in India, took notice! I'm afraid that today it may already be too late to take back some of the offerings we've made to that goddess in the 17 years since Galeano wrote those words.
If you've stuck with this long blog post thus far, you really should go ahead and read Galeano's essay in its entirety - you might end up reading it over and over like me. Meanwhile, let me leave you with this passage, one of my all-time favorite quotes, from the beginning of the essay:

Dreams and nightmares are made from the same materials, but this particular nightmare purports to be the only dream we are allowed to have: a development model that scorns life and worships things.