Discipline is Must. Globalisation is Must. Our India is Great.

(the title is a notice painted on a gate I pass on the way to work.)

I spent the last week in the Himalayan foothills of West Bengal, and in Sikkim, India’s second smallest state. The train arrived in New Jaipulguri, part of an unpleasant urban sprawl without any of Kolkata’s rough-edged charisma or rural India’s serenity. I took a jeep up to Darjeeling, the alleged Queen of the Hills (alleged because I saw not a single snow-capped Himalaya, thanks to the fog.) After a couple days, I left for Sikkim, descending the mountain down a harrowing series of switchbacks that would have worried me had I not become acclimated to Kolkata’s manic road etiquette. I caught another jeep in Jorethang, and proceeded up another hill to Pelling, where I stayed for the night.

The dominant industry in Sikkim, as far as I can tell, is rock busting. The Carriers, all male, haulers huge baskets full of stones on their backs up and down steep embankments to the Busters. The Busters, both men and women sit on piles of fist-size rocks, upon a thin mat, and whack the stones into gravel with small sledge hammers. They are often shielded from the sun by an umbrella, lodged into the pile of rocks, but the monsoon clouds actually made the temperature quite bearable. The resulting gravel is then accumulated by the Carriers, who haul these enormously heavy baskets somewhere else, where I suppose it is used for road construction.

******

Yesterday, back in Kolkata, I putted around town for while, marveling at the blocks of book stalls on College St, before finally heading over to Forum Mall to get something to eat at the food court. The Lonely Planet had described the Mall as “futuristic,” and I suppose that’s an apt if pessimistic description. Forum is a 6 story mall, medium sized by American standards. It is extremely clean and well lit, with what have to be India’s cleanest public restrooms. I browsed Music World, with it’s skimpy selection of DVD’s and tunes from Hindi movies, and had pretty good dosa at the food court. It’s like a mall anywhere—fat teenagers will cut in front of you in line, babies scream over the shoulders of their befuddled parents, and huge glossy posters hang from every available surface. In keeping with the tradition of evil genius in mall architecture, Forum has only “Up” escalators; to go down, you have to wait in long lines for the lift, or take the stairs. Once you’re in, it’s easier to stay than it is to leave.

The trappings of American shopping culture don’t stop there. Passing a toy store, I noticed the “Roboraptor!” toy in the window (“A fusion of technology and personality”) and the vast shelf of Barbie dolls, prominently displayed. I noticed that all the Barbie dolls were light skinned and blonde. I tried to explain to the woman behind the counter that I was not at all interested in buying anything, but that I wanted to know if they had any Indian Barbies. The clerk climbed atop a step ladder and began pulling down five or six dolls with black hair and “traditional” Indian clothing, hidden neatly behind the rows of the white dolls. I thanked her and left.

I shouldn’t hold myself up as too high and mighty here—I spent a good hour in the mall, eating lunch, snacking on an ice cream cone, enjoying the air conditioning. As much as I wondered at the affluence inside Forum compared with the squalor outside of it, I was certainly no different from the other patrons, who also, I’m sure, came to cool off and relax on this rainy, humid weekend.

*******

I had decided to do the first two days of the Monastic Trek, a four day walk through West Sikkim that takes you to all kinds of idyllic locations—mountain lakes and waterfalls and rhododendron gardens. For the first day, the Lonely Planet says, “Take the obvious trail from Pelling straight down to the river. Turn onto the main road, go through Rimbi, and go left at the fork.” Then, it says, you’ll end up at Khechepalri Lake (pronounced something like “catch a perry”).

There is nothing at all obvious about the “obvious trail,” and I spent the whole morning and much of the afternoon wandering on tiny footpaths down to the river. These trails aren’t just for hikers though—in many cases they are the only means of getting to the houses of farmers, who grow rice and jute in terraces that cling to the sides of the mountains. One moment I’d be passing through a scenic patch of giant bell-shaped orchids: and the next, I’d emerge into the common area between a house and a chicken shack, the only two structures in a small encampment. Often, the residents of these thatch and mud buildings would be a mile or more from the next such dwelling. A few times, a rock carrier would pass me, grunting his way up the mountain with his several-hundred pound load.

The monkeys were swinging merrily overhead, the brooks were babbling brightly thanks to the monsoon—had it not been for feeling tremendously lost, and for frequently tumbling down the slick rocky trail, and for being completely soaked with sweat and rain, it would have been a perfect morning. A few times, I stopped to ask a farmer or rock-buster for directions.

“Rimbi?” I would say, I’m sure looking something like a very large and very wet rat. Each time he or she would point down the direction I was already headed. Some laughed at me, one woman inexplicably gave me the finger. One girl, probably no more than 14, working the fields with her little brother, gave me the widest, most wonderful smile as I desperately tried to communicate myself.

She was one of the many child laborers I saw in Sikkim, working in fields, or as rock busters, or hauling brush. They were only slightly less common that the school children, in their immaculate uniforms, trudging up and down the hills on their way to school.

It seemed like all of the laborers were working on government-sponsored development projects—paving a road, building a bridge. It was unclear exactly what these projects were supposed to do, except make it slightly cheaper for folks to make their way to the already-overcrowded cities, or to hospitals too far away and too expensive to be of any importance to the average rural Sikkimese person. I suppose better roads do make it a little easier for people like me to come and visit, and pour my dollars into the stalled Sikkim economy.

*******

One sign I saw in Forum Mall was for a clothing store called Sarovar. It read like this:

“The Industrial Revolution: Freedom from Slowness
The French Revolution: Freedom from Bondage
The Russian Revolution: Freedom from Exploitation
The Green Revolution: Freedom from Hunger
Sarovar: Freedom from THE USUAL!”

The implication, I think is: “Well, congratulations India! We’ve successfully become efficient, free, and well-fed—now, let’s get hip!” This attitude is pretty common among the middle class. Even if things aren’t perfect now, given time, and more economic liberalization, the poor will be brought into the fold. The term “middle class” itself is emblematic of this perspective—the middle class, those wealthy enough to go to Forum and buy stuff, represents only about 10% of the population, although that proportion is growing.

Next door to Forum, in Crossword Books, one of the “Crossword Recommends” books is “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand. Rand was born in Russia, and developed a philosophy of extreme individualism that she put forth in a few novels and several nonfiction works. The self-interest that Smith described positively in “The Wealth of Nations” assumes a normative status in Rand’s work—the pursuit of self-interest is an ethical principle unto itself, and capitalism is the ideal system for organizing individuals under this ethical principle. Rand is phenomenally popular in India—every bookshelf I’ve seen has a copy of one of her books, and every bookstore has a whole Ayn Rand display.

Perhaps I’d understand this rampant individualism a little better if I’d lived through the years of India’s clumsy 5-year plans, the interventionist ‘mixed economy’ strategy, the defunct alliance with the USSR. In West Bengal, the communist party came to power in the ‘70’s, effectively implemented land reform, and then proceeded to completely strangle industry. The new Chief Minister of West Bengal is widely regarded as a good fellow, primarily because he’s been making the state more attractive to foreign investors. After decades of corruption spoiling the good intentions of the liberals, I understand frustration with socialism of any sort.

But, amongst the elite, the abandonment of social responsibility seems nearly total. Soon after I arrived in India, a national debate was flaring up about the quotas (or reservations) for lower caste individuals and the OBC’s, or Other Backward Classes—the poor and educationally disadvantaged. At India’s hyper-competitive technology and medical universities, students went on strike, wearing t-shirts that read “Kill Me Before You Kill Merit.”

And it’s not that the reservations were even such a good idea. Even people deeply concerned with social equality, and many supporters of quotas in theory feel that the quota system is corrupt, and a poor way of achieving social equality. They argue that what the government needs to do is to spend money at the lowest levels of the education system, so that quotas aren’t needed for admittance to the universities.

But the way the national debate over quotas has played out makes me skeptical that this dubious method of achieving social equality will be replaced by anything better. The argument I’ve heard most often is that they make the Indian workforce less competitive in the world market, and deprive smart people of good jobs. For these people, achieving social equality is so far down on the list of priorities that it doesn’t warrant mention. Plus, the same week of the debate, when someone would occasionally argue that the government should pursue equality at the lowest levels of education first, Parliament passed a bill removing quotas from primary schools.

On CNN India (which bears its pro-corporate bias even more blatantly than in the US) the coverage of the quota debate bordered on the absurd. The tag line for the debate was “Reserve or Deserve?” casting privileged students as diligent, and hard working, and the lower-caste students as thieves, attempting to steal what is not rightfully theirs. Pro-quota demonstrators were displayed turning cars over and clashing with police, while anti-quota protestors where shown on hunger strike, lying on blankets in a Gandhi-like state of somber serenity.

A month later, when anti-quota demonstrators vandalized the dormitories of lower caste students, and harassed them into moving, the story didn’t make CNN; it was 5th page news in Kolkata’s Daily Telegraph.

A fellow I met on the train, who graduated from a prestigious business school, told me that quotas were not needed. I asked him if it wasn’t easier for high-caste and rich students to get admitted, and he said it wasn’t. I expected him to say that at his school many low-caste students were admitted without quotas; instead, he said that entrance exams measure natural intelligence and not anything you need to be taught, so rich students who attend fancy prep schools don’t have any real advantage. “It’s only language and basic maths,” he told me. When pushed, he admitted that, “Yes, well, the language is English, and the whole test is in English, so there is a difficulty there. But the maths, you don’t need to go to school for that.”

When I consider my afternoon in Forum Mall and my day trekking through Sikkim, it seems as though I was experiencing two completely different nations, with entirely different concerns and difficulties. The panic-stricken higher-secondary students have nervous breakdowns preparing for college entrance exams; the teenagers in Sikkim have been working for years on family farms and small-scale construction projects.

It’s easy to be high and mighty about inequality in a foreign country. It’s easier to see, I think, when you’re not burdened by the routine and culture that masks it at home. How often do I travel to impoverished areas of the US? How many days can I go between seeing a run down neighborhood, or meeting a person who cannot afford health insurance? For me, at home in Northern Virginia, avoiding poverty is a matter of habit.

I suppose what makes this ignorance so terrifying is that it can be accomplished at close range: the panging sense of embarrassment and guilt and responsibility that you feel when you see a person worse off than you gradually can fade away, explained away as a product of biology, or optimistically dismissed in the name of development. And development, we all know, has costs.

But who will bear them?