Then that ogre called Capitalism found India...

On the new elites in India and life in Delhi...

Contemporary Indian society is transfixed by wealth. A new genre of popular magazine is filled from cover to cover with features about gold-plated bathtubs, diamond-encrusted mobile phones and super-de luxe vacations, allowing readers to wallow in what they can never afford. Television game shows give weight to the seductive whispers of the market, showing working people in the very moment they are transformed into millionaires. People love to read about the possessions, opinions and talents of India’s leading industrialists, some of whom have succeeded in creating quasi-religious cults around themselves. Criticism of the rich results in astonishing waves of rebuttal by ordinary people who feel it is an attack on their national pride.

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Driving past Delhi’s sole dealer of Bentleys and Lamborghinis, I stop in on a whim and ask to speak to the manager. He’s not around and I’m sent to have coffee with the PR girls. They are appropriately attractive and, judging by their diamonds, from the right kinds of families (‘I’ve driven a million Porsches and Ferraris,’ says one. ‘They’re nice cars. But when you get into a Lamborghini it’s something else’). For them, Delhi is a place of infinite money-making and they fall over themselves trying to express this fantastic fecundity.

‘When someone comes in here looking to buy a Bentley, we don’t ask him what he’s driving now. Just because he drives a BMW doesn’t mean he can afford a Bentley. We ask if he has a jet or a yacht. We ask if he has an island.’

‘Are there many people with jets in Delhi?’ I ask.

The girls wax apoplectic.

‘Everyone has one. And not just one – they have two, three, four.’

We chat about nice cars and expensive living. A Lamborghini is driven into the showroom: the noise is so deafening that we have to stop talking until it’s in place. I ask the philistine’s question: what’s the point of spending 30 million rupees ($635,000) on a car that can do over 300 kilometres per hour in a city where the traffic doesn’t move? They tell me about the car club that meets at night in the diplomatic enclave, where the roads are straight, wide and empty.

‘You have to have at least, like, a BMW or a Mercedes to join. They meet at midnight and they race their cars. The Prime Minister’s office is always calling us to complain.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the Prime Minister can’t sleep. These engines make so much noise they keep him awake. So he calls us to complain, but obviously there’s nothing we can do.’

As I drive away, I cannot help thinking of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh tossing and turning in bed, his snowy hair un-turbaned on the pillow, his dreams interrupted by the rich boys’ Ferraris screaming up and down the roads outside. Manmohan Singh is of course the man who, long ago, as finance minister, opened up the economy and set the course for a new market elite.

Perspectives in capitalism

The cheap tricks private health insurance companies sometimes use to screw the rest of us... This one is called 'rescission'.

A House oversight subcommittee took a close look at a particularly shameful practice known as “rescission,” in which insurance companies cancel coverage for some sick policyholders rather than pay an expensive claim. The companies contend that rescissions are rare. But Congressional investigators found that three big insurers canceled about 20,000 individual policies over a five-year period — allowing them to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims. The companies typically argue that the policyholders withheld information about pre-existing conditions that would have disqualified them from coverage. But the subcommittee unearthed cases where the pre-existing conditions were trivial, or unrelated to the claim, or not known to the patient. When executives for the three companies were asked if they would be willing to limit rescissions to cases where the policyholder deliberately lied on an application form, all said they would not. This tactic will not be ended voluntarily.

The audacity to choke - and squeeze further

I recently read an article in the New York Times that had me thinking about the swaths of self denial that certain institutions use to cover themselves as they continue their business of making money off the global marketplace.

Read the report here in detail but one statement in particular got to me.

The report focuses on the ever growing trend of companies in the United States fanning out over larger areas around the globe in their search for the eternal lucre and profit. I can’t find too much fault with this behavior given that variants of capitalism seems to work OK in a majority of nations around the world (of course, it has it’s attendant warts that I shall list in some post later, but in its most basic form, it is a fairly feral animal that weeds out and mostly tramples slower moving animals leaving significant road kills in its hunting grounds while providing game meat for the villagers…)

With our economy currently heading towards a state of extended stasis, it is only natural for the capitalist machine to seek our greener pastures and feed itself. This way the economy grows, we keep the industries from dying out and innovation is spurred (add in a couple of hundred extra millionaires and all are happy with equilibrium). Most of us are ok with all of this because for the most part, the system works and we can go to the movies and have that bag of popcorn unhindered on weekends…

What does get to me is when senior analysts (the well educated suits) at financial firms start to couch naked capitalist aspirations with ennobling messages that portray financial companies playing a role in alleviating people in other countries from their current economic conditions to a higher, more modern, purportedly better condition while trying to explain their actions… Cunning contortionist are among the phrases that come to mind, but the quote is very telling.

“Think of 400 million people in China going from the 6th century to the 21st century over the last 15 years,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at ITG, a brokerage and advisory firm. “The same thing is going on in India as well. That’s still the big driver for growth. It could self-destruct for any number of reasons, but that underlying story is decades away from being over.”

Hogwash!

This statement is plain wrong and misleading for a lot of reasons.

- If people still think that countries are stuck in the 6th century then they would need to revisit their high school history, geography and civics classes (not to mention maybe a flawed education system)..

- Even if the above is true, it is indeed puerile to think that it is the capitalist industrial complex that is responsible for lifting people from the 6th century to the 21st century…

- A reason for some nations to become stuck in less modern times might be due to the reckless plundering that oiled the economic engines of countries fuelled by ideas of enlightenment and industrial revolution (here the plundering of nations was not just limited to human beings in the form of slave capital, but also materials hijacked from these nations to fill the coffers of the plunderers)… Think King Leopold II.

- At a psychological level, the statement just shows the brand of hidden elitism that a lot of us have towards the purported ‘third world’ (how I hate that term) countries. The elitism is normally well disguised in polite dinner chatter, but wells from the collective subconscious during times like these…

If one is in the business of making profits, just say it, it is sad when I see individuals believing that they are lifting people from their supposedly un-modern conditions when the alternative – leaving them untouched might have led to a better state – we just do not know for sure – do we?

Maurits Escher (1898-1972), 'Predestination', 294 X 422 mm, Lithograph, 1951