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| Latha Jishnu: Slumdogs and fat cat bankers |
| Latha Jishnu / New Delhi Feb 28, 2009, 00:27 IST |
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Mesmerised by the cinematic kitsch of Mumbai's underbelly, Americans are seeking palliatives to the horror stories tumbling out of the Byzantine world of investment banking.
Middle India is cock-a-hoop over its surrogate triumph at the Academy Awards. The eight Oscars for Slumdog Millionaire — three of these going to a couple of true blue Indians — for a romanticised Dickensian tale of a vile Fagin, exploited children and an uncaring system comes as the perfect stardust for a country seeking to gloss over the cruel realities of its 21st-century poverty and joblessness, a predicament made worse by the deepening global recession.
Thus, entire front pages have been given over to the delirium of watching the Indian slumdog arrive on the international stage, never mind that the portrayal is as savage as you can get in an oddly prettified plot. That it hasn’t touched a national raw nerve is because middle class Indians have begun to take such things in their stride; they are no longer affronted by the outside view of the degrading poverty that afflicts the overwhelming majority of their countrymen.
For an America that is experiencing what is possibly the worst recession in its history since the Great Depression, Slumdog Millionaire offers some relief from its own lethal cocktail of unemployment, unaffordable food, homelessness and increasing debt. Americans who are mesmerised by the cinematic kitsch of Mumbai’s underbelly are clearly seeking palliatives to the horror stories tumbling out of the Byzantine world of investment bankers who have been the cause of their undoing. For them, specially the legion who have lost their homes in the property market crash, real life characters like John Thain, the former chief of Merrill Lynch and Co, who couldn’t work without a $1,400 wastebasket in his office and a $35,000 commode in his toilet, are probably harder to stomach than the impeccably British-accented Jamal Malik who tries to pass off as an unlettered chaiwallah (tea boy) and hops from one implausible situation to the next with all the aplomb of an Etonian before winning Rs 2 crore in a game show.
After all, what have down-and-out Americans been hearing in the past fortnight? That Thain gave bonuses of at least $1 million each to 696 employees of Merrill Lynch before it imploded and was bought by Bank of America and, worse, that the total payment of bonuses, amounting to $3.6 billion, was made with the ‘apparent complicity’ of the bank which got billions of dollars of government bailout money. No major American investment and banking institution has remained untainted by the disclosures made to a Congressional panel. Citigroup’s CEO Vikram Pandit cancelled an order for a $50 million aircraft only after it became public.
It’s not as if the disclosures and the popular disbelief and outrage are stopping these financial behemoths from their feckless ways. Morgan Stanley, which intends to pamper its top executives with lavish bonuses, made the disingenuous statement that the money for bonuses would come from operating expenses rather than the bailout money!
For the vast majority of Indians, Slumdog Millionaire’s message of hope — apparently that is the basic message of the Danny Boyle concoction, which The New York Times review described as “one of the most upbeat stories about living in hell imaginable” — is an affront. The Bollywood-style melodrama is as superficial a slice of India as you can get although its makers claim to be reflecting the joyous spirit of the slum dwellers.
As the delighted press took up the ‘joyous refrain’ with outsize headlines and hype, it managed to hide a nightmare that is engulfing India’s slumdogs. Edged out of the picture and squeezed into small print, the papers gave little play to the real underdog of the global downturn: The vulnerable Indian worker whose job always hangs by a thread and who has little hope of finding any alternative livelihood in a time of shrinking markets and heightened protectionism. Over half a million workers in the garments sector alone are out of work and will soon be joined by an equal number unless exports look up — an unlikely prospect for some time to come. And as the gloomy estimates pile up from the labour ministry — a recent survey estimates that the small-business sector lost about half a million jobs in the December quarter — the game show view of the world offers an enticing escape from reality.
According to the Federation of Indian Export Organisations, its member-companies may end up cutting 10 million jobs this year as construction firms and exporting units put new projects on hold. Add to this the nearly 20,000 Indians who have returned from the Gulf, almost all of them bottom-rung workers who have taken the first hit from the construction bust in the region. This is just the beginning of an exodus that will have serious repercussions for India because the Gulf worker has been the bedrock of foreign remittances, in good times and bad.
It’s not surprising that the euphoria over Slumdog Millionaire is limited to the mainstream media and the upper classes. Collections in India show that the movie hasn’t been a hit, and its Hindi version almost a flop. If Dharavi is cheering, it’s only because two of its tiny denizens who were used to portray the cruel heart of poverty in India, were dolled up and sent to Kodak Theatre in LA for the big night.
But Americans will continue to be enticed by the false promise of the slumdog phenomenon. Paul Smith, the executive producer of Slumdog Millionaire and chairman of Celador Films, is apparently all set to revive the most popular game show in television history: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? which was aired on ABC from 1999 to 2002. Millions of viewers watched the show on which the India version was modelled. Some reports have it that Slumdog was just the trailer to bringing the main show back in the US sometime soon.
Interestingly, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? has just been licensed in war-ravaged Afghanistan. Clearly, there is little to beat the opiate of a game show in keeping the masses hooked while bombs keep exploding outside.
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