On the spot
Tavleen Singh
It was one of those fortuitous coincidences. On the day last week that I picked up an old biography of Indira Gandhi to do some research for a new book I am writing I happened to go for the first time into one of Gurgaon’s vast, new office complexes. My excursions to Gurgaon had until then been restricted to visiting its plush cinemas and shiny shopping malls but my son wanted to introduce me to a new German fitness regime called Milon which is currently available only in one gym run by some private companies so I suppose it could be said it was through discovering Milon that I discovered a whole new India. If not quite discovered then at least became acutely aware of this change for the better.
It is an India that would not have existed had we continued to follow the socialist economic policies of Mrs. Gandhi and an India that could well disappear again if our Finance Minister continues to steer us back towards those old policies. He is inclined that way because Pranab Mukherjee did his first stint as Finance Minister when Mrs. Gandhi was prime minister and if his recent Budget is anything to go by he has not moved away from the lessons he learned at Mrs. Gandhi’s knee.
First, let me describe to you what I mean by the new India that I caught a small glimpse of in the Gurgaon office complex and let me offer you a comparison with the old. To get to the gym we drove down a road that was a model of the old India: filthy, disorderly, decaying and hopeless. The road was newish but on either side were small, shabby windowless shops of the old kind. They sold everything from sweets and groceries to cell phones and colour televisions. The shops stood on the edge of an open drain and beside an open garbage dump from which garbage spilled everywhere and reeked to the skies. Unhealthy cows and mangy dogs scrabbled in the dump for rotting food. This is so common an Indian sight that those of us who have lived in India all our lives barely notice it any more. If I mention it here it is to emphasize the contrast between this old India and the new India I am about to describe.
My son’s trainer, Jeevan, waited for us outside the entrance to the office complex because security restrictions would have prevented us from getting in without him. After we met him we followed his car down to a basement car park and then walked into a tall building of glass and steel. No sooner than we had entered its air-conditioned lobby than the old India I just described seemed to belong to another planet. We wandered past food courts in which young Indians, both men and women, worked in spotless uniforms and then down to a huge gym in which more young Indians worked as trainers and fitness consultants. In Mrs. Gandhi’s time private enterprise was almost non-existent so these same young people would have had no choice but to work in some government office. The height of aspirations in that time was a government job, no matter how lowly, no matter how bleak. A government job was the thing young Indians wanted more than anything else because it was all there was. Even upper middle class Indians would return from completing a fine education in Oxford or Cambridge and aspire to join the civil service because other opportunities were so few and far between.
Mrs. Gandhi’s economic policies did not create wealth because she had a contempt for consumerism and prosperity. Her idea of economics was to ‘serve the poor’. Her voters came mostly from rural India where in the time that she was prime minister poverty and illiteracy were the norm rather than the exception so people voted for her often only because they knew no better. In the biography I was reading of her when I went to the Gurgaon gym last week the adulatory biographer describes an ‘ideally suited’ constituency for Mrs. Gandhi as one in which ‘a little over forty per cent of the population lived below the poverty line.’ Mrs. Gandhi spent vast sums of taxpayers money on welfare programmes for the rural poor that did very little to reduce poverty. Things began to change only after the economic reforms that began in 1991 and that laid the seeds of a new India in which young people can today aim for higher things.
The young people I saw in the Gurgaon office complex are living proof of how much has changed. Young Indians today aspire to a standard of living that has nothing to do with poverty lines and welfare programmes but because Sonia Gandhi, our de facto prime minister, has the same economic worldview as her late mother-in-law we have in the past two years started reverting to old times. Pranab Mukherjee’s latest Budget has been described by experts as the second worst in Indian history because it is so retrograde. The worst Budget ever being the one Mrs. Gandhi came up with more than three decades ago in which rich Indians were made to pay 97% taxes. Mr. Mukherjee’s recent attempts at retrospective taxation is in keeping with this philosophy and has succeeded mostly in driving foreign investors away. Last week he made a feeble effort at luring them back by deferring some of his tax propasals but it may end up being too little too late.
Meanwhile, to end on a happier note. During my day spent reveling in the new India I worked out on the Milon machines and in seventeen minutes felt more impact than I do in an hour spent on a treadmill. As someone who works out nearly every day and works out hard I was more than a little skeptical when Jeevan told me that I needed to spend no more than a minute on each of the six weights machines and a mere four minutes on a cycle and a cross trainer. I thought this would be for me no more strenuous than a slow walk in the park. Imagine my amazement when at the end of seventeen minutes I nearly collapsed with exertion. Milon is a new German invention that is just beginning to enter the Indian fitness market. Will it spread and thrive? Only if the new India continues to spread and thrive. It is too depressing to think that we could go back to the way we were.
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