Sunil Sethi: Was 2004 the Year India tempted fate?

AL FRESCO

As the year ends on a high note of tragedy with the killer tsunami leaving hundreds and thousands dead and wreaking havoc in peninsular India and Southeast Asia, one cannot help wondering if 2004 was the year when Asia, and India in particular, tempted fate.

It was a year of dramatic turnarounds and unexpected growth, a time, for instance, when the rest of the world would rather park their money in Asia than anywhere else; and also when an unexpected election result in India plunged the Sensex to its nadir and then broke records by touching a historic high.

Such a volatile swing of the pendulum by itself should suggest something odd.

Yet the fundamentals of the economy were visibly strong, thanks to the worldwide confidence India inspired by the ruling triumvirate of Manmohan Singh, P Chidambaram and Montek Singh Ahluwalia.

Resilient enough anyway to tide over concerns at coalition partners in the new government tugging in different directions or outbreak of war in the country's mightiest industrial empire.

My overriding personal impression of India in the year gone hinged on surprise tinged with anxiety. In all my life I had never seen middle-class Indians make so much money or splurge with such insouciant ease.

Each time I ventured out of the capital all I saw was miles and miles of urban sprawl""there was not much left of open unspoilt countryside, for instance, on the Delhi-Agra, Delhi-Jaipur, or Delhi-Moradabad highways.

Jaipur, considered the first properly planned city of the 18th century, was nothing but a raucous, chaotic slum; Agra, a somewhat sleepy little town till a decade ago, was a nightmare; and a contemplative spot on the Ganges, crowded out on the Hardwar-Rishikesh stretch by a Disneyland of outlandish temples and ashrams, was scarcely visible until one hit the half-way heights of the Garhwal Himalayas.

The young urban rich are always a class apart in any society but I had not realised there were so many in India, leading a precariously virtual life based on the web, the cell phone and the credit card.

Sex, that great benchmark of middle-class social mores, became a tradeable commodity among teenagers. Tales of hysterical sanyasins, swapped babies and kiss'n'kill images of Bollywood stars preoccupied the media and the public.

The word that came continuously to mind in 2004 was "promiscuous". I use it judiciously. In its broadest sense promiscuous can mean indiscriminate, casual, random or even confused (viz. Alexander Pope: "Throngs promiscuous strew the level green").

Reckless borrowing or spending is a form of financial promiscuity. The meaning was sharply brought home to me in a recent chat with a cameraman colleague, a young provincial Tamil who arrived in Delhi 18 years ago in search of a career.

Today the bulk of his Rs 50,000 salary is swallowed by a home loan, a top-up on the home loan to finance his family home in his village, a car loan and a personal loan to pay for extras.

In addition, he confessed, he trades online in a small way in stocks. "Everyone in my department does it," he said by way of explaining that he was following the accepted norm among his peer group. But what about a few pennies to fall back on? Had he no savings at all ? "Nothing," he said with a stifled giggle. "If I don't get my salary one month I'm done for."

2004 should be remembered as the year when that most diehard of middle-class values, value-for-money, lost its cachet. Ironically, despite booms in the property market and the services sector and a high rate of industrial growth, it was not clear if poverty levels had shown a commensurate decline.

The monsoon was patchy and agriculture growth was mediocre, if not stagnant. There was no evidence to show that the lot of the rural or urban poor had undergone any of the changes widely visible among many sections of the urban middle class.

This can only mean heightened, not reduced, disparities""surely a promiscuous occurrence if one takes the word in its broadest sense. Large pools of darkness in a canvas glimmering with sparks and flashes of light.

Is this not a way to tempt the furies ? Life in its purest, truthful forms is an imitation of nature. And perhaps nature has its way of reminding us that there is far too much injustice prevalent in Asia, particularly in India.