Sunil Sethi: Festive season's feeding frenzy

AL FRESCO

I have been in Europe for the last couple of weeks""Munich, Frankfurt and, later, in provincial England""and one thing struck me with some force. I have never seen so many streets with so many shops so full of festival rubbish more than two months in advance of Christmas. How it was possible to stuff so many candles, twinkling lights, straw, sticks, glassware, food hampers and festival season geegaws into so much retail space? From the shopping plazas of Germany to the supermarkets of rural Yorkshire, the gift-shopping frenzy had begun""a telling comment, I thought, on the conspicuous consumption of the west.

But back home in Delhi consumption was hitting the high-decibel notes. Diwali madness was in full cry with bumper-to-bumper traffic on the roads and standing room only in the shops. One evening I ventured into a popular white goods showroom in south Delhi, situated about half a kilometre from home, in search of a washing machine""it took 45 minutes to negotiate the traffic jams and almost as much time to catch the sales staff's attention. About a hundred customers were trying to do exactly the same. From the basement to the second floor the shop was crammed with so many TV, home theatre and washing machine models that the enterprising owner, clearly running out of floor space, had inventively built display shelves along the stairways. Crowds of customers, many with children in tow for the free prizes, were snapping up the latest LCD screens, upwards of Rs 70,000 a piece, as if they were about to go out of fashion. Business was so brisk that the retailer was throwing in free-home deliveries""a sort of dial-a-washing machine service like a phone-in pizza.

With a pang of sentimental regret I thought of the pre-Diwali day back in the late 1960s, when, on a similar family outing in Connaught Place, we acquired our first TV set, a four-legged Hungarian model called Orion, for which there was actually a waitlist! But Diwali in those days, like black-and-white Doordarshan programming, was a simpler, uncomplicated festival, an intimate celebration with family and a few friends.

Another evening during the week I was taken by a friend to an art gallery to advise her on an artwork she was considering buying. Situated in central Delhi the gallery (two large floors plus a sculpture garden at the back) was about four times the size of the white goods showroom, worth a rental of at least Rs 25 lakh a month. There were more artists on display than there were TV and washing machine models""and most of them so new that not only had I had never heard of many but of a quality of work so variable that some were virtually on a par with pavement art.

A smooth-talking young man in a cool combo of navy blazer and blue jeans""he called himself "art advisor" to the gallery owners""took us through a staggering number of works. But it was soon clear that he was more a shop talker than art stalker. He knew more about posting, mailing and downloading art images on the net than real art""a "virtual" salesman.

Rock-bottom prices began at about a lakh rupees for medium-sized canvases by unknowns and climbed steadily to Rs 5-6 lakh. Then a sudden 10- to 50-fold leap for the few works by established names, ranging between Rs 50 lakh and Rs 3 crore. I was dumbfounded but my friend was undaunted; she negotiated skillfully and made an on-the-spot purchase.

With another pang of regret I thought of the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, when one popped round to see artist friends or art gallery owners, often bought directly from them and usually on installments that, in a spirit of unhurried friendship and ease, sometimes carried on for many months.

After Diwali week's feeding frenzy it is no longer easy to believe that conspicuous consumption is the prerogative of the rich and greedy west.