Last week, a curious article on urban poverty, sympathetically described young men and women (or "millennials") across India's towns and metros consumer-walking their way into malnutrition and hunger because after shopping for contemporary necessities such as upwardly mobile food and clothes, they had no money left to feed themselves adequately. The article was panned by an equally indignant and righteous toned rebuttal about who the real millennials in India were and what poverty - urban or rural - was really like.
Both articles miss the point really.
I am sure scores of such millennials and their predilections exist, as do of course the "real" ones, and highlighting the death-drive of consumerism is well-taken. But the come-back on the death-drive is not the reality principle. To me, the ersatz millennials are symptomatic less of urban poverty - and more of aspects of our urban imagination.
Imagination is the technique we deploy to bridge the gap between aspiration and status quo. In recent years, and for a variety of reasons that I am not able to go into here, in the imagination we have used to bridge our personal and collective desires, what has been eviscerated is work - and the place of work in our lives.
To these millennials and others, there is very little evidence of the relevance of work and its existence in relation to the realization of most collective aspirations these days. Collective narratives of work have all but disappeared. Bollywood, that custodian of our popular imagination, has scarcely shown a hero or heroine for some time now to do a day's work, earn a wage, fight with the boss on a work related issue, or come up trumps with a work-plan that defeats the villain/enemy/poverty.
In fact, poverty has all but disappeared from our screens and these narratives. Our heroes are born to an empire, and our heroines are rich daddy's girls. Films feature the super-rich as aspirational role models, but no longer provide templates on how to get stupidly rich.
Those who work in factories, workshops, and call-centres take home an ever-decreasing fraction of the income of their bosses. The farmer may have a very good sense of the political power that the local MLA has accrued in one electoral term in office, but he has absolutely no handle on how the MLA has come to own a fancy car that costs several times the annual turnover of the village. Thus, the spectacular and ever-growing wealth of so many increasingly appears to most like a cipher.
While visible labour produces no real wealth it seems, visible wealth seems to come increasingly from invisible or secret labour. There is no satisfactory explanation in the public domain that connects the rise of spectacular wealth in the face of its ostensibly arbitrary relationship with work and labour. In an environment governed by arbitrariness, wealth has become vastly disconnected from productivity and appears to be generated from nowhere really, and certainly without any work.
When you can't understand how your neighbor has suddenly acquired assets disproportionate to their day job while your family races to the bread-line and permanent indebtedness, it is then that terms like "business", "corruption", "growth rate", "economy" all become talismanic carriers of meaning and proportion on both sides of the divide.
This is not to say that those who aspire to have better lives do not wish to work, or indeed do not work. Far from it. It is just that in the imagination, there is no signage of work in the map of travel from status quo to an aspired future. In such a scenario, it is no surprise to see that trade in speculative futures - astrology, pyramid and inviarably Ponzi schemes, godmanship - has thrived and won the day. This also explains the runaway success of the
achhe din campaign. All these have one thing in common - none of these futures are based in any form of labour whatsoever. So it is not difficult to see why our ersatz millennials are convinced that it is not enough to merely turn up at work, but that to be able to move up wearing that unaffordable designer kit is uncompromisingly essential towards securing their aspired future.
(Kriti Kapila teaches anthropology at the India Institute, King's College London.)
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