It was a prominent British mediaperson and a strident compère of a popular programme on BBC, who as he anchored a discussion on TV posed a query to his audience thus: “Are Indians mean?”
I didn’t think the debate could come to a definitive conclusion, but I suspect that like a viral epidemic, this is a thesis some eminent westerners have been positing lately. Not so long ago Bill Gates came up with the startling conclusion that Hindus (read Indians) are tight-fisted. Maybe he was upset with the fact that India’s top industrialists did not chip in for the corpus of funds for charity to contain AIDS.
Now, how on earth does one get to be a tycoon in the first place? A wag once said that Alfred Nobel invented the dynamite, blew up many people and bridges, and made a hefty packet in the bargain. And what does he do as atonement? Institute the Nobel Prize. What a spin-off!
That said, there is a case for introspection. Our finance minister is mooting the idea of bringing in new tax slabs for the super rich. A few among the elite band have actually welcomed this. What does the upper-crust Indian work like the proverbial ant for? A popular cartoon depicts an opulent wedding where a lady tells her husband that the vulgar show of wealth at their daughter’s wedding was better than the one at hand. Some pundit deduced that up to 15% of the grain produced in the country goes towards the consumption at our weddings.
The sons and daughters of our land have carried on the same charming traits across seven seas. When I spent a weekend at my medical school chum’s house in England and asked him about a famous NRI’s daughter’s wedding that had just got all the media attention, he said it went way beyond imagination.
The industrialist must have spent a fortune, may be even an amount that all 60 from our MBBS batch would earn in a lifetime on the festivities. But then, he added with a shrug, “It is his money.” Didn’t a comic once say, “Money is like manure, to be effective, it should spread out thin and not heaped up?”
Down in the south, weddings are only a shade less ostentatious. We also seem to revel in making huge mansions which neither please the eye nor are comfortable to live in. Now the paints come in hideous hues; baby pink, revolting red, garish green. The landscape is dotted with partly occupied houses made from the remittances sent by NRIs. At this rate, people in the next millennium would say a 1000 years ago, a civilisation worshipped concrete structures.
Maybe Indians are habitually thrifty. Until the 90s, it was all about shortages, long queues with no certitude of getting what you wanted.
People in the South Sea Islands are so carefree and generous they gladly part with their earnings towards loans and charity. We Indians are nowhere near as charitable. Nor for that matter the famous TV anchor and his kin in the west.