Lunch at the Hilton

Without realising it, the boys paced down the marble staircase like a pair of distinguished statesmen. While hilarious, something in that image made me reflect on what the future of India holds in the hands of its following generation of leaders. At just over twenty years of age, this lot were typically employed as managers in international companies, bankers or the like, and going about it with impressive ease. Lunch at the Hilton Oberoi had proved to be an overpriced experience but it seemed that for Gurveer and Ryan, this was not too far from the ordinary, and for a selected few, very much part of what India has to offer today. I am not qualified enough to introduce a proper discussion about the construction of social strata in Indian society, but it is suffice to say that from a European traveller's perspective, the pyramid of wealth distribution appears to stand firmly on its head.
Cruising down Muhammad Ali Road one night, the sight of hundreds of homeless people sleeping rough under a flyover bridge reminded us of the flipside of urban life in Mumbai: a city where Asia's largest slum hosts more than 1 million people. Ironically, driving down the street we whappened to be tuned into American Christmas songs, and a bizarre image of Santa Claus coming to town distributing salvation out of a Coca Cola truck sprang to mind. Then and there, however, for reasons beyond my comprehension, the homeless seemed at ease where they were resting: a strange observation from behind locked doors, in an air-conditioned white Honda.
After all this, you should be as surprised as I am to learn that India, according to a study by Messrs Deiniger and Squire for the World Bank (from 1996, quoted in Ormerod: Why Most Things Fail 2005), has been assigned a Gini coefficient (measure of income inequality) notably lower than that of the US and France - i.e. this is, on paper, a society where income is disrtributed more widely across social strata than in some of the richest and most developed nations in the world: a strange observation from an academic perspective.
To sum up the experience I reckon that never in my life, in such a short span of time, have I met people facing such varying standards of life. Beggars, omnipresent; merchants, touts, hoteliers, hassling people day and night; bureaucrats, brahmins, cops, guides, all scouting for a bribe or donation; the truly wealthy – I guess only them minding their own business. It often feels like, in India, hospitality goes as far as your purse stretches and that relationships to visitors are fickle and open for exploitation. These may be harsh words, and may merely reflect a fleeting memory of some disappointing moments, but it holds some truth, for local culture and values are much shaped by a surprisingly stern tradition of individualism: not in the occidental sense, but more in the context of survival. Time and again, our wonderful hosts in Mumbai proved the opposite by huge doses of an amicable hospitality I wish to return someday soon. But nevertheless, in some ways, there are traditions within the nation's cultures that, from our perspective, come across as weirdly counterproductive in the warped world of "Modern India".
On that bombshell, it should be noted that modern India has started to grapple with its identity, and while traditional India has yet to prove its willingness to follow suit, there is no hiding from the demons within- and outside its borders. Unlike Europe, India is not afraid of the dark: in fact, parts of it still has not emerged from the hiding, and much prefers to stay that way. True change springs from numerous elements within the body and soul of an entire nation, but it will take more than political leadership to grapple with this in the immense plurality of India: and this translates to other great projects too. Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of the Nation, once put it thus: „Unity to be real must stand the severest strain without breaking“. Where have we seen this before?