Please Sir, may I have some more?

Please Sir, may I have some more?

Charles Dickens, said to have been reincarnated as JK Rowling, the author of the phenomenally successful Harry Potter series, never got over the trauma of being sent to the Poor House with his entire family, on account of his father’s bankruptcy.

The brilliantly conceived Harry Potter, though an ace wizard, is an orphan, maltreated by his remaining family. Could it be the same Dickensian soul in JK Rowling carrying on with the expiation?  

Dickens mined the trauma of that poor house experience of some two years in book after book including Oliver Twist , David Copperfield and A Christmas Carrol. He, even after he became rich and famous, also demonstrated several colourful mundane and profane quirks in his personal life as well.

In Oliver Twist, the protagonist famously has the temerity to ask for more porridge in the orphanage and brings down the wrath of the establishment on his hapless if innocent head.

Dickens’ thematics of deprivation, hunger and brutal repression brings to mind the strange ongoing discourse about the so-called Poverty Line, with a blue-turbaned Mr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia of the Planning Commission trying to calm the troubled waters in his considerably pucca accent while wearing his air of inviolability.

But showing surprise at the media focus on his Rs. 32/- per person per day Laxman Rekha, when it used to be only Rs. 24/- is somehow missing the point. Nobody seems to realise that having such a thing in itself shouts about the failure of our remedies and nostrums in this regard after more than sixty under-achieving years!

It is shocking the amount of newsprint and broadcast media time that has been devoted to this obscenity. Noted columnist Mr. Swaminathan.A. Aiyar added to the surrealism in a recent article by opining that since poor families tended to have more members and had say five or six mouths to feed; a rate of Rs. 32 per day times 6 would work out to a not totally shameful Rs. 6,000/-  or so per month! And that the middle class were not morally qualified to ask for more for the poor because they cribbed about paying this kind of wage to drivers and servants. What happened to the logic of 6,000/- times 6 here, presumably for a family of domestics all cleaning and swabbing in unison in neighbouring homes, or drivers of either gender, from ages 10 to 79 doing likewise? Then, the poor would be veritably middle-class, and we could move the Poverty Line to say, waist-high!

The fact is that Socialism over 40 years has done us no favours. We became a nation of lofty, lecturing, hectoring, arrogance-laden theorists, our reach nevertheless always exceeding our grasp. Then Liberalisation came, with an ultimatum from the World Bank in 1991, and changed the rate of growth, slowly, and then very fast, considering it was climbing from a paltry little third-world base.

And gradually the middle-classes swelled, till now we talk of some 300 million people, with the poor being twice as numerous, and a couple of hundred million people in the rich category, differentiated between those who have cash and assets worth crores of rupees, and yet others with so much that they could never properly tell you just what they were worth.

Besides the number of Indian US dollar billionaires is swelling respectably, not just in the domestic but the Asian context, and millionaires are plentiful enough to hardly elicit comment.

This singular fact of growth in the economy near the double-digits year-on-year has led to whatever change and transformation we see around us. If the poor are going to get anywhere at all, then they are going to benefit from the effects of this sustained growth and transformation in their possibilities.

But there is indeed another problem that hasn’t quite hit the comfortably pontificating middle-classes here in India as yet, but might, when rising wages drive low-end jobs overseas to poorer countries.

Remember, once the developed world busy exporting jobs, spoke of cheap Japanese and Taiwanese imported goods of dubious quality.  Even China with its formidable manufacturing strength and current export competitiveness is going to have to move up the value-chain and hopefully be saved from the fate of many others. They, like us, have a potentially massive domestic market to run to.

Similarly, as India climbs up the same globalised economic tree in hot pursuit, the middle classes will have to keep expanding to fuel more and more domestic demand.

But if we export low-end jobs, our economy, as in the West, will turn from being investment driven and manufacturing/service industry/infrastructure based, to a consumerist/trading one.

This tends to favour the rich with the resources to corner trading opportunities, and the economy tends to get polarised between the rich and the poor, relatively speaking of course.

America is seeing the shrinking of its middle-class now, grown strong in the post WWII years with its massive job creation programmes, and, if we tread the same developmental path we could see the same thing happen here.

Of course, we have a long way to go before the worm turns, particularly with our birth rate persisting and prolific, and the years in between are assuredly good ones.

But decades from now perhaps, we will have to face not the problem of monetary scarcity, but one of plenty without that many jobs. And that is provided the rich who control the finance haven’t bet it all on the wrong horse like Lehman and Goldman and all those happy Jewish people in Wall Street, now being occupied by a bunch of irate “smelly hippies”.

But even if the famous Indian conservatism and rectitude keep us on the straight and narrow, it might still be a feeling amongst those of us who are not rich and probably not poor. A feeling of being all dressed up with nowhere to go unless we plunge into the world of the self-employed. This more so with no Laxman Rekha drawn up to tell us our place in the scheme of things.

(1,004 words)

10^th October 2011

Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader Edit on Edit Page of The Pioneer on 14th October 2011 as "May I have some more?". Also published online at www.dailypioneer.com and in The Pioneer ePaper. Archived under Guest Columnists online at www.dailypioneer.com