Tightening the belt

It’s literally ‘all quiet on the western front’, here in Cannes, at the Tax Free World Association Fair.

It is the first time I am looking at recession up close, and it is both, saddening and frightening. The place usually bustles with energy. Walking up and down the many villages, colourful and choc-a-bloc with brands that spell magic in any language, is both tiring and invigorating.

And the mind has marvelled at the new launches that I have witnessed each year, one more ambitious than the other as each brand tries to out do its competition.This year, too, there are launches, but the mood is different.

Cautious, is one word that comes to mind. Introspective is another.

And rightly so. Tightening the belt always has a direct effect on the mind. When the stomach is half full, the mind begins to go into unexplored realms, often stopping to examine life and its meaning.

Thus, it is perhaps that the opening conference at the Fair had three speakers, each a known figure, each associated with humanitarian causes, talk about the future of the world and the need for corporates to look to giving back to the world some of what they have gained.

So it is, too, that most of the new launches seem to try to portray hope for the future in presenting both brightness and lightness.

Gold was obvious in every new launch, bottles glittered with the gold fragrant liquids they were filled with; gold coated flacons were planned for the near future, to entice and seduce the spending to resume. Even chocolatiers had downsized their products,
creating brightly wrapped baubles instead of stocky, stodgy bars, and monochromatic gift boxes.

Yet, most fragrances were lighter in composition, thus priced up to 15 per cent lesser than earlier editions, and aimed at younger, not so cautious, pockets. The young can always be seduced by sensuousness and the magic of glamour.

And not surprising India is in the news. The West is looking eastward for comfort; the fact that our country is ‘recovering’ faster from a recession that seems to have enveloped the West like a blanket of fog that will not lift, is like the first shoot that shows itself after the long snow covered winter.

It makes me happy, and it makes me wonder. Whether this new found attention will help us find ourselves faster in the world arena. Or whether we will lose out moorings as Indians as we play host to brands that see us as a lifeboat in the sea of their crisis.
Time, I believe for introspection on our part too, as the privileged few of a country, on how to walk the thin line between getting, and giving.