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ShareNumbers have always been a problem with me. All this talk and persistent bemoaning about economies going belly-up, recession and unemployment is too abstract for me. I need a good story, some faces, for the empathy factor to kick in.
I have been in Washington DC for the last three weeks and if your antennae is not out looking for doom and gloom you won't spot them. Yes, everything seems to be on sale or drastically reduced. But the restaurants are full. People don't look grim. The big gas-guzzlers are on the road. And, just the other day I saw a designer boutique for dogs which had fancy dog carriers and beds for the canines in the shop window. Would you believe it, there was a Chewy Vuiton with the famed logo of the luxury-goods maker, a Burberry, a Dolce Gabbana -- faux or real I could not tell! It was also a dog spa: within five minutes three women walked in to retrieve their freshly shampooed and buffed pets -- two of them Pomeranians. To Indian eyes the hard times did not appear to be all that bad.
But last week I read an article in The Washington Post which suddenly made all those numbers and dire predictions in the media all too palpably real. It seemed at first to be an insignificant story: there was a 10 to 30 per cent increase in people going to libraries. However, it wasn't the number of people flocking to libraries but the kind of people that rang an alarm bell.
The libraries were spilling over with the newly desperate -- from men in suits who had lost their jobs and slept their nights away in their cars having lost their homes to "anxious and depressed people with nowhere else to go" to the homeless coming in from the cold and even children, brought in to participate in the libraries' cultural activities because their parents could no longer afford to entertain them.
Interestingly, job-search desks are also springing up in libraries where people are being helped to write their resumes. Even more shocking is the fact that therapists will soon be counselling librarians who can't deal with sad and anxious people congregating on the premises. Well, at least there will be more jobs for therapists.
I now begin to understand what Mother Teresa meant when she said, after a visit to the States, that a poor person in a poor country is better off than a poor person in a rich country. And, she didn't even see the tent cities that are cropping up all over, pitched by those who have lost their homes in foreclosures.
Perhaps, I am guilty of shedding crocodile tears. Real and unimaginable misery lies closer to home; just look under the flyovers in our big cites or at the slums nestling on the toes of high rises.
I can't forget the image of families shoe-horned into tiny spaces behind grill-like structures under the Tulsi Pipe Road that runs along Western Railway line. They remind me of half-dead chicken squeezed together in cages on their way to the butchers. (What Mother Teresa might have meant by that remark is that it takes much less for the poor in richer nations to reach the cracking point.Perhaps the nouveau-poor are not as resilient as the old-poor. )
Depravation is also a very relative thing. While many middle class Americans are losing the roofs over their heads, recession is also forcing the rich to lose or let go of their mistresses. In hard times they probably top the list of luxury items that have to be dropped. Being a mistress or even a gigolo is no longer as lucrative as it used to be.
A recent survey carried out by Prince and Associates, a market research firm, showed that over 80 per cent of multi-millionaires were cutting back on gifts and expensive clandestine vacations. Shrinking expense accounts and stricter scrutiny of the finances of corporate honchos is making it increasingly difficult for them to put their little infidelities on their expense accounts.
Perhaps we can now upend F Scott Fitzgerald's memorable phrase and say that the rich are no longer so different from you and me after all.
