Comment

Rang De India

There was an interesting example of saturation reporting in a well-known news channel during George W Bush's visit to India. The reporter stood in front of a healthy buffalo from Haryana. The newsworthiness of the animal was that Bush during his visit to the NG Ranga University in Hyderabad was shown the buffalo. The reporter felt helpless that the buffalo could not speak. So he turned to the buffalo-minder, and asked him what happened when Bush met the buffalo? The man said that nothing really happened. The president saw the buffalo and said it was good. Nothing more. The reporter was disappointed that no nice anecdote could be got out of either man or buffalo.

Why is the Indian media so obsessed with the US, when the majority of the middle class are indifferent? It is not just the poor people who kept away from all the excitement surrounding the visit. Even the Hollywood and MacDonald-crazy urban Indians showed no great interest in the Bush trip. It is an interesting disjunction between the "conspicuous opinion-makers" andthe people. The common people are not anti-US as the ideologically committed Left or the belligerent mullahs, they are not any more in awe of the US of A either, a perception that has not percolated to the media and to the rest of the intelligentsia. The Indian middle class is more critically aware of the good and the bad in the American system.

There is this trend, mostly unnoticed, that young Indians do not anymore look to the US as the El Dorado, the land of luxury and happiness. They have discovered that India is now a changed place, and in many ways a better place to live in. That is why not many are looking for that precious "green card" any more. Even those who go there do so with a sense of rare realism. They know the problems of living there, the not very attractive sense of social isolation and of being wrenched from traditional roots. So they are looking for ways of connecting with the home country while they continue to live in the US for strictly professional reasons.

The young Indians who went to the US in the 1960s and the 1970s had stars in their eyes. America was not only a land of promise and plenty. It was also the place where you broke free from the conservative family and social bonds. But that trend has changed since the 1990s. Young Indians increasingly value traditional bonds. They are no less focused on careers yet they have also begun to value the warm and relatively stressfree Indian lifestyle. The informal support systems loom large in their eyes as they realise that along with financial well-being, emotional and spiritual assurance are equally important. It is this subtle shift of the middle class to conservative ethos which has not been grasped either by the media or by social scientists.

There is also a more mature view of the American system, Indians realise the problems of social differentiation based on race, creed and class. Many of the Indians now know the differences between Democratic and Republican politics, though they are still not ideologically hooked to either of them. Their political choices are based on hard pragmatism. One can also see the emergence of the fierce Indian liberal in the US, exemplified in Manmohan Singh’s daughter—a prospect unimaginable even a decade ago. And more and more Indians are investing in India even as they stay abroad.

Young Indians are not any more enamoured of Hollywood. For them Bollywood has an emotional resonance and so they are not shy of flaunting their love for it. The silent revolution of the last 20 years is that it has become hip to be Indian. The Yankee accent is out, and the desi drawl is in.

The writer is a commentator on social and political issues.