We experienced liberalization alright, but indirectly through the lives of other Indians. Our grainy black-and-white TVs showed us the lives of luckier Indians who were buying cars, shopping in Dubai, vacationing in Mauritius, and going to Delhi from Mumbai on a plane. What trickled down to us was not the jobs and the wealth of liberalization, but its glitter and its rhetoric. Though 1991 did not change our lives, it did change the world around us.
The rickshaw-wallahs remained rickshaw-wallahs, the sweepers stayed sweepers, and the labourers continued to labour. When “jobs were created in telecom, media, technology, finance and newly denationalized aviation industries” after the 1991 reforms, our parents were not among those eligible, or even if technically eligible, they didn’t have the financial wherewithal and the social capital to go grab these new jobs. What trickled down to us was not the jobs and the wealth of liberalization, but its glitter and its rhetoric.ĭespite the cultural diversity, we chawl-dwellers shared the socio-economic label of “marginalized” or “underprivileged” Indians. As a kid I didn’t even register that I was buddies with Muslims and Dalits and Christians until much later when I realized that for many other Indians, labels were far more important than individuals. I grew up sharing, regularly and not on just special occasions, games and fights and modaks and sheer kurma with children from all the major communities that form India.
When the kids played cricket, we represented a richer diversity than the national cricket team itself. More than 200 ragtag souls lived in three separate structures, each family in a little 2-room section of it. We lived in a noisy chawl complex in the 1990s, some versions of which the rest of India has seen in Bollywood movies like Vaastav (I specifically remember Vaastav because as a kid that was the only film I saw which showed a superstar living in the kind of place where I lived). My father used to work in a textile mill in the 1980s, but after hundreds of mills closed down around the time of liberalization, he took to plying an auto-rickshaw - and remained in that occupation even as his sons graduated and got decent jobs in the 2010s, with one of them going to Harvard after finishing an MBBS degree in Pune.Īs a kid I didn’t even register that I was buddies with Muslims and Dalits and Christians… The year 1991 did not change that for us. Besides, while folks from some Indian families landed jobs in big cities with multinational companies, bringing home “shiny red push-button telephones,” families like mine continued to live our same old telephone-less (and fridge-less and motorbike-less etc.) lives, in chawls with a community latrine the path to which would often be flooded and occupied by snakes and mongooses during the Konkan monsoons. Many commentators have argued that 1991 was not as sharp a break as has popularly been portrayed. I am sure even he realizes the generalization involved in those words. Mukherjee discusses several political economic challenges of the 1970s and 1980s and then says “all this ended” after the 1991 reforms. This essay thus aims to represent what people like me feel about India’s current state of affairs - fully aware that my perspective is still only one of many that can make the case for why the nation has spectacularly failed in the last six to seven years, or even prior to that. It became obvious that true to our country’s awesome diversity, there is diversity even in why people are losing hope in it. The essay talked about several valid issues and challenges, but many issues that I believe are fundamental, did not appear or played a minuscule role in Mukherjee’s argumentation. I took note, and after seeing more people sharing it day after day, I felt happy imagining that finally someone had written with eloquence on just how disappointing, toxic, and self-defeating India’s social and cultural milieu has become of late.Įventually when I read the article, I was left quite unsatisfied. A few weeks ago many people on Twitter approvingly shared an essay titled “Why I’m Losing Hope in India” by columnist Andy Mukherjee.