Freakonomics: Reason to Live

Hm.

Spare Change

Originally written- 28th August 2008
Revised – 2nd October 2008

I have a very generous father. Not to me though. I’ve never been pampered. But we both share the same concern and interest in the welfare of the less fortunate, and he taught me to feel this way.

When we stop at traffic lights, scruffy looking little girls, and young but tired mothers, carrying babies with mucus all over their faces, often push their hands and sometimes their entire selves, through car windows, and auto rickshaws. While waiting for autos or to cross the road, the same faces of poverty, will crowd around you. They crowd around you, like the flies around them, penitently asking for us to spare them some mercy.

However, my father is often grudging with his alms when it comes to these unlucky souls. So I asked him about it. He justified, that this was all a big racket. Those girls who push themselves through tiny hoops, and mothers with bleating babies at their breasts, are all apparently pawns in a game. They all have to hand over their money to someone else, who’s getting rich off their sad faces.

Before you begin wondering about my father, let me tell you, that this is a thought process very common to us educated middle class folks. If you pay close attention, you’ll see that other people who do have a happy jingle in their pockets, refuse the sad empty begging bowls as well. These morally righteous souls are also afraid of supporting this black market, I suppose.

People feel that they are better off not displaying mercy. They fear that if they take out their wallets, it’ll probably be snatched and run off with. Weren’t they better off ignoring?

Returning to the idea of sparing your change and how it can save the world:

My dad and I discussed this, and this is what I had to say:

Give them the change. Maybe it is a racket. But if we don’t give them the money, they’ll have nothing to give to the racket –incharge at sun down, and finally, they won’t have anything for themselves either.

It’s a choice.

CHOICE 1-Would you want them to die of hunger, because you want to be a ‘responsible citizen’ and not allow the racket lord to get rich (because you believe in equal distribution of wealth, or some such other close to impossible ideology)? And remember, you don’t even know for sure if the particular beggar in question is involved in the scam.

CHOICE 2- Or would you just give them the few bloody coins so that they can put something into their stomachs?

So you say you want to be a responsible citizen?

Let me ask you then.

After a satisfying meal at a restaurant, don’t you leave more money on your dinner table as a tip than you give to unfortunate beggars in a whole week? But then, if you didn’t do that 10 percent, you wouldn’t come across as a nice person to the family on the neighbouring table, would you now. Please realize, that waiters and bearers are at least getting a steady and assured salary. I’m sure that they don’t earn much. That I will not dispute. But at least they know where their next meal is coming from. The beggar you just walked past, doesn’t know why he is living, if he is going to live tomorrow or if he should even hope that he lives tomorrow.

If you hire a taxi for a day of sightseeing, don’t you leave the cabbie with some money, so that he can get himself some lunch? You probably don’t have to do that. He probably brings his own ‘tiffin’ from home. But you want to be a nice person, so you give him the few notes.

At certain airports, passengers are informed not to tip the coolies. They are a free service provided by the airport. But most people always discreetly pass them some money.

Please don’t get me wrong. Tip all you want. Just don’t deny some mercy to that bedraggled face that just pushed itself through your window.

Or if you’ve got lots of money to spare, and want to be that nice person we all so earnestly strive to be, give money to everyone who needs it. Just don’t leave out the people that matter.

Millionaires off our own slums

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Slumdog Millionaire is all the buzz now. India is visibly excited about the movie. And the media hasn’t been helpful in distracting us from it either. If anything, they’ve been fueling us further on.

In the last 2 days running up to the Oscars, India’s most popular news channel NDTV, couldn’t get enough of it. The news reader today was unable to wipe the smile of her face, verging on coy at times even. All other national and international news was suspended for these last 2 days, with 15 minute bulletins, every hour or so. Instead, they repeated the same footage over and over, which their reporter in the US had sent them.

It wasn’t just the media who was celebrating. Several images and videos of families and random people, in a state of jubilation, because of the success of the movie, were being circulated.

Sometimes I feel so disconnected, and wonder if the problem is really me.

I wasn’t celebrating the success of the movie. And when it won the 8 Oscars that it did, I wasn’t happy. I was not jumping in my seat for the movie, because it is yet another white man making money out of us. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the world thrives on disparity.

The success of the movie was not ours. Indians nothing. It was directed by a non Indian. The screen play was by a non Indian. The movie was financed too, by a foreign company. Its their creativity that has been showcased in the movie, not ours. It happened to be about Indians, set in India and used stumble-upon Indian actors in it.

And yes, thank goodness there happened to be an Indian musician and sound mixer on set, who were talented and got recognized. Of course I’m happy for Rahman, Pookutty and the kids. But what if they had not won? We here in India were celebrating the movie even before news of Rahman’s victory. We were celebrating the movie because we thought it a big deal that such an Indian flavoured movie should have made it so far in the Oscar race, when several earlier entrants by Indian directors, had failed to cut it.

I was very agitated today, with this news. I picked up a conversation with a bunch of friends, but was literally asking for a fight, and wanted to find if I was judging this situation wrongly. One of my friends said something which accurately summed up what was going on in India. He said that people in India are seeing this as a Bollywood/Indian movie making it to Hollywood, when really it is Hollywood that has come down to Bollywood. And Hollywood won, but we think Bollywood did.

Danny Boyle doesn’t ‘love’ India, and so came with the noble intention of taking an Indian story to America. He came with the sole intention of creatively challenging himself. And the movie got points not because of highly unusual concepts, amazing special effects or jaw dropping acting. Sure it had a good story with universal appeal, and hey, there’s a million bucks involved! But this movie got points for the novelty of it. I don’t think even Danny Boyle thinks he has done India a service, by drawing attention to our immense poverty. He’s just made a movie. There’s nothing wrong with what Danny Boyle did. Nothing wrong in directing a successful film, that makes a lot of money. So I have no accusations of him. My only accusation is of the Indian public, that is being so gullible and weak.

Why didn’t Lagaan, Taare Zameen Par, or a much older Malayalam movie called Kala Pani get this far? They definitely had better stories, and great acting too (presuming these are some of the criteria involved in picking Oscar winners).Were they too brown for someone's liking?

Everything about this movie was characteristically Bollywood. If a person who was unaware of the details of the movie had watched it, he would have presumed it was directed by some Chopra or Mishra. There was song and dance. There was even a train scene at VT, so dear to Indian cinema.

Any Indian could have made this movie.

It so happened that the foreigner was smart enough to make Indians act in a movie about us, but in English, so that it reached a larger audience, who were intrigued by a culture they had never been exposed to before. He mimicked us. The style is ours, the glory is his. The slums are ours, the millions are his. He is the millionaire, from our slums. The foreigners are always smart. That’s why I’m so sore.

And what’s also sad is, that Indians have made movies about the trash in our backyards before. But we failed to appreciate and encourage it. As another friend of mine said, we here in India are always quick to rush off to Switzerland to shoot, when we have so much here that we can showcase. And finally, a wise white man came along, who saw the potential in our slums, and used it to his advantage.

Yet another friend said that no matter what, she was proud because ‘India made history tonight.’ I can give the movie credit as a movie. But saying that it is of historical importance to India or has ‘put India on the international cinema map’ is naïve. I just don’t understand how this was an honour for us.

When the Namesake began to do well at international film festivals and awards, was Australia celebrating because Jacinda Barrett had played a role in it? Are we celebrating every time Kal Penn gets a role in an English flick? Also, in the hypothetical situation of an Indian making a movie about Guatemala, it would only be a cause of celebration for India, if the movie won big. However if only won of the Guatemalan actors won awards for his acting, it would not be our party. And in a role reversal, it would be the people of Guatemala who will be celebrating.

The movie wouldn’t have been as effective if a rich man had won a million bucks. It needed a poor man in squalid conditions to win it. And welcome to India!

I know I cant generalize, but a lot of the western world already thinks India is over populated, polluted and under developed. A movie like this, even though it has only depicted the truth (and I don’t have a problem that it did), has perpetuated this notion of India being Third World, in thousands of under developed minds. And we are dancing in the streets about it?!

What I want us to realize here, is that in this movie, India was only a subject.

What of those children who were recruited straight from the slums, Rubina and Azhar? They are going to grow up thinking that a white man changed their lives. And indeed he did. But when they think that the white man saved them, they’re also going to think their country abandoned them, thus perpetuating the cycle, of us coloured people constantly feeling subordinate to the ones without colour.

Why are we clamouring so? Why are we fawning for attention? Why do we need a pat on the back from the white man, to feel good about ourselves?

Some of the ideals that Gandhi built this country on, are Swadeshi: of one’s own, self sufficiency and self reliance. These ideals do not just pertain to not purchasing of foreign goods and wearing of khadi. It also urges us to take more pride in ourselves, and what we have. Nothing we are today is truly indigenous. Everything is a leftover from an earlier invader. But when are we going to have confidence to be original and take pride in our own Indian kichidi?

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Gripped By Terror - Part 2

All I could think of during the exam was this. The first thing I did when I came home, was watch NDTV.

And I was thinking, why India? Why my India? Of course, we can also ask, why not my India?

I’m trying to look through the history I know, and the culture as I understand it, to find an answer.

Sure, we are a developing nation with extreme poverty. But there are poorer nations, and they aren’t necessarily a hot bed of terrorists asking for independence.

Since when did violence become a part of us? Sure, we were colonized by the British. But so were a lot of other nations. And they don’t have the same situation. Then again, what do the British have to do with this? Weren’t we disunited even before they set up camp, which is precisely what they used to expand their territory? We still haven’t learnt the lesson of unity. How long are we going to make excuses for that?

But then we had that historic Freedom Struggle. It was the most unique of its kind that the world had ever witnessed. We have never seen anything like it since. It was non violent and non denominational. We followed the policy of Non Alignment with regards to the world community.

But then we also had communal riots. And then we had the take over of Hyderabad, and Kashmir. We had the troubled and neglected north east and the annexation of Sikkim. We had land issues, about temples and mosques. And even though my friends and I haven’t studied about this in our history textbooks, some people have. And these people never forgot.

These people who never forgot, today call themselves the Deccan Mujahideen. It scares me to even type out the word. Their demand is an independent Hyderabad (Hyderabad lies in the Deccan Plateau of South India. Hence the name, I presume.). They want a separate Muslim state of Hyderabad, within the secular state of India.

What I can’t understand is this: India has never prohibited Muslims from their worship. Certain sects of Indians, of certain religions, have been involved in religious riots. But the nation of India is not the perpetrator of those crimes. So why then do they want a separate Muslim state within India?

So from this latest event we see that, radical Muslims aren’t just happy with one state of Kashmir. Now they want Hyderabad as well.

Check out this blog here.

It makes the point that apparently an Indian Mujaihideen wasn’t enough. A Deccan Mujahideen was required. Do they want one for every area of the globe they lay claims on?

Why does this seem more like a conquest and less like a Holy War or anything along those lines, if it even can be considered holy?

To add, here’s another example of how messed up this is. Is there really a clear objective to this attack? If it is only for the independence of the Deccan, and in revenge of the injustice inflicted by the Indian Government on the Muslims over the last 60 years, as the Deccan Mujahideen has said, why did the terrorists specifically ask for British and American nationals, thus making very serious international statements? Or is this a two birds with one stone thing?