Shopping in India, Part 2
In the last entry, I made some observations about
a number of shopping experiences we've had in India. These are interesting in
and of themselves. But in this entry, I try to find the deeper significance of
my shopping-related observations. I guess you could say I get a little political
in this entry, so be forewarned. I would say, however, that I am not being
political, just a little self-critical, which I happen to think is an essential
part of self-growth. Be sure you read "Shopping in India, Part 1," before this
entry, it will help everything make more sense.
In a way, my observations in "Shopping in India,
Part 1" relate to the earlier entry about how India is embracing capitalism.
Some of my reflections are also stimulated by having finished a book called
One Night @ The Call
Center, a fictional book about six employees
at one of India's famous call centers. Call centers, also known in India as
BPOs, or Business Processing Outfits, are Americans unknowingly call, for
example, when they are trying to get help starting up their new Dell computer.
The book is actually less about life working in a call center, and more a
vehicle to critique India's headlong rush into consumer capitalism, at least
inasmuch as it's a rush towards a future that looks like the U.S. of today.
In the book, most of the characters complain about their jobs in the call center, and the self-effacing way in which they are required to deal with the technical problems of "stupid Americans." But at least one character, Vroom (or Agent Victor to the Americans who call him at the call center), admits that he puts up with the work because the 15,000 Rs/month he makes is more than he could make anywhere else. More significantly, Vroom admits that he needs to make this much money to keep up with his friends' new habits of frequenting clubs and wearing the latest fashions. Yet Vroom is also the most insightful, and perhaps self-critical, character in the novel. He argues that an entire generation of India's youth is wasting away in call centers. And to what end? Vroom says that these unstimulating, unchallenging jobs exist to solve the problems of stupid Americans. His generation is not hard at work building up India's infrastructure, discovering alternative energy sources, reforming its government, or in other ways changing the country for the better. Instead they are stuck inside the call centers, working through the middle of the night, so that they can have enough money to buy the cultural commodities of the very people whose problems they are solving in their call center jobs.
Now, back to my point. The examples in "Shopping in India, Part 1" of what can best be described as awkward approaches to customer service are probably in some way an outgrowth of significant and meaningful cultural peculiarities. But I wonder if they are also an outgrowth of India, or at least India's retail industry, trying really hard to woo the reluctant Indian consumer. In other words, the "overwhelm-the-customer-with-attention" technique is a misguided, albeit eager and well-intentioned, approach to creating the kind of consumer experience that companies like Disney, for example, have perfected. But if retailers in India ever succeed in creating consuming environments on a par with those Americans are used to--and they have already succeeded in the form of some of the malls we've seen--then India will cease being India. In a way, this is what Vroom, from One Night @ The Call Center, was criticizing. I think he was arguing that India's current youth generation needs to stop buying into the consumer lifestyle being sold to it by the same people who they are helping figure out how to connect a USB cable to their computer. If the youth generation does not opt out of this lifestyle, they, as much as any multinational corporation or government economic policymaker, will be responsible for India's failure to realize its real potential.
Do I agree with Vroom? In some ways, I do. I certainly agree that there is a middle-class in India that appears to be trying very diligently to consume in American ways. As an example, after Jayalakshmi we went into a store that had a mix of children's clothes, toys, and parenting needs. Now, I'll admit that most of the plastic infant and toddler stuff that Americans buy is totally unnecessary, and some of it is terrible quality. But for parents who opt into the "nothing-but-the-best-for-my-child" approach to parenting, you can find some quality products. I'm talking about toilets for potty training, walkers, bouncy seats, car seats, strollers, all that kind of stuff. Even at a store like Target, you can find car seats that range from very high quality to "barely-meets-government-standards." But at the store we visited, it seemed like everything was absolute junk. There were no Graco car seats, and certainly no Britax car seats. There were no MacLaren strollers. What strollers they had were gussied up cheap models that looked like they would break after a week on Indian streets.
Why are Indian parents buying this stuff? Maybe they aren't, since this particular store was almost completely void of customers. But presumably some middle-class Indian parents are buying this stuff, or such stores would not be in business. One possible explanation is that, as new (or even old) members of the middle class, they have been sold an idea of what it means to parent. This idea, largely sold to them through the western media to which they have access, includes things like using strollers, even when 99% of these middle-class parents live in places where the strollers are useless (except, perhaps, to take to the mall).
To me this is sad. It was sad looking at the quality of the products in this store. It was sad to think that parents in India are buying this junk because they think their children need it, or because they think their children will be more advanced, smarter, or more competitive in the global marketplace as a result of having had a knock-off Fischer Price talking train. It was sad to think that a culture that for thousands of years managed without these things, was now finding it necessary to have them. So on that level, yes, I agree with Vroom: there is sector of Indian society (I don't know that I would categorize it as a generation, but rather a socioeconomic stratum) that is driving India towards the consumerism that defines the American identity. And Americans, by the way, are on average a depressed people. All these things we buy for ourselves, regardless of their quality, fail to make us collectively happy as a nation.
I know the response many Americans would have to the above argument, it would go something like this: "If they've earned the money, then they have every right to spend it how they want." But it's just that sort of reasoning that has set up the current global arrangement--an arrangement in which about a tenth of the world's population lives extravagantly by exploiting the cheap labor and resources of the other 9/10ths, and the 9/10ths of the world that is being exploited is simultaneously being told that with the help of the 1/10th-ers, who will set up industry in their countries, they too can live comfortably. What do I mean? Well, Americans like to think that we have a right to our big SUVs, to our cheap disposable goods, and to our cheap out-of-season produce shipped to us from South America. We work hard, these things are available to us in the marketplace, and therefore we have a right to spend our hard-earned money on them if we want. This mindset denies any personal responsibility for the consequences of producing and transporting the goods to the consumer in the first place.
Yet we are completely hypocritical in this way. After all, we make connections between bootlegged DVDs and terrorism, and define it as our moral duty to abstain from purchasing such products. We also make the determination for others that the production and consumption of pornography, tobacco, alcohol, and drugs, can be dangerous for certain members of society. So we regulate their production and distribution. Yet we don't regulate our own companies when they operate overseas in ways that might adhere to local production and labor standards, if such standards even exist or are enforced, but that would clearly be in violation of standards we have in our own country.
The U.S. grew economically wealthy as a country during the last half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. This growth was a result of visionary leaders, innovative entrepreneurs, and a motley collection of immigrants who came in search of the American dream. Many of them achieved it. Of these characteristics, I think most Americans, myself included, are duly proud. But in the mid-20th century, when it began to become apparent that some of our growth was made possible through various forms of internal exploitation (e.g. child labor, the labor of illegal aliens, and other forms of exploitation of labor, as well as through exploitation of the environment in the form of pollution for which corporations did not have to pay), we passed laws to put constraints on these forms of exploitation. Quite simply, corporations determined that they could escape these constraints by moving to other parts of the world where, because of economic depravation, industry in any form would be welcomed.
Today, these same corporations are able to provide us with the cheap goods to which we believe we have a right, only because they are able to exploit the 9/10ths of the world's population, and its resources, that make up the developing world. At one time, we could make purchases in the marketplace and be somewhat assured, because most everything we purchased was made in the U.S. and therefore met American labor, environmental, and human rights standards, that our purchases were not harming people or the environments on which people depend for their livelihood. Today we live in a global marketplace and therefore do not have the luxury of making such presumptions.
Yet we want Indians and Chinese, who make up huge untapped markets, to join us in our consumer lifestyles. We don't wish for them to join us because we have some deep sense of compassion and justice that leads us to believe that they must be given access to the same quality of life as us. If we were motivated by a deep sense of compassion and justice, we'd call into question our own lifestyles, which are only sustainable to the extent that others around the world are denied some of the basic comforts--like clean drinking water--that we take for granted.
At what point do Americans take responsibility for global poverty and environmental destruction not by promising to raise the rest of the world to our standard of living, but by questioning our own standard of living?
In the book, most of the characters complain about their jobs in the call center, and the self-effacing way in which they are required to deal with the technical problems of "stupid Americans." But at least one character, Vroom (or Agent Victor to the Americans who call him at the call center), admits that he puts up with the work because the 15,000 Rs/month he makes is more than he could make anywhere else. More significantly, Vroom admits that he needs to make this much money to keep up with his friends' new habits of frequenting clubs and wearing the latest fashions. Yet Vroom is also the most insightful, and perhaps self-critical, character in the novel. He argues that an entire generation of India's youth is wasting away in call centers. And to what end? Vroom says that these unstimulating, unchallenging jobs exist to solve the problems of stupid Americans. His generation is not hard at work building up India's infrastructure, discovering alternative energy sources, reforming its government, or in other ways changing the country for the better. Instead they are stuck inside the call centers, working through the middle of the night, so that they can have enough money to buy the cultural commodities of the very people whose problems they are solving in their call center jobs.
Now, back to my point. The examples in "Shopping in India, Part 1" of what can best be described as awkward approaches to customer service are probably in some way an outgrowth of significant and meaningful cultural peculiarities. But I wonder if they are also an outgrowth of India, or at least India's retail industry, trying really hard to woo the reluctant Indian consumer. In other words, the "overwhelm-the-customer-with-attention" technique is a misguided, albeit eager and well-intentioned, approach to creating the kind of consumer experience that companies like Disney, for example, have perfected. But if retailers in India ever succeed in creating consuming environments on a par with those Americans are used to--and they have already succeeded in the form of some of the malls we've seen--then India will cease being India. In a way, this is what Vroom, from One Night @ The Call Center, was criticizing. I think he was arguing that India's current youth generation needs to stop buying into the consumer lifestyle being sold to it by the same people who they are helping figure out how to connect a USB cable to their computer. If the youth generation does not opt out of this lifestyle, they, as much as any multinational corporation or government economic policymaker, will be responsible for India's failure to realize its real potential.
Do I agree with Vroom? In some ways, I do. I certainly agree that there is a middle-class in India that appears to be trying very diligently to consume in American ways. As an example, after Jayalakshmi we went into a store that had a mix of children's clothes, toys, and parenting needs. Now, I'll admit that most of the plastic infant and toddler stuff that Americans buy is totally unnecessary, and some of it is terrible quality. But for parents who opt into the "nothing-but-the-best-for-my-child" approach to parenting, you can find some quality products. I'm talking about toilets for potty training, walkers, bouncy seats, car seats, strollers, all that kind of stuff. Even at a store like Target, you can find car seats that range from very high quality to "barely-meets-government-standards." But at the store we visited, it seemed like everything was absolute junk. There were no Graco car seats, and certainly no Britax car seats. There were no MacLaren strollers. What strollers they had were gussied up cheap models that looked like they would break after a week on Indian streets.
Why are Indian parents buying this stuff? Maybe they aren't, since this particular store was almost completely void of customers. But presumably some middle-class Indian parents are buying this stuff, or such stores would not be in business. One possible explanation is that, as new (or even old) members of the middle class, they have been sold an idea of what it means to parent. This idea, largely sold to them through the western media to which they have access, includes things like using strollers, even when 99% of these middle-class parents live in places where the strollers are useless (except, perhaps, to take to the mall).
To me this is sad. It was sad looking at the quality of the products in this store. It was sad to think that parents in India are buying this junk because they think their children need it, or because they think their children will be more advanced, smarter, or more competitive in the global marketplace as a result of having had a knock-off Fischer Price talking train. It was sad to think that a culture that for thousands of years managed without these things, was now finding it necessary to have them. So on that level, yes, I agree with Vroom: there is sector of Indian society (I don't know that I would categorize it as a generation, but rather a socioeconomic stratum) that is driving India towards the consumerism that defines the American identity. And Americans, by the way, are on average a depressed people. All these things we buy for ourselves, regardless of their quality, fail to make us collectively happy as a nation.
I know the response many Americans would have to the above argument, it would go something like this: "If they've earned the money, then they have every right to spend it how they want." But it's just that sort of reasoning that has set up the current global arrangement--an arrangement in which about a tenth of the world's population lives extravagantly by exploiting the cheap labor and resources of the other 9/10ths, and the 9/10ths of the world that is being exploited is simultaneously being told that with the help of the 1/10th-ers, who will set up industry in their countries, they too can live comfortably. What do I mean? Well, Americans like to think that we have a right to our big SUVs, to our cheap disposable goods, and to our cheap out-of-season produce shipped to us from South America. We work hard, these things are available to us in the marketplace, and therefore we have a right to spend our hard-earned money on them if we want. This mindset denies any personal responsibility for the consequences of producing and transporting the goods to the consumer in the first place.
Yet we are completely hypocritical in this way. After all, we make connections between bootlegged DVDs and terrorism, and define it as our moral duty to abstain from purchasing such products. We also make the determination for others that the production and consumption of pornography, tobacco, alcohol, and drugs, can be dangerous for certain members of society. So we regulate their production and distribution. Yet we don't regulate our own companies when they operate overseas in ways that might adhere to local production and labor standards, if such standards even exist or are enforced, but that would clearly be in violation of standards we have in our own country.
The U.S. grew economically wealthy as a country during the last half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. This growth was a result of visionary leaders, innovative entrepreneurs, and a motley collection of immigrants who came in search of the American dream. Many of them achieved it. Of these characteristics, I think most Americans, myself included, are duly proud. But in the mid-20th century, when it began to become apparent that some of our growth was made possible through various forms of internal exploitation (e.g. child labor, the labor of illegal aliens, and other forms of exploitation of labor, as well as through exploitation of the environment in the form of pollution for which corporations did not have to pay), we passed laws to put constraints on these forms of exploitation. Quite simply, corporations determined that they could escape these constraints by moving to other parts of the world where, because of economic depravation, industry in any form would be welcomed.
Today, these same corporations are able to provide us with the cheap goods to which we believe we have a right, only because they are able to exploit the 9/10ths of the world's population, and its resources, that make up the developing world. At one time, we could make purchases in the marketplace and be somewhat assured, because most everything we purchased was made in the U.S. and therefore met American labor, environmental, and human rights standards, that our purchases were not harming people or the environments on which people depend for their livelihood. Today we live in a global marketplace and therefore do not have the luxury of making such presumptions.
Yet we want Indians and Chinese, who make up huge untapped markets, to join us in our consumer lifestyles. We don't wish for them to join us because we have some deep sense of compassion and justice that leads us to believe that they must be given access to the same quality of life as us. If we were motivated by a deep sense of compassion and justice, we'd call into question our own lifestyles, which are only sustainable to the extent that others around the world are denied some of the basic comforts--like clean drinking water--that we take for granted.
At what point do Americans take responsibility for global poverty and environmental destruction not by promising to raise the rest of the world to our standard of living, but by questioning our own standard of living?
Posted: Tue - April 11, 2006 at 09:56 AM
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The Zavelogue chronicles the travels and travails of Stephen, Marion, Claire and Luc during our six months in India on a Fulbright.
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Published On: Jul 15, 2006 12:54 AM
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