Need and want

The front page of today's Times of India (October 13, 2001) is dripping with ads for that festive fervour, gold raining at the Commonwealth , Sachin Tendulkar topping popularity chart in Don’s own land and Mukesh Ambani adding diamonds to this glittery India shining crown with his ready-to-move-in 27-storeyed mansion.
The festive zeal picked up as I turned to the inside pages, with colourful display of creative advertising, smartly infusing consumerism with religious sentiments. Even news stories were advertorials, goading consumers to shop for the best ghagra -cholis for the Devi pujan and pop dandia raas. Coming to Page 13, Narendra Modi’s picture showed him flashing the victory sign as his party swept all six municipal corporations in Gujarat. But just below Modi’s successful cocktail of communal polarisation and industrialisation with a generous sprinkling of urban shine was buried a story on food insecurity in India. It said that India had dropped two ranks to reach 67th among the 84 developing countries in the International Food Policy Research Institute’s annual Global Food Index for 2010. Even Sudan, North Korea and Pakistan ranked higher than India.
India is home to 42 per cent of the underweight children under the age of five in the world. The report said the food insecurity is so rampant in the country that India is clubbed with minor economies like Bangladesh and Yemen, recording the highest prevalence of underweight in children under five.
The Commonwealth muck has now been pushed under the debris of the broken foot bridge as was evident in the glitter of the opening ceremony. Now, the government is pulling out all stops to showcase the plush Indian drawing room at the international fora. Never mind the hungry children stashed away into the empty kitchens inside or the sick dying of dengue, malaria or malnutrition in dirty-dingy interiors. Even the media chooses to push hunger inside and yield to the salability of glamour and glitz.
Coming back to the man who made it to the Forbes’ billionaire list, Mr Ambani. He has devoted six levels of his multi-million-dollar castle to park his 160-plus cars. Back in Delhi, the government had “rinsed” the urban space and made it squeaky clean by driving out the homeless a day before the Commonwealth Games contingents began arriving. And in forests, far into the interiors of Chattisgarh or Orissa, native tribals go to sleep with the Damocles’ sword of displacement hanging over their heads.
This is a dangerous but inevitable cliché: Our drawing rooms are bright and shiny. But when are we going to generate light to the insides of our house?
My nine-year-old daughter, to whom we read and explain the papers every morning, asked us a question: Why does God give some people too much money and some nothing? Do people ‘need’ so many cars? Why can’t God give food to those who are hungry?
Poor creature! She still thinks God up there is responsible for feeding the hungry and clothing the poor. Having been brought up in the ‘need’ and ‘want’ theory diet, it might take a few more years for her to understand it is the ‘want’ , not ‘need’, that is driving our nation’s consumerist economy.