Dear Friends:
This article "How India became America" by Akash Kapur appeared in the New York Times' Opinion pages on 10. 03 2012. It is long, therefore I dropped the picture at the beginning. -bhuban How India Became America By Akash Kapur Pondichery, India ANOTHER brick has come down in thegreat wall separating India from the rest of the world. Recently, bothStarbucks and Amazon announced that they would be entering the Indian market.Amazon has already started a comparison shopping site; Starbucks plans to openits first outlet thissummer. As one Indian newspaper put it, this could be“the final stamp of globalization.” For me, though, the arrival of these twocompanies, so emblematic of American consumerism, and so emblematic, too, ofthe West Coast techie culture that has infiltrated India’s own boomingtechnology sector, is a sign of something more distinctive. It signals thelatest episode in India’s remarkable process of Americanization. I grew up in rural India, the son of an Indianfather and American mother. I spent many summers (and the occasional biting,shocking winter) in rural Minnesota. I always considered both countries home.In truth, though, the India and America of my youth were very far apart: coldwar adversaries, America’s capitalist exuberance a sharp contrast to India’saustere socialism. For much of my life, my two homes were literally — but alsoculturally, socially and experientially — on opposite sides of the planet. All that began changing in the early 1990s,when India liberalized its economy. Since then, I’ve watched India’stransformation with exhilaration, but occasionally, and increasingly, with someanxiety. I left for boarding school in America in 1991.By the time I graduated from high school, two years later, Indian cities hadfilled with shopping malls and glass-paneled office buildings. In thecountryside, thatch huts had given way to concrete homes, and cashew and mangoplantations were being replaced by gated communities. In both city and country,a newly liberated population was indulging in a frenzy (some called it an orgy)of consumerism and self-expression. More than half a century ago, R. K. Narayan,that great chronicler of India in simpler times, wrote about his travels inAmerica. “America and India are profoundly different in attitude andphilosophy,” he wrote. “Indian philosophy stresses austerity and unencumbered,uncomplicated day-to-day living. America’s emphasis, on the other hand, is onmaterial acquisition and the limitless pursuit of prosperity.” By the time Idecided to return to India for good, in 2003, Narayan’s observations feltoutdated. A great reconciliation had taken place; my two homes were no longerso far apart. This reconciliation — this Americanization ofIndia — had both tangible and intangible manifestations. The tangible signsincluded an increase in the availability of American brands; a noticeable surgein the population of American businessmen (and their booming voices) in thecorridors of five-star hotels; and, also, a striking use of American idiom andAmerican accents. In outsourcing companies across the country, Indians werebeing taught to speak more slowly and stretch their O’s. I found myself turningmy head (and wincing a little) when I heard young Indians call their colleagues“dude.” But the intangible evidence of Americanizationwas even more remarkable. Something had changed in the very spirit of thecountry. The India in which I grew up was, in many respects, an isolated anddour place of limited opportunity. The country was straitjacketed by itsmoralistic rejection of capitalism, by a lethargic and often depressive fatalism. Now it is infused with an energy, a can-doambition and an entrepreneurial spirit that I can only describe as distinctlyAmerican. In surveys of global opinion, Indians consistently rank as among themost optimistic people in the world. Bookstores are stacked with titles like“India Arriving,” “India Booms” and “The Indian Renaissance.” The Pew GlobalAttitudes Project, which measures opinions across major countries, regularlyfinds that Indians admire values and attributes typically thought of as American:free-market capitalism, globalization, even multinational companies.Substantial majorities associate Americans with values like hard work andinventiveness, and even during the Iraq war, India’s views of America remaineddecidedly positive. I HAVE learned, though, that thenation’s new American-style prosperity is a more complex, and certainly moreambivalent, phenomenon than it first appears. The villages around my home haveundeniably grown more prosperous, but they are also more troubled. Abandonedfields and fallow plantations are indications of a looming agricultural andenvironmental crisis. Ancient social structures are collapsing under theweight of new money. Bonds of caste and religion and family have frayed; thepanchayats, village assemblies made up of elders, have lost their traditionalauthority. Often, lawlessness and violence step into the vacuum left behind. I recently spoke with a woman in her mid-50swho lives in a nearby village. She leads a simple life (impoverished even, byAmerican standards), but she is immeasurably better off than she was a coupleof decades ago. She grew up in a thatch hut. Now she lives in a house with aconcrete roof, running water and electricity. Her son owns a cellphone anddrives a motorcycle. Her niece is going to college. But not long before we talked, there had beena murder in the area, the latest in a series of violent attacks and killings.Shops that hadn’t existed a decade ago were boarded up in anticipation offurther violence; the police patrolled newly tarred roads. The woman was scaredto leave her home. “This is what all the money has brought tous,” she said to me. “We were poor, but at least we didn’t need to worry aboutour lives. I think it was better that way.” Hers is a lament — against rapid development,against the brutality of modernity — that I have heard with increasingfrequency. India’s Americanization has in so many ways been a wonderful thing.It has lifted millions from poverty, and, by seeding ideas of meritocracy andindividual attainment into the national imagination, it has begun the processof dismantling an old and often repressive order. More and more, though, I findmyself lying awake at night, worrying about what will take the place of thatorder. The American promise of renewal and reinvention is deeply seductive —but, as I have learned since coming back home, it is also profoundly menacing. Akash Kapur is the author of the forthcoming “India Becoming: APortrait of Life in Modern India.” This article has beenrevised to reflect the following correction: Correction: March 10, 2012 An earlier version of the picture caption thataccompanied this article incorrectly identified the name of the mall. Thepicture, showing “Shoppers in the Mantri Mall, the largest in Chennai,” wastaken at the Express Avenue mall, not the Mantri Mall, which is in Bangalore. Aversion of this op-ed appeared in print on March 11, 2012, on page SR5 ofthe New York edition with the headline: How India BecameAmerica. _______________________________________________ assam mailing list [email protected] http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
