All the Glitters R Not Gold free essay sample

All that glitters is not gold Ambanis and Mittals are no Buffetts and Gates. But we can’t blame them for the appalling poverty that prevails in India Now that Durga Puja’s son et lumiere has faded, comment might be permitted on what this annual exercise of expensive competitive showmanship reveals of popular taste. That no doubt explains why no one voices the real charge that should be levelled at the super-rich who should be in the dock not for spending too much but for the waste and crass vulgarity of their spending. Given its Brahmins and Dalits, India has always been a land of contrasts. It has also always epitomized the concentration of wealth. But no one salivated earlier over how rich the rich were, how they acquired their money or how they spent it. Mr Mukesh Ambani’s 400,000 sq ft mansion is a talking point because it’s news in the West and because the public and private domains are no longer separate. We will write a custom essay sample on All the Glitters R Not Gold or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Their overlapping not only exposes the rich to scrutiny but also distracts attention from the Government’s neglected responsibilities. India lags behind many sub-Saharan countries in almost all the indices of modernity not because of the Ambanis, Mittals, Mallyas and Modis, but because our politicians are on the make and our civil servants are on the take. It’s their job to create systems that enable people to raise their standard of living; it’s not the job of those who have either escaped the rigours of the system or learnt how to manipulate it to their advantage. The spotlight is on the rich also because political democracy creates its own fantasies. Universal suffrage fosters the illusion of participative decision-making. The notion of equality before the law is taken seriously. Tub-thumping politicians whip up populist sentiment to pander to the gallery and distract attention from their own misdemeanours and extravagances – marble monuments and statues, for instance. With the media forever on the lookout for titillating titbits, it’s news when Mr Ambani buys a Rs 642-crore luxury jet for his wife’s birthday. The information revolution places a premium on immediacy. The past is another country. Those who gloat over the number of Indians in the Forbes list of billionaires forget that time was when India occupied the Number One global slot. Few asked how His Exalted Highness the Nizam of Hyderabad and Berar, reckoned the world’s richest man, had accumulated his wealth or questioned how he spent it. Something called social consciousness and responsibility provides the phoney justification for inquisitiveness. The logic is that extremes of wealth and riches are intolerable and that the rich owe a debt to the poor. Conspicuous consumption is condemned for the same apparent reason. But whatever lofty moral arguments might be invoked, the underlying reason for condemning lavish spending is fear: the rich must for their own sake take care not to provoke the envy and enmity of the poor who are always the majority. The French and Russian Revolutions are history’s warnings against unbridled and careless extravagance. These are Western notions and, significantly, much of the knowledge about even our own rich that excites India’s media comes from the West. A society in which the caste system is firmly entrenched does not recoil in horror when an import ban is temporarily suspended to benefit one polyester tycoon. But the Western media thought the manipulation outrageous and reported it. Western society has evolved notions of social consciousness and responsibility. Western Governments have achieved an egalitarian ethic and devised a social welfare net. In the fifties, the Western media went to town on what it considered immoral spending like the jewel-studded 18-carat gold faucets on Sir Bernard Docker’s 860-ton yacht. Now the stories are about similarly ostentatious Indians, and India’s media picks them up. That is how Indians know that the most expensive home in Britain is the ? 117- million Kensington townhouse that Mr Lakshmi Mittal (who spent ? 34 million on his daughter’s five-day wedding junket at the Palace of Versailles built by France’s King Louis XIV) bought for his son. Another tycoon, Mr Bhupendra Kumar Modi, paid nearly ? 10 million for one of Singapore’s most expensive penthouse flats in Marina Bay. Mr Vijay Mallya, who spent ? 1. million last year on buying five relics of Mahatma Gandhi, reputedly has 26 residences around the world and is planning a new home in Bangalore that will soar to 30 storeys against Mr Ambani’s 27. Such details tell us a great deal about the quality of India’s wealthy. Not for them the example of the 38 US billionaires who pledged at least 50 per cent of their wealth to charity through a campaign started by Mr Warren Buffett and Mr Bill Gates. Not for them the candour of the oil investor, Mr T Boone Picken, who famously said, â€Å"I like making money more, but giving it away is a close second. Wealth may not generate wit or wisdom in India but that doesn’t mean the wealthy can be blamed for Mumbai’s slums or our shameful public services. The most we can accuse them of is not investing enough in schools, vocational training, hospitals and recreational facilities. Instead, many prefer to store their wealth abroad. Some salt it away in concealed accounts. Mr Ratan Tata prefers to acquire automobile and steel corporations in Britain, South Africa and Singapore, and has reportedly donated $50 million to Harvard. The solution does not lie in redistributing the wealth already created but in encouraging others to generate more while the Government also spends more on amenities like potable water, sanitation, housing and hygiene, and effective free and compulsory primary education throughout the country. India’s self-image is that of a superpower but a country does not become one only because a few people are filthy rich. It’s equally facile to argue that India isn’t a superpower because 800 million Indians survive on around Rs 70 a day. The British working class lived in abysmal squalor when Britannia ruled the waves. The solution lies in unleashing the collective creativity of the Indian people. Deng Xiaoping’s remedy was to â€Å"let some people get rich first and then when they get rich, they will move the whole society and the rest will follow. † It became China’s slogan. Perhaps it will work in India too but if it does, it will also mean garish glitter down the line. Taking the totality of Indian society, the Ambanis, Mittals, Mallyas and Modis are only more of the same. Source : Internet (by Sunanda K Datta-Ray (columist))