Yin and yang of India

The movie is a beggars’ opera but is more than just a story of the begging business in Mumbai. Just like the spectacular deal in London last week which is so much more than a merger or acquisition. In their own ways, they reflect the yin and yang of India’s story.

Madhur Bhandarkar’s Traffic Signal is a grotesque picture of the city’s underbelly. It is about beggars and bhais, whores and thugs. The director told me the idea came to him after reading a front page story in DNA about the city’s Rs180 crore begging business. He doesn’t try to entertain; he unsparingly documents that wretched reality in dramatic style.

Several readers have shot off e-mails to us saying they would never pay a beggar again or buy fruit from a street vendor after seeing the movie. Whether that is a correct reaction or whether you should continue to be generous to street-dwellers in a city where property prices are the same as Manhattan’s while millions continue to live on and off the streets, is an issue that the movie does not tackle. Yes, it shows that begging is a business run by hoodlums and all beggars are not like Lazarus with holiness shining out of their backsides merely because they are poor. But it tells us how hopeless their lives are in the starkness of their poverty out of which they daily try to climb only to fall back. And in that squalid, miserable surrounding, they live full lives of sorts, with love and friendship, kindness and warmth. At the end of the day, their lives are as normal as their weird world allows.

That’s the yin in our story — what ancient Chinese philosophy says is the part of life associated with earth, dark and cold — and it co-exists with yang, which is associated with heaven, heat and light. They are both reality, both with their place in a complex life. In India today, one picture the world sees is the one the movie shows; it is dank, brimming with despair. The other is of an India unbound. It radiates light and hope in full spectrum.

That other, shinier India was on display in newspaper headlines around the world last week. In London, Tata Steel took over Britain’s Corus group at the end of a dogfight with a Brazilian competitor. It was a daring move by Ratan Tata, who in characteristic manner shyly told the world, in front of hundreds of TV cameras, how he had gone shopping and come out a winner to form the fifth largest steel company in the world. His modesty seemed to say, hey, it’s just another company we bought, no big deal. But his chutzpah in closing the deal at the price he did was in a way a reflection of India’s vaulting ambition.

It is the daring of an India which had its economy growing at 9.2 percent at last count. It is an India which has actually reduced the number of absolute poor — that is, living on less than a dollar a day — by 120 million in about a decade to around 260 million now. It is an India which, says the latest Goldman Sachs estimate, is likely to surpass the US economy in size in fifty years to become the world’s second largest economy after China.

The trouble is, the same Goldman Sachs report warns about risks that might unravel it all. Education is a key area where we are woefully short in performance, despite the full blown hype about the IITs and IIMs being among the world’s best. Not only is primary education in a major mess, our universities figure nowhere in the top league of the world’s institutions of higher learning. Our roads, ports and power systems have a long way to go before they are truly supportive of growth instead of being hindrances. And our public services, which need radical reform, continue to languish because no one in the educated middle and upper classes actually depend on them. The poor take the hit.

Goldman Sachs coined the BRIC acronym — which stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China — to declare that these are the economies of the future and that the future is almost upon us. Well, not quite, we should tell ourselves even as we score significant global points. It is one thing to be bracketed in a superior world league; it is a monumental misreading of facts to believe we have arrived. China, in particular, should sober us.

Over the last 25 years, China’s per capita growth has been roughly double that of India’s. It has managed to clean up and organise its cities, which now look like they could be anywhere in the developed world; at the same time, it has reduced the number of people living in absolute poverty to below 10 percent of the population. And it invests much more in research and development, and thus ensures future dominance, than India does.

So, yes, India is poised. But it might freeze in its leaping posture if it becomes mindlessly complacent.

Email: gautam@dnaindia.net