Thoughts of Things

June 2014: I spent a whole year without shopping. Here’s why, and what I learnt.

Conceptual image courtesy Sahil Mane.

We consume more in every successive generation, more as we get richer, more as quality of life improves, more as the population explodes, more as mass production makes things cheaper, and so I’m compelled to believe that environmental concerns aren’t alarmism but plain common sense. I, you, we’re the target audience for millions of brands owned by thousands of corporations, vying for our attention—that they often get, along with our money, begging the question of indoctrination and the commercialisation of our tastes, needs and wants. And these corporations big and small… who are we making rich and what ethics do we end up supporting, literally buying, with our money? (Slaveryfootprint.org has a simple, if simplistic, survey to tell how many slaves work for you.)

Truth be told, I’ve never been overtly concerned with possessing or attached to things, and it’s not like I shop a lot. I’m no ascetic: I dress up to look good and pander to the pull of fashion, and I’ve spent as much on the experience of a meal, a holiday, an adventure, rescuing an animal, surprising a loved one, a massage, as others do on jewellery, clothes and gadgets. Plus, I bought two houses as soon as I could: homes to fill the emotional void of an unstable childhood. And how can you ignore the better utility of a Mac and iPhone vs the PC and Blackberry, irrespective of the cost and show-off value. Of course, I need to feed my pride and ego with other things, let me not be confused for a saint. But brandishing brands, having things for the sake of having things, keeping keepsakes, ascribing objects with emotional value… never and decreasingly has that been for me.

Things, however, have always found me. Circumstances conspired to make me the proud owner of a houseful of hand-me-down things, courtesy my parents’ migration to Australia and my ex-husband’s transfer to Indonesia. At 23, in a house the size of a matchbox, in a new city where other strugglers like me slept on mattresses and could count on one hand the dishes they owned, I drowned in sofas and Kenwoods, artefacts, a king-sized bed, a sofa set and a rocking chair. Eight years later, my home is almost purged of all these expensive things, once pregnant with memories and too precious to give away (though not necessarily necessary nor my aesthetic).

While I’ve brandished this personality trait about as a matter of pride—a disinterest in the abject materialism that characterises our age, a sort-of bastardisation of the Hindu detachment ideal—there was a flip side. I'm not sure whether this is an Indian or generational trait, a bit of both perhaps, but my grandparents held on to the things they bought, treating them lovingly and maintaining them: they still use a sewing machine that they got as a wedding gift over sixty years ago. Unlike them, I took my lack of attachment to things to mean a use-and-throw attitude, never bothering to maintain them, replacing them easily and cheaply (I’ve always been a street shopper, even when I could afford not to be) when they broke or tore. Then, didn’t this make me consume as much as others who glutted on things?

Plagued with these macro and personal realisations and questions, on the first of May last year, I decided to go on a no-shopping experiment for a year.

There were rules, of course: I could replace something that was irredeemably, unfixably broken in my wardrobe and home; I could buy something if it was truly needed (not only wanted); the rest I would make up as I went along. Obviously, groceries weren’t part of this moratorium. I found that my learnings at the end of this year are closely aligned to my reasons for embarking on this embargo in the first place.

Shopping, Happiness & Addiction

They call it ‘retail therapy’ for a reason. It’s been proven that shopping makes you happier, and even the most disinterested shopper can’t help but feel a frisson of excitement at the buying and savouring of new things. That high can be quite addictive.

May was okay: I was newly motivated, plus I replaced my badminton shoes that were truly broken. In June, I finally picked up some things that had been with my tailor since February. By July I was craving hard, the withdrawal symptoms at their peak, but I didn’t cheat. And, you know what, like any addiction, the craving faded away.

And though I found myself looking forward to my birthday and anniversary presents with an unhealthy, feverish excitement, I learnt a few things along the way.

* While retail is therapy, studies have shown that the happiness from an experience—watching a film, travelling, enjoying a meal—is much longer lasting. This is true, and what I’ve believed all along.

* When you buy what you truly, truly need/want, and not just when you give in to a craving, there’s a special thrill in an occasional indulgence (I bought a pair of shoes for a wedding in January, a bag in March).

* A surprisingly effective way to feel the same joy-of-the-new is to ‘discover’ something you haven’t used in a while—when I finally got to a tailor with my bunch of things to mend, and when they finally came back, voila, I had a whole lot of things I hadn’t worn in a long time, good as new.

*I’ve also started an informal barter system with a couple of friends, trading things I’m bored of in my wardrobe for similar stuff in theirs. Oh joy!

Choose Quality Over Quantity

Or spend more time, effort and energy maintaining stuff that wasn’t built to last.

Maintain & Mend

I now wash clothes by colour groups, follow the ‘stitch in time’ adage, get the oil checked in my car and pack my laptop away at night (on more than one occasion before, I’ve woken to the sound of it crashing to the floor, from beside me on the bed). New India is at the beginning of the consumerist cycle, with newfound spending power and the lure of glittering foreign brands and aspirations. That less is more, and the idea behind the developed-country-cars-public-transport quote are lost on us. In the meanwhile, counterculture movements across the world, including veganism, are going back, growing a certain ‘awareness’ of things and seeking fulfilment beyond them—back, ironically, to the ways of my grandparents.

Borrow

July last year posed a challenge: I had a Big Fat Indian Wedding to attend, and my wardrobe’s sparse Indian selection would just not suffice for the six functions. Even if I considered this a mitigating circumstance, I reasoned that I’d only be buying clothes I’d only rarely wear again. I borrowed almost everything I wore from friends and family, and it worked!

At the end of this year, I am certainly richer (much richer) in wallet, but poorer in wardrobe (which has certainly started to feel the pinch, and I’ve truly be struggling for fresh clothes and shoes). I do need new upholstery, and a fresh bunch of cushion covers will certainly be welcome.

Of course, I’m not recommending that we all become monks or even that you spend a year living without shopping. I am just saying that we each need to think more deeply about the choices we make. A dear friend, who once held down a high-powered job in the fashion industry, is now a raw food eater and avoids multinationals like the plague. While this year has not set me on her extreme path, I’ve come away a little more mature, with a little more Mindfulness and with better priorities.

2014: Less is More.

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This column appeared on 3QD in June 2014.

In Defence of Valentine’s Day

February 2014: Despite the criticisms in the Indian context, I explain why I’m a huge fan of the day of love.

Conceptual photograph courtesy Sahil Mane.

Call me a romantic fool, but I love Valentine’s Day. In college in New Delhi, I’d laugh and say, “Why not? It’s just another excuse to celebrate and get presents!” Now, 10 years, awareness and much consumer fatigue since, it isn’t about the gift economy at all. For days before, love is literally in the air (and on the airwaves, TV and everywhere). Consciously ignoring advertising suggestions of what we should be giving-receiving, where we should be going, what we should be doing, Sahil and I celebrate without spending. Last year, we just cooked for each other over music and laughter; this year, we’re planning a party. I also wish my mother, family and friends.

When I speak of my love for Valentine’s, it tends to spark debate with a whole range of people. I’ve had the religious and cultural traditionalists play the ‘Against Hinduism/Islam’ (India’s two major religions) and/or ‘Against Indian Culture’ Card, say it is a cultural contamination from the West. Friends who are nonconformists and anti-consumerism are, well, anti its consumerism, the nauseating marketing blitz and the pigeonholing.

And the many arguments of those coming from a postcolonial perspective are best summed up on Wiki:

“The holiday is regarded as a front for ‘Western imperialism’, 'neocolonialism' and ‘the exploitation of working classes through commercialism by multinational corporations’ (Satya Sharma in ‘The Cultural Costs of a Globalized Economy for India’, Dialectical Anthropology). Studies have shown that Valentine's Day promotes and exacerbates income inequality in India, and aids in the creation of a pseudo-Westernised middle class. As a result, the working classes and rural poor become more disconnected socially, politically and geographically from the hegemonic capitalist power structure. They also criticise mainstream media attacks on Indians opposed to Valentine's Day as a form of demonisation that is designed and derived to further the Valentine's Day agenda.”

And, surprisingly, I agree with most of these criticisms.

The Religion & Culture Card

I agree that this day, the Feast of St Valentine, which originates in ancient Roman and Christian theology, does not come from Hinduism or Islam. Though it is stripped of religious significance in its current avatar, one can understand why purists would see it as celebrating another religions’ festival. However, I see this broadening of horizons, loosening of religious strangleholds and cultural cross-pollination as a positive way forward towards a liberal, melting-pot world.

What’s worse, this is a festival celebrating love—the dizzying, crazy-making romantic and/or sexual variety that is condemned by Islam and Hinduism, in its current Victorian-prudery-infused avatar far removed from Kamadeva, Khajuraho and the Kama Sutra.

Now, most traditional societies and religions don’t like love. Love is blind, and deaf to reason, ‘honour’, society, status, money, norms. It beckons their young (daughters, in particular) away from their fold, un-enslaves them from ‘mummy-daddy’, and makes them—gasp—free-willed. It breeds in young, reckless minds and hearts, and feeds on Bollywood happily-ever-afters, romantic notions and lust. It grows in the generation gap like an insidious sapling in a wall crack. It is a subversive, idealistic idea that disregards social, political, economic, religious, caste barriers like no preaching, media or education can achieve. Age-old systems—arranged marriages, joint families, stay-at-home wives and mothers, divorce-free not-so-happily-ever-afters with (legally sanctioned) marital rape, dowry and other patriarchal traditions—fall in its wake. This too is a good thing, methinks, particularly from a feminist perspective.

A separate issue is the sex (or any physical contact), pre-marital to boot, that is a consequence of the love and its expression that Valentine’s Day propagates. Some activists claim they are not against love, just against its ‘vulgar’ exhibition in public—a definition that could include merely holding hands in the more conservative parts of the country. This cultural obsession with and repression of sex (controlling who can do what with whom, when, where, why and how much), and hypocrisy about sex (we’re clearly having a lot of it, just not talking healthily about it) is hugely problematic.

So, for the past few years, in various parts of the country, moral police from religio-political groups like the Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal and Hindu Janajagruti Samiti have been burning cards, red-coloured gifts and roses, and beating up, or threatening to beat up and forcibly marry, couples who are found on dates on Valentine’s. (Through the year, they also target bars, music concerts and women’s sartorial choices, other Western corruptions.) Yet, we don’t lament the irony of being more comfortable with Public Displays of Anger than with Public Displays of Affection. “We live in a world where we have to hide to make love, while violence is practiced in broad daylight,” said Lennon all those years ago.   

(More by me on culture and love in India in Governance Now.)

Just like the stand against consensual homosexuality, the stand against Valentine’s Day unites traditionalists across religions, cultural positioning and political affiliations across the country. However, in that case, as this, the governance and legal systems should prioritise individual choice over this tyranny, a their-size-fits-all. After all, if right-wingers are allowed to live a patriarchal lifestyle that is offensive to certain demographic groups in a democracy, others should be afforded the same respect.

Consumerism Overload!

Love sells, I agree. It sells roses, cards and lingerie, dinners, diamonds and holiday packages.

Valentine’s entered the Indian mainstream with the advent of satellite TV in ’92. The first music channels, MTV and Channel V, carrying strong influences of American pop culture, hyped it as a peg for contests, dedications, love-song countdowns, on-the-ground events and early-day reality TV, to enthuse their teen audiences, and generate marketing and advertising revenue. For Indians, this alien festival was manufactured in the media, through content as well as advertising campaigns for mushy cards, chocolates, teddy bears, etc. It has since established the rituals—not only have we been told that we must celebrate this day of love, but how and how much we should spend on it. The more you love, the more you should be willing to spend, it says, inextricably linking the two in the manner of American capitalists.

I’ve been on the other side of the fence, and I’d know. Come January and the PR agents are at it, sending out press releases about Valentine’s Day offers from the companies they represent. They hope you will feature these in the next issue of your monthly magazine (on homes, with a female target audience), which they assume has a love theme. And you do, because it does.

Though it is advertising bucks and brouhaha that sustains this festival of love, although it is with an intention to get people to buy, buy, buy and not altruistic, the optimist in me rejoices the very fact that there is a day for romantic love. Men and women alike are being conditioned to expect, express and prioritise this happy, powerful emotion.

My octogenarian grandparents from small-town India, married since 1951, tell me that, though “Valentine’s Day didn’t exist” in their youth, they now celebrate it by going out for coffee. Through all the marketing din, I’m sure the nonconformists can separate the message from the madness.

Postcolonial Perspective

I agree with the argument that Valentine’s Day is a part of Western cultural imperialism. Notwithstanding the Chicken Tikka Masala-Britain example, the extent of the influx and acceptance of the Anglosphere’s culture in India and Asia is far greater than the reverse. The growing urban Indian middle class, exposed to what passes as ‘global’ culture through TV and/or the internet, knows America’s movie and pop stars, celebrates Halloween, and loved 'Friends' and 'Breaking Bad' and 'Dexter'. We are adopting, and being conditioned to adopt, its mores. The hegemony of American culture (and English, food, design, fashion, etc) continues to be cemented around the world, aiding and being aided by its economic might and business globalisation… the very definition of neocolonialism.

But, culture has never been linear or fixed, and has always evolved and adjusted—a British ball game remained here after the Raj, to become the Subcontinent’s religion. In the age of communication, knowledge and travel, cultures are evolving more rapidly than ever before anyway, with or without Valentine’s! I believe people have a right to tap in to ‘global’ culture, assess their cultural influences, and pick and choose their individual beliefs.

Some of us have become what Wiki refers to as the “pseudo-Westernised middle class”, whose acceptance of a few aspects of new culture does not mean a complete break from the old. At the numerous weddings I’ve attended in the past year (yup, it’s that life-stage), all couples, without fail, personalised their ceremonies, appropriating and incorporating things they like from other cultures and abandoning some aspects from their own. From tattooed rings to bachelorettes and buddymoons… at our own wedding two years ago, Sahil and I skipped the most important Hindu wedding ritual, taking seven circles around the sacred fire to the droning of an unintelligible priest, in favour of exchanging vows. Individuals should be allowed to negotiate their own cultural positioning, whatever it may be.

It is also true that Valentine’s Day and its commercialism widen the pre-existing cultural and economic gap between this class, and the working classes and rural poor. Economic inequality, the gap between the landed and nouveau riche, and the poor in India, is growing and becoming increasingly apparent every day. In his latest book, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Michael Sandel, professor of philosophy at Harvard, discusses the dangers of what he calls “the sky boxification of life”—the growing separation between rich and poor in the ordinary activities and common spaces of daily life owing to rampant marketization. In an interview to Mumbai Mirror, he asserts this is damaging to democracy, because “it erodes the sense of belonging, the shared identity that democracy requires.” Neither do the ‘masses’ understand or subscribe to a culture that understands and permits a day of love, nor can they afford to join the celebration.

An unfortunate fallout of these disparate cultural influences regarding Valentine’s Day on the masses is that it leads to the sexual harassment of women by Roadside Romeos across India. Valentine’s Day propaganda and Bollywood expose these men to the idea of and desire for romantic love, at odds with their conservative cultural environments. Love, according to older Bollywood plot lines, happens at first sight, and comes to fruition and marriage once the hero has followed and convinced the girl. Starry-eyed boys ‘eve teasing’ and harassing the girls they ‘love’ becomes a pandemic during February. Growing up in North India, I’ve had letters flung at me and a stalker from a different city end up at my doorstep to hand me a teddy bear!

The depression, loneliness and suicide around the Christmas holiday in America among those who cannot partake in the celebration and spending is well documented, and may indicate an upcoming trend vis-à-vis the Indian population and Valentine’s Day. Though statistics are not yet available, incidents of jilted lovers seeking revenge are thought to be higher during the month of love.

Valentine’s Day is clearly not the only place where this cultural and economic chasm is obvious—it’s in housing, Bollywood, clothing, lifestyle, food, etc, and even in the consumerist gluttony encouraged at Indian weddings and festivals. A daylong love festival, one that has many positive sociocultural consequences, is, in my opinion, less deadly that the sustained disparateness on display throughout the year.

The intellectuals’ contention, however, that mainstream media attacks on Indians opposed to Valentine's Day is a form of demonisation that is designed and derived to further the Valentine's Day agenda is a tad simplistic. For one, the English media is not, in the strictest sense of the word, the mainstream media of India: vernacular and Hindi media have a much more pervasive reach, and they continue to be religious and cultural mouthpieces. For the most part, the English media, run by people from the “pseudo-Westernised middle class”, is liberal leaning and pro-West. Its ability to provide sustained cultural critique from a liberal point of view is important to counter the rampant patriarchy, religious intolerance and complexity of Indian culture, and it is often seen taking politicians to task for the misogynistic statements that invariably follow every sensational rape. 

The pro-Valentine’s agenda of the English media derives not only from commercial interests, but also from the intrinsic cultural positioning of those in it. The English versus Hindi and vernacular languages divide is not merely linguistic, but also promotes and exacerbates a deep cultural chasm with thin middle ground.

Love, Life & Laughter

India is in a hyperactive state of sociocultural flux, between the old and the new cultures and religions, between the have and the have nots, between rural and urban realities, those educated and those not, those who speak English and those who don’t, men and women. It is and will continue to be interesting to watch how we negotiate these dynamics as a nation, particularly in respect to love, sexuality and Valentine’s Day.  

I’m clearly on the side of love, and choose to see Valentine’s as much-needed reminder and celebration of the emotion that makes—or should make—the world go round.

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This column appeared on 3QD in February 2014.