Almost two decades back on a nippy May afternoon, I landed in the US via an Air India ‘Maharaja’ Boeing 747 flight, its windows framed on the outside by an artwork of red, Mughal-style looping arches. A short discussion about the plane’s unusual floral wallpaper was my first (and a very awkward) experience of talking to a foreigner, a sizeable black woman who boarded from London’s Heathrow and whose lips and eyes I reluctantly tried to read for I couldn’t follow even a punctuation of her accent. ‘Isn’t that a naaais wo feipa?’ is all that I remember from that short and tense conversation.
For me, that travel — it was my first time in a plane—to the mother of all overseas destinations in a wide-bodied jet was nothing short of a dream. Had the Indian software industry not crowded the American consulates and loaded planes with blue-eyed programmers like me, it could have been the journey of a lifetime. It was a jump across the ‘seven oceans’ to a seemingly irreconcilable culture. A leap from the bright, humid and chaotic Mumbai to the neatness of a chilly and overcast New York.
Waiting for my turn outside the immigration counter at the JFK airport, I wondered how lucky I was (even if I wasn’t yet, technically, my grilling with a large grumpy fellow still pending). America for me was the fabled land of the MIT and GRE. Niagara and McDonalds. Michael Jackson and interminable presidential elections. This was the country I, like many other Indian ‘coders’ of that time, had always longed to come to. ‘Dollar Dreams’ as they call it.
I shared an apartment with six other Indians in a pricey Connecticut suburb and took a bus to office everyday. A bus that could fart and squat. Cars and insurance were costly; we didn’t want to splurge on those luxuries yet. I remember asking my flat mates (a few months later) if they would agree to pool in money to buy a second-hand BMW we saw in the parking lot — a sticker behind its windscreen said ‘For sale: $19,000’ — and how they had laughed at my outrageous suggestion. I made another deranged proposal, to take a helicopter ride over the Niagara falls that cost sixty dollars each, and that too met the same fate.
‘Idiot, worry about how much you can save in the few months of your L1 visa, and not these,’ they advised. They taught me dollar has to be earned, rupee needs to be spent.
During the initial days, I lived a self-rationed life, multiplying every dollar amount with fifty to get the Indian equivalent. Everything was fifty times costlier! I kept on browsing the shelves of Stop and Shop, Seven Eleven or Walmart — their trolleys reminded me of rolling cycle tires in childhood — making the mental arithmetic until I found a palatable multiplication.
Eight hundred rupees for a packet of prawn! Ah, I could get it for only two-fifty back home!
I was asked by my room mates — who initially behaved like college seniors — to count the white ‘firangi’ onions before chopping them. Same with tomato, another pricey vegetable Indians couldn’t cook without. And so I did.
I bought cheap calling cards from New York’s Jackson Heights and spoke to my parents in a single breath, before disconnecting quickly to save talk time. I had to make the card last at least three calls. I made weekend trips to factory outlets to buy ill-fitting dresses (because I hardly got any for my size). I made frequent pilgrimage to dollar shops full of Chinese stuff, and scoured garage sales for furniture and even cutlery. Some of us collected discount coupons from newspapers. Saving as much dollar as possible was a priority. Because it was worth fifty times more back home!
But if there was one thing I splurged on (with a few exceptions, of course) it was food. And there was a pretty good reason for it, which I will come to later.
While I was living my American dream, making noisy road trips along most of the eastern coast, from Maine to Virginia — briefly breaching speed-limits and half-expecting the blaring sirens of a police car or dreaming about my own Connecticut state driver’s license one day or straining my neck to size up New York’s towers — I didn’t grasp the magnitude of the American obsession with consumption. I was too busy soaking everything up.
Life was (mostly) easy.
You didn’t clean the floor because there was a carpet (however, you are dead if you spill something bad or burned it). You didn’t wash or dry clothes yourself. A machine in the lobby took care if you fed it enough dollars. You hardly had to cook. The supermarket refrigerators were stacked with pre-cooked stuff that smelled yummy once you turned on the oven. Heck, you didn’t even have to chop the vegetables or skin them.
And then, there were foils or paper rolls for everything that could get dirty. Cool, huh?
Only after coming back to India did I truly realize the magnitude of America’s obsession with consumption and single use items. It was a country where you didn’t repair anything; you only used and threw. We saw fat men and woman subsisting on bottles and cans and jars and packets. With hardly any domestic help, unlike India, everything was designed around decreasing manual effort. Consequently, the amount of trash — we learned to pack them in disposable polythene bags with a drawstring and carefully dropped the bags through a long, whistling chute from the eleven floor of our staid-brown apartment — we threw everyday was mind-boggling.
Pizza, along with all its toppings, came frozen, neatly wrapped in a transparent sheet and packed in a cardboard box. Pineapple (which I agree is notoriously difficult to skin even for an extremely patient peeler like me) came pre-sliced in a metal can, floating in a preservative juice. Chicken legs or wings came in large plastic packets, marinated, cooked and sprinkled with spices. Carrots came in zip-locks, surgically peeled, each piece measuring exactly the same as the others. Salad shrink-wrapped in plastic trays. As for juice, there were bucket-sized plastic bottles (which we finished overnight to ensure we did not lose our fair share). More bottles for water and soft drinks. Packets for peas. Foam tray and shrink wrap for ‘fresh’ chicken.
The list goes on.
To me, the grocery stores looked like cosmetic stores. Shiny edibles packed in shinier packets. I hadn’t imagined food to be so colourful!
If we spilled anything in the kitchen, there were always reams and reams of kitchen towel, and not a washable, reusable wipe. Who has the time to clean?
Now imagine a country feeding itself from packets, wraps, boxes, cans and bottles! Imagine the waste it must generate and the damage it must do to the environment everyday. But that’s probably the curse of a developed, self-obsessed nation. When you make more economic activity, you become richer. And how do you make more economic activity? You consume. And you keep consuming without worry, as long as you could outsource the side effects to someone else. Like China. Or India. Or Taiwan. Srilanka. Bangladesh.
You see the nasty footprint of consumption everywhere (it sometimes gets too funny, like a knife to open envelopes. Seriously?). From fuel-guzzling SUVs to disposable razor blades. However, what shocked me most was watching fairly usable cars being driven into junkyards and ruthlessly pressed into a mangled mess of metal. Here, we would probably keep them in running condition until they disintegrate or are only good enough to be pulled by a bullock-cart!
I loved the food though, partly because it looked and smelled exotic. Like the burgers, it fanned craving because of the careful manufacturing of ingredients. And like all unhealthy food, it was yummy and cheap. So, in a couple of months, I bloated up to fit into American garments.
My grandfather always said something about consumption. I didn’t understand then, but now I do. He said when you go to the market and want to buy something, postpone that desire for a day. Come home and ask yourself if you really, truly, need it. The keyword is need, not want. He said human beings have limited needs, but unlimited wants and that the earth has enough for man’s need but not greed.
A slightly more popular man called Warren Buffet said something similar — If you buy things you don’t need, you will soon have to sell what you do.
I consider myself lucky that in India I can still buy something fresh that has never been put inside a packet. Where pea still comes inside its pod and carrots with their skins and roots intact. Where leafs are taut without refrigeration and eggplants have holes in them because they weren’t dipped in insecticide.
However, I also feel terrible that this country is changing too (and fast), fuelled by an irreverent capitalism and the same, irresponsible consumerism. Brands go all out to bind your sense of existence to your material possessions. A bigger car that will make you own the road (why own the road, I ask, what arrogance that is?). A slimmer, smarter TV. A sexier phone with a (slightly) improved camera. You must upgrade to the next thing, because, hey, ‘you deserve better’. They have to necessarily fool the consumers to keep their factories rolling and cash registers ringing. I don’t understand how it helps the world in the long run.
However, simultaneously, and ironically so, they also find it fashionable to talk about environment, green technologies, alternative energy, ‘sustainable development’ and other such ‘responsible-sounding’ things.
I am no economist, but I have blown air into a lot of birthday balloons. There is no sustainable way to keep blowing them!
