I was prompted to make this post after reading, and pondering over, the story that Abhishek Bachchan, the movie-star son of movie super-star Amitabh Bachchan, has "booked" a new Audi A8 for his 4-month old baby daughter. Not quite sure what that means, since I'm sure that Baby B(or Baby A, as the rumors have it- Amitabh, Abhishek, wife Aishwarya[Miss World 1994], so Baby A looks quite likely- I feel sorry for odd-one-out Jaya who cannot pack the family-monogrammed towels and toiletries) will not be ordering her chauffeur around from home to playdates to ice-cream parlors, or pack it with her baby friends for a joyride around town. But it has made headlines here in India, and mostly admiring ones.
[Update: I'm not sure what happened to the "booked" Audi A8, but Abhishek Bachchan has now apparently bought Baby Aaradhya a new red Mini Cooper S for her first birthday. I'm sure she'll have a ball driving that around town.]
It's not that the Bachchans, senior or junior, lack for luxury cars in their stables. The senior Bachchan was supposedly gifted a Maybach by a friend, and then he allegedly gifted a Bentley to his son, and now junior Bachchan allegedly gifts a $300,000 Audi A8 to his infant daughter. But all the super luxury cars aside, the stables do include a fair number of luxury cars like BMWs, Mercedes, Range Rovers, etc., which means they have a decent complement of "status" vehicles to be seen in(which, after all, is the whole point of luxury vehicles, which have such a low rate of return on their inflated prices that they are really quite a joke). So why buy a car for your infant daughter(rather than for yourself or your wife) that costs the equivalent of 300 years' earnings of the average Indian?
Normally, I couldn't care less who bought what car or what palatial home. But India is different. There are people who own $30 million apartments in Mumbai(and one whose "family home" is a $500 million 27-story monument to bad taste) who encounter the worst sort of poverty that exists in the whole world as soon as they get out of their gilt-ceilinged homes and the high-speed elevator of their climate-controlled high-security super-luxury apartment buildings and into their million-dollar chauffeur driven cars. This isn't some hedge-fund manager taking a tour around lower Manhattan in his new Lamborghini Aventador, which would actually be a rather enjoyable experience. But when you make your money a dollar per off of people who make a little more than a dollar a day, it would be more appropriate to be less conspicuous in your consumption, and perhaps a little more conspicuous in your charity. Nero is excoriated for allegedly playing the fiddle while Rome burned(thus displaying a contempt for the conditions of the citizenry). Is it any less worthy of censure when wealth is flaunted in the face of excruciating poverty?
The funny thing about super-rich Indians who own exotic cars, especially the ones capable of close to 200 mph, is that they cannot even drive them out of their own garages. They need to flat-bed them to the nearest new toll highways, which have the only road surfaces in all of India that would not scrape the catalytic converter off the underside of your exotic $1 million supercar. So realistically, you spend that enormous sum of money on a "status" car, in one of the poorest societies on the planet, so that you can spend perhaps 2 hours a month driving it in the company of your fellow profligates at "invitation only" show-off parades.
In the entire city of Bangalore aka Bengaluru, there is not a single road- and I mean this literally, not one single road- where you could drive a Chevy Corvette at the legal maximum speed(just under 40 mph) without doing serious damage to the underside. Ditto for the euphemistically-named "highways" which are not toll-access. Digressing for a moment, the "highway" from Bangalore's CBD to the new international airport is one of the worst roads I have ever encountered, with no marked lanes, full of potholes and sudden "diversions" that appear at the last second, and they have the nerve to have begun collecting tolls without even having resurfaced the road, let alone having marked lanes!
Getting back to the point: I find that rich people in India don't give a rat's tail about anything that doesn't directly impact them. Example: (Since I'm in Bangalore at the moment, my examples will tend to be from Bangalore!) Church Street in Bangalore is known as "restaurant row", and there is no doubt that a good number of restaurants located on that street do very good business indeed(i.e., they make boatloads of money). And yet these restaurateurs(and the other businesses along the street) do not seem to consider for a moment that they should band together and "do up" the street. Often, when I walk along Church Street, I am struck by the thought that I could have a thoroughly satisfying meal at any of the several "upscale" restaurants along that thoroughfare, and then promptly disgorge the expensive contents of my stomach upon coming out onto the street. The stench that permeates the entire length of the street has to be experienced. Most of it seems to bubble up from the unpiped sewer that runs under the poorly sealed sidewalk. Why do Indians have such tolerance for violations of basic sanitary rules? And if you can afford to do something, whether on your own or in concert with others of means, what keeps you from doing something about it? Especially if it will contribute to better business? Sheer apathy, is my conclusion. I will not patronize a restaurant on Church Street again until it is cleaned up.
My point is simply this: if you've made a fortune off of poor people, give back. And if you don't- and even if you do- don't flaunt it like you don't have a conscience. If you do flaunt it, you obviously have more money than you deserve, and less class than you think.
P.S.: I'd have liked to have had some pictures to go along with this post, but I don't have any handy just now. I will add some later. In the meanwhile, as I was Googling for related content, I came across this, coincidentally published today!
Middle-class Bangaloreans are trying to do something about cleaning up the city: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=m8fikwv3Obg
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