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In today's India, status comes with four wheels
(nytimes.com)
Updated: 2005-12-05 12:02
Consumers' Appetites Grow
The 8,300-square-foot
Toyota showroom had been open only a few months, and its location just outside
town on the silky new highway had already turned out to be a prime sales aid.
The general manager chuckled, saying that if he gave a test drive on the road,
it would be "a happy ride."
That many of the city's one million residents are what Sastry V. Prakky, the
dealership's senior sales and marketing manager, calls "filthy rich" also does
not hurt.
Named for Visakha, the god of valor, Vishakhapatnam faces the Bay of Bengal,
in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The city is home to one of India's largest ports
and the country's oldest shipyard. It is also squarely in India's booming south.
Some residents have prospered by going to work in the United States in
information technology, others by opening "business process outsourcing"
centers. Many work in pharmaceutical production, or export carpets or shellfish.
Pricy hotels line the beachfront, and driving schools the side streets,
although Indian driving habits raise questions about the quality of their
instruction. Almost every beauty salon also has a "body weight reduction"
center, reflecting the upper-middle-class's new obsession, and plumpness: people
are still starving in India, but people are overeating, too.
In a historical blink, capitalism, which postcolonial analysis once labeled
poverty's cause, is now seen as its solution. Debt, once anathema for the middle
class, is now an acceptable means to an end.
For a sliver of Indians, the go-go years are here. The same sentiment has
permeated the countryside, where young men drive bright yellow motorbikes with
names like Ambition and dream of becoming crorepatis, or multimillionaires.
America, of course, went through a similar evolution: the making of a postwar
consumerist economy; the introduction of credit cards and growing comfort with,
and dependence on, debt; the rise of an advertising culture. India today offers
the chance to watch it in real time, at a hyper, almost-out-of-control, pace.
"Now the people want to spend and enjoy," Mr. Prakky said. "Everyone wants
upgradation": the scooter owner wants a motorbike, the motorbike owner a car,
the car owner a more expensive one.
He was checking the paperwork on another new purchase, including a deposit of
180,000 rupees, or about $4,000. He took it upstairs to the general manager, C.
Sudhaker, whose glass-walled office overlooked the showroom floor. In modern
times, as Mr. Sudhaker put it, a good car was a business necessity, not just
about showing off, although he conceded an appetite for "recognition in
society."
That appetite was on display in other showrooms along the highway.
"Life is short, madam," said Sanganagouda Patil, a politician and landowner,
explaining why he had to buy a new car model every two years. He was at another
Toyota showroom, about 600 miles away in the state of Karnataka, inspecting the
Innova even though he already owned four cars. Proper vehicles were expected of
V.I.P.'s, he said, even if the roads near his home district were not yet good
enough to drive them.
He wore gold jewelry, Ray-Ban sunglasses and an expensive-looking white kurta
of the hand-woven fabric that Mohandas K. Gandhi popularized as a symbol of
swadeshi, or homegrown, in an era when all things foreign were mistrusted.
Many Indian politicians today see the state merely as an object of plunder,
and they are not shy about displaying their spoils. Car salesmen say that when a
new model comes in, politicians call and demand to have the first vehicle
delivered to them, with a discount.
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