The common man versus the hungry millions

There is something unique that Mahatma Gandhi's entry in the freedom struggle, in the early part of the twentieth century, brought about. As Michel Foucault's conception of power would suggest, the grassroots is where the real power lies and all other power holders' power emanates from there. M.K. Gandhi provided this hitherto missing conceptual block to the movement and roped in the ‘hungry and naked’ masses into the freedom struggle. The marriage of the coming in of the masses and their hope of amelioration after the downfall of the Raj proved to be pivotal in bringing about the downfall of the British Empire in India. The successful and hastening role of the masses proved that real power lay with the lay people.

            Of late, contemporary India has been witnessing a disturbing trend that is somewhat antithetical to what transpired during the blossoming of the freedom struggle. We are witnessing a marginalisation of the hungry millions and glorification of the ‘common man’.

            Common man – a term being mostly used for referring to the middle class of the society – has been witnessing an ever greater share in the public discourse. The creation of Aam Aadmi Party is one such manifestation. Be it the provision of free Wi-Fi, or the hue and cry over dearer onions, or the coming up of plush shopping malls, or the public policy jargon of regressive subsidies, the central figure in all these has been the middle classes or the more commonly known common man. The shaping of opinions that the media endeavours belong to this class.

            The common man gets an unusually big chunk of media attention as compared to its absolute numbers. India’s annual per capita income is approximately Rupees 80,000. This figure is an average of all Indians’ income. A substantial proportion of the population lies much below this average level. (Not to mention the 20% of 1.25 billion Indians who live below the generously defined poverty line of India – Rupees 27 or 32 per day depending upon which poverty hat one dons – rural or urban.) This substantial portion of population, unfortunately, is not part of the discourse on common man.

            Along with the media attention, this class also gets a lot of disproportionate attention from the political parties. The major reason for this is basically rooted in the economics of demand and supply. This class is the major consumer of the so called news channels and political debates. When every night, in so called debates on the so called burning issues on the so called news channels, over-enthusiastic anchors shout their lungs out while asking what the nation wants to know (sic), the nation is but a small part of India – the middle class (mistaken for the veritably common common man). There is something oddly ironical and tragicomic about men and women sitting in their cars being interviewed about how the rising onion price is cutting a deep hole in their deep pockets.

            There is a need to bring about a course correction. There is a need to focus on the right issues - a need to identify the real common man (the hungry millions); a need to repriortize – free and clean sanitation facilities over free Wi-Fi at Connaught Places, feeding the hungry millions over providing subsidized diesel to BMWs. There is a need to bring back a revolution of sorts to empower and strengthen the grassroots. But first of all, there is a need to identify the problem correctly because the answer to a problem, more often than not, lies in how we perceive and understand the question. John Dewey, an American scholar, once remarked “a problem well put is half solved.”

The happiness rat race à la Facebook

In a quest for greater rationality, the societal patterns – the way society is structured and its ordering to minimise entropy – have been evolving over a period of time and striving for greater internal consistencies among its constituents in an overarching framework. From the economic turmoil of the so called Great Depression to the rise of socio-economic neo-liberalism and continuing through the current confusing trends of glocalization is the march of capitalist hegemony, which in a Gramscian sense is seen both as legitimate and non-contestable. India has been witnessing it in the more easily identifiable names of the World Bank sponsored ‘Good Governance’ and ‘Reforms’.

            The agenda, in the ultimate analysis, which seeks to monetise and commodify everything has got so ingrained in the psyche of the ‘modern (wo)man’ that it is hard for him/her to think beyond the ontology of numbers. Everything has a number associated with it which characterises the essence of it – the ‘package’ of a potential spouse, how costly your mobile phone is, how big a car/house someone has or even how ‘beautiful’ his/her partner is!

            This obsession with numbers tends to deemphasise the substantive and intrinsic aspects of a thing, emotion or value and tends to highlight the economics of it. This economisation brings with it an inherent tendency to compare your numbers with my numbers and with everyone else’s numbers, since the basic philosophy of numbers is that one is less than two which in turn is less than three and so on. This gives rise to feelings of superiority/inferiority depending upon which side of the numbers you find yourself to be. A person’s worth is reduced to his ‘net worth’ in the process.

            Off late I have noticed some not so ‘smart’ people clicking pictures on their ‘smart’ phones here, there and everywhere. They do it in different poses, with different people and in all shapes and colours. I had a sudden epiphany after watching a group of girls clicking pictures – “Okay.. now they will upload these pictures on facebook or some other even ‘cooler’ book that might have come up..” Such photos are labelled in detail with proper care being given to make the emotion of the moment come out alive. The emotion more often than not is: Look how much fun we are having! Going through a facebook ‘home’ page one can notice that there is a sort of a competition going on between people – Who is more happy? Or Who is having more fun? And the like. While the exact emotion may change depending upon the contextual setting, the number game, the comparison rules the roost.

            Is this really happiness/fun? Do we even try to understand the meaning of happiness in metaphysical terms? What are the epistemological pathways concerning the label ‘happy’ or ‘cool’? Is it the number of likes or comments? Why is there so much of an urge to share and tell the world how happy you are? Haven’t we all fallen for the ‘soft power’ of capitalism? Why are our thoughts, actions and behaviour channelled with an eye on some social media platform?

            Aren’t we all, to borrow Weberian terminology, smaller cogs in the machine, trying hard to become bigger cogs?