A great opinion piece. Although, its focus is Mumbai & the rising social inequality there, this rising social inequality is visible in almost every metropolitan city, from Los Angeles to New York to Rio de Janeiro to Lagos to Johannesburg to Dubai to London to Moscow to Beijing to Kuala Lumpur to Sydney.
Politicians & governments are only interested in how much money they can stuff in their "pockets" (i.e. bank accounts) from companies, industries, & lobbyists. They will sprinkle some money on a few projects in the development, & even then those projects need to be highly visible for elections & public.
Western countries have already gone through this large & increasing divide between the 99% & 1% of the country (remember Occupy Movements around the world about 5 years ago?) but talks of recession ending & new economic growths have only helped fuel the divide now. Western governments didn't bring any new legislation to resolve this divide. All of the countries, both developed & fast developing ones, are turning back to the medieval times.
According to a report from New York's Coalition for the Homeless, 60,000 people are sleeping in city shelters every night – almost double the amount since 2004. Let that sink in for a minute. Homeless people in NYC have DOUBLED in the past 10 years ... & there's no end to it.
Recession didn't even dent the increasing wealth of the business & political elites. While their wealth increased several folds between 2007 & 2014, the middle class is not only getting wiped out from society, the poor are barely hanging on to life.
This is all happening, & will definitely keep happening, in the so-called seemingly equal, fair, developed countries of the West. So what & how can one expect something better from developing countries like China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Russia, Vietnam, Pakistan etc.?
BUT, what rich are not seeing, by getting blinded by their fast rising tower of wealth, that you can only push the poor down to a limit. The numbers of poor are fast increasing in the urban cities all over the world. Those human beings will try to fight back for their survival when the survival of them & their families is severely threatened.
This will become the scene from the French Revolution, except it won't be happening only France, but all over the world. Are governments & politicians ready for this Revolution? Can the rich business & political elite handle the onslaught of poor on them?
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In Christmas 2007, I found a nightclub in London selling the most expensive cocktail in the world. I was reporting a piece on the gulf between the super-rich & the rest of society – and here was a liquid metaphor.
Hand the barman at Movida £35,000 & he would mix up a shot of Louis XII cognac, some Cristal Rose, a few flakes of edible gold leaf & at the bottom of the glass a diamond ring. During both mixing & drinking two security guards would keep watch.
Running around Mumbai for the past few days has sometimes felt like travelling back in time to that credit-crunch Christmas. Not because I think a banking crash is just around the corner, but because of the size of that gulf between those right at the top of this city & everyone else.
On Thursday afternoon, an events organiser for Mumbai’s wealthiest told me stories of children’s birthday parties in which a Bollywood celebrity was hired at huge expense to sing & dance – for a group of eight-year-olds. Of crores of rupees (hundreds of thousands of pounds) being spent on wedding dancers alone. She herself would rank among the city’s elite. For her two-year-old’s birthday, a swimming trip & family lunch was planned & yet friends would ask, “Aren’t you doing anything to celebrate?”
As India’s commercial capital, Mumbai has long been home to some of the richest people on the subcontinent. But in all my travels back & forth to India, I’ve noticed across big cities over the past decade or so a much greater willingness by the wealthy to show off. In Mumbai, that has reached extremes. On our first day here, the cabbie showed us Nariman Point, the Hanging Gardens, the Taj & the Gateway of India – then drove us over to Antilia, reportedly the most expensive home in the world. Owned by Mukesh Ambani, it is worth an estimated $1bn, is 27-storeys high & has 3 helipads.
However extreme, Antilia is hardly anomalous. A half hour away from where I am writing this, a new residential estate is up for sale, offering seaview flats alongside access to private jets & yachts. The black & gold billboards read: For Kings. For Queens. For Royalty.
The bit of this that really reminds me of London before The Fall is the way those enjoying this lifestyle assume that everyone else is getting a bit of it, too. I am thinking here of the property developer who is now in New York for 5 days’ shopping – his second trip there in 2 months. Just before he left, he told me that he regularly took 10 holidays a year – but then went on to talk about how his cook had also been to South Africa. Except, it turned out, his servant had gone there for work.
In the 90s, as the second great wave of globalisation got under way, policymakers thought they knew who the winners & losers would be. On the debit side were the blue-collar & manufacturing-workers of the west, whose jobs were going to move east. But that was all worth it, we were assured, as long as people in developing countries got richer. But what a visit to Mumbai shows you is the vast inequality in how those riches have been spread around. You see it in the physical infrastructure: all those new flyovers sprouting up around the city to enable the chauffeur driven classes to get about more easily, even while the commuter trains are still bursting; the crowded, chaotic public hospitals that get by while gleaming new private hospitals open up.
Unlike in Britain or America, the middle classes in urban India are still far better off than they were 10-15 years ago. But in Mumbai, you see how they also struggle to pay for their English-medium schools & non-government doctors. I am thinking here of a family I met last night who were adamant that that they were middle class & yet were also open about how much they were struggling to afford even the basics for their children.
At the end of our chat, the party planner began angsting out loud about what kind of society Mumbai was becoming. “At the top, we’re creating a generation of brats. If they have iPads & birthday extravaganzas now, what will they demand when they’re teens? And at the bottom, can you imagine how much resentment they must be carrying?”
Politicians & governments are only interested in how much money they can stuff in their "pockets" (i.e. bank accounts) from companies, industries, & lobbyists. They will sprinkle some money on a few projects in the development, & even then those projects need to be highly visible for elections & public.
Western countries have already gone through this large & increasing divide between the 99% & 1% of the country (remember Occupy Movements around the world about 5 years ago?) but talks of recession ending & new economic growths have only helped fuel the divide now. Western governments didn't bring any new legislation to resolve this divide. All of the countries, both developed & fast developing ones, are turning back to the medieval times.
According to a report from New York's Coalition for the Homeless, 60,000 people are sleeping in city shelters every night – almost double the amount since 2004. Let that sink in for a minute. Homeless people in NYC have DOUBLED in the past 10 years ... & there's no end to it.
Recession didn't even dent the increasing wealth of the business & political elites. While their wealth increased several folds between 2007 & 2014, the middle class is not only getting wiped out from society, the poor are barely hanging on to life.
This is all happening, & will definitely keep happening, in the so-called seemingly equal, fair, developed countries of the West. So what & how can one expect something better from developing countries like China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Russia, Vietnam, Pakistan etc.?
BUT, what rich are not seeing, by getting blinded by their fast rising tower of wealth, that you can only push the poor down to a limit. The numbers of poor are fast increasing in the urban cities all over the world. Those human beings will try to fight back for their survival when the survival of them & their families is severely threatened.
This will become the scene from the French Revolution, except it won't be happening only France, but all over the world. Are governments & politicians ready for this Revolution? Can the rich business & political elite handle the onslaught of poor on them?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In Christmas 2007, I found a nightclub in London selling the most expensive cocktail in the world. I was reporting a piece on the gulf between the super-rich & the rest of society – and here was a liquid metaphor.
Hand the barman at Movida £35,000 & he would mix up a shot of Louis XII cognac, some Cristal Rose, a few flakes of edible gold leaf & at the bottom of the glass a diamond ring. During both mixing & drinking two security guards would keep watch.
Running around Mumbai for the past few days has sometimes felt like travelling back in time to that credit-crunch Christmas. Not because I think a banking crash is just around the corner, but because of the size of that gulf between those right at the top of this city & everyone else.
On Thursday afternoon, an events organiser for Mumbai’s wealthiest told me stories of children’s birthday parties in which a Bollywood celebrity was hired at huge expense to sing & dance – for a group of eight-year-olds. Of crores of rupees (hundreds of thousands of pounds) being spent on wedding dancers alone. She herself would rank among the city’s elite. For her two-year-old’s birthday, a swimming trip & family lunch was planned & yet friends would ask, “Aren’t you doing anything to celebrate?”
As India’s commercial capital, Mumbai has long been home to some of the richest people on the subcontinent. But in all my travels back & forth to India, I’ve noticed across big cities over the past decade or so a much greater willingness by the wealthy to show off. In Mumbai, that has reached extremes. On our first day here, the cabbie showed us Nariman Point, the Hanging Gardens, the Taj & the Gateway of India – then drove us over to Antilia, reportedly the most expensive home in the world. Owned by Mukesh Ambani, it is worth an estimated $1bn, is 27-storeys high & has 3 helipads.
However extreme, Antilia is hardly anomalous. A half hour away from where I am writing this, a new residential estate is up for sale, offering seaview flats alongside access to private jets & yachts. The black & gold billboards read: For Kings. For Queens. For Royalty.
The bit of this that really reminds me of London before The Fall is the way those enjoying this lifestyle assume that everyone else is getting a bit of it, too. I am thinking here of the property developer who is now in New York for 5 days’ shopping – his second trip there in 2 months. Just before he left, he told me that he regularly took 10 holidays a year – but then went on to talk about how his cook had also been to South Africa. Except, it turned out, his servant had gone there for work.
In the 90s, as the second great wave of globalisation got under way, policymakers thought they knew who the winners & losers would be. On the debit side were the blue-collar & manufacturing-workers of the west, whose jobs were going to move east. But that was all worth it, we were assured, as long as people in developing countries got richer. But what a visit to Mumbai shows you is the vast inequality in how those riches have been spread around. You see it in the physical infrastructure: all those new flyovers sprouting up around the city to enable the chauffeur driven classes to get about more easily, even while the commuter trains are still bursting; the crowded, chaotic public hospitals that get by while gleaming new private hospitals open up.
Unlike in Britain or America, the middle classes in urban India are still far better off than they were 10-15 years ago. But in Mumbai, you see how they also struggle to pay for their English-medium schools & non-government doctors. I am thinking here of a family I met last night who were adamant that that they were middle class & yet were also open about how much they were struggling to afford even the basics for their children.
At the end of our chat, the party planner began angsting out loud about what kind of society Mumbai was becoming. “At the top, we’re creating a generation of brats. If they have iPads & birthday extravaganzas now, what will they demand when they’re teens? And at the bottom, can you imagine how much resentment they must be carrying?”
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