May 18, 2012  Print Email | Mall is beautiful in urban India
Letter from Bangalore India's dream TV is not reflected in neglected urban India
Posted by C Shanti at 01:57 PM GMT on Feb 17, 2009 | IF YOU WATCHED any of the hundreds of channels on Indian TV here in Bangalore, you’d be forgiven for thinking life on the sub-continent is an affluent dream, with everything becoming better all the time.
You’ve got it all in Bangalore – Maseratis on the streets, Kentucky Fried Chicken, TGI Friday, malls, malls and more malls, gleaming glass towers in the science parks in Whitefields, and happy smiling people.
But that doesn’t reflect a disturbing fact about Indian life. While 60 per cent of the population live in the countryside, only one newspaper, The Hindu, appears to have a rural correspondent.
That fact was reflected in the last general election, when the pundits on the newspapers all said that the BJP would win. The picture was different in the rural areas of India, but not apparent to urban India, which appears to be cocooned from some hard realities in the country.
 The fact is, that with a few honourable exceptions, the press in India doesn’t like to report on rural India, where there are huge problems. Malnutrition in some areas is as bad, if not worse than the poorest areas of Africa.
There is also a strip of India in the east, from Nepal down to Karnataka, where Maoism is on the rise. The Maoists, called Naxalites here in India, control big areas which are no-go regions for the state authorities. The Maoists effectively are the government in these places.
Much of this is ignored by the Indian press, which largely toes the government line, possibly compounded by the fact that TV, radio and print - like their counterparts in Europe – are more concerned with the cult of celebrity, with all that entails.
When I was first in India in 1978, I only saw TV in Mumbai in a swanky hotel. And the only channel was the government channel and in black and white rather than colour. In rural Gujarat, the cinemas were crowded while crowds of people gathered to hear pandits read the Ramayana or the Mahabharata to them, in the open.
But now the many colour channels reach out to the rural districts too. No one seems to have made one simple connection. Indian TV is presenting a vision to many hundreds of millions of people in rural India of things that they are never going to get. Every brand known to the world and its dog is promoted – in the supermarkets of Bangalore you can buy the same sort of junk as you can in shops in the West. The adverts are full of happy, smiling people with lovely, lovely lives.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that the dispossessed, the poor, and the hungry, turn to Maoism as their only hope in their distress. Maoism offers a way out that consumerism never can.
Even in the Garden City, Bangalore, all is not as beautiful as it seems. People from all over India have poured in to take advantage of the outsourcing bonanza, while the locals largely provide the support for these outsiders. There’s something in the eyes of the locals called resentment, because when IT companies retrench, the first jobs to go are those of the taxi drivers and others who rely on the outsiders for their living.
Down in Brigade Road on Saturday, I was surprised to see far fewer people and far less traffic than normal. Although India is not officially in a recession, people are obviously as fearful here as in the West that their jobs might disappear overnight, and the bubble might burst.
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