irrational opulence

Recently I had been to Tiruppur – the knitting capital of India. It would be heartening and disheartening to note that the cloth and often the garment itself for major brands like reebok, nike, adidas and many many more have their origins here for a fraction of the price at which it is bought off the shelves. This town (yeah it is still a town), and its surrounding towns and villages have a predominant occupation as either the textile industry or farming.

I could not digest the information I gathered on this town, based on a lot of hearsay and eye-seens. The people here are hard core business men… the business is flourishing as this was an outsourced business long before the word outsourcing became a common household utterance in our country… some of the finest cotton yarn is produced here and the worldwide brands pay a premium for these yarns and the cloth manufactured… actually the only contribution from these brands is the brand name… so truly a brand is a brand is a brand…

The people make huge profits and own big houses whenever there is a windfall of profits, but in case there is a bad luck and one consignment of the company results in a loss then the very same guys are reduced to poverty – but without loss in spirit. Earlier he might have been traveling in a merc E-class and now maybe a tvs-50 (yeah these mopeds are still sold here alongside the 100 color option scooty peps…) but he still travels…

On the flip side, the city is totally polluted and the ground water is colored from all the dyes. Traffic is bad on these roads with smoking trucks and buses plying these roads with overloaded cargoes of those expensive brands. The basic necessities are either expensive for those who can afford it or carcinogenic for those who cannot.

It is funny that such a rich town is so undeveloped in terms of attitude. This town has had a favorable economy for decades as Indian cotton and yarn is supposed to be of the best quality. At this kind of money exchanged, the town should have become a huge financial capital of Tamilnadu eating up Chennai in fame… really what is there in Chennai except for the government? This is maybe one of the richest zones of Tamilnadu but the people here have not come out of their cocoons…

The city still has open drains and many houses still manure their farms directly… they use tractors and heavy farm equipment, but still spend very little for their own travel convenience. The transports used mostly are 30-40 year old breaking down trucks and buses spewing smoke all over the roads… sometimes it makes me wonder if the black roads are actually due to the tar or the smoke settled over the ages… I really could not believe my ears when people said that the premium and pure petrol actually screwed up the engines and reduced the life of the vehicles.

The people who drive the vehicles are excited to own the steering wheel for the moment… in spite of the reality that they don’t have a valid license to drive, let alone kill, they own the roads and consider it a sin to adhere to the speed limits, or even twice that. One-way signs if at all they still exist are ignored and the roads are just barely wide enough to support traffic on opposite directions to cross each other and most often the outside of the vehicle is out of the asphalt… many of them don’t even have the asphalt and use the swampy mud that soaks up the rain water and moves deeper into the earth… the roads are often neglected and there are potholes at blindspots on the long but unnecessarily winding stretches…but still these are the roads that has produced the heritage of the Narain Karthikeyan… not the straight broad stretch called the “Mount road of Chennai”.

The kind of facilities that are normally accepted with even half this kind of wealth is conspicuously missing… I cannot find any coffee-days or shopping malls, the theaters are the old weather beaten moth eaten proud 70MMs… the food in the restaurants are good, though the hygiene factor is nowhere to be seen. If anybody has been following the personal hygiene rules taught in primary school, they would give out twice of whatever they have eaten. The romantic-time-spending-under-soft-lights fancy restaurants are missing… however the normal restaurants pamper you with whatever food they have… the reason usually being the importance attached to food rather than the customer-is-king concept.

Even though these extravagances are missing, the extravagance is not totally missing. People own mercs, lexuses and land cruisers. To quote my close friend from a nearby town – there were only 3 mercs at the time of their introduction in India – one owned by some business tycoon in the north (probably the ambanis, I don’t remember) and 2 in his town!!! Similarly after the major metros, the famous international standards icici bank opened a branch in this area even before visiting many major cities. People do get those jazzy bikes and cars and trucks… but you can still find that this has affected only a very small part of the population. The majority still relies on the bullet for the mirazdars and the tvs-50s and the bajaj m80s for the middle class transport.

Gold is something that the people here are usually decked in after their dazzling silk and polyester saris and dhotis. Of course the fact that Indians still revere gold above their husbands may be one of the principle reasons for their spending in gold. But the opulence is displayed only in the metal and the material and not in the quality. I doubt that anil ambani or azim premji would invite any of these business families to their dinner parties even if these businesses were richer than them – actually it could be true, the richer than the popular business houses part, that is.

Despite so many popular engineering colleges around the towns, they still lack the basic primary education infrastructure… and some industries do proudly sport the board “No Child Labor” (yeah right it is only some). The broadbands and the internet is still beyond the reach of even those who can afford and appreciate them… oops did I jump the gun, before talking about the black and green screen boxes also known as computers… some houses use perfect lan-cords with brand new connectors to hang clothes to dry… communication still usually happens through the government post offices and at the other end of the spectrum the all pervading cellular networks. No, no GPRS and stuff… just plain voice mail…

I am not cribbing about the lack of infrastructure at this place. Nor am I saying that the bigger cities that have adopted the western culture are better off just because they satisfy some of the above requirements. What surprises me is the attitude of the people here. They are earners and not spenders. Whatever they spend on is usually not the priority number 1 of the city dwelling people of similar income levels.

This town is a classic case of money can’t buy everything. For everything else they still don’t accept mastercard.