The New Normals

Much has become everyday stuff that would have stunned us just a decade ago.

98.4°F. Normal temperature for the human body, barring an evolutionary mishap, is unlikely to change for a long, long time to come. Urban indicus is safe, at least in that respect. But pull that mercury-meter from your mouth, reflect for a moment, and the changes become apparent—differences that separate the way we were, and the way we are. The transition from the old-economy enterprise of landlines where conversations began with “How are you?” to cellphone queries that start with “Where are you?” In just one harmless little word, the human connect has shifted from well-being to geo-position.

Is this the New Normal?

It is. In the span of a decade, entirely new crowds of consumers, kids of the liberalisation era who are now young adults, have taken total control of the norms of consumption. To them, Pizza Hut’s Punjabi 12-incher is as Indian as bhelpuri, a McAloo burger is an obvious menu option, and KFC is perfectly sane selling gravyless dishes as ‘finger lickin good’. And while McWhatnot invades mindspace, security checks invade your personal space. After the series of terror attacks across urban India that led up to Mumbai’s 26/11, it’s almost by reflex that you raise your arms sideways to have a cold metal detector run over your body at malls, markets, temples and mosques. In this era of New Normals, the frisk is the essential pre-ritual before you can worship, eat or shop.

It’s always easier to measure the tangibles. Like the frightening way today’s kids are ballooning, how India has become the world’s back-office, and how the globe exalts us as the next Consumersaurus rex. Marketing maestro Santosh Desai, CEO, Future Brands, sees a New Normal in “the difference between the 3 per cent and the 8 per cent economy”. It has changed how you relate to yourself. “Now when you stand up, you don’t hit the ceiling,” he says, “We’re in such a state of consumption, that at weddings, we’ve cut short the ceremony and extended the sangeet. The core rituals are reduced, the show is pomped up.” According to an executive at Mindspace, a consumer behaviour and trend-mapping consultancy, “With significant disposable income in the hands of 18–22-year-olds, a lot of them are earning more than their parents. For them, deferred gratification is as un-cool as grey polyester safari suits.”

There are also quieter ways in which we’ve slipped into New Normal life, such as the comfortable awareness that being Indian is to be wanted and wooed by the world economy. That we can retreat if we want from urban ugliness into expensively feathered caves, many of them advertised as gated parcels of paradise. That being obnoxious can be a career choice—if you take the reality TV show route. That in the brave new kidderarchy, it’s a world ruled by kids and their demands. That talking about money in front of children is okay. C’mon, you’ve surely seen the TV commercial with the kid bringing home a banker so daddy gets a loan.

Affordability has its own New Normality. While dal and sugar deliver sticker shocks, TV sets can be bought for a little more than the cost of moulded plastic and flattened glass. All this has inverted our idea of uselessness. “Till five years ago,” says Chiranjee Lal, a South Delhi scrap dealer with ‘40 years of experience’ in the trade, “people would buy TV sets off me as I carried them down the streets. Now I sell the components.”

We’ve been so immersed in the transition that these New Norms might simply have escaped our notice. That’s okay. Let’s suppose we’re making ourselves future-proof. After all, who can predict tomorrow’s Normals? Will our pets be fitted with GPS collars? Will movies be thrill-pills we can pop and play inside our mind’s eyes? Could our future normal be 98.9º F?

26/11. That’s the day that the idea of ‘normal’ exploded with gruesome exactitude in India. Far from the chronic conflict theatres of Kashmir, the Northeast and Naxal strongholds, a new urban war erupted on 26 November 2008, when crazed terrorists disembarked in South Mumbai and struck India from the sea. The attacks lasted three long days, killing over 170 and wounding more than 300 people.

Fear continues to stalk the innocent. “My children tell me, ‘please mummy, don’t go to the Oberoi’,” says Divya Manchanda, a homemaker. “They’re not paranoid, that’s where their friend’s parents were killed,” she says. In art classes, terror has an iconic image. “Kids draw the Taj Mahal building with fires blazing outside its windows,” says Renuka Taneja, who runs Windows, an independent art programme in Delhi. Beyond TV screens, Ajmal Kasab has become part of politically conscious Ganpati pandals.

In the half decade before this, 13 major blasts flared up outside temples, mosques and markets in Varanasi, Hyderabad, Delhi, Jaipur and six other cities. The death roster includes labourers in our infotech capital Bangalore, worshippers in our city of eternal light Varanasi, patients and blood donors in a civil hospital in Ahmedabad and travellers on the Samjhauta Express.

It’s been enough to ratchet state and private vigilance to an all-time high. Intrusive security, the kind we only had at airports, is now standard procedure across temples, malls and markets. We know the drill. Cross the wooden frame, get intimately patted down by a stranger in uniform, and turn your handbag and pockets inside out for examination. At Delhi’s swank Select Citywalk mall, teenager Shivam Gupta is oblivious to the terror threat. “I’m pissed,” he says, after being frisked before a film, “Why’d they confiscate my bubble gum?”

At last count, we had 1.1 million policemen. That’s supplemented by an army of 6 million private security personnel, guarding homes, businesses and markets. Delhi has more private guards than police. We’re living in a state of siege, and we don’t even know it.

In the insect world, we called the phenomenon cocooning, when precious new life is protected in a freshly spun silk casing. Our expanding suburban world is fast-resembling this, as new money and home loans usher people into shimmering glass, steel and marble cocoons. The age of the average home buyer is down to 30, and many are seeking houses detached from the ugly external planet, in lush private gated communities and luxurious townships.

Spinning suburbanites closer into the cocoon is an inner life dependent on wi-fi connections. Slowly, we’ve been going deeper and deeper within, only to reach out to people we know, not on the streets, buses or trains, but on social networks. Twentysomethings are spending up to 45 minutes a day on Facebook. Nearly one-third of all unique visitors on Orkut worldwide are Indians. Here, unlike our real touch-and-feel world, they call a virtual handshake a ‘poke’. And these networks have unusual votaries. Anthropologist Shiv Vishvanathan poses a challenge: “Show me a civic area that is better than the online community. It’s a feasible new public space that is sane, hygienic and policed.”

How did we get so deep inside? For the upwardly mobile who’ve been denied amenities like 24/7 power, water and security, and shunned by snobbish clubs where they’d like to relax and play some sports, gated communities hold out a home and lifestyle, free from municipal tyranny.

“It’s got enough security so my kids can run and play,” says Brijesh Tripathi of Qualcomm, a global telecom firm, on his wonderful family life in 10 Downing in Bangalore, a posh little enclave for fashionable folk, “When I travel on business trips, I know my family is safe.”

Soon, we’ll have townships with a lifestyle menu that includes a four-screen multiplex, an 18-hole golf course, a mall, international school and a multi-specialty clinic. Some developers are considering an inhouse helipad as a taxi-cum-ambulance service. With this, who’d want to drive out of these gates?

It’s taking nothing less than push-button harvests to please city customers who aren’t hungry anymore, but hungry for choices. Ask Gagan Saini. Having inherited a vegetable shop in Delhi’s Hauz Khas market six years ago, he’s had to run it differently from his father. In his small squeeze of a stall, tucked below this season’s stash of winter veggies are a collection of summer staples like lauki and bhindi. “I sell all sabzis, all seasons,” says Gagan, all for customers who want “menu-change items”. Traditionally ridge gourds, bottle gourds and green tindas, high on water content, are natural body slakers in season during Delhi’s dry summers. But for today’s bounty hunters, six months is just too long to sup on a limited summer diet of lauki-tinda-tori. They’ve been agitating for carrots, French beans and cauliflower, even in the off-season.

Keeping farm produce rolling in from faraway farms, an improved feeder-network of interstate trucks gets Gagan juicy red tomatoes from Bangalore, cabbages and cauliflower from Himachal even during the monsoon. Season-hoodwinking like this has been setting in across cities. It’s taken to its poshest peak at boutique stores like Godrej’s Nature’s Basket in Mumbai. Walk in and find yourself surrounded by flawless summer, winter and international temptations like lissom endives, pert peppers and luscious tangerines.

“We offer twice the range of any bhajiwala, and the widest array of exotic vegetables grown locally,” says the fresh category manager at Godrej Nature’s Basket, which is three-branch strong and growing. On an average day, they’ve got 70 varieties of veggies on offer. Their astoundingly fresh greens, handpicked from farms and hi-tech greenhouses, have plenty of takers. Svelte socialites can ponder over which of 15 salad varietals to go for, lollo, romaine or tango? Others flip flop between the seven apple baskets. Sticker-pickers prefer Chinese and Chilean.

Although India’s apple season only lasts from August to September, with fruit coming in from Jammu & Kashmir and Himachal, markets are supplemented with global apples. Imported fruit is not a bourgeois proclivity. Mother Dairy, a government-supported neighbourhood chain in Delhi, also sells juicy reds shipped in from Chile.

Constant harvest has its unsavoury aspects. “In order to survive the transportation over long distances to reach India, the fruit needs to be picked unripe, and bred to survive shipment, rather than taste,” says Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, Markets Power and the Hidden Battle for World Food. He elaborates, “If the US is any indication, India’s urban youth might soon think that fresh fruit and vegetables grow on market shelves.”

Till now, however, there’s no getting around notoriously seasonal stars like the home-grown ripe and luscious Alphonso. We may have sold our rumps to Levi’s, our chests to Allen Solly and our feet to Nike, but there’s still one part of our palate that’s still patriotic and willing to submit only to the mango when it comes to seasonality.

One of the best things about school was vacation time, when you’d empty your desk and ditch your compass box. Not anymore. Somehow, life between semesters just means students swapping their heavy schoolbag for a bulging haversack, stuffed with anything from ballerina shoes, footie gear, rollerblades or chessboards and even textbooks. “What to do?” asks a parent of a child in a Delhi school, despondently, “Teachers badger children for activity certificates and medals after vacations. My heart breaks when my daughter says, ‘I’m too tired for classes, Mummy’.”

Caught in an era of hyper-parenting, as kids are pushed to become a ‘somebody’, teens and even pre-schoolers are overloaded with special classes in swimming, dancing, tennis, gym and early reading, writing and mathematics, right through the holidays. With kids and parents on this performance treadmill, chess is popular not as a play-game, but as a daily black-and-white tonic to strengthen children’s minds and memories.

“Almost every second child is over-scheduled today,” says Delhi-based child psychologist and family therapist, Dr Shelja Sen. “Though what kids need most is unstructured play, to sit and read, laugh or roll on the floor, chase butterflies… now there’s no time for that, even during vacations.”

“I’m not going to take childhood away from my children,” declares Sarita Kapur, mother of an 11- and 14-year-old studying at Delhi’s Amity International. But how? Weekends have evaporated because of Monday tests. Summer fun dries up as holiday homework piles up, and during the Diwali break, the real fireworks begin when she forces her kids to open their textbooks.

High on the holiday curriculum are outdoor camps, partly because working parents want kids to be ‘positively occupied’, and also because it’s an easy way of tearing kids way from TV and computer games. There is Youreka, for example, an 8-day adventure-based learning programme offered by iDiscoveri, a global team of educationists. The camp is designed to help 9–15 year olds acquire new skills, build character and develop confidence through ‘I did it’ moments. “We try to spur the child beyond what they’ve ever imagined, with peer support,” says a Youreka director. Between activities, children do have ‘solo’ and ‘reflection’ time by the river and mountain sides. But these great intentions in the great outdoors still mean that kids have to push and prove themselves among peers, “when the greatest need for over-burdened kids is the chance to just be”, says Dr Sen. Somehow, there’s no slack anyone is willing to cut city kids anymore.

As global warnings go, this one was dark and ominous. In 2003, the World Meteorological Organisation officially signalled that world weather had gone freaky. Flip back on our own screaming headlines diary, and you can’t miss the thick black facts flying into your face. March 2005, Mumbai gets pelted by hail and children stand in the street holding hailstones for the first time ever. October 2006, Shimla records the coldest day in 33 years. In 2007, Tibetan markets make record profits during Mumbai’s coldest February yet, as shivering locals snap up woollies, mitts and mufflers, as the mercury shrinks to 8.5º C. On 9 February 2008, Mumbai was colder than Delhi by 0.5º C. The upper end of the thermometer wasn’t spared mercury spikes either. “Of our ten warmest years in the last 100, eight occurred after the 1990s,” observes Dr HR Hatwar, additional director general, Indian Meteorological Department, Pune.

Climate change expert Dr Prakash Rao, studying the deeper definitions of change, has lived on a diet of weather data for the last five years. Looking up from his papers with a befuddled expression, he says: “Can you believe that Ladakh now has mosquitoes? You don’t normally find mosquitoes at 16,000 ft above sea level.” Rising humidity is the hidden culprit, due to which fans are selling for the first time in Ladakh, a place usually described as a frozen desert. Having researched the Himalayan glaciers, Sundarbans and other vulnerable zones in India, Dr Rao warns, “The pattern is disturbing, the number of extreme weather events in the last five years are more frequent than ever before.”

According to several sets of recent observation, climate change does indeed have glaciers in retreat. Since 1995, the Gangotri Glacier has been melting faster than ever. The loss of this mass of ice could have a devastating impact of livelihoods, eco-systems and bio-diversity. Rising sea levels in the Bengal of Bengal have caused villagers in Orissa’s Satabhaya region to abandon their houses. The sea is perilously close to swallowing some of Satabhaya. Pointing out other weather whims, Dr Gopal Rawat, a phenologist (specialist in the study of the relation between climate and biological phenomena) at the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, says,“During an unusually cold winter recently, warm weather species such as lantana, banana and young neem trees were damaged. This was due to frost, which is a very rare phenomenon in a subtropical area like the Doon Valley.”

Pay heed, the weather is clearly off-kilter.

(Additional reporting by Pallavi Polanki)

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