?I don?t care too much for money…Money can?t buy me love!? That old Beatles? chart buster song, based on the old adage that money can?t buy happiness, was part of my growing up years. But that certainly doesn?t seem to be the case today. As I dashed to the duty-free counter in Dubai Airport minutes before boarding last week, to hunt for a cellphone with all the latest trappings for my teenage daughter, nothing seemed to be further from the truth. As I waited patiently, or should I say impatiently, for the Malayali salesman to serve me, all around was chaos, as sweating shoppers scrambled for the latest goods. None of them looked very happy to me, as they struggled with their bulging bags.
I shuddered even as I stood in line with all of them. They seemed to be carrying the baggage of affluence. And everything was all about money. Money that they were using to buy love.
The Indian society, in this age of globalisation, is going through a transformation. It is getting more preoccupied with spending, with comfort and bodily well being, with opulence, and purchase, with more goods this year than last and more next than this.
Today?s India is violently different from the India of my childhood days. We had one telephone in our home and that too was used by the entire building. Today, my two daughters, my wife, my maids, my two drivers and even my local electrician and bhajiwala, all have cellphones. While this may be a welcome indication of the communication revolution, the problem begins when you feel the need to replace your perfectly competent phone with a new one just because it has some ?latest feature? that the other does not have.
Today?s kids confuse a good life with goods. They find it very difficult to extricate themselves from the temptations or to look away from the seductive messages that are beamed into the homes from TV and internet, which is: contentment is available for the price of a car, a computer, a cellphone, a little more getting and spending.
Call television whatever you want ? ?idiot box,? ?child molester,? ?chewing gum for the eyes,? ?white noise for the brain,? this electronic medium is the greatest selling medium ever concocted by man. The advertisers use this gizmo, which has by now become a part of our nervous system and entered our bloodstream, to sell all kinds of goods to all kinds of people. Someone said: ?In day to day commerce, television is not so much interested in the business of communication but in the business of delivering audiences to advertisers. People are the merchandise, not the shows. The shows are merely the bait.?
But to be honest, I find it would be as simplistic to say, ?here are the nasty advertisers leading us into temptation for their own profit,? as it is to say, ?here are the crooked holy men who are manipulating our imaginations and trapping our souls for their own aggrandisement.? As somebody rightly said, we need Gods more than the Gods need us.
The Gods of the 21st century are in the hands of the commercial manipulators, and our holy grails have become those objects of desire that are tantalisingly displayed in palatial, glitzy shopping malls, which stock not a few, but thousands of varieties of goods out to seduce your ever open purse. But however much we may feel comforted by thinking that ?they are doing this to us,? the truth is, we are doing this to ourselves. They are ?narcotised? by goods.
The main thing today that people do when they are depressed, is shop. Years ago, a person, if he was unhappy, and did not know what to do with himself, went to a church or a temple, or joined a guru, or joined a political party and started a revolution. But today, when we are unhappy, what do we do? We go shopping. Shopping is our salvation. I know an actress who is a compulsive shopper and spender. She is what one can call a shopping addict, a shopaholic. Whenever she is lonely and depressed, she goes on a shopping spree, just like a drug or alcohol addict. The credit card is to the shopaholic what a bottle is to the alcoholic; the swipe replaces the swig. Shopping addiction tends to affect more women than men. Women with this compulsive disorder often have racks of clothes and possessions with the price tags still attached, which have never been used. Remember Imelda Marcos and her 2,400 pairs of shoes? In some cases, shopaholics have an emotional blackout and do not remember even buying the articles. If their spouses and family complain about their purchases, they often hide the things they buy. Psychiatrists today recommend that these spending addicts seek professional counseling before the shopping binges devastate them.
But little do we realise that, as our ancestors have forewarned, the more we seek satisfaction in material goods, the less we find it there. Satisfaction purchased through buying products has a short life and that feeling of well being is fleeting. We must understand that so long as we continue to identify happiness and well being predominantly in economic terms, we will remain unsatisfied. In a country like ours, where so many have so little and so few have so much, it is imperative that we reign our desire for more and more. As a historian of religion said: ?The good is not in ?goods.? The good is in justice, mercy, and peace. It is in consistency and integrity, in living according to truth and right. It resides in men and not in things. It is other than the goodness of goods and without it goods are not good.?
The writer is a Mumbai-based film director