LET A DIAMOND
CUT MY SOUL
A slew of über-rich lifestyle magazines is
hitting the market. Nisha Susan gawks at the new Indian
they are touting
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Are you
a person of taste? You should drink a bottle of Maldivian coconut
brandy (Rs 4 crore), and have sex in space (Rs 163 crore) |
Glossy magazines
were once an innocuous pleasure, a matinee ticket to mild fantasy, until
the culture doctors jumped in and told us that we are what we flip through.
This summer what we are flipping through is a slew of new lifestyle
magazines, and if we are what they say we should be, it’s time
the psychoanalysts moved in. Helen Gurley Brown once said she thought
of her magazine Cosmopolitan as a ‘sophisticated older sister.’
If that is so, the magazines now hitting the Indian market are brazen
sirens, not advising you on the right mascara or how yesterday’s
idlis can become tasty tiffin today, but hissing sibilantly at you to
get a life, get some taste.
The Indian editions
of Hello! and Ok! are already here, Vogue is due to arrive later this
year, and Outlook and India Today have recently launched their lifestyle
supplements, Envy and Spice. Poised as style guides, these magazines
offer yachts, aeroplanes, space tourism, watches that cost Rs 1 crore
and the right way to eat an ortolan as ordinary preoccupations for the
well-heeled Indian. (In case you were wondering, the ortolan is a small
bird that serious gourmets like drowned alive in fine cognac and eaten
whole. The magazines also tell you that chewing the ortolan takes approximately
15 minutes.)
Are you a person
of taste? Then you should have a wax model of yourself made (Rs 1 crore),
drink a bottle of Maldivian coconut brandy (Rs 4 crore), cook on a gold-plated
barbecue grill (Rs 5 lakh), have sex in space (Rs 163 crore) and presumably
write about these experiences with pens made of enamel and gold (Rs
1.9 lakh). One imagines Mr Millionaire eating his butter chicken shamefacedly
behind thickly curtained rooms because he knows he ought to be eating
spargel, for instance — white asparagus (Spice’s July issue
devotes four pages to ‘this season’s uberdish’).
So how is one to
read these magazines and the “new India” they seem to signpost?
Some observers think they are an outrage in a developing country. Madhu
Trehan, veteran editor-journalist, believes these magazines fly in the
face of ethical journalism. “There is nothing wrong with aspiration,
wanting to move ahead, making more money, sending our children to better
schools. Companies have to promote their products, but it ought to be
an editorial decision not to brainwash consumers into buying things
they don’t need.”
But others point
out that these magazines are merely flashes of lightning that illumine
the huge wealth sloshing about in contemporary India. Time Asia reported
in 2006 that 1.6 million households in India earn around Rs 45 lakh
per year and spend about Rs 4 lakh per year on “luxury/very premium”
goods and services. Time also said this number would probably cross
3 million by 2010.
Still, you might
wonder who these magazines are for. Are they for the uber-rich, the
ones who presumably read them and think, “Let me buy a necklace
of golden crocodiles locked at the tails, and studded with 1,023 yellow
diamonds to cheer myself up”? Are they for the middle-class gazing
longingly yacht-wards? Or are they just vehicles for advertisements?
Either way, it would be a mistake to merely toss them aside. They are
a sociological symptom.
AD Singh, owner
of the Olive restaurants, hangout of the super-swanky, says that the
magazines have, in fact, arrived right on time, rescuing the wealthy
from the hypocrisy of hiding their desire for luxury. “People
in India now have a larger disposable income. These magazines help them
understand and acquire the symbols of wealth. They guide their decisions.
We have censured the well-off for a long time. Why shouldn’t they
spend their money? They have worked hard for it.”
Shefalee Vasudev,
editor of Marie Claire India, believes these publications create desire
– “expand the realm of the good life” – regardless
of whether you can afford them. “People don’t necessarily
go out and buy the exact things they see in magazines. But they
will buy something similar or affordable replicas. So, these magazines
pump overall purchases.”
Media is perhaps
one of the most powerful barometers of social character. If that is
so, the new Indian elite many of these new magazines are moulding may
well end up believing that “nation-building” lies only in
fuelling economic boom with idiosyncratic excess. As ad filmmaker Prahlad
Kakkar says, “These magazines are paving the way for the entry
of luxury goods like Dolce & Gabbana, Hermès, Jimmy Choo
and Gucci which are all coming to India soon.”
Examine the impact
of just one category of these heralds of hyper consumerism. In the last
five years, no lifestyle magazine has produced an issue without at least
one column imploring you not to get those wines wrong when serving mutton
curry (What, no ortolan?) Now we even have Sommelier India, a magazine
devoted to wine. Is it surprising that wine sales have grown at 25 percent
per year since 1998?
Spice and Envy and
publications of their ilk carry a message. Decades of shame at being
a rich Indian in a poor India are over. Ernest Hemingway said the rich
are different from us because they have more money. Now the rich seem
not unlike what the magazines tell us about white asparagus. “Although
not genetically different, white asparagus is nuttier than its sturdier
green cousin.”
And nuttier is
what we green cousins want to get.
