The Middle Class of Indostan

Midlife Musings

We sit solemnly in a suitably sterile room on straight-backed chairs on a cold winter’s day wondering why we are here, what exactly are we meant to do, to be and to say. Alone, in our homes and our condominium cocoons, at our ergonomically designed desks, on our office commutes, in our minds, we each have worried thinking, where do we go from here. We have politely ‘taken time off’ to present ourselves at perfectly peaceful protests, making sure that, that day, we skirt our expressway of carefully curated comforts, many of them bought on interest-free EMIs, beautifying the climb up the urban ladder with Urban Ladder and the likes. We’ve even been to a Shaheen Bagh, for a lark. We are the conscientious, conscience-free, callous middle-class, which isn’t even that.

In fact, in the continuing offence to my middle-class sensibilities, there is now ample half-hidden evidence that we may no longer be as massive a market as touted to be, certainly not after demonetization and GST. You will refute this with a knock-out bout of whataboutery, for good reason too. After all, we are the mythic demographic dividend now forever democratically divided by religion. Numbers have been lying for a long, long while, but the middle-class lies even better, illustrated by the Delhi elections of February. The middle-class has also mastered the art of wasting time. And that is what we accomplished at this meeting of minds, like John Godfrey Saxe’s ‘six men of Indostan’, all of whom were blind.

There was but one exam question -- how would we, the ‘woke’, withstand the breaking and put our shoulders to the wall other ‘wokes’ are facing and go for broke. And so it began. The first of us wanted to maximize the movement, or moment, to end, once and for all, all patriarchy, through the sisterhood soirees she hosts in her drawing-room. After all, all does seem well after fine wine, and a fulsome dine. Before doing that, she felt it essential to diss uneducated and semi-literate rural and rurban women, whose ways of asserting their few rights are apparently all wrong.

Another wanted to take the scenic route à la the Green Party, fixing climate change to fight a toxic environment. I had to bite my mental tongue on how few of us had boarded the proverbial bus to show up at a protest to bring our government’s attention to the air pollution crisis.

The third amongst us wanted somebody, anybody, who could please fix the economy. Yet another wanted to game the system through the end of the caste system. One wanted to have the singular pleasure of the powerful biting dust, somehow, even if it meant that all the somewhat working bits also went bust. And the sixth amongst us was just longwinded, incoherent, and plotless like those pretty but pretty pointless PowerPoints. And like this, it went on and on -- there was an elephant in the room, and what we, the middle-class, ‘saw’ was a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a fan, a rope. As middle-class me felt my way around the talk-talk-talk, I found myself fumbling around for any hope against hope, and then, one woman, sat at the back, spoke.

This petite, pale-skinned, raspy-voiced, soft-spoken, salwar-kameez-clad woman with hastily-applied bleeding-red lipstick, a covered head and unstockinged sandaled feet had stepped out of her middle-class home onto her middle-class street, braving middle-class beatings, projecting her middle-class voice to call out to middle-class women to give body to ‘othered’ women who had gone hoarse screaming. Of us all, this middle-class woman had seen the elephant in the room, whole, while we ‘disputed loud and long, each in his own opinion, exceeding stiff and strong, though each was partly in the right, and all were in the wrong!’

The middle-class’ tightrope walk down the middle path, clutching onto the meticulously prepared ‘kagaz’ (papers) of its citizenship of the middle-class, is now a circus that can barely be watched. The rogue elephant is rampaging through the green grass.