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June 5, 2009

LETTER FROM INDIA

Market Economics, Indian Style

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

MUMBAI — It is surreal to live in the so-called third world, in a country belatedly stumbling on capitalism, and to hear Americans, of all people, heralding its end. It feels like watching your parents fight for the first time.

Nations like this, that used to suppress money, now bow at its altar. But as tens of millions of Indians and Chinese and Russians enter the age of malls and MasterCard, they may be stunned to hear from rich lands that greed is out. It’s hollow, this capitalism. It’s derivatives of derivatives, money making money on money. Private jets are sin. Debt is dumb. Restless wanting is so pre-2008.

“To straighten a bent stick,” Michel de Montaigne wrote, “we bend it in the contrary way.” But a stroll through this money capital of India may remind capitalism’s new doubters of why they believed in it to begin with, and may warn against bending the stick too far.

On the streets of Mumbai, still in the early stages of capitalist development, one sees not the emptiness of money but rather its vitality: a power to breathe dignity into the poor, to foster social change, to spur a culture of self-improvement, even to rinse away unearned privilege.

And one sees, as well, when capitalism begins to sour: when it becomes bigger, boxier, an abstract video game for managers.

At its roots, however, the market in India is dynamism. Far from the bustle of Mumbai, in small towns and villages, people wait and wait, thumbing newspapers, gossiping, with history on pause. But in this town, there is money to make; people move constantly, selling tomatoes and shooting films and ferrying pipes with fundamentalist fervor. They do not ask if you’re Hindu or Muslim or Christian. If you want to buy, buy. If not, bye-bye.

Markets bring dignity. In most of India, the poor cower before their betters. But visit the Mumbai fish market, and see deference disappear. Time is money; fish are more valuable at 6 a.m. than 8 a.m. And so customers at the market, however well-dressed, are pushed and berated by slum-dwelling women carrying catch on their heads. If you have lived in India long enough to be sickened by servility, such pushes can inspire.

Markets quantify hope. They spur self-improvement, for what is measurable can be improved. You know how good you must be to graduate from motorcycle to car and car to S.U.V. Even as consumption loses favor in the West, it is worth remembering that accumulating stuff is a more peaceful, democratic, healthy form of tribalism than light- or dark-skinned, Sunni or Shiite, gentile or Jew.

Markets bring change. Traditional societies like this one saw time cyclically; life’s goal was to replicate lives lived before. Markets usher in linear accumulation, enabling people to build on the past and venture in new directions. Where markets have reached in India, women and homosexuals and the young have found voice. Where the preserving impulse reigns, silence predominates.

Markets, of course, are not perfect. They are bringing an intellectual narrowness to India, leaving few ideas of the good life besides self-development. With their dogma that anyone can rise, they can blind the fortunate to the plight of the suffering.

But their real dysfunction begins not when there is too much market, but when business grows detached from that original street hustle.

In India, street capitalism is slowly surrendering to skyscraper capitalism: tea stalls ceding to espresso-bar chains, corner stores to supermarkets. And so, one Excel spreadsheet at a time, efficient managers grow ever more remote from the actual marketplace and from their deeds’ human impact.

At India’s corner stores, the service is impeccable. They deliver. They take back spoiled fruit, even after a bite. Now the free market has brought big-box stores to India, air-conditioned and clean. But the staff doesn’t care if you buy. They don’t remember faces. They are all training and no instinct.

The USB port on my BlackBerry once broke. My mobile provider, one of India’s top companies, took weeks to inspect the phone, then told me I had “manhandled” it and quoted an extravagant repair charge. Then a friend told me of a man with a small shop who could sort me out. He was, unlike my provider, vulnerable to the market: he collected the phone, fixed it for a few dollars and delivered it back to me.

Likewise, Mumbai street food is consistently delicious because market forces give vendors no second chances. In the finest restaurants, where dishes can cost one hundred times more, the food is often good and often revolting. These restaurants become entrenched and powerful, and people go because they always have; the feedback on which a real market depends erodes.

The line from such restaurants to credit-default swaps is shorter than it seems. Markets bring scale; scale brings remoteness; remoteness rids markets of the nimbleness and human sensitivity that are best in them.

Now that this is plain to many, what shape might capitalism take, here or in the West?

An answer offered by these streets may be to return capitalism to its origins. In a new age of slow food and local energy grids and community gardens, perhaps we might reinvent a community capitalism: a capitalism with all the advantages of the lean, leveraged, synergized, just-in-time world that markets have made, but a capitalism whose soul remains somehow in the sweaty, throbbing, life-giving bazaar.