India's liberalisation through middle class eyes
Book: "The Liberals", Author: Hindol Sengupta; Publisher: Harper Collins India; Pages: 309; Price: Rs.350.
The
middle class will decide the course of liberalisation in India which
will become more micro-level in search of solutions to problems, says
writer and journalist Hindol Sengupta in his new book, "The Liberals".
"It
is imperative for us to focus on local problems in the next phase of
liberalisation. The idea of liberalisation is a dystopian utopia. It is
like what Kipling had said about the east - it is true yet untrue. We
might be conservative in public life, yet at the core, our deepest
desires are all liberal," Sengupta told IANS.
Sengupta's book
takes a look at the 20-year journey of India's liberalisation through
stories of the common man - and the everyday aspirations of the
country's growing middle class with their dilemmas and new adaptability
to cope with the bottom-up dynamics of empowerment and wants of the
grassroots.
Middle class is like the modern Indian woman, who is
now the greatest enemy because after thousands of years of suppressed
patriarchy, tools of education have given her an identity, the writer
says.
"The Indian middle class, the beneficiary of
liberalisation, is now facing a backlash from people who have benefited
less. The modern Indian middle class has to battle with the idea of that
strata of society (lower than us) getting re-imagined," Sengupta says.
The
middle class has to realise that "unless it can extract equitable
social distribution from the upper class, we will not be bale to hold
the lower strata below us," he says.
"It is a very scary
situation for India," Sengupta says, predicting a future of "multiple
wars on all fronts and the challenge to balance rising aspirations
against dwindling resources".
The book moves between three cities - Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata, where the writer has spent his life.
A
couple of chapters on Pakistan at the end gives an outsider's view of
the country, making a comparative note with India's liberalisation.
The
book often comes across as chatty, skimming the surface in its rush to
negotiate through all the realities that the writer has encountered in
31 years of life. But the observations are sharply defined - the
language easy and almost familiar in their references to the immediate
surroundings.
The absence of intellectual debates based on the
realities to arrive at profound perceptions makes the volume more of a
young liberal's engaging travelogue through a changing India.
