Some parables and parallels of 2003

The year 2003 was when I realised that I hardly received mail by ordinary post anymore. Letterboxes were rendered virtually redundant; almost everything arrived by special delivery and courier.

Whereas letters from around the world arrived with interesting postmarks and colourful stamps, would Indian stamps soon be a philatelist's dream?

It was also the year when most events and many invitations -- political, corporate and social -- was accompanied by a barrage of personal requests and entreaties. Not by the hosts but by swarms of PRs, event managers, spin doctors and a host of hidden persuaders betwixt and between.

A film star's secretary used to be known, well, as a film star's secretary. In 2003 I spoke to one who took objection to the word. He referred to himself as 'Mr So-and-so's Managing Agent' and privately explained that he ran an office with a dozen people in the star's employ and had a stake in the movie star's company.

Not long ago public relations was a small-time service managed by professionals in well-worn suits and serviceable saris; political and corporate fixers were a few familiar faces, the object of friendly banter in newsrooms.

In 2003 it became clear that former journalists had not only established PR empires of their own but often in dangerous proximity to political leaders, business and media houses. Big corporations not only had their own communications departments but hired consultants at exorbitant fees who were corporations in themselves. There being no umpire in sight it became hard to tell the player from the PR or the PTP (Page Three Person).

As in the West, consumer culture has spawned a whole new hospitality and entertainment industry. A party is no longer a party: it's a promotion, a restaurant opening, a product launch, a premiere. Party people are cast as separate species with their own caste heirarchy.

For the first time in India I heard event managers carefully tabulating guests as A list, B list, C Plus and so on. It was also the year -- another first -- when public schools took to inviting beauty queens and starlets as chief guests, for students to emulate "their beauty and fine grooming".

None of these symptoms of a new-rich, free market, media-driven culture are really surprising because, coincidentally, I spent several months of the year in parts of the First World from where we acquire them. Yet the shock of surprise of returning home from Europe or Japan can take days to wear off.

First Indian impressions are always of squalor, chaos and the strange smells at Indian airports. Large dirty carpet stains at Delhi, cheap plastic flowers at immigration counters, planes landing in the midst of festering shantytowns in Mumbai.

In Japan, where public services and personal interactions are precise, cold, clean and clinically efficient, one longs for a human connection. In India one is constantly overwhelmed by a surge of often unwelcome humanity.

Yet Indian schools inviting beauty queens as role models is a merely silly aspiration as compared to Japan's permissive society where schoolchildren can be seen dawdling over porn magazines in supermarkets and prostitution among schoolgirls raises no more than a casual shrug.

In Japan a general election is a staid affair -- same party, same prime minister, same issues -- with no surprise results. An Indian election is the reverse. Yet, ironically, many of the arguments concerning development priorities are similar in both countries. In India, the debate, visible in the recent state elections, centred on roads, power, urban transport and city flyovers.

In Japan where they have poured so much money into infrastructure that they are now cementing riverbeds, the debate has decisively shifted to saving the environment. This is not really an issue in India yet.

Take a cab from an Indian airport or look out the window of an Indian train and all you can see is piles of garbage and a landscape covered in plastic bags -- the wages of industrial India.

And as for party life and papparazzi, India is only learning what a free media knows anywhere else. One of my favourite moments in London was a restaurant, a regular celebrity haunt in Knightbridge, where regardless of the hour or weather conditions, the photographers and TV cameras lie patiently in wait.

So it was in August. Spotting a larger crowd than usual I leant over for a closer look. And there was J Lo hoisting her skirts high for the flashbulbs as she came out. I was pleased to note that she repeated her exit six times so that the obliging cameras got the best shots.

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