You can’t afford to be rich and nice unless you’re Ratan Tata. In today’s digitised world, you can get away with repugnant opulence, the disavowal of work-life balance, or even mass termination. People might repost a news clipping exposing your despicability, or carp on about how you’ve looted, displaced, and made the land that remains deliberately unliveable – but no one is going to buy any less of what you sell. There is just one caveat: your death will not be met with a woebegone public. You’re no Tata.
Tata’s death necessitated the moral court of the media landscape to seal any incriminating records. After all, what has he done, the still enamoured public might ask. He loves dogs, he does charity – Tata Trusts has already clarified they couldn’t care less about the write-off that might accompany this charity – and is all-in-all a sweet old man. How can you be mad at him, especially after his death?
After The Savala Vada, a satire news account on Instagram, posted a carousel of pastiche news headlines announcing Tata’s death, it was met with a flood of comments about how their choice of timing was ‘poor’. The (faux) headlines were squibs:
“Humble Billionaire Passes Away in Country Where 60% Live Under ₹260 (sic) A Day”,
“Ratan Tata Passes Due To Natural Causes Unlike His Workers”, and
“National Icon, Billionaire, Genocide Enabler Dies”.
After a few days, the “editorial board” of The Savala Vada issued another missive. A chicanery, if you will: a statement that resembles the kind that companies like Tata’s are used to typing out after a disgruntled individual admonishes them. The statement launches into a series of allegations against Tata, linking his companies to everything from exploiting tribal lands and using child labour to collaborating with oppressive regimes, concluding with an insincere apology and a quote from Douglas Adams, a writer known for his humorous science fiction.
The Savala Vada’s target was uncritical hero worship, which has the penchant to lodge individuals like Ratan Tata onto a pedestal. The frenzied reaction to even suggesting that possibility is not only symptomatic of the fact that Tata has a brilliant PR team, who have clearly cultivated an atmosphere where dissent is rare, but also that his death is perhaps the perfect time for remonstration, as the increased attention on Tata now offers an opportunity for criticism to reach a wider audience. When most newspapers bundle up sentences for an editorial on how India has lost a visionary, it failed to account for a basic principle of journalism: nothing is one-sided. The question, then, should be what this tells us about Tata, and subsequently, what the reaction to his death signifies. More pressingly, what does it tell us about this country?
In the eyes of the fawning masses, Tata embodied two supposedly contradictory forces. One was the garb of a middle-class individual – humble, unassuming, marked by a genuine desire to improve things in the country. One could run into Tata anywhere and not notice him. He was just an ordinary man, an aam aadmi who even needed to borrow money for a phone call sometimes. His mystique was his humility, which starkly contrasted with his unimaginable wealth and separation from the rough and tumble of ordinary life. The rich are supposed to be arrogant precisely because they are so distant from us. Tata, however, was one of us, and that was cause for both perplexity and admiration.
Perhaps this is not as big a contradiction as it seems. Just running through a list of things that Tata’s vast industrial machinery manufactured – from lorries to watches, salt to internet, steel and even educational and charitable institutions – Tata’s industries slip into and fill every crack in our third-world life, injecting a dose of reliability into our creaking infrastructure. He had to be ordinary so that he could inconspicuously insinuate himself into every aspect of our lives. At the same time, his image played a function more important than just normalisation: to limit aspiration. That is why Tata remained very different from our other billionaires. How could one aspire to be like Tata when he lived in a two-bedroom flat, wore ready-made clothes, and looked just like a regular uncle one runs into on the street? If one was middle-class in India – which is already to say that one was in the top 3% – that was already your life. What could be emulated were his stolidly middle-class virtues of humility, thrift, national interest, but not his desire, which, though perhaps unexpressed, in any case, was never manifest. What the middle-class Indian wanted to emulate was this lack of desire, this seemingly magnificent disinterestedness.
Death is a moment of reckoning. It is when someone dies that their existence is bombarded with the overwhelming recognition that they were important; Tata didn’t need death for that. Words like “humble”,“generous”, and “kind” chaperoned any news that spoke of him. He wasn’t thought of as a businessman, but an industrialist, and while the etymological difference is only a matter of scale, culturally, the distinction is less tenuous. Ambani is a businessman, and even though he is technically not part of the nouveau riche, he has the accoutrements of one: Antilla, a 27-storey skyscraper with a multi-level car parking facility that can accommodate around 168 cars, not to mention the grandiosity of the recent family wedding, replete with the assurance of never running out of wealth. Adani and Modi are a fraternity, so he also doesn’t get many brownie points with the liberal middle-class. Tata’s appearances alongside Modi are overlooked, as is the reason he’s able to donate so extensively to charity.
When faced with this reckoning, the middle-class Indian is stirred up. He then offers the only remaining counterpoint in his arsenal: the creation of jobs, the sustenance of an economy. Even if they might be unethical, shouldn’t we be thankful to these billionaires for that? These jobs allow us to buy things that make us who we are, insist these businesses, and the Indian middle class sings along.
Also read: Consumption Data Shows the Indian Middle-Class Is Shrinking
Post-liberalisation, the Indian consumer has become much more discerning and demanding, tricked into believing their carefully cultivated tastes are unique expressions of their personality, rather than the product of external forces. If you’ve ever stepped foot into a Zudio – a chain of fashion retail stores that is part of the Tata Group – you know how mind-bogglingly affordable those trending clothes are. The bargain basement’s ubiquity democratises fast fashion to the point of near-uniformity. At your next gathering, you’re almost guaranteed to spot a familiar face sporting the same outfit, a shared costume for our subtly dystopian present.
Luxury goods like expensive watches, diamond rings, and fancy vacations in the Seychelles or Maldives are now aspirational realities, tangible signs of a desired lifestyle that transcends mere basic necessities, rather than far-off distant dreams. This transformation of the Indian consuming class has had incredible effects on the distribution of labour in the economy, with a vast and underpaid service class labouring invisibly to maintain the comfortable first world illusion of certain pockets of society. Yet that has also led to the percolation of aspiration downwards, even if the way up has been effectively blocked by a lack of means, leaving many scrambling to acquire status symbols through precarious debt and readily available “easy payment” schemes in a world engineered to fuel such desires.
When it was released, everyone wanted the 1983 Maruti Suzuki 800, but few wanted a 2009 TATA Nano. Tata products, once symbols of aspiration, now represent the budget option, the bottom of the barrel. The Nano, a poor man’s aspiration, and the rest of Tata’s offerings cater to a romanticised past, a simpler time of cheaper goods and uncomplicated desires. The reverence for Tata after his death is rooted in this nostalgia, a yearning for an era when aspirations felt innocent, before they became entangled with the anxieties of modern consumerism. It’s a wake-up call that makes this millennial generation realise that they have been moulded into desiring subjects who unfortunately can never realise their desires. It is this tension, which one can find reflected in the various reactions to his passing away. In the end, the loyalty to Tata wins out for the Indian middle-class, over all other considerations. That shouldn’t be surprising. After all, as the idiom goes, hum sab ne Tata ka namak khaya hai.
Diya Isha is an editor.
Huzaifa Omair Siddiqi teaches English at Ashoka University.