The Abstraction of Numbers
Jairus Banaji
suggested to a New Delhi audience, in
millennial year 2001, that we should be concerned about how our provident fund and pension savings are invested in local businesses. In the
following years, we saw how global capital created crises after crises, and the
relief that Indians felt when concurrent recessions were not experienced in
India. However, we know that post office and SBI savings were the spine of
the Indian economy. The agricultural
population turned up for work at industrial sites, receiving a minimum wage,
and keeping in touch with their families through mobile phones. Those who had
their families accompany them, served the nation, built metros and malls,
nuclear sites and smart cities, watching their children play in the dust while
they worked. The heartlessness of capitalism is perhaps it’s trade mark, and
whether it was putting up tin sheds, or plastic tents in work sites, for
labourers, it was the substitutability of wage labour that pushed the foreman
and the supervising mechanics and engineers forward.
On 15th March, 2018, at Delhi University’s
Literature Department, Arjun Appadurai spoke to an audience of university
scholars of the puzzle that is global finance. Multi sited, it rests on the idea
of ‘contract’, which is also a promise, but a narrative that is ambiguous in
nature, buttresses it. This polyphonic language is filled with nuances, such
that, the client is ready to believe that profits are immediately to be made,
if he or she invests, but if there is a mishap, the ‘narrative’ has already
preserved the verbiage of possibilities of risk. According to Appadurai, who is
simultaneously referencing a reservoir of literature on the subject, published
by Chicago University Press, and weaving them in with his own observations, the
game is really endowed with “performativeness”. The media too plays a large
part in representing the variety of options that global finance has. The latter
plays with abstract numbers, buys and sells, and if the market crashes, the
victim was the one who did not guess right.
It is in this perspective, that demonetization was
represented as the “search” for
black money.
Farmers’ suicides
because of debt to fertilizer and seed
companies, internet banking which installs itself without electricity, unpaid
pensions, promise of currency to already indebted farmers, if they invest in complex insurance,…all of these are now everyday
conversations, oft repeated. If Prime Minister Modi does not believe in Climate
Change, then why provide insurance for farmers to protect them from floods and
earthquakes?
Commonsense would tell us, that now news of thousands of
crores of scams, divesting banks of their money assail us, that demonetization
happened because the domestic economy which consists of house holder’s savings
had to be called in. The banks were able to function because the citizens of
the country were summoned, and asked to deposit what they had, in person, at
the counters. India’s wealth has rested in it’s ordinary lives, the people who
have worked hard, and earned little, and saved much. There is a certain grace
in which “channa chabanna” (or chewing roasted gram) has been the way in which a large mass of the
population has lived. They have survived millennia, bearing children and
accepting fate. Their hardiness is what makes India a land of maya. Nothing
will stop the magnetic core of planet earth from pushing itself out, and in the
same way, nothing will stop the sun from cooling down. History is made between
these two events, as our plans for future existence in future planets continue
to be made.
Yet, we know that the life we have is made precious by our
interactions with one another. We know that our sense of empathy comes from
being human, which involves both imagination and language. The Depression was
the site of many suicides, as wealthy and poor struggled to exist in circumstances,
which were very much changed. In
America, the poor and the old were hidden away, and did not appear in
public, because there was a standardization of life chances, where a welfare economy
ran parallel to the extravagance of Capitalism.
The past was always represented as being either Boston Brahmin, White
Trash, or Black. In between, the
Assimilation Model used the idea that the Irish, Latins, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans,
followed by Chinese and Indians could co-exist, but in stable hierarchies. The Vietnam War changed
all that, as the music that evolved led to the possibility that anti war
platforms could rethink the America of the McCarthy Era. In the 21st
century, the protest movements have been so varied, whether it is Occupy Wall
Street, or Equal Citizenship for Minorities and Blacks, that one can only look
towards niche cultures and resistance movements against the gun lobby, and the
odd world of “global finance without a body” as Appadurai calls it.
