Shanghai is a metaphor

Shanghai is a city, a metropolis, a financial capital, a global economic hub. Shanghai is in China but the word Shanghai is a signifier for India.

Shanghai is an attempt by the political class to divert our attention from the immediate problems to a promised future, a transformation. We are sold the dream of a swanky Shanghai like city where prosperity envelops all. And it is all planned for the future. A future, which when it comes will not hold them accountable. A future near enough, but far enough so that people forget as well. Rome was not built in a day they say. But it was also not build by the using the famed Indian jugaad.

Shanghai is a dangling visual smokescreen. Take a look (at the image below) at what happened between 1993 and 2010 in Shanghai. It is this transformation to a gleaming economic hub that rivals the first world that so seduces the transforming third world. Shanghai is a metaphor.

It is the Promised Land that the politicians like to promise in a safely distant future .This future is rounded up into nice sounding numbers – 2016, 2020, 2025. And when time inches towards these years they push it back to another nice sounding year – Twenty Thirty, Twenty Forty what say? Because somehow,we never think of future being imperfect and dystopian. We always hope the future to be better. We have done so from the past. We continue to do so now. Where is the progress, is this the progress we hoped for and were promised in back in 1995. Wasn’t 2012 supposed be the year when every village in India was electrified?  And now, in 2012, we are still debating nuclear power when we are so many megawatts short of electrifying even our cities that it is embarrassing. Who do we hold accountable?

Any social commentator would agree that India of today, of 2012, throws more bewildering contradictions than say it did in 2000. We are young and aspirational, but then we are also sceptical. We have tastelessly designed flyovers and an underbelly right beneath and around it. The malls are swanky and the earth just outside it is murky, the road leading to it potholed. We have grandiose and leaky socialist schemes in a capitalistic economy. Cross subsidy that skews the supply-demand and market dynamics. And then there’s an audacious proposal of regulating a democratic medium like the internet. The models and actors in ads get paler and whiter even as thankfully, it is a sultry Freida Pinto and swarthy Irfan Khan who have a foothold in Hollywood.

As a nation we have regressed in the last 10 years – the traffic, the civic amenities, our open values, what we can see on television, what can be said on it and what is beamed on it. We can all bring out the largest democracy cloak, but hey we are not a mature one. We can’t laugh at ourselves; we are offended by things which we should bother too much with. The people with sense of humour are on Twitter and those numbers don’t total to many a number.

The irony is inescapable when we are promised maglev trains when people are crushing themselves in Bandra-Churchgate local trains. It makes us smirk at the politicians who do not know the ground realities that the middle class go through, we are sceptical when we are promised a Shanghai in India.

If you can’t save a Kolkata, if you continue to see Bangalore crumble, if you go on as usual as Mumbai bursts to seams, what are you promising to convert to Shanghai ? Cities cannot be transformed easily and briskly.5 years is not enough, 10 years should see considerable progress but 20 is enough if you have the will, even in a democracy. Maybe we should emulate Hong Kong or Istanbul for a change. We should let our states compete and build up their cities. Competition wakes us up. If we have 3 Singapores, city based economies, it is progress. Singapore has no natural resources; it is a power because of the commerce and talent it draws.

We do not need just one Shanghai. We want our Pune, Mangalore, Jaipur and the likes to grow up and shed that non-metro feel. Take advantage of the fact that they are not as messed up as the metros are and realise that therein lies an opportunity. Become the new-age metros. That would do two things. We will have better up-and -coming cities and it will stop the migration to metros and stretch their infrastructure.

Shanghai is in another country, another time zone and another 2 decades ahead of us. Shanghai is a pipedream not worth chasing.