:: Kishwar Desai

When the West finally learnt stingy desi ways

By Kishwar Desai

Mar 21 : Surprisingly, being brought up in a developing country does, sometimes, give one huge advantages over those who have always lived in the first world and have just been hit by recession. The irony is that till now the boot (a rather expensive Jimmy Choo, at that) had been on the other foot. Countless immigrants have come here, to the "promised land", expecting the roads to be paved with milk and hamburgers, designer clothes hanging from every tree. The reality, however, is totally different.

Unless you are saving every pound under your perfect-posture mattress, normally you spend whatever you earn since the cost of living is very high. And then, for all the good things and times that you can’t afford, you borrow. Since that magical credit has suddenly dried up, a startled pop-eyed population has been left abandoned and alone, staring horrified at a huge amount of accumulated debt.

So lifestyles have slowly, gloomily, begun to change, especially as unemployment figures head towards three million.

Obviously, when money was easy and flowing like water, wastage was also high. People bought more than they consumed. But all that is passé. Now, the bestselling books are those with titles such as How To Cook With Leftovers. And, as I said, for those of us born in India, where frugality is in-built since birth and there is no shame in wearing second-hand clothes, this new-found attitude of "cheap is chic" is vastly amusing. "Don’t worry", reassure agony aunts, "there is nothing wrong with bargaining. In fact, people will be very impressed if you can bring the price down — it shows how smart you are!" To think that Britain is embracing hardcore Janpath values is shocking, isn’t it? The interesting thing is that the pleasures of parsimony are now the new mantra and are very much in vogue.

All those ethics which in most poor countries are taken for granted — i.e. nothing is thrown away, everything is recycled — are now, at last, being appreciated by West. The greatest impact has been on the supermarkets (at least on those that haven’t shut down as yet) where the sale of fresh food has jumped up enormously. People just don’t have the extra cash to eat out as often as they used to, and so home dining has become ultra fashionable. This sudden change in eating habits means that if you don’t go shopping early enough in the day, supermarket shelves will have been emptied out by canny penny-pinchers. Catching up on the cost-cutting fad, corner stores have started stocking fruits and vegetables to support "trendy" home cooking.

However, as I said, these are attitudes that are deeply ingrained in the desi community. We have always preferred home food to eating out. After all, restaurants in the developing world are expensive and eating out is still reserved for "special occasions".

So, do higher prices work as a deterrent for certain forms of consumption? Logically, it would appear so. Therefore, is it the high price of "luxuries" such as chocolates, alcohol and fast food which has kept their consumption low among the middle classes in the Third World? For instance, back in India, I certainly do not remember the same dedication to drink that people in the UK normally display.

In comparison to income levels in the UK, alcohol is cheap and the average adult consumes an equivalent of 120 bottles of wine annually.

Perhaps realising this anomaly, the chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, recently tried to suggest an increase in the price of alcohol in order to reduce its consumption. He even suggested that there is a malaise of "passive drinking" — in which innocents are victims of drunk driving, domestic violence and other anti-social behaviour. But almost immediately there was a backlash against his suggestion and a political furore ensued as life without cheap booze is unimaginable. The bogey of bootlegging was also raised.

This despite the fact that Sir Liam’s reasoning was straightforward: the number of alcohol-related deaths and hospital admissions would fall dramatically. In recent times, drink-related deaths have doubled to 8,700 a year, while beer has become 36 per cent cheaper in pubs and the percentage of drinkers has also gone up by a fifth.

The largest new lot of consumers are girls and youngsters. Not only do these girls become increasingly vulnerable to assault or rape, they are often the aggressors themselves. Other statistics showed that out of a million assaults last year (where the perpetrators were both men and women) most of the aggressors were suspected to be drunk. Despite the figures, the government has shown a remarkable resistance to the suggestion saying that the price increase will punish the moderate drinkers too much.

Drinking in moderation is, of course, never a problem. But it is the rising cost of binge drinking and the accompanying health problems that are increasingly worrying people like Sir Liam. The British government may be lagging behind, but the Scottish government is seriously looking at increasing the price of alcohol in the hope that it will work as a deterrent.

But how do you change a whole generation that has been brainwashed for far too long about the goodness of red wine, with the emphasis on the need to have at least a glass of it everyday. Not only that, people look across to France as the perfect "drinking" country since wine is served there with every meal, and children are taught to drink from a young age — with their families. Just as the country was high on cheap credit, it is still drunk on cheap alcohol.

The government has just realised that while cheap credit has been wiped out, they can’t seem to yank the cheap drink out of the hands of an addicted population. So it seems the middle classes can continue to enjoy their cut-price booze — at least it is a good way to drown their ever-increasing sorrows during these difficult times.

However, Sir Liam hasn’t given up his battle over the bottle yet. And the truth is that the debate against the price rise is also being fuelled by a very vocal drinks industry. It is, no doubt, a debate that, whether drunk or sober, promises to stagger on.

The writer can be contacted at kishwardesai@yahoo.com