There's a Market for Everything

(Published in Zeitgesit, The New Indian Express, dated 31st January, 2009)

"It's a fifty lakh deal, yaar, I can't sign it just like that. I need to see proper papers for half-crore deals! You guys send me a proposal, and I'll see what I can do about it."

Everyone on the bus had turned to look at the speaker. All of us had booked the cheapest flight from Delhi to Chennai, and hearing words like 'lakh' and 'crore' during recession under those circumstances, has that effect on one. Especially when the words are barked out by someone who is travelling on an airline that does not have Business Class, and where you have to pay for in-flight sustenance. The speaker did not have a Blackberry either. The situation brought to mind something a professor of mine had said, while assuring us he loved receiving calls during meetings. "It makes me feel important," he announced, "I'll probably say 'hey, Kim, yeah, I was speaking to Fidel this morning…yeah, it's a bit of a crisis, but Georgie likes sushi, so you really can't expect too much.'"

To his credit, the-signer-of-half-crore deals grew a couple of inches under our collective gaze and then smiled and nodded, much as Pete Sampras might if one ran into him on the subway. I call them the Compulsive Life-Marketers. You find them in lifts, in restaurants, in buses and in flights. Some of them are so obliging as to let you into their lives by sharing the music they have on their laptops. Others talk to their bosses, acquaintances, colleagues, lovers, following the same strategy as television commercials. Show as much as you can as best as you can in thirty seconds or less. Sometimes, it spills over into the realm of trailers, where one finds scenes one might not find in the movie the trailer trails.

The most frightening species of the Compulsive Life-Marketers are the Lift-Dwelling-Screamers. One wonders at times whether the only reason they work in high-rise buildings is to take the lift an average of twenty times a day and give their journeymates a peek into the non-mundanities of their lives. There you are in a three-foot-by-four-foot space with someone shouting with a passion that would put politicians at rallies to shame, about everything from the tailor not having clothes ready on time to the intricacies of their plans for the evening.

Another category that makes one distinctly uncomfortable is the Wine-Drinking-Lone-Dining-Mobile-Wielding-Maverick. You find these at restaurants, usually occupying the table right in the centre, so as to avoid any allegation of partiality. An hour after calling up all those pieces of their life that could prove most useful, they pay their bills and then move to the bars, where they go on to chat up the few who have been too drunk to hear or remember the aforementioned pieces of their lives.

Then there are the Security-Check-Victimisers. You're waiting to board your flight, dreary from lack of sleep and anticipation of the ubiquitous howling-child-in-the-flight. And in comes an alien-or-familiar-language-speaking interceptor with all the attributes of badly made coffee. They wake you up, but make you reasonably benign to the prospect of a howling-child-in-the-flight, knowing it can't get worse. At least, you don't usually understand what the howling child is trying to communicate and thank God for small mercies.

But it would be unfair not to acknowledge the purposes they have served. The Lift-Dwelling-Screamers remind you of how peaceful and quiet the noisiest office is. The Wine-Drinking-Lone-Dining-Mobile-Wielding-Mavericks show you the advantages of alcohol-induced-oblivion.

However, the case where a Compulsive-Life-Marketer achieved the ideal of the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number was when a friend and I were trying to get tickets to Chandramukhi."I don't care if you got the tickets! I don't understand Tamil!" a woman was screaming to a sheepish man, two feet away from us. A few minutes later, the transaction was complete. We have reason to believe we saved their relationship.