Book Extract: How the urban young live in penury to make it big

The Hungry Tide

Manoj Harit, 50, Advocate, Malegaon and Mumbai

Marwadis used to have places called wadis in and around the Kalbadevi area. Few still remain. It was a wonderful ecosystem where everyone was given a small place of ten square feet in which they would sleep, live and stack their cooking vessels. One member of the wadi would cook in the morning and evening by turns. Very little money was charged. Many successful Marwadis, who are millionaires today, with apartments in Malabar Hill, started their lives in these wadis. My father was one of them. His first salary was ₹50 a month working for the Siyaram Silk Mill. He was staying in one of the wadis when the company, which wanted to utilise the power looms in Malegaon, asked if he would relocate to Malegaon village for three to four years. They raised his pay to ₹100. In time he started his own brokerage firm and a manufacturing unit that spanned 100 acres employing 300 workers. He built his life from those wadis. I too lived in the Modern Hindu Hotel, another relic of this era, where I would get food and accommodation for ₹250 until seven to eight years ago. I loved it because it provided simple home-cooked food, the amenities were not fancy but neat and clean, and it also formed an ecosystem–you got to meet people from around Maharashtra and South India who visited the city on work. These places, which once provided cheap, hygienic and supportive infrastructure for migrants, are dying out today.

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Lobbies of five star hotels in Indian metros are filled with young men in off-the-rack jackets and young women in off-and-online-sale skirt suits awaiting client meetings. Some of them, in client services, have an expense account for such activities and the company reimburses them for a reasonable number of coffees or teas or sandwiches that become inevitable during the course of the conversation. Most don’t.

“In fact, it’s the only reason I got myself a credit card at all. But even then they only reimburse it at the end of the month. But my credit card due date is 24th, and my salary only comes on the 2nd or 3rd, so already by the time I can even make a minimum payment, the amount has attracted late charges, and nobody reimburses those. Also, somehow no matter what you do, money that you have spent never comes back to fill the gap at the end of the month. It’s always less,” said Manoj Sharma, a 25-year-old marketing executive in a tech firm, waiting in the lobby of the Taj Lands’ End. Sharma is waiting to meet a client who had kindly offered to introduce him to another businessman who was newly setting up shop, and therefore, offered him the opportunity to make a large sale. He hadn’t eaten at all that day, as he was saving the space on his card for any cost that would accrue from the meeting. He had some cash, but even that was back up “in case the card fails”. When you do not come from privilege, and have not paid your minimum due for a few months, reality is the sound of a credit card being declined.

I ask if it hasn’t struck him that the profit from the potential sale would go in actual terms to the office inventory. It only notionally applies to him, the executive, for having made the sale. But the cost of the coffee, present in the here and now, is a very tangible cost to be paid. “The effort will be considered in my appraisals at the end of the year”, Sharma shrugs, with a smile. If he doesn’t make the sale, that’s just one more expensive coffee that he paid for that went nowhere. It seems like a small risk, though for him, with ₹22,000 salary and rent to pay, it is a very big one indeed, but one he is willing to take. He sees it as an investment. “We have to go out of our way and set up these meetings or we will not grow,” he says.

He points out that the company only profits if he actually makes a sale, but he profits from the work experience made available to him, and when he exits, that is what will stay with him. I leave him unable to decide whether he is foolishly naive, or brave and intelligent.

Young people everywhere are investing in this notional profit for their future. The bill will come at the end of the month and is not reimbursable because it is a coffee poured of his initiative. He hopes his boss will be fair to him, but if he isn’t, he is preparing himself to gain what he needs from his work experience, and move on. So, are the young awake and smelling the coffee, or intoxicated by it?

Several stories like these pour in from around the country. Two marketing managers from New Delhi speak of going hungry since they may have to pay for coffee in the evening. A medical representative speaks of walking up to 15 kilometres a day to save on taxi and rickshaw fares that eat into his salary. A finance manager in an multi-national firm mentions travelling to work by hitching rides on passing trucks and surviving on one meal a day. A publisher tells the story of a young visitor who would hang around till he was offered breakfast. The first port of compromise when the month outlasts the money is always food.

Hunger is a great leveller. Hunger is not a competition; it is equally painful, physically and psychologically, to all who face it. Hunger, and with it poverty, becomes a spectrum, with the intensity of it varying, rather than an absolute, in which some are dubbed unworthy of the pain of their experience.

These distinctions are often mixed with the complex politics of the non-governmental organisation ready with a cheque of dole to cash, in the wake of which entire swathes of people get labelled as ‘worthy of aid’. The question is not the same as ‘worthy of feeling hunger’—a confusion that stems from deep-rooted class issues and hierarchies of control over them.

Aid workers tend to confuse the two. All human beings are ‘worthy’ of hunger, the range and depth varying. Only some may be worthy of a specific kind of aid, however.

Excerpts have been taken with permission from Bloomsbury; 184 pages; ₹399