Over to you, Shah Rukh.

Aspirational. Being in advertising, I come across this word about 17 million times a day. Marketing analysis usually begins with the target audience. If the target audience is SEC B or below (marketing jargon for ‘poor people’) as a marketing man you can almost never go wrong with the ‘aspirational’ tag.

It’s a bunch of horseshit, really. All human beings are aspirational. That’s why we don’t forage for food or live in mud huts anymore. From the tuxedo wearing duke to the humblest peasant in Bihar, we are all aspirational. We just have different aspirations, that’s all.

There was a time, way back, when along with the basic aspiration towards well-being and material goods, aspiration also meant refinement, culture. Moving up in life meant appreciating better things in life. All Kings and Emperors will bear testimony to that. The more advanced the civilization, the more advanced their poetry, music and the arts.

India has made its contribution towards world culture and the arts. Architecture, paintings, handicraft, poetry, cuisines, textiles, fine embroidery, dance forms, music.

But consumerism came and changed all that.

Refinement made way for crass materialism. Look at the richest homes in Delhi and Bombay and you’ll see fat men in Charagh Din shirts eating pan, getting drunk, picking fights and screwing Uzbek hookers. It’s a caricature, but if you’ve lived in any of these cities long enough, you’ll know it’s not too far from the truth.

This is what pisses me off about India. Where has the refinement gone?

A couple of weeks back, I had to pay a village visit to somewhere near Rewari, a ‘rural immersion’ as they call it in the trade, to better understand the class of consumer we were hawking cheap phones to.

We went there along with a bunch of visitors from abroad, who, like most foreigners, were gushing over the ‘simplicity’ and the ‘warmth’ of the villagers even as their digital cameras were being yanked and a collection of yokels tried to cop a feel of the ‘gori’. “They’re so happy” “It’s beautiful”.

For the most part, I sat in my car and read Salim Ali’s Book Of Birds.

The place made me angry. Call me cynical, but here’s what I saw. A squalid shithole with a collection of half-literate, inbred losers who spat and slapped and shat in the streets. They stared at women like they’d never seen them in their lives (which was probably the case). There was a stream of raw, untreated sewage flowing through the centre of the village. There was rubbish everywhere – used condoms, sanitary pads among them. There was a school in an open courtyard where rows of small children baked in the sun, their hair faded golden through photon-induced chemical damage. The next generation of spitting, grabbing sexually frustrated yokels being raised.

What’s so fucking beautiful?

Is it just me? Or is it really this halcyon, idyllic hamlet where rainbows appear from nowhere and butterflies sit on your shoulder?

It’s easy to dismiss me as a crusty cynic. But I think it’s a case of the emperor’s new clothes. Us cynics can see that the emperor’s really a nudist.

It’s nothing to do with the government. It’s to do with the people.

To cite an example, villages in Kerala aren’t shitholes. And their government is filled with the most number of assholes south of the Vindhyas.

I have never, ever seen a person shit on the road in Kerala.

Everyone, even the poorest of the poor are clean.

So why is it that the villagers in Kerala are clean and civilized and those in U.P. are so crappy?

I think it’s down to role models. Again, it's about aspiration. You aspire towards what you idolize. Kerala, historically, has known relative peace. It allowed the arts and culture to prosper. Great strides were made in refinement. With the King being the ultimate aspirational figure, the people mould themselves in their form. Just like the people of Britain mould themselves in the form of the Royal family.

What happened in the North then? They had kings and culture here too. What went wrong? I’m not too sure really. I’m just attempting armchair anthropology here but I think it has something to do with the feudal system.

Sure, Kerala was feudal as well but vassals were respected and treated as allies. In the North, the zamindars were a particularly cruel lot. They treated landless peasants worse than cattle. And the peasants, intimidated and defeated, considered it their lot. It’s all karma. They didn’t rebel. They accepted it. They accepted the fact that they were cattle.

Aravind Adiga, author of Booker-Prize winning White Tiger, speaks out his mind why he wrote the novel: “… I wanted to challenge this idea that India is the world’s greatest democracy. It may be so in an objective sense, but on the ground, the poor have such little power… I wanted something that would provoke and annoy people …The servant-master system implies two things: One is that the servants are far poorer than the rich—a servant has no possibility of ever catching up to the master. And secondly, he has access to the master—the master’s money, the master’s physical person. Yet crime rates in India are very low… What is stopping a poor man from taking to the crime that occurs in Venezuela or South Africa? You need two things [for crime to occur]—a divide and a conscious ideology of resentment. We don’t have resentment in India. The poor just assume that the rich are a fact of life. For them, getting angry at the rich is like getting angry at the heat…But I think we’re seeing what I believe is a class-based resentment for the first time…”

This is my hypothesis. Master slaps landless peasant, puts him in his place, tells him he is scum, his children are scum, his entire family are scum. Instead of rebellion, he accepts the fact that he is scum.

What happened in ancient Northern India is barbaric. Fuck Lagaan. Fuck the romanticised versions we see in films of village beauties carrying pots of water. The village system in the North is a sub-human existence, robbing people of their dignity and based on schadenfreude.

This lack of refinement is not just in the villages. It permeates through all levels of society in India. Just flick through the channels on Indian tv and you'll see what I mean.

What's the solution?

Apart from the obvious solution of better government and policy making, I think we also need better role models.

Their parents, who ought to be their role models, have failed.

The big men about town are pan-eating Bania businessmen.

The politicians? Don't make me laugh.

So what’s it down to?

You're not going to believe this, but it's

show biz.

What else is there?

(Read Marina Hyde's story on celebrities in the Guardian for further elaboration).

The film stars and cricketers, whom the public idolize, need to fill that role, that parents and leaders and village elders cannot fill. In today’s scenario, the world is putty in their hands. They have the power to shape world culture.

And that’s the sad truth.