India's liberalized children embrace lap of luxury
Boom has middle-class zippies spending freely, living high life

Mike McPhate
Sunday, November 13, 2005

New Delhi, India -- Where since ancient times marriage has been deemed a sacred duty, Yuvika Bader, a quick-tongued 20-year-old, rejects the very concept of matrimony. "If someone's going to live with someone, then I'd just do it," the college student said recently. "I don't need to get the marriage stamp on it."

Where not long ago few besides beggars and cows wandered after dark, the son of a leather exporter goes clubbing four nights a week. The longhaired 24-year-old, who didn't want to be named, said he once downed a vial of LSD and became convinced he was the Hindu god Shiva. "I was completely screwed, gone," he said.

Where older generations viewed luxury spending as vulgar, Bhavdeep Mehta, a 24-year-old retail manager, has splurged his salary on three cars, a giant flat screen TV and a $370 cell phone, his sixth upgrade in five years. "Phones," he said, "go out of fashion very quickly."

PHOTO: ADRIAN FISK

Late night partiers dance at the club Odyssey in Gurgaon, a suburb south of New Delhi.

A strange new brood has come of age in India. Part of a plumping middle class -- the first to enjoy satellite TV and U.S.-style consumerism -- India's well-to-do 20-somethings spend freely, date casually, and party hard. As if slipping out of a medieval corset, many now reject their ancient society's tight restraints on personal freedom.

Heirs to a booming economy, more than 50 million young adults in India are now affluent. They are trailblazers for the country's huge under-30 population, a demographic balloon that amounts to 60 percent of a billion-plus population. Their frustrations and desires will soon dominate India, a nuclear-armed nation of rising global ambitions.

"In many ways," says Nandu Ram, sociology professor at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, "they are forcing India toward a new set of norms."

Indian media have offered several names for the group: "zippies" for the zip in their stride, "indies" for their financial independence, and perhaps most aptly "liberalization's children," coined in reference to the 1991 fiscal reforms that marked the Indian economy's lurch skyward.

Middle-aged Indians call them aliens. Following independence in 1947, that older generation faced decades of recurring famine and war, along with a dreary, socialist-inspired marketplace -- consumer choice meant two models of cars and a year-long wait for a phone line. They obeyed their fathers and revered the principle of Gandhian austerity.

Fourteen years into the fiscal liberalization project, their children have entered adulthood with little or no memory of their country's sedate past. The changes don't apply to everyone -- a third of the country remains mired in poverty. But interviews with more than 20 middle-class Indians between the ages of 18 and 30 found that most view themselves as vanguards of an emerging, more modern Indian identity.

"We think the idea is there is no harm in fun," says Nitin Mehndirata, 23, a software engineer in rimless glasses who mingled at a late-night DJ party south of New Delhi, the capital. "If you want to have a pool party -- that's OK."

Some Indians worry that middle-class youth have become scornful of their heritage. They note how young men now sport baggy pants and slick goatees like U.S. hip hop stars, how young women spurn saris for Capris and spaghetti tank-tops, how drug use and one-night stands have become routine among the urban party crowd.

"Aren't we losing our identity?" asked Usha Harikrishnan of Young India, a group that sponsors community activism among young professionals. "Why can't I, as an Indian, be proud?"

At the heart of the new orientation are television and rising white-collar employment.

Since the early 1990s, the number of TV channels has grown from two to more than 100, broadcasting U.S. shows like "Friends", "Sex and the City" and, most recently, "Desperate Housewives".

It was Indian MTV though, with its idolatry of youth, fame and stylishness, that spearheaded a new culture of egotism, says Vamsee Juluri, author of "Becoming a Global Audience: Longing and Belonging in Indian Music Television". "There was this whole sea change," Juluri says.

Where duty to family had held sway, individualism became the mantra. Careers have multiplied in industries like retail, tourism, banking, and most notably Internet technology, where the average employee is under 30 and takes home roughly $1,100 per month, a handsome sum here. Thanks in part to outsourced U.S. jobs, software and information-technology enabled employment has in the past three years doubled to about 1,045,000 jobs, according to the industry lobby Nasscom.

As marketers scramble to corral the estimated $14 billion in spending money held by young Indians, shopping malls have spread like an advancing empire across India's slum-ridden cities -- the first rose in 1999 and around 300 are planned by 2010.

At glass-paneled Ansal Plaza in New Delhi, packs of shaggy-headed teenage boys prowl for thin girls in low-waist jeans, as Bananarama's "Cruel Summer" plays over the sound system. They shop at Benetton, eat at McDonald's.

Sitting in the ground-floor coffee bar Barista, Surojit Dev, 25, a stubbly-faced advertising rep, says the free-wheeling market has opened the minds of his generation. "Whatever is shown on TV, we want to try that," he says, fiddling with a swanky Nokia handset. "In my parents' time they didn't even listen to radio. They were more into books, ancient stuff."

Not long ago a family trip to the cinema was thought the height of entertainment, but India's metros have now spawned a kinetic party scene. More than 100 nightclubs have opened in the past five years in two of India's most happening cities, New Delhi and Mumbai.

Liberalization's children are beset with new temptations. In the last five years, India has experienced a dramatic rise in middle class drug addiction, an affliction that was before largely confined to street dwellers, say observers.

"It's all related to the rave party, trance, night club boom," says Yusuf Merchant, head of Mumbai's Drug Abuse Information, Rehabilitation and Research Center.

The scene has also become staging ground for a secret sexual upsurge. India remains a land where nonmarital sex is highly stigmatized, particularly for women. Public kissing is not done, and boys and girls traditionally grow up sharply segregated. However, according to separate studies -- by the Indian Journal of Social Work and researchers Deepak Gupta and DK Gupta -- the number of urban, educated youth who are open to premarital sex has shot up to 59 percent from 10 percent in 1993. Middle-class partiers say one-night stands are common.

"People are going absolutely mad," says Raghav Bhalla, 24, a New Delhi nightlife regular and self-declared playboy.

The growing penchant for mischief has gone largely unnoticed within India's extended families, but many young people are breaking more overtly with tradition. Increasingly they are choosing to remain single well into adulthood, or picking partners of whom their parents disapprove. More than a third of single, urban women now reject the tradition of arranged marriage, according to a recent poll by the news magazine The Week. Seema Prakash, a New Delhi family counselor, says generational clashes will become increasingly common among India's middle class. "The value system is fast eroding," she says.

For Yuvika Bader it's not fast enough. Bader sits at a Barista with her friend Kanika Sharma, 20. Both women hail from affluent business families, attend a top women's college, and don short, tomboyish hairdos.

They love the TV show "Friends" and have assigned characters to everyone in their circle of friends by personality: Bader is Pheobe, Sharma is Chandler. Sharma, who wears a silver hoop through her left eyebrow, teases her friend about her anti-marriage policy. "Basically, she doesn't believe in love," Sharma says.

Bader snaps back: "No, I don't believe in long-term love: You like someone and then you stop," she says.

"You don't have to, like, be with one person forever."

Asked if her parents know she plans to forgo marriage, Bader shakes her head somberly. Rather than face the wrath of her deeply conservative father she plans to go to New York for graduate school -- and never return.

"If I stay here I'll never be totally independent," she says.

Just outside the cafe, beggar kids pick plastic out of fresh puddles. With a modern world opening up to them, the women say, they have little reason to abide by the rules of yesterday's India. "Some people don't really want to take on their parents," Sharma says. "Actually, when it comes down to it, what can parents really do?"

Mike McPhate is a freelance writer based in New Delhi. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

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