A Colossal Wreck (44 page)

As the Economic Policy Institute’s State of Working America 2004 Report instructs us, any story of rising income for working families across the past quarter century is, at bottom, a story about rising annual work hours, particularly among women. The extra hours worked by wives in 2000, compared to 1979, translates into additional full-time workweeks as follows: 8 weeks in the bottom 20 percent, 12.9 weeks in the second, 12.5 weeks in the third, 9.2 in the fourth, and 8.3 in the fifth. If women in poor families hadn’t gone to work in the years after 1979, their family income would have fallen by almost 14 percent.

It’s always eerie how quickly people accept sharply changed circumstances as normalcy, like paying 22 percent interest on a credit
card debt and watching payments on all cards get hiked to the fiercest interest rate if you’re late on one payment. Twenty years ago those were credit terms the FBI took to be proof of Mafia membership and got prosecutors to file charges of extortion. Now, both parties in Congress leap to obey when the credit card companies—i.e., the banks—issue their commands. Latest to come under the axe is Chapter 7 bankruptcy, where bankrupts could go down and not have repayments through their next ten incarnations, which is what Chapter 11 bankruptcy mandates.

March 25

How many times, amid the carnage of such homicidal sprees, do investigators find a prescription for some anti-depressant at the blood-spattered murder scene? Luvox at Columbine, Prozac at Louisville, where Joseph Wesbecker killed nine including himself. Scroll through the last fifteen years and you’ll find plenty such stories.

That’s the trouble with time. As Paul Krassner joked about Waldheimer’s Disease, you get old and forget you were a Nazi. But it’s never too late to go back to the dim distant origins of the Depression Industry in the late 1980s and early ’90s, and the saga of what happened after three researchers working for Lilly concocted a potion in the mid-1970s they christened fluoxetine hydrochloride, later known to the world, to Wesbecker and to Jeff Weise, as Prozac.

Long years of rigorous testing? When Fred Gardner and I investigated the selling of depression and of Prozac in the mid-1990s we found that the clinical trials of Prozac excluded suicidal patients, children, and elderly adults—although once FDA approval is granted, the drug can be prescribed for anyone of any age. According to Dr. Peter Breggin, the well-known Bethesda-based psychiatrist who analyzed the FDA’s approval of Prozac, it was based, ultimately, on three studies indicating that fluoxetine relieved some symptoms of depression more effectively than a placebo, and in the face of nine studies indicating no positive effect. Only sixty-three patients were on fluoxetine for a period of more than two years.

Psychiatrists—a breed whose adepts, according to a study published
in the
Journal of Clinical Psychiatry
in 1980, commit suicide at twice the national rate—have been central to the entire enterprise. The process linking their alchemy to the corporate bottom line has a robust simplicity to it. As Prozac came off Lilly’s research bench and headed for the mass production line, psychiatrists, some in receipt of Lilly’s money, labored to formulate conditions to be installed in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, whose chief editor in the 1980s was Robert Spitzer MD, an orgone-box survivor and adept copywriter skilled at coining the DSM’s arsenal of “disorders” sanctioning treatment, medication, and most crucially of all, reimbursement by insurance companies. When troubling questions were raised about Prozac’s possible linkage to violent acts, psychiatrists were there to douse the flames of doubt.

In the US the government is in the pay of the drug companies, and prescriptions for anti-depressants have risen as the call for any collective social action to cure “depression” has long since been taken from any political manifestos. How they must have cheered at Eli Lilly when Congress wiped out Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy statutes, creating family violence, heightened crime, and a vast new potential market for Prozac and kindred potions at the stroke of a pen.

March 26

Mumbai—Sainath and Priyanka advise me against going out this morning since it’s Holi, a day when rowdy fellows pelt you with dye and balloons filled with stones in honor of spring. I wander out at dawn and soon meet people whose faces and clothes are blotched with red and green stains. I retreat for the rest of the morning to the Club, whose guest board showed roughly a 50/50 split between Anglo and Indian names.

I prowl around the Yacht Club’s library, mostly full of light fiction, but finally come across
The Indian Field Shikar Book
, compiled by W. S. Burke, sixth edition, published by Thacker, Spink & Co., Calcutta and Simla, 1928. Embossed on the flyleaf is “J. N. Tata,” presumably once the owner. The Tatas are probably India’s best-known business family, now running a vast business empire, having flourished down
the years from their origins as opium concessionaires, just as Jardine and Matthiessen were further east.

I turn to a chapter called “The Game Destroyers.” Burke advised that with the “marked decrease” in game in several parts of India, “it has become urgently necessary for sportsmen to turn their attention to the game destroyers of India.” Conservation is the order of the day. And who are these “natural foes”? Burke entertains no uncertainty on the matter. “The leopard is one of the greatest foes to the preservation of deer which, largely owing to his depredations, have been almost, if not quite, exterminated in many parts of India … and of all the leopards the Ounce or Snow Leopard (
Felis unca
) is the most inveterate and successful destroyer of the game to be found in the higher elevations of the Himalayas.”

Below the leopard, Burke ranges the other game destroyers: wolves, wild dogs (“should be remorselessly destroyed”), civets and mongooses, martins and weasels, crows (“arrant egg thieves and chick destroyers”), owls (“ditto”), eagles, buzzards, falcons (“usually deserving of a cartridge, though we must not forget that their partiality for rats, snakes and other small and noxious animals is a recommendation to mercy which should carry some weight”).

Night—Sainath, full of bitter denunciations of Indian food in America, takes me off to a Mughalai restaurant. He has butter chicken. I choose mutton curry. Despite Sainath’s acrid dismissal of all Indian restaurants in the US, the food tastes not too different to a decent Indian meal in New York or Los Angeles, though Sainath’s butter chicken was over-salted. Indeed, with some diligence you can find passable North Indian food in a few major American cities.

Southern Indian food is another matter. How I will miss southern Indian cafés and restaurants. How I will yearn for the dosais (crepes or pancakes), the idlis (steamed cakes), both made from a mix of rice grits and urad dhal fermented overnight. I will pine too for fish and shrimp curries, for oothappam (onion pancakes) and rasam (thin soups), of which a popular one is the Tamil milagu-thannit (literally, pepper water), rendered as “mulligatawny” by the British and thickened into the brackish brown sludge served in clubs and British Railway hotels in the 1950s. By the time my trip is done I’ll
have enjoyed Malabar, Chettinad, Mughalai, Gujarati, city Tamilian, Mangalorian and Goan cooking.

Sainath says he puts on two kilos every time he visits Kerala, and I can see why. I miss the thali too, a stainless steel tray about the size of a pizza platter on which the smaller bowls of vegetable curries, curds, deserts and other elements of the thali palette are set and refilled until you’re done. Why is there no southern Indian cuisine in America? After all, the motel industry may be 70 percent run by clans from Gujarat, but there are a lot of Indians from other regions here too, including Andhra Pradesh which, says Sainath with the pride of a native son, has the fieriest food of all.

I ask Sainath how he started working in the countryside.

At the start of the ’90s Sainath was in his early thirties, born into a distinguished Brahmin family, educated by the Jesuits in Madras (a city renamed Chennai five years ago), then seasoned in the radical flames of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. By 1980, he was at United News of India, and three years later working for R. K. Karanjia, a famous journalistic figure of that era and proprietor of the muckraking weekly
Blitz
, which in the early ’80s commanded a national circulation of 600,000 and a readership ten times larger.

Karanjia lost no time in making the teetotal and hard-working Sainath deputy chief editor. Soon Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, author of
Blitz
’s “Last Page” column, which he had written for over forty years, willed the column to Sainath, thus trumping from the grave Karanjia’s designated inheritor. Abbas, incidentally, was the author of the great novel
Inquilab
(
Revolution
), plus seventy-two other books, plus the scripts of many of India’s greatest movies.

A year later Sainath toured nine drought-stricken states in India, and recalls ruefully, “That’s when I learned that conventional journalism was above all about the service of power. You always give the last word to authority. I got a couple of prizes which I didn’t pick up because I was ashamed.”

Ten years later Sainath’s moment came. “The economic ‘reforms’ began. That’s when the great intellectual shift took place.” Just as the US press romped ever deeper into celebrity journalism as the war on the poor unfurled through the 1980s and ’90s, so too the Indian press
plunged into full-tilt coverage of India’s beautiful people. “I felt that if the Indian press was covering the top 5 percent, I should cover the bottom 5 percent.”

He quit
Blitz
and in 1993 applied for a
Times of India
fellowship. At the interview he spoke of his plans to report from rural India—terra incognita to the national Indian press. An editor asked him, “Suppose I tell you my readers aren’t interested in this stuff.” Sainath, a feisty fellow, riposted, “When did you last meet your readers to make any such claims on their behalf?”

He got the fellowship and took to the back roads in the ten poorest districts of five states. He walked hundreds of miles. The
Times
had said it would carry a few pieces. He had two good editors there who supported what he was doing. In the end the paper ran eighty-four reports by Sainath across eighteen months, many of them subsequently reprinted in his well-known collection,
Everybody Loves a Good Drought
. They made his journalistic name and earned him a bundle of prizes, both national and international. The prizes furnished him credibility and also money to go on freelancing.

In those days, Sainath remembers, the legitimacy of the “neoliberal reforms” that plunged India’s peasantry into the inferno “was very great, like religious dogma. But I was getting 300 letters a month from people applauding and ratifying my reports as well as sending money for the people I was writing about. It was very moving. I learned that readers are far ahead of editors. I was saying that poverty is not natural, but a willed infliction. I asked, what are the survival tactics of the poor? I saw that the Indian woman eats last. She feeds her husband, her children, the parents, and then if there’s anything left she eats that. I learned how the poor lived off the forests. I did what they did. If they migrated and got up on top of a train, so did I.”

For hundreds of millions of poor Indians, the brave new world of the ’90s meant globalization of prices, Indianization of incomes. “As we moved to fortify our welfare state for the wealthy, the state turned its back on the poor, investment in agriculture collapsed, and with it, countless millions of lives. As banks wound down rural credit while granting loans for buying Mercedes Benzes in the cities at the lowest imaginable interest rates, rural indebtedness soared. In the ’90s, for
the first time in independent India the Supreme Court pulled up several state governments over increasing hunger deaths. Welcome to the world so loved by the Friedmans—Thomas and Milton.”

From the mid-’90s on, thousands of Indian farmers committed suicide, including over 5,000 in the single southern state of Andhra Pradesh. As employment crashed in the countryside to its lowest ever, distress migrations from the villages—to just about anywhere—increased in tens of millions.

Food grain available per Indian fell almost every year in the 1990s and by 2002–3 was less than it had been at the time of the great Bengal famine of 1942–3. Even as the world hailed the Indian Tiger Economy, the country slipped to rank 127 (from 124) in the United Nations Human Development Index of 2003. It is better to be a poor person in Botswana, or even the occupied territories of Palestine, than one in India.

Few journalists write well about poor people, particularly the rural poor, who have mostly vanished from public description or discussion. Reporters tend to patronize them. The drama is really about the journalist visiting the poor (whose categories include several hundred million Indians, ranging from destitute itinerants to small farmers crucified by debt). Interviewing the poor as they reel off numbers from the balance sheet of their misfortunes takes concentration. The devil, in recent years often meaning suicides, is in details that have to be got right: inputs per acres, sources of irrigation, market price for crops.

These numbers have to be jotted down in the fields, often in temperatures upward of 110F, and even 118F (47.7C) in the fields, at which point all electronic equipment gives up.

It’s necessary to keep good records. When we visited the family of a dalit (i.e., an untouchable), Sainath gave me the standard form he has designed and fills out for the 300 or so families he’s personally visited after a suicide. Name: T. T. Johny, aged forty-three. Date of suicide: July 9, 2004. Debt: 60,000 rupees. (Exchange rates: in March and April of 2005: $1 US traded for about 42 rupees. In the Mumbai slums a bucket of water sells for 5 rupees, about 12 cents. One thousand rupees exchange for about $24. So T. T. Johny’s debt
was c. $1,430.) Family members: one wife, one daughter. Land: one acre. Cattle: none. Crop seed changes …, Sources of credit …, Source of irrigation: no well. Input per acre …