Perilous unconcern As happens always, this time too in the run-up to Eid-ul-Fitr, it is boom time for the business community here. And as has been the precedence, the business people are doing everything they can to woo the public. Besides the newspaper advertisements, the hoardings and banners on shop-fronts are announcing bumper sales on various goods. At times people find these offers irresistible go on a spending spree without actually knowing that these attractive offers are nothing but a ploy to cheat and loot them of their hard-earned money. What is really confusing is that there hardly exists any institutional mechanism anywhere in the state which could at least verify the authenticity of shopkeepers’ claims vis-a-vis the discounts they claim they are offering on the festive occasions. And obviously it is the gullible public that is always at the receiving end. While on the one hand, festivities push them towards spending, on the other they have to burn a proverbial hole in their pockets by paying whatever is demanded from them. Take for instance the market places in Jammu or in Srinagar. The prices of a same good or commodity are at great variance depending on the place a person chooses to buy it from. For instance in city interiors the goods and commodities are priced comparatively lower than what the same things would cost in uptown ‘posh’ localities and big shopping malls. And it refuses to sound logical to think that the concerned governmental agencies won’t be aware of this. They are pretty well in the know of how common people are cheated, but at the same time, they have developed a habit of being unconcerned and unmoved for reasons best known to them. Understandably then, in the absence of any checks on their deceitful tactics, the shopkeepers are having a great time. They are looting the people with proverbial both hands. And people too have, willingly or unwillingly, put themselves at the mercy of the greedy businesses. They no longer question and hardly ever complain, and therefore contribute their bit in propagating and patronizing a culture of trickery and pretence. Add to it the attributes of globalization which have over the years in a very subtle manner popularized consumerism to the extent that our society too has evolved with a ‘throw- away’ behaviour of sorts. It is no longer that people shop because they need to, but like elsewhere in the world, here also there exists a huge chunk of population who shop only because they feel like renewing their repository of consumer goods at home and elsewhere every now and then. The trend would have been a welcome development had ours too been a society with very high per-capita earnings. However, it is not like that. While a handful few are placed very comfortably on the income scale, a vast majority is finding it very difficult to make even the ends meet. As a result of this, the gap between the ordinary and the ‘elite’ has widened to the extent of creating cleavages of dissent between the rich and the poor. It is during the festival seasons that these cleavages are further widened to mock at our entire social security system. The government which is already guilty of doing precious little to bridge the gap between the haves and have-nots in terms of their economic wherewithal, complicates the problem further by siding with the rich and the elite. In such a situation, it is only too obvious that the amount and extent of frustration among the commoners surges with every passing day. If the trend continues like this, the day is not far off when we will be face to face with yet another conflict with economic disparities as it primary cause.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Aug 2013 23:00:02 +0000
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