Back in London for the first time since the end of 2007, Barton saw little change, the shops were bustling, the crowds seemed no different from the Christmas shoppers of previous years. The West End lights looked as cheerful as ever with the traffic gridlocked as shoppers shopped. It was far from the grim besieged image the media had been working-up over the last months, there were no dole queues or breadlines, at least for the moment, perhaps 2009 would see visible signs of change as banks and businesses went under.
In spite of the apparent bustle unemployment was rising fast, the news announced Woollies had gone and thirty thousand jobs would be lost before Christmas — as always it was the small people who suffered most. Barton realized that the ripples went far, the majority of the baubles that had filled Woollies shelves were certainly made in China.
Behind the festive lights and tinsel the Conservative Shadow Chancellor suggested that the country ran a serious risk of a default. Britain’s debts had reached a never before heard of level, even the prime minister admitted national debt would reach more than one trillion pounds.
The news media’s attention was distracted from the country’s economic woes by the bloody battle for the Taj Mahal Palace in Bombay. The public was brought a blow by blow account of the siege in real-time with the death toll mounting by the hour. Police were still recovering dead bodies from the ruins of Bombay’s century old iconic landmark. Barton could not help thinking that only nine months earlier he had stayed in that very same hotel with Emma Parkly following the death of her banker husband.
A friend of Tarasov’s, whom Barton had met during his weekend in the Aegean, was one of the innocent victims of the attacks on the hotel, as was one of Simi’s French friends on a visit to Bombay for her textile business. It was a small world and few could escape the economic and political consequences of events that took place in what were once far away places.
A lot of things had happened in those months which seemed to have confirmed Barton’s impression of India, a giant with feet of clay, prey to a multitude of risks, as the economic crisis was showing, a country facing the difficulties that went with its creaking government structure. A country trying to cope with a nineteenth century political and social system in a head-on confrontation with the demands of the third millennium.
Many Westerners were mesmerized by India, aping its culture without the slightest understanding of its real complexities. In London stressed-out executives and neurotic women attended yoga classes and undertook Ayurvedic cures. Stars spouted pseudo-Hinduisms laced with mystical prattling. There was no denying India’s spiritual lure was powerful. Businessmen were drawn by its new economy. But the reality was different. India’s GDP did not exceed that of crisis stricken Spain. Naïve commentators raved about India’s hi-tech economy, which in reality lay in an ocean of cruelty and poverty, as fragile as its shinning crystal towers.
Insensitivity flourished in India’s upper and privileged middle classes who paid servants and workers a pittance. It was nothing for them to expect their drivers to wait up all night with servants at their beck and call twenty four hours a day. The rich explained from their sumptuous residences everything was relative: a poor man could live well on a few rupees a day, with a few onions, dhal and bread they could eat to their full.
Barton had witnessed the chasm that divided rich and poor on India’s teeming streets and had seen the incompetence, self-interest and hypocrisy if its authorities. The fragility of the emerging economies was underscored when the Financial Times BRIC index had lost sixty percent of its value in eleven months.
Everything was easy with hindsight, but that did not prevent Barton from smiling when he remembered the forecast of a prominent online market analyst. His Boxing Day news letter, with the aid of impressive charts and extrapolations, announced the Footsie would reach 6947 points at the end of 2008. The forecast coincided almost precisely with Barton’s flight from Blighty. It fell by 3000 points.
The Villain