This can be extrapolated from the film without even looking at the sex scenes. The extraordinary opening sequence, with its sparse dialogue and the unbearable pathos of its symphonic backdrop, mostly takes place in Brandon’s New York bachelor pad, a place as horrifying as any dungeon, showing us from the outset that we have sat down to a horror film. There is a fridge and a tiny kitchenette, a sofa and a flat screen television. The bedroom is functional and unadorned. Only a record player and a few LPs (one of which, Chic’s ‘I Want Your Love’, will be deployed to tremendous effect in a later scene) point to the kindness of the main protagonist, a kindness that Michael Fassbender manages to maintain despite the (largely masochistic) horror of the acts he participates in.

Next there is the ride to work. Sullivan travels alone through the New York subway, searching out a married woman who might be vulnerable to his unquestionable physical charm. She is dressed elaborately, perhaps too elaborately, as if they have made too much effort. A randy bachelor pursuing a married woman is a bit of a cliché, something a group of men might joke about at a stag night, and yet McQueen manages to extract so much out of these scenes. There is a loneliness in the woman’s eyes and in her apparent eagerness to meet Sullivan’s gaze, at least until they go too far and she takes flight.

Sullivan arrives at work, a banal office building. There are no shots of the exterior, no attempts to establish its presence at the heart of the metropolis. New York has rarely looked so banal on the big screen. McQueen is not seduced by the Big Apple; its glorious history is of no interest to him. Even Sullivan’s precise job is unclear, although we learn that he is good at it (at least when he’s not watching porn on the office computers). The secretary fancies him, his boss is fascinated by him, and he remains indifferent. He is not motivated by his work, but nor is he alienated by it. Sullivan is not a subversive in the making. There is no sign whatsoever that he has any desire to break out of the straitjacket of his atomised existence.

Except, perhaps, when he goes on a date with the secretary, Marianne, a buxom and pretty Brooklynite. This is one of the most disconcerting scenes in the film (and there are plenty of those), certainly much more disconcerting than the sex scenes, and here I felt that McQueen could have dwelt a little longer, much like he did (to record effect) with Bobby Sands and the priest in Hunger. As in the rest of the film, the dialogue is impressively, embarrassingly banal. I squirmed as Sullivan argued against the importance of relationships, while Marianne patiently rebuts him with clichés of her own, albeit clichés that might have been useful, had Sullivan been willing to listen. “You have to commit,” she says, even though the irony seems to be that he’d like to be capable of a serious relationship with her, while she – as we see the next morning – is perfectly happy to fuck his brains out. The banality of this dialogue is reflected elsewhere, most notably during an office night out after the team have “nailed” a big deal. Sullivan’s boss leads the way with excruciating chat-up lines, while Sullivan hovers in the background, kind, patient, friendly, and then proceeds to fuck his boss’s target for the night, a beautiful and dynamic blonde, under a grimy bridge.

In some respects, Sullivan is like something out of a Bret Easton-Ellis or a Michel Houellebecq novel, but perhaps more frightening, because he’s more immediately recognisable. His dilemmas are not those of a mere sex addict. His torments are mostly hidden, to be visualised only in his tragic sister’s outbursts, but they are surely torments that have touched most of us who have grown up in the modern world, with its emphasis on our rights and choices, but without any effective guidance as to how to make it through. Sullivan is not just a sex addict, he’s an everyman.

Earlier today, in a report that someone with Silverstein’s prose might describe as ‘breathless’, he declared: “An exclusive report from a confidential highly-placed Israeli source says that a booby-tapped drone crashed and exploded at the top-secret Israeli airbase Sdot Micha.” According to this ‘confidential highly-placed source’, the drone was probably sent by Hizbollah/Iran, and the mainstream media reports (that it was an Israeli drone which malfunctioned) were a cover-up.

Over at +972, Dimi Reider convincingly demolishes Silverstein’s claims. His analysis seems reasonable. But he doesn’t stop there. The obvious conclusion is that Silverstein can’t be trusted (those who want to point out that he sometimes gets it right should be reminded that even a broken clock is correct twice a day), but Reider says he has unwittingly played into the IDF’s hands. “But the real question is: who would have us believe this highly improbably hypothesis is true? Iran is mostly trying to avoid escalation [by reassuring Israel that it is perfectly comfortable with its existence - Alex]. Why it would give Israel a perfect casus belli by launching such a blatant military attack, which causes no significant damage, is beyond me; but I can well imagine plenty of people within the IDF who would dearly like a casus belli to bolster their case for an attack on Iran. If I were Richard, I would be extremely suspicious of any information – especially uncorroborated information – that helps the pro-war camp in Israel. Not to mention that the source might be acting in good faith, but is being hoodwinked by his own sources within the system.”

Now, Dimi is far more intelligent than most of the folk out there who oppose Jewish statehood, and he’s certainly far more intelligent than the man with no sense of irony who calls his blog Tikun Olam. He must know that Silverstein’s a bit of a dupe. But here his world-view has forced him into some ludicrous contortions, especially now that Israeli footage of the drone proves that it was indeed Israeli. If the IDF wanted us to believe that Iran/Hizbollah had crashed a drone in Israel, why wouldn’t it just say so? Why would it bother coming up with a plausible – and verifiable – story about an Israeli drone malfunctioning? Why would it choose to use a consistently inaccurate and possibly unhinged blogger to try to convince the world that Iran was attacking Israel? Has he heard of Occam’s Razor?

The only conclusion to be drawn from this episode is that Richard Silverstein shouldn’t be taken seriously. But then most of us knew that a long time ago.

No  more evidence required. You can count on less than one hand the number of times I’ve called out anti-Zionists for anti-Semitism on this site, but if the allegation insinuated by Phil Weiss isn’t anti-Semitic, then nothing is. Unless, of course, he has more evidence that he’d like to share.

PS I am Love came out before the appearance in Vogue, and she wasn’t nominated for that either.

PPS Steven Spielberg wasn’t nominated for War Horse. Any keffiyehs in his closet?

Next, rather tangentially, Goldman writes: “I am also pretty sure that the Egyptians don’t care whether Larry or any other non-Egyptian supported their revolution. They particularly don’t care whether or not Israeli liberals supported or opposed their revolution. We Israelis can be quite vain, but really – this revolution is not about us. At all.” Again, notice a commentator supposedly committed to universalism drawing attention to Israeli vanity, and all because they do what anyone would do in their place – worry about what’s going on in their neighbourhood. Would Goldman have taken the Egyptians to task for worrying about the results of the last Israeli elections? Of course not. That she herself is Israeli (albeit one who publicly states that she has left the country for political reasons) should not mean a free pass from critical scrutiny.

Goldman goes on to say that, because of its support for Mubarak, “Israel is not part of the discourse about the Arab world”, before arguing – reasonably, I think – that the primary reason for the weakness of liberalism in Egypt is the repression of liberal parties during the Mubarak years. In any case, she rightly notes that the liberal parties still won 30 per cent of the vote. I agree with her when she suggests that the “situation will probably get worse before it gets better”, but that we should not yearn for Mubarak. Once democracy is out of the bottle, it is very hard to put it back in. However, this does not mean that Israelis are acting unreasonably by expressing their concerns, even if Derfner did it in a rather insensitive, zero-sum way.

Goldman seems to be in awe of the judgements of her Arab friends and colleagues, and it is with these that she portentously completes her piece. “He [important Arab journalist with “an impressive knowledge of Israeli society and politics”] said that there was not a single Israeli journalist who evidenced any true insight or deep knowledge of the Arab world. And he said that the Arab rising was unstoppable.” One can only wonder whether Goldman was the exception to this seemingly absolute rule, but, as someone who neither claims nor particularly desires to have a deep knowledge of the Arab world – at least not any more than a concerned neighbour would want – I remain mystified by the mystification of it. For an Israeli to express concern at the Egyptian election results is reasonable, irrespective of Israel’s past relationship with Egypt or the current make-up of the Israeli government, just as Egyptian concern at the right-wing make-up of the Israeli government is reasonable. Goldman is correct to criticise Derfner for yearning for Mubarak, but then takes things too far in declaring that Israelis have no right to comment. She may be very confident about the ultimate outcome of the “unstoppable” (and presumably glorious) Egyptian revolution, but her criticisms of Derfner’s worries are at best banal, and would be of no interest if the citizens being reprimanded for their concern were not Israelis.

The final paragraph is key: “That’s why there is nothing “left” about the “Zionist left.” And there’s a clear connection between voting for Tzipi Livni or Shelly Yachimovich, and supporting a Price Tag crime. The difference is encapsulated by your stance on the Altalena Affair: it is an internal discussion within the colonial forces. Whether colonization should be carried out with by more or less force, and whether it should consider international law or not. There is nothing in all of that to help you produce your social democratic identity in a shared space.”

In short, even the left-wing of Israeli society is racist and despicable. We can assume that Jabali feels the same about the right-wing. And yet at the same time we are told that Jabali and other anti-Zionists are pursuing a one-state solution in which everyone will be accorded the same rights. Given that you consider a vast majority of Israeli society to be beyond the pale, why on earth would you want them to be part of your new state? If I were surrounded by people who held such awful views, I would demand immediate separation and perhaps even international protection from them. But we are told that Jalabi & Co want to join together with the despised in creating a new polity without precedent in world history.

But wait. If the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza get a vote, as well as the descendants of Palestinian refugees, then sharing no longer becomes necessary. Because democracy would then mean a Palestinian-Arab state with Jews as second-class citizens, a mirror image of the state we’re told currently exists between the river and the sea, the state Jabali and the other anti-Zionists despise.

In short, the one-state solution is a vision for Palestinian victory. The high-minded rhetoric about peace and justice and democracy is a ruse; it cannot sit alongside the widely held view – honestly expressed by Jalabi – that Israel is a country where even the left-wing are irredeemably racist. That is, without us going through some kind of de-Nazification programme. But even the Germans were able to keep living in Germany. If you sincerely believe that there is a “connection” between voting for Tzipi Livni and setting fire to mosques (perhaps it’s akin to the “connection” between a BDS activist and a suicide bomber), then you are very optimistic if you think that a single democratic state will bring peace. That is, unless it is not peace you seek, but victory.

The raison d’être of the State of Israel is the defense and advancement of the Jewish people. For a Zionist, when universal liberal values conflict with this raison d’être, the latter must prevail. Though these conflicts do exist, they are not terribly widespread. Even Lee acknowledges that “Many of the inequalities…are not unique to Israel. If we look at education rates of young Arabs in France or Hispanics and Blacks in the US, we’ll find similar inequalities in situation and even opportunity [sic]. Likewise, for infrastructure.” He goes on to claim that what singles Israel out are its inequalities of citizenship, but doesn’t really go into specifics, aside from the poorly chosen example of military service. In choosing that example, he ignores the ongoing efforts to encourage more Israeli-Palestinians to do national service (efforts which have been predictably opposed by anti-Zionists).” Read the rest at +972 blog.

Dear Aron,
I take comfort from reading your kind and heartfelt words about your experiences patrolling the Egyptian border, and your feelings on the importance of offering dignified refuge to those who have suffered as we suffered.

Like you I am an oleh, although from the UK, l and have been living in Israel for 6 years now. Many of my friends do the same reserve duty on the border, and show the same kindness and compassion to those they find stumbling out from the night, often injured, from the nightmare of their past life and their journey to Israel.

My involvement in this story begins when they arrive in Tel Aviv. For the past 3 years I have been involved in running shelters for pregnant women, single mothers, and children, first as Shelter Manager and then as Humanitarian Coordinator for the African Refugee Development Center. I do this partly in honor of the people who assisted my grandparents and great grandparents when they arrived in the UK, just before the Holocaust swallowed up those who stayed behind.

I know that the work that ARDC does, staffed full of volunteers from across the Jewish and non-Jewish world, does justice to the stories we grew up hearing. It is clearly the only right thing to do to survivors of modern day genocides and state sponsored oppression.

I do not feel, however, that we can say with the same clear heart that we are proud of the response of our nation, our country. The Israeli neighbors near our shelter are prone to shout abuses at the residents and the volunteers for bringing black people into their neighborhoods; local rabbis print posters demanding that real estate agents refuse to rent properties to Africans; schools and nurseries refuse African children from entering their classrooms; and hundreds of men sleep every night in the parks and abandoned buildings of South Tel Aviv whilst receiving no humanitarian support at all from the state or the municipality.Between you receiving them on the border with hot drinks, blankets and lifesaving medical treatment and them arriving to our shelter, there are a number of worrying issues that cannot help but keep people like us awake at night.

After leaving you, they are taken to Saharonim detention facility in the Negev for processing. There are people who have been detained in Saharonim for years, with no access to claim asylum and no independent oversight of this closed military site. Women who arrived pregnant from the horrors in the Sinai are held there until their pregnancies become so advanced they cannot have an abortion, adding to our list of challenges having to counsel and support women having to bring these children into the world. There is no gynecologist on staff at Saharonim despite our regular reports and advice.

A recent article in Haaretz partially described the process at the Saharonim prison: “Attorney Omer Shatz of the human rights group Anu Plitim (We are Refugees), says the tribunal at Saharonim “cannot be considered a court, certainly not one that rules on the freedom of asylum-seekers. The best evidence of this is the fact that these tribunals are located inside a prison, far from the public eye.” Its judges, he says, are not subservient to the Judicial Ombudsman, “and as opposed to criminals, who are allowed a public defender, these victims come before the tribunal without representation.” Until this article, the media had never been allowed inside this prison for refugees.

Once released from detention our refugees are released onto the streets of Tel Aviv with a visa that specifically prohibits their right to work. All Eritrean and Sudanese refugees (86% of the refugees in Israel) are refused the right to enter the Refugee Status Determination procedure despite the well documented slaughters in Darfur and South Sudan and brutal human rights abuses committed by the Eritrean government. This prevents them from getting access to the basic rights that refugees receive in the US or the UK. Our refugees are now forced to survive on the charity of others or take illegal black market work with no guarantee of payment. With no insurance for the all too regular injuries that occur to construction and agricultural workers who are not trained in the equipment they use, our refugees are dumped in hospitals and left to pay enormous hospital bills, all the while employees know they can just go the next day to find more willing and uninformed workers.

As a law student you are only too aware of the behavior mandated on our government as signatories of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. Indeed Israel was one of the very first countries to sign the document, which was written in the most part to provide a legal framework for the world to deal with over 1 million of our fellow Jews held in camps across Europe after the Holocaust. We continue to encourage the government to adopt the convention as national legislation, a role one day as a lawyer you will be able to assist us with. Without this the 45,000 refugees in Israel will remain without rights and without a future.Most worrying of all, is the legislation currently going through the Knesset. Our Parliament has discussed imprisoning anyone who enters the country illegally; including refugees of genocide; a penalty of up to 5 years imprisonment for Israeli citizens who assist refugees (that is you and me); building a closed detention camp for up to 10 000 refugees in the desert; and building a wall along the border that will prevent those asking for asylum to ever get through the door.

To think that my own government would discuss a bill that would criminalize me for my work and send me to prison for assisting vulnerable victims of genocide and oppression. My family was in shock when they read the proposal. How do I explain to them that this is the response of the country of the Jews, the victims of countless expulsions and attempted genocides?We must be proud of the work of our soldiers on the border whose gut reaction is to offer the hand of support and aid to the tortured faces we meet, we must be proud of the families and teachers who have embraced the stranger in their land and welcomed them into their homes and classrooms. We must also face up to our Interior Minister who says “infiltrators” pose “an existential threat to Israel”, and falsely claims they arrive carrying diseases. We must face up to politicians who score cheap points in poor neighborhoods by ratcheting up xenophobic sentiment, and to a government that does not invest a single shekel in humanitarian or medical support to these poor souls.

I am writing to you because the letter you wrote last week has travelled the globe, arriving in the inboxes of Jewish community leaders and congregants alike and I am sure you would like to paint as honest picture as you can.

I kindly invite you to visit our center and shelters to learn more about the situation so you are able to develop your beautifully written words to continue telling this complicated story.

Our story is a heavy burden to carry and more than a life’s work to do. We must face it honestly and know, in the words of Hillel, that we did not do to others that which we would not have done to ourselves.

Nic Schlagman Program Manager                                                                                                ARDC Golomb Street 52 | Tel Aviv | 66171                                                                                Office: 03 537 4617 | Mobile: 0544 427647

The second objection is to Grossman’s depiction of the Israeli-Palestinian (Weiss petulantly describes him as plain Palestinian) driver character, Sami. “Ora’s privilege within the novel extends to her freedom to repeat ranting soliloquies about Arabs…It is unimaginable that Grossman would dare to allow the Palestinian character the same freedom in his thoughts about Jews, but in this and other passages…he reveals the pervasive intensity of the societal hostility to Arabs.” Of course, there is no evidence for her claim that it is unimaginable that Grossman would give the Palestinian character the same freedom in his thoughts about Jews, and one is immediately reminded of A.B. Yehoshua’s brilliant The Lover, published in 1978, in which an Israeli-Palestinian character gets the very freedom Storace seems so sure an Israeli-Jewish author would not dare bestow upon him. As for her second claim, that of “the pervasive intensity of the societal hostility to Arabs,” one can presume that she wouldn’t be as triumphant were the character an anti-Semitic Arab.

Finally, Storace notes that Grossman does not give sufficient background regarding Holocaust education in Israel: “The novel gives no description of this rite of passage,” before referring to an essay by the chairman of the Early Childhood Department of Efrata Teacher’s College about Holocaust education, in order to show that Israeli society is insanely paranoid. To be fair, she doesn’t criticise Grossman for not mentioning this stuff, and it may just be a case of Weiss projecting, but it seems another irrelevant criticism. The anti-Zionist project is totalitarian, which means absolutely everything that comes out of Israel (other than its critics) must be despised; hence the attempt to use Israeli fiction as a stick with which to beat Israeli society.

I am reminded of Borges’s seminal essay, The Argentine Writer and Tradition: “A few days ago, I discovered a curious confirmation of the way in which what is truly native can and often does dispense with local colour; I found this confirmation in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arab book par excellence, the Koran, there are no camels; I believe that if there were ever any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this lack of camels, or even camel medium for that matter, would suffice to prove that it is Arab. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were particularly Arab; they were, for him, a part of reality, and he had no reason to single them out, while the first thing a forger, a tourist or an Arab nationalist would do is bring on the camels, whole caravans of camels on every page; but Mohammed, as a smoke and an Arab, was unconcerned; he knew he could be Arab without camels. I believe that we Argentines can be like Mohammed; we can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local colour.” Storace and Weiss are demanding camels in the Koran, and camels with four humps at that. Their attempt does not stand up to scrutiny.

Gobi had led us into the sanctuary with an umbrella in his left hand and a rusty blade in his right. I had already joked about whether he was going to use it to kill us – Wolf Creek style – but I soon became glad that he had it. Because a few minutes after my watchtower stunt, we heard the trumpet of an elephant, and it was alarmingly close. Gobi signalled for us not to move. Three hearts began beating that little bit faster; every forest sound suddenly took on the ultimate meaning. Gobi signalled for us to keep walking, muttering something in Mayalayam under his breath.

Gobi was a mystery. He walked in flip-flops, exposing his three missing toes. We asked if they had been removed by a tiger – his answer was inconclusive. For the next hour, as we walked through the park, he would suddenly pause, look out on the horizon as if in a trance, before quietly saying something like “elephant” or “other side” or “very close”. At one point, he opened up his backpack, which we assumed was filled with nothing more threatening than our dinner, and pulled out a small explosive that would no doubt make a useful addition to a suicide-bomber’s belt. Then he said something about “close”.

My watchtower yellings meant that our presence was now felt. So as to avoid danger, we had to take the long way round to our night-time tree-house. Gobi told us to wait, and wandered off into the bush. I was frustrated by his enigmatic behaviour, and keen to get to the tree-house as quickly as possible. I thought of George Orwell’s seminal essay Shooting an Elephant, so loved by my father, wondering if he would mention it after my appropriately flattened casket was placed in the ground. Then Gobi called us over. “Elephant” was now “very close”.

We followed him for 20 metres but saw nothing. Then a flash of grey and another trumpet, softer this time. Gobi turned and began to run, a comic cartoon run; we ran with him. Then we turned back. The elephants (I think there were three or four of them) were at ease, sizing us up, while we stared back, awestruck. I unsuccessfully tried to take a picture. These were the same creatures I had seen being bathed earlier that week, but meeting them in their natural environment was a totally different proposition. Now we walked calmly away, the bomb left in the bag, the rusty blade still in Gobi’s right hand. We made it to the tree-house, where Gobi’s companion was waiting, slightly concerned that it had taken us so long. Gobi explained to him what had happened, and he laughed. The next morning we saw the footprints the elephants had left behind before crossing the river, but sadly we didn’t wake up to see it happen.

The only other creature of note we saw was a green python. Chinnar is one of the less well-known sanctuaries in southern India, although it has a large selection of wildlife. Presumably it’s harder to spot anything there. But maybe that’s more fitting. In land that is wild because of human non-intervention, even a single peek is an encounter to cherish, even if it is the result of one stupid but fitting cry into the cloudy skies of the Western Ghats.

“Would you rather have a Lexus or justice? A dream or some substance? A Beamer, a necklace, or freedom?” Hip-Hop (Dead Prez – Let’s Get Free)

The ‘Occupy’ phenomenon hasn’t yet made it to India, despite the country having a rich/poor divide that dwarfs anything in the West, and the fact that the Indian masses clearly have the stomach for long protests, as the success of the Anna Hazare movement demonstrates. Perhaps the historical legacy of caste divisions means that people are more content to tolerate economic inequality in a way that they wouldn’t elsewhere; it’s certainly noteworthy that the most sustained and radical opposition to neo-liberalism in India has come from the proudly godless Maoists. But it’s also important to note that it isn’t entirely obvious where an Indian ‘Occupy’ movement would occupy. The economic centres of Mumbai or Delhi do not occupy the same place in the national consciousness as Wall Street in New York or the Square Mile in London for the simple reason that most Indians wouldn’t be aware of their existence. But a recent article in India Today offers one possibility for an occupy movement – pace The Educators – namely the homes of the country’s ostentatiously wealthy.

The article was billed as a special feature dealing with India’s luxury market in ‘Tier II’ cities. For example, the Maharashtran town of Kolhapur, where I stayed one night on the way from Pune to Goa. There lives the industrialist Shivaji Mohite, who in 2006 constructed a 1.2km go-karting course for his son Dhruv. It was built to international specifications, whatever those might be, and cost Rs 1.5-crore, or just over $300,000. Not to be outdone, in the Assamese town of Guwahati, printing-press baron Diganta Barua is currently constructing an Rs 5-crore indoor cricket ground for his beloved 14-year-old son. That’s just over one million dollars.

The World Wealth Report by Cap Gemini Merrill Lynch states that the number of Indian high net worth individuals, i.e. people with liquid assets of over $1 million, is 153,000, almost double the 2008 count. India’s luxury market is currently valued at $2.45 billion, and poised to double to $5.8 billion in the next five years. India is now in 12th place globally in potential to purchase luxury. Wealthy Indians are chomping at the bit to be recognised. In 2010, a consortium of Aurangabad (also in Maharashtra) industrialists decided that they wanted to place their city on the map. Did they consider chipping together to ensure that the city had a clean water supply, or perhaps to make sure that there was adequate food supply in the surrounding area? No, they placed an order for 150 Mercedes cars. Total value? Rs 65-crore. You can do the maths yourselves this time. And, lest we think that Maharashtran industrialists lack a social conscience, over in Kolhapur we should heed the words of Shivaji Mohite: “I am passionate about cars but I won’t buy a Ferrari. The roads in Kolhapur aren’t good enough.” I can confirm from my one day in Kolhapur that he’s telling the truth.

Noam Chomsky once said that “the lifestyle of the Indian elite is amazing. I’ve never seen such opulence even in America.” You don’t need to be a radical leftist to get his point. Indian ostentation is shocking to the eyes of a foreign observer, particularly if you know the country’s poverty statistics. For example, as many as 46 per cent of malnourished children in the world – of whom 75,000 die every month – live in India. A huge debate is currently raging in the media over what the poverty line should be set at – it’s currently around 32 rupees a day in the cities and 26 rupees a day in the villages. This is absurdly low.

The principal of luxury and lifestyle practice at AT Kearney, Neelish Hundekari, however, has other concerns: “The market is still shallow…Global brands are still not doing enough to customise for India, which is why there’s low penetration.” Shallow, indeed, and apparently said without irony. But as Yashovardhan Saboo, CEO of Ethos, India’s first nation-wide chain of stores selling multi-brand premium and luxury watches, is quick to remind us, it’s not all about the money: “It would be a mistake to assume that every high-end watch purchase is a financial investment. I find it quite acceptable that a watch lover buys a high-end watch for the pleasure it gives him or her, just like an art lover buys a painting for the pleasure of seeing it every day.” I felt a bit guilty about this point, given my passion for books, but then again Beyond Belief by Sir Vidia costs only 150 rupees.

The quotations above – and I’ve only given you a small selection – speak for themselves. They attest to the emptiness of shallow wealth and the devastating selfishness it generally brings in its wake. Nor do India’s wealthy necessarily have a great commitment to charity. As Parvan K. Varma writes in the brilliant The Great Indian Middle Class, “For the burgeoning and upwardly mobile middle class of India, such poverty has ceased to exist. It has ceased to exist because it does not create in most of its members the slightest motivation to do something about it. Its existence is taken for granted. Its symptoms, which would revolt even the most sympathetic foreign observer, do not even register any more. The general approach is to get on with one’s life, to carve out a tiny island of well-being in a sea of deprivation. The utter obsession with individual survival and betterment and the complete absence of a sense of social obligation is not unlike a system of apartheid, rendered even more insidious because the perpetuators no longer even notice the conditions of those they have banished. The concern with personal salvation at the spiritual plane had assumed, at the temporal level, a Frankenstein form: the almost complete inability to see or identify with anything beyond the narrowest definition of self-interest.”

I can understand wealthy Indians’ disdain for the judgements of foreigners. Maybe they think we’d prefer that the country remain mired in poverty forever, and that our contempt for their penchant for luxury is jealousy. But I have no problem with India becoming a superpower, both politically and economically. India’s impressive rate of growth over the last twenty years has brought in its wake staggering and generally positive changes to a people that for generations had floundered under the errors of a state-run economy. But for a rich man from Jalandhar to say, “I don’t think you could possibly do a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous here. It would needlessly expose one to harassment by the Income Tax Department,” in a country where, according to Varma, only the top two per cent of urban India pays taxes (and where the middle class is supposed to be 250-million strong) is more than scandalous, it’s embarrassing. I simply do not understand how he found the chutzpah to say what he did. “If you have money, why not spend it on getting what you have dreamt of?” asks Raju Giju from the Gujarati diamond town of Surat. To which I can only reply: your dreams are vacuous, and they shame your great nation.