Happy New Year and Eid Mubarak to all Drishtipat readers! It’s been great to become part of this community this year, to hear from you, read your comments, and get to know some of you. Here are a few cheery thoughts on consumerism and inequality to start off the new year. I sat on the plane bound for Singapore last week, idly flicking through the Duty Free magazine, with its fantasy world bathed in golden light. Here were perfumes whose names and bottle designs alone have consumed the energies of the brightest and best Madison Avenue has to offer. So what was available? Would you prefer Kenzo Amour, whose blurb read: “the bottle itself…is a stylised expression of an abstract bird. It is a symbol of love, the sensuous curves of a woman and the desire to travel”? Or for the rugged male, perhaps Boss Selection, which declared, “It’s about striking a note, leaving a mark: distinctive and always present.” Bollocks. I would have thought it’s about making a profit. But then what would I know? Such perfect examples of consumerism creating a gap which we never knew existed, until we were instructed to notice it, and then of course to fill it.
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