Where have the Raj Bohemians gone?

I just noticed, that I had posted the following on September 9, 2011, on my tumblr.

Yesterday, I was on a Manhattan-bound train. At Prince Street, Soho, two girls board the train. Both look overtly made up. There’s a young black girl, her face awash in blusher, and her companion is a Chinese-American teen.

No sooner than they sit, than the latter opens her purse and whips out a lipstick and waves it like a dandelion as she begins to descant on the virtues of the brand of lipstick she was brandishing.

Here lies the crux of my interest: It’s an Estee Lauder lipstick, in a shade of red. The girl talks and talks about how she adores all things of an Estee Lauderly order. The word “Estee Lauder” perforates the air surrounding her, as though she was making a sales pitch on behalf of Estee Lauder.

I thought much about the girl’s touting of a brand and was reminded of Hari Kunzru’s short story Raj Boheminan (The New Yorker, March, 2008).

Narrated from the perspective of a nameless New Yorker, Kunzru’s story is about a consumerism-driven, shallow social order, where people are less like people and more like Buzz Agents who “monetize their social networks” because they are “early adopters” of trends, and spout buzz lines to their equally trendy friends whenever they can, especially at gatherings inside fashionably dilapidated warehouses in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The protagonist wants to rebel against such “zombie-ization” of the multitude:

I started to notice something odd. Every time I met a friend, he or she would immediately make a recommendation, urge me to try something new. Lucas had been to a club on the other side of town and insisted that it was the best night out he’d had in ages. Janine almost forced me to take home a bottle of her “new favorite nutritional supplement.” At first, I shrugged it off. But, deep down, I knew that it had something to do with Raj and his vodka. Every night, I’d turn the incident over in my mind. I swallowed Ativan and Valium and Paxil (I had a compliant doctor), hoping that my anxiety would pass. It didn’t. There was Joe and his new running shoes. Razia’s bike. All my friends seemed to be dropping snippets of advertising copy into their conversation, short messages from their sponsors. They were constantly stating preferences for particular brands, dishing out free samples.

Whether the girl on the train was a brand-zombie or not I can’t tell, but the possibility is immense.