Global time of modernity triumphs over "Hindustan" time

HMT watches, marketed throughout my childhood with the jingle, "If you have the inclination, we have the time," will no longer adorn the wrists of Indians.

Hindustan Machine Tools, one of India's largest public sector undertakings (PSU's, an acronym, which the public sector bashers of India had nicknamed "poshu", meaning "beast" in Bengali, were anathema to many in Socialist India because of their under-productivity and inefficiency) has closed shop, finally.

Indian Premier Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurated HMT in collaboration with the Japanese multinational, Citizen, in 1964. Nehru's objective was to supply every Indian worker with a wrist watch, so she/he (mostly he) would value time, understand the importance of being on time and speedy accomplishment of tasks. A favorite quip of Nehru's was "Talk less, work more". HMT, along with other massive PSU's embodied the Nehruvian vision of a modernizing and industrializing India.

Since the opening up of the Indian economy to foreign brands, the sales of HMT watches had plummeted, but one of HMT's domestic competitors, Titan, a creation of the Tata corporation, had tolled a death knell for HMT watches long before foreign brands had.

I wore my first wristwatch in middle school; it was an HMT slim band watch with a tiny round, dial, the smallness and the lunar-shape being indicative of the wearer's gender, of course. It had belonged to my mom. 

My very first wristwatch, which my dad presented to me during my last-year in high school was a Titan. It looked much more snazzier than an HMT, and had Roman numerals, something I totally loved. My father, who was a champion of the private sector, gleamed with delight as he announced the watch to have been made by a private corporation.

Looking back, the Titan had more attention to detail, as I remember the design was slick, and the color scheme reflected harmony. It was a better watch in the department of aesthetics, though I am certain it kept time the same way as its HMT counterpart did. 

Bye, bye HMT.

The biggest loser

The queue to the first Mcdonalds that opened in 1990 in Moscow was phenomenal. However, such a queue was only expected right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a dissolution of Soviet-style Communism.

After all, a bright emblem of Capitalist consumerist modernity had just set up shop in the tattered halls of Communist economy.

Zoom forward to today: President Vladimir Putin is cracking down on Mcdonalds in Russia (there are 208 outlets in Moscow itself), to retaliate against U.S. sanctions over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Yet, McDonalds is no longer a shiny badge of American capitalism; if anything, it's an emblem of Capitalism with a capital C claiming no Cold War-era allegiance with a particular nation. In today's global economy, Capital reigns supreme and Capital will do just about anything to adjust to the conditions of the market in which it operates. It's sole interest is to thrive.

McDonalds, like other mega corporate entities, is highly transnational. The golden arch seeks not to impose anymore, but to blend in with the local.

So, the joke is on Putin, who being a sad relic of the Cold War, uses outmoded Cold War tactics to fight a battle which has no name except, perhaps, "a poor facsimile of the Cold War". Putin also resorts to Cold War propaganda, or a war of words conducted via Twitter, to distract and deceive global attention from his misdoings in Ukraine. the other day somebody wrote of how Putin has revived the culture of Orwellian newspeak/doublespeak, something that the other Vladimir, Vladimir Nabokov, made mincemeat of in his novels.

The Russian Mcdonalds is for all practical purposes very Russian, in that it caters to Russian taste and Russian appetite and most significantly, sources its meat and veggies from Russian farmers. As reported by Quartz, two Russian companies, Wimm-Bill-Dann and Barybino State Farm, have got so successful supplying lettuce and milk to McDonalds, that they registered in the New York Stock Exchange.

By cracking down on the Russian McDonalds, Putin has cracked down on his own. What might he be fighting against? Capital itself? Then there is no winning. In his insistence on wielding the Cold War lance Putin is getting to be the biggest loser.

Dear planet, we're feasting off you as you spiral deathward

Station Eleven is the author's 4th novel. Emily St. John Mandel the writer based in you-know-where, had despaired of finding a publisher for this most dystopian of all American novels because she had surmised the wave for the genre to have peaked and subsided. 

The fiction market is saturated with dystopian novels. Like the literature of the Cold War that expressed a collective anxiety of a nuclear destruction of the world, today's dystopian fiction is dominated by contemporary fears of climate catastrophes, pandemics, and epidemics, among others. However, there have been one too many dystopian novels of late, making, Ms. St. John Mandel, a relative newbie to the genre, anxious about the economic prospects of her book.  

To her surprise, however, no sooner than Station Eleven was completed, it found itself at the center of a minor (three-day long) bidding war, with Knopf snagging the deal with a six-figure advance, an amount that's three times that generated by her three previous novels taken together.

The money is good news because (good) writers deserve to make a living off their products just as app developers. But does the appetite for dystopian, post-apocalyptic fiction tell us something about ourselves and our real-world attitude toward apocalypses? 

Take the recent epidemic of ebola in countries in West Africa. In terms of real action all that Americans could muster were something akin to fear-triggered hysteria of contamination. "Keep the African savages from the borders of our country" was the general collective scream that emerged from the millions of tweets generated by the news of the outbreak. Not much else in the way of empathic action was committed. I can imagine an entire posse of fantasy/post-apocalyptic/dystopian fiction mongerers based in you-know-where, frenetically cranking out plots of a post-ebola world order ruled by an African warlord who is the sole survivor of the viral attack. 

That we are "entertained" by the world-is-coming-to-an-end spectre, is not unprecedented. During major global Wars and conflicts of the past, ranging from World War 2, the rise of fascism, through the Cold War and the ambiguously worded War on Terror, the book and movie market have been traditionally been glutted by visions of the ending of a familiar world order. This is what a market-based economy does: ossifies, and some would say, deflects, real fears of real impending doom, into dollars and emblems of entertainment, thus deferring perpetually the action that's badly needed to stem the tide of the doom.

The planet slowly spins netherwards but the maximum we can do is to convert the descent into subject matter for fiction to be bought, read and "engaged" with at a very nominal level of entertainment.

The one thing that differentiates the 21st century apocalyptic fiction from the Cold War one is the envisioning of a post-.Today's young, educated, readers, the future-conscious, career-conscious and cautious folks that they are, want to plan ahead of time. Thus the dystopian fiction of today, as epitomized by the likes of Ms. St. John Mandel's, tells us repeatedly that the "end" is just a new beginning.

The world of Station Eleven is an emergent, post-present world, one that has been wiped off by the flu virus. It's like a startup cosmos all over again.