Still few signs of retrenchment in Notting Hill, although at a Euro-bankers party this weekend one wit did propose that Soda-Streamed Chablis might pass as acceptably crunchy Champagne. How the time must fly in what’s left of the City. Over the canapés (chestnuts wrapped in lardo, salmon with liquorice), one guest described the distress she had felt at the appalling poverty which co-exists with the conspicuous trappings of new wealth on a recent business trip to Mumbai.
Recent tragedy aside, the Western press seems reluctant to criticize this aspect of the Indian economic boom, preferring to relegate teeming misery to the status of energetic vibrancy or authentic local colour. The harshness with which India treats its poor was briefly bemoaned before the real business of the evening, a runway competition for the women’s shoes, began. (Alexander McQueen’s gold-flash five inch platform stiletto won). But is the wailing of collective hackery at the underclass antics of Karen Matthews evidence that we are less cruel to our least fortunate, or merely more hypocritical?
Owen Matthews (no relation), in town from Russia to attend the Guardian awards for his book “Stalin’s Children”, recalled the mayor of Moscow’s solution to cleaning up the city in time for its 1997 anniversary. Through a twist on an old Soviet law, tens of thousands of homeless people were packed into trains and disposed of 101 kilometres beyond the city limit, a tactic which reflected the Notting Hill preference: we don’t like stepping over the poor on the way from the cab to the restaurant, or hearing them shrill and clamour when we pop out for a latte. We prefer them ghettoized and tranquilized, soothed with lager and Prozac and telly, emerging for a meek waddle to the dealer or down the social.
It’s only when the wretched make themselves conspicuous that we denounce their squalid lives. Periodic outrage at the underclass seems less concerned with a genuine desire to do something about it and more at the cognitive dissonance momentarily imposed by finding a beggar impaled on one’s thousand dollar heel.
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