How the middle class ruin my world

Touristically, all value has gone out of India, and the whole third world is going the same way – thanks to the rise of the middle class in the third world.

I don’t mean of course that India hasn’t anything to offer to a tourist: indeed, few places posses a richer palette of wonders, experiences, and knowledge; and few places will change you the way a good visit to India will. But India is simply no longer good value. Accommodations are lousy, food is often poisonous (if delicious), getting from place to place is a bloody pain. It has always been thus, of course, but until recently it was also – cheap.

One didn’t get quality, but one also didn’t pay for it.

Now one does, and how.

In 2001 I stayed in the YMCA in New Delhi: $20 bought me a very basic room: stone floor, camp bed, a tuberculotic wardrobe, a sink, a shower, a single setting a/c, a big, very antique-looking sort of phone which connected me (feebly) to reception. Everything was, like everything has been in India since the Brits left (and perhaps since the Mughals were toppled) a little tired, a little tatty. But then one only paid $20. In 2005 I stayed in the same room and paid $55: the same room in which nothing has changed, only a little more paint has peeled and the bed squeaked more for all the abuse of the intervening years.

All this means that, from the point of view of value -- when one is compelled to pay for Indian vacations about what one pays for Venetian holidays -- then it is hard to find any VALUE in the Indian holidays: the quality of the wares is simply too low to justify that sort of price. One might as well go to Venice, or Paris, or elsewhere. Maybe the spiritual values gained are no more, but the quality of creature comforts is much more -- and all at the same price.

Indians blame this dramatic repricing of India on the BRIC phenomenon. (Some Wall Street guru declared that henceforth all money would be made in BRICs, them being Brazil, Russia, India and China). Nothing like a good acronym to move the market: western businessmen began to arrive en masse. And here a shocking statistic: all of India has 100,000 hotel rooms, less than New York City. And hotelier’s response to increased demand is not to build more, but to – jack up rates. Five star hotels which in 2001 went for $120 now go for $350, with no change in quality. YMCAs went up in line.

But the truth is that Indians blame foreigners for something for which they themselves bear full responsibility. Foreign arrivals in India are not up all that much. It is the Indian middle class, finally paid something resembling real wages (in the same order of magnitude at least, if not quite in line, with western middle class) who travels – and books all those hotels, and all those restaurants. Eager to spend their earnings, they bid up prices to western levels; which is way out of line with what a similar property might fetch in, say, Europe. To Indians it is still cheap: to go and stay at a lousy hotel in Goa for $55 seems a great deal if you do not have to pay for the airfare to Europe to do this. But for Europeans to fly to India only to pay home-style prices for Indian-style quality is plain silly.

Don’t.

Now I see the same happening in Morocco. Waterfront properties here rent in August for silly money: you could do better in Sicily, or Portugal.

Damned Bourgeoisie. It’s all their fault.