On Saturday evening, at the local market near my house (which, since it is in Gurgaon, is largely a cluster of restaurants and boutiques and one overpriced vegetable shop), a lady in a shiny top and salon-dried hair tottered up to us in her high heels and proffered a tray of cupcakes. My daughter grabbed one. “That will be ₹500,” she smiled. For one cupcake? She shook her head in irritation. “₹500,” she said again.
I rustled around in my wallet to see if I had enough; “isn’t that a bit much?” I asked. At this, she crinkled her eyes, tilted her head to one side, looked at me as though people like me were the reason people like her were forced to start cocktail hour at 6 pm, sighed and said, “Well, it’s for Nepal.”
“What?” I ask
“Part of the proceeds of the cupcake sale will be donated to the victims of the earthquake in Nepal,” she said slowly, as though explaining to a toddler.
I had many questions. What part of the proceeds would go to Nepal? How exactly would it get there? Who was keeping track of these things? But the lady had trotted off to seek other unsuspecting victims to help the Nepal victims, and I walked out of there feeling both cheated and uncharitable.
However, now that I was alerted to the possibility of eating a cupcake in order to help the victims of the earthquake, all I seemed to bump into were other interesting ways of being charitable. The nightclub across the road from my house was hosting a rock band to raise money for Nepal. I could reserve a table for a charity champagne brunch on Sunday or go to an exhibition and buy pashmina shawls and hand-crafted silver jewellery to aid the victims of the natural disaster. I could buy tickets for a stand-up act or even just buy groceries and add 10 per cent to the bill. If all of this seemed like too much effort to dress up and get out of home (and really, how lazy can some people be in the light of others’ misfortune), then I can simply get online and bid for a painting or a sculpture, part of the proceeds of which will be used for earthquake relief. So many options for fun and frolic and, what’s better, zero consumerist guilt. It’s for Nepal, no?
I have only one question. No, scratch that. I have many questions. But the most pressing one is this. When did this happen? When did we get to a place where within minutes of a spectacularly devastating tragedy, we are running into our kitchens, aprons on, frosting bags ready? When did a calamity become the ultimate marketing boon? It’s not just home bakers and local bars that are advertising calamity-linked events, it is even multinational companies. Within an hour of the tremors, an online retailer managed to get thousands of retweets on a message asking people to “shake it off like the earthquake” and avail its discount offer. Sure, most commentary on the promotion was critical, but as each critic weighed in, the more the name of the company spread. The following day the company put out another tweet, calling the original message an “accidental choice of words”. This too went around cyberspace, since the choice of words could be described in all kinds of ways, but accidental it wasn’t. I am not sure how much sales this generated, but it certainly had an impact on brand reach and recall.
There are scores of other, less controversial fund-raisers that are still going on. You could take an Uber ride, for example, and contribute to charity. Or buy ₹2,000 tickets and be entertained by comedian Papa CJ for 90 minutes. If you are the sort to optimise on your charity, you could ride to the show in an Uber and, later, smoke the cigar you bought at a fund-raiser auction. My point is not to mock these efforts. Well, not entirely anyway. But I do think it’s a bit sad that we have come to a place where in order to genuinely help someone in need, it needs to be presented to us as something enticing to buy. What happened to just sending some money to an accredited organisation and keeping quiet about it? Or donating medicines, groceries, tarpaulin or whatever else is needed to an NGO working on the field? If you are the sort who absolutely wants something in return, why not just send a cheque to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund and get the tax break? When did we become so self-obsessed that if we gave ₹5,000, we needed a ₹4,800 pashmina shawl in exchange, as well as the bragging rights to how the shawl came by. “This? Oh this was at an exhibition for the victims of Nepal, those poor dears. By the way, I even baked some cupcakes to raise money and this one annoying woman, who came with her daughter, was all, ‘isn’t ₹500 too much for cupcake’. Come on, it’s for Nepal, no?”
( Veena Venugopal is editor BL ink and author of The Mother-in-Law )
Follow Veena on Twitter @veenavenugopal