For months now a question has been brewing with me: what’s India’s biggest brand destroyer? Why has the wheel turned, more than three decades since the economic reform began and India became the darling of the developed world?
Investors have pulled out their money and left, while foreign tourist arrivals aren’t consistently back at 2019 levels. I’ve been searching for a thread to weave a cohesive argument. Until the epiphany arrived with the fire in the unauthorised Bed & Breakfast in New Delhi’s Malviya Nagar that killed 21 as we write this.India has many individual factors as brand destroyers, with the three most damaging being garbage, air quality, and safety of women in public places. For now, all of this combines into that larger disaster, the Indian city. Add to this threat individual survival from the elements. Or let’s be truthful and call it the scandal of urban misgovernance.
You come from remote villages, or run-down small towns to India’s most pampered city, where everybody who matters lives, from the President and Prime Minister to the Chief Justice of India, and of course the most prominent journalists and activists, supposedly the conscience keepers of civil society. And you can’t be sure as you go to sleep that a fire or a building collapse won’t kill you.
