Marcel Proust, Snapdeal.com Nagar and the Interstices of Time

I was thinking of writing a bratty article about "10 Ways to Alienate Family and Friends this Holiday by Insulting America" as a joke for 4th of July/ discontent liberals. Instead, this is a piece about relativity. Happy Birthday, Baby Capitalist America.

Recently, the village Shiv Nagar renamed itself Snapdeal.com Nagar (or Snapdeal.com Town). Snapdeal.com is a website that provides discount coupons for luxury goods. The company decided to sponsor Shiv Nagar and distributed water pumps in the town. They plan on helping the town with various other renovations. I was alarmed that a village changed its name in tandem with corporate marketing.

I wondered whether the Internet-capital-I executives of the dot.com bubble anticipated such a global transformation. I doubt some nefarious troupe of tech wizards sat around playing backgammon, executed high-level programming and plotted the demise of the free world. I surveyed the past and wondered whether it could somehow possess intent.

The past has the luxury of existing in memory, but rarely is it divested of meaning. I compare previous situations to the past in order to conceptualize change. I am equally likely to cultivate nostalgia through the arts to sustain inaccuracies of vision. I begin to think my emotional self exists only to respond to the real or imagined experiences of others. I am keen to transpose past experiences upon the present to engage in an emotional response. I do this to protect myself against becoming desensitized to information in an increasingly hyper-aware environment. But, I hasten to say, that this type of media consumption tends to lose the facts in consideration of emotion.

I decided to reconsider the case of Snapdeal.com Nagar. The facts about Snapdeal.com Nagar is that the residents will now have the ability to use clean drinking water. The town and its civitas reportedly decided on the name change on their own. The reason given for this was that they somehow wished to protest the government’s previous lack of involvement with their plight. They wanted to attribute ownership to the company that helped them. CEO Kunal Bahl had solid rationale and came up with the idea after conversing with some coworkers in a hallway.

Bahl’s point of view was that this was a beneficial service. He said that if all ~640,000 companies in India invested in towns, then they could alleviate water problems for ~64,000 villages and millions of people. His idea was well-received. The press reported that the townspeople responded positively and Snapdeal.com benefited. Snapdeal.com has more value in India than Groupon. This was an achievement from a material perspective.

But, surely there are discontents and it can't just be the technophobic. Any action will have a positive and negative response. There must have been someone, somewhere who was negatively impacted by this change. There could have been an individual who didn’t want their city to change its name. The name change could have been conducted without the consultation of every person who lived in the area. Then, even in instances of consensus, there is still the concept of corporatism to consider.

Neocorporatism evades protest by inveigling itself in the celebration of the individual. Advertising platforms foster loyalty by playing up individual choice in their platforms. I say that the individual must then redefine themselves in contrast to this phenomenon or at least define themselves apart from products. Otherwise, the individual is susceptible to anti-intellectualism, secretarianism and fascism. These schools seem to promote thought, but actually stifle it. They reinforce the boundaries that create the isolation in the first place.

The arts should be most concerned with addressing the alienation that arises from crucial failures in communication. As writers, musicians and cultural workers, we should be more concerned with social contract theory than debating the ethics of Brazilian blowouts. Sharing memes about terrible things that happen faraway won't change more pressing issues of inequality, threats of populism, and the fissures of a capitalist society. But, if all of this only makes us sad in an unstructured or hopeless sort of way, then let us return to the arts.In another riotous time, M. Marcel Proust embalmed himself in his writing. Due to his extreme asthma and distaste for society, he wrote a large portion of À la recherche du temps perdu locked in a sunless writing room. He plugged all of the holes in the room with corks. He challenged himself to situate the individual memory within the spectrum of time. He thought about why he was in that deserted room, political changes sweeping France like the Dreyfus Affair and his own past. Proust ended up writing an eloquent eulogy of himself and his times in repast.

In Sodome et Gomorrhe, Proust’s narrator turned down an invitation to meet up with some friends from the past. The narrator's given reason for this was “because I was now detached from them. From them, that is to say, from myself. We desire passionately that there should be another life in which we would be similar to what we are here below. But we do not reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, but in this one, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we had wanted to remain immortally.”

He is perhaps speaking of the afterlife, but also the lived experience on earth. The narrator also declined because he was fearful of (re)cognition or to become known in difference to his former self. You do not realize that your own pursuit of ideals betrays them. The quandary of Snapdeal.com is that is a prime example of what happens when you allow the status of the communal self to become less than ideal.