In invoking her simplicity, Sudha Murty inadvertently set off a social media storm. The author and wife of Infosys founder, N.R. Narayana Murthy, appeared on The Kapil Sharma Show on television a few weeks ago.
Flanked by actor Raveena Tandon and award-winning producer Guneet Monga, Murty related two stories. Once, she was travelling business class, she said, and was dressed in a salwar kameez. Two women in the line with her told her, “Behenji, this is not the queue for you, economy passengers go elsewhere”. Murty didn’t say anything and they continued to speak to each other, referring to her as “cattle class people”.
On another trip, she said, she was at the immigration line at London’s Heathrow airport, and the officer asked for her residential address. She wrote down 10 Downing Street. “The fellow looked at me and said, are you joking? No one can believe that I am a 72-year-old woman and simple, so how can I be the mother-in-law of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom?” Murty said.
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For more than a week, Sudha Murty Simple, was a trending topic on Twitter, spawning a thousand jokes and several memes. Here’s a sample: ‘Why doesn’t Sudha Murty have any ₹2000 notes? She’s a simple person and that would be two grand’. (Cleverly marrying the two discussion points of the day.) Another: ‘Sudha Murthy is so humble that when people tell her she’s down to earth, she says it’s because of gravity’.
Simplicity no longer a virtue
You get the gist. This is not the first time Murty has talked about her simple lifestyle. In fact, for a couple of decades now, this has been her central brand message, that despite being a multi-millionaire, she has not let go of her middle-class roots and upbringing. This was not even the first time she spoke about her experience in the business class line. It’s an old story that has always won her a round of applause. This time around though, something shifted.
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Essentially, this blowback comes from the fact that simplicity is no longer a value that is cherished. There has been a generational shift and there is nothing aspirational about simplicity any more.
People raised on stories about Gandhi and Shastri and the frugal lives they led are fading out. For them, ostentatiousness was gauche, they shuddered at the sight of luxury and lavishness, judging that as an activity devoid of intellectual acuity. ‘Simple living and high thinking’ represented the mores of the educated middle class.
But now, 32 years after economic liberalisation, all of that has been jettisoned. In this era of unicorns, where a jackpot IPO is all that keeps anyone from becoming a billionaire, the idea that you’d forgo affordable luxuries seems both alien and unnecessary.
Why shouldn’t a billionaire dress like one? What is the glory in pretending to be something you are not? There are very few takers left for Murty’s brand of simplicity. Today, the idea is that if you have the money, you should be living the life, so that the rest of us can watch and dream of something similar.
People are brands
Second, there is now a certain jadedness about the PR-ification of everything. Communication professionals, who carefully curate and stage events, have worked the “storyline” aspect of everyone and everything to the bone. Earlier, only brands were brands. Now, people are brands; they come with a message and a strategy to maximise exposure.
Between national dailies selling space in their weekday supplements, where anyone can get anything printed, and social media, which helps users stage their public presence, there has been a total erosion in credibility. And as with most things, the pendulum often swings too far the other way.
Caught between not knowing what is true and what is trumped up, the “audience” is now primed to stay in a constant state of suspicion. Therefore, when a story like this breaks, the first instinct is to fact check. Is it possible that if she were headed to the British prime minister’s residence, she wouldn’t have security clearance already? Why is she pretending to be a person like us, when her family is literally heading a country? And the questions roll on.
It used to be that one could get away with a casual, throwaway anecdote, maybe a small embellishment for drama, some creative licence to make the story a bit more rounded. But not any more. Now everything has to stand up to the microscopes of millions. If some celebrities have been caught in a lie, it is not a big leap to think that all celebrities must be lying.
Perhaps Murty did not realise the terrain had changed. The people who cared about the values she projects are not the loudest voices any more. They have given way to a generation that has been raised to question everything, spare no one. Murty’s projection of her simplicity hit this double barrier of disinterest and suspicion. Other, more astute, communicators have been careful not to make this slip. Even Narendra Modi has stopped talking about his chai wala days.
The writer is the author of ‘Independence Day: A People’s History’.
