Entitlement Mentality - An Epidemic in the Making

A few weeks ago, I had a disastrous experience when I attended an Indian classical music concert that was held at a relatively upscale auditorium in South Mumbai, SoBo as it is popularly called. (This part of the city still calls itself Bombay as SoBo sounds so much cooler than SoMu!) An evening that I was so looking forward to, since both the performing artistes were ones that I had wanted to experience live since the last many years, turned out to be an eminently forgettable one thanks to some eminent members of society for whom it seemed more like a ‘to be seen at’ event to burnish their cultural, and not just capitalistic, credentials.

The ticket specified that the concert would begin at ‘sharp 7 p.m.’. Which in IST terms means roughly around 7:15-7:20 p.m. It is a scenario that all of us have come to ‘accept’, just like a lot of other things that demand punctuality but are set to clocks that run on IST. What was appalling though, despite this acceptance, was that audience members kept trooping in right till around 7:45 or so. Which was also the time for those punctual ones who had reached well within acceptable limits of punctuality, i.e. 7:15 p.m. or thereabouts, to start sauntering out of the auditorium. Audience members kept walking right in and walking right out all through the entire time of the concert. Things didn’t stop at just that.

There were several Bharat-bhets (Guys … we live in Ram Rajya … we better know what a Bharat-bhet is) that happened among those walking inwards and those going outwards. One could see and hear a lot of bonhomie in the aisles as hands were shaken, back slapping hugs were exchanged, and a lot of catching up, appreciation of outfits / weight loss / defying age, etc was happening all while the accomplished singer was going about justifying his performance fees.

Thank God, auditoriums are usually darkened during live performances. And thank God again that Indian classical musicians mostly perform with their eyes closed. It’s possible that what we think as their intense concentration and focus on their craft could very well be their coping mechanism of avoiding witnessing the utter lack of respect that is being accorded to them by the audience.

If you thought this was it, then there’s more. The ordeal of the likes of us who had come to enjoy a musical evening, which was turning into a collective eavesdropping and overhearing session of conversations all around us, wasn’t to end so soon. The second performance for the evening was by a sitarist who is quite popular among the aficionados as well as the occasionals. What was announced as a 10-minute break became an approximately 20 minute one because ‘hey, they don’t allow any snacks and tea inside the auditorium … so you see we had to wait outside to finish it … can’t waste food you see … it’s so not right with so many people going hungry you see … etc etc.’

Anyway … the performance commenced. The sitarist requested that the lights of the auditorium not be dimmed as he liked experiencing the reactions of the audience. Something tells me that it was his pretext to put the audience in an embarrassing position, were they to behave the way they did in the first half of the program. But we Indians, in general, are made of sterner stuff.

Embarrassment is a feeling that we are not particularly aware of - especially when we are monied. So, by the time the sitarist got into his groove it was dinner time for a chunk of the audience members, at some fancy restaurant that takes table reservations in two time slots of 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. And so, the great migration began. In trickles at first, and a deluge in a few minutes. The sitarist took it in his stride. I am tempted to think that he must have also thought good riddance so that he could get genuine appreciation from those who had come to listen to some great music, and not just ‘dropped by at a concert’ en route to an important evening engagement.

This certainly wasn’t my first such experience. The other two that I can remember from the recent past are also horror stories. The first one is of a play that I went for sometime last year. The play was an intense one, not a light comedy. It was a highly celebrated, highly successful one. It had had several successful runs over the last couple of decades. It doesn’t hold as many shows of late. The cast comprised the who’s-who of theatre royalty. In sum, it had all the elements of an evening that not just theatre enthusiasts but even novices like me (I am more a movies kind of guy … theatre, I have always felt is a little too full of theatrics). The usual announcement of ‘keep your phones on silent mode’ was made. The play started. We were all deep into it. So were the cast. And suddenly a popular film song started playing. It was someone’s phone! This happened a few times. The lead cast decided to stop the play for 5 minutes telling the audience to complete their respective phone calls, then put their phone on flight mode (not just put on silent) and only then would the play begin again. And if any disturbance happened again then they would stop the performance. Unbelievably, the audience took more than the allotted 5 minutes to get weaned away from their phones!

The second instance of a popular percussionist’s concert was funnier, albeit in a sad way. When the audience started getting up to leave midway through his performance, he started with a slight banter with them asking them what would make them stop. He was indulging in this banter in the hope that he would instill some sense of guilt into the leaving members. Eventually he gave up, stopped the performance, and announced that all those who wanted to leave because they had a train to catch or some date to keep could leave now so that he and his troupe can play undisturbed for the rest of the evening. Once again, unbelievably, a whole swath of people got up and left. The auditorium that was packed to the rafters (did I mention that he is a very popular percussionist?) was half empty.

Maybe it is me who attracts this kind of audiences, or maybe it is the SoBo venues that I choose to book my tickets to, given their proximity to where I stay in CeBo. For a lifelong live concert enthusiast like me these have been new experiences I have had to go through only in the last decade or so. What I felt after the first instance in the case of the percussionist’s concert as being one of those aberrations because of an unappreciative crowd, seems to have become de riguer in a very short period of time.

What is the reason behind this boorish behavior on our part as a collective? How come it is being seen everywhere all of a sudden? How come it has become the new norm, often bordering on being the de facto way? What does this kind of behavior say about us as a society? Where is all this coming from? Why are we becoming insufferable as individuals representing an impending superpower nation?

This boorish behaviour is not restricted just to concert venues as I have just recounted. It’s seen at all public places. Airlines. Hotels. Cinema halls. Schools. Colleges. High end stores. Restaurants. Housing societies and their club houses. Elevators in commercial complexes. Offices. High end clubs. Temples. And many more public places. It’s everywhere.

I am putting forth a theory that has no well-researched or scientific basis. It is just a theory that I have come up with, but which I think you might find plausible after you read it.

The foundation of where we are and how we are today goes back to the time we gained our independence from the British in 1947, followed by liberalization and the economic reforms that were undertaken in 1991.

In 1947, we went from being a captive nation to a free nation. For the first time in their lives, people came to know they also had rights. And those rights didn’t come with any taxes (remember Lagaan?), any reprimands, any arrests or any kind of repercussions. Right away we started exercising those rights with gusto. We were a free society after all, and that too after several centuries of being ruled by foreign powers.

Unfortunately, we got so drunk on exercising our rights that no one cared to look at our duties as free citizens. While there are two different sides to every coin, in our case both the sides were about rights.

The heady mixture of freedom and its resultant rights was however tempered by socialist principles that bordered on communism, without its downsides. A lot of good came out of this that saw us punch a lot above our weight on the global scene. We steadied ourselves as a vibrant democracy. We became self-reliant to a point where we only looked inward, probably because many times bitten made us shy of embracing the rest of the world.

Our inward centric outlook deprived us not only of understanding what it truly meant to have rights, it gave us a warped sense of what’s right and what’s not. We became a deprived society – deprived of not just the basics of a good quality of life, we were also deprived of inculcating some good habits and ways of the world that would make us truly world, and worldly, citizens as a nation. Anything goes, popularly expressed as chalta hai, became our default setting. This attitude deprived us of fully knowing, and hence be appreciative of, our duties as citizens.

With no one to point out our fallacies, we started taking pride in them saying ‘we are like this only, don’t mind it.’ We plumbed newer depths of attitudinal anarchy. It lasted while it lasted till our coffers ran empty by 1991 and we were forced to open ourselves, and our riches as an abundantly populated marketplace as a country, to the world.

Almost overnight we were transformed from a deprived to a plentiful society. We were no longer looking Westwards, rather the West started looking Eastwards. The best the world had to offer was now at our doorstep. Not just materialistically, but in all aspects of life. Standards of education and curriculum that was more market driven grew. State board education got replaced by international boards. Besides the perennial favourites UK and USA, newer and newer countries were being explored for higher education. Not just basic graduation but post-graduation became the new norm, primarily in the form of MBAs. Professionally managed MNCs became the go-to campuses as everyone’s ticket to riches. Newer avenues to make money opened up for everyone.

As the overall standard of living went through the roof, the standards by which we would be judged also changed dramatically. More visible signals and labels of our worth got bandied about. ‘Addresses’ were how people started getting judged. From a mindset of ‘money is the root of all evils’, we now started believing ‘money could buy anything’ – not just the tangibles like houses, cars, foreign trips, brands, etc, but also intangibles like status, respect, and love as well.

Take one portion of an acute awareness of rights, add one portion of an equally acute ignorance of duties, mix well and marinate over four decades. Then add several portions of the lure and the power of never-seen-before levels of money and worldly riches for the next couple of decades. And voila … what you get to taste is a brand-new social evil called Entitlement Mentality!

Dan Brennan’s article on WebMD titled ‘What is an entitlement mentality?’ states, “The entitlement mentality is defined as a sense of deservingness or being owed a favour when little or nothing has been done to deserve special treatment. It’s the “you owe me” attitude. Simply put, people with a sense of entitlement think the rules don’t apply to them.” 

As we close in on four decades of liberalization, we are at the same peak of entitlement mentality as a nation that we were at when the deprivation mentality was its peak. We are at a stage right now where Gen X’ers who were the first to get a real taste of the economic reforms and hence were also the first to get their first taste of duties free (and duty free) entitlement have comfortably settled into a pattern of life and lifestyle where their not so glorious younger days have been conveniently forgotten.

They have seen and experienced first-hand the power they wield as people with higher disposable incomes. They have seen customer service executives shiver when threatened with discontinuing their services. They have experienced showroom executives genuflect in front of them and give in to their every whim and demand. They have seen car salesmen go out of their way to conclude a sale by massaging their egos. They have seen institutions change their rules at their behest - like auditoriums which used to shut their doors once a performance began and would only allow latecomers to go inside only once the performance in progress got over, have now capitulated to the demands of those suffering from entitlement mentality who must have threatened action or refunds, or both.

They have lost their ability to hear a no. They can’t relate to a virtue called patience. They want everything NOW. They think that everything is on sale, and everything can be owned. But this supreme self-confidence has also brought in massive insecurities where the need to assert oneself over and over again is felt at the slightest provocation. It is not for nothing that we often see them lash out at others in anger or frustration when they don’t get what they want. It’s the reason that we often get to hear “Don’t you know who I am?” in case it’s someone known but not truly famous, or “Do you know who I am?” when it is felt necessary to announce your credentials.

These Gen X’ers are also parents to children who, they have made sure, are not deprived of anything the way they once were. We now have a generation that has been brought up in an environment of abundance, and a total absence of ever being told no for anything. “The Psychology Behind A Sense Of Entitlement” on betterhelp.com mentions, “This may cause impressionable children to believe that these are acceptable patterns and behaviours throughout life. Children who are always given what they want and are not required to earn rewards for good behaviour may become adults who expect others to cave to their demands. As adults, they may not know how to effectively communicate with others, and they may have trouble developing healthy relationships or maintaining stable employment.”

According to Mark Manson, who wrote The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, a strong feeling of entitlement is rampant today because many people have bought into cultural and social media messages about what it takes to be happy — where you believe you’re entitled to feel good all the time, and you believe that you’re exceptional or different in a self-aggrandizing way.

The focus is now on feeling good about yourself, rather than trying, failing, learning, and accomplishing things. As a result a whole generation is being brought up which feels entitled to success, regardless of whether they have earned it.

What is also seen is that those with an entitlement mentality also suffer from a know-it-all syndrome that further reduces their propensity to cure themselves of this affliction.

So how does one address this entitlement mentality? In an excellently researched article titled Sense of Entitlement: Why it’s a problem (& how to fix it) on shortform.com, Emily Kitazawa analyses the entitlement mentality which according to her and the likes of Mark Manson has reached epidemic proportions. It may not have reached epidemic proportions in India yet (though we are well on that path), but it has certainly become endemic to how we are now behaving as a nation. Ms. Kitazawa proposes several ways and means to free yourself from a sense of entitlement, which includes counselling and therapy as well. Problem, though, is that those suffering from entitlement mentality already know more than their counsellors and therapists!

In the long term, maybe we are destined to suffer from an entitlement epidemic.

In the short term, though, my problem is how to avoid any more live concert disasters? Maybe I should just book my tickets in some NoBo venue for a change. Maybe the entitlement epidemic hasn’t yet reached there, thanks to the traffic.

Be braver. Be kinder.

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While my post has been geographically limited to my experience of entitlement mentality in Mumbai, one is given to believe that it is even more rampant in New Delhi. For Keep Watching this time, therefore, I couldn't think of a more apt movie than Murder Mubarak to illustrate the topic of today’s post.

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A posh Delhi club. Filled with members with an entitlement mentality who all have a dark past. A dead body is found in the gym. And all skeletons come tumbling out. Turns out it’s a murder and not an accident. Based on Anuja Chauhan’s book ‘Club You To Death’, Murder Mubarak is a fast paced, dark humoured whodunit littered with so many known actors and characters that it’s difficult to keep track. Sara Ali Khan as a club obsessed widow, Vijay Verma as the middle-class but ambitious member, Sanjay Kapoor as the broke royal, Karisma Kapoor as an actress, Dimple Kapadia as a ‘sculptor’, Tisca Chopra and Deven Bhojani all come under the scanner when Pankaj Tripathi as the seemingly bumbling detective comes on the murder scene. Taut and engaging, Murder Mubarak is in the classical mould of a detective solving a case and assembling all the suspects in a room and walking them through a process of elimination. Good one time watch.

Murder Mubarak | Netflix | 2 hr 21 min