The Sandwich Nation
On jealousy, biometric machines, and what happens to a country when merit stops mattering
There is a short, wordless film Satyajit Ray made in 1964 called Two. A rich boy in a large house has every toy imaginable — a train set, a bugle, a robot, an air rifle. Outside his gate, a poor boy plays a homemade drum. The rich boy, bored of his own abundance, uses his air rifle to shoot down the poor boy's kite, purely because he can. Ray never explains the psychology; he just shows it. Sixty years later, the film reads less like a period piece and more like a diagnostic tool, one that still fits a country whose relationship with merit changed shape sometime after its economy opened up in 1991.
The standard telling of India's economic liberalisation is a success story — growth rates, a new middle class, Coca-Cola and Levi's arriving on the same shelves as instant noodles. What gets left out of that telling is the quieter shift underneath it: a generation of gatekeepers who inherited access rather than earned it, presiding over institutions that still pay lip service to merit while running increasingly on proximity, capital, and inherited comfort. This isn't a claim that merit vanished entirely — plenty of people still get where they are through sheer graft — but the ratio changed, and ratios matter more than exceptions when you're trying to explain a mood.
The mood in question is a specific, low-grade resentment that doesn't announce itself as resentment. It shows up disguised as concern, as gatekeeping, as "standards," as the small daily frictions that make ordinary life harder than it needs to be for people who are simply trying to get by. Ray's rich boy needed no larger justification for shooting the kite down; the pleasure was in having power over something he didn't personally value. Bureaucracies and hierarchies can run on the same logic at scale, dressed up as procedure. The British colonial administration understood this instinct well and built policy around it — divide and rule worked because it recruited local intermediaries who had their own reasons to keep other locals in their place. The mechanism didn't require a conspiracy to keep functioning after 1947; it only required successor institutions to keep reproducing the same incentive structure, and largely, they did.
Layered onto this is a second, more diffuse phenomenon: the erosion of joint and extended family structures since the early 2000s. Indian census and sociological data have tracked a steady, real decline in average household size and joint-family living over the past three decades, driven by urban migration, nuclear housing markets, and the economics of city jobs. Whatever one thinks of joint families as an institution, they functioned as a buffer — a place where an individual's rough edges got smoothed by multiple generations holding a shared frame of reference. Strip that away and you get something closer to Jean Baudrillard's idea of hyperreality: a culture that has lost its original, lived referent but keeps circulating as image and simulation anyway. Festivals, rituals, and family obligations persist not because the underlying social fabric that generated them is intact, but because enough people still believe in the performance to keep it running. The belief is doing the work the community used to do.
What replaces the buffer, for a lot of people, is a kind of low-hum absurdism: the entire experience of adult life under systems that demand outward discipline while offering no inward reason for it. Consider the ordinary employee who was once punctual because punctuality meant something — to a team, to a purpose, to himself. Somewhere along the way he notices that his punctuality changes nothing about the job's meaning or his stake in it, and the discipline quietly falls away. The organisation's answer to this isn't to restore meaning; it's to install a biometric attendance machine. He is now compelled into precisely the behaviour he once did voluntarily, minus the voluntary part, minus the meaning, minus the self that used to hold it together. Marx had a word for this a long time before biometrics existed: alienation — the estrangement of a worker not just from what he produces, but from his own labour, and eventually from himself. The machine doesn't need him to believe in the job. It only needs him to badge in.
Multiply that experience across a population and you get something like a nation of people going through the motions of a self they no longer fully inhabit — punctual without conviction, dutiful without belief, present in body and absent everywhere else. Call it a sandwich, if you like the image: pressed from both sides, held together mostly by the pressure itself. The people benefiting from the arrangement rarely notice they're the ones applying it, because privilege is good at disguising itself as normalcy.
It's worth being careful, though, about where this argument should stop. Japan is sometimes invoked in these conversations as a cautionary tale — a hyper-disciplined society whose extraordinary rates of overwork (there's even a specific word for death from overwork, karoshi) and social withdrawal (hikikomori) are read as a culture quietly buckling under the weight of its own machine. That's a real and well-documented strain in Japanese social science. It is a very different thing to romanticise the darkest possible individual response to that strain as some kind of enlightened refusal. Exhaustion with a system is a legitimate, sociologically interesting phenomenon. Despair is a personal one, and it deserves care, not aestheticisation.
None of this requires a villain twirling a moustache behind the curtain. It requires only that inherited advantage keep mistaking itself for merit, that families keep thinning out faster than new sources of grounding appear, and that institutions keep preferring surveillance to trust. The kite gets shot down not because anyone hates the boy flying it, but because no one with the air rifle has ever had to ask what the kite was worth to him. That, more than any single decade or policy, is the story worth sitting with.