Contents
List of Figures xi
Preface xii
Acknowledgements xv
Introducing the Intersections: Commodities and
Their Images in the Consumerist Landscape 1
Why I Love De Beers and Care Less about the Kula Ring
Predominance of the 'Pet Themes': Spotting the Elephant in the Room
An Emerging Consumerist Class: Releasing Indian Sociology from a Rural House Arrest
Three Hundred Centuries and Three Decades:
The Delayed Birth of a Consumer Society in India
Consumers as Active Participants: Ways of Reading Multiple
Surfaces
Chapter Scheme: Ten Anti-commandments
1. 'If Your Jeans Are Original, How Come Everyone Else Has One?': Representation of Exclusionary Attitudes
in Advertisements 27
Exclusionary Attitudes: Middle Class in the Colonial Period
Restrained Consumption: Before the New Consumerist Spree
From Thrift to Unapologetic Indulgence: Use Value to Image Value
Dressing the Self: Covering the Body, Revealing the Information
The 'Elite' and the 'Upper Crest': Some Classist Claims
2. Discovering Lineage amidst Urban Anonymity:
Role-Playing through Images of Things 63
'Who's Who' and 'Who's He': Apparel in the Urbanscape
'Discover Your Lineage': Role-Playing through Material Possession
Something for Everyone: Catering to the Difference
3.Peer-Reviewed Images: Image-Consuming Selves
as Visual Commodities 79
Consuming Body Images and Transforming Body Images for Consumption
The Idea of'Extra as Excess': Making and Manipulating the Ideal Body Image
I Am Seen, Therefore I Am: Sharing and Circulating the Body Image
( Ob )scene Onscreen: Acceptability and Legitimacy of the Eroticized Body Image
Image Meets Body, Body Meets Image: The Process of Becoming the Body/Image
4. Till It Lasts the Wash: Attached Messages, Detached Consumers, and the Trajectory of the T-shirt
T-shirt as Casual, Flexible, and Androgynous: The Death of Symbolic Depth
Visual and Textual Imprints: New-Generation T-shirts
Hybridization and Repetitiveness: A Dual Kitsch
5. Material Callings in an Outsourced Outpost : Accounts of an Aspiring Consumer 127
joining Frequently and Absconding Soon After: Fetish on the Fast Lane
Living with Bare Minimum : Locating the Self before Aspiring to be a Consumer
The Interview: Say Something More about Yourself
The First Day: What if They Find Out?
Getting Trained : 'Bite the Bs, Kiss the Ws, Roll the Rs, Soften the Ts, Fade the Ps'
360-Degree Feedback: Controlling the Call and Serving the Customer
The Absconding Cases and Attrition: Probation Rarely Leading to Permanence
(Not) Serving the Customer: Responding to Material Callings After-Call Wrap-Up: Globally Connected and Locally Disconnected
6. Visual Access and Excess : New Ways of Seeing and Sharing 149
The DigitalRemediation
The Post-photographic condition
Datafication and Dataveillance : self-Generated
Data and its Concerns
7. After the Tourists Depart: The Visual Postmortem of a New Tourist Destination 186
Consuming the Image and Travelling the Distance: Gazing at the Destination
A Consumerist Trajectory of Ladakh: A Tragedy in the Making
Pangong Postmortem: Some Remains after the Tourists Depart
8. The Afterlife of Things: Inorganic Transplants in the Liminal Debris of Consumer Culture 208
The Logic of Discarding as an Impetus for Consumption
Usefulness of the Discarded in Debris of Consumer Culture
Technological Shifts in an Automobile junkyard Trashing the Waste: The Death of an Ambiguity
9. The Visuality of Materials and the Materiality of Visuals: Loss of Material Sovereignty
in an Abandoned Industrial Site 226
Remnants and Remembrance in the Making:
A Prelude to the Exploration
The Trajectory of jute Mills: The Industrial Expansion and the Post-industrial Demise
The Past Intruding on the Present: Subverting How We View Materiality and History
Navigating the Anarchy of Debris: Observing the 'Loss of Material Sovereignty'
A Postscript of a Deviant and Liminal Space
Obsessive Compulsive (Dis)Order:
The Promiscuity of Choice and the Ephemeral 254
The ' New': Taking Waiting out of Wanting
The ' Now': Own the Moment and Move On
All Consuming Effect: Consumerist Tendencies in Personal
and Professional Spheres
Index
About the Author






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