Is your life better than mine?

It’s a new-age twist to an old philosophical question: are we alive unless others know we are living? It’s also the latest existential crisis to hit the upwardly-mobiles.
It’s not enough to have a perfect life — the biggest car, the biggest house, kids who are all-rounders and the husband who brings in the bacon as well as the diamond ring for your anniversary.Others — mainly peers — have to see that you have the best life.
"It''s not enough to to be the busiest and glossiest and most productive for their own personal satisfaction,’’ The Sunday Times, London, reported last week. "To make it worthwhile, they require an audience of their peers against which they can measure their success. These are the Competitive Marrieds, the newest and scariest social category since the yuppie, and their mantra could be: “My life is better than yours."
It’s not enough that we have superwives and supermoms, now we need to be superfamilies as well. Is the Competitive Marrieds a tribe that you’ll find here back home as well?
Vinita Narang, a 34-year-old Delhi-based PR executive, thought she had it all — a job, two children, a house, two cars — until she started comparing notes with her friend. "They were going for holidays abroad, moved in the right social circles, bought an apartment in an upmarket area and had a Honda Accord. Suddenly our Maruti 800 — and my life — started feeling inadequate."
She started making excuses everytime she had to meet her friend. "Everytime I met her, I had to hear about their weekend trips to Bangkok, their shopping expeditions in New York and so on. I used to come back so depressed, I just stopped meeting her."
It''s a trend that’s gaining in intensity, says psychiatrist Sanjay Chugh. He says it’s a common complaint he hears from his patients: of feeling inadequate in comparison to peers who are doing extremely well. "Success is increasingly being measured by the address where you live, by the designer labels you flaunt."
The need for social approval and recognition is a basic human need in the hierarchy of needs: if we do something it makes us feel good, but if we can flaunt it to 50 other people we feel even better, says Chugh. "But if it becomes all-consuming it could lead to self-destructive behaviour. You have to look at what you have and sustain what you have.’’ Suddenly it’s not enou-gh that we are wearing Armanis and Nikes, we have to sport them so others see it; It’s not enough that your children are getting good grades, they have to take music lessons as well.
"Everybody’s trying to outdo each other. Parents feel guilty if their kids are not doing enough things," says Mandvi Singh Rath-ore, who teaches in a leading public school in Delhi. It’s the reason why parents are pushing their children into every conceivable activity outside school, she says. "Very little is done for the joy of doing things, but because you feel that’s what should be done — because everybody’s doing it. You don’t want to feel left out. The fun element is not there."
Ratna Sharma, a homemaker, admits she gets a complex everytime she meets her closest friend, "They both work. Their son is into football and tennis, and he’s also learning the tabla. Everything in their lives is so picture-perfect, it makes me feel like a failure, and it''s a lie if you say it does not affect you," she says. "They all seem to be happy... so you also want to be like them. It’s not a nice feeling, of being left out."
Even children are doing it. Last summer holidays Pallavi, 16, told her friends she went to London for two weeks while in reality she spent the time with her grandparents in another part of town — even though it meant not being in touch with her friends all this while.
There are two main factors behind the rise of the Competitive Marrieds, writes author Shane Watson in her book, out in Britain on February 4, Other People’s Marriages. First, the pressure all women feel to be living a perfect glossy-magazine lifestyle. "Nowadays, we are meant to be hairless, eternally youthful, capable of earning a living and raising a family, independent, fit... It is no longer enough to have a couple of healthy children and run a home; you also need a personal outlet for your ambitions, uplifted breasts and white teeth, and you need to make your kids’ birthday cakes yourself, even though you know you could buy a better one at Waitrose," Husbands are pretty incidental to this driven existence, she says: women aren''t competing for the attention of men but to outperform each other.
The second reason is basic insecurity. "Whereas our mothers’ generation were all pretty much in the same boat, ours is at sea in every kind of vessel you care to mention. While they sat around the kitchen table, dunking their Rich Tea biscuits and moaning about men and the amount of darning they had to do, this generation of married women is eyeing each other surreptitiously, wondering who has got it right."