India, June 23 -- Despite the overarching attempts to explore substitutes for consumerism from the early 20th century onward seeking alternatives ranging from rabid nationalism to more spiritual definitions of happiness, from the anti-consumerist youth protest movement of the 1960s - the blossoming of back-to-nature hippie communes - to the 1979 revolution in Iran, it is by now established that consumerism, despite all the opposition, seems to be "the 'ism' that won". To borrow further from Gary Cross, one who has explored the social, cultural and political dimensions of consumption extensively, consumerism "did succeed where other ideologies and discourses failed", such as Marxism that usually gestured in the direction of a working class...