Yesterday an ex-colleague told me about a very happening newspaper appointing a certain person- lets call him Mr X- to a very senior position there. My only reaction was ‘great choice’. My ex-colleague found the response a bit surprising since I all along never had much of an opinion about this Mr X. But you could look at it in the same way as most drivers never have a good opinion of their seths. A streak of jealousy perhaps.“Come on what has happened to you? You really think this chap is good?” this ex-colleague asked me.Of course I said. Look at everything that he has and tell me how he can go wrong there? I asked this ex-colleague.“What does he have?” he insisted.“He is not middle class, bloody middle class like me so what are his chances of going wrong anyway” I said and added that at the end of the day that is the greatest asset you bring to the table. And sadly yours truly, the ex-colleague and another very senior and extremely talented reporter we weaved into the conversation were all just that – bloody middle class.Mr X was a smooth talker, you could never know if he knew his onions but he definitely showed he knew the entire grocery market damn you. He spoke with a twang that you get when you go to the elite public or boarding schools. Now this includes saying ‘skedule’ instead of staid ‘schedule’ with the ‘sch’ the same as in ‘shit’. If you tell anyone that your favourite musician is Michael Jackson, you get slotted as bit of an upstart and it gives away the game but if you say you love listening to Brothers Four or say Rosemary Clooney and her Italiano Mambo - just some of the fabulous songs on the Ipod of a colleague-, then that is class. And your pedigree needs no introduction anymore into the rarefied air engulfing the top offices of the new age economy where middle class is nothing more than the stench of an open sewer.
I have seen so many attempts made by people to get away from that cursed phrase all their lives that sometimes that is in itself a life.
A friend from small town Jamshedpur did such a fabulous job of it that almost a decade after we left school and met at Marine Drive, I could place no bits of memory I had about her growing up in Jamshedpur to the person standing in front of me.
Her lips were a seductive shade of brown- aided of course by lipstick- but that she said was to hide lips gone off-colour with all the cigarettes she lit up through a tough day. Her prim business suit and the skirt just inches above her knees made it a great sight for several of the all-guy gangs that come to Marine Drive from middle class places like Virar. Her hair, a salon frizzy, had light streaks of blue that gave it a nice glow in the yellow light that bathed Marine Drive. Her voice had turned husky probably with all the cigarettes or simply with time. After all I had last met her when she was 15 and now she should have been around 28, the kind of age where a lot of working girls start turning into women, and the sari comes out of the cupboard more often to be worn seductively at office parties. The voice at that age also achieves varying degrees of modulation as is required to beat a tough day at office when just work might not suffice in keeping your name out of the wrong logs maintained of the rat race by bosses
She had come along with some colleagues for a business conference to Mumbai, were all put up at the Oberoi and when she handed me her card later, I got to know that when compared to me- just a reporter at a city newspaper- she had run the race as a sprint and not like a marathon as I had and still did.
The middle class uncouthness in me couldn’t resist telling her that she had changed. Changed for the better or the worse is best to avoid because you can really never be sure about these things. The butcher might love the stench of carcasses because that for him is money in the cash box.
“Ya I have” she said. “It took me some time. But yes today I am not the person you ever knew. Am I happy, I don’t know but if you are living a life fast enough to never think about it, I guess it just doesn’t matter,” she added. I guess she was right. She acknowledged she at most times of the day felt she was not good enough for the job she was holding but yes the attitude which made her say so had long gone. In a world where it doesn’t matter how much you know but how much you show you know, our girl had all of it covered perfectly.
When I suggested to her friends that we could go to Gokul for a drink- and talk about old times- she looked at me, then her colleagues – all of them the perfect shirt crease and gelled hair and scrubbed face types- and said, “Binoo, so middle class man”. I looked at my baggy pants, my Rs 200 Jockey T-shirt and my Rs 250 Bata floaters and allowed my case to be rested in her favour.
Another example I remember is when some top marketing guys of a hugely successful newspaper went to meet a top railway official whose English is dodgy and his choice of shirts and pants a reminder of his genteel upbringing in north Bihar. The meeting ended with the marketing hotshots realising that the Indian bureaucracy is probably the only place where you need not be as suave as Shashi Tharoor- never mind the bungling- to be somewhere at the top of the rung. The man used his head to calculate all the figures thrown at him by the marketing suits and then sent them packing saying the Indian railways- because of an animal called the Central Bureau of Investigation and because of a human tendency to get jealous- offered no free lunches to corporates who could very well pay.
So there you go. Middle class gets you only till the middle like the station in life I find myself in, and then you wait for the tide to take you wherever the tide plans to go...
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Friday, December 11, 2009
Telengana is the way to go
If one reads newspapers today, you would imagine the people of Telengana who have supported the movement to create a separate state are as dastardly as Qasab and unpatriotic as probably the jehadis.
I think it is high time we saw smaller states, time we saw states forming informal groupings among themselves, sharing economic resources without much interference from the Centre.
The type of federal democracy that the founding fathers envisaged for India has long been compromised by leaders like Indira Gandhi and subsequent Congress leaders who gave it a name that has become part of official lexicon- High Command. Time and again we have heard after state elections that the ‘High Command’ would decide on the chief minister. As if the people of the state who voted were idiots and came out to vote because they did not get stall tickets for the movie they were planning to go on the afternoon of voting day.
Smaller states mean resources can be utilized better, project outlays could be smaller leaving them not just more manageable but also protects them from too much stealing. Now think of it, if the total outlay for computerization of all RTOs in Uttar Pradesh is say Rs 10000 crores, just imagine the scale of the project, the time it would take and the number of babus through whom the files will have to routed. The work might never take off and by the time we realise it, almost 25 percent of the total outlay might have reached the pockets of sundry netas and babus. But if we had smaller states, the outlay for the same work might be say Rs 2000 crores, the scale limited. So work might have been done and at the most the netas would have pocketed say Rs 150 crores. We will live with that, thank you. Similarly almost all other aspects of administration get better.
Just think of Andhra. With Hyderabad gone to Telengana, along with it goes the cyber city and the billions of rupees worth of investment.
The challenge would be to now create a new capital, a new powerhouse of economic activity, a new magnet for investments. As a state they might be able to do it if the economic climate provided by the government is good enough. What does the nation as a whole get in return? In place of one Hyderabad, we get another one in the region formerly known as undivided Andhra Pradesh.
Dividing babus and IPS officers has never been a problem except for those corrupt ones who do not want to leave the city they have preyed on for long. Like some cops in Mumbai who do not mind heading to nondescript departments without any manpower or cases as long as they are left in peace in Mumbai, close to their daily watering hole and to the neta they serve at Mantralaya.
At the end of the day the simple logic is that it is better to have smaller states within our national boundaries. Than allow the apathy and blind eye to give people and states a reason to move out of them. And in the process give our nation a black eye.
I think it is high time we saw smaller states, time we saw states forming informal groupings among themselves, sharing economic resources without much interference from the Centre.
The type of federal democracy that the founding fathers envisaged for India has long been compromised by leaders like Indira Gandhi and subsequent Congress leaders who gave it a name that has become part of official lexicon- High Command. Time and again we have heard after state elections that the ‘High Command’ would decide on the chief minister. As if the people of the state who voted were idiots and came out to vote because they did not get stall tickets for the movie they were planning to go on the afternoon of voting day.
Smaller states mean resources can be utilized better, project outlays could be smaller leaving them not just more manageable but also protects them from too much stealing. Now think of it, if the total outlay for computerization of all RTOs in Uttar Pradesh is say Rs 10000 crores, just imagine the scale of the project, the time it would take and the number of babus through whom the files will have to routed. The work might never take off and by the time we realise it, almost 25 percent of the total outlay might have reached the pockets of sundry netas and babus. But if we had smaller states, the outlay for the same work might be say Rs 2000 crores, the scale limited. So work might have been done and at the most the netas would have pocketed say Rs 150 crores. We will live with that, thank you. Similarly almost all other aspects of administration get better.
Just think of Andhra. With Hyderabad gone to Telengana, along with it goes the cyber city and the billions of rupees worth of investment.
The challenge would be to now create a new capital, a new powerhouse of economic activity, a new magnet for investments. As a state they might be able to do it if the economic climate provided by the government is good enough. What does the nation as a whole get in return? In place of one Hyderabad, we get another one in the region formerly known as undivided Andhra Pradesh.
Dividing babus and IPS officers has never been a problem except for those corrupt ones who do not want to leave the city they have preyed on for long. Like some cops in Mumbai who do not mind heading to nondescript departments without any manpower or cases as long as they are left in peace in Mumbai, close to their daily watering hole and to the neta they serve at Mantralaya.
At the end of the day the simple logic is that it is better to have smaller states within our national boundaries. Than allow the apathy and blind eye to give people and states a reason to move out of them. And in the process give our nation a black eye.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Islam is as peaceful as Hindus are intelligent
The Asian Age has a good opinion piece on page ten in its Sunday edition on the ban on minarets in his native Switzerland by Peter Stamm. Nice because Stamm writes simple lines and probably does not think of himself as in intellectual. Some of the opinion pieces- save the ones by Swapan Dasgupta and MJ Akbar in the Times of India and Admiral Arun Singh in Asian Age- can be very bombastic and tough to follow after a couple of paragraphs because the writer is busy trying to sell himself as a ‘know all’.
However I have a serious problem with Stamm’s idea of a friendly, peaceful, accommodating Islam.
The religion as I know it in India isn’t any of the above three. It is just a religion whose proponents have realised that come hell or high water, they would be pampered for their ability to rise above local issues and unite behind imaginary persecutions and ‘Islam is in danger’ cries during the elections. Plus every Muslim who votes knows that his ability to carry around a persecution complex in garb of inequality is rewarded in election after election by ‘secular’ parties. And he uses the unique gift.
Secondly the Muslims of India know that the vast majority of Hindus in this country are hypocrites, frightened, unlearned and vain. All of which is true since I myself am a Hindu and possess all these characteristics in abundance.
Just lo look at us. When a group of like-minded Hindus get together, they form a party like the Bharatiya Janata Party. When those who dislike the Hindu ethos or culture of this country- the negationists like Nehru- come up with a party, they make the Congress. The Congress is probably the brainiest party in any part of the world and its ability to divide and pamper different groups of people in the right amount and at the right time is so legendary that even when they are up for the count after ten years of stupendous inactivity and mismanagement, they still win elections. Look at Maharashtra. The problem with a lot of foreign writers like Stamm is that they live in worlds far removed from the bile of lesser developed nations and have this amazing urge to show themselves as secular as is defined by the West. Probably how I might react if I am told that some bloody black Nigerians have blown up some oil pipelines in the Niger Delta. My first reaction would be savages, heathens and the like. But my view might not be the truth because I would not be knowing the angst of a group like the Movement for Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) because I read newspapers run by big corporates whose brotherhood with big corporates, who sustain the former with their ads, is too strong to give in to the urge of reporting what is true.
However I have a serious problem with Stamm’s idea of a friendly, peaceful, accommodating Islam.
The religion as I know it in India isn’t any of the above three. It is just a religion whose proponents have realised that come hell or high water, they would be pampered for their ability to rise above local issues and unite behind imaginary persecutions and ‘Islam is in danger’ cries during the elections. Plus every Muslim who votes knows that his ability to carry around a persecution complex in garb of inequality is rewarded in election after election by ‘secular’ parties. And he uses the unique gift.
Secondly the Muslims of India know that the vast majority of Hindus in this country are hypocrites, frightened, unlearned and vain. All of which is true since I myself am a Hindu and possess all these characteristics in abundance.
Just lo look at us. When a group of like-minded Hindus get together, they form a party like the Bharatiya Janata Party. When those who dislike the Hindu ethos or culture of this country- the negationists like Nehru- come up with a party, they make the Congress. The Congress is probably the brainiest party in any part of the world and its ability to divide and pamper different groups of people in the right amount and at the right time is so legendary that even when they are up for the count after ten years of stupendous inactivity and mismanagement, they still win elections. Look at Maharashtra. The problem with a lot of foreign writers like Stamm is that they live in worlds far removed from the bile of lesser developed nations and have this amazing urge to show themselves as secular as is defined by the West. Probably how I might react if I am told that some bloody black Nigerians have blown up some oil pipelines in the Niger Delta. My first reaction would be savages, heathens and the like. But my view might not be the truth because I would not be knowing the angst of a group like the Movement for Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) because I read newspapers run by big corporates whose brotherhood with big corporates, who sustain the former with their ads, is too strong to give in to the urge of reporting what is true.
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