The Angry Husband

Ramgopal became head of the family fairly late in life after his father’s demise at the ripe age of eighty five. Till then he lived a somewhat non- participating style within the joint family, concerned mainly with his own family of wife and two children. He accepted the headship with apparent humility but did not realise that it was not an easy task to satisfy a large family of uncles, siblings, cousins and their families.  Of course, he had ideas like enlarging and improving the sanitary and sewerage system of the old village house they lived in, asking the womenfolk to make family’s requirement of condiments such as pappad and pickles at home and promoting vegetarianism in the family. and so on. Though the elder members of the family were on his side, the youngsters thought that he was too dominant, adamant and imposing. He faced severe opposition particularly with regard to his campaign for vegetarianism. Gradually the grumblings became more and more vociferous and even the elders who supported him earlier became his critics. This further alienated him from his own family and he too began showing intolerance to their views and actions.

One of his cherished dreams was to become popular in the immediate neighbourhood as well as in the town. He nurtured the ambition of becoming an important leader and to this end started visiting friends and acquaintances.  In fact, he spent more evenings on such visits than at home. He liked the civility and geniality others extended to him as the head of a big and old family of the town.  He often mistook their hospitality as indicative of his personal charm.

Like any angry husband, he is happy outside his home

The Third Force in Governance –The Indian Experiment

When India was under foreign rule of Britain, governance was in the hands of a single force, that of the then ruler. There was no serious debate about this singularity of the governance force  as the whole country was engaged in driving out  the foreign rulers  rather than worried about ruler.  

The dawn of Independence in 1947 and the adoption of parliamentary democracy for India  gave rise to the duality  feature  of governance viz . ,a  legislature comprising elected representatives of people and an executive comprising a cabinet of ministers responsible for the day to day administration. The Constitution of India clearly defines the respective duties and powers of these two wings of governance aided by an independent Judiciary to interpret and settle the occasional differences and transgressions on the part of the dual forces. The point to note is that the legislature and the executive have been performing their respective functions unbiased by any ideological leanings, whether it was a single political party commanding the majority in Parliament, such as the Congress in the first two decades, or later when coalition governments were formed participated by multiple political parties as widely different as the ends of the right-left spectrum. And yet, both the legislature and the executive were accountable to the people, the former through periodic elections and the latter through the ministers.

The General Elections in 2014 has introduced a  new element in India’s governance. A major socio-cultural movement like the RSS has entered the fray, albeit not directly through participation in the elections but by guiding and supporting a political party and influencing its plans, programs and agenda. There is the feeling that its influence has even spread   in the choice of cabinet ministers, some policy formulation and implementation, appointment of heads of academic and cultural bodies, etc... This may be called the third force in the governance of India and is an additive to the traditional dual forces envisaged in the Constitution.   As our Constitution did not envisage such a third force, its emergence particularly without electoral accountability would tantamount to  a first time experiment in the practice of constitutional/ parliamentary democracy.  It therefore appears that there is an urgent need for an extensive debate and discussion among legal and constitutional experts, political scientists, etc. in order that this new force should gain legitimacy and validity. 

What mandate?

The Times of India on 4^th July carried a centre- page article by Pavan Varma, M.P (@PavanK-Varma) which basically addresses the arrogance of authoritarianism among the current powers that be. Wondering whether this will lead to the declaration of Emergency once again, a la a recent statement to similar effect made by L.K.Advani, the article mentions the high propensity of Indians for sycophancy and hero worship of those in power.

Is this the reason or a near about fait accompli situation of having elected to Lok Sabha a single national party with a huge majority with hardly any opposition? Whoever thought that such majority in the Lok Sabha is only an administrative majority and not a legislative majority which includes a majority in Rajya Sabha as well and which then could be used to pass appropriate legislations towards bringing in reforms?

The not so moral alternative route of promulgating ordinances on important reforms like acquisition of land for speedy industrialization and discarding debate and discussion in the House does not portend good democratic governance. There is also a growing feeling that any opinion not in square with the overall policy of the government would be disposed of under an attitude of “either my way or the high way” like the sudden discovery of the negativity of the social media vis -a- vis the PM’s blog or tweets.

The last General Elections put an end to the scam-a day government of the UPA reflecting the anti- establishment mood of the electorate. The experiment of coalition governments only resulted in the different parties pulling the developmental juggernaut in different directions, notwithstanding the common minimum programme inked by the parties before taking oath of office.

The new dispensation of another coalition government cobbled by the NDA is different in that it has within it one single national party with a whooping majority in the Lok Sabha. This naturally aroused a lot of expectations by the people, particularly as the single large party had in its election manifesto and campaigns promised good governance free of corruption and inclusive development.

Now, the new government and most of its critics (not the opposition political parties) admit that dramatic results like economic development through conducive policy for foreign investment, etc. is too early to happen since it still has to cope with less than the required majority in the Rajya Sabha. The oft-cited reason of clearing the mess created by the previous government has washed well only so far and the people in general will not be impressed any more

Is economic development through facilitating the setting up of industries to make (things) in India the panacea of all our ills today?  Investment in social sectors like eradication of famine, mal-nutrition of children and women, basic education and public health are prior requisites. But the government does not seem to think so since the PM during his frequent visits to foreign countries asks the people there ad nauseam to invest in India in the manufacturing sector.

 Be that as it may, can economic development be not brought about without changing socio-cultural identity of India? Many of the initiatives taken by the new government appear to indicate that the changes in socio-cultural aspects of Indian life are their first priority.

It began with the reverse proselytization of members of some minority communities followed by banning the sale and consumption of beef and desecration of some places of worship. In most of these, the ball was set rolling by some obscure M.Ps or party ideologues and the government not only had not taken them to task but turned a Nelson's eye when the thing actually happened. Next, the institutions of higher education and social and scientific research came under attack, where many a "head" literally rolled and was replaced by persons of identifiable ideology acceptable to the ruling party. Even the regulatory bodies like the Film Censor Board were not spared. The joke going round is that no chief of these institutions dare leave his chair even to answer the call of nature, lest the HRD ministry would send a replacement

The justification given by the party spoke-persons in the media is that this government has come to power on the basis of the clear and huge mandate given by the people in the last elections. The mandate, to be sure, was for clean governance and development, sans coalition of ideologically differing political parties as promised by the candidates, particularly the prime ministerial candidate. It was not certainly intended as a carte blanche for meddling with the socio-cultural fabric and mores of this great country or to usher in changes affecting the daily life, like right to worship or the dietary preferences of the people.

Is there a way to let the powers know this or do we have to wait till 2019? 

The Blood Transfusion Chain of Criminals

The Times of India Mumbai  head line on 29th January 2015 says "1000 HIV+ cases in  state(Maharashtra) due to infected blood transfusion". Nothing can be more dreadful than this news.When the hapless  surgery patients surrender themselves  by signing, as it were,  their own death warrants to the effect that they would not hold the doctors/ hospitals  responsible for anything going amiss in their case, would they have thought that the vital blood that they had got transfused during the surgery could be  infected with HIV ?

Who is to blame for this crime? The entire blood transfusion chain consisting  of the donors,their motivators, the blood banks including their staff for checking the quality of blood, their  equipment and procedures of collection and  storage and  the  requistioning  hospitals and  their staff for checking the quality, is responsible for ensuring the quality of the blood.Therefore,all  those  involved  along the chain must be proceeded against in criminal suits for culpable homicide not amounting to murder.

Is anybody listening?

The Economics of Indian Industry.

The Economic Times in its today’s edition has carried the excerpted version of a recent speech by the RBI Governor, Mr. Raghuram Rajan. He has said that in India we have many sick industries but no sick promoters. This sentence took me back to my own speech some 25 years ago when the IDBI Bank in Pune asked me to speak on the sickness of the small scale industry in and around Pune. I did a small personal survey of about six small scale industries in the Bhosari Industrial Estate in Pune which then were not doing well. They were mostly fabrication units or foundries started by engineering graduates with the assistance of Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation and nationalised banks. Their profitability was eroding year after year and the owners blamed it on the irregular orders and delayed payments by their customers, who were the big industries in the Pune industrial belt. I noticed that while their company’s balance sheet was in the red, the individual owner’s personal lifestyle was improving. For instance many of them had, at best, a two wheeler to commute when they started their business. Within a couple of years, they bought a Maruti 800. Another couple of years saw their buying an air conditioned car and booking/ buying a flat in main town Pune. In seven to eight years’ time , most of them had taken a holiday tour to some foreign destination. All this while, their units were going down and down. I could only conclude that financial impropriety on their part was the reason and when I mentioned this in my speech, the audience, mostly bank staff and some small scale unit owners, were meaningfully silent.

In India, the PSU banks are the whipping boys of industry, both big and small. They get their project finance and working capital from the banks and as the RBI Governor says, without any rigorous contractual obligation. When the going is good, they forget to return the loan and interest but siphon away the profit for meeting personal gains like higher commission and perquisites. And when the going is tough, they bemoan the need to service the debt and ask for rehabilitation packages like capital restructuring and loan re-scheduling.  And we have had always a government ready to oblige them.

Delhi's Madrasis

   Till about the early sixties, New Delhi was just a central government city, except for a few corporate offices along Ramlila Maidan from Delhi Gate to Ajmeri Gate, a stretch of about a mile and half long road called Asaf Ali Road, and some shops big and small in Connaught Place and Karol Bagh. The inhabitants of the city were mostly government servants living in government quarters located within in a circle of about two miles radius from Gole Market. The high ranking Government servants like Secretaries, Joint Secretaries etc.  Lived in aristocratic bungalows in Lodi Estate, Queen Mary’s Road, Aurangazeb Road, Ashoka Road etc. while lesser rank officers like superintendents etc.  lived in smaller bungalows  on Talkatora Road, Mahadeo Road, Baird Road etc.   Low ranked officials like Assistants and Stenographers lived in smaller quarters consisting of an open veranda in the front, a small front room, one or two bed rooms, a store room and kitchen. The latrine in most quarters was away from the living rooms and kitchen at the end of a court yard at the rear side.

    The quarters were in blocks called “Squares” named after British monarchs and  viceroys  like Edward Square, Hastings Square, Cornwallis Square, etc. with an occasional Indian name like Ganesh Place, Ranjit Place. The difference between a Square and a Place lay in their shape; the Sqaure had four rows of quarters, one each on its four sides while the Place had quarters only on three sides, the fourth side being the boundary road, like Reading Road (now renamed as Mandir Marg). What intrigued us as children was that the squares were mostly rectangular , two long parallel rows of quarters  on two opposite sides and two short  parallel rows on the other two opposite sides

     In this great city there lived the “Madrasis”- a collective noun invented by the North Indians for all people who came from the south of the Vindhyas. Almost all of them were government servants with some essential service providers like school and music teachers, vadhyars (religious pundits0 and cooks. With many Subramanians and Ganesans, distinction was made either with reference to the Ministry where they worked or in the Square where they lived, like Finance Subramanian, Defence Ganesan or Wilson Square Ramasubban and Lawrence Square Sivaramakrishnan. If two Sethuramans were in the same Finance ministry, then the distinction was based on the Wing/ department, such as Expenditure Sethuraman versus Controller of Capital Sethuraman.  Another distinctive clue was their pass time or leisure activities like Bhajana Samaj Krishnan or Karnataka Sangeetha Sabha Ramamurthy and these persons had high titles like Additional Secretary, Joint Secretary Etc. in their respective organisations... And in addition, there were also nick names given and recognised by the whole community like Bonda Srinivasan, Typhoid Krishnamurthy, and Driver Devarajan and so on.

    When it came to their career in government, all Madrasis earned the unenviable reputation as honest, sincere, hard- working, efficient and with absolute integrity. The price that was paid for such appreciation of work was the neglect of leisure time happiness on holidays with family and friends. Many of them would have spent decades living in Delhi but not had had time to v see the Kutb Minar, the  Red Fort,  Purana Kila and other historical monuments which abound in Delhi .Their Annual Confidential Reports grading them as “Outstanding” were confidentially and individually leaked to them by their superior officers. They would then confidentially tell their wives! There was this joke about a Madrasi junior officer once getting reported by his senior Punjabi officer that he (the Madrasi) often “slept in office” - a remark considered as adverse in his annual confidential report. When he remonstrated to the senior officer about this, the latter told him that he wanted to highlight the fact that on several days the Madrasi officer had worked very late hours in the office almost till the early hours of the next morning and was thus compelled to sleep in the office itself in the absence of a bus to go home at that hour. ! Similarly another Madrasi officer’s work was graded as “far from satisfactory” by his senior Bengali officer. He later explained saying that the work of the junior was exceptionally good and the grading category “satisfactory” did not adequately describe the quality of work which was several notches high!!

     The institutions that united them were The South India Club, The Madrasi  School, The Karnatak Sangeetha Sabha, The Vaishnava Siddhantha Sabbha, The Saturday Bhajana Sabhas, The Navaratri Golus and of course the Irwin Road Pilliar  Koil and the adjacent Hanuman Mandir and the Baird Road Kali Koil. Apart from mutual family visits, inter family communication was through the Tamil Vadhyar group to which the families belonged when a Sastrigal of that group came to announce the important religious events of the month and collect monthly subscription. Integration with other communities was next to nothing for most of the Madrasis although they collectively enjoyed the confidence of the Punjabi grocers, clothiers and other shopkeepers who gave them credit facility liberally without a question The Madrasis however privately made fun of the Punjabis’ English pronunciation like    meyerment for measurement, lier for lawyer as well as bad grammar like “Mehra don’t even Know English”.   Little did they know as to how many times the Punjabi traders took advantage of the Madrasis ‘confusion between “Dhed” (one and a half) and “Adhai” (two and a half).

    Among the uniting institutions mentioned above, the Madrasi School occupied a predominant position as it was here that the children of all Madrasis irrespective of the status of the parents, whether a Joint Secretary or an Upper Division Clerk, or the child of a Sastrigal or a cook, came for studies. Those were days of no dress code or uniforms and yet all children studied in an environment of equality and fraternity .The teachers,  both male and female, were exceptionally devoted to their profession, took  avuncular interest in each student  and were  kind hearted . Till the fifties there was only one school at Reading Road. Even when there was no bar for students from other regions or linguistic groups for admission, the Madrasi School remained exclusively a Tamil school. Ironically, when it became a multi branch Tamil school in its name in the sixties, called The Delhi Tamil Education Association School (DTEA), it has now both students and teachers form other parts of the country.

  

     The Madrasis were a powerful group in the Central Secretariat. Their network was strongly knit and mutually helpful. Any special treatment or facility in AIIMS, Safdarjung and other government hospitals were arranged by the Madrasi Jt. Secretary, in Health Ministry, while his counter- part in Civil Supplies Department took care of additional allotment of sugar and maida for weddings. Acquiring of land and construction of the many temples in the sixties and seventies in New Delhi was mainly because of the initiative and strength of this group which at one time had the Hon’ble President of India as Patron. . Even the introduction of Leave Travel Concession for visiting home towns by Central Government Servants and their families was said to be the brainchild of some Madrasis in the Home and Finance Ministries. They quietly introduced the main condition that the home town should be at least 400 kms away from Headquarters so as to benefit the South Indian employees!   Not only did the Northerners feel  jealous, the Punjabi booking clerk oh the Northern Railway felt further injured as he had to book the onward journey to a home town like Kattumannarkovil  by the shortest route and had no clue as to which of the two routes from Madras Egmore, the chord line or the  main line, was shorter. 

     Most of these Madrasis have retired by now.  Many continue to live in Delhi in DDA and other housing colonies in the faraway Dhwarka and Mayur Vihar and their post- retirement activities and interest are confined to within these areas mainly centring the local temple.  Some of their sons and daughters, the next generation Delhi’s Madrasis, took the Madrasi School – St. Stephen’s College route to qualify for induction into the All India Services and other Allied Services while others have become doctors, engineers, lawyers and accountants. The Old Students   Association of DTEA Schools with branches in Chennai and Bangalore is their social network apart from Facebook.

We Are Like That Only

The HUDHUD has gone leaving devastation behind in coastal Andhra and Odisha. Vishakhapatnam has been worst affected with telephone , internet connectivity and electricity all cut off, nearly all trees uprooted, buildings blown over, crops and cattle dead and thousands rendered homeless. The authorities are doing their best in relief and rescue operations and to restore all utilities and services affected and bring normalcy as early as possible. Thanks to our improved forewarning system of typhoons and cyclones and the government’s preparedness for evacuating thousands of people to safe buildings and the role of agencies like Disaster Management groups, the casualty has been only 29 persons, tragic still as it is. Let us wish the people of Vishakhapatnam God- speed rehabilitation .But have they responded to this calamity with a sense of endurance and virtuous behaviour? Read what a TV Channel has to say about the situation in Vishakhapatnam two days after the Hudhud.

“As Visakhapatnam tries to limp back to normalcy after the destruction caused by Cyclone Hudhud, there is a mad scramble for food, water and fuel in the affected areas. The situation is tense with people stopping trucks, mobbing relief officers and looting supplies.

The police have been resorting to lathi charge to disperse the mob. The city is facing acute shortage of water, food, fuel and other essentials.

Shortage of supplies have caused the prices of essential commodities to skyrocket with essentials like a bottle of water being sold for Rs 250 and a packet of milk for Rs 100. Power and communication networks are also down in many places.

"The prices are so high that common people can't afford things. The government is not providing all facilities," a Visakhapatnam resident said.

"The current supply has been given to dairy farms and the essentials. The government is trying hard to help. But it will take time to recover," another resident said.

Long lines are being seen at petrol pumps in Visakhapatnam. "So many petrol pumps are closed. They are covered in the black market actually," a resident claimed.

Much of the work of the NDRF teams is focused on trying to clear the roads so that essential supplies can come in. Long queues are also being seen at ATM booths and milk booths.
Amidst the chaotic scenes, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit Visakhapatnam to take stock of the situation on Tuesday afternoon. The Vizag airport has been reopened for relief operations but the city and 12 districts in Andhra Pradesh remain in darkness. 26 people have lost their lives in Andhra Pradesh and three have been reported dead in Odisha.”

What a low level has mankind sunk to in this hour of great challenge to its sense of forbearance, tolerance, sharing, mutual help and compassion. People are looting the relief materials meant for equitable distribution. Police is controlling unruly mobs instead of guarding the property whatever the cyclone has left behind. Our great retailers are missing no opportunity to profiteer instead of showing normal trade “dharma” of selling at normal prices till stocks last. And the public, starving and roofless, is beating their breasts and crying that authorities are not doing enough and soon.

As Indians we will never learn to calm and compose ourselves whether it is a natural calamity or a man –made event like the arrest of a leader. For, we cannot then get away with it saying that “we are like that only”