THE BEAST OF BURDEN!

SUNNY THOMAS

Precisely when S Jaipal Reddy crushed the backbone of the middle class by hiking the petrol prices by Rs 7.5 a liter, deafening cheers rose from the other India – the India of investors, stock market players, and the super rich. The stock market became buoyant and bounced 1.8% the next day. Foreign investors packing to go for better destinations stay put their flight. The Wall Street Journal critical of India’s reforms turned India-friendly once again. The World Bank and IMF sent flowers and bouquet to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh!

Now you know why our farmers commit suicide in their hordes? They are robbed of all their entitlements, like power, irrigation and fertilizer subsidies. They are deprived of markets and a fair deal so much so that even a campaigner like Rahul Gandhi stumbled upon heaps and heaps of discarded surplus produce like potatoes and tomatoes for want of marketing network while in the metros the price of these produce skyrocket. Any pro-poor, pro-farmer gesture by the government is instantly termed ``policy paralysis’’ which the brainless breed of scribes add to their vocabulary, understanding little they are in no-man’s wonderland!  

In the 1950s and 60s, agriculture was at the heart of the Prime Minister’s policy decisions. Slowly the foreign investors hijacked that sacred space, and today the flight of foreign capital alarms the government more than the death of a hundred farmers. Since the government does not run on bullock cart wheels, the farmers count for little and are treated like cattle to be butchered after their productive season – which is voting time! Of course, anyone with a basic understanding of economics will recognize the value of foreign investors to an economy. Admitted that India’s competitive edge comes from foreign investor confidence. But that’s no reason why you should let the farmers die the most ghastly death.  

The ethics of good governance dictates that a government elected by the people should make life easier (not harsher) for the people. Bad economics penalizes people, forcing them to tighten their belts till it breaks. The conundrum of bad economics is that it is made by good economists bereft of the human touch. Dr Manmohan Singh does not have the faintest idea how many million middle class homes are blighted by his price lash! Dr Montek Singh Ahluwalia the other day cracked a joke in right earnest while defining the poverty line, but people started attacking his joke.   

Should the people of Athens live in misery because of an economic fad held on tenaciously by German Chancellor Angela Merkel? Policy makers have the power to inflict pain on people who have done them no wrong, and go scot-free! The Greek lessons are always an education to the civilized world. But this time around, it is not about Homer and Socrates and Pythagoras but about how to avoid the mistakes of a floundering Greek economy.  

The Greek economy was one of the fastest growing economies in the euro zone from 2000 to 2007. Since Restoration of Democracy in 1974, large public deficits are a feature of Greek social model. Successive Greek governments have, to woo the Left-leaning population, ran huge deficits to finance public sector jobs, pensions and other social benefits. Since 1994, the debt-GDP ratio remained above 94%, and during the global meltdown it crossed the maximum sustainable level of 120%, and now according to some estimate is poised to hit the unsustainable level of 198%.   

Two of the country’s largest industries are tourism and shipping, both susceptible to global meltdown. Another major problem Greece faces is tax evasion to the tune of $20 billion a year! Worse still, a stunning disclosure was made that Greece has been paying Goldman Sachs hundreds of millions of dollars in fees since 2001 to hide the actual level of borrowing. 

Every move by the new French President Francois Hollande is being scrutinized by friends and foes alike. Hollande displayed genuine leadership in foreign policy when he decided to call it a day in Afghanistan, vowing to bring back his troops by year-end, 24 months ahead of the Coalition deadline. He is convinced that a prolonged stay would achieve nothing and in fact derail whatever has been achieved in terms of security and reconstruction of Afghanistan. He said so bluntly at the NATO summit at Chicago.  

Hollande’s euro initiative has sent jitters among private investors who have been fishing in troubled waters. His proposal for pan-European bonds to generate liquidity for banks is the last thing they want to hear. But already he has emerged as the star of attraction eclipsing the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, known as austerity Merkel. Hollande proposed that growth, not austerity, should be the goal of euro economies, galvanizing the enthusiasm of European leaders.   

But you can’t sell surprises to Angela who can peddle in greater surprises. A staunch supporter of the former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, known for hectoring his way around, overnight she turned his bitter critic and successor. After a year-long campaign for nuclear energy, Angela bedeviled her critics by advocating a Nuclear-free Germany, robbing them of their electoral plank. Now she would be the first to desert the austerity boat and row with Hollande on the growth boat just floated. Angela is ever the winner because she is always on the winning side!  

Purno Sangma is seen mooning with Jayalalithaa and Navin Patnaik. He is hoping to become the Rashtrapathi by gathering defectors. To Sangma, every politician is a potential defector, like himself. In one of the most hilarious interviews ever with an Indian politician, Arnab Goswami (then in his ancestral home NDTV), used a devastating punch line: ``So Mr Sangma, there is no guarantee that you will not defect again in the next six months!’’ With consummate skill, the broadcaster stripped Sangma naked with his punch line, repeating it thrice, and finally ending it with dramatic effect. The same Sangma is in the ring once again. The irony is his own daughter cannot campaign for him, since she is in Dr Manmohan Singh’s cabinet, unless she follows in her father’s footsteps!      

MAHARAJA’S MISERY!

SUNNY THOMAS

When pilots, duty-bound to fly aircraft strike work and disrupt your flight schedule, you might call it treason. And when doctors, duty-bound to save life go on strike and kill the poorest of the poor, you call it treason, too. But when Parliamentarians disrupt Parliament and write their Script of Disruption, which the rest of the nation enacts, would you call it treason?

To recapitulate the Maharaja’s misery is to trace the glory that was Air India under JRD Tata, its spectacular growth in fleet and crew, its monumental mismanagement, and its hijacking and grounding of flights by a bunch of irresponsible pilots.  

It is difficult to believe that Air India started its operation from a palm-thatched hut at Juhu aerodrome. The airline then had just one pilot, two apprentice mechanics and two piston-engine aircraft. The year was 1932 and it was known as Tata Airlines.

After World War II, the aviation industry across the world started expanding. In 1946 Tata Airlines became a public limited company and in 1948 was rechristened as Air India. JRD was the first Indian to pass the pilot’s examination, and his historic flying from Karachi to Juhu airport on October 15, 1932, was celebrated in the aviation history.   

JRD was a charismatic person who believed that every obstacle is an opportunity. Groomed by a Scottish business leader, John Peterson, who headed Tata Sons after his tenure in Indian Civil Service, the young Tata was educated in France, Japan and England, imbibing the virtues of all the cultures. However, he had one regret in life that he could not take an engineering degree from Cambridge, as his father wanted him back home.  

When JRD was 22, his father died, and ever since then he was on the board of Tata & Sons.  He was born in Paris because his mother Suzanne (`Sooni’) was a French national, but at the age of 25 he surrendered his French citizenship and started devoting himself to building Modern India, with a strong industrial foundation. 

The Golden Age of Air India was indeed JRD’s tenure as Chairman. But in 1977 when Morarjee Desai became Prime Minister, he was not happy with Tata and wanted him replaced. From then on, it was a story of steady decline for the airlines, which showed itself from time to time, though on paper business was growing. 

Vir Sanghvi, the former editor of The Hindustan Times, describes the moment thus: Being Morarji Desai –  by which I mean, a bit of a crank and a nutcase – he chose not just to punish JRD but also to punish Air India. So he sacked JRD as Chairman of Air India… Once JRD went, the babus moved in. Air India became a plaything of the civil aviation ministry and the handmaiden of the government, used and abused by ministers and bureaucrats. (JRD himself accepted only Re 1 a year as salary).  

The merger of Air India with the loss-making Indian Airlines was a fatal mistake. Instead of saving the sick airline, both airlines became sick and a national liability. The combined loss of Air India and Indian Airlines touched Rs 7.7 billion in March 2007, which went up to Rs 72 billion in March 2009.

In 2011, the airline missed salary payments and interest payments (for June, July, August) to creditors like State Bank of India, inviting Moody’s warning. Its decision to buy 111 new aircraft as part of the modernization drive has put Air India deep in the red.

The airline’s poor customer care and abysmal passenger rating (4.1 out of 10) is indefensible. It tells a tale of low morale and dismal management. Already, the government squandered Rs 32 billion in April 2009 and another Rs 67.5 billion in March 2012, double the government budget for new hospitals in the last three years!

It is time the government realized that the job of the government is not to run airlines but to run the government efficiently. Improve the plight of government hospitals in the country, open more rural health centres, improve the quality of primary education, and take care of the malnourished, whose population puts India in a dubious first – which India can do without.  

The pilots, by any stretch of imagination, are not malnourished! Robbing India’s malnourished to pay the pilots who don’t fly their aircraft is a crime we must put an end to immediately.   

 The government has only two options: sell the aircraft to a consortium of industrialists or even to foreign players who can run the airlines creditably; or sack all the pilots who have gone on strike three times in two years, and appoint a Chairman who could be a former pilot or someone who knows how to run the aviation business profitably (even the private airline owners who do a meritorious job could be considered).    

It is indeed time the government ended the Maharaja’s misery! 

THE UNSINKABLE TITANIC

SUNNY THOMAS

The Tower of Babel, the Titanic and Space Shuttle Columbia carry a fatalist flaw. And a hollow ring of absolute certainty that crashed on the land, in the high sea, and in the air. Everything that could be said has been said, and nothing new could be added, except fiction, on these tragic milestones of human civilization.

 

What an irony of fate for a man who foresaw and warned of the danger of a colossal tragedy himself became its victim! W T Stead was the much-respected editor of The Times (London) who wrote in his column that a tragedy of enormous magnitude could befall the Titanic, the proclaimed unsinkable ship, should it sink because of shortage of lifebelts and life boats. On its maiden voyage, the liner was packed with celebrities, one of whom was Stead himself! 

In 1912, the Titanic created quite a sensation across the world: The World’s Luxury Queen, the Fastest Ship Ever, Titanic the Unsinkable Liner! What attracted the global imagination was Titanic the Unsinkable!! The builders and designers of the ship (Harland and Wolff ship yard at Belfast) were less to blame than the myth-builders and myth fabricators, the White Star Line that owned her. Fabulously built for a capacity of 2222 (plus one), alas, the ship’s 1514 passengers perished on a tryst with the ocean.

   

The shortest lived ship, Titanic clocked four days of sailing on April 14, 1912 when an iceberg hit the vessel, south of Newfoundland. It was 11: 40 pm (GMT).  The hull plates buckled inward on the starboard side and opened five of her 16 water-tight compartments to the sea. Just before 2:20 am, the ship broke up and sank, with over a thousand people still on board. Those in the water died within minutes because of the freezing temperature.

 

Realizing in time the gravity of the situation, the shipping magnate and chairman of the liner, J Bruce Ismay, rescued himself instead of rescuing those who have placed their trust and money with him. The rest of his life, he lived as a recluse, ostracized by the society. Many of the victims were émigrés from Europe, seeking a better life in America, and most of those who survived lost everything and had to begin life from scratch.  

  

In a saga of adventure, Captain Rostron of Carpathia sailed 58 miles in three hours and a half through an iceberg-ridden route, halting and diverting to avert a shipwreck, to rescue the 710 survivors from their lifeboats.  

The most colourful personality among the survivors was the much interviewed and photographed Molly Brown.  The 7-year-old Eva Hart, perhaps the youngest survivor, recalls her mother’s comments: I don’t like this ship because a vessel called unsinkable was flying in the face of God. The Shipbuilder magazine (1911 edition) described the Titanic ``practically unsinkable’’ because of its water-tight doors when closed would permit not a drop of water.

As a background, it must be noted that Greenland is a kind of huge ice factory with about 20 iceberg producing glaciers. Glaciers are formed from snow, accumulating for thousands of years. The glacial ice thus formed moves slowly as a kind of viscose ice river trekking to the ocean. And the break-away ice, we call icebergs.  

In the final analysis, the speed (22 knots) at which Captain Edward John Smith raced the ship through a known ice-field in the dark waters, egged on by Ismay, in spite of three iceberg warnings, is reckoned as the primary cause of the disaster. It was precisely the time when rivals were competing for high-speed vessels, and the success of her sisters, Olympic and Britannic, gave her their share of false confidence. And some even blame First Officer William Murdoch for the tilt he ordered just minutes after they spotted the iceberg. A tilt in the opposite direction would have saved the ship, they maintain. 

 

On that fateful night, the Achilles’ heel of Titanic was exposed: the ship was not nimble enough to avoid an iceberg. In What Really Sank the Titanic, the authors claim that it was not the steel that was weak but the rivets, the all-important metal pins that hold the steel hull plates together.

In 1985 when the remains of the Titanic were finally located 2.5 miles down on the ocean bottom, it opened a new world of Titanic literature, Titanic movies, and Titanic museums.  

The exit of Columbia, with Kalpana Chawla and six other astronauts, was much more dramatic in that tragedy snatched one of the greatest moments of history! Those who came to celebrate remained to mourn.  It is widely known that when a spacecraft enters the earth’s atmosphere from outer space, it generates enormous heat that could explode the aircraft. Yet that is what happened to the spaceship that NASA launched, without adequate unmanned experiments and safety tests. Cost cutting on safety always cut short human lives that are treated as guinea pigs.

People’s idea of the universe was once so primitive that they thought gods and goddesses were up in the sky. They sent incessant rains for 40 days that the whole earth was destroyed, except very few. When humans began to muster enough confidence, which means the few became many, they decided to challenge the gods and punish them forever so that people on earth are not at the mercy of gods and goddesses. 

So a magnificent building programme was launched that would one day reach the heavens. They built and built but their ideas did not match. Out comes mortar when steel was needed, out came a pillar when bricks were needed. Something went wrong with their planning because there were too many builders. The building that was supposed to reach the sky halted in the mid-air. They called it Babel and blamed the gods. 

    

Three stages of human civilization, yet the same fatal flaw!

KARL MARX GOES TO THE MARKET!

SUNNY THOMAS

Like monarchy, oligarchy and feudalism, Marx has disappeared from the political map of the world! The disappearance of the Soviet Union and the course correction of the Chinese economy from Marx to market have proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that Marx was a grand illusion! Now even the ghost of Marx is being exorcised in Bengal by the stormy petrol Mamata and in Kerala by the swinging pendulum of power.

What Marx destroyed in Bengal was the industrial base and in Kerala the agricultural base – the state once known for its panoramic paddy fields, and blooming sugarcane flowers that wafted an aphrodisiacal aroma, and cashew fruits that drooped like the forbidden apple of the Garden of Eden! While cerebral Bengalis fled to other metros and prospered, Kerala’s paddy fields became the global showpieces of lifestyle mansions.  

As real estate zoomed, poverty is wiped out. Swiss-type villas with swimming pools and Turkish baths and tennis lawn and a mini hanging garden are in vogue. Metros like Kochi, Thiruvanamthapuram and Kottayam are magnets of real estate, setting new standards of opulence. Kerala’s craze for luxury cars can be seen from the brands on the road. 

 

A new breed of education mafia has emerged as if from nowhere. B-schools and medical and engineering colleges are sprawling across the landscape, who mistake real estate for education. Bribing to get the licence and to break all by-laws, some B-schools pay the future employers an entire year’s salary per student for campus recruitment so that they can advertise `cent percent placement’. Except education, they provide everything else, and the standards of students passing out are pathetic.

The only state in India where you can drive without licence is in God’s own country (but devils’ own people, say God’s own NRIs returning home). The number of young people dying is appalling, and almost always they are hit by tipper Lorries flying next to the speed of light along narrow and serpentine roads, under the influence of alcohol induced by `pan masala’ kept under the tongue.       

Kerala is notorious for political vendetta murders. A former Marxist leader, T P Chandrasekharan, was hacked to death, with 51 wounds, which show the savagery of operation and the desperation of the party. Leaders with mass appeal are hounded out by the KGB-type leadership and, in sheer disgust, some like the slain leader have left and joined other parties.  

Leadership is about saying the right thing the right way the right time. But Sushma Swaraj got it all wrong by telling the nation Vice President Ansari lacks the stature needed for a President. Of course, Ansari did not play the game that BJP wanted during the Lokpal drama in the Rajya Sabha. But by disqualifying Ansari in her statement, Sushma Swaraj has in fact disqualified herself from the 2014 prime ministerial race – assuming that perceptions give the psychological advantage.

The French presidential election proved the invincibility of substance over style. The least winnable candidate Francoise Hollande elaborated his pro-people program as lucidly as possible – subsidise water, electricity and fuel, generate 60,000 jobs for teachers, close down the oldest nuclear plant –  while Nicolas Sarkozy’s histrionics and swing to the right mid-stream with xenophobic anti-Muslim, anti-immigrants’ policies failed to win the nation’s endorsement. So the socialists are back after a 22-year hiatus in the Elysee Palace.    

The burglar did congratulate the house owner for installing the latest model burglar alarm. But he assured the house owner the alarm would go only after the burglars leave, just to inform that the act has been committed and that he can go back to sleep. Dr Manmohan Singh, the house owner, has been spoken to in Mandarin, soon after Agni V was launched, say rumour mills. (Our television editors insist that the Chinese premier and Pakistani President should have rang up our prime minister personally and congratulated him for installing the ballistic missile that could strike any of their cities at the press of a button!) 

   

TELEVISION GORILLAS

SUNNY THOMAS

Truth and TRP are poles apart. What dips when TRP rises is truth, and what rises with TRP is trivia. Truth powdered, watered, shaken, filtered, cooked and doctored is TRP. (TRP short for TRP-raising stories). It is true that Kaushik Basu made an intelligent statement in Washington – being intelligent, he couldn’t help it!

Swiftly, our TV channel editors went on damage control mode, as they believe every intelligent statement damages the Indian economy and the Indian diplomacy, leading to policy paralysis. Taking the cue from our TV editors, the EDC (Eternal Damage Controller), Pranab Dada, went into Operation Lightning, issuing clarification after clarification; the red-faced PM growing redder and redder by the hour, Rahul Gandhi accompanied by Priyanka and Vadra giving roses to the fleeing Foreign Direct Investors, imploring them not to leave this land of opportunity, and an Emergency Cabinet Meeting of Television Gorillas summoned by our channel editors to save the nation from the brink of disaster. That’s TRP!     

To escape from the mud-slinging combat between Ravi Shankar Prasad and Manish Tewari on Indian’s most volatile channel (Times Now), my friend switched to India’s oldest channel (NDTV 24X7) to find the same Ravi Shankar Prasad throwing mud at the same Manish Tewari; and after five minutes, my friend escaped to India’s most professional channel (CNN-IBN) and, lo and behold, the same Ravi Shankar Prasad and the same Manish Tewari throwing the same mud at each other and enjoying it. Party spokespersons are omnipresent, and when you can’t be omnipresent, quit, like honest Manu Singhvi.  

My  `Lady’ colleague the other day found the cat-and-mouse play of Renuka Chowdhury and Nirmala Sitaraman too much of a countryside gossip, and switched channels thrice to find that women are more omnipresent than men – to be seen on four channels simultaneously! 

Election time is Bofors time; otherwise, Bofors is quite dead. All that needs to be known are out in the open and can be inferred. It has high mud-slinging value and hence TRP-hunters give it a hot pursuit. Quattrocchi laughed all the way to the Swiss bank but there are no angels in the scam! Congress lost one election because of Bofors, but to expect Congress to lose all elections thereafter is mere Great Expectations.   

The American economy has not yet recovered from the Bush stroke. Faced with the history’s worst trade deficit and budget deficit to save capitalism from extinction, the Obamanomics is painfully slow in creating jobs to keep the youth anger and frustration at tolerable limits. With the Euro zone in the doldrums and the Arabs in a mood of revolt, Asia is the only relatively tranquil place. But our industrialists L N Mittal and Sunil Mittal are unhappy that their profit margins are not catching up with their expectations because Indian economy is not that reform friendly.   

The BRIC summit – which has the potential to buffer India and China, Russia and Brazil, from another global meltdown – found little TV coverage because there was no scandal in the news! And scandal determines the quality of news for TV channels. Courtesy instantly disqualifies all panelists and broadcasters, and a modicum of intelligence is the next disqualifier. Shout and interrupt as much as you can, if you are a panelist, and but in if you are a broadcaster so that not a line of intelligence emerges from the panel discussion, which has become the soul of broadcasting. 

An Award for the Rude Broadcaster of the Year is just announced (even Rude Panelists may be considered). Readers can send their suggestions to editor@ onionlive.com