November 20, 2017: My simpleminded take on the first anniversary of demonetization

I am not an economist. Can't fault you if you disregard this post as the incoherent ravings of an Economics ignoramus. This would be a good time to stop reading this post.

I keep hearing that demonetisation was a major economic reform. This puzzles me.

1. A government embarking on a systematic program of privatisation of PSUs is clearly triggering a process of opening more space for private initiative and private capital. This is a reform that will produce effects and outcomes over an extended period.

2. Reduction or elimination of licenses, permits and other preconditions for establishing a business is again a reform that has enduring impacts.

3. A major tax overhaul in direct or indirect taxation will have impacts over the long haul. If it was well conceived and competently executed, this would be a major reform and yield benefits for decades.

4. The abrogation of privy purses was a populist action that may even have been the right thing to do at the right time but it can't count as a reform. It took an entitlement away from families that had already lost royal privileges a few decades earlier. It had no enduring gifts to offer the economy.

My point is this. Not all acts of government, including grand gestures, no matter how sizeable their immediate impact, constitute reform. To qualify as reform, they must open new opportunities, and continue to open them, for an extended duration. Is that duration 3 years? 5? Even longer? I can't say. But if all the impacts dissipate or if things generally return to status quo ante, what was reformed?

Which brings me to my incomprehension of demonetisation as reform. Yes, it was a grand gesture. Yes, it unsettled hundreds of million Indians for several months. But was it a reform?

The government may realise a few extra income tax or indirect tax filings this year. Revenue department might investigate some accounts loaded with cash last year that may produce more assessees whenever they are able to conclude their inspection/investigation of these deposits. But sooner or later, all this will conclude and all the benefits will have been booked.

A hundred analyses and commentaries have pointed to the success of the decision by pointing at the electoral payoffs that the establishment collected in UP. That still doesn't make it a reform, just a successful grand gesture.

Over to the economists now to set me and my stupid argument to rights.

"We are going to have to let you go"

Show me someone who can say 'Human Resources Development' without a trace of irony and I will show you someone who has no self, or any other, awareness.

Ever since business schools and, by implication, business graduates have existed, so have congenial sounding euphemisms for entirely uncongenial phenomena. 'Flexible compensation' is a nice way of saying salary cut with the elusive possibility of performance linked pay. 'Offsite meeting' connotes a stressful, sleepless weekend when the company pays for your booze and expects you to work 14-hour days to produce a half-logical, one-fourth-plausible business plan which incarnates the wild fantasies of the business head. And "Performance Appraisal" means a theatrical performance designed to humiliate the employee: not once, not even twice, but three times. First, the employee is asked to fill her own appraisal document, aka the confessional statement which shall be henceforth be used as accusations by various reviewers. Then, there's the annual walk of shame to the boss's enclosure which begins with crushing anxiety and ends in fatally perforated self-esteem. Finally, there's the increment letter, quantifying the despair in economic terms.

Crowning all these gems of HR doublespeak is the dreaded statement, "We are going to have to let you go".

I speak from experience. On two occasions in a corporate career which lasted from 1985 to 2012, I was at the receiving end of this blatantly hypocritical line. I was not asking to be relieved. I had a wife, two growing children (read exponentiating expenses) and a colossal mortgage to defray. And on both occasions, the job market was beginning to dry up as the economy slowed down. Thankfully, there was a (light) cushion of savings and a large community of well-wishers which allowed the family unit to trundle, only slightly bruised, through choppy waters until, not a moment too soon, the next assignment came my way.

People don't ask to be relieved. Nobody asks to be relieved. I have resigned from jobs, even in a huff once when I was young and single and India's economy was in the first flush of galloping growth, soon after the great unleashing of animal spirits by M/s. Rao and Singh. I had a fundamental disagreement with my boss. Walked to my desk, picked up a memo pad, slipped in a carbon paper or two, and proceeded to write a terse but unambiguous letter of resignation. I wasn't asking to be let go. I was telling him I was done, finished, gone. There have been other resignations too; most have been elaborately constructed announcements of a forking of paths and a record of acknowledgements and gratitude. But none, not one, has ever been along the lines of "Chhodo mujhe, please chhod do, janey do mujhe, bhool jao ki mera tumhara kabhi koi rishta tha".

What, then, is this 'letting go' about? Gaslighting.

There. I said it. HR speak is all about gaslighting. Here's what a self-help website says about gaslighting. 

"Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that occurs in abusive relationships. It is an insidious and sometimes covert type of emotional abuse where the bully or abuser makes the target question their judgments and reality.1 Ultimately, the victim of gaslighting starts to wonder if they are losing their sanity".

I entered the corporate world as a management trainee in 1985. Back in those days, employment conveyed a sense of lien: on a salary and some perquisites, on a career path which would involve many promotions and fancier designations, on stability of employment which would be conducive to taking and discharging long-term debt for buying expensive things like homes and cars. That first employer, Procter & Gamble Company, prided itself on offering lifetime employment and the claim held up to scrutiny. People really did join the company as rookies and retire, four or more decades later, having never even contemplated alternative employment.

Employment today is no more than visibility of the next pay cheque or three. En route, however, is incessant corporate gaslighting. To ensure that the employee progressively loses her moorings on not just the outside world but even her own inner universe of ambitions, aspirations and dreams.

Employment, in 2021 and the disconcertingly bleak immediate future is a demolition of the employee's epistemological sense; a blurring to grey of the difference between what is indisputably verifiable and what is merely assertion.

Look what it finally delivers. An ex-employee who exits the door carrying the entire blame and shame for the untimely end of her job. Who struggles with guilt for the merely harbouring the thought that the employer was the real cause of the severance. Whose epistemology is broken.

Am I glad I left it all behind!

If you didn't see the glass marbles in her eyes, you could easily believe Free India was still alive!

There is no good way of sharing bad news, so let me rip the band-aid off without further ado.

There is little of substance left in India's freedom. Whatever will happen on Independence Day is merely and strictly a pantomime. All the set pieces will be in place. The vast grounds of the Lal Qila will be teeming with youngsters assembled from schools and colleges. NCC or Bharat Scouts & Guides uniforms will be freshly ironed. Other kids will wear tricolor livery and sit in orderly rows to reveal the colours of the Tiranga when the drone cameras hover overhead. Excitable anchors, swept up in paroxysms of patriotic apoplexy, will go breathless in their search for new and even more soaring metaphors for the many-splendoured joys of our Azadi. All these will be no more than opening acts, of course, because the real star act for the morning, all 56 inches of chest, designer apparel, dazzling shahtoosh shawl and yards of turban topped off with perky tura, will stride up next, and launch into his endless ramble about deshbhakti, atmanirbharta, swabhiman, vikas and, as I learned just a short while ago, "partition horrors". He will then allude breezily to how we, the people of India, ably assisted by all the clods and incompetents who preceded him in the prime minister's office, have failed him. And how, despite our feebleness and incompetence, he is back at work, bearing the weight of all 135 crores of us upon his divine shoulders, much as Lord Krishna held aloft the Govardhan Parvat.

The anchors, given all the time he consumes with his tirade, will rush back, their laudatory paeans to the incarnate lord all ready, to flatter the grand panjandrum. The NOIDA brigade will shower their visionary, dynamic, fearless, towering plaudits, which will, of necessity, be punctuated at metronomic frequency with choice expletives for anybody and anything which still opposes or dissents. Successes will be appropriated from far and wide (Neeraj, Bajrang, Sindhu, Lovalina, the Hockey teams, having featured in the morning ramble, will now appear live on channels to reaffirm their gratitude and undying loyalty).

That, briefly, is tomorrow's news today. 

In this orgiastic bacchanal, we will be expected to collectively incinerate all the wounds, agonies and malignancies visited on India's body and spirit, since 2014. Most grievous of all? We will be expected to clap and cheer full-throated, as we watch the life force our freedoms; of our democratic republic; dissipate into an steel-grey, grief wracked sky. 

The great taxidermist will walk back, well pleased with himself. Free India will have become the finest trophy to be mounted on the walls of his swish new palace, in the necropolis of central vista.

Our fragile social compact

Trigger warning: hate speech and genocide

Yesterday, a bunch of Hindutva extremists gathered for a 'protest' in the heart of New Delhi, within sight of Connaught Place, and not quite two kilometres from Sansad Bhavan, the Parliament of India.

Their widely publicised objective was to demand the repeal of a series of what they claimed were 'British era' laws. What actually happened was ghoulish.

"Jab mulle kaate jaenge, Ram Ram chillaenge", the mob screamed. When we put Muslims to the sword, they'll scream "Ram Ram" for mercy, which will not be forthcoming.

Watch the video before you read on https://twitter.com/shivangi441/status/1424365069219995650?s=20

However much it upsets me, there will be those who see this video and suggest that it is best to ignore such 'fringe lunacy'. They will refuse to accept that this lunatic fringe is (a) not lunatic but a carefully orchestrated part of the Hindu radicalization project and (b) no longer fringe, given the growing acceptance for such sentiments in the poshest salons and living rooms, even those with Husain or Raza canvases on their walls (oh, the irony of a Husain Durga or a Raza Mandala in a closet bigot's home)!

I remember a time when our inclusiveness and assimilation were the pride of India. A time when we celebrated with gratitude the syncretic traditions which characterised everything from our attire, our food and music to dance, architecture and worship; literally every facet of our lives. A time when we acknowledged the Gharana Parampara in Hindustani Classical Music, a tradition which would have been a pale shadow of itself if you were to somehow exclude or erase countless Muslim ustads and their shagirds, who kept the art alive, generation after generation. A time when we thrilled to sher-o-shayari with all its subtlety, poignancy and sensual charm. A time when the Taj Mahal was a monument to soaring love, not a reminder of humiliation. A time when young people, regardless of religion, responded to Gandhi's call for Swaraj, and shed their blood when the tyrannical regime unleashed lathi charges and discharged guns at them.

That India had a big heart. It might have been itself destitute but it opened its home and hearth for millions of refugees fleeing war in East Pakistan. Our soldiers served with the UN Peace Keeping Force in conflict zones around the world. Our economy may have been on a ventilator but our soft power gently exerted itself. As early as the 1920s, Uday Shankar, with Anna Pavlova, prima ballerina of Imperial Russia by his side, was already conjuring a beautiful new dance form at the crossroads of Kathak and Ballet. By mid-century, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan's Sarod and Pandit Ravi Shankar's Sitar began to mesmerize audiences  around the world, with their dulcet strings. The Beatles came to India, to imbibe our classical music and our spiritual legacy. And freedom movements across the colonised world heeded Gandhi's voice of peace and temperance to frame their own struggles against the extortionate coloniser.

Today, that India, that Bharat, that Hindustan lies sundered. A cannibal monster has taken its place.

Unless there really is a god, who really does incarnate as a mortal every time cruelty and injustice are ascendant, we are one horrible step closer to doom.

p.s. If your political and social beliefs line up with those of the RSS/BJP, and you intend to continue voting for that malignant monstrosity, I would be extremely grateful for you to block, or better still erase, my number from your contacts at this very moment. I really cannot even pretend to be your friend any longer.

Purity is piffle (and only ethnic cleansers find it pretty)

It appears that scientific scepticism, emphasis on dialogue over hostility, openness to new ideas, assimilation of diverse cultural strands- no matter where they originated- a 'liberal' (don't miss the quotes) mind, is now emblematic of a Nehruvian conspiracy to drown out alternative theses that represented the 'real' India. These alternatives, I am asked to believe, involve much more धर्म and परंपरा, and diverge sharply from the fake consensus that was really in the nature of leftist propaganda. We have been duped and our minds are contaminated. An epic 'cleansing' or 'purification', शुद्धिकरण, of our minds, and nothing less, is imperative. And imminent.

I have two issues with the argument:

1. India has a liberal tradition that predates Western Colonisation by centuries, perhaps millenia. Remember that Vedanta allows or even encourages multiple interpretations. From Nyaya, Vaisheshik, Mimamsa (of two variants) to Lokayat or Charvak, they coexist and none has claim on immutable truth. We don't need the West. We can show them a thing or two about the liberal temperament. Like Khajuraho and Konark.
2. An epidemic called globalisation has infected the planet probably from back to the earliest years of the Silk or Spice Routes. People and ideas have been travelling back and forth across continents and oceans. As this mighty churn turns, everyone is touched by its centrifugal and centripetal forces. In recent years, the Human Genome project has been revealing how everyone is now of mixed ethnicity: we are not Asian or Caucasian, not Native American or Nubian or Pacific Islander but a little bit of everything. Ideas have been cohabiting and people have been procreating without inhibition about provenance. We began as a timorous homo sapien tribe in the Rift Valley. A million years on, having branched away to inhabit and adapt to every terrain and climate, we have spent the last few thousand mixing it all up. To speak now of a pure race is an unattainable goal. Then again, we may be closer now than ever before to recreating the original, undifferentiated stock that came out of Africa. Entropy was replaced by enthalpy and we are children of the confluence.

We can work up a froth about a pristine, uncontaminated state but our planet's civilisational history conspires against it. We can no more bring back this ethnic or religious or cultural purity than we can put humpty dumpty together again.

The food we eat is not our own. Chillies, potatoes and tomatoes came from the Americas. Our customs aren't our own. The demure घूंघट is a modified hijab. Our language isn't our own either. My mother tongue, Marathi, is shot through with Arabic and Persian, Portuguese and English. Would you strip away these variegated, many splendoured colours? And what do you think you'd be left with, at the end?

Let me break this to you gently. Your utopia of the unsullied state is only ever going to exist in your febrile dreams. Deal with it.

 If an year were to be a day, then today marks a week since I lost Baba, my father.

Let me rephrase that. Baba got reabsorbed, scattered, into the elements whence he had been made. Molecules, which once comprised him, are now in the air, water and soil. Baba is in the Arabian Sea and the water which evaporates from it and travels as the monsoon cloud across the continent. Baba is in the rain which brings nourishment and revival to parched land and sweaty brow. Baba is in the air which sustains all things. Baba is in a molecule of iron which will fortify a carrot, a carbon atom in the sweet sugars of an alphonso mango, a mote of nitrogen in a protein strand called DNA which is the stuff of life. Baba is here and there, in you, and in me, in passing into eternity, he has returned to the immortality which we are all guaranteed.

This, in essence, was how Baba understood rebirth and continuity, objective enough to survive the most rigorous scientific scrutiny, subtle enough to invoke wonderment in the most jaded of cynics.

Baba valued one virtue above all others: Scepticism. Everything had to be questioned. Why was it the way it was? Could it have been another way? What caused it to happen? What is likely to happen next? This critical lens was often turned upon himself. However, the questions were always unexceptionably kind. The idea was to understand, not assign blame.

His exploring eye took in every possible field of endeavour. He loved art, representational or abstract, in all its still and plastic forms. With him, I learned the right way of looking at Hussain and Pyne, with him I pondered Rodin's Thinker. He laughed with me as we read long passages from "Meet Mr. Mulliner" or "Jabberwocky" together. He led me to George Gamow's 1, 2, 3, Infinity. And to Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, bringing alive the wonders of Mathematics and Physics and the wonderment he felt as a part of the Universe which turns upon and observes itself. He could compare the Shukla and Krushna Yajurved one moment and Kukubh Bilawal and Bilaskhani Todi in the next. He was a baby when he was with the little ones; they took to him instantly, perhaps because they saw his guilelessness and innocence. But when he spoke to Jayant Naralikar about the Chandrasekhar Limit, the physicist was left wondering how a lay person could speak about it with such authority.

His prowess with the Times of India crossword (later inherited by Economic Times) was such that he would solve it all in his mind, then, picking up a pencil, fill in all the squares at the intersections of Across and Down, because he hoped, fruitlessly, that some day I too would pick the paper, and find my path to loving the puzzle through cracking clues using the hints and tips the filled squares gave me. His preternatural skills with Mental Mathematics would stun even the keenest Vedic Maths aficionados: he could cube three digit numbers in his head!

His otherworldliness ensured that his gigantic mind was never intimidating and never ever used to humiliate anyone, no matter the provocation.

His name was Ratnakar, the Ocean of Priceless Jewels. I am what I am because some of the lustre and coruscation rubbed off.

It is 16.15 now and I must stop, because it is exactly 7 years since his spirit wafted away.

Purity is piffle (and racial purity is a nazi's most obvious 'tell')

It appears that scientific scepticism, emphasis on dialogue over hostility, openness to new ideas, assimilation of diverse cultural strands- no matter where they originated- a 'liberal' (don't miss the quotes) mind, is now emblematic of a Nehruvian conspiracy to drown out alternative theses that represented the 'real' India. These alternatives, I believe, involve much more धर्म and परंपरा and diverge sharply from the fake consensus that was really in the nature of leftist propaganda. We have been duped and our minds are contaminated. An epic 'cleansing' or 'purification' of our minds, and nothing less, is imperative. And imminent. 

I have two issues with the argument:

1. India has a liberal tradition that predates Western Colonisation by centuries, perhaps millenia. Remember that Vedanta allows or even encourages multiple interpretations. From Nyaya, Vaisheshik, Mimamsa (of two variants) to Lokayat or Charvak, they coexist and none has claim on immutable truth. We don't need the West. We can show them a thing or two about the liberal temperament. Like Khajuraho and Konark. 

2. An epidemic called globalisation has infected the planet probably from back to the earliest years of the Silk or Spice Routes. People and ideas have been travelling back and forth across continents and oceans. As this mighty churn turns, everyone is touched by its centrifugal and centripetal forces. In recent years, the Human Genome project has been revealing how everyone is now of mixed ethnicity: we are not Asian or Caucasian, not Native American or Nubian or Pacific Islander but a little bit of everything. Ideas have been cohabiting and people have been procreating without inhibition about provenance. We began as a timorous homo sapien tribe in the Rift Valley. A million years on, having branched away to inhabit and adapt to every terrain and climate, we have spent the last few thousand mixing it all up. To speak now of a pure race is an unattainable goal. Then again, we may be closer now than ever before to recreating the original, undifferentiated stock that came out of Africa. Entropy was replaced by enthalpy and we are children of the confluence.

We can work up a froth about a pristine, uncontaminated state but our planet's civilisational history conspires against it. We can no more bring back this ethnic or religious or cultural purity than we can put humpty dumpty together again. 

The food we eat is not our own. Chillies, potatoes and tomatoes came from the Americas. Our customs aren't our own. The demure घूंघट is a modified hijab. Our language isn't our own either. My mother tongue, Marathi, is shot through with Arabic and Persian, Portuguese and English. Would you strip away these variegated, many splendoured colours? And what do you think you'd be left with, at the end? 

Let me break this to you gently. Your utopia of the unsullied state is only ever going to exist in your febrile dreams. Deal with it.

Meritocracy Shmeritocracy

Society, in India or anywhere else, is divided into strata. The gradients across strata may be gentle; apparently true of some Nordic countries, or steep (you don't have to look far to find examples); but they are there. It is as if tiering is genetically encoded into the Social Contract. 

In centuries past, fiefdoms and kingdoms were the power/political structures prevalent in most parts of the world. Rights and privileges were inherited, patrilineally in most cases, as were servitude and bondage. In India, we had pioneered the "Caste" system, which used specious reasoning to explain, and perpetuate, social hierarchies. In many other places, the liege or king was ordained by a pliant priesthood as directly descended from the gods themselves. Pharaoh was seen as Ra, the Sun god, incarnate. Even today, the Japanese royal family claims lineage from Amaterasu Omikami, the Sun goddess. Here in India, many Rajput feudal lines identify themselves as Suryavanshi or Chandravanshi, literally, Sun descendants or Moon descendants. 

Divine origins were an excellent ploy to stop all contentious quibbling in its tracks. As was the ironclad law of Karma. You were condemned to incarnate as a life form repeatedly, until your karmic slate was cleansed of the stains of bad deeds and thoughts. If, in this turn of the universal screw, you were a scavenger or leather tanner, it was only fair price to pay for a previous life of sin. Conversely, the brahmin or kshatriya had earned his exalted station by meritorious deeds in earlier lives.

Previous and subsequent lives may have gone from the vocabulary but the hierarchy is undisturbed. It is imperative, particularly for those who are winning the societal sweepstakes, to find a new framework, which retains the inevitability of divine rights or karma, but frames it in more palatable, contemporary language. 

I give you MERITOCRACY. 

Why am I successful? Because I have been capable, committed, diligent and ever willing to learn. What is more, I have kept this up my entire life. When I was in middle school, my parents got me into a coaching class which prepared me for competitive examinations and/or my high school boards. I worked harder than my peers, aced every test and eventually, got a prized, priceless, admission into a premium institution. I didn't have the benefit of a leg up, unlike other kids who availed of seat reservations to traipse in with much poorer academic records. They wallowed in complacency while I continued to bend my back, put my nose to the grindstone and abjured all pleasures, thus reaching graduation day as a proud recipient of medals, citations, scholarships and endowments. That same spirit of a pursuing excellence makes me the success I am. Now compare that with those indolent louts who envy my success but wouldn't expend a fraction of the effort. They thought they could be my peers just because they entered college on a reserved seat? Heck, no. I got here due solely to my "MERIT".

Sounds convincing? 

Advantages which we were, quite literally, born with, are hard to recognize. As a person with no handicaps or disabilities, you don't really see any reason to be particularly grateful for what is widely true about a large majority of the population. PODs, persons of disability, have to struggle to integrate and keep pace. When you hear "disability", you are probably thinking visual deficiencies, speech or hearing problems, or learning impediments like ASD or Autism, etc. Those disabilities are easily perceived, although not necessarily remedied. The incidence of such PWDs, sadly, is a mere fraction of the endemic disability: accident of birth into the wrong caste, community or religion.

How did the circumstances of my birth shape my life? Born into a Hindu brahmin household, I had well educated parents and grandparents. English was the preferred language of conversation, and books full of wonderful knowledge filled many shelves. Opportunities to experience and discover everything, from foods and cuisines of the world, to archaeological finds, travels to distant places and conversations with interesting, urbane people, were mine at every step of the way. The soil I grew in was fertile and well irrigated. The warm light of inspiration suffused my days. To all intents and purposes, I lived at an elevation which was shrouded in a metaphoric cloud from 99% of the population. 

If this was not enough, I entered the workplace equipped with a network of contacts which would have been the envy of those with undistinguished backgrounds. Doors opened, as if by magic, when I merely looked at them. I spoke the insider's lingua and understood barely perceptible winks and nudges, far outside the ken of those not to the manor born. 

If this still sounds to you like the victory of "merit" over whatever is its opposite, I will leave now, so you can enjoy the views where, it is said, the Sun don't shine.