A Winner All The Way

The Great Reformer has won the day - and lives to fight another day. Despite his all too obvious lack of leadership qualities, Manmohan Singh has been a winner all the way: first as a techno-bureaucrat, then as Finance minister and now as the Prime Minister of the country. As Finance Minister in the minority PV Narasimha Rao government in the early nineties, the good doctor administered the tottering Indian economy perhaps its bitterest ever shock therapy by ushering in the most sweeping reforms imaginable and – wonder of wonders – not only got away with it but has actually been feted for it ever since. While there was never any doubt about the fact that the former Governor of Reserve Bank knew his economics, he was certainly a political greenhorn when Rao pulled him out of nowhere to make him the Finance minister of the country. But Manmohan was nothing if not a quick learner – even in a field which had never been his domain. And he put the lessons in realpolitik that he learnt under the tutelage of perhaps the most underrated Prime Minister of the country to good effect when he became Prime Minister himself. Having seen from close quarters how the wily Rao weathered the very real threat to his minority government in 1993 by scripting the infamous JMM bribery case, Manmohan did a Rao in August 2008 to save his crippled government which had just lost its crutch in the shape of the Left. More than four years after the event, I still remember every single detail of the dramatic happenings on that eventful day. In my mind’s eye, I can still see him coming out of Parliament, V Narayansami and others in tow, beaming from ear to ear and flashing the ‘V’ sign from various angles for the benefit of the camerapersons in attendance. [The visual has actually become a bit of a signature tune for MMS given the zillion times that it has been aired on television as a ‘File Shot’ ever since. If you are a little attentive, you can watch it on TV even now, generally with the headlines.] Television channels, on their part, kept beaming the bearded winner all day long with the contemporary hit ‘Singhh is Kingg’ playing loudly on the background. It was the day Singh won his first real political battle. But it was also the day he lost his innocence. Asked by an enterprising reporter about allegations of crores of rupees changing hands to save his government, the just anointed Kingg asked a counter-question by way of an answer, “But where is the proof?”, knowing fully well that no power on earth can unearth the ‘proof’ now that he had weathered the challenge to his Prime Ministership. How true he was!! He has a Teflon-like quality that no other politician living or dead has/had. Nothing sticks to him. He may preside over the most brazen act of bribery to save his government, but nobody has so much as pointed a finger at him. It has all been duly blamed on the dirty-tricks department of the Congress. He may acquiesce in the massive loot of the exchequer in the form of the spectacular spectrum scam, but nobody is ready to believe that he facilitated it knowingly. Even now when it has been proved beyond any shade of doubt that the systematic selling (it was not even selling, but pure and simple gifting away) of the family silver, nay coal, happened right under his watch as the Coal minister, the commentariat is busy singing homilies to his ‘personal integrity’. Pray, what use is it if the man with this precious attribute has no compunction whatsoever in putting up with people utterly devoid of this precious attribute all around him. Years ago, when the Harshad Mehta scam blew on the face of an unsuspecting nation still recovering from the after effects of Dr Singh’s shock therapy, Manmohan had said he was ‘not going to lose any sleep over it.’ May be we should have paid greater attention to the import of what he had said back in 1993. May be we should have known that the good doctor could sail through the longest-ever procession of the most brazen scandals without losing any sleep over it. The only thing over which Manmohan loses sleep, it would appear, is when the natives do not understand the ‘economics’ behind the hike in fuel prices/cap on the number of subsidized LPG cylinders, when the courts tell the government to distribute rice rotting in the open due to lack of storage space free to the hungry or when the’ The Washington Post’ dubs him a ‘tragic figure’. For all his benign visage, Manmohan Singh has a vicious side to him which bursts through the carefully cultivated exterior every now and then. Odias who watched his televised address to the nation on Friday could not have missed a phrase that he used during his address: ‘Paisa ped par nahin ugta.’ [‘Money does not grow on trees’]. It was a phrase he was using publicly for the second time. The first time was when MPs from Odisha had gone to request him to for a special package for the state. When the PM’s insensitive and below-the-belt comment became a raging controversy in the state, he clarified that he was ‘just joking’. I wonder which one is more offensive; the original comment or the ‘joke’ part!! Just as Narasimha Rao needs to be complimented for spotting the man for the moment at a time of great economic crisis, the Empress of Congress needs to be given 10 out of 10 for spotting the politician in Manmohan. Just as his mentor kept Sonia Gandhi at bay for as long as he was at the helm of the party and the government, Manmohan has kept the perennial crown-prince waiting in the wings for as long as he is at the helm. Bravo Manmohan! [This column was first published in The Political and Business Daily.]

The Sky Is The Limit

Aseem Trivedi’s take on the all pervasive corruption in the country is no great shakes as a cartoon. It lacks the understated humour of a RK Laxman or the subtlety of a Sudhir Dar. It is anything but imaginative in the depiction of the celebrated lions in the national symbol of Ashoka Stambha in the shape of wolves, the substitution of the Ashoka Chakra with the danger symbol of a skull and bones and the pun on the slogan ‘Satyameva Jayate’. It is almost child-like in the simplicity of its message and in the unpretentiousness of its expression. In fact, it appears more like the work of a student venting out his anger against a particularly stern teacher in the form of a badly drawn caricature of the teacher on the blackboard than the outpouring of a mature artiste pontificating on the alarming proportions that the epidemic called corruption has assumed in the country. But sedition??? The charge is laughable and needs to be dismissed with the contempt that it richly deserves. The Indian State, the Constitution and our National symbols must be on very shaky foundations if they are threatened by the work of a mediocre activist cartoonist. Our national symbol can’t possibly be so fragile as to break at the anguished cry of a young man disturbed by corruption all round him. But then what better can one expect in a country where the Prime Minister’s Office (not the Prime Minister, we are told) gets worked up over an article published in a foreign journal describing the presiding deity of that office as a ‘tragic figure’? While on the subject of sedition, I am reminded of the Laxman Choudhury case some two years back in which the Mohana-based journalist was booked under this relic of the British era and put behind bars for full 79 days for nothing more sinister than the fact that a packet containing some Maoist literature had been sent to him. He was not even caught in possession of the leaflets which had only been addressed to him. But that did not stop the police from booking him for sedition, among other charges, the lower courts from upholding the charge and the Chief Minister from refusing to do anything about it despite a delegation of senior journalists meeting him twice and urging him to intervene. [I remember wondering at the time whether, with the abundance of Maoist correspondence at my residence and the intermittent Maoist calls on my cell phone, I too was not a fit case to be charged with sedition!] For those who do not know, Laxman Choudhury was no closet Maoist or even a Maoist sympathizer. He had been pounced upon by the officer-in-charge of the local police station for his temerity in doing a story for his newspaper on the alleged nexus of the local police with ganja traders. It might be of interest to the readers of this column (I hope there are some) that, in a case of divine justice, the same officer was caught red-handed by vigilance personnel while accepting a bribe of Rs 10, 000 from a ganja trader!! But let us return to Aseem Trivedi and his cartoon. To those arguing that everything, including freedom of expression, has its limits, I would like to pose two questions. First, what use is the freedom of expression, supposedly a fundamental right guaranteed to every citizen of the country by the Constitution, if can’t even allow the innocent, albeit crude, expression of anguish over a phenomenon that is tormenting millions of Indians? Second, who fixes the ‘limits’? Those whose heckles are raised at the mere mention of the Gandhi family? Or those who howl at the Prime Minister being called a tragic hero? On second thoughts, why blame just the Congress variety of politicians? Our entire political class put on televised display a palpable ignorance of the concept called freedom of expression, a brazen disregard for a contrarian point of view and an unhealthy level of intolerance during the debate in Parliament over a cartoon in NCERT school books. Babasaheb and Panditji, the dramatis personae in the cartoon, must be turning violently in their graves!! The danger with keeping the bar low in the matter of such a precious thing as freedom of expression (not for nothing did Indira Gandhi feel the need to abrogate this fundamental right during the Emergency) is that it would keep coming progressively down till it reaches a point where any utterance that casts even a minor aspersion on a politician could land somebody in jail. It would be the freedom of expression of the mute. The litmus test for curbs, if any, on the freedom of expression of an individual or an organization has to be whether it incites violence, communal or otherwise. But curiously, no government has mustered the courage to put restrictions on the ‘freedom of expression’ of the Bal Thackerays and the Badruddin Ahmeds in the country even as the ‘long arms of law’ homes in on the Aseem Trivedis, the Binayak Sens and the Laxman Choudhurys. Nearer home, a Jagdish Tytler can get away with instigating a crowd of boisterous Congress supporters to go berserk and launch a murderous attack on a police woman. But all governments would move heaven and earth when someone lampoons their ‘honourable’ leaders as the Mamata Banerjee government in West Bengal showed a few months back. If such intolerant curbs on the freedom of speech are condoned, the day is not far off when the government machinery, with all the powers and gadgets at its disposal, would eavesdrop even on roadside, drawing room or office gossip (some of which could invite calls for death sentence, given the level of intolerance of our politicians) and haul up both the speakers and the listeners on the charge of ‘sedition’ or ‘waging war against the State.’ The sooner the sedition charge is banished from the IPC, the better it would be for Indian democracy. As for that most precious gift called ‘freedom of expression’ given by the Constitution of India to every citizen, THE SKY IS THE LIMIT.

The Toughest Job in India

Guess who has the most difficult job in India today? No, it is not Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Nor is it UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi. It is not the editor of the venerable Old Lady of Boribunder or the captain of Team India either. Hard to believe though it is, it is the Congress’ man for all seasons, Manish Tiwari. True, he was banished into the sidelines and barred from the television studios by the party high command for a while after his intemperate outburst against Anna Hazare at the height of the Anna wave last year. But after the erudite Abhishek Manu Sanghvi shot himself in the foot with his indiscretions with a lady lawyer, the grand old party had no choice but to fall back on the tried and trusted MP from Ferozepur. Since his reinstatement, he has been holding fort at TV studios every evening virtually single-handedly, performing the seemingly hopeless task of defending the indefensible with aplomb. [The portly Renuka Choudhury, a poor second choice, is good for comic relief with her inane comments and weird mannerisms. But when it comes to defending the party or the government against some serious, credible allegations of corruption or impropriety with meticulously dug out facts and carefully thought-out arguments, she is not a patch on Tiwari.] Being a lawyer has certainly helped Tiwari. But what has helped even more is his rare facility with the spoken word: the choice of words and phrases, the diction, the pitch, the subtle sense of humour, the gift of repartee, the ability to put on an expression .. you name it. More importantly, he shares all these attributes – and more - in the two most relevant languages for the spokesperson of a national party: English and Hindi. It is indeed rare for a person to be so good in two completely different languages. Tiwari’s is unquestionably the most unenviable job in the country right now. After all, not many would relish the prospect of being pounced upon by an increasingly combative media on a daily basis. A horde of blood-thirsty television reporters at the daily afternoon briefing and a no-holds barred television anchor in the evening – all in a day at the office! What makes the task particularly difficult is the fact that scams and scandal have tumbled out of the cupboards of the UPA government and the Congress party with a frequency that is too hot to handle for even the most stoic person. When he is not is answering a question on a corruption allegation against a minister, he is defending a leader accused of sexual misdemeanours. But Manish is rarely, if ever, fazed by the shrill, virulent nature of the questioning. He may lack the intellectual air of a Abhishek Manu Sanghvi. But make no mistake. He would do the defending just as efficiently - and often more effectively - because of his ability to become aggressive and shrill when the occasion demands – something that the balding senior lawyer clearly lacks. Watching Tiwari defend Union Tourism minister Subodh Kant Sahai on an English news channel the other day, I was amazed at his ability to turn the tables on the accuser – in this case the redoubtable Arnab Goswami. “Arnab Goswami”, he told the man feared by the highest and the mightiest in the land in a matter-of-fact voice, “cannot sit in judgment over something that has already been judicially adjudicated and by no less than the honourable High Court.” He was referring to the fact the Delhi High Court had thrown out a PIL against Sahai charging him with much the same malfeasance that has now led to a full-throttled cry for his resignation. ‘Does Arnab Goswami have any respect for the High Court?” he continued the harangue. Poor Arnab! He did not know where to hide and resorted to the easy option of leaving the floor open for Ravishankar Prasad, the BJP national spokesperson, to step in. Given the facts that had come to light since the Delhi High Court judgment - that Sahai had written to the Prime Minister recommending SKS Ispat’s case for coal block allocation, that the minister’s brother was not only a director in the company but was also present at the screening committee meeting that took the decision to allocate coal blocks to his company, the fact that the Prime Minister, who was then also the Coal minister, was in indecent hurry to accede to Sahai’s request and so on (all of which ‘Your Channel’ trumpeted all day long as its exclusive) – Tiwari’s bid to hide behind it would have been, in the hands of lesser mortals, an act of clutching at straws. But the wily lawyer turned the straw into a veritable handle to beat the anchor with. There are times when he can get exasperating. He can test your patience and – at times – make you feel like bashing him up black and blue. I personally know many people who just cannot stand the very sight of him. I have myself found his shrillness occasionally off-putting. But when I imagine the enormity of his task and the general aplomb with which he has been doing his unenviable job day after day, month after month, year after year and scandal after scandal, I often feel like doffing my hat to him. If you do not agree, just imagine yourself for a moment in his position and think about how you would have defended the blatant disregard for all cannons of fair play, the flagrant violation of all rules and norms and the rampant corruption that have marked the allocation of coal blocks – besides several other things - in the UPA regime and you would immediately understand what I mean. It is not easy defending the indefensible, is it? Well done, Manish!

No Odia Please, We Are Odias

Naveen Patnaik has many distinctions, but at least one of them is of the dubious variety. Even 12 years after becoming Chief Minister of Odisha, he still can’t speak more than a smattering of Odia - “Apana mananku samastanku mora namaskar” being the most frequently heard. I do not know of any Chief Minister in the history of independent India who became one without knowing the language of the state - forget about staying on in the hot seat for 12 long years. It looks as if Naveen is DETERMINED not to learn Odia! How else does one explain his steadfast refusal to speak even a rudimentary level of Odia a full 12 years after becoming Chief Minister? After all, IAS and IPS officers in the state are apparently given no more than six months to learn class VII level Odia. In fact, many of them speak enviable Odia if the bytes they give on television news are anything to go by. In contrast, our popular Chief Minister revels in his ‘native’ tongue of English! Every time he tries speaking in Odia, he unwittingly provides comic relief to those around or watching him on the tele. The ultimate irony (and shame, for me) came at an NDA (of which Naveen’s party was part then) public meeting at the PMG Square in Bhubaneswar a few years ago – in 2006, if memory serves me right. The then and current Chief Minister of Jharkhand Arjun Munda – who, by the way, is the MLA from the place this columnist belongs to – spoke extempore for about 12 minutes in Odia! When our Chief Minister’s turn came, he unsheathed his paper and then started reading out a speech in English. It was a mixed feeling. I was ashamed that my Chief Minister was not shamed enough by his previous speaker to abandon his prepared English text for once and start speaking extempore in Odia. At the same time, I felt not a little elated that my MLA had cocked a snook at the Chief Minister in his den. If Arjun Munda can do it, I told myself, Naveen certainly can do it. Arjun Munda had to learn Odia because a section of the electorate in Kharswan – his Assembly constituency - speaks Odia. And here was our Chief Minister whose whole electorate is Odia and he still stubbornly refuses to speak even an acceptable level of Odia. That is when I stumbled upon this discovery that Naveen is determined not to learn Odia. Having arrived at the hypothesis, I then groped around for the possible motivation. After long and careful deliberations, I now think I have zeroed in on it. Somebody has apparently drilled it into Naveen’s mind that his three successive election wins had a lot do with his inability (or is it unwillingness?) to speak Odia. In fact, it has been his USP! The moment he starts speaking in Odia like you and me, he becomes part of the hoi polloi. I remember asking a senior BJD leader in the run up to the last elections about how Naveen communicates with the people in the rural areas. “Naveen Babu logon ki maan ki bhasha padh lete hain (Naveen Babu can read the language of the people’s minds),” answered the suitably fawning leader. [The interview was in Hindi.] What I did not ask him then (it didn’t go with the interview that I was doing) was: but how would the people read their leader’s maan ki bhashawhen they can’t understand the language he speaks? After all, they can’t be expected to have the super natural gifts of the supreme leader to read other people’s minds without speaking or understanding their language, can they? If my hypothesis has a rational basis, it can be safely assumed that Naveen Babu will never really make a serious effort at learning Odia till he bites the dust in an election – a possibility that looks extremely remote in the foreseeable future. So, we Odias have to suffer his heavily accented English, his pedestrian Hindi and his atrocious Odia at least till 2014, if not beyond that. Let us leave aside his Odia for a moment and speak about the language that he is most comfortable with: English. Under the spell that he has cast on us Odias with his Doon-honed accent , one thing has gone almost unnoticed: the fact that Naveen is not only reluctant but also terribly uncomfortable about speaking extempore even in the language of his choice. When was the last time he spoke extempore in English – on any subject - for five minutes at a stretch? When he does have to speak extempore - mostly before the cameras of news channels – he comes across as a person who is not in command of his words, notwithstanding his ear-to-ear grin. Public speaking is certainly not one of Naveen’s strengths. That is why he always keeps it short (God bless him for that) unlike most of our leaders. This fear of being caught off-guard is perhaps also the reason for another dubious distinction of his: not having a proper press conference in his 12 years as Chief Minister! [This feat will certainly take some beating.] People from the television biradari tell me that when they go for their customary daily dose of the CM’s byte, his office asks them to give the questions in writing first. The Chief Minister apparently ticks off the questions that he does not want to answer and asks his officers to prepare the answers for the rest. Now that he has been rudely jolted out of his stupor by the midnight coup bid by his erstwhile mentor Pyari Mohan Mohapatra (who recently admitted that all his efforts to make Naveen learn Odia came to nought), Naveen should realize that speaking the language of the people will take him closer to them. It will enhance his appeal, not diminish it. He now has an additional reason to learn to communicate in Odia soon: the need to interact with the grassroots level workers and leaders of his party to keep tabs on the pulse of party men and to smell any possible revolt brewing in the party. Go for it, Naveen Babu. You will be a winner all the way. [PS: How I wish Prof. RK Mishra would someday write in some detail about his experience of ‘teaching’ Odia to his illustrious pupil! ] [This piece was first published in The Political and Business Daily.]

Writers as Editors

I have always been intrigued by the number of eminent litterateurs who have been – and continue to be – editors of frontline newspapers in Odisha. I can vouch for the fact that a prominent writer is the first choice of many entrepreneurs when it comes to handing out the editorship of the newspaper they are about to launch. It is as if being a writer, poet or a critic of repute is all that one needs to become an editor.
I have nothing against writers. In fact, I admire the writing of many of those who have turned editors, usually at a ripe old age when they have retired from whatever they were doing all their life. But I am afraid I don’t quite buy the theory that being a writer – even an outstanding one – is enough qualification for someone to don the garb of a newspaper editor. It may have been an eminent qualification at a particular historical juncture when the language – indeed the state itself – was struggling to carve an identity of its own. The history of the pre-independence era and the first two decades of the post-independence period is replete with stalwarts who excelled both as editors and writers.
But the world of newspapers has changed beyond recognition since then. A newspaper today has no place in it for somebody who writes his weekly column containing nuggets of wisdom and scholarship with an occasional write up thrown in between two columns, engages colleagues in profound pontifications on the matters of the world and stays scrupulously clear of the mundane business of hard news. [Most of these grey eminences are also great draws at literary or cultural functions.]
Today’s newspaper editor has to be a hands-on editor, somebody who does not detest the ‘dirty’ business of news but actually revels in it. He cannot afford to be like this editor who, when asked for his email id, asked his PA with the questioner listening loud and clear; “Gouranga! What is my email id?”
May be it is a generational thing because one is yet to see proprietors or promoters opting for a relatively younger writer as an editor. It is almost always a 60-plus veteran who is preferred for the job. The proprietor, if he or she is launching the newspaper, perhaps believes that an eminent writer brings some brand equity to a completely unknown commodity. If it is a case of hiring a writer as editor of an existing newspaper - which, by the way, is very rare – the thinking perhaps is: a well known writer will add some value to the product. [The choice of jargon from new economics is deliberate because that is what a newspaper today is at the end of the day – a ‘product’.]
With due apology to those who have graced the editor’s chair, most of them only have a passing acquaintance with the events happening around them and around the world. Very few of them have definite, well thought out views on the burning issues of the day. I cannot resist sharing here my own experience with a famous writer – and an outstanding one at that, I must say. Unfortunately, my experience with him was not at as a writer but as an editor. Hours before he arrived in the office, a bunch of stapled editorials neatly torn off from the day’s newspapers would be placed at his table by the office boy. The editor would come around 2 pm, run through the bunch of editorials and then settle down to write the day’s editorial. More often than not, the bunch of editorials that he has just gone through would determine not just the subject but also the content of the day’s editorial. The editorials would frequently be a mish-mash of the points already made in them.
I am not for a moment suggesting that every writer turned editor is like this gentleman. But I dare say many of them are a little too removed from the world of news – perhaps deliberately so. And a man who is not in the thick of news is a liability rather than an asset as an editor these days.
The propensity to hire writers as editors perhaps has its origins in a widely popular misconception peculiar to Odisha that somebody with a ‘literature background’ has a much better chance of excelling as a journalist, presumably because both involve the business of ‘writing’. But as someone who comes from precisely such a background, I can assure you that nothing can be farther from the truth. A man with a literary bent of mind, in fact, has to work twice harder to unlearn all that he has been taught in college and university and learn to write for a newspaper - or a news portal for that matter. There is very little scope for the flights of fancy that a man with a ‘literature background’ is highly susceptible to.
Returning to the subject of writers as editors, I cannot really find an explanation for the reluctance of proprietors to make a professional journalist the editor. Most of them would rather ensconce themselves in the editor’s chair and leave the discharge of editorial responsibilities to a professional journalist who is humble enough to work under a non-journalist as an editor and nice enough not to complain about it. I must confess I was really elated when the venerable ‘Samaj’, considered the most conservative media house in the state, appointed one and then another professional journalist as the editor.

[This column first appeared in The Political and Business Daily]

The price of being a hack

Every profession has its own hazards. But nothing really matches the hazards that a professional hack has to contend with. The hard physical labour is the least of the problem. But the unearthly hours that one has to keep and the unhealthy habits that one has no choice but to acquire, however, are a different ball game altogether. A natural corollary of the two is a constant fight with the family.
Just one instance of what a journo has to endure will suffice. Early on Saturday morning came the information that the two interlocutors named by the Maoists would hold a press conference at the State Guest House. Having appeared at a live chat on the subject on the issue on a TV news channel at 9.00 am, this columnist had to file a story before going for the press conference. By the time the copy was through, it was 10.45 am. As I began to rush out, my better half (bitter half is perhaps a more appropriate description) started her usual lament about my skipping breakfast. When I said I would eat something outside, she was furious. With very little time to engage in a prolonged argument with wife, I had to settle for a compromise formula – a glass of fruit juice instead of a regular breakfast.
So far, so good. But the important part of the story was in what followed. When I reached State Guest House a couple of minutes past 11 am (thanks to the short argument with his spouse), there was not a soul to be seen. Surprised, I went upstairs and asked one of the interlocutors, who said the press meet had been postponed to 12.30 pm as they were busy preparing the note. Anxious to utilize the intervening time, I rushed to the bank for some urgent transaction and then finished a couple of other chores before ringing up a colleague who had stayed put in the Guest House since morning to find out if the rescheduled press conference had begun. “No yaar, the two Secretaries –Pradeep Jena and Sanrosh Sarangi - are huddled with the two negotiators inside the room. The press conference will start only after they finish their confabulations”, the fiend informed.
By the time I returned to Guest House, it was 1 pm. There were plenty of souls around this time, but all of them were loitering around the campus. There was no sign of either the negotiators or the government officers emerging out of the room. The only development that had taken place was that the Home Secretary had joined in a few minutes back. There was no word on when the talks would end. But returning home was not an option since no journalist worth his pen (or mouse) would want to miss out on such an important event – especially if s/he belongs to the electronic media. So, along with a host of journalists, I too had to hang around the place despite repeated queries from home over the ubiquitous mobile phone (one gets nostalgic thinking about the happy pre-mobile days).
The booms of about 15 television channels remained laid out on the table for nearly two hours before the three Secretaries finally entered the State Guest House lounge at 3 pm. But lo and behold! The ‘press conference’ lasted precisely 60 seconds with the Home Secretary speaking three sentences each in English and Odia and refusing to take any questions. The assembled journos, including me, were made to look foolish. Is this what they had wasted half the day for, we wondered.
Worse was to follow when I reached home. As I was beginning to settle in front of the computer, the ‘bitter half’ almost screamed; “Do you have some sense of proportion? Do you realize that it is nearing 4 and you have not had a grain inside the stomach since morning?” Having realized long ago that discretion is the better part of manly valour on such occasions, I quietly settled on the dining chair for lunch.

[This blog was first published in The Political and Business Daily]

The Prodigy vs. The Normal Boy

Debates are meant to end in a resolution, with one side prevailing over the other or – more often than not – both sides conceding some ground and agreeing to settle for a middle ground. But this one has dragged on for close to seven years now with no end in sight. One is talking about the debate over what is right for Budhia Singh: training and preparing him to be a future marathon champion or allowing him to be a ‘normal’ child; leaving him in the care of a dedicated coach like the late Biranchi Das or providing him ‘scientific’ training that does not take a toll on his tender body; acknowledging the fact that he is a prodigy and grooming him accordingly or rejecting the claim that he is made of some special stuff altogether.
There are forceful arguments to back each of these positions. Those who believe that he could have been groomed as a possible marathoner say champions are made not by pampering children but by putting them through the rigorous training regime that is the lot of every aspiring athlete. A ‘normal’ child leading a normal life with his/her share of fun, mischief and toffees, they maintain, can never become a champion. The counter argument is equally unexceptionable. A child is a child and nothing is more important than his/her childhood – not even the prospect of an Olympic medal some day.
Budhia’s present coach Rupanwita Panda, while acknowledging her ward’s amazing endurance, points to the fact that he was made to run marathon distances at a very tender age with not enough gap between two runs by his erstwhile coach when even adult marathoners are advised to undergo a one-month long period for recovery after every run. Running marathons frequently could have proved fatal for him, she says. But the other side says for all the ‘scientific’ training that Budhia has had at the Sports Hostel, he is not winning even school races, forget about running a marathon. It sincerely believes that for all practical purposes, Budhia has been ‘lost’ for good. The rejoinder to this argument by the votaries of the scientific training school is that Budhia has never really been a short distance sprinter; he has always been a marathoner and his strength has always been his ‘endurance’ rather than his speed.
Budhia’s endurance, however, is one thing over which there is very little argument. He can still take six laps at a stretch of the 400-meter track where he trains (the maximum allowed by his present coach) without any sign of fatigue. His coach still believes that he can be a very good middle distance runner, if not a marathoner, in future. She points to Budhia’s steadily improving timing in doing the laps to justify her belief. But at the same time, she is emphatic that rushing things at this stage could be disastrous.
Meeting Budhia recently was an eye opener. The boy that one met in Kalinga Stadium bore very little resemblance to the Budhia of yore who lived in the Judo Hall in BJB Nagar. He has grown bigger, taller and fairer (may be it is the ‘scientific’ training that has done the trick). He is a much mellowed child now. Gone is the fun-loving, mischievous and at times irritable boy with wild mood swings. In its place, there is now a 10-year old who listens to you with rapt attention, speaks confidently and coherently (though the peculiar twang remains) and even joins his hands in a ‘namaste’ when you finally bid goodbye. The shoeless, shabbily dressed Budhia has been replaced by a neatly shoed, immaculately dressed boy of 10 who even speaks a smattering of English these days (after all, he is studying at one of the most sought after schools in town – the Chandrashekharpur DAV School).
It is clear that his days at the Judo Hall are a hazy, distant memory for Budhia. It does not appear that he misses his old pals at Judo Hall much. He does, however, remember and miss his first coach. He gives the distinct impression of a happy, contended boy at ease with his surroundings and circumstances.
Certain things, however, remain unchanged. As was the case in the Judo Hall, he is still the baby of the team in his new abode – the Sports Hostel. All other boarders of his hostel are at least four years older than him. (The minimum age for entry to the hostel is 14, Budhia being an exceptional case.) Like in Judo Hall again, he is apparently loved and pampered by all his seniors in the hostel.
The distance from the Judo Hall to the Sports Hostel inside Kalinga Stadium is no more than seven kilometers. But in traversing that distance, it would seem, Budhia has stepped into a whole new world. The promise of an Olympic medal in marathon is now a long forgotten dream. He now strongly resembles the ‘normal’ boy that many wanted to make out of him. A ‘normal’ boy who plays a bit of sports!

The court as the ultimate arbiter

We Indians have a time honoured tradition of knocking on the doors of the court for just about everything under the sun. The reasons for the recourse to court range from the sublime to the bizarre. Courts have been asked to adjudicate on matters as diverse as whether or not Ram Lalla was born at the disputed site where the Babri mosque stood till December 6, 1992 and whether consensual gay sex should or should not be a criminal offence. More often than not, however, it is a mundane matter of life and death which brings an individual, a group or an oragnisation to the doorsteps of a court room: a poor man harassed by the local administration, government employees denied their rightful dues by an apathetic government, tribals fighting for their forest based livelihood threatened by a mining or industrial project and so on.
There are two primary reasons for our obsession with courts: an inability (or is it unwillingness?) to come to a mature, mutually satisfying conclusion with the other party and an innate belief that the court knows best.
Two recent judgments – one each in the Supreme Court and the Orissa High Court – call into question this assumption that the court is the last word on everything: from how much compensation an accident victim should get to whether or not the election of a candidate is void.
Let us start with the one nearer home. Adjudicating on a petition filed by Nishikanta Mishra of Nationalist Lawyers’ Forum, the Orissa High Court ruled that the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) can draw water from Mahanadi through an under-construction intake well in Cuttack for its refinery project in Paradip. The honorable court supposedly based its verdict on the report of an expert committee which had apparently concluded that drawing of water – a small matter of just 40 million gallons a day - for the refinery would neither affect the drinking water and irrigation needs of the people of Cuttack and surrounding areas nor threaten the embankments of Mahanadi in Cuttack city.
This columnist is too much of an ignoramus on the subject to even think of questioning either the verdict that the honorable court delivered in its wisdom or the report of the expert committee on which the verdict was presumably based. But certain questions do come to the mind. The first: why do expert committees appointed by courts on matters of a technical nature are almost always headed – and manned, one may add – almost entirely by retired bureaucrats? Are they the sole repository of all knowledge and wisdom on matters technical? For all knows, there could be an expert outside the cozy circle of ex-bureaucrats who could argue that the remedy suggested by the expert committee and accepted by the court – the dredging of the riverbed on a 6.5 km stretch from Naraj to Jobra – is worse than the disease. Should not such voices also be heard before ruling on a matter of life and death (and that precisely is what it is for millions of people dependent on the Mahanadi)?
But what takes the cake in the judgment of the honorable High Court is the list of do’s it has drawn up for the public sector giant: pay Rs. 10 crore to the Cuttack Shishu Bhavan, Rs. 3 crore to the Bhubaneswar-Cuttack Police Commissionerate for the modernization of infrastructure for safe and smooth flow of traffic and five hi-tech ambulances and construct a water treatment plant in Cuttack city to meet the drinking water needs of its people “as part of its corporate social responsibility”.

Sorry, Your Honour! But one thought you were requested by the petitioner to rule on whether or not the intake well at Hadiapatha would affect the drinking and irrigation water needs of the people and endanger the embankments along Mahanadi in Cuttack city. It was infinitely more important than the CSR obligations of a corporate house. If you thought, in your wisdom, that it would not impact either, the matter should have rested there. Why make the company pay for things totally unrelated to what it wants: water for its refinery. What, pray, is the link between the sufficiency or otherwise of water in Mahanadi and the number of beds available in the Cuttack Shishu Bhavan and the number of high-tech ambulances at the disposal of the authorities in Cuttack and Bhubaneswar? [In fact, IOC can legitimately challenge the High Court verdict asking it to pay what it has been asked to pay when its basic contention – that the intake well at Hadiapatha would not affect the people – had been upheld by the court. I have, however, no doubt whatsoever that it would do nothing of the sort, relieved as it is having the monkey off its back.]

The other question that comes to mind has to do with something entirely different. Was the fact that IOC is a public sector behemoth weigh, even if it was so small on the scale as to be called negligible, with the honorable judges? And the related question; would the verdict have been different had it been a private and a much smaller company?

Now to the other judgment, incidentally also related to rivers and water, delivered by the Supreme Court in the last week of February. In a judgment that could have far-reaching consequences, the apex court chided the Union government and asked it to implement the ambitious project of interlinking rivers in a ‘time-bound manner’ because delay in its implementation was raising the cost of the project. A three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice SH Kapadia also appointed a high powered committee manned mostly by babus from both Union and state governments, save two ‘social activists’ to oversee the implementation of the project.

The debate on the desirability of the inter-linking project has not even begun in right earnest in the country and it will take years before a conclusion is arrived at. Given the fact that the idea faces such stiff opposition from environmentalists, farmers and even experts, it is entirely possible that a solution may never emerge at all. They are of the firm view that inter-linking would lead cause serious ecological imbalance, lead to displacement of millions and still not fulfill the purpose for which it was conceived in the first place: to raise the irrigation capacity of the country to 160 million hectares by 2050. Murmurs of protest against the SC verdict have already begun and there are unmistakable signs that the opposition is going to get more and more vociferous in the days to come.

The petitioner in the Mahanadi case at least has the option of challenging the High Court decision in the Supreme Court, though there is no guarantee that the apex court will overturn the HC ruling. But where does one go if one has a problem with a verdict delivered by the Supreme Court (I am sure millions of people have a serious problem with the SC ruling on inter-linking of rivers)?

The New Look Naveen

There is a twinkle in his eyes, a quiet confidence in his demeanour and a new found swagger in his steps these days. You don’t have to be a professional ‘body language’ reader to see the remarkable (and all too visible) transformation that the just concluded panchayat elections in the state have brought about in Naveen Patnaik.
Just about a fortnight before, the Chief Minister and BJD boss gave the distinct impression of a man under seize. The alleged Pipili gang rape case had hit the government, the party and Naveen himself like a ton of bricks. Both the government and the party were reeling under the combined weight of the vociferous protest by Opposition parties, women’s organizations, Dalit rights’ organizations and others. With the National Commission for Women, the National Scheduled Caste Commission, civil rights organizations and – last but not the least – the media constantly breathing down his neck, Naveen was clearly on the back foot. Having positioned himself as the messiah of women all through his reign, the Chief Minister gave the distinct impression of a man who was unable to fathom what had hit him and how he should respond to this crisis. Those who have seen him on a national English news channel answering questions on the Pipili case would remember the sense of unease and embarrassment in his demeanour.
Hardly had he recovered from the shock of the Pipili case and the embarrassment of having to get rid of his Agriculture minister when the hooch tragedy struck. Though it was not the first such tragedy during his 12-year rule, this one came at a particularly difficult time for him. Questions were raised about everything. Why was the government trying to pass it off as a ‘medicinal tragedy’ rather than a hooch tragedy? Why was the Excise Commissioner in the same post for six years at a stretch despite the fact that there had been at least two major hooch tragedies during his tenure? Why did not the government have a contingency plan ready when it had been warned about precisely such a thing happening after production of country spirit stopped at the Aska Sugar Factory following the burst in the molasses palnt?
Naveen responded to these questions the only way knows: getting the Excise minister and close friend AU Singhdeo to resign; sacking, suspending or transferring dozens of officials, including the Excise Commissioner and the Drugs Controller and arresting over a thousand people all over the state for illicit liquor trade.
Nothing exemplified Naveen’s sense of desperation more than the way he campaigned for the panchayat elections. Observers noted that no other Chief Minister (himself included) had addressed as many campaign meetings (over a hundred, according to most estimates) during a panchayat election. Naveen hit the campaign trail with gusto, giving it everything that he had.
The results are there for everybody to see.
Armed with the resounding victory his party has notched up, winning no less than 26 out of the 30 zilla parishads, Naveen is now ready to take on the world. Gone is the diffidence, the hesitant manners and the shying away from the media. Seizing on the
opportunity provided by the latest guffaw by the bumbling UPA government in the matter of the powers proposed to be given to the National Centre for Counter Terrorism (NCTC), Naveen did something that one does not ordinarily associate with him: assembling a dozen Chief Ministers and regional satraps of disparate persuasions to raise the banner of revolt against
the UPAgovernment at the Centre. The man who kept a safe distance from the media just weeks ago created a record of sorts by appearing in live discussions on almost all national English television channels on the same day. The vociferous voices of protest that rent the air just a month ago have now been submerged in the deafening celebrations of BJD workers. The decimated Opposition, which went and hammer and tongs at him till the election got underway, has now been r e n d e r e d speechless. Civil rights organisations have exhausted their lung power while news related to the Pipili case and the hooch tragedy has receded into the inner pages of newspapers – and thereby away from public memory. The new found confidence saw Naveen
unilaterally announcing the candidature of Ranendra ‘Raja’ Swain for the Athgarh by-election, ignoring the openly expressed reservations of chief party strategist Pyari Mohan Mohapatra about Raja.

Not many people credit the BJD supremo with political acumen. But the ‘outsider’ has obviously learnt the one lesson that is nursery rhyme for any aspiring politician: public memory is short. The second lesson that he has mastered is: nothing succeeds like an election victory.

[PS: This blog was first published in “The Political and Business Daily”]

The Missed Call: India’s Lifeline

I seriously doubt if Sunita (name changed) has ever made a call on her mobile. Every single time she picks up the phone and makes a call, it is a ‘missed call’, the Great Indian Innovation. For some reason which is still a mystery to me, her particular brand of missed call would be so brief that bat an eyelid and you would actually ‘miss’ it. Just a single tinkle of your hello tune which, if you are not close enough or attentive enough to your mobile, you are more than likely to miss. But you are supposed to not only not miss the solitary beep, but call back within minutes, if not seconds. And once you call, she would just not stop. An average conversation with her lasts between 25 to 40 minutes. The cost is all yours, but the pleasure all hers! Thoroughly disgusted with this very irritating habit of Sunita, my wife stopped responding to her missed calls. Lo and behold! The missed calls simply stopped coming! Much to the relief of my wife, I must add.
The ‘missed call’ – and not the Great Indian Railways or Indian Post – is the true lifeline of India. The range of uses it is put to is truly breathtaking. You are waiting for the car. The driver gives you a missed call. You understand that he has arrived and rush downstairs. If that sounds a little too elitist, let us choose a more ‘aam admi’ example. The neighbourhood rickshawala who ferries your child to school gives a missed call and you realize it is time for your child to rush out. You get down from a bus, give a missed call to someone and s/he lands there in minutes to pick you up. I have absolutely no doubt that every reader of this piece can, from his or her own experience, list dozens of ways in which the missed call is used.
This kind of use of the missed call is based on sound economics and sound practical sense. After all, why do you need to spend, even if it is only a few paisa, when you can get what you want done with just a missed call? No wonder users of this kind of need-based missed calls form the overwhelming majority. But there are also those who use the missed call not to save their money, but that of others. Like this Good Samaritan friend of mine, who has asked his office peon to give him a missed call whenever he needs to speak to him. He would call back – to save a few paise from the peon’s mobile bill!
When it comes to creative use of the missed call, you have to hand it to the new age youth. Recently, I was aghast to hear that a 20-something youth has had 10/12 affairs – all of them born out of ‘missed calls’ (out of responding to ‘missed calls’, to be more precise). If the guy who narrated this to me - with the Casanova blushing like a coy bride throughout – is too be believed, there are apparently ‘hundreds’ of girls and boys scouring the airwaves through the proven path of the missed call for a virtual affair which may or may not transform into a real affair. I would have dismissed the whole story as so much hogwash had it not been for a story that I had read just days before on the front page of a leading Odia daily. A young couple had fallen in ‘missed call love’ and decided to come to Bhubaneswar and marry. The marriage solemnized (in a temple, where else?), the couple stayed in a lodge. On the fourth day, the boy told the girl her mother had suddenly taken ill and he had to rush. He promised to return by evening but never did. Desperate calls by the girl to the number that had been instrumental in the birth of their affair elicited the ‘switched off’ answer. Shattered, she went to the Mahila police station and that is how the whole thing came to light.
For every single way of using the missed call, there are at least ten different ways of misusing or abusing it. A friend’s wife had a harrowing experience for about a week after she committed the cardinal error of calling back after receiving a missed call on her mobile. The voice at the other end belonged to a young man, who kept pestering her with professions of love though dozens of missed calls a day, without realising that the lady she was proposing to was perhaps old enough to be her mother! Her husband, however, played spoilsport, ending the Cupid-struck boy’s short-lived dalliance with a mouthful on day.
Personally speaking, I am not a big fan of this business of the missed call. To be honest, I positively detest it. But I shudder to think of the day when the missed calls would be chargeable. I have no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the whole nation would rise against it like never before, not even during the brief euphoria of the Anna Hazare movement last year. The UPA government survived the Anna wave. But I doubt if can withstand the missed call avalanche if it were to make it a paid service.
May be the UPA government knows that already. May be that is why it has, despite a supposedly reformist Prime Minister, never paid any attention whatsoever to the persistent – and some would say legitimate – demand of the telecom operators that they should be allowed to bill customers for missed calls. In a country where governments have been known to fall because of the rise in onion prices, this one is a real hot potato for any political party or formation – and not just the UPA – to handle.