Many years back when I
was in India, I was watching an interview of Mr. Narayana Murthy, the chairman
of Infosys. He was narrating a story about a meeting he had with the
politicians of his state Karnataka. Apparently, the politicians were planning
to promote their regional language, Kannada, while dissuading English education
in state-funded schools. Murthy went around the table to ask each politician
where do their kids go to school – all the kids either went to the best schools in
India or abroad, and of course, they were all learning English. Amused, I told
the maid in our house how the politicians in Karnataka are trying to promote their
regional language in school over English. She replied that we should ask
where do these politicians send their kids to school. So, one does not need to
be chairman of a software company to figure out what the politicians are up to.
It is in their favor to keep the population less educated, less equipped,
economically weak and subordinate to them, as this will allow them to keep
their powers unchecked and unquestioned. I had told the maid of this incident
because I knew that she had made extra efforts to ensure that her kids learn
English. Less education does not mean that a person is a fool to fall into the
tricks of the politicians. Fools are fools. The people who look up to politicians as their leader for guidance in each step of their lives are the ones who are easily duped and manipulated.
Fast forward to 2016. The
prime minister of India announced one fine day that within a few hours, the currently
circulating currency notes will no longer be valid. Everyone needs to get the
notes exchanged with the new ones being issued by the RBI. This created a huge
turmoil for many months with long queues in the bank, people losing their daily wages, small
businesses suffering a loss in revenue, etc. The leaders claimed that this
will clean the economy of black money. I was watching a popular news debate “The
Big Fight” on NDTV – the topic was demonetization. A young girl from the
audience said that “she is willing to stand in the line to get the notes
exchanged. Our nation is being built and we should all look forward to that”. That
comment sparked an emotion of hope and patriotism. Everyone clapped. I also
felt a tinge of emotion. An year later, the Government admitted that they could
not recover any black money. People had found ways to get their black money
converted to white via many new avenues that had sprung up overnight. The entire
experiment was simply like an ant colony optimization scheme – the conditions
changed, a large number of people started figuring out the best possible way
out, many loopholes and methods were identified and voila – we are rich as we
were before. The young girl on The Big Fight was not from a poor family (people from marginal backgrounds
hardly ever make up the audience of TV shows). She must have not suffered
much. Who suffered were the poorest of the poor. They don’t have any say in
the news channels as yet. In December 2016, just a month after the demonetization
announcement, I was visiting some remote areas of Malwa region of India. The
artisans over there gladly took a bank cheque as a payment for our shopping,
but they told us that the nearest banks are many miles away. The workers they
hire for block printing do not have access to banking – they get their wages in
cash, they use boxes to store their money or sometimes dig pits in the ground to hide their savings. Most of them are not educated and
are quite unaware of what is happening in the country. At the time of demonetization,
they lost all their savings. To get their notes converted they had to walk many
miles to queue up outside the bank. Those days banks were running out of newly
issued notes. So, even if they spend their day not working but going to the
bank, there was no certainty that their money will be exchanged. Great job Modi.
It is said that Modi is a
PM who connects with the people. I heard a part of the speech he delivered
at the Madison Square Garden. He made two jokes, one that man is now a slave to the mouse
(referring to a computer mouse), and the second that it costs more money per mile
to take an autorickshaw in Ahmedabad than the per mile cost of ISRO’s Mars
mission. I did not laugh. Thanks to Whatsapp, I had heard these jokes before. So, we have a PM who goes center-stage and cracks whatsapp jokes. Not
surprisingly, he connects to the people, as that’s how we do small talk in our
drawing rooms. All fluff and no substance. As an example, when Raghuram Rajan talked about buying and selling of dosas to explain an economic concept, it became famous as Dosanomics. The leaders of yesteryears apparently made the mistake of presenting political, social and economic issues as serious matters.
