Politicians

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.