Category: Life

Posted on

Pride and the nation

Muzaffarnagar is the district in Uttar Pradesh,India where riots broke out in August 2013.  A chilling account of the monstrous violence perpetrated during this riot was published in a weekly news magazine in December. It was disturbing to read the extent of brutality, bestiality and bloody human cruelty towards fellow villagers simply because they belonged to another religion and community.

 

What is it that makes men turn into monsters during such situations? How do they gather the nerve to raise a weapon, thrust it through another human, hack the bodies, sodomise them and burn them? It is a cruelty that no other species on earth heaps on their kind or other kinds. And after committing such abominable actions, how do these men live their lives as if nothing has happened. How do they conduct daily acts of labour and love among their families? How do their wives, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, who may be aware of their involvement in the killing and the raping sprees, live with them in peace?

 

Living in the comforts of my home, far removed from the scenes of these riots, keeps me insulated from a direct impact of the happenings there. But after reading the accounts of the riots, I am disturbed immensely and try as I might, cannot think of anything else. Rapes and riots has become so much a part of Indian society that for years one read about them in the papers and moved on. Until the most brutal of them all woke me up along with the rest of the nation. Nirbhaya’s courage in fighting till the end during her gang rape and afterwards in the hospital shook me up last December. For the first time in my life of fifty years I went on a protest march only so as to calm my nerves and channelize my rage and feeling of helplessness.

 

My heart goes out to the survivors of the riot: women, children and men in the relief camps who are now braving the cold harsh winter in addition to their already subhuman treatment at the hands of their attackers. Even as many others who have returned to their homes are making the enormous effort it must take to achieve some semblance of normality after such harrowing experience.

 

It is disturbing that political parties are pointing fingers at each other and rubbing salt in the wounds of the victims. In recent days the entire political class, government machinery and most of the media went into a rage over a woman diplomat’s strip search at the hands of law enforcement agencies following accusations of visa fraud in the US. It is devastating to know that the very same people among the political class, government and media remain untouched by the plight of the riot affected. The pride of the nation is seemingly hurt when an outsider so much as flicks it with a finger nail, but is presumed to remain intact when our own people stab it with knives and batons.

 

The people ofIndia, all of them – which ever class, caste, region, political affiliation – need to realise that the honour of our whole nation is violated when some of us turn into beasts and brutalize our women, children and men. Neither any attack by terrorists in current times nor invasion by armies of other nations in our long history has injured our pride or hurt our humanity more than our own pathetic inaction towards our own people’s attacks on their fellow citizens in the name of religion and/or caste.

 

The “Bharat Mata” we so reverently hail on each national occasion or political rally is engulfed in sorrow and shame over the brutal conduct of some of her people through decades since our independence. There have been riots and brutalities all overIndiasince 1947 till date. Some of us with intellectual attachments to different political ideologies or affiliations to different political parties like to compare different riots through the years in terms of scale and extent of brutality. Debates are conducted and columns written about which riot was bigger, more heinous, lasted longer and who is more to be blamed. A kind of “your riot is worse than mine” argument and often political game. The details of extent of damage, number of victims and position of people who instigate the riots are important and legally to be handled to see that the perpetrators are punished. But the damage done to our nation and its so-called pride is equal whether one person is brutalised by another in the name of religion or caste or gender or if 200 or 1000 people are brutalised. The extent of damage is more but the hurt to the nation is never less because a lesser number of people are affected. Unless we realise this and accept this we cannot change anything.

 

Every time we hail the mother who symbolises our nation and say “Bharat Mata Ki Jai,” the wounds on her body aggravate in pain, for our words are in complete divergence to our deeds. Those among us who brutalize others share a big portion of the blame. But the rest of us, who watch helplessly without raising our voices against such inhuman abominations that go unchecked and unpunished are almost equally to be blamed.

It is high time we Indians made serious efforts to inform and educate our own people to join hands and together fight against this beast of riots that is let loose by chance incidents or cruel machinations of a few against the vulnerable amongst us. It is time we formed a movement not unlike the movement against corruption: a movement for prevention and containment of riots. For only when we make efforts to stop the beast and neuter it forever can the social and spiritual health of our people and the pride of our nation be slowly repaired and restored.

Posted on

Rights and Responsibilities

There has been a deluge of articles and news items on the recent movement against corruption. First by Anna Hazare and his associates from the civil society, then by Baba Ramdev and his followers. While the electronic media has been giving minute to minute accounts of the movements and organizing multi-party discussions on location and in studio, the subject itself is hotly debated everywhere in varying intensities.
Politicians from different parties have either supported the movement or opposed it based on personal opinions or depending on which side of the parliament benches they occupy – the governing side or the opposition. One minister from the ruling party likened the fast of Anna Hazare in pursuit of the Jan Lok Pal bill to holding a gun to the government’s head!
The focus of editorials, columns and op-eds of a majority of newspapers has been on showing how wrong it is for civil society to try to do what is obviously the role of the government. In fact, who constitutes civil society? Several columnists have declared that these movements are undemocratic, renamed civil society to “so-called civil society.”
So what is the role of a citizen? What are her rights and responsibilities in this current scenario? If a government official or elected representative is corrupt what should a citizen do? Report it to the media, raise an alarm in the affected community, try to access information through RTI Act to prove the allegations.
The RTI Act was passed and received assent from the President of India on 15th June 2005. 
In 2005? That is rather recent isn’t it? So I looked up the history of the RTI on the net. I found more than one source .  
History of Right to Information movement in India
To cut a long and successful story short, in the early 1990s, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan (MKSS), a group of workers and farmers from Rajasthan, fought for fair working conditions and wages for daily wage earners and farmers by using the method of Jan Sunwai (public hearing) to raise awareness of the practical value of the right to information for poor people. MKSS lead the national campaign for right to information and continues to use the right to information to empower local people to root out corruption and hold their government representatives to account.
The movement for the right to information was started in early 1990s by Mazdoor Kisaan
Shakti Sangathan (which literally means ‘organisation for the empowerment of workers
and peasants’) in remote village Devdungri (Rajsamand district, Rajasthan).  It was a
movement to expose corruption in the famine relief work by demanding information
related to copies of bills, vouchers and muster rolls for workers  recorded in government
files.
Under the slogan ‘Our Money-Our Accounts’ MKSS workers and villagers demanded their local administrators to provide them with an account of all expenditure made in relation to development work sanctioned for the area. While there was resistance at all levels, little by little, as public pressure continued and the media began to take notice, the Government relented and eventually provided the information requested.
MKSS then used the information disclosed to organise ‘social audits’ of the administration’s books. They organised Jan Sunwais/public hearings to see if the information in the government’s records tallied with the reality of the villagers’ own knowledge of what was happening on the ground. Not surprisingly, it did not tally.
At each public hearing, a description of the development project, its timelines, implementation methods, budget and outputs would be read out along with the record of who had been employed, how long they had worked and how much they had been paid. Villagers would then stand up and point out discrepancies – dead people were listed, amounts paid were recorded as being higher than in reality, absent workers were marked present and their pay recorded as given, and thumb impressions that prove receipt of payments were found to be forged.
Most tellingly, public works like roads, though never actually constructed, were marked completed in government books. Though many villagers were illiterate, through face-to-face public hearings they could scrutinise complex and detailed accounts, question their representatives and make them answerable on the basis of hard evidence.
 Following a period of struggle, MKSS succeeded in acquiring photocopies of the
relevant documents in which the siphoning of funds was clearly evident. The successful
experiments of exposing corruption through access to information was good learning experience for civil society, led to the demand of enactment of RTI law in Rajasthan. Government of Rajasthan yielded to pressure of movement and enacted the law in 2000.
Success of struggle of MKSS led to the genesis of a broader discourse on the right to
information in India and RTI  laws were enacted in some states  of India. The demand for
national law started under the leadership of National Campaign on People’s Right to
Information (NCPRI). In 1996, the Press Council of India headed by Justice P B Sawant presented a draft model law on right to information to the Government of India. A working group (Shourie Committee) under the chairmanship of Mr. H D Shourie was set up by the Central Government and given the mandate to prepare draft legislation on freedom of information. The Shourie Committee’s Report and draft law were published in 1997.
Eventually, the Shourie Committee draft law was reworked into the Freedom of
Information Bill (FOI) 2000, which was passed in the Parliament in 2002 but it was not
notified. However, civil society raised several objections to FOI bill and suggested
amendments to National Advisory Council. As a result of long drawn struggle of civil
society; the RTI was enacted in 2005 in India.
But the key question is, can RTI be an effective tool for ensuring accountability in governance institutions? What happens when the information available through RTI reveals acts of corruptions on part of government officials or elected representatives? Would an independent Jan Lok Pal then help in investigations and pave the way for prosecution of the corrupt?
If a group of citizens of India agitated for the passage of the RTI Act, is it not their right, nay responsibility to see that an effective Jan Lok Pal bill be passed? Wait a minute, isn’t that what Anna Hazare and his team have been trying to do? Exercising their rights and responsibilities as citizens of India?
Journalists and news media now effectively use the RTI to get information, frame questions, write editorials, columns and op-eds.  Just like some years from now, they will use the happenings and proceedings of the Jan Lok Pal to frame questions, write editorials, columns and op-eds. But for that to happen, the Jan Lok Pal has to be in place and the Jan Lok Pal bill has to be passed by parliament.

Posted on

Support the movement against corruption

At the moment of writing this, there are over half a million official supporters of the India Against Corruption Movement. In reality, there are many many more supporters of Anna Hazare’s fast and movement to get the Jan LokPal Bill redrafted and passed.
Details of the existing draft of the Jan Lok Pal bill and suggestions to change it are all available on the India Against Corruption website.
On 6th April Anna Hazare wrote to the PM again and here is the complete text of  the letter.
Here is an important excerpt from that letter by Anna Hazare to the PM:

We are not saying that you should accept the Bill drafted by us. But kindly create a credible platform for discussions . a joint committee with at least half members from civil society suggested by us. Your spokespersons are misleading the nation when they say that there is no precedent for setting up a joint committee. At least seven laws in Maharashtra were drafted by similar joint committees and presented in Maharashtra Assembly. Maharashtra RTI Act, one of the best laws of those times, was drafted by a joint committee. Even at the centre, when 25,000 tribals came to Delhi two years ago, your government set up a joint committee on land issues within 48 hours. You yourself are the Chairperson of that committee. This means that the government is willing to set up joint committees on all other issues, but not on corruption. Why?

Politicians showed their true colours from the first day onwards. By evening of 5th April, the first day of the fast, spokesperson of the Congress Party Abhishek Manu Singhvi showed his and his party’s contemptuous attitude by saying that others were instigating the veteran social activist to take a premature action. It speaks volumes about the ruling party and its attitude towards an activist using Gandhian methods to root out corruption. It shows how far the ruling party has moved away from the principles of the father of the nation.
Dr Kiran Bedi made a very valid and important point when she said that if Public-Private partnerships can be pursued for business ventures or infrastructure projects, why is there so much opposition in letting the citizens participate in the drafting of a bill that is so necessary in today’s time to root out corruption from the polity of India. 
Manish Tewari, another spokesperson of the Congress Party tried to obfuscate the issue by saying that there is the legislative and the executive of the government to make and pass the bill. Where is the need of people like Anna Hazare to intervene? Well, perhaps Mr Tewari does not realize that viewers and readers are not fools.  What is asked by the eminent citizens is that they be a part of a committee to draft the Jan Lokpal Bill. They are not asking the government to bypass any constitutional authorities nor short circuit any existing democratic methods. It is a straight forward, valid suggestion.
The BJP spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad tried to show solidarity with Anna Hazare and asked him to give up the fast. Well, we know that neither the Congress nor the BJP during their tenures have passed the Jan Lok Pal Bill so both are equally guilty of letting corruption thrive in the country.
On day one, Mr Sharad Yadav and on day two, Mr O P Choutala and Ms Uma Bharti tried to take advantage of the platform created by Anna Hazare and his supporters to create political mileage for themselves. Rightly, they were asked to go by the people.  Subsequently, Anna Hazare requested the people gathered there to let politicians and anyone else join if they want to support the movement and refrain from sloganeering against them, but he maintained that they cannot use the stage to make political statements.
While there is tremendous response and support to the movement from citizens and even film personalities, the silence from corporates is deafening.  The people of India are supporting the movement from every part of the country. We hope the government takes required action before the fast affects the health of Anna Hazare.
I pledge my support to this movement against corruption led by Anna Hazare. 
Posted on

Tragedy and Hope

I sent an email to a friend from Japan. Hoping it would reach her and a reply would confirm she is well. But the message was returned undelivered “unable to make a connection” it said. The devastation caused by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan makes one sit up and take notice of nature. Can we call it cruelties of nature? Or is it just  normal behaviour? How do we define cruelty when events occur because nature follows its own laws, the elements of nature follow the principles of physics that affect the geography and through it all devastate lives of human beings, creating tragic history.
Watch and endure. Wait and endure. In sometime, normalcy will be restored. Bridges fallen will be rebuilt. Property damaged can be restored again. Lives lost… lives lost are lost forever. Each one of those lost may have loved ones left behind to mourn. Would the survivors value their own lives more now? Did the people who lost their lives deserve to die in such a hard way? Is it all a matter of chance or was it nature’s careful selection? How bad are the damages? What is the impact on nuclear power plants? Will there be radiation leakage? How bad will it be? After sometime, the questions stop and one can only hope for the dawn of better times.
  
When the mind is numbed by thought, work is a good relief. As I watered plants in the balcony, I noticed the autumn-dried brown stems of my favourite creeper. One had broken out a green shoot and a rush of green leaves. And there were more green shoots and newer green leaves. Soon it will bloom and white Jui flowers will sparkle their beauty, spreading a faint fragrance. There is hope. Yes, there is hope for better times.

Posted on

Happy Women’s Day!

Why is it called so? International Women’s Day?
Because on the eighth day of March we want to remind everyone –
Women perform 66% of the world’s work, earn 10% of world’s income and own 1% of the world’s property.

Next year on this day, I hope the percentages will be better. That women the world over will have a better deal in life. We need men on our side to achieve it. But more importantly, we need women to be the biggest champions and support for women.

I end this brief post with three poems written years ago one short and two long (no pun intended).  Stashed away in my writing folders they have travelled from pc to pc and laptop to laptop. Today I remembered them and want to share them. They are raw, unedited. I chose to leave them that way.

Let me be

Don’t play in the sun
Your skin will darken
And then, who will marry you?
Sit straight, cover your knees
Look down, don’t speak
You are grown up now,
So behave
Don’t stay out after dark
For what will people say.
Let me be.
Just let me be myself.

Rage within me

There is this rage within me
Which rises every now and then
Like a storm it remains unabated
For a while, then subsides again
like waves noisily
rushing on to the shore
then going back to the sea
quietly,
helplessly
God must be a man I think
Why else would he
Make the man so free
To do what he wants
And go where he would
To rule and decide
While the woman
cleans and cooks
and trails behind
To march and conquer
While the woman
Waits, suffers, sheds a tear
To work and achieve fame
While the woman
Only gets his name
To hold the right,
the means to perpetuate
While the woman
Carries and brings forth
New life, bearing all the pain
God must be a man I think
Why else would he
Make the man always the achiever,
the saint,
prophet and avatar
to be revered and worshipped
far and wide by all
For was Moses not a man
And Spitama Zarathustra,
And so was Jesus, the son of God
So also Mohammed the prophet
And Buddha and Mahavir
Guru Nanak and other saints Sikh
And what of the Hindu Goddesses
Lakshmi, Saraswati and Shakti
Of Wealth, Knowledge and Strength
all wives of Gods more powerful than them.
While Lakshmi gives wealth,
she sits at Vishnu’s feet
Saraswati  gives knowledge like a mother and teacher
Is married to Brahma, the creator
While Shakti is none other
but Shiva’s wife Parvati
But the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer
The Trinity : Brahma, Vishnu,  Shiva
Are all men.
So are all the ten incarnations
a few of them are even part animal
But no, not a woman, not one of them
And while a man could be bought and sold
for silver, for its fifty pieces 
A woman, could be transacted
For only twenty pieces
Is it any wonder then,
That God is a man I think ?
And now you know why ….
There is this rage within me
Which rises every now and then
Like a storm it remains unabated
For a while, then subsides again
like waves noisily
rushing on to the shore
then going back to the sea
quietly,
helplessly.




A woman, a sari

 

A sari,
sometimes red,
for a newly-wedded bride
sometimes green,
like fertile, for a wife
but white for a widow
when left alone, forlorn
a married woman dead
is more fortunate
as dressed for her cremation is she
in a sari thats fresh, new and green
as if fertile even though
lifeless, no more  alive.
A sari,
a rope to escape
from a window upstairs, bravely
to a passionate lover waiting
somewhere patiently
A sari,
a cover to hide the breasts
and to uncover them sometimes
A sari,
for a baby to nestle behind
suckling, in comfort,
holding with one hand,
clutching its silken edge, tight
A sari,
damp with water seeping
from wiping hands and faces
from perspiration after cleaning
and cooking on kitchen fires
from tears of fighting,
crying children
and often unseen, untold,
unknown even,
from tears of the wearer
the woman,
quietly weeping away her troubles,
away from the eyes of everyone
A sari,
a hammock tied to cradle
a child, when she,
the mother, struggles on construction sites
to make ends meet
with loads on her head
of concrete and rubble
A sari,
Like a backpack 
with her child held within
when she, the mother, sells
bangles, bindies, rubber-bands
in crowded local train compartments
walking back and forth
traveling up and down
while the child sleeps
clutching onto her back
A sari,
Old and unworn now
Though still very much in use :
To wash and dry rice on
to make sweets from, for Diwali.
To hold curds, and hang up tied
to strain water from,
for making sweet shrikhand
To four-fold and sew a quilt
soft now with use and fragrance
of scents and touches of mother’s love
What child would not long
To clutch on or go under it
To shield the cold breeze
And sleep peacefully
In its soft cool warmth
into a deep slumber.
The sari,
too old and worn out now
torn all over
but wait, don’t throw,
it may be of use yet
to fold up and roll
into a ball
to cover something
maybe a rat hole.
Draped or undraped
the sari
and the woman who wears it,
their lives so deeply
woven and entwined
soon it is difficult
to distinguish
one from

the other.  

Posted on

Censusional Lady

Just a while ago, a young lady, pleasant and well-dressed came to my home for the Census-2011. Mrs Jyoti Pokhale is a school teacher at the Maharshi Karve Stree Shikshan Sansthan in Pune. Like over 25 lakh Indians, she is a part of this massive exercise. She stressed on the fact that she was doing this additional duty over and above her work as a school teacher. Earlier this morning, she gave a test-paper to her students before moving out to do the census work. After it is done, she will go back and continue with her duties at the school.
Although a little disgruntled about this work, she did her work well, strictly following all the rules while recording details. Surprised when I asked her to pose for a photograph, she liked that someone was appreciating this extra “unpaid” work that she was doing she said. It took much cajoling from me to get a smile out of her! When I told her she was doing very important work for the nation, she went away happy and smiling.
Here’s to Jyoti Pokhale and the hundreds of thousands of others who are giving their personal time for the Census-2011. Treat them well when they knock on your door!

(photograph not very clear – forgive me!)

Census 2011 official – Jyoti Pokhale, school teacher, Pune

  
Posted on

Feature on Delhi in Business Traveler Nov 2010

My feature article on Delhi – in Business Traveler, November 2010 issue can be read here!
Wrote it with some misgivings as the cwg scam was unfolding while I worked on it. This is my third feature article for the magazine. Besides these, I also write the monthly ‘India Update’ which unfortunately is not yet available on the web archives.. Will send another reminder to them. In the meantime, the feature will have to suffice. I’ve been wanting to do one on Mumbai, waiting for the right opportunity.

Posted on

Can we dare to laugh now?

A post, a tweet doing the rounds of social media and drawing rings of laughter from everyone:
New words: 1Crore = 1 Khoka; 500Cr = 1 Koda; 1000Cr = 1 Radia;
                    10000Cr = 1 Kalmadi; 100000Cr = 1Raja; 100Raja = 1 Pawar;

I laughed too and circulated it to my friends. They liked it and laughed in return.

Its incredible how in less than a decade what was termed a Khoka in underworld lingo and seemed huge, the amount of Rs 1Crore, possible to be acquired by ordinary mortals by only winning the final round of a television reality show hosted by the Big B, now stands looking shamefully small against the sheer amounts that corruption and scams have thrown up. The amounts are all relative to each other on a scale of numbers from zero to trillions. But what do these numbers mean?

That crores of rupees set aside for a definite purpose like development of a sector to reach the most vulnerable people of our society are swindled. The money dwindling all the way down until it reaches the hands of the deserving in amounts not adequate enough to buy food, to keep shelter, to pay for health or education. For every crore that reaches undeserving pockets, there are tens of crores of rupees that are not made available for developing our infrastructure, for building hospitals and providing electricity in remote rural areas, for providing much needed public transport systems in our emerging and expanding cities. For every crore that exchanges hands without being accounted for, women in villages and city slums walk long distances or spent long hours to fill up drinking water for the day for their families. For every hundred crore that was given secretly in exchange of favourable outcomes in business, generations of children will grow without proper nutrition or healthcare or education.

For every obscene amount of public money that the country has lost in corruption, every rain-fed farm is waiting for irrigation systems and farm ponds to get rid of the unpredictable outcomes of every crop season, driving farmers out of their centuries old occupation to leave in search of work as labourers to cities. For every unthinkable amount that is yet to reveal itself in yet another scam, for every such terrifyingly monstrous amount, the freedom we so proudly proclaim every August by unfurling the tricolour in all its glory, that freedom is rapidly eroding, the colours of the flag are slowly fading. The injustice of living under a foreign power is replaced by the worse imposition of living under the power of a monster of our own creation, that only we can get rid of. Should we remain calm and go about our daily routines? Can we watch the issues debated on television and read in newspapers over dinner and breakfast only to leave it aside and put up our blinkers?

Are we doing enough to keep this monster from growing? Are we knowingly or unknowingly feeding this monster with our own corrupt ways? Where are our fingers pointing, at those laughable figures or at ourselves? Can we dare to laugh now?

Posted on

What you need is not what you get! (WYNINWYG)

A group of upper middle-class women gathered for a kitty party were discussing the amounts they pay their domestic help. One of them talked about her maid asking for a raise since the last four months. She told the maid to wait till January of next year for a raise. Four months is not too long she added. Switching to a more interesting topic, she asked if any one was interested in starting another kitty – a bigger one of Rs 5000/- Didn’t take long for some other women to join in. The amount was not that big. The amount for the current kitty was just Rs 1500/-. That is like loose change. The maid can wait for another month for the princely raise of Rs 100. Her take home monthly salary at present for those wanting to know such things is Rs 1200 for spending an hour each day sweeping and cleaning floors, bathrooms and washing utensils. Everyday, no holidays.

What keeps an educated, well-off, upper middle-class, apparently sensible woman in India from realising that if she can spend thousands on kitty parties, she can very well give a raise of a few hundred rupees to her maid when she needs it. It doesnot require any complex arithmetic or lessons in labour laws to realise the importance of paying service providers adequately. Especially those service providers who give her essential services like keeping the Italian marble squeaky clean for her to put her pedicured feet on every morning she wakes up.

This is the story of India everyday, everywhere. Needs of the deserving millions are ignored in the overpowering greed of those who already have it and are in a position to use their clout and proximity to power.

In a hard-hitting column on the rise in farmer suicides through 2009, (The Hindu 27-Dec-2010 read the column here), P.Sainath talks about how bank loans at low interest rates have been made available for those wanting to buy luxury cars like Mercedes Benz and BMW. But poor and marginal farmers, the ones who need loans at low interest rates have a hard time getting it. Is is not the primary function of banks, particularly public-sector banks to provide banking and credit services to those who need it to carry out their livelihood activities and daily subsistence? Or is it to dole out monstrous amounts in loan to people acquiring luxury items that they do not really need except to make a show of obscene one-upmanship? These people are actually rich enough to pay for the luxury cars from their own pots of money. They don’t need a bank loan. Should there be some scientific thinking and logic behind who needs a bank loan and who should get how much at what interest rate? For the person low on resources shouldn’t the interest rate be lower?

These and such issues never make it into the mainstream media, print or electronic. Rare exceptions are like the one cited above. Electronic media use the prime time slots to cover stories that would maximise their TRPs. Whatever those are. Considering that at prime time a television news channel can give maximum exposure to stories that really matter, one would think that issues that are important to the nation in the long term would be addressed atleast once a week. But day in and day out, we get the same sensationalization of Breaking News … A minimum of four persons available on each news channel for panel discussions that are heavy on rhetoric and light on content. What we need is for the high-profile media to use their resources to study the real issues, analyse them and present a new, fresh perspective to enlighten the viewer. But instead,
we get the same, lazy treatment – a cacophony of voices from people, some of whom seem to have made a career out of appearing on news channels at dinner time.

Posted on

Onions please!

A steaming cup of hot adrak-ki chaye slipped off my hand and the tea spilled, half on the kitchen platform, half on the floor and splattered everything in the vicinity including myself with drops of tea. Oh what a mess! But happy to note that the cup was intact. The Schipol airport mug with the smiling cow and chubby windmill was unbroken. Great! Now all I had to do was make some more tea quickly and I was setup for an evening of blogging and surfing. Now why can’t feeding the millions of our country be managed as simply? Why do onion prices shoot up uncontrollably? What, we don’t have enough agriculturists, economists, engineers and management graduates in India to figure out how to maintain the balance of production, demand and supply? I mean, hey, we write software that will manage zillion volumes of transactions through payment gateways, stock exchanges and banks without a hitch. Ok, we have power outages & software glitches and human errors that bugger up the systems once in a while but we manage to get back on track quickly. Even a mind-boggling event like bombs exploding on Mumbai local trains does not stop us from jumping back to normal within a few hours. Heathrow airport in London may be facing the flak for not clearing up the snow fast enough to avoid flight-freeze every Christmas season for the last three years. But we manage pretty well each year through Mumbai rains, Bengal floods, cyclones in the south and excruciating heat in summers throughout the country. Then why can’t we manage food for all at reasonable prices? Is that like asking for too much?

Does the man incharge not have enough time after the additional burdens of the BCCI, IPL, Lavasa and party meets in New York?  The man is Incharge of Agriculture and Food Procurement is he not?

Take a woman in this country. Any simple woman, a housewife for starters. She will not rest until she has fed her family well within her capacity. If the earning member does not provide enough income, she will work. If one job is not sufficient, she will work two jobs and work at home to feed her family. No one will go hungry except perhaps herself at times. She will sell her jewellery and herself even to ensure each and every person sleeps at night without going hungry. This has happened since time immemorial. Whether the woman is educated or not, literate or not. It does not take economics or engineering or management or any other college degree to figure out how to feed all those who are in your charge. If she has ten guests at home, she will still manage to feed them all. Is she not incharge of food procurement in her house? How many such women do we have in our country? Millions and millions. Maybe they should be given a chance to manage this better. Maybe one of them will keep the onion prices from shooting up every other half-year. She will know how to calibrate the exports and imports well in advance to avoid shortages, she will know how to store stocks to make-up for loss due to rain. Hell, she is ingenious enough to bring out an alternative to onion in the days of shortages!

While at it, she’ll solve other problems too that you, Mr. Minister of Agriculture and Food Procurement have not been able to solve. Like the agrarian crisis causing farmers’ suicides, insufficient supply of water to unirrigated farms, shortage of storage options for grains without letting them rot while millions go hungry.   
Move over Mr. Agriculture Minister and give someone more efficient a chance to keep everyone well-fed at reasonable prices.

Now on to relish hot pav-bhaji. Someone pass me that plate of chopped onions please!