Friendship in a Changing World

When on a lazy weekend or on a blessed holiday, I reminisce my days with friends in school and college in the 1960s and 70s, I can see the look of disbelief in my children’s eyes. “How it could be?” their eyes popping out, seem to be scanning my mind. If they quickly change tack, it’s because they’ve, over the years, seen my childhood friends visit us, live with us, and interact with us. But that fleeting moment of disbelief is etched in my mind.
Over time friendships change, mostly due to divides – material, social, geographical, professional – that crop up as years go by. Friends become acquaintances, acquaintances/colleagues friends. But acquaintance-colleague-friendship matrix is not exactly like childhood friendship and rarely adorns the garb of uninhibited friendship of younger days. Some say you don’t make friends in later life, the alchemy of schools and colleges aids and promote friendships; later-day friends are not the same as childhood friends – they verge on acquaintanceship and border on the private thoughts’ periphery.

Not surprisingly, inscrutable time – kills as much as it heals. It kills friendships through disuse, the distance – geographical, mental, and psycho-spatial – not exactly helping the cause. In a rapidly changing possessive individualistic world with upward social mobility the leitmotif of human existence – or so we think – friendships are churned and tossed over in a limitless sea of possibilities. Quickly these possibilities hammer out their inherent probabilities that are largely mutated by social status and pecking order, material riches and professional necessities. To still call them friendships, as some protagonists do, is a travesty of any earthy friendship. They are not friendships – so devoid are they of the naturalness and the everydayness that once attended their friendship when they’re young.

Sadly this churning smothers and put pays to most childhood friendships. If they motor along with cloying symbolism for reasons of past emotion and ancient love (Alas, long lost!), they hobble about with putative crutches. Only for a while. The crutches are addenda, never convenient, and least envisioned in the original, pristine friendship’s scheme of things that freely and unhesitatingly admitted friends into the private recesses of one’s mind. The synthesis of mutual ideas and preferences, likes and dislikes – personal and familial – was the bedrock on which friendship efflorescenced.

It would be presumptuous of me to put this down to human cunning and aspiration in the societal totem pole. As paths take different trajectories, friends with humble glow feel unwanted and lost, even staggeringly out of whack, in company of humans with supernova success who were once friends. The commonality of interest they once shared is in tatters what with the turbo-charged now grown fretful to share precious time with his unfortunate proletariat also-friend for no better reason than of past childhood baggage now appearing light years away. Inequality and varying successes in life coupled with hedonistic quotients – plus the mutual spouses’ emotion deficits – crowd out the past. It is not the best recipe for a sustained lifelong friendship. Friendships – never set in stone – start withering. The meetings with little-something-to-share become scarce, the telephone vibes rarer, and text messages go missing. Time the friendship-pooper has raised its ugly head. Success begets hubris that fillets the mind with razzmatazz and places no premium on human goodness; failure begets coyness and distancing, imprisoning thoughts and emotions in private preserve of one’s mind. Amid all this, either party forgets that life is infinitesimally finite.

How old friendships fall by the wayside and new – brand new ones – pretend to take shape! This is not to say that there are no exceptions. There indeed are, but often enfeebled. It takes two exceptional human beings differently placed in life to stay the steadfast friends of yore. Each, at every point of contact, need to forget his existential place society has blessed/condemned them with/to and find that sliver of common interest that can keep the friendship going. How long, you’ll ask, such contrived relationship can last? More often than not they peter away unless the successful and rich is a human full up with the punctilio of higher code and sensibility and takes that extra care amid the encircling demand on his time. Not unoften such relationships languish and perish. You really can’t blame either though this can’t be a calming fact for the less fortunate.

Today’s friendships are different, sculpted in schools and colleges, offices and workplaces, where the mutual families rarely figure. During our times families provided the bedrock, a benevolent eye and loving glue that made friends more than friends; they became a son or a daughter (or nephew or niece) in their friends’ homes. The respective families became another family for them where the doors were open anytime of the day and where they could put their feet up and relax.

I can still recall fondly how my mother would cook 4-5 extra lunches or dinners so that my friends visiting me joined the family for the repast. Friends stayed at each others places, not because it was late for them to get back home, but because it felt nice to have them for a few days. It was like a cousin come home visiting.

Today, my children’s world is different. Rarely is it eating at mutual homes; they prefer eating Mac-Foods at in-your-mouth food courts, among themselves, and not with friends’ families. When I hear them traffic in their stereotypes, I stop trying to explain to them the fetishes of their ways. The family glue that encompassed our friendships and provided loving avuncular touch is missing. Unlike ours, we know little of our children’s friends, let alone their families. I guess there’s more independence and more distancing than the inextricability and phrasing of our days. The world’s changed; the degree of informality of our times has morphed into a more formal frame informed with individual human calculus.

Human relationship is a manifestation of the time we live in. The feudal world has given way to a capitalist-industrial order with premium on time where laidback living is an anachronism. And amid this welter of intense competition – dog-eat-dog syndrome! – it would be facetious of me to valorize that my children’s friendship or the lingering friendship of my younger days would conjure visions of a world-and-time long past. If there are some, still trundling along with the intensity of its younger days and with the same languid silkiness of time-in-hand, go count your blessings. Because, unbeknownst to us, the odds today are stacked against such luxuries.

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Throwback Nostalgia: Ravenshaw College in the 1970s

For us, youngsters, on the cusp of 1970, Ravenshaw was the college we longed to be in. It was a college of more than a hundred years old, and the grand red structure that sat majestically in the heart of Cuttack was the go-to place for higher education. It was a symbol of pride to be a Ravenshavian; fronted by tennis courts and the massive multi-purpose field in the rear, and trimmed by the newest hostels springing up off the field’s semi-circular perimeter, it was a campus that, in the small world of our minds, epitomized the grandeur of the past and the surefire passport to future success.

Apart from the impressive campus that gave us new-timers a few jitters, what was very upsetting for me the first day in the college was the medium of teaching – it was in English and not in my mother tongue Oriya. Sibanath Satpathy spoke in a monotone as he took us through the alley of syllogism in deductive logic. We understood nothing. Far from the deliverance we had thought college would be, we realized it was a leap right off the frying pan into the proverbial leaping fire.

The other classes were no better. But as days became months and a few months trundled by and we got used to our new environs, life seemed to be getting infinitely better. The freedom and independence we so fervently longed for were there at last. There was no compulsion to be in the college – from morning till evening – as in school. Even if we stayed in college there was no compulsion to attend all the classes. We could choose attending lectures!

Some lectures were of no consequence, though they provided ample entertainment. One such was Major Sir’s, always decked at his knocked-off finest: three-piece suit, Brookes Brothers tie, shiny black shoe.

But Major Sir was popular with us students. Doughy-faced and conspicuously displaying a well-fed belly, he was a cult figure for his indefatigable way of sprinkling Oriya in Queen’s English and for his inimitable transmission of nuggets of historical wisdom.

One day he moralized a student. “Bijoyanand, being a NCC cadet you’re coming hali hali!” We burst out laughing at the smidgen of Oriya-English. Major Sir wasn’t amused. He held forth in a plaintiff tone. “You children have learnt nothing. Have you forgotten how foreigners use French, Latin, German in their English? So why can’t we? You youngsters, born after independence, can’t appreciate use of Indian words in English.” We sat stock-still; our heads hung in shame, for our lack of linguistic patriotism.

Major Sir was every inch a nationalist. His lectures were laced with patriotic fervour; his tone/pitch varied as the battles he narrated swayed to the victory/defeat of the autochthonous versus the infidel. “In 1526 there was this big battle called the First Battle of Panipat: Babar vs. Ibrahim Lodi. Babar the Mughal came with generals, officers, soldiers, men, women, elephants, horses, sheep, goat. Ibrahim Lodi, the emperor of Delhi too marched ahead bravely with his able generals, loyal officers, brave soldiers, sturdy men, beautiful women, gigantic elephants, charger horses, innumerable sheep and goats.”

He scanned our faces, gauging if the crescendo he had built had put us in thrall. His right hand now simulated chopping of an onion as the left held onto a chair firmly and in three slices of onomatopoeic “fought, fought, fought!” the battle was made to get over. “They fought, fought, fought! Very deadly was the battle that was fought. Ibrahim Lodi, the brave Indian king, fought, fought, fought but sadly had to succumb to Babar.”

But within days he had the perfect comeback. “Humayun, you know,” he began with a slobbering grin, “was weak in body and mind. He was a weak administrator, a weak conqueror, a weak king, a weak husband, and even a weak father. In short, Humayun tumbled in his administration, he tumbled in his conquests/kingly duties. He even tumbled down the stairs and tumbled, tumbled, and died.” We choked at Major Sir’s carpet-bombing patriotism.

On the other end of the spectrum, stood Altaf Hussain, with his erudition and wit. He was a fabulous teacher. His reputation as a humorist is still remembered – for having conferred the moniker on the Principal. It was ridiculously simple: the first three syllables of his first, middle, and last names as spelt in Oriya were hoicked and juxtaposed to form an acronym in a delicious mix! No, I will not give out the moniker here. But old-timers will know! We never missed his lectures.

But we had plenty redundancies to potter about under the trees close to the Principal’s office or in the college portico (this avant-garde salon followed a pecking order and through an unwritten law was reserved for seniors), which provided a vantage point to espy all ingress and egress to/out of the college and happenings in the multi-hued, multi-coloured, state-of-the-apparel provided by lack of uniform, so much a part of school drudgery. Portico was the entrepot for our empirical study: who studied in the college, the sociology and proclivity of its students (particularly the distaff side that held many diamantinely charming ones who willy nilly forced us to fall in love head over heels with almost all of them at the same time – alas, in our fantasy!), the rural-urban divide, the trouserwallahs vs. the dhotiwallahs, the handsomeness of the boys and the beautifulness of the girls that made up the populace (the teachers, particularly the younger lot, not excepted), the romantic whodunits that were carried on furtively in a conservative world of Cuttack and spoken sotto voce. For the young hearts we were, emitting adolescent pulchritude, chit-chat and gossip were indeed a cottage industry.

When I returned to Ravenshaw in July 1978, this time as a lecturer, I was in cloud nine. For a Ravenshavian, nothing could be more soul-satisfying than returning to his alma mater to teach. Despite the passage of more than three decades when one has bounced around the country working in different climes, I still covet the short stint of a year and a half that I spent in my college – teaching.

I must admit I haven’t set my foot on the college (now University) in the last 28 years. Last time I went there, was perhaps in December 1982 to speak to the post-graduate and graduate honours students in the History department. A month or two before, I had written a fairly long piece titled The Changing Face of Clio in The Statesman Literary Supplement, and Altaf Hussain, then the Professor and Head of History Department, invited me to speak on this subject of Indian historiography. It was a pleasant experience to meet up with my former colleagues and many of my ex-students and travel back in time and exchange ideas with them. I can’t recall why I never went back to my college all these years. Maybe my visits thereafter have been fewer and for far shorter durations.

Notwithstanding this long absence, as I write this piece I’m filled with a sense of nostalgia. How the world has changed! My mind now is in ferment. For all the humongous blessings – liberalization, globalization, cable TV, and internet – of a shrunken virtual world where traffic has become real-time and magical, alas in one fell swoop the prioritization of study has changed. We, youngsters of yore fancied things other-worldly and romantic with no material bounty in sight; our extra-mural readings geared to life’s pleasures where marketplace and market-driven shibboleths, far from being the buzzword, were considered a pariah. The sense of history, of human civilization, of human and humane concerns, of happenings around the nation and the world concerned us more than anything else. Or so it felt; few aspired and quested for supernova material success.

I say this, my voice tinged with a quiet longing. I ask myself, post hoc today: did we value society’s circus of excess that was bridling in its leash? Not exactly, not at least, for us, free spirits. We believed in living life to the fullest, untrammelled by academic demands or familial expectations or society’s hopes. Successes and achievements, hopes and aspirations, were not exactly not something we didn’t wish for – we did; but these attributes of a fulfilled worldview were trumped by an amalgam of adolescent bravado (even grandstanding) and a vague nihilism that was a transmogrified form of Marxism gone bland to dare form different grains and strands to salt one’s real life. The youthful derring-do admitted no faux rationales, no faux- friendships, no petty or delicious bits of hypocrisy. And there wasn’t too the madcap and dizzying array of choices to spoil us.

It is invidious on my part to draw parallel with today’s youth because comparisons are bereft of context. Life is full of little ironies and tiny hubbubs to provide wings to introspect. Alas, the adult college days have well rushed past, punching up the script and architecture that can’t be changed on a later day, when one has seemingly (and arguably!) wised up. But we sure were not amid the nudge-nudge-wink-wink culture announcing its centrestage colonization with a triumphalist statement. Our times were different, our college was different, and our teachers imbued in us precious values we prize even today.

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Frying the Corrupt: A Citizen’s Prayer

Today, as we stand in the cusp of corruption – CWG, AdarshG, 2G – only one thought assails the mind: never perhaps in one’s fallible memory of corruption past has the issue reached its acme as it has today. While corruption has been endemic in our everyday governance and society, the cluster of recent diabolical scams has kicked up enough muck to bring the issue of corruption centrestage.

Like every other year, India continues to languish low in the Corruption Perception Index (CPI). The CPI 2010 of Transparency International places India at 87th place in a comity of nations of 178. With a CPI score of 3.3 against Denmark and New Zealand’s 9.3 (the nations at the top of the table), we should be abashed.

But we aren’t. On the contrary, we are least surprised and fazed that a scam or two keep lurking behind every event or non-event that involves government spending. The reason is not far to seek. Look, this has nothing to do with procedures, rules and processes. They are by and large well-crafted and in place. It is only in the execution by the managers and administrators that fail us. This is where the quality, morals and ethics of these public servants kick in. And this is exactly where the sanguine motivation of these public officials is missing.

People who delude themselves that the public servants aim to serve the nation are living in the ivory tower. Take one from the politico-bureaucrat-businessman nexus – the civil servant. Very few joined the civil service to serve the common man. Most are neither civil nor servants; they are the rulers! They joined to make a decent living, because a civil servant had a high social perch in our feudal mindset and pecking order created by the British Raj, because regardless of one’s pedigree it endowed social respectability and ensured rapid social mobility and sanskritization in the otherwise taut social structure of a government-controlled economy. On top of it, it brought goodies, freebies and largesse – perks of the sinister kinds – in its wake. Not to forget the escalator-paradigm that carried them up and up the totem-pole in their career. Result: their every act is self-regarding, prompted by that primeval instinct of a rational man acting in a self-interested way in a stinking marketplace of governance.

Liberalization and privatization, far from arresting corruption, have unwittingly acted as catalyst for elevating Mammon to a veritable God. Not only financial corruption, it embraces moral and intellectual that subsume nepotism. Multinationals ingratiate themselves to top bureaucrats and politicians with high salary jobs for their progenies; the MNCs, NGOs, and corporate houses with retired bureaucrats on the rolls luxuriate. It has unleashed an environ of material gain and magical empire for Mammon; a madcap consumer paradise of immediate gratification and online delivery, of hot images and cool gadgets, of designer jeans and eugenic genes. The limitless possibilities of cybercracy that has shrunk the world as no other invention has ever had, has had its instant approbation and deleterious effects.

Whither morality you could ask? Does it have a place in the kleptophiliac India we live today? A jog down the memory lane from Kautilya’s Arthashastra to Machiavellian devices through to the Mughul mansabdari system to Warren Hastings’ impeachment to the East Indian Company’s loot and plunders, serves as no emollient for modern India’s egregious departure from conventional morality. Government money be damned because unlike a living entity that grimaces when in pain, the no-one’s impersonal government winces not, makes no such excruciating gestures. When the fence is bent upon eating the crop, whoever can help?

That is all the more reason for the civil society to sensitize itself against corruption and the damage it is causing to the society in general and the individual in particular. I reckon most people would like to live in a corruption-free society where their life is social, easy, uncluttered, and comfortable. If only they knew that the tax they pay is going to be used for their own benefit and that the service they render is not going to be appropriated by one or a few for the personal good of ‘a’ or a ‘small’ number of people, will there be sincere honesty of purpose and action on their part.

The purported scams of 2G, CWG, AdarshG et al that keep tumbling out of the closet with quotidian monotony should act as an exemplar for the common man if only the guilty are punished and meted out exemplary treatment. It is good that the Supreme Court is monitoring the 2G Spectrum scam. It is indeed going to be a test case for all the agencies to learn from this experience as the media keeps up its unrelenting focus on the so-called scams and scandals and the common man waits with bated breath to see the outcome.

More than preaching what civil society wants today is action. These scams are acid tests for India’s morality and perhaps the last chance for establishing the credibility and effectiveness of the many vigilante outfits tasked with the job of investigation. There would be stonewalling and filibustering, lies and more lies peddled to whitewash truth, ingenious and grotesque logic to justify the heinous and defend the indefensible, but at the end if the civil society wills so, truth shall prevail. If indeed the culprits are nailed and fried, deep and long, and handed out their just dessert will it set an example and benchmark a standard that shall hold good for times to come. If it fails and follows the time-worn beaten path of past inquiries and investigations, it would succeed in further entrenching corruption in India’s body politic that shall ring down sinisterly the corridors of Indian democracy.

Up until such time the jury comes home from the outback with its findings, the common man shall nurse a gnawing sense of hurt and neglect – that kleptomania has rendered him hors de combat and an anachronism and an outrage in his own bailiwick called India.

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In The Badlands of Klepto-Society: Wikileaks From Delhi!

With the Wikileaks sending shivers down diplomatic spines all over the world, I have often wondered how the American Embassy would be reporting back to Washington on happenings in India in general, and the kleptocratic society we live in, in particular. Here’s how it most likely would be.

Of the many things immutable in present-day India and amid other uncertainties that beset this benighted country called India, the longevity of the kleptocratic society is fully assured – this, for us, how reassuring is it! Hard to believe but reassuringly and surrealistically true is the fact that there is a mad scramble, so the story goes, among all insurance companies to insure it against a chance occurrence! The insurance shall never have to be redeemed; so cocksure are all Indians about its continuance without a hiccup.

To be fair, there is no dearth of Doubting Thomases who are forever prophesizing finis to this society. Such hopes are nurtured, happily (!), on the quicksand foundation of the sporadic recrudescence of activity displayed by the CBI from time to time and on the so-called hot air unleashed by the CVC in its periodic incantation of honesty. But like quicksand they surprise you with its hollowness; hot airs are hot airs good only for the formation of monsoon clouds. They are quickly forgotten.

As a counterpoint, see the foundations of this society – built on concrete, mortar, and steel! How deep the piled foundations go! The Indian Constitution provides so much security to public servants that anyone not indulging in heroics has to be really ninny! The procedures emanating from rule of law and natural justice make the hero count his blessings. And though they are not enough, the camaraderie all around sponsors quid pro quo! The denizens of this sublime society hail the visible achiever much as they castigate the voiceless, faceless nincompoop! Little wonder the foundations have been rendered earthquake-proof of any rich vicious magnitude (inquiry)!

And see the magnificent super-structure that seems to be forever growing into the sky! Everyday there’s something to the matter, the tall imperial edifice keep ascending to High Heavens as the myopic idealist standing on the ground misses out on the happenings in the rarefied stratospheric environs. The yawn widens further making the moralist hang in midair, in animated suspension, unable to appreciate the higher “reality”. All his ranting refuses to lift off the ground. He’s an anachronism.

See the flip side of this venerable society. Its roots are firm, almost invincible, and they run deep and criss-cross one another. The result: they bind the sub-soil inexorably, making a continental drift defy the time-tested laws of geology! On the surface it meanders much like limestone topography, giving rise to stalagmites, stalactites, and columns assuming shape and size depending on the availability of the stated quantum of precious lime.

In practical terms, they are the bourses encashable in the banks that can’t get illiquid because they have the backing of the rock-hard State apparatus. Who would like to dissolve such an apparatus unless he is bird-brained to do so! The apparatus subsumes all the tricks and rules of the game, all the propitious ground conditions that make a Tehelka possible, the large and petty crimes – CWG, Adarshgate, 2-G Spectrum scams – that make up a marketplace in whose entrepot CBI, CVC and such like other vigilante outfits draw succour and offer plentiful employment.

Paradoxical as it may sound, they subinfeud the system. Trust begets trust and it is the same theory here: carnal in appetite and bacchanalian in spirit. He who’s employed the short-cut clandestine route hogs it as an aphrodisiac. He would make no compromise on that score, for the meritorious path is not so meretricious and saturnalian. He stands to lose here. And they are the vociferous lot who make or mar Indian society.

Given the scams listed above, be convinced that the kleptocratic society is here to stay – for keeps. Mercifully, Klepto-society is proactive, making things happen. It is in the same breath also reactive – quickly playacting the ideal role when certain flagrante delicto is caught out to discomfit its kleptoacts. In such rare cases it pays to look the purist. Because kleptocracy is still not a staid term in the lexicon – even here in India – though the inhered histrionics practiced over years in varied situations and climes come in handy. Every experience counts, rich as it always is.

I must elaborate here to make it less abstract. Klepto-society believes in aggressive marketing. In a way, it has to. Because without this important prop it is liable to slip into disrepute and consequential obsolescence. With shamelessness its leitmotif of existence, the exercise is none too difficult – this exercise of self-promotion with a catholic heart. Where every creature comfort is peddled and provided to the powers-that-be so that the coffin’s shroud is left alone there, not resurrected. The lies and stealth remains embalmed.

A direct outflow of this is that the straitlaced is rubbished with impunity. Because the strait gate enjoins certain decorum and civility and mouthing even the unacceptable does not pass its muster. As a result, the filth and dirt stay hidden. The promotion campaign of the Klepto-society earns its rich dividends.

This is what makes this Republic of Kleptos impregnable. Their servitor manners and bootlicking instincts make them a veritable band of achievers who can pluck the moon for their seniors, if so asked. If the moon is unpluckable, not so their pluck and confidence. They may yet rustle up an ersatz moon from nowhere for the boss to moon over his own diktat. And all this achieved with the same joie de vivre as the one that minister to basal, carnal instincts. They are loud and rambunctious, gaudy and meretricious, opulent and generous – everything that admits of no limit. You come out of such experience in a daze, wondering if the act you’ve seen and enjoyed is real or surreal, imagining if these people of the habitat are not Martian men come calling to earth.

True, an odd hiccup can put pay to such impulses. But such one-offs hardly tarnish the Teflon-image. Public memory here is frightfully short, catalyzed as it is with innumerable scams that show up its putrescent heads to lie embedded in the avalanche of its own siblings. The Teflon-coat stays as lawyers make their killings and promote such august luminaries to other such august perches in this very lifetime.

So worry not; we need to vociferously applaud their goings-on with passionate fervour and declamation much as our President did in his address to the Indian Parliament and make them feel great as an emerged world power – both economic and political. This is the Indian summer of glory! As I write, I can see more of the Indian Neros go to fiddle as the nation now a teardrop in world economy and in complete disarray, slides to invisibility and into a quagmire of its own making.

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When C Equals M + D - A

It’s been incredibly mind-boggling these past few months. The CWG scam, the Adarshgate scam, the 2G Spectrum scam, the Karnataka land scam – the litany is endless; every bit surreal and growing. Lest anyone has any qualms about a humble unelected and unelectable individual like me making bold to touch upon these touch-me-nots, question-me-nots, let me say it upfront that I write this as a citizen and that I have an inalienable right and a bounden duty to do so. So please be disabused, you the eminent sons of this country who flaunt and parade patriotism on your shirt sleeves and on television studios, rolling out spiels of pious homilies to lesser mortals like me!

By any facile definition, corruption is immoral, it is illegal, it is illicit, it is illegitimate; no country has legalized bribery, graft, extortion, pelf, embezzlement, fraud, or nepotism. But peel off the epidermis that masks these abstractions and semantics, and you’ll see that corruption is also a crime of cold immoral calculus. Individuals weigh the benefits/costs of giving and taking bribes. They include moral costs shaped by individual consciences, social values, cultural norms, and ethical standards; they subsume economic calculations including costs of the illegal transactions.

Shorn of morals or attitudes, this is as true of the private sector as the government or the NGOs. Competition is less vulnerable to corruption than monopoly. Clear rules of the game are less susceptible to corruption than systems where discretion is paramount. Systems with accountability are less prone than systems whose lack of transparency readily lends to questionable operations. As Robert Klitgaard, an international expert on the issue of corruption says, “Corruption is more pronounced in systems characterized by the formula C = M + D – A: corruption equals monopoly plus discretion minus accountability.”

Put the three magnum scams through this sieve. The CWG scam stemmed from the monopoly of the Organizing Committee to do what its high priest and his cohorts willed or desired, giving the processes a go by. The discretion was not spelt out; there was simply no accountability. It was banana republic at its worst. The Adarshgate was everything that CWG was – and more. It was a criminal conspiracy, hatched with admirable planning and flawless networking. Discretion became the Dictator and Accountability crushed asunder. The conspiracy threw up its own Monopoly. How else would you expect the high and mighty to hide behind the fig-leaf of Kargil martyrs! It was not only a criminal conspiracy but the greatest shame that could have attended the armed forces. The 2G Spectrum scam was indeed sui generis. The unholy nexus among politicians-bureaucrats-corporates-media was caused by Monopoly with limitless Discretion and no Accountability.

How must we begin? First, promote competition. But willy-nilly there shall be certain monopolies that can’t be wished away – a nation’s natural and electromagnetic resources – and inevitably has to stay with the government. When Monopoly is inevitable, Discretion needs be circumscribed and Accountability total. In the case of 2G spectrum scam, Discretion, far from being carefully delineated, was given the freest and wildest run, and Accountability didn’t exist.

What must we do? As Klitgaard says, “Corruption is a crime of economic calculation. If the probability of being caught is small and the penalty is mild and the pay-off is large relative to the positive incentives facing the government official, then we will tend to find corruption. Fortunately, economic analysis suggests that it is possible to locate areas within an organization where corruption is most likely. A heuristic formula holds: Corruption equals monopoly plus discretion of officials minus accountability.”

Given human nature, there will be the impulse to improve one’s lot in a society that values hedonism – even when it is not legal. This kleptocratic instinct may not hold fast for all but surely for the majority. Consequently, officials will veer towards corruption when the ostensible gain from corrupt means far outstrips the penalty imposed times the probability of being caught times actually punished.

How, then, to limit corruption? It could be broadly two-fold: Institutional mechanism and strong punitive action. The obvious institutional thing is to reduce monopoly to the limit possible, circumscribe discretion and temper it with transparency, and enhance accountability. Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) is a kind of super-body against corruption. It combines investigation, prevention, and popular participation – all rolled in one.

The other aspect relates to exemplary punitive action. Klitgaard suggests picking the low-hanging fruits – selecting a type of corruption “where visible progress can be made soon, without too great a cost”. This would help making a statement that rings through the citizens’ psyche – that the corrupt shall not walk away free.

Coupled with this, there is a need to upset the applecart of the pernicious culture of impunity – to disabuse citizen’s mind that has, over time of inactivity against corruption, become jaded and defeatist. Corruption today is not only tolerated but has come to be accepted as a way of life, a modus vivendi that has to be lived with.

This can only happen if the Big Fishes are fried. As a former Hong Kong’s ICAC Commissioner wrote: “An important point we had to keep in mind is the status of people we prosecute. The public tends to measure effectiveness by status! Will they all be small, unimportant people, or will there be amongst them a proportionate number of high-status people? Nothing will kill public confidence quicker than the belief that the anti-corruption effort is directed only at those below a certain level in society.” Italy’s success in its fight against corruption was largely due to frying a top Mafia official, many top business executives, and several important politicians from the ruling party. This would make a splash; big guns have high visibility, and more the frying the more the message conveyed.

The suggestions presuppose ringing in changes by simplifying laws, protocolizing procedures, and making processes transparent. Sadly, what we suffer today in India is not a lack of rules but a surfeit of them, with each caught up in tangles that makes legal interpretations – and consequential adjudicatory processes long-winded and endless – so cumbersome and infuriatingly exasperating that dares even to trivialize the constitutional performance of an august institution of Comptroller and Auditor-General.

The Big Three – CWG scam, the Kargil for Profit Adarshgate scam, the 2G Spectrum scam provide us with material that would make for excellent case studies – much like an articulated skeleton enabling medical students to understand human anatomy – to anatomize and educate the public. Given the outrage, they could be made the cornerstone for cleansing the system. Each one needs to be analyzed threadbare to lay bare how the processes were subverted and suborned and the nation deprived of its resources.

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Why scams tail procurement, properties

Recently I was addressing a group of senior army officers at the ASC Centre and College in Bangalore covering the topic that seizes everyone’s attention today: procurement in defence procurement. I covered the whole gamut of revenue procurement enunciated in the Defence Procurement Manual, and mentioned en passant that with detailed procedures and processes in place we have/are still moved/moving into a regime of transparency.

I was besieged with questions. “You spoke about canons of financial propriety in making government procurement,” said one, no sooner than I had welcomed questions. “If I’ve to buy a TV for myself, I’ll opt for Sony, regardless of the amount which I know is the highest. But I can’t do that for the government. Why?” I laboured to explain that government procurement is price procurement while what he was referring to for himself was value procurement. He was right in that the lowest tender isn’t always the best buy in the long run, but in government, unless we did the life cycle costing to arrive at the ‘effective’ cost, amid the welter of factors, it is perhaps the best option possible for a variety of factors: tax-payers’ money, least discretion, and accountability; lowest common processes predicated on societal mores and benchmarked for transparency so that when decision-makers stand in the bar of history and their collegial acts anatomised post facto, this appears the most sensible.

Notwithstanding all that is obvious, I have often wondered one simple fact that has defied comprehension in government procurement. Year after year, procurement after procurement, the purchases of the same items made from the same firm(s) by the same organisation(s) keeps increasing. The ostensible reason, quite in sync with the outside world, is runaway inflation. This is the simplistic justification. To make matters worse, along with the price increase is cartelisation by firms which, in a manner of speaking, believe in and practice extortionist selling to a buyer (poor invisible person) seemingly driven to the end of his tether in exasperation. Often these very firms’ balance sheet would show that their entire earnings ever since they were set up are from the one or few government organisations which have had procured these at prices ‘dictated’ by them. It is one of those strangest cases where in a situation of monopsony — one buyer with many sellers — it should be the buyer’s market with the buyer calling the shots, it is made to morph into a monopoly (not even a duopoly or an oligopoly) where the seller pushes the buyer up the wall. Worse, the cartels flourish. This is rather intriguing.

About a decade ago in a certain case I had a gut feeling that the firm is taking us for a merry annual ride, year after year, and it was about time its bluff was called. I happened to have taken a decision instinctively much against the wishes of others in the committee, sticking my neck out, almost daring other decision-makers that they were wrong and I was right. Reluctantly, very reluctantly, they agreed, hoping and praying my plans failed. My instinct and action — much to the consternation and dismay of my fellow decision-makers — didn’t fail me: the recalcitrant supplier was made to eat the humble pie; and the overall saving to the government was in the region of about 60 per cent with the potency to cascade year after year.

I quickly came to the conclusion — already deductively ideated — that cartelisation in a monopsonic situation as in huge government procurement is an anachronism. If it still flourishes, be sure and be warned there is an unseen hand doing the rope trick! And such ‘unseen hands’ — capable of doing all sorts of smart magic — are not amused one bit when the cash outgo from government kitty is less than what they had originally envisioned. For many who work the government, spending less government money in buying the same item that can be bought at a higher price is thought of as a crime.

Now see all transgressions through this prism and the picture would become clearer. In government procurement, irrational price increases often masquerade as market trend and are adroitly touted and gracefully accepted; but be sure all this can’t be done without active insider’s connivance. The same goes with the wanton price increase through cartelisation. A young colleague recently told me an interesting case of three rates sourced from the same Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM): the first through a tender from the OEM itself (the highest); a second one from the trader quoting the OEM’s ostensible rate plus some add-ons (the second highest); and yet a third mentioned in the OEM’s website (the lowest). Not surprisingly the organisation was rooting to buy from the OEM as per its tender. Possibly in fulfilment of its mission to ensure the maximum cash outgo from government account.

Zoom out and look around you, again through the same prism and see the findings in the latest breaking news story concerning the Adarshgate in tony Cuffe Parade of Mumbai. This is the same syndrome that afflicts nexuses that bleed the no-one’s government through criminal conspiracy though in this case the legitimate beneficiaries — Kargil martyrs and war widows — have been two-timed. And see the names of the beneficiaries to know where the rot begins and how it has a trickle-down effect. How national tragedies are turned on its head to benefit mercantilists!. Despite all the brouhaha and public outrage, you would be an outrageous optimist to imagine we’ll see light at the end of the long tunnel.

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A Million Leg-Ups: Snapshot of India Snailing!

Of the many analogies that bonsai and encapsulate events and situations, particularly the firm tongue-in-cheek kinds, I’ve never seen anything approximate Indian reality more than the one going around the net. It is the old Aesop’s fable of the humble – yet hardworking – Ant, and the lazy – yet bumptious – Grasshopper, that typifies our Dharmic India Bharat Mahaan.

The Ant works hard in the withering heat all summer, building its house and laying up supplies for the winter. The Grasshopper thinks the Ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the Ant is warm and well fed. The Grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.

This is the well-known universal story. But the Indian one is different, even nuanced – and not exactly malicious, if anything only a touch moralistic; and though we all know the parts, we rarely string them together into a kind of montage. So here it goes…

The Ant works hard in the withering heat and sweltering humidity all summer, building its house and stashing supplies for the winter. The Grasshopper thinks the Ant is a damned bloody fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the shivering Grasshopper promptly calls a press conference and demands to know why the Ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. The media is in full attendance.

NDTV, BBC, CNN show up to provide pictures of the shivering Grasshopper next to a video of the Ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. The World is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that this poor Grasshopper is allowed to suffer?

Promptly, Arundhati Roy (Bless her spirit!), the doyenne of crusading spirits, stages a demonstration in front of the Ant's house.

Simultaneously, Medha Patkar (Salute her lifelong profession!) goes on a fast in company with other Grasshoppers demanding that Grasshoppers be relocated to warmer climes during winter.

Without ado, Mayawati calls this “Maha-Injustice” perpetrated on hapless Minorities and the destitute.

And without batting an eyelid, Amnesty International and Kofi Annan pitch in, criticizing India for not upholding the fundamental animate rights of the Grasshopper.

Pronto, the Internet – bless the netterati and twitteratti! – is awash with online petitions seeking support for the Grasshopper (many promising Heaven and Everlasting Peace for prompt support as against the Wrath of God for non-compliance).

Never the ones to miss out on such godsends, the Opposition MPs stage a walkout, while Left parties call for “Bangla Bandh” in West Bengal, and Kerala demands a Judicial Enquiry. In tune with past performance, the CPM in Kerala immediately passes a law preventing Ants from working hard in the heat so as to bring about equality and equal distribution of poverty among Ants and Grasshoppers.

Always at the ready to steal the thunder, Mamata Banerjee allocates one free coach to Grasshoppers on all Indian Railway Trains, aptly christened the “Grasshopper Rath”.

Not to be outdone, the Ministry of Civil Aviation issues directives to its state carrier to reserve all middle seats in aircrafts for Grasshoppers to travel gratis to escape the harsh northern Indian winters, if they so chose.

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare loses no time to direct all government hospitals in the country to treat Grasshoppers free of charge when they present themselves for any treatment – largely arising out of lack of work and movement of limbs – and not necessarily connected with the cold and the blight.

Not to be left behind, the HRD ministry loses no time in sculpting out “Special Leg-Ups” for Grasshoppers in Educational Institutions and in Government Services.

Finally, the trigger-happy Ministry of Law quickly drafts the “Prevention of Terrorist and Anti-National Activities Against Grasshoppers Act” (POTANAGA) and the Parliament in a rare convergence of interest betraying a Good Samaritan passes the same unanimously in a jiffy without debate through a voice vote, and the Act comes into effect a month before the advent of the winter season.

The Ant is fined for failing to comply with POTANAGA and with nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, its home is confiscated by the Government and handed over to the Grasshopper in a ceremony covered by NDTV, CNN, BBC courtesy their OB vans.

Arundhati Roy smirks and calls it “A Triumph of Ultimate Justice”.

Lalu, smug and grinning, calls it “Socialistic Justice” from the grass banks bounding his cowshed.

CPM calls it the “Revolutionary Resurgence of the Downtrodden and Upstaging of the Illusion of Thrift and Saving in Utopia”.

Not to be outsmarted, Kofi Annan invites the Grasshopper to address the UN General Assembly and the Security Council.

And many years later...

The Ant has since migrated to the US of A and set up a multi-billion dollar company in Silicon Valley while hundreds of Grasshoppers continue to die of starvation despite the wide array of support, and leg-ups granted them everywhere, even through such scams as Adarsh (see the delicious irony!) Kargilgate at every turn in India;

and

Consequent to losing all the hardworking Ants and patronizing the freeloading and state-protected and state-propped lazy, laidback Grasshoppers, India still snails along as a developing country, notwithstanding what Barack Obama had to say to pamper our uncertain ego and uneasy vanity. From time to time, to affirm its rightful place in the comity of nations and to get a ravishing feel-good factor going and flaunting itself as a resplendent emerging (even emerged!) economy, it covets to host such mega events as the Commonwealth Games that – despite its intrepid athletes – alas boomerangs and lands egg on its face, and paradoxically shows how much travelled it is in crony capitalism and as the last, living testimony of mercantilism in the 21st century.

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