The Gift Of An Insight

A day before my 40th birthday, a stranger called me, claiming that he worked for one of my close friends. He sought an appointment from me, but refused to disclose the reason for it. 

I found this request rather strange. 

Although my friend was wealthy, he had always demonstrated humility and was known for his down-to-earth behavior, without the usual flashy opulence present in those circles. Therefore, this man’s insistence to meet me and his refusal to divulge the reason why, was something I found suspicious.

The man came to my office, and revealed a paper with a list of around 200 philanthropic causes. 

My friend wanted to give me a unique gift - he would donate his money to a cause of my choice. The money would go from his account ... but in my name !

I was moved & thought - what a fascinating gift, very befitting for some of us, whom God has blessed with all that we want. We can surely do with less, so that someone else can get a share of those blessings. 

I realized then that this gift was of more value than anything material that he might have given me instead. 

I decided to pick my pick with utmost responsibility.

I looked at the paper & went down the list - I was flummoxed, to say the least, with each cause seemingly more pertinent than the one before. It was a heartbreaking process to choose just one of them. 

The guy sensed my internal conflict & said "Take your time, pick any one & the needful will be done." 

It is on that day that I realized how easy it is to ask for money, but also how  difficult it is to give it away. 

We seem to measure these values differently. When one wants help, one usually knows where exactly to go - the options can be counted using a single hand : parent, uncle, friend, colleague or boss. Hard stop.

But if one wants to give, it’s not easy at all since there are so many who need help – should one provide for the old parents abandoned by their children or to the young infants that lost their parents to fate? 

For war widows or the policemen maimed in a riot?

For the mentally challenged or the physically disabled?

Or how about – should we save the Amazon forest from lumberjacks, or the disappearing ice poles due to global warming?

Adjusted for time against value of money, John D. Rockefeller was the wealthiest man in the world. He got so rich that it was said that if he dropped a $100 bill, picking it up would almost be futile for him, as he would have already earned that amount through his investments in the time it took to bend down and reach for the money. 

But the man had a conscience & so got sick of the excesses that life had bestowed upon him. He became one of the largest donors.

He soon realized that he was doing more harm than good with his giving aways in wild abandon. 

He had famously then exclaimed that “Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it” !

And so I realized that :

* Charity should be less of an emotional outpouring & more of a deeply considered act.

* It is better to reward the deserving than just help the needy.

* To make a difference, it is better to fall (like in love) for some cause, than stand for many.

In the final reckoning, I would conclude, to each their own for choice of charity - do fall for your personal cause.

But if done without due diligence & care, one may achieve the opposite of the intent - charity is a sin, if it reduces the self-dignity of the recipient.

For a very different reason I learned - giving isn't easy.

Am I Apolitically Incorrect?

American president Ronald Reagan is famous for saying "Politics is the 2nd oldest profession in the world. It got inspiration from the 1st one" !

The more a prostitute sells her service, more the customers she will attract but the more her reputation will get tarnished.

The prostitutes paradox may as well be ascribed to the politicians.

A politician has been elected by us, his job is to do pure politics - the more he does it, suffers the same fate.

In a public company, we have an appointed CEO & then the Shareholders. The CEO stays as long as he's serving the Shareholders, else is fired.

However, intuitively the CEO is often the short term guy, in pursuit of constant profits & always wanting to look good and so attempts to bring about a highly transactional culture.

The Shareholders however are the owner & so assert sustainability, asking for appropriate dividends at relevant times, demanding to keep the organisation's liquidity position & reputation be kept intact and so asserting a culture of longevity.

So if India is the organization & Modi the appointed CEO with public the Shareholders - what we are witnessing is something unprecedented.

The politician Modi is refusing to do politics as far as response to Coronavirus & yet his reputation is getting tarnished.

Wearing a politician-CEO's hat, the easiest thing for him to do is - have no lockdown, waive the loans and reduce the taxes.

One can surely argue that the populism will win him favor with the public, therefore the reappointment & so a continuation of his job.

However, he's going against his deep political ingrain & doing the difficult thing, so rare a trait in politicians.

He is actually thinking of the India-organization by keeping the Shareholders' assumed demands in mind.

But what do we the Shareholders really want? Are we abandoning our role and wanting our appointed CEO to take the easy road & prostitute away our India?

It's a worthy ponder.

It should shock anybody with a robust sense of fairness, that a politician - stays away from home, works long hours under the fullest glare of media, performing under a rigid rule based system, with power pawned to public and at mercy of the opposition to cooperate even for projects of national importance ...& must still manage to do his job !

And for that, we lampoon him through cartoons in the dailies, making him the butt of our popular jokes and roast him in stand-up comedy circuits.

In the end, Karma 101 strikes - we get what we deserve.

The buck should stop....where it started - me.

Brand Congress – a comedy of contradictions

Ever since the outbreak of the Coronavirus, world over, the China bashing narrative has gained momentum & become a hobby. Amidst that, scuffles were reported in the first week of May on the Indo-China border near Sikkim between army men on both sides. And immediately thereafter, senior Congress leader & opposition’s spokesperson in the Lok Sabha, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, has now asked the PM to accord to Taiwan the diplomatic recognition it deserves.

One would’ve thought that Mr Chowdhury’s plea was designed to add to the anti-China rhetoric at an opportune moment, to align with the nation’s mood.

Well, I would think not quite. His statement would’ve surely rubbed China the wrong way, but instead, it seemed to have caused an instant discomfiture to his own party. Congress was quick to dissociate itself from its leader & stated “That may be Mr. Chowdhury’s personal views. The Congress recognizes the special partnership between China & India”!

Motor mouths exist everywhere but how to contain them, so that they don’t dent the party’s brand, is a universal problem.

In that, the BJP ought to have bigger problems given - a) it is the second largest party in the world, trailing only the Communist Party of China and b) it is not a “family owned” party.

BJP has a colossal army in which who-says-what cannot be practically monitored, more so due to its democratic set-up that allows anyone to express thoughts uninhibited. Notwithstanding that, the headline hunting media has seldom incriminated any senior party members (of the rank of say, BJP’s National Executive Committee or a Chief Minister or any Central Minister) for speaking out of turn in contradiction with the party character. With an inability to denigrate members holding important posts, who all seem to echo PM Modi’s “India First” ethos, the media has had to do with virulent attacks on lower level party representatives for that odd distasteful remark or on MPs with no portfolio. They do so in a sensationalist manner to run their business empire with high TRPs. Nevertheless, there is still a top-down percolation of ideals and an overall sense of unison within the BJP, at least in a broad sense.

By comparison, the Congress party led none other than the listless Rahul Gandhi has become a comedy of contradictions, despite reducing in size and being, if you may, a “Pvt Ltd. Enterprise.” Monitoring members ought to be a wee bit easier given the hegemony of the Gandhi family, and yet, incendiary remarks or actions by essential members are evident even on matters of grave national importance.

Recall that even in the turbulent midst of the Doklam standoff, Rahul Gandhi found it prudent to go to the Chinese embassy to get a first hand report in hopes of pinning evidence against Modi, that he perhaps imagined the latter was suppressing. Even at a time when the situation was near war-like, his priority was – ‘India Second, Politics First’.

Not that he found any implicating evidence but what was far more important to note was his inability to prioritize even in critical matters of national interest. His inability to grasp the sheer gravity of a war-like situation, where the ‘enemy’ is often inclined to use him as a pawn rather than extend well-intended support, is baffling. As is his lack of nuance, wherein a white lie of sorts at such a delicate juncture would have been perfectly permissible so that what hung in balance was the high moral of the soldiers.

Sadly, the Congress in its journey has all too often muffled honesty and subverted authority only to perpetuate its’ own vested interest.

It all begs the question - why?

Swapan Dasgupta recently pointed out, that whilst Nehru’s momentous independence speech ‘Tryst with Destiny’, talked of "A soul of a nation, long suppressed"; he never bothered to explain what the suppression was. It remained a speech writer’s speech.

On the contrary, Nehru let the British narrative take grip in the Indian psyche, that they peacefully & willingly transferred power of India to the Indians, thus conceding some moral high ground in favor of the imperialists. He then set the “soft state’s” tone, when he shockingly rejected an offer by Russia of an independent India to be a part of the permeant members’ coveted circle with veto powers at the United Nations, thus opening way for China to seize the moment. And so not Nehru nor any of his progeny do much by way of speaking up for the nation’s soul. The very suppression of the story of the suppressed soul diluted and took away from the oppressor’s sense of guilt for its many appalling actions. It also didn’t allow for advocating India’s cause and her rightful place amongst a community of nations.

For that righting-of-a-wrong, the country had to wait till 2014 for Narendra Damodardas Modi to take center stage and reinvigorate modern India, simultaneously invoking her rich ancient civilizational values and alluding to a glorious past that was an antecedent to the idea of India.

And that’s when the chickens came home to roost for the Congress party.

As Swapan Dasgupta aptly points out, an interesting fallout is that today nobody seems to believe that the slogans - "Bharat-mata Ki Jai” or “Vande Matarm" were once associated with the freedom struggle led by Congress! Crowds chanting these patriotic slogans raised placards depicting imagery of a sari-clad Mother-India, resembling venerable Hindu Goddesses. The post-independence Congress had entered the political arena, enjoying the love of the common people owing to its presupposed brand of nationalism backed by the Hindu majority.

The Congress was practically living in an indefatigable goodwill. 

But over time, and by its own doing, it began eroding its brand & lost the support of both the nationalists & the Hindus.

For the lust for power, under the watch of President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, Indira Gandhi not only thrust the nation into an unfounded national emergency, she even tinkered with the constitution to create a platform for divisive communal politics. The word ‘Secular’ was inserted into the constitution without discussion or debate, not for the spirit of the word but for the opportunity it provided through vote banking.

In line with the kind of legacy it passes on down the generations, today’s Congress now not only shows a soft corner for China, but is seen playing the Pakistani cards too.

The senior Congress ministers have been caught in discreet meetings with the Pakistani establishment & just like our western neighbor, the Congress accusingly levies the label of "Hindu-nationalist" to the BJP, echoing the hollow politicians across the border.

In doing so, does the Congress not realize how much of a self-goal they score? Sadly, they are guilty of what they accuse the BJP of – divisive politics. The message they then seem to cement, is that it is the party mostly for non-Hindus & non-nationalists and so ends up falling into the hands of the fringe located on political extreme right.

As if that is not enough, for reasons known only to them, its senior ministers are regularly in the news for the wrong reasons, often standing shoulder to shoulder with the fringe or with those who chant seditious slogans, treating issues of national security either facetiously or with comical exaggeration.

Not cognizant of the fact that flip-flops lead to brand erosion, it is often seen contradicting itself in a rather consistent way & with much tomfoolery. At one end, it was seen leading a supposed coalition of all ‘secular’ parties under the umbrella of United Progressive Alliance & then on the other, it commissioned the infamous Sachar Committee to learn of the welfare of only the Muslims in India. It would accuse BJP of discriminating & dividing the nation along communal lines but their tallest luminary Manmohan Singh was shockingly heard promulgating that it was Muslims who had the foremost right over the natural resources of India.

And so after it’s debacle in the 2014 elections, it fell upon the senior Congress leader AK Anthony, to create a report that contained a detailed inquest into Congress’ resounding defeat. A Christian minority himself, he concluded that the humiliation of the party was due to lack of uniform clarity and a disproportionate amount of minority appeasement, a now open secret.

As if to prove to the public that the party had learned its lesson, Rahul Gandhi made himself a party mascot of a good learner. He temporarily yielded to image makeover tokenism. To disprove the allegation that his party’s only strategy was vote banking on the Muslims, he comically began to publicly flash his janeu (the sacred Brahminical thread) & indulged in bit of temple hopping for the public to see.

The comedy in contradictions was complete, when in the 2019 national elections, he again went back to his unconscionable ways and in contravention to AK Anthony’s report findings, decided to abandon the family bastion in Hindu majority Amethi & took refuge in the Muslim heavy Wayanad district. The clowning got elevated when instead of demonstrating maturity by supporting India’s attempt of checkmating the Chinese threat, he ran a baseless but shrill election campaign by calling PM Modi names for expediting the purchase of the much needed state of the art fighter jets from France.

In the final reckoning, Democracy is not about wishful thinking. It is hard work, one in which the voters can never be taken for granted. The system is about the art of the possibility. Only the arithmetic in the parliament decides what bills can pass, not what what is perceived to be ideal. To get the numbers in parliament, it’s imperative to put up winnable candidates. And finally, these candidates need to be the custodian of the party’s aspirational brand & project it to the people. A brand with which voters can easily get aligned.

Of all the ammunition in any entity’s arsenal, the creation of an aspirational brand that people will loyally subscribe to, is the most lethal weapon but also the most difficult to build. Once established, it is also the most difficult to blemish by opponents. It serves & saves the entity - like walls & moats around the fort in which live the entity’s members.

However, when the very senior most inhabitants of the fort begin to consistently damage from within, no structure can then protect the entity, no matter how tall the protective walls or how wide the surrounding moat.

That at one-time Congress’ solid brand was of a party of freedom fighters backed by all and sundry including & especially the Hindu majority – may be a veritable fact, but today, it feels stranger than fiction. It has made itself into a pitiable weakling by throwing away its most powerful Brahmastra - the united India’s nationalist brand.

So before Congress accuses BJP of any particular ideology, it must first look in the mirror & ponder: Didn’t the BJP appropriate & usurp the Congress’ own ideology? Or was it gifted to the BJP by the Congress’ own senior most leaders?

The odd unity among the opposing trinity

Ever since Modi delivered a resounding victory- the Left, the Liberals and the Islamists (all collectively against him) have turned into an angry lot instead of introspecting.

They are now spooked by the Modi-man who has initiated a renaissance of sorts, one of aspiration drawing from the nationalistic zeitgeist of our present and seeking cultural inspiration from India’s ancient past.

Let's understand the unintended but comical congregation of the Left, the Liberals and the Islamist trinity despite the very distinct ideologies each has from the other.

The Indian Left champions the cause of the working masses, wishes to revive socialism, presses for a strong public sector and consists of atheists for the most part.

The Indian Liberals often belong to the elite group who hold open borders, women empowerment, LGBTQ rights and capitalism dear to them. Religion plays second fiddle to their identity, and they take a rather ambivalent ‘to each their own’ stance as a means of exhibiting their broad-minded thinking.

The Islamists are identity centric who seek solace from religious pursuits and are regularly guided by the orthodox clergy. They draw strength by huddling within their respective sect and by adhering to its value system inexorably. 

Although each group has little in common, they all fit very snugly in the intersection of the anti-Modi Venn diagram. They put aside their diametrical differences and often bring about an entente with one another.

The Left hate Modi because to them, he appears to have taken up the lion’s share of the ambit of influence on the working class and rendered them insignificant.

The Liberals dislike Modi as to them, he appears anti-western, a region from where they derive and espouse their ideals.

The Islamists abhor Modi as they view him as a unifying force of the otherwise Hindu divided family and denigrate his actions as anti-minority and ones that diminish their grip in public matters.

Dislike for the man alone is their binding glue.

If they were to put up a candidate collectively, they would win. 

Minority as they may be, they are a politically conscious group who vote in large swathes and given that a third of the country doesn’t vote, a major victory for them isn’t far-fetched. 

However, were this to happen they would either get unstuck faster than one can blink or bring about mayhem on the economy and create an irreparable fracture in the nation's social fabric. 

The exact thing they condemn Modi of doing; one might ask how and why?

Their primary grouse is that Modi's further rise will lead to a situation where the insignificant opposition will count for less than it already does. In other words, they fear that he'll have powers akin to that of a dictator, preventing anybody (read themselves) to oppose him or flourish under his regime.

At best it is a figment of their imagination and at worst, it is fear mongering to propagate their warped agenda.

The Left draw their inspiration from communists and any attempt to demonstrate the virtue of their policies, which frankly destroy more than they create, is meretricious at best since China today is communist only for namesake. The Liberals appear to be living in a bubble of idealism, who question everything in the real world but provides no workable solutions. The Islamists seem to be frozen in time and so their inflexibility facilitates their claims of perpetual victimhood in the ever-changing modern world.

What this motley mix of anti-Modi brigade can't seem to fathom, is that the rise of right-of-center nationalistic powerful leaders is not just India centric, it's a global phenomenon.

Across the geographies there is both, fatigue and loss of faith in 1) Democracy, 2) Globalization and 3) Liberalism. All three phenomena were seen as the antidotes to the past, where human spirits were quelled and the citizens were downtrodden. They were seen as an ushering in of a new era of uplifting the last citizen of society and placing them first.

The reasons were the following:

1. Democracy had demonstrated how America, the nation with no monarchy could unleash the human spirit and keep rising. In this meritocratic and ability driven society, anyone could participate in the nation’s growth since there was equal opportunity for all. However, with time the democratic process has sadly come to mean as the least evil form of government and not necessarily the best one. Today, it is one in which the opposition’s preset agenda is to simply oppose the ruling party irrespective of the merits, including in matters of national development or international prestige. Partisan acrimony across the aisle has reduced the aspirational term “democratic progress” into an unfortunate oxymoron. This applies as much in America - the world’s first democracy, as in India – the world’s largest democracy.

There is adequate empirical evidence that can be drawn from modern governance to show that less “demo-crazy”, if you will, equates to a happier and healthier population.

Impatience bubbling, people no longer seek solace in the slow handy work of law, they demand a quick fix in order to ensure stability. And that can only be delivered by an agile, responsive and less interventionist democratic system. Finance and investment seem to prefer the same, as even foreign direct investment from democratic nations is seen to be heading faster in favor of those stable but less democratic. The examples of phenomenally high growth during the decades long rule of a nearly one-party monopoly in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia under powerful leadership is worthy of praise. The efficient royal management of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait – all have delivered similar results. China, which was lagging far behind on all progressive counts unleashed its potential energy into such a powerful force, having swallowed many nations’ GDP equivalent worth of wealth in the past three decades. It is now become a challenger to the US and is vying for the throne as the world’s superpower, rescuing a whopping 900 million people out of abject poverty in the process.

In today’s context, those ‘pernicious’ dictators whether living or dead appear to be far and few in relevance and are viewed as an aberration in the past.

2. Globalization was at first seen as a novel idea, where one could source the best and cheapest products from even the furthest or remotest distant lands. And so, outsourcing of goods by wealthy nations and exporting of products by the developing ones took a firm grip on the imagination of respective economy planners and became a key component of national strategy formulation. However, when special economic zones were created, the unintended consequence beyond just the cheap products coming in was of critical value contributing factories moving base to foreign lands. Many blue collared men lost their jobs in rich nations and a sense of over dependency of poor nations on wealthier ones was created.

With the advent of technology, distance became of piffling importance and the inevitable happened - services followed the goods. And that meant not only outsourcing goods but services and finance as well. This now hurt white collared jobs too and as a backlash, immigration controls were put in place. The e-commerce and automation induced efficiency was the clarion call for departure of jobs everywhere. The gap between the wealthy and the many less fortunate widened with each passing year and reached a point where the top 3% of people owned 70% of the wealth. Across geographies, shrill screams against the privileged wealthy and for job protection measures were heard by every politician in both the western and eastern hemispheres.As an offensive-defense response, tariff and non-tariff trade barriers, currency manipulations and revisit of trade agreements were introduced in the game. The champions of free trade were losing in their own game. Thus, through trade wars, they set off the slow poisoning of the globalization Frankenstein that they had once created.

3. Liberalism needs a special mention as it was a much-needed ether in Europe, after the execrable excesses of the 2nd World War. That conservativism leads to xenophobic and nationalistic tendencies with eventual wars amongst nations. But liberalism leads to brotherhood and trans-nationalism was a convincing argument then. Due to the wide spread of the British Empire, the English language had become a ticket to prosperity. In light of westernized education in erstwhile colonies and the witnessing of the mesmerizing all round rise in a classless America, nations across the world eschewed conservatism and embraced virtues of liberalism. And so, liberalism and its inalienable must haves such as respecting everyone’s individuality, extolling plurality, freedom of expression and using internet as an open unrestricted and uncensored resource by all took the fancy of the world's opinion makers and continued to do so for over half a century.

Nevertheless, over time liberalism turned extremely naive and unconscionable having moved away from realism. It continued to project a narrative beyond the use-by date, one that was hyper-moral as if set in some benign wonderland. That human evolution had not reached a point where every group can demonstrate maturity and good-natured reciprocity and above all a mutual respect for differences seemed to bypass the comprehension of the liberals.

The liberals continue to bestow the rather appealing to the senses title of ’moderates’ upon themselves. They believe that they are the balanced rationalists. They may have made sense in a different milieu, but today there’s a dire need for rationality’s center of gravity to shift. What the lily-livered liberals seem to not get is that world-over, new problems under democracy and globalization have mushroomed domestically or have travelled in from abroad just like the goods and services - without passports. Key among them is a motivated anti-establishment culture festered by interest groups and lobbyists, dissemination of fake or manipulative news, power brokering by minorities, culturally incompatible immigrants, foreign NGOs and sovereign funds posing as fronts with vested sociopolitical and financial interests and finally terrorism. And now these concepts or entities are visibly seen to be thriving due to unfettered support of the myopic liberals, who continue to assert a fool’s equanimity no matter how evident the risk posed by these approaching hostilities.

When called out, the problem makers would be heard taking shelter behind feckless arguments like – discrimination and subjugation and the feeling of being completely misunderstood, knowing full well that the liberals shall come rushing to provide succor at every instance.

In their zeal to protect the supposedly disadvantaged, the often limousine liberals have made any mainstream indigenous ideology, heritage or cultural pride of those in the majority look overbearing, unseemly and therefore at immediate fault. Instead of assimilating with the mainstream, mischief makers keep becoming defiantly assertive in their own deviant ways, with the encouragement of the liberals. Picayune squabbling of politicians on these matters clamoring for vote banks does no favors either. The liberals continue to sermon the mainstream population to unilaterally and unwaveringly go out of their way and be accommodative to them.

The proverbial tail had begun to wag the dog.

So clearly all the three phenomena have run their course and the pendulum has now swung away from them. And to rein in the impact of the same, strong leaders are being put into power from all and sundry world-over.