Celebrating life on Rs.32 per day

India is a country of odds! We are geographically diverse, with the majestic Himalayas on one end, all the way to the pyramidal south on the other. We have more than a thousand languages and dialects, and are home to some of the most prominent religions in the world. In a country where the colour of the soil apparently changes every 100km, we do have one unifying truth. We are all revelers in the joy of being an Indian! Heads instantly go up high, chests puff out with pride. 'I am an Indian'. These four simple words seem to bring out the collective pride of being born in one of the hotbeds of human civilization. Thankfully, a lot of us also make more than Rs.1000 per month. Imagine the horror of cashing only Rs.990 as your monthly salary, if you are living in a metropolis like New Delhi or Mumbai. Those extra ten bucks can change your life. They can uplift you, from being defined as a poor person by the government of India, to the next strata of the Indian society. And we all agree, nobody likes to be poor.

It therefore came as a gargantuan relief to the crores across the country, when the Tendulkar committee wrote in its report that India is getting richer, and anybody making equal to or more than the princely sum of Rs.1000 per month in an urban area is no longer poor. Crores of beggars and daily wage-earners became rich overnight. Never has such a miracle been conjured anywhere across the world! More joy to being an Indian, a not-poor one at that.

As is the norm in a happy society, there are naysayers and skeptics, who claim that Rs.32 is too small of an amount to live satisfactorily in an Indian city, and that the UPA government is trying to save face by fudging with numbers and statistics. To those naysayers I say, that first of all, the current government is not smart enough to fudge with numbers, let alone statistics. Hell, half of their MPs may not even be able to spell statistics! Secondly, an honourable government official, who lives in a humble abode, and has no access to the glamour of foreign trips and vacations, has said that Rs.32 is 'not all that ridiculous'. This gentleman never complained of inadequate bathroom facilities in his office in New Delhi. He simply thought that spending more than Rs.35 lakhs on fixing some toilets in his department, could help relieve the stress his team goes through in keeping India rich. 

Now, we have more proof that you can have two full meals easily within the limits of Rs.32 per day. First Raj Babbar, and then another gentleman, Rasheed Masood, has laid waste to the argument that you cannot have two square meals in this amount of money. Babbar said that you can have a sumptuous meal for only Rs.12, which also comes with the delicacy of Sambhar and vegetables. You can spend the remaining amount on his or his son's films if you wish. If only I knew the location of this reasonably-priced eatery in Mumbai, me and my friends could have saved a fortune on mess expenses during our IIT days. That amount of money could've propelled us to the upper middle-class (maybe, just maybe!). What a waste of money all those years! 

So there lies the proof to the argument that half of the beggars and jobless roadside dwellers in our country are not poor. They are simply lazy. Maybe they should learn from our efficient MPs and ministers, who work so hard to earn their money. They have kept the government running like a well-oiled machine. Such is our faith in their capability, that a lot of parents tell their kids to grow up and join politics. 99.99% of those parents are themselves politicians.

PS: I love my country, and I hope that we will all take a step towards cleaning up the mess of the last 5 years in next year's general election.

India Dairy: Rise of the women!

One week hence, as I am coming to terms with the unpleasant summer climate in much of India, an interesting phenomenon came to my observation yesterday, which I shall refer to as 'The husband identity'. My hometown is up for elections to the local corporation and the post of Mayor next Tuesday, and as they say, any election in India is vigorously contested, if nothing else than to distract the masses from the real issues. Sample the presidential election, where a clear victor has already emerged, and yet the media is boomeranging about the possibilities in the 2014 General elections.

Based on our system of caste-based reservation of electoral constituencies, Jhansi has been reserved as a 'Women-backward' seat, implying that only female candidates belonging to a classified backward caste can contest for the post of Mayor. And the same is true for our local ward. As campaign fliers piled up, some of the stuff mentioned therein caught my attention due to a multitude of reasons:

• Every candidate's picture is placed alongside an equally large picture of her husband. Just so that the masses do not get confused, the billing goes as 'Candidate name-wife of so-and-so'. Reservation for women is a sensitive issue in India, still hanging on the margins after umpteen attempts to get it passed, and a shameful one at that, considering the head of India's ruling political establishment, the leader of opposition in the Lower House, and the outgoing President of India, are all women!
• Newspaper interviews and advertisements begin with an appeal to voters to reward the 'good work' done by the candidate's husband, or in some cases, father-in-law. The only plausible way to construe this is to believe that the candidate has no identity of her own in the public sphere, and her candidature has materialized due to the chance falling of the contested seat in the reserved category.
• A rather interesting note is that some candidates have listed their caste in parenthesis, and yet appeal to the voters to ignore their caste or religion as a criteria for casting their vote. Paradoxical some would say!

With voting to be held on July 4, and this being my first official vote of any kind in India, I am looking forward to it. 

PS: Fantastic movie, if you haven't seen it already.

Freeze and thaw

Winter is a funny time of the year. There is a deluge of family-centered holidays, and shoppers flock to get the 'best deals' that only open up at this time of the year. In India, nobody remains slim anymore, as toddlers are covered in their layers of sweaters and the women bring out the expensive cardigans and shawls to the envy of the neighbors. As for the weather, depending on your geographical location, winters can either be the best time of the year or an absolute nightmare.

For me, 5 years in Mumbai destroyed whatever winter tolerance I had built up in 17 years living in Jhansi. Winters in Mumbai were the best time of the year- no fear of dehydration and humidity at its absolute low. Having swung between these two extremes, I was under-prepared when I landed in the desert. Having been here twice in the hot and dry summer, and knowing that Tucson was not very far from the west coast, there was nothing abetting my desire to pack enough warm clothes. Turns out, Tucson is more like Jaisalmer than Pune, and the cold wave outside makes me wonder about other assumptions that go wrong all the time.

For example, we assume that politicians are committed people who will put aside differences in the end and work out a mutual agreement in the greater benefit of the nation. Ironically, the educated US senators perform no better than the semi-literate, identity-bred politicians back home at this benchmark. You can gloss over other nations as well, and it becomes clear that politics is a dirty business to the core. Another assumption that often goes wrong is that the economy is going downhill because of less global spending. Never was there more investment activity going on across the globe. You simply need to look into the right sector. Be it clean energy, or the more conventional oil exploration, investors are flocking to the few seemingly reliable areas in both sectors. If anything, the reason might be the lop-sided nature of investments, where few monies are spent on human development, and more on increasing the already inflated MPLAD funds. We spend when we feel good about ourselves, or even when we want to feel good about ourselves. Having recently witnessed the Black friday euphoria in the states, the latter certainly seemed to be the case.

The third assumption, and this one is quite close to my heart, is that Science holds all the answers to every conceivable question, and if Science cannot explain it, it is not possible. The other day, I was having this conversation with a friend about religion and faith (you know where this is going), and I put forward my best argument that some of the practices seem to be lacking any logic whatsoever. Then comes the news that OPERA project was able to reproduce their results of neutrinos breaking the Einsteinian barrier of light travel. We might very well be re-writing all those Physics textbooks 10 years down the line. Who knows what else might become explainable with better and more sophisticated instruments!

The lesson I take from the above is that while it is good to assume certain stuff, it is imprudent to blank out an alternative. With that, I wish my assumption of a warm day on December 11 turns out to be correct!

PS: Nobody remained young at heart longer than Dev Anand did. He was the foremost style icon the industry ever had, and a wonderful observer of new talent where others would have seen none. RIP!