A Trip to Nowhere

Sometimes, you go just to come back.  Absurdity of life cannot get more explicit. One such meaningless journey was taken by me couple of months ago. I was nominated for a training programme in Delhi and had to go in a day’s notice. There was no seat on Air India’s flight to Delhi. An Air India flight got fully booked when other private carriers on the same day had ample seats. I wondered what the world was coming to. Incredulity seems to be the flavour of the season. Bangladesh beat India. Twice. All we could manage was to beat a fragile kid jay walking on the pitch. But for his country’s flannels, he could have passed off as poster boy for sub-tropical poverty. It seems their Acche Din had arrived. I was happy because if fortunes of Air India and Bangladesh cricket can turn around, so can mine.

I went back to the aam aadmi’s carrier. Indian Railways. If Indian Railways had a frequent traveller programme, I would have had enough credits to get a return ticket to moon. I contribute to five percent of the million odd hits IRCTC website gets everyday. It too hits me back with equal verve with its perpetual rotating circular cursor that could potentially leave you hypnotised or disoriented or both. The cursor has been known to have induced sleep amongst insomniacs and suicidal tendencies amongst Zen monks. Periodic regular systematic exposure to the cursor has, however, strengthened my mental immunity. Among the trains displayed in response to my query, I zeroed on Bangalore Rajdhani. It left Nagpur at 15 35 hours and reached Delhi next day at 05 55 hours. It looked perfect for my training which was scheduled to commence at 10 00 hours. I have had the same luck with women and berth on trains. I never get the one I desire. Due to the constraints of my lifelong affiliation with misfortune, the best the portal could offer me was a ticket wait listed at 1. Thanks to friends in railways and my pleading skills, I managed to get it confirmed.  

I reached the station the next day. The scheduled halt of the train at Nagpur station was 15 minutes. And just one family took 14 minutes to alight. I could see the descent of an entire genealogical tree. An infant who incessantly fluttered his hands with such intensity that if he had wings, he could be Icarus. A teenage girl who was more interested in fishing for her sunglasses than getting out. And a couple whose favourite pastime was one-upmanship in assigning each other tasks. If the wife asked husband whether he informed the driver regarding the pick-up, the husband would reply asking her if she checked that none of the infants accessories were left behind. Amidst their rally of questions, their old man just forgot whether they were alighting or boarding. The rest of family exuded such leisure that made me wonder if the train terminated at Nagpur. If the alighting of family in itself was not a task ardous enough, what followed was even more amusing. The family travelled with luggage of every genre. Suitcases, duffel bags, backpacks, hand bags, cartons and even a gunny sack. Only if Kingfisher had one such family travelling on each of its planes, Mallya would have repaid his entire debt with fare collected from excess baggage. A swarm of lecherous porters suddenly descended looking at their potential high value customer who could catapult them into the Forbes list of porters.

As I was contemplating to use the emergency exit to board the train, the last baggage got off loaded and I managed to board the train. I was surprised to be greeted by a half-empty coach. So what was the waiting list all about? The ways of railway reservation system are like that of God. It is beyond the grasp of the ordinary human intellect. Whether you get confirmed ticket or not doesn’t depend upon the time you log into the IRCTC portal or the number of days in advance you try. It is purely a trigonometric function of the alignment of Jupiter’s largest moon with Saturn’s outer ring and your birthstar. Gemmologists have suggested stones which would improve your chances at the IRCTC portal. Rings with these stones have to be worn on a specific finger which alone must be used while keying the captcha characters. For the best results, the finger should abstain from any ablutionary activity for atleast three days prior to the date of booking.

I was shaken out my meditation on the mysteries of reservation system by a jolt. The train started moving and I began looking for the attendant for my bedroll. After a massive manhunt that spread across four coaches on either side of my coach, I found my bestower of comfort seriously engaged in an animated discussion with his counterparts from other coaches. They were in midst of their Annual Bangalore Rajdhani Attendants conference discussing what they should petition the Seventh Pay Commission. He looked at me disapprovingly for disturbing their conference and tossed me a packet. When I opened, I found that the hand towel was missing.

Like Oliver Twist, I went again and I stretched my thin trembling hands asking for a hand towel.  He looked at me as if I asked for one of his kidneys. He did give me a hand towel but not before muttering the choicest curses on the passengers who stole hand towels and how he was penalised for their theft. The colour of hand towel matched the sheets - pale yellow. They entire linen looked like those white cloths which appear in television commercials before the use of the advertised detergent. He removed the blanket used by the passengers who alighted at Nagpur and diligently folded it. While doing so, lower end of the blanket swept the entire floor clean. Despite the blatant nauseating act, upon folding, he handed over the blanket as if it was the robe of coronation. Regular use of such blankets is definitely going to do wonders for one’s immunity. In fact, travel by train must be seriously considered for inclusion in immunization schedule.

And not just microbes, the other ticketless travellers included lizards, cockroaches, rodents and every living organism which perfected the art of living with you yet invisible to you. There would be many equal opportunity employers, but Railways is equal opportunity service provider too. It does not discriminate between the species or their hierarchy in the evolution ladder.

It was soon dinner time. I was served something that was christened rasam. It tasted like the left over tomato soup from the previous journey that was organically fermented by the in-house microbes which were cultivated on the blankets. I got two pieces in my chicken curry. And both were necks. I always wondered why my chicken curries on trains had pieces with maximum bone and minimal flesh. The uncanny proximity of the bone-flesh ratio to my own body always appeared to be a cruel joke that the pantry staff played on me. The fleshier part, which I would not name here lest I offend feminists who could see lascivious intents in my gastronomic pursuits, never favoured my luck.

While I was grappling with miseries of food and bed, a greater misery was brewing elsewhere. Nine hours before I boarded the train at Nagpur, a fire broke out at the signalling system in Itarsi. The closer we got to Itarsi, the slower the train moved. There was a traffic jam of trains. We woke up at the same latitude and longitude coordinates where we went to sleep. I forgot about my training and started worrying about existential concerns like water at the toilets, charge in the electrical points etc. The journey that was to be completed in 14 hours stretched to 26 hours. When the train finally chugged into Hazrat Nizamuddin station, the training I was supposed to attend was over. I went to Delhi just to catch a flight back home. But what remained in my memory when I alighted the train was the way the pantry staff managed to cook two additional meals with a smile and without adequate supplies.

Hasta la vista, Indian Railways!!!! 

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The Gold Rush

If raids are the most dramatic part of the Income Tax department, then seizing gold is the most melodramatic part of the raid. You may take away crores of cash from a man with an ease of taking shirt off Salman Khan’s back. He would plead for sometime but would soon accept the fait accompli and starts plotting the next plan of action. But making a woman, and may be Bappi Lahiri, part with one milligram of gold is like asking selectors to rest Tendulkar. It would be a malady of misery and misfortune and a demonstration of dishonor and disgrace. A sorrow that finds place next only to grabbing the dress of your dreams in a melee of end-of-season sale but finding it one size larger. I never understood the fatal attraction of women towards jewellery. But then, I never understood women in the first place. In any case, it is not unusual for me to deal with things that I don’t understand. I have been doing it ever since I went to school and have been doing it more confidently ever since I joined the Government of India.

We are quite reasonable and we do allow a reasonable amount of jewellery to be retained. So when you ask them to choose some jewellery from those proposed for seizure for retaining, they face their biggest dilemmas of their existence. It is like asking them to choose between Clooney, Cruise and Cooper. Or like asking them choose between husbands who can cook, clean or take care of babies. Unconsciously, you have triggered off the most complex decision-making ever in history of mankind, or rather womankind. A decision-making process that must consider a billion variables, each of which are a polynomial function consisting of intangibles as variables and invisibles as coefficients. One which would take the best super computer few years to arrive at the solution. The estimation of the utility value of each piece of jewellery has to be calculated with respect to the clothes, shoes, bags, watches and 524 other accessories, some of which could be passed off as a piece of UFO cutlery. So that calls for a massive inventorying of not just what the lady owns but also what she plans to buy and what she dreams to buy in the next five years. The same exercise has to be repeated with her sisters, cousins and friends with whom she has a bilateral jewellery exchange agreement. No spreadsheet and not even pen and a paper. An exercise whose magnitude and complexity is comparable only with that of Wal-mart’s stock taking is accomplished just by looking at the jewellery and staring into thin air.

After three hours, the first piece of jewellery is yet to be decided. If it was cash, I would have seized, deposited in the bank and be on my way to some watering hole. I just hate the notion of working on a weekend. But since we spend most of our weekdays figuring out what to work upon, we end up working on weekends. And here was a lady who has completely disassociated herself from time. I realize that the proposed beer at the sports bar in the afternoon has to be rescheduled to evening. With a heavy heart and heavier hand, I SMS the same to my friends. 

You know the utility evaluation is over when the lady finally begins to touch the jewellery. But what you do not know is that the touch has triggered the second evaluation, the one that is exponentially  more complex, emotional evaluation. The moment she touches the jewellery, you can see her going into flashback. Sepia-tinted images float before her and violins play at the background. Every piece of jewellery, has a story behind it and some even have epics. And all of these relate to those jewellery gifted by her parents. That which are bought by her husband, however, would have to contend with just anecdotes. Anecdotes of his tightfistedness and how she had to settle for less when she could have got something better. Something not very different from the perception about her choice of husband.  So the output of previous decision-making is fed into a new flow chart evaluating the sentimental value of the jewellery.

Even as the process goes on, the lady still thinks that some miracle would happen and she would be spared of this ordeal of separation. At regular intervals, she would come up with new pleas. She would begin to narrate how poor they are. It doesn't matter that there is fleet of luxury cars in their porch and the house is situated in one of the most expensive localities of the town. If they are poor, I wonder what her servants are. Further, what about those who earn less than 30 rupees a day. Anyways, she soon realizes that we-are-poor-strategy is not convincing even to her, let alone us. So now begins the next argument – “Why us? There are so many people richer than us, so why us?” This time her husband, who till now was a silent spectator to the proceedings, too joins and you soon start hearing scores of names. They even start saying that the department goes after poor, hapless people like them and we lack the guts to go behind the high and mighty. I remind them that raids are conducted on suspected tax evaders, not on the basis of Forbes ranking. I offer them an opportunity to file a tax evasion petition before me and assure them of suitable action. And that seals their mouths. So much cooperation from our public minded elite who cry hoarse over corruption, black money and swiss accounts. 

The discussions on politics, power and wealth have metamorphosed into a futile inconclusive philosophical polemic. As the sun goes down, so does my patience. I declare that if they fail to complete their selection within the next 10 minutes, I am going to decide by means of a lucky, or rather, unlucky draw.  The threat works. All decision-making algorithms are suspended with immediate effect and choices are made based on the momentary instincts. Its late evening and I have my doubts about the dinner. However she doesn't have any more doubts on the impending fate of her jewellery. As the jewellery makes its way into the container which would be sealed and stashed away, the lady looks at it with the sigh of a mediaeval explorer having the final glimpse of his homeland at the horizon from the ship. The expression on her face is a concoction of hope, anxiety, fear and misery. Her husband, however, has just one expression - petrifaction at the imminent pestering for new jewellery the moment we leave the premise. It is now that his dilemma begins - whether to first pay taxes or buy jewellery. 

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Doubt IV: Telangana Revisited

Three years ago, I made this post on Telangana. I, then, spoke from my observations as one among the hordes of engineering graduates who aimlessly join colleges and aimlessly pass out of it. Today, I will not claim to be wiser than I was then. But, I am, slightly, better informed. I am posted at Vijayawada and I hold the additional charge of Khammam. One in Andhra, the other in Telangana. Every week, I shuttle between the two places. Double work, double responsibilities, double reprimands, but single salary. Thanks to my jurisdiction which is predominantly rural, I got the opportunity to meet more than a dozen farmers. Farmers from both Telangana and Andhra regions. I must have spent, on an average, half an hour with each of them. The motive behind the interaction, or interrogation as they would call, was to ascertain their income. I have questioned them in an excruciatingly detailed manner about their families, lifestyles, crop cycles, credit facilities, past, present, future etc. And like any typical loquacious villager, they would tell me more than I would ask. I have also interacted with a lot of civil contractors from both the regions who execute irrigation projects in both the regions. It is these interactions which form the basis of my present post. I am not a sociologist or a political scientist. My observations could be totally wrong. But I will say, what I have to.

In this post, like in many others, it has been projected that a separate Telangana will fetch more water to the farmers in the region and, hence, greater prosperity. But, irrigation projects have become extremely complex in the present era with issues like environment, displacement of people (especially tribals), rehabilitation, resettlement, compensation etc. The separatists often project those from other regions to be shrewd, dominating and successful lobbyists. But even these attributes could not help them in making Polavaram a reality. Last year, when I cruised on Godavari from Rajamundry to Perantalapalli, all that was visible of the project were the concrete blocks placed by the survey teams indicating the extent of submergence. Polavaram is a testimony to the compounding complexities of mega projects in recent times. A new state would just be an addition to the existing hurdles. Every proposed project will reach the hallowed portals of the apex court, with the downstream farmers appealing for a stay. Yes, I understand that the constitution clearly leaves river water sharing to the legislature. But that did not deter Karnataka and Tamil Nadu from knocking the doors of the Supreme Court. And to overcome all these, political stability is crucial because decision-making becomes the first causality of political instability. Empirical observation reveals frequent leadership changes in smaller legislatures.

Hypothetically, let us assume a utopian scenario. There is an unbelievable consensus among the leaders in the proposed state. They exhibit imaginative statesmanship and succeed convincing all the stakeholders to agree for the irrigation projects. The projects are completed well within timeframe and the cost escalation is so less that the projects become a case study for schools of governances in the universities across the world. Will it usher in prosperity in the agrarian lives?

During my interaction with the farmers, both from Andhra and Telengana regions, the problems faced by them had little to do with water and more with other issues like increasing balkanization of farmlands, salinity of soil, raising prices of agricultural inputs etc. Since, most of them have to endure months at a stretch without seeing a single rupee of income, they just can’t wait for remunerative prices to arrive. Initially, I was very happy to notice the presence of large number of cold storage units in this part of the state. I was happy that finally technology has empowered the poor farmer to fetch him the best price for the crop. But my joy was short-lived, when I enquired a little. I was told that produce in the cold storage mostly belonged to the non-farmers. The real beneficiaries are the commission agents. And except a few large farmers, who have the financial strength to wait and preserve them in cold storages, the rest can never avail the best prices. The middlemen procure and preserve them in cold storages. Officially, the commission agents earn 1% of the transaction. Remember, it is one percent of the transaction, not the profit. (So they make money, irrespective whether the farmer makes profit.) But, the actual earnings would be much more due to price fluctuation, discrepancies in weighing and discounting on the account on “poor” quality of the produce. I have come across agents who earn Rs 35-40 lakhs a year. Now, consider this. A person makes Rs 35-40 lakhs a year, without having even an office. He does not have to bear the vagaries of nature. He does not suffer from risk of pests. Most importantly, he does not have to wait for six to nine months. This man does not have an identity, unless the UID cards give him one. Some have registrations. But many don’t. They don’t file their returns of income. There are thousands of such faceless agents who thrive on the sweat, blood and misery of the farmer. Yes, you have market yards, legislations, rules, bye-laws, vigilance systems and many other systems which aim to protect the farmers and ensure they get the right price. For example, the rice millers are barred from procuring paddy from persons who are not farmers. The Government has framed every possible law and rule to protect the farmer. But farmer is in such desperation for money that he would be more eager to cooperate with any deviation if he assured of instant cash.

Do those, who have burnt public property worth in the last few weeks, have any imaginative solution to such issues? I am surprised that none of the blogs have addressed these issues. Can you remove these faceless agents from Telangana? There are many of them who belong to other states, let alone other regions of Andhra Pradesh.

People speak of the employment which the irrigation projects would generate. Again, on the surface it looks very attractive. And when you apply a dash Keynesianism, it appears as if it is time-tested. Scratch a little, the facts become different. I deal with a lot of civil contractors who execute irrigation projects. And they do not use local labour. Most of them get labour from states like Maharashtra, Chattisgarh and Orissa. They claim that the labour from these regions is cheaper than local labour. Further, since the workers are away from their native, they turn up regularly for work and consequently, the absenteeism is low. Let us leave aside the genuineness of their reasons to opt for labour outside the state. The fact remains that execution of irrigation projects in a region may not necessarily translate into employment opportunities for the residents of the region.

Therefore, there is no guarantee that the new state will benefit either the farmers or daily wage labourers. These form the bulk of the poor and impoverished.

So, please enlighten me, in whose name, the public property worth crores are being destroyed?

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Vignettes of a Tamil Refugee

This is my delayed response to Sambol’s evocative post on the pain of those who are forced to leave their strife-torn countries. [Link via Desipundit]. It brought back the memories of one such Sri Lankan Tamil family whom I had known during my stay at Madurai.

The family consisted of a couple and their three daughters in their prime of youth. The youngest one had the loveliest oval face with big communicative eyes and a skin that was unusually fair and flawless for those south of Tropic of Cancer. Unfortunately, she had some problem with legs and could walk only with a limp. Fate seemed to have some cruel grudge on them.

The lady taught me Tamil. I was in fifth grade and the school, like many in Tamil Nadu, required me to study Tamil. I, then, barely knew the alphabet. So bad was my Tamil, that my parents eagerly waited to read my answer scripts for my unintended wit and humour.

Instead of writing “Kandhai aanalum kasakki kattu” [Even if it is a rag, wash thoroughly before wearing it], I wrote “Thandhai aanalum kasakki kattu” [Even if it is your father, wash thoroughly before wearing it]. Thanks to her, I just failed only in my second monthly test and by the end of the year, I always managed to get above 60%.

India in the pre-Manmohan Singh era provided little employment avenues for residents, let alone refugees. And of all the places, Madurai, a very sleepy town which my uncle often calls as a mega-village, gave them a very slender chance of resurrecting a living that was as respectable and as secure as they had in Sri Lanka.

The lady taught in a neighborhood school and a few students from there came to her home for tuitions. Except me and a few others, most of the students were Sri Lankan Tamils. They were pretty close to each other. Probably, they derived some kind of emotional coziness from each other. I used to find their accent very different and funny. Yet, I must confess that it had an element of rhythm and purity embedded in it. When compared to regular rustic Tamil of Madurai, even their angry spews appeared sweet.

The lady was very professional at her work and ensured that the time we spent there was used only for academics. Despite this, when the some student made an odd statement about someone who returned recently or some news from Jaffna, she would become both nostalgic and hopeful. Nostalgic about the past and hopeful about the future, though she knew that there was not much to hope.

Whenever, I see Kannathil Muthamittal, I wonder if she too fled amidst shelling. The song Vidai Kodu Engal Naadu empathetically captures the pain, agony and the uncertainty of being uprooted not just from your town, but from your country.

kaN thiRandha dhesam angae
kaN moodum dhesam engae?

There is the land where I was born.
Where is the land where I will die.

Of course, development always led to displacement. But the displacement a refugee faces has uncertainty written all over his future. People displaced due to development lose their home. But refugees lose their homes, their claim for compensation, their land, their identity. You begin to live on someone’s mercy. A family uprooted from a river basin confidently settles down at the nearest urban slum. But a refugee is often thinking about a piece of land for him to stand. Overnight, landlords like my tuition teacher, who owned a home in Jaffna, have to think about a place to even sit.

I was there for just one year. We later shifted to Hyderabad. A few summers later, I watched her walking past my grandfather’s home, where we went for our annual summer vacation. She was now giving home tuitions to one of my erstwhile friend. She was just same. Square face with prominent cheek bones and eyes securely rested in their deep sockets. She spoke to my mom with the same cheerfulness and wished me good luck. As she walked away, my mom recollected her travails. My mom was scared to touch upon sensitive issues like daughters’ marriages. In a small town like that we could always learn from others and if there was anything very encouraging, she would have definitely shared with us. I never heard of them again.

Some years back, when I applied for the TNPCEE exam, I was glad that there reservations for Tamil refugees. However, it seems that since 2003, these children are being denied admission into professional courses due some Madras High Court order and subsequent dilly-dallying of the center. The refugee camps, which Thiru says are equivalents of open-air prisons in Kannathil Muthamittal, are going to be worse with rising conflict in Sri Lanka.

When I read Sambol’s post, I felt how lucky he and some of those who left comments were to go to a western country. There were only two occasions when I could see a gleam in my teacher’s eyes. One, when she discussed about their joyful Jaffna life. Two, when she learnt how someone in a similar situation could migrate to western countries.

I hope she too got a chance to move out to greener pastures.

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