1. With Congress Record in Gujarat So Dismal, Why Is Modi Pulling Out All the Stops?
In his weekly column in The Times Of India, Aakar Patel takes a dig at Prime Minister Modi’s criticism of the Congress while also pointing out how both the parties are vastly similar. Calling Gujarat a North Korea, he believes the only reason why Narendra Modi is frightened by a Congress stuck at 33%-37% vote share and is being protective about Gujarat is the fear of ‘acche din’ customers not turning up to vote. BJP got hammered in Punjab, and that’s likely to happen in Gujarat too, Patel says.
If anger is debiting the BJP’s books, it is not showing on the credit side in the Congress accounts. So what then is the prime minister worried about? My guess is: turnout. In Gurdaspur, one of Punjab’s few Hindu majority constituencies, the BJP got hammered this month on a Lok Sabha seat it has dominated for two decades. The BJP’s sterling economic performance at the Centre (there can be few instances in history of such wilful and deliberate damage to an economy) has forced the prime minister to go negative, smearing the already tattered Congress brand as he drags his party once again over the line.Aakar Patel in TOI
2. 3.5-Year Itch: Don't Let 2014 Euphoria Turn into Despair
GDP growth data is like a grade in the government’s report card, and this grade is for a core subject: the economy. In his weekly column The Underage Optimist in The Times Of India, Chetan Bhagat puts to test the ‘Narendra Modi manifestation’ vs the man himself. The fiery, entrepreneurial Gujarati spirit of the PM was seen as a refreshing change from the slow academic style of Manmohan Singh, and people thought the economy would fly with him. But his obsession with eradicating black money, resulting in complicated time-consuming tax procedures, has made the entrepreneurs fear the taxman.
If the GST switchover was going to be cumbersome, the least the government could do was to reduce rates drastically in the ‘change management’ phase. Instead, for many products and services, rates were higher than before. Noble intentions to clean up India are not enough to ensure that people cooperate through the change. Every transition, even if it’s for the greater good, has to be managed well. The government needs entrepreneurs if it wants the economy to grow in double digits. Teaching them a lesson may be justified, but will sadly hurt growth. Taxes should be kept low, as getting through the transition smoothly is more important than penalising them. Instead of playing the strict teacher trying to get the homework done, the government would do better to slowly turn them into motivated students who want to do their own homework.Chetan Bhagat in TOI
3. Smart Cities? Don't Make Me Laugh
Giving external validation to the collective outrage that our cities are in a shambles, R Srinivasan in his column in The Hindu talks of how far away we are from being ‘smart’. While countries are striving to get into the ‘Big Seven’ of the world, India is in the news for all the wrong reasons. The municipal administration system bequeathed to us by the British is lapsing, the country is getting less democratic and inclusive, and floods, dengue and pollution are choking our growth.
Our cities are broken. Perhaps beyond fixing, at least with traditional remedies. The creaky, colonial-era infrastructure underpinning most of our major cities has just about rolled over and given up the ghost.It is against this dystopian backdrop that the government is trying to paint its grand vision of urban India of the future — smart cities populated by smart people living smart lives. Is this even possible? Clearly not, as the government itself appears to have realised. From the pre-2014 poll promise to build a 100 new smart cities from scratch (itself a response to China’s grand 2 trillion yuan plan to build 193 smart cities), the plan has shifted to building “satellite towns” and “modernising existing mid-sized cities”, to focussing on “compact areas within existing cities”, and then to creating a “replicable model” which would “inspire similar urban regeneration across the nation”.R Srinivasan in The Hindu
4. Dwelling Dreams
Ruchir Joshi in his column in The Hindu takes us back to our grandparents’ home in the countryside, the childhood memory of the favourite cushion on the sofa, the exact same manner in which our mother sets our house for the past several decades and how now as grown-ups, while we set up our own homes, we all try to replicate at least a few old favourites in order to feel at home.
But what I find myself really wanting is the laughter around a long lunch in place X in year Y; the feeling of discovery and excitement from a house next to the sea, somewhere else; the winter light from a messy ground floor studio in Jodhpur Park in 1968; the smell of fresh Gujarati food cooking from a flat in Sion or Altamont Road in ’70s Bombay; the great dance party from a terrace in Puerto Rico; the deep sleep from a particular hotel in Tokyo. Mind you, its not at all that I want to live hemmed in or bubble-wrapped in the past. Any new house you set up alludes to the future, the kitchen shelf you populate with spices, the medicine cabinet you stack, the throw pillow you chuck on the sofa, the angle of the TV set you adjust – all of these are a pranam to the life you intend to inhabit.Ruchir Joshi in The Hindu
5. The Ground Beneath Our Feet
In his column in The Hindu, Keerthik Sasidharan talks of the turbulence in the minds of those who have been forced to leave their homes for various reasons and that home isn’t just a tangible entity. The relationship with one’s own land is not just to stand up for himself, but the very self-dignity which is born from land he considers his own and taking that away is robbing him of internal peace.
What is particularly striking about such a formulation — even if it is decidedly inspired by Marx’s writings on English serfs in the 1650s — is that instead of thinking about modern history as a story of victorious leaders and glorious revolutions, and powerful nations, it allows us to think of modernity as a history of transformations borne by those who end up on the losing side. History becomes a story of the dispossessed, of living and losing one’s land, and of becoming irrelevant in the larger society. Over time, such people have had different names — settlers, smallholders, serf, campesinos, and, most strikingly, peasants and villein (from which the word ‘villain’ emerged). But eventually, history writing had little use for such lives, for they were deemed no longer relevant in the larger story of growth or empire-building.Keerthik Sasidharan in The Hindu
6. Mass Appeal Is Easy for Filmstars, but Respect Is Tough. Amitabh Bachchan Earned It, After Many Setbacks
Drawing parallels to veterans like Dharmendra, Dilip Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar and several others, TJS George in his weekly column in The New Indian Express talks of how these stalwarts of cinema have now disappeared into the shadows and there is only one person who has managed to be a class apart, earning not just love but lots of respect too: Amitabh Bachchan.
Bachchan had the universe at his feet with Hindi and English. It was his style of deportment that earned him respect. Perhaps he was also a good learner. He must have learned valuable lessons when he started a corporation and it collapsed ignominiously. His attempt to get into politics not only failed; it cost him the family friendship he had with Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi. His son got nowhere in filmdom and had to find his fulfilment in kabaddi. From all this Bachchan emerged as a mature and rounded personality capable of that rare human quality, empathy.Of course, it’s his movies that made Bachchan—the early ‘angry young man’ films and the post-prime character roles such as in Piku. But it’s his off-film work that brought him respect—his Crorepati TV show and his advertising shorts. The quiz show brought out the best in him. The way he related to the participants and the way he made them relate to the world made that show a memorable one. When he endorsed products, he exuded confidence and made the viewers believe him. He had a way of identifying himself with the product, be it Gujarat tourism or Lux innerwear.
7. The Books They Wrote
In today’s column Word Counts in The Hindu, Mini Kapoor quashes the so-called best-sellers and reminds us of all the gems who didn’t ever win a Pulitzer or a Man Booker, but how these undervalued scholars should actually make it to our list of good reads before the next generation steps in and they don’t even know such great men were once born.
Gauba would go on to convert to Islam, write a biography of the Prophet, and win a Muslim seat by defeating the Muslim League candidate. And he’d keep turning out “sensational books”, taking on the chief justice of the Punjab High Court for ordering an inquiry into the family business (name of book: Sir Douglas Young’s Magna Carta), his reservations on the idea of Pakistan (in 1946: The Consequences of Pakistan), and after settling down in Bombay a study of Muslims in India (in 1973, in what Raghavan says anticipated the Sachar Committee Report: Passive Voices). Alas, this bestselling writer was forgotten within his lifetime, and Raghavan quotes Khushwant Singh about his death: “Fifty years ago, KL Gauba’s cortege would have been followed by half the city of Lahore; last week he did not have a dozen to mourn his departure.”Mini Kapoor in The Hindu
8. Recycling Gets a Festive Twist
Taking a dig at the tradition of sweet boxes, dry fruit hampers, savouries spinning the town as second- and third-hand gifts, Shampa Dhar-Kamath writes in The New Indian Express about how that has been replaced by recycling of e-wishes, GIFs and memes. Growing weary of checking messages and clearing them, mostly just 2-3 forwards doing the rounds, seems like the recycled gift boxes were a much better idea than being glued to an electronic device and celebrating an e-Diwali.
The distribution process was similar to the method employed with the gifts. Only now, instead of a gift-wrapped box, one got an e-greeting from Party 1, forwarded it to Party 2, who sent it on to Party 3, and so on. The smart ones made a few alterations to the original message; others didn’t even remember to remove the sender’s name. Perhaps they were too rushed or maybe they hadn’t read the message in the first place and hence didn’t know that it came with a name/names attached. Some people sent two-three versions of the diyas; maybe they weren’t sure that they had covered their entire contact list the first time.The first sighting of the Rajinikanth clip made me laugh; by the 20th message, I was too tired to even grimace. The only message I really enjoyed came from a friend complaining that she had sent her family doctor an SMS about her daughter’s loosies, and got the following message in return: “Wish all of you the same.”Shampa Dhar-Kamath in The New Indian Express
9. Filling the Void of the Empty Nest Syndrome
In the column Heartchakra in The Times Of India, Pooja Bedi talks of how a mother feels pushed into despair once her flock flies beyond the horizon and to overcome many exert control and expect a payback. But after having sacrificed a large chunk of your life’s desires, emotions and time for your children, the void is guaranteed but its time to walk up to mirror and start introspecting the self and finally dig up all those hobbies and dreams that have been layered with dust and chase them.
Parents should see their kids journey forward as the end of a glorious era of ‘full-time parenting’ and view the same doorway from which they exit to spell freedom for themselves. I say, pat yourself on the back for years well spent and a job well done, and now, the scary part, make yourself matter! Focus on your body, your hobbies, your dreams, your need to evolve as an individual. Fill the void with everything that will make you smile as you sit on a rocking chair age 80 and reflect on a life well lived, well-loved and well played.