WORLD LEADERS AND WAR CRIMINALS

    As modern day war criminals go, you could be forgiven for thinking that it would be difficult to beat the Netanyahu- Biden duo. The former has initiated a genocide in Gaza and the latter has been giving him all diplomatic and military covering fire to get the job over quickly. 6000 civilians dead in Gaza as I write this (including 2500 children and 1500 women), with more to come as the ground offensive of this doomed enclave unfolds. Ukraine is being repeated in Gaza, with the logic of justice being up-ended as per their fascist convenience- Russia is the aggressor in Ukraine for invading another sovereign nation and killing civilians, while in Palestine a rampaging Israel is the victim for doing the same. Sheer moral bankruptcy and criminality under international covenants is now rephrased as geopolitics. Israel has even called for the resignation of the UN Secretary-General for having had the temerity to say that the Hamas attacks did not happen in a vacuum. And it has now taken to taunting the UNRWA, the relief agency of the UN in Gaza: on the latter's pleas for allowing fuel into Gaza, this rogue state has suggested that it ask Hamas for the fuel! This is not just over-arching arrogance, it's the confidence of a criminal who has bought both the judge and the jury.

   How can an alleged terrorist organisation be equated or conflated with an entire nation, as the global North has done with Hamas and Palestine? And then obliterate that nation for the sins of those "terrorists", as Israel has been doing for the last three weeks? This is like the RAF carpet bombing Ireland because of the activities of the IRA, or India bombing Lahore for the actions of Pakistan's cross border terrorists. Netanyahu, Biden or their pet pit bulls in France and the UK may not comprehend this logic, but surely India should be able to see it, and at the very least demand that Israel respect this distinction. Previous Indian governments, from the time of Nehru to Vajpayee, had the humanism, sense of history and vision to realise this; they had learnt from our own history the abject consequences of partitioning of countries, and could therefore empathise with the Palestinians whose own ancestral lands had been forcibly partitioned in 1947. Not so with Naya Bharat where the benefits of Pegasus, hi-tech weapons and training by Mossad matter more than shared history, humanitarianism and justice. Islamophobia has now entered our foreign policy, it would appear; it was inevitable after the nine years of the present regime, for, as Hubert Humphrey had remarked: "Diplomacy is nothing but domestic policy with its hat on." Which is why Mr. Jaishankar has gone silent for now on this war, with even his usual waffling missing.

   The Netanyahu-Biden strategy is clear: it's time for the "final solution" in Palestine: occupy the Gaza strip, if not annex it. Readers would recollect that at the last General Assembly meeting in New York in September, Netanyahu had displayed the future map of Palestine as he saw it: it showed almost the entire region from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean (the present West Bank and the Gaza strip included) as part of Israel. The attack on Gaza is the first phase of converting this map to reality on the ground. Israel will occupy north Gaza after expelling all Palestinians living there (almost a million and a half) and either occupy it militarily, or convert it into a buffer zone with a proxy government.  Over time it will push more Israeli settlers in there, dispossessing the few Palestinians who remain there, as it does in the West Bank. It will change not only the geography but also the demography of the area forever, with the blessings of the North and the silence of countries like India. This is what Netanyahu had meant when he stated, at the beginning of this "war", that the Middle East would be changed forever.

  By any definition of terrorism, and under international law, Israel is a terrorist state. It has forcibly occupied 85% of Palestine and allowed, under military protection, 700,000 Jewish settlers to encroach on Palestinian land in the West Bank. It distributes arms to these settlers and has killed and jailed thousands of Palestinians without any judicial process: it is an occupation force and behaves as such, in the teeth of opposition by the UN and in flagrant violation of all international laws. It has converted the blockaded Gaza strip into what one commentator has described as the largest concentration camp in the world, and all this with full support of the USA, which runs its own concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay. Between 200 and 250 Palestinian civilians are routinely killed by Israel every year (more than 120 have been killed in the West Bank in just the last two weeks) and has imprisoned about 5000 of them, most of them without any judicial process. 

  As of today the UN has announced that it shall cease its relief operations in Gaza: Israel's two week old blockade has ensured that no food, fuel, medicines or even water can enter this enclave where 2.5 million have been trapped like rats ("human animals", according to an Israeli minister). 35 hospitals will be shut down, and the 140 babies in incubators and 130 patients in ICUs will almost certainly die. This is deliberate genocide, far more barbaric than taking hostages, even though the comparison is odious. And this is even before the ground offensive has begun! What more does it take to be a terrorist, pray?

   What India, which has ditched all moral and ethical values for rank opportunism and, in the apt words of (retired) Ambassador Talmiz Ahmed has "corporatised" its foreign policy for the benefit of a few cronies, does not smell is the fecal stench of racism emanating from the Israel-Palestine issue. When "white" Ukranian civilians are killed by Russia the West is outraged, but when "brown" Palestinians are massacred by Jews it sees this as just retribution. Even an Uncle Tom like Rishi Sunak is blind to this. Historically, the Muslims have never persecuted the Jews- it has always been white Christians who have persecuted, disenfranchised and murdered Jews, culminating, of course, in Hitler's final solution. There were hardly any Jews in Palestine in 1947, the vast majority were in Europe and should have been given their sovereign state there. But the Christians didn't want them as neighbours, apparently, and packed them off to an enclave in the Middle East under the Balfour declaration, one that belonged to the Arabs. So who is the racist and aggressor here? Self proclaimed Zionists like Biden and Uncle Toms like Sunak should think about this. So should the Hindu Samrats. History has a way of coming back to haunt one. It may not repeat itself, as someone said, but it rhymes.

   In these sorry times we could do worse than recollect the words of the poet, Mahmoud Darwish:

" The wars will end and the leaders will shake hands, and that old woman will remain waiting for her martyred son, and that girl will wait for her beloved husband, and the children will wait for their heroic father, I do not know who sold the homeland but I know who paid the price."

MONKEYING AROUND WITH THE CENSUS, CONSENSUS AND CON-SENSUS.

 The current flavour of the season is Census, not to be confused with Consensus, which is a con job on a census, as witnessed recently in the DD (Delhi Declaration) of the G-20. A census is basically a count, and the DD was a count of those nations who resolved to do nothing on any issue of global importance, as I have explained at some length in an earlier blog. Which is why the DD was a Con-census, regardless of what our  Vocal for Local favourite Sherpa may call it. And even as I write this a similar Con-sensus appears to be emerging about the Israel-Hamas conflict in the Global North. And India, as the self-appointed leader of the Global South, in the best traditions of Indian politics, has decided to defect to the North, as 20 million of its citizens have already done. But I digress.

The central govt. gave a miss to the decadal census which was due in 2021, possibly because it was too busy counting the banknotes which returned to the banks after demonetisation, or perhaps the banknotes which did NOT so return after the NPA birds had flown the coop. Whatever the reason, we will now never know whether there was a dip in the population post demonetisation (because every joker and his wife were standing in ATM queues instead of being tucked up in bed), or a bump in the population post the lockdown (because every joker and the neighbour's wife were in bed instead of toiling in the office). We will get to know only when Ms Kangana Ranaut gives us her views, which may take some time as she is currently preoccupied with dissecting the war in the middle-east.

But, just as nature abhors a vacuum, a census abhors a zero; as Confucius told the guy who invented Zero- thanks for nothing! And so our Opposition parties have decided that they will now conduct a caste census in their states, a kind of mini decadal census, to find out the number of BCs (Backward castes), OBCs (Other Backward castes), and EBCs (Extremely Backward castes). The SOBs will be counted after the elections. Bihar has already done it and released the results, Karnataka too has finished it but is sitting on the results which it will announce at "an appropriate time", Rajasthan and Chhatisgarh have also said they shall do it soon. This has been dubbed as Mandal-2, a sequel to the original blockbuster Mandal-1.

The entire exercise is like a salami-slicing of society till the original sausage is unrecognizable. The BJP is not elated about this, not because it prefers sausages whole, but because it holds the exclusive IPR and monopoly on dividing society. It does this through religion, but has been outflanked by the Opposition's use of caste to do something similar. We have now gone through the entire gamut of division and ghettoisation , having used everything possible to fragment the country- religion, regionalism, language, festivals, clothes, food, occupations. All that remains now is to do a sub-census of the Upper castes ( Brahmins, Rajputs, Jats, Marathas) who comprise about 20-25% of the population nationally, and tribals, and India will then resemble a piece of Emmentaler cheese, more holes than cheese. The only organism which thrives in this type of cheese is bacteria, which is an apt description for our politicians, you will agree.

But, unfortunately, my own state- Himachal- has been left out of this caste carnival. The state does not have a caste issue, primarily because it has only two dominant castes- government employees and apple orchardists- and between them they control the economy and the politics. Everyone is happy except Preity Zinta (who has left for the USA) and Kangana Ranaut (who is happiest when she is unhappy with something, which is most things). So, not to be left out, the Himachal govt. has now decided to conduct a census of monkeys in the state, as announced this week by its Forest department. Only "bona-fide" monkeys (those who were settled here before 1974) would be counted, not the "domiciled" ones (those residing in the state for 15 years) because the latter would already have been counted in places like Karol Bagh, Kotkapura, Surat and Asansol. The author of this piece officially belongs to the domiciled category, by the way, even though I have been swinging on trees in Himachal for the last 50 years and look alarmingly like an aged Rhesus monkey. But rules are rules and "show me the face and I'll show you the rule" doesn't work on this one, unfortunately.

Why a census of monkeys ?, you may well ask, and since I am not an RTI Commissioner I shall give you the answer. The govt. feels that the monkeys harass tourists, particularly in Shimla, and have converted the Jakhoo hill into a banana republic, literally. They also destroy crops and indulge in gorilla warfare with the villagers. The Forest department has been sterilising monkeys since 2004, with greater success than Sanjay Gandhi's efforts with their cousins: their population has reportedly declined  from 3.17 lakhs in 2004 to 1.36 lakhs in 2019.

But I have my reservations. For one, the monkeys are better behaved than the tourists and I feel it's the latter who should be sterilised instead. Two, apes best exemplify the Darwinian theory of survival of the fittest, and catching the remaining 1.36 lakh will be tougher than catching a cold in Hell or catching Amit Malviya telling the truth. By the time I retired from the Forest department the simians could recognize every official in the department, from the Forest Guards to the DFOs, as well as their vehicle numbers, and disappeared the moment they spotted the long arm of the law, somewhat like our Women Development Minister vanishing whenever an atrocity is committed on a woman. Thirdly, according to the (gr)ape-vine, the monkeys are enthused by the frequent rallying cry of "Jai Bajrangbali" and the Hanuman of the TV series Ramayana being allotted a ticket for the elections in MP, and have decided to contest the next elections. Their reasoning is that they should enter the fray directly instead of being used as proxies and intermediaries, something I believe Mr. Adani is also seriously considering. That has the sitting MLAs worried: they can no langur take their seats for granted, hence the need for the final solution of sterilisation.

However, I'm an optimist. The original and rightful denizens of Jakhoo have survived the Gorkhas, the British, the BJP, the Congress, Uncle Chipps and the guy from Kotkapura. They will live to cock a snook at the last of the inappropriately named homo sapiens when the inevitable apocalypse happens- census, consensus or con-sensus notwithstanding.

DHAN KI BAAT

 I should have listened to Mintu, ten years my senior, way back in 1973. If I had, I wouldn't be living in a village near Mashobra, waiting with bated breath for my pension every month, hoping the Treasury Officer doesn't question my Life Certificate which states: "Brain dead but still breathing and smoking Wills Flakes." I'd be rubbing shoulders in Kensington Gardens or a Bangkok penthouse with the Nirav Modis and the Vijay Mallyas of the world, handing out lavish tips to ravaging beauties, all debited to the Bank of Punjab or Baroda, as the (suit)case may be. I'd better explain.

In the Delhi university of 1973 you couldn't take a girl for a "band omlette" to Khyber Pass unless you had a Jawa mobike between your knees, its exhaust sawed off in some reverse phallic ritual. Lumbering through my final year MA (no, Mr. Narendra Modi was not my class mate) I petitioned my nearest living ancestor for a loan for a bike. Now, my Dad sold oil (Burmah Shell) for a living and was harder to pin down than an oil slick. Like Mamta Bannerji I kept hoping for the funds but they never came. Fed up of waiting and seeing a life of enforced celibacy awaiting me, I decided to take matters into my own hands and sat for the SBI Probationary Officers' Exam. To everyone's great surprise I made it, but then developed second thoughts: I'd always wanted to sit for the IAS. Enter Mintu, to whom I went for advice. Now, Mintu was the hot shot in the extended Shukla tribe, a go-getter in a multinational company. " Take it!" he ordained. " Why ?" I sought to know.

" A bank job," said he of the unlimited expense account, " is worth dying for. The fortunate guys can play around with their own money, but only the blessed play with other people's money. That's what you'll be doing for the next 35 years, you know(give or take a few years of suspension and jail time). You can borrow as much money as you want. Remember, a borrower never dies- he just loses interest."

I didn't heed Mintu's Delphic advice and now have the next 15 years in village Puranikoti to regret it. I have an aversion to taking loans, believing implicitly in the old adage: Neither a loaner nor a loanee be. A mistake which I ascribe to a double promotion between Nursery and KG II, which made me miss the other adage which Nirav Modi, Vijay Mallya and Lalit Modi, et al. learned by heart in KG I: " A buck in the hand is worth two in the Bank." I guess I better explain this paranoia also.                                                                           I have had this great suspicion of loans ever since my Dad visited me when I was posted as SDM Chamba in 1976. Now, my Dad used to make a smooth transition from oil to alcohol every evening, scotch on the rocks. I had no rocks since , with a salary of seven hundred rupees a month, I could barely afford to keep my wife in clothes (not a bad thing when you're just married, but you get the drift), and therefore had no fridge. My Dad immediately directed me to buy one, saying he would put up the money for it. It was an (All)wyn-win situation. He went back to Kanpur after a few stiff ones on the rocks, had some second thoughts of his own, and informed me that the Rs. 4000 he had advanced to me was not a grant, but a loan. It was my Ashok Gehlot moment. I borrowed money from the District Nazir to repay my Dad and decided never to take a loan again.

But life has a way to make you eat your words. Suddenly, retirement loomed over the horizon and I realised that soon I would no longer have a leaking "sarkari" roof over my head. At about the same time my younger son Saurabh discovered Madhusudan Das ("Indian universities are the slaughter houses of intelligence") and decided to study in London. So I polished up my begging bowl and went with it to my bank manager for two loans: house and education. I got the loans but not before the bank had squeezed out every drop of information about me: a data extortion even Facebook would be envious of- salary slip, GPF statement, land revenue papers, default guarantee from employer, architect's plan. If I recollect it also took from me my horoscope ( to ascertain that I would live long enough to repay the loans), blood reports(to check whether I had AIDS), my ACR dossier (was I likely to be dismissed from service before repayment of the loan ?), an IQ test report for Saurabh to satisfy itself that he was intelligent enough for further studies (that was a close one), and perhaps even a report on my sperm count (to be sure that the bank would get a bang out of its buck- it didn't, nothing lowers the testosterone more effectively than two EMIs a month ).                                                                                                                                                                                                  After that experience I have never applied for a loan, not even a credit card or a post-paid mobile account, because I can't bear the thought of OWING money to anyone. A big mistake, because the only way you can get uber rich in India is by borrowing big time, and not returning the moolah. In this blessed country if you owe a bank ten thousand rupees it's your problem, but if you owe it ten thousand crores then it's the bank's problem! Just look at the couple of dozen bankruptcy cases before the NCLTA: while all the banks and depositors are taking what is called "haircuts" (but are more like fiduciary castrations) in the thousands of crores of rupees, the defaulters continue to live the life of the Sultan of Brunei. So, if you want to live the big life, go and borrow money- in crores. As the Duchess advised the ageing Duke: " If you can't raise it, you ain't getting no piece !" Which, by the way, appears to be a slight adaptation of that Confucious gem: Man who quarrel with wife get no piece at night.                                                                                             Which is also why I live in a village, doing Yoga when the sun rises and meditating when it sets. In between I think of Nirav Modi standing on tip toe peering down designer cleavages, of Vijay Mallya and his life membership of the Mile-High Club, of Lalit Modi who still appears to have the government by the  (cricket) balls, of the captains of Indian industry at Davos in their  bespoke suits which have no pockets- they don't  need pockets, because their hands are always in someone else's pockets, you see. Maybe I should have listened to Mintu. 

REFLECTIONS ON THE GENIUS OF THE "PAKODA" ECONOMY

 Some of us may recall that revolutionary doctrine enunciated by one of India's leading economists, Mr. Amit Shah, a couple of years ago, viz. that selling "pakodas" on the road constitutes gainful employment. Or that other one on this subject by our second most eminent economist, Mr. Piush Goyal, that unemployment rates in India are high because more and more people are opting for self employment. These twin blasts shook our neo-liberal foundations like the earthquake in Delhi earlier this week, and caused quite a stir among the subordinate economists from Harvard, Yale, DSE, the IMF and the World Bank; those in the Observer Research Foundation, of course, merely applauded politely- they had never doubted the brilliance of these two gentlemen, not even when the former had announced that India would become a five trillion ton economy by 2024, or when the latter had mistaken Einstein for Newton (or was it the other way round? Not that it matters, relatively speaking).

But you know what, folks? Our two leading economists were right! No, I haven't joined the RSS, I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel now that the light in the tunnel itself has been switched off. What makes this country survive is not the Finance Ministry, or the Nutty Aayog, or the Chief Economic Advisor, or the corporate fat cats of the Davos variety. No sir, these worthies only create more billionaires and multi-millionaires; what sustains our teeming millions of common folk is- they said it- self employment, the "pakoda" economy, the "juggad" at the bottom of the economic pyramid. Though I prefer to call it "proletarian entrepreneurship" on an industrial scale, something they don't teach you at the IIMs and Ivy League snob-shops, perhaps because they are not even aware of it. But it feeds millions of households, enables Mrs Sitharaman to crow like a cock about our growth rate, and keeps the country growing- without a paisa being contributed by the government, or even one of the 40 million government employees having to move an inch. This is the real "atmanirbharta", not what you hear in Man ki Baat. It's genius is all around us in our daily lives, but we rarely stop to think of it or to acknowledge it.

This home-grown genius consists of spotting the tiniest of demand niches in our economy or society, and then scrambling to fill it- provide that product or service required- without handing out expensive consultancies to Mckinsey or TCS or retired IAS officers. For example, on my many treks to remote areas, I have always marveled at the intrepid individuals who set up shop in the most inhospitable, climatically severe and sometimes dangerous locations. I am not talking here of areas like Khir Ganga or Kasol or Marhi (on the way to Rohtang pass), which have become mini-townships serving car borne tourists and require no entrepreneurship, just a few contacts in the Forest and TCP departments. 

The real entrepreneurship is to be found in near inaccessible areas. Like the young man from Baijnath I met in Chandratal lake (14000 feet, 20 kms from the roadhead): he had pitched a huge parachute as a tent on the shores of the lake, and for Rs. 100 per head provided accommodation, bedding and a hearty dinner (the rum was BYO, though mine host could arrange even that for an extra premium!). During the season his Hilton Heights catered to about 5-6 trekkers every day. Or Sharmaji's dhaba in a dense forest on the track to Khir Ganga in the Parbati valley, miles from anywhere: he told us that his biggest problem was dealing with black bears who were attracted by the smells of his chhole chawal and Maggi. Or the bravest of them all- a couple who had pitched a tent at Merh, just below the Thamsar pass at 16000 feet on the climb down to Bara Bhangal village; a more bleak, freezing and windswept location would be difficult to imagine. It served as an inn for exhausted trekkers (and locals) and no one minded sharing the tent with a few sheep or mules- in fact, they provided much needed warmth.

Only a marketing genius, with courage to match, would have chosen to ply a business in these remote regions, hundreds of kms from their homes. They are the stuff of Bata and Levis. They chose their spots with a perfect eye for the customer's needs, provided a badly needed product and service, acted as a clearing house for local news and weather, and have probably saved a few lives in the bargain too. They would pack up with the advent of winter, go back to their families in Baijnath, Kangra or Chamba, and return the next year in spring to resume. No bank loans, no PLI incentives, no subsidies, no complaints. Genuine entrepreneurship at its purest, outside what learned persons call the "formal" economy.

I see the same initiative, enterprising spirit, and appetite for risk in the urban habitat where I now live, in a massive, multi-storeyed housing society. Services which even an Elon Musk could not have predicted a dozen years ago have now become mainstream, something the privileged residents of these RWAs cannot do without now. Take pets, particularly dogs.

Pets are now a status symbol, a plaything for kids, a substitute for missing grandkids, and the pet care industry in India is valued at Rs. 4800 crore, growing at 16.50 % per annum. But that is only the formal part; the informal service sector I discovered only when I moved to the society. I'll give just two examples. There is a huge demand for "dog walkers" since the dog owners are either too busy, or too old, or too drunk or too high brow to take their doggies out on a leash. The job provides a good living: Rs. 4000/ a month for two walks a day, about 30 minutes each. A dog walker can easily do five pets a day- that's 20000/ a month the CBDT does not know about, more than what your average Management graduate or lawyer earns. Then there is the dog "groomer": for about Rs.1200/ to Rs. 1500/ the groomer will shampoo your pet, brush and trim his coat, cut his nails and brush his teeth for good measure. At the end of it the doggie looks better than the missus does after spending Rs. 4000/ at  Tony And Guy's or some other such gender neutral salon.  Not exactly a dog's life, you will agree!

I have another enterprising young chap in my society- he specialises in fixing anti-pigeon nets on balconies, a business niche like no other. Since statues are now all more than 100 meters high, and trees a rarity, pigeons have taken to roosting on balconies and depositing their "shagan" in them in respectable quantities. Enter Ajit Chauhan, who, at Rs. 15/ per square foot will give you a lifetime (the pigeon's life, not your's) warranty against the nuisance. The final charges for a 4 bedroom and 3 bedroom flat work out to about Rs. 12000/ and Rs. 10000/ respectively. And he does all the fixing himself, with just one kid as helper. He makes more money than an Apex scale IAS pensioner, and doesn't even have to submit a Life Certificate every July! 

My little village of Puranikoti, a safe 15 kms form the sanitary landfill known as Shimla, also has its jugadu entrepreuners. A Sikh gentleman comes on his motorcycle once a fortnight (he covers the entire panchayat) offering to sell/ repair/ service gas burners, regulators, pipes etc. It's a vital service for us at our doorstep, literally, since the nearest gas agency is 20 kms away and has never heard of the "Right to Repair" concept or law. A young lad from Haryana gets his womenfolk to make huge quantities of pickles back home, puts it all in his pick-up and motors up to Mashobra regularly to hawk his wares to us country bumpkins. I always buy my pickles from him, they cost Rs. 100/ per kilo ( yes, you heard that right- a KILO) as against about Rs 700-800 for the branded varieties, and are fresher and much more delicious.

It is these unknown and unsung (at TIMES NOW or INDIA TODAY type conclaves) innovators who are the real Atlases holding up the Indian economy and creating informal livelihoods for its teeming, excluded, millions. Unlike the Adanis, Ambanis and Mahendras, they don't demand or expect concessions from the government, they don't create NPAs, they don't fly to Davos in CO2 spewing jets, and they don't issue IPOs to milk the public. They do it all on their own. They represent our true genius. I'm waiting for some political party to make the "pakoda" its party symbol.