The Maanga

A conversation with a cousin included the mandatory sentences, filled with sadness, about the recent flooding in the Delta districts and consequent washout of crops ready to be harvested in a week’s time. The reply was swift — ‘Don’t even bother. After all this works best — Karunanidhi government will either equal or do better than the Jayalalitha government. We will get money for crop loss like the last time. And we did not even have to spend on labor‘.

The said cousin is 20 years old.

Think of top ten non-Ghandhi politicians from the Indian National Congress. Among them, count those who can win an election by themselves — no, not a state, just their constituency.

If only such a thing as Hindi heartland did not exist.

It’s somehow very sad when an adult decides to seek validation of one’s own life. Especially, when it is as stunning as this.

India’s politicians have evolved with Television while TV anchors have stagnated.

A landslide for Modi will leave Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and, to a lesser extent, Karnataka, alone.

Read this special piece on NRIs returning to India. It should not have been written, and even if it has been, it should not have been read. I could have rather spent an evening re-reading Aimé Césaire´s  “Notebook of a Return to my Native Land” 

Brain Drain is an over-used concept. It appears to imply that the average IQ of the Indian immigrant to the USA is significantly greater than the average IQ of the person who stays behind. While this might definitely have been the case in the early 70s, I am not sure it is any longer the case. The software boom has definitely trickled down to the morons. In some strange version of the dutch disease, the ease of getting an H1B visa has made mental processes redundant in most Indians abroad. 

Indians define their culture by two great taboos. Food and Sex. What you put inside your body has to be Indian. These taboos, buried in the unconscious, flare up when you have kids. You have to ensure that your daughter toes the line with these taboos. Sons may have more leeway, if they are not gay.  

The only truthful reason I can give if I return to India, is that I have not succeeded to the extent I expected. That, my failure is better hidden in a country with a population of over a billion poor people than three hundred million rich people. That I have not made any friends in the US, other than a pretzel lady and some taxi drivers. That I long for the kind service of poorly paid Indian serfs, to brighten my evening years  All that, and the taboos.  

Recently I was the attempt of an extortion attempt by a sastrigal. For officiating at my wedding, he demanded Rs 20,000 and a scooter. I was even willing to fork out the money, but the scooter was a bit much. I gently reminded him that I was the one who was supposed to get a Dowry. He would not budge. A cheaper sastrigal was found for just Rs 10,000 and a kids scooter. Amma has commissioned a  Globe detective to find out if he is at least a Brahmin.  

I have been thinking seriously about the downmarket for sastrigals. I mean, people like T Anna and me are old school. We go and meet chittis and pretend to like their pineapple rasam. The sastrigal comes to our house, giving us poonal etc. But there are few of us this days. What can sastrigals do when the new generation takes over, and invariably the market for their services collapses? They need new services.  

My US based fiancee said that she was going to a bridal shower next week and said there might be a striptease. That night I dreamt that a sastrigal handed me his card and it went like this:                         

Nataraja Sastrigal 
Sastrigal Striptease                   
For all your Divasams, Upanayanams, Bridal Showers                 
We aim to please the gods and you                 
Shashtiabthapoorthis and Pole dancing on special request  

I felt initially it might cause some horror, and Tripurasundari mami might wonder how Govinda Ganabadigal can say to her before he goes out - innikki oru upanayanam, oru divasam, oru striptease. Soon, she might accept it as some kind of abhishekam. Soon Jambudveepam might see a band of sastrigals riding scooters, wielding blackberries, rushing from once place to another, dancing.

After all, they already have the ponytails.  

In economics, we appear to be in the same situation that Wittgenstein appeared to be when he wrote the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus. He said that most problems were not philosophical problems at all, but problems of language. Since he also felt that most philosophical problems had been solved (notably by him) after the first world war, he felt free to go back to Austria and teach at a village school. It is another issue that he got kicked out for beating children at the school, and decided to write another book.  

Most economic truths, which were not self-evident before 1991, appear to be so self-evident now, that it seems pointless arguing about them. Is there any major economic problem left?  

There appears to be one, and that is the problem of Africa. Different economists have different suggestions. Jeffrey Sachs (and Bono) suggest massive aid. William Easterly, who worked at the World Bank and now teaches at NYU, saying massive aid has already been given and has not been effective. Easterly alone, of all economists, is modest enough to confess that he doesn’t know what is wrong with Africa and what could be done. All he says is that centrally planned, large-scale aid operations are bound to fail.  

Now, we have a new book and some more new research from Paul Collier of Oxford. Collier attracted some attention with a paper at  some Jackson Hole conference, which offered an interesting, geographical perspective on Africa, which I initially thought was as intelligent as Jared Diamond´s Collapse. So, I just ordered his new book, The Bottom Billion for Christmas reading.  

Reading Easterly´s review of this book, I feel I am bound to be disappointed. Collier did his research with the World Bank, and in the words of Daren Acemoglu, his work contains “correlations that are interpreted as causal effects that are really no more than correlations”. We are back with the ghost of Wittgenstein, who intoned “Der Glaube an den Kausalnexus ist der Aberglaube” (Superstition is the belief in the Causal nexus).

As someone fond of describing myself as classical liberal, I have always been surprised by my instinctive opposition to global warming, emissions trading and the like. Socialists welcome limits on emissions, as these imply limits on economic growth and bring back re-distribution on the agenda. For a liberal, economic growth and free trade should be able to achieve all the re-distribution that is needed, so any limits on either are instinctively opposed.  

In a perceptive article in the FT, Martin Wolf describes this conflict. (Might need registration).

For some reason, I remembered my Thatha´s divasam today morning. It was always conducted by an old Sastrigal, who was with the family for years. After the ceremony and the huge meal, invariably, his ass would go off to sleep. The other two brahmanas would take to swatting the immobile part with their angavastrams in order to induce some blood circulation. Patti would get all concerned, and give me a tumbler of panagam with a katterumbu inside it, and ask me to give it to kundajadam sastrigal, whose name she never remembered.  

At the end of all these ministrations, the sastrigals ass would loudly proclaim its existence,  and this would frighten away the crow/grandfather in whose honor the ceremony was being conducted, thus nullifying the ceremony, and forcing us to conduct it all over again.

All life is collateral damage.