For Bettor or Worse

One more scandal. In Cricket. And with origins in our north-westerly neighbor. Before you yawn and throw the newspaper away, cursing them for rehashing old copy, pause a moment. Media-baiting apart, recycling strategy does not sell newspapers, at least on a sustainable basis — and mine certainly wears its readership high on its sleeve. If this be the truth, there must be more to it, including a reason why Cricket has kept company with controversy with striking regularity of late.

My brush with the purported gentlemanliness of cricket came from pages of the same newspaper, years ago. The mid-80s, newly launched HT Patna edition headlined "It's Not Cricket" for some fiasco on the ground — the kind that’s hardly likely to cause you to blink in our more cynically evolved times. A question to the Pater elicited an etymological explanation in the game's history and tradition-rich lore. Not sure if it significantly altered my on-field behaviour (or lack of notable achievement), but much before Atticus Finch, it was an excellent introduction to that intangible called sportsman spirit.

Those wistful memories, though, are not the only reason to grieve the morass of modern Cricket. Mind you, the actual charges the tainted trio from Pakistan (and Akmal D’Artagnan) stands in the dock for are neither unique nor original. More than a few of India's own, including our Hon'ble MP from Moradabad (though his erstwhile tarnished reputation has lately been alight with some other flame!) have shamed cricket and left even its diehard fans wondering whether on-field exploits are driven by sporting acumen or Mammonic influence. One can go so far as to argue that this skepticism; and an exposure overdose have led to Cricket's (relatively) flagging following — and the gradual rise of other sports.

In any event, no nation has made such inseparable acquaintance with controversy as Pakistan. Go back but a few years and Pak cricket has been newsworthy more for unsavoury dealings and repeated individual misconduct than genuine cricketing reasons. If unconvinced, try and picture best-batsman-of-generation Inzamam (thus spake Imran; move over Lara, Sachin!), Peter Pan cowboy Afridi, sex-n-speed (pun intended) posterchild Shoaib Akhtar, twice-named Yousuf (more pun intended) and check if images of occasional glory are not tainted interminably with talent-wasting notoriety. Indeed Pakistani cricketers come and go (often for multiple voluntary and forced retirements!) but despite several efforts to clean their Augean stables, the muck refuses to wash off.

Perhaps the internecine bickering and dubious (on- and off-field) debacles in Pak cricket could be brushed off as symptomatic of the rot in that country. The world has, after all, been comfortably numbed to bad news from Pakistan. Nor is it easy to mourn the absence of sporting events there, given what transpired when the Lankan Tigers last dared to venture. Yet, history shows that existence of exclusion begets politics of hate. An economically challenged, educationally backward, and socially fragmented state is fertile ground for unleashing the worst within. If no other, then this is good reason to shed a tear for Muhammad Amir. Not from the country's oligopolistic elite (on whose doorstep lies the blame for most of the mess that is Pakistan, and whose fiefdom the nation's cricket has traditionally been), Amir would not have had it easy. His was a long, heroic journey from the Swat Valley, now less famous for panoramic beauty than notorious for the war against Taliban, to match-winning brilliance at Lord's. For a nation short on inspiration, at least of the right variety, his fairytale rise was profoundly apposite. Those no-balls, alas, shattered that illusion.

At another level, we must ponder if too much is invested in the game in the sub-continent: the ridiculous shenanigans before, during, and after IPL ought to have triggered such thoughts anyhow. As a case in point, consider the pointless brouhaha over another no-ball and symphony of sympathy for Sehwag (he too woke up to it overnight!). For sure lament the decline in the spirit of the game with such incidents, but let us equally appreciate the larger context of its commercialization where, indeed, we have played a leading role. And certainly go easy on ill-founded, frenzied waves of jingoism — it is, after all, still a game :)

PS: My vote too, for legalizing betting. Like the war against tobacco teaches us, one plays them best when allowed out of the closet. Viva Transparency!

Damp Squib

Months ago, the draft of a new Direct Taxes Code for India had drawn much public acclaim, including in these pages. This was not without reason. For starters, the existing system was visibly knocking on the doors of obsolescence. Hence, any review intended to simplify its archaic tenets (thereby reducing repeated recourse to judicial interpretation) was hugely welcome. Next, a forward-looking document shorn of its predecessor's dotage could enable the taxman to better engage and deploy New Age tools. This promised a sea change in efficiency and effectiveness of Direct Tax administration (on counts like evasion detection, internal security etc) making it a progressive legislation worthy of a budding economic superpower billing. Last and not least, the very idea of promoting larger debate prior to finalization bespoke intellectual honesty and inclusiveness rare in our policymaking experience. A thumbs-up for this wiki approach was much in line.

However, implicit in all these arguments (in fact providing them overall credence) was the game-changing nature of actual changes proposed to the tax framework. If it were to fall prey to back-room intrigue and lobbying, as the more cynical amongst us foretold, it would be a real pity in the face of path-breaking promise. Even as these fears lurked, the revised discussion paper one heard of a few months back also sounded headed in a compromise-riddled direction. And sadly that is exactly what has finally come home to roost in the proposal formally introduced in Parliament this week.

So how has the cheer of the finest toast for Pranab-da soured into old-wine-new-bottle despair? Selfishly or otherwise, my first disappointment is in the largely superficial personal taxation changes. In fact, perusing the reams of newsprint dedicated to laud the 'extra income' (a princely INR 24,000 at the upper end) through marginally tweaked tax slabs, one wonders when our mainstream media will mature beyond cliché. (To avoid sounding like a stuck record, we steer clear of media-bashing — richly deserved as it may be. There is zero surprise in our Fourth Estate's centrist and arguably pro-Congress slant.) In any event, basic math of inflation on the cast-in-stone slab values itself beats hollow the DTC's pithy positioning as a taxpayer windfall.

Going beyond this, one must rue the lost potential of a truly simplified tax framework. With 6.5% incidence sacrificed at the altar of exemptions and political expediency, the Government had a clear shot at reducing cost and complexity. Removal of potentially distortionary criteria would have improved investment decision-making for aam aadmi and HNI alike. Equally, a move to EET could have boosted long-term savings (PF withdrawal is an example). All that has been belied. Perhaps most importantly though, the survival of the exemption regime has reduced the leeway to lower rates and punt on increased adherence, ultimately limiting the ability to fund GOI's ambitious developmental agenda.

The saving grace has been the refusal to tinker with Capital Gains Tax that would have created an artificial portfolio churn opportunity (en masse profit-booking in March, followed by resumed longs in April, a cost minus any economic value add) that has been avoided. (In lighter vein, the DTC is also the government's first assertion of having achieved its gender equality goals. So the deduction differential allowed for woman taxpayers stands withdrawn, unless merely saved for a subsequent budget to reinstate!)

Elsewhere, the other notable revision in the Bill versus its draft is the compromise on corporate taxation. It is an easy argument that GOI frittered a chance to overhaul capital allocation in our economy. The erstwhile proposal to predicate MAT on gross assets vs book profits represented a fundamental change in the much-misused play of lowering tax liability via investment-led depreciation. From being a tool to manage tax, investments could have emerged into the light, to be evaluated for true CBA. The Big Business lobby however (including relatively genuine voices in its capital-intensive cohort) ensured we are left with Photoshop-type interventions to lower tax rates through elimination of cess, surcharge etc. If these were temporary inclusions in our tax regime, as successive FMs gave us to understand, it hardly needed a large-scale DTC exercise to get rid of them. Equally, there is no surety that some other flavour suiting the incumbent political mood will not 'force' the government of the day to resurrect these ostensibly stopgap devices.

All told, this residual pot of half measures still sets the Taxman back 1% of their INR 5.8 lakh crore annual kitty, without any redeeming expectation of increased adherence. A solitary hope remains — with the suspense of end-Feb Budget jitters gone, we could leverage a long-term Tax structure come 2012. If only the redoubtable Mr Mukherjee had been inspired by the spectacular doomsday caper of the same name, the changes would be a bit more appreciable...

Leave 'Em Kids Alone!

An article, tucked away in the inside pages of the newspaper two Sundays ago, rekindled some of my fondest childhood memories (with a twist). It bespoke an impending rewrite of ten bestsellers from the 'Famous Five' series originally authored by the iconic Enid Blyton. Yet, news of the tweak, planned to better their appeal to contemporary pre-teen palates, left me somewhat disquieted.

To talk joys first, my acquaintance with the four kids and their canine cohort (hence the Five) arose in rather happy circumstances. An infrequent happenstance of academic achievement led my father to gift me one of their novels as reward (likely expecting an encore!) from the neighborhood bookstore. The Five were thick with me in but a few pages. For the uninitiated, three were siblings: the eldest, Julian, an early introduction to 'first among equals'; the spirited and fun-loving Dick; and archetypal kid sister Anne. Accompanied by their feisty cousin George (never Georgina), their wondrous tales of adventure made them much more than adolescent characters on elegant typeface. And Timothy, Tim, or mostly Timmy, mongrel pet of supernatural gifts and even higher loyalty, was the dog's dog. If more was needed, he was added motivation for many a young boy to yearn for Man's Best Friend about the house. (No doubt an almost equal number of mothers held the ruthlessly opposite view, and we know how such debates conclude!)

In any event, Ms Blyton’s words and (albeit in smaller fashion) my animated imagination conspired to lend myriad hues to the sketched images. Convenient neighbourhood landmarks and sights from memory were cheekily appended, Rushdiesque, to suffuse them with vividly pulsating life. The Five were my friends next-door, yet magically faraway, in a subliminal construct that only childhood innocence and suitably stimulatory literature can produce. My love affair with the written word commenced with them (and a flock of the prolific Enid’s finest); kept alive thereafter by assorted characters from Fiction and more.

Imagine then, to have editorial scissors run amok this merry company! Guided by the singularly insipid beacon of market research to light the way, a team is attempting to "sensitively and carefully" reconstruct the original. The primary onus, one is given to understand, is to correct an ostensibly antediluvian slang. Unfortunately, such a stance sits well with spin-doctors, not purveyors of young adult literature — but it is perhaps symbolic of our analysis-paralysis times.

To begin with, the charge that today’s young are shying from Five's idiom, while not incredible, sounds frankly tenuous. For it to stick, one must believe that the set of 21 penned over a like number of years ending 1963 — amazingly alive and kicking for many of us through the mid-80s — has managed to age significantly over the succeeding two decades. Equally, it surprises me enormously that a generation at least a thousand times brighter than ours at an equivalent age, needs editorial crutches to understand Blyton’s oeuvre. One can dismiss mine as a jaundiced eye, but such misconceived research may be better illustration of testing biased hypotheses than allegedly passé language or deficiency of acumen.

Of course, true to spin-doctor form, the author's name has been invoked in justification of the exercise. We are reminded how a "passionate" advocate of child literacy as Blyton would appreciate the need for her immortal characters to mouth appropriate conversation-style dialogue. She was, in any case, famously disinterested in the views of critics over 12!

One wonders where such surgery would end, however. Would one, for instance, make George try less hard to be a boy in case not setting the politically correct example to today's youth? Or perhaps have in Anne not the occasionally tear-prone, timid young lady that she was, for fear of hurting Women's Lib? One ought to cleanse the precocious Ju of his 'girls will be girls; boys, boys' elder brother complex. The inappropriately named Dick must need drastic repositioning, surely. Persisting, we could turn our attention to plots and paraphernalia: highlight dangers of presenting camping out as fun; review gypsies’ portrayal lest they take umbrage; check for animal rights violations in Timmy's caricature; evaluate Uncle Quentin’s absent-mindedness as endangering the scientific community; and more!

Incidentally, there would remain a profusion of Blyton waiting to be tackled. Secret Seven, Barney, Mallory Towers, St Clare's — we could be at this for some time (thus keeping certain unnamed cash registers ringing)! Perhaps the indefatigable Blyton preordained the dangers she was flirting with - she had not one but two sets of Five adolescents solving mysteries around England. Now if only she had not let the other group be led by the redoubtable Fatty...

PS: The last named, Frederick Algernon Trotteville, has already been blessed with a trim nouveau visage last year... Who blames Kareena Kapoor for Size Zero fixation?

Animal Farm

One of India's more watched news channels and its leading English daily recently ran an exposé on the pitiful state of our food distribution system. Given the sheer emotive value of rotting grain in a nation home to the world's largest concentration of the hungry, yet with superpower ambitions, public interest was bound to get fired up. Again, the backdrop of runaway food inflation (that has under its spell more than a trifling percentage of our Great Unwashed) provided the outrage with a tinge of rare immediacy. A call to action, so to speak, seemed immanent in the wave of national indignation.

Yet, it remains a moot question whether this will lead to tangible change. While a grandstanding media may have chanced upon its newsworthiness now, the issue has been hanging fire for ages. My personal recall is of (copious, if not compelling) lamentations on 'distribution losses' two decades ago, in the pursuit of an Economics degree — and the problem was not of recent vintage even then. Indeed, pithy 'mouths fed if gaps plugged' protestations brought academic glory to many (not me!) over the years — clearly, to little avail, as the sordid TV visuals testify. The agricultural supply chain was held hostage to political ambivalence for far too long. Such was the potency of notoriously enmeshed vested interests in every leg that one had to be content with a status-quoist survival play, with cynicism and not challenge being the dominant trope.

A quick dekko illustrates the extent of the rot in the entire ecosystem. Starting at the farm gate, the so-called farmer lobby (read: large agriculturists) cannot think beyond input subsidy retention and diesel price control. Interest in output is limited to pushing periodic MSP increases, with populist governments only too willing to oblige. Their small and marginal brethren are too fractured to wield any real political influence, clear from the typically lackadaisical, stopgap response to farmer suicides. A lack of organised credit confines their choices in any case — a fledgling microfinance revolution is still some time away. (This is not to undermine the fact that better contextual appreciation and economic timing help sustain local moneylender-cum-intermediary strangleholds.) In this extant reality of stagnant productivity, the otherwise laudable NREGA and mostly reprehensible Maoist violence add fresh undercurrents. It remains to be seen how these play out, but (at least for now) they have bred more questions than solutions.

Moving ahead in the chain, the picture alters only slightly. Higher investment continues to be a crying need in the storage and distribution of agricultural produce. Public sector agencies hold the key, but gunny sacks full of foodgrain don’t have a vote, and tackling post-harvest waste remains low on their list of priorities. Other logistics players, only occasionally different from middlemen, have little motivation to drive efficiency, given the infrastructure (and corruption) squeeze on margins, unless to profit from (artificially induced) supply imbalances. Lastly, wholesale through last-mile retail suffers from a lack of scale, subject to high rents, rising operating expenses, and limited organised investment, disadvantaging honest trade.

Fact remains that our nation also drove a Green Revolution. The erstwhile stage was one of stronger political will, with public memory fresh from ignominious PL 480 capitulations. In consequently sympathetic ears, AIR propagated research science prescriptions, and rural India took to HYV seeds, fertilizers, and irrigation in little time. (Incidentally, the most common critique of the Revolution centres around land degradation, showing little appreciation of R&D’s evolutionary nature — science is a process of constant churn, not a one-time infusion. Critics likewise gloss over the lopsided nature of fertilizer subsidies and the like.)

In short, we must lean on science again. Be it input optimisation, cultivation and processing practices, storage, or transit efficiency — each can benefit from the strides the scientific-industrial world has taken over the years. (Robust risk modelling too can help drive deeper microcredit penetration, but that science, alas, draws much derision in a post-Lehman world!) And our IT prowess can be brought to bear on information gaps that mess up cycle time, cost, and pricing across the value chain.

Of course, it would be naive to think one can solve it without social science. And no, this is not a call to the political class to miraculously conjure the will to lead the charge. Shorn of direct electoral gain, political commitment levels seldom multiply manifold — if it has not happened in years, a blog post or television theatrics won’t. (Our beloved Agriculture Minister is anyway planning to focus on his new ICC chair when not engaged in periodic one-upmanship exercises with his professed allies.) This is merely a plea not to wilfully muddy the waters. We cannot afford to continue ludicrous supply-pricing games, with ill-advised and badly executed (if not dubiously intended) market interventions lacking economic sense.

Hypercritical of politics after a fashion? No. We must recognise the math by which 58 million tonnes of stock accumulates, double the actual need. Or how over a million tonnes are lost to storage and transit in just four years while at least as many parts of the country reported starvation deaths. (Yes, we did give folks with BPL cards TV sets in some state elections. Good — they can watch the tragicomedy live now.) So, if our political masters can just about manage to keep their gaming instincts under control, this can get off the ground well enough. And if we are really, truly lucky, perhaps they can think visionarily — and allow full mobility and free markets in the sector. Food Security would then move from policy shibboleth to proud reality.

Numb and Number: UID

Well into the 21st century, the first impression for anyone walking into a government office in India is likely an image of a deluge of paper, embodying its creaky infrastructure. A proliferation of overflowing cupboards, dusty files stacked wall to wall, cobweb-tangled piles kissing the roof, and reigning over every spit-stained corner; it is an ugly and telling sight. The obvious — a grim tale of bureaucratic sloth suggestive of callow indifference, busy adding to the karguzari paper mountain day by day. Equally, a sense of wonder how, in its midst and despite it, the business of governance carries on in our vast, parched lands.

Times are a-changing, though. Via some central initiative but mostly local effort, the Government is waking up to technology and convergence. While paperless is still a far cry, Indian officialdom is taking gradual, diffident steps to improve information management and productivity. This is only natural. Services, and specifically IT, offered a way out in a country beset by inadequate physical infrastructure. In tandem with corruption and lopsided left-leaning policy, these bottlenecks had leashed us to a stubbornly sluggish growth and economic has-been status. New Age technology enabled the emergence of a confident, vibrant India that is generously glimpsed today. Thus, it is only fitting that it provides the vehicle for our governance transformation, light in a pen-pushing, paper-gorging Black Hole where citizenry feared to tread.

Obviously, this goes much beyond paper. Of vital significance are technology's game-changing capabilities in delivery of governance benefits. Indeed, the Government has put no less than 27 mission-critical projects to this task. UID, or Aadhaar as it is now named, is arguably the most important of these: the core of our national e-enablement effort. The idea is simple - a unique identifier to serve as primary key driving the massive information repository that governance for a billion-plus populace entails. Naturally, the superstructure can only be as good as its edifice. And the UID ask is humongous — plan and execute a 12-digit numerical tag for a mindboggling 600 million records, including associated biometric and personal data. All this over the next 4 years, while staying true to the goals of building a robust and efficient system. If successful, this identifier and pathbreaking database of biometric permanent numbers and personal statistics would enable policy analytics and monitoring at an unprecedented scale. Frankly, it is nearly impossible to envision the full governance impact of the result. Yet, broadly speaking, its incisive segmentation and targeting ability would be a dream in terms of faster rollout, easier tracking, and better audit.

Of course, the picture is not all hunky-dory. The enormity of the exercise is perhaps equalled only by its complexity. For instance, potential private use is a double-edged sword. While it does wonders for, say, a financial services company for verification, marketing analytics, and the like, the risk in unfettered online access to personal information can be immense, especially for a terrorism-frontline state. To this extent, UID is much more than a technological challenge or design complexity. Imagine concurrent needs across multilevel security and ease of accessibility in a citizenry with varying levels of computer proficiency (safely assumed low on average). Then there are connectivity concerns (Mukeshbhai's opportunity can be Nilekani's bugbear). Revert to traditional paper census methods or a paper-hub-digital-spoke model and you open up data compromise risks in L1 implementation itself. Power can play spoilsport too — solar panels had to be used to fill gaps during proof-of-concept — and bear in mind that a Karnataka does not an India make. We cannot be blind to the bureaucracy's internal change resistance either — some of the flock do love a good drought, as we unfortunately know only too well! And so on.

Yet, the RTI experience shows that political will at the top goes a long way in overcoming what seems prima facie insurmountable. Similar commitment must be mobilised to tackle the issue of data privacy protection for citizens in post-UID India. Not only is this a checks-and-balances need, it is high time the GOI realised that potential for misuse in a nation with lax, ill-defined laws is not restricted to its Internal Security agencies alone. Take this train of thought forward, and one would love to see proactive public debate around Aadhaar's design and other postulates or concerns — beyond the self-congratulatory, world-hunger-solution posturing that has come by till date. Short of this, it will be another gamechanger that flattered to deceive!

U(r)LIP or Mine?

A couple of smug rookies posturing as 'Relationship Managers' at my bank, an almost equally minuscule clique that seeks me out for investment advice, and hordes of DNC-dismissive telemarketers peddling insurance — all can stand testimony to my ULIP-agnostic personal finance strategy. My stance is hardly original — most experts of any standing shun ULIPs in their shopping cart must-haves. Despite this rare unanimity and strong arguments against the product class, it has drawn investor interest consistently. Reasons behind this ostensible anomaly, or the product's long-term prognostications, have assumed centrestage with recent developments in the shape of a SEBI-IRDA jurisdictional battle. At the heart of this are changed regulations that address opacity and investor-unfriendly practices that ail ULIP sales and service, or inherent design.

To appreciate the context of the proposed changes, one must recognize that ULIPs have been sold in a manner completely antithetical to the fundamentals of the family to which they ostensibly belong. (Most people one knows, when buying a ULIP, actually believe they are taking 'smart' life cover.) The lure of entering an asset class where 'your money is not idle' but 'deployed to maximize returns' and offer 'better term cover', has been irresistible for the typical gullible investor, fed on years of stodgy state-run insurance firms’ (often unfairly so dubbed) unimaginative offerings and dull salesfolk. A general expectation of market efficiency over public sector sloth thus plays into the aggressively positioned ULIP schemes promising lay investors the moon.

Again, an investment offering of this kind, with significant dependence on market performance, usually comes into its own in the long run (and this is not 3 or 5 years that qualify as 'lifetime' to 25-year-olds nowadays). Think 10-15 years, or 20 if not more, and cyclical noise is factored out of markets and sensible stockpicking yields results fully. Admittedly, this is market investment spiel (for, say, equity MF) but unfortunately not what many newbie investors readily bite, obsessed as they are with 'timing' the market. The same investor, when thinking term cover, expects longer tenors in line with life expectancy. The resultant surge of patience, sweetened with promise of exceptional returns, draws savings to ULIP schemes by the boatloads.

Of course, it is obvious that such troths of exponential growth do not sit well with life cover. Yet, spurred by extraordinary incentives that can only come from heavily front-loaded cost structures (45% of Y1 premium, no less!), a bevy of insurance salesmen position ULIP as a best-of-both-worlds insurance product generating assured returns over months and years. The post-sale dissonance that naturally results (it is difficult to think a worse period of investor sentiment and market return than the last two years) leads to massive exits. Yet, unlike market instruments where such attrition is visible (and actionable), ULIP truancy figures are hardly the most advertised. Hence the ecosystem of under-informed investors, malintentioned agents, and lazy insurance firms continues to flourish unashamedly.

At another level, ULIPs represent a large (if invisible) problem for private sector insurance companies. There is a highly credible school of thought that unravels what drives this disproportionate focus on the win-today-worry-tomorrow rat race for the investable rupee. The motivation seemingly comes from higher capital adequacy norms for guaranteed (term insurance) vs market-linked (investment) assets. This makes minimization of life cover (per rupee vested) a lucrative short-term strategy. Unfortunately, this evanescence creates not merely an economic but a potentially significant social issue that can wreck us in the long run. In an under-insured nation like India, with rising healthcare demand (and costs) yet inadequate social security structures, such mis-selling of investment in the garb of insurance can lead to consequences far more dramatic than most of us care to think. (Term cover, after all, is for those eventualities of life that leave us at our most frail and disturbed.)

All this has been known for a while. Yet, aside from individual decisions like mine (big picture-inconsequential, likely), not much was attempted to correct this systemically (or if something was in the works, it was certainly not PDQ pace!). To this extent, the very public spat between our hyperactive market regulator and their largely somnolent insurance cousin was most welcome. In characteristic Bhave fashion, SEBI initiated measures to clear the mess under an investor friendly bias. In the ensuing turf battle, however, the IRDA came up trumps (SEBI's knock on the Supreme Court’s doors was in vain: GOI nipped it in the bud with an IRDA-primacy ordinance before milords could weigh in — all while CBB was away on business in Canada!).

Cynics in our midst ought to be unsurprised - the venerable J Hari Narayan has impeccable credentials to win any back-room battle. Years spent in the government have admirably equipped the ex-IAS officer to work the Establishment. (Interestingly, despite similar pedigree, Bhave does not have the same reputation.) Equally, while missing the visible zeal of his no-nonsense SEBI counterpart, the charitable can point to JHN’s record of not shirking from a tough stand in the face of controversy. In any case, he has Pranab-da’s mandate.

Regardless, the verdict in the territorial fracas is hardly the key issue. Of essence is whether and how the Govt and its now unequivocally empowered regulator finally set the house in order. Even if one were to ignore my arguably over-pessimistic predilections on the social impact of messing with the small saver, there can be little doubt that Shri Hari Narayan presides over a window of opportunity — to serve the lay investor well, while providing an overdue lifeline to ULIPs. Else, the victory, so to speak, may remain Pyrrhic.

Shoania, Show-Inane-Yeah

Incessant appetite for scurrilous gossip and celebrity obsession can hardly be classified as inventions of contemporary vintage. However, the heights (or depth, as seems a more apt description) this theatre of the Absurd has attained of late is certainly without precedent. This is mostly an inevitable fallout of advances in Media – the breadth leads some of its participants to stoop (competition, anyone?), and penetration allows its variegated output to become inescapable reality.

In the Indian context, media omnipresence has been pervasive (invasive some would aver) ever since one Pappu (Prince actually) fell down a tube-well and the nation woke up to Reality TV. Yet, its extent struck me this week when asked for my opinion on the ludicrous Shoaib-Sania tamasha over a meal with some office colleagues. Granted that a non-event like this must have an audience in TRP targets somewhere in our Great Unwashed, that it could wing its way to more pretentious dinner table conversations was a potent reminder of how much of an equalizer TV has become.

At one level, many aspects of the episode (soap opera, if you like) may interest the anthropologically inclined. One of these is clearly why so much collective consciousness need have been expended on this tragicomedy. Mind you, this is not elitist rant. One merely finds it difficult to turn from the fact (even for her most ardent fans) of Ms Mirza’s athletic prowess being decidedly higher on glamour quotient than sporting achievement. In fact, despite superior professional history, that it is Lee-Hesh’s (occasional) romantic dalliances or (not so occasional) fratricidal strife which has consumed more newsprint, buttresses the argument. Follow this line of reasoning and one can hypothesize that, culturally, embarrassing scrutiny is anathema to Indian sensibilities. We revel in demi-god status for those with more immodest track records in any walk of life. In fact, but for moviedom (where controversy may well be courted in the name of publicity), we have mostly shunned discussions even remotely suggestive of the human frailties of our icons.

Another distasteful (if not downright dangerous) facet of the media onslaught is the bevy of armchair experts only too happy to turn it into TRP-rich Indo-Pak confrontation. Neighbourly engagements in most parts of the world are reasonably complex but ours with the failed state to our West is special even in these terms. With a few wars fought, not to forget an ongoing proxy one, and Terrorism, Kashmir, Nuclear Proliferation etc to queer the pitch, the last we need is trivial nonsense to whip up jingoistic frenzy. That more of this despicable posturing stems from Shoaib & Co’s antics (or across the LOC in general) is immaterial. Some serious soul-searching is in order if India is not large-hearted and confident enough to dismiss such frivolity with the contempt it deserves. (Equally, who cares what flag adorns Sania’s epaulette, given the flimsy chances of her making it to the podium!)

Similarly trifling has been the attempt by some to use this occasion for characteristic Islam bashing. There may well be merit in debating Muslim Personal Law in India — in situ, or vis-à-vis Sharia-governed Pakistan (or Turkey, or Indonesia) — but an important, complex social issue is sadly trivialized to link it with Ayesha’s marital status. Crucial debates on woman’s rights, legitimacy of telephonic nikah, polygamy, etc make for difficult resolution with virtually administered polygraph tests for Shoaib Malik or Chand Mohammed’s sleeping arrangements. Such sensationalism loses us the battle — and the war is already lost.

Perhaps most enduring though, is an immanent need for introspection in our media moguls (or at least their electronic brood). Fourth Estate is vital to a vibrant democracy but an overdose of the inane is a sad abuse of its reach. It is truly beyond me as to how or who decides that the attention of the entire nation needs be converged on Sania’s break-up with Sohrab, her choice of Shoaib, Ayesha’s copious (and credulous?) tears, and so on — across news channels and without break.

Extend the argument, and the ravings of assorted fanatics or pronouncements of perennially affixed experts (the same set is sought, and duly supplies pithily TRP-arousing views irrespective of topic) are all media-created monsters (raise your hands if you see less of Shri Laloo Prasad now that he has 4 seats versus 30) under the sham of good copy. This circus, together with the adultery-rebirth obsessed tearjerker ‘general entertainment’ fare, makes one wonder which channels the media barons’ children watch. Cover it by all means, but for God’s sake, give us some choice!

Else let us all retire to watch Discovery Travel & Living.