Shri P.M. has announced that I am a VIP - Very Important Person. Being a VIP in India gives one many privileges : you skip serpentine queues at almost every place that has a service counter or kiosk (we are a highly over populated country, so long queues are quite normal), you are offered discounts for services rendered, you get priority at airports, hotels, restaurants, special rooms in hospitals etc. and exclusive entitlements that one with the status bestows upon oneself, as per the circumstance.
Until the announcement yesterday, about 5.6 lakh people enjoyed the status. Since the announcement, 1.26 billion people shall enjoy the new found status! What would this mean? Simply, that things haven't changed for the new VIP but have certainly changed for the old VIP. And a few more people will jostle in queues and hanker for better treatment. All this after the ban on red beacons on a few vehicles used by the erstwhile VIPs. So, now, along with erstwhile royalty, we shall also have a new class of people - erstwhile VIPs.
The government of the day has the much sought after ability to think-out-of-box when it comes to solutions to problems that have ridden the country for many, many years. They pat themselves on the back, and, I shall give it to them graciously, that, sometimes justifiably.
We enjoy a place of pride in the ranks of corruption in various countries. Corruption is part of the system and is believed to grease the mechanics of its functioning. Citizens (expcept the VIPs of yesterday) across the spectrum bore the brunt of it at some point in their life. Cash was the means of greasing and it became a deep rooted problem. So how would one deal with a problem like corruption that had spread like a malignant tumour, destroying every cell in the country? Reprimand the corrupt? Punish them, did you say? Or put checks and balances in place and bring the whole system under greater vigilance?
Cash was to be blamed, not the mindset of the corrupt. Remember the Hindi saying: na rehegi baas, na bajegi bansuri?
The answer to the problem lay in demonetisation, the currency reform that sent the people, ordinary, extra-ordinary and those in the middle, into a tizzy. Of course, as the impact of it began to unfold, targeting counterfeit currency and terror financing were the primary targets of the process. Punishing the corrupt, those who hoarded cash in their mattresses and flush tanks, became a side-effect of the process! Sure, they suffered. Overnight, all the lakhs and crores worth of currency collected by the corrupt become the equivalent of toilet paper. But Indian’s are very innovative people when they want to be: many found loopholes and managed to save as much of it as possible from being flushed down the drain. So has the bug of corruption been destroyed? No. Even the process of converting old currency into the new one had thrown up new models for corruption.
Corruption is essentially a cultural problem, not a money problem. So, it hasn’t targeted the root of the problem, rather only the symptoms. Demonetisation did bring in fear among those expecting bribes, but it will reappear in a different form. According to government figures, it did check terror funding and counterfeiting. And I believe them! Only the purported solution that "no cash will kill corruption" is only a quarter-way measure in dealing with the menace of corruption. Laws, rules, regulations to bring the corrupt to book need to be stronger, much stronger.
So, how would one transact without money? One still needed to buy-sell and survive despite the old currency being killed. Ah, the solution lay in our smartphone, we are told. Smartphones are dumbing us down. They remember too much of what pertains to us, and we have begun to remember less and less. Anyway, people scampered to get their smartphone to outsmart life and make themselves less smart. Doesn’t matter that one company did the maximum business in the process.
Despite the raging debates on privacy, biometrics and data security, smartphones are the way to go. Your phone recognises your thumb-impression and you are good to go. The thumb is mightier than the pen now, let alone the sword!
If anyone was trying to live life without a phone, its going to be a nightmare. And what of all the research surrounding the ill-effects on one’s health due to the use of smartphones? Didn't the honourable Supreme Court of India order that a mobile phone tower be shifted since a citizen proved that radiations from the tower caused him cancer? Health is no longer the real wealth; the smartphone is.
Talking of health, Indians suffer from many lifestyle diseases. What is considered ‘bad eating habits’ these days, and a sedentary lifestyle, are leading to increased cases of obesity and diabetes. An unhealthy population can pose to be a big problem to a country. How could the problem be addressed? The solution lies in having restaurants specify the portion sizes. To set the record straight, the intention is to help reduce wastage of food. The side-effect is that one would also know how much one is going to be eating. Not the calorific-nutritive-value of the food, only the size of the portion. You'd know the size of the portion in weight, so you better brush up on your metric system. Would the rule enable you to order a fraction of the portion? Nah, you’ll only know how much you are ordering, and, therefore, how much you are going to be wasting if you don’t consume it all, and, in order to avoid wasting, your waist will bear the brunt!
And what of a healthy mind? Watching a kiss longer by a few seconds can corrupt the mind, can it not? Within our grown bodies that can eat enough to get obese, that can use a smartphone to transact, we harbour a mind that can be corrupted easily and think in a 'non-Indian' fashion. The solution lies in censoring all that which can corrupt the mind of the viewer. The powers-that-be seem a bit confused on how to treat its citizens - grown up and mature enough to use smartphones to run the economy or immature to decide what to watch. We seem like those teenagers, when we are neither children, nor adult enough! Banning creative content and censorship of content isn’t exactly in tandem with the other things the governments expects of its people.
Isn’t our population growth a problem, too? Faced with dwindling population growth rates, countries in Europe are incentivising and encouraging their citizens to procreate. But their’s is a problem the opposite of ours. What would our out-of-the-box solution be? Any thoughts?
One of my favourite Ragas, Raga Bhatiyar by one of my favourite singers, Pt. Venkatesh Kumar:
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