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With Anuvab Pal
Many people are watching India, observing India, but how many can get inside India? Ok, anyone with a visa, that’s true, but
Truly,
Madly,
Deeply,
How many?
Maybe sixteen,
Or three people.
Real news has to be interpreted because, like water, like cotton, India matters. But does India’s 24/7 news ever ask:
India – what is it?
Where is it?
Maybe the real question is – is it?
Whatever it takes,
Whoever has to be taken,
He will take it.
Or allow himself to be kidnapped.
Every week, this stand up comedian goes deep inside India’s real issues. So very deep, into so very serious issues, that he has to fold his arms. And use the word Gravitas. Without knowing what it actually means. And the word Issues. Again. Issues facing the country. The country facing issues facing faces…of countrymen. Whatever it is, he’ll do it. He’ll ask. He’ll answer. Because even if the nation doesn’t, he wants to know. Point is, India is deep, he is deep. And he goes deep. Inside. Come inside with him. It is cold outside.
It can’t be much fun to be an Indian finance minister. Usually the week before any budget, a speech that usually lasts longer than the entire duration of the British Empire in India, TV channels and newspapers go around India asking pretty much everyone, from CEO’s to TV starlets, what their requests are from the finance minister. Short of saying “Just give me some cash”, the answers of the person on the street are quite enlightening (“Hon’ble Minister, I need a new pressure cooker”, said one lady) and reconfirm the Winston Churchill quote that the biggest argument against democracy is a 5-minute conversation with the average voter. In this digital age, two minutes are enough.
I can understand the sentiment. Our financial world is filled with glorious jargon and acronym-overuse. An actual headline last week in a business daily read, ‘Will SEBI speak to FICCI over AMFAR?’ If you’re a foreign investor, you’d have to wonder when the Indian economy became a kingdom on Game Of Thrones. The TV channels and newspapers say it’s about the common man, let’s go to the common man. What does he or she want? Ultimately it is all for them.
The common man has slight drawbacks. Before the genius British comedy writer Armando Ianucci started making his current HBO classic Veep, he made a seminal BBC TV show called The Thick Of It, about back-room British political maneuvering. In one episode, a British minister, leading an important trade delegation to negotiate a deal that could affect the lives of millions, gets a call from a person in his constituency. This man’s garden wall is having some kind of problem. Could the Minister look into it? The Minister explains he’s in the middle of European bi-literal talks that could determine the future of British trade. But the neighbor’s dog has been relieving himself on the wall. So, surely, the minister must decide what is more important?
Today, apart from the frenzied advice of nation watchers, TV experts, Twitter experts, bureaucrats, news headlines and other politicians, all telling him different things about what he should do, our finance minister has to contend with TV channels showing him clips of what people walking down the street want.
This added to the already bulging expectations applied on the speech itself, which some experts estimated as only equal to those on the Brazilian soccer team before a World Cup semi-final. No, three times that. I’m surprised he he doesn’t run away to the Andamans to write the Budget speech. Or call Neymar for advice.
In the old days of Indian democracy, it was the opposite. Great sycophancy, people prostrating themselves before ministers as they stepped out of their Delhi homes for a morning “appearance” (like a deity almost) to their voters. There was a kingdom-ish feel to everything, with the ruling party like noblemen and women and common people begging for stuff to get done, queuing up to bribe and such. Large vote banks were purchased, elections were won, things sailed. The common man was reduced to a cartoon in a national newspaper facing this or that problem.
As the country and the world changed to a free exchange of ideas between everyone, i.e., the influencer and the influenced (a debatable advancement), power shifted to individuals. To phones and Facebook accounts, and the common man had to be heard. Facebook, Google and Twitter have ensured that. A common man party showed up and did a lot of shouting and unfed protesting etc., election tactics had to be changed.
An MP from a party that ran on a manifesto of “call your MP anytime on this hotline” mentioned that he’d be in Parliament, or with secretaries in an important meeting, when a citizen would call and say, “I’ve lost my suitcase in this railway station, can you find it?”, or “Hi, I’m a farmer. This farmer from the next plot keeps kicking me in the balls. Can you get him to stop?”
In the old days, the minister could hang up. Today he has to answer it and most likely send someone to solve the problem before he’s trashed on TV or Facebook for not responding.
With the budget, one media outlet said, ‘Tell us anything. We will take it to the finance minister. Whatever you want. He will hear it.”
The requests ranged from, “Can he give retired people more fun things to do” to, “Can he somehow improve the bookmyshow website?, to, “I need an ATM closer to my house”.
It must quite something to pull the finance minister into a side room on the eve of the budget, while he ponders massive macro-economic problems ranging from a failed monsoon to a uniform tax code, with a team of folks who’ve spent their lives studying the economy, and be told the above demands. It must also be quite something to hear him nod and say, “I’ll certainly take these into account.”
We live in Mr Iannuci’s fiction.