That dreadful concept called the "trickle down effect" just hasn't worked. Ask anyone who was middle class when Ronald Reagan first put it into practice in the 1980s. And then step back, out of range, because it is more than likely he has (perhaps irreversibly) slipped too far down the ladder from the middle-class to give you a civil reply. 

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith called it the "horse and sparrow theory". A theory described thus by an older and less elegant generation: "If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows."

But this is not a recent squabble. William Jennings Bryan, a Democratic candidate for President of the USA around the turn of the 19^th century, said: There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

A fine idea for today's world. Make the poor rich and they will make the rich richer - by becoming more prolific consumers, which would lead to increased manufacturing, and a consequential boom in employment that would increase the number and spending of the new consumers, and thus repeat the cycle. It's a principle of wealth-distribution that's being championed today by Warren Buffet, the richest man in the world and one of its greatest philanthropists. 

Time to give Bryan's concept a whirl, methinks.

 

A contemporary of Thierry Henry, the fine French football player, once said of him: Thierry is like milk on a stove. Look away for a split second and you know you’re in trouble.  

I look around me these days and there's milk boiling over all over the place.

Thousands of people of Bangalore looked away for a moment, and the next thing they knew their homes and businesses were being razed so the roads can be widened to accommodate the city’s burgeoning traffic. It’s a mindless, knee-jerk and temporary solution because in a few months, the traffic, increasing at the rate of over 300,000 vehicles per year, will have overflowed the widened roads as it had done before.

The Chairman of BPL India looked away for a moment, and his (allegedly estranged?) son-in-law, Chairman of a toothless civic body and a legend in his own lunch-time, has manoeuvred to savage a perfectly pristine park twenty yards across from his main gate, to erect a military monument that will bring hordes of visitors into a tiny road and ruin his peace. Never mind that there’s a Law specifically prohibiting such an act, or that the monument would have been more appropriately located on any one of a dozen vast, empty and mostly unused military grounds in the city.

The people of this State looked away for a moment a decade or more ago, and their leaders illegally mined remote virgin territories of iron ore worth untold billions of rupees to line their own pockets. The current governing party’s Opposition, whose own hands are far from clean in the matter of this decade-long scam, are now on a protest walk from one end of the State to the other. Would that they might walk and walk and walk, until their headgear floats.

Preferably in the boiling milk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Harvard University professor has released a study that says Bangalore is directly responsible for the development of India. Our city, it postulates, is a praise-worthy example of how an urban cluster can bring prosperity to a poor country.  

Oh dear. Methinks this is going to feed all manner of righteous flames. And encourage the dousing of one that I am particularly partial to . . . a flame that resides under my charcoal grill and delivers a wonderful tenderloin steak to my table on demand.

Permit me to un-confuse you, gentle reader.

A law was mooted in Bangalore the very day the Harvard study was released: no bovine slaughter will henceforth be permitted. Worse, there will be no importation of beef into the State. And for a touch of the draconian, anyone caught with beef in his home is liable to spend up to seven years in chokey.  

And the hell with what the Constitution has to say about that. We’ve amended the Constitution more times than probably any other country in the world anyway; one more won’t matter.  

But you know what? This law does make sense in a convoluted way. The sensitivities of many, most of them in flared khaki shorts, are seriously savaged by the steak on my table. Sad sods. We simply must be sensitive to their sensitivities. It’s the civilised thing to do. So ban away. 

Next, let's focus on the sensitivities of them that are repulsed by pork. Stop the slaughter and consumption of pork. Let the porker run wild.  

And somewhere out there, there must surely be a sizeable gang of chickenshits who worship poultry. Give all fowls a lifetime reprieve, I say.  

And while we’re at it, let’s not forget those who would rather starve then eat root vegetables, or chlorophylled vegetables or honey. They have rights too.  

This rash of righteousness will have at least two consequences that I approve of. The Indian population in all  identified Heavens is bound to increase. And the Indian population here on the ground will halve as starvation stalks the land.  

Both commendable objectives, all things considered.

A news item this morning informed me that responding to a court order, the Water Board has cut its supply to an illegal structure but the Electricity Board is yet to comply with the same.

I was turning the page when a teleadvertiser called to tell me my car insurance was due for renewal and he wanted an appointment with me to discuss the same.

Then I read that the Ministry of Home Affairs has decided to change the visa rules for foreign employees in Indian firms. The Ministry of External Affairs, it was reported, has been informed of the same.

At which point the doorbell rang. I had ordered some medication and a chap had arrived, as he declared, to deliver the same.

What on earth has brought about this sudden onslaught of the same? The Indian reinvention of the English language that began as an exuberant exercise in modernism has turned into a Gotterdammerung that’s being fought all around me.

And I am disgusted by the same. Tccchi.

Bangalore is an international city. Ask anybody. The city bosses have worked so hard to get us there, and there we're surely getting.

First, we made it to the Nanny stage: shut the city's restaurants and bars down at 11.30 pm.

From there, it was a straight line to the Keeper of Public Virtue stage: You may not dance in a restaurant where drinks are being served, drinking and dancing are an immoral combination, unless it’s the Kuchipudi you are dancing, according to our High Priest of Public Virtue.

Then they let fly the vultures hanging around the culture bin. English must go, Kannada is in. (Hindi? What’s that? Never heard of it.) And never mind that every Minister and bureaucrat and Member of the Legislative Assembly chooses to send their children and grand-children to an English school or college.

Of course there are times when the Law gets in the way but there are ways to deal with such minor irritants. So there's a Law that says they cannot dig up a public park? Do it anyway. There's this bloke they know at the High Court who will make it right.

And now it’s a quick dash to the Police State stage. There’s an Act being readied that will say: thou shalt not get beef in our State, nor shalt thou purchase it wherever else in the country it is available, and thou shalt definitely not store it in your home for personal consumption, or the bloke at the courts will set you to rights pretty damn quick.

Oh yes, Bangalore is an international city. Just ask anybody.

(The title and much of the data for this blog has been borrowed from a New York Times report by Mathew Saltmarsh.)

The World Bank and UN have a programme called StAR (Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative) charged with finding illicit loot spirited away by the world’s corrupt leaders and returning it to their homelands. They estimate that approx US$ 20-40 billion is stolen annually by these monsters, most of them heads of poor and developing countries. The figure represents 15 to 30 percent of aid to the developing world. The programme has managed to recover $15 billion in the past 16 years. Piddling, but not unwelcome.

Some governments are undertaking their own initiatives. The sinister Swiss banking wall has been finally breached and $1.5 billion has been repatriated to developing countries. It includes $684 million looted by Ferdinand Marcos, $700 million by Nigeria’s Sani Abacha, $174 million taken by the former head of Peruvian Intelligence. Now the government of the Maldives wants $400 million back they say was stolen by Maumoon Abdul Gayoom who dominated their country for 30 years until its first open elections threw him out.

Last year, after the US government was able to twist Swiss bankers’ arms into providing them with lists of its citizens’ illicit money in their numbered accounts system, our media demanded that the Indian government do similarly. Of course they agreed immediately. And just as quickly forgot all about it. The media did too. Some loot, it was whispered, changed hands to purchase their silence. Not surprising in an industry that now "reports" blatant advertising as news, for a fee of course.

The World Bank estimates that every $100 billion recovered could finance clean water to 250,000 homes, or treatment for 600,000 HIV-AIDS sufferers. A large percentage of both causes reside in India.

Meanwhile, four of the G20 countries have refused to ratify a 2005 UN Convention Against Corruption, the first binding international anti-corruption act. Unsurprisingly, India is one of the four.

The facts of corruption in India are now daily fare in international reports, but nothing, not even international opprobrium, will shame our leaders’ any more.

One has to be a mindless clairvoyant to see an end to this situation.

The world is made up of two kinds of countries: those that perceive a problem down the road and act to head it off, and those that don’t, waiting instead to be overwhelmed by it.

Singapore is one of the few that fits the former mould. I realised that in the 80s, when I was among the first to arrive at the new second terminal at Changi airport on the morning it was opened. Changi Two was expected to field the estimated increase in travellers for at least a decade - and the government was already starting to think of Changi Three.

I recalled this sense of forward thinking this morning, reading a Bloomberg report that, at current rates, India may exhaust its supply of fresh water by 2050. That’s a mere forty years away; and current rates of consumption are unlikely to hold as we grow by an estimated 500 million souls in the interim.

It cannot be something the government is unaware of. So what is it, and its successors, going to do about it? Time will tell. For now, as Chapter 1 Corinthians has it in the King James Version of the Christian New Testament, we see through a glass, darkly.

I don’t expect to be around when that murky glass clears. Just as well, I think.

Fifteen years ago I quit Bombay out of loathing of the Maratha thuggery that has taken hold there. Unfortunately, communal chauvinism has followed me to Bangalore, it would seem. Consider some of the evidence:

At the recent municipal elections, the various print materials set out for the guidance of voters at our voting station, including the list of over twenty candidates, was exclusively in Kannada. The lady in charge primly told all who sought English versions that if we wanted to vote, we should learn the state language. Mr Ananthamurthy, the local champion of Kannada language enforcement, would have been proud of her.

A traffic offence notification I have received is entirely and exclusively in Kannada, except the section specifying the fine I have to pay, which is jointly in English. Kannada chauvinism notwithstanding, Bangalore Police knows which side their bread is buttered.

A handsome concrete medallion embossed at regular intervals into the side of the Metro sky track above our premier M G Road, is exclusively in Kannada. There would be an up-side to this if it were to attract all the Kannadigas to use this vital facility, clearing the roads for the rest of us.

A large number of the road signs, including street names, in Richmond Town have been replaced by exclusively Kannada signs. The locality is predominantly Muslim and Christian. One draws one's own conclusions.

And so it goes at international city Bangalore. "Cut off your nose to spite your face" is a phrase that comes to mind.

The latest issue of The Economist reports the 2009 Pew Global Attitudes Project's discovery that 94% of Indians express satisfaction with their lives.

That's so much more easy to digest than the Indian Planning Commission's latest findings that 400 million Indians (30% of the population) are living below the poverty line of 10 dollars a month per family.

Now I can go back to my ivory tower existence with a more placated conscience.

There’s this society of which I am a member, and it has a committee that’s pouring a lot of imagination and energy into very enjoyable new programmes.

I thought it would please them as much as it would me if I acknowledged their efforts, but I also felt that a mere ‘thank you’ note wouldn't adequately express my admiration.

So, I sent them each a little book covering the subject of their activities that I thought would amuse them. It was printed a half-century ago and it’s value lay more in its antiquity and oddity than anything else.

Not one replied.

Someone said young people today are so stretched, and stressed, that they often let the important fall under the wheels of the urgent. And that can lead to a certain cavalier casualness that isn’t always intentional.

Perhaps.

In our time, one was taught that to give someone a gift with the expectation of a response was poor form. But equally, not to acknowledge a gift was a sign of sniffy breeding.

The world is made up of two types of people: them that pay their bills immediately on presentation, and them that don’t. After the rigorous research of caustic observation and bitter experience, I’m inclined to conclude that most Indians sit securely, and unconcernedly, in the latter group.

For example, a young man I know owes me a small amount of money. He’s a well-paid professional, and cash flow is not, I think, a problem; but it’s been weeks, and he hasn't found the time to write a cheque.

Time was when it used to be a ‘given’ that when one received a bill for goods or services purchased, one reached for one’s wallet or cheque book immediately, and instinctively, to settle it. Evasive action seldom if ever came into it. But not any more, it would seem.

Worse, unless repeated reminders show up in the mail, and sometimes even when they do, the bill remains ignored. Pecuniary propriety has evolved right out of our DNA.

I don’t remind my young friend of his debt, though he’s very prompt with an ‘Uncle, I have to send you a cheque . . . tomorrow . . . promise” each time we meet.

There was an old saying, (now, not unexpectedly, somewhat passé), that the piper must be paid. Look around you and you will see a thousand disconsolate pipers walking the streets of India waiting for the cheque that is in the mail, pipped, as it were, at the post.

There’s little doubt that India is barrelling its way to the frontline of the world’s most important nations. And yet, to many, given the seemingly all-pervasive intellectual and moral corruption of much of our political leadership, and the overwhelming poverty that we meet around every corner of every street of every one of our most prosperous cities, it is a drive that excludes the majority of its citizens and therefore a deeply flawed march to the front.

Is this an unfair judgement? Are we up too close to see the real situation through unbiased eyes? Is the rot in the low-hanging fruit obscuring our view of the harvest further up the tree?

That’s what I was wondering as I read an essay called The India Model, by Michael Elliott, presumably a dispassionate observer, in this week’s issue of TIME. It’s an essay all thinking Indians, and especially serial pessimists (like me?) should read, because it lays out the enormity of our potential, and the road to it.

Not least meaningful in the essay is the conclusion in its closing thoughts: “If (only) India can translate raw figures of economic growth into widely shared (i.e. among all its people) prosperity . . . How will India do it? . . . it depends on having effective, clean governments, at every level down to the village, which do not waste economic largesse or appropriate it for the use of their own politicians and officials”.

You can read The India Model by using the link:
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1938510,00.html

Michael Jackson was arguably the most celebrated pop musician since the beginning of time. Certainly he sold more records and video tapes and CDs and DVDs than anyone else in history.

But that was then.

Then there was no competition to records; you had to get them to get to your favourite music. Today songs are downloaded online, mainly illegally.There will never be hundreds of millions of CDs sold ever again.

Then there was no YouTube. Today celebrity DVDs have been demolished by the electronic media. (Why buy anything when you can access it whenever you please, for free?) Gone too are the TV programmes that broadcast hours of Music DVDs. Worse, today’s stars have thousands of competing stars and not-so-stars and everybody’s aunty cavorting on YouTube. Michael Jackson wasn’t drowned by that level of competition the way he’d have been today.

And then there was no Twitter (ugh, that word) or Facebook. People had to purchase magazines with glossy photos to revel in their icons. Today the twits tweet at each other. The mindless medium is the message.

So would Michael Jackson today become quite the Michael Jackson he did thirty years ago? I think not. He was fortunate to be born, and flourish, in the times that he was. And so were we.

Time was when politicians cared what people thought. Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned as Railway Minister when there was a serious train accident. Jagjivan Ram did similarly when he was caught out not paying income tax for several years.

Time was. It’s all so different now.

The Burmese junta doesn’t care what the world thinks. They’ve kept Aung San Su Kyi incarcerated for 20 years when she won a free and fair election they hadn’t expected her to. The world stands by and watches.

The Chinese shoot inconvenient human rights activists and student protesters, in the secure knowledge that nobody will do much more than wring their hands. Business as usual continues unabated.

Mugabe will continue to live the life of a pasha while the country gets by on 100,000% inflation. A loaf of bread for a sack of one million dollars, anyone?

And Bangalore’s Chief Minister will take a hundred of his MPs (and their wives and perhaps their houris) on a study tour to Australia, New Zealand, & Malaysia, while simultaneously petitioning the Centre for funds to perk up our infrastructure, or whatever.

The animal kingdom is certainly evolving.

The PM of a country I once lived in said to me: Corruption is something that should be attacked ferociously the very first time it happens, in government or a company or your family. Crucify the perpetrator, and make certain everyone knows it. Anything short of that only serves to make corruption a risk worth taking. And then it grows uncontrollably to the point where it becomes institutionalised.

The Indian media has recently been awash in reports that political parties in the latest coalition were squabbling for the most ‘lucrative ministries’. There’s no doubting what that meant; certainly no one has thought it worth refuting the phrase. And there’s no question that corruption is now as institutionalised in India as the 72 alleged criminals elected to parliament.

Rajiv Gandhi once famously said that only 10% of the money spent in the service of the people ever reaches them. That was 20 years ago; it’s only grown worse since. In such an endemic situation, pious sanctimony is silly and sanguinity laughable. Responsible corruption may well be the only answer.

My PM friend defined it thusly: We let them make some money, perhaps 10-15%. But they have to deliver on the remainder 85% or they’re sacked, or worse. And they do. That’s why our citizens are so proud of their country and why our standard of living is far beyond anything your country can hope for.

Responsible corruption. An idea whose time has come?

I saw the film Milk yesterday. More than about the rise of the first gay man elected to public office in America, it is a harrowing depiction of the agonies of gay people as they crept warily, then boldly, out of their closets to attain social acceptance in America.

I am reminded of a play that I once was in, in which the gayness of one hapless character was exploited to achieve political ends. A lady I know said she hated it because it “glorified homosexuality” which, she said, was “abhorrent to the Lord”. And I wondered which lord she was referring to; surely not the same one who created her, and me, and then also created some men and women gay, only to abhor them. She couldn’t say, not coherently anyway.

I was reminded too of a gay couple I know in Europe. Two men, who have raised a little boy as their own and are now agonising over the young man’s choice of girl friend, just as heterosexual parents would. It’s sweet, and takes getting used to. Many never will. But I have little doubt that one day they will give him away at the altar to the bride of his choice, weeping proudly, just as heterosexual parents do.

I have many gay friends. They love life as much as anyone else does, and contribute to it as willingly as (and often a great deal more creatively than) the rest of us do. My enjoyment of life would surely be very much less vivid without the joy that Wilde and St Laurent and Gielgud and Hockney and Navratilova and Elton John and many many others have brought to it.

Nature, it seems to me, plays wicked tricks when it gets bored, but it’s foolish for us, and cruel too, to fall so unquestioningly for them.

A precocious young thing recently pointed to the Cartier on my wrist and said that’s not real, is it? I know you were in China recently, she flung over her shoulder as she sniffed her way toward someone more worthy.

This morning’s New York Times says the Chinese retailers of fake Cartier, Gucci and Luis Vuitton goods have sued those companies for cracking down on them. We have to eat too, they say, in a novel take on the Biter Bit syndrome

In Bombay last year, the Chairman of Gucci said pirates deprive companies like his of upward of ten billion dollars each year. I think that’s an absurd complaint. People who buy fakes could never buy the ludicrously priced real things. I would have told the blinkered fellow that he’s not losing a sale when someone buys a knock-off; in fact, he should be paying the pirates for advertising his product, as they’re displayed on the arms and feet of millions of world travellers. He wouldn't be amused, but he’s a Dutchman I’ve known since when he was selling ice cream at Unilever and they don’t come more dour than ice-cream selling Dutchmen.

Of course there are the ten dollar fakes and then there are the fifty dollar "100% fakes" that not even Mister Gucci Chairman can tell from his product because, surprise surprise, they’ve usually fallen off the Chinese trucks taking the real Guccis (and Cartiers and Pradas and Luis Vuittons) from the Chinese factories that manufacture them to the Chinese ports that ship them to the fashion capitals of the world.

I could have got ten different 100% not-so-fake Cartier models in Shanghai for what I paid for the real thing on high street Kuala Lumpur. There’s a sucker born every minute.

A sweet young thing from times past asked me six times in the last four weeks to contribute “25 Things About Me” for some project of hers. Her seventh exhortation did it.

Of course no discourse on moi could possibly be contained within 200 words, and this one isn’t. An exception for the exceptional? (You can stop that sniggering now.)


1. I drink two glasses (at least) of red wine every day. Secret of my rambunctious good health.

2. I drink three glasses of green tea every day. Another secret of said rambunctious good health.

3. I chat up four ladies (at least) every day. Third secret of my good health, if you don’t count the occasional black eye.

4. I occasionally play the piano. It’s a little like riding a bicycle and that other thing they say a man never forgets how to do. (I’ve forgotten what that other thing is, though.)

5. I listen to jazz all day. Loud. Drives my wife mad. Must be the secret of our long long marriage because she says I would be very boring if I didn’t drive her mad all day. (Are all women so strange, I ask myself.)

6. I sometimes talk for a long time to the sweet little pug on the balcony of the apartment next door, but only when he is in the arms of his owner, who is quite pretty too. Otherwise I ignore the little bugger.

7. I love Tom Clancy books.

8. I love John le Carré books.

9. I love the English language as spoken by The Economist.

10. I think ‘American’ is a language all on its own and it grows more unrelated to English by the hour. Good.

11. If you’ve eaten at McDonalds more often than once in your life, you don’t have a future with me.

12. If you’ve read Hello! magazine more than once, you don’t have a future with me.

13. If you’ve actually ordered a glass of Mateus Rosé at a restaurant more than once, you don’t have a future with me.

14. If you think Guernica is a salsa sauce or a terrorist group, you don’t have a future with me.

15. If you think Billie Holiday is boring, you don’t have a future with me.

16. If you think Kenny G is a jazz musician, you most definitely don’t have a future with me.

17. If you wonder out loud why some people think Theolonius Monk is such a genius, you not only don’t have a future with me, you may not have a future at all.

18. I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.

19. More and more people annoy me these days. There should be a stampede of walkers around me, shouldn't there.

20. I’m probably a snob. But life is too short to tolerate peasants.

21. I am growing increasingly anarchic about the proliferation of peasants.

22. OK, so I am a snob.

23. But if you can cook a perfect rare steak, Kobe or Argentinean I don’t care, with a slab of Stilton or Roquefort or Gorgonzola oozing out of a pouch that you’ve cut into the meat without completely savaging it, I will sit at the same table as you, at least for the duration of the meal.

24. If you will buy me a foie gras breakfast, I might even smile at you. Just don’t expect to discuss Kenny G or order a Mateus Rosé.

25. I wake up every morning and thank the Good Lord for His merciful bounty in making me so popular, at least with the right people.

Under pressure from the US government, a major Swiss bank is closing 19,000 off-shore accounts belonging to American citizens who have parked unreported money with it. The account holders will receive cheques – which they can either deposit into other banks or encash, leaving a paper trail for their government to follow and nab the culprits.

At least twenty billion dollars are expected to fall out of the bank’s vaults!

The secretive Swiss banking system came under serious attack some years ago when it was suspected to be holding billions in money stolen from the Jewish community during World War II. It was make or break time for the industry; as transparency increasingly became the watchword of public financial probity, they succumbed to the international pressure. The Swiss banking system’s vaunted and execrable privacy rules were changed. None of their clients were safe any more.

The Americans have set a trend that should resonate in India.It is generally believed that Indians have squirreled away among the largest tranches of stolen money in Swiss banks. Will the sanctimonious Indian government follow? Keeping in mind that the largest group of thieves are allegedly our Honourable politicians, will a similar demand be made on the Swiss?

Ha. Dream on. There isn’t enough real estate to build enough jails to house the scoundrels who will be unearthed.

Two years ago, I started a fine dining ‘club’ called The Bangalore Black Tie, based on the notion that few things inure one against the whims of outrageous fortune than a specially-crafted five-course dinner paired with fine wines. So we sit to dinner once a month, usually at an upscale restaurant with a name chef, and always, as the group’s name suggests, in formal dress.

There were many, and not only those struck by the angst of not being offered membership, who called it a decadent idea. These days, as the economy slows down and with it the urge to do any serious incidental spending, they consider that opinion well justified.

I think it’s silly. I think life’s to short for mindless abstemiousness.

The Empress Marie Antoinette is remembered, falsely as it happens, for suggesting people eat cake if bread was unavailable. She paid for the story on the guillotine, but was her kindly suggestion all that base?

True too that Gandhi is an international icon for, among other things, his austere lifestyle. That begs the question: would a world of people wandering about in not much more than a loin cloth be any less joyless than once a billion Chinese were in gray Mao suits and matching pallors?

As life’s latest drollery plays itself out, bring on the tuxedos, I say. Living well most certainly is the best revenge, even as it drains the bank balance.

Because what the hell, when it all comes to a close, and you know it inevitably will, you are a pretty damn long time dead.