Goa's Tourism based Politics

Ever heard of Matanhy Saldhana, the public figure from Goa? He used to be the state’s minister of tourism once and currently is more known for being at the fore front of a movement to stop tourists from coming to Goa. But perhaps many readers of this piece may not have heard of him. What about a story from Indian lore which talks about a wood-cutter who was sawing off the very branch of the tree that he was sitting on? Yes, Kalidasa, the classical poet. Arguably, many more people would have heard of him. Now trying to compare Kalidasa the poet with Saldhana may be attempting to do the impossible but as things stand, fact is mimicking fiction and Matanhy Saldhana is doing just that, as he cuts off the branch of the very tree he sits on. For Saldhana in his bid to attract attention to his agitation against SEZs being set up in Goa has decided that no tourist should be seen in Goa post December 28th.

I don’t know if this particular agitation has much of popular support and at the time of writing it is not clear if the movement is petering out and if I, the VIP suitcase toting middle class Indian tourist can visit the place next week as I want to. But of course SEZs have attracted a lot of controversy in Goa and else where, so this piece is not about the merits or demerits of these zones. But for those who promote them, the principal reason for doing so is economic advancement of the state and the ongoing prosperity that this industrialization will eventually bring. So it is safe to assume that if any one chooses to oppose the creation of the SEZ, they have a better option to propose to the people of the state.

That however is not the case here. Mr. Saldhana and his friends in the Goa Movement against Special Economic Zones (GMAS) which includes the Opposition BJP have decided to hit their fellow citizens where it hurts the most, by throwing uncertainty into the whole tourism based economy, peaking in the New Year celebrations on Goa’s beaches. Now a lot could be said about Goa’s tourism including some unsavory bits and a case could well be made out that the booming touristy economy has given rise to several social ills like pedophilia, drugs, and human trafficking. It would have been wonderful if instead of opposing the inflow of tourist’s altogether as they threaten to do, the Goa movement folks took up cudgels to clean up the tourism industry and control the kind of tourist who comes to Goa and keeping their eyes open to see how they spend their money. It would have done credit to Mr. Saldhana, a former tourism minister to be at the helm of just such an agitation and the BJP’s moral policing unit could do the cleaning up that they normally do.

Instead of taking on the human traffickers and the drug cartels and the pedophiles whose presence and activities are doing lasting damage to Goa’s social and moral fabric, the agitators take on the run of the mill tourist coming in by bus or train and plane and make sure they don’t come to Goa. Perhaps they want that the tourists instead discover some other hospitable locale where they can empty their purse and puff up the local economy instead of contributing to Goa’s own. And in the end may be, Goa will neither have an SEZ, neither the leisurely tourist with the generous purse, who has migrated else where to more welcoming climes. And Mr. Saldhana and his ilk like the Kalidasa of old end up cutting the branch of the tree on which they were sitting. Kalidasa of course under went a transformation and went on to leave a timeless legacy. Whether the leadership of the GMAS will do so is what we wait to see with bated breath.

Instant Prosperity through Instant Loans

The neighborhood grocery shop where I buy my supplies has a sticker prominently displayed near his counter which reads “Aaj Nagad, Kaal Udhar” (cash today and credit tomorrow). Clearly it is an attempt at dissuading customers from buying their supplies without paying for them on the spot. It is not that the shop was completely unwilling to provide credit; it is just that they were a bit discerning. Although I have never made use of the credit facility myself, I often see the shop staff taking orders on the phone and noting down details for orders to be fulfilled through home delivery with the bills to be settled on pay day. The shop has a fat and stubby note book where they keep the details of the orders fulfilled thus.

Outside the shops are stickers of another kind. They talk about “Turant Loan” available on call and a mobile number is provided for customers in need of a car loan or a personal loan. Some stickers announce that loans will be dispensed with minimum of fuss and documentation. Which is probably the big draw. I still remember the days when loans were available only from nationalized banks and getting a consumer loan or a housing loan was an even more notorious exercise as they were not considered the priority in the economy of the day. But things have obviously moved on in capitalist India Udhar is still out but loans, especially of the turant variety are very much in though.

Economic growth, especially without sufficient education on how to manage the newly created wealth leads to two kinds of phenomena, both heading down the same path. The first is that it creates a class of the nouveau rich who have the money but not necessarily the wisdom to use it well. As the International Herald Tribune pts it, thirty years ago, luxury in India meant having a phone connection at home, an Indian-made Ambassador car parked out front and a bar of Toblerone chocolate carted home by an uncle visiting from abroad.

All that is as passé as the decaying Ambaasador Car. A recent report by the National Council for Applied Economic Research in New Delhi forecast that the number of "crorepatis," Indian society's rough equivalent of millionaires, rose by two-and-half times in the last three years to an estimated 53,000 households nationwide; at today's exchange rate, an Indian "crorepati" household earns about $232,000 a year. A lot of that group of people today wants to flaunt their wealth and what they have and along the way carve out the unmistakable picture that “size does matter”.

What happens when the prince and the pauper are exposed to the same goods but their purses don’t match? The paupers who don’t have that kind of money but want the products that wealth can buy do one of two things. Either they head for the man who has put up stickers on the lamp post promising them turant loan and put in an application irrespective of their capacity to repay or they are turning to urban crime, the rates of which are rising.

Sadly, the future is going to be no better. According to a survey conducted by the Cartoon Network, children are now key both as direct and indirect consumers in the Indian market as they exercise a major influencing power, or alternatively termed as “pester power”, on parents in buying big items like cars. They spend nearly Rs.291 crores as pocket money and this is only in the fourteen cities where the survey was conducted. Clearly the time has come for policy makers and planners to wave a magic wand and provide India’s huge population with tatkal prosperity by removing the social inequities that exist, so that there will be less reason for availing the turant loans.

Celebrating the unknown Indian

Reader's Digest recently planted 960 ‘lost’ cell phones in 30 public places in 32 cities around the world to test people’s reactions in a cell phone honesty test. The most honest city in the survey turned out to be the smallest city in the group, Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana, where 29 of 30 cell phones were returned. But bigger cities showed they also had trustworthy citizens with Canada’s largest city, Toronto, coming second with 28 of 30 phones returned, followed by Seoul and Stockholm. New York came fifth in the list, tying with Mumbai, and Manila in the Philippines.

Many people predicted in preliminary interviews that return rates would be in the single digits but the average return rate on the ‘lost’ phones was 68 per cent. People didn’t expect a lot of good Samaritans. Since then, I have been thinking a lot about how we view our society and fellow men and the cynicism that typically drives our thinking. Maybe we should revisit our opinions and honour the many good Samaritans and the unknown men and women who keep society stable and our country liveable.

I have been thinking this way particularly because this is the time of the year when traditionally the media sifts through all the news makers of the year gone by and identifies the one celebrity who has made or is perceived to have made the maximum difference to the country’s life and profile. Typically they come from the world of politics, sports or entertainment as these contribute the most to the national image, at least in mainstream media. TIME, for instance, has already identified Vladimir Putin; CNN-IBN is still sifting through nominations and so are several other media houses.

But if our society survives, endures and even makes us feel proud of our Indianness today, it is not because of the contribution of stray celebrities here and there and their piecemeal contributions - in fact, it may be that celebrity contributions don’t really contribute any thing substantive - apart from a little feel good factor, what is there to celebrate if a top notched cricketer breaks another record or India wins a test series or if a celebrity superstar brings home another super hit?

It is of course extremely unlikely that advertisement driven mainstream media will ever recognise as the Indian of the year in any year, some one who is not already a celebrity and a magnet that will draw in advertising revenue. After all, these recognitions are not awarded to acknowledge true innovations or any genuine contribution to nation building in any field of human endeavour but rather to ensure that people buy a particular issue of a magazine or to make people watch a particular television programme and generate more and more advertising.

With the alternate media going from strength to strength, may be this is something, this genre of media should consider taking up. The intent here should be not to create a parallel set of alternate celebrities propped up by a parallel medium but rather to celebrate happenings, occasions and doings that serve as markers in those intangible areas of life and living that mainline newspapers and mediums normally would not capture but which nevertheless make us more human. Maybe in the manner in which the Godfrey Philips awards unshackled and redefined bravery, the definition and understanding of what it means to be a celebrity needs to be unshackled too and the unknown Indian holding things together needs to be celebrated rather than the single celebrity.

Asoka - The Convert and the Missionary

While researching the Ashoka Foundation and to answer my question- namely why did an American, Bill Drayton name his foundation identifying and promoting social entrepreneurship after the great Mauryan emperor, I came across several articles which convinced me that the Emperor himself was worth researching and writing about and not just the modern day foundation named after him. After all, how many today know much about him except that the lions on the National Emblem and the wheel on the National Flag are Asokan in lineage?

At a time when conversion is dirty word and people convert for political or economic benefit so often that every act of conversion is looked upon with an eye of suspicion, Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism under the guidance of his teacher Upagupta was a monumental act because his philosophy of governance guided by the law of piety turned traditional norms of empire building on its head. Guided by the Buddhist doctrine of the sacredness of all life, he redefined the concept of empire.

The greatness of an empire was to be determined not by the size of the empire, nor by the size of the standing army, nor by the number of people conquered in battle. Rather it was to be measured by the manner in which the subjects of the kingdom were looked after - their welfare, their happiness, their prosperity was the yardstick of the Ashokan empire. Most conventional emperors of that time, notably Alexander the Great lived by the sword, sacking cities and extending the boundaries of their empire. But Ashoka was different.

Ashoka is a living example of the sweeping changes that can occur when the highest levels of polity are guided by moral rather than political imperatives and motives and will always underscore the huge difference it makes when those to whom power has been given experience a genuine conversion. One of the most interesting and perhaps even unlikely tributes comes from the journal of the International Committee of the Red Cross in an extremely erudite essay; the journal hails Ashoka as the forerunner of the humanitarian conduct of war that would be millennia later codified as the Geneva Conventions. It is another matter though after the famous war of Kalinga in 256 BC till the end of his reign in 232 BC, he never fought another war and focused instead on ruling his kingdom based on the principle “"All men are my children'; and, just as I desire for my children that they may enjoy every kind of prosperity and happiness both in this world and in the next, so also I desire the same for all men.

Ashoka was not just a convert, he was a missionary too. “In his efforts to propagate Buddhism, Ashoka built shrines and monasteries and inscribed Buddhist teachings on rocks and pillars in many places. He sent missionaries to countries as remote as Greece and Egypt; his own son, a monk, carried Buddhism to Sri Lanka, where it is still the major religion. Despite Ashoka's vigorous exertions of faith, he was tolerant of other religions. The empire enjoyed remarkable prosperity during his reign. The life and conversion of Emperor Ashoka, one of India’s greatest emperors looks like the stuff of myth and legend. But it is actually the story of a convert and his journey and because in this case, the conversion of a king, the conversion also marks the transformational journey of a kingdom and its people.

Freedom of Expression in the Information Edge

The reappearance of Taslima Nasreen in the news – She has apparently been told to stay out of sight - underscores the need to define the definition and limits of freedom of expression in a society circumscribed more by technology rather than geography. Taslima is no writer of great literary merit in the opinion of most critics but in spite of expressing the most outrageous opinions, her troubled situation becomes a human rights issue. Outlook magazine has commented that of the six literary awards

she has won, four are for human rights and not for literary merit and her dissenting voice is more the shrill, attention seeking voice rather than one without any thing substantive to say.

It is not that there have been no dissenters before and no iconoclasts before. Remember Voltaire. His comments in the eighteenth century in relation to the church were as violent and volatile as Taslima’s comments today. Probably more, for Voltaire was a renowned intellectual. He along with his contemporary Rousseau provided the ideological base for the French revolution. Although Voltaire earned notoriety more for his stance on the dominant Catholic Christianity - he scoffed at such foundational Christian beliefs like the Trinity or the Incarnation. But he was eclectic in his disdain for faith of any kind – he wrote a play about the founder of Islam “LE FANATISME, OU MAHOMET LE PROPHÈTE” IN 1741 which portrayed him as a man of intriguer and greedy for power. He had a lot to say about the Jews too.

Voltaire and others who wrote and believed thus did have their enemies but their thought and writing and therefore their influence never crossed a certain geographical boundary and therefore the social ferment that their opinions could cause remained restricted; in this instance to Europe. Voltaire’s volatile writings never got amplified beyond Europe and so they never even made ripples beyond a certain piece of Europe. Voltaire was a firm votary of the freedom of speech and expression and he had no shortage of enemies in his time. After he died, the church refused him a church burial because of his disavowal of basic Christian beliefs and even after his eventual burial, religious extremists opened up his grave and dumped his remains in a garage.

This tangent on Voltaire was only to make one point – that people with disruptive and iconoclastic views have always been around and sometimes they had influence within their frontiers, but their views remained contained and their influence remained restricted. The opinions they had and the reasoning they presented for their beliefs was disseminated at a measured pace and allowed for a reasoned rebuttal.

Today all that has changed. Anyone can jump online with their opinions and half backed creativity and have their thoughts amplified many times over in the space of a short spell of time. Before one has had time to collect one’s thoughts, a controversy has erupted disrupting the lives and livelihoods of innumerable people disconnected from the writer’s utterances. I have been caught at least once on many of the road blocks in Kolkata when Muslims clogged the cities arterial roads and can honestly say that it did not really appear that many of the people involved in the road block had read any thing by Taslima and possibly any work by any writer.

In this technological age, where rabble rousers can amplify and distort thoughts and expressions within hours and create trouble, the whole concept and understanding of how “Freedom of Expression” should be expressed needs to be thought through afresh even though it will probably make most liberals cringe

Social Entrepreneurs -Silently Changing the World

When I had first heard of the Ashoka Foundation, I had imagined in my mind that it would be the social arm of a traditional Indian business house. With a name linked to the Emperor Ashoka, this was not a very unlikely possibility. Later on, when I discovered that they promoted social entrepreneurship, it still did not mean much to me.

Entrepreneurs we have all heard of. They are the business people with a difference; the ones with a prophetic footprint, who see an idea where others see only obstacles and then they unlike the dreamers and the visionaries go and do some thing about it. If there ideas succeed and they often do, the world is a different and often better place for their efforts. When I think of this genre of businessmen, the names of Sabeer Bhatia and Sam Pitroda are some of the Indian names that come to my mind.

So just who is a social entrepreneur? Allow the Ashoka Foundation, which popularized the term to explain: Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change. Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka expands by saying that “Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry”

Although the term is one not often heard used in India, we have plenty of them starting of course with the emperor Ashoka whose conversion to Buddhism sparked of a 180 degree change in methods of governance in ancient India that was radical. Drayton cites the shift in the emperor’s paradigm – from merely holding on to the kingdom and enlarging it to ensuring that subjects living in the kingdom are well cared for and looking after their welfare as one of the most monumental acts of social entrepreneurship which inspired him to name his foundation which would support future entrepreneurial initiatives after the Buddhist icon.

Drayton has other unlikely inspirers he counts the late Acharya Vinoba Bhave and his innovatively conceived Bhoodan and Gramdaan initiatives which largely failed as experiments in social entrepreneurship. The early years of the foundation and the movement it seeks to catalyze are documented in the appropriately titled book How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas (Penguin Books, India) authored by David Bornstein which was released in India by the IT entrepreneur , Narayana Murthy of Infosys.

Have there been other social entrepreneurs in India since Ashoka? Oh, yes plenty. But their names might not be as familiar to the average Indian as the entrepreneurs from the world of business. I, who work in the social sector could recognize only a few whose work and activity occasionally draws them media attention – Javed Abidi, the disability activist, Flavia Agnes, the human rights lawyer, who appears occasionally on NDTV, Anil Aggarwal, the environmentalist whose crusade brought CNG buses to Delhi and Jeroo Billimoria of child line and a few others.

I think that social entrepreneurs deserve a bit more of name recognition, brand recognition too if you will, for the invaluable work that they do quietly and largely unsung in the grassroots. For at the end of the day, it does not matter how much India’s economy grows and what our GDP is if the disabled do not have access to jobs and amenities, if children do not have access to help, shelter and safe spaces and the elderly lives of lonely neglect. Gandhi famously remarked that the way in which we treat minorities is the measure of civilization in a society. In differing ways, we have all failed Gandhi’s test but the social entrepreneurs are trying hard to make a difference. They deserve our applause and laudation.

Being Schooled or Being Educated ?

The other day I went to hear a lecture by an American anti establishment intellectual David Barsamian who was saying that in the US, they are good at teaching Quantum Physics, Rocket Science but were very poor at teaching many of the other things that go to form an education. He was alluding to larger matters of global import but the stories of the frequent shoot outs in the US malls and schools flashed immediately to mind. But then why worry about the US- Don’t we have similar issues to deal with in India.

Literacy has long been measured as a yardstick for human development and while that will remain so, the question perhaps needs to be asked – is literacy a good enough indicator to measure a person’s education, when all that it actually tells you is that a person can read, writer and do a little math. To learn to do that, typically one goes to school, but not necessarily so. One can learn these “off site” too. How important is schooling? How important is education? Does going to a school ensure education, and by extension, going to a “good” school, whatever that might mean, ensure a better education? What about the celebrated Emperor Akbar? From our history books, we know that he was illiterate. Was Akbar educated or uneducated?

Azad Yadav, the father of the accused Akash has told the Indian Express that he had sold off land in the villages lying in the hinterland and moved to the city, so that his sons could get a good education. Did he get a raw deal? He isn’t the only one to do so. Lured by the prospects of making a quick fortune in the city, many are selling of land in their ancestral village with the motive of obtaining a good education for their children.

Almost on cue to cash in on the boom, schools whose credentials and pedigree no one knows has come up. The Euro School, is itself just five years old, and is too new to have developed any deep rooted traditions and customs. If it is guided by any moral philosophy as say the Rishi Valley or the Vasant Valley, or the several other schools which are ideology driven, then it is a carefully guarded secret. The indicator of a “good” school is today the number of air conditioned classrooms and heated swimming pools and the number of computers and internet connections in the computer laboratory. Conspicuous by their mention if not their absence is the teaching of ethics, cross cultural living and the inner values that could help a child steer a course in a rapidly changing world.

But I want to come back to the Emperor Akbar. Azad Yadav wanted a good education for his son and at best got him a good and fancy school but perhaps not much of an education; especially if education is fundamentally about formation of the inner person. Akbar remained unschooled all his life but here is a summary of his life and reign: “The Mughal Emperor Akbar (1543-1605), though illiterate and unable to read or write, demonstrated a remarkable appreciation of other religious thoughts. He was also a connoisseur of music and fine arts. The Mughal architecture, that later culminated in the glorious Taj Mahal, found its beginnings in Akbar’s rule. Music and miniature paintings reached their zenith. The court of Akbar held some of the best India had to offer at that time. The great administrator who was also an aficionado of the arts attracted the best contemporary minds to his court. Nine such extraordinary talents, who shone brightly in their respective fields, were known as Akbar’s nine gems. The foresight of this illiterate and dyslexic Emperor was remarkable and unique in history”

Going to school is not the same thing as getting an education. One can be illiterate and be educated beyond measure and one can go to the best schools and be uneducated in just about every thing that matters. So the next time a human development report is released some where and the literacy rate shows a rise, let us applaud; for literacy has its own relevance but let us be circumspect too. For being literate is not the same thing as being educated and literacy rates will never tell us the whole story.