Gone like a camphor

Could a 17-year-old boy just disappear, leaving no trace and clues behind? That his mother sent to a downstairs grocery store, after which he "disappeared", rules out accidental speculations. And for six months his parents and their extended society rue in disbelief.

If not for an emerging pattern and larger indicator for social distress, the incident may have been dismissed as one of those weird happenings.

While the Prime Minister Narendra Modi trumpeted his long speeches during the election campaign, he left many charged and super-charged to debate with all passion about "ifs and buts" of his coming to the power. In one such charged conversation, a Modi supporting colleague ran into a senior bureaucrat in a government broadcasting organisation. He's a christian from Kerala. This disclosure is for easy understanding of his political orientation. 

The two argued at the top of their lung power and many a times threatened to tip over into a quarrel. They were saved with timely moderation offered by a little less charged political commentator. However, it became evident that the bureaucrat was in a disturbed state of mind. 

Since he was occupying the chair of another officer for some computer works, his full biography awaited his leave. And soon he left, explanation poured, that the man is disturbed, because his only son, who was on the brink of becoming an adult, is missing for six months.   

One and a half months later, the officer, whose office had hosted the "hot" discussions, was still baffled over the missing boy episode. "He was such a nice boy. He would mostly stay home. The family has no enmity with any as well. He just had gone to buy Harpic from a downstairs shop where he was last seen. How could such a grown up boy evaporate like a camphor," he asked.

In the intervening six months, all that could be done (FIR, missing report, forensic examination of laptop, mobile, etc.) have been done, but for no clue at all. 

The minds conditioned by patterns of past experiences could speculate on the lines of kidnapping (no ransom call yet, but could be for organ trade), fatal accident (body taken away by culprit), suicide, etc. 

But two incidents in far off areas of Odisa and Madhya Pradesh help think beyond the fixed patterns. First, the MP incident: Son of a small grocery shop owner was arrested from a small town in MP, who was about 18 and going to local government school, for murder charges. In the course of investigation, it emerged that he had befriended a "girl" on Facebook, that he accessed from his mobile phone. 

The "girl" had used a mugshot photo of an actress on her Facebook profile. The boy was in a fantasy land. Hundreds of calls were exchanged between them. After long courtship in the virtual world, the "girl" sought to meet him the real world.The boy got a rude shock to find the "girl" being actually a middle-aged woman from western Uttar Pradesh. He shot her dead a day later.     

The second incident from Odisa may scare the bureaucrat from Kerala. A 16 years old girl disappeared from her hostel from a small town in the state. For six months, there was no trace of her even after the police did what all could have been done.

But one day the principal of the school, while surfing the net, came across a news story. A girl married a Pakistani man after running away from her home in India. It was that girl, who had been missing for six months. She had befriended a Pakistani Muslim on Facebook. And they fortified their bond in the virtual world to such an extent that this poor girl managed to reach Pakistan from Odisa on her own. 

Photo from today24news.com

In the meantime, it's worthwhile to recollect how the officer described his colleague's son. "He would stay home always. He hardly had too many friends...," he had said. Add to this the personality of the distressed father. He had appeared dominating enough to have been dismissed as a domineering person; argumentative and man of fixed ideas; believing in "I know all"; full of negativism (he would dismiss all politicians as thieves), etc. Such a man would invariably be a strict disciplinarian, one many consult any book on Psychology. 

We may err in pointing fingers at any for not knowing clearly what the personal world was of the boy, who has vanished without a cause. But his vanishing act is reflective of the social distress. 

If he's not dead, he must have been too cold-blooded not to have spared a thought for his parents. He was their only child. And if he was so, he must have been psychologically disoriented despite going to one of the best school and brought up in New Delhi. 

And if he was lured at an age of 17 years by organ traders, he must have quite a weak person mentally. And the blame must squarely rest with his parents for not equipping him with enough defence mechanisms to cope with the challenges of the world. This should also apply in the event of him having given a damn to the real world in his pursuit of the virtual world. 

Above all the current generation is a first, which has accepted nuclear family in toto. With no grandparents around and no siblings to play with, the children are growing amid parents pursuing professional glories in utter loneliness. And the parents even if they think they're too smart to be deceived their offspring may have erred in underestimating the guile of the growing ups. 

The Principal of Tagore International school in upscale Vasant Vihar of New Delhi was unrelenting to a mother of 15 years old girl. The mother was seeking forgiveness for her daughter abstaining from the school without permission. "How is that you had no clues whether your daughter had been coming to school or not? It's for five consecutive days," the Principal told the distressed mother, who replied, "I always saw off my daughter in the morning taking school bus. But I don't understand where she had been going if not the school".     

"If that is so, I will not allow her to join classes for a week. This is a punishment and she has earned it. Let her know that she has done something bad, that of having cheated the school and her parents," quipped the Principal to the nodding mother.

Time to wake up, parents! 

Off the mark

The voice of the poor is most difficult to hear. You make efforts to hear them. The voice of the rich and affluent are too easy to hear. They're everywhere. 

And there lies the explanation for disoriented commentary on the Narendra Modi government in the first 50 days in the office. Not that all of them are undeserved, for Modi sowed their seeds by his brazenness in forming his Cabinet, which is, arguably, full of "Yes, Prime Minister" men.  

But first turn the focus on magnitude of lamentations post-budget. Some have commented to the extent to suggest that sky has fallen. Predictably, loads of advice have poured in for Modi and his colleague Arun Jaitely. 

Undeniably, India is a country of advisers, who offer their services mostly free. And mostly they are unmindful of the fact that hardly any one is keen for their well thought out advice. 

Furthermore, India is blessed with majority of its population who suffer from stereotyped thought process. And a large number of Indians are affected by the opinions of the rich and affluent, who enjoy ease and comfort in transmitting their vested interests as "independent analysis". Niira Radia tapes are just some confirmation of the malaise.

Post-Budget lamentations mostly veered around missing "big bang". We should forgive these anglicized commentators, for their little knowledge of language and governance. Evidently clear from the origin of "big bang", it's a phenomenon too rare and full of unprecedented consequences. Indian economy saw such "big bang" reforms in 1990s; first orchestrated by P V Narsimha Rao and Manmohan Singh combine and secondly by Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Yashwant Sinha duo.

Perusing to find out what "big bang" reforms Jaitely could have done but did not, one would come across suggestions to scrap "Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA)", "National Food Security Act (NFSA)", "dust-binning retrospective tax", "hammering away subsidies -- diesel, urea, LPG, Kerosene, etc.", "taxing big farmers", etc.     

Wishful thinking is too common. And they are passed on as well-thought views most of the times.

Could Modi and Jaitely scrap MGNREGA and NFSA? No, they can not and would not. For a great majority of people in this country have no secured means to ensure two meals a day. Almost half the Dalit (Scheduled Castes) population are dependent on MGNREGA for their livelihoods. That holds true for Scheduled Tribes (ST) also.

This blogger in a previous post titled "Red ant eaters" has illustrated field stories on how senior citizens work with their daughters-in-law from Mahadalit community in Bihar to run their families, as their young men idle away time with social ills for lack of jobs. Vast swathes of the country have not yet seen industries. And, undeniably, more than half of India's population are economically vulnerable.

And, therefore, to think that the Modi government can scrap MGNREGA, one needs to delude oneself with high dose of opium. 

But the widely unknown fact is that the state governments are no more able to spend MGNREGA funds as they had been doing in 2006-12. That was due to the performance audit by Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) and a few CBI cases. Even though it being an Act and, therefore, the government bound to provide for whatever the demand is, the fact is that expenditures under this head is going down. From the high of Rs 42,000 crores a few years ago, it's now about Rs 28,000 crore a year. And demand for jobs under it's going down also because of vulnerable people having earned enough to buy small parcel of land tp work on their own. 

The National Food Security Act is fundamentally a bad law. Not that it would suck over Rs 1.49 lakh crore each year to implement it in its entirety. It's bad, because it considers 75 per cent of population in rural and 50 per cent in urban areas deserving of almost free foodgrains. This is like splurging. That too when government estimates that 4 per cent of grains meant for public distribution system (PDS) ends up in black market. 

The business of subsidy is undeniably highly profitable for a few. Even without NFSA, government's food subsidy burden is close to Rs 80,000 crore a year. Barring Chhatisgarh, Odisa, Tamil Nadu, food subsidy through PDS has only fattened a class, which includes bureaucrats, politicians and middlemen 

And amendment to the NFS Act to limit beneficiaries to not more than 35 per cent population (currently 67 per cent) and ensuring Aadhar enabled PDS delivery system could give a robust direction to deliver the benefits to needy only.

Dust-binning retrospective tax, introduced by former Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee who handed over death warrants to industry and investors, could not have been practically possible for one simple reason. India has been dragged into international arbitration by Vodafone. Therefore, dust-binning it would have adversely affected the ongoing litigation.    

Rest of the possible "big bang" ideas are not really big bang but procedural in nature and doable as well. 

One digs to look for specifics to justify a lack of confidence. And Modi is himself to blame for this lack of

confidence in his Cabinet. He chose a bunch of ultra-loyalists as his Cabinet colleagues. And, he, thereby, shut the windows for free flows of ideas. His basket of talent is too narrow to instill confidence, that he can do a Vajpayee on Indian economy.   

The Modi cabinet is so inexperienced that it's very well vulnerable to become prisoners of suave bureaucrats. Inexperience of Modi ministers has already been exposed in the current Budget session of the Lok Sabha. If not for Speaker Sumitra Mahajan, the government could have been ripped apart for being callous in Parliamentary matters.

Post script

July to October is a period when prices of onion, tomato shoot up and leads to hullabaloo for a few months only to revive a year later. A seasoned bureaucrat having seen all of it for four decades had to say this:

"Onions and potatoes can easily be grown in pots. And it can be done rooftops and balconies easily. so,

while a lot of people grow flowers in pots, time has come that some vegetables like ladyfinger could be grown at home. So, in place of breast-beating lamentations on price rise, people should just take a little effort to become self-reliant in vegetables and that's doable also."

One would believe that individual actions too when aggregated can make a big difference. And that too when the flavour of the time is organic farming. So, why depend on vegetable carts; have your own small farm at your home.