No use splitting up

Asian Age Aug 15 2007 reports: “Londoners like Delhiites think their bus drivers are rude and blundering.”

In India, since we started administrative reforms we have got many things right (e.g. railway ticket booking) but some big holes remain. Lack of reliable public transport at most urban centres is one of the biggest of them.

I use Pune Municipal Transport’s (PMT) bus service about once in a week and it appalls me to find it as bad as ever. Most of the hardware, other than recently launched expensive BRT, is rickety. Most conductors are rude. Buses often don’t carry destination nameplates. Frequency of service on most routes is inadequate. There is hardly any timetable that is strictly adhered to. During peak hours, senior citizens can hardly reach a bus, let alone climb on it. During morning hours, I see school & college going children of all ages hanging on to bus door and windows perilously.

I feel sad because the neighbourhood Mumbai has had one of the best bus service- called BEST- on the offer for a long time now. Recently, BEST launched its website, one of the most useful and pretty I have seen. Visit it here.

When I was at Chennai from 1981-83, I probably used the best bus service- then called PTC- I have seen any where in the world. Particularly so if we considered the load on it and resources at its disposal. I remember an incident when the conductor of a very crowded bus got down to help an old woman climb on the bus. I couldn’t believe my eyes!

I had gone to Chennai after spending first twenty one years of my life at Miraj. At Miraj, I used bus service to get to my colleges from 1976 to 1981. Conductors on that service were almost cruel. We thought they derived sadistic pleasure by not stopping their bus at our college’s stop. We could never tell when we would get home after the college. It was a torture we could do without in those glory years of India’s socialism.

We used all the tricks like in picture below to get a bus to stop. Alas they almost never worked!


Artist: George Price The New Yorker Jan 11, 1947

Sixty Years of Pack Mentality........Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane recommend a certain stock

LANDON THOMAS Jr. has written an essay “Pack Mentality Among Hedge Funds Fuels Market Volatility” (NYT August 13, 2007).

“…These guys all know each other, and they all have the same strategies. They came from the same schools, and they get together for drinks after work, The strategies employed tend to be not only duplicable but broadly followed — the result being a packlike tendency that has helped increase market volatility and, for some hedge funds, has led to losses in the last month.”

After reading “Fooled by Randomness” by N N Taleb and "A Short History of Financial Euphoria" by John Kenneth Galbraith, nothing comes as a surprise in financial world.

Over last few weeks, so-called sub-prime crisis in USA is growing on the world like a creeping wine. In such times, we need to remember Galbraith’s words: “…And tragedy can be quietly enjoyed when, as is not true of war, nothing is being lost but money.”

I have always doubted wisdom, expertise and integrity of almost all ‘visible and audible’ experts in Indian financial world. Watching CNBC and NDTV Profit is loads of fun. They get you sit-down comedians through the working day.

Their anchors even have invented funny language to entertain us :” stocks have gone up/down for themselves……markets do what they want to do……”. Anthropomorphism at its worst!

They remind you of Michael Crichton s words:
“ A lot of people complain that television lacks focus. But that's the nature of the medium. Television's not about information at all. Information is active, engaging. Television is passive. Information is disinterested, objective. Television is emotional. It's entertainment. Whatever he says, however he acts, in truth Martin has absolutely no interest in you, or your company, or your airplanes. He's paid to exercise his one reliable talent: provoking people, getting them to make an emotional outburst, to lose their temper, to say something outrageous. He doesn't really want to know about airplanes. He wants a media moment. If you understand that, you can deal with him.”


Artist : Whitney Darrow,Jr. The New Yorker Sept 13, 1947

Vilasrao Deshmukh receives a letter

Dr. Shreeram Lagoo डाँ. श्रीराम लागू- a good stage artist, a ham cinema (both Hindi and Marathi) actor and an activist- has written an open letter (Lokmat Aug 5, 2007) to Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh.

It’s worth reading in its entirety. It sums up degeneration of Maharashtra leadership- both social and political.

It talks about democracy becoming just a formality because of caste, money, power and gundaism. It narrates number of instances where blatant violence was used by major political parties to silence the dissenting voice and how the administration did nothing.

It reminds the minister that the Indian Constitution declares scientific temperament as a fundamental duty of all citizens. The letters asks why the Maharashtra Eradication of Black Magic and Evil and Aghori Practices Bill, 2005 took such a long time to progress to its current stage. (btw- The State Government has sought suggestions from public on the bill by 30th August 2007) Read more on the bill here.

I wonder where the minister and his cabinet colleagues stand on the issue of superstition personally. Most of them are seen wearing amulets,stones, rings, threads, chains and what-have-you.


Artist: James Thurber The New Yorker June 1, 1935

Unless the bridges get blown up by helpful terrorists……..

Just one bridge fell in Minneapolis and people in US are talking about health of the most of the bridges in that country.

“Federal officials have admitted that as many as 70,000 bridges across the US - representing 12 per cent of all bridges in the country - had recently been rated structurally deficient. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the US would need to spend $9.4bn annually for the next 20 years to address all the problems with its aging bridges."

Garrison Keillor writes: “…Bridges are not supposed to fall down unless there is an earthquake. People die in violent storms, plane crashes, epidemics, but a person is supposed to be able to drive home on a summer evening and cross a river on a steel truss bridge and not find himself plunging headlong into the abyss…..
Unless the bridges get blown up by helpful terrorists, making us eligible for Halliburton to come in and rebuild them, I don't imagine that much will happen. There will be an investigation and someday, when we are much older, we will learn that the bridge collapsed due to a unique set of circumstances that could not have been predicted by anybody. Nobody had sex with that woman. Everybody was doing a heckuva job….”

NYT editorial (Aug 11,2007) says: “In its last state inspection, the Brooklyn Bridge rated 2.9 on a scale of 7, an unabashed poor rating, barely passing. It was not bad enough to close it or further limit traffic and city officials pronounce the bridge safe, but New Yorkers should be excused if they begin looking at the 124-year-old landmark in a different way.

Those who live in its magnificent shadow are in the same uneasy place as the millions of other Americans who traverse bridges daily. Many, in inspections prompted by the Minneapolis disaster, have been found to have structural, design or maintenance problems. ……”

Welcome to India!

I wonder what ratings bridges in India would get. We of course have digested bridge falls as easily as neighbourhood water logging during monsoons. Jaane-Bhi-Do-Yaro (1983), one of our all time great feature films, carries a backdrop of a bridge fall in Mumbai.

A fallen bridge always reminds me of “The Bridge on the River Kwai”. One of the most moving scenes is when on the eve of the blast Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) reminisces his days in India. He says he helped build railway bridges all over India.

Regardless of their ratings most of them stand today.



Artist: Mike Luckovich

Quiet! Apte-sir is armed…….is truly history now

Times of India (Pune) Aug 10, 2007 has a front-page headline: “Spare the rod, teacher, or else”.

It says: “If the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights has its way, school officials could now land in jail even for scolding students or calling them "stupid" or "mindless" in class.

Expanding the definition of corporal punishment to cover any form of adverse treatment—from scolding to death—the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) has urged parents to be fearless in filing FIRs against schools if children complain of such abuse. On Thursday, the commission directed the chief secretaries of states to ensure that complaints by parents against schools were treated on an immediate basis.

As per the directive issued by NCPCR chief Shanta Sinha, the term corporal punishment would cover "rapping on the knuckles, running on the school ground, kneeling down for hours, standing up for long hours". Beating the child with a scale (ruler), pinching and slapping, sexual abuse, torture, locking up children alone in classrooms, electric shocks and acts leading to insult, humiliation, physical and mental injury, and even death also count as corporal punishment, she said.

Under the new directives, even written impositions are a no-no. "Even calling a child an idiot or stupid or mindless, or asking him or her to write sentences condemning their mistakes in class or slapping a child are a severe insult and humiliation for the child," Sinha told TOI. "These acts are also corporal punishment and constitute a breach of human rights. So, we want to empower parents to lodge FIRs against school officials if their children have been subjected to such violence. And all state education departments have to ensure that no adverse action is taken against these kids in school for complaining against them."
”
I think this is a retrograde step. As it is students these days are treated more like ‘customers’ than students. With this step, discipline has little chance of survival on school campuses.

I remember at my school from 1969-76- Miraj High School-some teachers were known more for their ability to discipline students than teaching.

The late Apte-sir, known amongst us ‘Tiger Apte’- was one such. Stories abounded how so and so was beaten black and blue by him I almost never saw him beating any one but I guess no one wanted to verify the stories! But I remember how the late Bhagwat-sir, school superintendent, beat gregarious P D Joshi, our class mate, in 9th standard Sanskrit class. Mr. Bhagwat was trembling with anger. We were more worried about him than P D Joshi, who was a tough cookie. (By the way, PD's father was a teacher in our school. So maybe there was more to this incident than just class discipline!)

There is a January 1783 letter of Gopika-Bai, grand-mother of Peshwa (head of the Maratha Confederacy and the most powerful chieftain, French and British included, in 18th century India) asking the teacher of her 9-year old grand-son not to hesitate punishing the future Peshwa in private.
(Source- ‘Peshvekalin Maharashtra’ by V K Bhave- December 1935)

Artist: Mick Stevens The New Yorker 14 Mar 1994

p.s Our Apte-sir also taught English!

Nora, whatever you do, don't slam the door as you leave!

We all know Kipling’s famous words: "OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet". Indeed ways of the twain are so very different even in some minor matters.

Case in point is a mundane act of door closing. Slamming the door is ingrained in western culture.

One of the greatest plays produced in West is Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” (1879). It made a lasting impression on me when I read it in school. I have often wondered what if my mother (in the past) and wife (in the present)were to behave like Nora Helmer. The thought has scared me.

In play’s climax, Nora walks out on her husband and kids slamming the door behind her creating a sound, once described by critics as the sound that ''reverberated across the roof of the world''.

“A Doll’s House” cannot be perhaps as effective in the East partly because we don’t have that “slamming the door” culture. We Indians are often told to close the door softly. It is probably because until recently we did not have many doors with a latch!

When I interacted with Americans and Europeans I immediately noticed how they almost always slammed the door. Therefore, I was not surprised to see following picture.

Background maybe grim Iraq but sentiments are familiar.



Artist: Geoff Thompson

Toys aRe us

Purushottam Laxman Deshpande “Pu La” -humorist, playwright, actor, music-director, activist and philanthropist- died childless. His wife Sunita and he decided very early not to have children (read Sunita Deshpande’s book “Ahe Manohar Tari” for reasons thereof). Did he miss them?

One of his best essays is “Dinesh”- a word portrait of his wife’s brother’s son. Pu La describes the mess Dinesh first creates with his toys (real and imaginary) every afternoon and then he is fast asleep among them without a care in the world. It’s very moving.

When our 13 year old son occasionally does something similar, my wife and I ask ourselves-“For how long?” We don’t like to answer it but we know it. Sadly not much longer.

By the way I liked my own growing up only to the age of 15!

Isabel Berwick has reviewed Eric Clark’s “The Real Toy Story: The Shocking Inside Story on Toys and the Industry That Makes Them” for FT- June 8 2007.

“The toy business has always been a grown-up game, but in recent years it has developed in an odd way. Children are growing out of toys at an ever earlier age - known in the toy trade as KGOY (kids getting older younger) syndrome. Meanwhile adults are being infantilised, buying into a culture of permanent instant gratification through computer games, electronic gadgets and retro reminders of childhood, such as model trains. Toys really aRe us… By preferring easy over hard, fast over slow, and simple over complex, we are turning our backs on the fluency and thoughtfulness of the fully formed adult citizen, who can take informed decisions rather than be dictated to by marketing.…”By the year 2001, American children were seeing about 40,000 commercials a year, double the number in the 1970s.”

Clark shows that ”pester-power” is long-established. When Barbie launched in 1959, initial sales were disappointing. Mothers hated her as ”she had too much of a figure”. Little did they know, Clark writes, that the inspiration for Barbie came partly from an adult doll based on a German cartoon prostitute. It was the girls themselves who pestered to have the doll, and sales soared. This process repeated itself in recent years, when the Bratz dolls appeared. Inventor Isaac Larian put his heavily made-up, skimpily dressed (frankly, tarty) dolls next to Barbies and then asked young girls what Barbie reminded them of. ”Our mothers,” they replied. Larian had a hit, and by 2004, despite widespread parental disapproval, Bratz had captured 4 per cent of the UK toy market.”

Arvind Gupta-modern day Sage Agastya- a rare confluence of original mind and practicing hands- wrote an op-ed “Toying Around” for Times of India Dec 23 2006.

He said: “…Today, children are inundated with expensive toys. Parents seem to be in a hurry to buy the latest toys with flashing lights and sounds. Pedagogic learning is now associated with gloss and gleam. Children play with such toys for a while and then they throw them away. Instant gratification, instant forgetfulness seems to be the norm. Children need large chunks of time to play and mess around with things they like. This is how they construct their own knowledge patterns. According to Rabindranath Tagore, the best toys are those which are innately incomplete and which a child completes with her participation..

Children are eternal explorers. In their free moments they are experimenting and improvising. They are always making and inventing things out of odd bits and trinkets. They learn a great deal from ordinary, organic things found around the house, and without being taught. The main thing about scrap is that children can use it freely without adult admonishment. Traditionally children in India made their own toys — sometimes with the help of adults, often by themselves. Old pieces of leftover cloth were recycled into dolls and puppets…

These toys are a salute to the genius of Indian children. Much before the onslaught of the Barbies and Skullman — sexist and violent toys, children made their own toys and had loads of fun. They used local materials, often throwaway discards which didn't cost any money. Even poor children could enjoy them. Traditional toys evolved over centuries. Someone tried a simple design. Others added to it, and still other generations refined it to perfection. So the aesthetics, simplicity, utility, cost-effectiveness of a vernacular toy is a product of years, maybe centuries of R&D effort. And it is left behind in the public domain for subsequent generations to enjoy — magnanimity in an era of constipated patent regimes.

The best thing a child can do with a toy is to break it', might sound like an anarchistic slogan. But there is great deal of truth in it. Every curious child would want to rip open a toy to peep into its 'tummy'.

Our feel for things and phenomena are very crude. Our estimates of length, area, volume, weight and time are often off the mark. These concepts are merely 'covered' in the course curriculum and remain empty words. Before children can understand a thing they need experience: Seeing, hearing, touching, arranging, taking things apart, and putting them together. They need to experiment with real things. Children require a lot of experience, with different materials and situations before they start making sense of the world. The biggest crisis of Indian design is that educated people do not wish to dirty their hands. And there are no good schools for children of artisans. Burettes, pipettes, test tubes and fancy glassware often threaten children. Fortunately, in most schools they are kept locked in the cupboards with a grime of dust covering them. The need of the day is to do more with less. The great pioneers of science did their work with simple equipment. It is possible to follow in their footsteps. After all, the child's mind is the most precious piece of equipment involved.”



Artist: Whitney Darrow,Jr. The New Yorker 9 Dec 1944

Many Economic Hit Men Are Still Escaping to Heaven!

I knew who they were but did not know what they were called.

Economic Hit Men (E.H.M.’s)- Proud members of corporatocracy. See Donald Reilly's picture below to find out how they look like once they reach heaven!

John Perkins, an economic-hit-man himself, has published a new book “THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE- Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth About Global Corruption.” Joe Qeenan has reviewed it for NYT July 15, 2007.

“…Perkins is the author of the fabulously successful, and in some quarters revered, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,” which explains how a cabal of wicked men like him have enabled perfidious corporations to seize control of the planet. Now, in a follow-up written not for crass financial gain but because he owes it to his fellow man, the promiscuously altruistic Perkins comes completely clean about the epochal role he has played in ruining life on earth.

After all, it was Perkins’s work for a Boston consulting firm that allowed nefarious multinational corporations to plunder Indonesia, Perkins’s acquisition of for-your-eyes-only population data from the mysterious “Dr. Asim” that enabled the Secret American Empire to take over Egypt, Perkins’s covert missions in Saudi Arabia that sealed Saddam Hussein’s fate, and Perkins’s invention of an ingenious payment system that led directly to the destruction of Bolivia’s economy. Thus, while the average person may think George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin are the ones who pull the strings on this planet, Perkins disabuses his readers of such naïveté. It is the economic hit men and their rough-and-tumble cousins, the corporate “jackals,” all of them in the employ of the “corporatocracy,” who decide who prospers, who starves, who lives, who dies. And, as is so often the case with deceptively omnipotent organizations, it is the Secret American Empire’s ability to dominate the world without having an official address or even a fax number that makes it so sinister, so powerful, so deadly.

This empire “is as ruthless as any in history,” Perkins writes. “It has enslaved more people and its policies and actions have resulted in more deaths than those under the imperial regimes of Rome, Spain, Portugal, France, England and Holland or at the hands of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, and yet its crimes go almost unnoticed, disguised in the robes of eloquent rhetoric…

…“The Egyptians knew something that only a few of my countrymen comprehended: We used data like the projections Dr. Asim had provided to me for empire building. E.H.M. economic reports were far better weapons than crusader swords had ever been. Israeli bombs served their purpose, delivering havoc, raining down fear and compelling government officials to capitulate. But people like me were the real danger.”

Luckily for mankind, Perkins has retired from his job as an infidel dog and now works on the side of the angels. ”


Artist: Donald Reilly The New Yorker 30 Oct 1971

Many Indians surely watched their first lynching in 1947

We Indians are obsessed with sex but don’t wish to talk about it. Sex is not the only such subject. There are few more touchy subjects from our history we avoid discussing in detail.

India’s partition in 1947 is one such along with “The Great Bengal Famine”.

I was a sincere student of history in my school and there was hardly any information in our text books on them- two of the greatest tragedies of 20th century.

India soon will be celebrating 60th anniversary of its independence.

The Economist (July 21, 2007) has reviewed British historian Yasmin Khan’s “The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan”.

“…..The break-up of Britain's Indian empire involved the movement of some 12m people, uprooted, ordered out, or fleeing their homes and seeking safety. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, thousands of children disappeared, thousands of women were raped or abducted, forced conversions were commonplace. The violence polarised communities on the subcontinent as never before. The pogroms and killings were organised by gangs, vigilantes and militias across northern, western and eastern India. They were often backed by local leaders, politicians from Congress and the Muslim League, maharajahs and princes, and helped by willing or frightened civil servants….

Today the upheaval on both sides of the partition line would be described as ethnic cleansing on a gigantic scale. It left two traumatised, injured nations—suspicious and fearful of one another even to this day—where once there had been one country of loosely interwoven peoples….

The decision to divide India on religious lines was taken with regret but little foreboding and carried out with outrageous haste and unconcern by the British government and its viceroy in India, Lord Mountbatten. Asked by a journalist if he foresaw any mass transfer of population, Mountbatten said, “Personally I don't see it...Some measure of transfer will come about in a natural way...perhaps governments will transfer populations.”

No preparation or consideration was given to the central issues of citizenship, security and property rights in the division of the country. On the other hand, India's civil servants, the babus of empire, were busy itemising every fixture in their offices down to ink pots and paperweights that were to be divided between Pakistan and the new India. Lack of planning, hubris, confused thinking and a complete void as to the consequences were the fatal flaws in the partition plan, writes Ms Khan.

The announcement that India was to be partitioned and independence would follow not less than a year later was made in the House of Commons on June 3rd 1947. By August 15th the British were gone. They accepted no responsibility for the carnage that was taking place and they refused to allow the British troops still in India to keep order or protect people.

The movement of people and the privations they suffered were extraordinary. Muslims made their way west to Pakistan; Sikhs and Hindus moved east to India in “foot convoys” that involved 30,000-40,000 people, wagons, carts and animals spread out over 45 miles (70km). In one month 849,000 refugees entered India by foot. Trains that were impossibly overloaded, and dangerously targeted by the killers, ran across Punjab from Rawalpindi and Lahore to Amritsar and Delhi and back again as soon as they had refuelled and watered. Many families left for reasons of safety, taking only a few belongings because they expected to return. Not everyone imagined the journey across the partition line would be final.

When Jawaharlal Nehru made his famous speech on August 15th declaring that at the midnight hour, when the world slept, India would awake to life and freedom, massacres were taking place almost daily on both sides of the line. Nehru later wondered if his fellow countrymen knew how close India had come to imploding. The violence was simply uncontrollable.

Despite the pledges of equality for all communities in the new India and Pakistan, the driving force behind the violence was to eliminate or devour the other community, writes Ms Khan.”

Reading this, I thought, Iraqis are luckier than Indians. They have George W. Bush and no Lord Mountbatten.

And then we have historians like Ramachandra Guha who claim that Mountbatten helped avoid Balkanisation of India. I am not sure.

Historian Setu Madhavrao Pagdi, who was employed as a senior civil servant in Hyderabad in 1948, claims in his Marathi autobiography ("Jeevansetu" 1969 Continental Prakashan) that Mountbatten was part of the problem and not the solution in bringing Nizam around to sign instrument of accession.

According to historian Indivar Kamtekar: “…For the people who lived through the events of the 1940s, the meaning of the events depended on their experiences. Experiences are notoriously varied and contradictory. They varied in the 1940s with - among other things - region, social class, gender, ideology and political affiliation. For the villages of Bengal, the great famine dwarfed most other events of the 1940s. In north India, 1947 is still referred to as the year of `partition' rather than independence; in South India, the reverse is the case. For businessmen in India, the 1940s were a time of unprecedented war profits; for agricultural labourers, they were years of frightening starvation. For women abducted during the partition riots, and then claimed by the governments of India and Pakistan even when their families rejected them, the period was exceptionally traumatic, with little or nothing to celebrate. If the elation of many Congress politicians in 1947 was visible at one extreme, the grief of the victims of famine, rape and murder was discernible at the other. The past bequeaths to us a rich diversity of memory.”

Also, see Ajit Bhattacharjea's "Tryst with Destiny" Economic And Political Weekly Issue : VOL 42 No. 32 August 11 - August 17, 2007.

Conclusion: Many Indians surely watched their first lynching in 1947.



Artist: Reginald Marsh The New Yorker 8 Sept 1934

Patient with India, forever?

Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar wrote in his column for Times of India May 27, 2007:

“…most of the government sector is third-class and tarnished…… Actually, government spending is gargantuan: a million crores per year. But it has so much waste and corruption that voters refuse to show gratitude for the little that gets through….. The police no longer catch criminals and the courts no longer convict them. Conviction rates have fallen to 16%… Bureaucrats are typically callous and corrupt, though some officers do a great job. But 90% of civil servants are clerks and chaprasis, and less than 10% are Class I and II officers…. Around 35% of all electricity is stolen, causing power crises… it takes Rs 3.65 of government spending to get one rupee of Public Distribution System benefit to the poor. What a waste! The bulk of PDS supplies are diverted to the open market. Many poor families have no Below Poverty Line cards, but some rich folks do (such as the West Bengal governor)… Subsidies remain at 14% of GDP although half of these are non-merit subsidies, and go mostly to the non-poor… The problem is a decaying government sector that neither Congress nor other parties are willing to reform. So, expect the aam admi to keep voting out incumbent governments.”

Poor and downtrodden have always suffered in India at the hands of bureaucracy and the establishment. Read D D Kosambi or Indivar Kamtekar for more on this.

Let me narrate an interesting account of an old lady from Emperor Aurangzeb’s time (born 1618- death 1707, reign 1658 - 1707). This is taken from historian and Persian/Urdu scholar Setu Madhavrao Pagdi’s Marathi book “Bhartiya Musalman: Shodh and Bodh” (Indian Muslims: Search and Lessons) Parchure Prakashan Mandir (1992-2006).

“An old lady took a complaint of extortion against a district collector to the emperor. Emperor ordered the money to be returned to the old lady. Few days later, the old lady returned and complained that not only money had not been returned but also she was being harassed and hence suggested that the collector be transferred. Emperor signed the transfer order. Little later the old lady again came back with another compliant that not only new collector continued to harass her but was demanding money from her because he felt her payment to his predecessor was part of ‘Hapta’ (periodic bribe) and hence he too was entitled to it! On hearing this, Aurangzeb asked the old lady to pray to god that he sent her another emperor...

Khaphikhan, Aurangzeb’s well-known biographer, says that the emperor did not punish either of the corrupt officers.
Khaphikan also says that corruption among revenue officials was rampant and the officials who were sent from the emperor to check these practices were also equally corrupt! “

Just substitute “Aurangzeb” with “Manmohan Singh” and the story still looks entirely plausible.

Without getting mad, poor and downtrodden continue to be patient with India’s emperors and prime ministers.


Artist: Helen E. Hokinson The New Yorker 2 May 1942