Banks in India's Gilded Age

Jayant Sinha and Ashutosh Varshney, Financial Times, January 6 2011:

"...Both in its rot and heady dynamism, India is beginning to resemble America’s Gilded Age (1865-1900). Ending with Theodore Roosevelt’s rise to the presidency in 1901, the Gilded Age transformed an agrarian US into an economic and industrial giant. Yet Roosevelt’s assessment was gloomy: “The dull, purblind folly of the very rich men; their greed and ignorance, and the way in which they have unduly prospered...these facts, and the corruption in business and politics, have tended to produce a very unhealthy condition.”..."'



Samuel Brittan, Financial Times, June 5 2012:

"...In general terms it is difficult to go beyond Adam Smith. Few of us like competition; and the tendency to form closely knit groups to keep outsiders at bay is probably as old as the human race. For pre-capitalist examples one has only to think of the medieval guilds, whether of craftsmen or Master Singers. More subtle are the practices of bankers, as they come disguised as services for customers. In summary, success has depended more on whom you know than what you know. Hence the catchphrase “crony capitalism”..."

Jackson Lears, 'Something For Nothing/ Luck in America', 2003:

"In an laissez-faire economy, riddled by graft and scandal, robber barons and knights of the green baize were not always easy to tell apart."


Ajit Dayal, 'Why our bankers are like Gabbar Singh', June 20 2013:

"...Banking was a boring business.

But a lot has changed since Gabbar Singh took over. Now the banks are built to take risks and shed all fear of a serious reprimand. If "naming and shaming" had any relevance to the society we live in, most Indian industrialists (and many in the financial services industry) would be fakirs by now wandering aimlessly across the Indo-Gangetic plain in search of the mystical. Instead, they are surrounded by the material with some CSR to sprinkle around.

Which gets back to the other famous Gabbar quote: "Jo dar gaya, so mar gaya".

With no dar in the system, the mad expansion of bank branches will continue.

The mar will be for us."

 
I miss R K Laxman. He would have done real justice to the following news. 

"Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Deputy Governor K C Chakrabarty said banks had written off Rs 1 lakh crore in the past 13 years and criticised the lenders because as much as 95 per cent of these write-offs were for large borrowers.

“During the past 13 years what we see is that the banking system as a whole has written off more than Rs 1 lakh crore in advances,” Chakrabarty, the senior-most of the deputy governors  at RBI, said.
He said over 95 per cent of such write-offs have been observed in the case of big accounts and expressed anguish that public discourse focuses only on the government’s agricultural  debt waiver scheme of 2008. 

“We only talk about the debt waiver of the agricultural borrowers, we don't say big players and of this (Rs 1 lakh crore) 95 per cent are all big borrowers and it has been written off,” he said.

The government had announced a waiver of over Rs 60,000 crore in advances to the farm sector as a one-time measure in the Budget of 2008 following stress in the rural sector..."

(Business Standard, November 19 2013)

Laxman would have shown a marginal farmer with attendant goat, chicken and cow facing a 'fat cat' (like the one in the late Mr. Steig's picture below) and signed off with a killer caption summarizing the state of India's banking.



Artist: William Steig, The New Yorker, 2 July 1960
 
Here is a cartoon by Mr. Laxman similar to the one being imagined by me. It has a marginal farmer, his goat, a government minister and his secretary, complete with their chopper.

The caption given by the artist is:

"No, Sir, this is neither a flood hit nor a drought hit area. We are only hit by bad government!"

P Devarajan wrote in Business Line on October 15 2006:

“...For bankers in India, hopping from one air-conditioned room to another, funding the poor is a chore. Not an act of passionate conviction. “

Based on all of the above, my caption is:

"No, Sir,  I feel bad because I hear that my waived loan of Rs. ten thousand has resulted in bankrupting my bank."
 

In Search of Lost Food...उदाहरणार्थ अठरा धान्यांचे कडबोळे

Patrick McGuinness, The Telegraph, November 19 2013:

"...Past, present and future are not checkpoints, but porous membranes where one tense washes into another.
Time is ruthless and deadly, living is all loss, and the paradox of memory is that it gives you back what you had on condition that you know it has been lost. To regain it, you need to know it has gone; to remake the world, you need first to understand that it has ended. HG Wells had published The Time Machine in 1895. Proust showed that we are the Time Machines, though we are rarely at the controls..."

Isaiah Berlin quoted by Dileep Padgaonkar in The Times of India, October 28 2013:

"...“Indians want to be treated as a new exotic culture, whose poets are the best in the world, whose novelists outshine Proust” he tells a correspondent, whereas, in fact, they are “half-baked and exhausting”: there is “no intellectual bite, no firmness, no toughness at all”. And he concludes on this note: “If real social justice and rationalisation ever come to India it will be through some spellbinder whom people won’t bother to resist and under whose spell they will enjoy falling.”..."

Whatever else you take from the quotes above, Marcel Proust is a literary benchmark and year 2013 is 100th anniversary of arguably one of the greatest (and the longest?) novels of all time: Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time'.  


It is in seven volumes, running 4215 pages! I own one volume and haven't read even a page from it.

(The earlier English translation of the book was titled  'Remembrance of Things Past' )

Artist: Edward Frascino, The New Yorker, 1 April 1972 

(Here is an example, dated October 18 2007, from this blog, of a cartoonist targeting Leo Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' for its length, 1225 pages.)

Proust is little known to Marathi speaking world, including me. I haven't read him either in French or English. I don't think he is available in Marathi.

And I don't know if I will ever know him too but when I can't read a book I try to read about it. 

I liked what Ian Jack had to say in 'The Guardian' in November 2013: "What of all the vanished foods we can never taste again?":

"Marcel Proust's narrator took a little piece of sponge cake and dipped it into a spoonful of tea. "No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me," Proust wrote in Swann's Way, as translated by CK Scott Moncrieff. The extraordinary thing was an involuntary memory. We know how the story goes, though Proust takes his time in telling it. Many sentences follow, and then: "The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray … my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane." Out of this sensation comes the "vast structure of recollection" that taste and smell alone can provide "when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered … "
But what if the tastes and smells of the previous age no longer existed?..."

There are quite a few food items (almost) no longer available to a typical Marathi middle class person.

Shripad Krushna Kolhatkar's (1871-1934 श्रीपाद कृष्ण कोल्हटकर)  book 'Sudamyache Pohe'  (सुदाम्याचे पोहे) - for me one of the greatest prose in Marathi- was first published in 1910. 

It has a wonderfully funny essay : 'Pandutatyanchi Nirjali Ekadashi' (पांडुतात्यांची निर्जळी एकादशी)- 'Pandutatya's water-less fasting day'.

It makes merciless fun of what all some Marathi speaking middle-class (most of them Brahmins) people ate (and still do) on the fasting day in the name of religion. 

courtesy: 'सुदाम्याचे  निवडलेले पोहे' (abridged 'sudamyache pohe'), Varada Prakashan (वरदा प्रकाशन)

After reading the essay, I realised that quite a few fit-for-fasting delicacies listed there- captured in the quotation above-  have never been tasted, or even seen,  by me and probably never will be.
  
The title of the book, at the time of its first publication, was "Arthat Athara Dhanyanche Kadbole"  (अर्थात अठरा धान्यांचे कडबोळे).  I loosely translate it as "meaning pretzel / cracker made from eighteen grains"....Have I tasted or seen such a snack ever? NO!

[The third edition, published in 1923, and later editions of the book came with the subtitle of 'Arthat Sahitya Battishi' (अर्थात साहित्य बत्तिशी)]

                                                          Shripad Krushna Kolhatkar

courtesy: 'Bahurupi' (बहुरूपी), 1957 by Chintaman Ganesh Kolhatkar (चिंतामण गणेश कोल्हटकर)

In 60 Years: Fahrenheit 451 to Fahrenheit 1600!

Wikipedia describes 'Fahrenheit 451', 1953 by Ray Bradbury as a dystopian novel that " presents a future American society where books are outlawed and "firemen" burn any that are found."

451 Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper self-ignites and hence the title of the book.
 

 courtesy: Wikipedia


Today if we have to burn all the books, you have to also burn e-books and e-readers. "Firemen" need higher temperature than 451 F to burn them. That temperature supposedly is 1600 F !

Artist: Harry Bliss

 please visit  www.harrybliss.com  for more such pictures

My Sister was in Mother's Womb. ..ललितच्या मुखपृष्ठाची प्रसुती

The only Diwali issue of Marathi magazine I read (thumb through really) is Lalit (ललित) and that too because I subscribe to it.

Not that I am against Diwali numbers but I am too lazy to join a circulating library and I don't feel like buying any of them because I rather buy a Marathi / English book instead. 

On the afternoon of November 12 2013, I  received my copy of Lalit dated November 2013 and realised that it indeed was not carrying Vasant Sarwate (वसंत सरवटे) drawn cover, for the first time after Diwali 1964.

It was just a confirmation because Sarwate himself had informed me this on November 8 2013 on phone.

I did not know that 'ललित', as an adjective in Hindi, translates as pictorial (चित्रमय). Lalit magazine indeed was 'pictorial' because it proudly carried Sarwate on its cover at least once a year. 

If you wish to enjoy a few of the past covers done by Sarwate, please visit the given links.

2012:  Lalit, 2012 

2011: Lalit, 2011

2010: Lalit, 2010

2009: Lalit, 2009 

2008:  Lalit, 2008 

2007:  Lalit, 2007 



This is the first Lalit Diwali cover Sarwate drew in 1964.  I was four, my brother was two and my sister was in my mother's womb!

The small plant he started watering is still alive. It's a fantastic news in a brutal world of Marathi periodicals because many of Lalit's sisters who were around then have perished.

Passing of Diwali and Feelings of Matryoshka Doll

Philip Larkin,  'Aubade', 1977:

"...
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
..."


Diwali 2013 is now history. 

Containers that stored Diwali snacks up to the brim are emptying fast. Even 'Sunil Gavaskar'  'shankarrpale'  (शंकरपाळे) (called so because they come to 'bat first' and go out last) are on their last leg.

And no matter what, it leaves a sense of emptiness behind. It has always done so for me. It perhaps taught me, very early in life,  without using any words, that you couldn't hang onto to anything.

 I began to understand a little about Larkin's  "the sure extinction" much later.

"A matryoshka doll, also known as Russian nesting/nested doll, refers to a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside the other." (Wikipedia)

Artist: Geoff Thompson, The Spectator, UK, September 2013

(I have always loved Mr. Thompson's work and you will find a few more example of it on this blog.)