Aggression in the field - a few stray thoughts..

October 2008 had been a special month on many counts - the most notable among them, apart from the successful launch of Chandrayan, being the following:

1) Vishwanathan Anand regaining (retaining) his crown;
2) Sachin Tendulkar becoming the leading run getter in the Test & ODI versions of cricket;
3) Saurav Ganguly choosing to retire at the end of the current Indo-Australian series;
4) Anil Kumble retiring from international cricket

The coincidence of all these happening at about the same time is not the topic that I've chosen to dwell on. Instead, as a number of writers have already commented recently, it will be interesting to have a look at the on/off-field behaviour of these dignified champions, and possibly check if there is any correlation of their conduct on and off the filed with their actual performances. The moot question is - does one need to be overtly aggressive or arrogant in the field, in order to be a champion material? Can a gentleman choose to remain a gentleman and maintain his dignity but at the same time continue to be a champion or continue to tread all the way up to his or her stardom?

In the world of tennis, it was in the early eighties that Martina Navratilova came into the spot light, eclipsing the charming aura of Chris Evert. In the late eighties Steffi started on her ascendancy. When I used to watch the live telecast of Steffi versus Martina matches in those days, I used to wonder why Martina gets so charged up after beating Steffi - who was just a kid less than half her age at those times - who always used to exude a charm of vulnerability all around her even in her peak. As a strong contrast to Martina, Steffi's victory celebrations always used to be rather muted, with a relieved smile all around her face - a very dignified stance most of the times..

I used to enamoured of what Steffi does, as compared to Martina's gesticulations. Show one's relative superiority in one's performance, not in all other kinds of showing off, during the match or post-match. Does one need to be overtly aggressive and nauseatingly arrogant always declaring "I'm the best", to be a winner? Can't one be quiet, gentle, dignified and organised in sports?

As some of the articles that I have provided links for in my previous post, chess, of all games, was meant to be a game where contestants ought be boisterous and showing explicit animosity and contempt to the fellow contestant. They should always throw bad language and foul exclamations at the other - such was the practice. With a few exceptions though. In my child hood days, I used to follow the Spasky Fischer matches (1972) which was held in Iceland's capital Reykjavik. In those days, we had to rely on newspaper reports obviously, and I used to remember reports which indicated that Fischer, the freak genius that he was, used to be a bit crazy, sometimes. Bursting out that Spasky was hypnotizing him etc., was an example of his worst tantrums. But I understand that Boris Spasky was a gentleman, so much so that in the previous tournaments that they used to play one another, he used to go to Fischer's room, which used to be as disorganised a room can be, take him out to the swimming pool, and tried to make Fischer relax a bit. I used to read that after such positive interventions by Spaksy, Fischer's record of winning over Spasky used to go up!! A rarity that can only be dreamt about in these days,I say!!!

All the four gentlemen whose names I have written in the first paragraph have proved that one can be dignified and gentle while remaining champions in their own areas. One may have a view or two in divergence in his feel about Saurav's conduct, but I disagree. He was all energy, demonstrative sometimes, totally different, and might have been forceful, but his conduct was never undignified, or non-gentlemanly or even arrogant. I'd say that vis-a-vis Australia he was only showing to keep our heads high, and never to be servile. Being servile used to be the norm, rather than the exception, with our team, most of the times in the earlier days and it was at such times Saurav showed his own way to counter that.

Dignity will be remembered for ever, while histrionics will tend to be laughed at more often than not, except possibly for rare cases of freak geniuses such as John McEnroe. Such geniuses are rare in his history - so very rare that those others who wish to blindly emulate such behaviour should have the common sense and intellect to understand that unless they have such elements of genius within them they will soon fall by the way side and obviously into the oblivion..

Lord of the universe..

Now the turn has come to salute yet another genius - Vishwanathan Anand, the champion who is all smiles at all times. The person who has proved to the world that one can be a superstar and world champion in chess, without having to be rough, ill-mannered, overtly aggressive, and indulging in 'hate-speak' at all times. Whenever he is seen on TV or in the press, a smiling cheerful face is probably what strikes us the most..The ruffians that champion chess players ought to be is a belief, certainly a wrong one at that, that is unfortunately rooted deep in the psyche of many a chess-player - not fortunately in the part of the world where we hail from, but in many other parts of the world. Please see the related report in Times of India, and the blog post of Prem Panicker (from 'Smoke Signals'), from where I got this TOI link.

Let me salute the champion, one more time.. May there be many more laurels coming your way, Anand - we're proud of you..

About the girl child - cry thy beloved country..

This morning, or more correctly some time in between late last night and this morning, at some point when brain slips to a kind of delirium, when images that we have seen past but can't be irretrievably relegated to the inner folds of memory start circling around you, I was thinking of the girl child.. ..Just the other day, while coming back from a business travel, my co-passenger was a girl surely past her teens and possibly into her mid twenties..a very intelligent girl - not the type who is absolutely oblivious of things happening outside of her county, leave alone her country..very sweet and smart, who one would wish had been his or her daughter ..Her first destination was Kathmandu, possibly a Himalayan trek, and then the next few weeks in our homeland..she told me she'd love to travel all over India.

That return flight was a journey of close to 7 hours, and she slept for half the time...and was taking notes from a book when not asleep..probably making preparations for her trip I thought..

One question she did not ask me was about how safe would a girl just past her teens be in India, alone.. probably it is her own surroundings, the nature of her environs or what she'd have seen all around her while growing up, that made her not ask that question.. or she may have been in the know..but if she were to ask that question, what answer should I have given..?

And this morning I happened to read this..coincidental or not, I can't say either way..

Your words, Babita, somehow pierce into my heart..and surely it bleeds..when you write 'bodies lusted and whisked away in the name of love', I shudder to think it could be anyone's dear daughter, lovely sister who a father and a mother would have grown by giving love beyond what they could... but looking at her being disrobed and raped, the collective conscious of the society feigns to be attentive while talking about the stock exchange or TV serials with nauseating detachment.. yes - it is a collective betrayal on what I'd tend to believe, or what my upbringing has taught me to believe, as world's most wonderful creation..

Looking at the whole thing with a kind of impassioned detachment, I'd tend to believe that ours is a society which is hypocrisy personified in the truest sense of the term.. God's own country - it is made out to be. True, it made a good copy for the ad world , but does it mean anything to us? Society which imbibes relief when "my husband/my wife/my children" (sorry - parents not included) are safe, even when our neighbour has lost his entire family.. when our next door neighbour gets physically attacked in broad day light, we tend to close our front door and look at our wrist watch to see if it is time for the 5.30 serial..we have political parties, why political parties we have a reigning Chief Minister at the moment, who outsmarted anyone else in conveniently using the plight of the girl child to ride a popular wave and snatch a political victory, then only to forget the agonies of the girl child and relegate several of those police cases into the convenient oblivion of our collective conscious..

As a society, we have not seen a war being fought..except dawn to dusk strikes and harthals.... We have never seen even a fraction of the agonies of our freedom struggle, or taken part in any kind, yet ashamedly courageous enough declare before the masses in a self congratulatory mode the fruits of our incessant struggle..what has been our collective contribution to any cause, except certain isolated works by individuals - I wonder..

Cry thy beloved country..what else.. at least let your sins get washed off by your tears (unless they are not induced by glycerine)..

Thanks Babita for the strikingly forceful and violently forthright writing..

Why pamper industries at the cost of agriculture? A Tata example..

It was more than a decade and a half ago, in 1992 to be precise, that I happened to hear an economist speak on 'sustainable integrated balanced development'. Just to reminisce, that was the beginning of the globalisation phase of India, probably just before India Inc. started receiving the limelight, or shall I say more positively skewed share of focus, from the powers that be. The internet boom had not yet started its ascendancy. We had just survived the fall outs from the liberation of Kuwait and the (first) Iraq war by Mr. Bush, the Senior. It was only a few months prior to that, that we'd been through the the Indian Express expose on the pawning of gold by our government under the stewardship of the then Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha, who was at that time with the Janata Dal (his pre-BJP days). Dr. Manmohan Singh (MMS) had unveiled his first budget. P. Chidambaram was commerce minister at that time. IMF doctrines had just began its influence on governmental policies.

This sets out the back drop. 

It may be just coincidental that the 'economist-speak' (which I have referred to in the opening paragraph) was in Calcutta, in Narendrapur to be more precise. It took place during a refresher course which I was attending in my then employer's training complex at Narendrapur. Among several interesting things which he shared with us, he recounted his student days at the famed Delhi School of Economics, particularly the discussions that took place with MMS himself. He was tangentially indicating that there was a gradual shift since then in the economic postulates of Dr. MMS, compared to where he was in his DSE days, and he tried to make out a case that that was possibly due to the 'learning unlearning' process he subjected himself to in his is days at Washington. He (our speaker) felt that MMS got catapaulted to a totally different kind of doctrinated pedestal after his stint with the IMF.

Let us come back to our theme. His (our speaker's) one question was - why should we give primacy to industries and particularly so, at the cost of agriculture? His argument was that stimulated economic growth derived from enhanced industrial growth in a manner out-pacing agriculture may be less meaningful to a country like India. Politicians after politicians speak about the fortunes of industrialisation, but do not spare even an iota of thought on agriculture. Unless we have a sustainable environment-friendly integrated and balanced development where the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors are given balanced focus, it can only help widen the rift between the rich and the poor. As the saying goes, how does the rich becoming richer help the poor who is left with only one option - to become only poorer. Increase in the number of millionaires is by no means a good measure of what real development is. This was the crux of his rather thought provoking speech.

However, it is nothing but a bare fact that the story is no different irrespective of whether the state is ruled by the left or the right or those who take a middle path. Let us take the Tata project which was supposed to have gone to fruition in Singur. Have we spared a thought on how much financial assistance was promised to the Tatas by the Left-controlled WB government?Here's a snap shot of some of the "highlights" of the deal.

• Tata's investment supposedly ~ Rs. 1500 Crore.
  

• Heavily subsidised lease of ~1000 acres of land to the Tata on an express way, supposedly worth upwards of Rs. 600 Crore. Here's what a 'Rediff' report says
  

Incidentally, land for the factory had also been provided at a subsidised rate with 645 acres being provided to Tata Motors at Rs 1 crore a year against market rate of Rs 19.3 crore a year in that area, and with 290 acres being provided for the vendor and related facilities units at Rs 23 lakh a year against a market rate of Rs 8.7 crore a year. This excluded the cost of acquisition of the land pegged at around Rs 120 crore.

• Concessional power @ more than half of the rates charged to any high tension industrial unit, and promise of offset should the tariff increase by more than 25 paisa per KwH.
  

• Soft loan to Tatas of Rs. 200 crore loaned within two months of inking the MoU in May, 2006 at an interest rate of 1% per annum repayable 21 years thence, in five equal installments. By way of aside, please do a small calculation how much this amount would grow to, if invested as an FD in a bank. On interest subsidy alone, this would mean something like Rs. 25 crores a year.
  

• Reimbursement by WB government of Central Excise Duties that Tata pays for 10 years.
  

• Reimbursement by WB government of all corporate income taxes in full for first five years and 30% for next five years payable by Tata.
  

• All sales taxes i.e.VAT and CST collected by the Tata Motors from the customers to be kept with the Tatas for 31 years at an interest rate of 0.1% per annum!!!
  

• Reimbursement by WB government of the loan interest payable by the Tatas to build the project. A 'Yahoo' group report reads thus:
  

This can be described in very simple words that who ever buys any car and pays
taxes on that, the money is retained by Tatas for thirty years and instead of
depositing in the exchequer within 45 or 90 days, will deposit after 31 years.
If the amount of money that the Tatas will retain during the thirty years, it
will amount to huge sums of money to which 1500 crore will look pigmy.

In addition to the above, the government would have had to open new sections within the government secretariat, only to run separate accounts for this project keeping in view the accounting complications involved in the deferment of loans, reimbursements etc. explained in the foregoing..

My initial thought on reading the related reports is - who cannot be starting and running a project given the sops and incentives? Is the public aware of all these? It is nothing but an absolute shame that nobody speaks about any of these, but will outrun the other in fixing the blame squarely on Ms. Mamta Banerjee, who for whatever reasons chose to speak for the farmers. She may have had her own political agenda behind it, but can that reason mask the facts behind the deal? And to get what benefit - tangible or intangible - in return? 

More details about these here and here. Those who are inclined can read on...

PS: It will be interesting to do some research on the specifcs behind the likes of this - say the 'Smart City' project in Kerala, and see if similar things come up there as well.....

Impudence - but can that go to this extent?

Amidst the turmoils that we are witnessing day by day in the financial world, who would have expected that the American International Group (AIG) would dare throw a party at a Californian resort to celebrate US Government's bailout of their group with tax payer's money?

Please see what AIG officials have done (here) and some reactions to it (here)

WASHINGTON — Less than a week after the federal government had to bail out American International Group Inc., the company sent executives on a $440,000 retreat to a posh California resort, lawmakers investigating the company's meltdown said Tuesday.

The tab included $23,380 worth of spa treatments for AIG employees at the coastal St. Regis resort south of Los Angeles even as the company tapped into an $85 billion loan from the government it needed to stave off bankruptcy.

The retreat didn't include anyone from the financial products division that nearly drove AIG under, but lawmakers were still enraged over thousands of dollars spent on catered banquets, golf outings and visits to the resort's spa and salon for executives of AIG's main U.S. life insurance subsidiary.

"Average Americans are suffering economically. They're losing their jobs, their homes and their health insurance," House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., scolded. "Yet less than one week after the taxpayers rescued AIG, company executives could be found wining and dining at one of the most exclusive resorts in the nation."

Some gory details of the spend...

Here is your hard earned tax dollars at work....

$139,375.30 for rooms. $147, 301.71 for "banquets." $1,488 for the Vogue Salon, which features manicures, pedicures and hairstyling. $6,939.09 on golf. $2,949 for tips. $5,016.32 at the Stonehill Tavern. $3,064.71 for in-room dining and the lobby lounge. That's part of the $440,000 bill from a recent weekend bash that an American International Group Inc. subsidiary threw for its top performers ........