The Unlikely Economist

The Eighth Column has clocked more than 10,000 visitors and is still going strong. Needless to say, The Fatal ‘Head’ache series remains the most popular series on this blog to date, followed by the Nehru-Edwina affair. Thank you dear readers for making this a success. Keep sending your comments, queries and feedback to rajkmitra@gmail.com – they are truly my inspirations. Last but not the least, on public demand, I am contemplating “Season 2” of The Fatal ‘Head’ache series.

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Why is India still so goddamn poor?, I sometimes wonder. It’s not that our leaders and policymakers haven’t done any thing in the past six decades. They did whatever they could, yet the fruits of their efforts have not been as sweet as they should have been. So, what went wrong? Nothing apparently, everything really.

It was 1997 and Amartya Sen hadn’t won the Nobel prize. Economics as a discipline wasn’t quite “cool” with the educated Bengali middle class at that time. And I had no special love for Economics, because I knew very little about it, except that someone had told me that it’s easier to get through the civil services exams with Economics. I still remember my grandfather’s “what-the-f**k” expression when I told him that I wanted to study Economics. “Ota to meyeder saabject (only girls study Economics),” the 70-year old science graduate had retorted.

He couldn’t be blamed. Economics was and is still taught as part of the arts curriculum, along with History, Geography, Political Science, Philosophy et al. Economics remains an untouchable for the ‘elite’ studying Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. Thus studying Economics wasn’t really a choice for me as well. It was a compromise to keep Chemistry at bay and yet obtain the much coveted ‘B.Sc.’ degree.

I was quite excited about attending my first lecture on Economics. It was like going out on a blind date. I was desperate to fall in love at first sight. It however took just 45 minutes for the excitement brewing within me to subside. Poor people and nations are doomed to stay poor – that’s the first thing I learnt at college – the vicious circle of poverty.

When I grew older, armed with a wider perspective, I began wondering, if such a vicious circle did exist, how could the US or Singapore which were much poorer than India break out of this circle? Did they get hold of a magic wand? Even closer home China could achieve much more than we could, despite taking the path of economic reforms almost at the same time.

So, what really did the trick? Their approach to poverty. They didn’t see poverty as a constraint, rather a great motivator to push them out of their economic backwardness. Economics teaches you how to create wealth, not how to maintain poverty at sustainable levels. Nevertheless, there’s a much deeper connotation to India’s failure in tackling poverty. Poverty is beautiful. What would our policymakers and so-called social workers do if poverty is eradicated? How would they siphon off trunks of cash if the need to spend on social projects evaporate? Time to ponder!

Joel Stein’s “My Own Private India”?

Joel Stein (Source: thejoelstein.com)

When I read Joel Stein’s now infamous article, My Own Private India, published in TIME on Monday, I found it quite intriguing. But, little did I realize that this supposedly “humorous” take on how Indians have moved into and changed Edison, New Jersey, the place where he grew up, could create such a furore among the Indian-American community in the US.

At the first impression, the piece appeared to be under-researched, apart from being unfunny,  based on stereotypes and tired clichés. I believe the best response of the Indian-American community would have been to ignore it completely, but they chose the path most travelled, pushing up TIME’s otherwise dwindling sales and somewhat popularising Stein’s misplaced fear of “browning”.

Excerpts:

I am very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison, N.J. The mostly white suburban town I left when I graduated from high school in 1989 — the town that was called Menlo Park when Thomas Alva Edison set up shop there and was later renamed in his honor — has become home to one of the biggest Indian communities in the U.S., as familiar to people in India as how to instruct stupid Americans to reboot their Internet routers.

My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The Pizza Hut where my busboy friends stole pies for our drunken parties is now an Indian sweets shop with a completely inappropriate roof. The A&P I shoplifted from is now an Indian grocery. The multiplex where we snuck into R-rated movies now shows only Bollywood films and serves samosas. The Italian restaurant that my friends stole cash from as waiters is now Moghul, one of the most famous Indian restaurants in the country. There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime.

After the law passed, when I was a kid, a few engineers and doctors from Gujarat moved to Edison because of its proximity to AT&T, good schools and reasonably priced, if slightly deteriorating, post–WW II housing. For a while, we assumed all Indians were geniuses. Then, in the 1980s, the doctors and engineers brought over their merchant cousins, and we were no longer so sure about the genius thing. In the 1990s, the not-as-brilliant merchants brought their even-less-bright cousins, and we started to understand why India is so damn poor.

Eventually, there were enough Indians in Edison to change the culture. At which point my townsfolk started calling the new Edisonians “dot heads.” One kid I knew in high school drove down an Indian-dense street yelling for its residents to “go home to India.” In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if “dot heads” was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose.

Racism, like cultural prejudices, is nothing new. It exists in every conceivable part of the world. And that’s why the outrage intrigues me more than Stein’s piece. Is it just an expression of anger against a supposedly racial slur? Or is there more to it than meets the eye? The answer is not so simple, as it may seem.

In 1999, India’s environment minister Jairam Ramesh had written an article, Yankee Go Home, but take me with you, published in the Economic and Political Weekly. “This is more than a one-liner but captures the ambivalence of our attitudes,” writes Ramesh. It would be hard to find a parent in India who would not hesitate to stake their last penny to fuel their child’s American dreams.

But, dreaming an American dream isn’t the root cause, the real problem lies somewhere else – in our colonised minds. History is a witness that our minds strive for recognition from the west, even at a much broader level. We crave for American interest, attention and affection. We want to be taken seriously at the world stage.

In 1893, when a Hindu monk wanted to visit America to represent India and Hinduism at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, no one came forward to fund his trip. Swami Vivekananda stormed the parliament with his brief speech, getting rave reviews in the American press. I sometimes wonder whether we would have ever recognised Swamiji had he not received such glory in America.

Every world citizen with a little knowledge of global affairs knows how America treats multi-lateral organisations with disdain, imposing bilateral sanctions and taking unilateral decisions on wars and patronage. And thus despite two-timing India and Pakistan, we continue to look forward to a harmonious marriage. After all, tolerance and universal acceptance are two key things that we have been teaching the world since time immemorial.

What angers me the most is when I see Indian media trying to make a mountain of something that’s not even significant enough to be called a molehill. Namrata Randhawa takes pride in calling herself Nikki Haley, as Piyush Amrit Jindal does in calling himself Bobby Jindal. They live in their make-believe world, which is neither Indian nor American. And such outrages are just expressions of the identity crisis that runs deep within them. The Indian pride comes to the fore only when people like Stein openly express their fears and refuses to acknowledge their “contribution”.