Mr Prime Minister, we shrank the dragon: THE INSPIRATION

Powerful semantics and widely dispersed optics evoke a sense of suspicion in me. Folks, It isn’t because of current Covid19 gloom and doom. It probably is my going through the School of Hard Knocks after I finished all schooling that stopped at handing me degrees and things. As a consequence, with me alarm bells ring when somebody’s hype after numerous other hypes keeps hitting me with sickening regularity.

China’s political system is one such entity. It has fooled the world into abject surrender through its low-cost manufacturing might, based on prison labour and below-sustenance level wages to its people. West didn’t care as long as it was getting stuff 20 to 50 percent cheaper than what they could have produced. Immediate gains, folks, immediate gains has been the mantra. China is flouting proprietary right by blatantly copying their designs. Well, let’s ignore it. They help me make much greater profit margin by making my smartphone cheap; I will live with their chicanery. China is dehumanizing millions in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Well, we will put aside our moralizing. “Look, how low my cost of production now is,” exulted Samsonite.

Through my life’s experiences, I have come to believe that compromising with your principles inevitably hits you big. It is not that India did not fall into this trap. It did. And it ruined many of its own small and medium scale industries. In India, the decades-long refrain has been that China is militarily all too powerful. So we decided to mollycoddle them by buying electronic parts, firecrackers and cheap stuff like doormats and plastic toys.

Well, you allow someone to go on pulling wool over your eyes, he will. If it is China, it is a pastmaster at that.

Many Indians sitting in Delhi and in position of power chose to think afresh. I thought along those lines too. I mean, what on Earth are we dithering about! Vietnam could eventually scare the Americans to retreat and also make China run for cover; did they not? Haven’t we ourselves foiled them in 1967 and recently in Doklam?

That realization struck me like a ton of bricks. Then as a problem solving exercise—bless my corporate management experience—I figured why can’t I find a solution that takes care of some perineal problem area such as Pakistan’s intransigence. Liberation of Balochistan suggested itself. Pakistan is truncated one more time and China’s much-touted CPEC goes for a toss.

*****

Comments

Life Experiences

Like all my friends, I too was once a 17-year old awkward looking human in that shaded area when you are considered a naïve boy in certain estimations and a grown up man in the other situations. It leaves you so confused that you behave as neither of those. And I have also used the adjective ‘awkward’. It is because, at that age, facial hair appear to the extent that you are unsure whether to shave or not. In those good old days nobody asked you, “Son, what do you want to be when you grow up?” You generally were preached to from the pulpit. Unsure about what future held, I had to sit through sessions where three, mostly idle, older cousins and uncles ruled the roost. The agenda invariably was what I should be doing with my life. My Dad, an engineer himself and rather a busy man, didn’t have time for idle chatter. He gave all of two minutes to the first of those meetings and announced that I should go for an engineering career at Roorkee. He walked away and chose not to part...

An immigrant’s America: two chapters and a long interlude

Back in mid-1960s, I loved everything American. This mindset developed after reading whatever American material I could lay my hands on—that included ‘Old Man and the Sea’ on one end and dozens of Earl Stanley Gardner mysteries on the other. Sunday morning shows of Hollywood movies of all genre couldn’t be missed. The menagerie included Ben Hur, Roman Holiday, Who is afraid of Virginia Wolf, Guns of Navarone, The Great Escape, and a lot many other classics. To me, America was synonymous with modernity, spirit of inquiry, technological development and the ultimate destination for those who had a reasonable chance to get there. After my engineering degree, getting into a US Graduate School was the extent to which I allowed myself to look into future. Nothing else mattered. It happened. I was accepted at a great college in America’s southeast—cloud nine and all that. After a month of orientation with the new environs, I ventured out a bit. On a blind date, sought by me, I drew...

Privatisation: Let’s learn from Tanzania

I wonder what this for-and-against ballyhoo is on privatisation of PSUs in India. It is simple; Government has no business running businesses. Other than the inevitable reduction in unnecessary manpower and therefrom creating some unemployment, there is generally no downside to privatisation. Is it then a debate on efficiency versus spurious employment? Tanzania — much smaller economy – privatised over 400 public companies within 10 years. They knew the manpower complements were 3 to 10 times bigger than what the work called for. The country chose to bite the bullet and directed their attention to finding gainful employment opportunities thus making a positive contribution to the economy. In India, PSUs showing reasonable gross profit are only in the oil and gas space, and in power and its distribution. These are areas the government is in a comfort zone because they fix the product prices. Coal India—not in the two above mentioned business areas—is perhaps the only n...

Pradeep Goorha

Search This Blog