Kick and Tell

The honeymoon is over. In fact things are so bad, divorce is very much on the cards, I have even found myself a replacement. I have had enough! My calls have not been received, my problems have been ignored and I have been made to feel like a small little insignificant unimportant twit. Before you begin to anticipate a scandalous breakup story, let me share a few facts. Dolphin- the amazing MTNL telecom service, is being dropped by me in favour of its private, supposedly more efficient and consequently un-riching cousin Airtel. My choice of words till now may have indicated to all and sundry that my levels of dissatisfaction with telecom operators at large are almost proportionate to the bills that MTNL has been sending me.

It all began two months ago, when a bill of a grand Grand hit me. Yes and hit hard. From a modest Rs.300, to the very immodest 4 –digit figure, I had made cell bill history in my family. My parents of course weren’t amused. Frankly neither was I. It may not seem that big a deal to you, it may still belong to the realms of reality for many. Reserve your opinion till you hear my call rates- Rs. 1.20 for local, Rs. 1.75 for STD, and messaging 25 paise local and Re 1 for STD. If the altitude of the call rates has left you gasping, imagine my plight at receiving the above mentioned bill, despite the low rates. No I haven’t found myself a new chatty Boyfriend, No I haven’t started to dinner talk on the cell, No I haven’t done anything drastic enough to bring about the kind of inflation that my mobile bill experienced. When my mother blessed me with the connection, at the start of my college life, I couldn’t help but feel smug at the more than fair deal I thought I had struck. Now I am just struck, with bad luck, a worse telecom operator, and the worst of it all- the poverty only a college student can inflict upon him/herself.

The only problem is that for this once in my life I am actually not to blame. Now every young adult has enough things he/ she did to take blame for, which are denied nevertheless, so when something like this happens, it’s a real tragedy. Moving away from the melodramatic I shall now elucidate upon the circumstances that have brought me to this- and Airtel. In the 21st century what does a consumer (who is God) do when faced with a problem? Approach Customer Care of course! Exactly what I did. As you may have guessed my encounter with this particular ‘care’ has not been fruitful, infact some of it has even been funny. Leaving out the mundane( Your call is in waiting…music…your call is in waiting..music…your call is in waiting…..music..music…music…….music…SLAM!) when you mercifully do get connected ( 1/10000 times) this is what you get. Sample-

CC: Good __ sir…sorry ma’am. This is fksdhgilgiy ghi ( some coded language) How may I help you.

Me : (explain my problem)

CC: May I have your name.

Me: Malavika

CC: Nice name ma’am

—–at this point the connection is disrupted as often happens with my dear Dolphin—–

Me: what?

CC: Nice name ma’am

Me: Surname? Vyawahare

CC: No. No, Nice name ma’am.

Me: V-Y-A-W-A-H-A-R-E

CC: NICE NAME MA’AM! (mutters- what’s wrong with your connection???)

Me: ( You should tell me what’s wrong!) Oh…uh huh so what about my complaint?

CC: Ma’am please stay online while I check your details..

Music…your call is important to us, please stay online….music….your call is important to us please stay online….music……music…….music….music……music…SLAM! Thanks buddy you made my day.

I should have been prepared, my earlier attempts to get the GPRS activated in my phone was a mini disaster too. Initially having innocently subscribed for GPRS, and patiently giving my details and agreeing to shell out Rs.50 activation charges, I tried configuring the thing. Nothing happened. 20 calls to Customer Care later, it still wasn’t working. Their inadequate knowledge, inability to convey instructions or understand the customer’s problem is funny at times and appalling most times. How to activate GPRS with a Dolphin connection still remains a mystery. I did not pursue that, but this billing problem really took the cake- and my money. Fortunately in the Billing mystery I am not as clueless about what’s going on. Recently much to the amusement of my friends when they called on my number, some old lady who did not happen to be me, answered. My attempts to call my friend lead to the appearance of a number on my friend’s display screen, that did not happen to be mine. I am almost sure, that if I were to call that number, an old lady would answer, or maybe I will…basically you get the mess that MTNL has landed me in. To their credit this cross connecting business has not happened to me again, I am not so optimistic about the cross- billing though.

I clearly recall the day when our professor had told us, how in the not so distant past, people had to wait almost 3 decades to get a phone connection in India. The collective giggle that broke out amongst us was a clear indication of our assessment of the absurdity quotient of such a situation. My experience has made me wiser, judging from the way MTNL has taken care of me, I shudder to think of a situation where the Customer Care knew that the poor thing at the other end did not have the option of an Airtel or a Vodafone et al. Unfortunately even today, competition has not ensured efficiency. I don’t have any grudge against MTNL or its attempts to become competitive ( sorry guys I am not giving them a clean chit yet), but it seems that the focus is only on competing for the users, schemes, AD campaigns, you name them and they have them, but what about pure as they call it- Customer Care?

Crossing the Divide

This summer, I undertook a journey transcending boundaries; boundaries whose existence I had till then been unaware of, or to be fair whose reality I had not yet acknowledged. Boundaries that define the ‘New’ and the ‘Old’ India- two separate worlds, separated not so much by distance as by time- A day long train journey that seemed to cover not just dreary kilometers, but years of progress. I found myself in an orbit around both these worlds-in a paradox working for a NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) Survey team on one hand and as an Intern at Google on the other. From being part of a voluntary survey on the implementation of a State sponsored Employment guarantee scheme promising minimum wages for the poorest for their sustainence , I moved on to join a high paying internship of ‘the’ Company that regularly features in the World’s Best Employers’. The paradox was not lost on me.  If ‘irony’ were a song, it would be the national anthem of 21st century India.

As is apparent, my reason to take up the two ventures was neither sheer career mindedness nor academic lust. If I may be as crass as to say- it was a pure whim to see the world in black and white. And indeed, I was not disappointed in my discovery of the two worlds which might as well have been a photograph and it’s negative.

Surguja (Chattisgarh), the district which I toured as a surveyor was exactly the way P. Sainath had described in his book ‘Everybody Loves a Good Drought’ in 1994. Much touted as one of the poorest districts in the country, inhabited by tribals, the villages of Surguja are a picture of photogenic poverty and atavistic lifestyles, finding a place in many a concerned newspaper report. Though, even on their own my experiences here left a deep impression on me, their true impact was felt afterwards, when I entered the equally ‘glamorous’ Gurgaon. Gurgaon of course is hardly a “gaon” (village). A symbol of Globalised India, it is more appropriately an established centre in the Global Village (perhaps a glorified cybercafé), attracting the best of the educated with the promise of a king-size life.

However I have no wish to resort to age old clichés; my objective here is to share the perceptions of a much bewildered young mind. Indeed sometimes the contrasts are so damning, that simply stating them would be enough to make a statement. I shall thus take the liberty of giving the facts the shape of a report card.

REPORT CARD -India 2008
Status	Villager, Badegoan, Surguja, Chattisgarh	Employee, Google, Gurgaon, NCR
Employment Status	Seasonal Agricultural laborer/ NREGA worker offering unskilled labour at minimum wages, migrate under conditions of extreme distress.	Permanent employee, with on the job training. Pay with perks. Migrate to different company in the case of heftier pay packet or offer of better post
Nutrition	Daily diet of coarse rice, potatoes (wheat is a luxury), Men survive on only Mahua the local alcohol sometimes (sic). Ration Cards for procuring basic necessities ( also used as collateral, mostly forced)	Breakfast and lunch served at in-house café run by top class chefs,   that pride themselves in offering cuisines from across the world. Snack bars with all varieties of chocolate, chips, brownies; fruits for the health conscious. Free of course (perks). Sudexo Coupons for the choosy.
Water	Hand pumps at respectable distances. In some regions the iron content is slightly higher giving one the impression it’s Mirinda*. Surprisingly did not prove fatal.	Hot, Cold or Lukewarm? 6 coffee machines. Numerous Fruit juice refrigerators, A Costa coffee counter. Recent addition – coconut water stall.
Sanitation	Non-existent.  Unless riverside bathing and bush-toilets qualify. All morning chores to be completed in groups- An ordeal specially for women.	World class; Perfumed toilets complete with toiletries, loo-assistant and flowers?! Sanitary napkins and dustbins available in every cubicle.
Transportation	In the rare presence of “kachcha” roads in the interiors- minivans hosting humans, chickens and sometimes policemen with AK-47s. Jeeps on hire for rich farmers. Stops are undefined and wait can last 2 hours. Cycles for the slightly better-off. Kilometers of walking in the forests for poor, sometimes with 10Kgs of ration on their back.	A/C Cabs available for pick up and drop from home every morning.  Drivers pulled up for delays. Cabs leave every half an hour in the evening. Toll bridge constructed to ease traffic jams in the area due to presence of similar such cabs for every office.
Electricity	Non-existent again. In the most remote areas however, to give credit some places do have overhead wires in place. The only hitch is, as a resident pointed out – There is no electricity anyway… if only these wires were lower we could have at least dried our clothes on them.	The most brightly lit offices. Power cuts are unheard of, Google servers host the world’s information- it shows. The infrastructure has to be seen to be believed.
Security	Chattisgarh has a history of Naxal terrorism, a fact that is driven home by the presence of Police lookouts in most villages. The survey team too was stopped at gunpoint on entering a village, only to be let off, after submitting a handwritten letter to the effect that we were responsible for our own safety, not the police.	Before joining the company, even as intern for 6 weeks one is subject to a thorough background check by specialized agency hired for this purpose. On the floor the regular security procedures are followed; identity cards issued for entry and even an electronic signature for visitors.
State Presence	Villages under Gram Panchayats. At one GP the Sarpanch was a woman, who was serving us tea, while her husband answered questions about the administration. He held no post. At another village after we finished with our questionnaire we were informed that the interviewee who had been running the show was infact the Sarpanch’s brother who had been unable to run for the post as his family size (children) made him ineligible under the law.

(* Mirinda is an orange colored aerated drink)

To a development economist, this might be the extreme but expected truth, but to a not-even-graduate it is an eye opener- to watch Romeo and Juliet after having read Cinderella. The premises are the same - a world of great inequality, of unfairness and lack of opportunity, of exploitation and of Fairy-God Mother like schemes. The tragedy and irony of the real play however are striking. It is one thing to read about vicious circles, lack of facilities, failure of policies and plans, study the why and the why-not, and the haves and the have-nots and simply quite another to be with the people caught in the vicious cycles, plagued by the deprivation, betrayed by the policies, and without answers to the questions, not of where the Indian Economy is headed, but where their next meal is coming from.

Admittedly, the divides must run deeper, the chasms wider than even what meets the eye. But what meets the eye has definitely opened my mind to the world that exists outside the walls of my classrooms and textbooks. True, several important questions remain unanswered. True, the scope of my little sojourn to the Great Indian Village and the brief embrace of the Great Indian Dream does not allow for much academic discourse-one that my limited knowledge would in any case not be able to sustain. But the questions have begun to form. The boundaries that I had spoken of earlier  which are now so clear in my mind…I wonder where the lines of division are drawn ? Where does “the” prosperity end and poverty begin? Who draws these lines? More importantly how do they come into existence? One can talk of islands of prosperity, but the real issue is –what about those who are at sea?

A Gandhian Ideal

Khosla ka Ghosla may not exactly be the best example to bring home (pun intended) the importance of property. But there definitely is something about land which provokes the most primal instincts of man. Maybe it’s the notion of ownership attached to it that makes human beings display behavior similar to that of a dog marking its territory. Let me clarify that I have nothing against the dog species, they just happen to have such a distinctive style (pardon the second bad analogy in a row!)

A more rational way of understanding the significance that property, or broadly land holds in human history can be judged from the existence of entire theories on it. In fact a fundamental point of difference between the prevailing antagonistic ideologies of socialism and capitalism happens to be their distinctive approach towards property. The reason it becomes imperative for these economic theories to look into the question of property, is simply because economics recognizes land as a factor of production. And come to think of it, without land the only way to indulge in productive activity is in cyber world, fortunately or unfortunately it’s not possible to actually ‘live’ online……yet. So land is crucial to man, the glitch is it’s important to every man; the bigger glitch is-till Mars becomes colonized we have to do with limited amount of land.

So according to pure but common sensical economic logic, if a lot of people want the same thing and here I mean a lot( check out the last census figures for India if you want to know what I am talking about) and that entity is not just limited but non-reproducible, we have a problem. This fundamental problem has on its own accord, given rise to countless others and been the basis for power struggles since the beginning of time, across the world. Which is why Gandhi in his bid to provide an alternative method of conflict resolution, based on the twin ideas of truth and non violence, was compelled to discuss property. The idea of property as a root cause of inequality is not hard to fathom. You not only have a ‘makkan’ you also have the ability to decide who gets roti and kappda too. In other words you own and control a factor of production.

Having established property as a ‘necessary evil’ Gandhi goes on to, as his brand demands, find a solution. Now this solution is based on a premise which, to my mind, crystallizes the crux of the Gandhian philosophy. Gandhi related property with trusteeship and by doing so he effectively destroys the notion of power that is inherent in any ownership issue. Trusteeship involves the using of the land under your control for the benefit of society but at the same time keeping aside for yourself the amount that compensates you for providing the services of up keeping and maintenance. Ownership has no role to play here. This is an essential departure from theories of yore because it asks of man in essence not to be or behave like an animal. If that condition was satisfied things become very simple indeed.

It is easy at this point of the article, to fling the words idealistic, unrealistic and many other –tics on Gandhi and get on with it. The only injustice would be that we would in essence be flinging away what is ‘right’. Indeed of all the debates that I have ever been audience to, the bottom line somehow is always drawn with the acceptance that it all boils down to someone knowing what’s right and doing that too. I applaud Gandhi’s valiant effort so many years ago at converting this vague idea of goodness into a concrete concept, that of trusteeship.

Economics has tried to teach me a lot of things. One of the rare notions that has managed to find a favoured place in my mindset, is that at the end of the day, everything is subjective. Everything in economics is based on the assumption that the players involved are rational. Gandhi the economist, based his entire theory on the assumption that the consumer was ‘good’. Because for him goodness was the only rational way to be

So long...

Like bubbles the moments of our togetherness,

The laughter filling them with life,

Moments bursting with it...

So frivolous we could be,

So easy in our belonging,

Like the frothy waves rising from an ocean

An ocean full of depth, clarity and beauty

A reserve of trust and truths unspoken...

Despite its depths, darkness and despair,

It would never run dry

Do the waves have a faith?

That no matter how they pull...

Reach further out onto the dry land,

There will always be the ocean...

To pull them back into its embrace,

Somewhere to come back to,

To merge into something bigger than them...

Somewhere to be and belong,

Because, were they ever away?

- 20 years, 2008

A Juvenile Romance

A juvenile romance

A crippling emotion

An undecided fate

A heartless farewell

An unwelcome night

A sweet surrender

A lipfull kiss

A meaningless poem

In the high noon of youth,

A Shadow of love is born...

-21 years, 2009