True Enterprise

My friend G called me out for lunch the other day. He wanted to take me to a restaurant that serves South Indian fare in an unlimited thali system.

We were to meet outside the restaurant; one coming from work and the other from home. Mumbai traffic was stymied by simultaneous Shiv Sena and MNS rallies, both claiming to be true champions of Mumbai mill workers.

While their workers set the stage, inconvenienced other Mumbaikars, I was standing patiently outside the Shri Krishna Restaurant. The location is the most unenvious location. The restaurant is plonked right outside the Matunga railway station. People jostling, bustling, going about their average day hardly ever look up at the restaurant.

Yet, lunch time is when there is not a seat vacant.

Outside the restaurant, there is clamour of the street bazaar, cars parked illegally. Add to that, rains in July in Mumbai make roads splotchy and very dirty. Waiting for G, as I was looking for a place to rest my heavy bag that I carry to work everyday, I saw a very strange sight.

In middle of the cacophony of rallies, train station and cars, there were two cows standing in a remote oasis peacefully cudding. There was a boy roughly 20 years of age feeding them green shoots. After feeding the cows, he touched them and considered himself blessed.



Smiling, he proceeded to pay a rather affable looking old woman some money. I soon realised he had bought the green shoots from her. She had some grass laddoos also. After the boy left, two-three more people came by and bought some green shoots from the old woman and fed the cows.

I went across to the woman to ask her name. She told me her name was Malti. I asked her who had left the cows by the roadside. She informed me the cows belonged to her only. She brought the two out everyday and sold these green shoots to people who fed the cows in turn.



In India, many cursed souls are directed by pundits to feed cows as cows are considered holy.

Malti told me she sells the shoots and laddoos for Rs. 10. She sits everyday for about 4 hours and gets roughly 25 to 30 customers everyday. Simple math, she makes roughly 6 to 8000 rupees every month. For a woman like Malti, the cows are indeed holy.

G arrived half an hour late for lunch. He explained he got late because of the slow moving traffic. Putting the whole city on hold, MNS and Shiv Sena may want to raise a cry for the Marathi Manoos but it is people like Malti who are the true symbol of Marathi enterprise.

A museum of virtues!

The CEO of Gujarat Narendra Modi is getting all his testimonials in place. The man who was earlier known as the glamorous face of rightist ideology is being hailed by the most virtuaous of corporates today.

The corporates who Narendra Modi has bagged for himself are men known for their integrity, their value system and a quality that at least in public domain is larger than just profiteering. Modi obviously hopes, these virtues would have some rub-off effect if not on him, then at least on his image.

Ratan Tata, the big daddy of Indian business world was the first to catapult Narendra Modi into the "right circle" from the rightist circle. The benefit was mutual. Tata got much wanted land in Sanand to start his production of Nano and Narendra Modi got not only nation wide but international coverage for being the man who made Nano possible.



Following his success with Ratan Tata, Narendra Modi started promoting Vibrant Guajarat Summit ferociously. A biennial event that is supposed to bring business leaders, investors, corporations, thought leaders, policy and opinion makers on the same stage has been going on since 2003. But genuine public interest in the event started showing only post 2007 when 675 MOUs were signed and garnered 152 billion USD of business. In 2009, 8662 MOUs worth 241 billion USD were signed only to followed by a grand success n 20011 when 7936 MOUs were signed that were to bring 462 billion USD. Although the figures are mighty impressive, the underlying fact is that Modi Inc. has been rather surreptitious about the implementation rate which over the years starting 2003 to 2009 has been on an average not more than 26%.

Nevertheless, perception is a big magnet. Narendra Modi has been carefully constructing his image as a single-minded progressive thought leader. He does not engage in petty politics nor does he voice his opinion on wrong platforms. Thus, it is no surprise that after Tata, the next big catch for Narendra Modi is Narayan Murthy - the gentle, messiah-like mentor to India's biggest export Infosys.

Although, Narayan Murthy's research centre in Gujarat will bring its obvious fruits of benefit to Gujarat's people, would Murthy be able to do another Ratan Tata for Modi?



The two proud trophies that Modi would have liked to display on his shelf - Ratan Tata and Narayan Murthy are not the same men, as we knew them.

Ratan Tata is a man with a compromised image post Nira Radia tapes scandal. Narayan Murthy though not embroiled in a controversy that large, however is a mentor to an Infosys that is slowly but surely losing it's leadership tag to other more agile and open-minded IT companies.

Co-journalists argue inspite of the dented image of Ratan Tata post Radia tapes scandal and not-so-democratic-after all image of Narayan Murthy post Mohandas Pai's resignation; the two men will continue to be perceived as the torchbearers of Corporate Virtuosity.

Possibly! But then maintaining a museum of virtues on the graves of innocent is an old Modi tactic. The facade can continue for some more time.

Two more years

Alpu is a charming woman with dark brown skin and a bright smile. She has been cooking for me for the past 5 years. In this city, she is my friend and family. I am not sure if I too am her friend and her family. She doesn't ask me any questions about my work ever, nor about my friends. Yet, she comes to know if I have had a bad day.

Sometimes I indulge her by asking her about her life. She is married and has three sons. The eldest is studying in a college. The younger ones are in school. Her husband developed brain tumor some years ago but it was successfully removed. Alpu works in four other houses besides mine. Her husband cannot work in sun anymore so he travels in search of labour work where he can dodge the sun. These days he is in Kerela.

Alpu lives in a rented house which is a small shanty in a smelly lane where I happened to go once in all these five years of my knowing her. She was shocked to see me as I grinned at her little ones. The children were watching a small TV that I had given her after having used it for seven years. She gladly took it, like she took the computer monitor, keyboard, mouse and a corrupt mobile phone. She got all of them repaired.

On Sundays when I am rather unoccupied, she stands by the kitchen door and speaks to me. She smiles as she talks about her eldest son who she says is quite bright. She laments that her middle one is not interested in studies at all, instead likes to dance on bollywood songs.

She hopes that her eldest will get a good job after his graduation. Till then, she is ready to toil. Her husband sometimes gets disheartened when contractors cheat him off his money but she doesn't give up. She comes everyday with a bright smile and wakes me up with a cup of elachi tea in the morning.

There are days when she gets uncertain about her financial security. Monthly groceries, children's school fees, her husbands quarterly CT scans and increasing rent... The other day she told me how municipality was flattening out slums. She feared she would have to leave soon. I asked her looking up from my laptop, "Where will you go?" She didn't know. She said perhaps she'd have to go to her village.

Her village in Bengal is a small hamlet that doesn't have any decent schools, leave alone colleges. Alpu's eldest has just joined first year of college. She is anxiously hoping that after two years, the son would turn around the life of the family.

Alpu's husband has been away for the last three months. She has been battling the monsoon of Mumbai all alone. I ask her how she manages to lie in a pool of water with her mattress getting wet.

She smiles at me and says, "Two more years."

Rahul Gandhi - A case study of contrasts

As a journalist, I feel the pressure of making an opinion about almost everything under the sun. However tempted I may be to allow both sides of the argument to prevail, I realise I am not "I am" till I have an opinion on issues.

A recent issue on which my faculties have eluded me is Rahul Gandhi. Rahul Gandhi, son of India's most powerful woman Sonia Gandhi (who often makes it to the Forbes list of most powerful people in world also)has become a phenomenon in India politics.

Till sometime ago the scion of the Gandhi family to some was like a prince to Indian dynasty and to others a foreign educated bloke who understands nothing about the realities of grassroot politics. Rahul Gandhi born with a silver spoon in his mouth has attended the best schools of India and pursued his further education at Cambridge. He worked with a company in London followed by some work experience in an Indian company too.

It does look like that Rahul has lived a life very protected from Bharat which is not India. However he is making efforts to travel the distance between his India to our Bharat by way of pillion riding to Bhatta Parsaul and sometimes taking Padyatras to Aligarh. And recently with his strategy to lend his shoulder to the cause of farmers, he has become a phenomena of sorts.

A young politician who comes laden with a foreign education but talks farming and not urbanisation is a bit of a contrast. Especially, with his party leading the coalition at centre has at the helm at least four prominent people who talk reforms in their sleep also. However, Rahul has positioned himself differently and his positioning is not just connecting him with his vote bank but also inviting attention of the old-guard politicians who had only recently started talking "development".

On many a occasions however, Rahul has let us down with his gaucherie. Whether it was his much publicised arrest in U.P following his visit to Bhatta Parsaul or undertaking "Padyatra to Aligarh". It appears as if he is either unaware of the disconnect between centre and state politics or he plainly assumes that people are incognizant of the fact that land acquisition policies in states are bad because there hasn't been any change in the archaic land acquisition bill 1894 and that required centre to bring about a responsible bill.

In either case, to me he appears either naive or scheming. The distance between the meaning of these two words may be apogean, however for Rahul neither would be very becoming.