This surely has to be the line of the day:
We regret to announce that due to unforeseen circumstances beyond our control, the publication of The Astrological Magazine will cease with the December 2007 issue.
I have never before been so tempted to put a smiley on my blog!
(Link via email from Narasimha Shastri. Earlier posts on superstitious nonsense: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24.)
British photographer Alison Jackson, famed for her portraits of celebrity lookalikes in compromising positions, launched an appeal for would-be Gordon Brown impersonators on Monday, after six fruitless years of searching for a stand-in.
Jackson said she had “never had such difficulty finding a lookalike before” and attributed the struggle to the prime minister’s “huge bovine features”.
Hmm.
(Previous posts on cows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 , 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100.)
Headline of the day:
Don’t pay us to be patriotic: Muslims to UPA
It seems that the central government “has proposed to offer additional grants to nearly all the 12,000 madrassas, which get Government funds, to celebrate national festivals namely Independence Day and Republic Day.”
If politicians wish to bribe or pander, they are welcome to do with their own money. But why on earth should you or I have to pay for it? Immense disgust comes.
(Link via email from Vikram Chandrashekar.)
This is the 44th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.
A few days ago, the respected theatre artist Nadira Babbar spoke to the newspaper DNA about the state of theatre in Mumbai. She felt that there weren’t enough good auditoriums in the city. “My appeal to the government is to build small, simple auditoriums with basic infrastructure,” she said. “I am seriously thinking of meeting the chief minister and put before him certain stark realities of the state of theatre. Some of my proposals are to subsidize the rates of the halls. Secondly, it would be of great help if they subsidize the rates of placing advertisements in newspapers; not only for the theatre events, but also for other cultural events.”
Most of us would sympathize with her. The arts are essential to a civilized society, and deserve our support. And there are many neglected areas of it, besides theatre, where an infusion of funds would help. Traditional folk arts are dying out, literature in regional languages gets a raw deal, and so on. So, naturally, many of us turn to the state.
But should we?
We appeal for government spending much as children appeal to their parents. “Dad, I’m thinking of taking guitar classes, it costs X.” Or “Mom, I want to learn Bharatanatyam, the fees are Y.” And Mom and Dad evaluate if it’s good for us and fork out the money.
But parents spend their own money, money honestly earned. It’s not so simple when it comes to the government.
The money that our government spends does not come from the skies. It is taken, forcibly, from millions of ordinary citizens in this country. Those include not just you and I, who are effectively slaves of the government for three or four months of every year, depending on what percentage of our income our total taxes come to. They also include my maidservant, your building chaprasi and the girl who sells flowers at the Haji Ali traffic signal, all of whom contribute to the government coffers when they purchase a bar of soap or a chappal.
I’m not taking the extreme view that the government should not tax us. We need a government to protect our rights, and for a handful of essential purposes. For these, taxes are a necessary evil. But we should question its use beyond these necessities, for taxes come at a high cost.
The French writer Frédéric Bastiat had once asked, “Does the right of the legislator extend to abridging the wages of the artisan, for the sake of adding to the profits of the artist?”
Let me paraphrase that question in the context of Mrs Babbar: “Does the right of the legislator extend to abridging the wages of my maidservant, your building chaprasi and the girl who sells flowers at the Haji Ali traffic signal, for the sake of adding to the profits of the theatre groups of Mumbai?”
Ah, I can already hear the protests. “But theatre is a worthy cause, and deserves to be promoted,” the howls come. Indeed, but my maid may find uses for her money that she thinks are worthier. Her tax burden—and ours— could be eased considerably if the government stopped taking from Peter to give to Paul. And even if you insist on parting her from that money, it could be argued that the government itself could do worthier things with it. After all, tens of millions of people in India still lack access to clean drinking water.
I am reminded here of something the American Congressman Ron Paul once suggested. Paul was the sole dissenting vote when the US Congress voted to give the Congressional Gold Medal to Rosa Parks, and also voted against giving it to Mother Teresa and the Pope. His point was not that they did not deserve it. He simply saw no reason why the taxpayer should cough up the $30,000 each medal is estimated to cost. Instead, he proposed that every member of Congress who supported the award pay $100 from his or her own pocket towards the cost of the medal.
Similarly, I suggest that those who support all sorts of worthy causes should consider funding it themselves instead of demanding it of me, my maid or your chaprasi. It is easy to ask for other people’s money to be spent to support causes you support—but is it moral? Also, such short cuts to nobility are often hypocritical—if everybody who supported government funding for Mumbai theatre actually went and watched some plays, my guess is that there would be no need for a subsidy.
There are all kinds of good causes in this world that deserve our support, and we should not hesitate to support them if we feel strongly about it. But we should be careful of what we ask from the government, for it involves other people’s money. Instead, we should put our own money where our mouth is, and have the self-respect to refrain from demanding other people’s dosh.
* * *
You can browse through all my columns for Mint in my Thinking it Through archives.
And my occasional series: Where your taxes go: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25. Also see: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
If so, so should tall men, argues a new study by Greg Mankiw and Matthew Weinzierl.
No, they’re not being facetious. The abstract of the paper states:
Should the income tax system include a tax credit for short taxpayers and a tax surcharge for tall ones? This paper shows that the standard utilitarian framework for tax policy analysis answers this question in the affirmative. This result has two possible interpretations. One interpretation is that individual attributes correlated with wages, such as height, should be considered more widely for determining tax liabilities.
Alternatively, if policies such as a tax on height are rejected, then the standard utilitarian framework must in some way fail to capture our intuitive notions of distributive justice.
You can download the paper here (pdf link).
(NY Times link via email from Ravi Venkatesh.)
Susan Orlean explains the anatomy of
a cow
an essay:
I know it’s ultimately impossible and probably unnecessary to define what an essay is, but I think the Visible Cow offers an interesting and tangible analogue. What holds an essay together — the cowhide, so to speak — should be nearly invisible. The best kind of structure should be organic, revealing only the very natural way a smart person’s mind works through a topic, making connections and forming conclusions as they occur. And an essay can contain many thoughts and observations (those organs! those bones!) that might not seem to fit together, but in the end lead to a satisfying whole — a cow.
And if you’ll allow me to torture this poor cow — the Visible one and now all the real, live cows on the planet — for one more moment: just as each cow is individual, each of these essays is, too, though they are identifiably part of the same species.
This is part of Orlean’s introcution to The Best American Essays 2005. And I agree with her when she describes a cow as a satisfying whole. There can scarcely be a better occasion to assert that than the 100th cow post on India Uncut.
It’s been quite a ride.
(Link via email from Nitya Pillai. Previous posts on cows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 , 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99.)
Check out this entertaining excerpt of a recent question hour at the Rajya Sabha. My favourite bit comes at the end:
Mr Chairman: The Question Hour is over.
Dr V Maitreyan: Sir, it is very unfortunate that you are giving opportunity to ask questions only…(Interruptions). I am raising my hand for half an hour. This is very unfair. I want to protest against this. Only Members from Congress and BJP do not exist in this House. From tomorrow, I will disrupt the Question Hour…(Interruptions).
Apropos of nothing, I remember school.
(Link via Prem Panicker, who points out that “this is what is costing all us taxpayers Rs 26,000 per minute.” My happiness knows no bounds.)
In the WTF story of the day, Bejan Daruwala, speaking to Rajesh Pansare of DNA, suggests a cure for Sachin Tendulkar’s “nervous 90s”:
It’s well known amongst the astrology community that Sachin Tendulkar is a Taurus and that numbers 3, 6 and 9 apply to him.
But according to Chinese astrology, Tendulkar is also a Buffalo, a cousin of the bull — and these two systems combined make him a Double Bull.
The Bull is steadfast, a sign of strength and consistency. The weakness of Bulls and Buffalos is that they get into a rut and often cannot think out of the box, something which applies to Tendulkar. […]
Because he is a loving and faithful husband, to get out of his nervous 90s, I would suggest that Tendulkar follow four steps:
1. Sleep in the lap of his wife and tell her to love him sweetly and gently
2. Cook his own mutton cheese burgers and eat them
3. Have a terrific bath
4. Jump in his Ferrari and go for a drive
There is no indication on that page that this is a joke of some sort. It reads like a parody, but Daruwala always reads like a parody of himself. Anjali Tendulkar, of course, must be befuddled at what Sachin means when he asks her to love him “sweetly and gently.”
“What do you mean, sweetly and gently,” she could respond. “How else have I been loving you all these years? You can cook your own damn mutton burgers from now on. And take a bath, you’re stinking—now wonder Dada likes to run you out.”
(Link via email from reader Gokul. Earlier posts on superstitious nonsense: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23.)
I’m always running into young Indians who tell me with pride, “Cow is my mother.” Well, shame shame.
(Via Zentastic, which Peter Griffin and Sunil Mohan Ranta pointed me to in separate emails.
Previous posts on Google Trends: 1, 2, 3.
Previous posts on cows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 , 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98.)
This essay of mine was published today in the Independence Day special issue of Lounge, the weekend edition of Mint, as “Those Songs of Freedom.”
Just thinking of it sends a chill up my spine. On 12 March 1930, at the Sabarmati Ashram in Gujarat, 79 men went for a walk. For 23 days they marched, covering four districts, 48 villages, 400 kilometres. On the way they picked up thousands of other ordinary people, animated by a cause so much bigger than themselves. Then, on 6 April, by the sea at the coastal village of Dandi, Mahatma Gandhi picked up a handful of salty earth and said, “With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire.”
The empire shook. The purpose of Gandhi’s march was to protest the oppressive and unfair salt tax, and across the country people joined the battle. They made their own salt. They bought illegal salt. That year, 60,000 Indians were arrested during these protests. The Salt Law was not repealed. And yet, “the first stage in … the final struggle of freedom,” as Gandhi described it, had made an impact.
More than 77 years have passed. We have been free of the British empire for 60 of them. If we were to get inside a time machine, go back to 1930, pull in some of the men and women who marched to Dandi, and bring them to this present time, how would they react? Would they think that they were finally in the India that they had fought to achieve?
Or would they set off on another walk?
* * *
The story of our freedom struggle was not the story of a Gandhi here or a Nehru there – it was about millions of people who rose up because they wanted to be masters of their own destiny. The British empire was naturally the focus of that struggle, and when we were rid of them in 1947, the relief must have been enormous. The tragedy is that for most Indians, political independence was freedom enough. What else was there to fight for?
Well, plenty. The oppressive empire from a continent away was gradually replaced by an oppressive, omnipresent state, and we did not protest. The lack of economic freedom kept India poor for decades, and we did not protest. Personal freedoms were routinely denied to us, and we did not protest. In parts of our country people are treated worse than the British treated us, and we do not protest. As a nation, we stopped caring for freedom once we gained independence.
It is ironic that we celebrate the Dandi March so much. The taxes that weigh us down today are no less unjust that the infamous salt tax being protested then. Do some math: Calculate the percentage of your income that you pay as tax. Then apply that figure to a year, and see how many months it comes to. (For example, 25% tax would come to three months.) For that much time every year, you work not for yourself, but for the government. Add to that an approximation of the other taxes that you pay – everything you buy is taxed, so you are taxed not just while earning money, but also while spending it. You might just find that your ‘tax-freedom day,” when you actually start working for yourself, comes in May every year, or even later. Do taxes not cause a kind of part-time slavery, then?
It is not my case that taxes are unnecessary. We need a government to maintain law and order, to protect individual rights and so on, but our government is a bloated beast that goes far beyond that. Rajiv Gandhi once said that only 15 paise of every rupee that the government spent reached its intended recepient, and the planning commission later found him to be optimistic. More than 90% of our taxes are probably wasted – middle-class people like the readers of this article may not feel the pinch (unless we fantasize about what we could have done with that money), but think of our maidservants and sabzi sellers, whose every purchase feels the weight of government greed. The salt tax Gandhi protested was no worse.
Freedom for a country should mean every person being free to live their lives as they please, as long as they do not interfere with the similar freedoms of others. But our mai-baap state has long treated us as subjects, not citizens, and these freedoms have been denied to us.
Take trade, for example. When two people make a transaction, they only do so because both are better off. Prosperity is the result of a chain of such win-win transactions between people profiting by fulfilling each other’s needs. But Jawaharlal Nehru once described profit as a “dirty word”, and gave in to the fatal conceit, to use Friedrich Hayek’s phrase, of imagining that the economy, and the lives of people, could be planned.
Given India’s natural strengths, we should have excelled in labour-intensive manufacture and been a manufacturing superpower, but the license-and-inspection raj and our labour laws did not allow that to happen. The draconian restrictions on economic freedom introduced by Nehru and strengthened by Indira Gandhi meant that entrenched big businesses were protected from competition, and cronies of the government enriched themselves. Despite some liberalisation, most of these shackles still exist, and much of our country remains poor.
The benefits of economic freedom are unintuitive, and popular outrage has rarely been expressed on its behalf. But what about personal freedom? The Indian Penal Code, drafted by our imperial overlords in the 19th century to keep us natives in place, and tailored on Victorian morality, is filled with archaic laws that should have been repealed 60 years ago. Section 377 effectively outlaws homosexuality. Section 295(a), that makes it illegal to “outrage religious feelings,” is routinely used by bigots, from all religions, to stifle free expression. It is filled with laws that criminalise the act of giving offence, outlaw victimless crimes and treat women as the property of men.
Our constitution, written by freedom fighters, allows caveats to free speech like “public order” and “decency and morality” that are open to the interpretation of babus and judges. This has led to a culture of censorship and banning that spreads across the arts, as if Indian adults are in a special class of imbecility, and must be told what to think. Perhaps that is indeed so, for why else would we not feel aggrieved at that notion?
* * *
In some parts of the country, remote from our cities and our consciousness, the government treats the people as the empire once treated us. Do you remember a photograph from three years ago, of a group of Manipuri women outside the entrance of the Kangla Fort, which was occupied by the Indian army? They were protesting the gang rape and murder of a 32-year-old woman named Thangjam Manorama, who had been picked up from her house in the middle of the night by the army. Frustrated that no one cared to listen to them, that the law-and-order mechanism existed only for the rich and powerful, 12 of these women stripped naked, and held in front of them a banner that said, “Indian Army, Rape Us.”
I suspect had that image been taken in 1930, and had that banner said “British Army, Rape Us,” it would have been one of the defining images of our struggle for freedom. Today, no one cares. Across the country, law and order is a joke, and our government fattens itself on the sweat of a billion people. Free speech is endangered, and censorship thrives. Honest men wishing to start a business that will fulfil the needs of others – as all businesses must in order to survive – find themselves having to deal with licenses and inspectors.
The price of freedom, it is often said, is eternal vigilance. We let our guard down 60 years ago. Perhaps it’s time to fight back?
