EDITORIAL
The resumption of industrial activity post lockdown and growing vehicular traffic increased the carbon load on the environment. While early May weather, up until the 15th, continued to be benign with two or three showers, the sun soon showed its mettle. Ere long we were battling mid-40’s Celsius temperatures. Back to the ACs and increased power bills. Fortunately, it has cooled down again. Ten weeks of near-zero economic activity have left some companies in a coma and many others severely bludgeoned. Companies had to willy-nilly resort to salary cuts. The ones in the automotive industry are going to face a demand slump as well. Almost every company I know has enforced salary cuts between 10% to 50%. Companies overseas have resorted to furloughs. We should be glad we don’t have to work pro bono.
No country imposed such a sweeping lockdown like India did. While it may have flattened the curve to manageable levels, the economic costs and the long-term effects of this lockdown can be debilitating. Exporters are ruing the fact that their buyers may be forced to look at alternate sources of supply and could thus lose their client base forever. Many such epidemics may not have made news about 25 years ago, before the advent of the internet and social media. We have lived through all that. I have this sinking feeling that the cure of the lockdown may be worse than the disease. Unemployment and hunger alone will claim more lives in India than the global toll of Covid-19. Unfortunately, in the cruel calculus of catastrophes, a casualty figure of 5,000 is viewed favourably! Even if this number swells ten times, it is still a piffling number. Every year, TB kills more than 250, 000 people in India alone. We never had lockdown for that or for dysentery or cholera or malaria, each of which kills a lot more people than Covid-19 has or will do. However, the lockdown has taught us some important lessons, some of which will become a way of life when normalcy returns. For instance, before the lockdown, I could never imagine reading e-news. The feel of newsprint in one’s hands gave a sense of joy that I never thought e-news would. I now realise that it is just a question of habit. I began reading newspapers online and I am none the worse for it. Likewise, e-learning, webinars, Zoom, Microsoft Team, and Google Hangout meetings will reduce going to seminars, unnecessary travel for meetings, training, etc. Many companies will save a lot of money. However, it would be bad news for airlines and the hotel industry.
After 8 weeks of being locked up within the four walls of your home, the silver linings of this lockdown are getting harder to identify. It’s great to get so much of quality time with family but spending 20 minutes each day talking about whose turn it is to take the garbage bag to the C Block dump or who is going to clean the toilet or do the dusting isn’t the bonding most of us hoped for! There is, however, one thing I cannot get enough of, imagining walking through the deserted streets of Delhi. Jaywalking the narrow streets of Chandni Chowk, which, without the teeming crowds seems like a walk into the past. There’s also the fact that without the crowds, traffic, and the smells, the ancient, medieval and recent history of the capital inspires awe. I hope I have conveyed the reverie’al appeal of one of the greatest cities on Earth, minus the crowds, dirt, noise and traffic. It also turns out that dedicating two hours to making your own cookies when you get a pack of Defence Bakery's cookies for a hundred bucks is not as rewarding as it may seem.
There is something sinister about the creatures that hang upside down and have this snarling countenance. The spectre of blood-sucking vampires of Dracula fame does not help. Bats, like all living creatures, have a role to play in nature, but the bad press the chiropterans have received of late, because of the widely held belief that the zoonotic virus ‘corona’ made its transition from them to humans, cannot be dispelled. The Chinese role in this whole saga is well documented. The Chinese, who eat everything that moves and consider bats as delicacies, and may have been responsible for the transition of the virus to humans, are the true villains. Therefore, to vilify the bats is not fair to these creatures. Even the charisma of Batman, who championed the cause of the lowly bat, has not been able to dispel the human wariness of bats. At one time, the C Block meter room under the Club House was colonized by bats. This very dread of the bats made us find solutions to exterminate them from there. Kunal Savarkar pestered me to arrange to get rid of them. We do not value their role as pest control and pollination agents.
These days it has become a fad to name children, associating with events of the period of their birth. This works fine when the event leaves pleasant memories, but it is not always the case. Children often have to bear the brunt of parents’ overwrought sense of history. Often, the monikers have negative connotations. Names like Hitler and Stalin, who were amongst the most brutal mass executioners in history, can claim their association with a politician in Meghalaya and Tamil Nadu respectively. Now, names like Corona or Covid-19, amongst the most dreaded pandemics that have wreaked havoc world over, have found favour with parents wanting to go viral with association. Unfortunately, the hapless babies have no choice in the matter and may grow up to face ridicule at their parents’ misplaced sense of pride.
I am a votary of grandmothers’ homemade remedies which are culled from Ayurveda, Unani, Naturopathy and other native curative protocols. I have benefited a lot from these potions and have rarely resorted to allopathic solutions when confronted with an illness. Therefore, I am dismayed that despite the Government having a full-fledged Ayush programme and India being the world’s foremost centre of excellence in Homeopathy, Ayurveda and Naturopathy, we have not given enough credence to these alternative therapies from offering affordable scalable solutions, despite the universally acknowledged fact that such a regimen has no inimical side effects like allopathy has. I have found that allopathic medicines often just act as a palliative than a cure. Due apologies to allopathic doctors in the colony. I am not belittling your contribution to society, but I have found native cures more apposite in my case. However, most people including my wife, children and many others favour the immediacy of relief that allopathy offers.
The most unfortunate of circumstances may throw up the most promising of opportunities. I am talking about the stock market. We may be at the start of a prolonged bull run. Historical patterns point to a paradoxical twist. Every time the US entered a recession, the Indian stock market witnessed a bull run. The economic prudence displayed by fund managers has a logical bearing. Every time the US goes into recession, the oil prices plummet. Since the price of oil can influence nearly two to three percent of our GDP, the correlation is hard to ignore. On top of that, India is also a net importer of metals like copper, nickel, aluminum, tin, and magnesium. Prices of metals likewise fall with the downturn in US demand. Another important factor to be considered is that with every recession there is monetary policy easing whereby the world is awash in liquidity. Which asset class will the liquidity chase? The one that can be easily monetized. Enter the stock market. Which country gains the most with global recession? No marks for guessing – it is India. India is still and will continue to be a largely domestically driven economy which imports more than it exports. With imports becoming much cheaper, Indian companies’ profits will soar. So, if you have spare cash, put your bets on the Indian stock market. However, you have to be wise with your investment, as in a bull market even dud stocks appreciate and when they fall, they fall precipitously. There are, however, three factors that were not in play on earlier occasions. China was not nearly as large an economy as it is now and the effects of the extended lockdown in India will have a fairly large negative fallout on the Indian economy as well in the short run; reinventing the way we do things may have a crippling effect on some businesses. Therefore, the bull run will not be secular. You will need to cherry-pick stocks and have a clairvoyant’s perspective. The best way to help the Indian economy is to increase buying of goods and services. This will restore employment opportunities and tax collections. Try your best to buy Indian brands and avoid Chinese products at all costs. Their belligerence shows no bounds.
One of my favourite musicians, Little Richard, died of bone cancer at the age of 87 in the US this month. He was a rock-and-roll musician with a queer dressing taste who could bellow the bass notes and howl out a falsetto. His piano play was feverish, frantic, and uncontainable. His stage presence and antics endeared him to an audience which, in the America of those days, was segregated between blacks and whites. He was a great entertainer with a pearly white infectious smile and was one of the first to unify the whites and blacks on the dance floor. Such was the influence of his music. Hail the King, Richard Wayne Penniman.
The easing of restrictions to allow the opening of liquor stores in many states has seen long queues, lack of social distancing and desperation that borders on frustration and a death wish. It just goes to show that it is a necessary evil. Many may argue as to why we should prefix necessary before evil at all. I will paraphrase what Sir Winston Churchill said to lend credence to this dichotomy of thought. Liquor is the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, literally takes the food out of the mouths of little children. It’s an evil drink that topples men and women from the pinnacles of righteous and gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, shame, despair, helplessness and hopelessness. On the flip side, liquor is the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the elixir of life, the brew that is consumed when friends get together, that puts a song in their hearts and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes. It brings good cheer, the stimulating sip that puts a spring in the step of the elderly. It’s a drink that magnifies his joy, helps forget life’s great tragedies, heartbreaks and sorrows, it removes inhibitions and gives courage to the timid to propose to the person they love. It’s a drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries, thousands of crores of rupees each year, that provide tender care to our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf and dumb, our pitifully aged and infirm, help to build the infrastructure like highways, schools, hospitals, universities, housing for the poor etc. If that is not a reason enough to call it a necessary evil, then what is? I hope the aforementioned answers a miffed Jayashree Mohan and some others, who upon seeing WhatsApp videos showing endless lines of tipplers queuing outside liquor stores and ignoring social distancing norms, was totally and utterly outraged.
It would be presumptuous of me to think that the letter I wrote to the Prime Minister and RBI Governor in April, on the steps the Government must take, had an influence on the Prime Minister’s address to the nation on 12th May, 2020 announcing a series of economic measures which more or less mirrors what I wrote to them. However, Government’s plan to give loans without collateral will lead to more NPAs and consequently bank delinquencies. There is a more secure way to prevent NPA’s without the need for collateral in the MSME sector – route all the receivables through an escrow account which through a computer program can be made to operate the automatically third-party approval based on deduction of interest at quarterly rests and loan repayments on annual rests. To ensure that MSMEs route all their sales through the escrow account only, link it to e-way bills or GST payments. This will ensure full compliance and we can say good-bye to NPAs. For whatever is worth, I am going to write to the PM about this.
Mr. Murphy’s notoriety was again on display. On 11th May, the motor of the submersible pump got burnt, possibly due to a voltage spike. As luck would have it, within 20 minutes of running the standby motor, it started making a noise due to alignment issues. Since the motor was stopped as soon as it started making a noise, the bearing could be saved and only the rubber bush was broken. Lockdown crippled our efforts to get the required part or get the submersible pump repaired, as the KSB Pumps service centre was closed. The third pump, which is 40 years old, did not have the muscle to pump water to the tanks. Some flats got water, and some didn’t. The next day, we got an agency to come and fix the alignment issue and he did the job by taping the rubber bush in place and correcting the alignment. The normal pumping resumed. Understandably, the non-availability of water for one day caused such a hue and cry that some residents let the irritation show. I must have got at least 100 calls enquiring as to how both pumps could fail at the same time and why we should buy another spare pump. People should understand that these are unusual times and a lot of things are beyond our control. The Committee members are juggling with office work, housework and Society work all at the same time. Some of us devoted the whole day to the pump issue.
When spring turns to summer, the winter plants wither and the shrubs, trees, and creepers start flowering. We are lucky to have Thomas Abraham in our midst. The passion and devotion he fosters on the plants is amazing. The plants he tends to have a sheen, the shrubs are nicely topieried and the creepers tastefully stringed; it is a joy to behold.
For those who wish to get married cheaply, there is a deal going abegging in corona times. It is a readymade wedding package for 50 people for Rs. 1,99,999. The package consists of e-invitation card designing, bridal make-up, mehndi artist, photobooth, decoration for one car, standard mandapam and entrance décor, sannai melam, veg food for fifty members, basic sound system with two mikes, photography and videography, photo album with 50 sheets, thermal screening for guests, UV hand sanitiser station, hand sanitisers-50 nos.,N-95 masks 50 numbers, cuddle curtains for greeting, obtaining necessary permissions, venue selection, social distancing arrangements, web telecast, decoration with quality artificial flowers and welcome drink. Any takers?!!!
OBITUARY
Mr. V.V. Bhotlu’s (F-203) wife, Smt. V. Prabhavaty (79), had a peaceful and natural demise in New York on Sunday, 17 May 2020. Yamuna residents convey their sincere condolences to the family.
SNIPPETS
Namagiri and Prabhu’s younger daughter, Akshara Ram (resident of H 002), an aspiring astronaut, attained worldwide stardom on Twitter and within Amazon Global when she stumbled upon a big flaw in the Amazon Recommendation System. Apparently, when you search for “Rockets for Girls” on Amazon, it suggests “Rockets for Boys” instead. If you still persist with the search, Amazon autocorrects to “Lockets for Girls”. The superwomen at Amazon global team made a special video for Akshara for her 8th birthday.
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Raj and Priyanka Nathan’s son, Kiaan (A-107), took part in a cooking competition organized by the British Council He described in detail, the method to make South Indian filter coffee and Kolkatta’s dahi puchka. Has Yamuna’s cooking competition spurred his interest in culinary art?
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