A Hit-and-Nearly Run - in 5 tweets

Hit-and-nearly-run at India Gate this morning. Rajan Yadav rams his white Figo into the rear of a labourer's cycle and backs to scoot.

A crowd gathers and I whip out my camera, so he stops. "The cycle emerged from nowhere". On the broadest road in Delhi!

"While you were looking at your phone", I guess. "No. It had fallen down, so I was looking FOR it, not AT it". Helps the labourer?

"I'll give him Rs. 250." 1 thousand, I say. "500.I only have 500". "Call a friend, or I call the cops." I call 100. He finds 1 k.

I hand the 1 k to the labourer, who isn't badly hurt. Wait for the police to arrive. Rajan, you are a callous, careless youth.

Those 5 tweets, with punctuation rectified, were my story of this Sunday morning. A Tourist Patrol vehicle of the Delhi Police arrived in a few minutes, noted my name and address, and had a brief chat with the labourer, who was loading his damaged cycle into an auto-rickshaw.

I cycled on; half an hour later, I saw a flurry of missed calls. Turned out they were from an ASI* at the Tilak Marg Police station, which had sent a van to the location, to follow up my complaint, and found no one at the spot. I told the ASI about the Tourist Patrol vehicle, and he said he had subsequently heard about their intervention.

The Delhi Police were - both in person, and on the phone - most civil and efficient.

Retail Investors are getting shut out of new ventures

Since investing is for the future, I decided to consult my 16-year old son about companies and sectors he saw as holding promise.  “Technology,” he said. “Phones, and computers.” Like Apple, I thought. That’s a US company. Samsung? Korean. There is, of course, Micromax, but that’s not yet listed. “Can’t really invest in those.” I told him. “Other gadgets?”, he offered “Like TVs, fridges, air-conditioners?” “The Koreans practically own the space”, I explained. “And none of them have listed in India” “If I was a little younger, I would have said, candy”. “Chocolates dominate candy markets around the world. And I would love to own shares in Cadbury. But that’s now owned by Mondelez, and they delisted Cadbury India a long time ago” “Amul?” he asked. That’s a cooperative federation, and its shares are not openly traded. The soft drink space is dominated by the global rivals, Pepsi and Coke, and neither of them have Indian listing. Through its Frito-Lay division, Pepsi also dominates the Indian snack food market, with Kurkure and Lay’s potato chips. The number two snack-food player, with the Bingo range, is ITC. One could buy ITC shares, but you’d be buying into a conglomerate which purveys everything from cigarettes to agarbatti, and exercise books to hotel rooms. The largest player in aviation, Indigo, is also unlisted. Times of India, the largest print media brand, is owned by Bennett Coleman, a privately held company. Among television channels, two market leaders, Sony and Star, are owned by foreign companies. The digital space is completely dominated by US brands, whether Google, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. The battle for Indian e-tail is likely to be an intense and keenly fought one, with Flipkart and Amazon India both drawing up investment budgets that top a billion dollars, but not a paisa of that is coming from the Indian retail investor.  You get the drift - as an ordinary investor in listed Indian companies, vast swathes of business are not looking for my money. This makes me feel deprived. The figures are eloquent - in all of 2014, Indian markets have had 5 IPOs*, with an aggregate issue size of Rs. 1355 cr. To put that in context, the market cap of Indian stocks is close to 1.8 trillion US dollars, or 100,000 crores. That’s a lot of zeros, but if I got my math right, the Indian IPO market in this year of boom and optimism is .001% of the market cap. The investor is secondary to the process of raising capital! The stock market trades only in second-hand goods. The factory-fresh merchandise is ear-marked for financial intermediaries of all manner - VCs, PE funds, pension funds, investmant banks, sovereign wealth funds. I’m not writing this piece to plead for my right to invest. My intent was to explore three thoughts: • how constrained my opportunities are, which I have done above • whether regulation or other structural issues have moved the market in this direction • how an individual might expand his pallette of opportunities. *IPOs in 2014:  Shemaroo: 120 cr., Sharda 352 cr, Snowman 197 cr, Wonderla 181 cr. , Engineers India 505 cr.

The Falling IPO Market The IPO market has been falling, both in numbers and money collected, since 2007. Last year saw a late issue by Powergrid that bumped up the number (it was a 7,000 cr. IPO). But thats still tiny compared to the 34,000 cr.+ issues in 2007 and 2010, both great bull market years. This year is a bull market, by any standard, except the enthusiasm to list companies through an IPO.

In context, Zomato, Snapdeal, Ola cabs and Housing are Indian businesses that raised money from private markets (venture capital). Snapdeal alone raised 3,700 cr. - more than all the public market IPOs in 2014 put together and multipled by 2.  In the next part, we'll speak of regulatory hassles companies face when they go public, and how we can look forward to participating in a growth story that is almost exclusively restricted to non-retail investors today.

During night, wear something light

Delhi's traffic - I increasingly feel -  has passed the tipping point.

This morning, as I negotiated morning traffic at Adhchini, one car swung from the middle lane to the right, to perform a U-turn. A motorcycle plonked off the pavement at a perpendicular to the traffic, darted across a red light, and revved towards IIT Gate. A cycle-rickshaw headed directly at us, in the wrong channel. Two traffic cops on duty looked on, impervious - this is the normal state of affairs, why do you expect us to do anything about it?

The response of the senior admin is to compose doggerel and put it out on Twitter:
- Share the road with care
- Speed thrills but kills
- Don't be daring, be caring
- Caution and care, make accident rare
- Accident brings tear, safety brings cheer
- Have road sense, drive with confidence
- Drinking and driving, a bleak chance of surviving
- Alert today, alive tomorrow
- During night, wear something light

The versifiers have been deserted by their muse; this morning, I read:

-Always wear helmet Tight, and
- Stop before Stop line.

Oh dear.

8/9 The muse returned over the weekend:
-  Have road sense drive with confidence

Find Your Dreams, and Fund Them

Liberty is the rosary of choice, on which I count my many blessings.

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I choose where to live within my nation—unlike the Chinese, who need a hukou, a residence permit.

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I chose whom to marry—unlike millions in South Asia, whose parents arrogate that decision.

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I choose what clothes to wear—unlike those who reside in jails, or work in banks.

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The state curtails my many freedoms—to buy land in some parts of the nation, to have sex with other men, to read some books, or watch some films.

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Yet, it disturbs me even more when we willingly yoke ourselves to conformity, a burden that eventually deforms us. When the stays chafe, and we notice our shoulders sag in the mirror of contemplation, we shrug. “Life’s like that.”

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It is not, but we make it so.

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Management guru Michael Porter wrote: “Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs, it’s about deliberately choosing to be different”.

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I chose to be different very early. Within a year of joining the ranks of management trainees at a multi-national corporation, I realised that I was not meant to be a corporation man, that I needed to live in nature, to watch the peaches grow. In my spare time, I drew up business plans to run a dairy farm, or drive a tourist taxi. Most importantly, I realised I needed to build up a war-chest from which to fund my freedom. My F*** You Fund, I called it.

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For the next two decades, I fed my fund. I changed jobs and moved homes; started a business and watched it crash; joined the stage and learned to light plays; worked with street children and shared their dreams. But I never lost sight of that FY Fund. It was my finger to the world, my faith in my own future. Irrespective of my material circumstances – and they were often strained –  I never used that money to pay for my daily life. Michael Porter again: “The essence of strategy is knowing what not to do.”

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When I left the corporate world, I lost my company car. I didn’t replace it for 7 years, wrote TV scripts at home, and cycled to the editing studio. Expensive suits gave way to denim jeans; hand-made shoes to Hawaii chappals. Holidays were a bus ride or a friend’s car into the hills, a tent in open fields, or a run-down room in a dak bungalow. On one of these trips, waking in a clearing in a Kumaon forest, I realised the home of my dreams would be here.

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Meanwhile, with the magic of compounding, and the deepening discipline of material restraint, the FY Fund had grown, and stretched to a small plot of fallow land, and a one-roomed cottage of stone and pine, built by a local mason. No architect, no interior designer. No furniture, except for a picnic table, and a cast-off sofa. To this day, we sleep on mattresses in the loft, and my work-space is the sill of our large window on the garden.

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The winter view from our cottage in Satoli

During the six years we lived in our forest Eden, we had no phone, no road to our door, little money, and no shops in which to spend it. Banks, telecom and groceries were over an hour away, and we made that trip less and less often. Our financial plans for our time in the mountains were drawn up on the basis of gradual depletion, but that didn’t happen. The joy of living close to nature, close to our essential nature, and close to each other pared our needs to the bone, and we needed less and less to get by.

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In the late 90s, dot-coms boomed, stock markets surged, and the FY Fund bloomed. As the century turned, and financial markets crashed, the fund ebbed. But our resolve didn’t, the money stretched, and my wife found off-line work to do in the quiet of our mountain home.

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The Delhi of this decade is a different time and space, and I have a new-found familiarity with the world of business, with the adrenalin of large M&A deals and larger egos. Young professionals take 5-star holidays for granted, wear labelled clothes, and change phones with the seasons. I admire the ease with which my son’s generation leads a life of affluence, and struggle to find a balance between his need to belong and my own habits of abstinence.

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But, above all, I pray that he will find a dream to nurture, and the focus and self-discipline to achieve it.

Published here:
http://qz.com/244258/i-can-afford-the-choice-of-not-working-full-time-it-took-two-decades-of-planning-and-discipline/

Two Top Regrets I Won't Have

TIME UNWATCHED*

Life is too short for a full-time job. Too short, and too precious.

There are lakes to swim and hills to climb, sunlit valleys of green and gold, forests rich in dew and shadows. There’s music to be savoured and books to flood your mind. Time unwatched is its own treasure, gracious host to conversations that drift and swoop, afternoons that stretch into evenings, dinners that slur into a last coffee.

And, if you’re like me, and can spend entire winters watching tongues of fire flicker in an open fireplace, “There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.”  Bill Watterson

But you don’t have to listen to me, part-time mountain dweller and full-time maverick. Here’s Carlos Slim, the world’s second richest man,  “We should be working only 3 days a week”. It is time, he says here*, for a radical overhaul of our working lives. We need more time to relax, for quality of life..

*http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/4899aaf8-0e9f-11e4-ae0e-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz37tebgYNQ

In his book, Critical Path, polymath and futurist Buckminster Fuller anticipated that rising productivity would make part-time work an option for all of mankind. We haven’t got there yet, but it is an option for most readers of quartz, I’d warrant. Appropriately, I only found time to read Bucky when my wife and I decided to honeymoon for a year in our stone cottage in the Kumaon. One autumn morning, when the sun glistened off dewdrops, and the Himalayas towered in their snow-white clarity, my wife offered a prayer to the grace bestowed on us. “Do we need to go back?”  

We didn’t, and spent six incredibly rich years in our garden in the forest, watching the peaches grow, and our son toddle, rocking him to sleep with Dave Matthews or vintage Stones, serenading the moonlight with candles and home-made peach wine.

When we returned to Delhi, to send our son to school, I knew I could never go back to full-time work.  I was too consumed by the love of life and family to chain myself to the clock of a daily routine. I needed the freedom to spend the day in a couch reading a book, or taking the sun in the park. I needed to have time to listen when a friend wanted to talk. I needed to be home when my son came back from school.

Modern life is not structured for such eccentricity. Early feelers made it clear I needed to occupy a desk, administer an office, sit in long meetings, work late hours. “Surely”, I thought, “someone can see my detachment yielding objectivity, my dilletante behaviour offering unusual perspectives, even creativity.” Meanwhile, I ran in the park, lounged in my couch, hugged my son as he told me of his day at school, and drove him to birthday parties in a car bashed into disreputability by years of mountain driving.

When the assignments came, tentative at first, they paid a fraction of a full-time wage for someone of my age and training. But I was grateful. Material progress gives us the choice to trade our earning ability for more consumption, or more time. I had made mine, and found enormous joy in every day.

More recently, I found affirmation in the writings of Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse who worked with dying patients. She recorded the reflections of their last days in a book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying (see this article: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying).

Near the head of her list, “They missed their children’s youth, and their partner’s companionship”. I believe that our children are the most lasting legacy we leave to the world, and it needs both love, and time, to craft that legacy. As my son turns 16, I can see him turn to step out into the world.  He will carry his gifts and my flaws, but the flaw of inattention will not be one of them.

Last week, I was at IIM Ahmedabad, briefing a group of students about a property rights project to which I have contributed some time. When we were done, they took me to chai, and asked me about my life in the mountains, my life in theater. “I can also say ‘I want to go and live in the mountains’. But who will let me?”

“Remember this”, I laughed, “You need no one’s permission to be yourself.”  When I got back, I read The Top Regret again - I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

*This piece appeared, slightly edited, in Quartz India on Jul 29, 2014:

http://qz.com/241043/i-quit-working-full-time-years-ago-heres-why-i-recommend-it-highly/

Extreme exercise and heart health

"Each time the suggestion that too much exercise is harmful makes the news 'it invariably rockets around the cybersphere powered by schadenfreude.'"

As this article in the New Yorker concludes, the jury is still out on how much exercise is too much. However, this medical study of 18000 runners in Copenhagen, "published in theAmerican Journal of Epidemiology, confidently concluded that, when compared to non-joggers, runners lived, on average, five to six years longer." 

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/extreme-exercise-and-the-heart

The evidence suggests that there may be a diminishing return to vigorous exercise, beyond about 45 minutes per day.

And when it come to more extreme forms of exercise, like the marathon, preparation is key: "the degree of detectable damage was lowest, or completely absent, among those who had trained by running more than forty-five miles a week, as opposed to those who ran thirty-five or fewer." 

What I learned about, when I learned about running

Inspiration is an unexpected guest, an unknown young woman at a party, high on whisky and the thrill of romantic pursuit. For reasons unfathomed, she took a break from her dalliance, and turned to the oldest man in the room - “ I really want to do the Delhi Dream Run next month.”

“You must,” seemed an appropriate response.

“But I’ve never run before.”

“Nor have I. Let’s train together. Tomorrow morning?”

Then, as she took another slug of whisky, “The day after.”

We never met again. November passed, as did Christmas and the excesses of the New Year, all of which showed up on the bathroom scales. I’d been overweight before, but at age 54, the window of fitness was all but shut. I resolved to nudge it open, one step at a time.

Which is exactly how I began. My first jog was 100 m long. My second, two days later, was 2 stretches of 100 m each, separated by a 2 minute walk. Surfing the net, I found this training schedule that mimicked my instinct. Using it as a rough guide, I took 6 weeks to hit my interim target of 2 km.

http://running.about.com/od/trainingschedules/a/fourweekstoonemile.htm

Getting from 2 to 5 km. took me another 2 months. That winter, I ran the Delhi Dream run with ease. The Christmas indulgences seemed deserved, but the scales weren’t happy. That New Year, I set myself a target of 10 km. With a year of running behind me, building the distance was easier. But there’d still be mornings when I’d wake up and regard my shoes as cruel slave-drivers. Sometimes, I’d take a deep breath and submit to a hot morning in the cotton fields. Others, I’d head to the pool and relish not just the coolth of the water, but also the reprieve from training. Between the indulgences and the discipline, I hit my 10 km. target by the end of May. Before my summer break, I resolved to run the half-marathon that November. Two years from zero to a half-marathon - is that too long? I don’t know, but in play and in business, that’s me - start off on a whim, or a random inspiration, give it time to become a part of me, build on it, and set new goals only when they feel right.

Listening to yourself is key. In the early days, I experimented with different ways to run - longer strides and shorter; on the mid-foot and the front-foot; lots of arm action or not. I was mindful of how I held my lower spine, watched how other runners held theirs. And, as I ramped up the distances, I watched for tensions emerging in my neck and shoulders, sought the stride, the pace, above all, the ease that eliminated them.

It’s like experimenting with different business models and delivery systems for a new business. The most successful - especially in the digital space - have beta tests going all the time. But, once you find what works best, Keep your form. In the second half of a long run, especially if you have a target time, you’re most liable to drop form - allow your limbs to splay, your head to roll, try to compensate with the rest of your body for the tired muscles that have been driving you for hours. STOP. Take a break There is only one best way for you to run, and engaging these other body parts is not going to help. If you break form, you’re liable to crack. We fashion our selves, our lives, from awareness of self. When we lose that awareness, to ambition or greed, the results can be ugly.

Finding the right pace is key. After 4 years of running,  with 8 half-marathons under my Nikes, it still is. Every few minutes, as the rhythm builds and the endorphins flow, I’ll  find I’m running ahead of myself. “Slow down before you’re out of breath. After is too late.” If you pace yourself well, you’ll be running most strongly at the very end. And if you can cross the finish line with grace and a smile, why that’s the way to live life!

Mohit Satyanand

Occasional entrepreneur, occasional mountain-dweller, occasional actor, recent runner, and triathlete-in-the-making

This piece was published in quartz India, on Jul 18, 2014.
http://qz.com/236617/i-became-a-better-runner-once-i-saw-all-it-has-in-common-with-starting-a-business/

The Stray

Millennia of breeding will do that

To wolves -

Make them prance for affection
Even if they're stray
And gray
And wet,
At a blinking early-morning traffic light.

Decades of city life will do that
To men -
Make them chary of affection
Even if it prances
And wags
And begs,
At a blinking early-morning traffic light.

The last grasp of Kamal Nath

"The dying gasps of the Congress", Vasant Saberwal remarked when I told him about Kamal Nath's land schemes as we cycled through the Aravalis on Saturday morning - ironically, just a couple of hours before the NCR plannng meeting.

"Not gasps", I responded, "grasps. Ten years of grasping, a wretched, avaricious manipulation of land zoning, clearances and insider rigging, that has made land-sharking the most-preferred occupation for upwardly mobile Indians.

As expected, Kamal Nath steam-rollered all objections and ensured that 500 hectares of Haryana forest land is cleared for 'tourism-related" construction by builders. 

Here is the text of the DNA article* that documents what happened that morning:

Kamal Nath overrules environment secy, grants 500 hectares to builders as parting gift

Saturday, 26 April 2014 - 6:05am IST | Place: New Delhi | Agency: DNA

Rohinee Singh

Two Congressmen — Union urban development minister Kamal Nath and Haryana CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda — on Friday hijacked the NCR planning board meeting despite stiff resistance from senior bureaucrats and signed an order converting 10 lakh hectares of forest land into a "natural conservation zone".

Nath and Hooda showed the door to environment secretary Dr V Rajagopalan and his team as they had vehemently opposed Nath's attempt to change the 'land use' of the prime forest land spread over Faridabad, Gurgaon and Aravali hills.

"You are not a member of the NCR planning board. So, your comments are not required," Hooda is learnt to have told Rajagopalan. And Nath is understood to have said: "If the environment ministry has any problem with our decision, they can approach the court."

Rajagopalan apparently walked out after heated arguments. In his written comments, he strongly objected to the forest being converted to a natural conservation zone. "The Supreme Court judgment on forest clearly says that a hectare of land, with 10 per cent area under canopy will be declared as forest land and its status cannot be changed. And here it is 10 lakh hectares of forest land," he wrote.

As reported by dna first, Natural Conservation Zone regulations permit construction on 0.5 per cent land for tourism purposes. Thus 0.5 per cent of 10 lakh hectares comes to 500 hectares of land. The catch is Kamal Nath is opening the doors for builders' lobby to grab 500 hectares of prime land in Gurgaon, Faridabad and the Aravali hills.

Conservative estimates of the government peg price of 500 hectares of land at over Rs50,000 crore.

The NCR planning board meeting fell short of quorum. There should be at least five members of the board present for approving or amending a plan. In Friday's meeting, four members, including Nath and Hooda, were present. Nath urgently called minister for housing and urban poverty alleviation Girija Vyas to complete the quorum.

In their desperation, Hooda arrived for the NCR planning board meeting half-an-hour before the scheduled time. And Nath too reached dot on time to initiate the meeting.

The Election Commission had allowed Nath to hold the meeting, but had prohibited him from taking any policy decision owing to the model code of conduct. Still, the NCR planning board went ahead and approved a major land use change in the Haryana sub region plan.

Nath and Hooda's hastiness is evident from the fact that the high court of Punjab and Haryana had put a stay on the state for issuing any new licences to builders. The court had said that the state should first make land available for construction.

In one stroke, 500 hectares of land is up for grab and thus it also opens the door for the Haryana government to issue new licences to builders.

As reported by dna, Nath's name had surfaced in a conversation with corporate lobbyist Niira Radia. Tarun Das, the former chief mentor of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), told Radia over the phone that he had pitched "big time" for Nath for the surface transport portfolio.

"Highway construction and road construction is a big priority. He (Kamal Nath) is a doer. He can make his 15% in this. You can do national service and also make money…", Das said in the tapes. Radia had responded: "This (surface transport ministry under Nath) is still an ATM."

* http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-kamal-nath-overrules-environment-secy-grants-500-hectares-to-builders-as-parting-gift-1982206

kamal nath

Kamal Nath's parting gift to NCR builders

In an earlier post, last autumn, I wrote that entrenched interests were hoping to be able to convert parts of the NCR's reserved forests into real estate projects

"One day, he will make this into a landscape to rival Gurgaon, or Delhi, with bright lights everywhere.", 
a chowkidar told me in the Asola-Bhatti reserve forest. Naive old me said,
"Unlikely. The Central Government has declared this a nature reserve, and that's not going to change in a hurry."                   .

A piece appearing today in DNA this morning* suggests that our environment Minister of the next 21 days, Mr. Kamal Nath, is about to bequeath 500 hectares of forest land to builders. Ironically, this will be achieved by declaring 1 million hectares of land as a Natural Conservation Zone, thanks to a clause which permits 0.5% of such land to be allocated for construction of tourism facilities.

Clearly, the chowkidars of Asola-Bhatti knew a great deal more than I did about the fine details, and the coarse corruption, inherent in our environmental protection plans.

Here is the full text of the DNA piece, entitled :

500 hectares. Rs 50,000 crore. Kamal Nath and the builder lobby eye NCR forest land

(Raman Kirpal)

It is 10 am. In an hour from now, Union Urban Minister Kamal Nath will have the last roll of dice to change the landscape of Delhi NCR. At the stroke of 11, he, as chairman, is holding a full NCR Planning Board meeting at India Habitat centerer in Delhi today.

In the heat and dust of elections, Kamal Nath has called full NCR Planning Board meeting to radically change the 'land use' of the Haryana sub region plan. He wants the board to endorse his idea of declaring 10 lakh hectares of prime forest land a 'natural conservation zone'. This prime forest land is spread over Faridabad, Gurgaon and Aravali hills.

Sounds good on paper, doesn't it? But Natural Conservation Zone regulations permit construction on 0.5% land for tourism purposes. If you calculate 0.5% of 10 lakh hectares, it comes to 500 hectares of land

And here is the catch. Kamal Nath is opening the doors for builders' lobby to grab 500 hectares of prime land in Gurgaon, Aravali hills and Faridabad, and even by conservative land rates of the government, the cost of 500 hectares is no less than Rs 50,000 crore.

Sources in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) said the Ministry of Environment and Forest (MOEF) had opposed Kamal Nath's move on environmental grounds. And the PMO had endorsed the MOEF's stand and had prevented the Union Urban Ministry from holding meetings in February and March in this regard.

However, Kamal Nath reportedly gained permission from the Election Commission to hold the NCR Planning Board meeting today to enact his last design. Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda is fully backing Kamal Nath on the issue.

This is happening despite the fact that the Supreme Court has declared this area as forest land under the Punjab Conservation Land Act. The apex court has even declared that protected area and wildlife sanctuaries, as is this 10 lakh hectares area, shall be treated as forest area and should be governed under the Forest Act. The Aravallis have wildlife and act as catchments for lakes in the area.

The Supreme Court has also declared that 10km of area around the forest should be notified as an eco-sensitive zone. Egged on by the builders' lobby, the Hooda government hasn't done so.

Kamal Nath's name had surfaced in a conversation with corporate lobbyist Niira Radia. Tarun Das, the former chief mentor of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), told Niira over the phone that he had pitched ''big time'' for Kamal Nath for the surface transport portfolio.

"Highway construction and road construction is a big priority. He (Kamal Nath) is a doer. He can make his 15% in this. You can do national service and also make money…" said Das in the tapes. Radia had responded: "This (Surface Transport Ministry under Kamal Nath) is still an ATM."

*http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/standpoint-500-hectares-rs-50000-crore-kamal-nath-and-the-builder-lobby-eye-ncr-forest-land-1981857

Happy Songkran

“They need some Punjabi blood here”, I whooped as we loped down to Nopparat Beach. The road curved down from our hotel, over the creek, and into the clear light of the bay, Krabi’s signature islands still shadowy in the early sun . On the pavement outside a store, a little clump of children stood around a large blue plastic drum. Tentative, they splashed some clear water on us from a little kitchen bowl. “Happy Sonkrant”, I beamed, my hands folded. “Namaste”, then swooped into the drum,  my enormous hands cupped into twin scoops, and showered water in arcs of joy.

“Happy Sonkrant”, 20 yards down, I teased a garden hose from a smiling teenager, and sprayed my son and our friends with the energy of a North Indian Holi mobster. Our hosts beamed and smeared our cheeks with the most innocent of white pastes – talcum powder and a daub of water. “Thank You”, I turned the hose on them and did a bhangra jig.  

Outside the Holiday Inn Resort, white tourists with pink calves lined the kerb, wielding fat-barreled water-cannons in Disneyland plastic colours. Thai hotel workers dressed in black tended hoses and  vast plastic drums. “Happy Sonkran”, we screeched, and grabbed a hose. Someone turned on generic pop and we bobbed and sprayed.

A pick-up van slowed as it slithered towards us, teenagers clustered around the drums tethered to its bed. “That’s evil!” Maya screeched as they splashed us with iced water. “Turn the hose on them.” Some of the water cannons followed suit, some more iced water was rained, and one pick-up van was followed by the next.

Shack-owners and shop-keepers gave way to food stalls with satay sticks and cut pineapple, with fried cockroaches and grilled cocoons. On the beach, a thousand picnics celebrated the New Year with movable feasts and Thai pop thumping  from parked cars. It was everybody’s Sonkran, if you wanted. Or not, if you didn’t. The streets were awash with water from drums and pistols, hoses and plastic buckets, but no one was sprayed unless they were willing. And though the young who cruised Ao Nang on their motor cycles and  vans were well-fuelled by Singha beer, there was no drunken revelry, no hint of festive energy turning renegade or threatening.

“Same-same like Sonkran?” our taxi-driver asked when I told him about our Holi. “Indian festival have colour, no?” Yes, it has colour. Too much colour. And too much energy. An energy that turned demonic and aggressive, and had to be taken off the streets of my native Delhi. Shut behind the walls of our homes and our clubs, and our farm-houses. Where like now only meets like, and the public becomes private. Where the goodwill of a festival that could spread clear across a bay, or an entire peninsula, is confined  within tiny little pools isolated from each other by sand banks of fear and privilege.

Theater that pays

Two kinds of people hover about the driver's window in Delhi - stoplight denizens such as vendors and beggars, and petrol pump attendants.

The former, while a great deal more pesky, are by far the more benign. When a petrol pump attendant offers to clean your windscreen, and engages you in small talk, or patters on about windscreens, don't look him in the eye. 

Watch that meter! 

This morning, I was in a particularly benign mood - it was Holi, there was not much traffic on the streets, and I was going to drink a friend's home to drink a cold beer in the warm sun. I paid for Rs. 2000 worth of petrol - roughly 27 liters - and then chatted with the smiling, blue-faced attendant who asked me to squirt water on my wind-screen, so he could squeegee it off. I didn't stop to think, "Nobody ever asked me to do that before; they use the squeegee to rinse the windscreen with water." After I had spread some of the good cheer around and received the receipt for my money, I turned the key, and noticed my tank was way less than half-full. I asked the attendant to look at the gauge. He protested, but weakly, and concurred that the amount of gas filled was less than Rs. 2,000 worth. I told him we could do get into a whole drama of reporting and tests, or he should top my tank up by as much as they had tried to steal.

He quietly added another 10 liters into my tank, and I quietly drove away.

I wonder how many times a day this drama of distraction works.

Lucrative theater! Barry John once told a group of young actors we were working with - look at beggars on the street. See how realistically they act. Their very livelihood depends on how convincing they are at evoking the right emotions. 

The petrol pump attendants are equally professional actors, ensemble performers. It requires at least 2 or 3 of them to have worked the whole act out. I wonder how often they change the script. Over their chai, at the beginning of the day, do they toss a few improv ideas around - today, let's try it with a scratch card offer. Or, how about you try - Uncle, how come you've stopped coming to our pump so frequently? 

It is a sad commentary on our nation that you always have to have your wits about you. Even in the most mundane of transactions, there's every chance you'll be fleeced.