Learning is not a linear art form

Keynote Speech

Liberal Arts and Business

OP Jindal University Conference - April 2016

The arts is my business, certainly one of my businesses, so you could say that I am biased in my views about  Arts and Business. Or if you were generous, you could say I am well qualified to have a view - I appeal to your charity.

At Teamwork Arts, we celebrate the performing arts - theater, music, dance, and literature. I am, of course, recruited here to talk not of these arts, but of the Liberal Arts - a term I only heard of when the children of my family started looking at college studies. The Liberal Arts tradition, I then learned, is an ancient one, with its origins in Greece. This early democracy took decisions by the direct participation of its citizens - rather than by debate among their elected representatives. Free citizens - as distinguished from slaves - needed to equip themselves with the intellectual wherewithal to meaningfully participate in the conduct of public life; the essential tools of which were considered to be grammar, logic, and rhetoric. If  you took a look at Indian parliament today, you could justifiably say - “Send them all to Ancient Greece”.

Today the liberal arts are a lot more inclusive, encompassing everything from philosophy and psychology to music and art history. A rather more convenient way of looking at the Liberal Arts  is to define what kind of education it is not - professional, vocational, or technical. No doctors, or lawyers, or computer programmers, or MBAs. Nothing that is useful, in other words.

And hence, I guess, the title of this conference - Liberal Arts and Business. If you said IT and business, today, there’s really nothing to discuss, is there? I mean, everybody knows that IT IS business, from Big Basket to Amazon, IT whizkids fulfil all your daily needs. Even your evening ones, with dates via Tinder.  And MBAs? They are the guys who make the fancy presentations, which raise the cash, which pays the programmers, who design the software, that allows you to scan an entire dormitory-worth of possible dates, with the swipe of an index finger.

But art historians, or philosophers, of what use could they possibly be - I mean, to a business?

So let me start with my business - Teamwork. For our team, we look for people with passion, young people who are inspired by theater, and music,  and dance and literature; who are willing to travel the world to support art and artists, to showcase Indian culture to the world, and bring the world’s culture to India. That passion, that dedication to the arts, transcends college degrees and the boundaries of classrooms - and we don’t ever look at academic records. The members of our team love their jobs - if they didn’t, the pace and intensity would burn them out, without the fat salary packets of investment bankers or corporate lawyers.

Like my colleagues at Teamwork,  I was seduced by the performing arts at a young age, and by the time I joined college, I had spent hundreds of hours in rehearsal and on stage, behind mikes in recording studios and live on All India Radio.

The performing arts shaped my life, deepened it in ways I could then only dimly discern. Acting asked you to reflect on the other - other selves, other realities, other relationships. This deeply  internal exercise then used the physical tools of the body - voice, movement, and gesture - to  project this altered self to the audience. In life, attempts to alter one’s being, to shift to different realities, are hesitant, jerky, even false; best done over years, even decades of experimentation. But on stage, aided by the craft of the playwright, the guidance of a director, and the interplay with other performers, theater allows the actor to ‘be’ someone else. And at its best, most rewarding moments, you almost believe you are that someone else, immersed in a flow of give and take, a flow of deep reward that engages the audience and delights your co-performers.

BUT - this was make believe, and outside the performance space was reality - an economy crippled by a colonial legacy, socialism and unthinking state control. Survivors of the partition, my parents had crafted a decent life from their own work, and it was clear I had to do the same... So, I prepared myself for a career in the corporate world, by studying economics. In less than a decade, I had experienced two extremes of that world, first at the lowliest levels of a highly organised, regimented multi-national, Hindustan Lever; then as the leader of a chaotic, under-resourced enterprise struggling to define the rules of engagement in a business sector which hadn’t existed till then -  that of  packaged snack foods. Crax was born, the first entrant into this now crowded space; it was an early success, but even as I rushed to create management systems, planning and order around this young star, I felt a deep sense of loss of my other lives.

One day, I took a deep breath, smelled the fresh air outside of my office cabin, and my chauffeur driven car, and left. Left for the magic of theater, the joyous spontaneity of music, and for time in the elevating beauty and quiet of the mountains.

With those joys also came new-found poverty, and the lack of support systems - no chauffeur, no secretary, no coffee on call. But what the heck, I was free. And I was still young, and I found passion.

From that passion, I founded Teamwork - where our first projects were documentary films shot in tiny villages in remote corners of our nation. Another film-maker had just completed a film on child workers, and got talking to me about the world of street children. Thanks to her, I began exploring the harsh world of life on the street, and was seduced by the vulnerability of these children, and by the tragedy of  potential lost to unfortunate circumstance. In the heat of that grief, I pulled together a support group of relatives, friends and theater colleagues, and we cobbled together a program to work with and for those children. Funds were hard to come by, neighbourhoods were hostile, and the regulatory authorities harsh and exploitative. But every battle hardened our resolve, and - ever so slowly - our work gained traction. We joined hands with an old friend, a film maker called Mira Nair, and called ourselves Salaam Baalak Trust. Today the organisation employs 150 staff, houses 500 children, and works with 50,000 children a year. We dared to dream, and promised the children - “To sleep, perchance to dream” (Pablo Neruda).

Dreams are the foundation of a life of passion. And dreams cannot be taught - by IITs, or IIMs, or the best business schools in the world. They arise  - unpredictably - from interactions - with other people, with books and ideas, with music and theater and cinema.

Let me talk, then, of other dreamers - others who allowed the richness of wide ranging influences to shape their lives. Let me talk of the 1970s, when a counter-culture of love and universal peace rocked the staid world of white America. When students challenged the wars waged by their nation; battled the police on University campuses, and talked of oriental mysticism and Flower Power. When millions of young people experimented with new forms of music, clothing, and ways to get high. Many dropped out, and doped out. The center of this counter-culture was San Francisco. It cannot be just an accident that Silicon Valley, the center of the world’s economic creativity, lies just south of the site of its last major cultural revolution. Art shapes thought; acid dreams .gave way to  electronic dreams, and now  science shapes products more magical than any stoned 1970s playwright could have conjured up.

The engineers who give shape to these dreams are products of Stanford and Berkeley University, and Caltech, institutions that are the recruiting yard of Silicon Valley.. But what about those who dreamed the dreams?

Let me tell you of of one man of that time who dropped out of college and travelled to India to find a guru. Who met his first collaborator  through a mutual fascination with Bob Dylan and a collection of reel-to-reel tapes of bootleg Dylan recordings.

Who once told a reporter that taking LSD was “one of the two or three most important things” he did in his life.[9]

Whose biographer would call him: a "creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing."[2

I’m talking, of course, of Steve Jobs, founder of the world’s most valuable company.

His inspirations came from various sources - he took a calligraphy course once, and of it, said, "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

I’m sure we would have got there, eventually; but the fact is, this is the man who got us there first, with an exquisite sense of aesthetic, inspired by a random course in a dying, pretty useless craft.

Jobs practiced Zen Buddhism, and seriously considered living at a Japanese monastery. Those who didn’t share his counter-cultural roots, he said, would never understand his way of thinking….

The sources of Jobs’ inspiration were incredibly eclectic - he took courses in creative writing; and when given the opportunity to spend time at the Stanford Student’s Union, he didn’t join the electronics club; instead, he put on light shows with a friend for their avant-garde Jazz program. His formative years were not shaped by the narrow specialisation of a technical degree, or the rigour of an MBA. They are truly the fabric of a Liberal Arts education.

It is true, at the same time, that the modern world functions on specialisation; the vibrancy of a city comes from the tens of thousands of super-specialisations it can host. Medicine is a prime example - today, it’s not enough to be a dentist; you have to specialise in root canals, or prostheses such as dentures and implants, or peridontal diseases. If you work in finance, you need to hone your skills in one tiny part of this rapidly developing field - in analysing shares of consumer goods, say; or assessing the quality of home loans; or in structuring interest rate swaps - I’m not even sure what that means!! This kind of super-specialisation requires intense dedication and focus, often to the exclusion of all else.

There is a fundamental tension between this economic and intellectual need and the existential hunger of the soul to consume the world in all its beauty and variety  - it’s art and culture and cuisine and  architecture; its lakes and mountains and deserts; even its suffering, which we can all help to ameliorate.

This is a tension that each of us must resolve for ourselves - in our space, and our time.

But in the choices we make, I would urge anyone who cares to listen - Time is on your side. We live longer than the human race ever did before. And more healthily. Fauja Singh ran his last full marathon at 101. Zohra Sehgal could still move audiences at 102.

If you look after your body and nourish your soul, they will stand you in good stead for a long, long time. There is no race, no hurry to rush from School to University, to post-grad, to a well-paid job in a successful business. If you don’t stop to smell the roses, or sample the grass, you’d be justified in thinking - “Life’s a bitch, and then you die”

I have absolutely nothing against getting into business - I believe in business. I have founded a few, and invested in many. I believe that businesses have enormous force to shape the world. They are uniquely democratic institutions - if people don’t like what you produce, they shut you down, without violence or threat, just by sheer apathy. Businesses allow you to offer employment and opportunity to people of varied talents and desires, to create meaning from their lives, to support their families.

I love the world of business, its intellectual challenges, and the framework it provides for creativity and enterprise.

But above business, I place the business of life.

To quote another restless entrepreneur, Jack Ma:

“I always tell myself that we are born here not to work, but to enjoy life.”

Life, like nature, is not crafted from straight lines. It is shaped by arcs of discovery, by sparks of inspiration, by the sheer randomness of a dance  through the world.

A life well lived does not require us to decide at 20 - "This is what I am going to do for the rest of my life." I turn 60 this summer - and I still don’t know what I am going to do with my life. But I’ve had a blast finding out.

I close with the words of one of my dearest friends, one who has repeatedly inspired me. “When God made time,  He made plenty of it.”

The busy trade of round-tripping funds.

CAYMAN

The largest bail amount in history is of the order of $1.5 bn., for the release of Subroto Roy, “Managing Worker” at Sahara India, a financial organisation which once claimed to be India’s second largest employer. Unable to deposit the amount, Roy has been in Delhi’s Tihar jail since 2014. Among his company’s assets are iconic London and New York hotels, Grosvenor House, and The Plaza, which Sahara said it would sell to spring the boss. For several months, prison authorities gave him access to a conference room with video facilities to facilitate transactions that would enable him to raise the bail. Given the value of the properties on the block, it seems strange that no deals were forthcoming. The 67 year-old Roy no longer makes the headlines.

In 2012, an intriguing headline featured on the pages of Times of India, India’s largest English daily. “Mauritius offers India 2 islands in effort to preserve tax treaty”. According to the paper, “Mauritius has offered a couple of sun-drenched islands to India as part of a trade and investment deal. While the offer has been talked about for a while, Mauritius has revived it - at a time when it's very keen on persevering with the 1983 double-taxation avoidance treaty with India.” Those islands were never ceded to India, and the Times of India retracted the news,  but the very fact that the item was published underlined the importance to Mauritius of its financial relationship with India.

The hotels that didn’t get sold and the islands that were never ceded are linked through the more shadowy realms of India’s financial flows.

Sahara first: Subroto Roy was the flamboyant head of a “residuary non-banking company” or RNBC, which accepts deposits of tiny amounts. Over time, Sahara came to build townships, and own cricket teams, a newspaper, even an airline. When Roy’s two sons were married in 2004, 10500 guests attended the joint celebrations in his 170 acre estate in the north Indian city of Lucknow. A Russian gymnast showered flower petals on guests from a hot-air balloon, flamenco dancers entertained them, and they were joined by the Prime Minister, political leaders from every major party, and the A-listers of Bollywood, India’s cinema fraternity.

Roy’s political connections were well known, and rumors of whose money he was managing changed with every major election. The facts that landed him jail were that he had failed to obtain requisite clearance for the issue of several bond schemes of two Sahara companies, with a total face value of Rs. 20,000 crore, roughly $ 3bn. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) ruled the issues to be illegal, and asked Sahara to refund the amounts to its depositors, which Sahara declared to be 30 million in number. This mammoth number allowed Sahara to claim that all individual deposits were of a cash value of below Rs. 10,000, the threshold above which transactions need to be made by cheque or other banking channels.

Confronted by the regulator and the courts, Sahara said the bulk of these deposits had been repaid; further, that no complaints of non-payment had been received. It was unable to satisfy the courts of the former claim, though the latter seemed to be true. When the courts asked for documents pertaining to the deposits, they arrived by the truckload. The courts sent officials out to track depositors selected at random: not one could be located. No depositors, ergo no complaints!

Fed up, the courts ruled that Sahara should deposit Rs. 20,000 crore with SEBI. Roy was thrown into jail, and the price of his “Get Out of Jail” card was set at half this sum, Rs. 10,000 crore. The fact that this sum is not forthcoming leads many to believe that the Sahara assets are not Roy’s to control, and that beneficiaries other than the company determine their disposal.

India’s intelligence agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation, or CBI, estimated in 2012 that 500 billion US dollars of illegal money of Indian origin was stashed abroad. Against that number, the sums involved in the Sahara transaction barely cause the needle to budge.

But unlike in the Sahara case, much of that money does come back. Gains from unrecorded transactions, many related to real estate clearances and transactions, find their way to traditional boltholes overseas, and are held there until required in India.

When this money is ready to return to India, it seeks anonymity. This has been provided by the convenient device of Participatory Notes, or PNs, which allow Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) to buy Indian equities without revealing the ultimate beneficiary to our regulators. Since 2000, the largest point of origin of such investments has been Mauritius; in the first decade of this century, 9 of the 10 largest investors in India were based in Mauritius.

Aside from its convenient location (and those lovely islands in the sun), Mauritius has become a financial gateway to India thanks to a Double Tax Avoidance Treaty (DTAC) with India. Capital Gains in India get taxed at the Mauritius rate of 3%, and much of this, I am informed, can be eliminated by local tax avoidance measures. India has a similar treaty with Singapore, which has a much deeper and stronger financial market, but the Limitation of Benefits (LoB)* provisions in Singapore make it less attractive to those in a hurry to move money into India.

What kind of investors would seek the cover of Participatory Notes? Some investors desire anonymity for strategic reasons, not wanting to reveal the extent or timing of their bets on specific assets; others, who are round-tripping illicit funds, get the benefit of the same cover. Some money, it is believed, has both colours at once - and belongs to Indian businessmen who control listed companies, and use the PN route to manipulate the prices of their own stock*.

Concerns about the colour of PN money have existed for almost two decades now, and were formally tabled in 2001 by a Joint Parliamentary Committee on securities scams. Since then, regulators have passed the buck to politicians, who have passed it to each other. In October 2007, in a bullish market flush with liquidity, the regulator banned PNs, and Indian equities crashed. Within the week, the matter was ‘clarified’, by stating the stricture would only apply to fresh exposures. The markets duly recovered.

*To qualify for the capital gains exemption, the Singapore entity must have incurred an annual expenditure of 200,000 Singapore dollars on operations in Singapore in the 24 months prior to the date the capital gains arise.

Since then, there has been much bureaucratic business with disclosure norms and quantitative ceilings on FIIs and the number of sub-accounts they run. But PNs still ply the Indian Ocean: try analysing any form of foreign investment into India - portfolio or direct - and you end up concluding that Mauritius is the largest source of global finance.

Though there is periodic concern about how tax avoidance agreements will affect the Mauritius routing, there is also little incentive to rock this cosy arrangement. At the broader level, FIIs, and the PNs they hold, have become critical to the health of Indian equity markets. Over 20% of the floating stock in listed Indian companies is held by FIIs, and no government wants to rock the boat of our stock markets by triggering an exit, even a temporary one.

In his first year in office, Prime Minister Modi made a two-day visit to the tiny nation, signalling its place in the Indian world-view. Speaking to the Mauritius parliament in March 2015, Prime Minister Modi told its leaders that, while there were concerns about the treaty giving shelter to tax evaders, and it need to be reviewed in that light, “I also assure you that we will do nothing to harm this vibrant sector of one of our closest strategic partners.”

For the time being, at least, Mauritius seems to have been granted status quo - without ceding its islands. A pity about Mr. Roy, though.

* Just 2 weeks after writing this, Mint writes about a company which looks like having used just such a route to regain control of a company which was in danger of getting lost due to debt proceedings:

http://www.livemint.com/Money/OvK6BEVABPdtfCUlNFMNsM/Is-First-International-Group-a-front-for-Dharmesh-Doshi.html

 "the regulator has stated very clearly that banks are required to do additional due diligence on the new buyers and establish that they are not related or are associates of the current promoter group.", but
"Foreign investors, while investing through ODIs (offshore derivative instruments) or P-notes in India, are known to sometimes create such structures that Sebi can find it hard to pinpoint the ultimate beneficiary."

Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan

Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri coined the phrase 'Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan' in 1965, and it became a rallying call for a poor and struggling nation, reeling under a shortage of food grains, and one that had just repelled an attack by Pakistan. Fifty years later, the BJP government has adopted the sentiment, if not the words.

By adopting OROP (One Rank, One Pension), and lionizing one of the soldiers who was killed by elements on Siachen, the Modi government has been in "Jai Jawan" mode for several weeks now. Today, Mr. Jaitley's 3rd budget has added "Jai Kisan" to this stance. The NDA government is now fully transformed to UPA3!

A plethora of new schemes for agriculture and farm welfare were announced. I am clearly sceptical of their value, for 3 reasons. The first is structural — the most crying need for rural areas is to get people off the land, and into jobs in service and manufacturing sectors; this will only happen if urban growth is promoted, not rural schemes. The other two are the bane of government schemes — poor design and implementation; and massive financial leakages. Prime Minister Modi repeatedly claims that he has eliminated large scale corruption in the central government, and I will take him at his word. Corruption at the district, tehsil and panchayat level is quite another matter.

The additional resources for these schemes will come from — a trebling of tax on short-term trading on equity markets (STT on F&O segments); a hike in the Income Tax surcharge on those with incomes over 1 crore, from 12% to 15%; and a 10% tax on dividends for those receiving more than Rs 10 lakh in dividends. "Soak the rich" is standard for those seeking to deepen the honey pot, and the billionaires on TV this morning seemed relieved that the sponge was not applied too vigorously.

A sense of relief was the dominant reaction to this Budget. Two big concerns had built up over the last couple of weeks:

• The first was that Finance Minister Arun Jaitley would abandon, or stray from, the path to fiscal consolidation. This path required him to reduce the fiscal deficit for the coming financial year (FY17) to 3.5%. With the difficult circumstances in the world economy, and the professed need to stimulate growth, it was felt that this budget might postpone that attempt. Today, the FM underlined that this budget will stick to the target of 3.5%.
• The second was that long-term capital gains tax (LTCG) on shares would be reintroduced. This concern was so widely aired a couple of weeks ago that it had the air of a trial balloon. The market tanked sharply. When the Budget had no word of it, the sense of relief was palpable. In retrospect, the LTCG rumor could have been a trial balloon that didn't fly; or, it may have been spin-doctoring, designed for this very sense of relief.

Our bond markets had the most reason to celebrate, as Jaitley clearly signalled that he planned to borrow less in the coming year. Bond yields celebrated by dropping 10-12 bps (0.10 - 0.12%) during the day. In itself, this is not a major move, but it could signal a shift, especially if the RBI governor follows through with a cut in interest rates.

Raghuram Rajan has repeatedly asserted that fiscal consolidation is a necessary pre-condition to further lowering of bank rates. His back-room boys must be looking at the budget numbers to ascertain how credible Jaitley's numbers are — they are a lot better equipped to do so than I! At first glance, though, I do find the projections of a 19.5% increase in indirect taxes, and a 25% in service tax, somewhat optimistic. If Mr. Rajan seems convinced, though, and announces a rate cut, it will have a dual impact on our markets. It would give a stamp of credibility to the budget estimates. And it would make it easier to repair balance sheets, of both borrowers and lenders.

The health of our lending institutions, public sector banks particularly, has been of mounting concern. Mr. Jaitley has earmarked 25,000 crore for the purpose. It's probably not enough, but he also indicated that he would raise funds as required.

From the perspective of markets, the Budget day has passed without too much damage, the most one could wish for. The global scenario is not very encouraging though, and trouble in China looks like it will continue. For many money managers, India and China get clubbed in the same Emerging Markets (EM) basket, so foreign withdrawals could keep our markets weak. That's of unknown strength and duration, so I don't think about it too much. Back to the hard work of finding under-priced stocks with low risk!

This quick review of the budget for FY 2017 was written for Outlook, and published here:

http://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/jai-jawan-jai-kisan/296693

Death, in black and white

He was dressed in black, and rode a white horse on a street of smooth asphalt, with traffic lights as clean and shiny as Lego props. The traffic island was the flawless green of astro-turf, and his helicopter had hovered above it for a second before it vaporised.

He was equally at home on the horse, his gun slung low, and ready.

I edged our group away from street-view, into the shadow of the walls above. We loped along the terrace. Then it ended in a high wall.

Minutes ago, we had left the crowded lecture hall. Against the flat blue sky, the gleaming white airplane, with its bright yellow tail, looked like an 8-year old boy’s conception of a summer sky. How did the plane grow so fast, swoop so low? Noiseless, effortless. A black figure filled the doorway, his black assault rifle slung low across his chest.

Now it was a helicopter sweeping the skies of our town. I urged my little group into the fire escape, and up onto the landing of the floors above.

An array of windows looked on to the terrace, grey, drawn and unblinking. Didn’t they know? We hurried past. Now the wall. I hesitated.

Behind us, a door opened, noiseless. He had been working at a laboratory bench, his room grey, bare and purposeful. He hadn’t known, but now he understood.

It would be better to come in.

We diffused into his space. An inner room had the light of color.

A curtain parted. Then another.

Here was a chamber draped in yellow folds, a large poster bed with plump red quilts. It would be better to sleep.

I awoke before my phone alarm. Plugged into his oxygen machine, my father snored lightly. The rest of the house was silent. In the winter darkness, I savoured my coffee. Plenty of time before I needed to get on my cycle to ride with Vasant. My Whatsapp buzzed. “Can we push it to 6:45?” Sure. Now I could cycle through my Twitter feed.

“14 killed in San Bernadino mass shooting”

I am not Aamir Khan

At the launch of Mrigya's album

(25th November 2015)

I am not Aamir Khan.

That’s obvious, right? He is several inches shorter than me, several years younger, and several hundred crores richer. AND, the only film in which I starred never made it out of the editing studio.

But, like Aamir Khan, I am married, and like him, I do talk to my wife. I won’t tell you what we last talked about, because if I use the ‘I’ word, we’ll invite the abuse and intolerance of those who insist that India is a tolerant country.

If it wasn’t for them, it’s true - India IS a tolerant country. And it is because of them that we did briefly consider whether we should live in another part of the world.

But the very next evening, my wife was at Dilli Haat, a crafts bazaar, and heard the voice of MS Subbulakshmi at a stall selling archival recordings. She came back with tears of joy, and two CDs, and said, “Our culture is so rich, how can we even dream of living elsewhere?”

Indian music goes  beyond tolerance. It is assimilative by nature. Who can say where ‘shastriya sangeet' ends, and the khayal begins? Who can say whether the violin belongs in Indian music?

Those who seek to draw such lines in time and space do so, either  because they are unable to deal with the vast richness, the moving landscape of our culture, or because they need to draw narrow constituencies they can govern.

Mrigya’s music defies such efforts; over the 15 or 18 years I have known them, they have drawn on, and exemplified, the vast mines of influence to which India has exposed herself, and in turn enriched.

Enjoy their music, and be proud that you, too, are part of the diversity that is India.

You can't fix the economy if you want to fix prices

The Price of Power

The Indian power sector has been in a mess for the longest time. The debt level of State Electricity Boards (SEBs) is an index of the mess, and tallied Rs. 4.3 lakh crore at the end of the year. The primary cause of SEB debt is their willingness to incur losses by way of low tariffs, coupled with high 'commercial' losses. Both phenomena are political pricing decisions - the first explicit; the second an implicit willingness to look the other way as power is stolen, and hence not billed.

Now, the Modi government has launched UDAY, The Ujjwal Discom Assurance Yojana. The essence of the program is the transfer of accumulated debt from SEBs to state governments. Those states that participate can issue bonds to fund this debt, which should cost 8-9%, as against the 14-15% that SEBs are currently paying. Though banks will lose, SEBs in participating states will suddenly have hugely improved balance sheets.

This is all to the good, in the short run. But the key question remains - will states be willing to put a remunerative price on electricity? If they don’t, it is only a matter of time before the losses pile up again; whether in the finances of the state, or in the books of SEBs, is not the most pertinent question. At the heart of this matter is a question of political economy - are our leaders willing to let costs and prices find their own levels?

For Indian politicians and bureaucrats, demonstrating their ability to determine prices has long been seen as a demonstration of power. I don’t see many signs of a willingness to let go of that sense of puissance. Airlines - barely recovering from years of losses - are being threatened with a cap on ticket prices at Rs. 2500 per flying hour. And this, despite the fact that no one can argue that airlines are an essential service for the poor - the usual justification for meddling.

Meanwhile, plans are being drawn up to invest billions of dollars in modernising our railways. God knows the investment is sorely needed. But without the political willingness to raise passenger fares, this investment will not be recovered. Our rail fares are extraordinarily low, while unattractive freight rates have led to a continuously reducing share of goods being shipped by rail. Unless our leaders are willing to bite the bullet of ticket pricing, our railways will not be viable.

Meanwhile, I just heard that the government is planning to set up a body that will regulate the price of coaching classes for IIT entrance exams. An essential good for the masses?

T&D losses in India: http://www.teriin.org/upfiles/pub/papers/ft33.pdf

Investment in technology will help reduce SEB losses, but the efforts in Pakistan to tackle power theft show difficult it is to tackle the ‘commercial’ losses, aka theft.

The Eternal Pilgrim

The Eternal Pilgrim
(This tribute to a departed friend was originally written for the magazine Life Positive in 1996.
It was expanded and adapted for a 'story-telling session' to a convention of travel agents, SITE, in 2015)

If you want a glimpse into the soul of India, set out on a pilgrimage.

Join the 500,000 pilgrims who labour each year up steep paths, along dizzying gorges, to Kedarnath. Here, 12,000 feet above the sea, a medieval stone temple nestles in a remote valley. Winter recedes late, and the meadows see the briefest of summers, before the monsoons lash the paths with hail and rain. Two years ago, a cloud burst caused a flash flood that took the lives of 6000 pilgrims, and destroyed the entire township. Only the temple survived. To the devout, this is testimony to the power of the Lord Shiva. To the scientific, it points to intelligent medieval architects, who erected the edifice on a large stone platform.

Modern Indians find a comfortable balance between rationality and faith; between scientific temper and unquestioned ritual. But on my first visit to Kedarnath, all of 12 years old, I lost this balance - and questioned my parents’ faith in the priesthood, and in the value of ritualised prayer. On the one hand was the devotion of thousands - like my mother - who had braved the long drive, the rocky climb, woken in the dark and bathed in the icy cold to worship at the shrine; on the other, the ugly face of the temple clergy’s transparent greed; the complete absence of aesthetic in their worship. I was pushed from one priest to another, told where to kneel, and where to join my hands. I was nauseated by the smell of rancid ghee (clarified butter). Barefoot, I squirmed at the untold horrors of grime underfoot, and was maddened by the unceasing clangor of tuneless bells, I had no choice but to conclude that The Sacred - whatever it is - dwelt outside of this ugly hole.

“Cherish the journey”, I pleaded with an aged pilgrim decades later, as he struggled up the slope in his tattered clothes. “Will I make it to the temple in time for the evening prayer?” he pleaded.

“This river is a prayer, these towering forests an entire rosary”. But his tired eyes had no time for them - his quest was joined to the temple, to the idol, to those clanging bells. “Drink some water, old man, and may the temple bring you peace.”

In my thirties at the time, I had turned to the science of yoga, and I talked to my spiritual teacher about this old man’s attachment to the temple. “The abstract is too difficult for most. The temple is just another path, like yours.” He asked me to be gentle with those who needed symbols.

Again and again, I returned to Kedarnath. Was the path my symbol? Did I seek to draw energy from the heavens, that here seemed both closer and deeper; to be inspired by the glistening snows; to draw comfort from the dark unpolished stone of the Kedar shrine?.

On my second trip, now a young adult, I had stood alone above the stream, in the early velvet of an autumn night. The first stars had pierced the skies, and the river Mandakini danced in phosphorescent delight. Sheltered by the black warmth of a craggy rock, I was blessed by the silence and the distance of my companions, by the many depths I found while the red pin points of their cigarette-ends still threaded up the dark ribbons below.

Maybe it was the silence that drew me, the same sense of retreat that drew early seekers to these icy regions. Irony then, that the paths they beat were now trodden by millions, the quiet refuge they found now marked by cheap artefacts sold at a hundred stalls, by shanty restaurants and pack mules, by the plastic debris of mass tourism.

Still, I walk these paths.

Over two decades ago, I journeyed with another seeker. On another autumn night, along another river. Chari opened the tiny wooden window of our ashram room in Bhojbasa on to a single silver star above the Bhagirathi peaks. A gentle white, painted with the faintest pink and shadowed by the deepest, darkest heavenly blue. How could these gigantic mountains rise into the night as gentle as a dream?

The next morning, Chari was quiet, increasingly intense as we neared the source of the Ganga, the cavernous ice cave of Gaumukh set in a towering glacial snout. Large as houses, blocks of green-tinged ice tumbled to the river bed, with crashes that drowned the rush of the infant stream, then melted back into it.

‘We’ve reached,’ he said. His words as deep with faith as any words I’ve heard; then he raced down the scree to the river, to stand cheering, exultant, upon a rock. This was a Chari I’d never seen before, or since. His was the soft voice of a doctor’s reassurance; the quiet assertion, the gentle bedside manner; even the way he rung my doorbell was special in his short softness. I hadn’t known Chari for long, but from our first meeting, our interaction had been effortless—gentle conversations about the joys of the mountains, long, easy silences, and a sharing of wide ranging music. One night, we had just heard the wild, stirring beauty of Peter Gabriel’s Passion, and sat quietly on my bedroom floor. ‘You know,’ I said, almost ashamed to break the silence,’ if there’s one trek I want to do, it is to Gaumukh, to the source of the Ganga’. An experienced trekker and accomplished climber, Chari looked at me and slowly allowed himself to smile: ‘That’s the only trek left that would mean anything to me.’

And so we had set off from Gangotri, the day after the Ganga temple had closed for winter, into a landscape of autumn leaves and cobalt skies. The infant Ganga was a chill, pale blue, and as we climbed the empty pilgrim’s trail, we left the last of the forest for a desert landscape of gray and brown. At the Bhojbasa ashram, Chari had wanted to engage the resident baba in conversation, but, busy in his kitchen, the arthritic old man had growled in return: ‘I am here to do, not to talk.’

And now we were high above the Ganga, at Tapovan, from where the Shivling peak swept up to its hooded summit. In her cave that night, the ‘Mai’, the holy woman of Tapovan, fed us with freshly fried puris and a potato curry, and answered Chari’s questions about the search that had brought her from a small town in hot and crowded Karnataka to this achingly desolate meadow swept by snow.

More. Chari always wanted to know more. In the after-dinner conversations we so relished, I had learned, piecemeal, of the spiritual search that began in his adolescence, and braided with the other thread of his life, his arduous training as a pediatric surgeon.  During the breaks in his medical education, his spiritual enquiry took him to the ashrams of Rishikesh in the north and Calcutta in the east. To Chennai - Madras at the time - in the south - where he was struck by the luminosity of a young monk. “You have found something”, he pleaded with the monk. “Share something with me.”   

“There is a deep joy to be found in meditating at dawn”, his young teacher told him.

Back in the hostel of his medical college, Chari took to waking at four, spending his first hours in silent contemplation, and earning himself the name by which I called him - ‘char’ being the Hindi word for four.

In every quiet tale he told, there were nuggets to be gleaned. I often asked him about his native Kashmir. Once he told me of the silent snows below Amarnath, where he had looked for a route to the holy cave long before the path was cleared for the ordinary pilgrim. When night fell, he was alone in the snowfields - alone, cold and lost. ‘That night, I lost my fear of death.’

In the Mai’s cave, the fire died, and she let the silence speak.

The next morning, Chari was suddenly restless, as though he needed to escape the intensity of Tapovan. We had planned to spend the day exploring the valleys to the north and west, but Chari’s need to leave was like a black hole. You couldn’t see it, but if you tried to engage with it,  it had an energy vastly greater than blazing suns. I had to step back. At that moment, it was if I would never be able to understand the man. “Something changed in Chari on that pilgrimage. Something so subtle I could never put my finger on it. And yet extremely powerful”, his wife would tell me.

A few nights later, as we shared the late streets of Malviya Nagar in Delhi with drunks and starving dogs, Chari reduced his life to the simple urge. ‘I want to find my guru. When will I find my spiritual guide?’

‘I have found my gurus,’ I told Chari,’ You, and the holy woman of Tapovan. And Jeevanti, my village neighbour, who laughs even as she and her children shiver in the winter cold of Kumaon. All those with whom I have travelled the path of my life; all those who have shared their homes and their hearts and their learning with me - teachers all.’

Chari smiled benignly, almost indulgently at me.

But in reply: ‘I want to meet my maker.’

Five years later we carried Chari’s ashes up the Ganga, in a time of winter silence. He was not yet 40.

“Shaant raho mere yaar,

Tu kya insaan tha,

Hum se pyaara Rab hai tera,

Sukh raho us paar”

He went in peace, my friend the pilgrim, in smiling acceptance of a sudden, savage cancer.

The Ganga had shrunk into sparse skeins of lapis and steel, knitted into a valley of ash gray and bone white. The road met my car tyres in a crunch of ice and rubble. Dry orange grass and  ice bordered the road. A single spire of smoke reached, oh so slender, for the skies.

We paused at the exquisite settlement of Harsil, two hours from our destination - the Ganga temple of Gangotri. Five years earlier, Chari and I had paused at this very spot on our way up to Gangotri. Now, the young junipers had grown into strapping youths, winter green against the crystal snow. Jagged Himalayan peaks flirted with winter clouds. Time to drive on, as we had then.

But it was not to be. Less than a minute out of Harsil, our car skidded. Black ice cloaked the road in danger, and when I got out to survey the surface, I realised Chari would never reach Gangotri again.

We turned back to park in Harsil. Silently, threaded through the stand of  junipers, and found our peace above the river. Kalyan drew an Om in the snow. I closed my eyes. And took an age to find my voice.

‘Om bhur bhava svaaha, Tatsavittar Varenaiyam

Bhargodevasya dhi mahi, Dhiyo yonah prachodaya svaha’

The strangely comforting sound of a chant whose meaning I only knew in translation:

“We meditate on the Supreme Sun whose light pervades this world, the heavens and the next world. May thy light guide our intellect in the right direction.”

I poured Chari’s ashes out of the clay pot, and watched them settle to the river bed.

As if from the crystal clarity of the mountain river, I heard Chari’s voice float up to me, from 5 years ago, from that autumn evening when we drove up to Gangotri: “Harsil—what a lovely place in which to spend some time… some other time.’

In a slow arc, I released the emptied clay pot to the river. It settled on a sand bank, and allowed the river to flow into it, and out.  Filling itself to the brim, yet welcoming more.

Never empty, never stale, always seeking more. My friend Chari - the eternal pilgrim.