The Hindu Business Line : Do not ask & Sensex will not be harmed

The Lord was happy. It looked like an ordinary day; there would be no inordinate demands made on Him. But the clatter of school kids disturbed His musings.

At around 7 in the morning, a flow of girls and boys from a municipal school started as it was the day of pre-Deepavali exams.

Most of them were studying in Class 7 and 8 and wore the drab dark blue (frock or pant) and white top or shirt; at least half of them were bare footed.

Their parents never came to drop them and they had only Lord Ganesh on their side (or at least they thought so). They were not praying for anything in particular and were just continuing with a habit. It did not bother them if they were not marked up Triple A like some scrip of a suspect corporate by an equally suspect rating agency.

As all gods are secretive, one could not read the mind of the Lord nor did the kids much care; also, they offered prayers and not any pedas to the Lord like the children of Sensoholic parents living on the 30th floor of an illegal housing society in Malabar Hill.

They were talking about Drona, Abhishek Bachchan and the illness of Amitabh Bachchan unlike their ilk in Malabar Hill familiar with Hollywood and who visit the place during vacations. Their cheer and fun made it a pleasant morning, for this writer.

Walking back, one was overwhelmed by the chatter on Link Road of the retired over their disappearing portfolios.

They talk today only of scrips, openings, closings and probably a final shut down or shunya (zero). They pick up business papers and ponder over the oracular writings of business correspondents before they sit in front of their TV sets at 10 in the morning to collect the garbage spewed by business anchors.

One good friend of mine, has stopped watching cricket for the yo-yo of manipulated markets. In Mumbai today only Sensex lives. You are respected if you are a Sensoholic and condemned to a sneer if you are not.

My friend Amit recently wrote in Business Line that some brokers felt the Bull at Dalal Street was unlucky for the share broking community.

This writer has a suggestion. They should pull down the Bull and replace it with a granite model of any of our leading business correspondents as most of them act as billboards for their channels or publications.

If the broking community is particularly feminist, they are welcome to invite a lady business journalist.

In addition, the Government should ban all selling of shares to keep the markets on a permanent high. As there will be always some compulsive sellers, New Delhi should set up a Controller of Share Sales (headed by an IPS officer), in the Finance Ministry, whose okay will be a must before any sales. The same rule should apply to bonds – government, oil or fake.

New Delhi can rest in peace and business papers open a bottle of Scotch. The relief seen in the writings of business reporters and faces of TV anchors over the RBI package to release well over Rs 150,000 crore suggests a lot. Are the writers and talkers, players in the market? Sorry, these are not times for asking questions.

Do not ask and Sensex will not be harmed. It is like living in the times of Galileo. In just a week, the RBI has trimmed the Cash Reserve Ratio more times it has ever done in all its life.

NRI deposits have been made attractive and foreigners can bring in funds more easily. Indian depositors do not exist for the RBI; only NRIs, who have abandoned India, are more earnest and critical.

If the Western economies are as bad as they make it out to be, how will dollars come? Is it to enable our Bharat Ratna politicians and industrialists to bring in their Swiss dollars with elections nearing. Sorry, do not ask and Sensex will not be harmed.

When a few lakh Biharis (for believers, even Yama does not want Biharis and that is the ultimate insult) went under the waters of Kosi, a month or two ago,

New Delhi sanctioned a relief of Rs 1,000 crore for the unwanted (for business papers and TV channels, Kosi was not Breaking News) after studying the situation for well over a month..

The political class in Bihar grabbed the funds and that was it. The poor living on the banks of Kosi continue to be ill-liquid and banks are not bothered as the ill-liquid do not have collateral.

Ask a banker how a poor Bihari family can have collateral when his mud hut dissolved in the waters, and one will have two replies. If the Finance Minister is around, the banker is sure to say that he will be including the poor Biharis in the loan portfolio after appropriate studies.

By the time the studies are made public, one generation of Biharis would have been swept away and the banker retired. In private, the banker will admit no bank bothers. “Inclusive lending is for the media,” he will add. Well none cares.

Has anybody bothered to look into the fund needs of vast sections of communities whose homes are being burnt to a regular schedule as general elections come near? Rs 1,000 crore for Kosi-hit Biharis and more than Rs 200,000 crore for the Sensoholics, with more to come.

Well, what’s wrong as the Western governments (and the great US) have done the same. We are just copying as we are good at it, says my friend.

In the 1990s, the Indian government secured its own banks by injecting around Rs 30,000 crore as equity and still continues to do so.

Now, the Indian government has extended the largesse to the richest sections of this blessed country like in the US and Europe, who in the first place ruined the economy.

In earlier days, the media was not cussed. It did protest. But not in these modern times.

My friend styles it the dictatorship of democracy — the poor are voting machines for effective power to be in the hands of the rich.

Funds are critical for the corporates, markets and Sensex. Saint Ramanuja has said: “Thou my mother, and my father Thou./ Thou my friend, and my teacher Thou./Thou my wisdom, and my riches Thou./Thou art all to me, O God of all gods.”

The Saint Journalist of India today will replace Thous with Sensex to read: “Sensex my mother, and my father Sensex.” Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.

P. Devarajan

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