By Roland Francis Title: Madness in Mumbai - Stray Thoughts of a Toronto Goan Source: Goan Voice UK Daily Newsletter 23 Sep. 2012 at www.goanvoice.org.uk
There is an old saying in the financial industry that is true of any other. "What goes up must come down". If that is true, there is a lot of coming down that is on the cards for Bombay and hence India and by natural extension, Goa. Manmohan Singh is a wily old Prime Minister. Highly qualified both in education as well as in national and international financial positions, he alone, with the mood of a nation behind him, was credited with bringing India to a level the world celebrated. However, he has just sounded a sober note in a speech to the nation, a kind of death knell to anyone reading between the lines. To some who likened India's all-too-quick rise to a mere bubble that was bound to burst, what he warns about was seen as the inevitable result. In practical terms, for ages there was the Bombayite, or Bomoicar as he is known in Konkani, a struggling middle class denizen, living from salary to salary, denied of anything that could be deemed remotely luxurious including foreign travel. Suddenly, as if the QE2 turned on a dime, witness his measly square footage become worth the price and then some, of a spacious and pretty home in a mid-sized city in North America on the right side of the proverbial tracks. He was earning by some magic, in Purchasing Power Parity terms, much more than a median wage in Europe and was travelling the world over, jet-setting and cruise sailing, Zagat and Michelin in hand. He was investing in high priced equities, precious metals and real estate in the suburbs. He was buying cars his parents only saw and spending on restaurants and entertainment alone, thrice the full salary he earned less than a decade ago. His cousin in Goa fared not any less. His was not the money that came from a booming economy and a well-paying job in a corporation that was flush with Foreign Direct Investment. It came in the form of tens of millions in local currency from the sale of ancestral land that was once not worth the labor it took to cultivate and care. The magic of tourism, the ill-gotten and corrupting political wealth, the greed of Goan miners deriving their tainted profits from sources that were non-renewable, seemed to overfill the pockets of everyday and every class Goans. What they didn't realize while they were getting their sudden wealth was that land once sold was gone forever, that the Goan landscape once destroyed could not be made half-pristine again. They were in the dark. Manmohan Singh was not. He knew what was bound to happen but chose to be helpless in the face of it all. People who put their trust in their Prime Minister were betrayed by the seeming spinelessness of a man who didn't seem to know or care about the puppet masters who played him and his success. In any case he wasn't sure the masses would hear him while they were having it so good. He should have at least tried. Now that he is pushed against the wall, he is fighting back. Perhaps his manipulators have no choice but to let him do what needs to be done, if it can be done at all. He talks about how subsidies can no longer be given, how interest rates may rise. How India's economy is slowing down while inflation speeds up and its fortune no longer separated from the ills plaguing its patrons in the West. How 1991, when India ran out of foreign currency and had to pledge gold to its lenders could happen all over again. He likens India's future to Greece if things don't change. What he doesn't say is that bribery and corruption must stop. Perhaps he has no guts to implement that or to be fair to him, he knows that it is too endemic and beyond him or anyone else currently in power. To "aam aadmi" the Indian term for a common man, the Bomoicar and the man in Goa and others like them, that could only mean one thing - a return to the bad old times. For a video clip of Manmohan Singh's prognosis, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwFNgzfKOPw Roland Francis (roland.fran...@gmail.com )