Bank Mentor

The initial impact has been positive, but dangers lurk around the corner Born in the early ’80s, I am a borderline millennial. It means I had a cassette player once, but am on Instagram now. It also means I saw the Internet grow out of the sweet innocence of blogs, hit puberty with social media, and reach adulthood with fake news. It is now essentially a salesman with a major personality disorder. It is safe to say that looking for personal improvement and constructive criticism on the Internet is the equivalent of watching a Pahlaj Nihalani lm to understand Indian culture. The idea of India, even culture itself, is irreversibly damaged in the process. There are comment sections on Reddit where dignity and self-respect are tightly curled up in a corner sucking their thumbs. Now WhatsApp forwards deliver more pop psychology and misogyny to the average Indian household than a TV serial. Self-esteem in young adults is currently quantfiable under likes, shares and comments  It...

Given the macroeconomic context, India should have recorded higher economic growth this year  By tradition the Economic Survey used to be presented to Parliament on the eve of the Union Budget. But then, the government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is known to break with tradition. For instance, it advanced the presentation of the Budget by one month; it has done away with a separate Railways Budget; and it has merged the two categories of “plan” and “non plan” spending. These are signicant breaks from the past. The big one, of course, is the winding down of the Planning Commission itself. So also, in a break from tradition, this year, the full Survey was not presented at the beginning of the Budget session. Only Part I was presented. This is the part which is policy oriented and future looking. It reads like a doctoral thesis, with many conceptual ideas and analytical pieces. It covers various topics: the puzzle of lack of convergence in growth of States, the challenge of...

The banning of marijuana has been a sweeping action, depriving people of the good things it has to offer. In the Indian context, marijuana is mostly considered as being of recreational use, but it is not just that. Recreational use is probably true for not more than 5%; for the rest, it has medicinal purposes. The cannabis plant has tremendous amount of medicinal value and its potential for industrial usage can hardly be overstated. China is investing a few billion dollars in developing different strains of the marijuana plant towards several objectives. It has proper factories for processing marijuana. Many countries have developed fabrics. It has unlimited usage in diverse fields, including in the field of semiconductors. A potential cash crop The cannabis plant is something natural to India, especially the northern hilly regions. It has the potential of becoming a cash crop for poor marginal farmers. If proper research is done and cultivation of marijuana encouraged at ...

Reforms suggested by the Election and Law Commissions must be given a chance The statement by Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley recently that the Election Commission has failed to curb ‘invisible money’ in polls is remarkable. It is unusual for a senior Minister to make adverse remarks against a constitutional body in public. However, there are factual problems with his statement. The Election Commission (EC) works in accordance with Article 324 of the Constitution of India, the Representation of the People Act (RP Act), 1951 and the rules framed by the government thereunder, and various judgments of the Supreme Court and High Courts. The power to frame rules under the RP Act has not been given to the EC by successive governments, which includes the current one.  Action and reaction Most of the reform proposals by the EC have not been acted upon. It sent 22 proposals in 2004. In December 2016, it sent 47 proposals including those for “Election expenses and election ...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, according to his bhakts, alone represents the India of the future: muscular, bold, uncompromising. Those who don’t cheer are anti-national. Bhakts present demonetisation as a panacea to root out black money. The rich suffer and the poor are happy that the ‘haves’ have been targeted. Gains, they say, will be longterm. Bhakts used the electronic media with sound bites to support these perceptions. A foray across the Line of Control is presented as a bold, audacious venture never attempted before.  They call it a surgical strike. India’s past is an embarrassment, its icons inglorious and their policies the root cause of conflicts today. Internally, Hindutva and its mindset must prevail. Gau mata must be protected at any cost. Those trading in animals are suspects, and are on occasions, without proof, lynched or killed. Ironically, victims become the accused and the aggressors the aggrieved. The police, when and if present at the time of the onslaught b...

In a recent judgement, the Uttarakhand High Court declared the rivers Yamuna and Ganga as legal or juridical persons, enjoying all the rights, duties and liabilities of a living person. Indian courts have granted this status to temple deities, religious books, corporations, etc., but it is for the first time that an element of the natural environment has been declared a legal person. And it is not just the two rivers — all their tributaries, streams, every natural water body lowing continuously or intermittently of[f ] these rivers will enjoy this status. The dismal ecological state of these rivers, as well as the variety of factors responsible, is well documented. And so are the crores of rupees spent by government agencies to (unsuccessfully) attempt a cleanup. Could this judgment be a gamechanger? Before answering that question, let us take a step back. What was this case about? The two issues before the High Court were: removal of illegal constructions on the banks of a cana...

T he losers are at it again, blaming the electronic voting machine (EVM) for their electoral defeat. Of course, this is nothing new. Every time a party has a rough time in an election, the easiest way out for its representatives to console themselves is to blame the machine. This is a blame game indulged in periodically, notwithstanding the fact that the Election Commission of India (ECI) has time and again demonstrated, through increased and transparent measures, the reliability and foolproof nature of the EVM. How it works  As usual, with EVMs being blamed after the results of five State elections were declared recently, the ECI issued a detailed press note reiterating that EVMs are standalone machines and are not networked either by wire or by wireless to any other machine or system. Hence, they cannot be influenced or manipulated by signals from mobile phones or any other source. The software in the machine is burnt into a one-time programmable chip or masked chip a...

Why did the Bharatiya Janata Party win and the Samajwadi Party get wiped out in Uttar Pradesh? Did the BJP win because of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise of sabka saath,sabka vikas? Or did Akhilesh Yadav lose because of his government’s governance failure, particularly when it came to law and order? Most post-poll analyses have concluded for either or both of these propositions. The larger consensus is that the BJP won because of Mr. Modi’s muscular campaign predicated on development and a better future for all, while Mr. Yadav got done in by his governance failure, aided and abetted by his damaging feud with his father and a disastrous alliance with the Congress. The unchanged Indian voter While both arguments have merit, it would be facile to conclude that the Indian voter is changing, and development now makes a more compelling case for the electorate than old-school politics of caste and community. Because, if that were the case, the BJP Shiromani Akali Dal combine shoul...

In a recent UN report, Norway was declared as the “world’s happiest country”. The top of the list included Denmark, Finland and Iceland. The U.S. came 14th and the U.K. was in 19th position. Given the everyday stress and the alienation from social life that defines life in the U.S. and U.K., all I can say is that this World Happiness Report cannot really be about happiness. (Disclaimer: This claim has nothing to do with the fact that India was ranked 122nd in this list.) Happy days are here again! Very often we use the word happy to denote something which is not happiness at all. There are a number of terms that are often used in place of happiness: pleasure, joy, contentment, satisfaction.  Not all of these correspond to happiness. These are particular types of experience which overlap with the experience of happiness but are in themselves not the state of happiness. The famous anthem of happiness, Bobby McFerrin’s song ‘Don’t worry, be happy’, was a song which had global appeal. ...