Cut Off From Reality

The last few days have seen Delhi University colleges reach new heights for cut off marks. SRCC announced a stratospheric 100% cut off with St. Stephens, in a close second for absurdity, with 97%.

Things have changed since my days in Sri Venkateswara College, or Venky for the English medium types. Even then getting admission was not simply a matter of turning up and bribing your way into the sports quota. (Many Venkyites were track and field champions who didn’t have the stamina to run after the Mudrika(ring Road bus) for more than the length of a bus stop.)

Many readers will be very upset that I gained admission by quota. Not as a scheduled tribe person or a backward caste member, despite those groups being a more apt description of my character, but as a bloody gora. This was something I didn’t advertise, as my very first day in College was a full blown riot in the dark days of the Mandal Commission, that saw volatile nationwide protests against quotas for education and jobs.

I spent that first day with my eyes wide open like a possum caught in a car's headlights. I saw future friends, through a light haze of tear gas, address the students with a frenzy that you don’t see in New Zealand unless you are a mental health nurse. That has never left me. That raging passion for a fair chance from having studied madly for the larger part of their lives. Often at the cost of a childhood.

Australasians have it so very easy. For me to have qualified for a seat in DU on a level playing field is a comical concept. I certainly wouldn’t have got in the sports quota as sumo wrestling in India is still in it’s infancy. My Kiwi exam marks were an almost perfect inverse of the now ridiculous cut off marks.

Not everyone is disadvantaged enough to have an unfair advantage, such as being a Kiwi. This lack of opportunity, despite securing an average of 80% plus, is a matter of life and death to many students.

The tragedy of the annual suicides that darkly come with the admission season is proof to that. Young boys and girls who have pressures that many western children would simply not withstand for a mere morning. The years of family discipline that enforce daily hours long shifts of calculus and Shakespeare. Parents petrified at the thought of their loved children ill equipped in a society that has no Centrelink and then strongly projecting those intense fears on already stressed kids.

Frustratingly, these tragedies are not only driven by justifiably neurotic parents and elite colleges conducting ‘branding exercises’ but by the reality of sheer numbers mismatched by finite seats.

Delhi University has 54,000 seats with over 125,000 applicants. "It is a grave crisis that we need to look into. At least six more DU's are needed in the national capital region to meet the skewed ratio of demand and supply," said Pillai, The Vice-Chancellor of Indira Gandhi National Open University.

Other solutions have been put forward including a much wider program of evening classes in DU’s 70 colleges. This would have been a policy from heaven in my day. Our Doordarshan era dance parties were stifled by girls having 4 pm curfews. I think you’ll find students will have no incentive to graduate within 8 years and the necessary introduction of abnormally large crèches.

All this injustice is good news for Australasian education institutions. In fact it might give impetus to a phenomena where the intellectually less fortunate Indian students are the foreign students rather than the cream.

As when Malaysia exercised it’s prejudice against ethnic Chinese aspiring students and Australian and New Zealand Universities enjoyed a windfall, as they still do. The continued and strongly increasing prejudice of the Indian Government against her own aspiring students, albeit a universal prejudice, will ensure greater numbers will look abroad.

But what about students who do not come from business families who can afford foreign fees? What about students who don’t come from business families that can support perfectly good students that don’t have impossibly perfect scores?

They will have to live in a society that has very little opportunity for a ‘respectable’ position without a graduate qualification. It can be a nightmarish reality to exist in a vacuum of opportunity.

Young seventeen year old innocents know this. I feel deeply sad remembering the tears when friends saw their posted results. The student sitting next to me in an exam who was caught cheating. How he wept and begged with pressed hands to be excused. It was like he was begging for his life. He was.

Henry, King Of The Intellectually Less Fortunate

The recent fine imposed by the Broadcasting Standards Authority of $3000 for Paul Henry’s racist observations on Sheila Dixits name was pathetically limp wristed. It also could not have come at a better time for Henry as it coincided for the launch of his memoirs “What was I thinking?”, and provided him thousands of dollars of nationwide advertising.

How there was no fine imposed for his repugnantly racist questions about the Governor General is bewildering.

Random House, his publishers, who admit to him being a ‘complex character’ probably very wisely decided to launch his book at the same time as the judgment.

The book has sold 4,000 copies in it’s first week which is litmus test not so much of Henry’s contribution to New Zealand society but on sections of the society.

It seems New Zealand is suffering another intense brain drain but now from experts refusing to leave. Any citizen who spent the 30 odd dollars on his memoir and not on a bucket of KFC needs to reassess their life’s philosophy. Then check in to a mental health facility.

But these imbeciles who endorse Henry’s character mostly need to broaden their jaundiced horizons. But I really hope they don’t.

That would mean mixing with them. That would bore me to death. ‘Yes Dave, Indians eat eggs’, ‘Yes Susan, India does have elephants but they are not the main mode of transport’. My wife was asked in Onehunga how on earth could she be television producer when India didn’t have any electricity. She sweetly replied Indians watched TV by candlelight.

These stratas of society really should remain just stratas. Easily identifiable mono culturalists. Bitching and moaning about immigration and globalisation as they speed off to have a curry after an hour shopping at The Warehouse. Marked out and easy to maneuver around.

They are welcome to tune in for TV breakfast shows run by fellow bigots. That means for a few hours they are off our roads. It worries me greatly that Henry is back in radio and his disciples might be simultaneously operating dangerous machinery and listening to tripe.

I am also told within their raving loony ranks are National Business Review journalists who propose that Dixit should change her name. On the contrary, it is a cruel fate that Henry’s name is not reminiscent of a Punjabi abuse. It is also fateful that he did not poke fun of goras with truly ridiculous names in New Zealand’s political sphere. Chris Carter had an assistant with the very judgmental name of Badcock and another man suffered friction with being Christened James Cockburn.

What I will agree with Henry is his anger at the New Zealand Government apologising to the India Government for his appalling behavior. That was setting a precedent for the Government to accept responsibility for precious dandys who pollute our culture.

We can barely tolerate them at home but internationally they are an intense embarrassment.

(Image stolen from nz-tees.spreadshirt.com)

Loony or Messiah?

The last few days saw the surging anti-corruption movement in India suffer an affront with Baba Ramdev’s supporters being lathi charged in Delhi. This has prompted Ramdev to declare he will form a militia of 11,000 armed soldiers. Is Baba Ramdev a guiding light to the movement or will he potentially derail this rare chance for Indians to wipe the window to the gears of Government clean?

Baba Ramdev’s wide influence in India cannot be overstated. He has for many years been a televised Yogi with an audience of millions of people. I cannot tell you how surreal it was to be sitting in Arunachal Pradesh, the remotest state of India, to be lectured on the benefits of Ramdev’s signature explosive breathing. The late tribal Minister, who was enthusiastically telling me this, was convinced this would cure his hypertension. As indeed Ramdev’s drug company insists that his herbal remedies cure HIV and cancer.

This creative entrepreneurship has spawned an empire worth many millions.

This is a break from the Swami tradition of austerity. Gandhiji on being asked why on earth he travelled third class replied because there is no fourth class. If Ramdev was asked why he was travelling in an aircraft’s first class he would reply because I couldn’t charter the whole blessed aircraft, which is exactly what he does.

But India has changed. This hedonistic behavior inspires awe not disdain. His eccentricities are swallowed whole by millions of followers.

Including his five-point plan. 100% voting. 100% Nationalistic thought. 100% boycott of foreign companies. 100% unification of the country. 100% yoga oriented nation.

These tickle me but his points that address corruption make me sit up and pay attention. The death penalty for graft convictions amongst them. This would be a sound move if it didn’t involve the impracticality of liquidating the entire political class but it is academically deeply satisfying.

The repatriation of the estimated trillion dollars in Swiss bank accounts. I have met industrialists who openly admit to having offshore accounts. It seems there is a finite amount of black money you can blow up in 5 stars and weddings attended by a populace that would qualify as a New Zealand city.

He has tempered these Swadeshi instincts with a reported purchase of a Scottish Island for several million pounds. Which is a just spare change for a man worth 1,100 crore.

But can we be too precious about the individuals who are leading the people to what we pray is a historical change? Who gives a monkey’s uncle if the diseased limb of corruption is severed by a scalpel or a garden spade?

Yes, Ramdev is the polar opposite of Hazare. Hazare is the cleaner than clean Gandhian. Not the MLA Gandhian who habitually sports a gold Mount Blanc pen in his kardi kurta pocket but the real deal. Hazare would sooner starve to death than charter an aircraft. Yes, this has gained a deep respect but not a universal respect. No contemporary politician has understood this modern voter burnout to Gandhian austerity like Mayawati.

Mayawati, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, understands down to her chopals that Gandhism isn’t moving off the shelves like it used to. She sells bling. She shamelessly flaunts her massive personal wealth like a West Coast rapper and commissions pharaoh like memorials to her living self. The dalits love it. She’s one of them and they want to be like her.

They no longer respect Gandhian ideals because the lifestyle they aspire to rid themselves of is in fact Gandhian and is practiced out of simply having no choice. They are now revolted by the hypocrisy of money grabbing gangsters shouting twisted versions of the Gandhian gospel. Ramdev is unashamedly capitalist, much like the electorate.

He still has a long journey to be an enduring national leader. For India’s villagers are uneducated and because of this they rely on a steel strong instinct for a person’s character. Will he stand up to this aggressive litmus test? Will the result be saffron or a cowardly yellow?

What is indisputable is that Ramdev is a marketable hybrid of emerging India’s worlds. The jet setting sadhu. A living metaphor of India’s half complete metamorphosis from spiritual socialism to globalisation.

He has my reluctant vote because I think he can learn to not talk of armed revolution when having fasted for three days. He has the vote too of 85 year old K.L. Gupta who made his way from Indore to Rajghat, alone and in 40 degree weather. Even with his catheter bag he slept outside on Delhi’s pavements so he could pray with Hazare and Ramdev for his beloved India.