Rude awakening
The news that American chat show queen Oprah Winfrey has established a state-of-the-art, free-of-charge Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls near Johannesburgh, South Africa at a whopping cost of $40 million (Rs.1,800 crore) has hardly attracted any comment from the media, or from the numerous captains of Indian industry who strut the national stage as benefactors of education and champions of children’s rights. Which is hardly surprising given that compared to American business tycoons who give away fortunes measured in terms of billions of dollars as witnessed by the munificence of master investor Warren Buffet who recently bestowed a massive $38 billion (Rs.171,000 crore) to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for education and health causes around the world, the over-hyped generosity of India’s rapidly multiplying number of HNI (high net worth individuals) is niggardly to the point of being mean. For instance in the garden city of Bangalore where IT (information technology) businesses are booming, there is a conspicuous paucity of free private sector schools, public hospitals or libraries. Shockingly in Bangalore, a city choking on garbage and automobile pollution, there is only one (government-sponsored) public library, and that too has been closed for over a year for mysterious renovation. Surprisingly not a single one of the garden city’s uber rich captains of industry, who salt away thousands of crores through the simple expedient of converting their Indian equity shares into dollar denominated ADRs (American Deposit Receipts) which are traded on the Nasdaq, has stumbled upon the need to establish a public library in the city which has offered them the space and other enabling conditions to earn staggering fortunes.
Once upon a time in another avatar this writer was perhaps the first champion of indigenous private enterprise. But now several years into reporting the continuously neglected public education sector with which benighted Indian industrialists — in sharp contrast with their American counterparts — maintain minimal linkage, one has had to accept the reality of the ugly face of Indian capitalism which is driving a growing number of the nation’s youth into extremist anarchic movements. It’s been a rude awakening.
Government gullibility
As usual the almighty transnational row that has broken out over the alleged insult to Indian actress Shilpa Shetty who was persuaded (with a reported signing fee of Rs.3 crore) to participate in a British reality television show, has resulted in more than a smear of egg on the face of the government of India, which for mysterious reasons felt obliged to protest the alleged racist abuse directed at Shetty. A spokesperson of the ministry of external affairs as well as the information minister Priyaranjan Dasmunsi felt it incumbent upon themselves to issue protest statements. Moreover the unfortunate Gordon Brown, Britain’s finance minister and prime-minister-in-waiting who was visiting India at the time with a heavyweight business delegation was obliged to issue a statement deprecating racism in all its forms. According to reports emanating from South Block, New Delhi, the PMO (prime minster’s office) has issued a sharp reprimand to the MEA and the information minister for falling prey to the machinations of the publicity machine of BBC’s Channel 4, which had orchestrated the racism row to boost the declining viewership of its reality show titled Celebrity Big Brother. In particular, the emissary conveyed the message that the derailment of the high-potential Gordon Brown mission to India by this trivial much ado about nothing, caused much anguish in the PMO.
New Delhi’s gullibility and overreaction to the stage-managed Big Brother has also drawn sharp domestic criticism. Not a few political and social commentators have commented about the hypocrisy of spokespersons of an irredeemably colour, caste, religious and class-conscious society getting worked up into righteous lather over mild verbal abuse. Meanwhile following the massive global publicity she has received over Big Brother, Shilpa Shetty (who was adjudged winner of the show) is all set to sign up several million-dollar television and movie contracts, laughing all the way to her bank.
Soviet-style directorate
One could make a strong arguable case that the subliminal motivation behind the promotion of post-independence India’s massive public sector enterprises (PSEs) was to deliberately create opportunities for generating clandestine corruption and graft opportunities for politicians and the 18 million-strong army of bureaucrats and government servants countrywide. At the last count made several years ago, the number of Central government PSEs aggregated 543 enterprises with a gross block (assets) of Rs.450,000 crore — purchased out of public funds which could surely have been put to better use, given that the overwhelming majority of them are deeply in the red. To this number of Central government PSEs add the thousands (no official estimate of their number has ever been made) of state government PSEs which are even more so.In this connection, one of the longest-running rackets has been the mysterious manner in which government and PSE advertising is distributed within the complicit media by the Central government’s Soviet-style Directorate of Audio-Visual Publicity (DAVP), which moves in mysterious ways its largesse to bestow.
Apart from doling out government and PSE ads to thousands of minor, upcountry newspapers and publications, some of whom print only a dozen copies for government audit, even creative contracts to design government campaigns are awarded to obvious amateurs. For instance the Tea Board of India is currently running an expensive and patently ridiculous television ad campaign which projects civil, well-mannered individuals as people who don’t drink tea, and boisterous, over-the-top individuals as imbibers of the beverage, when as anyone knows, social reality is the contrary. Likewise the Union ministry’s Incredible India campaign is well, incredibly vacuous.
Is this prejudiced criticism? Yes. EducationWorld’s marketers who have attempted to win the favour of DAVP have been offered government advertising at the handsome price of Rs.1,000 per page (cf. our rate card price of Rs.25,000), — take it or leave it. Mysterious indeed are the uses of DAVP.