According to the Delhi-based IT industry lobby Nasscom (National Association of Software and Services Companies), the garbage (NB: that’s not a typographical error) city of Bangalore (pop. 8 million) aka the Silicon Valley of India hosts more than 170 IT and related companies with an estimated 500,000 employees on their muster rolls. Official encouragement given to the development of the city’s — and India’s — IT industry by way of income tax exemption, highly-subsidised land grants, and preferential customs duties and indirect taxes, has enabled IT hardware and software companies which have set up shop in Bangalore, to prosper mightily. Consequently, rupee billionaires nurtured by tax-friendly policies are thick on the ground in garbage city. Yet in typical subcontinental style, their demands upon the citizens and civic services of Bangalore are in inverse proportion to their charitable impulses. On the contrary the city’s IT czars have acquired a notorious reputation for mean-minded stinginess and hard-hearted indifference to deserving charitable causes.
Celebrating its silver jubilee last month, the Bangalore School of Music (BSM) published a commemorative souvenir issue titled Celebrating 25 Years. Strikingly, only one IT company (Intel) contributed an advertisement in the BSM souvenir. This is a mere continuum to the obstinate refusal of the city’s IT czars to contribute towards building the school’s new campus in the city which was completed in 2008, entirely funded by small contributions from the public. Earlier, the school was housed in the home of its founder-director, the redoubtable Aruna Sunderlal for 22 years.
After the state government belatedly conferred a land grant of 8,000 sq. ft site to BSM to establish a full-fledged contemporary conservatoire in 2000, Sunderlal intensively courted the city’s IT billionaires to make modest contributions towards construction of the school and its Rs.30 lakh auditorium in particular. All of them including N.R. Narayana Murthy, the billionaire founder-chairman emeritus of Infosys Technologies who claims to be a western music buff, turned her down. All this is perfectly in character because five years ago, the over-hyped Murthy abruptly cancelled the annual Infosys-EducationWorld Young Achiever Awards (expenditure Rs.4-5 lakh), pleading financial distress (“no bang for the buck”).
Public plea to Union finance minister: In budget 2013-14, please cancel all tax concessions to this industry which has grown fat on subsidies and tax breaks without engineering any worthwhile innovations and engaging in low-end techno-coolie work for foreign IT multinationals.
Successful failure
When our mighty masters in the centrally planned Indian economy belatedly deemed the Indian population ready for the television age in the 1980s and permitted a hundred channels to bloom through cable television a decade later, the expectation was that the populace would be spared the mind-numbing entertainment of Bollywood and its regional clones. However instead of raising the rock-bottom standards of popular Indian cinema by eulogizing a handful of path-breakers such as Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Shyam Benegal among others, Indian television has become a camp follower and cheerleader of the brain-dead badshahs of Bollywood and its regional clones. Indeed India’s cable television companies have addled the minds of the youth of India’s urban elite and have ushered in a new age of fair and lovely neo-colonialism into this leaderless nation (mis)ruled by a runaway kleptocracy.
Against this backdrop, it was rather difficult to share the enthusiastic celebrations of Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan’s 70th birthday which blanketed Indian television — including English news channels — which couldn’t stop telecasting sycophantic interviews of the suave Bollywood superstar.
Evidently well-educated and the progeny of a poet, given his iconic status, Bachchan could have taken the initiative to upgrade and raise the bar of Bollywood and Indian cinema by insisting upon strong storylines, quality scripting and credible characterisation. Instead, he struck a faustian bargain to willingly star in a host of weakly scripted, purposeless, violent, foot-stomping staple Bollywood extravaganzas.
It’s wondrous — indeed shocking — that neither Bachchan nor the highly articulate television anchors and captains of industry who heaped encomiums on the megastar didn’t squirm with embarrassment while viewing the best of Bachchan glorified on television last month. Your editor’s verdict: a successful failure.
Immoral question
As open, uninterrupted and continuous migration from neglected rural India into the country’s 7,900 cities, of which 73 will grudgingly host populations of 1 million-plus by 2030, shows no sign of slacking, the ruralisation of urban India is gathering momentum. In several metros, huge waves of migrants from rural India have transformed into electoral majorities and have elected leaders who are importing many of the regressive norms and attitudes of village India, described by the architect of India’s Constitution, Dr. B.R Ambedkar, as a sink of localism and den of ignorance, into urban habitats.
An extreme manifestation of the patriarchal mindset of rural archetypes who rule the southern state of Karnataka and the once swinging city of Bangalore, is a decree issued by the registrar of Bangalore University ordering confinement of women students within their hostels before 7 p.m, a revolutionary and perhaps globally unprecedented (Saudi Arabia excepted) injunction, matter-of-factly reported in civic media. This is the response of the university’s controversial registrar Dr. B.C. Mylarappa, to the numerous sexual assaults on women students on BU’s sprawling 1,100-acre campus in the past few months.
It’s pertinent to note that women residing in BU hostels are full-grown adult postgraduate students. That they have meekly accepted this abridgement of their fundamental right to freedom of movement, and the draconian decree has the tacit approval of society, is conclusive proof of the ruralisation and regression of this once vibrant garden city.
Your correspondent is agonised by the sorry condition of BU’s male students. If all women students are locked up by 7 p.m, with whom will they wine, dine and socialise? Wait a minute: in the current environment of this once liberal city, this might be an immoral question.