Friday, 18 April 2025

Of BlueSmart and Startup Blues

 

Photo Courtesy www.financialexpress.com

Why did it take a SEBI to discover that the crooks of Gensol, the Jaggi Brothers, had purloined the money they had borrowed for purchase of Electric Vehicles? Why did the government institutions, viz. IREDA and the PFC never check how their loans were utilised? Why didn’t the Board of Directors of Gensol ever review the finances and performance of the company? What if Gensol were still a privately held nascent startup and had not come under the watch of SEBI? Would the Jaggi Bothers have settled the matter “internally” with the VC/PE fund providers the way Ashneel Grover of BharatPe did after “some financial irregularities”? When cheating of a single individual by any other individual attracts provisions of the Penal Code resulting in jail term, how is it that such forgery at such scales as committed by the promoters of Gensol, BharatPe, Byzu’s, BookMyShow (for Coldplay), WazirX’s Crypto heist and many-many more such frauds are simply brushed under the carpet as an almost benign case of “Corporate Misgovernance”? The Jaggi Brothers siphoned off 262 crores out of 978 crore of public money; it wasn’t the personal fund of an angel investor but of government agencies. Why are these people not in jail already?

Well the carpet has a huge pile of garbage under it now. With look-rich-quick, not get-rich-quick tendency Startup promoters have been quick to use the seed and series funds for buying Camilla Apartments and Lamborghinis, fancy holidays and ultra-expensive golf-kits. Nobody would grudge them all that pomp if it was acquired out of profits and salaries. But now they don’t even want to wait for the exit, the IPO, or a profitable merger. They want it big and they want it now. And call it a mere lapse of judgement or corporate misgovernace.

What a blot on the startup and corporate ethics? A very stern handling of these defaulters and fraudsters is called for. And it is needed to be done today.

                                                        —-ooo—-

Wednesday, 16 April 2025

Once in the Lifetime of a Nation

 


Indian Railways have completed 172 years of the first run of a train in the country. It is a matter of pride for Railwaymen like me and of celebration by the countrymen. Indian Railways, over the years, by their vast and expanding network, have connected far corners of the country and brought a sense of nationhood and oneness to Indians. 

 

Apart from connecting far-flung geographical areas the Railways in India also brought about a social harmony, or social tolerance, that was previously unthinkable. Indians of all castes and social status, even the so-called upper caste and the untouchables, were forced to travel sitting on the same bench in the rail coach because the railway builders did not provide any classes of travel except those dictated by the paying capacity of passengers.

 

Railways in India - A Great Social Equaliser

 

If one could afford only a third class travel no matter how high a caste one belonged to, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, for hours together, with a person of unknown caste and status was unavoidable. On the other hand, if a so-called lower caste person could afford a first-class travel, he automatically acquired a higher status - no village panchayat or khap could deny him that in a train compartment. Thus, Railways in India brought about social equality in no less significant measure than any social-reform movement.

 

Did the British Alone Build the Railways?

 

It is often claimed that the British built the Railways in India to help them colonise the subcontinent and for exploiting resources. While it may be true, the storytellers ignore that many Princely States built their own railways to serve their subjects. That they built these Railways, running into hundreds of miles, with limited resources, little foreign inputs, and with the benign purpose of easing the lives of their people is no less creditworthy than what the British did. Limited resources forced them to work with metre gauge or narrow gauge. Hyderabad State, a wealthier entity, however, built a broad-gauge railway for compatibility with the British-built gauge. Some of them are listed below.

 

Year

Name of State / Railway

Gauge

Approx. Length

1862

Gaekwar’s Baroda State Railway

Narrow gauge (2 ft 6 in)

~8 miles (initial); later expanded to 200+ km

1870s

Hyderabad State Railway

Broad gauge (5 ft 6 in)

~100 km (initial); expanded significantly

1878

Bhavnagar State Railway

Metre gauge (1,000 mm)

~200+ km

1881

Gondal State Railway

Metre gauge (1,000 mm)

~150+ km

1882

Jodhpur–Bikaner Railway

Metre gauge (1,000 mm)

1300+ km (by 1906)

1886

Morvi Railway

Narrow and  Metre gauge

~100 km

1895

Gwalior Light Railway

Narrow gauge (2 ft)

~199 km

1900

Parlakimedi Light Railway

Narrow gauge (2 ft 6 in)

~100+ km (with expansions)

1902

Cochin State Railway

Broad gauge (5 ft 6 in)

~30 km (Shoranur–Cochin)

1903

Kalka–Shimla Railway

Narrow gauge (2 ft 6 in)

96 km

1904–07

Neral–Matheran Railway

Narrow gauge (2 ft)

21 km

1905

Cutch State Railway

Metre gauge (1,000 mm)

~70 km (initial)

1911–14

Arrah–Sasaram Light Railway

Narrow gauge (2 ft 6 in)

102 km

 

Railway Line - A Permanent Fixture

 

Trunk routes were built largely by the British. What we need to appreciate is that a Railway Line is built but once in the lifetime of a nation. Once laid a rail route is as permanent as the land it rests upon. As can be seen in the picture above the rail routes built as early as in 1870 remain exactly the same today, a century and a half later. Take a look at Delhi-Calcutta, Bombay-Allahabad, and Bombay-Madras lines. There is no reason to believe that these routes will ever be shifted even an inch from where they are embedded. More lines may be built but the original roads of steel are permanent. No wonder they are called Permanent Way. 

 

Where the Modern Planners Failed

 

It is for this reason planners have to be humble and farsighted, both. What they do today will decide what path generations will take in the future, literally, a rail path. However, they failed in recent times, whenever opportunities arose to convert MG and NG lines to BG. They simply replaced the narrower gauges with the BG with all the curves and gradients that existed unchanged. This froze the speeds on such converted BG routes to measly 40-60 kmph at multiple locations. Rather than thinking big and acquiring necessary land to straighten the curves and ease the gradients, they found it expedient to follow the beaten path and condemned those routes to low and medium speeds for ever. Such routes will never see even 130kmph let alone higher speeds. Some such routes that I know of are Nagpur-Chhindwara-Jabalpur and Gondia-Balaghat-Nainpur.

 

I hope new line-builders take a more farsighted view.


                                            —-ooo—-

 


Monday, 31 March 2025

E.M.P.U.R.A.A.N and Mohanlal - Unwatchable. I Want My Money Back

 


Watched the latest Mohanlal-starrer Malayalam movie EMPURAAN, with English subtitles. Some dialogues were is Hindi and English for which subtitles were in Malayalam.

Created with a lot of negativity the movie casts Hindus as mass murderers, cruel bigots, and unrepentant butchers. The opening scene, without saying so, is an exaggerated depiction of Gujarat riots of 2002. What it conveniently brushes aside by displaying that single  location, though lengthy scene of gore, blood, rape, and massacre, is that Hindus too were killed in large numbers (700 of them) in the same Gujarat riots let alone those, who were burnt alive in a train. It also ignores the fact that hundreds have been tried and jailed for those heinous acts of 2002. Perampuraan opens up old, forgotten wounds for reasons beyond the box office, it wants to create a new narrative. It portrays that a sense of revenge has festered for a whole generation. It might well have but the film has stoked the dying embers so crassly and shows that a victim boy, whose family were killed, grows up and becomes an international mercenary eventually descending in Kerala to slay the perpetrator, Bajrangi, in an equally gruesome way.

To fire up the imagination of the audience the grieving Muslim boy, when asked by Mohanlal, the flamboyantly named Lucifer, the anti-Christ yet the son of a sober Christian priest, what he wants most, he says, “BADLA”, in Hindi, so that the healing sense of victimhood raises its head once again and resonates across the land - North, East, West, and South. Upon that Mohanlal says, again in Hindi/Urdu for universal acceptance, “Sahi bola. Rahmat se Allah khush hota hai, Badle se insaan.” Wow! Gandhi Ji must be shedding copious tears in the heaven.

The cleverly named Bajrangi is a Hindu fanatic and viewers are nudged to compare him with the benign Bajrangi Bhaijaan recently played by Salman Khan. Not to leave anything to imagination, the grown up Muslim boy, who is now a semi-Superman (the full Superman is Mohanlal, of course), says in the last scene - Bajrangi is mine, Bhaijaan! You can take the rest.

The movie takes you to Yemen, London, Pakistan, Afghanistan, even a deserted oil-rig, with Mohanlal and his protege traveling seamlessly across international borders. He kills the British, Russians, Africans, and Indians in a drug-and-diamonds war yet he is called upon, via a YouTube video, by conscientious Keralites, to come back and save the peaceful Kerala from a selfish dynastic CM, son of a benign but dead former CM. The rogue CM has sought help from the same Bajrangi, the mass murderer from the North (West?), to form a new party and perpetuate his rule in an imagination-gone-wild political plot. That the dynastic rogue CM must be replaced by the dynastic daughter of the same dead CM is rather easy on the conscience of the storyteller.

If M/S Antony Perumbavoor, Prithviraj Sukumaran, Murali Gopy etc. wanted to present a counter to the largely-true Kerala Story of Vivek Agnihotri, they have miserably failed cinematographically. They have, on the other hand aggravated the sense of victimhood among Muslims and tainted the largely tolerant and peaceful Hindus blackest of black, and widened the chasm that may take years to fill. The suggestion that Muslims and Christian, together, are pitched against malicious Hindus is creation of a new of divide in the peaceful society that prides itself in calling its state God’s Own Country. The film makers have effectively created distinct children of three Gods, two pitched agains the third.

I don’t know how such a divisive film was cleared by the Censor Board. The movie Empuraan should be banned forthwith and the entire Censor Board sacked.

Shame on you, Mohanlal!

                                                 —-ooo—-


Sunday, 23 March 2025

बैताल-पच्चीसी - आज का बैताल कौन?

 


बचपन में चंदामामा बाल-पत्रिका में विक्रम और बैताल की कहानियाँ आपने भी पढ़ी होंगी। हर कथा में महाराजा विक्रमादित्य की पीठ पर बैठा बैताल एक नई कहानी सुनाता है। फिर उससे राजा के विवेक को चुनौती देता हुआ एक प्रश्न पूछता है। हर कहानी में एक क्लिष्ट कथानक होता था, जिसका कोई सीधा समाधान हम बच्चों को नहीं सूझता था। पर बैताल का प्रश्न तो राजा के लिये होता था, कि चंदामामा के बाल-पाठकों के लिये।

 

प्रश्न के बाद एक चेतावनी भी होती थी, हे राजन्, यदि तुमने जानते हुए भी मेरे प्रश्न का उत्तर नहीं दिया, तो तुम्हारे सिर के हज़ार टुकड़े हो जाएँगे। राजा हर बार एक समुचित उत्तर देता, पर उसके मौन तोड़ने के कारण बैताल उड़कर फिर पेड़ पर जा लटकता। राजा फिर अगली रात बैताल को ढोने के लिये बाध्य हो जाता था, फिर एक कठिन प्रश्न का उत्तर देने के लिये।

 

दशकों बाद आज समझ आया कि बैताल राजा विक्रमादित्य को ट्रेनिंग दिया करता था राजोचित चिंतन करने और न्याय-अन्याय का भेद समझने में। ट्रेनिंग इस बात की भी होती थी कि राजधर्म के अनुसार राजा के लिये सही बात बोलना आवश्यक है। राजा सबकुछ जानते हुए चुप नहीं रह सकता। विक्रमादित्य के उत्तर अक्सर हम बच्चों की समझ से परे होते थे। अब यदि मैं विक्रम और बैताल की कहानियाँ दुबारा पढ़ूँ तो शायद बैताल की जटिल कहानियों, उसके कठिन प्रश्नों, और विक्रमादित्य के विद्वतापूर्ण उत्तरों का सार बेहतर समझ में आए।

 

पुराने जमाने में राजा में ही समस्त शक्तियां निहित होती थीं - वही शासक, वही न्यायाधीश, वही क़ानून-व्यवस्था और आंतरिक सौहार्द्र और शांति का रखवाला, और वही सेना का प्रधान सेनानायक होता था। आज ये दायित्व बॉंट दिये गए हैं और हर एक क्षेत्र का अलग रखवाला बना दिया गया है। पर क्या हर विभाग-प्रमुख को अपने-अपने कार्यक्षेत्र के लिए बराबर का और पूर्ण जवाबदेह भी बना दिया गया है, या उनकी नाकामी और बेइमानी का प्रतिफल बेचारा राज्य का प्रधान ही सहता है, हर पॉंच वर्ष में?

 

अतः हे जागरूक नागरिक, हे प्रबुद्ध पत्रकार, हे समाज के सहज नेता, जागो! बैताल बनो। जो भी विक्रमादित्य तुम्हें नज़र आता है, जिससे भी तुम प्रश्न करना चाहते हो, जो जानते हुए भी तुम्हारे प्रश्नों के उत्तर नहीं देना चाहता, उससे बार-बार प्रश्न करो। शायद तुम्हारे प्रश्नों से प्रमादी के सिर के हज़ार टुकड़े हो जाएँ।

 

तो चलो, दिल्ली दमकल विभाग, पुलिस विभाग, आयकर विभाग, और न्यायपालिका से शुरु करते हैं। विक्रम और बैताल की कहानियाँ तो बैताल-पच्चीसी तक ही रुक गई थीं। हमें शायद बैताल-हजारी तक जाना पड़े। थकना नहीं, रुकना नहीं। 

                                                     —ooo—-