Hunger Be Hanged

Dear men-who-matter,

India, as I am sure you have now read, ranks 97^th on the latest Global Hunger Index published last week.  Such top-line data is provided by rather dubious organisations like the International Food Policy Research Institute, with the obsessive intention of shaming us; never forget that there are many envious folks who have looked at our GDP growth with increasing despondency. 

We are celebrating the 25^th year of Economic Independence (liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation, as the new wave was called), that has unleashed entrepreneurial magic, created Gurgaon (though we do apologise for that) and propelled the Sensex to twenty seven thousand (and counting).  Our per capital GDP has grown from $324 to $5730 and, among other accomplishments, we are now the diabetic capital of the World. 

It is critical therefore that we ignore the myopic presentation by the IFPRI, sieve through this data carefully and arrive at fair conclusions.  In other words, we must look at the resplendent bright side.  So, here goes:

    a)       There are 21 countries whose hunger is worse off than ours. 

    b)      One of them is Pakistan. 

    c)       Liberia, our biggest competitor for world market share in software services and business outsourcing, is slightly behind us as well.

    d)      Zambia, which also got independence from England, though later, should have done much better than us, because it is a smaller country.  Their Hunger Index is 39 and we must cheer that we are at 28.5 (the bigger the number, the worse the hunger), though we were about the same when liberalisation set off in 1992.    

    e)      Mali, with a GDP per capita (income per head per year) of about $2300 – which is less than half of India’s – is only slightly better than us in hunger, not significantly better.  Given that they have just waged a nasty war with extremists, many hungry people must have died which improved the average, else they’d be behind us.

    f)       The People’s Democratic Republic of Laos – which is, in reality, neither democratic nor a republic – has the same ratio of Hunger to GDP per capita, which should give us much cause to cheer, because, you see, we are both a functioning republic and a democracy.  Our country is one where you have unrestricted freedom to go hungry.    

   g)     Rwanda has (percentage-wise) fewer hungry people, but don’t look down on India.  Our GDP is over three times theirs.  We should focus on GDP per capita, not on hungry people.  Also, remember that we belong to the BRICs trading block, while Rwanda can only have modest dreams of, at best, exporting feathers to South Africa.   Another oft-forgetten point: we have a 5000-year old culture that has included a form of hunger in it called fasting.  More people fast in India than go hungry in Rwanda and these things matter – they add to the Hunger Index.  

    h)      You should be relieved to hear that, despite the best efforts of DreamWorks, Madagascar’s hunger situation is alarming.  So is the hunger in Zambia and Chad.  Yes, don’t forget Chad and thank your stars that you live in a country like ours which has only 28.5 points stacked up on the Hunger Index.  The only thing good about Chad is that it isn’t Zimbabwe.

    i)        So what if Tunisia is only 5.5 on the Hunger Index; it’s a really dangerous country to live in and you could die of other reasons than hunger (Travel Mortality Score of 61.5).   Likewise for Ukraine, that just got part taken-over by Russia.   In India, we are much safer and many only die of hunger. 

    j)        Data released by the Thai Rice Exporters Association suggests that India has beaten Thailand to become the largest exporter of rice in the world. According to the reports, India has exported 10.23 million tons of rice in the year 2015 as compared to Thailand's 9.8 million tons. In terms of imports, China remains the number one importer of rice.  As China scores only 7.7 on the Hunger Index, India has done much, no doubt, to ameliorate hunger in that deprived country.  Other countries we have hugely helped are Nigeria, Iran, Malaysia and some in the Middle East, all of which rank better than us in the Hunger Index.  

    k)       Djibouti – which country's name we should all learn to pronounce correctly and learn more about, as it is one of our largest competitors in laundering money – is much worse off as far as hunger goes, I am pleased to report.  They speak French there and are not very good at cricket or kabaddi, and therefore, will stay behind us for a while to come.

    l)        At least two countries that play cricket are worse off than us – Pakistan and Zimbabwe – and, while, in the others, hunger is less prevalent, their Cricket Boards have much less money than ours, which is something we should be deeply proud of.

    m)    Mukesh Ambani, who has been named India's richest person for the ninth year in a row with a sharp increase in net worth to $22.7 billion, has a fortune that is equal to Estonia's GDP, says Forbes India. Estonia scores less than 5 on the Hunger Index, but that is pathetic in comparison to Mr Ambani – he scores 0 on the Hunger Index.  And, that is again something, we should all be proud of, but why does no one focus on these things and go on and on about hunger?  

    n)      We have set one record that no international organisation - damn them - gives us any credit for : as per the response of the Food Corporation of India to a request for information, at least 1,94,502 metric tonnes of food grain was wasted in India due to various reasons between 2005 and March 2013. 

    o)      We must also be deeply respectful of the ability of the FCI’s bean-counters to keep detailed information – down to the last tonne - of such wastage.  Our records of people who have died of hunger are sketchy and exaggerated though – the Iron Lady from Bengal is absolutely certain that no tea garden worker in the closed gardens of North Bengal has died of hunger or malnutrition.  And, since the Iron Lady is always right, those who recorded such data – journalists, fact-finding missions and others –are liars, with mendacity bordering on the criminal.

    p) India has also engendered the most extensive body of original research on hunger, which has resulted in the most books published anywhere on the subject.  Books such as "Hunger and Famine in Kalahandi: An Anthropological Study".  Such research has provided valuable employment to a number of doctoral students. 

If you are reading this, the chances are you do not know anyone who has died of hunger.  No one who has a Linked-in or Facebook account in India has died of hunger as well.  So, should we not wonder at IFPRI’s objective in publishing this stuff?

2016 Global Hunger Index

The Maths Teacher I never knew

The tall, thin and shy young man seated at the dining-cum-study table had the thick spectacles and genteel demeanour of an earnest khadi-clad socialist; he looked briefly up at me – then a little boy of ten – and went back to the Maths text book in front of him, while my brother, who was studying for his IIT entrance exams with the assiduity he normally reserved for his tennis, concentrated on the entirely unfathomable heavy book in front.  

The young man was good at his subject, of this there was no doubt; indeed, if anything was his world, it was the arcane planet of formulae and he had a good Brahmin’s brain to negotiate the treacherous pits that math sums (as problems were then called) hid in your path.  

My parents were delighted at having him teach my brother maths, of course, and my mother, as moms are prone to do, alternated between praying for the IIT seat and praising the maths teacher every day, though she hadn’t the faintest clue to what was being taught (she would, however, announce to the world that Calculus was not for the faint-hearted).  For in Digboi, the World’s finest little town, nestled amidst the tea bushes of Margherita and the oil fields-and-forests that stretched to Burma, a maths teacher of his competence was quite a dream come true; possibly, the only thing that might have bettered this would have been an invitation from IIT on a bone-china plate with a lemongrass, rosemary-and-thyme dressing (but, of course, one must be realistic, particularly about the lemongrass, rosemary-and-thyme dressing). 

Purkayastha did not set out to be a professional teacher; he was studying Chartered Accountancy and had a modest job in the Finance Department at Assam Oil, where Dad was the head of Internal Audit.  He looked up to Dad and had volunteered to teach my brother maths, when Dad had passed the question around.  And, so, that was that.

When my brother got into IIT, I saw Purkayastha for the second time (I was banished from the dining room when he normally came in to teach, as ten-year olds are deemed a nuisance to society in general and to older brothers in particular).  Purki (the name that stuck with him for life) had a broad smile on his face, and his quiet tone conveyed satisfaction.  And, one can only speculate that this early success was a deciding factor in his decision to become a high-school maths teacher at Carmel Convent, the local ISCE institution.

He never taught me: a couple of years later, we left Digboi for good just after I had finished my sixth standard. Family friends who visited us in Bangalore said that, while he had left his finance job at Assam Oil, he hadn’t quite left finance; his goal to become a Chartered Accountant had only been strengthened, and he prepared twice a year;  CA exams, I will add, may be termed the most arduous of all punishments invented in the Twentieth Century. 

Occasional reports informed us that he hadn’t yet cleared CA, though he came close, even as his reputation as a Maths whiz began to grow and  everyone spoke of him with a touch of awe.  And then, the odd report from Digboi stopped coming and I assumed that Purki had probably moved out of the town, possibly to Calcutta or elsewhere. 

In 2012, I went back to Digboi, thirty five years after I had left it and met with my old – and among my dearest – friends, Rajiv.  We had much catching up to do (and some ribbing, for the water that had flowed under the bridge over the years had taken a lot of our hair as well) and then, the conversation inevitably moved to our teachers.  When Rajiv spoke about Purki, his normally-genial expression underwent a change and he turned grim and forthright.  For Purki, he said, had been a terror, a monster of sorts, for my old classmates when they reached their tenth standard and had remained one ever since.  He would set problems in tests that were harder than the hardest and was harsh and relentless in his assessment; often, only one student – Vineet, acknowledged now to be quite a genius – consistently met his grade.  For the others, there would be vitriol, scathing sarcasm and nasty predictions of failure and it seemed that many in the class were deeply emotionally impacted by what was said and, more, by who said it (a maths teacher is a touch below God in the Hindu pantheon).  A few years of personal failure – that damn CA exam -  seemed to morph this genial, shy, young fellow into a dark, embittered man.  Rajiv ended his possibly justified tirade with a mild warning – he has retired from the school and is still somewhere in Digboi, he said, but meet him at your own risk. 

I decided at that moment to meet Purkayastha.  It was an impulsive thought, of course, and strange, for I had seen him just a couple of times, had smiled at him once thirty five years ago, had never been taught by him and knew nothing about him.  A silly decision?  Perhaps.  Or perhaps, I believed that a word of appreciation on my brother’s behalf would make a retired teacher’s day come alive.

 Events conspired interestingly.  I met a lady with the same surname as his, asked if she knew him and, voila!, I had his number.  When I called the next day, the voice was non-commital and hesitant; he would be ok to meet me, he said.  Walking up to the busy market area of Charali, I sipped a cup of tea at a ramshackle little hotel and then strolled down a nondescript street asking passers-by for the way to Purki’s home.  It wasn’t easy to find and I lost my way a bit but, when I did get there, the tiny little house on a narrow by-lane presented itself.  I stood for a moment to contemplate if I was indeed nuts to do this and then rang the bell.

This was the second time I had met Purki and, of course, he had changed; he had put on more weight and had a heavy chin, but, above all else, I saw a tired and unhappy man.  After we had sat down and exchanged small talk, I spoke of my father, whom he remembered well, and passed on the compliment I had come to deliver.  

It was as though I had opened up a tap of turbid – and complex - emotions.  Purki began to ramble, with more than a trace of dejection, his rant reserved for Carmel School that had been his life but had in the end treated him badly, even as he recalled some of his students fondly while being indifferent to others.  He spoke of his integrity as a maths teacher, of how he had hardly ever missed a day of school in decades of teaching, and of being isolated by other teachers and of the hurt caused by this loneliness.    He spoke of his frustration with the CA exam, the abandoning of which had sealed further opportunity.  And, he spoke of his son, a bright student he said, but languishing in the Government College as there was no money to pay for private education.  

I listened. 

Isn’t it true that beneath many exteriors - many sustained exhibitions of hubris, derision, harshness and criticism – there is a great sadness?  Anger masks sadness and nostalgia enlivens it. And for many who do not see a different tomorrow, this sadness offers the meaning they once were seeking.  

After a while, the conversation, as it unwound, began to seem forced and it was time to say goodbye.  He asked for help for his son and I promised, leaving my number behind, but knowing that he probably would not call. 

As my palms came together and I said Namaste, I knew that we would not meet again.  Some meetings are meant to be this way.