When It Rains, It Pours

Not a good year, Ramappa said.  

I had stopped by to chat with him.  He is normally an effusive chap, with a ready smile and the standard question, “When did you come?”  Today, the question was asked but the smile was weary and worn. 

It has been a hard year in our parts; agriculture seems increasingly stitched together by a thread that will cause it to tear further as it comes apart at the seams, a mosaic of the inevitable, the causative, the jagged and the linear.  Rice – a rich-red large grain called dodaberu nellu and the staple of a feast – was given up years ago, when the rains played truant and low-cost polished grain inundated the ration basket; the road to hell, they say, is paved with good intention.  

The ragi economy, once the palliative, inches towards history, as rains this year were on, then off, then, well, on again at the wrong time; the elephants were missing, but wild boar marked their attendance alright.  Ours is a hardy ragi-consuming landscape; it is eaten twice a day, stored for a year.  Ragi is an insurance, it is belief, faith.  An emotion. 

Ragi needs labour to harvest –now rarer than it ever has been and therefore costly - and the threshing machine is a feature these days, not a bug.  Capital and weather combined, the risk category has changed to high now, but – here’s where economics stays theoretical – the return hasn’t.  At twenty-five rupees a kilo, a price fixed by an oligopoly of buyers with capital and staying power, it has been a ruinous crop to grow this year.  The TN Government could buy ragi at the minimum support price and change the script, but wishes aren’t horses…..   

Ragi is grown for another reason, of course: its straw is staple cattle feed in our parts, but that – the cattle economy, in normal times an epitome of stability and the only source of capital gain, when a calf or milch cow is sold – has had a lightning strike with the lumpy skin disease; vets – private and Government – and quacks have made their money, a wicked transfer of wealth from the believer to the soothsayer, from the prey to the predator. Seenappa paid twenty thousand, then sold his cow for nothing, in despair; he is minus seventy overall in this asset.  

So, ragi, avarekkai and mustard, all low-input, rain-fed and low-maintenance crops, and cattle don’t work anymore; roses, chrysanthemums, beans and tomatoes are the choice for they work occasionally with fluctuating return; these are high-input, pesticide-heavy games of chance, each harvest a lottery with the price a game of Russian roulette, for the revolver is loaded with debt.  What kind of economy is that?  

Ramappa sits on his haunches & looks away.  “I will not grow ragi anymore,” he says.  I don’t believe him, for ragi isn’t a crop, you see. It is an emotion.  

It is time to fix what is broken before that changes.  

Crypto, Idiots and Why Some People Need a Haircut

 On Dec 6th last year, I wrote, with a skip and a whoop!, that I had finally found a research methodology to study Idiots:
"I am deeply touched that millions of people are buying cryptocurrency. 
For years, I had been searching for a reliable way to measure the percentage of Idiots in a population.  The current population of gullible, naïve, inept, self-delused, infatuated, dense, obsessed, asinine, gauche, gumption less, bird-witted, desipient, unstable idiots on our planet is officially at about 240 million, which translates to about 72% of the population of the United States (do not read anything more into this). These are people (crypto buyers, not Americans) who wake up all animated in the morning and shout, “Is there a new scheme to defraud me?” and if they hear an echo, they do a funds transfer.”

In the last year since that deeply sentimental story, I had been rubbing my journalistic hands and eagerly waiting to do a follow-up breaking story on this.  And then this Giant Idiot who set up a crypto exchange thing called FTX goes and dirties the carpet now and the Crypto Idiots are exiting in droves, thereby nipping a promising career (mine) in the bud.  
ps: I said bud, not dud.  

Now think about this for a sec: Mr. Giant Idiot’s name is Sam Bankman-Fried and those private equity shipwrecks still gave him money.  I mean, would you – someone with common sense untainted by a finance education – give, like, three hundred million (dollars, not yen) to a guy called Suresh Bheja- Fried?  There’s a museum somewhere - Gallery of Pantheon of Idiots – with exhibits marked ‘DO NOT touch’ and in the room reserved for private equity, it says, ‘Specimens: Private Equity.  DEFINITELY Out of touch.’ because they have cotton wool doused in argemon oil between their ears and spend their days inhaling hydrogen.  

The reason I am so upset, troubled, distressed, is that this Giant Idiot has messed up my aspirations to serious Journalism because I had forecasted that, “The most heartening news is that the population of Idiots is exploding and new precious insights are a daily occurrence”, which forecast is now not even worth its weight in dogecoin or something.  

 
After all this FTX stuff, Bitcoin - which is for Puritanical Idiots only, a sub-species that believes in the Real Thing and which was worth Rs 37 lakhs last year this day - is now worth only 14 lakhs, in fake money.  So, because of this Bheja-Fried guy - who urgently needs a haircut, will someone please oblige? – all those who made heaps of fake money, have now got less fake money.  

So, for the sake of furthering that thing called Deep Research, please consider buying a few bitcoins as they slide down (to raise funds, you can sell your Rolls Royce on Olx. If the buyer has my name, it will be a coincidence, I promise). 

Two hands and One Mouth Don't Make a Threesome

Following some thought-provoking analyses, I have concluded that there are 19 things that irritate me most (this does not include people asking me how I earn money; that is part of the list of 24,987 things that irritate me second most).  Of the List-Of-19, the one at the top is the sight of someone digging his nose with deep introspection in the hope of recovering some lithium for his electric scooter.  But a close second is when cab drivers insist on doing more things at the same time than are possible with various parts of their (visible) anatomy.  Possible, that is, even for cab drivers, who are certified lunatics in general.
Now, I am all for multi-tasking: I can sleep and dream at the same time.  But that is about the limit.   In case you didn’t know, George Bush – that guy with the IQ of a desiccated coconut – could either chew gum or think and when he tried to do both, there was a chemical reaction and potassium permanganate fumes surrounded him (from the usual look on his mug, you could reliably conclude that other fumes surrounded him too, but Facebook is watching, so I will curb the urge).  And he ran the US for many years, which only proves that you don’t need to multi-task (no, no, he didn’t run the US, as in Usain Bolt, he ran the US as in doing things to screw up the economy and inventing weapons of mass destruction (ie, himself).  There’s a subtle difference.).  Look, even Quick Gun Murugan only shoots when eating paan and coming across a newly painted wall.  

But cab drivers don’t learn from these noble people (Bush, Quick Gun and me, that is).  Two days ago, a cab driver did the following at a traffic light, all at the same time: speak on the phone which was pressed to his ear with his right hand, eat something that had once been a paratha with his left, do a U-turn on the busiest road on the planet at 11 am and stare like a cross-eyed scowling owl at a guy on a bike.  This bike guy looked livid and  seemed to want to strike up a vibrant conversation, beginning with the profound familial Kannada term, Magane, which, when strictly translated means Son and when loosely translated does not mean I Love You, My Son. 
Now, here’s the crux: the biker was also multi-tasking; he had a parallel conversation going - on a phone hidden under his helmet - which is now a certified internationally-accepted, peer-reviewed, accredited behaviour of an imbecile crossed with a toothbrush (and there’s a new danger-keep-away logo being created for it).  But, of course, this was not enough multi-tasking for him – he kept adjusting a large bag on the petrol tank, had carefully chosen words for the cabbie, some of which reflected on his, the cabbie’s, ancestry, and returned hostile glances that were javelined at him by the rest of humanity who were waiting to cross.  
So, all in all, good clean fun and I am now of the revised view that, if people did not multi-task, if they did just one thing at a time (like the Germans), the world would be a decidedly dismal place (no, I did not say Germany) and, because there would be no re-work and repair and recrimination and recourse and reversal and returns, our GDP – which is nearly five trillion minus some change when fake news last came in - would suck (no, I really did not say Germany).