Agadhalla

There are some days that make you think.

I am sitting at Agadhalla village, at the base of Gopalswamy betta, at the edge of Bandipur Tiger Reserve.  A couple of hundred metres away is the main road to the temple atop the hill, a temple that is as breath-taking to reach as it is to behold.  The winding road to the top has panoramic views of the valleys below and the hills beyond, and sighting the odd elephant herd is routine.  Vehicles – the best of them – wind their way up, for the diety at Gopalswamy betta is revered by many.

Agadhalla is a couple of hundred metres away from the main road, but in every other sense, it could be on another planet. 

Every household has a story of woe to tell; often, it is the untold story that is vivid, evident in the expression of its denizens, in the deprivation that surrounds them, in the unimaginative homes that have been constructed for them by an uncaring administration.  The hamlet has two tribes – the Soligas and the Jenu Kurubas – and the friction between them is evident.  As the men and women engage in high-volume banter, there is little joy that you might sense and lesser expectation.   Even as the entire village delves deeper into debt, alcohol is the staple diet of the men - and many women -  in the evenings (as we have learnt to expect).  The homes have nothing inside; a few clothes and utensils, the odd, broken trunk in the corner, all of which reveal an unwillingness to seek a better life.  For the hundredth time, I ask the question: why? 

And as we – a motley group of students and, well, older students (including me) -  install a few fuel-efficient stoves in some homes and then wind our way to the primary school to speak with Guruswamy, the assiduous teacher there, there are more stories that await.  Of a child abandoned, of single-parent homes, of an older child who threatened to emulate his father and kill himself if forced to go to middle school.  

The relationship the hamlet shares with the forest is beset with tension: the Forest Department asserts that there is illegal firewood harvesting and the odd poaching of wildlife and when a Forester was speaking to me, the denizens stayed away.  Far away.  This village, he grumbled, is spoilt and lazy and wants easy work and easy money.  The Government gives them cheap food - 28 kg of rice, 5 kg of wheat and a kilo of sugar for just Rs. 120 - so they don’t really need to work much and now, by giving them free fuel-efficient stoves, he implied, you are spoiling them even more.  They see the forest as an exploit-able resource, to be plundered, not protected, he asserted fiercely.  I had to admit that he had a point.  But then, everyone did, everyone had a point in this forgotten village, in this place no one would want to understand.

Agadhalla is, be assured, just another tribal village around a National Park (Bandipur has a hundred and twenty three of them).  Another tick on my growing list of the tribal villages that I have spent time in around forests, searching for meaningful solutions.  Another tick on the growing list of an ailing, empty micro-society that is unhappy.  Perhaps angry.

Sitting in the sun that day and watching two little children on a tricycle, the dried flem from their noses seeming like a scar above their lips, their brown hair indicating protein deficiency, all of us asked the questions that have taunted me this long: why?  Why are we different from them?  

Why has it turned out this way, when we all know that the tribals were the original sustained protectors of the forest?  Why do they see the Forest Department as their enemy, when at least half their annual earnings come (or could come) from labour work done with the Department?  Why are they, as one of my students asked, unwilling to improve themselves, to seek work, to aspire for a better life, to yearn for a better tomorrow? And, most importantly, how can we catalyse change?  Change that preserves what is left of their culture, yet provides them respect and purpose and elicits from them, in turn, respect for the forest. 

That day, I returned to the metropolis, just in time to be at a friend’s place for dinner.   He introduced me to a colleague of his saying that I was ‘a guy who has quit the rat race to trample around forests’.  The colleague, mulled wine in hand, looked askance and with a mock shiver of his hand asked me if I was ‘an activist’. 

I don’t mind saying that I felt like hitting him then.

Seenappa buys a cow

Seenappa is amongst the most unassuming farmers you would come across in Javalagiri.  A thin, wiry man with a toothy smile and the easy stride that farmers have, his commitment to hard work is special.  Which is why I seek his labour as often as I can, to do the odd digging, clearing and planting that farms are always crying out for.  If there is one part of him that is possibly less endowed than it should be, it is the part well enclosed by the skull.  To add to this woeful deficiency of grey matter, is an inability to take decisions when they should be taken – a factor that has ensured his wife’s dominance over significant aspects of his life.

In July, Seenappa had exchanged a word with me on his monsoon plan; he would spend about seven thousand rupees on growing ragi on his land – this was normal -  and another fifteen on a cow.

“My wife…” he explained.  When I struggled to find the connection between female bovine and the better half, he elaborated, “it’s her decision to buy the cow.  It is milking now and we reckon that the profit in the next few months should be substantial.”  I tended to agree as a milking cow is generally (save for the onset of a nasty illness) a safe bet.  Farmers in these parts buy cattle that are a genetic mix of Jersey and naati (local) for, while this reduces the yield of milk, the animal is hardier and easier to maintain. 

Seenappa made his investments and, over the months,  kept me abreast of the progress.  The cow was doing well.  The ragi – failure of the monsoon notwithstanding – was ok.

When I saw Seenappa a few days ago, he grinned at me as he always does and, honestly, he looked a bit different.  Just what was different about him, I could not fathom and, as he began to chat, I lost that thread of thought. 

“How are your investments, Seenappa? The ragi and the cow?”

“Good, Sir,” he replied. “ I should get about twenty thousand from the ragi and its stalk sale (cattle fodder). But, Sir, this is only because all the effort is by me and my wife, with very little outside labour.” (which, incidentally is about two hundred rupees a day).  

So, a profit of about thirteen thousand rupees in all, for four months of regular effort, night vigils to prevent wild boar incursions and the risk of crop failure.

“And how is the cow coming along?”

He hesitated and then grinned (again, I noticed something different, but couldn’t place my finger on it).  “Sir, I don’t know about the cow. We spent about four thousand on the cow this season, and the milk has yielded about ten thousand.”

“That’s excellent!”  The analyst is me is calculating a return on investment (quarter-on-quarter) of forty percent.

“Yes, Sir.  A week ago, I was placing some feed near the cow when she, poor thing, shook her head to get rid of some flies.  Her horn took my tooth right out.” He lifted his gum to show me the now-dried stain; so this was what was different about him!

“Good Lord! But I suppose you are lucky it didn’t get further up……” Its easy to look at the brighter side, when it’s not you who has lost a tooth.

“Yes, Sir,” he readily agreed.”I went to the Government hospital and got it treated for free. But if I am to get a tooth to replace this, it should cost me a little more than all the profit that I have made on the cow this far.”

“That is dreadful!” I exclaimed. “So, what have you decided?”

“Well, we need the cow more than the tooth.” He answered philosophically as he walked briskly away, in that characteristic easy way of his, to dig another pit. 

MRI stands for My Radiant Inside

I just went through a scan called the MRI
Take my word: it isn't worth a try.
In the rarified world of academia
This chapter is 'An intro to claustrophobia'.

The sounds were from a broken hearse
Moving uphill in reverse.
I felt some needles and many pins
And nails on glass and sadistic djinns.

But when I went through the MRI
It was the bill that made me cry.

Say 'No' to the Demwe Hydro Project in Arunachal

In February 2012, the Hindu, carried two little reports, side by side, on its last page.  The first piece read “Films to help promote Incredible India campaign”, while the piece by its side read “Jayanthi overrules wildlife panel to approve Arunachal dam.”

The irony could not have been greater.

The first report is self-explanatory, so let’s go to the second.  Jayanthi Natarajan is the Union Minister for Environment & Forests, with a mandate to protect and preserve what is left of our forests.  She overruled a committee set up by the National Board of Wildlife that recommended the shelving of a proposal to create a dam across the Lohit river in Arunachal Pradesh (called the Demwe Lower Hydro Electric Project).  This committee, comprising respected wildlife experts, visited the site (which the Minister did not) and detailed the damage to the river and grassland ecosystem, as a result of the dam : fragmentation of wild water buffalo habitat, threats to the Gangetic river dolphin (which, by the way, is our National Aquatic Animal, declared so by Dr Manmohan Singh himself in 2010) and the Bengal bustard.  The ecosystem to be submerged is considered to be priceless and includes a conservation area of medicinal plants, according to the report.  The summary that I read of the report, mind you, did not detail the damage caused to the ecosystem during the construction or the social impact of a large number of construction crews descending on the small villages in the area.

This project is stated to generate 1750 megawatts of electricity, to be transmitted across the country to the power deficit states. About half – I repeat, half - of the energy will be lost in transmission.  The rest will be consumed by the growing business districts that now dot our urban landscapes- malls, centrally cooled homes, climate controlled offices and entertainment parks, none of whom have an idea of just what irreversible damage they are causing to our own collective future.

The Ministry’s defence was that “the spirit of the clearance system (which phrase itself is indicative of the Government’s preference – clearance) demands evaluation of trade offs for balancing the developmental needs with environmental sustainability, examination of the scope of mitigation and capacity of the ecosystems to withstand the impact.  The project, therefore, needs to be considered in the light of this overarching principle.”  In other words, rubbish.

Arunachal Pradesh is not just a part of wild India.  It is the best part of wild India, most of it unexplored, unknown to science and undocumented.  Yet, there are a hundred and fifty dams being built across Arunachal, each with a raison de etre that defeats common sense.  Each dam is a nail in the State’s ecological treasure trove, sealing its future.  My friends, who have spent time across the state, detail the exacting price being extracted: the destruction of livelihoods and forests, increased conflict between humans and humans on one hand, and humans and animals on the other, destruction of tribal culture and loss of their dignity.

Sure India needs power, but at what permanent cost?

Instead of involving the brightest technical minds in this debate and formation of policy, and incentivising energy conservation and dis-incentivising wasteful consumption (such as by paddy growers in Tamil Nadu, where power is free for them), and urgently replacing inefficient transmission lines across the country that create power losses and mandating large office and residential complexes to generate some part of their power need using solar energy, instead of  these sensible measures, the Government’s bureaucrats and vacuous- headed Ministers have moved with ferocity to generate hydro-electric power from every possible source, using their limited understanding of science to destory.   This is the arrogance of power, this is technology without conscience.

So, what can you do?

A great deal.  For starters, do not just take my word, read up on the project (and on the other projects sanctioned in Arunachal).  Then, if you are convinced, please speak up.   Write to the Minister at mosefgoi@nic.in expressing your dismay at her decision and requesting a rethink on the Demwe project.  You may mention that there are smarter options than hydro-power today and that we need to leave Arunachal alone.

Because if we see it as someone else’s problem, we forget Chief Seattle’s immortal words : do not forget, the World is round.

Just Another Chemistry Teacher

There was an air of expectation in the classroom; the rumour was that Chat was angry and would storm in from the Chemistry Lab any minute.  All eyes were on the connecting passage and the forty of us in ninth standard – one of whom was in a stage of advanced terror -  sat in silence. 

Chat, as always, did not disappoint.  He strode into the room with an air of irascible purpose, and I was immensely relieved that his ire was to be vented on someone else.  One of my classmates had messed something up and sat in front, quivering like a huge lump of freshly-set jelly buffeted by a monsoon wind.  Chat looked around for him, peering over his specs and spoke in that uniquely ascending nasal voice, his index finger jabbing the poor fellow’s chest, “I say, I will take you by the scruff of your neck and the seat of your pants and physically, do you understand, physically eject you from my class.” This was Chat’s favourite sentence and he would say it as only he could, in the most comical way, his academic stoop accentuated by the rapid forward-backward movement of his head, much like an ostrich in a zoo sizing you up.  His bottle-brush moustache would bristle and move in directions beyond his control,  and the face would turn a mild red, the ears a bright crimson. 

 Yet, no one in class dared laugh, giggle, snigger or show traces of a smile.  For this infuriated him and an angry Chat could go berserk, throwing things, getting into a fit and hammering students without any seeming control on his hands.  

Chat – David Chatterjee – was the Chemistry teacher for three generations of students from Josephs and the best in the business.  He seemed obsessed with the subject and, had he had children of his own, would probably have named them after acids.  He would spend a large part of his day lurking around in the Chem lab, with its myriad colours and smells, and plotting the creation of some arcane compound or digging into a grim textbook the size of a bedside table.  

In class, he would, with childlike delight and a trademark smile that showed just how much he was enjoying himself,  rattle off formulae and dictate notes with only occasional reference to a book, notes that were clear and precise.  Occasionally,  this dictation was interspersed with phrases from quotidian Shakespeare,  for he was as much a master at English literature as he was at Chem.  On one memorable occasion, arriving at a conclusion by the method of induction,  he quoted Sherlock Holmes as well, ”If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.  I felt a thrill, the one you feel in the presence of a Superior Human.

Yet, what made Chat unique, what put him in a class of his own,  were his peculiar mannerisms.  I am hardly knowledgeable about psychological disorders, but there is little doubt that Chat had every one of them:  prone to great mood swings and particularly suspicious of his students’ intentions.  If you were smiling when he hadn’t said something he thought funny, he took it to mean that you were smirking at him and  the index finger of the right hand would dangerously wag up and down in the warning sign of recrimination .  Once, in my four years in Chat’s class, I smiled at something the fellow next to me was drawing.  In an instant, Chat was by my side staring at me with a menacing furious glare through those thick specs that froze the bone marrow.   I shrunk back and put my head down, a figure of sorry contrition, until he wordlessly turned away. 

Another trademark was his humour, or alleged sense of humour:  when he smiled, it was at something he felt was blindingly funny, though the forty boys in front of him sat open-mouthed in puzzled silence for a few seconds before deciding to follow suit.  His upper lip would rise, much in the way an Army major smiles before the execution of a sworn enemy, and out would pop some comment that was, admittedly, very droll indeed.  When presented with a wrong formula by an unprepared (but shaking) fellow in front of him, for instance, Chat turned towards us and said, the upper lip rising a millimetre and the head rocking on its hinges, ostrich-style: ”I say, we have in front of us, a fellow who has redesigned the arithmetic of valency.  He has the hallmarks of a genius.” while the rest of us let ourselves go and laughed heartily.  Or the time when,  with a smile that was dripping with Chat sarcasm,  he mocked a fellow writing a formula on the blackboard:  “This man is unique in his ingestion of the recesses of mercuric oxide” or some such cryptic sentence in his own slowly-ascending recitation, while the left shoulder seemed to do a sort of waltz of its own - he seem to laugh most at that shoulder. 

On these occasions, the entire class would burst into laughter.  Poor Chat never quite realised that the laughter was because of his mannerisms, not at the student’s inadequate knowledge (in which condition, I assure you, he was not alone).   If he wanted to call you names, options such as ‘foolish’ or ‘negligent’ would simply not do.  He once called my closest friend a ‘troglodyte’, which had us rushing to the library in the recess.

Then there was the memorable incident when he forced each one of us to smell hydrogen sulphide.  Now, as you know, there are gases.  And gases.  And then there is hydrogen sulphide which, he emphasised with much delight, smells of rotten eggs (when it is in a good mood).  He somehow got it into a test tube and had every one of us take a short breath of it, our extreme reactions, even the odd attempt at retching,  giving his upper lip a fair bit of work.  It was Chat’s way of saying, “So you see what a career in Chemistry can do to you?”  Four decades after the incident, I have not forgotten the smell. 

Chat was the aloof sort. He stayed close to school and cycled to and from it; if you passed him by on the road and greeted him, he would nod briefly and continue on his way.  He had few friends, mingled very little with other teachers and, due to his bouts of anger and mood swings that both terrified and confused the students, was the subject of much gossip amongst us, the most common one being that he concocted his own consumable alcohol in the lab.   Everytime we entered his class, all of us would look for the signs on his expressive face and at the movement of the head.  For the formidable brain within was a mystery wrapped in enigma.

When the ICSE results were announced every year, all this would be forgotten.  For, without exception, every student would do well, indeed very well, in the subject, and no one would hold back their tribute to the man they feared, yet held in some awe.   When I finished my tenth and left school to join up at college in the accounting stream, I was relieved at having left Chat behind and sad at not taking up Chemistry further on, both emotions being a tribute to the idiosyncratic, yet brilliant, teacher. 

Two decades later, and after having taught for about thirty odd years,  Chat left the school, some say, in a bit of a huff.    Shortly thereafter, he dropped into school to collect some papers and, on his way home, was hit by an autorickshaw, while crossing the road. 

Across the World, from the thousands of students who had studied under him, there arose a collective groan at the news of his demise.  The tributes flowed thick and fast (my own little piece was titled 2KMNO₄ + 16 HCL =............ , the beginning of my favourite formula that I remember to this day), and in the years since, when we old students bump into each other across the seamless World and walk down nostalgia lane over chilled beer, Chat inevitably pops up as a topic of conversation and, often, imitation.  Much to the amusement of those watching, we stand up and recite the formulae for neutralisation, mimicking his stride as we do so, the stoop at the shoulder and the head moving up and down, the eyes twinkling with the passion for knowledge.  And we all realise that three decades later, we still remember a great deal of what he taught but have gladly forgotten his wayward, unpredictable tantrums.

For such is the power of a teacher. 

The Art of Keeping Up the Pretense of A Conversation With Someone Who Knows All About You, But Who You Wish Would Vanish

If you are a bit like I am – and in this respect, I think you are – you have probably classified yourself in humanity’s ‘Most Forgetful’ category.  It happens to me all the time: I am standing in some queue or the other or in the reception of a company and a fellow walks up, all 32 teeth on display, puts his hand out and says, ‘Hi Gopa, how are you?’.  As you see him walking your way, you know this is going to happen; its too late to run or pull out your self-defence weapon – a newspaper to hide behind – and, when he begins to speak, the only question on the otherwise-vacuous mind is ‘What the hell is his name?’ Actually, there is a second question: ‘Where did I see this fellow?’, which gets answered immediately with his ‘It was good to be in your session last week’ or some such thing.

Now, after years of such trauma, I have perfected my response and, when you have read this piece, you will acknowledge, with trembling folded hands and grateful, weeping eyes,  that I have done my good deed for the day.

Here’s the trick.  I have stopped trying to guess his (or, worse, her) name and instead focus on which part of India he comes from.  If he is from TamBram land, you can begin your reply in basic Tamil (much of which is picked up at the Chennai Railway Station) and now choose from the following four names that are most likely: Venky, Subbu, Anand or Karthik.  If, like me, you can make out a Mallu from a mile, use the second ‘Rule of 4’, if you think he is a Syrian Christian (which is about one-third of the population in Kerala, but one-sixteenth of the population of any software company).  His surname will end, I assure you, in one of the GMAT code – George, Mathew, Abraham or Thomas.  Feel free to choose from these and combine in any way, for instance, Abraham Mathew or George Thomas.  If your gut tells you this is not the name, start speaking in Malayalam.  When I do so, most Mallus excuse themselves, for they recognise torture when they hear it.  

If you recognise a trademark Bengali swagger, you are saved much of this process by simply addressing him as ‘Babumushai’, which was pretty much Rajesh Khanna’s only contribution to making our lives simpler.  For the rest of India, you can use Hindi with ease and, if the other person does not know Hindi and says so, remember to continue with even more difficult Hindi until he recognises some profanity and slinks away in shame.

I am not yet done.  If you are in the premises of a software company, there is a mean trick you can use, and it works all the time.  After a couple of initial sentences, draw his attention away to something on the wall – even if it is the ubiquitous clock showing the time in Monrovia – and then sneak a look at his prisoner’s identification tag, which companies impose on their people.  If you meet in a queue, say in a passport office, at an ATM or in a department store, take out your mobile, manufacture an apologetic smile and mention that your phone is in the silent mode, and pretend to take a call, which can go on until he makes an apologetic smile in return and moves away. 

I am still not done.  If the other person is in his teens or twenties, you can guess his name to be Aditya, or the female to be Aditi.  Most people in the sub-continent are now called one of these two names and it is a tendency that must be strongly encouraged using social media, flash mobs and Satyamev Jayate.  Imagine the ease of meeting someone like this and confidently shaking hands with a “So, how are you, Aditya?’ In fact, why don’t you try it?  If he replies with, ‘Sorry, I am not Aditya’, you can always say, ‘Well, from now on, you are….’ and get him to run from the scene of the crime.

For a long time, I have pondered on just why I am so forgetful with names.  My mother insists that her mother’s generation had a great memory and that, what with all the pollution, deteriorating quality of life and television, our generation is getting an early case of Alzeimer’s or brainstain or whatever.  This theory sounded a bit off the rack to me, so I came with one of my own.  Imagine, then, my delight when I read recently of the Dunbar number, that proves me dead right (or, let me honest, about a quarter right). 

The problem, it seems, is that we are meeting or corresponding with just too many people these days.  This guy, Robin Dunbar, is an Oxford Univ anthropologist, who, like others of his kind, spends most of his waking hours reasoning out just why humans make monkeys of themselves, when science did the reverse.  About twenty five years ago, he found that people tend to self-organise in groups of 150.  Humans evolved in groups of about 150 and most of us interact with about 150 other people. 

Now, this was just another piece of research which had no validity whatsoever, since he had not used Facebook.  But, he’s just done that! Yessir, what makes this absolutely sacred is that Dunbar has studied this pattern in Facebook communication as well.  This number – now known as Dunbar’s number and I am not making this up – is the upper limit to how many interpersonal relationships our brains can process.  

When I read this, I opened an Excel file and began to write down the names of everyone I interacted with, in a reasonably regular way.  When the list just about crossed 140, it was time to pop a cork out of a figurative bottle (and close the file).  So, why did Dunbar not win a big prize for this, a prize like the Nobel?  The Swedish guys are always giving it away to frizzy-haired scientists who chase neutrons in a lab, but ignore those like Dunbar, who make you feel really good about not having Alzeimer’s or whatever.  It’s high time that right thinking people like you and me have a say in just who gets the Nobel; awarding these prizes by election would do just fine.

I recommend, with the greatest emphasis, that you do the exercise I did and feel good about your memory.  If you score like I did, inform your Mum and post it on Facebook, Twitter and your online college group.  If you score below, much below this number, inform your Doctor.  If, that is, you can remember his name.

They happen only over a beer

They happen only over a beer, these discussions of philosophical import for which any form of circumspection or inquiry into human nature is elicited.  And there we were, Dilip, Vij and I sipping the lager of animated conversation.

Our topic of discussion moved on from one to the other, until we landed on the issue of ethics among Indian working ‘professionals’, or, to be precise, the absence of ethics amongst them.  The papers have recently been full of all that Kingfisher has been upto - except their planes, of course, which are not upto, but down to a dozen or so, most of which grace the tarmac with their unsolicited presence all day.  And then there was Reebok, where the senior leadership milked the golden goose (to mix up metaphors, much to an ecologist’s chagrin).  Closely followed by the CEO of Onmobile, whose entire goal seems to have been to make the company Offmobile for good.  There are dark rumours about Subhiksha’s CEO  that have now come to light (in which case, you could argue, the rumour would not be dark any more).  Multiple stories of sales heads of big – really big - pharma companies pinching samples meant for doctors,which practice itself is not high on anyone’s list of ethics, and then selling them in a market that they have made all their own.  These luminaries, of course, line the walls of a rogues gallery that is under perpetual construction, where the demand for space far outstrips its supply. 

‘What is it,’ Dilip asked meditatively over a Tintin Toit, ‘ that makes our managers this way?’ 

I have pondered on this question for the last few days, much after the beer wore off.  Was this always true? Is it our upbringing? Is it society?  Or is it that a meditative beer should be best avoided?

Until some years ago, money was just another factor in our judgement of another.  Was his integrity unquestionable?  Did he have guts to stand up to authority?  Was he skilled at his job?  Was he tough, but fair?  Did he carry himself with dignity? 

Of equal importance was his lineage -  the “he comes from a good family” bit -  or even his school (I was sent to St Joseph's for this reason).  As you think of this, reflect on the men and women you admired in the 1970s and the 1980s  (if you are old enough, that is).  Most of them were possibly not rich, certainly not by the standards of 2012, yet they were conscious of their image and down played their wealth.  Those who chased money all their lives were christened Delhi-wallahs, Banias or Marwaris, unequivocally.  A telling way to see this is to ask the question: who would have been a Chairman of any of the IIMs in the 1980s?  The answer is: most probably a retired public sector head or a distinguished economist (such as Abid Hussain), or possibly an academician.

Sometime in the 1980s, this began to change and, in the 1990s, wealth became the factor in judging a person. Usurious wealth that stock options generated in the US and, to a lesser extent, here, added fuel to a growing fire.  This was above board, but got many thinking of, not the means, but the ends. Cricket is a good metaphor: as the substance of test cricket gave way to one-days, and now T-20s, the mantra changed from style and technique to ‘let the runs come, no matter how they come.’ So too with money. 

The accepted yardstick now for measuring a person’s worth is by measuring his Generally Accepted Bank Balance (GABB).  If a guy in school with me, who got less marks than I did, is now worth a couple of hundred crores, surely I should be as well?  If not stock options, how about a quick bank heist or IPO (which is what many entreprenuers have done in the last fifteen years, taking public money off for themselves).  Or a fudging of shoe stock at Reebok?  Or a quiet diversion of some customer payments to an overseas account, with a later claim of ‘bad debt’?

And, now, for the clincher.  The Chairman of IIMB is Mukesh Ambani.  What academic input can he provide, other than to design a session on 'how to pocket a Government' or 'how to lose a billion dollars in a new business without really trying? 

Maybe it is the meditative beer.  Or maybe I am right.  In any case, since we can’t do a damn about it, how about one for the road?