There’s the old Mulla Nasruddin story. Mulla goes to a barber. While the work was in progress, he perhaps nodded, and so suffers a sudden nick. In sharp pain, he mutters under his breath, “Damn.” The barber hears the word, but does not understand what it means. A barrage of abuse begins thereafter, with the barber shouting at Mulla, “You are a damn! Your father is a damn! Your grandfather…”
Now you know why I’m shorting Jim, soon after he says he is shorting India. Well, jokes apart, India can look very different when you see it from within, compared to seeing it from outside. (That applies to almost every geography, unless the bulldozing through homogenisation has erased the diversity of the place.)Most of us are in the first category, inside, and we are not going to run away from what we see, despite Jim saying that this is the worst country to do business in. And, to those who see India from outside, the warts and all show, quite amplified, as in ‘Slumdog Millionaire,’ but the truth, as Indians generally know, is far bigger than the Hollywood portrayals, a truth that grows on us, even as we have moved beyond the stereotypical depictions of the country as a land of elephant-rides and snake-charmers.
“I have new reasons to short India -- just read its newspapers everyday and you will see why,” fumes Jim. He was saying that to a newspaper guy, and I need to tell them both that I stopped reading print newspapers a few years ago. And, more recently, stopped watching news channels. No one is asking me, “The nation wants to know why?” It was a surprise, a few years ago, when more than once I heard in the US someone saying that he/she does not have a television at home. As the shrillness on the telly increases, it may become acceptable and fashionable for us to hear that comment back home, too, over time.
“The government goes from one mistake to another -- no matter what the controls are, no matter how much the debt keeps rising, Indian politicians are only looking for scapegoats.” Didn’t anyone tell Jim that politicians entertain us? Often, the opposite also happens, as the US has also copied, in the form of Ronnie or Arnie. In fact, we elect them and allow them to play out, while we get busy with life. For relaxation, there are always those spokespersons of the political parties to tune into; and they come out well when poked with menacing mics.“Every one year, they (Indian government) come up with more reasons for me to be less optimistic about that country,” frets Jim. “I am not sure if India has been really a democracy in the true terms -- from 1947 onwards, the opposition has had just one full term at the centre. The first five decades of its democracy, the centre has only seen a government led by a single party.” In comparison, the World Bank’s governance indicators rate Singapore highly on rule of law, control of corruption and government effectiveness, as Wikipedia informs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Singapore). But the page also adds, “It is widely perceived that some aspects of the political process, civil liberties, and political and human rights are lacking.”
Let me wrap up with something of interest to entrepreneurs: “There are millions of entrepreneurial, driven and smart Indians, but most of them want to be abroad because they know that unless they are involved with the right people in India, they are not going to be successful.” Would startups and entrepreneurs here agree with Jim on that?
And, to jog Jim’s memory, here is a video that I shot when I met him a few years ago, in Viviane Wei’s GalleryV, Bukit Timah Road, Singapore. Sound bytes that our incoming RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan may find relevant, because Jim says that the Indian central bank is better than the American central bank.