Of Being Zero-savvy
It is too sad. Most Indians have forgotten most aspects of their cultural roots, roots that gave them credit for many things and gave them some respectability as carriers of a great tradition. Thanks to the Indian Space Research Organization and its perspicacious pilots at the helm, today Aryabhata is a name that is well preserved in the minds of at least the school children and votaries of quiz programmes. This genius, who lived in the 478--550 AD in the court of the Gupta emperors, was mathematician-astronomer non-pareil. That he was probably born in Kerala is an idea that opens up other possibilities, surely. It is the words of Bhaskara I, who about 100 years later wrote a commentary on his masterly treatise 'Aryabhatiya' that sums up his achievements:
"...Aryabhatta is the master who, after reaching the furthest shores and plumbing the in-most depths of the sea of ultimate knowledge of mathematics, kinematics and spherics, handed over the three sciences to the learned world."
And as the world knows and accepts, Aryabhata was the one who invented the grand concept of the zero and unleashed it on the world.
The power of zero has never been more apparent to the non-savvy guy on the street than now. Aryabhata himself had stated that his work 'Aryabhatiya' was composed 3,600 years into the Kali Yuga, when he was 23 years old --which corresponds to 499 AD. That tells us we are into Kali Yuga by about 5,000 years plus. Not bad when you notice that at least one good has come to pass. The average person, whether in India or elsewhere, I am sure has his/her difficulties when it comes to tackling numbers with more than, say, half a dozen zeroes. Perhaps in a fitting revenge of the past, in India 5,000 years into Kali Yuga, we are now faced with the mammoth task of digesting numbers with God alone knows how many zeros. Surely we are going to need all the blessings of these past masters if we are to make head or tail of all those zeros. Aryabhata, Bhaskara, Varahamihira and the great minds of the past are having the last laugh as we grapple with the 'genie from the bottle'.
Of Black and White
The airwaves are saturated with zeroes. The print media, for once, is foolishly ignoring their advantage and playing a low-key game. Whether it is a few lakh-crores or maybe a few crore-lakhs, it just doesnt make all that difference when you listen to it on the TV channels. On the other hand, just imagine the impact in print of 1 followed by, ahem, a whole procession of zeroes. Who bothers if you can count? But the sheer impact tells you that it is HUGE. English is a poor language and has no adequate word to describe such a size. Perhaps India should, along with 'curry' and 'verandah' and 'pucca', contribute an apt word too to describe figures of such grand proportions.
Be that as it may, let us take a closer look at all these zeroes and what goes with them. It is the latest revelations about the wealth stashed away in Swiss and other banks. These days when even diehard Socialists are shouting themselves hoarse about the need for wealth creation, what is wrong salting away some wealth in a bank or two. The trouble is, they say this is all "black". Ah, the colour of money! The government in its wisdom does some exercises every March-April ("...beware the Ides of March..." Google that and be scared!) and announces a financial 'road map' for the country and its citizens to follow. This involves sums with Aryabhatiya scales of zeroes, and in the end they append what is termed 'deficit'. The common man doesnt understand much about that, except that the government is spending more money than it has. Good, we think, for them; but we pay for it all with runaway inflation and price rises and all that. In brief, the government approved financial 'tamasha' is supposed to be all in "white", despite the existence of the deficit. Anything that goes beyond that and is not accounted for is all grouped under "black".
What the average Indian thinks of black money is that it is the paltry sums made by the average trader and businessman by defrauding the government of some taxes. If the average tax is say, ten percent on goods etc, it will take a long time and millions of tranasctions before a trader could amass black money totalling lakh-crores. But what shook the man in the street has been the pronouncements of the Honourable Judges of the highest Temple of Justice of this land, perhaps the last sanctuary of the common man in this country. They speak in strong terms of the plunder of the nation to the tune of lakh-crores by the 'kings of black'.It sure paints a totally different picture. And the average citizen naturally has a tendency to go by what the Justices say than by the words of Kapils and Sibils, blue eyed boys though they might be. Here is money that has been plundered from the law-abiding, tax-paying citizens of this country and has been salted away in safe havens outside our country. And the money amounts to...forget it, you wont be able to make sense out of the zeroes; just take it that it is many times more than what the government earmarks for our national budget. Oh my God!!!
Of Treaties and Testosterone
Even if you are the type who believes only half of what you hear, definitely this is going to make you think. Suppose we get all that money back into the country, you are not going to need any loans from the World Bank or the ADB, who are all basically Shylocks in expensive suits after their pound of flesh. If we are to believe that what has come out now is only the "tip of the iceberg", then every single Indian is going to end up with a tidy sum in his name in a government-sponsored bank account. No, not in Switzerland or in Germany or in that unpronounceable place called Lichten--what, but in our own Nationalized banks that had weathered the recent economic tsunamis with aplomb.
C'mon, quick march, let us get those baddies and get all that money that is rightly ours. Not so fast! Says who? Says our own beloved PM, the FM and others who are "in the know of things". What, may one ask, is the problem? It is the treaties, my dear sir. Treaties, the dictionary tells us, are agreements between two States or Sovereigns relating to mutually agreed and mutually beneficial things/situations etc. So if we have a treaty with say, Mauritius, for trade, what we will expect is that we will agree to imports and exports between the two countries that will be to the benefit of both. If the treaty is about the extradition of criminals and such like undesirables, again the conditionality of mutual benefit is there. Only a nincompoop would think of inking an accord that would benefit only the other side.
And talking of treaties and Mauritius, one is reminded of the treaty that India signed with that nation sometime back. The then FM was at the time waxing eloquent about the gains that India would reap as a result. But after all these years of runaway inflation and what not, the average Indian is yet to be persuaded to see some of its advantages, except, if we are to believe the naysayers, that it has served as a conduit for ill-gotten 'black monies'. Whatever is the stuff of treaties and diplomat-speak, one thing is certain. Treaties, national or international, should never overstep the dictates of our legal system and the laws of the land, which are supreme. One cannot have two different laws applicable. The 'umbrella' should be our laws. Period. If some idiot in some ministry has put his signature on a piece of paper without paying due respect to the established laws of the land so as to circumvent its intent and effectiveness, it is time he was sent to his "father-in-law's house" posthaste. Dont we have a Law Minister? A Foreign Minister? And a Prime Minister, who are all paid handsomely to look after all these affairs?
In India, to do the business of govenment as per the dictates of Indian laws, all one needs is a conviction of your just stand and some testosterone in your system. It is a documented fact that testosterone levels decline with advance in years. Still, one doesn't suspect that the collective testosterone levels of India have fallen to such abysmal lows as has been apparent now.
Of Crime and Punishment
Recorded history is full of attempts at reconciling crime and its punishments. Googling for such terms would bring in results that would curdle your blood with the gruesome nature of some of those punishments. Ah, but we who live in "civil" societies need not quake in our boots or chappels. Already the FM and the government is thinking of some 'amnesty' for the 'blackies' if they promise to declare their cache and bring back some as 'legit white' into the country. What a lark! Make a cool 1,000 crore as 'black', park it abroad and get some good interest too for a while, get in touch with the Financial Ministry honchos and tell them, "Look here I wish to help the country, what is going to be your percentage?" You strike a deal and none could be wiser, all for the price of a "Legit-white" stamp from the Ministry! Hooray!!
On second thought, I was struck by some of the things that had escaped me in my hurry to digest all those zeroes. We are still a Republic--arent we reminded of that on this Republic Day! I will leave it to your memory of those civics lessons in school to spell out what a sovereign republic means. We have our laws and we have at least one of those Four Pillars of our democracy standing erect with not much damage. The Romans were perhaps the first who codified laws and naturally, they included various crimes and punishements too. The punishment meted out in those days for what could be termed broadly financial misdemeanour was attachment of the property and exile of the accused. We are on safe ground there. We are in the Indian soil and ruled by our own laws and the legal system, and safely out of reach of any 'treaties' or such bogeys. And the 'accused' are all holders of Indian citizenship and they have vast holdings in India. So what is preventing the ponderous machinery of the government from going to work on extracting what is due from these clever sultans of 'black'?
I dont think we have to ask the FM or even the PM or any other dignitary to do this "dirty work"; it is infra dig. We have minions enough in the Income Tax and other ministries who are 'at home' doing such work a per the laws of the land. Just give them the names, if you wish, in a sealed cover, and before you could say 'Jack Robinson' (or, if you are a patriotic Indian, before you could say 'Kapil Sibal'!), you would hear the sweet sound of money tinkling into the nation's coffers.
Yes, why are we not doing that ASAP?
That is the 'lakh-crore rupee' question in the mind of every upright Indian on this R-Day.
And I wouldn't take issue with anybody if s/he were to think of R-Day as Reckoning Day!
Republic Day salaams!
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PS: Here is a useful link if you are bothered about buttressing the Four Pillars of democracy with a fifth one:
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