Fee-good is also feel-good

Tarak is pleased to see me, the Dilliwallah, and demands a treat. On a vacation, I have been foolish enough to look for old friends in the afternoon crowd. Happy to find an acquaintance, I decide to walk down to a Park Street pub with him. He flinches a bit as I order prawn with our drinks. 8216;8216;We could do with some roasted peanuts,8217;8217; he suggests. 8216;8216;These joints just rob you.8217;8217;

Tarak hasn8217;t changed much. His family used to stay in a small, rented flat in my neighbourhood till they moved out to the suburbs. Now he and his younger, married brother, a small-time broker, look after the family of soon-to-be six. Tarak8217;s ailing parents finally have something to look forward to 8212; his sister-in-law is expecting.

Tarak had joined a courier company after graduation. He was retrenched and won8217;t talk about it. Now he teaches secondary students in batches of four. After our first drinks, we realise our stock of nostalgia is running out. He just nibbles at the delicious Waldorf snacks 8212; his bhadralok ego making him conscious that he won8217;t contribute much, if at all, towards footing the bill.

After a 8216;8216;now what8217;8217; pause, Tarak asks me what every journalist is supposed to have an answer for: How8217;s the country doing? Feel-good and all? Before I can think of some rigmarole to keep the conversation going, Tarak butts in: 8216;8216;Maybe it8217;s shining in Delhi and Mumbai. Kolkata, and these Marxists, are doomed.8217;8217; I follow his fingers twitching. I wait for him and he blurts out: 8216;8216;Anyway, this IIM fee cut was good. What do they think? They will take the best jobs just because they have money?8217;8217;

His anger is not without reason. Between the two brothers, without job security or a roof of their own, no one8217;s asked how they run a family of six in about Rs 8-9,000 a month. Surely, the BJP can8217;t ignore the whining multitude before the elections. In fact, it doesn8217;t. That8217;s what explains the IIM fee cut.

In a democracy, the majority 8212; shining or not 8212; always matters most. If the BJP must win, it must also give the whining India something to feel good about. And when the whining India of the likes of Tarak sees the Shining India compromised 8212; IITs threatened, IIMs cornered and sundry other technical and B-schools8217; fate hanging fire 8212; it gets a kind of a pleasure. Vicarious? The BJP won8217;t mind. It is much easier to engineer than to positively impress the whining India by, say, setting the primary education system right.

Don8217;t insult the BJP leadership8217;s collective PQ. The party isn8217;t just pampering Joshi8217;s ego by letting him carry on with an agenda. It must have found the method in the HRD madness handy.

Tarak, for one, has no soft corner for any party and he doesn8217;t relate to the official feel-good. But fee-good appeals to him. Not because he had ever fancied joining an IIM or IIT. He was never that sharp; and his immediate concern will anyway be to ensure good basic education for his soon-to-be-born nephew.

Nevertheless, Tarak relishes fee-good as kind of poetic justice: Good it doesn8217;t shine so bright when millions like me are left out of the 8216;8216;shining8217;8217; party. Of course, it8217;s negative. But so is the very existence of the whining India. Trust Joshi, and the BJP leadership, to know how two negatives make a positive. Now only if that holds good in the election lab, too.