The BJP-led NDA alliance is feeling good after winning the recent Assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. And they want the entire nation to feel good so that they can reap the harvest in the mid-term Lok Sabha polls they are gearing up for. For argument’s sake, let’s assume there is a feel-good factor. Sniff hard and you may trace it in the big cities. Even then, it is only palpable among the rich and powerful who can make sense and profit of the stock market figures. Beyond these pockets of wealth, lie the vast tracts of rural India, still grappling to ensure the basics of life. Economy is growing, so is unemployment. Even the President, at the recent FICCI AGM, expressed concern over growth without job opportunities. He felt that urban facilities were not being transferred to rural India. That’s why he suggested PURA (Providing Urban Facilities to Rural Areas). The sensex has crossed the 6000 mark but labour force is declining. The domestic industry has taken a severe beating in the last five-six years. There is no effort to bolster agro-based industry or the cottage industry. In fact, the Government’s policies are often counter-productive. For instance, when the steel industry is looking up after a long slump, efforts are on to reduce duty on imported steel.The NDA is welcome to rely on its gut feeling while testing the poll waters. History, however, is never short of lessons. Not so long back, after pursuing reforms for five years, the Narasimha Rao government was also carried away by a similar feelgood factor. Rao went to the polls and lost the prime ministership.Please handle Indians with careFor the record, not a single Indian citizen has figured in the US list of terror suspects so far. But security officials at American airports are either ignorant of this fact or deliberately choose to ignore it. While the Americans have every right to safeguard their country against Islamic terrorism, they shouldn’t ill-treat Indians just because they happen to be from South-East Asia. In recent days, there have been a lot of complaints from Indian travellers who were subjected to stringent and rough screenings at different US airports. They force you to take off your shoes and jackets, rummage through your neatly-packed luggage and stop just short of unleashing a sniffer dog on you.This mindless security mania crossed all limits recently, when former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and former President K.R. Narayanan were subjected to stringent security checks at a US airport. The accompanying Embassy staff tried to point out that the VIPs were individuals of international repute, but the Americans wouldn’t listen. If this is how our former prime ministers and presidents are treated, one can well imagine the plight of thousands of Indian students, professionals and tourists. The External Affairs Minister should immediately take up this issue with Colin Powell.Doubting the geniusA genius so often meets our unreasonable expectations of him that we get used to expecting more. In the process, we tend to forget that even a genius cannot quite escape the law of averages. We all know Sachin Tendulkar is a genius. But we forget that he is also one of us. So when he didn’t score in the three tests Down Under, we suddenly began to doubt aloud — how the year has been barren for him, how his feet didn’t move like before, how there seemed to be a hole in his mental armour. A number of critics and commentators promptly decreed that Sachin had lost his magic, that he was a spent force.Cricket is a funny game and when Sachin slammed a 300-plus unbeaten personal scorecard in the next test in two innings, the same wise men conjured up scores of innovative phrases like ‘‘Kohinoor Hira’’ to describe the resurrection. Public memory is short, so the experts could get away with their rather quick turnabout. But they must realise that no player, Bradman included, could escape a bad patch. To doubt the ability of a man who has scored 65 hundreds and over 20,000 runs in international cricket just for not coming up trumps in a handful of matches is preposterous.Strangely, many of these experts themselves were performers of exceptional repute. Don’t they remember how they went through slumps in form in their respective careers?
