Tipping point

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes, argued Shakespeare’s Portia before a Venetian court.

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes, argued Shakespeare’s Portia before a Venetian court. She might have been sitting on the bench of the Bombay High Court, which recently ruled that the baksheesh of Rs 2.73 lakh paid by a Maharashtra sugar factory to sugarcane workers to ‘incentivise’ them in the harvesting season was a valid business expense.

The court has thus legitimised the baksheesh, which in this region at least, is regarded as a gratuity, or tip, or bribe, paid to expedite service. It has also gone by terms like palm-grease or speed-money. India, of course, is an old hand at speed money. Ronald Segal in his 1965 book, The Crisis of India, calculated that “it took 30 days for a file to travel from one table to another in Mysore”. A decade later, Indira Gandhi pleaded, apropos of the ‘trusts’ that a Mumbai politico had set up in her name, that “corruption is a global phenomenon”.

The common or garden variety of baksheesh is the Diwali baksheesh. Diwali is a time when everybody does that little bit extra in anticipation of the baksheesh. When the postman knocks, he holds out his right hand for the tip, even as he clutches a bunch of week-old letters in his left hand. Your phone could go dead around Diwali time, and the linesman would turn up with a glint in his eye to set things right. But why blame him alone? MPs in Britain as well India have been caught accepting bribes for raising questions in Parliament.

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The size of the tip is a delicate matter. Tourist guidebooks naively lay down its quantum as 10 per cent of the bill. If the tip is too small, the recipient will make the giver feel small. If it is larger than expected, it will make other givers comfortable. In 1993, the Sultan of Brunei thought nothing of giving a ‘small token of appreciation’ — amounting to $ 170,000 — to the general manager of the Cyprus hotel in which he stayed during the Commonwealth Heads of Governments Meeting. But then, remember, he was estimated to be the richest man in the world at that point!

Incidentally, the Bombay High Court has left the quantum of baksheesh an open one, leaving it to the assessing officer to define what is ‘excessive’. I suppose we have to be grateful for that because not many among us can lay claim to the fabled riches of the Sultan of Brunei.

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