The disaster of 'me,me'

This happened in Mangalore as February 14 — now marketed as Valentine’s Day by traders to sell their wares — was approaching.

S Gurumurthy

Upset with public drinking by boys and girls, a freak by name Pramod Muthalik got mad. He got some of them in a pub beaten up like their parents would do, but unlike them. He had informed the media about his show so that the news cameras were in place to telecast the Muthalik action everywhere. Thus the Muthalik show was a joint venture between him and the media to keep away the state police, which could spoil the show. Predictably, the whole world pounced on poor Yeddyurappa who heads the BJP government in Karnataka for allowing Muthalik to take the law into his hands. The BJP, ever torn between its love of Hindu culture and its desire for a modern image, was greatly embarrassed. With the BJP in power in Karnataka, Muthalik knew the publicity value of his show. Had he enacted his theatre elsewhere, like when the Shiv Sena raided pubs years ago in Mumbai and Pune under the ‘secular’ Congress rule, it would have been far less noisy.

More. By just one mad act, Muthalik turned many, including a minister, into full-scale lunatics. Renuka Chowdhury, a minister of state, supported a “pub bharo andolan” to take on Muthalik, thus openly encouraging young boys and girls to take to mass drinking in public. And believe it or not, her portfolio is Women and Child Development. Came an even more mad response to Muthalik’s take on Valentine’s Day. “I support every kind of love, heterosexual, transgender, marital, extramarital”.

This is Arundhati Roy sermonising to youths. Why she left out incest from her catalogue of love is not clear. Now, take the secular media. It quickly equated pubgoing with individual rights, and held Muthalik as an offender against human rights. Evidently, the mad act of a freak Hindu in a distant corner of India is sufficient to turn the whole of secular India into lunatics. Now move away from this trivia to the danger to which Renukas and Arundhatis expose the nation’s economy.

The current Indian discourse on individual and human rights, which tends to smuggle in even gay and lesbian rights, apes the West. As India attempts to copy the West, it clearly misses the serious economic issues that confront West, thanks to its obsession with unfettered individual and human rights. Many in the West now seem to realise that continuously undermining the moral and social order has led to the present economic crisis. The West did not slide overnight. Beginning from the late 19th century, the Anglo-American West gradually moved away from a relation- based lifestyle to a contract-based lifestyle.

While culture and tradition govern relation, law and rights inhere in contracts.

And this move from relation to contracts became almost complete in the second half of the 20th century. With law overriding relations, even parents could not curb the rights of their wards once they legally matured.

It is the other way. If they acted against their wards, the law would punish the parents for child abuse. So contracts replaced relations, and rule of law substituted for moral order. To what effect? The rise of unfettered individualism and undefined feminism have led to the erosion of families and a rise in divorces, singleparent families, unwed mothers, lesbians, gays and almost the collapse of traditional families. Over 50 per cent of the first marriages, 67 per cent of the second marriages, and 74 per cent of the third marriages end in divorce in the US. Over 40 per cent of births are outside wedlock. Almost half of the families are headed by a single parent.

The number is more in most of Europe. It was seen as cultural erosion first. But slowly it has turned into an economic disaster.

The contract-based model undermined families and led to low or no household savings, high personal debt, credit card based living, outsourcing of household functions including kitchen work. The erosion in relation-based lifestyle soon imposed a huge social security burden on the state because the family mechanism that supported the unemployed, infirm, aged and the rest and the state had to step in to aid them. Thus the family functions were taken over by the state. The families were nationalised. The overburdened state consequently had to shed its traditional functions, like public works, and privatise itself.

The socialisation of family functions obviated the need to save for a rainy day and led to even lower savings. With the growth of individualism to the exclusion of kinship and relations, corporates and the state alike promoted unrestrained consumerism.

Result, some 110 millions US households have some 1.2 billion credit cards, almost a dozen cards per household.

As the people saved less and spent more, they got into trillions of dollars of private debt; and as the government spent more, it also ran into tens of trillions of dollars of public debt. The result is that the government is bankrupt and so households are insolvent. More, the US, the largest creditor nation of the world three decades ago, is today the number one debtor of the world, with $12.5 trillion of debt.

A quick survey shows this: all individual- centric economies are deep in debt; but nations more family-oriented and less individual- centric, like Japan, China, India, and generally Asian nations, account for over three-fourths of global savings; the individualist West lives off the savings of family-centric Asia. Today the West says that, in the present crisis only Asia, which has huge savings thanks to family orientation, can save the West, which has almost lost its traditional family lifestyle.

So the idea of unbridled human rights and unrestrained personal freedom that have led to social and cultural degeneration are increasingly seen as the cause of the present economic crisis. Weeks ago, Thomas L Friedman, a leading economic journalist, wrote in the New York Times that he had told those eating in a restaurant that they could no more afford to eat out and they had better cook and eat at home. But how will they cook and eat at home unless families are re-created? If they do, how would the US compensate for loss of employment if restaurants, which exist because households have closed their kitchens, shut down? There seems to be no solution within economic laws to the present crisis of the West. Amoral economics once yielded higher returns. It now yields negative returns.

Here Renukas and Arundhatis advocate unbridled individualism that has undermined families and morals and dynamited the economies of the West. Renuka questions the idea public morals. Arundhati advocates amoral living. Both seem unaware that an economy built at the cost of family and social morals, too collapses on the ruins of the morals it has brought down. QED: morality supports economics; lack of it ruins economies

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About the author:

S Gurumurthy is a well-known commentator on political and economic issues

Today's Woman

All the characters referred to in the below blog are fictitious and bear no resemblance with anyone living or dead whatsoever. Any co-incidence is purely co-incidental and unintentional.

Jahnavi gets up at 5 in the morning. She has got two hours with herself before her office cab will be arriving to pick her up. Before that she has to prepare the breakfast and make preliminary lunch preparations in addition to the daily chores. Some days will be more hectic when she might have to cater to a couple of e-mails as well from office. It will take an hour’s ride to the office and it is no less hectic after reaching there. Working with one of the top-notch software companies in the world, workload is never less. Being in the troubleshooting department, issues can come up any moment. Meetings need to be organized, juniors have to assigned work, boss wants the updates on critical issues and so many other issues needs to be handled. Jahnavi does all this with a firm resolve. The day’s work is wound up by evening and she has to take the evening 6:30 cab to reach home. In the evening’s traffic she will reach home by 8 or 8:30, and after reaching there she has to again cook. Her dad is waiting for her to return. She is fully exhausted and stressed out with the hectic day in office and also has a long list of chores pending before she can blink an eye. After cooking and finishing off in the kitchen she has to prepare for her GMAT and also finish some pending office e-mails. By the time everything finishes, it is almost 12 midnight. Tired she goes to bed. But sleep eludes her as she has got one more thing to worry about. She has got to think of something about Siddharth, her estranged husband, who is trying his level best to bring her back but she cannot stand him a moment in her life. Her parents, her cousins, some of her close friends, all have been trying to convince her to give Siddharth one more chance. But Jahnavi, who is completely shattered and disillusioned with Siddharth’s indifference, insensitivities and a one-sided relationship, is fighting her fight alone. So it seems it is like an agony being a woman, a working woman. We will come back to Jahnavi, but before that let us have a look at Kamini.

Kamini on the other hand, has just finished her college in Arts and is nowadays at home. She is the only daughter of her parents and has been pampered a lot since childhood and all her wishes have been fulfilled even before she sneezes. She has a younger brother as well. She is very arrogant, stubborn and ill-disciplined. Just after she finishes her studies, her parents find a match for her. A software engineer, working in an MNC in Bangalore and he is the only son of his parents. Jignesh is a dream son-in-law for anyone as he is a very family oriented person and wants to give his family nothing but the best. But Kamini has her own dreams, getting married to a software engineer working in am MNC, having a decent salary, owning a flat in his own name in Bangalore, all she could think of is a life full of luxury with no restrictions. She also had this confidence in herself and in her so called “Love Gestures”, that she would be able to convince Jignesh to live separately from his parents. Her parents also coaxed Jignesh beyond limits to achieve this goal. But Jignesh was a hard client. He would never do something that his conscience does not allow him to and strongly objects to Kamini’s and her parents’ unjust demands. They subject him and his innocent parents to mayhem of mental cruelty by not only maligning them socially but also going to the extent of filing false criminal cases against Jignesh and his parents and force them to come to a compromise. But Jignesh is a fighter and vows to fight back but does not give in. And so it may seem like it is an ecstasy being a woman as the law allows her to get as vicious as she wants and can have the confidence of making her unjust demands conceded to by shedding crocodile tears and unleashing a string of fabricated lies. But little does Kamini know that she herself is her biggest enemy. Time will teach this lesson to her.

So here we have two different women. Jahnavi who has given everything she could do to not only make her relation work, but also to prove that a girl can handle office and home simultaneously. And we have Kamini who has only known to lie and shed crocodile tears to gather false sympathy and trap Jignesh. Jahnavi knows very well that in the current legal system she can easily force Siddharth for a divorce, but she is a woman of substance and principles, who will not want her husband to go through legal hassles, and neither will she ever separate a son from his mother, “because a mother is a mother”. These are two examples of “Today’s Woman”, or is this title itself a misnomer. They are just examples of the different facets of the “The Fairer Sex”, and since it relates to the timeline of “Today”, may be it is convenient to refer to them as “Today’s Woman”. But it is not the woman alone. Kamini could not have done all this without her parents’ illegal support and faulty upbringing. Jahnavi’s parents also realize that their daughter is not happy with Siddharth, still they are advising her to re-consider him, for they know it takes a moment to break and years to make. And is it not the fact their upbringing is also reflected in the fact that Jahnavi, though disillusioned by Siddharth, still wants the divorce to go through peacefully. She is fighting with her parents for Siddharth’s sake. Hats off to Jahnavi and her parents. In spite of these agonies Jahnavi should take pride in her strength wherein she has put herself at stake for the betterment of people she loves. To me it is an Ecstasy being Jahnavi and an Agony being Kamini.