Random Thoughts - Pattabhi Sitaraman

A few years back there was a huge uproar in Kerala when a bank decided to sell the non performing education loan portfolios to a private asset management company. Neither the borrowers nor the public have any moral right to obstruct the sale as it was a commercial decision by the bank on the quantum of NPA to clean up the balance sheet. If the borrowers were frightened with that development, they should have paid back the loan.  The media, politicians and the public all - voiced their concern in the bank's decision to sell the NPA portion of the educational loans to a private AMC.  The genesis of the problem is something that require a deeper understanding.  This write up is an attempt to look into various actions of the governments at various levels over the years which brought things to head. The University education was mostly a state owned and state funded one with most of the universities set up by the state till about 1980s save for a few in every state. ...

There was a video of a child of about 6 to 7 years old doing its homework of probably class 1 or 2, under the strict admonition of its mother doing rounds in the social media for some time. The child was crying uncontrollably and and the video went viral and was viewed by not less than a 100,000 people.  The comments by many on the video were empathizing with the child and running down the mother not in the video.   Let us go back to about five or six decades when most of us would have been in primary school as in the case of the child in the video. In the early sixties, the village panchayat school was my place of primary education.  I still remember the first teacher Kasturiranga Iyengar who made me tell the story of Dakshayani in  the class.  He was a resident of the house next to ours in the village and was privy to all my tantrums in the house.  Thanks to my great grandfather I was proficient in story telling of characters of various pu...

The judicial system left behind by the British is such that it is highly time consuming and the judges allow any number of adjournments leading to such delays that by the time verdict is announced, people might have forgotten the original case itself.  The joke that normally shared in this regard that my great grand father filed the petition and now I am in my seventies fighting the case and yet to be decided though the original litigants had all died, holds good especially when it comes to a case involving a political person.  In a country where it is easy to target a politician and slander him/her with all sorts of allegations, it is seldom a political person is convicted.  If at all s/he is convicted by a court, the political person has enough muscle and money to go to higher courts and extend the lease of life outside. In case of a few political persons the time taken to decide on the case is so long that in the meanwhile they get elected to the legislature and take...

The Brahmins in Tamilnadu a state of India form hardly a small percentage in the overall population of the state. But their contribution in many fields, be it art,literature, cinema, music, medicine or technology had been immense which helped the state become numero uno among the states in the country during and immediately after independence.  The state produced some of the best administrators who passed out of the government schools and went onto become great administrators thanks to their sheer dent of hard work and discipline. The changes in the political scenario during the second half the 1960s saw the parties professing pure dravidian outlook in policy and practice coming to power.  Though the parties that came to power on the plank of anti Hindi agitation and food scarcity, slowly started showing their true colours and their staunch anti b rahmin attitude came to the fore.  The parent party of the ruling party in the state in the early 1970s, went about its ...

Long back I read a joke which is somewhat like this: The bright students in the class, sitting in the first bench get good marks and become IAS, IPS and IFS officers. The not so bright last bench students know how to tackle the problems of life and become politicians and they become the masters of the bright students who are now IAS IPS etc.  The ones who droped out of school become Godmen, who are visited by both the bright students and not so bright students in school. The recent happenings in the country somewhat reinforce this thought. The politicians, irrespective of their creed, colour and party affiliation have to remember the age old saying that those who swear by the sword get killed by it.  We have innumerable examples of the same from history and of even recent happenings.  Jarnail Singh Bndranwale was put up by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi to oppose and neutralise  the Shiromani Akali Dal which was gaining ground politically.  Every on...

China had been trying to get a foot hold on the Arabian sea for a long time now. It had been wooing Pakistan only with that in mind and it succeeded by getting the development of the port of Gwadr in Pakistan in the Baluchistan Province.  There were reports of the previous government in Srilanka entering into agreement with China for the development of the Hampantota port and the Colombo port.  With the change in the government in the country, this agreement has come under review and most of the operative parts relating to use of these ports as port of call by the naval vessels had been rescinded.  Like wise the port on the estuary of river Irrawady in Myanmar and the port of Aceh in Indonesia had fallen by the wayside though China assiduously cultivated the regimes in both the countries. All these were done with the sole aim of encircling India in the sea from all sides. The Chinese Navy is bigger and has more submarines than what Indian Navy has. Though both the natio...

Let us go back a little in history.  Narendra Modi had taken charge as Chief Minister of Gujarat on 7th October 2001 after Keshubhai Patel.  He was the first time member in the assembly and was elected the leader of the party to become the CM.  His years of administrative experience in the government machinery was a big zero and the only thing that went for him at the time of his becoming the CM was his ability to lead people and bring them together on a platform.  He was a staunch RSS worker and a committed nationalist. He was handpicked by L K Advani to lead the campaign during the times of state elections in 2001 in both Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh.  As Keshubhai Patel did not handle the post earth quake scenario in Bhuj properly the party asked its general secretary Modi to be the star campaigner and lead the party to be the CM candidate.  Thus a history was made by Modi becoming the first time member of the legislative assembly and a CM in that entr...

India on becoming an independent nation in 1947 had drafted a constitution and the same was accepted in the parliament which made the country a republic. The country had embraced the secular ethos as found in the practices of its founding fathers both Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru and scores of others who lived and died by the mantra of secularism.  The country had benefited largely due to this particular trait in the initial years of its independence but the same has become a burden of cross on the shoulders of the country over the years thanks to the relentless changes in the way the same had been viewed and acted upon by many successive governments in the center and state with little or no long term view at all but only short term political gains in the process. With the split in the congress and the emergence of Indira Gandhi (though the latter preceded the former as she was responsible for the split), the style of governance by the central government ha...

The elections to the Rajya Sabha from Gujarat for three seats had just been concluded with all the drama and money and political power in display.  ON seeing the way in which the ruling party and the main opposition party in the parliament went about the recently concluded elections in Gujarat for the three RS seats leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. The conduct of the "neutral body" of election commission leaves a lot to be desired. Wind back to the bye-election to the lone assembly seat R K Nagar in TN where from the former CM was the elected member which became vacant due to her sudden and untimely demise.  The elections were announced within the stipulated period and the parties had already spent a considerable amount of money in campaign; the state also had spent money on preparing the election material, getting the officers for the election booths, getting required safety arrangement in place etc.  Thanks to the IT raid on the premises of a key minister in th...

The government during the last three years had been consistently reducing the subsidy in almost all spheres of economic activity. The major impact was on the subsidy on fertiliser and the same on the cooking gas and petroleum products as the change in these affect the people at large and there is a huge political cry to restore status quo ante.  Very recently there was a report in the media that the government is planning to do away with subsidy totally on cooking gas and with that in view had advised the OMC to increase the price of cooking gas at INR 4/- per month per cylinder of 14.20 Kg of cooking gas.  This created a furore in the parliament with the opposition parties demanding that the subsidy cannot be removed and to be continued. The Minister of Petroleum had given his assurance in the parliament that there is no plan to remove subsidy for the cooking gas. Similarly in the food security act enacted by the parliament a few years back, it was decided that the essent...