| | | Good morning! | | After almost two years, I think it’s time to change the format of this newsletter, and also the name. For the next few years (or months; it’s more a function of audience boredom than personal preference), I will focus on five things that took up my mind space (as a person and also as an editor; it’s quite difficult to separate the two) this week. | | One The lathi and the bulldozer are as much symbols of new India as shiny expressways and the Unicorn-of-the-month are. And all four are integral components of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s appeal — sometimes to the same audience. The lathi was introduced by the British in India sometime in the late 19th century. For decades, they were made in Ghorgat in Bihar’s Munger district — and urban legend has it that people of the village stopped making the instruments of oppression after Mahatma Gandhi made his acceptance of a lathi conditional to that. Munger is now the hub of a thriving country arms trade, with foundries and workshops capable of ripping off sophisticated small arms design. Police forces around the country issue lathis (or their modern-day counterparts made from fibre-glass) to their personnel, who think nothing of using them freely and indiscriminately; indeed, the lathi-strike has become a commoditised act of violence to such an extent that most people, strikers and the struck alike, think almost nothing of it unless the injuries are grievous, which they sometimes are. The lathi has been in use for almost a century-and-a-half, but the bulldozer has joined it in recent years — a symbol of instant, almost vigilante-style justice, usually without following due process. To digress, no one can really quibble about the use of bulldozers when due process is followed, and where the objective is to demolish illegal constructions or encroachments (both conditions have to be met), although the same thing cannot be said about the use of lathis — flogging isn’t a punishment under the Indian Penal Code (and fortunately so). Yet, the use of both lathis and bulldozers are usually accepted by the victims, sanctioned by the state, and cheered by much of the general public. Indeed, it’s become fashionable for chief ministers to be associated with bulldozers. Yogi Adityanath, who popularised (if not started) the trend is Bulldozer Baba; Shivraj Singh Chouhan is Bulldozer Mama; I wonder what Manohar Lal Khattar will be. | | Two Have Indians become better at macroeconomics in the past nine years? Have they become more passive? Or, with fuel, gas, and now tomato prices at record highs (and the rupee far lower than it was in 2014), has the Opposition lost the ability to shape the narrative? One school of thought is that the middle-class doesn’t care because they are happy with the government for other reasons. A second is that given the circumstances — Covid, the Ukraine war, the climate crisis – we haven’t done all that badly, especially when compared to other countries, even those with larger economies. A third is that the government’s welfare push (including significant strides in the delivery of basic services) has offset angst over prices. And a fourth is that there is deep, but silent unhappiness, and that it could show up during elections – like it did during the Karnataka assembly polls. I do not know the answer, and it is within the realm of the possible that each of this applies to a section of Indians (after all, within India is a Sri Lanka — in terms of population — with the per capita income of a United States. My colleague Roshan Kishore responded to my query by sending me the translation of a short story by Manik Bandyopadhyay titled Why Didn’t They Snatch and Eat? | | Three  The monsoon session of Parliament that ended on Friday will be remembered by history as the one that saw the passage of laws that will affect, among other things, our privacy rights and the environment, but most people can be forgiven for thinking that the session was all about deciding who controls Delhi and the ethnic conflict in Manipur. Opposition parties, keen to get the Prime Minister to speak on the issue, eventually resorted to a no-confidence motion, then walked out 97 minutes into his speech, which eventually lasted 133 minutes. To be fair to them, he had not spoken on Manipur till then, although did speak on the state after. As expected, PM Narendra Modi used his speech to set the state for 2024 – promising to make the Indian economy the world’s third largest in his third term, and challenging the Opposition to bring a no-confidence motion against him in 2028, just like he had, in 2018, challenged them to bring one in 2023. As HT pointed out in an editorial, while the no confidence motion “may have achieved the political objective of showcasing Opposition unity, perhaps the country would have been better served if the opposition parties had instead come together to discuss and debate some of the important legislations that were passed by Parliament”. | | Four The government’s decision to restrict the import of laptop computers — the enforcement has been deferred till later this year following an outcry — has provoked charges of protectionism. To be sure, one half of the justification proffered — that it was done in the interests of national security – doesn’t really make sense. But the other – pushing the cause of local manufacturing — does. In spades. If implemented well, this could well see a repeat of what happened with mobile phones in the country. India may have missed the soft-manufacturing wave, but it still has a chance of jumping on to the electronics manufacturing one. | | Five  It’s difficult to explain what Americana is to someone who doesn’t listen to a lot of (good) music. It’s basically music that is linked to America’s roots — and therefore includes folk, country, bluegrass, and, of course, blues. There are many bands whose names are associated with the genre, but to my mind, there are two, one contemporary, one not so, that captured the essence of Americana. The older one, interestingly, was not American, but Canadian (by city of origin and the nationality of most of its members). It was called, simply, The Band. As The Hawks, they backed Ronnie Hawkins; then toured with Bob Dylan; before finally launching themselves as The Band in 1967. Their first album, Music From The Big Pink (the cover painting was by Dylan) is, to my mind, the best album of all time, narrowly edging out The Grateful Dead’s American Beauty, and comfortably scoring over The Beatles’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. Robbie Robertson, their lead guitarist and moving force — pretty much the hero of the film Martin Scorsese made on their farewell concert The Last Waltz — passed on this week, and I’ve been spending a lot of time listening to The Weight (apart from other Band songs), not just by The Band but also by others. The song is as much an anthem as the Dead’s Ripple is.  | | | | Were you forwarded this email? Did you stumble upon it online? 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