Kyunki Shampoo Bhi Kabhi Simple Tha

Igrew up in simpler times, in the town of Mira Road, a place that merely existed as a banter point on whether it was a part of Thane or Mumbai. Mira Road received water at the same frequency I got a beating from my mom, i.e., once every three days. Plus, my forefathers came from Kutch. Clearly, my family was attracted to places with water problems the same way United States foreign policy is attracted to places with oil.

Water was so precious to us, that our minds went into Marwari mode when it came to spending it. Showers were alien to us, and the only accessories in our 4×4 bathroom were a red bucket and a blue mug. In Mira Road, water was heated by my mom on a stove. In Kutch, on a chulha. Most kids my age received pocket money. I, instead, received half a bucket of water and could use it any way I wanted. And my only friend was a green Medimix bar.

Medmix was the superhero of the soap world. It was all the Avengers rolled into one. Not only was it a soap, it also doubled up as a shampoo and anything else that you wanted it to be. There was just one soap to rule them all and it was all you needed to get rid of “dhul, mitti, ya daag”.

Shampoos had not made a grand shiny entry into our lives. I wasn’t even familiar with the concept of shampoos until my early teens. Back in the day, my innocent mind would judge the quality of a soap based on how much foam it could generate, and Medimix was just nailing it.

In the hierarchy of soaps, Medimix was the standard of the time, the vanilla equivalent in the ice-cream pantheon. If you were the upper middle class, you could afford colourful Nirma bars endorsed by Sonali Bendre roaming with lions. And the really rich would go for milky white Dove, or at least that’s what my social barometer told me.

As my parents started climbing up the social ladder, my morning rituals started getting complex. The first to penetrate our tiny cabinet was the shampoo that came along with the soap, the original OnePlus One of the world. I rationalised the thought in my head, “Fair enough, the soap is for the body and the shampoo is for the head.” But it wasn’t going to end at that, was it? Capitalism was at its peak and you were bombarded with choices, whether you wanted them or not.

Soon the generic shampoo had a sibling – the straight-hair shampoo. My sister purchased a special thingamajig that promised her hair without waves and I was warned to stay six feet away from it. I was more worried about accidentally using her shampoo than popping a casual paracetamol.   

My sister was not the only one falling for all this froth and farce. Dad switched to  a hair-fall shampoo. I found it ironic, at first, that he believed he could fight the Gujarati genetics of a balding patch with a yellow fluid that looked like pus. Mom purchased one for keeping her hair “black and strong” (whatever that means) and before I realised it, there were twelve types of shampoos, eight types of conditioners, four types of gels, and six types of body washes overflowing from our humble sunmica cabinet.

Our changing tastes in shampoo called for a change in the cabinet – the only bit of renovation our one BHK apartment has seen. Today the shampoo cabinet is overpowering the shoe cabinet, and we’re considering a menu to keep track of what’s what.

Now every time I go for a bath, it feels like I’ve entered an examination hall of cosmetic care. The other day, I spotted a “Lux Strawberry and Cream Silky Shampoo”, which caused a minor existential meltdown. Is that meant to be eaten or to be used on the hair? What if I use a shampoo that is not for my hair type? Will I ruin it forever? I don’t want to end up like Donald Trump. What are the steps to be followed? Is it soap first, then shampoo, and then conditioner? How much time do you have to wait between using the two products? What if you mistakenly use the conditioner before the shampoo? Will I have to spend a minimum of 45 minutes in the shower? Am I even allowed to use Halo, which is an egg-nourishing shampoo? I’m a vegetarian, what does the Gita have to say about this?

I needn’t have worried so much.

Eventually, it took me only a few days of getting used to when I finally succumbed. Yesterday, I was all set for my luxurious Sunday shower – body wash, shampoo, and conditioner all lined up… when the tap ran dry. I’d to make do with half a bucket of water and frantically started searching for my beloved Medimix. Sadly, it had already been replaced by some fancy bottle of gunk.

Loan-Waiver Schemes Got 99 Problems. And Implementation is One

Earlier this year, over one lakh farmers from across India reached Delhi in March, demanding a special session of Parliament to address the agrarian crisis. The protesting farmers, showing incredible grace and dignity, spent the night at Ramlila Maidan before marching towards Parliament on Friday. Describing it as “one of the largest congregation of farmers” in the capital in recent times, the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC) pressed on its demands for loan waiver and remunerative prices for their produce. 

Waivers are par for the course in our country. The Madhya Pradesh CM Kamal Nath, after winning a hotly contested election, announced loan waivers in his state. We give them more often than Duterte hands out the death penalty. In the last year alone, Uttar Pradesh announced a debt waiver of ₹36,400 crore, Punjab of ₹10,000 crore, Maharashtra of ₹30,500 crore, Rajasthan of ₹8,000 crore and HD Kumaraswamy’s Karnataka government waived off ₹34,000 crore.

It is easy to see just how far loan waivers have solved the problems of our farmers, the most disenfranchised of Indians. The protests across the country are a result of our systemic failure to address concerns in the agriculture sector, pushing farmers to a corner. Organised protests are one way of registering their distress, an attempt to stake a claim to their basic rights of existence and dignity. On the extreme end, of course, the only solution left to them is suicide.

As one state granted waivers, protests erupted in other states, hoping to reap similar benefits. As state after state goes to polls, the demand for farm-loan waivers is only expected to get louder. With the fear of paying for it with a political defeat, governments cave in.

But what makes good political sense, rarely makes for good moral and economic sense.

When we’re ill, we listen to medical opinion by doctors because they’re specialists in the field. When it comes to economics, we need to pay attention to what the experts have to say. “The culture of loan waivers must end,” said former RBI Governor and media darling, Raghuram Rajan in 2014. It was a sentiment that was later echoed by his successor Urjit Patel last year. Even the World Bank commented on the issue in January earlier this year, claiming, “Debt waiver is not a good way of supporting farmers.”

These recommendations, however, seem to have fallen on deaf ears.

It’s the fashion of the times to negate any achievements of the previous government, but at least we can learn from their failures. Not only did a loan-waiver scheme implemented by the Manmohan Singh government in 2008 fail in its long-term objectives, but it also failed to provide short-term relief to farmers. It only marginally affected the number of suicides. The reason is simple: Loan-waiver schemes suffer from 99 problems and implementation is one.

There is difficulty in identifying the beneficiaries and distributing the amount. Seldom do the benefits of a debt waiver reach the right people at the right time, in the right manner. According to the 2008 Comptroller and Auditor General report, many eligible accounts weren’t considered. In other cases, beneficiaries who were not eligible were granted waivers. There are also fundamental question marks over coverage, how many people actually qualify, and can benefit from these schemes.

And then there is the problem that loan waivers only look at institutional credit – but the government is easy to deal with, private loan sharks are not. According to the 2012-13 NSS-SAS report, about 39 per cent indebted households acquired credit from non-institutional sources like moneylenders who charge exorbitant rates, which are outside the purview of debt-waiver schemes. Loans are taken from multiple sources, they are taken for multiple reasons, including non-farm activities.

But those are only the surface problems, the issues with loan waivers are much deeper.

Loan waivers create moral hazards; they discredit farmers who were able to repay their loans fairly on time. It’s a little like telling students after an exam that they could have copied and passed. It is unfair on the students who worked hard and attempted it fairly. Secondly, whenever loan-waiver schemes have been announced in the past, we’ve seen rich farmers default on repayment despite being in a financially viable position to do so.

What we fail to grasp is that when a loan is waived, it is not erased from the face of the Earth. It’s just that the burden of repaying the money shifts from the farmers to state governments. And with the time it it takes the government to pay back the principal loan amounts, the burden shifts to the bank. See what’s happening here? The good old game of relay.

For a system that’s already struggling with huge NPAs and stressed assets, this only makes things worse. When banks don’t get back their money on time, not only does it affect their capacity to lend money to others and fund various large-scale projects, they become selective in their lending of money to the agriculture sector in the future, knowing it’s a possible red flag. If I know that lending money to someone could result in a potential loss, I might just do away with it and save myself the headache. It affects the overall long-term credit culture of the banking system.

As money goes out from state budgets to pay these loans, it goes from a kitty that was supposed to fund some other project. As dads told us, “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” and a sum that was allocated to fund a highway, college, or hospital will now be used to waive off loans, crippling infrastructure demands of the state.

Again, all of this trouble would be completely acceptable if the waiver did indeed solve the problem forever. It would be acceptable even if at least improved conditions for farmers so there are no more suicides. But is that really happening?

The government is only able to waive off the farmers’ current loans instead of empowering them to be able to pay their future loans. What happens if we face the same problem again next year? Another drought? What if farmers borrow and default again? Will there be another protest? Another loan waiver?

Loan waivers are a short-term remedy, and – unpopular opinion alert – a quick-fix with the aim of political gain rather than an attempt to fix deeper structural problems that engulf the agriculture sector. Instead of waiving off their debts and sending the economy into a spiral, it is infinitely better to ensure farmers become capable of repaying the loans themselves. When this happens, farmers do well, and the economy does well. Instead of adopting this paternalistic attitude, we need to push for their self-sufficiency and profit. It is a goal towards which all efforts need to be made.

The tougher but more tenable solution to this is to strive toward increasing agricultural income. It includes attempting to tackle long-term and difficult problems related to supply chain, trade cartels, land reforms, modernised farming, irrigation, wastage, crop productivity, insurance, and warehousing among others. In his Union Budget speech, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced a remuneration price 1.5 times higher than MSP, which turned out to be an empty promise on closer examination.

We have known these problems for a long time. We have also known the solutions to them for a long time as well.

My guess however, is that loan waivers will continue to be the story. The problem with these structural long-term reforms is, they don’t help you win the immediate election. The effects will be seen in a decade from now, when a government may or may not be in power.  

Loan waivers have been carried out by the Congress, by the BJP. The only thing they help in solving, is the problem of voting a party to power and soothing a protest. But these short-term fixes will never be able to solve the acute agrarian crisis we are staring in the face right now. To really bail out the folks who put the food on our plates, will require a more humane rethink.

PFA: My Dead Vacation

Artificial Intelligence will soon be out there to take our jobs. But as the popular Internet meme goes, machines can’t take our jobs… if we become machines.

And so, working crazy is primed and stress has become a currency to flaunt. Taking a breather is for losers, real men take a paracetamol and email the project file at 3 am on a Saturday night. The gulag-like slavery and peanut-sized paychecks are so mainstream that if you leave office at 6 pm, people ask you if you’ve taken a half day. And do you dare ever ask for leave?

Going on leave is so demonised in Indian office culture, that employees feel guilt and shame even asking for a few days off — about as stressful a question as asking your boss for his daughter’s hand in marriage. He looks at you with the same level of love Arvind Kejriwal reserves for Narendra Modi; the tension could be cut with a knife.

Every leave application turns into a leave negotiation that would put a sabziwala outside Malad station to shame. “Why do you need three days for your sister’s wedding? I’ll give you three days for your wedding. Chal, two days extra I’ll give even for honeymoon hahaha.” You pretend that was funny because you have a job to keep, but you know what’s coming next. In a velvety soft tone comes the dangerous question that’ll decide the fate of your “vacation”.

“You’ll carry your laptop, right?”

This right here, ladies and gentlemen, is the word of the devil. You can judge the evil in the framing of the question itself. It’s not asked in a polite and neutral tone – Will you carry your laptop? That’s where decency and niceness lie. But ain’t nobody got time for that in desi office culture. The question already assumes that you will carry your laptop. That’s what normal people do right? Go on a trip to Bali so they can work on spreadsheets from a beach. Right?

The other 364 days of the year, you’re an incompetent buffoon who can never get anything done and is an embarrassment to the organisation. But on this one question, if you respond in the negative, you will be subject to a long barrage of “how deadlines are important, how your work is important, how we operate on a tight schedule in a competitive environment”. Yes, everything is important, except your honeymoon.

In Indian corporate offices, there is work in office, there is work at home, and then there is carry laptop on leave. It is an attempt to squeeze some work out of you even when you’re on a camel in the middle of a desert safari or in an underwater staring match with a dolphin. There is something rooted in basic common sense and logic that bosses fail to understand, which is that working while you’re on leave is not leave. It is the textbook definition of work. And work ≠ vacation unless you’re a Yatra.com tour manager or a fashion blogger.  

You’re always told there’ll be no work, you need to carry it “just in case”. They always make it sound sweet and innocent, maybe you’ll have to just update a file for a couple of minutes or forward a mail, it’s going to be nothing really. It sounds like merely a formality, akin to linking your Aadhaar to your bank account. But we all know how that one ends. You will receive a message every 12 seconds and eventually you’ll want to kill yourself in a foreign environment.

Carrying your laptop on a vacation also has wider psychological impacts. The first time you take the laptop out of your luggage bag on your vacation, you feel inexplicable guilt and shame like the first time you uploaded a washroom mirror selfie. But then you get used to it. Even friends and family travelling with you keep continuously mocking you for being a fucking loser, like Hrithik Roshan from Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.

If you ever think your work from a remote location in Himachal in the middle of a trek will ever be appreciated, you’re in for another thing. In India, whether it’s kids, students or adults, we don’t believe in being appreciative of anyone’s work. It’s always important to point out mistakes and the one time your network wasn’t available in the middle of an important meeting. They’ll never understand, it was just Airtel having that time of the month.

There is no other way to get out of this situation, except a straight-up refusal. When it comes to the office laptop question, always deny. Not only are you allowed leave as per company policy, you are also allowed statutory leave and the whole point of leave is to tune out work, chill, and relax the fuck out. Regardless of what managers try to tell you, no one dies if an Excel file isn’t finished or a mail doesn’t get sent when you’re away for six days. Besides, knowing that you’re on leave, it’s their job to assign it to someone else and get it done.

After all, the hint of a manager’s role lies in their designation, it is literally their job “to manage”. He gets a salary that is three times yours — let him also justify his paycheck.

Control + Alt + Delete. Shut down.

Should Women Cricketers Get Equal Pay? The Economic Argument

The Indian women’s cricket team is on an absolute tear in the ongoing Asia Cup, demolishing opposition with an authority that rivals world-beating sides like Viv Richards’ West Indies and Steve Waugh’s Australia. Despite proving for the umpteenth time that the quality of their game is on the same level as their male counterparts, a yawning gap exists when it comes to how they’re rewarded. The prize amount for winning Player of the Match, an honour bagged so far by captain Mithali Raj and Harmanpreet Kaur, is a paltry 250 USD. In comparison, the Man of the Match in the 2016 men’s Asia Cup final, Shikhar Dhawan, took home 7,500 USD. When it comes to getting a slice of the monetary pie, women cricketers are still getting the stepchild treatment from the BCCI.

In March this year, BCCI announced new contracts for both the men’s and women’s cricket teams. A few of Kohli’s boys would be earning 14 times more money than Mithali & Co. To sum up the irony, they decided to make the announcement just a day before Women’s Day.

The pay gap between men and women players of the Indian cricket teams needs more scrutiny than merely comparing final contract figures of male and female cricketers. Not only is it a gender issue, there are also economic realities of the free market attached to it. It is important to understand why these differences exist, how the BCCI – generally regarded one of our most corrupt admin bodies – has failed, and what they can do to correct course. And there’s a lot that the richest sporting body in cricket can do.

Why do male cricketers get paid so much more than their female counterparts?

Think of men’s cricket as a chain reaction, where one thing leads to another. Male cricketers attract bigger crowds and large viewership on TV. These in turn attract big sponsorship and branding deals, which result in higher revenues being generated from the game, which then enable these fat cheques and huge monetary contracts for male players. One of the reasons women are paid less is because – sadly – women’s sport makes less money.

It brings us to a difficult question that needs deeper introspection than just a knee-jerk Twitter outrage. Why do people not follow women’s cricket with the same ardour and in the same capacity? If we don’t watch the games and follow the team’s progress with the same level of obsession that we followed Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma’s wedding, can we really blame sponsors and advertisers if they don’t see a similar potential in the women’s game? The very people who want equal pay for women players haven’t adapted to the game. Are we, then, not part of the same problem?

Some arguments have been made about how women’s sport isn’t as interesting. To which, I call bullshit. One only needs to recollect the enthralling Olympic final between PV Sindhu and Carolina Marin, or thousands of other exciting contests across sports day in and day out. To say that men’s sport is 10, 20, or 40 times more interesting to demand that kind of a pay difference, is a ridiculous argument that holds very little ground. Besides, it’s not true. Think about the success of the Women’s Big Bash League in Australia, that has been an economic success and witnessed record viewership in 2017. The 2015 Women’s Football World Cup final had more viewership in the US than the men’s football world cup final.

The market and the opportunity is right out there. If only we – viewers, the BCCI, sponsors, and advertisers – knew how to take advantage of it.

But we don’t, because women’s cricket has been primed for failure. This isn’t an equal opportunity market at many levels, and the pay cheque is only a small part of it.

This is where the BCCI can make amends. Women’s cricket will catch up with the men’s game only and only when the body decides to invest in it commercially. This can’t happen piecemeal. It has to be at a pace similar to the men’s game. They have to ensure infrastructure and quality wherein women don’t have to work part-time because sport is not a viable full-time profession. Senior domestic players make around ₹30,000 a year, which is ₹2,500 per month. You probably pay your house help a little more than that. How can the players be expected to opt for cricket as a full-time career?

It is quite appalling how little Indian women’s players are paid compared to their international counterparts in Australia and England. Cricket Australia covers its domestic cricketers under central contracts and also came up with the Women’s Big Bash League. Even the England Cricket Board has pledged £3 million for a Women’s Twenty20 Super League.

This is an important time to emphasise, yet again, that the BCCI is the richest sporting body in the cricket. In the entire world. What gives?

The solution lies in another chain reaction. If the BCCI decides to invest in the game, women players can think of it as a full-time profession. Which in turn means, that the quality of the players and the overall game will get better. We’ll see an influx of fans and sponsors that the women’s game truly deserves.

India keenly followed the 2017 Women’s Cricket World Cup, with the final attracting 19.53 million impressions, making it the most watched women’s sporting event in India. It’s a no brainer that we love cricket in India, and the women in blue made us super proud. After the end of the tournament, captain Mithali Raj floated the idea of a women’s T20 league in India, saying that the “time is right”.

The BCCI keeps paying lip service, making public statements about doing more for the women’s game. Now, however, the time is right for them to put their money where their mouth is. Equal pay will follow.