FEE-GOOD IS ALSO FEEL-GOOD

When Dr Joshi arm-twists the IIMs, the institutes that are behind India Shining, doesn’t he dent his party’s constituency? Why is the party letting him get away with what is clearly an attack on all those who are feeling good? I found the answer in Tarak.

I bump into him at the Kolkata Book Fair. Tarak is no intellectual in search of brain fodder. He is just an ordinary Bengali out there, on a ritualistic visit to the carnival to pick up something inexpensive for his students. If one must survive on private tuition, one must adopt some retention policy.

Tarak is pleased to see me, the Dilliwallah, and demands a treat. On a vacation, I have been foolish enough to look for old friends in the afternoon crowd. Happy to find an acquaintance, I decide to walk down to a Park Street pub with him. He flinches a bit as I order prawn with our drinks. ‘‘We could do with some roasted peanuts,’’ he suggests. ‘‘These joints just rob you.’’

Tarak hasn’t changed much. His family used to stay in a small, rented flat in my neighbourhood till they moved out to the suburbs. Now he and his younger, married brother, a small-time broker, look after the family of soon-to-be six. Tarak’s ailing parents finally have something to look forward to — his sister-in-law is expecting.

Tarak had joined a courier company after graduation. He was retrenched and won’t talk about it. Now he teaches secondary students in batches of four. After our first drinks, we realise our stock of nostalgia is running out. He just nibbles at the delicious Waldorf snacks — his bhadralok ego making him conscious that he won’t contribute much, if at all, towards footing the bill.

After a ‘‘now what’’ pause, Tarak asks me what every journalist is supposed to have an answer for: How’s the country doing? Feel-good and all? Before I can think of some rigmarole to keep the conversation going, Tarak butts in: ‘‘Maybe it’s shining in Delhi and Mumbai. Kolkata, and these Marxists, are doomed.’’ I follow his fingers twitching. I wait for him and he blurts out: ‘‘Anyway, this IIM fee cut was good. What do they think? They will take the best jobs just because they have money?’’

His anger is not without reason. Between the two brothers, without job security or a roof of their own, no one’s asked how they run a family of six in about Rs 8-9,000 a month. Surely, the BJP can’t ignore the whining multitude before the elections. In fact, it doesn’t. That’s what explains the IIM fee cut.

In a democracy, the majority _ shining or not _ always matters most. If the BJP must win, it must also give the whining India something to feel good about. And when the whining India of the likes of Tarak sees the Shining India compromised _ IITs threatened, IIMs cornered and sundry other technical and B-schools’ fate hanging fire _ it gets a kind of a pleasure. Vicarious? The BJP won’t mind. It is much easier to engineer than to positively impress the whining India by, say, setting the primary education system right.

Don’t insult the BJP leadership’s collective PQ. The party isn’t just pampering Joshi’s ego by letting him carry on with an agenda. It must have found the method in the HRD madness handy.

Tarak, for one, has no soft corner for any party and he doesn’t relate to the official feel-good. But fee-good appeals to him. Not because he had ever fancied joining an IIM or IIT. He was never that sharp; and his immediate concern will anyway be to ensure good basic education for his soon-to-be-born nephew.

Nevertheless, Tarak relishes fee-good as kind of poetic justice: Good it doesn’t shine so bright when millions like me are left out of the ‘‘shining’’ party. Of course, it’s negative. But so is the very existence of the whining India. Trust Joshi, and the BJP leadership, to know how two negatives make a positive. Now only if that holds good in the election lab, too.