Tolling times

This time too Mumbai seems besieged when I landed there on the morning of 12 February this week. While entering the city one could feel hoards of palpably glittery policemen around toll booths even as early as 7 am in the morning. They were seen checking all incoming vehicles and questioning random commuters. Later that day news broke out that Raj Thackeray had been detained after the orchestrated attacks on toll booths had reached alarming levels

While Raj Thackeray may have political compulsions on mind to queer the pitch for the forthcoming Loksabha elections, the Toll Booth issue raised some questions in my mind at-least

1. It is a common perception, one that is gaining strong currency to me is that Toll booths are a organized form of hafta vasooli (Extortion Agencies) that has gained a cloak of credibility and acceptance because of Govt’s ineptitude and mishandling . Sample this - in the last 5 years there is no visible improvement in the driving condition between Bangalore & Belgaum. In fact it has worsened due to numerous diversions due to incomplete road works. Yet the Toll collected between the two cities has risen from around Rs.250 to almost Rs.500 for cars today. How is that possible? Why is nobody questioning this?

2. I can understand the compulsions of PPP (public private partnerships) engagements to involve private sector in running toll booths and the economics of charging user fees to recover the cost of providing such services. But is the state giving a free hand to private enterprise which by its very nature is a vested enterprise as opposed to the collective public interest that the Govt represents? It appears so. If the Govt can bungle on larger & more important assets like Coal and spectrum so spectacularly what credibility does it have in managing such smaller assets?

3. Can you arrive at a definitive conclusion as to how much such utilities are to be charged and the time frame for recovery that fair & equitable to all parties - the private enterprise that builds such facilities, users like us who utilize it and the Govt which facilitates ? No again if one could look at the case when Chicago city authorities leased its street-parking meters for $1.157 billion for 75-years in 2008.

So what Raj Thackeray seems to be doing to highlight this issue is pretty much like that of Arvind Kejriwal - UNCONVENTIONAL. It strikes a chord somewhere . And he has succeeded in keeping the Govt on tenterhooks going by what I saw in the city that day. Hope it helps in addressing the issue.

Spare a thought to the flogging stock

Last week was spent in making several trips to the nerve center of government activities in Bangalore - the MS Building, which is conveniently housed adjacent to the famed Vidhan Soudha. Here in the labyrinths of numerous entry gates, floors and corridors you will find the tentacles of what is a humongous State govt machinery.

Almost 17 years back i was here, surrendering my Govt job offer as a Gazetted Probationary officer and at that point i had felt that i had turned my back to this building once and for all. But strange are the ways of the world and i found myself frequent here albeit in a different role.

I was making presentations on several topics to the Karnataka Evaluation Authority which is the nodal agency apprising many govt schemes, programs and implementations. In a way it acts like a mirror to the Govt on its activities and helps it being effective.

In the process of making presentations to a panel of senior officers drawn from various dept on our approach plan & methodology in carrying out third party consultation services I had dug deep into subject matters ranging from Village development Scheme (Suvarna Grama Yojane), Land development & cultivation Program (Suvarna Bhoomi Yojane), Apiculture development scheme, Oil Palm Development, Culture & Heritage preservation.

While each of these is a vast subject that would need several reams even for a summary description and coverage, my point of this blog article is to emphasize the following
 

• Govt schemes in their right earnestness seek to touch the lives of people who are the farthest from the mainstream. Implemented properly this can bring qualitative change to the remotest corner of the country where poor & marginal farmers still live substandard lives
   
• For all the criticisms the Govt attracts, the sheer arch of its involvement spanning public policy making, implementation & administration is staggering. The issues on hand are complex and there are no simple answers (contrary to many of the media news channels like us to believe )
   
• Many a times the Govt has to choose between the devil & the deep sea. Either way its damned for e.g., Scaling up Palm oil cultivation and production is urgently need of the hour to bridge the yawning gap between edible oil consumption and availability in this country. Palm Oil cultivation generates 4 times the yield as conventional crops and is suited for Indian agro climatic conditions. However it is ecologically destructive as countries like Indonesia have found the hard way. The international price situation is also volatile and Govt intervention in procurement through price fixing mechanisms has backfired in the past. But Govt cannot sit back & watch as the supply gap is only widening.

So let’s spare a thought to what is commonly a flogging stock.

6 Management Ideas that Kejriwal has ushered with his AAP

1. Disruption – AAP and Kejriwal showed us how disruption can be ushered in politics. With a non existent political machinery (read cadre based organization), almost no or limited funding & backing and with no specific patronage or lineage, all perceived entry barriers, his party emerged from being a mass protest movement to a potent political force in the shortest possible time. He changed the paradigm for the way election is fought & won in this country

2. Market Timing – If the Delhi electorate could be looked upon as one large market of votes, Kejriwal was its brilliant marketer. He had the pulse of this ‘market’ from the time he saw the response to Anna Hazare fast against LokPal bill and wasted no time devising a ‘strategy to market’ which practically took less than a year to convert the votes to power.

3. Innovate : Kejriwal innovated on ‘people engagement model’ in politics. His concept of reaching out to the masses through ‘Mohalla Sabhas’ and having their say in local development was a big leap in devolution of power . Similarly reaching out to people for small contributions instead of institutional funding to fight elections was a novel way to reach out and connect with people

4. Focus - Kejriwal rallied all his energy and forces around one powerful theme - to fight corruption  at all costs. He cleverly identified himself with Anna Hazare in the ‘anti corruption movement’ and in way used the movement as a springboard to politics. Later he attacked the main political parties with a series of ‘exposures’ to strengthen his agenda. The corruption ridden Govt at the center and states were easy fodder for him and he had his opponents on the Mat even before the fight began.

5. Branding – by choosing the broom as his political symbol, he conveyed a powerful visual metaphor of cleaning up politics and the establishment. With his anti corruption agenda firmly implanted in the political consciousness of people, it was time to represent it with a simple yet powerful symbol.

6. Differentiate - ‘positioning’ in management parlance; he  set a publicly accountable behavior by refusing the perks of power such as security or official bungalow. By traveling in public transport or in his own modest car, and by taking oath in a public ground in front of the crowd, he has resorted to novel ways in differentiating himself and his party in the minds of the people.

Django Unchained

This is one gooood MASALA movie I came across in a while. SONYPIX premiered the movie last Sunday and boy! Quentin Tarantino had me fixated on this movie from the word go. Even though i tuned in a while after the movie had started.

This is almost the flick every dreamy eyed movie-goer aspires for. A story of two African slaves (a couple actually) separated in the slavery era, Jamie Foxx plays the swashbuckling hero (Django), the eternal romantic madly in love with his wife (Broomhilda) and determined to find her at any cost.

He pairs up with  Christopher waltz (Schultz)  a German Bounty Hunter, and the two catch up on some business with the bad arses in the American badlands from Texas to Mississippi . Tarantino is a master of the bluster and the bombastic; the gun fights and the blasts are spectacularly his stylistic flourishes. The guns of the historical period depicted in the movie could have hardly reloaded that fast or were anything but accurate. But who cares as long we are on a Tarantino groovy train, right ?

Leonardo DiCaprio marks entry as a delectable plantation owner (Calvin Candie) interested in Mandingo fighters and slave trade. He has broomhilda as the household slave but does not realize that the duo have planned to hoodwink him with a plan to get her out. His shrewd butler, played by Samuel L. Jackson (his make up was pathetic i must say) soon finds it out and the plot then unfolds and races to a fiery climax.
 
A wildly enjoyable movie with crackling dialogues, remarkable soundtrack and awesome cast. The movie is wildly comical too, there is a hilarious scene involving a bunch of a negro lynch mob followers (pre-KKK) discussing how difficult it is to see out of their hoods and to ride at the same time!! In another, Tarantino comically blows out Candie's widowed older sister Lara Lee out of the frame with a mere gun shot.

Go watch the movie if you have fallen in love with oldies like "Once Upon a Time in the West" or "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" or have been mesmerized by Tarantino’s earlier flicks.

Finally a word about the director - he is the Steve Jobs equivalent of the celluloid . Reservoir dogs, Pulp fiction, Inglorious Basterds & now this …. phew!! gotta hand it to this guy.