Author: Pramod Mathur
Publication: The New Indian Express
Date: November 24, 2014
URL: http://www.newindianexpress.com/columns/2014/11/24/Glimmer-of-Hope-for-a-Level-Playing-Field/article2537583.ece

As a TV journalist, growing up in the Nehruvian socialist India of 60s and 70s was a daunting task for my generation. So it was to raise two children in the post-Sanjay Gandhi 80s era.

As a young man in my mid-20s, the wide world was a beautiful place. Time and Life magazines were windows to the outside world. Romance was in the air. Energy was in abundance, so was hope. Then the realities came knocking at regular intervals. My father, supposedly an influential, middle ranking government officer, stepped in to help me raise a bank loan of `3,600 for a Vespa scooter to spare me the drudgery of travelling by a bus. Life became a bit easier until rising aspirations pushed for more loans to buy professional equipment even after becoming a veteran war journalist in the 70s.

By the early 80s, one was face to face with the real “licence raj”. After hundreds of rounds to scores of government offices and hundreds of forms, I sat across the table of a government officer. I explained to him why a licence to import professional equipment from Japan should be issued to me as a self-employed journalist to help me continue to perform my duties and earn livelihood. A smile or sympathetic understanding was not the order of the day in government offices those days. After much harassment, I was told those who had already smuggled in similar equipment, without a licence, were “entrepreneurs” and I should follow in their footsteps.

It took a little while for me to understand what the government officer was telling me. He was telling me to generate loads of black money, fudge my income tax returns. Buy foreign currency in black market, carry it on my person, fly out of the country on a false pretext, buy the equipment cash down across the counter, go past the custom officials bribing my way back to my life and continue to pretend to be an honest professional journalist. Perhaps a tall order for any young man who, as a child, was taught by parents to be an honest Indian and taught by the Gita to “perform your duties and leave all else to god”.

I can only say it wasn’t easy to live in the Nehruvian or the Dynasty era by defying the norms of governance ever compelling to compromise the dignity of a citizen. I know, and many others like me know, merely chasing banks in Switzerland and other countries for black money could only be considered an uphill task. Culprits generating black money are crawling all over the Indian marketplace and hiding within the cracks of the “rusting steel frame” of our bureaucracy.

What have I lost, and what has my India lost in these five decades? Above everything else, I lost hope. I retained the sanskar my parents and grandparents bestowed upon me and passed them onto my children. In hindsight, I think it was not a good idea.

Armed with Indian sanskar and knowledge of global society, it became increasingly difficult for my children to find a level playing field with their contemporaries succeeding without much effort. With crony capitalism and institutionalised corruption, clubs of pseudo-intellectuals with gift of the gab encircling every avenue of Lutyens’ Delhi, what chance has a young honest Indian to succeed?