BUDGET BROUHAHA

Today the Indian Finance Minister presented the Budget in the Parliament. Predictably his own party members thumped their tables in support (in feigned comprehension for they hadn't read the document). The opposition booed in derision and schadenfreude(real, not feigned). The Budget was the most futile exercise or the best thing that happened since sliced bread, depending on which side you listen to.

The fun part was not the rowdy goings on in the House for we have come to expect of our politicians nothing better than chicanery, double speak, pandering to vote-banks, financial frauds and outright  lies. The fun was in the various so called "panel discussions" on TV. If you watched these discussions you will come away wondering why India is such a mess when it has so many wise, articulate, knowledgeable, incisive, educated persons. Predictably the incoherent political "heavy weights" ( literally, as much as figuratively)  and movers and shakers mostly from the ruling party are kept locked up lest they open their mouths in a moment of stupid enthusiasm. You see, with elections coming up next year it is important to make a good impression on the TV-watching middle classes with their misguided concerns for law and order, women' issues, the environment, economic progress, governance and corruption.

The TV discussions are anchored mostly by vividly painted women. They are not always dented contrary to what the President's son believes.  Nothing dents their breathless enthusiasm for the most mundane news which they present as if it was the most exciting in the world.  These women have a tendency to speak without punctuation marks and  in the shrilliest of  voices imaginable. Each sentence elides over a full stop into the next, in what they imagine to be the best BBC style, such that only the imminent total breathlessness stops them.  Immaculately coiffed, shampooed and blow-dried they still manage to convey a  "seen it all" world-weariness in their demeanour. Some go so far as to affix and maintain a plastic smile throughout the show. 

The men anchors are fewer and are different in many ways. For one, they speak in complete sentences which do end. They do not wear brightly-coloured lipstick - at least on air.  Their hair is mostly gelled and slicked back. They do tend to out-shout their guests such that the guests often appear answer-less. Triumphantly looking straight at the camera, the anchor proceeds to grind to a pulp the finely chopped guest. They affect a look of stern earnestness and  talk down to the guests and viewers like a teacher to a kindergarten kid. Listening to them you will be forgiven for believing that the world consists entirely of tricksters and frauds and all that's standing between you and utter ruin are the anchors. 

Their panel tends to be predictable. Most are politicians. Others are celebrity economists. An occasional lame businessman or woman; lamer the better. There are some professional idiots who are permanent fixtures in these discussions - they speak in long sentences, affect a clipped accent, use obscure hyphenated words, have fashionably unkempt hair,  and generally pretend to be serious intellectuals  which they are not. One of his fellow panellists called one such celebrity an "idiot" in the now infamous tapes of the hacking of a lobbyist's cell phone. He is. Totally. 

Today was no exception. Whether male or female, the anchors were living their dream - hauling the political class over hot coals in public and make them squirm. But the latter proved more than a match for the anchors: prevaricating, saying their set pieces no matter what the question was,  etc etc. They had been despatched by their High Command to defend their ranks and the poor blighters did not have a clue as to what the facts were. One young scion of an erstwhile royal family looked as if he had fortified himself with rather a lot of liquid courage and conveniently dodged a tricky question claiming he could neither hear the beginning nor the end of his co-panellists. But he was able to recall an obscure point from the middle of a lot of chaff that flew.

The anchors raved, the anchors ranted. On and on about the state of the government's finances. The panellists tried to look earnest and bandied figures in order to appear confident. One went so far as to quote an absurd number which was off by a magnitude of 100 times the correct figure. 

But all that did not matter. What mattered was that the anchor was shrill, she had on bright lipstick, spoke without a full stop and was neatly plucked and well-coiffed. And she made the participants all look like bumbling idiots without a clue. The Left was loony as only clueless Left can be. The right had no clues but was resolute in its opposition. The rulers played  to every conceivable gallery: the poor, the not-so-poor, the middle, and the top end; they played to the makers and to the takers; to the producers and to the evil  traders. The industry representatives bent over backwards not to sound critical of the government, praising the budget up front and damning it with caveats (it is a good budget, but......etc etc).  A celebrity economist famous for his shock of white hair was thoroughly lost in the rough and tumble world where politics and media collided; where shrillness overcame truth if there was such a thing.

It did not matter who they were; the anchor chopped them all up into bits and fed them to the meat grinder. Without getting a hair out of place or breaking sweat.

And the Budget? Who the hell cares about the Budget anyway?