So, it's Valentine's Day. The economy needs all the help it can get, so here's my bit for the Gibsons, Archies and Hallmarks of this world - Happy Valentine's Day to you! I won't buy heart-shaped candy or massacre masses of orchids, but this much I can, and will, do.
I have nothing for or against the day, really. I had classes all morning, and am back in my room now. Last year, I was at work, researching transactions I knew nothing about. The year before that, I spent all day panicking and doing little else about a tute that was due two days before. You get the drift.
But I refuse to take a detour and walk an extra kilometre to 32 UB simply because all of Bungalow Road, from Reebok to Barista, Archies and the florist's included, is off limits for the ordinary junta. I've always thought that the saffron brigade was a bunch of jobless jackasses, but, honestly, the deployment of close to 500 policemen and the barricading of the entire street only because the custodians of our morality choose to demonstrate against teenagers holding hands is patently stupid. Traffic clogs the road, irritated pedestrians have to go hunting for the bylane that opens at the back of beyond, and everything is unnecessarily tense.
Are they trying to tell us that youngsters out together are a more serious issue than the kids forced into begging at NDLS? A bigger problem than the homeless that line the streets? Illiteracy, corruption, unemployment, terrorism?? No, other than volunteering to teach kids or arrange for temporary shelters, I haven't done much towards allaying any of these issues in my 23 years...but then I don't take the moral high ground on people exercising their rights in a democracy either. I'm no expert on the Constitution, but as I recall from tenth grade Civics, there wasn't anything in it about stocking greeting cards and presents, or hanging out together at the movies or in a coffee shop being a punishable offence. I'm very interested in getting to know what reasoning these jobless morons use in arriving at the conclusion that their imagined interpretation of our "culture" holds greater weightage than the Constitution. Also, since I haven't, in 18 years of formal education, been taught anything about beating innocent people up as part of our culture, I'd appreciate a chance to learn. I doubt that any of these saffron-clad idiots knows how to spell 'culture', to begin with, or ever studied beyond second grade. And by wringing its hands helplessly (if it is even doing that much) and actually deploying policemen to curb the violence, instead of having the whole lot of these people thrown into prison, the Government only endorses the absurdity.
The economist in me tells me this is basically because these scruffy, loud, blindly "ideological" men are unemployed - which means we have a bit of a trade-off between keeping inflation in check and living in sanity.
Here's a humble suggestion to the RBI, then : We can live with the inflation for a bit.
