[In 2003 I displeased powerful people and was eased out of my job as consultant editor of Business Standard. I celebrated my liberation with a visit to Serendip. This is a brief account of my trip - the first of the Tuesday columns I started writing for the Calcutta Telegraph, published on 1 July 2003.]
EXODUS FROM PARADISE
The longer I stayed in my last job, the better it fitted
me. The income it brought elevated me from comfort to luxury and finally
extravagance. Then, just as I lapsed into complacency, my livelihood suddenly
got ready to forsake me. I counted the money in the till; penury could only be
months away. I looked at investments; they ranged from illiquid to ill-chosen
ones. It was a relief that not too many years remained ahead; but disaster was
not years but months away. Those months before D-day had somehow to be
stretched out. So I cancelled the summer trip to Europe.
Catastrophe does not become more endurable if one pulls a
long face. I decided to cheer myself up. I thought of all the economic concepts
that might help save me – ingenuity, innovation, enterprise. I looked around
for an opportunity; I found it in Sri Lanka. It was not a job; but Sri Lankan
Airlines was prepared to fly my wife and me to Colombo and give us a five days’
holiday for less than the cost of flying to Calcutta (I prefer to call it
that). I decided to save money and fly to Colombo. I thought I was being clever
and economic: there would be no tourists in the war-torn country, and I would
have my run of it. How wrong I was! Eighty thousand Indians had preceded me
there last year – more than tourists from any other country – and the Ceylonese
hoped Indians would cross 100,000 this year.
In Ceylon I took further cost-saving measures. I decided
that the cheapest holiday would be if I could sit in one place and meditate.
And what better place for meditation than the holy city of Kandy? It has a lake
surrounded by green hills. On the lakeshore is the Temple of the Tooth. It is
very different from a comparable Indian temple. There are no shops or hustlers.
Entry is controlled, separately for the Ceylonese and foreigners; foreigners
pay more. I do not know how they recognize Indians as foreigners, but they do. In
return for the entry fee, Indians can give their footwear for safekeeping;
locals have to leave theirs here and there. There are also separate booths for
body search; foreigners, being fewer, have to wait less. On one wall are
photographs of the temple as it once was, and as it became when the LTTE bombed
it in 1998; the entire front of the temple was reduced to rubble.
Inside, the believers do not mill around; instead, they go
and sit down on the floor in front of the inner temple, waiting with their offerings
of lotus flowers – white, pink and purple. Every once in a while the silver
doors of the sanctum open and a pilgrim is admitted. I wandered to the back of
the temple, where there is a historical museum. The kings of Sri Lanka were
pretty sanguine and adventurous; one even invaded south India and defeated
sundry local kings.
Once the Cape route was discovered and Europeans swarmed
across Asia, the Ceylonese kings found it increasingly difficult to protect
their kingdoms. One even turned Shaivite, but it did not save him. Finally,
they retreated to Kandy, which is 1800 feet above sea level and must at that
time have been inaccessible on account of the thick jungle. The palace was
built above the temple, and the queen built a square little building jutting
out into the lake, where she could go and have a bath. Today, the queen’s
bathhouse is a police station.
Although the bathhouse is no longer available for bathing,
the Queen’s Hotel is just opposite the temple. But after looking at the
photographs of death and destruction, I decided that if I stayed in the Queen’s
Hotel, there was a slight risk that my meditation might be violently
interrupted. So I traveled some kilometers upstream, to a charming little hotel
called the Citadel. It is on a hill; its rooms, each with its own broad sun
terrace, cascade down to a garden, which borders the Mahaveli river. With a
singular lack of imagination, some people call it the Mahaveli Ganga. That is
an insult to Mahaveli; it is a clean, green stream coming down from the
mountains: no water hyacinth, no plastic bags, no detritus, just serenely
flowing water. For those who do not fancy entering the river, there is a
swimming pool, and next to it, a little watering hole. It suited my
meditational inclinations perfectly as I floated on the water and contemplated
the stars in the late evening sky.
Although the civil war is over, its accoutrements are all
over Sri Lanka; there are pillboxes near important installations, and soldiers
with automatic weapons. As one leaves Sri Lanka, one’s luggage is searched by
well-mannered women soldiers. It is apt to make one paranoid sometimes; but my
worry was misplaced, for there is real peace in the island. I was even told I
could take a bus to Jaffna.
Still, the Tamil question is very much in the air. Locals
guess immediately that one is Indian; then they assume that one speaks Tamil
and likes South Indian food. Tamils come and introduce themselves. Somehow, it
is difficult to hide one’s Indianness.
I noticed how many people had close relatives abroad, and
how many young people wanted to emigrate. At first I thought it was only
Tamils, since they spoke to me about it. Then I read that the editor of
Ceylon’s premier English newspaper had decided to migrate to Canada. An editor,
who can hire and fire journalists, who earns a big multiple of their income,
should surely feel he had arrived, joined the country’s elite; he at least must
feel secure. I sensed a certain sense of despair, of lack of confidence in the
country’s future.
I asked the Prime Minister if it worried him that so many
people wanted to emigrate. He said it was to be expected; local salaries were
so low. He mentioned a ridiculous figure for MPs’ salaries – Rs 200, but I
still cannot believe what I heard.
Maybe he is right; maybe it is not lack of hope that
drives people out of Sri Lanka, but low real incomes. But real incomes are
limited by real productivity; they must be low because productivity is low. It
is a bit like socialist India, although Sri Lanka is anything but socialist.
The reforms in India made being rich respectable, and unleashed a flood of
productive activities that supported a new, high-earning corporate middle
class. That is what Ceylon missed out on – and so did Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
And that is why young middle-class people – the ones that tourists like me are
likely to encounter – want to leave these countries, just as they did India
till the 1980s.
They cannot solve this problem by liberalizing. Both
Bangladesh and Ceylon have more liberalized economies than India. But
liberalization by itself cannot create productive industries. One needs a large
market too. If India seriously wants to make friends with its neighbours, it
should open its markets for goods and labour to them. Ceylonese would make
perfectly good software programmers; importing them would make Indian IT firms
more competitive.
