I left Business Standard in March 2003, and joined the Calcutta Telegraph. This is my first column, published on 1 July 2003. In between, I visited Sri Lanka; My first column in the Telegraph, on 1 July 2003, was about the trip. The Sri Lankans I met did not envy themselves, but the island charmed me.
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 1,800 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 travelled some kilometres 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 Eighties.
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.
