Kusum Choppra

A few days ago, the newspapers carried statements of SEBI and private banks’ head honchos declaim against RBI rate cut in absence of other government hand outs.   What, one wonders, was the purpose of private banks if they can operate only with government handouts?   What happens to their much lauded ‘private’ status then? Banks, entrepreneurs, economic intellectuals et all rail against the food bill that promises food in the belly of India’s poor.   Instead of those lakhs, they argue in favor of diverting that money to industrialists’ coffers, purportedly to speed up development via industrial growth, claiming that will raise India up faster. The Question is: against a handout of x lakh crores, what guarantee is there of creation of at least y thousand jobs?   In recent times, the import of state of art technology means less than c hundred jobs, generally limited to the upper middle and upper classes? What are these chappies afraid of?   Actuall...

Going back to my roots seems to have become a thing of now. First it was my book BEYOND DIAMOND RINGS which revisited my matriarchal Sindhi roots and the evolution of Sindhi women since the Partition, although I was born post partition. Suddenly last week, I found myself wearing what would a today version of the traditional dress of my grandmothers “paro chadar”.   Their paro was a full skirt, could be poplin, bosky, silk, satin, velvet , whatever; topped with a kurti, the length of which was obviously dictated by fashion. The whole would be topped by a chadar, sindhi adaption of the odhni or the muslim ‘chador’ that all enveloping cover all. Once again, that could be plain white fabric, poplin or mull, net or silk, depending on the ocasison, the time and circumstances etc.   jewelry was obviously a must. My adaption was a cotton printed skirt made from the salwar fabric of a salwar kameez set.   And my kurti was a T shirt to match. Odhni dispensed with in...

Does it sound like a totally preposterous comparison: of the BJP to the Mughals?    But there it is, the BJP has just done what the Mughals did centuries ago. Once past their prime, the Mughals oversaw the demise of Hindustan, first losing the south and letting administration slide. In our times, the BJP rose swiftly to take Delhi and spread its wings across the country. Slowly those wings lost wind; its southern bastion, Karnataka took the sting out of the BJP’s neta-speak, rather raving and ranting about corruption and scams. Now Karnataka has firmly rejected the BJP, actually opting for the ‘scam prone’ Congress instead.    One wonders: was it a mere coincidence that all the scams crept out of the woodwork while BJP was facing voter rejection?    Were the BJP years all that scam free or it is mere Congressi forebearance that has kept those worms inside the wood work still? The BJP mughals have not only lost the south first in their retreat ...

When the government announced a scheme aimed at putting cash into BPL hands for two square meals a day, a cacophony of learned corporate intellectuals pontificated over the evil of such hand outs to the poor. Better, it was argued, to give that money to entrepreneurs and industrialists to set up units to provide jobs, instead of food protection. Many wondered whether that might not be a more effective way of taking the country forward.   But then how many businessmen actually use their own money to start business? And are the numbers of jobs created worth the number of crores from public money in the banks?   Also does industry really run on its own? The answer is a big NO, as evident from the enunciations of banking heavyweights from the private sector, the head honchos of the private banks who consider themselves a cut above nationalized banks and of SEBI, the bastion of those with investable surpluses. On May 3 rd , 2013, the Reserve Bank of Ind...