Tag: dole

Retired politicians

I must admit a particular fondness for former External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh’s biweekly column in the Business Standard. I was not a great fan of him as a politician, and was happy to see him go when he was accused in the Iraq cash-for-food scandal, but there’s a certain freshness and honesty in the column that I’ve learnt to appreciate. Having had a colourful political career, he has a lot of stories to tell, and though some of these are already well-known, there is value in reading the way he narrates them.

This makes me crave for more such pieces, but the unfortunate fact about Indian politics is that there are few retired politicians. Unlike in developed countries where most politicians go out of office before they are seventy, and then hang around making money by giving speeches and critiquing their successors, the people here continue in active politics even after they’re well into the proverbial seventh age. Look no further than LK Advani who, well into his eighties, still harbours the hope of becoming India’s prime minister one day.

While one result of this is that senior citizens occupy all the posts that matter in a country like ours that is so young (in terms of median age), this also means that there are no retired politicians. This means that there are few people who have seen it all, from the inside or the outside, who are now free from any contractual or political obligations, and so can afford to educate us about all that they’ve seen.

Now that makes me think that our political parties are afraid of people who are still around but out of the system, since their personal and party incentives are not aligned any more. Hence, it might be a possibility that political parties give out posts to senior party members as a sort of dole, so that they don’t retire and tell the wider public all that they know.

Slender Loris and Punny Animal Names

I think one of my cousins ( a very young fellow) looks like a Slender Loris, and refer to him by that name. Unfortunately, I can’t make the nickname official because of a punny reason.

The Kannada word for Slender Loris is “Kaadupaapa” which is supposed to mean “baby of the forest” or some such thing. The problem arises with the word “Kaadu” which can refer to both forest and as “troublesome”. I suppose the reason for these diverse meanings is some sort of root meaning “wild”.

So Kaadupaapa can also mean “troublesome baby”. There’s more to it. “Kaadupaapa” also happens to be a fairly common abuse that is directed at young kids when they get too troublesome. I clearly remember my mother abusing me using this phrase a few times when I was small. So nicknaming a young boy as Kaadupaapa would be similar to some guy in IIT being given a nickname such as “bastard” or “chutiya”. And clearly the parents of the kid will not approve and the baptist will end up getting a bad name in their eyes.

This unfortunate combination of circumstances means that I can’t make official what I think is a splendid nickname. At least, in IIT I didn’t have to bother about what the parents of the boys would think about the nicknames that I’d dole out, which enabled me to dish out a few decent ones. Though I admit that a conspiracy by the institute to deny freshies to Narmada Hostel meant that there weren’t too many people I could have named.