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ShareEvery year, the days immediately preceding January 1, are loaded with extravagant hope of impending prosperity, peace and order. On an individual level, we resolve to throw away debilitating habits, and to be nicer to our colleagues.
At the stroke of the midnight hour on December 31, when our thoughts keep their tryst with revelation-inducing intoxicants, we realise that expecting our colleagues to be nice to us is in itself a debilitating habit! But that is another matter altogether.
The hopes of Mumbai as a whole for the New Year tend to be heroically grand. People want more responsive governance and the netas issue celebratory assurances. Hard-working folks want fewer crimes on the street, and the cops - occasionally swapping their regulation caps for party hats - promise more alert policing, at least on the day when everyone except bartenders is drunk. Corporate chieftains pledge to work harder for the country and to add more acquisitions to the growing heftiness of Brand India.
Between personal resolutions that are carelessly abandoned and the grand declarations that are easily forgotten, lies the intransigent squalor of the licence-permit Raj of Old India. Yes, right here in Mumbai. As you take a richly deserved break and look forward to the New Year, pause for a moment for those who will never see the difference between 2007 and 2008; or between 2008 and the 1980s.
These people are the countless entrepreneurs who carry the freight of Mumbai's wealth behind the engine of the city's super-rich.Yet many of these entrepreneurs will be awaiting the end of the New Year fuss so that they can continue to pursue the babus after they return from the break. Unhappily, the babus will never take a break from the era when being an independent entrepreneur was as hard as being a farmer on a hardscrabble land.
A typical case will illustrate that our congratulatory cries of "Happy New Year" are meant only to drown the frustrated whimpers that attend to unending drudgery. A young entrepreneur who runs a dotcom start-up wanted to open a post-office box to receive official communication. The folks in a suburban post office wanted the proof of the company's existence. The young man presented the documents from Delhi's Registrar of Companies that endorsed the bona fide status of his firm. Won't do, the post office said.
Then he showed them papers from the state's ministry of corporate affairs which was processing his case and which acknowledged his permanent address. The post-office clerks dismissed that docket too. So what did they want? Character certificates from "well-known shopkeepers" in the area where the entrepreneur operated! So much for rigorous documentation! The entrepreneur managed to get the certificate in the end. "My father told me this was the method in the 1970s and I knew about it," the entrepreneur said. "I wish they had told me earlier and not made me run around."
Well, Happy New Year. Now you know why Om Shanti Om was such a hit in Mumbai!
Email:raghu@dnaindia.net
