Being attacked by a arms wielding mob
of 150 and running for cover just to stay alive, isn’t something one imagines
in ones wildest dreams, least of all see in reality. But the events of 23rd
Nov 17, have shaken me and my belief on the future of this nation.
The company
that I work for is known to build and operate some of the finest wellness
retreats in the country. A relatively young brand, we have won some rather
prestigious awards for our art of delivering hospitality and for our wellness
programs. We were smug at having created our third fine hotel, just 27 rooms,
spread over 8-9 acres, kissing the Vembanad lake and were
getting ready to welcome our first guest on the 5th Dec.
75 odd crores (approx USD12 million)
of spend over 5 years made it a rather well appointed upmarket hotel of global
standards. We have always been proud of our business practices such as highest
paymasters by industry standards, highest no of training hours imparted per
employee and treating our guests as if we would treat our families and parents.
We thought we are formidable force if we generate employment for approx 500
people.
We heard that a few local bodies
alleged an encroachment by our hotel to the extent of .0044 and .0050 sq mts at
2 spots (a notice to this effect is with us now) and to protest this
encroachment a march is being carried out by the local DYFI arm. I quickly
relied upon my calculator to convert this astronomically large number into sq
feet and discovered that we had allegedly encroached 0.053 sq ft and 0.047 sq
ft of land at 2 places. For the readers of this blog, and to put things in
perspective this area is just a tad bit larger than the area a shirt button
would occupy. And without giving us a
chance to explain or to respond the militant arm chose to punish us by vandalising our hotel and setting us back by 6 months and destroying
property worth 10 Crores.
Properties can be rebuilt, Monies can
be recovered but the soul of an entrepreneur, confidence of employees and
confidence in the state once broken can never be recovered.
A state/nation where you can get away with
anything (as
I mentioned in another blog), have negligible chance to be punished for a
crime, and where on a working day, hundreds of young people can be mobilized
and dangerously motivated to destroy and plunder an asset that contributes to taxes,
employment and brand of a state that alleges to be God’s own country – that
country and state has no/little future.
Our
dependence on services contributing approx. 60% of our GDP up from 30% in 1950
and agriculture at 17% - down from 55% in 1950 might sound great from an
empirical perspective, but is an utterly dangerous statistic. Just
30% of our population is contributing to 60 percent of GDP. This implies
that the balance 980 million or say a billion people are contributing to a mere
30% of GDP
(approx. USD 736 billion).
Do you get what I am getting to…
A billion people are contributing to
just 736 billion USD of GDP or exactly 2 USD per day. A slightly deeper
analysis (pls don’t curse me for confusing you with numbers) reveals that if
amongst these billion, approx. 200 million are still making their 2 ends meet
somehow by contributing approx. USD 2000 per year, the last 800 million Indians
are merely contributing 336 billion USD in GDP (420 USD per person per year)
Doesn’t that explain why our hotel
was so brutally plundered and destroyed for allegedly encroaching a piece of
land literally measuring the size of a shirt button? Without even giving us a
chance to show the legal land records and valid permissions in our possession.
This is
God’s own country.
Artificial intelligence is scary and
may it be damned – for it is threatening to put more and more people out of
jobs. If the world has to be saved, more people need to get into farms and more
factories need to start bellowing smoke. A greater percentage of the global
population needs to contribute significantly to the global GDP’s rather than
it getting concentrated just within the services sector.
Or else be warned that ours wasn’t
the last hotel or business that got temporarily destroyed by the zealots
pretending to be GOD. This epidemic where mobs can be mobilized to cause
plunder and destruction at the drop of a hat could be a national/global problem
in a few years.
We have failed the dream of Nobel Laureate
Rabindranath Tagore for his vision of this country penned in 1910 in the
epic poem…
Where the
mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where
knowledge is free
Where the
world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow
domestic walls
Where words
come out from the depth of truth
Where
tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the
clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the
mind is led forward by thee
Into
ever-widening thought and action
Into that
heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Niraamaya
Kumarakom will rise like a phoenix soon and we will welcome our guests in a few
weeks, but lets not allow the nation and the democracy to fail.
Manu also writes in Huffington Post
