IMF -World Economic Outlook 2020-India has little to cheer

Presuming ‘Stay Indoors  Stay Safe’ advisory doesn’t bar neighbours chatting across parapets on the roof, I do not let go any chance to chit chat with my immediate neighbour, who ,like me, waters his terrace flower plants early morning. And like it or not politics inveigles it’s way into the mundane. Today it happened to be the  IMF’s world economic outlook for 2020 and 2021 . Assuming the CORONA pandemic is contained by the second quarter, India, the report foretells, will grow at 1.9% in 2020 while all significant global economies will regress, not grow at all . More heart-warmingly 2021 will be a goodie year, growth at 7.4%. 

He wasn’t just ecstatic but exuberantly euphoric. With gloom and doom enveloping the nation that is something certainly to cheer about. His elation undeniably humanly. 

But I wasn’t quite as convinced. Firstly, it’s a forecast, the oracle of armageddon in 2012 proved quite uneventful. Secondly, CORONA will be contained by June is a huge imponderable. Thirdly GDP has been slipping for quite sometime, from 8.3% in 2016 to 7.0, 6.1, 4.2, to predicted 1.9 in 2020. The predicted rise to 7.4 is a statistical mirage. It’s like one falling off a 1000 mt cliff to the road 100 mt below and finding his way back up . He fell 10% but climbed more ,11.11% , only to find he is where he fell from. So a 45 year high of unemployment , a high current account deficit, a worse than Hindu rate of growth in manufacturing, that’s where we were before the Corona disruption occurred and that’s where we will get to should the IMF foresight proves true. Only it will be compounded by a worser current account deficit and a more blighted global economy. Jobless growth is what it was and what is promises to perpetuate. Fifthly, what little comfort can one derive from other nation’s misery? A poorer neighbour panders to national ego but doesn’t put food on the plate of its own poor. Lastly, India’s problem of feeding the largest absolute number of destitute in the world wouldn’t drift away by such poor quality of growth, if any. 

He vociferously protested. Aah ! suffering your half empty glass syndrome again, aren’t you ? He wouldn’t see that in fact the glass held no water. His mood soured. 

So, I told him a story, a telltale sign of my taking Sudha Murthy as my preceptor ! ( she never ended her classes without relating a story to her students) 

“Once a boy came running in from play and asked ,mother, what is milk? My friends say it is creamy and white and has the sweetest taste, second only to the nectar of the gods. Please, mother, I want milk to drink. The mother , who was too poor to buy milk , mixed some flour in water ,added jaggery ,and gave it to the boy. The boy drank it and danced in joy,saying, now I too know what milk tastes like ! 

And the mother ,who through all the years of her hardship had never shed a tear, wept at his trust and her deception. “

(Reproduced as I learnt it.)

Life under COVID-19

Lately, I spend my evenings on the balcony overlooking a lane that once reverberated with clamorous activity. It’s cooler and breezier out there. And ,now , noiseless . Ideal for book reading. After a while an awareness of lurking solitude seeps in. I am alone, enveloped in a pervasive stillness all around, time effluxing languidly unmolested by human activity. 

It feels queer to see the lane flooded white as the streetlight comes on, but none treading it. The car parked by its side  gathers dust, it hasn't moved anywhere for a week. Men and women dangling carry bags with veggies bought from the bustling sabji bazaar by the overbridge, a few rows of houses away from where I live, do not pass by on way home. No young boys and girls walk past to coaching centers or return from it. There is no traffic, no pedestrian. The kirana shop next door has folded up and  bears a deserted, spooky look. 

Lights from open windows spilling onto the lane purvey a sense of life but one that is clammed up - voices from within muted, sound of teevees muffled. The barking of a dog somewheres, sometimes breaks the stillness. Breeze blows, night advances ,nature cycles on. Else, nothing. It is eerily hush, a stillness of the grave. But the living live boisterously till doomsday. Wherefrom then this quietude ? The evening is just an hour old, 1900 hours. 

I keep staring into  this quaint , deafening lull , a cessation of human activity that nothing in my living memory measures up to. Nothing moved in last half hour or so, save the flipping of pages of the book in hand. There is the midnight stillness of a populace abed or the enforced  curfew in times of strife. I am aware of both but neither is absolute. There is the movement of stragglers, late arrivals in the first instance and police patrols in the second. But this one is different, a new existential condition ,an undefined stillness. It is the stiilness of 'absences'. 

A silence induced by absence of activity,  as if people have  swallowed 'Stillness Pills’ and gone into premature hibernation in homely cocoons. 

One brought on by COVID-19 . To remind us of a harsh reality - nature still holds unfathomable mysteries,  the three aces in the gamble of 'Teen Patti'. It beckons us to return to its ways or face the consequences ; to learn its lessons and stay safe.