We are living in a dystopian world!
Jio ने सबको बीज़ी कर दिया है! ग्राहक आए या ना आए - ये अपना भोजपुरी इन्टरटेंमेंट में ही लगा रहता है! 😆With the economic headwinds strong, and no sight of respite - it amused me to notice the scene I was in. The poor vendor was not disappointed or dejected; he wasn't looking forward to his job or future either - notably, food inflation has remained at its lowest levels in the last few years due to efforts of Modi government and the vegetable vendor has surely not had or expected higher earnings. Other forms of inflation - housing, transport (fuel) etc - are moderate and hence his savings, if he has any, would not have grown, rather would have been depleting. The only thing that may have improved for him is what his preoccupation thence - cheaper data speeds and thus access to cheap personalised entertainment.
Mulling over all this, I proceeded to board the metro train. It was rush hour and the metro was jampacked with people - most were texting or watching videos on their phones here too. Most of them would be midlevel executives going by their attire - I wondered why they were in a metro? I knew the answer because it was the same reason I was in the metro - the roads were worse than the jampacked metro - there were not only jampacked, they were worse in terms of commute time; Mumbai ranked #4 in traffic congestion and the city's roads saw 119% congestion in 2019.
Again, for the mid-level city executive, a look at the last 5 years was the same as that for the vegetable vendor - traffic hadn't gotten any better, commute times have only risen; so have fuel costs.
Interestingly, we've had two dips in international crude oil in these 5 years - but on both occasions [rather time periods], the govt has chosen to enjoy the gains of the lower pricing to fund its own deficit than pass on the benefits to the consumers/citizens. Not that cheaper fuel would have helped - it would only have made the terrible traffic woes even more terrible.Food inflation has stayed low but real estate is so damn expensive that people have no choice but to rent/buy housing farther and farther from the city. Recession, or stagnation in the industry is not going away - Banks are stretched and hence credit is not flowing, so there is hardly any new investment and hence fewer opportunities on the horizon. Professional growth isn't something most mid-level executives are vying for - several, in fact, maybe just trying to keep their jobs and their salaries intact.
Back to the scene in the metro, a phone rang - given that there was no space when the co-passenger pulled out his mobile, I had no choice but to peep into this phone. I could see the Trucaller screen pop up the name of the caller - a telemarketing agency. He cut the call without bothering to pick it up and went back to the Netflix show he was watching. Had it been a friend, I would have lectured him on the HUGE privacy nightmare that TrueCaller is! On this occasion though, I kept quiet not to offend an unknown bloke.
I got down from the metro and started to look for an Uber - it took the usual 4 minutes of search and 10 minutes of waiting time for me to board one. The driver was estranged, almost as if he had resigned to the traffic which he stared at. I tried to make small talk asking him where else he had driven during the day and if traffic was any better.
D - सssब तरफ़ ऐसाही ही है साहब!! जहाँ देखो रास्ता खोदे रक्खे हैं!
Me - चलो कम से कम waiting का तो पैसा मिलता है आपको
D - कोई फ़ायदा नहीं साहब - २ साल से Uber वाले commission कम कर दिए हैं! और traffic में गाड़ी कम चलता है तो उतना कमाई भी नहीं पूरी होती
Me - पर पहले से तो अच्छा है ना ?
D - पहले मैं काली पीली चलाता था; Uber वालों ने पहले तो सपनें दिखाए, तो हम सबने नई गाड़ी खरीदी loan लेकर - अब commission कम किया तो हमारा गाड़ी का हफ्ता ही महंगा पड़ रहा है हमें | इस से अच्छा तो हम पुरानी काली पीली ही चलाते!
The gist of the above conversation is that he bought a new Car on loan in hope of better earnings when Ridesharing companies were offering better commissions. But now that the commissions have reduced, he is finding it difficult to even manage to pay off his EMIs for the car loan. But now that he was caught in the vicious circle of the Loan-EMI repayment, there is no way he can go back. He has to continue being an Uber driver in the hope that someday his EMI will be paid off and he will start earning money - assuming the maintenance costs of his vehicle do no rise by then.
I got home and a friend was already there waiting for our pre-planned dinner. He had flown in from Delhi for a day and we decided to meet for dinner. We compared notes - Delhi was no better, real estate was marginally cheaper but public transport was worse off. His preferred method in spite of traffic woes was driving his car and his commute time was worse than mine - almost 2 hours one way. Delhi had one more problem, acute pollution which gets especially worse in winter months; he was worried if his daughter would develop asthma with the kind of air she was breathing at a young age.
The entire day reminded me of the dystopian movie In Time, where people stop ageing past 25 so time has become the universal currency traded between people. When the time "bank account" on an implanted clock reaches zero, that impoverished person "times out" and is euthanized. So everyone earns so that they may live a little longer, and each luxury they enjoy reduces their time to live. In a heart-wrenching scene - the protagonist goes to meet his mother when the city bus fare rises from 1 to 2 hours, and she only has 90 minutes. She tries to run to meet her son, but times out at the last moment and dies in his arms!
It feels like we are living in a parallel era, where people pay with their Privacy, their time and their Health. The vegetable vendor gets his ₹300 a month entertainment - just like Opium to fulfil his desires, while his future remains suspended in his current state; the Uber driver is perennially under debt but yet unable to give up his profession; the mid level executive stuck in his day job and stuck in the traffic of the city; also a parent stuck with poor environment and constant worry about his offspring's health!
It is as if the Big Bad Corporation - the Mobile Operator, the ride-sharing app, the MNC corp, the Govt and the Carmakers have all managed to lock the common man into a vicious cycle of selling their time, their privacy and their lives for luxuries they cannot afford anyway. It is, as if, these citizens would have been better off without the luxury - without having to pay for it, and without having enjoyed it - but alas, they are paying for these luxuries by reducing precious hours from their lifetimes!
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
How entrepreneurs contributed to rise of the Indian freedom movement
Dadasaheb Phalke
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Nana Shankarsheth
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Many entrepreneurs, while opinionated about business issues, often tend to be apolitical or at least try to steer clear of making public their political leanings to prevent negative impact on their business interests. Some, of course, are fanatics, who also use their monetary success to defend and further their political interests. Some others are fanatic enough to declare the entire political class as useless and corrupt.
Nevertheless, for times immemorial, entrepreneurs have pugmarked the path of technological and social progress, albeit to further their business interests in the short term, but resulting in ultimate progress of society towards being more fair and equanimous. Some entrepreneurs who played a pivotal role in India's freedom struggle include G.D. Birla whose association with M.K. Gandhi is well known and his struggles against British & Scottish traders and his efforts to set up indigenous industry are well documented. There were other 'swadeshi' businessmen such as Ardeshir Godrej and Ramnath Goenka who in their own ways supported the growth of local businesses in India.
If you trace the strength of the final Indian Independence movement - the one led by Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Bose and other leaders - it was in the fact that it had a national appeal. Unlike 1857, when the British were able to defeat local rebellions in isolated skirmishes, in 1940s the freedom struggle was spontaneously nationwide. This nationally 'integrated' rebellion was a result of India having transformed itself from being a collection of princely states (as it was in 1857) into one nation. There were many reasons for such transformation - but two forces which played a major role in this were Railways and Cinema.
Indian Railways led to massive intermingling of populations across the length and breadth of the country; also since people could move they could assemble to one city by travelling from across the country creating the possibility of large gatherings that would be impossible for local administration of one city to dissipate or thwart. Of course, Gandhi's non-violent methods made it even difficult to stop such gatherings on legal grounds because no 'crime' was being conducted.
Cinema acted in two ways - one it helped people watch and "vicariously" experience cultures from other parts of the country; it helped the different 'communities' in India realise they weren't as different really as they earlier thought they were. They spoke different languages but had similar value systems, similar social issues, similar problems. In fact, as Cinema (especially Hindi Cinema which is now called Bollywood) spread, it created a common 'national culture' which acted like an umbrella over sub-national identities of Indians. Second, Cinema acted like a conscience awakener of the masses - as this Quora answer says:
The conjecture which I want to present is that both these elements - Railways and Movies weren't a result of any well thought out plan to 'awaken' the nation or get it independence but simply the hustle typical of entrepreneurs. It is well known that Movies came to India due to the efforts of Dadasaheb Phalke - the movie Harishchandrachi Factory - beautifully captures his journey as a typical slightly eccentric entrepreneur who is just mad about Cinema and bringing it to India.
Less is known about the fact that Railways were also a similar effort by an Indian financier Nana Shankarsheth who used to finance British and Indian traders. Shankarsheth was known for developmental works, but his main contribution was the formation of the Indian Railway Association which lobbied for and finally succeeded in getting Railways to India in the early days of Railway development in the world. It was his idea and efforts to start Railways in India according to which he had discussed the proposals with British Govt of that time. Eventually, the association was incorporated into the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, and Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy and Shankarsheth became the only two Indians among the ten directors of the GIP railways.
My ratiocination is that entrepreneurs are important for a society - even though they often don't directly participate in political awakening but they are the change-makers, the square pegs in the round holes who create tools and sometimes conditions which finally lead to changes that they themselves never imagined of!
Nevertheless, for times immemorial, entrepreneurs have pugmarked the path of technological and social progress, albeit to further their business interests in the short term, but resulting in ultimate progress of society towards being more fair and equanimous. Some entrepreneurs who played a pivotal role in India's freedom struggle include G.D. Birla whose association with M.K. Gandhi is well known and his struggles against British & Scottish traders and his efforts to set up indigenous industry are well documented. There were other 'swadeshi' businessmen such as Ardeshir Godrej and Ramnath Goenka who in their own ways supported the growth of local businesses in India.
If you trace the strength of the final Indian Independence movement - the one led by Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Bose and other leaders - it was in the fact that it had a national appeal. Unlike 1857, when the British were able to defeat local rebellions in isolated skirmishes, in 1940s the freedom struggle was spontaneously nationwide. This nationally 'integrated' rebellion was a result of India having transformed itself from being a collection of princely states (as it was in 1857) into one nation. There were many reasons for such transformation - but two forces which played a major role in this were Railways and Cinema.
Indian Railways led to massive intermingling of populations across the length and breadth of the country; also since people could move they could assemble to one city by travelling from across the country creating the possibility of large gatherings that would be impossible for local administration of one city to dissipate or thwart. Of course, Gandhi's non-violent methods made it even difficult to stop such gatherings on legal grounds because no 'crime' was being conducted.
Cinema acted in two ways - one it helped people watch and "vicariously" experience cultures from other parts of the country; it helped the different 'communities' in India realise they weren't as different really as they earlier thought they were. They spoke different languages but had similar value systems, similar social issues, similar problems. In fact, as Cinema (especially Hindi Cinema which is now called Bollywood) spread, it created a common 'national culture' which acted like an umbrella over sub-national identities of Indians. Second, Cinema acted like a conscience awakener of the masses - as this Quora answer says:
Indian film industry (including regional films) before Independence explored a lot of social, moral, cultural, devotional, mythological themes, but refrained from an overt anti-British, pro-independence presentation. For obvious reasons.Movies created a mass sentiment in support of the freedom struggle, by profiling historical stories gave Indians reasons to feel pride in their nation prior to British Raj and finally, progressive themes also created conditions for Indians to aspire for modern values - independence and self-governance being two of them. Just like Twitter played a role in Arab Spring and other movements across the globe today, Cinema played a role in the Indian Independence movement.
However, they sometimes tactfully inserted the voice of the freedom seeking Indians in a manner which can escape the scrutinising eyes of the British sensor. The author mentions the song 'Door Hato O Duniyawalon Hindustan Hamara hay' from the movie Kismet (1943) as an example.
The conjecture which I want to present is that both these elements - Railways and Movies weren't a result of any well thought out plan to 'awaken' the nation or get it independence but simply the hustle typical of entrepreneurs. It is well known that Movies came to India due to the efforts of Dadasaheb Phalke - the movie Harishchandrachi Factory - beautifully captures his journey as a typical slightly eccentric entrepreneur who is just mad about Cinema and bringing it to India.
Less is known about the fact that Railways were also a similar effort by an Indian financier Nana Shankarsheth who used to finance British and Indian traders. Shankarsheth was known for developmental works, but his main contribution was the formation of the Indian Railway Association which lobbied for and finally succeeded in getting Railways to India in the early days of Railway development in the world. It was his idea and efforts to start Railways in India according to which he had discussed the proposals with British Govt of that time. Eventually, the association was incorporated into the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, and Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy and Shankarsheth became the only two Indians among the ten directors of the GIP railways.
My ratiocination is that entrepreneurs are important for a society - even though they often don't directly participate in political awakening but they are the change-makers, the square pegs in the round holes who create tools and sometimes conditions which finally lead to changes that they themselves never imagined of!
Attitude vs Aptitude
There are a lot of quotes on Attitude vs Aptitude but my favourite on this subject is this dialogue from the movie Chak De India
Kabir Khan, the coach, explains beautifully - टीम बनाने के लिए ताकत नहीं नीयत चाहिए - you need 'attitude' (intention / sincerity) to form a team and not power (aptitude).
Kabir Khan, the coach, explains beautifully - टीम बनाने के लिए ताकत नहीं नीयत चाहिए - you need 'attitude' (intention / sincerity) to form a team and not power (aptitude).
Lal Bahadur Shastri - the original strategist PM
Who was the first Prime Minister of India to authorize an 'across the border strike' to defend Jammu & Kashmir? The answer is [Sorry Narendra Modi fans!] Lal Bahadur Shastri whose birthday we celebrate today with Gandhiji.In 1965, the Pakistani army hatched the Operation Gibraltar which was aimed at annexing J&K by cutting off India's neck below Jammu. Sometime late August / early September, Pakistan started advancing its troops [as usual - disguised as locals] from Gulmarg, Uri and Baramulla. When they got detected, it launches Operations Grand Slam to annex Akhnoor and then Jammu. Incidentally, Indian forces which were devastated recently (1962) during the Indo-China war could not mount an effective defence in this sector. In response, however, Lal Bahadur Shastri's government authorised advancement of Indian forces further south in Punjab cutting off the Pakistani forces advancing towards Jammu from the other side - a classic military tactic. Indian forces invaded all the way up to the borders of Lahore, even scaring the American forces stationed there who asked for time to vacate the Lahore airport. There is a long story after that, including the very celebrated battle of Asal Uttar - but the endgame was when the Indian army was in possession of 1,920 km² of Pakistani territory and the Pakistan army 550 km² of Indian territory, the Pakistani's finally got the US and USSR push India into a ceasefire agreement. It all started with one Prime Minister deciding that J&K was not a 'special' or 'disputed' state of India but an integral part of India, and so Pakistan's advancement on the Line of Control (then called the Ceasefire Line) will not remain restricted to the LoC but could be assuaged by an attack across the International Border (IB) also. On his birthday today - let's salute the decisive strategist that Shastriji was! --- Image Source: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/asal-uttar.html
Greta Thunberg may be a fraud - but is that the point?
If you are writing off Greta Thunberg as a case of poster girl for environmentalists-with-vested-interest and believe that her doomsday predictions are just shenanigans - you are missing the point entirely.
Here's a teenager who's situation is compounded by Asperger's syndrome and Selective Mutism - speaking out aloud to a community of world leaders. Her scenarios are obviously blown out of proportion - weren't yours when you were adolescent?
The point isn't whether or not her predictions are true - the point is we adults care so much less than we should.
Mankind will not go extinct - and while some species might, its not going to be a mass extinction either. If it indeed does happen, while millions of poorer humans may perish, most of us using social media, (presumed to be) living in developed cities / towns will survive. Temperature going up by 2° will inflate your Air Conditioning bill and may be add to 'work from home' days when its either snowing or raining heavily. Recession will be longer but we will still get food. A century or so later, worst case, we might be living in artificially environment controlled domes - a little larger than today's malls. It'll be fun also - imagine your hostel days. And trust me - I am not being sarcastic!
But again, we are missing the point - just because we will survive and live better, doesn't mean than climate change isn't real or that its all brouhaha. All that the kid is asking you to do is pay more attention to the climate than economic recession or AI taking over the world. Just make it the top item on your bucket list. Raise it at every forum you can - discuss it with your friends before you talk about the next web-series.
She's a kid, what does she know? She doesn't, but her emotion, which is surely hormonally charged given her age, is what we need to relate to - all she's asking you is to think about this from your heart than just your head.
Image Credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/qbtyUQtqJ8k
The Curious case of Prosenjit Hazra - Part 3
Read Part 1 and Part 2
Part 3: Macanos Hangba
It was a sultry morning as he got into the newly opened Dubai Metro service, Macanos wondered why Dubai was so late in introducing metros. His own hometown, Bangkok, though much worse in terms of traffic than Dubai, had a metro network since quite some time. The reason for all these thoughts was simply that he was running late for his meeting and could not afford to be late. This was a critical meeting.
Thankfully the metro station opened into the hotel lobby and Macanos reached a good 15 minutes before the appointed time of 9:00 AM. Five minutes to 9:00, a young boy dressed like an American teenager walked in and joined him at his table – “Crimson Carter!” he said extending his hand. Macanos had heard that Internet hackers were mere ‘kids’ but he wasn’t really prepared to actually face a kid with a hoodie on him! This is going to be interesting, he said to himself.
Crimson Carter was the online identity with whom Macanos had been interacting for past several months. Following the arrest of Khan Saheb, his business was in deep trouble and he urgently needed to find ways to revive his trade if he wanted to survive. The business of arms is dirty and you cannot just quit – you make enemies in this business and they are always out to get you, so you got to keep making money – not just to make ends meet but to keep paying to secure your life.
Recent arrests in India hit him hard in two ways – Khan Saheb was a financing conduit to his customers. Militant groups in India’s North East would receive funds siphoned off from government schemes and then use these schemes to pay dealers like Macanos who would supply them arms. On the other hand, Khan being a civil servant could also provide them access to fake identities and opening Bank accounts to move and receive funds. Macanos himself had a fake Indian passport and even the recently launched Aadhar Card. Last time he had crossed the border, he even used an ATM card to withdraw funds from a Bank account earmarked for him by his hosts.
But with this arrest, the Indian intelligence agencies had cut off both – his source of funds and his channel of moving these funds – in one fell swoop! It was then that Macanos, despite his relative apathy to the Islamic terror outfits, started researching more about how they operated. After all, they had perpetrated attacks against America – they must have much superior means of working! It was in this research that he encountered Crimson Carter in a chat forum online and after a parley of emails they agreed to meet in Dubai.
Macanos wasn’t quite sure whether or not to trust Carter, he had in fact delayed this meeting for 3 months in hope of some other way emerging. But time was running out on him, it seemed that the Indian intelligence authorities had gained a lot of headway. Also, some of his ‘customers’ had gotten politically misaligned with the ruling disposition and were being targeted. He had to find other ways of financing his business and moving funds. Carter had supplied him with online passwords for email accounts, fake IDs and even Bank account numbers as a test. In today’s meeting, Macanos was going to be told the ‘hawala code’ which he had saved in an email draft on Proton – an encrypted email service.
To Macanos, all this was a huge education – after all, forget about the Internet, Hacking and Computers – he wasn’t even educated properly on literacy. Macanos was an alias he had acquired during one clandestine smuggling deals, and the name just stuck to him – his real name was Thiounn Mok and he was a Cambodian national.
Thiounn was born in the city of Batambang but by the time he was old enough to understand the world, his parents were exiled [1] to a village in the interiors by the dreaded Khmer Rouge. Then, within an year Thiounn lost his parents when Khmer Rouge executed [2] several ‘weak’ city dwellers unable to contribute to farming in the village. He, being a child, was spared, so was his uncle – his mother’s much younger brother. Thiounn and his uncle, himself 29 years of age, had seen enough bloodshed to believe in any regime – Communists or the Monarch; they were just figuring out ways to keep alive.
So, when Khmer Rouge leadership lost the war with the Vietnamese and were fleeing to Thailand, his uncle hatched a plan to join the entourage and smuggle himself and young Thiounn along with them. Thiounn was 11 when the Khmer Rouge leadership fled the country through his village which bordered the Khao Larn camp in Trat Province of Thailand [3]. On reaching Trat, they broke away from the Rouge party and with the help of local fishermen escaped to Pattaya. Once in Pattaya, they changed names, addresses and his uncle changed jobs as often as he could, always afraid of getting detected and extradited back.
Young Thiounn hence never had the luck to get a formal education and the only company he had was amongst poor kids from brothels – his education was in crime, and arms dealing came naturally as a career choice. His uncle, having lost his youth in running away from persecution and then trying to evade detection was so lost in his own insecurities that he didn’t notice when Thiounn grew up into a bulky body building teenager on the outside, but a hardened criminal on the inside.
Somewhere along the way, they just went separate ways – his uncle still languishing taking up odd jobs in Pattaya, while Thiounn carved out a life for himself in Bangkok as an arms dealer. Initially, he would keep visiting his uncle and even tried to show gratitude by helping him financially and asking him to join him in Bangkok, but his uncle would always just remain a drifter, increasingly wanting to return to his homeland. A few years later, when Thiounn visited Pattaya, he couldn’t locate his uncle as he seemed to have moved places – only to discover after some recce, that he had gone back to Cambodia. Thiounn never again contacted him – the anonymity and lack of family ties suited his criminal life anyway. From then on, he never mentioned his name Thiounn to anyone - he was Macanos Hangba.
Macanos looked at Carter and guessed that he was probably 17 or at best 19 years old – this was the age when Macanos had done his first arms deal. It was difficult to place Carter’s nationality – his face covered in a full beard, eyes covered in sunglasses and the hoodie on his head, little of his face was visible – but Macanos could guess that Carter was of South Asian descent; India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. Carter started with giving him the hawala code which turned out to be correct – the first test passed! Macanos also blurted back certain pre-decided codes to establish his identity and then Carter motioned to follow him.
Carter walked outside to the parking lot and motioned him to get into the back seat of a black SUV. As Macanos, opened the door and stepped in to sit, he sensed fear – but it was too late; two hands came from behind, blindfolded him and he felt the nozzle of a pistol being pointed to the temple – a thick voice instructed him to keep his mouth shut to avoid being shot.
Macanos cursed his own negligence, he had apprehensions about the identity of Carter and he knew that meeting someone in a foreign country was fraught with risk of his playing into the enemies’ hands. But it was too late to reminisce – what he wondered now was what would happen next. He had taken a calculated risk when he knew that the meeting would be in Dubai – a country with a heavily controlled law and order system. He was quite sure his meeting and even his entry into the SUV was recorded in the CCTV cameras. If his enemies wanted to get him, Pattaya or Phuket would have been better options – why Dubai?
The car started moving, in between, he had heard some conversation between the kid whom he had met as Carter and the thick voice who commanded him. The kid must have been a non-entity contracted to just meet him and get him to the SUV, it was apparent that the kid was not in the car any longer. No words were spoken for the next several minutes as the car seem to have been cruising at high speeds on the highways of Dubai.
After several minutes, they came to a halt, the felt the pistol being withdrawn from his temple and his blindfold being removed. The door opened and when he looked out, a valet wearing a uniform was standing holding the door – this was an unusual abduction style for Macanos. His abductors stayed in the car as it drove off and the valet let him into a warehouse-like building outside which they stood. Macanos cast an eye on the surrounding, and all he could see in all three directions was the Desert.
They entered the warehouse shed, which seemed like a storage facility for electronics – he could see boxes with images of computers, laptops, printers etc on them. The valet led him to a set of stairs, and he saw glass panelled offices lining up to where they ended. As they reached the top of the stairs, the valet opened a glass door for him and stood outside while ushering him in. The man seated behind the desk rose as Macanos entered and extended his hand – “I apologise for the last 40 minutes of harrowing experience you’ve had Macanos, but this was necessary to secure us.”
Macanos was relieved, it seemed that the bluff was over, this was not an abduction and he may live to see many more suns. The man explained that ‘Crimson Carter’ was not a single individual but a whole organization of hackers who worked in a loose federation. They were all independent – he himself did not know the real identities of all the hackers but he was their quarter-master nevertheless. He managed to get them deals, arrange payments and kept the engine running. Some of them called him the ‘accountant’ which was technically his role in this cartel. When dealing with players like Macanos where payments wouldn’t necessarily come via established banking channels, they wanted to be sure of the identity of the individual giving them business but to keep matters as discrete as possible, they had employed this method of pseudo abduction.
He then explained that things were changing and soon, they may even be able to transact money without much hassle using a new technology called Bitcoins. Many hackers in his network were already asking him to pay them in Bitcoins and asked Macanos if he had any Bitcoins which he can pay them in. Macanos could just blurt out a ‘No’, knowing well that the expressions on his face gave away that he was hearing this name for the first time.
Then they came to the subject – what did Macanos want? Macanos explained his problem that he needed secure means of exchanging information and money with his customers; he wondered if he should ask how he could use this Bitcoin thing, but refrained knowing well that his customers in North East India might be even more unfamiliar with this term than him. He did not want to add any more complexity to the chain which was already weakening after Khan Saheb’s arrest.
The solution was simple, he was explained - the hacking group would break into email accounts of real people, steal their identities and use this information to create fictitious bank accounts which can then be used to transfer stolen money without the authorities ever noticing. He was told about a pricing model where the rate changed depending on the nationality of the victim – stealing an American identity would be the priciest – given that the Americans had superior technology to detect such hacks, the cheapest would be Bangladeshi or Pakistani nationals followed by Indians and then the Burmese and Thai.
Macanos was sold – it sounded simple enough and very similar to what Khan Saheb had provided. Instead of a fake identity, he would use a stolen identity from the hackers. If they could supply an Indian identity, this would be the lowest friction route to solving his problems; he was familiar with the modus operandi to use an Indian identity to transact. A deal was struck, an Indian identity it would be – Macanos was told they’d get back to him with a few names over IRC in the next few days. Some advance in US Dollars had to be made the next day at the same hotel lobby where he met the kid today and the rest would have to be arranged in Bangkok.
... to be continued.
Photo by Drew McKechnie on Unsplash
It was a sultry morning as he got into the newly opened Dubai Metro service, Macanos wondered why Dubai was so late in introducing metros. His own hometown, Bangkok, though much worse in terms of traffic than Dubai, had a metro network since quite some time. The reason for all these thoughts was simply that he was running late for his meeting and could not afford to be late. This was a critical meeting.
Thankfully the metro station opened into the hotel lobby and Macanos reached a good 15 minutes before the appointed time of 9:00 AM. Five minutes to 9:00, a young boy dressed like an American teenager walked in and joined him at his table – “Crimson Carter!” he said extending his hand. Macanos had heard that Internet hackers were mere ‘kids’ but he wasn’t really prepared to actually face a kid with a hoodie on him! This is going to be interesting, he said to himself.
Crimson Carter was the online identity with whom Macanos had been interacting for past several months. Following the arrest of Khan Saheb, his business was in deep trouble and he urgently needed to find ways to revive his trade if he wanted to survive. The business of arms is dirty and you cannot just quit – you make enemies in this business and they are always out to get you, so you got to keep making money – not just to make ends meet but to keep paying to secure your life.
Recent arrests in India hit him hard in two ways – Khan Saheb was a financing conduit to his customers. Militant groups in India’s North East would receive funds siphoned off from government schemes and then use these schemes to pay dealers like Macanos who would supply them arms. On the other hand, Khan being a civil servant could also provide them access to fake identities and opening Bank accounts to move and receive funds. Macanos himself had a fake Indian passport and even the recently launched Aadhar Card. Last time he had crossed the border, he even used an ATM card to withdraw funds from a Bank account earmarked for him by his hosts.
But with this arrest, the Indian intelligence agencies had cut off both – his source of funds and his channel of moving these funds – in one fell swoop! It was then that Macanos, despite his relative apathy to the Islamic terror outfits, started researching more about how they operated. After all, they had perpetrated attacks against America – they must have much superior means of working! It was in this research that he encountered Crimson Carter in a chat forum online and after a parley of emails they agreed to meet in Dubai.
Macanos wasn’t quite sure whether or not to trust Carter, he had in fact delayed this meeting for 3 months in hope of some other way emerging. But time was running out on him, it seemed that the Indian intelligence authorities had gained a lot of headway. Also, some of his ‘customers’ had gotten politically misaligned with the ruling disposition and were being targeted. He had to find other ways of financing his business and moving funds. Carter had supplied him with online passwords for email accounts, fake IDs and even Bank account numbers as a test. In today’s meeting, Macanos was going to be told the ‘hawala code’ which he had saved in an email draft on Proton – an encrypted email service.
To Macanos, all this was a huge education – after all, forget about the Internet, Hacking and Computers – he wasn’t even educated properly on literacy. Macanos was an alias he had acquired during one clandestine smuggling deals, and the name just stuck to him – his real name was Thiounn Mok and he was a Cambodian national.
Thiounn was born in the city of Batambang but by the time he was old enough to understand the world, his parents were exiled [1] to a village in the interiors by the dreaded Khmer Rouge. Then, within an year Thiounn lost his parents when Khmer Rouge executed [2] several ‘weak’ city dwellers unable to contribute to farming in the village. He, being a child, was spared, so was his uncle – his mother’s much younger brother. Thiounn and his uncle, himself 29 years of age, had seen enough bloodshed to believe in any regime – Communists or the Monarch; they were just figuring out ways to keep alive.
So, when Khmer Rouge leadership lost the war with the Vietnamese and were fleeing to Thailand, his uncle hatched a plan to join the entourage and smuggle himself and young Thiounn along with them. Thiounn was 11 when the Khmer Rouge leadership fled the country through his village which bordered the Khao Larn camp in Trat Province of Thailand [3]. On reaching Trat, they broke away from the Rouge party and with the help of local fishermen escaped to Pattaya. Once in Pattaya, they changed names, addresses and his uncle changed jobs as often as he could, always afraid of getting detected and extradited back.
Young Thiounn hence never had the luck to get a formal education and the only company he had was amongst poor kids from brothels – his education was in crime, and arms dealing came naturally as a career choice. His uncle, having lost his youth in running away from persecution and then trying to evade detection was so lost in his own insecurities that he didn’t notice when Thiounn grew up into a bulky body building teenager on the outside, but a hardened criminal on the inside.
Somewhere along the way, they just went separate ways – his uncle still languishing taking up odd jobs in Pattaya, while Thiounn carved out a life for himself in Bangkok as an arms dealer. Initially, he would keep visiting his uncle and even tried to show gratitude by helping him financially and asking him to join him in Bangkok, but his uncle would always just remain a drifter, increasingly wanting to return to his homeland. A few years later, when Thiounn visited Pattaya, he couldn’t locate his uncle as he seemed to have moved places – only to discover after some recce, that he had gone back to Cambodia. Thiounn never again contacted him – the anonymity and lack of family ties suited his criminal life anyway. From then on, he never mentioned his name Thiounn to anyone - he was Macanos Hangba.
Macanos looked at Carter and guessed that he was probably 17 or at best 19 years old – this was the age when Macanos had done his first arms deal. It was difficult to place Carter’s nationality – his face covered in a full beard, eyes covered in sunglasses and the hoodie on his head, little of his face was visible – but Macanos could guess that Carter was of South Asian descent; India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. Carter started with giving him the hawala code which turned out to be correct – the first test passed! Macanos also blurted back certain pre-decided codes to establish his identity and then Carter motioned to follow him.
Carter walked outside to the parking lot and motioned him to get into the back seat of a black SUV. As Macanos, opened the door and stepped in to sit, he sensed fear – but it was too late; two hands came from behind, blindfolded him and he felt the nozzle of a pistol being pointed to the temple – a thick voice instructed him to keep his mouth shut to avoid being shot.
Macanos cursed his own negligence, he had apprehensions about the identity of Carter and he knew that meeting someone in a foreign country was fraught with risk of his playing into the enemies’ hands. But it was too late to reminisce – what he wondered now was what would happen next. He had taken a calculated risk when he knew that the meeting would be in Dubai – a country with a heavily controlled law and order system. He was quite sure his meeting and even his entry into the SUV was recorded in the CCTV cameras. If his enemies wanted to get him, Pattaya or Phuket would have been better options – why Dubai?
The car started moving, in between, he had heard some conversation between the kid whom he had met as Carter and the thick voice who commanded him. The kid must have been a non-entity contracted to just meet him and get him to the SUV, it was apparent that the kid was not in the car any longer. No words were spoken for the next several minutes as the car seem to have been cruising at high speeds on the highways of Dubai.
After several minutes, they came to a halt, the felt the pistol being withdrawn from his temple and his blindfold being removed. The door opened and when he looked out, a valet wearing a uniform was standing holding the door – this was an unusual abduction style for Macanos. His abductors stayed in the car as it drove off and the valet let him into a warehouse-like building outside which they stood. Macanos cast an eye on the surrounding, and all he could see in all three directions was the Desert.
They entered the warehouse shed, which seemed like a storage facility for electronics – he could see boxes with images of computers, laptops, printers etc on them. The valet led him to a set of stairs, and he saw glass panelled offices lining up to where they ended. As they reached the top of the stairs, the valet opened a glass door for him and stood outside while ushering him in. The man seated behind the desk rose as Macanos entered and extended his hand – “I apologise for the last 40 minutes of harrowing experience you’ve had Macanos, but this was necessary to secure us.”
Macanos was relieved, it seemed that the bluff was over, this was not an abduction and he may live to see many more suns. The man explained that ‘Crimson Carter’ was not a single individual but a whole organization of hackers who worked in a loose federation. They were all independent – he himself did not know the real identities of all the hackers but he was their quarter-master nevertheless. He managed to get them deals, arrange payments and kept the engine running. Some of them called him the ‘accountant’ which was technically his role in this cartel. When dealing with players like Macanos where payments wouldn’t necessarily come via established banking channels, they wanted to be sure of the identity of the individual giving them business but to keep matters as discrete as possible, they had employed this method of pseudo abduction.
He then explained that things were changing and soon, they may even be able to transact money without much hassle using a new technology called Bitcoins. Many hackers in his network were already asking him to pay them in Bitcoins and asked Macanos if he had any Bitcoins which he can pay them in. Macanos could just blurt out a ‘No’, knowing well that the expressions on his face gave away that he was hearing this name for the first time.
Then they came to the subject – what did Macanos want? Macanos explained his problem that he needed secure means of exchanging information and money with his customers; he wondered if he should ask how he could use this Bitcoin thing, but refrained knowing well that his customers in North East India might be even more unfamiliar with this term than him. He did not want to add any more complexity to the chain which was already weakening after Khan Saheb’s arrest.
The solution was simple, he was explained - the hacking group would break into email accounts of real people, steal their identities and use this information to create fictitious bank accounts which can then be used to transfer stolen money without the authorities ever noticing. He was told about a pricing model where the rate changed depending on the nationality of the victim – stealing an American identity would be the priciest – given that the Americans had superior technology to detect such hacks, the cheapest would be Bangladeshi or Pakistani nationals followed by Indians and then the Burmese and Thai.
Macanos was sold – it sounded simple enough and very similar to what Khan Saheb had provided. Instead of a fake identity, he would use a stolen identity from the hackers. If they could supply an Indian identity, this would be the lowest friction route to solving his problems; he was familiar with the modus operandi to use an Indian identity to transact. A deal was struck, an Indian identity it would be – Macanos was told they’d get back to him with a few names over IRC in the next few days. Some advance in US Dollars had to be made the next day at the same hotel lobby where he met the kid today and the rest would have to be arranged in Bangkok.
Photo by Drew McKechnie on Unsplash
Budget 2019 - between the devil and the deep blue sea with a monster waiting!
If you have ever visited Jabalpur, you surely would have taken a boat ride across 'Bandar Kodini' at the Bhedaghat waterfalls. The boat ride initially takes you along the Narmada river at a leisurely pace, as you gape in wonder at the majestic white cliffs - a hundred feet tall on both sides - changing colour. They do not actually change colours, the cliffs comprise of many shades of marble and as the rays of the sun bounce off their surface, give an illusion of changing colours. And then as your boat ride comes to a close, the tranquil waters of the river gain a sense of urgency after a point and turn turbulent as they crash down the Dhuandhar falls.
I don't know if the new Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has ever visited Bhedaghat, but she might be able to relate this with the experience she is going to have with the Indian economy. The two giant cliffs she is rowing the boat between are Slowdown in Economy and Managing Inflation. With the NDA government having managed a thumping victory in the elections - the waters are very calm now on the surface but as we get nearer to another election, the waters will again turn turbulent like they did for the UPA-2 (though for an entirely different set of reasons) from 2012-13.
The simile with Bhedaghat doesn't end here - the cliffs that Sitaraman faces change their colours and hues. Economic Slowdown manifests in form of farm sector distress, and the moment you allow farm incomes to rise - you drift towards the other cliff - retail inflation! Then you might try to solve the dual issues by not allowing farm output costs to rise (thus keeping retail inflation in check) but dole out money to farmers via Income Guarantee schemes like MNREGA or PM-Kisan Samman.
But the moment you grant income guarantee to farmers, the cost of labour goes up [read more on this here]. With this, sectors like real estate - already grappling with a slowdown due to structural reasons, stringent regulation and impact of demonetisation - will suffer the problem of labour shortage.
The manufacturing sector will also start avoiding labour because they are costly and their availability very seasonal. Also, as labour availability drops or cost of labour rises, manufacturing becomes a capital intensive industry rather than labour intensive industry (like it is in China) - and so that leads to a drop in generation of jobs which is again another sign (colour) of the Economic Slowdown.
If you've noticed the highlighted text - we have come a full circle from Economic Slowdown to Economic slowdown, just like you can keep shuttling between two tall marble cliffs at Bhedaghat.
Successive finance ministers have kept shifting their policy positions from trying to spruce up the 'Indian economy' to gain escape velocity 8%+ growth to trying to protect 'Bharatiya Arthvyavastha' from getting marginalised in the rising tide. If you had infinite time, you could keep shuttling between these two and enjoy your boat ride merrily - like successive FMs starting with Yashwant Sinha, Jaswant Singh, P Chidrambaram, Pranab Mukherjee, and finally Arun Jaitley have done.
However, Nirmala Sitaraman now has to bear the brunt of increased load on government expenditure of welfare schemes, at the same time managing to maintain low inflation, high growth and yet keeping fiscal deficit low. Unfortunately, solutions for her lie outside the purview of the Finance Ministry into structural reforms by other ministries - probably the reason why her role in the Cabinet committees will be more important than her role within her own ministry. Some of the changes that need to be brought about are:
- Land reforms - For all the talk about India's farm distress, the most visible statistic is India's agricultural productivity which is less than 6% of the global average and 25% of the median. Urgent reform in land laws and agricultural ownership methods - this is urgently needed so that the farm sector gets corporatised and can improve its productivity.
- Labour reforms - the reason for manufacturing boom in China is not a program like Make In India or Make America Great Again, but flexible labour laws. As much as I believe that the global economy has already passed the point where manufacturing can become a force to beckon [ref], if any country wants to employ its people in labour-intensive industries - whether its manufacturing or BPO/KPO services - freedom to hire and fire labour is a key requirement to boost employment.
One of the reasons why a majority of employment is generated in India by Small Enterprises rather than large ones is that major labour laws do not apply to Small Enterprises. So large corporations often prefer outsourcing jobs to smaller companies than insourcing those jobs by increasing workforce. The result, of course, is not just non-applicability of labour laws on labour employed but also the exclusion of this labour from government statistics and social security programs offered by large corporations. If only certain aspects of labour laws were modernized, these labour could enjoy better work conditions doing the same work they are doing right now, but under the aegis of a larger corporatised entity in the formal sector. - Infrastructure development - mostly the portfolio of Nitin Gadkari; improving infrastructure will contribute to a large extent in removing the growth bottlenecks for the industry. Again, the China equivalent shows up - whether it is highways, highspeed rail or better-planned IDCs (Industrial Development Corridors) - almost all measures are outside the purview of the Finance Minister's portfolio.
- Resolve the NPA mess and bring about measures to improve corporate governance in public sector banks
- Provide tax subsidies or reductions or both to export-oriented industries which are badly hit by the US government's announcement to revoke GSP status from India.
- Sops for sunrise sectors of consumption such as food processing, energy (especially cleantech) and technology.
- One of the biggest challenges for the RBI has been that its decisions to cut interest rates have little impact on the markets because Banks choose not to transmit these rates to the market. While I am not a big fan of the Govt running the Banking Business, nevertheless, given that the government does today own majority of Banks and regularly intervenes causing ill-effects on the economy; the govt can push public sector banks to get better interest rate cut transmission.
Its a tough job and historically, no one has emerged unscathed from their role as the Finance Minister - including the much haloed Manmohan Singh. It remains to be seen how India's first woman Finance Minister fares with this role!
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Universal Basic Income vs Income Guarantee
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| Image Credit - Abby0427 Yoga |
With Modi's farmer scheme (PM Kisan) and then Congress follow up with 72k per annum for poor (NYAY), a lot of debate has ensued on the efficacy of income guarantee as a tool of public welfare. There are many who argue the time has come for India to start giving some form of Social Security to its citizens while some others argue the exchequers (in)ability to do so. The financial debate aside, one major aberration I see is the conflation of the terms 'Income Guarantee' (IG) and 'Universal Basic Income' (UBI). I am no economist but I have keenly read about the UBI experiments in Scandinavian countries, libertarian geeks on the subject [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] and the recent UBI proposal by the American Presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
On the basis of this reading, I was able to conclude at least on one thing - IG and UBI are different concepts. UBI is supposed to be Universal - even an Akash or Mukesh Ambani, heck even Nirav Modi and Vijay Mallya, would get their UBI irrespective of their economic, social or even criminal status; taxpayers would get it, the non-taxable citizen will also get it; poor in villages will get it, poor in urban India would get it; most importantly middle class - lower middle class and upwardly mobile middle class - everyone would get it.
The basic premise of UBI is that when people are assured minimum income support, it empowers them to make positive choices about their lives, their livelihood and their consumption preferences. Take some simple examples:
- If a student of art, passionate about arts, knows that s/he is assured of a minimum sustenance income even if her art doesn't sell, s/he won't be forced to take up that job in the advertisement firm and instead pursue a slightly longer but fruitful journey to become a classic artist himself / herself. In short, UBI gives youth the freedom to pursue whatever they want to do in life, without the compulsion of what earns them their livelihood.
- If a farmer knew that they have minimum income support, whether the crop makes it or fails, they can chase a cash crop over the staple one or they can pursue fertilizer & pesticide less organic farming over fertilizer & pesticide supported "high produce" farming. This choice by the farmer is because they can now risk the crop getting spoilt but at the same time, they also bet on the upside of higher prices due to the growing interest of the urban population in organic foods. In short, UBI helps producers make a choice to chase healthier alternatives for society over the more 'efficient' or 'remunerative'.
- If an experienced professional knew that he is assured a minimum income and that his family - his ageing parents and his children - will be able to afford a good life, good education and necessary healthcare whether or not he keeps earning his monthly paycheck, he might quit his job (which he hates!) and take up his passion in social work, join politics and either way help the community. In short, UBI provides society free up qualified human capital for its social obligations.
- If the head of an independent news journal is assured of minimum income, s/he does not need to rely on Government grants or private funding to make ends meet. S/he can then pursue stories which matter rather than chase 'masala' stories or celebrity news. S/he already is freed from the need to get access to broadcast media, thanks to the Internet in general and YouTube in specific. In short, UBI helps media become independent of the biases introduced by its funding sources.
- The biggest of all, if a poor man is assured of minimum income, he will never force or condone his children into begging or stealing because he knows that he can afford not to equip them with life skills like these to survive! Their life and liberty will be assured by UBI. In short, UBI can be a game changer for law and order and bring down common sins without the state making any active intervention.
Now let us look at IG - we needn't go very far, MNREGA is a living example of IG already in place to measure how it impacts society. IG by its definition is NOT universal and is directed towards a certain specific section of society. It might be farmers, or poor or people with disabilities or socially disadvantaged communities etc.
The biggest challenge with IG is the identification of beneficiaries requires the state to get access to large amounts of specific data about citizens - this need comes into severe conflict with the privacy of individuals which is an essential element of liberty. For example, because you want only the poor to get subsidies on cooking gas (LPG), you need to capture income data of ALL citizens and link it to the national identity or some such database. The unintended fallout of this is tax terrorism where the tax department uses this same dataset to harras people. To tackle this different problem in itself, government or judiciary must enact other laws to protect citizen liberty and spend even more money (than the one allocated for this subsidy itself) to ensure that data intermingling or misuse is prevented. If these safeguards are breached, this may result in either harassment of citizens or litigation between the state and the citizen wasting umpteen number of productive hours of everyone involved.
The second challenge with IG is leakage - with all the "data-driven", "targetted", "direct account transfer" methods of IG programs - there are ways of gaming the system. Insiders and outsiders collude, mafia grows its tentacles into the system and even politicians abet syphoning of funds from these schemes into the coffers of the undeserving. Again, one can blame the system for these problems - but these are inevitable - almost like increasing entropy of the universe and the only way to eliminate these problems would be to stop these schemes altogether.
Further, let us evaluate the scenarios described above for UBI - would IG help any of these?
- IG may never allow students to pursue their passion - because by definition, IG will only be given to students who are so poor as to struggle to get educated in the first place. There is a positive - as a scholarship - they may help those students get educated who otherwise would possibly have refrained from education and got a job at an early age - but once this education is completed, they would again be back in the same saddle of family or personal responsibilities and need to take up the best paying job with maximum guarantee of livelihood.
- IG will help poor farmers, but it will never promote the farmer to take risks. A farmer coming from a small and marginal family having combined land holding/ownership of upto 2 hectares is so poor that even with subsistence income of 6000 per year, he cannot afford to take a risk with his crop failing a season.
- IG will not apply to any professional earning a decent income. It cannot prod them to quit their job because IG being conditional, will make it difficult for them to become eligible given their qualifications and social status. No professional will afford to quit their salaries job because they are not assured of themselves, their parents or their children getting income support given its targetted nature.
- IG will similarly not apply to journalists or their likes - they would fall into the same bracket as the professionals
- IG would indeed apply to the poor man, but he would have a painful awareness that if ever his children educated themselves and started earning a salary, they will stop getting this support. And so, the poor man knows that he gets this only until they are poor enough. This will be a disincentive to outgrow their current conditions. It is similar to how SMEs often pay their employees less than the minimum income tax bracket and try not to exceed their pay above the minimum slab.
The last part of an IG scheme is what the initial years of MNREGA demonstrated [8] - skewing of labour markets. Farm labour became expensive and also scarce leading to a shortage of labour and hence this also led to inflation in food items. Another fall out of the scheme was that many self-help groups (SHGs) disintegrated - since people got an easier option of employment in the form of NREGS, it appears that they do not want to make efforts for building SHGs and other community-based organizations.
In fact, IG will only contribute towards decreasing fraternity because of the have-nots (those classified as privileged) would resent the haves (the disadvantaged eligible for IG) for getting a subsidy here or an income there without 'having to work for it'; while the haves would anyway resent the have-nots for their economic or social status.
UBI, on the other hand, is completely different - since it would apply to everyone, it will promote fraternity, and it anyway will be aimed at enhancing social JUSTICE, LIBERTY of individuals and being universal it promotes EQUALITY among people. Also, the ill impacts of an IG scheme such as skewing the labour markets or disintegration of Self-Help groups will not happen for UBI since UBI would be universal. If a poor farmer would get his/her share of UBI, so would their employer and the consumer. Overall, it will lead to higher consumption, better standard of living but no relative change in how markets would function.
To close, I am not arguing that we shouldn't have targetted income guarantee schemes until we can roll out a UBI for all citizens. But I would certainly urge that an excess of IG schemes without considering UBI would only indicate crony publicity and populist measures with no serious intent to provide for constitutional guarantees.
Economists, politicians and society at large needs to consider a breaking point where all IG schemes would be closed and converted into a single UBI scheme which would be non-discriminatory, untargeted and hence universal in its application. UBI can usher in a new age of happiness in people's lives while IG can only help reduce unhappiness. It's a choice which shouldn't be too difficult for anyone sincere enough to make.
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The Curious case of Prosenjit Hazra - Part 2
Read Part 1
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| Manikarnika Crematorium Varanasi |
Part 2: Prosenjit Hazra
Prosenjit Hazra’s father, Biswajit Hazra migrated to Varanasi from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) at the time of partition. Belonging to a poor Hindu family from East Bengal, he was still pursuing his graduation when partition happened. Varanasi was once called a ‘mini Kolkata’. Nearly three lakh Bengalis, who had settled here were engaged in various activities – trading, business and tourist services, among others. Biswajit knew a wealthy Banerjee family who had a large house [5] along the riverbank in Benaras and visited the place during vacations. When partition happened, Biswajit sought out the Banerjees who lived in Kolkata – the Banerjees could not invite him to Kolkata, but instead offered him to become the caretaker of the family’s ‘holiday mansion’ in Benaras.
Living as a servant of the Banerjees, Prosenjit’s father completed his studies – as a caretaker, he had almost no income, the Banerjees though provided just enough to cover his food and other incidentals. After he completed his studies, they appointed another caretaker but allowed Biswajit to live in the outhouse until he could figure out his own life. Biswajit soon took an accounting job in a local office and in few years rented his own place. Biswajit married a local Bengali girl and in 1960, Prosenjit was born. Prosenjit’s childhood was ordinary; while his father managed to live by well financially, there wasn’t much luxury.
They had their own house by the time Prosenjit was ready for college but then, tragedy struck. Prosenjit’s mother contracted cancer and all his father’s attention, income and emotion went into ensuring her wellbeing. Prosenjit, who had dreamt of appearing for IAS, too got caught up in the same charade and could not focus much on his studies. He, however, managed to pass his graduate and postgraduate courses in Eastern languages with distinction. His mother finally lost the battle with cancer by the time he completed his post-graduate studies. Prosenjit’s mother’s loss hit his father badly – the old man lost all touch with reality; his own mental health deteriorated creating another set of troubles for Prosenjit.
Prosenjit got a job in one of the local colleges of the Benaras Hindu University as a professor of language but trying to take care of his ailing father and teaching – Prosenjit’s life was just sandwiched between work and home. His salary wasn’t great, but having a home of his own, his needs were few.
The only pursuit which gave Prosenjit some gratification was the local theatre activity at his university. Prosenjit didn’t start as a theatre enthusiast but being a professor of languages, he slowly got exposed to literature and in turn theatre which arose from this literature. Many students who came to his class had dual interests in theatre and literature. ‘Coordinating’ theatre activities started as an administrative responsibility allotted to him by the college but as time passed, he started enjoying it and got more involved.
Over time, he also started getting connected with the theatre circuit in other parts of the country – sometimes through his students, sometimes through delegations from other universities. Theatre thus gave his otherwise morose life a larger canvas which he could connect to people far and beyond. Through some of his students who went on to join institutions like National School of Drama in Delhi and Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, he started connecting with some leading theatre personalities. When the NSD organized Bharat Rang Mahotsav in Lucknow, he was sent by the University to attend.
As the years passed and Prosenjit became more familiar with theatre, his language classes started becoming burdensome – he didn’t enjoy teaching languages as much as he enjoyed theatre. He first tried changing his department and joined as a faculty of the Theatre Communications course in his college; even then he longed to move into mainstream theatre – in Mumbai or Delhi where the theatre was wider and more intense. But he had little choice – his father’s mental health left him with little options to move out of Varanasi.
In 2010, when the Bharat Rang Mahotsav was held in Bhopal, he was invited by several of his connections to attend it, but he couldn’t go. His father’s condition had deteriorated further – he became hysterical, experiences from a long bygone era of partition, longing for his birthplace and even a sense of alienation started taking over him. Though he had spent almost his entire life in Varanasi, he still lacked the sense of belonging to this place. Finally, his mental health took over his physical well being as well - he started refusing to eat, he lost a complete sense of living – and finally died.
During the interrogation with the Mumbai police, Prosenjit explained that after his father passed away, he had little else to do in Varanasi than continue his job. Bengalis in Varanasi were anyway on a decline - most of the big houses owned by Bengalis were either being sold or encroached – education too wasn’t as great as it used to be. And even though he was with the prestigious BHU, he had pivoted away from his main skills of language studies into theatre. And he had no other responsibilities and family to take care of, he decided he wanted to spend the next few years of his life working full time into the field which he had become passionate about – theatre. He had meagre savings, but they would suffice, and he had some former students who treated him with high esteem and affection, who had invited him to join the theatre community in Mumbai where they themselves were. And hence, after the death of his father, Prosenjit decided to migrate to Mumbai.
The story was very convincing, ACP Vaman could not spot any fabrication, any lie, even any discontinuity in his version of events – the whole Maoist handler angle did not fit in anywhere in this story. During interrogation, Prosenjit sounded and acted natural and genuine – there was hardly any reason not to trust his version of events. When told about his email and messenger communications – Prosenjit was lost. He had an email account on Gmail, the password to which he volunteered to share but he claimed to have never heard of the encrypted mail service and he didn’t even know what a messenger was – Whatsapp was yet to gain popularity.
Prosenjit Hazra had a frail, thin frame – he didn’t look very healthy, and this always made Vaman and his team go mild on him. They had not used force on him during the interrogations; in fact, he volunteered information he had so willingly, that they did not find any reason to use force until now. Vaman wondered if IB and Assam police had sent him on a wild goose chase; was Prosenjit Hazra indeed an innocent man only to have the wrong first name and circumstances which put him into a peculiar set of suspicion?
The Curious case of Prosenjit Hazra - Part 1
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| Mumbai Police Headquarters |
Part 1: ACP Vaman Chandrakant
ACP Vaman Chandrakant just couldn’t settle his mind on how he should present the case of Prosenjit Hazra. He had taken this case on the recommendation of his mentor ADGP Padmanabhan. “Just like a case on the Underworld was a stepping stone to promotions in our times, it is going to be terrorism and cybercrime in yours – and this case has a perfect blend of both” – Padmanabhan Sir had said.
Padmanabhan himself had risen through the ranks of IPS to become the DIG and then the ADGP. He was a legend in the police department for his ability to solve cases of serial Bomb blasts in Mumbai in the 1990s. He had not only found the much-needed evidence to prove the links between the underworld and the bomb blasts, but he was also instrumental in arresting the growth of underworld in Mumbai in that period. Coming from him, this case was a mandatory assignment of sorts and even a golden opportunity.
When he took up the case, the case brief made it look like a case which could conclude very fast. It was just about arresting Hazra and getting him to confess, Vaman had thought – after all Hazra was just a History Professor, not some hard-boiled criminal. And again – Hazra was small fish; had it not been for Hazra’s presence in Mumbai for last few years, his arrest and interrogation would possibly have been part of another larger case for Assam or UP police. Vaman had planned to close the case in 3 months, and then hand over the evidence to Assam Police or UP police or (as he thought was more likely) to the NIA for further investigation on the larger canvas of Maoist terror cases.
Unfortunately, by the time the cobwebs of state elections cleared, and Vaman was able to get pace on the case, Padmanabhan Sir had retired and migrated to the United States where his daughter lived. Given that he had just become a grandparent, chances of him visiting Mumbai in the near future were bleak and his availability even on the phone was very low. So, Vaman was fending for himself – the new ADGP was a different man with ambitions different than Padmanabhan sir. There was a rumour that he was making moves to get into politics after retirement. If Vaman went to him with his dilemma about the Hazra case, he was sure his case could get into political headwinds which he wanted to avoid at all costs.
So, what was the Hazra case all about – on the surface it was simple; Prosenjit Hazra was a ‘suspect’ handler for Maoist terrorists in North Eastern belt of India [1] – from Assam to Meghalaya and Sikkim. The accusation on Hazra, a professor of North-Eastern languages by the day, was that he was a handler for Maoist terror groups by the night. He would be contacted by ‘higher-ups’ online with instructions which he would then relay over to operatives on ground. The narrative tied well with the recent media reports which accused several ‘intellectuals’ – many of them artists or educationists – being involved in supporting Maoist activities in North East. Or did it?
The original case file was based on information collected by Assam Police. Assam Police had discovered a money trail from the Maoists operatives to a local handler in Nongpoh in Meghalaya midway between Gauhati and Shillong 50 kms from each. The local handler was a sports teacher at the local High School in Nongpoh [2] – Assam Police had recovered weapons from the school’s sports room. The handler had also opened a Bank account in a local cooperative bank and money had travelled via a series of cash dealings into his bank account which later was made to pay out ‘connections’ in Burma who were apparently the arms suppliers. The most amusing part of the local case was the name of the handler – Adolf Lu Hitler Kharmalki [3]!
The boss of the local handler was apparently someone with a first name ‘Prosenjit Da’ – who would be in touch with him through ‘email’ and ‘messaging’. The group used a Switzerland based encrypted email service to communicate in addition to encrypted messaging using Blackberry phones or a service called Telegram. It was this cyber-angle which made the case interesting for Vaman, who was an IIT-Delhi alumnus [4] before he joined the Indian Police Service (IPS). While he was a chemical engineer by qualification but had a good grasp on information technology given his technical bent of mind – good enough to understand the nuances of what encryption meant and how it was being used by the terrorists.
But this is where the case became difficult – there was little that the Indian Police could do to influence the Swiss or American email and messaging service providers to provide them with further data. So they had to go blind on this one – the only inroad was access to the Adolf Lu’s email account. Assam Police passed on whatever information they could from this and identified Prosenjit as the handler. For almost 4 years thereafter, the whereabouts of Prosenjit were unknown - Prosenjit is a common Bengali name. The hunt started for several Prosenjits – their backgrounds were checked, their family histories and their income sources checked. But nothing came of it.
Finally, two things happened serendipitously – first, the IB relayed a message to the Assam Police about a certain Prosenjit Hazra then employed with a local graduate college in Varanasi had quit his job, sold his ancestral house in Benaras and had migrated to Mumbai. Mr. Hazra fit the bill of a typical Maoist sympathizer – he was a professor of ‘East Indian languages’ at Benaras Hindu University and taught students of Theatre Communications. He was keenly interested in Theatre otherwise and would often organize plays on topics which were considered close to separatists. More so, he was unmarried though 55 years old now and hence moving cities at such a late age was suspicious.
The second serendipity was information arriving from Assam about the involvement of a government official [5] in syphoning government funds to terrorists. The government official interestingly got his instructions from someone in Mumbai – Assam police put the two and two together and concluded that Prosenjit Hazra was the handler ‘Prosenjit Da’ and his Mumbai move was to connect directly with the ‘higher-ups’ in Mumbai now that the government official was arrested.
Assam police relayed both sets of information to the Mumbai police and stage was set for Hazra’s arrest. Vaman, along with a team of Assam Police deputies arrested Hazra and work started – the idea was to extract information from Hazra and add to the case against those involved in illegal arms purchase case. The deputies from Assam police returned after the arrest and hoped that Vaman would be able to soon pass the necessary information.
But the more Vaman interrogated Hazra, the more confused the case became – either Hazra was a master at feigning ignorance or he was indeed innocent. Hazra first denied all charges – his own story was very convincing and indeed one with which Vaman not only related, but he also developed sympathy for Hazra – if indeed his story was true.
Continued in Part 2.
Padmanabhan himself had risen through the ranks of IPS to become the DIG and then the ADGP. He was a legend in the police department for his ability to solve cases of serial Bomb blasts in Mumbai in the 1990s. He had not only found the much-needed evidence to prove the links between the underworld and the bomb blasts, but he was also instrumental in arresting the growth of underworld in Mumbai in that period. Coming from him, this case was a mandatory assignment of sorts and even a golden opportunity.
When he took up the case, the case brief made it look like a case which could conclude very fast. It was just about arresting Hazra and getting him to confess, Vaman had thought – after all Hazra was just a History Professor, not some hard-boiled criminal. And again – Hazra was small fish; had it not been for Hazra’s presence in Mumbai for last few years, his arrest and interrogation would possibly have been part of another larger case for Assam or UP police. Vaman had planned to close the case in 3 months, and then hand over the evidence to Assam Police or UP police or (as he thought was more likely) to the NIA for further investigation on the larger canvas of Maoist terror cases.
Unfortunately, by the time the cobwebs of state elections cleared, and Vaman was able to get pace on the case, Padmanabhan Sir had retired and migrated to the United States where his daughter lived. Given that he had just become a grandparent, chances of him visiting Mumbai in the near future were bleak and his availability even on the phone was very low. So, Vaman was fending for himself – the new ADGP was a different man with ambitions different than Padmanabhan sir. There was a rumour that he was making moves to get into politics after retirement. If Vaman went to him with his dilemma about the Hazra case, he was sure his case could get into political headwinds which he wanted to avoid at all costs.
So, what was the Hazra case all about – on the surface it was simple; Prosenjit Hazra was a ‘suspect’ handler for Maoist terrorists in North Eastern belt of India [1] – from Assam to Meghalaya and Sikkim. The accusation on Hazra, a professor of North-Eastern languages by the day, was that he was a handler for Maoist terror groups by the night. He would be contacted by ‘higher-ups’ online with instructions which he would then relay over to operatives on ground. The narrative tied well with the recent media reports which accused several ‘intellectuals’ – many of them artists or educationists – being involved in supporting Maoist activities in North East. Or did it?
The original case file was based on information collected by Assam Police. Assam Police had discovered a money trail from the Maoists operatives to a local handler in Nongpoh in Meghalaya midway between Gauhati and Shillong 50 kms from each. The local handler was a sports teacher at the local High School in Nongpoh [2] – Assam Police had recovered weapons from the school’s sports room. The handler had also opened a Bank account in a local cooperative bank and money had travelled via a series of cash dealings into his bank account which later was made to pay out ‘connections’ in Burma who were apparently the arms suppliers. The most amusing part of the local case was the name of the handler – Adolf Lu Hitler Kharmalki [3]!
The boss of the local handler was apparently someone with a first name ‘Prosenjit Da’ – who would be in touch with him through ‘email’ and ‘messaging’. The group used a Switzerland based encrypted email service to communicate in addition to encrypted messaging using Blackberry phones or a service called Telegram. It was this cyber-angle which made the case interesting for Vaman, who was an IIT-Delhi alumnus [4] before he joined the Indian Police Service (IPS). While he was a chemical engineer by qualification but had a good grasp on information technology given his technical bent of mind – good enough to understand the nuances of what encryption meant and how it was being used by the terrorists.
But this is where the case became difficult – there was little that the Indian Police could do to influence the Swiss or American email and messaging service providers to provide them with further data. So they had to go blind on this one – the only inroad was access to the Adolf Lu’s email account. Assam Police passed on whatever information they could from this and identified Prosenjit as the handler. For almost 4 years thereafter, the whereabouts of Prosenjit were unknown - Prosenjit is a common Bengali name. The hunt started for several Prosenjits – their backgrounds were checked, their family histories and their income sources checked. But nothing came of it.
Finally, two things happened serendipitously – first, the IB relayed a message to the Assam Police about a certain Prosenjit Hazra then employed with a local graduate college in Varanasi had quit his job, sold his ancestral house in Benaras and had migrated to Mumbai. Mr. Hazra fit the bill of a typical Maoist sympathizer – he was a professor of ‘East Indian languages’ at Benaras Hindu University and taught students of Theatre Communications. He was keenly interested in Theatre otherwise and would often organize plays on topics which were considered close to separatists. More so, he was unmarried though 55 years old now and hence moving cities at such a late age was suspicious.
The second serendipity was information arriving from Assam about the involvement of a government official [5] in syphoning government funds to terrorists. The government official interestingly got his instructions from someone in Mumbai – Assam police put the two and two together and concluded that Prosenjit Hazra was the handler ‘Prosenjit Da’ and his Mumbai move was to connect directly with the ‘higher-ups’ in Mumbai now that the government official was arrested.
Assam police relayed both sets of information to the Mumbai police and stage was set for Hazra’s arrest. Vaman, along with a team of Assam Police deputies arrested Hazra and work started – the idea was to extract information from Hazra and add to the case against those involved in illegal arms purchase case. The deputies from Assam police returned after the arrest and hoped that Vaman would be able to soon pass the necessary information.
But the more Vaman interrogated Hazra, the more confused the case became – either Hazra was a master at feigning ignorance or he was indeed innocent. Hazra first denied all charges – his own story was very convincing and indeed one with which Vaman not only related, but he also developed sympathy for Hazra – if indeed his story was true.
Continued in Part 2.
References
- https://fountainink.in/reportage/a-mutiny-in-assam
- https://ribhoi.gov.in/public-utility-category/schools/
- http://www.nancy.cc/2014/01/06/colorful-names-meghalaya/
- https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/IPS-officers-with-medical-engineering-degrees-are-changing-the-face-of-policing/articleshow/48137820.cms
- https://www.timesofassam.com/headlines/nc-hills-scam-court-sentences-3-life-imprisonment-8-12-years-others/
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