Births, deaths,
weddings and funerals are all a part of life’s myriad experiences. But
given the law of disparities, some make more news than others. The most
recent example of a wedding that hogged the limelight was that of Vanisha,
daughter of British-based steel tycoon, Lakshmi Mittal. Last year Mittal
caught the media’s attention when he bought a hugely expensive house (akin
to a palace) in the real-estate agent’s dream-city, London. It is needless
to say that whenever Mittal is in the news, it is more often than not
connected with his wealth. Even when there was talk about Tony Blair’s New
Labour favoring his industries, it was linked up to the huge funding that
Lakshmi Mittal had provided the party.
Last week Mittal held a fairy-tale wedding for his one and only daughter,
Vanisha. Not satisfied with living in a house as big as a palace, the
doting father decided to hire a true-to-life palace in Paris for the
occasion. Everything to do with the wedding was lapped up by the media;
from the 50-page wedding invitation, bound in silver, to the run-up
festivities that took five days, culminating in the actual ceremony,
including all the celebrities who attended and the Hindi film-stars who
went over to dance on the occasion. (This is a new trend that has been
introduced in India of getting film stars to attend and dance at wedding
ceremonies for which the above-mentioned are compensated handsomely). Much
was written about the food that was served at the festivities including
the flying down of a Maharaj (a local term for an expert cook in
Bengal) from Kolkata, the city that Mittal grew up in. The cook had
earlier rendered his services at the wedding of Mittal’s son, which had
taken place in Kolkata.
This piece now shifts to another story that hardly attracted any media
attention for want of the glamour that was a part of Vanisha’s glitzy
wedding. This one deals with the death of a carpenter, Bangaru Ramachari
of Mukundapuram village in the Nalgonda district of Andhra Pradesh.
Ramachari and his family subsisted on the income that he was able to
generate from making farming implements for the farmers who lived around
him in the village. During good times, this carpenter was compensated in
kind with each farmer giving him 70 kilograms of paddy in a year that
amounted to about 2800 kilograms, every year. After keeping aside what he
needed for his family, Ramachari sold the rest and was able to eke out an
existence without having to face the spectre of hunger.
In the last three years, there were no orders for farming equipment as
farming failed on account of drought and the vagaries of the agricultural
business. While most farmers and others in the village took loans from
money- lenders and village banks, Ramachari was too proud to do so. After
five days of starving, Ramachari collapsed and dropped dead. Heaven knows
who paid for his funeral. While this hapless man’s death resulted from
starvation, many others opted for the easy way out. In the last six weeks,
300 farmers in the state of Andhra Pradesh have resorted to suicide to get
out of the debt trap. The steady erosion of local democracy and extreme
outside interference from agencies like McKinsey, World Bank, the IMF and
DFID who insisted on their blueprints (highly-paid “consultants” were
hired to implement the same), have been cited as the reasons for this
horrific state of affairs.
In the midst of all this, there is a man of Indian origins like Lakshmi
Mittal, choosing to flaunt his wealth in this blatant manner. Perhaps his
preoccupations with the wedding have kept him unaware of these people who
probably worship a lesser God than Lakshmi, judging by what has happened
to them. Or maybe Mittal, if questioned, might justify the wedding and the
amount spent like Clinton in his memoirs: I did it just because I
could.
There is no harm in celebrating your daughter’s wedding grandly but should
there also not be some sense of balance in the spending? If Mittal had
thought of having the wedding in India, at least there would have been
some income generated for local enterprises. Or else, he could have had
the wedding in the U.K., the country, which has made him rich and helped
the people there. There is a term called spreading the wealth, which has
become of even more significance in a country like India, with the huge
disparities in living standards between the haves and the have-nots. One
can only hope that the latter won’t revolt and turn on the rest of us like
it happened in France and Russia.
Perhaps Lakshmi Mittal and others of his ilk can take a leaf out of the
book of the Big B, Amitabh Bacchhan, who, troubled after reading about
farmers’ suicides in Andhra Pradesh, while on a visit on Tirupati, has
pledged Rs. 11 lakhs through the Rotary Club of Mumbai to ease the burdens
of some of them. 16 farmers have benefited from his munificence. While 11
lakhs is just a drop in the ocean, yet little drops can make up an ocean
as much as each one of us can make a difference in this world of births,
weddings, deaths and funerals.
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