Marxism on Overdrive; Marxism on Hormones in God’s Own Country!

I don't post for a day and my ranking plummets. Guess blogging is fraught with such caprice that one has to always bee on the lookout for subjects. One can't believe the way prices have gone up. A kilo of potato is Rs 50 now, wifey says. How will we manage? People are coping in different ways. I find my fruit vendor, who sits on his haunches peeling papayas outside my office, nearly in tears. The monthly bribe he pays to the law-keepers has been doubled from Rs 50 to Rs 100. Last week I saw those guys in person, collecting the money from him. Today they came and collected a papaya for free. Such is life on the streets of Bombai.

Yesterday a friend dropped in. We were talking about the labour situation in Kerala. Most farmers have stopped tilling and planting their lands because labour is Rs 300 a day. They will come at 10 a.m. leave for lunch at 1 p.m., again come back at 2 p.m. and leave at 4.30 p.m. They work strictly according to the schedule agreed and prepared by the Marxist government. That's dialectic materialism. I think this materialism is grossly unfair to the poor landowners, who are the new poor of the state. On top of this, the farm labourers are given subsidized rice at Rs 2 a kilo and a lot of other free goodies like chicken, goats, cows, etc. etc. I think this is Marxism in overdrive, Marxism on hormones.

Actually all these are aimed to improve their live, lift them up from the nadir of poverty, educate them, make them better citizens. Actually that's not happening, which is my grouse with all types of Marxist ideologists like Kuriachen Kuriakose. Verily, this thing of the state spoon-feeding the poor with quotas and goodies doesn't work because it makes them lazy. If supply is abundant we don't have incentives to produce, do we? If labour is expensive, we don't hire them, do we?

So what do the recipients of the subsidized rice, chicken, goats do? They sell them in the market and drink it up, not start an animal farm. It's like giving sweets to your son and making him promise to study. He will eat the sweets and won't study. So a cousin of the friend (who dropped in) has a solution. He is a building contractor, a shrewd one. After the day's work is done he drops his workers to the "Kallu Shap" meaning "Arrack Shop" in his Jeep with their day's pay. The rationale is that, at least, they will drink like dehydrated fishes, pay the shop-owner and be back for work the next day. If they keep their money they would never report for work. Sure as hell, after a night's binge-ing in the shop, they return to work bleary-eyed and broke the next day.

That's God's country's own Marxism on overdrive. Kuriachen Kuriakose begs to differ. According to him. "An abundance of supply will drive production." That's zilch, I say.