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A mandate for change |
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Widening income inequalities
Use stative verbs with correct tense form
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A mandate for change IT is a historic victory for Narendra Modi that surpasses all projections by opinion polls and political pundits. The Congress stands decimated. The large states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Maharashtra apart from the current BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat have given Modi a massive mandate. Many BJP lightweights were swept to victory, riding the Modi wave that spread beyond the Hindi heartland - moving as far as the Northeast. Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi has offered to quit and his resignation may trigger similar demands in Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Andhra Pradesh has voted for Chandrababu Naidu's TDP and the TRS that had agitated for and got Telangana. Only Tamil Nadu, Odisha, West Bengal and Kerala have managed to hold their own ground in the Modi tsunami. Punjab too has bucked the trend as it handed over four seats to the Aam Aadmi Party, saving the Congress from annihilation. It was essentially a vote against Akali-BJP misrule, but the choice of credible candidates helped AAP as the Congress, plagued by infighting, failed to cash in on anti-incumbency. AAP's disastrous performance in Delhi shows how swiftly the party has frittered away the public goodwill it had generated not long ago. Perhaps, the party got over-ambitious and spread itself too wide, too fast. Arvind Kejriwal's anti-corruption crusade and allegations of corporate funding against Modi did not resonate with the people. Modi had started early and single-mindedly spearheaded a well-conceived election campaign, using social media and gadgets to reach out to the maximum number. BJP and RSS workers worked like a team to orchestrate a presidential form of campaign, pitching a performer Modi against an inexperienced Rahul Gandhi, while the Congress muddled along, trying to make it a communalism-vs-secularism fight. The Congress had no effective communicator to match Modi. To choose between Modi and Rahul, the voters did not have to think twice. Yet it is not the end of the road for the Congress. The leadership will have to reinvent and re-energise the party, bring in fresh blood and shed the corrupt. Friday's verdict reflects how deep public disenchantment has been with the UPA whose leadership had inspired little hope. Yearning for change, people have solidly stood behind a national party led by a strong leader. They have reacted angrily to relentless price rise, persistent economic slowdown, non-governance, politics of freebies, appeasement of minorities and rampant corruption. The last two years saw the country's growth dip below 5 per cent. Job opportunities shrank. The Congress forgot reforms so essential to push growth and create jobs. Focusing on rights-based entitlements, it wooed the poor who were hit hard by price rise, which remained unmanageable and extracted a heavy political price. The Congress abandoned the assertive and demanding middle class, which had earlier benefited from a 9 per cent plus growth rate. The RTI law gave activists the power to dig out scams and messy governance as the media went to town with them. Women felt unsafe and demanded a functional government. The aspirational middle class, which in 2009 had pinned its hopes on Dr Manmohan Singh, turned to Narendra Modi, who held out the promise of growth, jobs and efficient governance. To domestic and global business houses Modi offered a re-play at the national level of the popular vibrant Gujarat model. The stock markets gave a resounding thumbs-up to Modi. Development requires peace and social harmony. Muslims and other minorities are apprehensive. Modi will have to reassure them as also his political opponents that he would not be vindictive. How Modi deals with the hardliners in the Sangh Parivar with their agenda of uniform civil code, Article 370 and the Ram temple in Ayodhya will be keenly watched. Faster growth also requires cordial relations with India's immediate neighbours as well as trade partners in other continents. India has achieved high global respect and position which any inward-looking Prime Minister cannot afford to roll back. Relations with Pakistan, China and the USA will test Modi's leadership. The euphoria over the massive win has its dangers, however. The challenge before Modi now is to live up to the expectations he has aroused. People are fed up with political fights over non-issues and want growth to accelerate, peace to prevail and society to stay free of riots. Modi starts with a huge advantage. With no coalitional pulls and pressures, he can pick the best available talent to run the government. He may have to fight the temptation to reward loyalists facing criminal cases. A clean-up cannot happen with tainted leaders at the helm. His opponents within the party have been silenced and may no longer be able to throw tantrums over posts or portfolios. Going by his belief in "minimum government, maximum governance", he may, and should, keep his government small.
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I am not young enough to know everything. — Oscar Wilde
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Widening income inequalities
A
young French economist Thomas Piketty is creating waves with his new book Capital In The Twenty-First Century, which is on inequalities of income. He has been hailed by top economists of Harvard and MIT as having completed a monumental and exhaustive research endeavour. His work deals with historical data that covers a long span of time and goes deep into the economic histories of nations to determine their wealth and income patterns. His theory is somehow familiar to all of us in India who are witnessing how inequality is growing. And though he has examined the data of mostly western developed countries, it is the same story in the case of India. He said recently in an interview that the top 1 per cent in India owns 8 to 9 per cent of the national income. With 61 dollar billionaires and 200,000 dollar millionaires, India has a top layer of very rich and a bottom layer of very poor comprising of around 300 million people. His book is all about how capital begets capital and people who have capital to begin with, will always earn more than those who are trying to earn their living by working on salaries. However hard one may work, he or she will never be able to compete with people with capital and assets. As is well known, capital is uniquely and unequally distributed throughout the world. He explains why income inequality is worsening in the US and around the world since the 1970s. Currently in the US the top 10 per cent own about 70 per cent of all the capital and half of that belongs to the top 1 per cent, the next 40 per cent who compose the middle class own about a quarter of that total (mostly in the form of housing) and the remaining half of the population owns next to nothing or about 5 per cent of total wealth. The causes are well known — the deterioration of labour unions and collective bargaining, erosion of minimum wages and the impact of globalisation which has led to intensified competition from low-wage workers in poor countries, technical changes and shifts in demand that have led to low demand for unskilled jobs and rising demand for highly educated, skilled jobs at the top. The pattern is universal. He divides wealth measured in the local currency of the time by national income also in the local currency and arrives at a wealth-income ratio. For example, the total wealth of France in 1850 amounted to about seven years of income but only four years for US in 1950. According to Piketty, income from wealth is concentrated because large blocks of wealth tend to earn a higher return than small ones. It is because big investors have access to a wider range of investment instruments than smaller investors. Income from work on the other hand is less concentrated than income from wealth. In the US, the top 1 per cent earns 12 per cent of all labour incomes, the next 9 per cent earn 23 per cent, the middle class gets about 40 per cent and the bottom half gets about 25 per cent from working in various occupations. In India, the wealthy will remain rich for generations even though the middle class is growing in size. This is because if a person’s income comes entirely from accumulated wealth, he or she is likely to be very wealthy because she will consume only a small fraction of her income. The rest is saved and accumulated, andher wealth will increase and so will the income. Thus as long as the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth, the income and wealth of the rich will grow faster than the typical income coming from working in other occupations. This will naturally increase the trend towards increasingly inequality. People also save from their incomes derived from labour and thus a fair amount of accumulation of capital takes place in the hands of wage and salary earners. But given the small initial wealth and relatively low saving rate of people below the top group plus the fact that small savings earn a relatively low rate of return, calculations have shown that this mechanism is not capable of offsetting the forecasted widening of inequality. Thus it is an unequal society everywhere and the rich get richer and the dynamics of change strongly suggest that it will get more so in the future. In the twenty-first century, there will be slower growth of population and productivity and a rate of return on capital will be distinctly higher than the growth rate of countries. As a result the wealth-income ratio will rise back to nineteenth-century heights. Already it is true that agglomeration of wealth has tended to grow faster than incomes from work, it is likely that role of inherited wealth in society will increase relative to that of recently earned and more hard worked fortunes of the labouring class. Though the aggregate of wage incomes grow only at a relatively slow rate, there are cases of outstanding people who are successful innovators (Bill Gates), managers, entertainers (Bollywood stars), entrepreneurs who can accumulate large amounts of wealth in a lifetime and join the ranks of the ‘rentier’ class and live on rents. It is likely that their children will also enjoy the wealth. But if economic growth is slow, such success stories are less likely. Already there is ample proof that the concentration of wealth and its ability to grow will give an increasing weight to inheritance as compared to talent and hard work. To correct this trend, Piketty suggests an annual progressive tax on wealth worldwide but realises that will be difficult to implement because there will always be flight to tax havens. In India any type of wealth tax would be hardest to implement because a huge amount of wealth is already stashed away abroad. Widening of inequality is inevitable in India in the future. The writer is Senior Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi
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Use stative verbs with correct tense form “You are all knowing, friends,
what sweetness is in Miss Pushpa... 1. I am thinking a holiday in the hills is better Unless the speaker wishes to account for minute-to-minute “thinking”, which would then make it an action and not a thought, the user must use the simple present tense. This form is used to convey thoughts and attitudes, complete by themselves. The sentence should be reworded as “I think a ...”. Words like “think, remember, believe, seem” and “know” express mental states and must use the simple present. 2. I am seeing what you want Once again, the simple present needs to replace the –ing form for the sentence to read as “I see what you want” unless the user wishes to describe an event. In that case “see” will occur as a dynamic verb along with an adverb of time to complete the sense, as in “I am seeing them tomorrow”. Words like “see, hear, smell”, etc. are stative verbs since they stand for physical sensations. 3. I’m lovin(g) It Riding on “creative licence”, Mc Donald’s tagline has travelled the continents with its wrong verb form. “Love” is an emotional state, which makes it a stative verb. Therefore, it should not use the –ing form. But the company justifies it on the plea that it invites consumer attention to every moment of the experience, which makes it an action. Other stative verbs like “dislike, hate” and “prefer” must also occur in the simple present. 4. Sweetie is having a labrador Sentences such as “I am having two brothers”, though erroneous, are frequently heard. Stative verbs “have, own, want” and “belong” in contexts such as these represent possession and therefore cannot use the -ing form. The sentence can be reworded as “Sweetie has ...”. When “have” changes its meaning becoming an action with a beginning and an end, it takes the –ing form, as in “I am having tea”. Linguists like Tom McArthur and Pam Peters are of the opinion that many Indian users at the intermediate level of competence ignore the rules discussed above. The correct use of stative verbs can take such users a step closer to the next level of competence.
— The writer is Director, Regional Institute of English, Chandigarh
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ON a note of satire, Ezekiel captures English as it is used by many in India. He cleverly weaves a string of stative verbs together to pen the 42-line poem, but with a twist. Meddling with rules of grammar, he uses the progressive tense form (-ing) for stative verbs, as seen in “knowing” and “feeling”. While dynamic verbs describe physical actions like “running” and “fainting”, stative verbs express mental, emotional and physical states of being like “know” and “feel.” Stative verbs occur in the simple present tense form though exceptions can always be there, as in “I am enjoying the film” (the emphasis is on the action). Instances of stative verbs occurring with wrong tense forms follow: