What you need is not what you get! (WYNINWYG)

A group of upper middle-class women gathered for a kitty party were discussing the amounts they pay their domestic help. One of them talked about her maid asking for a raise since the last four months. She told the maid to wait till January of next year for a raise. Four months is not too long she added. Switching to a more interesting topic, she asked if any one was interested in starting another kitty - a bigger one of Rs 5000/- Didn't take long for some other women to join in. The amount was not that big. The amount for the current kitty was just Rs 1500/-. That is like loose change. The maid can wait for another month for the princely raise of Rs 100. Her take home monthly salary at present for those wanting to know such things is Rs 1200 for spending an hour each day sweeping and cleaning floors, bathrooms and washing utensils. Everyday, no holidays.

What keeps an educated, well-off, upper middle-class, apparently sensible woman in India from realising that if she can spend thousands on kitty parties, she can very well give a raise of a few hundred rupees to her maid when she needs it. It doesnot require any complex arithmetic or lessons in labour laws to realise the importance of paying service providers adequately. Especially those service providers who give her essential services like keeping the Italian marble squeaky clean for her to put her pedicured feet on every morning she wakes up.

This is the story of India everyday, everywhere. Needs of the deserving millions are ignored in the overpowering greed of those who already have it and are in a position to use their clout and proximity to power.

In a hard-hitting column on the rise in farmer suicides through 2009, (The Hindu 27-Dec-2010 read the column here), P.Sainath talks about how bank loans at low interest rates have been made available for those wanting to buy luxury cars like Mercedes Benz and BMW. But poor and marginal farmers, the ones who need loans at low interest rates have a hard time getting it. Is is not the primary function of banks, particularly public-sector banks to provide banking and credit services to those who need it to carry out their livelihood activities and daily subsistence? Or is it to dole out monstrous amounts in loan to people acquiring luxury items that they do not really need except to make a show of obscene one-upmanship? These people are actually rich enough to pay for the luxury cars from their own pots of money. They don't need a bank loan. Should there be some scientific thinking and logic behind who needs a bank loan and who should get how much at what interest rate? For the person low on resources shouldn't the interest rate be lower?

These and such issues never make it into the mainstream media, print or electronic. Rare exceptions are like the one cited above. Electronic media use the prime time slots to cover stories that would maximise their TRPs. Whatever those are. Considering that at prime time a television news channel can give maximum exposure to stories that really matter, one would think that issues that are important to the nation in the long term would be addressed atleast once a week. But day in and day out, we get the same sensationalization of Breaking News ... A minimum of four persons available on each news channel for panel discussions that are heavy on rhetoric and light on content. What we need is for the high-profile media to use their resources to study the real issues, analyse them and present a new, fresh perspective to enlighten the viewer. But instead,
we get the same, lazy treatment - a cacophony of voices from people, some of whom seem to have made a career out of appearing on news channels at dinner time.