Prunes and Prisms

Prunes and Prisms


It has been quite a year for blood, betrayal, lies and crime. Sometimes, when the cascading bad news turns into an avalanche, we, the educated but ordinary, the informed but powerless, may look for solace. We can suckle comfort out of love if we have it, or from literature, unfazed by the passage of time, even making up a wad satisfying enough to chew the cud with. We can mine it, going deeper to the mother lode of dead languages, from whence it came.

Of course, there’s always the high road and the low road. And sometimes the low road doesn’t do half badly. Notwithstanding the high-brow British Admiralty Officer, gold braid gleaming across the Naval Whites, Britannia did rule the restless waves, for a full century after Trafalgar. And this, without losing even a single battle! Britannia did so, using formulaic quantities of the fabled “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash”.

But as Annus Horribilis 2008 grinds towards a close, we may need to remind ourselves of certain fundamentals that seem to have eluded the mighty. This even as the world’s ordinary people huddle, like beasts sheltering from a storm, cringing under the whip arm of inimical fortune, hoping for betterment in 2009.

Many, here and around the globe, are facing calibrations of financial pressure, losing homes, jobs, contracts, feeling suicidal, and even slipping off the mortal coil altogether.

Alongside this financial purgatory, this crushing destruction of self-worth, we have had to endure terrorist threat, insecurity, fear for loved ones vulnerable to senseless attack, contemplate the spectre of sudden death.

But even as we cast about for rescue, flailing for stability, hoping; we are met with unrelenting, inexhaustible, political chicanery, chaotic governance, insensitivity and animalistic opportunism. It must be admitted, however that “there is narcissism about insecurity,” as Lauren Laverne, a BBC presenter put it. We the members of the Indian public, protected by the scantiest ratio (1.45:1000) of police personnel per thousand, less than half the global average, are yet, no doubt, narcissistic about our personal safety. But how much more intensely must the self-love run amongst our amply protected politicians?

Yes, it has been quite a year for blood, betrayal, lies and crime. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of White Collar Criminals have made off with hard-earned investments, placed in their fiduciary trust, Bernie Madoff fashion.

Bernard Madoff was a trusted money-man for forty years, investing billions from European and Swiss Banks, from American Charities and Celebrities. He is 70 now, and facing twenty years of prison time. He has fraudulently lost 50 billion dollars in a grand Ponzi Scheme. But this man was considered one of the very best. Till recently, he was Chairman of NASDAQ and adviser to the Government of America on, ironically, how to deal with financial scams.

But we are no longer surprised. Madoff is just the latest in a long line of appalling developments. We are bracing for more. Newsweek has put it at four trillion American Dollars, or 7 per cent of the world’s GDP, needed to make the global season of bailouts effective. And all this money needs to be found, pledged, and spent now and within two years.

But this is already about the cure, and we haven’t quite finished discussing the disease. There is a drought of integrity in high places. It has become hard to believe anybody. How is it that Integrity came to be side-lined so comprehensively? Did the Movers and Shakers really imagine they could render it obsolete? Is this what the Age of Click and Mouse has come to?

Yes it’s truly been a landmark year for grand larceny and reckless brigandage; a year of pirates and desperadoes, of system failures and chaos. And there is no clear answer to that age old posit: “who will protect us from the protectors”. You can vary the question: ergo, “who will watch the watchers/who will guard the guards/ Quis custodiet ipsos custodies”; but don’t expect an actual answer. If there was a viable, incorruptible answer, we wouldn’t still be asking. So what if Roman poet/satirist Juvenal put it down in the first century A.D.

As for comfort, it might be appropriate to take heart from a great writer whose soul was humiliated and lacerated by early want, but not so much that he failed to extract wry humour and touching emotion from adversity, penury, bleakness and blight. All this in the smoggy twilight of a full-blown Victorian Industrial Revolution.

Charles Dickens was only 12 when his father, mother and siblings were whisked off to Debtor’s Prison. It was 1824, and they went to the infamous Marshalsea. Charles himself was assigned to work off some of the debt at Warren’s Blacking Factory. Charles’ father John, a clerk at The Naval Pay Office, and his family, were released when his finances improved a little. And Charles was able to go back to school. But this experience marked and informed all that Dickens wrote over a long and illustrious career.

Some of it, was not about the inequity, or tragic circumstance. It was about helplessness and perhaps, the whimsy of amusing oneself as best as one could under the circumstances. In Little Dorrit, set in a Debtor’s Prison, Dickens writes: “Papa. Potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips: especially prunes and prism.” It makes you purse and stretch your lips over the words as you read them and benefit from a simple amusement for paupers.

But Dickens wrote about money quite directly too. To wit, putting this in Mr. Micawber’s mouth: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness”. It sounds idyllic in this season of savage de-leveraging and erstwhile bumper profits using borrowed money, but it must be remembered Mr. Micawber, from David Copperfield, was, in fact, sent to prison for his debts.

Or, this little primer for today’s Wall Street: “A person who can't pay gets another person who can't pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don't make either of them able to do a walking-match”.

What else? Perhaps, just this one from his A Christmas Carol. ... “A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!"

(1,055 words)

December 19th, 2008
Gautam Mukherjee


Published in The Pioneer on 30th December 2008 as "Good riddance to 2008" and online at www.dailypioneer.com and also archived there under Columnists.