a CHeESY sToRY

A Cheesy Story


Tough times extract change from all who don’t necessarily favour it. Most people are not like the prescient mice in the best-selling management parable of a few years ago: Who moved my cheese by Spencer Johnson, incidentally a medical doctor. Most of us, in keeping with the parable, are slow mice, resting on our laurels and trying to maintain the status quo. We keep expecting to repeat our formulaic successes, preferably with less and less effort as the time goes on. And we are baffled when diminishing return gives way to total cessation of cheese one fine day. We are then, and only then, forced to change in order to survive, feeling aggrieved all the while, and foolish too, like we are bolting the barn door after the horses have bolted.

And, as in the maze so in the real world. So, over the last six decades, freedom movements in a seemingly impervious imperialist world gave way to a largely socialist dawn of independence. And then they evolved into capitalism, one party rule, or dictatorship, with varying results. But gradually, the political lost ascendancy in a largely peaceful world not so much ruled by security concerns, and started ceding space to economics, till it eventually assumed centre-stage.

Of late, with the 21st century readjustments in the power structure taking place, more than six decades after World War II, country after country finds itself compelled to undertake the painful process of transition and transformation.

Despite the agonies of current economic difficulties and the scourge of Islamic terrorism; there is indeed a multi-polar world emerging, like it or not. And the North-South Divide is breaking down. America is being openly confronted by China in various fora, and loose coalitions of the have-nots and have-somes are taking on the erstwhile all-powerful West.

There are more and more calls to replace the Bretton Woods Global Monetary System established in now distant 1944, despite several modifications since. And calls to get away from the US dollar as the global reserve currency, even though there is no alternative clearly in sight.

Meanwhile, the G-7 has given way to G-8, and now to the G-20.The old rivalry between Communism/Socialism and Capitalism has truly run its course and is receding into 20th century history. Today, we can see both basic systems being modified, both within their own changing terms of reference, and by taking from each other.

Besides, the geographical imperatives of distance and global commerce have been drastically altered by communication technology, interdependence and speed. There is literally nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

Noted editor, journalist and author Prem Shankar Jha writes in his new book on China Managed Chaos-the fragility of the Chinese miracle, that China’s growth story may not be sustainable. He cites the political time bomb of lack of democracy and underdeveloped “regulatory and market institutions”. But, explains Jha in counterpoint, holding out little hope of Chinese democracy: “From the Han dynasty onwards, the Confucian State has dealt with political unrest and dissent by reforming itself and its practice of statecraft and not by ceding power to the populace.” But then, is this necessarily a bad thing?

Has the Chinese miracle perhaps succeeded, unbeknown to us, in simultaneously transforming the old Communist Party apparatus? Has it not delivered double digit or near double digit growth for thirty years now? And this, without the turbulence and frustrating two-steps-forward-one-step-back chaos of vote-in-vote-out democracy.

After all, look at the flak President Obama is catching in his attempts at reforming laisser-faire capitalism. But after just a year in office, in which his government has successfully stemmed the recession and prevented the US economy from going into a thirties style Great Depression; there is a lot of carping about the wisdom of many of his measures and proposals. The Americans seem to dislike the very interventionist government that has come to their rescue.

Besides, vested interest is not a monopoly of absolutist regimes. The American financial system, as also in its healthcare system, and its armaments industry, amongst other lobbies and power centres, are more than willing to take on the reformist President and his administration to prevent radical change. And the rank and file public is not amused with over 10 per cent joblessness either.

The sad thing for President Obama is that he has not carried the people with him to counterbalance the powerful establishment forces ranged against his initiatives. As president, he seems to have forgotten the wildly successful “yes we can” sloganeering of candidate Obama.

But substantively, despite the shrinkage of American prestige in the world; like former President Gorbachev of USSR in his time, Barack Obama may be the first American president to recognise, with his policies, the new realities of the 21st century.

He may be demonstrating the guts, despite seeming timidity, to signal that there are limits to American influence and power in a world where America and the West have lost much of their political, military and economic traction. But this de facto response to the new reality will naturally take some time to sink in with the American public. Ironically, America has heretofore won in the global sweepstakes by playing beggar thy neighbour, outclassing the USSR military spends with such aggression that it finally resulted in an implosion of that Communist empire. But today, the same America has neither the money nor the stomach to be globocop, anymore than Britain could sustain its empire after the two devastating world wars.

For India, the cheese has also been in motion. These geopolitical changes are altering our possibilities. We are no longer poor but we have a third or more of our people living in dire poverty. We are capable but inefficient. We are democratic but narrow in our vision and insincere in our resolutions. We are not used as yet to the corollaries of growth and sustenance that will ensure our future supplies of cheese. But the good news is that we probably know how to stay amused in the meantime. Bread and circuses become subsidies and tamasha in our adept hands. But we can be timeless with our expectations as a consequence of both our fatalism and faith. We know that our train will surely come in, and a little wait is not the end of the world.


(1,049 words)


January 31st, 2010
Gautam Mukherjee


Published in The Pioneer as Op-Ed Leader on February 2nd, 2010, print and online under title: "Of mice and reforms". Read it also under Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com where it is archived.