Mr. S. Gurumurthy came into the limelight when he went after the poster boy of Indian business tycoons .. Mr. Dhirubhai Ambani, and then took on Bofors and then many other things. I remember seeing a series done by him for some TV channel on the local business practices of India and why we cannot force a Western economic model on India. I liked the logic and it felt right to a non-economist, lay person like me, because “no best practice” is non-contextual and universal. Only human values are universal, stealing and cheating is bad in all cultures, but how you bring the offenders to book or not is dependent on the culture of the society. In Saudi Arabia, they may cut the hand that stole, in India we may shake the hand that stole and in the US, they may put the kid into a juvenile correction home and in Africa, they may do an “Ubuntu” (redeem) on him. While the value of being honest is universal, the way its dealt also differs.
In the same way, the economic policies of the West will not work everywhere, the democracy that works in America..(ok, I see the smirks, poor Donald being their President-elect now), will not work in Burma, the Queen may continue to be the loothead, oops no, figurehead of England, but the Irish need not accept her and so on. All “best practices” have to be contextualised, to the country’s culture, to the society’s culture, to the company’s culture, to the family’s culture, why even to an individual’s attitude. A small example would be the best practice of exercising. Exercising is good universally for all human beings, but what exercise suits your body and attitude has to be contextualised – asking me to swim only will put me off exercise for good, but will work wonderfully for Krishnan.
Yesterday, Mr. Gurumurthy gave a lecture at the Vani Mahal hall, in Chennai as part of the Nani Palkhiwala Memorial series. He has spoken about the demonetization move and yes he is a Khaki pant wearing RSS “karyakarta”, so feel free to discount the deriding of the CONgress government, but verify the facts. This man is sharing numbers that all of us can verify, and explaining the reasons behind the demonetization move. We are seeing the effect this move has had on Maoists, terrorists and the Kashmir issue. He speaks of the Counterfeit Capital of India, Malda, and why Mamata di is behaving as shamelessly as she has been or the histrionics behind the opposition’s opposition to the move.
Please watch the lecture and understand why demonetisation is good and why the famed R-Exit might also have been good for us as a country. Am a fan of Raghuram Rajan and I even wanted Gandhiji’s photo to be replaced with his on the currency notes, for his good looks, but it “looks” like he might have done some damage in retrospective!. Sad, but probably true and not because he is not a patriot, please ($%&*(@), save the verbal drivel for another day.
Here’s the link to the Youtube video of Mr. GuruMurthy’s lecture – https://youtu.be/ZEnAz6F9HIo. Please watch from the time that Mr. Gurumurthy starts to speak which is from the 25th minute or so and he speaks for 60 minutes. The Q&A is in Tamil so feel free to ignore it. Just the lecture is a lesson in lay man’s language about the pros and cons of this demonetization move and how to move from here.
Just brilliant and a must watch.