The Honourable Finance Minister has adopted a new national objective: Gross National Contentment. Cynics will say they know where he is coming from: he has at last recognised the value of chanting Hare Rama, Hare Krishna, loosening one's belt and stretching out in the afternoon (not necessarily in that order).
They will say that he cannot do anything to increase the gross national product, whose enhancement his job is; so he wants the country to undergo suffering and enjoy it.
Might he be right? Do we bitch about too much and take our blessings too much for granted? Again the cynics would say, what do you expect from this government? With every grand gesture it has worsened the state of the economy. It has no clue about how to better it, so it would like to say: lie back and enjoy it.
It has excited communal passions, promoted violence, and when the fire spreads, it says, there is too much division, let us unite.
Cynicism is the appropriate attitude towards this government -- as it no doubt was towards Indira Gandhi's -- but let us get away for a moment from set attitudes and ask ourselves: can the government make people contented without spending money -- or, at any rate, a lot of money? Are there any cheap bargains in the market for happiness?
Obviously a full stomach is the source of much contentment, and a good belch its highest manifestation. Midday meals for children are a good idea -- as long as teachers do not take cooking as their only duty. The question is, what meal would, while being tasty and nutritious, create the least mess and need the least infrastructure.
Shiv Sena was not so interested in feeding children since they would not vote for it.
Instead, it set up stalls all over Bombay to sell Jhunka Bhakar to adults at absurdly low prices. It cluttered up Mumbai pavements even further to give them space. Despite free real estate in prime areas and subsidies, few of the stalls survive. Even rabid Shiv Sainiks do not want to eat Jhunka Bhakar; Pao Bhaji and Masala Dosa are more to their taste. Similar political preconceptions have led to the supply of cooked meals, largely made up of surplus foodgrains, to schoolchildren.
I enjoy a well cooked meal eaten at leisure, and I recognise that Indians love lunches cooked by their wives -- so much so, that they pay to get them collected from home shortly after they leave for office and delivered at their desks at lunchtime in Mumbai.
But it is all right if grown-up men decide to waste their earnings on fare cooked by their wives; and if they, as a result, need to take a nap afterwards, that is their employers' business.
The government, as a model employer, does make it its business. The Government of India supplies every desk employee with a napkin to drape over his backrest, so that he can take a nap without smearing it with his favourite hair oil. But school benches are quite inappropriate for taking naps; if children start dozing off on benches, they would slouch and slump sideways and fall off.
If a heavy meal is forced on them and they have to have a nap, it would be best to give each a little mat on which to stretch out.
Stretching out mats in between benches will promote closeness at an early age, and train kids to sleep on the floors of crowded economy cabins of planes when they go to work in the Middle East or wherever they have to go out of jobless India.
But if we want to train them for something better than being coolies abroad, then perhaps we should rethink this business of cooked meals.
When I went to school, my daily allowance was 2 paise, for which I could get a reasonable quantity of peanuts; that was my lunch. In my last year of school the allowance was raised to 1 anna; then I could afford the luxury of having both chickpeas and peanuts.
That remained my midday meal when I went to work for National Council, but my new-found prosperity enabled me to add a glass of sugarcane juice. It was a tasty, nutritious lunch that could be taken on the run and had no after effects requiring the draping of napkins over chairs.
Now I am considerably more prosperous; but I still sometimes have variants of this lunch. The chanawallah of yore has himself diversified. Now he sells chana and peas in a number of colours and flavours, all pretty sharp; and he has added on gajak -- a sweet made of deoiled sesame cake and white north Indian gur -- peanut chiki and such other delectable sweets.
Cane juice, unfortunately, has largely disappeared from Delhi streets. Cane has become too cheap, and cane juice can no longer support the shop rents and bribes of Delhi. But it has been replaced by a multiplicity of fruit juices. The juicer is a versatile and undiscriminating machine; it enables the juicewallah to make an undefinable multipurpose juice out of the cheapest materials and to earn the highest margin.
But at a price he is prepared to make such delectable juices like pomegranate or chiku-orange.
The government may not be able or prepared to give children such expensive juices every day. But the development of the Indian economy has opened up many snack choices before children than were conceivable in my childhood; an intelligent government should use those choices rather than force boring roti and dal on the poor kids.
To return to the Finance Minister's grand theme of gross national contentment, children's contentment can be increased without additional cost to government if they are allowed the choice of lunch. Rather than turn classrooms into kitchens, buy big vessels, engage fat cooks, make a special LPG allocation for schools and spatter children with haldi stains, it would be better to give them pocket money and let them buy whatever junk food they like best.
That would be good enough in towns where private enterprise ensures that children would have ample choice. But in villages and near small schools too small to attract chanawallahs, the government may find it necessary to provide meals. They should, however, be the same kinds of tasty snacks as chanawallahs sell in cities -- tasty, light, durable and portable.
And that is just an intermediate stage; eventually the government should work towards setting up a cyber cafe in the place of every school, where children would get free junk food and pick up knowledge from the Internet as a by-product. Teachers are an endangered species.
