“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way”
April is not prime time for fooling alone. It also happens to be the examination time for the academic community. Perhaps it is the reason why every citizen who happens to be a political animal and therefore a political student is now going through the mill. The examiner is none other than the quintessential questioner occupying Fort. St George who however does not seem to know all the answers himself.
Just consider this. Would anyone take a guess on what the current price of milk is? If the price before the hike was, say, x per litre, then after the hike of Rs.1.50, it is x+Rs.1.50. But the prices were ‘slashed’ yesterday by a ‘whopping’ Rs.0.50 which when brings down the price of milk to x+Rs.1.50-Rs.0.50=x+Rs.1. Now, that sounds as a simple enough arithmetic. Just between those simplistic additions and subtractions lies hidden the mad rush to pay the differential amount on the card value as the government had virtually issued an ultimatum to pay up. Not to speak of the upheavals in the tea-coffee business.
There is also now the added turmoil of awaiting the refund of the extra amount extracted in a hurry. But the fact remains that the price of Aavin milk has gone up by a handsome Re.1 per litre and the CM’s grouse that the State has lost Rs.30 crores owing to the reduction sounds churlish when the government has actually netted a neat sum owing to the hike. No doubt it is just peanuts considering the State exchequer’s hunger, but is all this wool-pulling by the CM with a view to distorting the picture about the real burden to the people, a necessary exercise?
One can’t understand the rationale behind this convoluted attempt to lead the people down the milkyway just to get them milked? Couldn’t the authorities have done their homework better before embarking on such ‘testdrives’ on the people’s nerves? Or was the government too taking a leaf out of the typical discount sales technique employed by merchants world over by effecting real hikes and then tempering them down by offering imaginary concessions?
Such strange arithmetic is not new to the rational thinktank of Arivalayam. Indeed, a similar trick was pulled off when the bus fares were first hiked and were then subsequently scaled down by a trifle in the face of heavy backlash. But the damage had been done, and the people reeled under the unbearable burden of all round increase in prices of essentials, though the ruling party also paid a heavy political price. And as if to rub salt into the wound, the reduction was trumpeted as a concession to the hapless people while all along they have only been taken for long rides on the bumpy roads in the ever-rattling government busses.
The ‘power’ful Minister from Arcot appears to be a master mathematician and even more adept at visual tricks. He should be so, for how else could he keep the State and its people in the dark for ever about the real power situation? He always manages to come up with strange additions and stranger answers by putting two and two together to arrive at two hundred to suggest that the State is indeed in no trouble on the power front while in reality the industries and the common man are sweating it out.
There is no clue about the real shortage faced by the State as the enlightened Minister goes around in circles dishing out his shocking damned lies, sorry, statistics. There was recently a lighter side, but quite a revealing one at that, when the Union Power Minister Kumaramanglam visited Chennai last week. Our man from Arcot had promptly gone to meet him. Guess what happened when the two ‘powers’ met? There was a power failure! Truly symbolic of the State’s return to the dark ages.
No doubt truth hurts, but there is no alternative to it. Whatever the attempts to subvert or camouflage it. Notwithstanding what is offered for public consumption, the cat is out of the bag everytime a common man walks upto the milk booth, or when a commuter ambles up into an omnibus or for that matter whenever we open our windows to let in some fresh air and sunlight, not to speak of the frequent moonlight dinners that we are forced to partake of.
Unfortunately for us, our rulers, rooted as they are in decades of deceptive rhetoric, will never learn to call a spade a spade but would instead seek to bury the truth in spades full of half-truths and falsehood. They sift the chaff from the wheat and then parade the chaff as wheat. Who are they trying to fool?
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