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Another one bites the dust
R Srinivasan
Sorry folks, this will also be one of those year-end review type pieces. It is the end of the year after all, and time for all hacks (and those chased by them for quotes) to sit back and reflect over the year that was. So what has 1997 been like? Forget GDP. Write off the rupee value. Ignore industrial production. Your columnist has three far more tell-tale indicators for exactly how horriblis this particular annus was. According to the greeting-card barometer, 1997 was pretty tough. The calendar chart says it was downright terrible. But my own, personal diary index is the frighteningest of them all. It has plunged so low, l got the bends just going down to take a look at it.Let me explain. First, the greeting cards. Notice how the crop has thinned this year? Or how few corporates have gone in for designer stuff? Or the fact that your mailing list has not been quite as exhaustive as in the past? It's logical, really. It may be the season for jollity and good-feeling and all that, but when the mere
thought of H2 results fills one with a nameless fear, jollity and good-feeling go out of the window, don't they?Let's take calendars. Aaah, for the golden days of the pre-scam boom, when companies were coming into existence faster than one could count and everybody but everybody appeared to have corporate money to burn on them. So much so, that even one's peon would sneer at those four-months-to-a-sheet jobs put out by cheapskate companies.But this year? I don't think I would have known that August 15, 1998, falls on a Saturday if it were not for the British Council. Once upon a time, you got flooded with the next year's calendar in October. Nowadays, you're lucky if they are in circulation within the first week. Still, the trickle does come.But there is absolute famine on the diary front. Don't believe me? Just check the sales figures for filofax refills.It's pathetic, the way I have to dodge around avoiding old friends and associates. And to think that up till the other day, one could be sure of even
the friendly, neighbourhood mithaiwalas for a pocket diary sheathed in pink plastic!This absence is not to be dismissed lightly. The west may have its three-Martini lunch. We have diaries and calendars.Of every size, shape and description, from deluxe jobs featuring Raghu Rai's shots of ethnic chic India to the single-sheet `God' calendar in glorious technicolour mass-produced in Sivakasi. From swank apartments to roadside tea-stalls, they would suddenly bloom across the land, carrying, despite the giant range of their appearances, the same underlying message - that everybody had somebody who had had a good enough year to have shelled out for creating them. There have been tough times earlier. `Cost-cutting' is a hardy perennial which flowers in bad times. But this time around, it strikes me that their absence has an ominous ring of permanence about it.Reforms have kicked in. Barriers have gone. And the Indian economy has been ejected kicking and screaming into the cruel reality of global
competition.Not that the absence of parti-coloured portraits of Amitabh Bachchan, sporting pink jackets and purple lips would be any great aesthetic loss to the world.But their passing does mark a watershed. Amen to that. As for 1998 - why, we'll just hope for the best, won't we?
Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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