[False start]

Can marathoners take a mulligan? Only the ChampionChip knows for sure.

You'd have been correct in assuming I had fired the gun with my previous post. And breezed past the wire with a thoroughly unearned exuberance. I did take two samples at Lamington Road, one by Churchgate, and one at the stand absurdly placed in front of Candies. But if I don't blog it concurrently, it don't count.

Somewhat more devastating than that four-cart pile-up was the talk given a few days ago by investigative journalist P. Sainath. (Thanks to Anand for the tip.) He called it "The Moral Economy of the Elite: Rural Distress and the Crisis Before Journalism," I suppose to lay the groundwork for a crise de conscience among its attendees. But I'm imagining Lewis Lapham noodging him to call it "At Nero's Table." While the decision could be read as a victory of sanctimony over subtlety, for me it simply does a disservice to Sainath's critique. He appeals to our minds, our hearts, and our pocketbooks, but he doesn't privilege them over our stomachs. His analysis may be sophisticated but his reasoning is alimentary.

Farmer suicides are occurring in India's rural districts in alarming numbers. The underlying cause is indebtedness, and the effect, increasingly, is the inability of farmers to feed their families. Even as the urban middle class eats better than ever before on its soaring purchasing power, the rural poor have gone hungry at a rate unprecedented since the Bengal famine of 1943.

India's highest-growth industry, Sainath forcefully asserts, is not IT — it's inequality. The causes to which he attributes this precipitous rise are
(1) liberalization of agricultural imports
(2) reallocation of subsidies, and the simultaneous
(3) restriction of credit to small farmers in favor of automobile owners.

These three policies, he claims, were adopted as part of the BJP's "India Shining" campaign. One typically vivid (and unsourced) statistic: as car sales nearly doubled over the '90s, tractor sales halved. Sainath doesn't spare the current UPA government, however. Baramati MP and BCCI member Sharad Pawar, nominally in charge of the situation, was described as "Union Minister for Cricket."

Beyond the overwhelming need to address this problem, the talk brought home two points. The first is that there are two Indias, one of which is still totally foreign to me. (I had accepted this contention vis-à-vis America two Novembers back.) Even as urban India becomes more and more an open book, I'm still ignorant of how the vast majority of Indians live. The contrast could not be greater than in my last post, when, for example, I lament the ongoing disrepair of my coastal parkway while shoveling in biryani.

Second is that this blog, though conceived to deal entirely in mundanities — nay, inanities — can do more. No, I'm not planning on taking any turn toward the high-minded. That market is saturated, and well-served. But if we agree with Sainath that journalism is in "crisis," we admit that to the extent that we have readers, we have a responsibility to inform. I don't know whether eating for hunger awareness is ridiculous (any more than, say, running for disability awareness) but I am, brace yourselves, pledging this marathon to that service. I'm no SEA-EAT but it's a start.