How Business Funds Politics

indira-gandhi-ji

In the year 1969, Indira Gandhi split from the Congress party, to form her own Congress party. At that point of time, Gandhi was worried that the corporates would back the parties which opposed her.

Hence, she banned corporate donations to political parties. As Vijay Joshi writes in India’s Long Road—The Search for Prosperity: “One of the watershed moments in the history of corruption was the ban on corporate donations to political parties imposed by Mrs Indira Gandhi in 1969 because she was concerned about the money that would flow into the coffers of the right wing parties that opposed her.”

Of course, this did not stop corporates from donating money to political parties; it only drove them underground, into black money. This ban was lifted in 1985, after the assassination of Gandhi in October 1984. But the black money-non transparent nexus of businesses and politicians has continued since then.

There is very little direct evidence for this other than a few sting operations over the years where politicians have been caught on tape, asking for money. These sting operations have impacted the credibility of politicians across party lines.

Nevertheless, there is some very good research evidence to suggest that businesses do pay politicians before elections. In a paper titled Quid Pro Quo: Builders, Politicians, and Election Finance in India Devesh Kapur and Milan Vaishnav look at cement consumption of builders to show that builders make payments to politicians.

All construction requires cement. When it comes to cement demand, the real estate sector accounts for a major part of the demand in India. When the construction activity carried out by the real estate sector goes up, the demand for cement increases. If the real estate companies are key financiers of politicians, as they are assumed to be, then just before the elections, they will need money to finance the electoral campaign of politicians.

If the real estate companies pay the politicians, it would mean that they will lesser money to carry out their own activities. This would mean a slowdown in construction activity. And a slowdown in construction activity should lead to a fall in cement consumption.

Hence, cement consumption can be tracked to figure out whether real estate companies are actually financing politicians.  Kapur and Vaishnav looked at elections in seventeen Indian states between 1995 and 2010. They found a “contraction in cement consumption (representing a 12 to 15 percent decline) during the month of state assembly elections”. What this clearly tells us is that real estate companies do finance state level politicians, as is commonly inferred.

In fact, there is more evidence of businesses financing the electoral ambitions of politicians through black money. Sandip Sukhtankar looks at this phenomenon in a research paper titled Sweetening the Deal? Political Connections and Sugar Mills in India.

As he writes: “The cane price falls by approximately Rs 20 in politically controlled mills during election years. These drops translate to an economically significant drop in revenues of Rs 60 lakh (US$ 135,000) per election year per mill. Evidence suggests that the profit decline is not due to effects on mill operations, but rather due to appropriation of funds for electoral purposes… From the perspective of farmers, this fall in prices could represent either pure theft by mill chairmen, or indirect campaign contributions.”

Hence, sugar mill owners pay low prices to sugar cane farmers in an election year to be able to funnel more money into electoral campaigns of politicians.

So what is the way out of this? Companies are allowed to take tax credits for corporate donations i.e. they can make a deduction of the amount of political donation while calculating their taxable income. But this hasn’t’ helped. As Joshi writes: “Tax credits do not work because corporates prefer secrecy: they are risk-averse and fear reprisals from parties that win election for donations given to their opponents.”

And so the story continues!

The column originally appeared in the Bangalore Mirror on July 20, 2016

 

Why Inflation Cannot Be a Growth Strategy

ARTS RAJAN

In the recent past it has been suggested that some amount of inflation cannot be bad in order to get economic growth going again. Hence, the Reserve Bank of India(RBI), should cut the repo rate in order to get the economic growth going.

Repo rate is the rate at which RBI lends to banks. The hope is that when the RBI cuts the repo rate, banks will also cut their lending rates. At lower rates both individual consumers as well as firms will borrow and spend more. And this will get economic growth going again. (As I have said in the past individual consumers are already borrowing at a record pace even at the so called high interest rates).

How does this work? As RBI governor Raghuram Rajan had explained in a February 2014 speech: “By raising interest rates, the RBI causes banks to raise rates and thus lowers demand; firms do not borrow as much to invest when rates are higher and individuals stop buying durable goods against credit and, instead, turn to save. Lower demand growth leads to a better match between demand and supply, and thus lower inflation for the goods being produced, but also lower growth.”

When RBI cuts the repo rate this trend reverses. As Rajan explained: “Relatedly, if lower rates generate higher demand and higher inflation, people may produce more believing that they are getting more revenues, not realizing that high inflation reduces what they can buy out of the revenues. Following the saying, “You can fool all the people some of the time”, bursts of inflation can generate growth for some time. Thus in the short run, the argument goes, higher inflation leads to higher growth.”

The trouble is that this inflation eventually catches up with growth. As Rajan said: “As the public gets used to the higher level of inflation, the only way to fool the public again is to generate yet higher inflation. The result is an inflationary spiral which creates tremendous costs for the public.”

Hence, it is important that inflation stays in control, if a country is looking for strong growth over a long period of time. (As I had explained in a column last week).

Inflation as per the consumer price index has started to go up again. For June 2016, the inflation was at 5.77 per cent. In comparison, the inflation in June 2015 was at 5.40 per cent. One reason for this jump has been food inflation. Food inflation in June 2016 was at 7.79 per cent. Within food, vegetables, pulses and sugar, saw an increase in price of 12.72 per cent, 28.28 per cent and 12.98 per cent, respectively. Spices went up by 8.13 per cent. Food items constitute 54.18 per cent of the consumer price index. Food inflation impacts poor the most given that a bulk of their income goes towards paying for food.

As is obvious, the jump in inflation as per consumer price index has been due to a rise in food inflation. The RBI cannot do anything about food prices through the repo rate, and hence, the RBI should cut the repo rate, or so goes the argument.

In the 2014 speech Rajan had explained this by saying: “I want to present one more issue that has many commentators exercised – they say the real problem is food inflation, how do you expect to bring it down through the policy rate? The simple answer to such critics is that core CPI inflation, which excludes food and energy, has also been very high, reflecting the high inflation in services. Bringing that down is centrally within the RBI’s ambit.

So RBI cannot control food inflation but it can control the prices of other items that make up the consumer price index, through its monetary policy. In fact, the RBI can control, what economists call the “second round effects”.

Economist Vijay Joshi explains this in his new book India’s Long Road—The Search for Prosperity: “What sparks inflation is quite different from what keeps it on the boil. Though a supply shock raises the price of, say, food or oil products, this leads to a persistent rise in the overall price level only if it spreads and gathers strength due to the pressure of aggregate demand. If the economy is ‘overheated’, the inflation impulse becomes too generalized. A wage-price spiral can then develop that is hard to break, especially if people begin to expect higher inflation and increase their wage and salary claims in order to protect their real incomes.”

And this is where monetary policy and the central bank come in. As Joshi writes: “To prevent these ‘second-round effects’, monetary policy has to keep excess demand and inflationary expectations under check.”

Hence, while the RBI cannot control food prices, its monetary policy can have an impact on other elements that constitute the consumer price index. And this explains why the core-inflation (prices of products other than food and fuel) in June 2016 cooled to down 4.5 per cent. It was at 4.7 per cent in May 2016. This, despite the fact that food inflation is close to 8 per cent.

In fact, Rajan explained this beautifully in a June 2016 speech where he said: “The reality is that while it is hard for us to control food demand, especially of essential foods, and only the government can influence food supply through effective management, we can control demand for other, more discretionary, items in the consumption basket through tighter monetary policy. To prevent sustained food inflation from becoming generalized inflation through higher wage increases, we have to reduce inflation in other items. Indeed, overall headline inflation may have stayed below 6 percent recently even in periods of high food inflation, precisely because other components of the CPI basket such as “clothing and footwear” are inflating more slowly.

Given that this is not such a straightforward point to understand, many people fall for the inflation is good for growth and that RBI cannot control inflation, arguments.

The column originally appeared in Vivek Kaul’s Diary on July 19, 2016

Of Football Goalkeepers, RBI Governor Subbarao and the Art of Doing Nothing

 

subbarao-rbi-governor

Sometime in August last year I got an email, late in the evening. Before I clicked to open it, I thought it was one of the many spam emails that one gets during the course of any day.

Thankfully, I did click on it and the contents of the email told me that it wasn’t spam. The sender of the email was writing a book and he wanted my permission to refer to an article I had written for the Daily News and Analysis(DNA) in August 2013.

This book, which refers to my DNA article, titled Who Moved My Interest Rate? has recently published. It has been authored by D Subbarao, who was the governor of the Reserve Bank of India between 2008 and 2013, before Raghuram Rajan took over.

On page 140 of the book, governor Subbarao refers to my August 2013 DNA article. The article was titled RBI is behaving like a football goalkeeper. The article was written during the taper tantrum.

On May 22, 2013, Ben Bernanke, the then Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States, the American central bank, told the Joint Economic Committee of the American Congress that “if we see continued improvement and we have confidence that that is going to be sustained, then we could in the next few meetings … take a step down in our pace of purchases.”

The Federal Reserve of the United States had been printing dollars every month. It had been pumping those dollars into the financial system by buying financial securities. The idea was to ensure that there was enough money going around in the financial system, so that interest rates remained low.

At lower interest rates, it was hoped that the American consumer would borrow and spend again, and in the process revive the economy. What also happened was that low interest rates allowed financial institutions to borrow dollars and invest them in financial markets all over the world. This became the dollar carry trade.

This led to financial markets rallying all over the world. Bernanke, spoilt the party in May 2013. What he was basically saying was that money printing by the Federal Reserve would come to an end. Of course, this wouldn’t be done all at once and would be done gradually (i.e. tapered) over a period of time. This meant that the dollar carry trade would no longer be viable with an era of easy money coming to an end and the interest rates starting to go up. And as a reaction institutional investors who had borrowed in dollars to invest, started to get money out of financial markets all over the world.

This included India. Foreign investors sold both stocks and bonds. When they did that, they got rupees in exchange. These rupees had to be exchanged for dollars, if the money was to be repatriated back to the United States. This pushed up the demand for the dollar, and the rupee started to lose value against the dollar.

In fact, on May 22, 2013, when Bernanke made his comment one dollar was worth Rs 55.41. By August 7, 2013, when my article appeared in DNA, one dollar was worth Rs 60.78. Of course, the RBI was trying to intervene in the foreign exchange market in order to ensure that rupee doesn’t fall too much.

One of the major reasons for doing the same lay in the fact that those were days of high oil prices. India imports four-fifth of the oil that it consumes. Hence, the oil companies would have to pay more in rupees to buy the dollars that they would have needed to buy oil.

Further, back then the oil companies weren’t allowed to pass on this increase in price of oil to the end consumer by increasing the price of diesel, kerosene and cooking gas (since then diesel has gone out of the list). The government picked up a major part of this tab and in the process the fiscal deficit of the government went up as well. Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government earns and what it spends.

Getting back to the point. In my DNA article I suggested that the RBI was behaving like a football goal keeper. This analogy came from a research note written by Societe Generale’s Albert Edwards. In this note, Edwards said: “When there are problems, our instinct is not just to stand there but to do something… When a goalkeeper tries to save a penalty, he almost invariably dives either to the right or the left. He will stay in the centre only 6.3% of the time. However, the penalty taker is just as likely (28.7% of the time) to blast the ball straight in front of him as to hit it to the right or left. Thus goalkeepers, to play the percentages, should stay where they are about a third of the time. They would make more saves.”

But they rarely do that. “Because it is more embarrassing to stand there and watch the ball hit the back of the net than to do something (such as dive to the right) and watch the ball hit the back of the net,” wrote Edwards.

The point being that in a moment of crisis it is important to be seen to be doing something. Using this analogy, I had said that the RBI would have been better off just letting the rupee fall and finding its right level. The efforts of the RBI between May and August hadn’t helped much, and the rupee had continued to fall. As I wrote back then: “The RBI is like a football goalkeeper. It knows ‘do nothing’ is the best course, but it can’t just stand pat.”

This is something that Subbarao also suggests in his book. As he writes: “Let me conclude my experiences of steering the rupee in turbulent waters by reiterating a standard dilemma. Given my position that a sharp correction of the exchange rate was programmed and forex intervention by the Reserve Bank would only postpone the inevitable, wouldn’t it have been rational to just stay put till the adjustment had been complete…Sensible maybe, but virtually impossible in the shrill democracies of today.”

To conclude, this is a point that another ex-RBI governor (not Subbarao) made to me once, when he said that in “moment of crisis the central bank can’t be seen to be doing nothing,” even if “do nothing” might be the best strategy to follow.

The column was originally published in Vivek Kaul’s Diary on July 18, 2016

The Modi Govt is Finally Unleashing the Power of Executive Action

narendra_modi

Any stock market survives on two things—hope and stories.

Sometimes both hope and stories run parallelly.

Sometimes the stories run out and hope takes over. Sometimes the hope runs out and the stories take over.

When Narendra Modi was elected as the prime minister of India in May 2014, there was great hope among stock market investors that he would unleash a new wave of economic reform that would fast-forward the economic reforms process started in 1991.

But nothing of that sort happened. As economist Vijay Joshi writes in India’s Long Road—The Search for Prosperity: “There can be little doubt that the Partial Reform Model has left India unprepared.”

The country is unprepared to take on the challenges that lie ahead, the biggest among them being the fact that nearly one million individuals will enter the workforce every month, over the next decade and a half.

For the stock market investors, the story did not turn out the way it was expected to. Initially, they went back to hoping that some economic reforms will be initiated. When that did not turn out to be the case, they found another story to explain to themselves, and anyone else who was ready to listen, why things hadn’t turned out as expected.

This time the story was that the Modi government did not have majority in the Rajya Sabha and given this, the Congress party was in a position to block key legislation, which they did. What they forgot to tell us was that the Bhartiya Janata Party had behaved along similar lines in the past when it was in the opposition.

As Joshi writes: “Lack of a majority in the Rajya Sabha is also not a completely new problem: other governments in the past have faced it quite successfully by using their negotiating skills. It was therefore widely expected that the new government would undertake a programme of sweeping economic reform.” Nevertheless that did not happen.

Also, every reform does not need a legislation. As Joshi puts it: “Quite a lot can be done without new legislation, simply on the basis of ‘executive action’.” An executive action of the government unlike a new legislation does not need the approval of the Parliament.

The Modi government has started to unleash the power of executive action in the recent past and that is a good thing. Here are a few things that it has done in the recent past and plans to do in the days to come, which should work well for the Indian economy.

a) Starting this month, the government has allowed oil marketing companies to increase kerosene prices by 25 paisa every month, up until April 2017. This will result in a saving of Rs 2.25 per litre (25 paisa multiplied by nine months) of kerosene sold during the current financial year.

The strategy is similar to the previous Congress led United Progressive Alliance government allowing the oil marketing companies to increase the price of diesel by 50 paisa every month. It was ultimately this strategy which helped the Modi government to deregulate diesel in October 2014.

The under-recovery on diesel for the month of July 2016 stands at Rs 13.12 per litre. The Bank of America-Merrill Lynch expects that this gradual increase in prices will lead to savings of Rs 1,100 crore for the government during this financial year. If the price increase continues in 2017-2018 as well, then the government will see savings of another Rs 2,400 crore.

While this is not a huge amount, it is a step in the right direction. Also, it needs to be pointed out here that 46 per cent of kerosene distributed through the public distribution system does not reach those it is intended for. The leakage into the open market is used to adulterate diesel and is also smuggled into neighbouring countries.

b) In June, the government had introduced some reforms in the textile sector through executive action. The government re-introduced the concept of a fixed term contract which allows textile companies to hire workers for a fixed period, instead of offering permanent employment.

Up until now companies had been hiring contract workers, who in many cases are not paid as much as permanent workers are, even though the work being done is exactly the same. The fixed term contracts will also allow companies the flexibility to hire according to their demand. And they won’t have to keep workers on the rolls even when they don’t actually need them.

This should help create employment in the low-skilled workers space, which is India’s natural competitive advantage and that is precisely what India wants. (You can read the complete article here).

c) Another good decision is the government’s move to invite merchant bankers to sell shares of 51 companies that it holds through the Specified Undertaking of Unit Trust of India(SUUTI). The SUUTI was formed in 2003 to bailout the investors of US-64, the flagship scheme of the UTI.

The government owns companies like ITC, Axis Bank and L&T, through SUUTI. And it’s time the government sold these shares to raise some money. Also, it is important how this money is used. Instead of simply going into the general coffers of the government, it should be specifically earmarked towards creating better physical infrastructure.

In fact, as I write this, there is a report in the Mint which suggests that the government will get the Life Insurance Corporation of India to pick up a major portion of the shares held by SUUTI. The Mint quotes an official as saying:LIC has been asked to pick up at least a third of the overall SUUTI holdings. This primarily includes (its holdings in) ITC, Axis Bank and L&T. The cost of the deal could be Rs 25,000-30,000 crore for LIC.”

If anything of this sort happens this will dilute the entire idea of the government selling out shares held by SUUTI, lock, stock and barrel. Basically money will move from one arm of the government to another. It is estimated that the current value of shares held by SUUTI is around Rs 60,000 crore.

d) A news report in the Swarajya Mag suggests that the NITI Aayog has recommended that “as many as 16 PSUs” be put up for strategic sale and 26 others be closed down. If the government does get around to doing this, it will be a huge thing. A lot of money that is currently being wasted will no longer be wasted. The loss making public sector enterprises lost more than Rs 27,000 crore in 2014-2015.

Other than money being saved, it will also give the government more bandwidth to concentrate on more important things than looking after loss making public sector enterprises.

The column originally appeared in Vivek Kaul’s Diary on July 14, 2016

Mr Jaitley, Depositors Don’t Have a Union, It’s Easy to Take them for a Ride

Fostering Public Leadership - World Economic Forum - India Economic Summit 2010

 

The finance minister, Arun Jaitley is at it again, demanding lower interest rates. As he said, late last week: “Now, whether domestic savings are only to be used by such instruments which give you a higher return and create an interest regime which is extremely costly and makes the economy sluggish, or higher returns are to be got from such instruments as funds, bonds, shares.”

Jaitley further said: A lot of them have also an element of secured investment in them which can give people a very respectable return itself.”

Normally, Jaitley’s statements on interest rates  in the past have been as straightforward as, I demand lower interest rates. But this time around, he has made a long and a convoluted statement, which basically means the same.

So what Jaitley is saying here is that people save money with banks. The interest rates on bank fixed deposits are high. Given that interest rates on bank fixed deposits are high, the interest rates on bank loans are high. Since interest rates on bank loans are high, people and companies are not borrowing, and this makes the overall economy sluggish.

Hence, people should be investing their money in mutual funds, bonds and shares that finance projects and economic activity.

This is what happens when people make statements without looking at numbers. In fact, growth in retail lending carried out by banks in 2015-2016, has been the highest since 2009-2010. So clearly retail lending is growing at a very robust pace. The so called high interest rates on bank lending, clearly hasn’t had much of an impact on this front.

DatesRetail lending growth
March 20, 2015 to March 18, 201619.40%
March 21, 2014 to March 20, 201515.50%
March 22, 2013 to March 21, 201415.50%
March 23, 2012 to March 22, 201314.70%
March 25, 2011 to March 23, 201212.90%
March 26, 2010 to March 25,201117.00%
March 27, 2009 to March 26, 20104.10%
Source: Sectoral Deployment of Credit Data, RBI

 

The problem has been in bank lending to industry. The lending growth to industry in 2015-2016 slowed down to around 2.7 per cent. In comparison, it grew by more than 23 per cent, during the go go years between 2009 and 2011. But a lot of that lending was to crony capitalists.

Banks have not been lending to industry, because of all the bad loans that they have accumulated on the lending to industry, in the past. Also, many corporates continue to be heavily leveraged, even though things did improve a little in 2015-2016.

As the RBI Financial Stability Report released in late June points out: “An analysis of the current trends in debt servicing capacity and leverage of ‘weak’ companies [defined as those having interest coverage ratio (ICR)<1]was undertaken…[It] indicated some improvement in 2015-16. The analysis shows that 15.0 per cent of companies were ‘weak’ in the select sample as at end March 2016, compared to 17.8 per cent in March 2015. The share of debt of these ‘weak’ companies also fell to 27.8 per cent of total debt in the second half of 2015-16 from 29.2 per cent in the second half of 2014-15. However, the debt to equity ratio of these ‘weak’ companies increased to 2.0 from 1.8.”

Interest coverage ratio is the ratio of the earnings before interest and taxes of a company during a period divided by the interest that it needs to pay on its accumulated debt during the same period. This basically reflects the ability of the company to finance its debt. An interest coverage ratio of less than one basically means that the company is not making enough money to be able to repay the interest on its accumulated debt.

The RBI categorises these companies as weak companies. The proportion of these companies fell to 15 per cent as on March 31, 2016, in comparison to 17.8 per cent earlier. Nevertheless, these companies still had around 27.8 per cent of the total bank debt. Further, their debt to equity ratio deteriorated to 2 from 1.8.

Given that many companies continue to be highly leveraged along with the fact that they are not making enough money to be able to service their accumulated debt, it is but natural that banks do not want to lend to these companies.

The purpose of any bank is not to get the economy going by lending. It is to lend money to customers who are likely to return it. At the same time, they need to charge an adequate rate of interest, which basically takes the credit risk (or the chances of a default) of customers into account.

Also, Jaitley’s statement seems to suggest that corporates are just waiting to borrow money and expand. And the high interest rates of banks are stopping them from doing so. The data clearly suggests otherwise.

As per the Order Books, Inventories and Capacity Utilisation Survey (OBICUS) survey carried out by the RBI, for the period October to December 2015, the capacity utilisation of 1,058 manufacturing companies which responded to the survey, stood at 72.5 per cent. This was slightly better than the period July to September 2015, when it had stood at 71.4 per cent.

But on the whole capacity utilisation continues to be low. More than one fourth of manufacturing capacity is still not being used. In fact, the situation is even worse than this in some sectors. As Manasi Swamy of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy points out in a research note titled Why should manufacturers invest more?: “Large manufacturing industries like cement, steel, sponge iron and aluminium worked at an estimated capacity utilisation of 65 per cent or lower in 2015-16. Automobile companies too have enough capacity to meet any increase in demand. The passenger cars industry is running at 63 per cent capacity utilisation level, two-wheelers at 76 per cent, commercial vehicles at as low as 37 per cent and tractors at 63 per cent. Capacity utilisation levels in industries like paper and textiles are also quite low.”

Over and above this, the return on capital employed for the manufacturing sector has fallen from 11.7 per cent in 2006-2007 to 3.8 per cent in 2014-2015, Swamy points out. In this scenario it is safe to say that industry is also not interested in borrowing more to expand. They may welcome lower interest rates because that will help them service their existing debt in a better way. But that is another issue altogether.

Also, Jaitley seems to suggest that investing in stocks and mutual funds leads to entrepreneurs being able to raise capital. This doesn’t hold true anymore. Public issues these days are basically about investors trying to sell out their stakes in companies. It is rarely about entrepreneurs funding expansion by selling shares. These investors can be venture capitalists, private equity firms or even the government.

Further, banks raise deposits to give out loans. And these loans are also helpful for the economy. If retail lending is growing at close to 20 per cent, it is benefiting vehicle companies, consumer durable companies, as well as real estate companies. What about that? How is that not helping the economy?

Also, the basic question that Jaitley needs to answer is that if the Indian economy grew by 7.6 per cent in 2015-2016, how is the economic growth sluggish? The finance minister cannot have it both ways. When he wants to project the government in good light he says, India is the fastest growing major economy in the world. When he wants lower interest rates and show the RBI in a bad light, he says the economic growth is sluggish.

Another point I wanted to make is that the government can play a huge role in bringing down interest rates further. Currently, the difference between fixed deposit interest rates and the interest rate offered on post office small savings schemes is anywhere from 40 to 160 basis points. One basis point is one hundredth of a percentage. Banks compete with post office schemes when it comes to taking on deposits and cannot keep cutting interest rates on deposits beyond a point.

Further, I think Mr Jaitley must clearly not have forgotten all the ruckus that was created when the government tried to cut the interest rate on the Employees Provident Fund(EPF) by 5 basis points to 8.7 per cent. This would have meant that contributors to the EPF would have got a lower interest of Rs 50 less per lakh, during the course of the year. To break it down further, it would have meant a lower interest of Rs 4.5 per month per lakh, for those who contribute to the EPF. The government couldn’t even push this through.

The current interest rate on EPF is 8.8 per cent. This is close 100-180 basis points higher than the interest rate on fixed deposits, without taking into account that interest rate on fixed deposits is taxed, whereas interest on EPF is tax free. Why should there be such a huge difference in interest rates? How about some fairness on this front Mr Jaitley?

Of course, those who contribute to EPF are an organised lot and can create a lot of hungama if the government decides to cut the interest rate. The same cannot be said for a normal depositor who is placing his money in the bank in the hope that it grows in the years to come. The depositors do not have a union and hence, it’s easy to take them for a ride.

The column was originally published on the Vivek Kaul Diary on July 13, 2016