Gulzar

The ‘GULZAR’ Principle of Investing for Regular Income and Safe Returns

Summary: There is no real way of earning a regular and a safe income that is enough to meet the monthly expenses.

The headline was a clickbait. But now that I have your attention, let me explain the logic behind it.

The title song of the 1979 Hindi film Gol Maal was written by the lyricist Gulzar (Honestly, calling him just a lyricist is doing his talent a great disservice. Other than being a lyricist, he has written screenplays and dialogues for a huge number of Hindi films. He is a poet and a short story writer. He is also a translator of repute. Oh, and he has also directed a whole host of Hindi movies as well as a few TV serials along the way. Also, for the millennials, Hrishikesh Mukherjee made Gol Maal, much before Rohit Shetty started using the title for everything he could possibly think of).

Now getting back to the point I was trying to make. In the title song of Gol Maal there is a line which goes: “paisa kamane ke liye bhi paisa chahiye,” essentially meaning, in order to earn money, you first need money. And that is what I am going to write about today.

In the twenty months, as the economy has gone downhill, people have been getting in touch with me on email and the social media, with a very basic financial query. The numbers were small first but post-covid this has turned into a deluge. The question being asked is how a reasonable monthly income can be generated from savings, without taking any risk, in a safe way.

The answer to this question has become very important as people have lost their jobs or seen their salaries being slashed and incomes falling. What does not help is the fact that the post-tax return from bank fixed deposits are now largely in the range of 4-5%. The inflation as measured by the consumer price index is close to 7%.

Before I try answering this question, it is important to understand why interest rates on bank fixed deposits have fallen. The simple answer to this lies in the fact that there is too much money floating around in the financial system, with the banks not knowing possibly what to do with it.

Between March 27 and July 31, a period of little over four months, the non-food credit given by banks has contracted by Rs 1.32 lakh crore or around 1.3%. The banks give loans to the Food Corporation of India (FCI) and other state procurement agencies to primarily buy rice and wheat directly from the farmers at the minimum support price declared by the government. Once these loans are deducted from the overall loans given by banks, what remains is non-food credit.

What does non-food credit contracting tells us? It tells us on the whole borrowers have been repaying loans and at the same time not taking on enough new loans. It also tells us that banks are reluctant to lend. Further, as we shall see, there has been a huge surge in fixed deposits with banks, as people have increased their savings in the aftermath of the spread of the covid-19 pandemic. Banks will take time to lend all this money out.

Between March 27 and July 31, the total deposits of banks have gone up by Rs 5.95 lakh crore or 4.4%. In an environment, where the non-food credit of banks has contracted whereas deposits have jumped big-time, it is but natural that interest rates on fixed deposits have fallen. In fact, the weighted average term deposit interest rate or simply put average fixed deposit interest rate has fallen from 6.45% in February to 6% in June, the latest data available. Now that we are in August, the interest rates may have possibly fallen even more.

In fact, there is nothing new about interest rates on fixed deposits falling, this has been going on for close to eight years now. Having said that, interest rates shouldn’t be looked at in isolation, it is important to compare them with the prevailing rate of inflation. Take a look at the following chart. It plots the average interest rate on fixed deposits during the course of a year, along with inflation as measured by the consumer price index. The difference between the two is referred to as the real rate of return on fixed deposits.

Interest v/s Inflation


Source: Reserve Bank of India.

What does the above chart tell us? Between 2014-15 and 2018-19, there was a healthy difference between the average interest paid on fixed deposits and inflation. (Of course, this is without taking tax on fixed deposit interest into account, else, the difference would have been lower).

These were the years when first Dr Raghuram Rajan and then Dr Urjit Patel were at the helm at the Reserve Bank of India. In 2019-20, the real return on fixed deposits narrowed to 1.6%. Shaktikanta Das took over as RBI Governor in December 2018.

Let’s take a look at the real return on fixed deposits month wise since December 2018, the month when Das took over as RBI Governor. The real return on fixed deposits as explained earlier is the average interest rate on fixed deposits minus the prevailing rate of inflation.

Crash in real returns


Source: Author calculations on data from the Reserve Bank of India.

This chart is as clear as anything can get. The real rate of return on fixed deposits has simply collapsed since end of 2018. This has happened as the interest rate on fixed deposits has fallen and inflation has gone up.

The interest rate on fixed deposits has fallen primarily because the rate of loan growth for banks has crashed over this period. This we can see from the following chart.

Loan growth crash


Source: Reserve Bank of India.

The above chart clearly tells us that the loan growth of banks has crashed since December 2018. In fact, for the week ended July 31, it stood at just 5.4%. Given this, the Indian economy was slowing down even before covid-19 pandemic struck.

Hence, as economic growth has slowed down, the loan growth of banks has slowed down and this has led to fixed deposit interest rates coming down as well. The point being that in economics everything is linked.

Of course, there is more to this than just the economy slowing down. Since February,  like the rest of the central banks, the RBI has printed and pumped money into the financial system to drive down interest rates, in the hope of getting businesses and people to borrow more.

Also, with collapse in tax revenues, the government will have to borrow more this year, in order to keep its expenditure going. Hence, it likes the idea of borrowing more at lower interest rates. The RBI goes along with this because among other things it also acts as the debt manager of the government.

The problem is that India’s economic crisis has grown worse since the covid pandemic hit the world, leading to a lot of individuals losing their jobs or facing salary cuts. Small businesses have been majorly hit and incomes have come down dramatically.

In this environment, people are now looking to generate some sort of a regular income from their savings. Of course, most them want to do this in a risk free way. As one gentleman recently asked me: “I am currently not employed after having worked in the corporate sector for 10 years. My request to you is to honestly guide me on how and where to invest to earn steady income especially when the fixed deposit interest rates have fallen so low.”

The first thing I can clearly say is that the gentleman believes that there is a solution to his problem. He believes that it is possible to generate a good steady income despite fixed deposit interest rates having fallen.

I see this belief among many people. My guess is, it stems from the fact that way too many personal finance publications believe in offering solutions to everything. I mean, why will a reader read you, if at the end of it you say something like there aren’t really any solutions to this problem that you might have. At least, that’s how their thinking operates. Also, they need advertisers. And advertisers love solutions to everything, even when none really exist.

In June 2020, the average rate of interest on a fixed deposit was 6%. Once we take income tax into account, the rate of return would be much lower. Of course, there are banks out there which are offering a rate of interest of 7% or more. Nevertheless, these banks are perceived to be among the riskier ones. So, the question is are you willing to take on more risk, for a 1-1.5% higher return? If yes, then these investments are for you.

While, we live in an era where no bank is going to go bust, they can and have been put under a moratorium or periods under which only a limited amount of money can be withdrawn from them. And money that can’t be spent when it is needed, is essentially useless. Hence, if you do end up putting money in a bank which offers a 1-1.5% higher return, do remember not to put all your money into it.

There are corporate fixed deposits which offer a slightly higher return but again they don’t have the same safety as a bank does.

If you are senior citizen, you can look at the Senior Citizens Savings Scheme. But that comes with the pain of dealing with the post office.

Debt mutual funds as many people have found out over the last one year, come with their own share of risks. They were marketed to be as safe as fixed deposits, but they weren’t anywhere close. Also, irrespective of what financial planners and wealth managers might say, debt mutual funds are fairly complicated products, which I am sure most people selling them don’t understand. And that’s why they are able to sell them in the first place.

A lot of individuals in the last few months have turned towards investing in stocks. The logic is that the stock market has rallied from its March low. On March 23, the BSE Sensex, India’s premier stock market index was at 25,981 points. Yesterday, August 26, it closed at 39,074 points, a jump of over 50% in a period of a little over five months. This rally has been driven by a few stocks and if you had invested in the right stocks, you would have ended up with good gains by now.

While, one can’t question this logic, but what one needs to remember is that on January 12, the Sensex was at 41,965 points. From there to March 23, it fell by 38% in a little over two months. The point being the stock market can fall as fast or even faster than it can rise. Also, do remember this basic point that a 50% fall can wipe off a 100% gain. (A 38% fall would have written off a 61% gain).

Hence, the larger point here as I mentioned in this piece I wrote a few days back is, just because an investor takes a higher risk by investing in stocks, it doesn’t mean he will always end up with higher returns, precisely the reason the word ‘risk’ is used in the first place. And by the way, the 10-year return on stocks (including dividends) is less than 9% per year.

So, the question is what should a person looking for a regular and safe income, actually do? As helpless as it might sound, there aren’t many options going around beyond the humble fixed deposit, especially for people who aren’t senior citizens. The trouble is the fixed deposit interest rates are at very low levels.

If you need to generate a monthly income of Rs 20,000 at 6% per year, this needs an investment of Rs 40 lakh.

The moral of the story here being that if you want to generate a regular safe income which is enough to meet your monthly needs, you need to invest more money. Or as Gulzar wrote in Gol Maal: “paisa kamane ke liye bhi paisa chahiye.” I would like to call this the Gulzar principle of investing for a regular income and safe returns.

Also, there are corollaries to this. These are very difficult times. Hence, there is a good chance of individuals ending up in a situation where they might have to spend their savings (rather than just the return on savings) to keep meeting expenditure.

Let’s take the example of a middle-class household with monthly expenses of Rs 50,000. In order to generate this income through a fixed deposit, an investment of Rs 1 crore is needed. Of course, the chances of a middle-class household with expenses of Rs 50,000 per month having savings of a crore, are rather minimal. In this scenario, they will have to resort to spending their savings. Given this, as I keep saying, the return of capital is much more important now than the return on capital.

In the short run, the only way to generate a good regular and safe income is find a job or any other source of income by selling the skills that one has (Like I write. I can do that for a media house or do it individually). In the long run, the next time you see interest rates of 8-9% available on fixed deposits or any other safe investment, invest in these assets and lock in the high returns for as long as possible.

While, this might not sound much like a solution but that is the long and the short of it.

One idea that real estate companies want to borrow from Gulzar

Gulzar
In the film Ek Thi Dayan, lyricist Gulzar wrote a song, which had the following line: “koi khabar aayi na pasand to end badal denge [if we don’t like some bit of news, we will change the end.]”  In the recent past, the real estate companies do not seem to have liked the bad news that has been read out to them. And to tackle that they plan to create their own news. Or at least that is what a recent development suggests.

The Confederation of Real Estate Developers Association of India (CREDAI), a lobby of real estate companies, which has about 10,000 members, now plans to collect its own data on the industry.

As President of CREDAI Geetamber Anand told Business Standard: “The need to come up with its own set of data cropped up after varying figures from real estate consultants including Knight Frank, JLL India, Liases Foras and others, which at times create panic amongst the buyers fraternity.”

A spate of research reports brought out by real estate consultants in the recent past has suggested that real estate developers in large cities are not able to sell homes that they have built. A recent research report by Knight Frank suggested that over 7 lakh homes were unsold in the top eight cities of the country. The report also estimated that it would take more than three years to sell homes that have piled up.

Other real estate consultants have come up with similar reports with similar numbers. This is something which has not gone down well with the real estate lobby, which now wants to put out its own data. How can someone else tell them that all is not well with them?

What has also not gone down well with them is a recent comment by the Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan, asking them to bring down prices.

As Rajan said: “It would be a “great help” if realty developers sitting on unsold stock bring down prices…Once the prices stabilise, more people will be keen to buy houses…I think we need the market to clear.”

The CREDAI responded to Rajan with the following statement: “While we respect the RBI governors concern for kick starting the real estate sector, it would be prudent to say that from the developers side a substantial reduction in prices has already happened across the country [italics are mine] and any further decrease in sale prices would be a deterrent for the growth of a sector that contributes so much to the economy and employment at large.”

CREDAI President Anand told PTI that “housing prices have gone down by 15-20 per cent on an average in last two years across India, while input costs have risen by 15-20 per cent.” The good bit here is that here is a top real estate lobbyist admitting that prices have fallen. It is tough to get them to admit even this much. Nevertheless, if the reduction in prices has already happened, why there is an inventory of 7 lakh unsold homes across top 8 cities? Also, the total number of unsold homes all across the country would be much higher than 7 lakh, but no such data is complied.

The real estate companies need to go back and learn some basic economics. One of the most basic laws in economics is the law of demand. The law essentially states that there is an inverse relationship between the price of a product and the quantity demand by consumers. If the price of the product goes up, demand falls and if the price of a product falls, the demand goes up.

In case of the real estate sector in India what the law of demand tells us is that if prices had fallen enough, people would have bought homes to live in and the unsold inventory would have cleared out. Nobody likes to let go of a good deal. But that hasn’t happened.

Why? Some simple Maths should explain this. In the National Capital Territory (Delhi and other smaller cities around it) an average flat costs around Rs 75 lakh (most research reports agree on this number). Assuming 20% of the price has to be paid in black (and I am being extremely conservative here), the official price of the flat is Rs 60 lakh (80% of Rs 75 lakh). A bank or a housing finance company gives a loan against this price.

The housing finance company HDFC has a loan to value ratio of 65%. This means it gives 65% of the value of a home as a loan on an average. This would mean that HDFC would give a loan of Rs 39 lakh. The buyer would have make Rs 21 lakh as a down-payment. He also needs to raise another Rs 15 lakh to be paid in black.

Hence, the buyer would need to raise Rs 36 lakh (Rs 21 lakh down-payment and Rs 15 lakh black) on his own. How many people have that capacity even in a city like Delhi? And I am not even taking into account the cost of furnishing the house, the cost of moving into it, other expenses like stamp duty etc.

The same maths works for all other big cities as well. What this clearly tells us is that home prices are way beyond what most people can afford. They are in a bubble zone. The sooner the real estate companies understand this, the better it will be for all of us.

They may want a different end, but that isn’t going to happen. The longer they hold on to prices, the longer they will have to hold on to all the inventory that has piled up.

The column was originally published on Sep 8, 2015 in The Daily Reckoning

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

Ek akela is shehar main: This song tells us all that is wrong with Indian real estate

ek akela is shehar mainVivek Kaul

Very few songs survive the test of time. One such song is ek akela is shehar main from the 1977 movie Gharaonda, written by Gulzar, set to tune by Jaidev and sung by Bhupinder Singh. As the lines from the song go:

ek akela is shehar main
raat main aur dopahar main
aabodana dhoondta hai
aashiyana dhoondta hai

(aabodana = food and water. aashiyana = a home)

This iconic song has an iconic scene which most people miss. Some 3 minutes and 26-27 seconds into the song there is a shot of what looks like Marine Drive. The road is full of Premier Padminis (or Fiats as they were better known as) and Ambassadors. If you look carefully enough there is even a white Mercedes somewhere.
The movie Gharaonda was released in 1977 and those were the days when Indians had the option of buying either the Ambassador produced by the Birlas at Uttarpara near Kolkata or the Premier Padmini produced by the Doshis at Kurla in Mumbai. The situation was akin to the early days of the American automobile. Henry Ford, the pioneer of the assembly line system of manufacturing remarked in 1909 that: “any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”
In short the customer did not have any choice. The same was true about India in 1977. If one were to paraphrase Ford, “ any customer could buy any car that he wants so long as it is a Padmini or an Ambassador.”
But things have changed since then. Some 37 years later in 2014, a similar shot of the Marine Drive would show so many models of cars that it would be difficult to count the number quickly. This is the impact of competition and a largely free market which operates in the Indian automobile sector with very little interference from the government and in turn politicians. The companies compete with each other in order to offer the best possible features to consumers at the best possible price. This wasn’t the case in 1977 and the Indian consumer had a choice of two models of cars. The free market has clearly changed that.
Now let’s go back to the 1977 song that we started with—ek akela is shehar main. The song is about the inability of a man to buy a home in Mumbai in 1977. Thirty seven years later nothing has changed on that front. In fact, things have only gotten worse.
And the reason for this is very simple. Most homes across Mumbai and large parts of this country remain unaffordable for the same reason as the Indian consumer had a choice of only two cars in 1977. There is no free market in real estate.
Most real estate companies are fronts for politicians. What makes this very clear is the fact that even though there are thousands of real estate companies operating across India, there is not a single pan India real estate company. Forget pan India, there are very few companies that operate across large states. Most of the big real estate companies have an expertise in a particular part of the country. Why is that the case?
The answer lies in the fact that for any real estate company to operate in any part of the country it needs the cooperation of local politicians. And politicians in every area have their favourite real estate companies. This effectively ensures that even though there are many real estate companies there is very little genuine competition among them to offer the best possible home at the best possible price to consumers. Also, it limits the ability of a real estate company to grow in different parts of the country. It is not possible for the same real estate company to manage politicians everywhere. In short, the free market is not allowed to operate.
There is huge government interference in the sector to ensure that the favoured real estate companies continue to benefit. As Bombay First points out in a report titled My Bombay My Dream “Government and the land mafia in fact do not want more land on the market: after all, you make more money out of the spiraling prices resulting from scarcities than you could out of the hard work that goes into more construction.”
Over the years, the major infrastructure projects in Mumbai like the Bandra-Worli Sea Link or the Versova-Ghatkopar metro link, have addressed areas that have already been built up. The Sewri-Nhava Sheva link, which will open up a lot of land for housing is yet to see the light of day.
One excuse that is constantly offered by the real estate companies to justify spiralling prices is the lack of land. While this may be true about a city like Mumbai it is not true about most other Indian cities.
The Indian Institute for Human Settlements in a report titled Urban India 2011: Evidence esimates that “the top 10 cities are estimated to produce about 15% of the GDP, with 8% of the population and just 0.1% of the land area.” So clearly scarcity of land is not an issue.
This situation can be improved significantly if some of the land that the government has been sitting on can be made available for affordable housing. KPMG in a report titled Affordable Housing – A key growth driver in the real estate sector points out “The government holds substantial amount of urban land under ownership of port trusts, the Railways, the Ministry of Defence, land acquired under the Urban Land (Ceiling and Regulation) Act, the Airports Authority of India and other government departments.”
Over and above this the end consumer has almost no access to price and volume trends. He has to go by what brokers and real estate companies tell him. And for these insiders the real estate prices are always on their way up. In this scenario the real estate market is completely rigged in favour of brokers, real estate companies and politicians. This is what the Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof called a scenario of “asymmetric information”.
As Guy Sorman writes in An Optimist’s Diary “Economic actors don’t all have the same information at their disposal. Without institutions to improve transparency, insiders can easily manipulate markets.” This is precisely what is happening in India—politicians and real estate companies acting as their fronts, have been able to manipulate the entire system in their favour.
And unless this changes, the dream of owning a house will continue to be just a dream. Until then we can thank Gulzar, Jaidev and Bhupinder Singh for this beautiful song and hum it…ek akela is shehar main…

The article originally appeared on www.Firstbiz.com on August 4, 2014

(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

If Sanjay Dutt is innocent, I am Amitabh Bachchan

sanjay-dutt_0
Vivek Kaul
Subhash Ghai’s Khalnayak with Sanjay Dutt in the lead role released on June 15, 1993. This was around two months after Dutt was first arrested on April 19, 1993, for his involvement in the Bombay bomb blasts which happened on March 12, 1993 (Bombay is now Mumbai). The story goes that Ghai had shot multiple ends for the movie, and after Dutt’s arrest he used the one which showed Ballu, the character played by Dutt, in a positive light.
That’s the thing with reel life, if the director does not like the end, he can change it. Real life should work a little differently, that’s what you and I might think. But it doesn’t always work like that. At least, not if you are Sanjay Dutt.
On March 21, 2013, the Supreme Court of India, convicted Dutt for illegal possession of arms and sentenced him to five years in prison. Between then and now a small cottage industry seems to have evolved which is trying to tell the world that Dutt is innocent and is trying to change the end of a long judicial process which has finally delivered some justice.
This cottage industry includes those working with him in the Hindi film industry. They cannot believe that Sanju Sir, as they like to call him, will have to go to jail. Rakhi Sawant, who is largely famous for what the Hindi film industry refers to as item numbers, has even volunteered to go to jail instead of Dutt. “If there is any provision in the law, then I’d like to request the court to send me to jail in place of Sanjay. Not because he is a big actor today, but because he has a family and kids at home to take care of,” she has remarked.
Support has also come in from Marakandey Katju, Chairman of the Press Council of India, who on other occasions has spoken out strongly against media’s obsession with celebrities. Katju is also a former judge of Supreme Court. He wants Sanjay Dutt to be pardoned.
He has offered various reasons for the same. In the last twenty years Dutt has suffered a lot. He had to take the permission of the Court for foreign shootings. He has two small children. And to top it Dutt has through his film revived the memory of Mahatma Gandhi and the message of Gandhiji, the father of the nation. Justice Katju in his appeal to grant pardon to Dutt had also said that “his parents Sunil Dutt and Nargis worked for the good of society and the nation.”
Congress General Secretary Digvijay Singh has jumped into the rescue Sanjay Dutt bandwagon as well. “Sanjay Dutt is not a criminal, he is not a terrorist. Sanjay Dutt, at a young age, in the atmosphere of that time, thought that perhaps the way Sunil Dutt had been raising his voice against communalism and favoured the minorities, then perhaps he could be attacked. So, as an obvious reaction of a kid to do something, if he has committed a mistake then I feel that he has undergone the punishment for it,” Singh said.
Mamata Banerjee, chief minister of West Bengal, who normally goes cholbe na cholbe na against everything, has also come out in support of Dutt. “Today, I fondly remember Sunil Dutt ji. He used to come to my residence whenever he was in Calcutta. If he were alive, he would have no doubt made all efforts to see that Sanjay does not suffer any more. My heart echoes the same sentiments ,” the Trinamool Congress chief wrote on Facebook, getting nostalgic.
Let me demolish this arguments one by one. In 1993, Sanjay Dutt was 33, going on 34. He was no kid, as Digvijay Singh makes him out to be. On the other hand Ajmal Kasab, who was recently hanged to death, was actually a kid, when he carried out the gruesome act that he did.
In the last twenty years Dutt has suffered a lot, feels Katju. But so has everyone else who was accused in the Mumbai bomb blasts case. Yusuf Memon, one of the accused, who will serving a life sentence, is schizophrenic and the Supreme Court dismissed his plea seeking relief from his conviction and life sentence.
During the last twenty years Dutt managed to marry twice (Rhea Pillai and now Manyata earlier known as Dilnawaz Sheikh ). So much for him suffering. And as far as kids go, if people were pardoned because they had kids, nobody in India would ever go to jail.
The movies Katju is talking about are Munnabhai MBBS and Lageraho Munnabhai. Dutt did not make these movies, he just acted in them. The movies were the vision of director Rajkumar Hirani, who also co-wrote them. In fact, Dutt was not even supposed to play the role of Munnabhai in Munnabhai MBBS. The original choice was Shah Rukh Khan, who later declined due to a back injury. So Sanjay Dutt was simply lucky to have first landed and then played the role which made Gandhi fashionable again. And that is no reason to let him go.
Digivijay Singh in his statement seems to be justifying Sanjay Dutt possessing illegal weapons for self defence. What he forgets is that we are not talking about some desi katta or a revolver here. We are talking about AK-56 rifles. Its worth remembering that the year was 1993 and not 2013. “And AKs were not weapons you almost ever saw outside some militant districts in Punjab and Kashmir,” writes Shekhar Gupta in a column in The Indian Express.
And as far as the nostalgia of Mamata Banerjee goes there are people who might still feel nostalgic about the late Head Constable Ibrahim Kaskar of Mumbai police. As S Hussain Zaidi writes in Dongri to Dubai – Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia “In the predominantly Muslim stronghold of Dongri, Ibrahim’s baithak was the first place people went to if they had a problem. It was privy to everything-from people discussing their choking lavatory drain to the excitement of the elopement of lovers or cases of police harassment.” Kaskar’s son is Dawood Ibrahim. So should sons committing crimes be let go because their fathers happened to be nice men? Maybe Justice Katju and Mamata Banerjee can give us an answer to that.
In fact, it would be safe to say that Sanjay Dutt was very lucky not be convicted under the the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (or what we better know as TADA). Dutt was arrested in 1993, for acquiring three AK-56s rifles, nine magazines, 450 cartridges and over 20 hand grenades. One doesn’t need so many weapons and ammunitions for self defence. This despite the fact that Dutt already had three licensed weapons. And when was the last time you heard anyone keeping hand grenades at home for self protection?
Some of these weapons were later stored at the home of a woman called Zaibunissa Kazi. This included two of the three AK-56s rifles that Dutt had got. Kazi was convicted under TADA. Same was the case with Baba Mussa Chauhan and Samir Hingora, who delivered the consignment of arms to Dutt’s house. And so was Manzoor Ahmed, whose car was used to ferry the arms out of Dutt’s residence.
But the special TADA court did not convict Dutt under TADA. This is very ironical given that those who got the arms to Dutt’s house were convicted under TADA. So was the women in whose house the arms were placed, after they were moved from Dutt’s house. He had also admitted to being directly in touch with Anees Ibrahim, the main conspirator Dawood Ibrahim’s younger brother. Further, CBI did not challenge the TADA court’s decision which relieved Dutt of charges under TADA, in the Supreme Court.
In fact Satish Manishinde, Dutt’s lawyer later admitted in front of a spy camera in a sting operation carried out by Tehehlka that “The moment she (Zaibunissa Kazi) was convicted, I thought Sanjay too would be convicted under TADA .” No wonder Kazi’s daughter feels “I wish I was a celebrity or my mother was a celebrity or a sister of an MP. Even my mother would have got the kind of support Sanjay Dutt is getting. If it is on humanitarian grounds then why only Sanjay Dutt, why not Zaibunisa. Isn’t she a human? Isn’t she a citizen of this country?”
As a line from the song Yaaram written by Gulzar, from the still to be released Ek Thi Daayan goes “koi khabar aayi na pasand to end badal denge”. Everyone who is trying to appeal for a pardon for Sanjay Dutt is trying to change the end of a long judicial process which has finally delivered some justice.
To conclude, let me say this loudly and emphatically, if Sanjay Dutt is innocent, then I am Amitabh Bachchan.
The article also appeared with a different headline on www.firstpost.com on March 29,2013. 
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek. He can be reached at [email protected])

Matru Ki Bijli Ka Mandola is the new Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron

Matru-Ki-Bijlee-Ka-Mandola tri
Vivek Kaul
Spoiler Alert: While I have tried to reveal as little as possible about the movie, but then its four in the morning as I write this, and I am sleepy and there might be some spoilers that may have slipped in.
When Zee Tv was launched in the early 1990s, I loved it for the fact that it ran interviews with film stars almost on a daily basis. For a generation who had grown up watching krishi darshan for entertainment, star interviews were fascinating. But the interviews soon got very boring. Most of the answers were dull, boring and repetitive, like the Hindi cinema of the 1990s.
The one answer that really got me irritated during those days was “It’s a very different kind of film.” In the annals of Hindi cinema a different movie is a movie which has already been made before. I still cringe when directors or actors say “bahut hatke picture hai,” or anything along those lines.

Directors who do make hatke pictures do not need to go around telling the world that their movie is a little hatke. Vishal Bhardwaj is one such director and his latest movie Matru ki Bijli ka Mandola (MKBKM) falls into that category. It is genuinely hatke. The only fair comparison I can make is with the 1983 comedy Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (JBDY).

In a country which has basically two genres of film making, one being the boy finally meets girl genre, and the other being the angry young man who beats up the villain and finally gets the girl genre, it takes a lot of courage, commitment and knowledge to come up with what Bhardwaj and his team have been able to do with MKBKM. It is much easier to make a Rs 100 crore movie.
Cinema in India is not expected to tackle serious issues. And when it does it is not supposed to be entertaining. MKBKM beats that myth. The movie is full of contemporary issues that plague India. From politicians and industrialists conniving to take over the land of farmers to build special economic zones (SEZs) to farmers under debt to the agri procurement system being in a mess to bureaucrats who have sold out to honour killings and to the oft asked question of when will the revolution come?
It also has an aggressive ambitious female politician and her useless son, on whom all the hope rests. And then there is also a gulabi bhains, a real first in the history of Hindi cinema, where a pink buffalo has a pivotal role in taking the story forward. Despite its serious undertones, MKBKM is a political satire which is a two and a half hour laugh riot like Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron was before it. Released in 1983, JBDY started slow and found its audience over the years. I hope MKBKM finds it audience much more quickly. It really deserves it.
Pankaj Kapoor gives the finest performance of his life in what is first mainstream lead role. How many actors in their sixties (other than Bachchan and Naseeruddin Shan once in a while) get a lead role in the first place? Kapoor pulls off his dual faced performance with absolute panache.
The Bandra boy Imran Khan looks the rustic Haryanvi that he plays and does enough to take over the crown of the thinking woman’s sex symbol from the actor who now calls himself just Irrfan. And Anushka Sharma adds glamour to the entire equation. She also most probably becomes the first mainstream Hindi film heroine to mouth everybody’s favourite cuss word b#$&^%*od and does it several times (Okay now don’t tell me Seema Biswas did that first in Bandit Queen. I know, I saw that movie, first day first show at Welfare Cinema in Ranchi. Two days later it was banned. And I saw it once again after the ban was lifted).
Shabana Azmi stands out in a small but a pivotal role. And she also has the scene which has the crux of the film and at the same time explains in a couple of minutes all that has been wrong with India since independence. That scene on its own is a total paisa vasool for the movie.
The writing of the film is what makes it the classic that it will eventually become. To be able to deal with so many ‘serious’ issues plaguing India today and do it in a funny way, takes some doing. So take a bow Abhishek Chaubey and Vishal Bhardwaj. The dialogues by Vishal Bhardwaj are fantastic and there is a particular one in reference to a certain industrialist and his wife that you guys need to definitely watch out for (Okay sorry about this spoiler, but I just couldn’t help it).
Gulzar as always is in fine form writing the lyrics for the movie. Some of Gulzar’s best lines get written for the movies that Vishal Bhardwaj makes. The 2009 release Kaminey had the line “masoom sa kabootar naacha to mor nikla”. In MKBKM he matches that with “Jo nahi kiya, kar ke dekhna, saans rok ke, mar ke dekhna, yeh bewajah, be sabab, khamkha nahi.” And he also manages to write a song with the words 2G and 3G in it. 
On the flip side the movie has too many cuss words (which I thoroughly enjoyed) and thus is likely to keep the family audiences away. They can obviously let their sons watch Kareena Kapoor singing main to tandoori murgi hoon yaar, gatak le mujhe alcohol se. And they can let their daughters enjoy the misogynistic jokes in Khiladi 786 (or was it Rowdy Rathore, all Akshay Kumar movies look the same these days). The cuss words though are definitely not good for the children.
As for me as I leave the theatre I find myself humming “gulbai bhains jo teri dekhi…”. I see pink buffaloes everywhere. The Worli Seaface is full of them.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on January 11, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected])