George Menezes

If nothing else, the title of this piece will ensure a more than normal readership. People love to hear confessions. Especially when it involves a person who they feel “thinks no end of himself”.

Impotency after all is a subject which like death is a great leveler. May be Charlie Chaplin is an exception, but it comes to each one of us stealthily, leaving us confused and groping. It functions beyond politics and, all said and done, defies the reach of “Mandalization”

I can foresee busy husbands, on their way to office, cutting out this article with furtive and trembling hands for detailed study before bedtime.

I can also foresee wives serving their spouses their breakfast of eggs and bacon, or maybe puri bhaji, with the newspaper article right in their face, hoping it will turn out to be for them a mixture of 30+, ginseng and Chavanprash.

The fact is that of late, all kinds of people are getting involved in bringing my impotency to my attention in ways that would have driven a weaker soul to hanging himself from the ceiling fan. A major usefulness of ceiling fans which, strangely, ceiling fan manufacturers have not exploited in their marketing strategy.

Let me tell you something. There are stages in one’s impotency. You can use a scale of 0 to 10. At the peak of my career in Human Resources Management with a German organization my team was able to successfully influence the Vision and the thrust of the Organization in the direction of openness and transparency and fairness and justice and growth for all employees.

I don’t think the secretarial pool had an opportunity to identify my level of impotency but I gave myself a low score of 2 in the scale. The reason being that I was impotent only as far as being unable to convince the German Management to permit Managers to abandon suit and tie and be allowed to come to work dressed casually.

Let me move to an area where my inadequacy in the scale of 0 to 10 had almost reached 8. It is my membership, in fact a very active and committed membership, at national and international levels of the Catholic Church in India which I have loved so very dearly.

Not as the parish councilor, not as President of the All India Catholic Union, not as a member of the Asian bishops think tank and not even as a member of the Pope’s advisory Council for five years have I made any substantial progress in my goal in seeking transparency in matters that affect members of the church, in justice especially for women and dalits and a strong collaborative decision-making role for the laity.

Presence at seminars, conducting of countless training programs for the laity, religious and clergy including bishops and an assertive Christ driven presence in various committees and commissions have hardly created a dent. The impotency scale stuck at an all high figure of 8.

A rare moment of adequacy and power was the occasion when 150,000 people, cutting across many denominations, gathered together at the Azad maidan to protest the unjust withdrawal of recognition of St. John’s Medical College and the attempted introduction of the Tyagi Conversion Bill.

I tasted the sweet smell of success and the impotence scale hit 0.

I write this piece years after what I’ve described earlier

At my age, with the legacy of activism that has witnessed the election of our “citizens choice” as Municipal Corporator, the successful public interest litigation against hawkers, the retrieval of open spaces from greedy builders and corrupt politicians, the taking over of the entire sea-front along Bandra for providing amenities that cater both to the body and mind, for protecting open spaces at personal cost to activists and for the hope of flood free residential areas, I thought we had come a long way in regaining my potency the non-Viagra way.

On the contrary. A recent spate of scholarly, unprejudiced and well-meaning white papers from various sources has led me to believe that all hope is lost. That my “circle of control” has shrunk to the size of a little puddle inside a gigantic ocean of my “circle of concern”.

Well-intentioned people are asking whether India is in a coma. Is it a fact that the problem of corruption in India has assumed enormous and embarrassing proportions in recent years although it has been with us for decades?

Are we at a juncture in the life of the nation where tripping over the precipice cannot be ruled out?

If all the scams of the last five years are added up, are they are likely to rival and exceed the British colonial loot of about a trillion dollars?

India, says a commentator, is becoming a Banana Republic instead of an economic superpower. Special treatment is promised at the expense of the people. So Ms Mayawati who is the chief Minister of the most densely inhabited State is pacified when an intelligence probe involving millions of rupees is scrapped.

The multimillion rupee fodder scam by another Chief Minister wielding enormous power is put in cold storage. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh presides over this kind of unparalleled loot.

European newspapers talk about, what every Indian knows, namely the shadowy financial deals of the Indian Cricket League. Some talk about some powerful entity in Poona who with his wife is operating a 1,000,000,000 Swiss account with the “sanction of the Indian regime”

Another story is about a former Chief Minister of Jharkhand who is reported to have funds in various tax havens that were partly used to buy mines in Liberia. There is no news about the progress in the inquiry of this case.

In the nastiest business scam in Indian records (Satyam) the government is accused of cleverly covering up the political aspects of the swindle predominately involving real estate.

Says an Austrian newspaper “If the Indian prime minister knows nothing about these scandals he is ignorant of the ground realities and does not deserve to be Prime Minister. If he does, is he a collaborator in the crime?

Says Mohan Murti in a brilliant piece written from Germany where he lives, “in the European mind the caricature of a typical Indian encompasses qualities of falsification, telling lies, being fraudulent, dishonest, corrupt, arrogant, boastful, speaking loudly and bothering others in public places. Not to mention spreading rumors and attempting to swindle if the slightest opportunity arises.”
Even if most of these are perceptions and only a fraction of these is true, I know I have lost control and my impotence meter has crossed the benchmark of 10 and crashed into 100 pieces.

The only consolation is that I am a powerless impotent. And I’m in the august company of the Indian Prime Minister the powerful impotent not to mention his remote controller the presiding deity of the Congress party…

What more could a person in the winter of his life ask for?