How much land do Gunday require?

After 45 minutes of watching the much talked about Indian movie 'Gunday', I could not resist falling asleep. It reminded me of the pre-teen days, when my father was a member of the film censor board and used to take me with him occasionally to view the special showings for the censor board to award the required certificate. In those days the greatest violence was seen in simple fist-fights or ordinary gunshots in westerns or war films, women never took off their clothes, and nobody shouted obscenities. Even the loudest gunfire could not stop boredom, and my father had to wake me up on a couple of occasions.

There were annoying things in 'Gunday'. The first was the credit given to Mamata Banerjee at the beginning. I don't like this lady any more. The second was the infamous reference to the Liberation War as the "Third Indo-Pak War". The third was the unclear sequence of events that led the two young kids, both Hindus, to migrate to India from a free Bangladesh. The fourth was the appearance of Priyanka Chopra, a former Miss World known more for her IQ than for being fair and lovely, in this stupid story, in very scanty clothes, performing unaesthetic callisthenics with our Gunday heroes.

Since my knowledge of the story stops at 45:15, I do not know how the story continued and ended. Before that I could see the kids enter a life of crimes, grow up with six-packs and kick off dozens of adversaries using their steroidal muscles. I presume that like "Once upon a time in Mumbai" or the more recent "Boss", they became popular as good, decent lawbreakers, like Robin Hood, or our own Baker Bhai. With a physics background I am not overwhelmed by wild imagination and fantasies. I have never seen in real life Gunday who deserve respect or sympathy on any account.

But many other people obviously see halos of greatness covering the darkness of reported moral turpitude. Naren Modi, no gentleman to me, and to many Indians, may become the next PM of India, in a free and fair election. In Europe and elsewhere people with eccentric moral values became celebrity politicians and rose to the top. Only when the aura wore off and their misdeeds became visible to the public eye did they have a great fall.

There is a widely shared joke on the Internet: The smartest students pass with First Class and get admissions to medical & engineering schools. The Second Class students get MBA's and LLB's to manage (or harass) the First Class students. The Third Class students enter politics, and rule both First & Second Class students. The Failures join the underworld and control politicians and businesses.

Of course intellectual merit is not necessarily strongly correlated with moral righteousness, and Gunday without Ph.D.s can be quite smart. And in contrast to the joke above, there may be Ph.D.s from respectable universities (not bought from the Internet) who are Gunday par excellence. One master of laws, an MP in Bangladesh who has been accused of many wrongdoings in his constituency, kicks a cameraman following him, and after some transient adverse media reaction, a few days later rejoins professors in talk shows to enlighten audiences about his philosophy of life.

A large part of the law enforcing agencies regularly exact tolls or help people who do it. Higher officers do not accept cases lodged by victims and threaten them with more dire consequences. Even journalists who make too much noise endanger their own life and limbs. There were rumours once that the Sagar-Runi murder case, never to be solved, may have been related to revelations causing discomfort to powerful persons who control a significant part of national economy. The journalist leader who was so vociferous at that time, is less enthusiastic about it after getting a lucrative position.

When a distant relation met me and said with some humility that he had just got his Ph.D. from Cambridge in Economics, I congratulated him and added with a sigh – "Isn't it true that much of our economy is related to black money? I don't understand why there are no university courses or Ph.D. theses dealing with financial corruption, its impact on national economy and concrete suggestions for ameliorating the situation?" He smiled weakly and said that academically minded people of the developed world usually dislike dealing with the netherworld and enjoy working with neat transparent equations of supply and demand.

So, what do Gunday demand? Money and power, and even respect! These things are interlinked and one leads to another. An APS to a VIP can collect money from job-seekers for his boss and get a share in it, and buy an expensive car to show his neighbours what a successful man he has become. A man can become an industrialist by taking huge loans, and drive out the competition by means that are less than transparent. A person

in a very high position can collect a percentage from every file signed. Hence, you plan more expensive projects to generate more files. To be in power is important, by fair means or foul.

The best investment in populous small Bangladesh has to be land. Land price doubles every couple of years or so. The government has no interest in imposing mechanisms for the control of land price. Part of the reason can be seen in the asset statements of the MPs. The greatest increase in their asset has been in the astronomical increment of their immovable possessions. Small supply, high demand, simple arithmetic; you do not have to be a Ph.D. in Economics or Finance, and many of our MPs know it without even having completed high school. Land-pirates go ahead and drive the poor out by intimidation, having collected the signatures by whatever means, or faking it. They grab khas government land. They sell nice square or rectangular plots made out of all kinds of complications and combinations to unsuspecting non-Gunday PhDs who have to approach them with their last retirement benefit purse. On the other hand, there are also very distinguished professors, and nobody would dare to call them Gunday, who have been associated with the development of cities by virtue of their related academic qualifications, who keep adding to their assets by securing a plethora of government plots in new settlements developed or planned by the government, despite already being in possession of substantial chunks of prime city land. A false affidavit is no big deal.

While India might have had a Third War with Pakistan, we did fight a Liberation War – not to produce Gunday.

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Ahmed Shafee is a columnist.