Doom-time boom

Our reporter Imran Gowhar got us a story about a couple who tried to beat their recession woes with the help of black magic.

Dhananjay (28) sought help from a black magician when he found he couldn't handle his money problems. He had been sacked from a software firm, and started a business that hadn't really gone anywhere. Police have locked him and his wife up for going to a graveyard with a black magician, and causing "public nuisance". From being in a good job to ending up in police custody in just a couple of months must be devastating for anyone. This is a sad story, and we are hearing many sad stories these days.

When the economy was thriving, we heard stories of people giving up secure jobs and striking out on their own. They built enterprises that impressed the world with their ingenuity and daring. But we now mostly hear stories of anxiety and desperation.

Some young people have put off or cancelled their weddings because they feel they can’t afford to run a family. Software firms have stopped issuing health insurance for parents of their employees, and the elderly have less of a cushion if they fall ill today. Some months ago, their children would have willingly admitted them to the nearest posh hospital.

We also see reverse migration: a work force finding itself suddenly unemployed and going back to where it came from. A cab driver told me he knew of hundreds of vacant houses in Electronics City: its residents had returned to their villages in Tamil Nadu because they just couldn’t afford the rents here, and work was drying up. (The good part was that some of them had returned to cultivating their land when, propitiously enough, their villages had just been irrigated). This is happening globally: people moving out of the big cities to wherever they came from.

In the United States, 5,900 journalists, or about 10 per cent of all journalists in that country, lost their jobs. The world’s biggest newsprint factory, in Canada, filed for bankruptcy last week. More and more employees are being laid off in the software sector.

But some sectors are still doing well. Booze is selling like never before. Work for astrologers and others in the prediction business has shot up. The guru empires would have shown spikes in profit if they'd had to draw up balance sheets, but their accounts are unaudited and secret. And strangely, luxury goods are selling more than ever before. For instance, Mercedes sells about 3,600 cars a year in India now, and isn't overly worried about the downturn.

Many things can push humans to despair. Our theology talks of something called karma, of actions being triggered by our own past actions, but in the short run, it is difficult to understand why bad things happen, or for that matter, why good things happen.

Anyone who can give a plausible explanation for one's miseries and offer a straw to clutch at has a good chance of making a fortune, and acquiring a faithful following.