MEDIA SYNDICATE, VULGAR SALARY AND COMPANIES ACT

Yesterdays’ handsome figures are today’s vulgar shapes, with a prominent belly moving a foot ahead always. Salaries too are not immune to this phenomenon. The advertisements read as ‘handsome pay and perks’ will be translated in to the ‘vulgar salaries’.

The revelations of the Hon. Minister Mr. Salman Khurshid and the stamp of approval by Mr.Ahluvalia led to hectic discussions in the Economic Times and other Gazettes of Commerce and Industry. In no time, let me borrow the term familiar to Keralites, this Media Syndicate came out clamoring to prove a few CEOs right and the nation wrong. Economic Times even wrote the editorial on a development affecting a few; the number could be counted on finger tips.

Now Mukesh Ambani takes 2/3 cut in his salary. Will they apologize to the public? They had spent more than enough space for proving him right and others wrong. They screamed that 44 crore salary is too less compared with that of US and conveniently forgot that there are staggering Bullock Carts and flying Ferrares on the same road in India. Of course, the Ferraries housing a few CEOs and bullock carts with their products. The majority of population in India earns less than a Dollar a day. They forgot it too. I am not for the income uniformity among beggar and the big B, but against unfairness of drawing 44 crores when an average Indian makes a mere 100 a day

Further, they also drew the difference in era, the yore days were gones with winds and now the globalization rules the roost. In the Times point of view, this salary is handsome, not at all vulgar. Besides, the Companies Act 1956 provides for it, the rule states that up to 10% of profit can be spent as salaries. This is something like an MRP; to us it is the abbreviation of Minimum Retail Price.

Let us not get rid of ‘age’. The Times speaks relentlessly of the present age. But this 10 percent provision is as per an Act aged more than 50 years. Though they are very much confident that the past is a tale told by some idiots, not a single line was contributed for amending the Companies Act 1956. Everything else has to be changed except the old laws which had shed its teeth.

Either our words and deeds often take different routes or we speak a lot and do a little. The seriousness of the Government is well under cloud, with the declaration of the Prime Minister that the Government has no plans to enact laws for trimming the vulgar salaries to handsome pays.

We may remember the recent media reports on the pay, allowances and freebies our MPs are entitled. They also compared it with that of the best in the business world and people thought on it a huge executive pay with no responsibility. The intention behind the revelation aims to prove that the elected emperors are lesser paid than the business tycoons, lest the words and deeds would move go hand in hand. Necessary enactments for curbing the indecent salary would have been initiated by now.