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D. Murali

THIS is not about the image of economics, rather the economics of image. The hip thing is image building, be it in the US or the North Block. Otherwise, you would not be having the US President, Mr George W. Bush, haranguing about a clean America ending the days of cooking the books, shading the truth, and breaking the law; nor Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee on bombshells hiding in a boom time economy.

With newspapers reading like scandal sheets of corporate greed, accountants are scurrying around to rebuild their image and wipe the tar off their faces. But what is image?

It is an actual or mental picture, a picture or likeness of somebody or something, the common one being the one that stares at you honestly enough from the mirror. As an economic phenomenon, image-building should rank as one of the high-end ones, in terms of the money that gets poured into it, the top notch endorsers who give their word or shake their body, air time that it logs on the electronic media, and news that it out-beats by many times the column centimetres. And, sadly, also in terms of the shock of the fall when an image bites the dust.

If it were not for image, half the shelves in your local department stores should be empty, and what would be left would be racks of bread, cereals, pulses and fruits. Also, you would reclaim half your time that was otherwise being spent on choosing a designer label, attitudinal aroma and other labelled things.

For all the investment we have all made in images — whether it is of CEOs being angels and auditors being truthful, accounts being matter-of-fact and regulators being ever watchful — it is necessary that we do not allow dents to appear there.

Nobody likes to see one's favourite hero age, nor the heroine with wrinkles.

Similarly, blue-chip companies should never show red in their P&L, nor should qualifications encroach into audit reports of well-governed companies.

That is the way we have grown up as kids. Little, pretty princess meets the handsome warrior and they live happily ever after into zillions of years.

A story that should never be overwritten by facts. How else do you get the feel-good-factor the Finance Minister is busy with?

If the IT major reports a sub-optimal profit, it is just because of the global slowdown.

If a megacorp defaults in complying with company law, it could be because of a stupid secretarial officer. When a star performer returns to the pavilion with a duck, he is simply not in form.

Or when a tax policy goes haywire, perhaps the Finance Minister was not lucky. One could always wish away aberrations and slips, or wave off anomalies and awkward skews, and dream only of the ideal as the terra firma facts. How childish.

It is like reserving the best seats for the pet students even when they underperform, and rewarding sycophancy even when it becomes obnoxious.

If images are economically indispensable, we should have financial statements prepared by flamboyant fiction writers, and not by amateurishly criminal accountants.

Also, instead of knee-jerking regulators, one should have glitzy matadors.

(hindubusinessline@hotmail.com)

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