Toons tell the top stories of 2019 ⁠— with a dash of sarcasm

Dec 31, 2019, 17:56 IST

News is serious business. Business news can get even worse with the numbers, charts, and dense analysis thrown at us. But Business Insider is not just for the corporate hotshots ⁠— suited up and ready for deal any time of the day ⁠— it is also for the Instagram junkies, twitter trolls, and those relentlessly forwarding memes on WhatsApp.

Insider InJest ⁠— news of the day delivered with a smile and sarcasm ⁠— was a special initiative started by Business Insider India in 2019 to catch the attention of those who have enough stake in the events that are unfolding around them but stay away from the news ecosystem for various reasons.

These are some of the top toons of 2019 and the news that triggered it.

The year started with ‘Kisan Jam’. Ahead of the impending elections, political parties woke up to the rural distress that unravelling for many months before that. It was time for promises ⁠— offers that voters couldn’t refuse.

The incumbent Modi government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was the strongest outfit, even after five years in power. The party projected Prime Minister Narendra Modi as an invincible candidate with solutions for the millions of problems that plague India’s economy and society, much like Thanos in the blockbuster Hollywood franchise, ‘The Avengers’.

On the other hand, unlike the two-party structure in the US, there was a motley crew of political parties with equally big egos but very diverse ideologies, and varying degrees of charisma. At the end, the grand anti-Modi coalition ⁠— in India they call it ‘Mahagathbandhan’ ⁠— failed miserably.

However, it is important to mention that in the run up to the elections that government shelved a report that showed that unemployment had a 40-year high.

Meanwhile, as political parties slugged it out, Hotstar, the Indian streaming site owned by Disney, minted money with three of the hottest spectacles in its kitty this year ⁠— the final season of Game of Thrones, the Indian Premier League, and top of the rung, the cricket World Cup of 2019. The semi-final between India and New Zealand got so close, Hotstar added millions of viewers in the final minutes of the match and set a new record.

But just as the World Cup fever was catching on, an Indian state was running out of beer.

The ongoing election for the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India's Parliament, has had an unintended consequence. The country's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, is fast running out of beer. Ironically, Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of alcohol drinkers in the country.

While Indians were getting high on cricket and the political drama unfolding in many parts of the country, the economy was hitting new lows. The national income, popularly known as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), fell steadily and hit a six-year low. The slowdown was so sharp even experts couldn't keep up with it.

The slowdown was visible in everything from car sales to home sales to even biscuits and underwear. But the government couldn't see it.

As the new government was planning its year ahead, it did seem like there wasn’t going to be enough tax revenue due to a steadily slowing economy. So, Sitharaman announced a higher tax on the super rich and that didn’t go down too well with the country’s wealthy.

While a part of it rolled back eventually, India's stock market investors had already lost ₹15 lakh crore (trillion) in the sell-off. Ironically, the expected revenue from the added tax was only ₹14 billion.

The billionaires were fuming but the dissent was either misdirected or under the breath. Out in the open, the country’s top corporates continued to flatter the politicians.

By December, it was clear that the economy’s ‘animal spirits’ had to be awakened. The government was already spending too much on keeping the economic engine running, and it couldn’t do anymore. The pressure fell on the Reserve Bank of India to reduce lending rates. The new governor Shaktikanta Das delivered six rate cuts this year but no cigar!

The RBI even offered its reserves to the Central Government despite heavy criticism from many quarters. The growth continued to decline.

The crisis in the Indian economy is that of confidence, not money. Investors hoarded the safe blue-chip stocks, and even invested in promising startups. The risk appetite was missing, especially after the domino effect of the colossal failure of infrastructure lending giant IL&FS played out in 2019.

Private enterprise had to incentivised to loosen its purse strings and invest more in business. Boom! The unexpected tax cuts of July 2019.

The country's businessmen, many of whom are based out of the financial capital Mumbai could have celebrated the tax cuts better but the city was dealing with its curse⁠— the civic body that was once again grossly under-prepared for the annual deluge that comes with the monsoon.

Nearly all of the cities roads were dug up for most of the year for metro rail projects making the traffic worse. But people held on to their nerves hoping for a better tomorrow.

Then came the state assembly elections, which was followed by an unprecedented political drama at the end of which Shiv Sena broke away from its winning coalition with BJP and joined hands with rivals -- both ideological and political -- Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) to form the government and Uddhav Thackeray was sworn in the Chief Minister. The process of this government formation was a lot more dramatic.

Meanwhile, the economy worsened. People were spending less and less. However, even though the number of frequent fliers had reduced earlier in the year, the airfares remained sky high for much of the year⁠— thanks to the demise of Jet Airways, India’s oldest private airline.

2019 was another year when the Air India couldn’t be sold. By the end of December, a government official was quoted as saying that the national carrier may have to be shut down if it is not sold within the next 18 months.

But it wasn’t just the Maharaja who was getting crushed under debt. India’s top telecom operators like Airtel and Vodafone-Idea were already full up to the brim with loans while trying to fend off the aggressive competition from Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Jio.

Then, came the knockout blow from the Supreme Court of India that took the wind out of the sector. The consequence was an unintended advantage for Jio.

While Mukesh Ambani got richer and stronger ⁠— and spent more money on another extravagant wedding, this time for his son, a ceremony attended by global luminaries like Google CEO Sundar Pichai and former US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton ⁠— his younger sibling, Anil Ambani, kept courting trouble. Reliance Communications, the telecom services company owned by the younger Ambani, even went into bankruptcy.

The new bankruptcy law has opened a new avenue for lenders to recover their money and honest entrepreneurs to revive their company from misfortune. It also opened up a new career option for a new breed of insolvency professionals.

Another person who grew a lot wealthier in 2019 was Ritesh Agarwal, the founder and CEO of the hotel chain OYO. Agarwal bought back some of the shares at a higher price and increased the company’s value at a time when the losses peaked, the brand took a hit because of increasing complaints of dues aside from an anti-trust investigation.

OYO was not the only startup to court controversy this year. Zomato locked horns with restaurant owners leading to a brief boycott.

Meanwhile, Flipkart, which was bought over by Walmart last year, tried hard to remind people that the company was born in India⁠— which is expected to be the world’s third largest e-commerce market soon. This was essential for the brand that was constantly under attack from a large lobby of physical retailers seeking the government to crackdown on e-tailers for deep discounts and predatory pricing.

Flipkart-owned PhonePe app had a good year like many of its peers in fintech but an embarrassing end although due to no fault of its own. Nearly 50,0000 fans of the Irish rock band U2 were left fuming at the Mumbai concert after a server crash made it difficult for them to buy food and beverages at the concert.

In the closing months of the year, India witnessed some usual and some unusual upheavals.

The unbreathable air in the National Capital Region (NCR) ⁠— comprising of New Delhi and the satellite cities of Noida and Gurgaon ⁠— was on expected lines in November when the country celebrates ‘Children’s Day’.

The unexpected upheaval came in the form of rampant protests against the Modi government’s amendment to the Citizenship law. The government with its comfortable majority in the Parliament, and inefficient opposition parties, continues to stand its ground on a law that led to many violent protests in the country.

Things got out of hand so bad that people did not turn up for Dabangg 3, the latest serving from a super-hit franchise starring one of the country's most popular stars, Salman Khan. It is another matter that people who went for the movie wishing they hadn't risked their lives for it.