How to write a blog post criticizing Anna Hazare and the Jan Lok Pal Bill

Apparently many ardent and strident bloggers still want to write critical blog posts on the subject that had grabbed last week's headlines: Anna Hazare's fast and the Jan Lok Pal (JLP) Bill. It is necessary for them to do this, it seems, since their peers have already voiced their opposition on the subject, but they haven't done so yet. And tauba tauba ... they wouldn't want their silence to be construed as support for Hazare and the JLP! Heavens forbid!

If you're not one of those looking to write a critical article on this subject, you could skip reading the rest of this post. But if you are then here're some broad guidelines that are easy to follow and will help you write a really unique post on this subject.

First, express some trepidation around the possibility that what you are about to embark on i.e. criticizing Anna Hazare and the JLP, may be considered iconoclastic and perhaps even blasphemous by the public at large. This establishes you as an original thinker with a really off-beat perspective on things, who doesn't get shepherded into following mass movements. (Besides, it is so uncool for someone like you to be seen on the same side as Baba Ramdev and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar!) Of course, your regular readers know that in matters cerebral pertaining to a  cause célèbre such as this one, you always take the road less traveled. But remember that your post will be passed around among friends, and you will have several new readers who should eventually become part of your fan club. Hence necessary to establish you as both: maven and maverick.

Second, give a clean chit to Anna Hazare. Acknowledge the good work he's done and his spotless record. Provide a link to the Wikipedia page on Ralegaon Siddhi. Make it clear that you mean no disrespect to the man. If you are really bold, you may venture to suggest that Hazare played to the galleries and was enthusiastic about being part of the reality show that the movement became. But stay within reasonable limits. You don't want to outrage your audience, just to shock them into a new awakening with the epiphany of your revelations (which you will do in subsequent paragraphs).

Third, agree that corruption is a big problem in India today. Deride the venal panjandrums who have been indulging in jobbery, robbing the common citizen blind. Mention the 2G scam and the CWG scam, for sure, and any other scam that comes to mind (there are many of them).  Also make a note of the frustration and anger against graft that has been building up among the hoi polloi over the years, and endorse it as being fully justified. Depending on how bold you feel, you may consider suggesting that people get the government they deserve. If you must do that, then also acknowledge that such homilies are not very useful in crafting solutions. (It would help to remember that the reader is looking for some kind of solution from you, thinking, fallaciously, that if you are criticizing a particular solution then you must offer alternatives.) Strongly advocate the need for urgent action to bring probity to public life and to implement reforms aimed at clean governance at all levels.

Fourth, oppose Hazare's fast as a matter of principle. Call it coercive. Use the word blackmail, if needed, to emphasize your point. Quote, from Dr Ambedkar's speech, that priceless phrase -- "Grammar of Anarchy", and make it your own. (In fact, pwn it, if you know what I mean.) Assert that it is unconstitutional to use fasting and other satyagraha tactics to subvert the normal course of action undertaken by a government constituted by the elected representatives of the people of India.

Next, oppose the JLP Bill as a matter of principle. Call it draconian. Suggest that it paves the way for dictatorship. Identify specific items in the proposed draft JLP and take issue with them. Your duty as a responsible citizen ends here as far as the JLP is concerned. You don't need to suggest alternative language or replacement of egregious text with better verbiage. Since per se you don't believe that this Bill in any form is the solution (or even "a" solution since it doesn't address the real issues), you don't have to pass on your feedback to Hazare & Co., even though there's enough basis to support the belief that this Bill, in some shape or form, is going to be passed by Parliament within a year. Having correctly diagnosed the root cause of the problem as [insert your diagnosis here, followed by rationale] you'd rather focus your keen intellect on developing the "right" solution, than improve what you know to be a draconian Bill that will most likely see passage in a few months. As far as you're concerned, posting your thoughts on your blog is enough contribution. Your fan following will take forward the good work.

Then, call this whole agitation misguided (for above stated reasons) and self-righteous. Inform the reader that it is not enough to be virtuous -- one has to abide by the principles of democracy. Does this imply that Hazare is a morally upright guy, but since politics is the business of villains it should be left to them? No. What it means is that sanctity of democratic processes is paramount. Virtue needs to be patient and learn to work the system. It's a different thing that Vice is unfettered by any such mores and in fact freely abuses the very systems that it is supposed to uphold and protect, through its perversion of powers vested in it by the very people it is supposed to serve.

Further, oppose the constitution of the Committee that will work on drafting the Bill. Oppose it primarily because it doesn't include you or your aantel buddies that hang around your adda, or any other right-minded intellectual (i.e., someone who thinks like you), but instead includes people of questionable predilections and biases. On the other hand, you don't believe this Bill is a solution, anyway, so why would you want to get on this Committee to begin with?

Conclude your post by pointing out how this could well be yet another example of good intentions that can go very, very wrong. Express fervent hope as a concerned and responsible citizen, that this doesn't end up as a cure that's even worse than the disease.

These above are the basic points around which you can build your post. Depending on your individual taste, your own personal style, the tone/ tenor and degree of stridency of your blog, and on what, specifically, is biting your ass right now, feel free to go as heavy or as light as you like, on each of the points above. If you're really good at the craft of using language for atmospherics, then create the overall feel of a savant who sees beyond the obvious and shares deep insights into mundane matters with an audience that is dumb enough to follow you and swallow your nuggets of brilliance whole, without any mastication, much less rumination. Sit back and gloat over the re-tweets on twitter and the 'likes' on facebook that will invariably follow, and the encomiums of praise that will promptly flow in your comments box. Your good work for the day is done!

The Fraud of All Things (or, The Case for the Sedation of the Seductive Seditionist)

I am not against the very idea of discussing Kashmir's secession from the Indian Union. There, I've said it. Not that I am in favour of secession either -- certainly not, all else being equal. But hey, if Kashmir's Aazadi is the only way things can move forward to bring peace and stability to the region, to reduce conflict in general and terrorism in particular, and to allow India and Pakistan to focus on economic growth, social reform and prosperity for their respective peoples, then it has my reluctant vote. My objection to Arundhati Roy's inflammatory speeches that have been fanning secessionist fires among Kashmiris in an atmosphere already charged with anger and hatred for the Indian Government, is not about that. It is about the motives of Ms Roy, as they appear to me.

I've never been a fan of Arundhati Roy. Years ago, I didn't find her book "The God of Small Things" particularly interesting or worthy of the Booker she got. In fact I found it eminently put-down-able and so put it down after a few honest attempts at reading it. Going on from there, I've found her anti-establishmentarian antics over the last few years very shallow, jejune and churlish -- devices to grab attention, revealing her to be a controversial contrarian who delights in intellectual delinquency and basks in the media spotlight that it brings. I seldom discuss Arundhati Roy or her work, because I fear that it might feed the invisible demons who conspire to bring publicity to opinionated twits like her. In a manner of speaking. However, there are times when I am drawn into it and can't help myself.

About a year ago, at the birthday party of a friend, an impressionable young man (who happened to be my friend's husband's nephew) was gushing over Roy and her activism and her bold stand on various issues to a group of people. According to me she doesn't really have a stand that can stand sharp intellectual scrutiny, but she's definitely got a lot of people fooled. Since I entered the conversation late, I had to ask said nephew of said friend's husband who he was talking about, and when told, couldn't help saying, with a dismissive wave of hand -- "Oh! her." Which, of course, immediately led to my being quizzed about such a response. "She's just an attention-mongering contrarian and devoid of any real substance" said I. The nephew, stung by this blasphemous disparagement of his 'goddess of big things', parried back with "And aren't you being a contrarian yourself by taking that stand when all of us here think highly of her?" Realising by now that this whole bunch was on one side, I said, "No. I expressed a considered opinion, which, as it turns out, is different from what you guys think of her. A contrarian would do it in reverse -- wait to hear what the general consensus of the crowd is, or, if there's no time for that then quickly get a sense of the crowd's mood, and then stun them with outright contradiction."

Roy has been in the media a lot in recent times -- specifically apropos her support for the Maoists, but also for generally being the enfant terrible of the world of social causes. Not wanting to waste time on her and her controversies, I've restrained my urge to comment in the social media, though I did air my views a couple of times in private conversations. However, earlier today, I broke my self-imposed oath to never utter her name in public, and at the risk of drawing the ire of her misguided fan following, tweeted:

They say it takes all kinds to make a world. Apply that to Arundhati Roy, the fraud of all things. Does she make a world? Or break one?

and, feeling recklessly brave, followed that with another tweet:

On a different note, what is the verb from 'sedition'? In Roy's case it could be 'to seduce'. She may need to be 'sedated'.

Someone remarked in a back-channel message (on the second tweet) that it smacked of sexism. I replied that it would indeed have been a sexist comment, if it weren't for the fact that Roy's go-to-market strategy freely draws on her own dainty muliebrity, or the fact that she has a knack for foxily leveraging her feminine allure (or what's left of it) in her interviews and her public interactions. Why should she then escape characterization as a seductress? Moreover, sedition is a kind of seduction in itself, isn't it?

Just as I don't have issues with peaceful discussions on secession as a solution to our problems, I also don't have issues with peaceful discussions on using anarchy as a means to achieve a better end-state. (I don't agree that anarchy can or will lead to a better end-state -- I think there are less risky ways to get there, but I am open to discussing anarchy as a possible approach.) There are many ways of getting from A to B, and my moral compass in such matters is more aligned with teleological morality rather than deontological morality. Which means that I don't think that anarchy is a bad thing per se and so, in my opinion, someone trying to create anarchy is not committing a crime ipso facto. Their motives in doing so are important.

In the case of Ms Roy, in her support for Maoist insurgents and Kashmiri separatists (different contexts, same agenda) the anarchy she is trying to create, as far as I can see, is not a means to an end (such as a better India) but an end in itself. Not a solution to a problem but a deepening of the problem itself. I suspect she would go to any part of India where there is strife and suffering and stoke the anti-establishment fires that are burning there: the far east, the central corridor, the north .. wherever trouble is being fomented. But she cleverly stays within the ambit of the law, in each case, never really crossing the line herself. Not the originator but an agent provocateur. Not a reagent that participates in a chemical reaction, but a catalyst who accelerates precipitation but remains untouched. It is almost as if she wants done to India what the Taliban has already begun doing to Pakistan -- to disintegrate the state and destroy its institutions, and to look like an ingénue while it happens. If that's her motive, that is something I will not stand for.

So, whereas I strongly believe in unconditional freedom of expression in an Einsteinian world -- of curved spacetime inhabited by zen monks where the lyrics of John Lennon's "Imagine" ring true, when it comes to the Newtonian world we live in -- of Euclidean spacetime populated by brutes capable of unimaginable and unconscionable violence and full of volatile mobs that can explode within moments of listening to hate speeches, I would draw the line somewhere. Sorry, no unrestrained free speech for those whose sole purpose is to cause total system failure -- it is not on the menu. True, it takes all kinds to make a world (and those who know me will testify to the fact that I am a strident pluralist, an avid celebrator of diversity and a staunch upholder of all kinds of individual freedoms) but it takes just one kind to break a world -- the kind who loves the smell of napalm in the morning.

Migration Migraines: Going Against My Grain

Some time last week an article by Vivek Wadhwa (written, no doubt, in the wake of President Obama's recent speech about immigration reform) caught my attention. As I read through this article and followed the link to a related previous article, also by Vivek Wadhwa, I was intrigued by the author's concerns about reverse brain drain. Numerous thoughts relating to immigration and brain drain started straining my brain (pardon the word play). So I brushed them all aside to the background recesses of my mind where I let them jostle with one another and take coherent shape on their own as I went about my daily routine, and decided to put them all down in a blog post over the weekend in one concentrated burst of effort. After all, that's what blogs are for, aren't they?

First, there's the issue that triggered it all off -- Mr Wadhwa's warning to his President that immigration reforms won't stop the reverse brain drain, and his alarm bells on how reverse brain drain to India and China is a very real threat to the American economy. Why, I wonder, would a Vivek Wadhwa be so concerned about reverse brain drain from the US to India as to write about it so often, when he himself was, in all likelihood, part of the original brain drain from India to the US? Didn't the original brain drain concern him then when he was an Indian, as much as the reverse brain drain concerns him now, as an American?

This is not a personal criticism. I don't know Mr Wadhwa and have nothing against him. I can safely speculate, though, that he is of Indian origin and presently a US citizen. It is possible (though unlikely, I think) that he was born and raised in the US and always was a US citizen. (I did 'google' his name and spend some time researching his past, but all I could come up with was that he graduated from a university in Australia. No information about schooling etc. readily available in the public domain.) But it is also possible (and more likely -- don't ask me why) that he was actually born and raised in India, as an Indian citizen, and went overseas as a student/ young adult. Strange, then, that he should write sentences like -- and I quote from his article:

"The reality is that [..] the poor and unskilled will still be here. But the educated and skilled professionals—who could be creating new jobs and making the U.S. more competitive—won’t be here. They will, instead, be boosting the economies of other countries."

Where was he when that same reality prevailed "here"? (And by "here" I mean India, not the US.) In fact, isn't he one of those (to borrow his phrase) "educated and skilled professionals who could be creating new jobs and making India more competitive" who is, instead, boosting the economy of another country? At a personal level, I have no issues with Indians who've migrated to the US. People will go where opportunities abound, and that is most natural. Nothing wrong with that. Several of my best friends from school and college have migrated to the US and other Western countries. But they don't write articles like these -- expressing concern over reverse brain drain from the US to India. If anything, most of them find themselves on the horns of a dilemma, when it comes to the question of supporting US Govt. policies that affect the Indian economy in one way and the US economy in another.

The question of affiliation with the "old country" tends to come up quite often with my friends who've settled abroad (all first generation immigrants) and some of them are quick with preemptive statements like "Don't ask me whose side I would be on if India and America were at war -- that's too hypothetical and too melodramatic and too cliched a question". When I encounter this dodgy argument (or rather, foil to an anticipated argument) I turn around and ask them which team they would root for if India and America were pitted against each other as finalists in the World Cup -- a relatively less hypothetical and less dramatic question that puts many of the Indian Americans I know in a bit of a quandary. But when the same question is re-cast at the level of government policies -- on matters such as immigration, jobs going offshore etc., it becomes far less hypothetical, far more real, and a dilemma for most of my friends. After all, the two countries collaborate but also compete in the global arena. It's not about questioning their sense of patriotism to the US, it's just that the emotional connect with the country of origin is difficult to ignore completely.

Second, there's this laissez-faire attitude in India towards brain drain from India to the US over the last several decades (whose reversal Mr Wadhwa seems so concerned about). Right through my own childhood, adolescence and youth, I have been witness to the steady migration of some of our best and brightest, year after year, moving out from India and into the US and other lands of opportunity. As a nation, our body of talent has been bleeding 'from a thousand cuts' for several years now. Have we in India recognized this as a problem that needs to be solved? No. Instead we have developed an attitude that, to my mind, is best characterized by a tragic and grotesque blend of: (a) denial (b) rationalization and (c) resignation to fate. There's this standard line of reasoning about Indian talent migrating overseas -- in many cases even after receiving education that has been subsidized by the Indian tax payer (from institutions like the IITs), and this is how the argument unfolds, as more and more evidence of brain drain becomes obvious and undeniable:

Initially: Oh it's nothing much -- there's hardly any brain drain to talk about.
Followed by: Well, yes, quite a few good people do migrate, but look at how many people stay back here.
And then: OK, agreed that the ones who are staying back are doing so because they couldn't migrate; agreed that the good talent does migrate, but some day the trend will reverse and they will come back.
Later: Yes, quite a few of those who have come back to India, have again returned to the US in frustration after a year or two because they couldn't deal with the ground realities here. But the point is that many of them have stayed on.
Lastly (the final justification that to their mind clinches their side of the debate): Well, it's all for the greater good of the whole world, isn't it? Look at the big picture -- India is contributing to global progress, people of Indian origin are leading global businesses, are achieving eminence in academia and research, and are even at the forefront of global politics. We should be proud of that instead of complaining about brain drain!
And as an epilogue: In any case, we keep producing more and more people, so how does it matter that many of the talented people migrate?

You seldom hear anything along the lines of:
- Our systems are broken, we must fix the root causes of brain drain.
- We must have a strong resolve to retain our talent. At the very least, we should stop new outflows, even if we can't reverse old ones.
- We must attract the best minds from abroad, just like America does, and make that our competitive strategy.

Why is it that we hardly, if ever, hear people speak this language? I put this down to the mind-numbing fatalism that is hidden deep inside the Indian psyche when faced with monumental challenges. We find it easier to deny, and if denial doesn't work then our next response is reconciliation -- we accept graciously, for it is so ordained. This is what goes against my grain. And gives me a migraine. Apologies, again, for the play on words. My weak humour is but a poor attempt to mask the pain.

Third, there's the broader issue of talent migration and flow of human capital around the world. This is something that America should learn to deal with, if not actively promote. Up until now it was working in their favour -- they were able to attract the best talent from all over the world. The same thing that drove immigration into that country in the past will drive emigration out of that country in the future, when opportunities abound elsewhere. But even before that future happens, Americans must learn to accept what their President has been saying for quite some time now -- that prosperity does not happen in a vacuum, that steep inequities will only serve to be more divisive, and will disenfranchise large sections of the world population and increase global conflict between peoples and nations. This cannot be good for America, can it? On the other hand, qualified Americans going back to their countries of origin will help in bringing those countries up to a better standard of living and ensure a better quality of life for their former compatriots. This will eventually reduce conflict in different parts of the world and also reduce tensions between those parts of the world and the US.

Moreover, Americans who migrate to other parts of the world will act as cultural and knowledge ambassadors for America. They will draw on the intellectual capital that America has created within them, and will therefore replicate American values, institutions, policies, systems, technologies, management models, regulatory frameworks, etc. thus keeping America in a vanguard position and always ahead of the curve. If these other countries were to develop on their own, who knows -- they may even leapfrog over America some day! Don't you think, Mr Wadhwa, that you should warn your President about that?

Filling Buckets Or Lighting Fires?

"Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire" -- W. B. Yeats

I was reminded of that quote today as I read a news report in the The Times of India excerpted here below:

The 86th Constitutional amendment making education a fundamental right was passed by Parliament in 2002. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, a law to enable the implementation of the fundamental right, was passed by Parliament last year. Both the Constitutional amendment and the new law came into force from today. 

Future generations of Indians will look upon this as a 'Great Leap Forward' for the Indian education system, notwithstanding the fact that it happened on All Fools' Day. It certainly would be a giant leap when successfully implemented, in terms of enabling 10 million children with access to schooling. Of course, there are several unanswered questions at the implementation level, including the dearth of qualified teachers, lack of suitable facilities, the potential for malpractices, etc., but let's assume that we will find ways and means of overcoming these challenges. But there is a larger issue here, even at the conceptual level, and that deals with  our understanding of, and approach to, education itself. And that's where the quote from Yeats comes into the picture. When it comes to Education Reforms, are we seeking to light fires or are we continuing to fill more buckets (and that too, more efficiently)?

I found myself wishing that they had more accurately called it 'Right to Literacy' because that's what it really is. Yes, it deals with primary education. And yes, it comes under the rubric of "Education Reforms" with a capital E and a capital R. But let's not confuse education with literacy. Or with skills training. While all three are important, each has a specific purpose and each plays a unique and vital role in shaping our children's lives as they grow into adults. Literacy gives them the basic tools they would need to learn more, acquire knowledge, develop skills, etc. and training empowers them with a range of capabilities -- some general, some specialized. But education builds character. Unfortunately, nowhere in our education system do we really focus on the last part. A few exceptional schools make an earnest attempt, but that stems more out of their own independent vision than from a systemic requirement.

IIT Bombay, where I spent my late teens and early 20s, has as its motto "Gyanam Paramam Dhyeyam" -- Sanskrit for "Knowledge is the Supreme Goal." The IITs excel in selecting the brightest (read: most analytical) young Indian minds (of those that have opted for the science stream in high school and chosen to pursue engineering as a career, as opposed to medicine) and then honing their pre-existing analytical skills to near perfection, through years of rigorous training in a highly competitive environment. What the IITs do not do, or even attempt to do, is to provide a well-rounded education to their students -- an education that would help them understand, for example, that the supreme goal is the development of the sensibility to apply knowledge judiciously, and not just the mere acquisition of it, as a literal reading of the IIT Bombay motto might suggest. Only the well-educated mind would be able to interpret this motto wisely, and understand the difference between letter and spirit, between acquisition and application. So this is the feedback loop in which this issue is stuck: the minds that run the IITs are the minds that believe that (acquisition of) knowledge is the supreme goal. And that too when what they mostly do is develop analytical skills and impart technical knowhow.

Our children have a right to a decent education too, not just a right to literacy and a right to training. Now that we've taken the first step today, I wonder when we will take the next one. And what, exactly, that would be.

Dictional Differences: Dictates vs. Didactics

I've given up my indignation over the hijacking of the Hindi word avatar (pronounced "uhv - taar") by English-speaking Westerners (who pronounce it as "av - uh - tar"). I used to get bent out of shape about this mispronunciation and fought it passionately till I found the numbers on the other side of that fight overwhelming. So gradually I decided to let it go, as I had many years ago with a similar fight about the Hindi word karma. But there was a whole war I had yet to lose. Having won some ground, the other side started advancing further by dictating terms of use to me. They started correcting my own pronunciation of avatar, trying to highlight the difference between the English neologism and the original Hindi (actually, Sanskrit) word. And this would get me all riled up, especially if the individual doing the dictional dictation was a condescending NRI / PIO with an attitude (who according to me should have fought the battle on the same side as I).

Over time I learned to let that go too. I may not quarrel any more -- at my impassioned best maybe put up a feeble protest. But I will not accept this dictate. Ever. I'd rather face rebirth as a lower avatar in my next life, than say "av - uh - tar". So what if it is now an English word with an English pronunciation? I'm no orthoepist but I'm of the opinion that words can be pronounced as per their original phonetic structure, even after they've been adopted by another language and adapted (mauled might be more accurate) to suit the marauding language's phonemes. Have the French stopped pronouncing words like penchant or accoutrement or bête noire the French way and embraced the American pronunciation for such words? If they have Gallic pride, don't we have Indian pride?

Be that as it may, I've given up fighting the dictional war over avatar. But there's another war that I am still fighting and shall continue to fight for as long as I have to. It is about preserving the spelling and pronunciation of the Indian name "Gandhi", which has been coming under increasingly strong pressure lately to morph into "Ghandy". I have vowed to fight it through dictional didactics -- I shall correct every written or spoken instance of "Ghandy" that I come across, anywhere in the world and anywhere on the world-wide web, by teaching the concerned author or speaker the correct spelling or pronunciation as the case may be. Not so much out of respect for the man we've all been brought up to revere as the Mahatma, but more out of a sense of outrage that my compatriots who may happen to be closer to the source of the error either don't care or don't seem to be pushing back. Or pushing back hard enough.

I'm quite certain that people who've learned to spell and pronounce Javier Perez de Cuellar and Dag Hammarskjold can also learn to spell and pronounce Gandhi correctly, if taught to do so. My anger is not directed against them. My anger is directed against Indians who don't think it is important to educate their friends from other (predominantly first world) cultures about the pronunciation of Indian names or words from Indian languages. These are mostly the same Indians who modify their own names to make them more user-friendly to the English-speaking world, or, worse still, just adopt the nearest American-sounding name. (Side note: in my case, Westerners tend to mistake my first name for Herman, when written, and Eamon or Hammond, when spoken. But I'm usually quick to point it out and to help them with a mnemonic -- getting them to say "hey" and "month" in rapid succession till they get it right.)

These are also the same Indians that disparage other Indians who don't get the pronunciation of names like, say, McMahon or names of places like, say, Worcestershire. I use a rather colourful expression to refer to such sub-species of Indian origin but I'd rather not reproduce here in full. It consists of 3 words: the first two are 'Cocky Caucasian' and the third word is the unprintable one. (Hint: it is a hyphenated word, referring to a person who fellates men, and alliterates wonderfully with the first two words.) And if you've got that right you'd know that's not a racial slur against Caucasians; it's an obloquy aimed at the obsequiousness of Indians who think that cultural acquiescence brings personal acceptance (and who, in the first place, crave such acceptance by the first world). This is the problem: obsequiousness when facing West to interact with first world citizens; superciliousness when facing East to interact with their compatriots back home who haven't had as much exposure to the occident. Even if I could deal with the former, I find it impossible to reconcile to the latter.

Yet another reason for me to be pissed off with these Cocky Caucasian [unprintables] is that their sort of behavior plays so easily into the hands of the hard-core right-wing Hindutva bigots who are looking for every opportunity to oppose what to their eyes might appear to be a new avatar of colonialism or Western imperialism or religious proselytizing. Look at the way they react to St. Valentine's Day celebrations in India, every year. Why does this have to be a case of two extremes? One set of Indians with a zero tolerance policy towards other Indians imbibing Western culture, and the other falling all over themselves to get accepted by the West. We don't seem to be able to embrace diversity without it having to be a struggle to keep our cultural identity. A struggle that some think they win by digging their heels deeper into the quagmire of regressive morality (which they confuse with tradition), and others readily and willingly surrender to at the altar of acceptance by the West.

I'm all for cultural osmosis. When I travel, I love to soak-in the sights and sounds of the place, mingle with locals, speak their language if I can, or try to learn it, enjoy the local cuisine, and sing and dance the local song and dance. I'm not hung-up about where I come from or how different I am from the people I am amidst, nor am I scared of losing my sense of self by opening myself out to another culture (on the contrary, I revel in it, and it adds to my sense of self). When it comes to identity, "They can't take that away from me", to quote the lyric of an old song. And neither do I go to the other extreme by jumping out of my own skin and into one I was not born in. Or born with.

Cultural osmosis is a two-way process -- you learn some, you teach some. I learn the correct pronunciation of Dalziel and I teach the correct pronunciation of Gandhi. There is mutual respect. Everybody goes home enriched.

The Wisdom to Know the Difference

As a child in school, I used to make silly mistakes while solving problems in subjects like Mathematics, Physics etc. Typically, I would work out the solution but at the very end do something stupid (the equivalent of adding 2 and 3 to get 6) and get the final answer wrong. I vividly remember one of my teachers admonishing me once, and urging me to focus hard on the problem till it was fully solved and resulted in the correct final answer. "Life gives you no marks for wrong answers, even if your approach and method are correct" he declared in the soft but authoritative tone of a mentor who has seen a lot in life. "Remember, it is all about the final answer!" he added, with an indulgent smile, eyes twinkling benignly behind the thick lenses of his spectacles, and a slight wag of his index finger. It was a lesson I had to learn the hard way, and a very useful lesson that has helped me in confronting and overcoming many challenges in life. Many. Not all. Definitely not some of the more complex ones - the ones, for example, dealing with human relationships in the face of adversity, where there is no "correct final answer".

On the sports field of the same school, I kept hearing this one homily: "It's not about winning or losing, it's about playing the game to the best of your ability." As I grew older, I noticed that they typically said this to those who came second (or third) in the race. Winners are seldom told this; they are only congratulated and given a medal. I used to get quite confused by what appeared to be mixed messages, to my impressionable and naive mind, and I was too young to even identify the source of my confusion. All I could see was that it was the trophy, bright and shiny, that everyone coveted - be it for academic excellence or sports, and the system was set up to award medals and prizes to the one guy who topped the class, and to make everyone else want that, somehow, anyhow. While I could see why it had to be that way in some cases, I wondered why this seemed to apply to just about everything else in life.

As an adult, I have come to recognize the boundaries of the simplistic models we sometimes use, in our naivety, to understand, describe and deal with the complex challenges of life. Life is not a mathematics test and nor is a 100 meter sprint. Both of these have a beginning and an end, simple rules and clear targets to achieve, and a finite number of possible outcomes. Yes, life does consist of situations that closely resemble either an exam or a game or both, but it also consists of other situations that really don't. It is essentially our need for cognitive fluency - our resistance to complexity that makes us force-fit all situations into a zero-sum model. Life, on the whole, is just not a zero-sum game, but we make it look like one because it makes it easier for us to handle. And that's where we make the mistake that Einstein cautioned us against with these words of advice: "Make things as simple as possible but not simpler". The zero-sum model is neat, simple and lays out clear rules for winning and losing, and so we go ahead and use that as the basis to model all human endeavour. In the sphere of education, all the systems we have set up for evaluating our children's performance are based on the zero-sum model. (Exceptions, though they exist, are too few to be statistically significant.) We have extended the ostensibly resounding success of this model into our adulthood as well. We wage war to resolve conflict, since war leads to decisive victory. We compete in free markets for market share and growth, edging out our rivals. All the systems we have created at work (performance measures, KRAs and KPIs, RoI, quarterly results) and at play (scoring goals, scoring runs, bettering the timing of the world's best athlete) are zero-sum models. Message: Achievement, not Effort, matters.

What we have not recognized is that this has resulted in creating a culture of over-achievers, as I have argued in a previous post. And a culture that silently encourages Jugaad, as I have argued in another previous post. If you can't win by staying within the confines of the rules of the game, then bend or break the rules so you can win. Because only the final answer counts. It is precisely this culture - of winning at any cost - that has led us, the human race, to the brink of collapse as evident in the 3 major global crises the world is still reeling under, as a glance at the global economy, the environment and socio-political landscape will testify. We are where we are, in each case, because a small number of over-achievers have been playing to win a zero-sum game, to meet their own narrow goals. Zero-sum is the reason why we use wars to work out conflicting needs between two groups of people, instead of trying to achieve congruence of different agendas through negotiation and diplomacy, in a spirit of partnership, tolerance and mutual respect. The bravado associated with winning wars, the drama, the romance, the glory ... all make us pooh-pooh earnest attempts at a peaceful positive-sum resolution, which the uber macho alpha prime male stereotype would mock at as the approach of wimps. On the contrary, it is war that is the refuge of the weak, as the strong will only look for peace.

Few events in recent world history have brought out the contrast in these two approaches (particularly in the area of global diplomacy / foreign policy) more starkly than the two Presidential campaigns in the United States last year. We saw the conservative business-as-usual approach, albeit with some modifications in a few areas, and the "other guy's" strategy that was radically different, since it was based on inclusiveness - an intent to actively engage with allies and a willingness to negotiate unconditionally with adversaries, even with those that were historically considered to be enemies. It is not as though the latter is unprecedented in the history of the United States (or of the world) but to a lot of minds, caught up as we were in the panic of the crises of our current time, and in part due to the outrage expressed by the incumbent Party, it seemed like a revolutionary approach. When Obama was elected President, I considered it a testimony to the American people's resolve to adopt a dramatically different position on the world stage and to actually lead other countries and communities to a world of peaceful co-existence. However, reactions from most people - Republicans as well as Democrats, Obama's supporters as well as detractors - when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, have led me to believe that Americans elected him President simply because they thought he was the only guy who could save them from the financial mess that his predecessors had left behind - essentially a domestic issue. It wasn't really a mandate to him to go implement his vision of world peace, as I realize now. Sadly, a significant proportion of the American population displays a "don't know / don't care" attitude towards the rest of the world, not realizing the long-term impact of that attitude. Several political analysts and commentators have been criticizing Obama in the last few months for having "apologized" to the world for America's hubris and imperiousness in the past, for trying to build bridges with the Muslim community, etc., claiming that such moves have diluted the leadership position of the United States. It's a pity that they do not realize that what he has been trying to do, in fact, is to restore the U.S. to its former position of glory, but in a way that is different from what their simple, zero-sum minds have been trained to think.

Leadership comes with privileges, no doubt, but it also comes with accountability. Americans must realize that if they expect their country to lead the world by the same democratic principles as they expect their President to lead their country, then they must acknowledge that their country is as accountable to the rest of the world as their President is to them. This includes responsibility for world peace, considering America's position as a military mega-power and its hegemony in most other areas 'that matter'. And this peace cannot come by taking an "us versus them" approach (where quite literally, "us" = "U.S."), which for several years has been the fundamental plank on which American foreign policy was built. Obama's most significant contribution towards world peace has been in initiating moves that are already shifting the "us versus them" paradigm, and this is not something he started working on only after he became President. When it comes to world peace, there is no exam, no top score, no super-bowl, no tape at the finish line to breast ahead of others and no final answer. Peace is characterized by the absence of conflict, which comes from the de-escalation of tension, which in turn comes from the birth of hope among affected parties - the hope of working out a win-win resolution. Positive-sum, not zero-sum, outcomes. And again, there is no finality to it, no single event or milestone, the accomplishment of which can qualify as having achieved world peace forever. War is different from peace, in this respect. Start World War III and you will get a final answer - the end of the world, and nothing can be more final than that. On the other hand global peace is like nirvana: you continuously work towards it but you may never attain it. But that doesn't mean you give up your effort. And so it all comes down to effort and attainment.

The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to several people, including, as Rachel Maddow painstakingly points out in this video clip, some whose efforts towards world peace have ended in failure (Woodrow Wilson / League of Nations), some whose efforts did not bear fruit till several years later (Desmond Tutu / ending of apartheid in South Africa) and some whose efforts have yet to make any significant impact to disrupt the status quo (Aung San Suu Kyi / democracy in Myanmar). Why then single out Obama? After my initial post at my mini-blog on Friday, a few hours after the news about Obama's Nobel Prize broke (during which few hours I valiantly and more or less single-handedly defended the decision in various debates - actually, diatribes - that erupted on mailing lists and social media), I thought it prudent to back off a bit, let the dust settle over a couple of days and wait for second thoughts from observers, analysts and commentators. I would expect that Obama supporters, at the very least, look for the silver lining in all this, like Michael Moore. Especially if they are American, to whom my question would be: "What are *you* doing to support your President?"

Meanwhile, Elinor Ostrom and Olive Williamson were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. Since I did not know enough about them or their contributions, I decided to do some research. "Let's find out who these people are and what the heck they have DONE to deserve this award, considering that they haven't achieved anything by way of ending the global economic crisis", I said to myself sotto voce, parodying the same line of reasoning that critics took in challenging the Nobel Peace decision. Interestingly, I found an article by Ostrom titled "Governing The Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action", which addresses the classic Prisoner's Dilemma in game theory, and which also carries a paragraph that starts with:

"Changing the rules of the game to turn zero-sum games into non-zero-sum games may be one way to describe the arc of civilization for the past 8000 years"

I smiled as I read that, since a lot of this is pretty much the kind of thinking underlying the core values and principles that my little fledgling business venture is based on. I even have a downloadable FAQ (right click to download) that talks about playing to win versus playing for win-win (on Page 4, in the answer to the last question on Page 3). My own solution to the Prisoner's Dilemma has always been to stay silent and take the least cost approach for both parties taken together, and I've always wondered as to why on earth anyone should want to exercise any other option. Most economists expect that the "rational" decision of an average human would be to betray the accomplice, which is an indication of how deeply steeped in zero-sum thinking we all are.

I shall end this rather long post (and thanks for staying with me till here) with my own paraphrasing of the Serenity Prayer - Dear Lord, grant us the capability to win zero-sum games, the skill to negotiate a win-win in positive-sum partnerships, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen to that!

"In Praise of 'Jugaad'"... Wait! Really?

In an article in The Wall Street Journal, Ms Devita Saraf extolls the virtues of Indian ingenuity and proposes Jugaad as a concept that Indian enterprise should leverage in order to be globally competitive. I recognize that there's a chance that you, dear reader, may not know what Jugaad means, in which case I would recommend that you find someone who knows the Hindi vernacular well enough (including colloquialisms and slang) and get them to explain to you its full meaning, since I would be digressing significantly if I were to go into it here and now. (My guess is that you will know it anyway by the time you've finished reading this post.) Jugaad is not a new concept -- at least, not in the Indian IT industry, and that I can assert confidently. In my by now rather longish career, I've worked for (or with) several companies where the sales force openly specialized in Jugaad tactics, and veteran salesmen took great pride and pleasure in narrating their Jugaad war-stories after work, at their favourite watering hole, to bright-eyed tyros who would give their left index finger to be able to emulate them. In fact one company used to unofficially (but affectionately) refer to its PC sales division as the "J-segment", since Jugaad was what really seemed to work in that fiercely competitive market.

I've never been impressed by cunningness, clever lies, cheap tricks and other forms of prevarication and prestidigitation in business. Jugaad has been something I've sought to be as far away from as possible, managing to successfully evade it through most of my career on the 'sell' side of the market, barring perhaps a few exceptions. (Let me add that in those exceptional situations I always strove to retain my professional integrity even at the risk of earning my team-mates' ire for being, from their perspective, a party-pooper. But that was not enough to stop them from tricking unsuspecting customers or suppliers or alliance partners.) And while on the 'buy' side of the market, I've generally been a Jihadi against Jugaad. As a buyer, I've developed a nose for all forms of chicanery, sophistry and subterfuge over the years, having been on the other side and having had a ring-side view of the metamorphosis from the 'sudden brilliant idea' stage to the parasitic feeding off the budget of the hapless customer -- I smell such creepies and crawlies from a mile away, and tend to promptly squash them before they could get under my skin and disrupt my plans.

This is not to say that I am against out-of-the-box ideas to overcome typical constraints faced by Indian industry / business. I wholeheartedly support clean and honest ingenuity and innovation in, for instance, applying modern tools and technologies to solve India's unique problems through effective low-cost solutions sourced from local providers and drawing on locally available resources. (While on this, I want to add that I do not see this as 'insular' as Ms Saraf suggests -- I still believe in the nascent post-independence doctrine of self-sufficiency as the platform for development and growth of the Indian economy, but unlike Nehruvian socio-economists, I would advocate that it be coupled with liberalisation and international trade in relevant sectors.) There is no question in my mind that the indigenous development of 'appropriate technology' solutions is a highly beneficial strategy for India. The same goes for original ideas and innovative management thinking around challenges in the way we organize and conduct business in India. I have in fact always lamented the lack of focus on these areas in our technical / higher education curricula, and lack of adequate impetus to / funding of research aimed at developing indigenous solutions, in Indian educational and research institutions. Some of the examples cited in the article are great testimonials to Indian ingenuity, and exemplary models worthy of replication and emulation not just in India but any other geography or economy where the basic underlying approach could be ported. But there are some areas where ingenuity is clearly not to be encouraged (e.g., 'creative accounting', regulatory compliance, etc.). The problem with Jugaad as an overall inspiration to strategy is that it is an omnibus category that includes all of these ideas and does not exclude the bad parts (such as deceit, trickery and evasiveness). Jugaad clouds ingenuity with disingenuousness.

Online WSJ requires you to register and log-in, in order to be able to comment, and while I usually get discouraged to comment because of this, I made an exception this time since I thought it was important that readers of Ms Saraf's article also see things from a different perspective, i.e., mine. My comment is reproduced here for your benefit, to save you the trouble of searching for it at the site.

Good post! Thanks for sharing some very interesting insights on Indian ingenuity, which, arguably, is unparalleled across global industrial and business cultures. However, I have a couple of concerns about Jugaad, which I shall attempt to crystallize around two focal points: 

1. 'Jugaad' could easily become another word for 'adjust' - an English word that is used in a totally different sense in India. While it means different things to different people in different contexts, the common thread running through all of those is the ability to 'make do' with the situation and 'somehow manage' to meet your goals. It can be a positive thing sometimes (for instance, when we learn to accommodate and tolerate some inconvenience, with a larger good in view) but quite often, it becomes synonymous with either compromise or poor quality or unfair means - or any combination thereof. We must be cautious, in according official sanction to this approach, to not sweep all of these overtones into the same box. Frugal engineering is a good, healthy, positive spin to put on Jugaad, but only if we mine the 'ore' of the broad concept, get rid of the unwanted and toxic sludge, and refine the valuable part (i.e. the part dealing with value addition through innovation out of constraints) of the core concept. If we are successful in doing that, India could actually create her own unique methodology aimed at gaining competitive advantage in the global economic value chain across all industry. 

2. Notwithstanding the above, and from a different point of view, where are environmental considerations in all this? Are Jugaad strategies green? Does Jugaad provide an opportunity for sustainable competitive advantage? Unfortunately, the path of socially responsible ecological economics is not easy, in that there are no short-cuts. Instead, there are some really tough trade-offs to be considered and hard decisions to be made. Jugaad sometimes also becomes synonymous with short-cuts, as explained above. But if Jugaad strategies also result in sustainable wealth creation, then they are more than welcome. If not, even if they are ethically sound practices, we must first check if they are also 'clean and green' before we deploy them. 

To summarize, my mixed feelings about Jugaad centre around the potential for breach of ethics and the absence of environmental / ecological and social considerations. While I am excited by the potential of Jugaad - to become our next national slogan, if you like - I am equally concerned that official endorsement of it may become a license to unscrupulous businessmen to continue indulging in malpractices with even more gusto. Let's remember that the myopic tactics followed by some sections of the global financial services industry, which eventually led to the global economic crisis, were also a form of Jugaad. Such tactics were innovative, perhaps, but they were also toxic, as time has shown. And non-sustainable. 

Thanks for your patience with my rather lengthy comment!

While the article does acknowledge, towards the end, that 'it needs some serious work on two fronts ...' before the idea of Jugaad can be embedded in all Indian business thinking, it does not address the concerns I have outlined. On the contrary, the two fronts it says it needs serious work on, are (both) in the nature of further advancing the concept as it exists, without any cleansing or sanitization along the lines I have suggested in my comment. I really hope Ms Saraf pauses to factor-in relevant inputs from the comments and makes the necessary tweaks in her ideology before further developing the 'Jugaad-as-the-way-forward-for-India-to-become-a-superpower' theme. Otherwise, the glorification of Jugaad just might result in business folks of questionable integrity smirking to themselves, thinking: "Heh. Jugaad is cool - even the voices at the top say it is. So what if it is not always above board or not sustainable? It is now official!"

I have my fingers crossed, but am not holding my breath.

It's Only Words ...

Back when I was a kid we used to play a lot of Scrabble. Those were the days when we had exactly one telephone for the family - a big black heavy instrument with a thick brown cable attached to it. There was no Internet, no mobile telephony, no cable TV (only one Govt. controlled channel that aired in the evenings, with content that mostly focused on the appropriate use of fertilizers). Computers were big expensive things with tapes twitching and turning every few moments in a restricted area with glass walls where it was freezing. And long-distance telecommunications really sucked.

It used to rain (not too heavily, and hardly any flooding except in really low-lying areas) and Mom used to make tea and pakodas in the afternoons. And we used to pull out the Scrabble board and play. No dictionaries were allowed in the regular course of the game - you were supposed to play words whose meaning you already knew. You could be challenged by any other player, and you had to be able to provide the meaning, and if they chose to, they could look up the dictionary to verify it (and they could look up only that word - they could not sneakily look up something else they might have been toying with). My father used to excel at making 7 letter words and sometimes he'd make as many as 3 of them in a single game. I learned a lot; my vocabulary improved and I knew the meaning of each word I played. There were times when I knew a word existed but wasn't sure what it meant, and I would refrain from playing it, for fear of being challenged.

End of flashback. Cut to circa 2007. Between my wife and I we have 4 mobiles and 3 land-lines. I am on-line most of the time - my line of work involves using mail, IM, mobile telephony and teleconferencing extensively. Recently, when I was casually surfing, using a laptop immensely more powerful than most mainframes in those years, sitting in my room in some crummy hotel somewhere in North America with really high-speed broadband access, I discovered Scrabulous - the online version of Scrabble. Since then I've played a few games and won some, lost some. I was horrifed initially, to learn that you could freely reference the dictionary. And the fact that you could make two-letter words like CH, UG, MM and ZA which, in my humble opinion, are abbreviations, not words. This game requires a killer instinct. It appears that most players spend hours (sometimes days) trying out all kinds of combinations with their tiles, for a given board configuration. There probably are tools out there to help you maximize your score for each play - I don't know. Players are happy making words sticking to other words and not opening out the board (they leave this to me I guess). Nobody cares if you make a word whose meaning nobody knows - the 'TWL' or 'SOWPODS' dictionary must allow it. Period.

My style is very different. I like to play interesting words that result in a reasonably decent score, and I don't like to spend too much time computing scores of each available option ad infinitum. If a word seems nice and I can notch up a good score, I play it. Usually this is within a few minutes after my opponent has played. And then my opponent will respond after several hours. Or a few days.

This game has killed Scrabble, according to me. The skill being tested here is your ability to quickly look up as many tile combinations as you can in the dictionary. Not your word-power. I thought I should keep up with the times and adopted the style that this game requires. I looked up the dictionary. I made those meaningless 2 letter words. I won a few games but it gave me no joy at all.

Give me a rainy afternoon with a real board, real tiles, real people, real cups of tea. And a real dictionary, to be used only when one player wants to challenge another. Some day real Scrabble lovers will beg to go back to that. Till then, let the fast and the furious megaflop generation knock themselves out with this on-line apology for a word game. Playing all the words that TWL / SOWPODS has, that don't take your heart away.

The Idyllic Idealism Of An Idle Mind

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Indian Independence, a few thoughts and observations (all my own work) ...

Like the papers said we're sexy at sixty (by the way - the media also said that about Big B some time back), but chose to ignore the smut around the sexiness. And this is not about censorship of so-called vulgar content on cable TV (ref. my post dealing with the time they shut down most English movie channels). Then what's it about did you say? Go figure! There's way too much to be said about this and if you're not with me already then there's no point in my going into it here and now.

Like we're forever talking about our potential as a global superpower but doing precious little to become one. I guess it's a nice thing to have as a dream but hey - reality's better, for a lot of us. There are abundant opportunities in today's India, for a lot of us to get rich and powerful quickly. But once such people get there, they do nothing other than continue to enhance their own wealth and power. Those who have a vision but not the means don't count (they're not Page 3 gliteratti), and those who can actually make a difference are doing sweet F.A.

Like I can't get over the fact that there's a gutter that overflows every monsoon outside my house and I am told there isn't much that can be done about it. Considering that I live in an upscale part of a tony suburb, I find that hard to digest. Guess I'll have to drop all my other pressing affairs and devote my attention to this and that will be the only way it will get fixed. If ever.

Like how I started out wanting to put back more than I got, to the land that gave me and to its people. I argued several years ago that if good people left this land in favor of a better life, then life in this land will never get better. I stayed back because I wanted to change our world. Still do. But today I'll consider myself lucky if I can get that wretched gutter fixed.

Like how I'd love to participate in a good strong movement with a robust foundation backed by people with vision, resources and integrity to clean up our act and hit the path to progress. If I find one.

And like how much I miss Busybee and his gentle way of making poignant points. Mr. Contractor I salute you and I hope you will excuse the liberties I have taken in imitating your style here though I know I've not got the tone right. And I salute all my other great compatriots - past, present and future, who've dedicated their lives trying to make a difference. I just wish there were more of you and less of the parasites who live off the fruit of your labour.

Vande Mataram!

The Logic In Ecological Economics

In my early years there were several things about the world and its people that puzzled me. I was a highly curious kid and could not contain my questions till I found some answers. As I grew older I came to understand how things worked, and came to an understanding about the things that I could not understand. As an adult, a few things do puzzle me even now, but there aren't too many things that leave me totally bewildered. One of the few things in the latter category is this whole fuss over saving the world by saving endangered species from extinction, when what we should be panicking about is population explosion. Let me elaborate ...

The fuss over endangered species manifests itself in various missions and movements, has many names, has world-wide reach, and leaps at you in various forms and forums, all aimed at making you feel guilty. The problems they talk about are numerous, but a closer look at each of those problems, and at all of them collectively, reveals that they all essentially point to two things we humans are doing too much of: (a) consuming (in many cases permanently depleting) planet earth's natural resources, and (b) dumping (in many cases non-biodegradable) waste matter, back on to planet earth. Wildlife activists, who campaign with missionary zeal, pull out all kinds of statistics to show you how Man's greed has been pushing many species into extinction. Man should learn to take only what he needs, in small quantities, and when done, recycle the waste matter so as to not disturb the natural scheme of things too much. (I saw a bumper sticker in California that said "Ignore the environment long enough and it will go away".) Operative words - preserve, conserve, save, protect.

In principle I am in agreement with this PoV. I'm a softie at heart. It hurts me to watch a cheetah kill a gazelle on Natural Geographic, to hear its desperate bleats as sharp fangs sink into its throat. It makes me want to jump into the TV set, shoo the bad cheetah away and save Bambi. When I was a kid (who was puzzled by a lot of things he didn't understand) I tried to rescue a rat which was being attacked by a crow in our building compound. I managed to drive the crow away but the rat bit me when I tried to pick it up to nurse its wounds. (This was one of the things that puzzled me, by the way -- I was a dumb kid.) So quite often I wonder why people go into the jungles of Africa and film these splendid animals, but don't save prey from predator. After all, these film-makers are sensitive -- which is why they take so much trouble to go to these inhospitable areas, live under hostile conditions and film animals in their natural habitat. Then it dawns on me that gazelles need to die so that cheetahs can live, and the food chain can continue and the cycle of life and death can perpetuate. I also realize then that people who film a kill don't want to disturb the natural order of things, and that this is a mature form of caring: observe, don't participate. However, on the drive back home if they came upon an injured baby wildebeest they would pick it up and take it to a vet. Right? I think so, but am not so sure (wouldn't that disturb the natural order of things?) But I digress.

As I was saying, I'm a softie at heart and I definitely would not want more rhinos or tigers or pandas or whales dead than need to die. But I have trouble when I start thinking about the nitty-gritty. Like -- in the previous sentence -- how many "need to die"? Assuming we could save endangered species from extinction ... would we then allow (or even facilitate) those species to go forth and multiply arbitrarily? ad infinitum? No, we would want to stop their rampant reproduction before their population exceeds ours (and well before that, really). And I believe hunting is permitted in some parts of the civilized world simply because hunting helps in controlling the growth in population of certain species. So, here's my question: do we have the magic number for each species which represents what the 'correct' population of that species should be? In fact, what does this mean? What is meant by the 'correct' number and according to whom? In other words, who are we to save any species from extinction? Isn't any attempt to do so also an attempt to disturb the natural order of things?

Another dilemma -- paper or plastic? There are as many arguments in favor of one over the other as there are in favor of the other over one. I won't go into any of them here. What I will say is that I have a different take on this: NEITHER! Don't buy stuff that requires you to decide between paper and plastic. Start from this statement and go back up the causal chain, till you come to your own existence. Well? Where did it get you? Consider this: Indiscriminate consumption and over-consumption could, with some education, be controlled. But consumption cannot be stopped as long as there are consumers. For consumption to be controlled we need to control the number of consumers. As long as humans exist and have wants and needs, and the means to satisfy them, they will consume (voraciously) and dump (copiously). And that is the natural order of things. What Man is doing to the planet today is as much a part of natural evolution as anything else. In fact changing it ... or reversing it, would be challenging "God".

What does this mean? It means that the humans will eventually destroy the environment, but they have a choice to be smart and let it happen slowly. We can slow down the pace of self-destruction through smart consumption and smart disposal (assuming we can find answers to some of the questions I've posed earlier that continue to confound me, such as 'paper or plastic?'). However, the best way to slow down the pace of self-destruction is to slow down the growth of population. We're talking root cause here. There's this whole body of over 6 billion free agents, expanding in size by the minute, which eats whole forests, sucks out the ozone layer, farts noxious gases into the air and craps tonnes of non-degradable garbage all over land and sea. How much permanent damage to the environment can we avert when we produce more and more of the very same free agents that cause the very same permanent damage, every day of their lives?

It's the people, stupid! Not the fluorocarbons! Save whales if you're fond of them, but if you want to save the world, it would be more effective to spend that same time, energy and money on stopping the next 10 humans from being born. That's what the fuss should be about.

(P.S. I am tempted to shout "Soylent Green is people!" to every wildlife conservationist I meet. That movie makes so much sense to me now.)

News That's Fit To Print

Earlier this week, on Monday January 22, the SRE1 launched by the ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation, for those who don't know) twelve days ago, was successfully recovered after being maneuvered to reenter the earth’s atmosphere and descend into Bay of Bengal. The ISRO issued a modest press statement http://www.isro.org/pressrelease/Jan22_2007.htm outlining various technical details about the mission. What they did not mention was the fact that this makes India one of the few nations to return from orbit, a spacecraft that it had launched earlier. This is quite characteristic of humble technicians buried deep in research, who do not realize the significance of what they've achieved. I don't blame them one bit, and needless to say, applaud their feat wholeheartedly.

I waited patiently through the week to see what kind of coverage this got from the press. I haven't seen any yet that came out on its own and sought viewer / reader eyeballs in any of the dozen or so TV news channels / dozen or so newspapers. On searching around a bit on the Internet I found some coverage about the launch on Jan 10 but nothing on the recovery.

What I did get a lot of, and which was hard to miss, was coverage on 'Abhi and Ash' and the rest of the Bachchan family visiting temples and doing other family things. And on Navjot Sidhu and the Supreme Court decision on his conviction and sentence several years ago on a road rage case. And various people's opinions on Shilpa Shetty and reality shows. And several other news stories not worth mentioning here (or, frankly, anywhere else either).

It is appalling to see what people who launch campaigns like 'India Poised' focus on and what they don't.

The Push and Pull of Telemarketing

Whenever my mobile phone rings and flashes a number (as opposed to a name), I am fairly certain (about 0.8 probability) that it's an outbound sales call from a direct sales agency, typically plugging a financial services or telecom product. This is telephone spam, which has yet to be legally regulated or in any other manner controlled, in this part of the world. I guess we have bigger problems as a nation (such as someone's paintings or writings or movies or other creative expression offending someone else), so this one is something we'll have to live with for several years to come. Evidently, the number of people affected by telephone spam is not large enough to be called anything - not even a 'minority community'.

There are several levels of irritation such calls cause me and it is a constantly evolving thrust-and-parry battle of wits between the caller and me. My initial tactic was to stop them in their tracks with "Is this a sales call?" which worked most of the times in the early days. Thanks to other victims like me, the intruding sales force slowly started developing counter tactics. The dumber (and/or less sophisticated) ones ignored my question and bashed on with their script, while the smarter ones would skirt around it and say: no sir, its not a sales call; we'd like to educate you about our product. Yeah right! Tell me about it, buddy. I have a meeting going on but never mind the banal distractions that might draw my attention away from your call - I am here to make your work easier, and you are here to improve the quality of my life by educating me about your product, at a time that suits you. And so my counter to this counter gradually evolved to a few choice epithets and a rude disconnection of the call.

About a year ago, I was carpet-bombed with cold calls from several direct sales agents, all representing a certain large multinational bank. Apparently they were running an aggressive campaign to recruit new customers. There were times when I got about 3 or 4 calls a day. It got to a point when I used to hang up the moment I heard the bank's name. Finally, I lost my patience. I started calling the bank's head office - I wanted to get to the head honchos in consumer banking and give them a small piece of my broad mind, including lessons in brand management, CRM and basic telesales etiquette. Reaching the head of retail was an ordeal: everybody at HQ was trained to keep callers at bay (they'd ask who you are and what you want and then won't even give you the time of the day) so that their top brass could drool uninterruptedly at the next sports car they'd buy after this telesales campaign closed. Even getting his name seemed to be a bigger challenge than most other things I faced at work those days (finally found it on the web-site). I must have spent over 6 hours straight before I got his direct number, and it turned out he was on vacation (surprise surprise). Not to be discouraged, I waited till he returned another couple of weeks later, to speak to him. And that conversation is another story, which I shall keep for another blog post.

Things get a little tricky if you already happen to be a customer. You suspect they're calling about something concerning your existing account. And if you're like me, you'd suspect the worst. For example - we haven't received your payment for the last bill and your subscription will be disconnected, or - your balance has dropped below minimum and your cheque has bounced. Before you conclude that I'm either generously disorganised or parsimoniously tardy, let me tell you that I'm usually prompt with my financial commitments and in general a good customer. However, there could be errors and omissions along the way ... cheques mailed may not get delivered in time or may get stolen (next scam?) and payments effected through "e-channels" may get debited twice and take your closing balance below sea level (this has happened to me, and the bank made no attempt to provide any relief of any sort and took 2 months to rectify it without bothering to apologise, much less pay me the interest for those 2 months). Since I am acutely aware of the fragile and fragmented nature of 'best practice' business processes prevalent in the back-offices of most of my 'best-in-class' service providers, callers representing such organisations end up getting my attention right away. So my next question to them is "Is this about any of my existing accounts with you?" the answer to which (assuming it's a sales call and not routine operations) should be: no, sir, it isn't; we thank you for being our customer, but we'd like to offer you more products that could fulfill your other needs. Right? Wrong! I just get more of the scripted yadda yadda yadda. "Excuse me ... " you go again. This cycle is repeated 4 times on average (yes, I have statistics on this) before you get some traction. Switching to a local language helps - it may get the average down to 3 iterations. If the caller is from a 124 area code, an assertive "oi jee ... hallloh ... galle sunoh" is likely to get immediate attention.

Life is strange and its many twists and turns could spin this whole game around ... to your disadvantage, all over again. If due to some quirk of fate you happened to actually need one of these wretched products one day ... well, guess who has the last laugh. Last week, I spent several hours per day for a good 2 or 3 days, trying to get hold of someone who would sell me a new mobile connection (the same was being shoved down my throat several times in the last 6 months and I vehemently pushed back each time), with certain special services thrown in (there's a reason I'm vague about this - if I get more specific, the company's name will be known, and I don't want to to indulge in malicious blogging against a specific organisation). Each name and number I was given led to another name and number. Most of the contact information at the website didn't work. It took Paul Simon four days to hitch-hike from Saginaw, and me as long to get my connection, and a whole lot of negotiation over the documentation needed and who needs to go where to do what, so as to complete all formalities. At the time of writing this post, I am waiting for the connection to be activated, after which the special services will be activated. Hopefully by the end of this week, unless they're waiting for Christmas (next year's - this one is round the corner).

And now I'm thinking that maybe it is more prudent to let them badger you after all. Perhaps push works better than pull at times.

Zen and the Art of Management By Doing Nothing

It's been over a week now, that I've been waiting for some people at work to get back to me on something. (Sorry to be so vague, but I really can't reveal much more about this, than that, at this stage.) It is important to me that this gets done soon, because it impacts my future. Which is why I keep looking for a sign that somebody somewhere has decided something and we can now move to the next step. Frankly, I don't care what they decide - I just want them to do it within a reasonable time frame. I am ready with action plans for each possible outcome for all the conceivable outcomes I could think of (including 'nothing'), given my intrinsically worrisome nature (which, according to someone I know who has a penchant for hyperbole, sometimes borders on paranoia) compounded by many years of dealing with bullshit artists of all kinds (ranging from the wildly exotic spiritual tripper to your plain old garden variety overambitious and highly political overachiever) that have taught me to expect the unexpected, and further exacerbated by a fairly vivid imagination that can conjure up the bizarre from scratch - right 'out of the box'. And by now I am equally detached, emotionally speaking, from all of them (well, ok, almost). So it really doesn't matter to me which way the cookie crumbles. I write this, then, not out of pain but out of ... something akin to amusement, actually, if you ignore my slightly disparaging tone.

Some people just can't make a decision. Or take one. So they do nothing. Some others can't act on decisions already arrived at, so they do nothing too. Quite often it turns out, in let's say 3 out of 5 cases, problems go away (or so it seems) even when nothing is done. So the wise among the foolish say "See? It went away without us having to do anything". Years of practice leading to mastery of this approach towards dealing with problems, gave birth to the wonderful art of Management By Doing Nothing (MBDN) - a proven methodology that saves time energy and money spent on thinking (valuable benefit for those are intellectually challenged), especially thinking about complex things that really matter (valuable benefit for those who don't know what those things are and are scared by complexity), then arriving at decisions (valuable benefit for those who are accountable for decisions but shudder at the very thought of making them) and then acting upon those decisions (valuable benefit for those who don't feel empowered to implement any decision unless it has been agreed to by all members of the Security Council and ratified by majority vote in the General Assembly) and still .... a methodology that delivers ... (drum roll) .... at least 60% of the time!

Strangely and paradoxically, what the ancient Chinese (Taoists) called 'wei wu wei' (which literally means 'action without action' or 'effortless doing') is indeed a profound philosophy, also involving a very different way of conducting one's life. (More on this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wu_wei if you’re interested.) When I used to practice T'ai Ch'i Ch'uan, I understood this as the minimal action required to bring about desired results. In a lot of cases that involved doing nothing. This is not like the MBDN methodology at all. This 'doing nothing' has a conscious decisiveness underlying it ... and an action involving non-action. A decision to act by not acting. To act by letting happen. To intervene when necessary and that too only to the extent required. This involves a profound understanding of, and deep insights into, situations. And a fine appreciation of the concept of causality and its manifestations in the sometimes deterministic, often probabilistic (if not stochastic) and usually chaotic world in which those situations occur. Apparently these ancient folks understood chaos theory far better than most of us do today.

For those familiar with the 'butterfly effect' ... sometimes all you have to do to save a whole world is to not trample on a butterfly. For those not familiar with the butterfly effect - go figure!

Apropos allowing truth to prevail ...

I continue to be amazed by the blatant double-speak that people indulge in, and in a strange way, the world encourages. Whatever happened to the search for truth? I guess people don't want to go there any more - it's not exciting enough! It is one thing to learn to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty and paradox. But I missed that part when they taught us to live a lie. Taught us secretly, of course: no one ever used those words. But the world quietly allows such people to succeed, and actively encourages it or at the very least looks the other way. Which in fact proves the point: say "say what you do; do what you say" but do "say what you need to say; do what you need to do". Yup I got it, boss. Too late to change the twists and turns in my double helix, but will try and inject some of this into the kids.

Sadly, these days it is being seen as prudish to embrace virtue (in the form of integrity, for example) and condemn lack of character. In fact these very phrases seem to have developed an archaic ring, in a time when we worship gloss. And if this sounds like a lament for old school values that are dead and gone, think again. These are some of the principles that have kept the world spinning. But then who cares? Whose lie is it anyway ...