It’s coming up to that time of the year again when a very large group of completely self-absorbed people with very inflated egos gather to congratulate themselves on how astonishingly amazing they are and how they are the almighty’s gift to humanity, if not the entire creation.

The PanIIT 2008 site declares: “IIT Alumni 2008 Global Conference is being held at IIT Madras, from 19th to 21st December. With 3000 alumni participants from around the globe, a galaxy of eminent speakers, and selected sponsors who are leaders in their industry, the 2008 Global Conference will be the most impressive ever. The focus this year is to inspire IITians to innovate and transform India.” [Emphasis added.]

The Bright and the Beautiful

Really very impressive. Especially the globe and galaxy bits, and the eminent speakers. Shilpa Shetty and Hema Malini are eminent speakers. Not impressed, are you? Well, then consider this. Not only will Prof Amartya Sen be there, but the “Nobel Laureate has rescheduled his busy schedule to make time for us”.

Now are you impressed? Do you have any idea what it means when a NL flies in to attend even though it means major disruption of his other engagements? What on earth could be more important than the annual PanIIT circus?

Now that I am done with expressing my disgust with the organization and its c-j antics, it is time to move on to more substantial and important matters. It has to do with gratitude, credit constraints, education, fairness, development, and India.

As the above graphic from the PanIIT ad shows, around 300,000 have passed through “7 hallowed portals” (don’t you just love the hyperbole?) in 52 years and have gone on to grant their benevolence in 100 nations. Very impressive. What the ad fails to mention is that every one of those 300,000 has been the receiver of a major transfer of resources from an extremely materially poor society.

The Unfair Deal

The full cost of a decent 4-year technical education today is around Rs 20 lakhs (or around US$ 45,000.) That’s a conservative estimate. So in today’s nominal rupees, the full cost of educating 300,000 engineers is Rs 6,000,000 lakhs (or US$ 13.5 billion.) The IITs do charge some fees but those fees have been a small fraction of the true cost of education. It is reasonable to peg the total subsidy to be of the order of the estimated Rs 6 million lakhs. The objective of this exercise is to get a feel for the total transfer of resources from the general public to reasonably well-to-do upper segment of society.

That subsidy is a pure transfer or a grant, not a loan. The beneficiary is not required to return, either directly or indirectly, the money spent. There’s only an expectation that the return will be indirect. Moreover, not everyone has an equal chance of getting the subsidy. To get into an IIT, you have to have an excellent school education, for otherwise you fail in the intense competition for admission. Therefore you must be from a family with means much above average. Therefore the subsidy is targeted at the already fortunate.

It is also important to explicitly state that the opportunity cost of the spending is the foregone opportunity to use the same resources for the education of the segment of the population which is too poor to even afford basic education. It can be argued that primary education is more of a public good than tertiary education. We will not go into that here as I have argued that case elsewhere on this blog. For now I will merely note that the spending on higher education when the lower levels are not adequately funded is regressive and harmful in the long run.

It is reasonable to argue that the public spending on elite technical education does have some positive returns on investment. The graduates of IITs have made a name for themselves in India and abroad. It is a respected “brand” and India gains in the reflected glory of those IITians who have made billions such as Vinod Khosla, Desh Deshpande, and others. Without the subsidy, many of these worthies would not have been as successful.

The counter-argument is also very simple. The benefits of any spending have to be considered not in isolation but relative to those conjectural benefits that would have accrued from alternative uses of the resources. What would have been the benefit of subsidizing three million technicians instead who would have gone on to become highly productive factory employees? Or subsidizing 30 million fully literate and numerate people whose 100 million descendants would also have been literate as a consequence?

There are reasonable arguments on both sides of the issue of subsidizing tertiary education. At one extreme is the pure neglect of tertiary education, and on the other, the pure neglect of primary and secondary education. I believe that it is possible to take the middle-wayed way that avoids the extremes. I propose a model of tertiary education which preserves the benefits of the subsidized system without having its obvious flaw of it being regressive. But before that, I will quickly take a detour and explore what it means to be poor and what the phrase “credit constrained” means. It is important for us to understand the model I propose.

The Poor and Credit Constraints

One way of defining a poor person is to say that the person does not have money (or other equivalents of money.) That is a natural definition but it is surprisingly not quite accurate. I define a poor person as one who is “credit constrained.” I could have no money at all and yet be not poor provided that I have the ability to borrow and be able to repay the loan at a later date. Note the three conditions necessary and sufficient to be really poor: (1) having no money, (2) inability to borrow, (3) inability to repay the required loan.

By my definition, a person can have a negative net worth and still not be poor. You can think up of examples of people who for some reason lost all their money and were in fact in deep debt. But they had the ability to borrow more and use the resources to rebuild their businesses and thus repay the loans and get out of debt. The moment that a person is unable to borrow — that is, the person faces a credit constraint — is the moment that you can term a person as poor.

Just a side note. The US is not poor not merely because it has a lot of accumulated capital (people, infrastructure, etc.) but also because it can borrow from the rest of the world and does borrow around US$ 700 billion a year currently. The US does not face a credit constraint, unlike many developing countries.

Back to the main argument. Person C with no money but the ability to borrow is clearly better off than person D with no money and facing a credit-constraint. Now consider person B, who has no money, has the ability to borrow, and has the ability to repay the loan at a later date. Finally, consider person A, who has no money, has the ability to borrow, but right now does not have the ability to repay the loan. However, person A can by using the loan appropriately become capable of returning the loan.

The Returns on Education

It is easy to see where I am going with this. It makes a lot of sense to lend money to A types provided the loans are made specifically to build their capacity to repay. I will use my personal example as a typical case. Being born in a middle-class family, I had the advantage of a good school education. That allowed me to compete and get a subsidized engineering education up to the postgraduate level. I could not have paid the full cost of my engineering and computer science education. But — and here’s the main point — after receiving the education, my earning capacity increased sufficiently that I became capable of repaying the education subsidy I benefited from.

Note a very important fact. The returns on education in a well-designed (appropriately defined) system is always positive. That is, the benefits are higher than the costs. If your productivity (and therefore, your lifetime income) does not go up by at least the total cost of the education, it does not make sense to acquire that education. This is an important argument against not doing full-cost pricing of all education. I will not go into this right now but will write a separate note. (That’s a true promise.)

My Address to the IITians

What holds true for me — that I can repay the subsidy that I received for my tertiary education — holds true for every one of the 300,000 IIT graduates. So here’s my short speech that I composed for delivery at the PanIIT 2008 conference:

Dear Fellow IITians:

A good morning to you and how are you all?

I see that you are all having a wonderful time. Isn’t Shilpa Shetty quite a bomb? I tell you, the stuff of dreams. Aren’t we just great? We must be. Otherwise why would such a stellar personality — a phoren star — come to strut her stuff here? Aside from the money we paid her, of course.

Not just good looking people, we are so important that India’s only living Nobel Laureate, Prof Amartya Sen, has changed his schedule just to fly in and deliver his usual spiel about inclusive growth. Wow! We’re the best. The cat’s whiskers, the loin’s (sic) roar, the cheery on top of the sundae, the crème de la crème. Isn’t that precious!

But I got some bad news for you, sunshine. We have all fed at the trough of public largesse. We’ve sucked at the teat of involuntary public generosity. We, the select, the few — our fancy education was funded by denying a very large number of the really poor the opportunity to even get a basic education.

So my precious sweeties, don’t you think that it is time that you actually paid the full cost of your education now that you can? Should we not today, now, here, at this very convention — and a very nice convention it is — decide that every one of the fortunate 300,000 should contribute at least the full amount spent on us for a fund which will do for others what was done for us?

Let me make the promise of paying Rs 20 lakhs today into this fund — the IIT Graduates’ Gift of Gratitude Fund (IITGGGF) — to be used for the future generations of IITians. I don’t have that cash lying around in my checking account but I am sure that I can get a bank loan today and pay back that amount I owe.

In other words, put up or shut up, my preciouses.

Thanks and may you all have a wonderful time congratulating each other on how wonderful you all are.

Just Kidding

Now you know that the above is just a joke. I will never be invited to speak at the PanIIT 2008 in a million years. I attended the 2006 event in Mumbai and wrote about it. It did not go down too well with the organizers. They would like me to speak over there about as much as they would like a huge hole in their cranial cavity.

But seriously, what I propose should make sense to the meanest of intelligences. The IITians are mean but not unintelligent. OK, I take that back. Not all IITians are mean. Only some of them are self-absorbed and delusional.

The Proposal

This should have been done a long time ago. It could have been done but then of all sad words of pen or tongue, the saddest of all are “it might have been,” as the man said. They who made the rules were simply not smart enough, and it had to wait till I articulated it (he said modestly.)

Imagine this. Someone has demonstrated preparedness and aptitude for elite tertiary education. The full cost is Rs 20 lakhs. The person does not have the money. Give him a loan for the full cost of the 4-year education, with the understanding that the payback period start four years after graduation and last for four years. The payback will include the principal and the interest. (We neglect inflation in this exercise for now as it does not alter the basic argument.)

This means that the first payback occurs eight years after the loan is issued. So there has to be sufficient resources to give loans to the entire batch of students for the first eight years of the existence of the educational institution. The money required for Year 9 will be the money paid back by those who attended in Year 1.

Let’s do the arithmetic. Take, IITI. That is, IIT Imaginary. It teaches 1,000 students. Cost per year, Rs 5 lakhs per student. For eight years, total cost (8 x 5 x 1000=) Rs 40,000 lakhs. That’s the total investment required. From then on, each batch will receive a loan from the amount of the loan repaid from the batch eight years previous to it. The IITI is totally self-supporting.

If this scheme had been followed, the total money required to initiate the loan process for the 7 IITs would have been around Rs 200,000 lakhs. Compare that to the Rs 6,000,000 lakhs spent so far. In other words, the same resources would have made possible not 7 but 200 IITs. It would have meant that India would have been graduating 200,000 IIT graduates each year. The mind boggles, doesn’t it?

Not Too Late

It is never too late to do the right thing. Let’s assume that there are 200,000 living IITians today. Let each of them chip in Rs 10 lakhs in partial repayment of the cost of their IIT education. That would net Rs 2,000,000 lakhs (or US$ 4.5 billion). That’s a lot of money in the aggregate but is not an unreasonable amount for the average employed IITian. Remember, they are not credit constrained. They can take a loan, if needed.

With that money, you could pay for the educational loans of 400,000 student-years (at Rs 5 lakhs per student per year.) In other words, you could give educational loans to 50,000 students a year and do so for eight years. From Year 9 onwards, the loans recovered from the old students will keep the system going indefinitely.

In other words, you could fund the operational expenses for 50 new IITs (each of them with 1,000 students). What about the startup costs of infrastructure? That could be part of the public expenditure and could even be funded by high net worth individuals and institutions.

If we got started today with this scheme, one can imagine that the 50 new IITs can start operating in 2010, and from 2018 onwards, it would be totally self-financing, and graduating 50,000 graduates a year from year 2014 onwards.

India’s immense and young population can become its greatest asset provided that we can figure out a way of educating its population. India does need to have a large number of highly qualified engineers and technologists. It can be done provided there is political will and the smarts to properly allocate resources using good policies.

What I have outlined above is a very simple scheme. It appeals to the sense of fairness which we all have. IITians, despite their claims to the contrary, are not special either. They are neither better nor worse than the average. However, they have been more fortunate than the average Indian. It is time for them to think deeply about what it is that they owe to others. And it is important that they do a bit of collective introspection and ask what it is that they can do aside from the airy slogans of “Inspire, Innovate and Transform.”

That’s all.

Previous related posts:

1. Over three years ago I had a post on a new educational model. It is an “inter-generational transfer” model. I liked re-reading that post and the follow up to it.

The article “Who Actually Paid for My Education” is also quite popular.

2. IIT: Inspire, Involve and Transform –Part 1.

3. IIT: Inspire, Involve and Transform — Part 2.

4. PanIIT’s Reach 4 India.

For now, here’s a story. A correspondent who is a faculty member at IIT Bombay recently wrote to me asking me to consider what he called “a sordid mess.” Here’s what he sent me. It is a posting by a professor on an IIT Bombay course forum:

On Friday, 29th Feb, I wrote: “Also, I will bring out the second assignment during the weekend.”

To which Jinesh responded: “The first assignment is not yet published”.

This was shocking, to say the least. As per my records, I marked HW1 as “out, 2/10; due, 2/28″ and emailed it to the TAs on 10th or 11th Feb at the latest.

So I wrote to Jinesh, CCing the TAs: “I sent hw1.pdf to the TAs many weeks back”. At which point, Dhaval responded: “We do not have privileges to upload documents. We will do it soon. Kindly grant us permissions.”

So for three weeks, the TAs were waiting for me (without telling me, btw) to add permissions to Moodle so they could post the homework. When they could just have posted a forum message and attached the PDF file, like I am doing now.

Or hey, used carrier pigeons. Or gone to hostel rooms and read the homework aloud to each and every student taking the class. Which is what they would do if a document related to their job or their health was at stake. I was expendable.

This says a lot about how Indians (do not) work as a society. It is extremely depressing to me. And now the TAs will say they are sorry, of course. But that won’t change anything.

The homework is still due on 2/28. Which means none of you submitted it. In a relative grading world, and especially a world where the job market will not evaluate you on how dependable you are in such matters, why would you care?

[NOTE: Names above may not correspond to actual people.]

Let me see. The TAs for the course must have had at least 16 years of schooling (12 years of school, and 4 years of college). At least in this case, they have demonstrated that their schooling did not teach them anything about taking initiative, of solving problems themselves, of not waiting to be told what to do. The system had successfully implanted in their brains that they have to follow orders, and sit quietly if orders have not been sent.

Yes, we are talking of IIT here. My correspondent cynically remarked, “The best and brightest that are still miraculously within our borders.”

Deva, deva.

Naturally, I was not part of the organizing committee and so I can’t know how they chose the keynote speakers of Dec 23rd at the Pan IIT 2006 meet. Therefore, I give in to wild conjecture. Consider this a sort of “reverse process engineering.”

“We need to choose a keynote speaker.”

“I guess that is a great strategy. We must have complete and comprehensive coverage of the entire spectrum. We need the commies as well as the capitalists amongst us satisfied. So, we must get a money bag to be a keynote speaker. Married speakers as well as bachelors.”

“OK, I get the idea. Let’s see: we have married, unmarried; commies, capitalists; spiritual, commercial; desi, foreign; political, apolitical; national, universal; pseudo-secular, communal; majority religion, minority religion; good speakers, bad speakers; good writers, bad writers; young, old; sensible, idiotic—anything else?”

“That settles it, then. We have the winners. These four are the minimal set that most comprehensively covers the entire set of dimensions except for that gender bias. Ah well, you cannot have it all.”

Having gotten the non-serious stuff out of the way, let’s get back to what matters.

For the record, the four were President Shri APJ Abdul Kalam, Sashi Tharoor, George Soros, and His Holiness Pujania Gurudevji Sri Sri Ravi Shankarji. I wrote briefly about Kalam, Tharoor and Soros the last time and ran out of steam before I could get to SSRS. So here goes.

Container and the Content

After having read so much about SSRS, and having received so much mail from his ardent followers, I was really psyched up to actually see SSRS in person. Of course, I had seen his picture plastered all over India a million times—on billboards and flyers, in newspapers and magazines. I was expecting to react along the lines of

Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

It was a terrible let-down for me. SSRS delivered his well-worn homilies in a faintly feminine voice, pausing frequently for effect while he smiled benevolently at the crowd. I was in awe of the man. He has got to be the world’s most successful marketing genius, a brilliant strategist. I should make it absolutely clear that what he talks about, apparently teaches, and packages is not snake-oil: it is some of the best that India has to offer, such as yoga and meditation. That sort of stuff doesn’t have to be sold and for selling it, you don’t have to be a genius. And therein lies the answer to why he is so successful.

Here are two questions I try to answer whenever I buy something. What am I being sold, the container or the content? And, which is the container and which is the content? What I buy may often not be what is being sold. I may buy the content even though they are merely selling the container, or vice versa.

Yoga and meditation are the container. What is being promoted, in my opinion, is the content, His Holiness Gurudevji Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. People are attracted by the container and the content gets spread. Gurudevji wraps himself in ancient Indian wisdom and promotes himself to the hilt. The marketing genius is in figuring out that yoga and meditation are a golden container and encasing oneself in it.

So how do I feel about the Art of Living and SSRS? Very positively. His self-promotion is actually spreading Indian ideals and ideas that I value across the world. From a consequentialist point of view, I value the service he ultimately provides to the world, never mind what I consider his motivation to be.

The Social Good

Which brings me back to the larger issue of the PanIIT meet. What was being sold there? What is the overall impact of such an exercise? From a free market perspective, the event is like any other voluntary exchange and therefore socially beneficial (because when private parties engage in free exchange, social welfare is enhanced.) There are externalities, of course, that arise from most private transactions. For instance, the negative externalities of, say, a celebrity speaker whose attendance causes public inconvenience which is a social cost that is not compensated for by the private parties involved in the event. But one should not discount the positive externalities as well.

Self-confidence and an optimistic can-do attitude are valuable traits in an individual which make success more likely. So also collective self-confidence and optimism can lead to preferred outcomes. Events such as the PanIIT 2006 can raise the collective consciousness if directed properly.

I went through their souvenir publications which collected some of the best contributions of celebrated and accomplished Indians. There is a lot of reporting there but no real analysis of what should be done and why. That is in my opinion an unfortunately widely accepted practice: doing too much and calling for action on many more directions without adequate thought to why we are where we are and what must be done to get to where we should be.

Positive analysis must precede normative recommendations. That is, you must understand what is and why before one recommends action to reach a future desired state. I saw very little positive analysis and too much call to action.

I will continue this line of inquiry in my next bit.

The PanIIT 2006 conference was a marvel to behold. I was among the over 5,000 (so the organizers claimed) who attended the event at the Bandra-Kurla Complex in Mumbai, Dec 23rd to the 25th. I had had my misgivings about being part of the hoopla but my curiosity trumped discretion eventually. I don’t regret being there, mind you, as it was a supreme learning experience. Besides, I got to meet some interesting people, and see some people who I had heard and read about a lot but never seen them in the flesh.

President Kalam Azad

Dec 23rd was a red-letter day for me. It was the first time that I saw one of the greatest contemporary Indian icons, President Shri APJ Abdul Kalam. He arrived an hour late. I believe it is called being “fashionably late.” Which was a good thing. While waiting for him, the guy who was the master of ceremonies actually got to learn the name of the President of the Republic of India, and thus saved everyone the pain of feeling embarrassed for him for making a fool of himself in front of President Kalam.

The MC (I never quite figured out what his name was) thought that he would fill in the time showing off how cool he was by reciting some shairi. The word “tuk-al-luf” figured prominently in it. What followed was a rambling eulogy of the guest of honor who was “none other than Prof Kalam Azad.” The “none other than” must be his favorite phrase because throughout the day, every single person was introduced by him as “none other than.” Anyway, if he were to be not too clued in about the name of a relatively unknown person, he could be forgiven. But not knowing the name of the guest of honor who just happened to be the president of the country, and whom he was supposed to introduce, takes the cake when it comes to being clueless. He repeated what he thought was the president’s name a few times during his show of coolness. After a brief break, he came back to announce that he had learnt the name of the president of India, but he still thought that “azad” was appropriate as it meant “Freedom,” an ideal much prized by the president. I am happy that the MC did not embellish the president’s name any further. I was afraid that his next iteration would be “Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad.”

Panned IIT

I think that was the high point of the PanIIT 2006 meet that day. It was downhill all the way from there. And I guess the organizers figured that too. They took the stage for the next hour or so (but seemed interminable) congratulating each other on the “great success the PanIIT 2006” was. Each tried to outdo the other in heaping praise on all and sundry for the great job they have done. It was an orgy of premature congratulations. Their praise for each was only interrupted by references to how great a “brand” IIT was and how they, as the “product” of IITs, were going to “Inspire, Involve, and Transform” the nation, and who knows, perhaps the world, if not the entire universe. They were clearly impressed by their own cleverness in expanding IIT to mean spell the theme of the event.

It was a bit too thick, and I was beginning to feel a little sick. A bunch of self-absorbed inflated egos strutting about the stage sprouting meaningless drivel about how great they and the IITs were soon gets nauseating. So it was a pleasure to see President Kalam take the stage, of course after the mandatory references to “scientist” and “rockets.”

Kalam is charming. There is a naïve simplicity about him that is endearing. His eagerness and sincerity is almost childlike. Perhaps that accounts for why he is an able administrator; people like him. I sometime wonder: is it better to be very bright, extremely arrogant, supremely competent, and highly accomplished—but disliked—or is it better to be not too bright, quite humble, somewhat mediocre, charming—but liked? I suppose the answer depends on what job you want done. If you need a monumental work done, you need the first kind, the kind I would call “General.” (General Patton is the archetype.) But if you need to be inspired to be good, then you need the second kind, the “Grandfather.”

Anyway, as I was saying, Kalam was a welcome break. His introductory remarks lasted for about 10 minutes in which he panned IITs. He used an interesting device. He said that he called up a bunch of people the previous day and asked what was the first thought that came to their minds when they heard the word “IIT.” His respondents included, among others, a General in the army and a former director of an IIT. The responses he received ranged from “very low value addition” to “largely irrelevant.” Not exactly the sort of thing that the organizers of PanIIT wanted to hear, I am sure. But then, Kalam had warned that what he was about to say was going to be “mixed.”

Nanotech Genomic Economic Rural Development

If Kalam had limited his talk to the introductory remarks, it would have been sufficient. But then he got on to his favorite hobby horse and rode off into technological wonderland. I am sure that there are those who upon hearing a long speech heavy leaden with a huge amount of scientific jargon (nanotechnology, bioinformatics, genomics, etc.) mistakenly believe that their incomprehension is an indication of profundity of the thoughts expressed. These people eagerly lap up books with titles such as “Quantum Healing” (Chopra comes to mind) and “Nanotechnological Genomic Economic Rural Development” (Note to self: Finish writing that book already.) There is a market out there waiting to be exploited.

Kalam exited stage right after receiving a flurry of bouquets and mementoes, amid much cheering and expressions of gratitude for his gracing the momentous occasion. The next event was a panel consisting of IIT directors. Many people decided to take this opportunity to leave the main hall and wander off to retrieve their cell phones from the security people. Due to security concerns, all bags and any sort of electronic devices were not allowed into the hall during Kalam’s visit.

Stay Home, ET

Which brings me to one of my pet peeves. The organizers of these sorts of events naturally like to bag high profile people as trophies. It costs them a bundle but that is all paid for by the thousands who attend to watch the trophies. Private costs and private benefits roughly match and all is fine and good. But what about the externalities that are associated with the visit of a celebrity such as the president? No one seems the least concerned with the considerable public costs without the attendant public benefits.

Kalam could have been virtually present at the gathering from his comfortable residence in Delhi. The technology was all in place for him to make his half-hour speech and we could have seen him larger than life on the massive LCD projector screens. He would not have been late; air traffic would not have to be disrupted twice at each airport (Delhi and Mumbai) for his arrival and departure for a total of about 2 hours; disruption of traffic in Mumbai and Delhi during his transit would not have occurred; the list goes on. Delayed flights, longer commute times, the flights carrying the president and his entourage—all avoidable but not avoided because someone else bears the costs, not the organizers nor the president.

The Brightest and the Best

Retrieving the cell phone was an ordeal that I would not even go into. If the mismanagement of a simple foreseeable task such as the safe-keeping of cell-phones is indicative of the brains of the so-called brightest engineers of the land, I am afraid that the land is in trouble.

It took only an hour to get my cell phone back. I got back into the hall to find the organizers praising each other. The next celebrity speaker was “none other than” Shashi Tharoor. Handsome, urbane, English-accented, India’s nominee for the top job at the UN, Tharoor was introduced with appropriate recognition of his many accomplishments.

Talking of introductions, I noted a pattern. These intros were multi-level contraptions, wheels within wheels. The speaker X was introduced at length by Y, after Y himself had been introduced at length by Z. Thus, Purnendu Chatterjee was given a long introduction, following which Chatterjee then gave a long introduction to Tharoor. Just for good measure, Chatterjee launched into a long speech himself before getting on with introducing Tharoor.

Every Cliché About India

I had anticipated that Tharoor’s speech would be entertaining, considering that part of his day job includes speaking and writing competently. A professional speaker, so to speak. (I heard rumors—stress rumors—that he was paid $50K for the performance.) Anyway, Tharoor did not disappoint in the entertainment department. The jokes were inserted at the right moments and were appropriately changed to be pertinent to the context.

Have you heard that one about the Texan farmer who visits an Israeli farm? So the story goes that the Israeli proudly shows the Texan around his rather modestly sized farm. After all, this is Israel, which barely shows up in small maps of the world. The Texan boasts to the Israeli that he himself has a farm in Texas. Back home, he says, when he gets into his car in the morning to drive across his farm, by evening time he still doesn’t reach the other end of his farm. The Israeli shakes his head in commiseration and replies, “I know, I know. I used to have a car like that once upon a time.”

Tharoor told a more elaborate version of the joke, replacing the Israeli with a Punjab da puttar. His point was that our assumptions dictate our perceptions. A clichéd observation. And that was the disappointing bit about Tharoor. His speech was a string of clichés, though well put together. First came the cliché about how every statement about India, and its converse, are both true. Then came the cliché that India is a pluralistic democracy and everyone in India is a minority. He clearly side-stepped the issue that while we all are equal in our being minorities, some minorities are more equal than others, as Orwell had pointed out.

I suppose it gets a tad tiring when one is reminded for the umpteenth time that a Muslim president administered the oath of office to a Sikh prime minister who was nominated by an Italian Catholic leader of the party. The Muslim presidents of India, the Muslim officer who commanded this sector during that war with Pakistan, the Parsi officer who led the Indian army the other war—the list is long. All shows how secular India is. Whenever I hear people talking so vehemently about Indian secularism, I am reminded of the statement made by some wit: “The louder he spoke of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

Then there was the cliché about how the Hindu Indians can only be secular by denying their religion but non-Hindus can be secular even if they claim that theirs is the only valid faith. Tharoor loudly proclaimed that he was a practicing Hindu and a recovered atheist. Good for him. I wasn’t taking notes but that is no loss as I am sure that he makes those points frequently enough that it is bound to be there somewhere on the web for anyone interested in what he had to say.

George Soros

The public gave Tharoor a standing ovation. Cynic that I am, rarely get off my seat upon hearing pretty speeches. “Yeah, yeah,” I say, “Just get on with the show.” I was eager to hear the next speaker, Mr George Soros, and we were already running about an hour late. Soros is a hero of mine. Knows his stuff and knows that he knows it. Means what he says and says what he means. (How about them clichés, eh?) Of course, that does not protect him from being misquoted. The next day, DNA, a Mumbai newspaper, quoted him as saying, “Get into philosophy only after you have become rich.” (Philosophy, philanthropy, what’s the difference, eh?)

It was sad that Soros was not given an opportunity to speak. He was told that as they were running short of time, they would go straight to questions. Still, Soros snuck in some of his observations about India. By the way, Soros stole someone else’s line about being an expert on India: that within 48 hours of being in India, one becomes an expert on India, and in a few months one realizes that one is not an expert.

Upon reading what I have just written, I realize that this is too bloody long. I should take a breather. I am saving the best for the last. In the next bit, I will go into the phenomenon called “Sri Sri Ravi Shankar” who was the concluding speaker that evening. I have pondered SSRS for years and here was the most exciting event coming up. I was going to see him (or should it be “Him”?) in person. Please come back for the next exciting installment of “Panned IIT” when I get to see “His Holiness Guru Dev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar ji” in the flesh.

It’s all karma, neh?

[Will wonders never cease? I have actually written the promised followup to this post here.]

I had gone there to sit on a panel which was deliberating such weighty matters as policy for encouraging open source in education. I had little to add to it but still I was given a nice desk weather station (has a hygrometer and thermometer in addition to the clock). Neat little gizmo, made in China, of course.

The event was held at the Kanwal Rekhi School for Information Technology. The school is housed in a building which looks pretty modern. It has a faint resemblance to the painting by Eicher called Up and Down. There is something impossible about that place. If you go there, it is impossible for you to find out who is in which room. There is a fairly large display board with the names of the prominent professors of information technology. It lists names but not the room numbers. Which room does a particular worthy occupies is a closely guarded secret. Remember, it is the school for information technology and we all know that means PCs and wireless and all sorts of stuff that is high-tech and expensive. Information on a low-tech sign board? No way, Jose.

To be fair, perhaps they don’t list room numbers because even if you were to list the room numbers, you cannot find the room because the rooms are not numbered. And even if they are numbered, the numbers are not very prominent. So in the end, you have to ask someone where Dr. Such-and-such may be found. In any event, there you have it: the school of information technology gurus have yet to figure out that the information comes first and technology next.

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While we are on the topic of IIT Bombay, here is something that is a crying shame. Soumen Chakrabarti, of the computer science faculty, has a pictorial essay titled Destruction is our second nature. He documents the algorithm used for the wholesale destruction of trees on campus. What he describes with illustrations resembles slash-and-burn (or swidden) agriculture.

Panthers form another great excuse for decimating trees and shrubs. Here is an excerpt from a notice from our security chief: “Clearing of bushes: Wild bushes in and around departments, residential areas and roadsides are being cleared on priority basis.”

What remains at the end of a burning orgy? Vast expanses of charred moon-like surface, trees devastated worse than the Godhra victims, tracts of wasteland, dramatic loss in ground cover and increase in airborne suspended particulate matter.

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Today is my last day in Mumbai. I am leaving for New Delhi by the spanking new Rajdhani Express train. Lately I have been too busy doing stuff that I have neglected this blog. It may get worse since I will be on the road. But who knows, maybe I will write about my travels around the country. Until we meet again and the case is sol-ved, as Inspector Clouseau says, good-bye.