(Simple rule of thumb: (t x g) = 70. Time t to double given a compound growth rate g is approximately equal to 70 divided by g. Thus at 7 percent growth rate, it would take 10 periods for a quantity to double; at 3.5 percent, that would be 20 periods; at 10 percent, the time would be 7.)

India’s actual rate of economic growth averaged over 60 years is around 2.1 percent per year, what I call the “Nehru rate of growth” because Nehru was the principal author of India’s socialist development policy. As I argue below, it is one of the greatest man-made disasters in the world. It was totally flawed, and the misery that it caused (and still causes) was entirely avoidable. Considering the present state of India is distressing but it is useful if considered side by side with an alternative that was possible. The counterfactual has to help move us to take a different path. Later on in the series, we will discuss what we have to do.

In the alternative scenario, I used a 6 percent long-run average annual per capita growth rate. Is that reasonable? Yes it was easily possible, and what is more, it still is. India is large, just like China. In 1978, they were both at the bottom of the economic heap, neck and neck in most measures of economic development. China got lucky and its leader Deng Xiaoping (1904 – 1997) steered China out of the socialist trap and made it into a market economy open to foreign investment. China’s economic growth was impressive, to say the least. Over a period of 30 years, it grew at an average around 8 percent annual growth rate. Today China’s economy is at least four times larger than India’s.

India could have easily become a market-oriented, open economy by 1950, and had an average 6 percent annual growth rate for 60 years to become at present a middle-income country. India’s per capita annual income could have been around $10,000, ten times of what it actually is. Its GDP could have been $11 trillion, and India, instead of China, would be the largest economy in the world second to the US.

Economic growth at 6 percent annual rate works marvels. India would have eradicated poverty by 1970. Around 1950, India had around 250 million below the poverty line (out of a total population of less than 400 million.) Today it has 700 to 800 million below the poverty line. That’s what Nehruvian socialism has achieved – a tripling of the absolute number of poor people. Had India followed the alternative model, mass scale poverty would have been history in less than a generation. Today the problem of poverty is much harder to solve because the solution has been delayed so long.

Mass scale poverty has its fellow travellers. India has the largest number of illiterates in the world. India has the largest number of malnourished people in the world. Reports indicate that around half of India’s children below the age of five are malnourished. The overwhelming number of Indians do not have clean drinking water, access to toilets, access to schools, health care, . . . the list is long and heartbreaking. Rural Indians eke out a Hobbesian existence: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Indian farmers are a distressed lot, and one famous journalist has made his entire career solely by reporting on farmer suicides.

There’s more to life than economic growth. Economic prosperity is not sufficient but it is definitely necessary when hundreds of millions are trapped in poverty. China provides evidence that six percent growth is possible for a large country. India had all the necessary precondition – except one – for becoming a middle-income country by now. If it had, this is what we would have had. (We will explore that one missing factor later in the series.)

If India had become a middle-income country, Indians would have read about abject poverty in history books and seen it in documentaries, not actually seen it cities, towns and villages as they do today. India would have been 100 percent literate. All Indians would have had at least graduated high school. India would have had scores of educational and research institutes ranked globally which would have attracted hundreds of thousands of students from the world over.

Indians would have been healthy and their life expectancy close to that of any developed nation. More importantly, they would have had an enviable quality life. India would have had clean, liveable cities – and lots of them – hundreds of modern cities with impressive infrastructure. The structure and composition of the Indian labor force would have been mostly in manufacturing and services, and about 10 percent in agriculture. With only of small fraction of the overall labor in agriculture, farm incomes would have been sufficient to make the life of farmers worth living.

With six percent annual growth over a long period, amazing things happen. Income growth has two effects. First, it allows greater consumption. That itself is a good thing if one is below the world average (or at least below a certain minimum.) The second effect of a large income is that savings can be larger – which means that investment can be higher. What you don’t consume, you can invest. This is true both of an individual and a collective.

Individuals grow their assets with savings. They end up with houses and other durable goods, all of which makes life more pleasant and people more productive. Similarly, with higher income, national assets increase. Nations can invest in assets such as manufacturing facilities, and infrastructure such as needed for transportation (roads, ports, railways, airports), housing, water supply and waste management, power generation, heavy machinery, facilities for hospitals, schools and universities, recreational, tourism, etc. All assets have positive feedback effects: the more you have, the more productive the economy becomes, which raises incomes, which then go on to increase the investable savings for building more assets.

The important point to note here is positive feedback effects reinforce positive trends and brings about structural and demographic changes in an economy.[1] A good educational system produces more educated people who become more productive and therefore the economy can afford to invest more in education. Send a few hundred million through a good educational system, and you will soon find hundreds of brilliant scientists, engineers, technologists, business people, social scientists, artists, dancers, musicians, actors, philosophers, poets, politicians, and other creative people. Creative people create wealth. And so the wealth grows. How many potential Aurobindos, Jamshetjis, Ramans, Vivekanandas, Chandrashekars, and have toiled untutored in the unyielding agricultural soil of India? It hardly bears imagining.

In the counterfactual arithmetic shows that India’s GDP aggregated over 60 years at 6 percent average annual growth rate would have been $143 trillion (compared to $24 trillion that it actually was.) That is, the aggregate national income would have been around $120 trillion more than what it actually has been. Imagine!

No, we cannot imagine. We are incapable of imagining trillions. Actually, beyond a few thousand, we don’t even understand numbers that go into millions and billions. Trillions is just a meaningless word to us. With a billion dollars, you can do amazing things. With a thousand billion dollars – a trillion – you can do stuff that you cannot imagine. With a hundred trillion dollars, you can change the world.

Over the last 60 odd years, India has lost income estimated at $120 trillion by growing at the Nehru rate of growth instead of the easily achievable 6 percent rate of growth. Part of that income would have created infrastructure and other durable assets by now. We would have probably had the best and biggest high speed railway system in the world. We would have had the largest and the most productive educational system in the world. Even things we don’t consider very important – number of Nobel prizes, gold medals in the Olympics, number of world class movies – would have been a reality because all those things require disposable income.

Always remember that India is a large country. Large countries have the potential to affect the world. If India’s poverty rate changes, it changes world poverty rates; if India’s trade or production pattern changes, it changes the world patterns; if India’s energy use changes, it changes world energy use. Given its large population, India could have been the world’s factory, producing cars, computers, TVs, white goods, furniture, and everything. India could have been the home of huge multinational conglomerates, producing big things such as container ships, and commercial jetliners. It could have been one of the world’s great trading nation – with its share of world trade around 25 percent, instead of the around 2 percent “Nehru rate of trade.” (Nehru’s brilliant autarkic economic policies closed India to international trade.)

Wealth buys many things, not the least of which is influence and power. Had India been a middle-income country, given the size of its population, it would have been a formidable military power. Culturally and historically, since Indians are not belligerent and don’t have extraterritorial ambitions, India’s power would have been a force for global stability. Instead of being one of the worst victims of Islamic terrorism, India would have been the one to bury Islamic terrorism for good.

The bottom line is this: if India’s economic policies had been different, not only would we have had an absolutely different India, we would have had an entirely different world. But India’s policies were brain-dead. A brain-dead leader’s brain-dead policies. Brain-dead policies leading to a moribund economy.

Walk into any bookshop in India and you will see books about India shining and India imagining. Check out newspapers, magazines and TV, and you will find lot of people talking about trivial stuff. Take the Anna Hazare circus, for instance. They think that the corruption counted in the thousands of crores is a big deal. It isn’t. It isn’t a big deal compared to the real loss of tens of trillions of dollars. It is a failure of imagination on a colossal scale.

To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever estimated the loss to India from Nehruvian socialism. His name is celebrated in India, and his descendants continue to rule India as their fiefdom. Yet it is demonstrable that he has been the greatest impediment to India’s success in the modern world. If we ever understand how incredibly damaging he has been for India, his descendants will have to take the flight to Italy, stopping on their way in Switzerland to pick up some cash.

But that day will not come until we wake up and understand why we allowed this to happen.

I will be back, as the man said. In the meanwhile, here’s a “what if” for you to ponder. What if syphilis had claimed the man 20 years sooner than it actually did? Worth thinking about, isn’t it?

NOTE:

[1] With higher incomes, fertility rate goes down. It is likely that India’s population would have been lower than 1.2 billion today had India grown economically at 6 percent a year. But it still would have been around 1 billion. Our conclusions are robust to those changes.

GDP is an aggregate measure of economic activity and it should not be taken as a comprehensive measure of social well-being or happiness or any such abstract notion. GDP is like the annual income of a person. While personal income is an indicator of how economically successful a person is, it does not define the person in any comprehensive way. But knowing that a person is doing well economically tells us whether he has the material wherewithal to live a decent life or not. This holds true for a country also. If the GDP is below a certain threshold, it is unlikely that the people are prospering.

One of the features of the modern world is that GDP grows with time. GDP growth is a recent phenomenon, actually. Over pretty much the entire existence of human civilization, there was scant progress in the material standard of living. From generation to generation, people lived pretty much like their ancestors did. Only after the Industrial Revolution (mid-1700s) did things change – and changed astonishingly rapidly compared to the past.

Instead of things improving at the rate of 0.01 percent or so, the average long term rate of growth of the production of stuff (goods and services) began to be in the low single digits. That’s a rate two orders of magnitude higher than before the Industrial Revolution. The implications of that higher growth rate are impossible to overstate. It is hard for us to get our minds around the idea of exponential growth. So we have to do the arithmetic, and in some cases, even after doing the sums, the results still strain belief.

So let’s do the numbers. I want to do a counter-factual exercise. Start off with India’s per capita GDP (estimated in 2010 US$) in 1947. I assume that to be $250. I assume the population of India in 1947 to be 350 million. How accurate are these numbers? I think they are ball park figures, and even if they are off by 10 or 20 percent, our exercise is robust and the conclusions do not critically depend on the starting numbers since we are more interested in estimating magnitudes rather than exact figures.

To begin, I hunt around for a pencil and some paper. OK, got it. Now I assume a per capita GDP growth rate of 2.1 percent per year. Multiply that with $250, the per capita GDP for year 1, and I get $255 as the per capita GDP for year two. I assume 2 percent population growth rate. So in year 2, the population is 357 million, and the GDP in year 2 is $89.25 billion (the product of population 357 million times the $255 per capita GDP.) For year 3, I repeat the exercise. Then I realize that doing arithmetic by hand is not very much fun. It is tedious and error-prone. So I start looking for an easier way. Ah ha! Let’s use a spreadsheet.

Spreadsheets are fun, if you know how to use them. I don’t. But then I rarely use them. One can do rough estimations in one’s head but when it comes to long series of calculations – and especially when one wants to do various scenarios – it is best to use a spreadsheet. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I pulled out the Google spreadsheet. (The link to my masterpiece of a spread sheet appears below.)

OK, so here’s what I did. Starting with $250 as the per capita GDP at year 1, at 2.1% growth rate, by year 62, I get a per capita GDP of $900. That looks reasonable to me. If year 1 is 1947, year 62 is 2009. (Note that I am using actual GDP numbers, not “Purchasing power parity” numbers since the PPP numbers don’t make any sense.) I am using 2% as the annual rate of growth of population since at that rate, 350 million in year 1 grows to around 1.2 billion in year 62. That is approximately the population of India.

Here are the numbers I crunched. GDP for each of the 62 years. For 2009, the GDP of India works out to be $1.061 trillion, which is the product of 1.2 billion population and $900 annual per capita income. That’s about right. Then I repeated the exercise with the same population growth rate but a different per capita GDP growth rate: 6% instead of 2.1%. With that, in 2009, I get a per capita GDP of $9,300. That’s an order of magnitude higher than $900 number. That is the per capita income of a middle-income country.

Then I did another thing. I computed the cumulative GDP. With 2.1% per capita GDP growth rate, the cumulative GDP of years 1947-2009 works out to be $24.5 trillion. Compare that to with 6% per capita GDP growth rate: the cumulative works out to be $143 trillion. That’s a difference of $120 trillion.

Let’s ponder those numbers for a moment. What do they mean? What are the implications? Is 6% growth of per capita GDP possible for such an extended period? What would have been possible given that? What about poverty? Global power and influence? What about the impact on the lives of hundreds of millions of people? In the next bit, we will discuss those and other bits.

(Click to see the spreadsheet.)

So for instance, Germans and Koreans differ in many ways: their physical characteristics, their culture, their history, the climate in which they live, and so on. Therefore, it is natural to expect differences in their economic prosperity, and if that’s what actually happens, it would not be surprising. But what if the groups are identical – such as the (erstwhile) two Germanys, or the South Koreans and North Koreans – and yet they end up in different parts of the economic spectrum? West Germany was successful and East Germany not so successful even though they started off identically. The success of South Korea stands in marked contrast to obvious failure of North Korea.

Unlike say in the physical sciences where researchers can do controlled experiments to determine how the world works, in the social sciences it is not possible to conduct laboratory experiments involving country-sized groups of people. So they have to rely on natural experiments that are available fortuitously. The German and Korean cases are just two of scores of natural experiments which tell us that it is not genetics, that it is not culture, that it is not resource endowments, it is not history, etc, that could explain the differences in outcomes. They could be part of the explanation but certainly not the most significant part of the answer. There’s something else that matters.

I believe that the most important part of the answer is just one word: rules.

Humans are unique in their ability and desire to invent rules. Humans make stuff – shoes and ships and sealing wax – but more significantly, humans make rules. Rules are ubiquitous and rule-making define humans more than the ability to make and use material artifacts. In fact, rules form the invisible foundation on which human civilization is constructed. All the stuff we have is the product of rules and a bit of human labor. Labor is not a big deal. You can pick up labor from any part of the world, and from any time in history. But there’s something that exists today that did not exist any time in the past.

Human civilization of 2000 years ago, or even a 100 years ago, differs from today’s civilization in the set of rules. The rules, and the recipes on how to combine stuff and labor to produce more interesting stuff, are critical.

We have rules coming out the wazoo. We have rules for everything. They are as invisible as the air that we breathe and just as necessary. Without our rules, our lives would be – as Tevye conjectured – as shaky as a fiddler on the roof. So it makes sense for us to ponder rules for a bit.

First, what are these rules? Take a simple example: traffic rules. Drive on the right side of the road (except for when you are in some third world countries such as the UK or India); red means stop and green means go; come to a complete halt at a stop sign. Some traffic rules are completely arbitrary. But because of tradition and history, we are stuck with them. Traffic rules are an example of rules that help coordination. If we don’t follow them, we end up causing major harm to all concerned. So there’s a rule which says you must obey traffic rules. That is meta-rule – a rule about rules.

Another example of rules: double-entry bookkeeping. Without it, accounting would be a mess. That’s an example of standards. Standards are an amazing invention. You cannot imagine the modern world operating at all without standards. There are professional bodies which define the standards for every conceivable thing. Without them, modern manufacturing would be impossible. Sizes are standard. The size of the windows and doors, the size of the beds, the size of screws and fasteners, the size of pipes and fittings – look around the house (in any developed country) and you will see standards everywhere. We can afford electronic gizmos because there are standards. Without standards, the goods (both intermediate and final) would not be interoperable, thus making manufacturing costly.

Standards literally rule us and standards are rules. The modern world is awash in standards. All the electronic gizmos I am using to write this, and for you to read it across time and space, is brought to you courtesy of standards. Language itself is a set of standards. Language is a prime example of rules and standards. The syntax and the semantics that make up a language are nothing but standards and rules that have evolved over time and which we all agree to. Can you imagine life without language?

There are rules on how to make rules. The mother of all rules – the mother meta-rule – is the constitution of a modern state. The constitution tells you how to make rules and defines broadly rules the constructed rules must obey. Start with a good constitution and things will turn out good; start with a bad constitution and god help you, since disaster is guaranteed. The constitution is perhaps the most important set of rules that determines the fate of societies. We will get back to this later.

For now, let’s note one important feature of rules. Rules are what economists call “public goods”. Economists divide goods into two disjoint sets: public goods and private goods. Private goods are the things that you can hold in your hand or kick with your foot. They are material objects. Material objects are “rivalrous in consumption,” meaning that your use of it prevents its use by others. You and I cannot simultaneously eat the same cookie or wear the same pair of pants. Public goods are those which are not rivalrous in consumption. Your use of it does not diminish the quantity available for use by others. A recipe is a public good because although you can use a recipe, you cannot “use up” a recipe. A recipe is an idea on how to do something. The generalization of this concept is that ideas are public goods. Rules are ideas and they are therefore public goods.

An interesting philosophical question: are rules inventions or are they discoveries? Rules of nature (generally called laws) are certainly discoveries since they exist a priori and require neither humans for their existence nor human acquiescence. The law of gravity operates independently of human motive or action. Not so the set of laws or rules that humans use, and so they are inventions. Humans invent rules, and since these rules are public goods, the set of invented rules are available for use by anyone who cares to use them.

Rules, standards, man-made laws – these are different ways of saying the same thing. They all figure prominently in the explanation of why different groups of people have different outcomes in the great big economic game. It all depends on what set of rules they choose to play by. Groups that choose wisely, prosper; those that don’t, either stagnate or regress. Thankfully, humanity has had a lot of time to invent a very large set of rules and also had a lot of time to figure out which ones work and which don’t. In a globalized, interconnected world where ideas are not confined to any specific geographic location, and where ideas are free for the taking, the question arises: why do some groups choose a bad set of rules? Don’t they realize that better rules are also there for the taking?

Why isn’t the world uniformly developed? Why is there so much inequality? That, my dear ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is a most interesting matter that we will turn to presently.

The prosperity of societies varies – across time and space. Fortunes shift. Societies that were once rich, become poor, and vice versa. At any time, there are rich and poor societies. Why these variations occur is a question that has engaged many brilliant minds for centuries. What can be done to bring about prosperity is a question not only analytically challenging but also of immense humanitarian concern. The broad outlines of the answer are clear enough and there can be little disagreement about it. Stated concisely, material prosperity depends on productivity. Material prosperity is function of how much stuff people produce.

I use the word “stuff” to denote all the things humans produce and consume. It means food, clothing, shelter, etc. Those are the basic “hard” stuff. Hard stuff is stuff that you can eat, hold in your hands, give to someone, etc. There’s another kind of stuff we also produce and consume: the “soft” stuff – such as education, entertainment, health care, scientific research, etc. These are generally called services. The richer the society, the greater the share soft stuff has in its consumption bundle. Rich people spend a significantly smaller portion of their incomes on food and other necessities of life than the poor do. The rich are different from us, not only in the sense that they have more money but also in the way they spend.

Interestingly, the production of soft stuff depends on the availability of hard stuff. In other words, the world produces more soft stuff today than it did in the past is because the amount of hard stuff produced has gone up. Everything we produce and consume ultimately depends on the production and consumption of hard stuff.

For instance, consider theoretical physics. All one appears to need for producing theoretical physics is some paper and pencil. (Story goes that Einstein’s wife was being shown around some giant astronomical observatory. “Here’s what we use to figure out the nature of the universe,” the guide informed her. She replied, “Really! My husband just needs a blackboard and chalk to do that.”)

But the fact is that theoretical physicists need food, clothing, shelter, and all the other hard stuff just as much as the rest of us do. Follow the chain backward and you will find that all the soft stuff depends on the hard stuff. If there isn’t enough hard stuff, there will never be enough soft stuff. The hard stuff is the tortoise upon whose back the entire edifice of human activity rests. We consume stuff because we are made of the stuff. The hard stuff is important because we ourselves are made of hard stuff.

From here on, I will simply say “stuff” to mean “the hard stuff, and by extension all the soft stuff as well.” So now we can say that if a society does not produce enough stuff, it is poor. An interesting question at this juncture is whether a society needs to produce all the variety of stuff that it needs. The answer is no: it can produce something and then trade its production for what it needs to consume. Thus, if it only produces rice, it does not have to solely subsist on rice as long as it can trade rice with others who produce non-rice stuff such as cars and clothes. Trade is good because it increases our choices.

More generally, when trade is possible, you can produce the tradable soft stuff alone and trade them for the hard stuff that you need. If an economy produces only software programs, for instance, it can sell software and buy all the other stuff it needs.

Coming back to the point, the prosperity of a society depends on its ability to produce stuff. If somehow that ability is inhibited, it leads to poverty. Conversely, everything that promotes production of stuff (and productivity) promotes prosperity.

People produce stuff. If what people produce is taken away from them, it inhibits people from producing stuff. Stuff can be taken away from people through legal or illegal means. People respond to incentives. The ability to reap the results of one’s efforts is a powerful incentive to produce. If one is prevented from reaping the fruits of one’s labor, one will not put in the effort to sow and tend the crop. That is the law of human nature, and messing around with it has dire consequences.

Talking of human nature, one of my core beliefs is that humans are pretty much the same in any part of the world. So what accounts for their varied successes or failures as collectives? Why are some collections of humans (such as nation states) more successful than others if indeed they are naturally essentially the same? Why do some countries produce so many apparently bright high achievers and others so few?

The answer lies in the distinction between nature and nurture. While it is true that humans are essentially the same anywhere in the world, what differs is the environment in which they find themselves. In some parts of the world, the environment is good and in others not so good. Where you are born determines how much your life-time earnings will be. It’s the luck of the draw. If you are born in rural India, as opposed to the San Francisco Bay area, you start the game of life with a handicap that is hard to overcome through personal effort alone.

The environment one is born into is external to any particular individual. No one has control over where one is born. So also, no one has control over the environment in which one is born. The environment has to be taken as given for an individual. In other words, the environment is “external” to the individual. But as a collective, society gives shape to the environment and determines what it is. The environment is external to the individual but “internal” to the society.

Actually, we need to distinguish between what can be called the “natural environment” and the “man-made environment.” The former is the environment which is defined by factors such as the terrain, the climate, the natural resources, etc; the latter is what humans create and includes things as the culture, the institutions, the history, etc. The natural environment changes slowly but the man-made environment can be rapidly changed if conditions are right. The natural environment is external to the individual (as mentioned before) and also to the collective (or society.) Contrast that with the man-made environment which is external to the individual but internal to the collective.

Thus the collective determines the nature of the man-made environment. Neither you nor the society at large can do a damn thing about the average rainfall in your part of the world. But while you as an individual cannot do much about the legal or the political system that prevails in your country, society as a collective determines what they are.

To sum up this part of the discussion, the amount of stuff produced by society determines whether the economy grows, stagnates or declines. That in turn is determined to some extent by the natural resource endowments (the natural environment), and to a very significant degree by the man-made environment. Therefore although two societies may have the same natural endowments, they may differ markedly in terms of material prosperity due to the differing set of institutions that government the two. That gives us reason for hope since the man-made institutional environment can be changed. What’s more, over the years we have acquired the knowledge – empirically and analytically – of how institutions affect prosperity and how to design good institutions.

The question we then ask ourselves is why, when it is known which set of institutions work, some countries don’t choose to make the needed changes. For example, we know with near certainty that economically free societies prosper. Why then do some countries choose policies that deny economic freedom to its citizens?

India is a shining example of a country which has had the potential to be a materially prosperous economy. Yet consistently over the decades, if not the centuries, Indians have been denied (or have denied themselves) economic freedom. Why? One possible answer could be that Indians are not actually free to choose economic freedom.

Or perhaps they do not value economic prosperity much, and therefore they don’t choose to become prosperous. This may not be such an outlandish proposition as it would appear: the collective objective of a society could well be something else. You can choose something if have a choice but you have to have the will to choose in the first place. As the philosopher pointed out, you are free to choose what you will but you are not free to will what you will. Is it possible then to invoke within Indians the will to desire economic freedom?

[Previously: Part 1.]

Part 1

Stealing is a bad thing. Trade is a good thing. Taking something without it being voluntarily offered is a bad thing. Giving voluntarily is a good thing. Taking something away from someone either by stealth or through coercion is a bad thing. All this we must ponder at length and fully comprehend in all its ramifications if we have to have any claim to being reasonably civilized adult humans beings. This is not difficult to do but is usually not examined closely enough.

Generally, while growing up we are admonished that stealing is bad, and we internalize it as children. And as children, we know it is a bad thing even though none of us is entirely innocent of that act. It’s a common enough human failing and no great sanctions attach to it. Mercifully, idiosyncratic stealing as adults is uncommon enough that society appears to function in a fashion and most of us don’t consciously steal at an individual level. Note especially the words “consciously” and “individual.” What should strike terror in our hearts is systematic stealing on a societal scale.

We know stealing is a bad thing but don’t quite fully understand why it is a really bad thing. And not fully comprehending why it is a really bad thing, we are unable to take our defences against it – when we ourselves steal or allow others to steal from us. In this piece, I will explore why stealing is perhaps one of the worst things that you can do or have done to you.

It is my belief that systematic or organized – as opposed to idiosyncratic – stealing is quite pervasive and at one level of analysis is the basis of all maladies that afflict human society. Stealing is the most common form of dishonesty and its central role in human misery is not fully appreciated. Practically all problems of human society can be traced back to acts of theft, and dishonesty, which as its source, is the greatest sin (if sin is defined as anything that reduces welfare), much greater than greed or lust.

We know what stealing is. It is easy for us to identify an act of theft: the taking of something that is not rightfully yours, either by stealth (theft) or by force (robbery.) But not all theft and robbery is as easy to identify as when someone picks your pocket or someone mugs you and grabs your wallet. Pick pocketing, robbery and other related petty crimes are obvious enough and thankfully rare in even minimally organized societies but we are not conscious of organized theft that is largely invisible and tremendously corrosive to social wellbeing.

To get a sense of what stealing and theft are in the context of this piece, let’s consider what is not theft. Trade is not theft. Remember this. Those who are against free and voluntary trade are indirectly supporting theft, as I argue later. As I mentioned before, trade is a good thing. Trade involves exchange – the giving and receiving of something of value – and all voluntary trade increases the well-being of both parties involved, and therefore is socially beneficial. Except in what is called a “Robinson Crusoe” economy (the simplest economy with total population of one), every economy depends on, and is involved in, trade.

Why so? Because people are the only life form on earth that extensively trades (with the possible exception of other primates), and people are what an economy is all about. But why do we trade? Because we as individuals have different skills, different tastes, and a variety of needs which can be met only through different material goods and services. None of us is capable of producing everything that we need and use.

The farmer knows how to grow food, the doctor how to maintain health, the technologist how to build gadgets, but no one knows it all. So we do what we can do best and then trade our production with that of others. This way we expand the set of consumption choices. Among the core characteristics that make us human is our preference for variety and our instinctive ability to trade.

There are two important points we must mention here briefly, and to which we will return in due course. First, each one of us knows something better than anyone else in the world, living or dead. It is this: we know who we are, what makes us tick, and what we can produce and what we like to consume. So you are the best judge of what you should do, not someone else. And having produced, you know better than anyone else what you would like in exchange for your production.

Which brings us to the second point: freedom. Specifically the freedom to produce and consume what you wish. If your production and/or consumption activities are constrained by others, you are necessarily worse off than if they were not. Freedom is a necessary condition for individuals to achieve their potential, and a society of free people is better than a society where at least some people are not free.

Moving on, the things we need we acquire either by being given them or by producing something that we trade with others and get in exchange. There’s one more avenue other than trade for what we have – charity. Charity is what is given in exchange for nothing material. As I mentioned earlier, giving voluntarily is a good thing. The role of charity in human affairs is not generally fully appreciated but has a very critical role in the functioning of a good society.

We should pause briefly to consider what is a good society. I would define it as one where there’s absence of conflict, and where people are free of coercion and are not materially or non-materially deprived within the limits of the existing state of the art of technology. If, for instance, the society is capable of producing enough food given the technology and the resource endowments, and yet if there are some people who are malnourished and hungry, then that is not a good society. By this criterion, very few societies in the world are good, and considering the world as a whole, the current global society is not a good society. The world produces – or has the capacity to produce – food sufficient for the eradication of hunger but it does not do so.

Here my contention is that theft is pervasive. We just don’t see it to be such because much of it is disguised and indirect, and therefore invisible. I claim that we don’t have a good society because of pervasive theft. We have to make visible the invisible theft by outlining instances of it, at least in general terms.

Let’s create a taxonomy of theft. One simple categorization of theft could be along the lines of economic efficiency. There’s efficient theft and then there’s inefficient theft. In the former case, one party’s loss is the other party’s gain. You lost a jacket but the thief gained a jacket. It’s just a redistribution of stuff.

But even when economically efficient, theft can lead to social welfare losses. If you lost your only jacket but the thief already had a closet full of jackets, then your loss of utility is greater than the gain in utility of the thief. Efficient theft that leads to decrease in social utility I will term as “anti-Robin Hood” theft.

On the other hand, if you had a closet full of jackets and the thief had none, then of course social utility increases since the decrease in your utility is lower than the increase in the utility of the thief. Theft which efficient and also leads to an increase of social utility can be termed “Robin Hood” theft.

Economically inefficient theft is the worst kind because it necessarily leads to social welfare losses. Your welfare decreases because of the loss of your jacket but the thief gains nothing because he just puts it in the dumpster. This is “Stupid” theft because it involves a loss to someone but there is no compensating gain to anyone else.

Another categorization of theft can be based on whether it is organized theft or unorganized theft. The lone shoplifter or the mugger in the park or the pickpocket are all involved in unorganized theft. In contrast, the mafia are involved in organized theft. Organized theft requires an institutional framework to operate. There are rules and a code of conduct, and office bearers and hierarchies. There’s institutional memory and well-understood methods of operations. There’s history and tradition associated with organized theft.

So now we can categorize theft in a variety of types. For instance, one type is the “economically efficient, social utility decreasing, organized theft.” Another type is “economically inefficient, unorganized theft.” Note that economically inefficient theft can never be “social utility increasing.” So that gives us six types of theft. There are specific known ways of dealing with each type of theft. For example, organized theft cannot be prevented the same way that unorganized theft can be.

Regardless of which type, all theft involves a loss to the original owner, or a “first order” loss. There is another loss which is a second order loss, and it is a social welfare loss which arises from the incentive distorting effect of the loss. Suppose it requires effort to produce something, but if you realize that your production could be stolen or taken away through some other means, it reduces your incentive to put in the effort to produce. An example of incentive distortion is income taxes. Knowing that a certain part your earnings will be taken away changes how much you would have worked otherwise. If you know that what you worked for could be stolen, you will avoid putting in the effort. This means that society as a whole loses some production as a consequence of the theft.

We should distinguish between legal, illegal, wrong and right. Something being legal does not make it right (morally or economically), and conversely something being illegal does not necessarily mean that it is wrong. Taxes imposed by governments are usually legal but sometimes they are economically inefficient or morally wrong.

Both theft and trade involve two parties. But theft is an aggressive act which negatively impacts the involuntary party while trade between consenting parties is beneficial to both. Trade as opposed to theft has to be one of the central organizing principles of a good society. In any society, trade and theft are opposing activities. To the extent that the one is promoted, the other is inhibited. Where theft flourishes, trade languishes, and vice versa. In general you may find that people who benefit from theft are not in favour of trade.

[Next: Part 2.]

As had been reported, Wiki (English language version) has done dark. This is the landing page image.

1. Make a large segment of the population dependent on government handouts.
2. Expand the size of the government. Nationalize large segments of the economy and run them into the ground.
3. Tax the productive segment of the population and make transfer payments to the non-productive segment. (The non-productive segment being larger, these transfers ensure continued victory in the elections.)
4. Give handouts to favored segments of the population. The handouts will end up crippling the economy.

To destroy India civilizationally, you would divide the population along religious lines and pit them against each other. If you were the enemy of India, you would be well-advised to do that. Conversely, if you did do that, you are definitely India’s enemy.

I observe that Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi is directing the UPA to do what I briefly listed above. So what lies ahead? Clearly, the BJP is either clueless, or incompetent, or who knows perhaps complicit. In any case, general elections are coming up and given the mood of the electorate, it could be bad news for the Congress: the regional parties could end up sucking up too many votes, leaving the Congress weakened. What would Antonia Maino do next to speed up the destruction of India?

I put myself in her shoes. What would be next on my agenda? Here’s what I would do. I would start a war with the neighbor. A war would distract the population from focusing on such matters as deepening poverty, inflation, employment, and corruption. People rally around the government during times of war.

Yes, a war just in time to change the mood of the public before the elections.

But, wait a minute. It takes two to have a war. Would Pakistan oblige? Yes! The rulers of Pakistan also need to distract Pakistanis. It has been a long while since they had one of those 1000-year jihads against the infidel Indians. So a war with India would be just perfect for them as well.

So my guess is that by mid-2012, India will be at war with Pakistan. How will it begin? I am thinking a huge big terrorist attack. I think it could be engineered around New Delhi. A series of bombs. Some of these will be in heavily crowded areas so that hundreds are killed; some of these in high profile locations so that the leaders appear to be targeted, and these leaders then reap the benefits of the public outrage.

To sum up, if I were to be in the business of destroying India, I would do the following. First, do what the UPA is doing: NREGA, reservations based on religion, FSB, loan wavers, etc. Next, I will engineer a series of terrorist attacks. Finally, go to war with Pakistan.

Maino’s Minions

P Chidambaram is probably a crook but he is not an idiot. He is most certainly more intelligent than average and thus certainly more intelligent than Antonia Maino. Born in India, I suspect that PC has more feelings for India than Maino has. In other words, he is more nationalistic than Maino. PC is more educated than Maino and is definitely more capable of understanding policy better than her. Although I have never met either of them, I am sure that in all regards, PC is better qualified to be the president of the Congress party than Maino.

Same goes for all Maino’s minions. They are all better qualified to be the president of the Congress party than Maino is.

(Maino’s minions. Has a certain poetic ring to it, don’t you think? Minions, as the big dic tells us, are “servile followers or subordinates of a person in power.”)

So here’s the question: why does she have the power and not one of her minions?

Maino, and Not Her Minions, Rules

That’s a silly question. Obviously, she has the power because she married Rajiv Gandhi, who was the son of Indira Gandhi, who was married to some guy who assumed the last name Gandhi because M.K. Gandhi decided it would be better received by some Indians, because M.K. Gandhi had figured out that his last name had become a potent talisman for some Indians.

It’s the name, silly, not the person.

What kind of people make important decisions based on names and not on character or ability? Ignorant, superstitious, uninformed, stupid persons. The kind of people to fool whom M.K.Gandhi advised Indira Nehru’s husband to change his last name.

India’s Most Loathsome

These are the people who have been awarded the #1 position by my friend Sandeep in his 2011 List of Most Loathsome People of India.

1. You

Charges: You are loathsome. You are lazy, unthinking, uncritical, and insensitive to the crap happening out there to your own country. Your idea of an intellectual conversation is talking about the sexy, super-powerful engine of Lexus or whatever other car and discussing the latest gizmo that further hastens the decline of your near-zero intellectual ability. Your idea of participating in the democratic process is supporting morons like Arvind Kejriwal and watching staged TV debates. Your icon of free speech is the lady at #8. Your idea of reading a newspaper involves drooling over Page 3 soft porn. Your definition of achievement is winning 5 Crores in Kaun Banega Crorepati. Your idol of a clean politician is Manmohan Singh. You don’t know who A K Ramanujan was or whether he existed at all. You think price rise is because of the US economy. You actually believe that the Congress party that Sonia Gandhi heads gave us freedom from British rule. You support Rahul Gandhi because you find his dimples cute. You think secularism is what is still holding this country together. You think the Congress party is a liberal party. You don’t even know what “liberal” means. You think that only politicians are responsible for all this mess you find yourself in. You think freedom in a democracy means allowing people to celebrate Valentine’s Day. You don’t know you’re bending over but you still bend over. And the Queen fucks you over and over again. You deserve it. You are truly loathsome. You are India’s #1 Most Loathsome Person.

Unfair and Unlovely

Actually, Sandeep’s target group is perhaps only the urban, “educated,” middle class and above, not the millions of unwashed masses who have never touched a Page 3 (whatever that be) or even seen a Lexus. Antonia Maino derives her power from the ignorance of the tens of millions who are awestruck by the name “Gandhi” — made even more attractive by the whiteness of the skin. Indians do have a generalized preference for fair skin, having been ruled for a while by white-skinned people. It appears as if as long as they are ruled, they prefer to be ruled by white-skinned people.

Fair enough, I say. Whatever floats your boat. Want to be ruled by a foreign born, white-skinned person? Knock yourself out.

Indians have been ruled by foreigners because Indians don’t have a generalized distaste for being ruled. They don’t have a very strong preference for freedom. No doubt for a foreign rule, you need to have foreign rulers but — here’s the other part of the story that does not get sufficient play — you have to have obedient domestic subjects. People have to acquiesce and voluntarily agree to be ruled.

Preference Precedes Action

In the ultimate analysis, no matter how incompetent, malign, dishonest, immoral, ignorant and myopic Maino’s minions are, they are there because Maino is powerful — and she derives her power from the ignorant masses who care only about the name and not the substance. They are indeed the source of India’s downfall today, just as they have been in the past.

I keep saying that India will never be truly free until the Congress party is given a decent burial. But that burial will not happen until Indians understand the meaning of freedom. I don’t think sufficient number of Indians have a sufficiently broad understanding of freedom is. The vast majority don’t have a visceral feel for freedom, because they have had so little taste of it over the centuries that they have lost the sensibility to even feel the loss of freedom. It’s a survival mechanism, one developed to cope with a seemingly unalterable reality.

Avoiding Costly Struggles

There is an analog of this capitulation in the case of poverty. Poverty is a very hard condition to bear. So it’s a bit of a puzzle to realize that there are cases where people don’t put in any effort at all to get out of it. Here’s a plausible explanation. The struggle to get out of poverty is costly. If the probability of success is low, then the expected return on that costly investment could be negative. So if one is sufficiently poor, it may be rational to not struggle to get out of it, and to just resign oneself to it. And over long periods of time, people forget what it is to be not poor and lose their desire to be anything else.

Not having tasted any freedom for a long time, people come to believe that a state of bondage is the only way to be.

Maino did not invent colonial rule, nor does she need armies to impose it. She has her minions but the minions are rational in their calculation that their power derives from Maino’s power. And ultimately Maino’s power flows from the mentality of Indians. Until that changes, India will not be free.

Related Post: I have written on the matter of Rahul Gandhi (Raul Vinci) and how he is not to be blamed. “In Defense of Village Idiots.” Nearly two years ago, in Jan 2010.

1. Retail is an essential service in any economy.

2. Organized retail is a good thing in any sufficiently large economy.

3. Organized retail requires investment, in terms of capital and human resources.

4. Foreign investment augments domestic investments and is good for the economy.

5. India needs an efficient retail sector.

6. India’s domestic resources are insufficient for creating an efficient retail sector.

Therefore inflow of foreign investments in retail is good.

But what about the millions of small kirana store keepers? Some of those stores will no longer be viable. Some, not all. Some of the people currently in the unorganized retail sector will find employment in the organized retail sector. Fewer people will be needed for the same volume of retail — which is another way of saying that there will be labor efficiency gains. Increased efficiency also means higher wages in the retail sector. That is good news. But wait, there’s more.

A growing economy implies that the retail sector will also grow. Given sufficient growth, it could even be that the number employed in retail grows even with increased efficiency in retail.

It is a mistake to consider the economy as a static game. Economies are dynamic structures and it is possible to have changes that benefit some without hurting others. In other words, Pareto improvements are possible.

An example of this is the telecom sector. At one time, it was feared by some that increasing the efficiency of the sector will lead to unemployment among the current labor force. As it turned out, those fears were unfounded, since the growth in the economy, and therefore of the sector, saw an increase in employment together with higher wages. Not just that, it also led to cost decreases which are reflected in the low prices of telecom services we all enjoy.

The cost of retail is a wedge between the consumer and producer prices. Reducing the size of the wedge is good for everyone with the possible exception of those who gain from the inefficiencies of the current system. The losers will have to find alternative ways of making a living. But that is another story.

Even a casual glance at the present rule of India by an Italian and her family will convince you of the plausibility of my guess. Without help from the Singhs (don’t forget Diggy dear), the Mukerjees, the Chidambarams, et al, it would not be possible for the Italian lady to rule 1.2 billion Indians. These people are the proud inheritors of a long tradition of locals colluding with the foreigners to enrich themselves and the foreigners at the expense of the country.

Deva, deva. It’s all karma, neh!

PS: I don’t remember exactly where but I had heard a rumor that AB Vajpayee was instrumental in convincing the Italian lady to stay on. I hope it is not true.

PPS: I notice that I messed up the the title of the post. Instead of “gora” it should be “gori” since the adjective “gori” refers to a female.

To be very sure, I am not against Advani. From what I hear, he may be a fine person with a stellar CV and a spotless character. Good for him and all that, but the truth is that there are others with equally impressive credentials — and equally unlikely to impress the voters sufficiently to vote the BJP/NDA to power.

I am not for or against Advani. For that matter, I am not even for or against the BJP. What I am definitely against is the Congress/UPA/Gandhi-Maino Dynasty/Manmohan Singh combine. I am against the whole bunch of thieving cretins because they are hell-bent on destroying India.

If Advani could lead the BJP/NDA to power at the center, I would be cheering him on in the streets of Delhi. But he does not have a snowball’s chance in hell of helping the BJP come to power. If under his leadership the BJP suffered a defeat in 2009, in the next one the BJP will suffer a resounding defeat of the kind — as they say in Hindi — that naani yaad dila daygi.

The direction India was headed in 2003-4 was promising and prosperous. That all changed with the UPA in 2004. India started a U-turn back towards Nehruvian socialism, which is a tried and trusted method of impoverishing a nation. Thanks to the BJP and their incompetency, the Congress came back to power in 2009 and UPA-2 continued the regression. All the gains that India had made during the NDA rule were given up and India is now poised to fail miserably. India cannot afford another Congress/UPA government. If they come back to power, it would be game set and match for India. It would be over and all that would remain is for the fat lady to sing.

I appreciate the compulsions that Advani has. He has longed to be the PM for donkey’s years. He wants a turn at the steering wheel. It would be an immense disappointment to him if he never gets there. More importantly, his family members must be eager to see him fulfill his ambition because that would allow them further opportunities: ambition is contagious.

But at what cost, I ask you. Should a person’s ambition blind him to reality? Should the future of India be jeopardized — which it surely will if Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi and her brood continue the rape of the land — merely to satisfy the personal ambitions of an old man?

Yes, Advani is old. Too old to take on the burden of hauling a country out of a deep hole. India needs not just someone with a great CV but also someone who can put in the 18-hour days, work under relentless pressure, make very tough choices, face up to ruthless enemies at home and abroad, be brave to say it like it is, be a beacon of hope, deliver a vision that motivate Indians to do what has to be done, and more.

Advani is not being served well by this advisers and his family members if they are fueling his continued ambition to be the PM. History will judge him very unkindly if his attempt ultimately results in the continuance of Maino/UPA rule and India’s inevitable decline.

Advani is no doubt held in high regard by many people, both within and outside the Sangha Parivar. Indeed, I myself have immense respect for him. However that respect does not prevent me from seeing that he could be instrumental in Maino/UPA victory in the next general elections.

I beg of you, Mr Advani, for the sake of the nation, please go. I beg you in the name of all that is holy and good and decent, please go. Please go because we would like to remember you as a patriot who worked tirelessly for the country and did what is right for the country, and not as someone who sacrificed the country in the vain hope of being the PM for a few years.

Much of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition. However, the focus on error does not denigrate human intelligence, any more than the attention to diseases in medical texts denies good health. Most of us are healthy most of the time, and most of our judgments and actions are appropriate most of the time. As we navigate our lives, we normally allow ourselves to be guided by impressions and feelings, and the confidence we have in our intuitive beliefs and preferences is usually justified. But not always. We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.

So this is my aim for watercooler conversations: improve the ability to identify and understand errors of judgment and choice, in others and eventually in ourselves, by providing a richer and more precise language to discuss them. In at least some cases, an accurate diagnosis may suggest an intervention to limit the damage that bad judgments and choices often cause.

I note that Kahneman stresses the importance of having a vocabulary to discuss the matter of thinking. I have long believed that a rich vocabulary is indispensable for advancing our understanding of the world.

Kahneman received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2002. The prize would have been certainly shared with his long-time collaborator, Amos Tversky, but for the unfortunate fact that Tversky died in 1996.

Kahneman writes

Amos and I spent several years studying and documenting biases of intuitive thinking in various tasks—assigning probabilities to events, forecasting the future, assessing hypotheses, and estimating frequencies.

In the fifth year of our collaboration, we presented our main findings in Science magazine, a publication read by scholars in many disciplines. The article (which is reproduced in full at the end of this book) was titled “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” It described the simplifying shortcuts of intuitive thinking and explained some 20 biases as manifestations of these heuristics—and also as demonstrations of the role of heuristics in judgment.

Historians of science have often noted that at any given time scholars in a particular field tend to share basic assumptions about their subject. Social scientists are no exception; they rely on a view of human nature that provides the background of most discussions of specific behaviors but is rarely questioned. Social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality. Our article challenged both assumptions without discussing them directly. We documented systematic errors in the thinking of normal people, and we traced these errors to the design of the machinery of cognition rather than to the corruption of thought by emotion.

Our article attracted much more attention than we had expected, and it remains one of the most highly cited works in social science (more than three hundred scholarly articles referred to it in 2010). Scholars in other disciplines found it useful, and the ideas of heuristics and biases have been used productively in many fields, including medical diagnosis, legal judgment, intelligence analysis, philosophy, finance, statistics, and military strategy.

For example, students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public’s mind while others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common. For several weeks after Michael Jackson’s death, for example, it was virtually impossible to find a television channel reporting on another topic. In contrast, there is little coverage of critical but unexciting issues that provide less drama, such as declining educational standards or overinvestment of medical resources in the last year of life.

My interest in the matter of thinking and biases is motivated by my interest in understanding the political system of India. The way Indians think must have a systematic effect on what kind of government India has — and thus has a fundamental bearing on India’s poverty.

This line by Kahneman — “It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media” — resonates with me because I am convinced that the Indian media is not independent. The authoritarian nature of the Indian government is not fully appreciated. But let’s move on.

Micheal Lewis has a nice article in the Dec 2011 issue of Vanity Fair on Kahneman and his book — “The King of Human Error”

Kahneman is a professor emeritus at Princeton, but, as it turned out, he lived during the summers with his wife, Anne Treisman, another well-known psychologist, near my house in Berkeley. Four years ago I summoned the nerve to write him an e-mail, and he invited me for a safe date, a cup of coffee. I found his house on the top of our hill. He opened the door wearing hiking shorts and a shirt not tucked into them, we shook hands, and I said something along the lines of what an honor it was to meet him. He just looked at me a little strangely and said, “Ah, you mean the Nobel. This Nobel Prize stuff, don’t take it too seriously.” He then plopped down into a lounge chair in his living room and began to explain to me, albeit indirectly, why he took such an interest in human unreason. His laptop rested on a footstool and a great many papers and books lay scattered around him. He was then 73 years old. It was tempting to describe him as spry, but the truth is that he felt more alert and alive than most 20-year-olds.

He was working on a book, he said. It would be both intellectual memoir and an attempt to teach people how to think. As he was the world’s leading authority on his subject, and a lot of people would pay hard cash to learn how to think, this sounded promising enough to me. He disagreed: he was certain his book would end in miserable failure. He wasn’t even sure that he should be writing a book, and it was probably just a vanity project for a washed-up old man, an unfinished task he would use to convince himself that he still had something to do, right up until the moment he died. Twenty minutes into meeting the world’s most distinguished living psychologist I found myself in the strange position of trying to buck up his spirits. But there was no point: his spirits did not want bucking up. Having spent maybe 15 minutes discussing just how bad his book was going to be, we moved on to a more depressing subject. He was working, equally unhappily, on a paper about human intuition—when people should trust their gut and when they should not—with a fellow scholar of human decision-making named Gary Klein. Klein, as it happened, was the leader of a school of thought that stressed the power of human intuition, and disagreed with the work of Kahneman and Tversky. Kahneman said that he did this as often as he could: seek out people who had attacked or criticized him and persuade them to collaborate with him. He not only tortured himself, in other words, but invited his enemies to help him to do it. “Most people after they win the Nobel Prize just want to go play golf,” said Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology at Princeton and a disciple of Amos Tversky’s. “Danny’s busy trying to disprove his own theories that led to the prize. It’s beautiful, really.”

And now back to reading TFaS.

From the individual’s purely utilitarian point of view, dishonesty is individually profitable but only in the short run. In the long run, a dishonest person interacting in a population of honest people will be found out and have to suffer the cost of being an outcast. But what if being dishonest is a population characteristic and not merely limited to a few individuals?

A population that does not have the habit of being honest will end up being materially poor. (I am leaving aside for the moment the moral argument for being honest not because it is not important but rather that even the utilitarian argument is sufficient to establish the need for being honest.) The short argument for why this is so is that dishonest people end up not cooperating, and the outcome is that of a repeated multi-player prisoner’s dilemma game. When people don’t cooperate, gains from mutual trade are not obtained. With time, losses accumulate and impoverishes the society.

It is good for a population to be honest because then people can trust each other, which is important because trust forms the foundation of beneficial economic activities. Being honest is materially good (regardless of whether it is spiritually elevating.)

I have been talking to groups of college students about India’s development recently. I have asked them to ponder these questions. Why does India have dishonest politicians? What does it say about us that the dishonesty of public figures is routinely publicly paraded and yet there is no outrage? Why is it that these dishonest people continue to hold on to their public office even after it is general knowledge that they are corrupt and dishonest?

I then ask them to consider this proposition: India is ruled by seriously dishonest politicians because Indian are collectively a very dishonest people. Needless to say, often that does not go down too well. Responses vary, from the defensive — “But we do take action against dishonestly. See the Anna Hazare movement?” — to the neutral — “But even in other countries you have dishonest politicians. The US, for example.”– to the belligerent — “You hate India.”

Evidently we Indians have our pride. My gripe is that we are not proud enough. We should be too proud to be ruled by thieving cretins. We should not stand for them to rule over us for even a day.

In February, I met Arvind Kejriwal of the Indians Against Corruption group. Rajesh Jain and I were both in Delhi and we took the opportunity to talk to Arvind about what should be done. Arvind talked about his Jan Lokpal Bill. I said that adding another layer of laws and another massive layer of bureaucracy would not do much. What would you do, Arvind asked. I suggested that we should gather 50,000 people and sit around the appointed prime minister’s house, and demand that since he has presided over corruption, he should resign. It sends a signal that anyone in that position should be prepared to be honest or leave.

I said that instead of fighting corruption, we have to make it personal and name a corrupt person in a position of authority and make an example of him. Just sit peacefully outside MMS’s house, make sure that he is immobilized. That tactic is being used in places — Occupy Wall Street, for example.

I have always believed that dishonesty starts at the top. If the top guy is corrupt, the one’s below him become corrupt. Or, corruption at any level points to corruption at the next higher level. MMS’s ministers are corrupt? Then it means that MMS is corrupt. And if MMS is corrupt, that means MMS’s boss is corrupt. (MMS’s boss is the Grand Panjandrum and no one is above it.)

MMS is a despicably dishonest person. But he has been the prime minister for years. That means that Indians are alright with it. I conclude that Indians are dishonest since it cannot be that the people are honest but the leaders are not.

Take the recent case of one Ms Sagarika Ghose. She pretended to her audience that she was conducting a live debate when in truth one of participants of this “live debate” was not present live. She actively deceived her audience. Will she be shunned by that audience? Will she be taken to the cleaners and hung out to dry? Not likely. The audience will be there, willingly and happily giving her their attention even after being informed that she lied to them and manipulated them.

(What’s the difference between a lying TV journalist and catfish? One is an ugly bottom-feeding lowlife scavenger and the other is a fish.)

For more on the deplorable mendacity of Sagarika Ghose, see Media Crooks’ article:

I have said often that it’s not possible to hide in the tech-age. Faster than she could say SriSri people on Twitter quickly pointed out the recorded interview of SriSri being misused by Sagarika on her programme. She later tweeted that it was a bug and that FTN will carry a full apology to the viewers and to SriSri. I believe one can apologise for a mistake or an error. This was neither a mistake nor an error but wilful deception. The apology can pass but if Rajdeep Sardesai has any moral decency left in him he has to let his deputy editor go. Willingly perpetrating a fraud on the viewers is not a mistake that can be covered up by an apology. It is far too serious a crime. It is time for Rajdeep, the Managing Editor, to sack Sagarika.

Did she really tweet that it was a bug? A bug as in something that crept into the code by mistake? That she was not aware that she was lying? That’s called a habit of lying. A habitual liar does it without being consciously aware of it.

Jeebus, that takes the cake. Now she says this:

Tweeple, I’ve repeatedly apologised, on web, TV, Sri Sriji has graciously forgiven us, now the endless abuse is verging on harassment pls

Clue to Sagarika Ghose: SriSri is not the only injured party. Your audience is at the receiving end of your mendacity. What have you done to demonstrate your contrition? Merely apologized. Endless abuse you say? Well, you are aware that you were on a program watched by a pretty large number of people. Can’t stand the heat — then get out of the kitchen. Take time off from strutting about as if you are above it all.

The original act of deception was bad enough. The cover-up apologies nauseate. She spreads the blame. She does not write, “. . . has forgiven me . . .” but instead ” . . . has forgiven us . . . ” Does she have frogs in her pocket that she refers to herself in the plural?

Anyway, back to the question of honesty. No body is perfect. I am myself not Satyavan. Even so I don’t brazen it out. When I am less than honest, I am acutely aware of it and feel ashamed of my weakness — for the strong don’t have to be dishonest. Therein lies the problem. Dishonesty is a sign of weakness. India has become weak and Indians have become dishonest. Which came first? I think dishonesty came first; and weakness followed. I am reminded of Oliver Goldsmith’s words–

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:

As long as foreigners and their lackeys (such as the TV anchors and “journalists”) rule the roost, India will continue to suffer the ills of dishonesty. Where does it go from here? How do we acquire a habit of honesty? I think it will happen when an honest person leads India. Somehow sufficient number of honest people will have to come together to demand change. Perhaps then we can reverse India’s descent into deepening poverty.

Related Post: The Habit of Being Honest. Feb 2011.

I think my propositions are quite reasonable. In fact I think they are reasonable to the extent of being self-evidently true and there should be little debate about their validity. So why did some in the audience find some of my assertions wrong?

There could be many reasons for that. One of the fundamental reasons could be that economists think differently from the general public. Economists talk at a level of abstraction which is hard for non-economists to follow. I remember quite vividly how I reacted when I first came across economic models which reduced all the complexity of the world of production to three factors of land, labor and capital — and in some cases to just land and labor.

Economists even end up producing widgets using nothing other than labor. How could that exercise be illuminating in the least way? Yet surprisingly that kind of seemingly simple-minded modeling is extremely useful.

Students of law are trained to know the details of the set of existing laws, and to take specific real world situations and apply the laws to argue their cases. There’s a specificity in that kind of work which is very useful to them but when it comes to economic reasoning, getting bogged down in details is the worst barrier to comprehension.

Last evening once again revealed a puzzle which really evades my comprehension. Why don’t some people intuitively understand the value of freedom? Why don’t they see that being free is a good in itself? Why do they bend to the will of others so willingly?

We live in an imperfect world in which we need to make compromises. To avoid anarchy, we have to compromise and allow for a government. But recognizing that government is a necessary evil, we should seek to keep it at a minimum. Yet some people believe that the problems of our society require more government rather than less.

In India, people have been fed too much socialism and it has become second nature to them. They cannot imagine a world of freedom from government interference and control of their lives. Our greatest challenge is simply this: how do we awaken the desire for freedom of our people?

The good news is that philosophically Indians are tolerant. Our dharmic traditions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism — are founded on the idea of tolerance and acceptance (unlike the Abrahamic faiths which are intolerant and exclusive.) It will be easier for us to cross over to the side of freedom (libertarianism) because tolerance is part of our existing mental make-up.

Human freedom is inextricably bound with tolerance. As Milton Friedman argued (see the video), the foundation of liberatarianism is tolerance.

Have fun watching Uncle Friedman.

Seven billion people. That means every year humans collectively experience 7 billion years. In just two years, the collective subjective experience exceeds the estimated age of the universe of 13.5 billion years.

Indians constitute around a sixth of the world’s population. India produces a lot of people every year. Sadly, India produces a lot of poor people because of two factors. First, there are a lot of poor people to begin with. Even if the poor people reproduced at the same rate as the non-poor, the absolute number of poor people born would be higher than the number born to the non-poor. Second, the poor breed relatively faster. Together these two factors ensure that India is tops the list of countries that produce poor people.

India is the largest producer of poor people in the world. I stress that point because too often the impression people have is that the poor magically appear as if by divine intervention. That is not so. The poor reproduce, they breed. I know the word “breed” is not very generous or polite. It’s an ugly word generally used in the context of non-human animals but poverty is an ugly thing and dressing it up as something pretty is not going to be very useful.

India breeds poverty. There are various causes of poverty, and a variety of factors affect the incidence and severity of poverty. Natural calamities, for example, could lead to poverty. Bad governance and flawed economic policies also breed poverty. But one of the prime requirements for the persistence of poverty is poor people. Poverty is inherited and it runs in the family.

Poverty, like illiteracy, can be cured by curing one entire generation of the malady. The children of illiterate parents are at a significantly greater danger of being illiterate than the children of literate parents. Having poor parents contributes more to one’s poverty than any other single factor.

Life is a random draw and one cannot choose one’s parents any more than one can choose one’s time and place of birth. No individual can be held responsible for the hand that nature and circumstances deal him or her. But collectively society is responsible for its poverty or prosperity.

The good news is that societies can and do change for the better provided it gets good leadership. Leadership is endogenous to society but in some instances due to some external shocks it can get leaders that it does not deserve.

The best we can do is pray for an external shock. Certainly praying is as effective as not praying. We pray only in the face of all despair. Still, unlikely events do happen. And given sufficient time, low probability events happen.

I think India will have an external shock soon. More about that the next time.

That’s integrity. That was then, this is now.

We hear of a team of very celebrated people around Anna Hazare fighting corruption vociferously. A noble cause and no doubt the people who are demanding public officials be not corrupt are themselves not corrupt. But wait! What’s this we hear that one member of the team has been fudging the numbers a bit and claiming reimbursement for travel expenses that were not actually incurred?

Ms Bedi, it appears, does not deny that her office inflated the bills but claims that she was doing it for a good cause. She says that the money taken under false pretexts was for some NGO. Sweet. Take from the rich and use it for . . . who knows what. Besides, she can always claim that it wasn’t she who took the money but someone else working below decks in her great big organization. She can’t be held responsible for people working for her, can she?

In any case, people who take money from others by misrepresenting the facts should hardly be talking too loudly about honesty and probity.

The louder she talked of her honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

McCarthy is a hero of sorts to me. In the 1990s, I had briefly corresponded with him on some matter related to computer science. Unfortunately, I have lost copies of that exchange of emails. Recently though I wrote to him to say that I continue to admire the wisdom contained in his signature line: “Those who refuse to do arithmetic are doomed to speak nonsense.” He replied.

I think that much of the world’s troubles spring from that singular failing — the inability or the reluctance to do arithmetic. We would all be better off if we learned how to do arithmetic. More importantly, we would all be better off if those who make public policy did a bit of arithmetic.

To be very clear, by doing arithmetic I mean doing basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division on numbers — things one should have learned in primary school. You don’t need to solve partial differential equations or compute the third derivative of some complex functions. Just plain old-fashioned arithmetic which often does not even require paper and pencil. All you have to do is to get ball-park estimates of costs and benefits of some proposed course of action.

Steve Jobs no doubt had a pretty large impact on the world but my sense is that people like Ritchie and McCarthy make a more profound difference to the world in the long run. Jobs brings a new shiny ball to the game but the McCarthys of the world change the rules of the game for the better.

Goodbye Prof McCarthy. I will never shirk from doing arithmetic and forever be on guard against speaking nonsense.

I have had better service in the cattle class of Asian airlines than what Lufthansa provides in their business class. It’s a shame. But what’s a real crying shame is that they have put lousy 20-year old design seats in one of the world’s most modern planes.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote in my “A Letter from California — 5″ of this week, for the record.

This is the fifth in the series “A letter from California.” Strictly speaking though, this is not a letter from California since I am in India. I arrived at the Chattrapati Shivaji International Airport in the early hours of Thursday the 13th of October. So this is a letter from Mumbai. Indeed, the next few letters will be perforce from India, and not from California.

It is good to be back in the old country. There’s always a primal connection with the land of one’s birth, the home of one’s ancestors. India will always be home – or at least as much as any place can be called home for an essentially homeless person like me. Since I roam around the world a lot, any place I unpack my suitcase is home. Not exactly home sweet home but home nonetheless.

I must have arrived at the Mumbai international airport around 35 times, and I have grown accustomed to the routine. The final minute of the flight before it lands is over a huge expanse of slums, reminding you that you are arriving at a major city of a Third World country. Among the many descriptions of Mumbai there’s one which describes it as “an overgrown slum.” Unfortunately it is too true.

As soon as one gets off the plane and enters the jetway, the first thing that hits you is the heat and the humidity. The second thing is the smell: a mix of disinfectant (I think it is phenyl) and the smell of urine. Why this is so, I have never been able to figure out. The third thing you notice is that the lighting is an unattractive florescent and dim. The journey from the US to India takes you across time and space: 10,000 miles and around 100 years. The journey also crosses an ideological divide: from capitalism to socialism.

The first point of contact that an arriving passenger has with an Indian official is at immigration control. They are a surly bunch. Not the least hint of a welcome on their faces, not a hello escapes their lips. I start with a “Namaste” as I hand in my passport. They silently take it and do their thing. After a bit, silently they return the passport, duly stamped on some random page. Perhaps it is the lateness of the hour that explains the unfriendly attitude. But perhaps it has something to do with India being a socialist country.

I cannot help comparing this to what I have experienced when I enter the US, an evil capitalist country. The man or the woman at the immigration counter generally starts off with a smile and a “How are you, sir ?” This is then followed with some small talk, and a few questions such as “How long have you been away ?” and “What do you do ?” I usually answer, “I am at UC Berkeley.” That gets a response like, “Great school. You are lucky.” And the short encounter ends with a “Welcome home, sir.”

All this can be dismissed as superficial and unimportant. But I believe that common courtesy does make a difference. Official India is not interested in being nice because they don’t have to be nice. Official India is not there to serve you, but rather to rule over you. That’s the socialist way and in any socialist paradise, there’s no need to ease things with a smile since things are perfect anyway.

The French are notorious for their rudeness. But I think Official India beats them handsomely. And talking of the French, I have to tell you that the worst service you get on an airline has to be Air France. “Air Chance” is another name for it. I once had a long conversation with a flight attendant on an Air France flight. She said that it was shameful how the cabin crew behave on most Asian airlines: they are forever at the beck and call of the passengers. On Air France, the cabin crew had better things to do than to take care of passengers.

Official rudeness is a symptom of a deeper problem. It is like a bad smell that tells you that something within is rotten. Just the other day, I was reminded of this by a very astute leader. He said that good governance is revealed in the way the conductor in a government bus treats you. How that government employee behaves with the passengers on his bus tells you a lot more about the quality of the government than the state of the bus station.

Good governance is about how government employees — from the minister on down to the clerk at the post office — consider to be their primary objective and function: to serve the citizens. Good governance is distinct from development. Development is about the infrastructure. Good governance precedes development, and is the more important bit.

Think about it.

Now I can say for sure that my book, “Transforming India”, has been read by at least two people. How do I know that? Because two people have recently written about it. My sincere appreciation for the reviews. Selected bits from them, below the fold.

Let’s start with the review by “The Third Eye”. (Dated Sept 11th. Coincidence? I think not.)

Atanu rightly argues that the key component for economic development is freedom. This is not just political freedom which India gained in 1947 but also personal and economic freedom. In the post-independent socialist milieu, the government decided what people should produce, buy and consume. While we have liberalized our economic landscape, much needs to be done as the government still controls large swathes of the economy such as education, transportation and telecommunications. Indians’ personal freedoms continue to be curtailed in the name of national security. Websites and books are periodically banned. The irony is that the government thinks that the people are smart enough to vote them in but not smart enough to decide what to read.

Most of the ideas in the book are familiar territory – privatizing education and railways, promoting urbanization, favoring railways over roadways and airlines and solar energy over fossil fuels. Since he is an economist, Atanu tries to analyze the problem using a systems approach by identifying the feedback loops and the linkages. However his book is almost two years late with Nandan Nilekani’s “Imagining India” having beaten him to the finish line. Nilekani deals with mostly the same ideas and in much greater depth.

I think that Nilekani’s book and my book belong to different genres. Nilekani’s book is a tremendous work of staggering proportions, of famous people and their views, full of interesting details that you can get engrossed in for days and make you the center of attention at cocktail parties. It is 500+ pages of carefully researched writing, professional editing and first class printing. It is a reference work of considerable heft. You have to be a Nandan Nilekani to write a book like that.

Here’s how different the two books are. It took me about the same time to read Nilekani’s book as to write my book. Chew on that for a bit.

Mine is narrowly focused on what went wrong with India’s development, why it went wrong, and what we should be doing to get on with the program. You can read my book in one sitting — a bathroom book, if you get my drift. It’s the kind of book that you pick up on a whim at the airport, and at the end of the flight, you are ready for something else to read. You can pass on my book to a friend and not worry that he may not return it for you to proudly display it on your coffee table for visitors to admire your obvious good taste in reading serious books of great social value.

My book is modestly priced and has no pictures on the cover. It is slim because if I were to go ask important people for an interview, they will not even bother replying to my emails. It is a book of ideas, which of course anyone can come up with just by sitting and thinking hard for a bit. There is one central idea in my book and it is this: economic policies made by a colonial government do not spell economic growth and development. Now you don’t have to read my book to understand that point. But if you do, you will see that we have to do something about them policies that keep India at the bottom of the economic barrel.

I should pause here to make a crucial distinction between privatization and liberalization. I really don’t care if a sector is privatized or not. Privatization is the selling of public enterprises to the private sector. What matters is whether the sector is liberalized — that is, whether the private sector is allowed to compete on a level playing field. Merely privatizing a public sector monopoly, for instance, does no good; it just becomes a private sector monopoly and the same dead-weight losses obtain as before. Liberalization, in contradistinction, increases competition in the market and that is what leads to welfare improvements.

Anyway, here’s TTE’s view of the idea of “United Voters of India” (for details of UVI, start with this.)

However I can think of atleast one major flaw with the UVI idea. The decisions of the UVI are selected democratically. Since UVI is based on hijacking the democratic process, it in turn is susceptible to hijacking in the same fashion. So a political party can infiltrate its agents within the UVI forcing it to take decisions that are in its favor.

UVI is not about hijacking anything, leave alone the democratic process. The idea is to vote strategically by collectively voting for that party or candidate that comes closest to an ideal.

And one final point. TTE writes,

My views about India’s governments are not as virulent or pessimistic as Atanu’s. The founding fathers were mostly ignorant on policy matters and did not go out of their way to oppress their fellow citizens. We did have a stroke of misfortune though – in our hatred for Britain, we ran into the arms of the Soviet Union and in turn embraced their disastrous ideas and policies. The Godfather was right – “Never hate your enemies, it clouds your judgement”.

I realize that TTE is using a metaphorical “we” above. He does not literally mean that you and I embraced Soviet-style socialism. But I must stress the point that it is not some diffused bunch of randomly selected nameless people that made the choices on behalf of the hundreds of millions of Indian — it was a handful of well known people led by one authoritarian gentleman who made the disastrous decisions. Perhaps they acted out of ignorance but it is more likely that they acted out of self-interest because socialist economic polices requires authoritarian rule and this the aforementioned gentleman was most eager to deliver.

TTE uses the phrase “stroke of misfortune.” It was not a misfortune, it was a disaster. (Churchill explained the difference between a misfortune and a disaster thusly: “If Benjamin Disreali falls into the Thames, that’s a misfortune; if someone pulls him out, that’s a disaster.”)

Moving on, let’s take a look at my friend Shashi Shekhar’s column in The Pioneer of Sept 25th, “Engaging with Indian Voters.” He generously mentions my book.

In his recent book titled Transforming India, blogger and economist Atanu Dey proposes an interesting construct for such non-sectarian political engagement. Atanu Dey calls for a voluntary association, ‘United Voters of India’, that functions as a lobby of sorts to pressure political parties and Government to make policies consistent with what he describes as “Pretty Good Principle”. Atanu Dey’s UVI is not much unlike what Mr Arun Shourie calls a “Lobby for Excellence” in his book We must have no price. Where Mr Shourie stops short of spelling out what the lobby of excellence must do, Atanu Dey is quite forthright in what he believes the UVI to be — a vote-bank of urban educated voters. The Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi led India Against Corruption movement could come close to being such a vote bank that Atanu Dey envisions. The upcoming Lok Sabha bypoll in Haryana for the Hissar constituency will likely tell us much if the IAC can be such a vote-bank that Atanu Dey envisions or if it will reduce itself to a negative force that merely knows how to say no, but hasn’t quite figured out how to engage by saying yes.

A riveting point Atanu Dey makes in his book is that any urban middle class vote bank like the UVI must not be apolitical. He sees the vote-bank as a means to change politics in India by becoming part of the political process. Atanu Dey’s book is an easy read. The pretty good principles are clearly stated that should appeal to the common sense of any urban middle class Indian. The book also stands out for its clarity on the kind of economic choices Middle India must make in the pursuit of its own enlightened self-interests. In the respect Atanu Dey’s book is quite similar to one other book by Sanjeev Sabhlok titled Breaking Free from Nehru that makes a case for economic freedom as a basis for political engagement in India.

I like Shashi’s incisive writing. But I have a confession to make. The stuff he wrote above the bits that I quoted here went right over my head. I will have to ask him to explain it to me the next time I see him. Better yet, go read it and explain it to me in a comment to this post.

Thanks. That’s it. Bye for now. See you later.

PS (stands for Parting Shot, not Post Script):

Disraeli (running his hand over Churchill’s bald head): Why Winston, your pate feels just like my wife’s bottom!

Churchill (doing the same to himself): So it does, Benjamin!

The statistics are horrifying. Bomb blasts — 3,486 or approximately one a day for 10 years. Over 21 thousand civilian casualties. Billions of dollars worth of damages. The Religion of Peace working its magic in the Land of the Pure. That’s the only reasonable conclusion one can draw from looking around the world. Wherever the Religion of Peace is present, the results are not pretty. Anyway, here’s a video ad which, according to some, CNN refused to carry.

It reaches stratospheric heights of stupidity. It is as if sponsoring terrorism around the world was not enough; it had to be compounded with an insane claim that Pakistan is actually the guardian of 7 billion people of the world. What next? Will the Pakistani government publish an ad telling the world how it supports the US with military and humanitarian aid? Will there be an ad claiming that it liberated Bangladesh from India’s evil clutches? An ad perhaps talking of how humanely it treats it non-Muslim citizens?

Here’s my conspiracy theory. (I seemed to have misplaced my tin-foil hat.) Perhaps the ad was a parody intended to draw attention to the horrors that the world suffers at the hands of Islamic terrorism by pointing to its effects on the soil where it springs from. Perhaps it was inserted by a group intent on defaming (if that is possible) Pakistan and by extension the Religion of Peace. As Congress big-wig Mullah Digvijay Singh would say, “The RSS hand cannot be ruled out in this — or in any of the other terrorist attacks by the Religion of Peace.”

Well, whatever. Perhaps it was the RSS which paid for the ad. They are unclear about it in Pakistan. The WSJ tried to figure out the provenance of the ad and did not get far. “Who Was Behind Pakistan’s 9/11 WSJ Ad?”

Pakistan’s officialdom is proving reluctant to take responsibility for dreaming up a half-page advertisement taken out in The Wall Street Journal last weekend to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. . . One Pakistani government official said the idea for the ad came from the army’s public relations division . . . Brigadier Syed Azmat Ali, a spokesman for the division, denied the army was behind the idea and said it was the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting who came up with it. The Information Ministry did not respond to questions.

The government official said the army pushed the idea through the office of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, which then passed it on to the Information ministry.

Attempts to contact a spokesman for Mr. Gilani were not successful.

The official said a number of people in Pakistan’s government questioned the ad . . . The ad was created by Midas Pakistan Pvt. Ltd, an ad agency which has worked with the military before, the government official said. It was not possible to contact the company through phone numbers listed on its website. . . The Pakistan army also attempted to place the ad in the New York Times. A spokeswoman for the newspaper said the newspaper had asked for the ad to more clearly state that the government of Pakistan was paying for it.

The Times did not hear back from the ad agency that placed the ad and has not yet run it, the spokeswoman said. She declined to name the agency.

The Army says it must be the information ministry. Information ministry says not us, perhaps the PM’s office. PM’s office says no comment. Ad agency not responding and when asked by the NY Times to clarify who is paying for the ad, goes silent.

I think that forces inimical to Pakistan’s interests are at work here. The Paki government is malicious and murderous but it is not this stupid. I agree with Diggy Singh — the RSS hand cannot be ruled out. This is not so off the wall crazy as you may think. Many followers of the Religion of Peace insist that all those suicide bombings and flying of planes into tall buildings and other acts of terror are done by Jews and their evil cohorts (the Hindoos) just to give the Religion of Peace a bad name.

Then another thought struck me. Perhaps it was Diggy Singh who paid for the ad. Perhaps he is the one who wants Pakistan to appear ridiculous.

Wait, wait, let me finish. The conspiracy theory goes deeper. Diggy Singh is a mole that the RSS has planted in the Congress. He makes the Congress look ridiculous — which you have to admit must be a nearly impossible task since, as we noted before, it is hard to ridicule the utterly ridiculous.

Now it all starts to make sense to me. Diggy Singh is an RSS agent. He makes the most outlandish statements that are designed to outrage any sane person and turn him or her against the Congress. Painting on a wider canvass, Diggy Singh decides to paint Pakistan in greener colors to show the world that there is the source of world-wide terror. He sneakily pays for the ads in the WSJ and when he tries to put it in the NY Times, he fails.

A theory does not amount to a hill of beans unless you can come up with predictions. Falsifiability, as Karl Popper reminded us all, is the hallmark of a valid scientific theory. Since this is a scientific theory of mine, here is my prediction.

One of these days soon, you will see an ad in the WSJ and the NY Times. What will be message be? Using the format as the Pakistani ad it will say essentially this:

Since 1947
a party of Nehru and Gandhi
has been ruling
A country of 1.2 billion today
where
Poverty and Corruption is rampant
with
700 million below the poverty line
and
Corruption in the trillions of dollars
in Foreign Banks
In a land where 50 percent of its children below 5 are malnourished
Where
the every scheme for poverty
is named after Nehru and Gandhi (Indira, Rajiv, Sanjay. . .)
The CONGRESS PARTY
Which other party could have brought so much in terms of
PROGRESS?
Tens of trillions of dollars lost since 1947.
Sixty-four years and counting.

That’s about it. The game is up. Diggy Singh is an RSS mole.

PS: Don’t miss the next post, “Digvijay Singh, the Demented Demagogue“.

A proper study of economics teaches humility. We are limited beings: our rationality is bounded, our knowledge finite, our information local, our comprehension imperfect. Attempts at the grand design to reach the commanding heights are guaranteed to fail. Look behind any economy that has failed to develop, and you will see the dead hand of powerful ignoramuses throttling the living.

India figured prominently in the development economics course as a case study of how a potentially rich country has been engineered to be desperately poor. It is a demoralizing tale of how people are trapped into poverty because of their bad luck of having been born into system which is designed to be poor.

India’s poverty is engineered, it is by design.

Two fun facts about India stand out starkly. First, India is a very poor country, and second, India is a very corrupt country. But note that while the average Indian is definitely poor by contemporary world standards, the average Indian is not any more morally bankrupt than the average human. Although I don’t have any hard evidence, I am convinced that Indians are at least average when it comes to honesty, intelligence, diligence, social capital, and the rest of it. So how do one explain India’s poverty and corruption? Is one the cause and the other the consequence? Which came first? Or is there another hidden variable which is the cause of these two?

It is my belief that the hidden variable is India’s lack of freedom. The stress is on “hidden” — Indians don’t know that they are really not free. There is a lot of talk about India having attained freedom in 1947. But all that is really cheap talk. With regards to freedom, India is no more free than it was under the British Raj.

The evidence is overwhelming that India’s political leaders are uniformly corrupt. It cuts across political party lines. Public corruption is not contained in some specific geographic region. It is not bounded by linguistic or religious divides. The percentage of criminals in the various state and central legislative bodies far exceed that in the general population. What’s more, that percentage has been increasing with time. And the magnitude of the corruption has also been increasing. The average corrupt deal was in tens of crores of rupees a couple of generations ago — small change compared to the deals these days which is counted in billions of dollars.

If Indians are not characteristically uniformly dishonest, how is it that India’s politicians are so acutely dishonest? Perhaps the system selects the most dishonest and the least principled.

Here’s how it works. The rewards of political power are enormous. Without loss of generality (as economists put it), let’s consider the position of an MP (member of parliament.) As an MP, a person has the opportunity to make $1 billion. Mind you, there’s no compulsion to actually make that amount of money — merely the opportunity. Now let’s ask who is likely to become an MP? Contesting the elections are A, B, C, and D. Of the four, Mr D is competent, honest, and hardworking. The rest are venal incompetent criminals. Mr D will not steal a penny if he were to become an MP, and therefore he cannot afford to spend more than whatever he can raise from his supporters. But A, B and C — they will make a $1 billion if elected. So they are willing to spend quite a bit of future loot, and this they can raise that from their cronies who will in essence be making an investment, the return on which they are assured post the elections.

The corrupt can outspend the honest in any elections because the former will recover the expenses (and more) upon assuming office. It should not come as a surprise that India has degenerated into a kakistocracy — rule by the most corrupt and the least principled.

It is the opportunity to make billions of dollars as an official of the government that is the proximate cause of the criminalization of the government. In turn, the proximate cause of the opportunity to make billions is that the government has control over vast areas of the economy. Being in government gives one immense discretionary powers — to grant or deny licences, to block and prevent legitimate economic activity, to extract rents wherever possible. The more powerful the government, the less power the people have. The larger the government, the less freedom the people have.

Dr Manmohan Singh was made the prime minister — not because of his competency as an executive (as evident as the testicles of an elephant) or his character (which is notable due to its absence) but because of his moral pliability and his ability to obey orders from his superiors without question. Removing him would be of little use because surely there are others who are equally compromised and would be happy to fill the chair.

Dr Singh rose to the top not because the people chose him but because the system is such that it selects the most corrupt. His boss is the most corrupt, and he in turn appoints corrupt officials. Dr Swamy has trained his guns on P Chidambaram as his next target. (Dr Swamy, hats off to you.)

The circus is in town. It is a three-ring circus. There’s Dr Singh’s boss as the Lion Tamer in the center ring below the big top. (Pardon the pun.) She takes home the biggest share. The side-show in ring number two is Civil Society — led by Anna Hazare. They are the dog and pony show. And in ring number three are the chimpanzees and the monkeys — the Dutts, Sardesais, etc — who pretend that they don’t belong to the circus but in truth are the ones who clean up the horse-shit and elephant droppings. (Where the elephants fit into this scheme, I leave it to the diligent reader.)

Everybody loves a good circus. It is a good distraction from the harsh realities of life — prices are rising, poverty is deepening, cities are increasingly becoming unlivable.

But the show can’t go on. We have to bring this to an end. There’s a way out and I will go into that in my next post. I promise.

“I think it would be an excellent idea.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Hauled from the archives:

THE POLITICS OF OBEDIENCE: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude

In this age of the interwebs (I love that portmanteau word combining internet and world wide web), you not only get to read the article, but if you care you can get to know how others feel about the story. The comments often illuminate the scene with a clarity that is a joy to behold. Here’s one comment (#214) by “sophie from Pasadena CA” that I have to share with you:

God, this story is so bizarre and interesting! The three stars: the amazonian maid, the rumply affable-seeming French man who could have ruled France, the beautiful wife with eyes that spell love. In the shadows: a bespectacled blonde Hungarian economist, Pablo Picasso, Bernard Henri Levi, the perfect Jewish lawyer,… It’s just manna. I mean, we all lie at the airport about having to make some urgent meeting…few of us actually have an appointment with Angela Merkel in a few hours.

And we have all experienced misery and joy. But, to experience such extreme ruin, being pilloried before the entire world and then such miraculous vindication, complete with a taped smoking gun phone call, (for some reason, I have identified with DSK throughout this storyline).

The truth is right on the surface and also impossible to grasp. Knowing the exact details of what happened is like asking exactly where was the atom at that moment in time. But, the macroscopic picture is very clear: a womanizer and a con artist meet in a hotel room. The air is cruel that day, the pathologies that have managed to stay below the surface rise into the open.

In the end, perhaps the most interesting aspect of this story is the lens it puts on ourselves. I have wondered why I have had such voracious interest in this story. I think it has to do with the upending of social categories, the thrill of seeing life at the very front of the herd mingle with life at the very back. “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and cat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.”

DSK was all set to become the next president of France. All that promise is gone, just because he could not keep his pants zipped up. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it.

Lots of people are still wondering what happened to Rajat Gupta. Renowned for his intelligence, ambition, hard work and achievements, he was the poster boy of the “IIT boy makes good” crowd. His fall from grace was fast, hard, and shocking. A friend sent me a link to a Forbes India article in an email with the subject line, “Rats fast abandoning the Rajat Gupta sinking ship”:

“How do you start a conversation with him? Do you say you’re sorry this happened or do you say, son-of-a bitch, look what you did?” asks Kanwal Rekhi, managing director of California-based Inventus Capital Partners and a friend of Gupta’s for 20 years.
. . .
Looking back, Rekhi recalls a negative trait about Gupta that suggested there was more to the man than meets the eye. “It was worrisome how Rajat always wanted to be centre stage at events such as those organised by Pan-IIT, which is a labour of love. If he didn’t get the spotlight, he often did not participate. But the lack of character and moral fibre — based on the taped conversation — wasn’t the Rajat I knew,” he says.
. . .
Vivek Wadhwa, senior research associate at Harvard Law School, says he has no words of support.

“He may or may not be guilty, but there is no forgiveness for his obvious lapse of ethics. He had no business talking to anyone after a board meeting, leave alone the head of a hedge fund. It’s shameful. I thought he was far, far higher than this,” Wadhwa says.
. . .
“I think Rajat is very smart, very thoughtful, very considerate, able to accommodate stakeholders’ perspectives and make events happen. The McKinsey partners loved him, people respected him, so let’s not judge him before the court does,” says Nitin Mehta, a California-based private investor and Gupta’s friend and former colleague at McKinsey, Europe. When asked how Gupta was holding up, Mehta said he had not spoken to him since the allegations.

Would you like another helping of schadenfreude?

Moving on, another email from the same aforementioned friend. “InfoShit to hit the fan” was the very clever subject line of the email which had this link to a blog post by a Don Tennant at ITBusinessedge.com about Infosys’s visa troubles in the US:

It has been a full four months since I began following developments relating to the visa fraud lawsuit against Infosys that was filed by Infosys employee and whistleblower Jay Palmer. Those developments, which include the U.S. government’s subsequent criminal investigation of the company’s operations, paint as unflattering a picture of an IT company as any I’ve seen in my 20 years of covering this industry. And I’ve seen some shameful pictures.

What’s unique in this case is the length to which Infosys, and especially company founder and outgoing chairman Narayana Murthy, have gone over the years to paint the company as a model of high values and corporate integrity. I’ve watched video after video of Murthy preaching about qualities like integrity and leadership, including one in 2008 in which he quoted Robert Kennedy (I couldn’t help but enjoy the irony of Murthy quoting a former U.S. attorney general, given what the feds would be investigating three years later). It all seems to have had an intoxicating effect on Infosys’ employees, who, I’ve come to learn, proudly call themselves “Infoscions.”

So that’s it. Lesser mortals like you and I neither soar so high nor fall so hard. The shame, the disgrace, the utter stupidity, the greed. But still, it’s just karma. There, but for the grace of the universe that created me utterly devoid of any ambition, go I.

This last one was taken around midnight.

Mrs Gandhi’s rule ended in a bad way. She had made a Faustian bargain and she had to pay. It’s always messy. The Nehru-Gandhi Dynasty continued to rule India. Rajiv Gandhi ruled for a bit. Things happened. And then Rajiv met his messy end. It was now becoming clear that as a member of that dynasty, you rise to undeserved power, impoverish the country for some years, and then meet a nasty end. (Dynastic dictators meet nasty ends, as I always say.)

Rajiv Gandhi’s wife, Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi, is the current dictator. She not only rules via proxy, she even speaks via proxy. Her son, Raul Vinci aka Rahul Gandhi, is a charming guy but is a few cans short of a six-pack. The lights are on but there’s no one at home. The top ranks of the Congress party do what they can to keep up the charade but I am not convinced that the slaves are ready for freedom.

Antonia Maino is alleged to have stashed away a few billion dollars in foreign banks. But if the past history of post-1947 dictators (which includes Nehru, I might add) is any indication of what lies ahead for her, I am afraid Maino’s exit is not going to be pretty. In the neighboring Islamic republics, the dictators end up either hanging or being killed in a coup d’état. In this (not quite but almost-Islamic) republic, it’s different but not too different.

In any event, Raul Vinci will become the prime minister. And then after his departure will be his sister. Then of course after her departure, her children.

The Dynasty will live on, and the slaves will continue their poor, nasty, brutish and short lives.

Related posts: Was Nehru a dictator? I think so. Part 1, Part 2. I despair. The Unbearably Sad Reality of India.

Agriculture needs reform. Only the severely deluded would expect MMS to deliver. The man is a statist, aside from being despicably dishonest, that is.

The costs of not liberalizing agriculture are there for all to see. As income of individuals has gone up so has the demand for food. Unlike telecom, agricultural commodity markets remain regulated. From farm gate to retailers, the government controls every single step: prices are “advised” by the commission for agricultural costs and prices and “set” by a cabinet committee. There is little scope for price discovery by economic agents. The results are in marked contrast: telecom services are dirt cheap; food is often so expensive that the poor have to go without it.

This story of failure is repeated in sector after sector. Perhaps, the biggest victim is industry where labour laws have ensured that manufacturing remains concentrated in very small firms that employ less than 25 persons. Big industries that can suck out unemployment have, at best, a scattered presence. The government has, now, proposed a solution: a manufacturing policy replete with incentives to be administered by bureaucrats. Were it not for the calendar, one could have mistaken the year as 1948 when the government embarked on a similar misadventure.

The 1948 “misadventure” (a nice euphemism for “total absolute fuckup that tragically destined a billion people to suffer unimaginable horrors of poverty and deprivation”) was the doing of Mr Jawaharlal Nehru. His spawn have carried that tradition forward and how!

Bad, clueless leadership is not confined to poor, impoverished third world countries alone. Even advanced industrialized countries can be subject to idiocy at high levels.

Russell Roberts of George Mason University explains, “Why Technology Doesn’t Destroy Jobs” in the Wall Street Journal.

Why do new jobs get created? When it gets cheaper to make food and clothing, there are more resources and people available to create new products that didn’t exist before. Fifty years ago, the computer industry was tiny. It was able to expand because we no longer had to have so many workers connecting telephone calls. So many job descriptions exist today that didn’t even exist 15 or 20 years ago. That’s only possible when technology makes workers more productive.

It’s true, there are some structural issues in the labor market. New jobs are being created but not at the usual pace and not fast enough to soak up the unemployed. But President Obama is wrong to blame innovation. A bigger problem is housing, where hundreds of thousands of workers have lost their jobs. The source of that problem isn’t technology but an over-reaching housing policy and distorted finance. The solution is to let the housing market clear—let interest rates rise, stop subsidizing mortgages, and clean up the foreclosure mess. That would let housing starts return to something like normal.

The other challenge is simply confidence. Businesses aren’t hiring because they’re uneasy about the future. There’s no easy way to instill confidence, but we know how to kill it—create uncertainty about taxes and regulations. Reducing that uncertainty would certainly help.

In the meanwhile, enjoy the ATM machine and the kiosk at the airport with a clear conscience. Doing more with less is the road to prosperity. When confidence returns, even more Americans will share in the bounty from innovation.

People confuse ends with means. Employment and jobs are means, not ends. I wrote about that in Dec 2005 in the Indian context. Go read “Employment versus Production.”

Production, rather than employment, should engage our policy makers more than it currently does. Why? Because if you don’t produce — irrespective of how many people you employ — you cannot distribute. Even if you distribute scanty production very evenly, you are left with a system that fails everyone.

Production is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a good economic system. Getting everyone employed, on the other hand, is neither a necessary or sufficient condition for a good economic system. Like I said, I would be happy to be ‘unemployed’ if, say, the economic system was run by robots and it produced the goods that I need and if the economy simply gave me my ’share’. I would spend my time contemplating the universe and eating lotus, I guess. And I suspect that there are others like me who would be happy to let the job of producing to others — human or non-human.

Production is a precondition to distribution. Fair distribution is a problem in itself but only arises after we produce enough.

Mechanization and automation expands the ‘production possibilities frontier’ and thus we can get more out of less — mostly less labor. Is that good or bad? Let me use a simple example.

That’s it for now. Bye.

Unfortunately, freedoms that are guaranteed to the citizens of the world’s largest democracy by their Constitution are often curtailed for reasons which fly in the face of liberty. Recall how the Government headed by Rajiv Gandhi had imposed a ban on Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, even before bonfires were made of copies of the book in Bradford by Muslim immigrants who would be hard put to read it cover to cover. While Iran came to the world’s notice with Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa sanctioning Rushdie’s murder, India came to enjoy the dubious distinction of becoming the first country to ban The Satanic Verses. Now contrast these responses with the reaction of the British Government. Mrs Margaret Thatcher, who was then Prime Minister, not only defended Rushdie and took on Iran’s mullah brigade but also ordered full protection for the author, including arranging for safe houses for him. And all this despite the fact that Rushdie was among the strongest and most outspoken critics of Mrs Thatcher, rarely if ever missing an opportunity to offend her and her Conservative Government’s policies. Compare that to a cussed Government of India refusing to issue a visa to Rushdie; he had to wait till 1998 when Mr Jaswant Singh, as Minister for External Affairs, struck down the dumb ‘policy’ that prevented a person to visit the country of his origin simply because he had offended those who hadn’t even read The Satanic Verses, including the Left-liberal commentariat.

We could cite numerous other examples of the Government and other institutions of the state bending over backwards to appease the easily offended by circumscribing the liberty of those who believe in free speech and freedom of expression. Few would remember today a celebrated — and controversial — case of 1985 when a petition was filed in the Calcutta High Court, seeking the judiciary’s opinion on certain passages of the Quran which were quoted verbatim in the petition. The judge who heard the case waxed eloquent on faith, made high falutin comments, and dismissed the petition. Later, the petitioner, Chandmal Chopra, along with popular historian Sita Ram Goel, published the court documents, including the petition, as a book. Chopra was arrested; Goel was declared an ‘absconder’. In more recent times, a huge mob of Muslims attacked Statesman House in central Kolkata in February 2009, claiming their sensitivities had been hurt and faith defamed by The Statesman which had reproduced an article by Johann Hari, “Why should I respect these oppressive religions”, from The Independent. The newspaper’s editor and publisher were arrested; they had to issue a groveling apology.
. . .
It serves little or no purpose to say this today, but those who are shedding crocodile tears for MF Husain, lamenting that he was ‘forced’ to leave India and live his last years in exile — he insisted his departure was voluntary; there are suggestions he fled on being told of an imminent inquiry into money-laundering and tax-fraud by some big corporate houses facilitated by him — were stunningly silent when free speech and freedom of expression were being ruthlessly trampled upon by the state, its agencies and institutions, denying others the same right which they believe the artist was entitled to. A prominent Bengali newspaper which has been extremely acerbic in denouncing Husain’s critics forgets that it dropped Taslima Nasreen’s column rather than risk the ire of goons who can’t even spell her name, not even in Urdu.

But two wrongs don’t make a right. Husain chose to offend Hindu sensitivities while exercising his freedom of expression — whether he did so wittingly or unwittingly is a matter of irrelevant debate. The correct response would have been to ignore him. After all, this is the land where Charvaks have preached that there’s nothing divine about religion, that the authors of the Vedas were “buffoons, knaves and demons”. A close scrutiny of Swami Vivekananda’s writings and speeches would show he often militated against conventional wisdom. The Bengal Renaissance, or the Awakening, was more about repudiation than endorsement; the Brahmo Samaj found a place within the larger Hindu samaj despite its rejection of everything that the Hindu orthodoxy stood for. We really don’t need to compete with those who teach their children that “Jews are apes and Christians are pigs”, as is taught to toddlers at King Fahd Academy in Acton, and believe that Hinduism is not worthy of recognition as either a faith or a way of life. They are worthy of neither emulation nor applause.

Freedom of expression is a non-negotiable basic right, in my opinion. So I have written quite a bit on that — see these posts.

And it is not disputable that Gandhi himself regarded his own versions of ahimsa and satyagraha as universally applicable. By 1939, he was announcing that, if adopted by “a single Jew standing up and refusing to bow to Hitler’s decrees,” such methods might suffice to “melt Hitler’s heart.” This may read like mere foolishness, but a personal letter to the Führer in the same year began with the words My friend and went on, ingratiatingly, to ask: “Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?” Apart from its conceit, this would appear to be suggesting that Hitler, too, might hope to get more of what he wanted by adopting a more herbivorous approach. Gandhi also instructed a Chinese visitor to “shame some Japanese” by passivity in the face of invasion, and found time to lecture a member of the South African National Congress about the vices of Western apparel. “You must not … feel ashamed of carrying an assagai, or of going around with only a tiny clout round your loins.” (One tries to picture Nelson Mandela taking this homespun counsel, which draws upon the most clichéd impression of African dress and tradition.)

Gandhi was forever nominating himself as a mediator: in 1937 in Palestine, for example, where he concluded that Jews could demand a state of their own only if all Arab opinion were to become reconciled to it; and later unsolicitedly advising the peoples of Czechoslovakia to try what Lelyveld calls “satyagraha to combat storm troopers.” The nullity of this needs no emphasis: what is more striking—in one venerated so widely for modest self-effacement—is its arrogance. Recording these successive efforts at quasi-diplomacy and “peacemaking,” Lelyveld lapses into near-euphemism. At one point he calls Gandhi’s initiatives “a mixed bag, full of trenchant moral insights, desperate appeals, and self-deluding simplicities.” The crawling letter to Hitler, he summarizes as “a desperate, naive mix of humility and ego” and as one of a series of “futile, well-intentioned missives.” We can certainly detect the influence of Saul Bellow’s “Good Intentions Paving Company,” but the trenchant moral insights and the humility are distinctly less conspicuous.
. . .
Lelyveld offers in passing the startling observation that Gandhi, who loftily asserted, “I claim myself in my own person to represent the vast mass of the untouchables,” had in point of fact “done next to nothing to organize and lead” them. On his way back from the 1931 London conference on Indian independence at which the differences with Ambedkar revealed themselves as insuperable, Gandhi stopped in Rome for a meeting with Mussolini, after which he wrote effusively of Il Duce’s “service to the poor, his opposition to super-urbanization, his efforts to bring about coordination between capital and labor [and] his passionate love for his people.” Imprisoned by the British on his return, he threatened to starve himself to death if special political dispensation was granted to untouchables … To my own alarm, I found myself sympathizing with Churchill’s tirade against this self-righteous combination of half-naked “fakir” and “seditious Middle Temple lawyer,” and with the viceroy’s exasperated staff who found themselves intercepting the correspondence between fakir and Führer.

If the Dalits had good reason to fear that they would be subordinated to Hindu-majority tyranny after the attainment of self-rule, the Muslims of the subcontinent equally dreaded a similar outcome. Lelyveld’s treatment of this still-inflamed subject is distinctive and original. I had not known that, in the early 1920s, Gandhi reposed his whole political weight in favor of the Indian Muslim demand for the restoration of the Ottoman caliphate as the guarantor of Muslim holy places. This so-called Khilafat movement, while conveniently anti-British in its implications, was by definition taking place in the realm of illusion, since by that time even the Turks themselves had rejected the rule of the sultan. But it gave Gandhi a platform to address sectarian and traditionalist Muslim throngs, and in his own eyes, this apparently trumped its quixotry. Whether the encouragement of Islamist ancien régime tendencies among Muslims was a useful path to overcoming communal divisions is a question on which Lelyveld is politely neutral. He does note that one Muslim leader who remained unimpressed by the Khilafat agitation was Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a relatively secular nationalist and modernist who at an early session of the Congress Party pointedly referred to “Mister” rather than “Mahatma” Gandhi. He was not the only one to see through Gandhi’s theatrical attempts to base reconciliation on ephemeral and crowd-pleasing themes: Lelyveld records that as early as 1921, “the impressive coalition Gandhi had built and inspired was proving to be jerry-built.” Jinnah’s future as the founder of the state of Pakistan could not then be imagined, but when it did become imaginable it was again as a consequence of a moment of Gandhian opportunism: when “the Mahatma” called on all Congress Party officials to leave their posts in 1942, the Muslim League had only to tell its own supporters to stay at work to guarantee itself a much greater share of power after Japan had been defeated.

Hitchens never disappoints. Go read it all.

Development economics is a much harder subject to teach. Unlike IO, development is a more complex subject to get your arms around. If development economics had been easy, it would not have been so hard for economies to develop. In IO, the theory and practice are well understood and there’s general agreement on what it is all about. Not so in the case of development. Expert opinion differs on what is important in development, what works and what does not, how does development happen, what should be done and what can be done.

Today I had lunch with an old professor of mine, Prof Irma Adelman. Born in 1930, she is retired now, and although physically frail, she lives alone and she still drives. But she continues to be an awesome intellect and her mind is as sharp as a tack. She entered the field when women were unheard of in it. A born maverick, she has often gone against conventional wisdom and triumphed.

When import substitution industrialization was the prescription for developing countries, she proposed a different path for South Korea. Fortunately for the S Koreans, the leadership paid attention to her. She stressed export-oriented growth for them. Why, I asked her.

Of course, I knew the answer. I had heard it from her many times before. But, you know like that little kid who says, “Grandpa, tell me how you climbed that mountain” even though he has heard the story dozens of times, the thrill of listening once again to an amazing tale is too much to resist. I must tell you that story one of these days.

We touched on many other topics. I asked her, “Professor, I want to ask three questions in the final exam of the development course. What should they be? I want the kids to be able to answer those questions, and that will direct how I structure the course and how I will approach the class.”

The convention in the US is that one addresses faculty by their first names. Practically no one says “sir” or “professor.” I follow that convention too but I make three specific exceptions. Irma is always “Professor” to me. (The other two? Pranab Bardhan and Peter Berck.) For the rest, first names do just fine — Jeff, David, Brad, Brian, Larry, etc.

It was a beautiful day. Quite warm. We were sitting outside The Cheeseboard Collective with our lunch. The musicians were playing. The sidewalk was crowded and it was noisy. She spoke softly, as she always did. The vice-president of S Korea had once remarked that “she speaks very softly but carries a big stick.” I had a hard time hearing her but I got the important bits. Later, when I dropped her home, I got out my note pad and discussed the important bits again.

One of these days, I will have to explore those questions. Perhaps from time to time, I will record on this blog some of the topics we touch upon in the development class. Looking back, I note that I have not paid much attention to development on this blog for a while.

Anyway, Prof Adelman’s advice helped create the modern industrial state of S Korea. One part of her advice was ADLI — agricultural demand led industrialization. (I wrote briefly about it in Dec 2003.) The other part was export-led growth. She recognized that S Korea was too poor for it to go for import substitution industrialization (ISI). Its economy in the 1950s was so small that its purchasing power was roughly equivalent to that of Detroit. The economy could not have supported industrialization because domestic demand would have been too little for achieving scale economies that are so important for industries to survive. They needed foreign markets to export to.

The second act of that drama is better known to us all. China. The Chinese leaders figured out S Korea’s secret of success and copied it. Irma tried to tell the Indians but then if the Indians (actually, Indian “leaders” like the cha-cha) were that smart as to understand her prescription, India would not be a desperately poor nation, would it?

I said, “secret of success” but that is strictly incorrect. There are no secrets when it comes to development. For anyone who cares to learn, all the various recommendations are there for the taking. All you have to do is to choose wisely. It is the wisdom of the leaders and their motivation that determines what is chosen, and that choice is what makes a country (such as S Korea) successful or a dismal failure (take your pick.)

What makes development economics so fascinating is that it is a matter of life and death. That expression — matter of life and death — is heard often enough but nowhere does it assume the proportions it does than in economic development where we are talking about the lives and deaths of hundreds of millions of people.

The Chinese leaders changed course and copied S Korea. Between 1995 and 2010, around 450 million Chinese climbed out of poverty. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what happened in India’s case during the same period.

Anyway, as I was saying, the development course will be a challenge but I will learn a great deal. I have always found that you can never revisit the fundamentals too much. For a real understanding of the subject, keep going back to the basics. Humility in the face of such an important and gigantic matter is wise.

I keep wondering: What would India have been like today if one particular leader of India had had the wisdom to realize that he did not have all the answers and had studied the fundamentals diligently, even perhaps asked Irma Adelman and looked around at what others similarly placed were doing?

I think India would have been a developed nation by now. Sixty years is more than sufficient for that. India would have had a head-start over China, instead of the other way around. And India today would have been about 10 times richer than China, instead of being four times poorer.

C’est la vie. Or more poignantly, it’s all karma, neh?

There has to be a way out of this but first let us address the obvious objection to my claim that the Indian press is not free. Newspapers get their support from advertisers and the government is a major player there. Newspapers cannot afford to alienate the government and therefore the reporters they employ are those that are willing to bow and scrape in front of the powerful. In a country like India, the government is the most powerful institution.

Just as an aside, note that the more powerful the government, the more corrupt it is likely to be. Government power is exercised by people who are not immune to any of the usual human failings of greed and the lust for power. If being in the government affords people the chance to make enormous personal gains, then the most greedy and the most corrupt would seek to be in government. The competition for government position would be intense among the most corrupt and the least principled, and this will drive out the people who are competent and principled. It is a downward spiral because the crooks who do make it to positions of power, will seek to enlarge that power by enlarging the government, thus increasing the scope for increased corruption, which will attract even more crooked people . . . till you have what you see in India, a kakistocracy — government by the least principled and the most corrupt.

Always pay attention to trends. In the 1950s and ’60s, the government officials (bureaucrats and politicians) were not absolutely honest but nowhere so desperately dishonest as they are now. The prime minister was not a paragon of virtue but in terms of character, he was nowhere close to the sheer dishonestly of the present man (I use the word “man” very loosely.) The press then was not as compromised as it is today. This is to be expected because even though India is still a shockingly poor country, the economy has grown several times in size and therefore the chances and size of the looting from the public has also increased. This implies that the public has to be bamboozled into believing half-truths and even outright lies. That’s where the press steps in. It serves the government by giving it cover.

By press, I mean the newspapers and TV. Radio is not included because radio is prohibited from doing anything other than play inane shit. It is already owned by the government and therefore they don’t have to be bought by the government.

Small newspapers, like The Pioneer, are independent. Which is why they are small. The Times of India is large — because it panders to the government and to the gullible public.

There’s a glimmer of hope in this bleak landscape: the internet. Of course, that immediately means that the government will do everything it can to throttle it. The more people have access to the internet, the more the government will suppress it. Freedom of speech in India. You must be kidding me!

Seema Mustafa writes, in “Blundering UPA Government, Meandering Congress” –

Unfortunately the media has become so pliant and servile that Chidambaram gets away with speech that would have created a storm of protest and walkouts by journalists even till 15 years ago.

Pliant and servile. Understandably so since the government has very large sticks to beat it with and large stocks of carrots to feed it. Carrots and sticks of course are something that motivate domesticated beasts of burden, but no moral judgement should be passed on them since their response is genetically programmed by evolution. In the case of the media, however, their servility is immoral and loathsome.

The journalist Micheal Kelly (who tragically died while reporting from Iraq) wrote a piece for his fraternity to do some introspection on way back in 1999, “The Know-Nothing Media.” He addressed it to “Fellow hacks, scribblers, on-air talent, talking heads and pundits” —

. . . may we speak about a delicate subject? To wit: Why does everyone loathe us so? Because, my little preciouses, we are so loathable.

Speaking on behalf of the media, he claimed (1) We are so relentlessly mindless, (2) We are so blatantly unfair, and (3) We are such awful frauds.

Now if relentlessly mindless, blatantly unfair, and awful frauds is not a fitting description of Barkha, Rajdeep, Shekhar and the rest of the sorry bunch, I don’t know what is.

You may ask what prompted me to write about this when I have a lot of pressing matters. It’s this report, “75,000 acres acquired for mega city south of Ahmedabad” in MSN news. It one of the biggest urban development projects in the world, as the report notes.

At a time when farmers are agitating against land acquisition in different states,75,000 acres have been acquired at Dholera, 110 km south of Ahmedabad for one of the biggest urban development projects in the world.

That’s incredible, isn’t it. But wait, there’s another incredible thing. This project is the brain-child of Shri Narendrabhai Modi, the CM of Gujarat. That’s the incredible thing: there’s not a mention of Shri Modi. It is as if the project has nothing to do with Narendrabhai’s leadership and vision.

If there is any violence in any part of India — or even abroad — the reports on them will likely have Modi’s name dragged into it somehow, just to please the Congress Queen Mother and the Prized Idiot Prince Charming. But when it comes to anything great going on in Gujarat, you would think that Modi lives on Mars.

The Indian press is, broadly speaking, a perfectly loathsome pimp, and continues to be in business because the johns — mostly the educated middle-class urbanites — are counted in the tens of millions.

UPDATE: If you have bought a copy of the book (or ordered it and is in the mail), please let me know. A second printing of the book, with better production values, is in the works and should be ready in 10 days or so. The publisher would be happy to send you a copy of that absolutely free. Thanks and my apologies for the trouble.

You can order the book from the publisher New Horizon Media in Chennai. They will ship it to you within 24 hours.

Less than a year after the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the United States Mission in Islamabad urged Washington to commit $2 billion over a five-year period beginning April 2011 to enable the Pakistan military to address, among other security needs, its “growing conventional disadvantage vis-à-vis India,” in order to secure its cooperation in the “war on terror.”

The U.S. Government accepted the recommendation. A report in the Washington Post on October 22, 2010 said: “The [US] administration will ask Congress to expand military aid to Pakistan, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday, announcing a five-year, $2 billion package that would increase current financing for weapons purchases by about one-third.”

. . .

The cable said the two initiatives would provide a powerful signal to the Pakistan military of the U.S. commitment to a true, long-term strategic partnership with Pakistan.

. . .
The Mission said the first two years of PCCF required the execution of $1.1 billion over 14 months, and the need for future PCCF was $1.2 billion for FY2011, and $900 million for both FY2012 and FY2013 — a total of $2 billion over that three-year period.

. . .

In addition to the proposed military aid, Washington is committed to provide $1.5 billion a year (beginning with 2010) for a period of five years.

A cable dated December 2, 2009 (237503: unclassified) from the State Department on the Af-Pak strategy of the [US] administration said:

“We are now focused on working with Pakistan’s democratic institutions, deepening the ties among our governments and people for our common interests and concerns. We are committed to a strategic relationship with Pakistan for the long term.

“We have affirmed this commitment to Pakistan by providing $1.5 billion each year over the next five years to support Pakistan’s development and democracy, and have led a global effort to rally additional pledges of support.”

Let’s remember that Pakistan’s long-term strategic goal is the destruction of India. So why does the US insist that that goal is shared by it and therefore it has to continue to have that relationship with Pakistan despite the fact that the Pakistanis hates the US more than any other people on earth?

This is bloody shameful. I am convinced that the US administrations (and not just the current one) are really the enemies of humanity in general, and in particular its interests are opposed to those who wish to live and let live. The interests of the US are aligned with that of Pakistan — as revealed by their continued support of that terrorist nation. What else can explain why the US is continually pumping money and weapons into Pakistan?

The US wants India to be a client state. The US therefore supports Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi and her bunch of unmentionables. She is suspected of being a foreign agent by many, but it may be hard to prove in a court of law. What most people suspect is that she has billions stolen from India in her foreign bank accounts. Unleashing her running dogs on peaceful demonstrators demanding an end to corruption led by Baba Ramdev points to the fact that she is indeed guilty of massive corruption. Does the Indian government beat up on Hasan Ali and other criminals who have stolen by the billions? No. But Baba Ramdev is fair game for them.

The US would be happy to see Antonia Maino continue to rob India of billions. Conversely, the one thing that the US government will not like to see is someone like Narendra Modi come to power. Modi is incorruptible. The US can only do business with the corrupt and the criminally compromised. The same goes with Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi. She works with the corrupt and the criminally compromised because then she had a hold on them.

The US likes to deal with corrupt dictators and with authoritarian regimes: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, etc. Though it speaks loudly about democracy, the last thing it wants is democracy in poor Third World nations.

I am disgusted with the whole affair. I cannot express my disgust in the unholy nexus between the US and Pakistan. For that, I will have to just quote Christopher Hitchens’ piece in Vanity Fair. Hitchens is awesomeness personified when it comes to polemics. “From Abbottabad to Worse:

Hating the United States—which funds Islamabad’s army and nuclear program to the humiliating tune of $3 billion a year—Pakistan takes its twisted, cowardly revenge by harboring the likes of the late Osama bin Laden. But the hypocrisy is mutual, and the shame should be shared.” —

Let me try to summarize and update the situation like this: Here is a society [Pakistani] where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment. Women can be sentenced to be raped, by tribal and religious kangaroo courts, if even a rumor of their immodesty brings shame on their menfolk. In such an obscenely distorted context, the counterpart term to shame—which is the noble word “honor”—becomes most commonly associated with the word “killing.” Moral courage consists of the willingness to butcher your own daughter.

If the most elemental of human instincts becomes warped in this bizarre manner, other morbid symptoms will disclose themselves as well. Thus, President Asif Ali Zardari cringes daily in front of the forces who openly murdered his wife, Benazir Bhutto, and who then contemptuously ordered the crime scene cleansed with fire hoses, as if to spit even on the pretense of an investigation. A man so lacking in pride—indeed lacking in manliness—will seek desperately to compensate in other ways. Swelling his puny chest even more, he promises to resist the mighty United States, and to defend Pakistan’s holy “sovereignty.” This puffery and posing might perhaps possess a rag of credibility if he and his fellow middlemen were not avidly ingesting $3 billion worth of American subsidies every year.

There’s absolutely no mystery to the “Why do they hate us?” question, at least as it arises in Pakistan. They hate us because they owe us, and are dependent upon us. The two main symbols of Pakistan’s pride—its army and its nuclear program—are wholly parasitic on American indulgence and patronage. But, as I wrote for Vanity Fair in late 2001, in a long report from this degraded country, that army and those nukes are intended to be reserved for war against the neighboring democracy of India. Our bought-and-paid-for pretense that they have any other true purpose has led to a rancid, resentful official hypocrisy, and to a state policy of revenge, large and petty, on the big, rich, dumb Americans who foot the bill. [Highlight added.]

Don’t believe me that the US administration is evil? Read on, and remember that Christopher Hitchens is a proud naturalized American citizen. He loves the US. His ire is not directed at the US but rather to its government. The same goes for me — both in the case of the US and India.

If the Pakistani authorities had admitted what they were doing, and claimed the right to offer safe haven to al-Qaeda and the Taliban on their own soil, then the boast of “sovereignty” might at least have had some grotesque validity to it. But they were too cowardly and duplicitous for that. And they also wanted to be paid, lavishly and regularly, for pretending to fight against those very forces. Has any state ever been, in the strict sense of the term, more shameless? Over the years, I have written many pages about the sick relationship between the United States and various Third World client regimes, many of which turned out to be false friends as well as highly discreditable ones. General Pinochet, of Chile, had the unbelievable nerve to explode a car bomb in rush-hour traffic in Washington, D.C., in 1976, murdering a political rival and his American colleague. The South Vietnamese military junta made a private deal to sabotage the Paris peace talks in 1968, in order to benefit the electoral chances of Richard Nixon. Dirty money from the Shah of Iran and the Greek dictatorship made its way at different times into our electoral process. Israeli religious extremists demand American protection and then denounce us for “interference” if we demur politely about colonization of the West Bank. But our blatant manipulation by Pakistan is the most diseased and rotten thing in which the United States has ever involved itself. And it is also, in the grossest way, a violation of our sovereignty. Pakistan routinely—by the dispatch of barely deniable death squads across its borders, to such locations as the Taj Hotel in Mumbai—injures the sovereignty of India as well as Afghanistan. But you might call that a traditional form of violation. In our case, Pakistan ingratiatingly and silkily invites young Americans to one of the vilest and most dangerous regions on earth, there to fight and die as its allies, all the while sharpening a blade for their backs.

Hitchens is incomparable both in style and substance.

This is well beyond humiliation. It makes us a prisoner of the shame, and co-responsible for it. The United States was shamed when it became the Cold War armorer of the Ayub Khan dictatorship in the 1950s and 1960s. It was shamed even more when it supported General Yahya Khan’s mass murder in Bangladesh in 1971: a Muslim-on-Muslim genocide that crashingly demonstrated the utter failure of a state based on a single religion. We were then played for suckers by yet another military boss in the form of General Zia-ul-Haq, who leveraged anti-Communism in Afghanistan into a free pass for the acquisition of nuclear weapons and the open mockery of the nonproliferation treaty. By the start of the millennium, Pakistan had become home to a Walmart of fissile material, traded as far away as Libya and North Korea by the state-subsidized nuclear entrepreneur A. Q. Khan, the country’s nearest approach (which in itself tells you something) to a national hero. Among the scientists working on the project were three named sympathizers of the Taliban. And that gigantic betrayal, too, was uncovered only by chance.

Again to quote myself from 2001, if Pakistan were a person, he (and it would have to be a he) would have to be completely humorless, paranoid, insecure, eager to take offense, and suffering from self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred. That last triptych of vices is intimately connected. The self-righteousness comes from the claim to represent a religion: the very name “Pakistan” is an acronym of Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and so forth, the resulting word in the Urdu language meaning “Land of the Pure.” The self-pity derives from the sad fact that the country has almost nothing else to be proud of: virtually barren of achievements and historically based on the amputation and mutilation of India in 1947 and its own self-mutilation in Bangladesh. The self-hatred is the consequence of being pathetically, permanently mendicant: an abject begging-bowl country that is nonetheless run by a super-rich and hyper-corrupt Punjabi elite. As for paranoia: This not so hypothetical Pakistani would also be a hardened anti-Semite, moaning with pleasure at the butchery of Daniel Pearl and addicted to blaming his self-inflicted woes on the all-powerful Jews.

And here’s the final point that Hitchens makes and which adds substance to my allegations against the US administrations:

If we ever ceased to swallow our pride, so I am incessantly told in Washington, then the Pakistani oligarchy might behave even more abysmally than it already does, and the situation deteriorate even further. This stale and superficial argument ignores the awful historical fact that, each time the Pakistani leadership did get worse, or behave worse, it was handsomely rewarded by the United States. We have been the enablers of every stage of that wretched state’s counter-evolution, to the point where it is a serious regional menace and an undisguised ally of our worst enemy, as well as the sworn enemy of some of our best allies. How could it be “worse” if we shifted our alliance and instead embraced India, our only rival in scale as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious democracy, and a nation that contains nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan? How could it be “worse” if we listened to the brave Afghans, like their former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh, who have been telling us for years that we are fighting the war in the wrong country?

I think Hitchens needs to look at the situation from the point of view that the US administrations’ and Pakistan’s interests are aligned when it comes to India. And I think that Indians need to understand that the UPA government’s interests and Pakistan’s interests are aligned — the destruction of India.

NOTES:

I have been writing about the US’s military support of Pakistan for years. By now I have about 20 posts on the matter. Here’s a bit from a post from way back in 2004, “The True Weapons of Mass Destruction” –

A report by Josey Joseph in the Oct 14th Times of India warmed the cockles of my heart. The story is about the supply of military equipment from the US to Pakistan.

… On the pipeline are more than $1.5 billion worth of military supplies over five years. Plus, numerous futuristic deals.

The arms supply is now in full flow and icing on the cake is the F-16 fighters that Pakistan Air Force has been dreaming of for long. The Navy can look forward to a new generation of torpedoes to maritime aircraft.

But the biggest gainer would be the Army: a generational upgrade in almost its entire armoury including top of the line attack helicopters, radars.

Richard Armitage in a recent interview to a Pakistani TV channel said there are “more helicopters in the queue. We have gotten now a steady stream of dependable funding to help the Pakistani armed forces… We realise they need the proper equipment, so we have embarked on a five-year programme of support.”

Armitage was referring to the $1.5 billion military aid that Pakistan is receiving over the next five years.

While Americans justify them in the name of terrorism, the supply is adding teeth to Pakistan’s offensive capabilities that are almost completely focused on India.

Why is the US so hell-bent on supporting the terrorist nation of Pakistan? What is in it for the US? After all, Pakistan is also broke. Why, one could ask in puzzlement, would anyone want to sell military hardware to Pakistan? My answer is this: so that India would be forced to buy weapons from the US to keep up with the terrorist nation of Pakistan.

The story goes like this. The US gives away $1.5 billion worth of weapons to Pakistan. In effect, the US is paying its own producers of weapons, who in turn support the US policy makers by locating their factories of weapons of mass destruction in the policy makers’ constituency. Read more jobs for the merchants of death. Then India’s defense establishment looks over the border and says we now need $2.5 billion worth of stuff from the US. More jobs for the merchants of death. Total benefit to the merchants of death: $4.0 billion. Total cost to the impoverished populations of Pakistan and India: $4 billion.

You might wonder what this has to do with Baba Ramdev and why I bring up those numbers. Fact is that I like to do arithmetic. It is something easy to do, and perhaps the only thing I can do that is not generally done by too many people. Doing arithmetic probably does not help you make friends and influence people who are naturally innumerate but helps you avoid believing in all sorts of foolishness. As my grandma used to say, do your sums carefully and you will not appear to be an utter idiot in and out of the classroom. But I digress.

The point that I am laboring to make is that you could do worse than learn pranayama and surya namaskar from Baba Ramdev. He is brilliant in that. For discourses on the Bhagavat Gita, one may be advised to consult him. Hindus could perhaps go to him if their moral compass needs a bit of tuning. He’s a specialist. But when it comes to politics, economics, technology, foreign policy, electoral reforms, brain surgery, superluminal space travel, avionics, genetics, astronomy, cosmology, national defense, stock markets, cosmetics, geology, haptics, motorcycle maintenance, computer programming, agriculture, etc., etc., I would advise you to give Baba Ramdev a wide berth. Just like Baba Ramdev is a specialist in yoga, there are specialists in those and hundreds of other disciplines. Getting your tax advice from a brain surgeon is a sure way to lose money (although perhaps not as bad as getting your brain surgery done by your tax accountant.)

Specialization matters because the world is a complicated place these days. Granted, 5,000 years ago, you could get your medical treatment from the same guy who was also a specialist in fortune telling. But today the guy who has spent 20 years learning brain surgery has not had the opportunity to learn much about anything else.

Baba Ramdev should stick to what he knows and maintain absolute silence on topics that he neither has any training nor competence in. I am not privy to what Baba Ramdev thinks, or even know of his views on a variety of matters. Just occasionally I get to read an article or two about him, like this article in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Nine More Things Baba Ramdev Wants”. Granted that it’s a hack job of an article, written by someone who is clearly biased and is interested in ridiculing him. But one has to admit that Baba Ramdev has brought the possibility of ridicule by straying into areas that he should have scrupulously avoided.

I commend Baba Ramdev for his vocal opposition to crooked politicians and for his fight against public corruption. I fully support him in his attempt to mobilize his supporters to kick the corrupt out of power. But with equal force I oppose his “buy Indian only” demand, his “no Western medicine” demand, his “go organic” demand, his “train Indian scientists in Hindi and regional languages” demand, and his ““cure” gay people through breathing” demand. In the interests of keeping this post short, I will not go into the details of why those things are silly at best. Perhaps I could be persuaded to go into them later. For now, I will make a few general points only.

Point number one. Stupid bleeds into the neighboring areas. If you say something stupid in one domain, it bleeds into other domains that you touch. Suppose you are a highly trained, widely respected quantum physicist, and suppose you make an utterly foolish statement about foreign policy. People who know foreign policy will judge you to be quite uninformed about foreign policy. But since they don’t have a clue about quantum mechanics, they will suspect that you are not particularly smart about quantum mechanics either. Your natural stupidity in one domain will make your expertise in another domain vulnerable to suspicions of incompetence. Revealing one’s ignorance is not a bad thing at all. In fact, the ability to say “I don’t know” is one of the defining characteristics of really smart people. They know the extent of their ignorance. People who don’t even know that they are ignorant of something are ignorant to a degree that exceeds mere everyday ignorance.

Point number one point five. Stupidity bleeds but smartness does not. Nobel prize in literature, for example, does not automatically confer expertise in economics. We witness over-reach by people too often and the sight is not pretty.

Smart people figure out early on in life that the thing to do is get expert advice. They say, “I don’t know the answer but I am sure there’s someone out there who knows this stuff. Let’s get him or her to tell us.” They hire the best and that’s what makes them smarter than the others who think that they know it all. One lesson we should take to heart is that no one knows it all. A bit of humility is what we chiefly need since we are mere mortals, and omniscience is not our lot.

“Wait a bleeding minute,” you may object. “Baba Ramdev is a free citizen of a free country with freedom of speech. He has a right to express his views on whatever topic he fancies.” Becoming indignant, you may ask, “Who died and made you in charge of deciding what Baba should say and not say? What about that freedom of speech that you constantly go on about? And haven’t I read you holding forth on a number of topics on this very blog when all you know is a bit of economics?”

Fair enough, I will answer. Here’s my point number two.

Yours truly is not a Baba Ramdev. The essential point of difference is that I have exactly three and a half followers on a good day. Baba Ramdev has thirty million followers — and that too on a bad hair day. That’s the point. If I say something foolish (which is not unheard of), no one could care less. No great harm will come out of my insisting that 2 plus 2 is 5. But Baba Ramdev’s prescriptions on matters economic can potentially result in massive avoidable misery for millions. Banning technology imports (whatever that means in a world that is so awesomely connected) is a prescription for disaster. Insisting on “organic only” is a sure way to increase hunger and starvation.

I can afford to be careless because what I say has nearly zero impact. With his immense following, Baba Ramdev can be a force for great good or for great harm. He has to be very very circumspect in what he says and does.

If I were to start my own political party tomorrow, no one will even know about it. But if Baba Ramdev so much as hints that he is considering starting a political party, great things will happen. Antonia Maino, aka Sonia Gandhi, will heave a great big sigh of relief and rejoice publicly. The Congress party will be assured of electoral victory for another generation, and consequently India will sink ever deeper into incomprehensible poverty. The Little Prince Raul Vinci, aka Rahul Gandhi, will be assured of his future as the prime minister of India. Baba Ramdev will accelerate the downfall of India. India’s future misery will make today’s misery look like a period of relentless prosperity in comparison.

Baba Ramdev is a very great man. That’s why I fear the very great harm he can do. So far, the signs are not very hopeful.

Related post: Three years ago — June 5th 2008 — I had written a post where I mistakenly referred to him as “Swami Ramdev” instead of Baba Ramdev. “Swami Ramdev’s Peculiar Beliefs.”

Did you catch that implied hint of causation in the reported correlation? Anyway, just how high is that raw 200,000 number? We just don’t know because the context is missing. India’s raw suicide rate in 1998 was 12.2 for males and 9.1 for females per 100,000 population, or approximately 10.6 people 100,000, per year. With a population of 1 billion, India can expect 106,000 suicides per year. Now we have to ask, “Is the number 18,000 farmer suicides a year unnaturally high if the total number of suicides a year is 106,000?”

The answer to that question depends on what the population of farmers in the Indian population is. If the population of farmers in the population is, say, 25 percent, then the number of suicides among farmers is actually below the population average.

The point is that for us to make sense of the suicide numbers, we need to know not the raw numbers but normalized numbers — “farmer suicide rate is 15 per 100,000, as compared to overall rate of 12.2 per 100,000,” for example. Not just that, we need to know the trend. “Farmer suicide has gone up to 15 per 100,000 in 2008, from 12 in 1997.” (These figures are made up and not to be taken literally.)

The piece by Deb is unfortunately typical of such reporting. Perhaps word limits don’t permit a fuller treatment of the subject by the reporter. But even then, surely one can glean from just looking around that India’s starving hundreds of millions is a symptom of a deeper malaise, and mention that however briefly in the article. Instead the overall impression one gets from the article is that somehow evil multinational corporations are behind all the unimaginable misery and it is a compassionate government which is trying its best to fix the problem.

It is not my case that MNCs are really benevolent charitable organizations. They are in the business for profit, and can be as ruthless as they are often reported to be. You cannot wish them away, although you could legislatively force them to keep off your property. But that comes at a cost — there are benefits to having MNCs around. The challenge is to control them such that the benefits exceed the costs. Which brings us to the one agency which lies at the crux of the matter — the government.

We all know those numbers: nearly half of India’s children below five are malnourished; x thousand farmer suicides; 40 percent illiteracy; lack of drinking water; lack of power; overcrowding and slums in cities; . . . the list is long and distressing. India is desperately poor — even compared to many sub-Saharan African states.

They have a saying in Texas which goes, “if you see a tortoise on top of a 10-foot pole, you sure as heck know that it did not get there by itself.” India’s poverty could not have happened without the active participation of some agency in engineering it. We have to understand that basic fact and internalize it before we can have a hope of fixing it.

India’s poverty did not happen overnight. It took decades to engineer. When the British left in 1947, India had around 200 million desperately poor people. Six decades later, that number is now 800 million. It could not be because of multinational corporations simply because MNCs and modern globalization are recent phenomena. No, India’s problems have a local genesis — and how can it not be local when India has been pretty much shut off from the rest of the world by its wonderful socialistic autarkic regime thanks to Mr Jawaharlal Nehru and his spawn.

The unarguable fact is that India cannot afford to have such a large population dependent on agriculture as their primary source of income. Just do the numbers. Basic arithmetic, really. We must do arithmetic. John McCarthy, the Stanford computer scientist guru says, “Those who refuse to do arithmetic are doomed to speak nonsense.” Let’s avoid nonsense.

India occupies two percent of the world’s land area and has 17 percent of the world’s population. Agriculture requires land. And huge amounts of water. India’s fresh water reserves are pitifully little. Water tables are dropping. India — and Indians — cannot afford to earn a living growing food. Indians have to bring something else to the global table. It cannot be food. It has to be manufactures or even services, but not food.

Sure India needs food, and food that is produced in India. But there is a limit to food productivity and food production. New Zealand with it single-digit million population can be single-crop economy and prosper. India cannot because India is no New Zealand. India has a population of 1,200 million people.

India’s agricultural productivity has to increase so that its production goes up and fewer people are in agriculture. Arithmetic again. If 100 percent of the population is engaged in producing food, surely no one can be “rich” because to be rich one has to have something other than food. Who is going to produce that something other if everyone is engaged in producing food? Answer me that!

The simple fact is that India is poor because too many people are in agriculture. What India has to do is to move out of agriculture and go into manufacturing and services. But then, you have to be educated to be in manufacturing and services. With absolutely low percentages of the population even literate, there is scant chance of being educated.

Why aren’t Indians educated — even literate? Because the government does not allow education and literacy. Really? Yes, really.

India has to move to manufacturing and into services. It can be done, and in a short time. it is a matter of policies. But it cannot happen under the current set of rules, which are such that it forces more and more people into desperate poverty. Why do they do that? Because it helps the policymakers — more specifically the Nehruvian socialist types. The policies they make help them personally and impoverish the nation. That’s what needs to change, not the MNCs.

India’s system of choosing policymakers is one of representative democracy with universal adult franchise. People generally accept that almost as if it were an unalterable fact of nature, and if not actually the best way of choosing a government, the widespread belief is that it works sufficiently well that there is absolutely no need to question it or seek alternatives. I think this is profoundly mistaken. I believe that we have to recognize the inherent, deeply embedded flaws in the system, and replace it to suit the reality of India.

We often hear about the “wisdom of the crowds.” The phrase has a comforting assurance to it which arises from the counter-intuitive realization that while the individual is not particularly wise, the collective is surprisingly full of wisdom and insight. But that assurance is at best an illusion maintained only by a suspension of disbelief, and is ultimately cold comfort in the face of real troubles brought on by the real stupidity of people.

The more the merrier, it is said. Perhaps, if you are talking about a party with your dearly liked family and friends. But not quite so much fun if the people involved are people like them rather than people like us. In fact, the more the PLT, the sorrier. The assumption I make here is that the present company — the PLU — are the informed kind and the PLT are the uninformed kind. There’s no need for me to waste time justifying that assumption, as it is so self-evidently true. (Make what you will of that.)

Getting back to the matter at hand. Uninformed voters are a positive danger to society. One uninformed voter is just fine. A few even — not a huge problem. But when their numbers grow to the hundreds of thousands — god forbid, millions — then you are asking for trouble. The theoretical argument for this is summarized by the Condorcet jury theorem (formulated by the Marquis de Condorcet in 1785, Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions.)

The theorem addresses the question of the optimal size of a decision-making group where the rule is that majority vote determines the decision. The model assumes that the individuals in the group have a certain (and equal) probability of making a good decision. If that probability of an individual making a good decision is more than half, then “adding more voters increases the probability that the majority decision is correct. In the limit, the probability that the majority votes correctly approaches 1 as the number of voters increases.” But if the probability of an individual making the right decision is less than half, “then adding more voters makes things worse: the optimal jury consists of a single voter.”

In real life, of course, voters are not homogeneous in their knowledge and cognitive abilities. But that does not alter the fundamental point that the larger the collection of uninformed voters, the higher the probability that the majority decision may turn out to be a bomb.

A few paragraphs up, I wrote, “of real troubles brought on by the real stupidity of people.” Stupid people are dangerous.

Allow me to briefly digress at this point. Prof Cipolla codified the basic laws of human stupidity thusly:

• First Basic Law: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
• Second Basic Law: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
• Third (and Golden) Basic Law: A stupid person is a person who caused losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
• Fourth Basic Law: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be costly mistake.
• Fifth Basic Law: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
• Corollary to the Fifth Basic Law: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

(See this post of Feb 2006, “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity” for details.)

While it is quite true that stupid people cause us needless troubles, thankfully not all people are stupid–only a small fraction of humanity is stupid. But you really don’t need a plane load of stupid people when the same negative effects of stupidity can be duplicated by a sufficiently large collection of uninformed people. A sufficiently large collection of uninformed people are indistinguishable from group stupidity in their effect on society. (With apologies to Arthur C Clarke.)

Stupidity is a congenital problem rooted in the brain. It cannot be cured. Being misinformed or uninformed is not similarly incurable. Nothing prevents us from making fully informed all the citizens who are eligible voters — nothing except that it would be too costly in term of time and money.

But wait! Do we really have to inform and educate all voters? Can we do something which does not involve educating everyone but that will have the same outcome as if we were to fully educate all the voters? Yes!

Imagine choosing a random sample of voters from the population. Then you educate this subset of voters intensively about the issues, the political parties and their manifestos, about the candidates, about the pros and cons of various proposals, about everything that a voter should be aware of before voting. Finally, you let these people cast their votes and figure out the winners of the election.

How large does the sample size has to be so that its choice is statistically close to the choice of the population? This always comes as a surprise to those of us who are unfamiliar with statistics, but the number is relatively small.

Take a look at this handy table (Source):

       Sample Size Table

Let’s examine one line in there. For a population of 5,000, if you need a 95% confidence level and a margin of error of 2.5%, then you have to have a sample of 1,176 — that is, over 20% of the population will have to be sampled. But for the same confidence level and the same margin of error, for a population of 300 million (an increase of 60,000 times in population over 5,000), the sample size goes up to only 1,537 (an increase of only only 1.3 times), or about 0.0005% of the population.

From the same table, if you need to have a confidence level of 99% and an error margin of 1%, you can sample on 16,586 to get the population estimate of 300,000,000 people. That is, you need to get only 5 out of every 10,000 people.

Imagine that. If 300,000,000 people were to vote, the results would be indistinguishable, for all practical purposes, from the results of a properly randomly selected subset of 16,586 voters. If it costs $1,000 to properly educate a voter, then educating 300,000,000 is an impossibility. But it will cost less than $17 million to educate the sample voters.

Three hundred billion dollars is a number too large for us to comprehend, leave alone spend. But $17 million we can understand: it’s what Mukeshbhai spent on the bathroom sink in the smallest of the guest bathrooms in his fugly mansion (if one goes by the reported $2 billion he spent on it.)

I will go into some details of this idea later. In the next post on the topic, I will look into “deliberative democracy.” Go to Stanford University’s Center for Deliberative Democracy to understand what it is.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

Previous posts in this series: Part 1, Part 2

About the Heart Sutra, Wikepedia says:

Briefly the sutra introduces the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteśvara, who in this case is representing the faculty of prajña (wisdom). His analysis of phenomena is that there is nothing which lies outside the five aggregates of human existence (skandhas) — form (rūpa), feeling (vedanā), volitions (samskārā), perceptions (samjñā), and consciousness (vijñāna).

Avalokiteśvara then addresses Śariputra, who in this text — as with many other Mahāyāna texts — is a representative of the Early Buddhist schools, described in many other sutras as being the Buddha’s foremost disciple in wisdom. Avalokiteśvara famously states that, “form is emptiness (Śūnyatā) and emptiness is form” and declares the other skandhas to be equally empty — that is, without an independent essence. Avalokiteśvara then goes through some of the most fundamental Buddhist teachings such as the Four Noble Truths and explains that in emptiness none of these labels apply. This is traditionally interpreted as saying that Buddhist teachings, while accurate descriptions of conventional truth, are mere statements about reality — they are not reality itself — and that they are therefore not applicable to the ultimate truth that is by definition beyond dualistic description. Thus the bodhisattva, as the archetypal Mahāyāna Buddhist, relies on the perfection of wisdom, defined in the larger Perfection of Wisdom sutras to be the wisdom that perceives reality directly without conceptual attachment. This perfection of wisdom is condensed in the mantra with which the Sutra concludes.

Also check out “Form is Emptiness” post from May 2007 in which I have the full text of the Prajna Paramita Hridaya Sutra.

“Form is emptiness, emptiness is also form” is a line from the sutra which I had used in a letter to Abhishek in June 2005.

Human ingenuity demonstrated at a level that we can marvel at. Of course machines that make those ICs and other high technology stuff must be even more amazing but appreciating them would require quite a bit more sophistication than is available to the average human–or even the average human senses. But what we see in that huge machine is more accessible to us.

Next time I will share more videos on the same topic. Leave some of your favorites in the comments. I am sure kids will love them since they find heavy equipment fascinating.

NEW DELHI: If the new rules framed by the Department of Information Technology for using cyber cafés are implemented in letter and spirit, they could well force people without their own computers to stay away from accessing the Internet, besides compelling the owners of these small businesses to store minute details about their customers’ surfing habits in the face of penal action.

Notified last month, the IT (Guidelines for Cyber Café) Rules, 2011, require cyber café customers to furnish proper identification proof, a copy of which must be stored for a year.

. . .

Additionally, cyber café owners must photograph their customers and maintain a detailed time-log of each of their visits. A soft and hard copy of these usage logs, which will include the customer’s photograph and ID proof, must be submitted to a government-designated “person or agency” every month.

. . .

Incredibly, the new rules, framed under the Information Technology Act, 2008, even specify the kind of furniture a cyber café must have. Cubicles with partitions higher than four-and-a-half feet will be illegal, and cafés are obligated to place terminals in such a way that computer screens face “outward” (towards common open space of the café) and can be easily monitored.

The new guidelines say that computers in cyber cafés should be equipped with “commercially available safety or filtering software so as to avoid, as far as possible, access to the websites relating to pornography including child pornography or obscene information.”

Further, cyber café owners need to put a display board, clearly visible to users, prohibiting them from viewing pornographic sites as well as copying or downloading information that is prohibited under the law.

About 10 percent of Indians have access to the internet, only a minority of whom I guess have internet access at home. If you are poor, the government will be standing behind you, looking over your shoulder to make sure that you only see and hear what the government approves of.

Deutsche Welle reports:

The Minister for Communications and IT, Sachin Pilot, has said the restrictions concern only content that might be considered “objectionable.” This includes material that “hurts the sentiments of certain individuals or communities, challenges the sovereignty of the nation or causes a threat to internal security.”

However, activists warn that while most of the restrictions in the rules are based on India’s criminal law and deal with blasphemous, obscene and defamatory material, some limitations are so loosely worded that they could easily be misused against netizens who are used to speaking their mind freely, whether about politics or other sometimes sensitive matters.

They feel that the rules are unreasonable as they undermine the free speech that is supposed to be guaranteed by the Constitution.

Hey mister activist, I have news for you. Two out of three Indians cannot read. They could not read the Constitution even if they wanted. But even among the minority who can read, a vanishingly small percentage have read it. For all practical purposes, the Constitution of India could be an elaborate hoax.

Freedom of speech is a joke in India. Most Indians do not know that the rulers of India do not permit citizens to disseminate news on radio.

NEW DELHI, India — Even in Asia’s supposed bastion of free speech, India, news radio is illegal.

Newspapers are allowed, and so are television stations. But those media reach mainly the rich. For the bulk of India’s more than 1 billion people, radio is all they have.

Restricting radio, then, is a powerful way to keep information from the masses. [Globalpost.]

I have been ranting about this for a while. Here’s a bit from a post from May 2007:

Even after British left, the structures they had created for controlling the economy in general, and the educational system more specifically, remained intact. The new political leaders saw it was beneficial for them not to deviate from the old colonial goal of imposing an extractive and exploitative government on the people. By continuing to control the education system, they were able to impose a degree of control over the population that would be unthinkable in a free society.

Universal primary education was especially neglected because it would have given rise to universal literacy. Universal literacy is not a good thing if the status quo is to be maintained in a regime which allows freedom of the press. It is safe to allow a free press if two out of three people cannot read. Freedom of the press is not meaningful — and is not a threat to the power structure — in a society of illiterates. We should note in passing that whether literate or not, people can hear and speak. So while the press was allowed freedom in a largely illiterate society, radio was absolutely government controlled, consistent with the aim of an exploitative and extractive system.

Sometimes I feel sorry for the slaves but in the end I am forced to feel contempt. I wrote this in March 2010.

I used to wonder how small marauding bands of barbarians ruled India for centuries, or how a few thousand people from a tiny island in the Atlantic ruled for nearly a hundred years a population of hundreds of millions.

Now I wonder no more. I think there is something in the Indian psyche that make Indians very easy to rule. The foreign rulers have been (to a large extent) replaced by domestic ones. There aren’t all that many rulers relative to the population.

All told, if you consider the members of the various state and central legislative bodies, the bureaucrats in the various ministries, the police and judiciary — all told it cannot amount to more than a few hundred thousand people. But like their foreign counterparts before 1947, these rule over hundreds of millions.

The poor sods — nearly 1,200,000,000, or one thousand two hundred million — cowering spineless sods dutifully obey the diktats of the rulers.

If this had been a population with any spine, any dignity, or honor, they would have dragged the criminals ruling over them on to the streets and strung them up from the lamp posts.

All the poor sods have to do is to drag half a dozen of the most corrupt politicians and judges and lynch them. The other few hundred thousands would get into line. They will know that it is they who are the servants and the people are the rulers.

Rules change over time. Sometimes the change is exogenous (brought about by external forces), and sometimes it is endogenous (when people wake up to a new realization.) More about how endogenous changes of rules later. For now, let’s get down to specifics.

Kaushik Basu has recently proposed a change in one rule. Without getting into the details, let’s just note that the rule relates to bribery of public officials. More specifically, the rule says that in a case of bribery, both the bribe taker (in this case the person who demands the bribe) and the bribe giver (who in this case is forced to pay a bribe) are guilty of a crime and both have to be punished. Basu proposes replacing that rule with a new rule which would de-criminalize the giving of bribes, meaning only the bribe taker would be guilty of a crime, and the bribe giver would be considered a victim instead of a criminal.

The implications are too trivially evident for us to waste time on it. But waste time I will. If I know that by reporting the fact that I paid the man at the passport office money so that he will not delay my passport application, I too will be charged with a crime, it is absolutely unlikely that I will report the matter. The man at the passport office knows this too and is quite happy to make that extra money on the side. Under the new rule, I would report him because paying a bribe under duress is not a crime any more. The man at the passport office knows this and will be afraid to demand a bribe.

There are societies where being raped is akin to committing a crime. Not that the rape victim had a choice in the matter (being a victim rarely is) but the rule in those societies say that the raped person is guilty of a crime. So you can imagine there’s a negative incentive to report rape. Which in turn means that rapists routinely get away with rape. This rule has obvious advantage for violent men and it should not surprise us if we find that rape is more frequent in it relative to other societies where rapists are the criminals and the victim has the full protect of the law.

India is a “third world” under-developed impoverished country because the set of rules that India is subject to is bad. For India to develop, the rules have to change. How to bring about that change endogenously is the biggest challenge we face. But it is not an impossible task. We will be looking at that in a later post.

[Part 1 of this series.]

Related Post: “The Tangled Web — Part 3“. June 2007.

For soft copies of the book, there are two avenues of distribution. One, as a Kindle book from Amazon. Two, as a PDF download from the book website. Kindle distribution is whatever Amazon charges and a little for fixed cost recovery. I suppose $3 would be an appropriate price since the cost of printing and S&H is not incurred.

For PDF download, I think there has to be a mechanism for people to donate whatever amount they feel is appropriate. The marginal benefit from the book depends on the reader. So if you buy the book and find it makes sense and you are glad that you read it, you could try to estimate how much you value it and decide to donate that amount. For someone it may be a positive number, zero, or a negative number. Since you cannot donate a negative amount in monetary terms, I suppose the lower bound is zero.

People who understand this are better off because they know that gains can be had by making changes to how things are done. People who question their assumptions, who search for more elegant solutions, people who don’t become complacent and smug about their way of doing things, are more successful. It’s a bad system that admits no changes — as is plainly evident in the failures of many societies that tenaciously hang on to outdated religions in the face of all reason and rationality. They not only lack imagination, they even lack the basic intelligence to learn from others who have figured out better ways of doing things.

So let’s question the received wisdom of democracy being the best way of organizing society. Let’s question the religion that democracy has been reduced to. Let’s look around, at the very least, to see if other ways of implementing democracy have been figured out by others. Unsurprisingly, better ways have been figured out but we are too intellectually lazy to take the time to consider them and too wedded to our prejudices to give them a try.

Let me be very clear about one thing. Questioning something is not the same as rejecting it. In fact, the very act of questioning can help in clarifying why it makes sense. Understanding that we have assumptions is important and checking that they conform with reality is absolutely necessary. In the present context, I question the assumption that democracy is the best system, and that “one person one vote” and “first past the post” are the best ways of implementing it.

Democracy is one of the ways of choosing who will be part of the government. But even if we accept it as the preferred way, we have to decide a more fundamental matter: What should be the role of the government? No doubt students and scholars of political science have debated that for centuries and have reached important conclusions. If we “the people” had the talent, the inclination and the time to understand their insights — which in our case we don’t — we would be better off.

Perhaps we should give the job of figuring out whom to elect — and what those elected should do — to those scholars. Let the specialists decide those matters of politics just as we let the doctors and surgeons decide on matters of health and medicine. But since we are empowered to vote, what we consider to be the role of the government matters, and so we must ponder at least for a bit what we have assumed the proper role of government in society to be. What we think the government should do has an impact on what the government actually does, and therefore has a profound effect on what we have to live with. It is actually a matter of life and death, and must not be taken lightly.

Let’s consider two extreme formulations of the role of government. At the left end, there’s a government which intervenes in every aspect of the society and the economy. It runs schools and colleges, bakeries and steel mills, airlines and armies, temples and banks, agricultural markets and telephone companies, electricity utilities and television stations, etc. It withholds or distributes favors to people based on their group allegiances. It decides for the people which books to read, which movies to watch, what is to be said on radio. It determines and dictates what food and how much should be served at social events. It decides which religion is legitimate and deserves support, it determines who gets how much for their religious observances. It dictates what you should do with your property and with yourself. It tells you whom you can marry and what you do are allowed to do to whom in your bedroom.

Having taken on so much to do, it does not do any of it well, and worse, it does not even do the job that it absolutely must. It runs airlines, running up loses in the billions, while it cannot even provide drinking water to its citizens. I label it the “Authoritarian Maximalist” or AM government.

At the right end of the spectrum, the government focuses on the absolutely essential bits and does it well. It protects the “fundamental rights of the individual” such as the right to their own self and their property (which requires running a police force and a legal system), it provides external security (which means having a military), provides an environment for economic activity (which requires regulatory bodies), and funds only those public goods which are inadequately provided by the free market. This government creates the environment for businesses to do business but does not get into business itself. It does not produce goods and services but stands aside while the people produce the goods and services. Let’s call this the “Freedom Maximizing” or FM government.

India has an AM government and that is the cause of most, if not all, of our woes.

Could an AM government ever work? In principle it can work if the people running the government are wise, enlightened, omniscient, selfless beings, and if the people are wise, enlightened, omniscient, selfless beings. But if that were so, in this ideal world, there wouldn’t be much need for a government. In the real world, all of us are self-seeking, unwise, generally ignorant, and short-sighted. So in practice, an AM government gives rise to massive corruption and lack of development. Exactly what we find in India since India has had an AM government for at least during the British Raj and definitely in the post-independence British Raj 2.0 that we have today.

Public corruption is getting a lot of press these days and people are frantically running around trying to figure out ways to reduce it. Unfortunately, corruption is here to stay as long as we continue to have the AM government. People in the government have enormous power, and that gives them the opportunity to extract huge amounts from the economy. That is being counted in billions of dollars (because of course much of it is acquired and stashed away in US dollars) and add up to over trillion dollars stolen in the last few decades.

What’s worse is that the opportunity for corruption that big government provides attracts the most criminally corrupt to seek political office, and these win elections because they can buy votes. This guarantees that competent and honest people can generally not win. The people who win are not only dishonest but are incompetent to formulate good policies to boot.

It is regrettable that too many of those who have decided to fight corruption are unable to figure out the causes of corruption and are wasting precious time trying to fix the symptoms instead of trying to do what has to be done, that is, reduce the power of the government. They are focusing on the fruits when they should be focusing on uprooting the tree. This season you could remove all the fruits but next season the tree will bear more.

Imagine that India were to some how get a very small government. Since there would be none or little financial gain from holding political office, it would be pointless for the criminally greedy to seek office. People with an interest in good governance could then stand a chance of winning elections, and public policy making would improve.

This is just the introduction to a series of blog posts where I examine these issues at some length. I will go into how you can have a better implementation of democracy in India, in the next bit. As I go along, depending on my mood and the mood of the readers, I will explore how we can bring about structural change (not just superficial cosmetic changes) in India’s governance and by extension, to India.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

It’s time to explain what my position is and why.

I am against anyone whose actions hurt the Hindu cause because I am a Hindu. Hinduism (to use the commonly used word for the Sanatan Dharm) and the other Indic religions are dear to me and I will fight anyone who gives them a bad name.

In this post I will explain why I oppose people like Satya Sai Baba and why on balance what he did was wrong and should be opposed by thinking Hindus. He has empowered the enemies of Hindus and endangered Hindu causes. He was either a charlatan or a severely deluded person, neither of which can be celebrated. On balance, he has done more to discredit Hinduism and Hindus than the good he is reputed to have done.

SSB, as any of his millions of followers will remind you, had a following in millions. He was — and is — regarded as a “Hindu leader” by many more millions who are not his followers. What the non-followers saw was a person who was plainly hoodwinking people. I am sure that aside from the really stupid cognitively handicapped, even his followers would agree that he was basically tricking people into believing that he could materialize ash (for the poor) and valuable small objects (for the rich.)

SSB used cheap tricks which any half-assed stage magician can do much better. Sophisticated trained magician he was not. You can see numerous videos on Youtube that clearly show that SSB was a really poor — not in terms of how much money he made but in the quality of the performance — trickster. But he had a huge following of people who call themselves Hindus. That is ammunition to people who would like to discredit Hindus and Hinduism.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Hindus are smart people did you say? Really? They are taken in by a guy who can’t even do simple stage magic without being detected, something that any two-bit magician can do for $50 for the entire evening’s entertainment at a child’s birthday party. Indians are not gullible, did you say? Really now. How on earth can you point fingers at our evangelizing preachers who fake-heal people at those rallies when one of your most famous ‘godman’ does lousy magic tricks and millions of Hindus hand over money to him?”

You reply, “But you are wrong. You are focusing on the magic tricks. Fact is that he built hospitals and delivered water to villages.”

“Are you claiming that he materialized those hospitals and the water for villages? And the money for the doctors and medicines — did he materialize that also?”

You reply, “No, don’t be silly. He told people that they should donate money for charity, and SSB used the money for getting all that done.”

“So you mean that he tricked people into giving him money. That shows that Indians have the resources to build hospitals and deliver water to villages but they don’t do it. The Indian government is incompetent and cannot get the resources from the people to do it. It also means that Indians have to be tricked into doing the right thing. They are gullible and mean. That’s what we have been saying — you Indians are ethically challenged. It is very sad.”

You reply, “You just don’t understand, do you. You don’t understand that our religion is really very good, and SSB used to give very deep lectures on how good it is. You just don’t know.”

“You are right that I don’t know about your religion. But from what I see from what SSB did, it cannot be very profound or deep. I am an outsider and I have to draw conclusions from what I see from the outside. If he has to use cheap tricks to get people to cough up, the underlying message must be shoddy. Think about it for a moment. Had the message been good, would it require conjuring tricks for convincing people that he was a man with a valuable message? So I have to conclude that the message of Hinduism must be quite worthless since it requires what amounts to putting lipstick on it.”

You reply, “I think you are being totally biased and unfair. SSB has very rich and powerful people as his followers. Very powerful politicians, even. One of the world’s most famous cricketers — Sachin Tendulkar — is a devotee.”

“Being rich and powerful does not mean that a person is wise, does it? Rich and powerful people often hang out and support each other in order to better fleece the powerless and the poor. In fact, it is a clever political ploy — to appear to be a great devotee of some powerful figure so that you gain the goodwill of followers and get political support. Can a politician really afford to alienate millions of potential voters by not appearing to be a follower also? My point is that SSB was a very smart man and must have known that using tricks was the only way to get his followers. I don’t believe that he had any real message because if a message is valuable, you don’t need tricks.”

You reply, “What’s wrong with you? Why are you fixated on tricks? All you have seen is a few minutes of YouTube videos. Do you know that videos can be doctored? Do you really believe all you see on videos? Have you seen any Star Trek movies? Do you think those aliens are real?”

“Forget those videos. Did SSB claim to have materialized stuff? If he did, then he has admitted that he was cheating because it goes against everything that is known about the universe we live in. If you believe that he could get stuff out of the air, you would have to believe that one can fly to the moon on a horse, that one can rise from the dead, and all the other “miracle” stuff. Then it is simply a matter of who claims to do more miracles. No wonder Christianity and Islam are getting converts — their stories have more miracles and the gullible Indians are converting. As I see it, SSB prepared the grounds for conversion by making the people believe the impossible, by not telling them to not be taken in by cheap tricks and inane fables.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

India is a large country and thousands of good people toil in total obscurity doing good work. They neither hobnob with powerful politicians, nor do they fool people into believing lies. Some of them educate people on the essentials of dharma, some work to undo the harm that the government does, some work to do the work that the government should have done but is too incompetent to do. Their work on the aggregate is much much bigger than what SSB ever did.

Agreed that SSB probably did not take all the money that he got from people and stash it away in foreign banks, unlike some of his politician followers. But you have to wonder — wouldn’t it have been better if he had not lied and cheated people? About his lying and cheating there can be no debate since materializing ash and small valuable objects is impossible.

If he really was able to materialize anything, to show his powers he could have materialized something that is not currently within the power of humans to manufacture. He is supposed to have turned a bucket of water to a bucket of petrol by sticking his finger into it. To show that it was no ordinary trick, he could have stuck his finger into a medium sized lake — at least it would have shown us a way out of our dependence on foreign oil.

I am being accused of helping out the enemy. That is truly unbelievable. Firstly, I don’t have followers — just a few people who read my blog. My message is that we need to clean up our act so that we are not ridiculed by others. Secondly, SSB has followers in the millions and therefore had the responsibility to behave ethically. What SSB did with those dirty tricks is provide our enemies with the ammunition they need to discredit Hindus, Hinduism and India.

To answer Rushdie’s question (rhetorical though it is): Depends on what you mean by “we” — if it means the average guy on the streets who votes for war-mongering presidents, then yes. They are the same ones who believed that “weapons of mass destruction” story, and the story that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with oil and it was only to bring “democracy” to Iraq and liberate the Iraqis.

Yes, “we” are supposed to believe that, and “we” do indeed obligingly believe because “we” are the idiots that the powers that be find very useful.The question for the rest of us, though, is why do they want the “we” to believe the unbelievable. My answer follows.

The Pakistani claim that they did not know is an useful one — and not just to the Pakis. That claim is also useful for the leaders of the US. The US and Pakistan are in this together. The US needs Pakistan as much as Pakistan needs the US. I have argued why previously on this blog and therefore I will not repeat myself.

Here’s the short version of the story. Osama bin Laden had been living in Pakistan for the last five or six years. The Pakistanis (by that I mean the ISI and other leaders) had to know where OBL was because how else would they protect him from some who would want him dead. Lots of people sincerely wanted him dead and a lots more people claimed that they wanted him dead. The latter knew that he was more useful alive than dead, and that when they really wanted him dead, they would know where to find him and finish him off.

The Pakistanis kept OBL safe and loudly proclaimed for all to hear that they had no idea where OBL was. That’s for the public — the “we” — to hear and swallow. The US (by that I mean the leaders of the American military-industrial complex) knew that the Pakis knew but were willing to go along with the publicly claimed ignorance of the Pakis because it helped the US. Not just in this matter of OBL, in other matters as well, it helps the US to pretend to believe the Pakis. Let’s stick to the OBL story for now.

Pretending to believe the Pakistanis was the only way for the US to not be forced to demand that the Pakistanis hand over OBL. Why would the US not want to grab OBL as soon as possible? Haven’t they been trying to do that for years? What about the billions — actually trillions — of dollars that the US has spent on fighting the war on terror?

Yes, indeed, the US is spending trillions on waging the war on terror. And the wages of that war is counted in trillions. Ask yourself who gets those wages, and you will have your answer to why that war has to be continued and cannot be terminated too soon.

If the US had not pretended to believe the Pakistanis, as I was saying, it would have had to force the Pakis to hand over OBL. That would have meant that the US would have to declare Pakistan a terrorist state, instead of an “ally” in the “war against terror.” That would have meant that the US could not continue to pour billions of dollars in “aid” to Pakistan. The words within quotation marks do double duty — they are not what they appear to be.

As a Russian proverb puts it, not all who snore are sleeping. The snoring was deafening but that does not mean that the Pakis and the US were asleep. Both were wide awake.

The Pakis lied that they didn’t know. The US knew that the Pakis knew but pretended to believe in the Pakistani lies. The Pakis knew that the US knew that the Pakis knew. The US knew that the Pakis knew that the US knew that the Pakis knew . . . ad infinitum. It was common knowledge to them. After all, it’s the business of the ISI to know what is going on in Pakistan. And it is the business of the CIA to know what the ISI knows.

Only the “we” don’t know that the ISI knows everything that is going on in Pakistan. Not only does the ISI know but it’s the one giving orders for what is to go on in Pakistan — and in some cases, as in the 26/11 terrorist attack on India, outside Pakistan. Only the “we” don’t know that the CIA can kill anyone anywhere any old time they want. Micheal Corleone’s realization, “If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone,” applies to the CIA (and by extension to the US) more than any other organization in the world, even more than to Al Quaida. (Remember the Al Q would certainly do the POTUS in if they could but they can’t.)

It’s all a big “let’s pretend” game. The Pakis pretend to be innocent; the US pretends to believe the Pakis. It’s like in a bad marriage where the woman pretends to be chaste while sleeping around and the cuckolded husband pretends to others that she is faithful. You have to wonder what is in it for the husband because it is certainly not just for the neighbors that this game of pretend is played.

For answers, follow the money. Trillions spent on the “war against terror.” One person’s spending is another person’s earnings, remember? Those predator drones don’t come for a song. Neither do the bombers and the fighters. Those million-dollar cruise missiles don’t grow on trees. The billions that the US gives to the Pakistanis for “fighting terrorism” does not go to Pakistan — they go to American arms manufacturers. The arms manufacturers buy the senators (the best money can buy) and the payback comes in the form of “aid to front line non-NATO allies” such as Pakistan.

The major portion of the trillions spent on the war in Afghanistan and Iraq ends up in the pockets of American arms manufacturers. The war on terror (let’s do away with the scare quotes) has to go on because otherwise it would hurt the American economy. That’s why the US finds it convenient to believe the lying Pakistanis, and the Pakistanis have to keep lying because if the war on terror were to stop, the Pakistani nation — the economy has died a long time ago — would collapse.

The US cannot afford to declare Pakistan a terrorist state. Salman Rushdie, you may come to the belated realization that it is high time it was declared such but it will be a cold day in hell before the US does that. Remember that even India — which is victim numero uno of Pakistani terrorism — does not declare Pakistan a terrorist state because it is useful to the movers and shakers in India. Pakistan is far too useful to the US for the continued war on terror. The most terrifying things for the US would be if the war on terror were to end.

Which makes me immensely sad. I love the US. More accurately, I love the ideals that the US once stood for, the ideals enshrined in its constitution. I love the land and the people who call it home. So it is sad for me to see what it has been reduced to by the narrow-minded greed and myopic self-interest of a powerful few. Where once it fought and won the last world war for free people all over the world, now it is pretending to fight a battle that belittles it.

Seeing all the triumphant chest thumping over the killing of Osama bin Laden brought to mind Rainer Maria Rilke’s words –

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.

Killing OBL is at best a small triumph over a very small man, and that too with the “help” of people who are even tinier. What saddens me is how the US has diminished itself by pitting itself against an almost inconsequential enemy while the greater enemies are roaming unheeded. The US has lost moral might and instead prides itself for having the world’s greatest military force. It is like the schoolyard bully who has failing grades and knows it, and to prop up its self-image goes around beating up weaklings during recess.

What the world needs is enlightened leaders. The fact is that the US is the most powerful nation on earth — scientifically, technologically, economically, and militarily (all of which are necessarily related.) The US needs to take moral leadership because no other country has the capacity to do so. Only it can do what no other nation can do — bring about peace and prosperity on earth. But the sad thing is that it does not even name the enemy, and merely pretends to be asleep. It is time for the US to stop pretending.

Notes:

1. Common knowledge. This is distinct from “general knowledge.” I have explored the term in two previous posts that I consider worth re-reading.

The Theater of the Absurd: The War Log Edition. Aug 2010. And the part two of that post.

It beggars belief that the government of the US does not know that the money they ship to Pakistan is being used by Pakistan to kill American soldiers. It is absurd to imagine that the US government does not have access to its own secret war logs. The US administration is pretending that it did not know, and only after the leaks it knows that Pakistan is a double-crossing nuclear-armed scum of a nation, and it is pretending to talk tough. Hillary Clinton, the US Sec of State, said the other day that someone in the Pakistani government must know where Osama bin Laden is.

Shocking!! I am shocked. I say I am shocked. Not.

I am not shocked because I think what Hillary Clinton said is common knowledge.

Slight digression on “common knowledge.” I may know something and you may also know the same something. But when I know that you too know, and you know that I too know, and moreover, if I know that you know that I know, and you know that I know that you know, and moreover, I know that you know that I know that you know . . . ad infinitum, then it becomes common knowledge.

Hillary Clinton knows that the Pakis know where OBL is; the Pakis know where OBL is; Clinton knows that Pakis know that Clinton knows that Pakis know; the Pakis know that Clinton knows that the Pakis know that Clinton knows . . . you get the picture.

Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the “Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again.” Hamish is shocked and declares that “No Scotsman would do such a thing.” The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, “No true Scotsman would do such a thing.”
—Antony Flew, Thinking About Thinking (1975) [Wiki]

At the risk of running afoul of Godwin’s law, allow me this: “Oh, Adolf Hitler! He was not a leader of Germans. Why, he killed lots of Germans. He was not a true German.”

Well, if Osama bin Laden was not a leader of Muslims, who the f**k was he leading and who were the people carrying out his orders — little green men from mars? Or was it the Amish? Anyone taken in by that kind of horse-doodoo deserves that kind of shit.

The man is an apologist for ruthless killers.

Seats in engineering college far exceed the demand. Demand far exceeds the supply in engineering colleges. The government controls the supply. The demand is derived from the benefits of getting a seat in an engineering college. If you have a degree, you can compete for the limited number of jobs. The government (indirectly) controls the supply of jobs. Briefly, the formal sector employs engineers. The formal sector is small — only about seven percent of the labor force is employed by the formal sector. The formal sector is kept small by government action.

Formal sector employment depends on the level of education attainment of the population. India has the largest number of illiterate people in the world. Getting educated is quite an achievement for the average Indian — most people are not even high school graduate. Tertiary education is even harder challenge. Government control of schools and colleges have ensured India’s distressed educational system.

Shortage of colleges to study in and the shortage of jobs for college graduates are not good for the economy, naturally, but it has to be good for someone — otherwise why would this situation persist for decades. Those are the people who are in the government and others associated with the government.

The chief minister of one states of India is reputed to have amassed billions of dollars of wealth just from the educational sector. (He also has interests in all other sectors that the government controls, of course, including cricket, real estate, sugar, power — you name it.) Power comes from control. Which explains why the government of India used the “licence permit quota control” mechanism. Governmental power allows wealth extraction. The opportunity to extract wealth as a government official fuels the extreme competition for political power.

It is all of a piece: government control –> power to extract rents –> competition among the most corrupt to gain power –> kakistocracy (rule by the least principled and the most corrupt) –> corruption in every sector of the economy (telecom, building of infrastructure for games, defense purchases, ad infinitum) –> more government control –> . . . the vicious circle of poverty, ignorant, corruption, and underdevelopment goes round and round.

Massive public ignorance and public corruption are related. Take the case of Antonia Maino, aka Sonia Gandhi. She is one of the most powerful people in a nation of 1.2 billion people. India is a democracy — meaning that Antonia’s power has to come from the support of a significant segment of the Indian population. It is impossible that this support would exist if people were not ignorant of the facts about Antonia’s corruption.

She has to be one of the most corrupt Italians ever — and that’s saying something if you know about Italian corruption. The mafia is one of Italy’s best known exports. Only if you have been living the life of a rather reclusive hermit on the far side of the moon, have you not heard about Antonia Maino’s shenanigans. But we don’t really know the full extent of the malfeasance. For that, we have to be grateful to people like Dr Swami. Go read “Sanction to Prosecute Ms Sonia Gandhi“, a letter by Dr Subramanian Swamy to Dr Manmohan Singh (the most despicably dishonest man in India.) It is a long letter and makes compelling reading. I doubt that Dr Singh is going to do anything about it, though. The Janata Party press release says:

April 15, 2011

Dr.Subramanian Swamy, Janata Party President and former Union Cabinet Minister for Law &Justice, today submitted a Petition of 206 pages, seeking from the Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh the required Sanction to prosecute Ms. Sonia Gandhi under Sections 11 & 13 of the Prevention of Corruption Act. Sanction is required under Section 19 of the Act because she is Chairperson of the National Advisory Council with Cabinet rank.

In his Petition to the PM, Dr.Swamy has made out a prima facie case on documentary circumstantial evidence that Ms.Gandhi abetted Italian businessman and close family friend Ottavio Quattrocchi to obtain an illegal commission in the Bofors Gun Purchase deal, and then influenced the government of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao to enable Mr. Quattrocchi to escape from the country in July 1993. Thereafter she directed the Union Law Minister in 2005 to enable Mr. Quattrocchi to get his London accounts de-frozen and decamp scot free with over $ 200 million [about Rs 1000 crores].

Dr.Swamy has also made out a prima facie case that Mr. Gandhi has illegally held in Swiss bank accounts illegal monies of about Rs. 10,000 crores received as a legatee in 1991 following Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. He also produced an admission on record of the spokesperson of the Russian government that KGB had provided funds to Ms. Gandhi and her family, as also evidence that she had received commissions on Indo-Soviet trade, which were illegal under Indian law.

In his Petition, Dr.Swamy has also catalogued a list of offences prima facie committed by Ms.Sonia Gandhi since 1974 which shows that she is an habitual offender who deserves to be prosecuted and punished.

It will be a while before Dr Singh even acknowledges the letter by Dr Swamy. I guess he is afraid for his life since his survival depends on his continued usefulness to The Family.

Anyhow, as I was saying, massive public corruption is ultimately enabled by public ignorance. I refuse to believe that if the Indian voters actually knew how absolutely corrupt Antonia Maino and her family are that they would not hound her out of the country. She has turned India into the laughing stock of the world but not without help from the other crooks who surround her. We have to wake up the people and tell them that they have to change their votes if they want to stop India being a Third World country.

Getting back to the matter of leaked papers: leaked papers is a symptom of the corruption that has spread to every sector of the economy and every segment of the population. Students who are morally and ethically weak see all the massive corruption being reported in the media. They cannot see how it can be wrong to buy leaked exam papers when apparently stealing by the billions is not wrong.

It’s all karma, neh?

A nation is a group of people who share culture, ethnicity, language and/or territory. . . A nation is not necessarily equated with country in that a country is akin to a state which is defined as the political entity within defined borders. Although “nation” is also commonly used in informal discourse as a synonym for state or country, a nation is not identical to a state. Countries where the social concept of “nation” coincides with the political concept of “state” are called nation states. [Wiki, Nation.]

The Indian nation has been shrinking for centuries. Look at the map. Or I should say look at a series of maps. Afghanistan, for instance, was a Buddhist nation and to that extent it was part of the Indic nation. Today it is a wasteland. It was conquered a few centuries ago. The land that is Pakistan today was part of that Indic civilization. It was formally chopped off in 1947 but the fate of that part of the world was sealed with the Islamic invasion of those parts. To the east, Malaysia and Indonesia are rapidly Islamizing.

If, as has been observed by many that demographics determine borders, then it should not come as a surprise that India has been shrinking because the most striking demographic change — conversion of people of Indic faiths to Islam and Christianity — is occurring for centuries. And once that demographic transition takes place, the new entity carved out of India becomes a sworn enemy intent on destroying India. Remember that Pakistanis are the descendants of people of Indic civilization who were converted to Islam. Today’s converts will in due course also take up arms against their former cultural and ethnic relatives. It will not be too long before some of the eastern Indian states will seek secession because their demographics — 100 percent Christian — would dictate different borders.

India has been shrinking and will continue to do so. Remembering that change is a fundamental feature of the universe, it is unreasonable to expect no change. But not all change is an improvement, and some change imposes immense suffering. The suffering that Islamization imposes on the population is heartbreaking, of course. Even worse, in a globalized world, the suffering of Islamic nations is quickly transmitted — often amplified — to non-Muslims. Islam claims universal domain and thus imposes suffering universally, whether you live in an Islamic country or not, whether you are a Muslim or not.

Islam’s older relative, Christianity, also caused untold suffering around the world for centuries. The natives of many countries in the Americas paid with rivers of blood and tears. Anyone even remotely familiar with the history of civilization is aware of the bloody history of those two monotheistic faiths. Samuel Huntington has pointed out Islam’s bloody borders — and innards — and he is just one of many who have argued that it is a clash of civilizations.

My central concern is suffering and how to reduce it. From that flows my interest in India’s economic growth and development. India accounts for a huge chunk of humanity and if we can do something to make India more materially prosperous, we have a shot at reducing human suffering. One of the things we have to guard against is the Islamization of India. Analytically you can argue that the Islamization of a population would be immiserizing (meaning “to increase misery”, to borrow a word from Jagadish Bhagwati) but the empirical evidence is so overwhelming that we need not tax our analytical faculties.

I don’t care what sky-daddy people believe in as long as they keep their beliefs to themselves and follow the dictates of their sky-daddy in the privacy of their own home. But if they go around killing non-believers for imagined crimes against their sky-daddy, I am not going to stand for it. It is not Islam as an ideology that I am against but rather what people do under its influence that I am against.

We have a problem at hand. It is a complex problem, as opposed to a simple problem. A simple problem is one that you have and you know you have it. A complex problem is one which you have and you don’t know that you have a problem. To solve a complex problem you need to first make people aware of the problem, and only then can you propose and implement a solution.

India’s fight against the designs that institutions motivated by the destructive monotheistic ideologies requires people who address the more difficult part of the complex problem: waking up the people. Once people become sensitized to the need to fight the enemy, it will not be too hard to end the longest running war in the history of mankind.

First step is to educate ourselves. Let’s pay attention to what the smart guys are saying out of concern for the universal good. Take, for example, Mr Rajiv Malhotra and his book, “Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines” (co-author Aravindan Neekakandan.) We have understand the full scope of the problem before we can help with the solution. If we understand that bit, the next step will be trivially clear to us.

The rest of this blog post is about that book. All of 640 pages of carefully researched, cogently argued, heavily annotated and footnoted. First of all, it is a big fat book. You all know how I feel about big fat books. But you have to read it and do something with the understanding.

Here’s what the blurb says,

India’s integrity is being undermined by three global networks that have well-established operating bases inside India: (i) Islamic radicalism linked with Pakistan, (ii) Maoists and Marxist radicals supported by China via intermediaries such as Nepal, and (iii) Dravidian and Dalit identity separatism being fostered by the West in the name of human rights. This book focuses on the third: the role of U.S. and European churches, academics, think-tanks, foundations, government and human rights groups in fostering separation of the identities of Dravidian and Dalit communities from the rest of India. The book is the result of five years of research, and uses information obtained in the West about foreign funding of these Indian-based activities. The research tracked the money trails that start out claiming to be for “education,” “human rights,” “empowerment training,” and “leadership training,” but end up in programs designed to produce angry youths who feel disenfranchised from Indian identity. The book reveals how outdated racial theories continue to provide academic frameworks and fuel the rhetoric that can trigger civil wars and genocides in developing countries. The Dravidian movement’s 200-year history has such origins. Its latest manifestation is the “Dravidian Christianity” movement that fabricates a political and cultural history to exploit old faultlines. The book explicitly names individuals and institutions, including prominent Western ones and their Indian affiliates. Its goal is to spark an honest debate on the extent to which human rights and other “empowerment” projects are cover-ups for these nefarious activities. For more information, or to view videos about this book, visit www.breakingindia.com

Here’s a commentary by NS Rajaram on “Breaking India” explains why the book is important.

BREAKING INDIA MAY UNDERMINE WAR ON TERRORISM

Authors of the just released book Breaking India allege that Christian organizations are engaged in a divisive program to expand in countries like India, Sri Lanka and other former colonies by creating and exploiting divisions. This shortsighted policy may seriously undermine war against terror.

N.S. Rajaram

The war against terror is not just India’s war or America’s war: it is a war of freedom against the spread of ideology of terror in the name of God. The West, America in particular, became aware of the threat only after 9/11 but India has been waging a war against Jihadi terror for over a thousand years. As a result no people in the world today have more knowledge and experience of fighting terror than the Indians. India and the West should be working together to defeat this menace. With countries in the strategically vital Middle East sliding into turmoil, solidarity with India becomes still more important: this is a fact not seriously disputed by any serious strategic thinker in the world

But curiously, some groups based in America and Europe are actively engaged in weakening Indian society by dividing its people into mutually hostile camps on the basis of tribe, cast and religion. It is part of an ideology and academic exercise promoted by evangelical Christian and so-called ‘human rights’ organizations in an effort to spread their influence and gain converts. Many human rights organizations are little more than secular fronts of various churches that have made inroads into the media and are now trying to gain control of sections of the government. All this is brought out with profuse documentation by Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan in their just released book Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines (Amaryllis 2011).

Their strategy is based on creating and fanning resentments among so-called ‘minorities’— a continuation of the tactics used by bureaucrats, academics and missionaries during the colonial era. These minorities are often based on willful misrepresentation. To take an example, McDonalds is one of the world’s largest fast food chains. In the past decade or so it has begun setting up franchises in India, Sri Lanka and other countries. In India its presence is miniscule compared to local businesses in the restaurant businesses. But no one for that reason regards India’s McDonalds franchises as ‘small businesses’ that qualify for tax and other benefits. Take another example: GM makes and sells cars in India, but in numbers it is dwarfed by Indian automakers like Maruti, Tata and Mahindra. Yet no one sees GM as a small business.

But this is exactly the claim of Christian organizations like the Catholic, Anglican and evangelical churches. Even though they are multinational organizations that are much larger worldwide than any Hindu sect or organization, they insist on being treated as minorities and given special privileges in education, jobs and other areas. This is a central thesis of the just noted Breaking India by Malhotra and Neelakandan. The authors further point out that in a manner eerily similar to what happened in the century preceding the European colonization of India (and other countries), these Christian organizations and their academic and NGO affiliates are engaged in weakening the country to facilitate foreign domination. It is no accident that Church organizations enjoyed special privileges under British rule, many of which have continued after independence in the guise of ‘minority’ rights. Their activities today give the impression that they would like to see the return of colonial rule in some form.

Dividing people along tribal and ethnic lines has a long and sordid history. In India it took the form of a racial divide of Indians into two groups called Aryans and Dravidians. Science has fully discredited the notion of race while the British themselves have acknowledged their political motive by admitting that the so-called Aryan Invasion Theory “gave a historical precedent to justify the role and status of the British Raj, who could argue that they were transforming India for the better in the same way that the Aryans had done thousands of years earlier.” (BBC, October 6, 2005.)

In a speech at the British House of Commons in 1929, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin echoed the idea by claiming that God had told the British (presumably in English) to uplift the degraded Indian Aryans to their former heights through British rule. This is what came to be known as the White Man’s Burden in the phrase made famous by Rudyard Kipling. Neither Kipling nor Baldwin originated the idea: they borrowed it from the missionaries who claimed, and still claim that by accepting Jesus as savior, we can be saved from our sins since Jesus died for our sins. (This is an obvious incentive to sin as much as possible since we can save ourselves by converting on our deathbeds; if we don’t sin, Jesus will have died in vain.)

But missionaries and academics later went much further. They claimed that their (meaning the British) presence was necessary to correct the oppression of the ‘minority’ Dravidians by the ‘invading’ Aryans. The most influential figure in this development was Robert Caldwell, Bishop of Tirunelveli. The Google Encyclopedia describes him as: “a Colonial Era Evangelist Missionary who used native languages as a tool to proselytize the Colonized in Southern India. To aid his mission, he nativised Christianity by adopting a teleological approach to re-classify Indian languages inspired by scientific (sic: pseudo-scientific) racial theories that was popular amongst the European intellectuals in the 19th century. His works revolve around the missionary work in Tinnevelly (Thirunelveli) district in Tamil Nadu and it laid the theoretical foundation for the political and academic ‘revivalist’ movement that came to dominate Dravidian nationalism in Tamil Nadu and racial polarization in Sri Lanka.”

This polarization led to the church-sponsored LTTE terrorism in Sri Lanka that ended only with its total defeat. In India it led to the Dravidian faultline—as the authors term it—that sustains Dravidian politics especially in Tamil Nadu. The original DMK was the handiwork of Christian missionaries. It was originally called the Justice Party, claiming its goal was to bring justice to the oppressed Dravidians. It is supposed to be scientific and rationalist, but still holds on to the scientifically discredited Aryan-Dravidian theory. This division is the centerpiece of both the Dravidian parties and the LTTE: their whole ideology collapses once they accept that science has demolished their racial basis.

This Dravidian ideology, it is hardly a theory, has spawned its own brand of ‘scholarship’. According to the Aryan Invasion Theory now kept alive by Dravidian politicians (and their academic camp followers like Michael Witzel, Iravatham Mahadevan and Asko Parpola), the invading Aryans destroyed the Harappan cities (of the Indus Valley) like Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. But these, Parpola in particular go further: the builders of these great 5000 year old cities were Dravidians who spoke an early form of Tamil. These were driven out of their cities by the invading Aryans and forced to migrate en masse to Tamil Nadu, a thousand miles to the south where they have preserved their Tamil language!

How does Parpola know that these long dead people spoke Tamil? He doesn’t but that is immaterial. He complimented the people of Tamil Nadu for preserving the ancient language of the Harappan people of which there is no trace. This pleased the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Karunanidhi sufficiently to give Parpola a cash award of a million rupees (about $25,000). When this news became public there was a flurry of activity in Western academic circles with several scholars claiming that they too had proof of the ‘Dravidian’ nature of the Harappan civilization. (Asko Parpola is from Finland.) But the activity died out when Mr Karunanidhi announced that the award would be given only once every five years.

A curious thing happened on the way from Bishop Caldwell to Dravidian politics— racism became inseparable from language: Dravidian language became Dravidian race. Even a supposedly great scholar like F. Max Müller became an advocate of it, at least until it became politically uncomfortable for him. This was denounced by real scientists. Sir Julian Huxley, one of the great biologists of the century wrote as far back as 1939:

“In England and America the phrase ‘Aryan race’ has quite ceased to be used by writers with scientific knowledge though it appears occasionally in political and propagandist literature…” To political and propagandist Huxley might have added ‘religious and missionary’, for it was the missionary Bishop Caldwell who created this conundrum. Even Max Müller believed in the Biblical superstition of Creation on 26 October 4004 BC! He even expressed admiration for the 17th century forger Father Robert de Nobili who produced a Biblical ‘Yesur Veda’ (Veda of Jesus) instead of the Yajurveda.

Today this brand religious ‘scholarship’ has been taken to abysmal depths by missionaries in India who now claim that the original Dravidians were Christians and the invading Aryans created the Vedas by borrowing ideas from the Bible! The authors of Breaking India cite several such examples by these missionary ‘scholars’. Here is a gem from one Deivanayagam (and his daughter Devakala) who claim that Sanskrit was brought to India (by Aryans naturally) after Jesus and prior to that India was Dravidian Christian, which is the source of the Veda. According to this theory Brahmins (Aryans) stole ideas from Dravidian Christianity and created Hindu scriptures including the Vedas. Sanskrit came into existence only 150 years after Christianity.

This raises a few difficult questions. What were Brahmins and what language did they use before they stole Dravidian Christianity and Tamil to create Hinduism and Sanskrit? What is Dravidian Christianity? According to these scholars, Dravidian Christianity was the Christianity preached by St Thomas when he came to India in 52 AD and was killed by Brahmins for that reason. Never mind that the Christian Bible (New Testament) came into existence only in the 4th century, compiled by St Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria. Or that St Thomas never visited India. (He may never have existed, but that is a different story.)

What is extraordinary is that such tripe should receive support and sponsorship from Christian organizations. Not so long ago Christian institutions could produce scholars of the caliber of Father Heras, W.W. Hunter and others who for all their prejudices knew the meaning and worth of scholarship. As I will describe in a future article, this precipitous decline in scholarship is due to the decline of Christianity in the West and the emptying of the seminaries. The vacuum has been filled by aspiring seminarians from Third World countries like India. So, where formerly Biblical scholars came from the divinity schools of Yale, Harvard, Gregorianum (Rome) and others, we now have shallow propagandists coming from troubled seminaries with no academic standards. Like the proverbial neo-convert (and neveu riche) many of them have become loose cannons without any trace of scruples.

This horde is now menacing their homelands with newfound money and influence. This is an important area that needs to be studied. Most Americans are not aware of the fact that Christianity today, the missionary movement in particular is a Third World phenomenon where it is creating social and political havoc. Another fact that Americans (and other westerners) are surprised to learn is that the Christianity being propagated by these is pre-Enlightenment Christianity with its baggage of racism and anti-Semitism: churches in India still preach that Jews killed Jesus and Jews are the enemies of God.

The relationship of the U.S. governments over the years with missionaries is a complex one. Some, mainly Republican administrations have not hesitated to use them as political tools for spying and other covert activities. Democratic administrations on the other hand have supported them in the fond hope they will carry out social works and advance ‘human rights’. (Both show that Christian outfits are willing political stooges.) Human rights bodies today are heavily infiltrated by evangelic interests pushing their own agenda. It is no exaggeration to say that human rights is a neocolonial ideology that has taken the place of the White Man’s Burden— of imposing a set of their own but alien values on the people of the Third World.

But the situation today is far too grave for such games: Indian and U.S. strategic interests now overlap to a degree that was unimaginable even a decade ago. And no area is more important than fighting terrorism. Fighting terrorism presents the greatest challenge for the two countries. But Church organizations, in their tunnel vision, focused on gaining maximum converts are oblivious to the social damage it is causing and the ill will it is generating. This discord can only help the terrorists. Leaders and thinkers in both countries must recognize the dangers of this ‘Breaking India’ activity that can only benefit forces that are bent on destroying freedom and civilization as we understand them. Needless to say these evangelists and human rights-wallahs will not be in the front lines when terrorist forces strike home.

It is impossible to do justice to the full scope of Breaking India in an article like the present one. I have only touched on a few salient points, occasionally going beyond the book to highlight their historical and other background. The book needs to be studied and discussed in detail at various academic and policy forums.

I have had the privilege of meeting Mr Rajiv Malhotra during the book launch in New Delhi in February. I spent a delightful day discussing all sorts of matters with him. I am looking forward to the book launch in the SF Bay area this month. (I will announce the date here when it is finalized.)

Anyhow this post is becoming inordinately long. I wanted to give out as much information as I can about the book and about Malhotraji’s work. Who is he? He is the founder and president of the Infinity Foundation.

Rajiv Malhotra is a public intellectual on current affairs, world religions and cross-cultural encounters between East and West. His career has spanned the corporate world as a senior executive, strategic consultant and successful entrepreneur in the information technology and media industries. His Infinity Foundation, seeks to foster a better global understanding of Indian civilization. Rajiv’s work argues that the dharma offers a complex and open framework for a genuine dialogue among diverse peoples, rather then a zero sum game. He shows the limitations of globalization when it is a parochial imposition of Western paradigms. He is well known as a speaker and writer for a wide audience and is frequently interviewed and invited to deliver keynote addresses. He serves on the Board of Governors of the India Studies program at the University of Massachusetts, and served as a Chairman for the Asian Studies Education Committee of the State of New Jersey.

More information about the book at BreakingIndia.com. Also please join the book discussion group.

And to end this long post (and make it even longer), here’s an informative review of the book at Amazon. The author is Dr Vijaya Rajiva.

The book Breaking India (2011) is a landmark event in that it brings together a comprehensive account of the many forces that have in the past undermined and continues to try to undermine the national unity of India, called Bharat . The authors, well known intellectual and scholar in the Indian diaspora Shri Rajiv Malhotra and his co author Shri Arvindan Neelakandhan, have placed together under one roof the documentation and analyses gathered over a period of several years. This is the book’s strength. The documentation is meticulous and is provided dispassionately and honestly. The facts are allowed to speak for themselves.

There are 19 chapters to this voluminous work, along with detailed appendices and an impressive bibliography. Each chapter is written with care and attention. The information contained therein should capture the attention of every Indian who believes in the integrity of the nation and how this had been attacked in the past and may well happen again if timely discussion and action are not taken to prevent that happening.

The major thread in the balkanization of India process started with the emergent West’s desperate search for identity (in the early 17th and 18th centuries) and for colonizing the earth’s resources. The search for European identity began with European scholars appropriating India’s linguistic identity in the shape of Sanskrit to fulfull their own need for identity. Thus began the Aryanisation theory according to which Aryans invaded India, subjugated its indigenous population and instituted the caste system, whereby the Aryan invaders remained on top of the hierarchy. In due time they mixed with the indigenous people and gradually lost the purity of their race.

Whereas, in Europe they retained this purity. Alongside of this , the European Aryans integrated their new found identity with Christian doctrine which harked back to a Semitic identity. In order to eliminate this semitic identity Jesus now became the founder of the new religion of Aryan Christianity. The book shows many leading scholars lending credence to this dubious creation of European identity and both wittingly and unwittingly contributing to the rise of anti semiticism and the eventual holocaust in Hitler’s Germany. A similar process took place with regard to India. The many icons William Jones (the first translator of Kalidasa), Max Mueller, the Sanskritist, to name only two of those that Indians have habitually respected, are shown to have clay feet . . . .

Their aim was not simply the aims of scholarship.

The second thread (which the book does not go into) is the European search for economic dominance of the earth, its people and its resources. This aspect has been written about in detail by other scholars. But while these accounts generally restrict themselves to a type of economism , that is, looking only at the economic component of the phenomenon of colonization, this book provides the ideological underpinning of the colonization process.

For India, the significance of both aspects of the European drive for identity/dominance and colonization for resources resulted in its second major Occupation, the British Occupation,the first one being the Islamic, whose present day avatar is fundamentalism and terrorism.

One of the important contributions of Breaking India is that it shows the Western project to be an ongoing one. It is not a thing of the past. It has a new avatar as Eurocentrism and is being propagated in two ways : the ceaseless attempt at the Christianisation of the Indian population and the ongoing imposition of western models of academic enquiry.

The major part of the book is devoted to what is called the Dravidian-Christian nexus, which started with the pre independence British policy of divide and rule. India was divided into an Aryan north and a Dravidian south which allegedly had no real connection with each other, other than the dominance of the Aryan/Sanskrit north.
Likewise the tribal population was cut off from mainstream Hindu society by the British rulers. The present day Dalits (former Untouchables) are being co opted into an anti Hindu India project. This is being done with scant respect to the very real distinction between the varna-jati system and Untouchability. As is well known, Mahatma Gandhi endorsed the varna-jati system, while working tirelessly against Untouchability.

The nexus pays no attention to the very real and tangible efforts of the Government of India to enfranchise the former Untouchables by affirmative programs and by the banning of Untouchability in the Indian Constitution. It also ignores the efforts on the ground by NGOs and private organizations to eliminate Untouchability and the resulting return of many members of the Scheduled Castes to their original religion, Hinduism, from which Christian missionaries had lured them away. The book demonstrates with clear evidence that the agenda is to implicate India in human rights abuses. The malicious intent is to haul India to the United Nations as an offender. While the new found alliance with the U.S. precludes any immediate threat in this direction, the impact of evangelical Americans who want to use this particular stick with which to beat India, cannot be ignored. Nor can Indians ignore the malicious plans of some of their own fellow citizens to be part of this agenda.

The Dravidian-Christian project is founded on the misappropriation and misrepresentation of Tamil culture and literature in order to create a vacuum which can be filled by the Christian missionary agenda. Both serious efforts in this direction and the ludicrous ones such as L. Samson’s attempt to remove Hindu icons and themes from the famed Bharata Natya dance form are documented by the book. She is now the Director of the famed Kalakshetra in Chennai (Tamil Nadu)

In each case, the divide and rule policy not only helped to consolidate British rule, but it also paved the way for the introduction of Christianity. Lord Macaulay’s introduction of English education (1835) not only destroyed the previously flourishing Indian educational system but produced a new class of Indians who would actively co operate and collaborate with the rulers. This process continues even today, in independent India, with the entire educational system being subverted to destroy any remaining traces of India’s Hindu identity. Here, the Hindu Indians themselves are the willing accomplices, largely because they have been trained to inwardly despise anything Hindu, but also because they do not know better.

The book goes into great detail concerning the Indian and foreign establishments and agencies that are seeking actively to establish Western dominance on an ancient and great civilization that continues to `resist’ in many unseen and unnoticed ways. The book is a warning to all Indians regardless of their religion or ethnicity that things may not go on as happened in the past, meaning that somehow an ancient and great civilization survived the savage onslaught and will continue to do so in the future. The book warns against complacency by providing factual data.

A great and ancient civilization is caught in the crosshairs of the civilisational struggle between the West, China and Islamic fundamentalism. The concluding chapter of the book suggests that the on and off relationship with the U.S. and the European West has both its advantages and disadvantages, and it would seem that at present India has no alternative except to stick with it.

At the same time Indians should be vigilant about the many ruses and treacheries that characterized this relationship in the past and continues to the present. Navigating through the present, requires knowledge of what happened in the distant past and in the recent past.

Breaking India provides that knowledge and is a MUST read for all Indians.

Dr. Vijaya Rajiva

If you have read this post (5,200 words) in its entirety, you have my admiration and gratitude. Be well, do good work and keep in touch.

Natalie Merchant’s accent is slightly difficult to follow if you are not familiar with it. Here are the lyrics:

I always knew that you would take yourself far from home as soon as, and as far as you could go. By the 1/4 inch cut of your hair and the Army issue green, for the past eight weeks I can tell where you’ve been. For I knew, I could see, it was all cut and dried to me there was soldier’s blue blood streaming inside your veins. There is a world outside of this room and when you meet it promise me that you won’t meet it with your gun.

So now you are one of the brave few, and it’s awful sad we need boys like you. I hope the day never comes for “Here’s your live round son. Stock and barrel, safety, trigger, here’s your gun.” Well I knew, I could see, it was all cut and dried to me there was soldiers’ blue blood streaming inside your veins. There is a world outside of this room and when you meet it promise me that you won’t meet it with your gun taking aim.

For I don’t mean to argue, they’ve made a decent boy of you and I don’t mean to spoil your homecoming, but baby brother you should expect me to. “Stock and barrel, safety, trigger, here’s your gun.”

So now does your heart pitter-pat with a patriotic song when you see the stripes of Old Glory waving? Well I knew, I could see, it was all cut and dried to me there was soldiers’ blue blood streaming inside your veins. There is a world outside of this room and when you meet it promise me you won’t meet it with your gun taking aim. I don’t mean to argue, they’ve made a decent boy of you and I don’t mean to spoil your homecoming my baby brother Jude and I don’t mean to hurt you by saying this again, they’re so good at making soldiers but they’re not as good at making men.

I have highlighted the bits that speak to me. We need soldiers, and that the army has to be good at making them. But it’s awful sad that it is so. It is also awful sad that we sometimes need people of questionable morals and motivations to take our money to fund social welfare schemes which should have been properly funded by a competent government of a compassionate society. While writing the last post, I was reminded of this song.

Sudarshan Gaikaiwari wrote,

Satya Sai Baba was a product of the free market economy. Do you want the government to regulate the god men? All the wealth he accumulated was from an exchange of value with other consenting adults without any coercion. Why do you consider him a bigger fraud than other businessmen?

I see that you have half the argument correct. The correct bit is that consenting adults (for the most part) gave SSB freely whatever they thought was appropriate for what they got in return. Voluntary exchange is part of the workings of a free market but whether or not an exchange is welfare improving (socially or privately) depends on whether or not there were “distortions” in the market. Without getting too technical, let’s just remember that market efficiency is not achieved if there are information imperfections.

One kind of information imperfection is information asymmetry. Person A donates money to SSB, and in exchange, SSB delivers a brief inane truism about the need to be truthful and good, and sprinkles some holy ash on A. The problem is that SSB knows that A is ignorant enough to believe that things can materialize out of thin air. SSB knows something that A does not and that knowledge is material in this exchange. If SSB were to truthfully reveal that he had the ash concealed in his hand and that it is no different from any other ash, that it was all a simple conjuring trick, that he no extraordinary powers — all the things that A does not know about or has been actively mislead to believe about SSB — then the information would be symmetric and the exchange welfare improving.

Let’s take an example. A is the seller of car to potential buyer B. A knows the true condition of C but B does not. That’s information asymmetry. B voluntarily buys the car. Was that “free market” exchange welfare improving? Yes, if A told B all he knew about the car. If A lied about the car, then even though no one forced B to buy the car, the exchange was welfare decreasing.

I would not like to make this into an Econ101 lecture. So let’s just say that SSB knew that he was cheating while millions of his followers actually believed that he was an honest person. Therefore even if they willingly parted with their money, those exchanges do not meet one of the most important conditions of welfare improving trades in free markets: no information asymmetry.

What’s the role of the government in this regard? Nothing new or extraordinary, actually. Any reasonable society should have laws that punish fraud and dishonest advertising. If someone is selling snake oil as a cure for cancer, and it is certain that the claim is false, that person should be punished and prevented from profiting from the ignorance and gullibility of the public.

In the case of SSB, someone should have dragged him to court on the charge that SSB was indulging in false advertising. This brings me to an important point. Markets involve trades between people. People are the active agents bringing stuff to the market. We don’t just bring bits of stuff to the market but also bring our understanding of what is what and what is the value of what, if you get what I mean.

Some people are uninformed about the harm that someone like SSB does to society (or “the market”, if you please) and that is a distortion that needs correction. People like me bring to the market a point of view which seeks to persuade others that people like SSB should be ridiculed and run out of business. What I do corrects the information failure and mitigates against the harm done by false claims by crooks and snake oil salesmen.

So, Mr Sudarshan Gaikaiwari, there is a difference between an honest business selling you a widget and SSB doling out holy ash. If the widget does not perform as advertised, the business will go out of business and other businesses would supply a widget that works. Survey the landscape and you will see the wrecks of businesses that were unable to make widgets that work.

Now what about all the “good work” he did such as funding schools and hospitals. I think that is admirable service. SSB gathered a lot of money from a lot of people — much of it from very ignorant and gullible people under false pretext — and some of it he used to fund social causes. That’s good. If he had not lied and cheated, he would still have gathered donations to fund social causes. That he lied and cheated is a terribly sad commentary on our society.

It is this. We as a society are not enlightened enough to fund social causes. We as a society are gullible and ignorant that we get taken in by cheats, and we give money to these people because we think we are gaining something in exchange. The cheats are cynical enough to take the money but savvy enough to channel some of the gains to social causes.

In other words, what SSB and his organization reveals is that as a society we are not only not smart, we are not very good. That we give money to crooks, who then use it to fund needed social institutions, and then we hold these crooks up as paragons is perhaps one of the most damning indictment of our society.

Anyway, the lesson endth here. Go in peace.

SSB was a sharp businessman, otherwise. He would materialize bibhuti, “holy ash” (although what’s holy about ash that is not holy about everything in the universe escapes me), and generously distribute it to the poor (although how that helps the poor is also not clear to me.) He would materialize gold chains also but these he reserved for the rich. The rich, in turn, would shower him with tons of gold jewelry. So as I was saying, he was a canny businessman. Take in gold by the tons, and then hand a tiny bit of it back to the same rich people after a conjuring trick. The real trick was how he fooled his followers.

SSB died miserable, it appears. I felt sorry for him. He was bedridden and died of multiple organ failures. It is reported that the people looking after him were impatiently waiting for him to die. They could not wait to get their hands on the wealth that surrounded him. It goes to show that however rich and mighty you may be, in the end, when Yama comes around, it is not a pretty sight.

I have had an acute dislike for SSB. That will not come as a surprise if you know how I feel about “godmen” and their shenanigans. SSB deceived, lied and cheated. He convinced millions of his followers that he was a good man when he himself must have known that he was cheating them. That in my books makes him despicable.

He was a crook. Even if you disregard all other evidence of his dishonesty, just consider this fact. He was praised to the high heavens by the most crooked people alive in India today. Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, and dozens of high powered politicians praised him. L K Advani went so far as to say, “I believe that spiritual leaders in our country provide sources of de-contamination, de-pollution….”. I understand the need for “de-contamination and de-pollution” for those who have to deal with so much dirty money and fraud on a national scale. It is clearly a confederacy of criminals — the politicians and fraudsters like SSB — that royally screws the ignorant Indian masses.

They gave him a state funeral. They usually do to crooks and charlatans. Teresa, the Merciless, the repulsive Catholic missionary who hobnobbed with cruel dictators and took money stolen from the poor, got a state funeral too. Criminals hold other bigger criminals in high regard and it shows in how the politicians of India revere the masters of deceit and deception.

What I find disgusting about SSB is that he gives Hindus and Hinduism a bad name. It is not a matter of national shame if an average guy diddles kids but when SSB does it, it is ammunition in the hands of the missionaries (who, I suppose, don’t like competition in their diddling of kids) and other enemies of India and Hindus. SSB was known around the world and when he cheated, that too was well known. By his pathetic lies, he drags down Hinduism because too many people associate Hinduism with people like him.

SSB claimed he was god. Of course, from a Advaita Vedantic perspective, he was god. But then so is everyone else in the universe. अहम् ब्रम्ह. I am Bramha. तत्वम असी. I Am That.

The man was a megalomaniac and his delusions of grandeur extended to believing that he was the god that monotheists believe in and that he had sent his son Jesus to earth. There’s something wrong with claiming that you are god of the monotheistic kind. It is a mental disorder routinely suffered by many in lunatic asylums. He was certifiably crazy. He said,

The statement of Christ is simple: “He who sent me among you will come again!” and he pointed to a Lamb. The Lamb is merely a symbol, a sign. It stands for the Voice—Ba-Ba; the announcement was the Advent of Baba. “His Name will be Truth,” Christ declared. Sathya means Truth. “He will wear a robe of red, a bloodred robe.” (Here Baba pointed to the robe He was wearing!). “He will be short, with a crown (of hair). The Lamb is the sign and symbol of Love.”

Christ did not declare that he will come again. He said, “He who made me will come again.”
That Ba-ba is this Baba and Sai, the short, curly-hair-crowned red-robed Baba, is come. He is not only in this Form, but, he is in every one of you, as the dweller in the Heart. He is there, short, with a robe of the colour of the blood that fills it.

Unbelievable. You cannot make that sort of stuff up. That quote is from a Satya Sai Publications book.

Believing you are Jesus Christ’s father is not all that remarkable. Christians believe in all sorts of crazy stuff and so do lots of people from other religions and cults, and so do the inmates of loony bins. It’s all crazy crap but nothing evil or wrong. What’s wrong with what SSB did was the message he sent out through the grand larceny he practiced with impunity. It says that it is ok to lie and to cheat as long as you give some of the proceeds to charitable causes and if important people support you. Those who are seeking ways to rationalize their criminal behavior see what people like SSB do and it gives them comfort and justification to keep on ripping off people.

SSB is dead but his legacy of cheating and ripping off the poor and the gullible will continue. The League of Extraordinarily Crooked Politicians headed by Manmohan Singh will carry on the job.

{Why? Because in the last few months, I bought a big fat LCD tv (Samsung), a network blu-ray player (Samsung), a big fat internet-ready 7.2 receiver (Onkyo), a big fat sub-woofer and other assorted speakers (Polk Audio), and other bits of electronics. TVs and receivers are awesomely complicated these days. Just figuring out what all the receiver can do is going to take a week’s worth of full time work. That’s why.}

Not so with poverty because poverty is a human condition; human feelings and human motivations come into play. To fully understand those, one has to be poor and hungry. Or be extraordinarily skilled to be abel able to imagine how it must feel to be poor. How you think and behave when you are chronically hungry has to be qualitatively different from how you think and behave when you are comfortable and well fed. I think that most policymakers get their prescription for poverty elimination wrong because they don’t understand poverty — and that is because they have never been poor.

Speaking personally, I never had any illusions about my understanding of poverty. I started studying economics when I realized that it was a discipline that studied human behavior. More often than not when I tell people that economics is the study of how humans behave, I get puzzled looks. They think that economics is about GDP and money and worse, the stock market.

Anyhow, I think that the people who are best equipped to address poverty are those who are not just good academically but have tons of empathy — the ability to imagine how it must feel to be very poor. They have to be able to think like how poor people think. I have concluded that many of the policy prescriptions from the experts fail because they either have never been hungry and poor, or they lack imagination and empathy, or both.

I have often thought to myself that many of India’s problems may be easier to solve if those who make policy aimed at reducing poverty were required to experience poverty first hand for say a year or so. What if the prime minister was required to live and eat like a person below the poverty line for a couple of months? What if he were forced to subsist for a week on 1000 calories a day from food that is nearly inedible? Would he still help his colleagues steal from the poor to the tune of billions of dollars?

In any event, I think it is a shame that poverty of the kind that means chronic hunger still exists in the world today. The productive capacity of the world exceeds what is needed to provide everyone with food, clothing, shelter and education. The misallocation of resources into weapons of mass destruction (the US is the biggest criminal in this regard) is the greatest avoidable tragedy and it is brought on by the greed of a relatively few people. I am convinced that the war machine will continue to expand as the global economy increases and thus continue to suck the life blood out of humanity.

Tocqueville’s work is often acclaimed for making a number of correct predictions. Tocqueville correctly anticipates the potential of the debate over the abolition of slavery to tear apart the United States (as it indeed did in the American Civil War) and the rise of the United States and Russia as rival superpowers, which they did become after World War II, with Russia as the central component of the Soviet Union. Noting the rise of the industrial sector in the American economy, Tocqueville also correctly predicted that an aristocracy will rise from the ownership of labor, warning that ‘…friends of democracy must keep an anxious eye peeled in this direction at all times’, saying further that the route of industry was the gate by which a new found wealthy class may potentially dominate; Karl Marx would later expand on this theme. Tocqueville also explained the alienation and isolation that many have come to feel in modern life.

Let’s pause to marvel at the fact that Tocqueville was only 25 years old when he visited from France to study the US for only nine months in 1831. His acute observations — still studied over a century and three quarters later — at such a young age goes to show that deep insight is an extraordinary ability.

Here’s Stiglitz:

Alexis de Tocqueville once described what he saw as a chief part of the peculiar genius of American society—something he called “self-interest properly understood.” The last two words were the key. Everyone possesses self-interest in a narrow sense: I want what’s good for me right now! Self-interest “properly understood” is different. It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest—in other words, the common welfare—is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being. Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything noble or idealistic about this outlook—in fact, he was suggesting the opposite. It was a mark of American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul—it’s good for business.

Another phrase which means the same things as “self-interest properly understood” is “enlightened self-interest.” Talking of enlightenment and Tocqueville reminds me of a connection that I find interesting. It is in the movie, “A Fish Called Wanda.” One of my favorite funny movies, starring John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline and Michael Palin. If you are a fan of Monty Python, you already love Cleese and Palin. Anyway, Otto West, the character played by Kline, is the male equivalent of the proverbial dumb blonde. Otto goes around with a copy of “Democracy in America.” Wanda, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, is constantly calling him stupid. Otto repeatedly tells her not to call him stupid.

Here’s a bit of dialog:

Otto: Don’t call me stupid.

Wanda: Oh, right! To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people! I’ve known sheep that could outwit you. I’ve worn dresses with higher IQs. But you think you’re an intellectual, don’t you, ape?

Otto: Apes don’t read philosophy.

Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it. Now let me correct you on a couple of things, OK? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not “Every man for himself.” And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.

Anyway, getting back to the point that Stiglitz makes in the essay: inequality in the US is high and increasing. The top 1%, owns around 40% of the total wealth and earns around 25% of the income. Which, as he explains, is bad because that leads to inequality of opportunity; inequality of opportunity means the most value asset of a society — its people — is not being used most productively; that it leads to distortions that causes economic inefficiency; that it leads to failure of “collective action” which is necessary for creation of public goods.

Stiglitz argues that the current state of inequality in the US is because the top 1% wants it that way because it is good for them. Wealth buys political power which is used to make the rules of the game favor the rich. It is a positive feedback loop.

Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.

What’s the relationship between inequality and development? Simon Kuznets (1901-1984), the man who revolutionized econometrics, and who invented the macroeconomic measure “gross national product” (and therefore the number “gross domestic product” that so many people obsess over), revealed it.

Simon Kuznets argued that levels of economic inequality are in large part the result of stages of development. Kuznets saw a curve-like relationship between level of income and inequality, now known as Kuznets curve. According to Kuznets, countries with low levels of development have relatively equal distributions of wealth. As a country develops, it acquires more capital, which leads to the owners of this capital having more wealth and income and introducing inequality. Eventually, through various possible redistribution mechanisms such as social welfare programs, more developed countries move back to lower levels of inequality. [Wiki.]

Bill Easterly put it very succinctly: development is uneven, get over it: “success is intrinsically uneven, so development and growth is intrinsically uneven, not “inclusive”.”

My guess is that economic inequality in the US is here to stay. Regarding India, the trend of increasing inequality will continue. I am neither for nor against economic inequality — I accept it as an unalterable fact of nature. What I am against is the inequality of opportunity. That is within our control. But let’s not forget that even if we achieve perfect equality of opportunity, the outcome will most certainly be unequal. That is the law.

It’s all karma, neh?

Today I was listening to some music on the web. Here’s a bit that you may like. Or you may not. As they say, YMMV. Still do give it a listen. Pink Floyd. The Dark Side of the Moon. Actually, it’s not the original. It’s “The Dark Side of the Dark Side of the Moon” — by a bunch of different groups playing the songs of “The Dark Side of the Moon.”

…Every year is getting shorter
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to nought
Or half a page of scribbled lines

…for long you live
& high you fly
& smiles you’ll give
& tears you’ll cry
& all your touch
& all you see is all your life will ever be

Listen and enjoy. I will be back. In a bit.

Have a listen when you can. I will be back with my comments later. I emailed Krasny while the show was on, which he read (around the 32:45 mark).

Michael,

Were the British ready to go? Clement Atlee said so. Did your guest address this point in this book?

Regards,
Atanu

Lelyveld spent the next two minutes addressing the point.

Also see the comments on the Forum page for the episode. I find it always amusing to read the comments of Indians — most certainly working in the technology sector in the Valley. Many of them reveal how they have been brainwashed into a herd mentality with very limited capacity for critical thinking.

“I praised only the development work done by Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar in rural areas. Alongside I clarified that I am equally opposed to any form of communal disharmony.” He said his only goal was “to save this country from corruption”. [Source.]

Good work, Anna. You will go far.

Inflation happens when the total amount of money increases relative to the total amount of goods that are produced in the economy. If a scheme merely adds more money to the pot without increasing production, it will cause inflation. If you increase production and at the same time increase the total amount of money appropriately, there is no inflation.

If you do a pure income transfer, without raising the total amount of money, you do not have inflation.

So what is the NREGS doing? If it is merely printing money and handing it to unemployed people (who are not producing anything), then it leads to inflation. This inflation reduces the real incomes of people who are producing something. So in this case, it is a pure income redistribution scheme. Drèze knows this as he knows basic economics. But he cannot admit the truth because his job depends on being economical with the truth.

Which reminds me. Have you ever wondered why people always have an opinion on what needs to be done to fix this or that economic problem? Other problems — such as what to do about national defense, or treat cancer, or environmental pollution — they will happily leave alone. But when it comes to economic development, we all have something to add to the matter. That is so because we are all natural born philosophers and as argued before philosophy informs economic development. Though we all are not very good at it, we are all worldly philosophers.

The good thing is that we can learn to do philosophy better. People have spent figuring out answers and we can learn from them. Unfortunately, as a student in the Indian education system, I was not exposed to it. Only after leaving engineering school — I studied mechanical engineering and followed it up with computer science at the post graduate level — did I study philosophy informally.

I think even young children should be introduced to philosophy. After all, they are born curious and if they are shown the joys of asking and answering questions, they would achieve their potential as philosophers. This is important because our collective wisdom determines whether we live in the good society. The good society is an emergent phenomenon which arises out of how we think.

What brought all this to mind was the reaction of the people to what Anna Hazare & Co were up to. I could not avoid the conclusion that if more people had thought through the matter, the circus would not have come to town. It is not that these people are stupid. They are merely untutored. (That makes me an elitist. I am. So there.)

It is never too late to learn how to think. Fortunately for us, we live in the age of virtually unlimited information. You can finds whatevers you wishes on them interwebs. I recommend this course from Harvard by Michael Sandel. Go watch, listen, ponder and learn.

Justice: What’s The Right Thing To Do?

Episode 01 “THE MORAL SIDE OF MURDER”

Episode 02: “PUTTING A PRICE TAG ON LIFE”

Episode 03: “FREE TO CHOOSE”

Episode 04: “THIS LAND IS MY LAND”

There are 13 episodes in all. Thank you.

Setting aside for the moment the merits of the Jan Lokpal Bill, I think we need to inquire into what’s being done to force the government to adopt it. Anna Hazare is a widely respected social worker, having brought the village of Ralegoan Siddhi to national attention. Without questioning his motive for pushing this particular version of the bill at this particular time, I find his use of a hunger strike questionable.

Hazare is celebrated as a Gandhian, and I believe that he is indeed one to the extent that he’s using an old Gandhian ploy. Gandhi too used fast-unto-death threats effectively and to much popular acclaim. Of all the hypocritical actions that Gandhi indulged in publicly, fasting to death is most definitely the most remarkable. It’s hypocritical because he talked loudly about non-violence and simultaneously took steps that could lead to death. If forcing others to give in to your demands by threatening to kill (suicide is not the same as homicide but it does involve the ultimate violence of the death of a sentient being) is not violence, non-violence is a meaningless concept mouthed by self-serving people.

Even if one is not wedded to the concept non-violence, a moral case can be made against the use of violent blackmail as an instrument of achieving public policy ends. Threatening to kill oneself to get others to do what you want is blackmail that’s impossible to ignore. That is unacceptable in small closed groups such as a family but it becomes infinitely more reprehensible when played out at the national level.

As a means to an end, I am not against violence. Violence is certainly justified in cases where it’s the last means of combating unbearable injustice. But violence has to be the last resort in one’s desperate fight against injustice and only if one’s violent action prevents an even greater violence. What makes me see red is when violence is camouflaged with pious talk of non-violence. Hypocrisy is ethically and morally repulsive.

Violence has no place in a civilized society which is supposed to be ruled by law. People who threaten to kill themselves are no better than those who take to the streets to riot and rampage destroying life and property. It is an unfortunate fact that too often the government gives in to demands — reasonable or not — when sufficient violence is employed. At some point when the nation as a whole, including the government and the citizens, becomes sufficiently mature to play by the rules, and the use of violence as an instrument of forcing public policy becomes verboten. I believe it is high time that India became such.

Hazare’s fasting to death and the public support that he has enlisted shows how immature India is as a nation. Endorsing his and his supporters’ actions in this case is dangerous for the simple reason that its essential consequence is rule by mobs hell bent on having their way by threatening violence. Already India suffers from episodes of mobs forcing the government to restrict personal freedoms such as expression and speech by violent means. Whether Hazare’s action will result in a better ombudsman bill or not is uncertain. But it will certainly reinforce the public perception that if you want your way, instead of taking the hard way of arguing your case, the quickest and most expedient way is to take to violence.

Yes, Hazare and his cohort are fighting for a good cause; yes, we have to collectively and publicly fight public corruption; yes, we have to make heroic efforts to clean the Augean stables which the Indian legislature has predictably become thanks to the Nehru-Gandhi clan’s misrule. But in our haste to do something we could be painting ourselves into a corner.

“We have to do something against corruption; this is something; so therefore we should do this.” It has superficial appeal but however intense our passion for justice, we have to make certain that it is the right thing to do, not merely the most expedient or the most TV news worthy.

My contention is that what Hazare and company are doing is definitely spectacular but is also as certainly the wrong thing.

Bandwagons are spectacular, full of sound and pomp, but the streets revert back to their normal once they pass and the spectators have dispersed. The celebrities — movie actors, cricket players, politicians, news anchors — after they are done riding this one, will jump on the next one to continue to distract the public. Candle sales will drop until the next big thing — perhaps another terrorist attack — comes along for the public to latch on to. Mind you, I like a circus as much as the next guy. I would rather have one in town for entertainment but not if we are entertained into a comatose state.

I have argued why fasting to death is the wrong thing to do. But there’s more. I am convinced that the “Lokpal Bill,” either version is at best a palliative and does not strike at the root cause of corruption. Corruption is a serious matter but in the end, it is only a symptom of a deeper cause. Corruption is the manifestation of a systemic problem. Government power and control forms the foundation on which the massive structure of corruption is built.

I have written about the connection between control, shortage and corruption previously. (See “The Shortage Congested Economy.” April 2010.) I will briefly recapitulate the arguments here. Here’s how it goes. First, the balance of power between the government and the civil society. The government gets control of economic activity and arrogates to itself the power to dictate who does what. Instead of merely being a referee and enforcer of rules in the great economic game, it becomes a player. That gives the people in the government the opportunity to make economic profits (what economists call “rent.”) Rent-seeking opportunities attract the most greedy and the least principled to government positions. Instead of a democracy, it becomes a kakistocracy. Massive public corruption is the necessary and predictable consequence.

Imagine that being the minister for telecommunications affords one the opportunity to make $20 billion through kickbacks. One has to get elected to become a minister. We know that getting elected is a costly business. How much one is willing to spend on elections to become the minister for telecom depends on two things: the opportunity to recover the money spent on the elections and one’s readiness to steal from the public.

Now the larger the opportunity, the more the attraction for the greedy to seek the position. This leads to intense competition among the morally and ethically handicapped. It also weeds out the honest people. Suppose you are really capable of formulating good telecom policy but you have scruples. You don’t want to steal. So if you were to become the telecom minister, you would not even take a wooden nickel from the public till. You can spend at most a few lakhs on your election campaign that you are able to raise from your well-wishers. But what about your thoroughly dishonest competitors? They will make $20 billion if elected and so they can outspend you. You know that and thus keep out of the race.

The license-permit-control-quota raj is at the root of the criminalization of Indian politics. The less scruples one has, the greater the loot; the greater the loot, the more intense the competition to win the position; the more intense the competition, the greater the cost of fighting elections; the greater the cost, the greater the need to recover them; the more greedy and unprincipled people in government, the greater their desire to increase the government’s choke-hold on the economy.

The government controls massive segments of the economy. Food procurement and distribution; education; fuel, aviation; telecommunications; railways; banking and insurance; real estate; . . . the list is endless. The government is in it not because it is good for the country but because it is good for the people running the government. The politicians ride around for free on the government controlled railways and airlines. The government determines who gets the licenses and how restrictive the quotas have to be to extract the most rents. Ministers in charge of handing out mining rights make more money than the annual GDP of many small countries. Some are so rich that they must be counted as the richest men in the world. Raul Vinci aka Rahul Gandhi made it to one such list.

As if that was not enough, multi-billion dollar schemes (all named after Gandhi or the members of the Nehru-Gandhi family) for “social uplift” proliferate. Using taxes — our money — the government buys the loyalty of this or that vote bank. It would have been the most astonishing miracle if given the circumstances India had not been the world’s largest kakistocracy.

India is a corrupt country because the rules — those that give all the power to the government to run a license control permit quota raj — make it inevitable. George F Will was referring to the US government but his words apply with greater force to India when he wrote, “The administration’s central activity — the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.” [Tincture of Lawlessness. The Washington Post, May 2009.]

The root cause of corruption and the related issue of absolutely abysmal governance is our set of bad rules. India’s persistent deep-rooted poverty is due to that. Douglass C. North noted that “economic history is overwhelmingly a story of economies that failed to produce a set of economic rules of the game (with enforcement) that induce sustained economic growth.” The road out of poverty starts off with people deciding on a different set of rules. The corruption we are suffering today can only be eradicated by redressing the balance of power between the government and the people. The way to do that is to change the rules. But that change has to come from actions that are legitimate and consistent with the principles of a constitutional republic.

But, one may argue, isn’t that what Hazare and company are trying to do: change the rules? Indeed they are but that rule change is palliative and not curative. What they are trying to do is to see that criminals are punished. That’s after the act and it is not likely to be a deterrent because the penalties are paltry relative to the rewards, and the corrupt can buy their way out given that the system — even the courts are not immune to corruption — is corrupt.

Alright, you may say, but what is wrong with doing this first and then taking on the larger matter later? Wouldn’t it improve the situation?

Actually it may make the system worse because it would distract the people long enough for the larger problem to become more acute. It is like giving a painkiller to a person suffering from a gangrenous limb. It reduces the perceived urgency of removing the limb and is therefore ultimately more damaging to the body.

So what should be done? Instead of a hunger-strike, what is a better way of registering protest? Hazare should get his millions of supporters to protest peacefully. A few hundred thousand should go to New Delhi and not allow Pratibha Patil, Manmohan Singh, and their handler the Italian-born Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi to move out of their houses. Do that for a few weeks under the full glare of international media attention — remember all these worthies have foreign connections — and I bet that these people will get the message.

Instead of threatening violence, Hazare should use reason to persuade people to vote for change. In civilized societies, people argue, debate and use reason to make their case and persuade people. Let him take on Manmohan Singh on prime time TV. Let’s all hear what Manmohan Singh has to say for himself. Let the people ask MMS tough questions, instead of a stage-managed bunch of stooges — oops, I mean media personalities — throwing him softballs.

Popular leaders like Hazare should educate themselves first — so that they don’t end up making a bad situation worse. Mere good intentions are no guarantee that one is not seriously mistaken. Too often it is like the monkey trying to save a fish from drowning by putting it up on a tree.

Work to amend the constitution. The set of assumptions made when it was written were probably wrong then, but they are most certainly wrong now. Treating citizens like immature children is one such assumption. The British did leave the building but their rule book is being followed still.

The Jan Lokpal Bills is better than the Lokpal Bill. But that is not saying much. Both bills are dangerous because they focus on what punishment to dole out for crimes, and not on preventing criminals from committing them in the first place. But even if you believe that passing a bill is what you have to do, how you go about doing it matters because of the precedent it sets.

To my mind, the way out of hole that the Nehru-Gandhi clan and the Congress party has buried India in is to elect a competent and incorruptible person to be at the helm of affairs. That’s a tall order but it is not impossible. We can do it because when all is said and done, the citizens of India have the power to elect such a person. No one of us has the power to elect a real prime minister but together we can make it happen.

We have to unite as voters and create our own vote bank that demands a great prime minister. We have to launch a public awareness campaign so that the next election cycle the leader is someone who is serious about governance and not interested in loot. The rules can be changed by a good leader. India has 1.2 billion people and it is impossible that there isn’t one competent and honest person to lead India. The way out is therefore through the ballot box.

Postscript: The hunger strike is off as of 9th of April. The powers that be have assured Hazare that something will be done. The matter will be looked into. A committee will review the changes.

Kapil Sibal said, “We have resolved issues which seemed intractible. Our fight against corrupiton is a fight in which we are the civil society are in the same page.” Yes, indeed they are. As I had argued before, without the civil society being corrupt, it would not be possible for the corrupt to rule the country for so many decades.

Anyway, it’s all about kissing and making up now. Hazare thanked Manmohan Singh and Antonia Maino. All’s just wonderful. Mera Bharat Mahan.

Additional Readings:

Nitin Pai wrote a great piece on the matter: “Against Jan Lok Pal and the politics of hunger strikes”.

The Jan Lok Pal will become another logjammed, politicised and ultimately corrupt institution, for the passionate masses who demand new institutions have a poor record of protecting existing ones. Where were the holders of candles, wearers of Gandhi topis and hunger strikers when the offices of the Chief Election Commissioner, the Central Vigilance Commissioner and even the President of the Republic were handed out to persons with dubious credentials? If you didn’t come out to protest the perversion of these institutions why are you somehow more likely to turn up to protest when a dubious person is sought to be made the Jan Lok Pal?

But this is us. Given this reality, the solution for corruption and malgovernance should be one that does not rely the notoriously apathetic middle classes to come out on the streets. The solution is to take away the powers of discretion, the powers of rent-seeking from the government and restore it back to the people. This is the idea of economic freedom. Societies with greater economic freedom have lower corruption. We have long argued that we are in this mess because we have been denied Reforms 2.0.

Sandhya Jain’s piece is another worth reading very carefully: “Anna Hazare: NGOs for Governance?”

Anna Hazare’s so-called fast-unto-death is questionable for its anti-democratic disdain for elected government and people’s representatives. The timing is equally suspect – right after the adjournment of Parliament after passing the Union Budget. It may be recalled that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was forced to gift Rs. 40,000/- crores to the leaky MREGA project favoured by Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her unelected friends in the National Advisory Council; his attempts to curtail this hole in the exchequer enraged her.

As if on cue, Hazare, NAC cronies, Rockefeller Foundation-funded Magsaysay Award winners, and other usual suspects, ganged up against the besieged prime minister. Concerned citizens and analysts have a duty to ask whether the government of a Republic that derives its power from the people should – in the months preceding the monsoon session of Parliament – cave in to blackmail by well-heeled and well-connected NGOs, and accept a legislation drafted by them? If laws are to be adopted and enacted in this manner, do we need either government or Parliament?

. . .

Readers who may regard this critique as harsh should consider that Anna Hazare wants a joint committee comprising government and civil society leaders [read individuals and NGOs favoured by him and his friends] to rework the current draft Lokpal Bill. I am refraining, in this article, from going into the merits of his critique of the Government Draft [I stipulate there will be much merit in it]; in fact, I am not going into the text of his draft at all, nor comparing it with the impugned Government draft.

My point is that he is instigating the middle class intelligentsia that comes to hear him at Jantar Mantar – and neither he nor any of his allies is a grassroots mass leader – to despise and distrust politicians and bureaucrats as a class when these are the constitutional pillars of State. In their place, Hazare moots an unelected oligarchy. This does not bode well for the nation or the society.

While he is within his rights to fiercely criticise the Government draft Lokpal Bill, it is utterly unworthy to say that, “If the government alone drafts the anti-corruption bill, it will be autocratic not democratic, there will be discrepancies.” Here it may be pertinent to note that while Hazare’s charmed inner circle includes some high profile lawyers who have made a mark in the battle against corruption in high places, he has placed NO FAITH in the Judiciary as an institution in rectifying anomalies in the law and its application, and in bringing culprits to justice. This is a strange kind of crusade.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s column “Of the Few, By the Few”

Corruption is a challenge. And public agitation is required to shame government. But it is possible to maintain, in reasonable good faith, that the Jan Lokpal Bill is not necessarily the best, or the only solution to the corruption challenge. We should not turn a complex institutional question into a simplistic moral imperative. Many of the people in the movement for the Jan Lokpal Bill have set examples of sacrifice and integrity that lesser mortals can scarcely hope to emulate. But it is the high vantage point of virtue that has occluded from view certain uncomfortable truths about institutions.

The various drafts of the Jan Lokpal Bill are, very frankly, an institutional nightmare. To be fair, the bill is a work in progress. But the general premises that underlie the various drafts border on being daft. They amount to an unparalleled concentration of power in one institution that will literally be able to summon any institution and command any kind of police, judicial and investigative power. Power, divided in a democracy, can often be alibi for evading responsibility. But it is also a guarantee that the system is not at the mercy of a few good men. Having concentrated immense power, it then displays extraordinary faith in the virtue of those who will wield this power. Why do we think this institution will be incorruptible? The answer seems to be that the selection mechanism will somehow ensure a superior quality of guardians. Why? Because the selection committee, in addition to the usual virtuous judges, will have, as one draft very reassuringly put it, two of the “most recent Magsaysay Award Winners”. Then there is no sense of jurisdiction and limits. It is not going to look at corruption only. It can even look into “wasteful” expenditure. They can, potentially usurp all policy prerogatives of democratic governments. So many accountability institutions, in the name of accountability, are not distinguishing between policy issues and corruption. They are perpetuating the myth that government can function without any discretionary judgment.

India needs big ideas if we are to create a rich, developed nation in the next 20-30 years. We are not getting these at the national level. In the political skirmishes between the various parties and their leaders, what has been left behind is an agenda of transformation.

In every sector of India’s economy, there is a need for big, bold and imaginative ideas to fast-track economic growth and development. We cannot have another generation hobbled by illiteracy, malnourishment, poverty and a limited education.

For the most part, we in Middle India have stayed away from the discourse of policy-making, leaving it to the so-called experts, politicians and bureaucrats. It cannot stay that way – for the future that is impacted is ours and that of our children. We need to participate in the process if we are to contribute towards changing the course of India’s future.

Over the course of the next couple weeks or so, we will take 10-odd areas where India needs big ideas, and open it up to contributions by all. Each weekday, I will outline one area and put forth a brief backgrounder on the need for change. You can then put forth your ideas on what needs to be done.

The 10 best ideas overall will receive a free copy of Atanu Dey’s forthcoming book, “Transforming India: The Road to India’s Development.” The judging will be done by me, along with Atanu Dey. To participate, you can simply leave your ideas as a comment on the blog post page or the Facebook page with the question or email me at rajeshjain@netcore.co.in.

I will announce the winners in the last week of April.

All the best! We will start the contest tomorrow with a few questions on the governance model and then move to specific sectors.

PS: These ideas will be valued. So don’t be skeptical. While good ideas are what we want all political parties to make use of, I will ensure that the best ideas are shared within the highest levels of the BJP.

Here are the questions that he has posed so far.

What should be the government’s role?

Is there an alternative to entitlements for the social sector?

What should the government-citizen engagement be?

Should India be a soft state or an assertive state?

What are the key economic reforms India needs to pursue?

What is needed for Indian agriculture to become more productive?

What should India’s energy focus be?

How should India urbanize?

Go check them out.

It is in Kashmir, though, that I fought most viciously against Rajiv and subsequent Congress governments for their human right abuses on the Kashmiri Muslims of the Valley. I was the first one to point out then that the Indian government had at that time no proof of Pakistani involvement in the freedom movement in Kashmir. Thus, I always made it a point to start my broadcasts by proclaiming that “the Indian government accuses Pakistan of fostering terrorism”, or that “elections are being held in Indian-controlled Kashmir…”

Other foreign journalists used the same parlance to cover Kashmir and they always spoke of the plight of the Muslims, never of the 4,00,000 Hindus, who after all were chased out of their ancestral land by sheer terror (I also kept mum about it).

Not just foreign journalists, most Indian journalists don’t have the marbles to call attention to the plight of the Kashmiri pundits. They call it a “free press” but this matter reveals its ethical and moral bankruptcy. At least Maclithon has the cojones to admit his errors of judgement and write what no mainstream Indian journalist (except for people like Arvind Lavakare and Arun Shourie) would ever do.

As for Sonia Gandhi, I did not mind her, when she was Rajiv Gandhi’s wife, but after his death, I watched with dismay as she started stamping her authority on the Congress, which made me say in a series of broadcasts on the Nehru dynasty: “It’s sad that the Indian National Congress should be completely dependent on one family; the total surrender of a national party to one person is deplorable. You have to ask the question: what claims does Sonia Gandhi have to justify her candidature for prime ministership? Running a country is far more complicated than running a company. Apprenticeship is required in any profession – more so in politics”. I heard that Sonia Gandhi was unhappy about this broadcast.

After then president Abdul Kalam told her that she had kept both her Italian and Indian passports for a long time, and which disqualified her from becoming the prime minister of India, she nevertheless became the supreme leader of India behind the scenes. It is then that I exclaimed: “The moribund and leaderless Congress party has latched on to Sonia Gandhi, who is Italian by birth and Roman Catholic by baptism.” She never forgave me for that.

Calling attention to Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi’s nationality and religion is a pretty risky thing to do. This landed in my inbox yesterday:

. . . last month when the official representative of the UPA Government in Washington, Ambassador Meera Shankar, delivered a speech at a US Emory university referring to Sonia Gandhi being a Christian as a testament to India’s pluralism and diversity. However, that reference was later quickly deleted.

In her keynote speech on the subject “Why India Matters” at Emory University on February 24, Shankar said: “India is a land of incredible diversity. Like the United States it celebrates pluralism. It not only tolerates diversity but has embraced it and has allowed people from all walks of life to flourish and realize their full potential. This is a tradition that is rooted in our civilization. Throughout our history peoples from other parts of the world have come to India and made it a home, resulting in a multi-cultural and multi-religious society, one where individual faith and belief is not only respected but adds to the overall sense of nationhood. Today the fact that we have a woman Head of State, a Sikh Head of Government and a Muslim Vice President and a Christian as the leader of the largest national political party is perhaps the best statement of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious nature of our state.”

This was probably the first time anyone in the government had referred to the religion of the Congress president and UPA Chairperson.

The speech was posted on the Embassy’s website but was quickly pulled out and replaced with a version where the phrase, “…and a Christian as the leader of the largest national political party…” was deleted.

Interesting, wouldn’t you say? Here’s a video of her talk. (I have not yet watched it.)

Anyway, back to Maclithon:

Today, I can say without the shadow of a doubt, that when history will be written, the period over which she presided, both over the Congress and India, will be seen as an era of darkness, of immense corruption, and of a democracy verging towards autocracy, if not disguised dictatorship, in the hands of a single person, a non-Indian and a Christian like me. Truth will also come out about her being the main recipient for kickbacks from Bofors to 2G, which she uses to buy votes, as the WikiLeaks have just shown.

Finally, I am sometimes flabbergasted at the fact that Indians -Hindus, sorry, as most of this country’s intelligentsia is Hindu – seem to love me so much, considering that in my heydays, I considerably ran down the 850 million Hindus of this country, one billion worldwide.

I have repented today: I do profoundly believe that India needs to be able to say with pride, “Yes, our civilisation has a Hindu base to it.” The genius of Hinduism, the very reason it has survived so long, is that it does not stand up and fight. It changes and adapts and modernises and absorbs – that is the scientific and proper way of going about it. I believe that Hinduism may actually prove to be the religion of this millennium, because it can adapt itself to change.

I predict that history will recall this era under Antonia Maino as one in which she used an Indian puppet — Dr Manmohan Singh — and it (the puppet) presided over the most corrupt government that India has ever had or likely to have in the future. History will properly label Dr MM Singh as India’s most corrupt prime minister. In time to come, people would spit upon hearing his name.

Update April 7th:

I did not know that John Maclithon was a pseudonym, the author of “Hinduvta, Sex and Adventure.” Deccan Herald reports that people are guessing who the real author is. I have no doubt that we will know soon enough whether it is Mark Tully, although he does categorically deny it. These days secrets don’t survive too long. In any event, there is more than a grain of truth in what Maclithon writes.

Looks like there’s going to be tough times for body-shopping companies. Is the H1-B visa gravy train derailing?

{Link courtesy of Rajan Parrikar.}

Very well articulated; you completely and correctly clarify why you write the way you do or indeed the focus on MMS .

I only wonder – there used to be a time when this blog was not exclusively dedicated to ranting about the Congress party, but also focused on themes including economics, urban development, education policy in India and the ‘glories’ of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, among other things.

It’s your blog and you can choose to write only about whatever you think matters. If focussing on repeating to readers here that MMS is bad for our present and future is where you want your blog to be, that’s fine. I just miss the fact that this blog used to be a place for intelligent discussion in matters other than Congress-bashing as well.

Thanks, Aaren, for the comment. Now for the answer to the question implicit in it.

This blog is about India’s economic development. Economic development is neither impossible, nor is it inevitable. I mention that repeatedly to underline the fact that India could have been developed but it didn’t and therefore it isn’t.

Development is a complex problem. But that does not imply that the way to bring about development is equally complex. Development happens provided a number of simple steps are taken to allow it to happen. Let me repeat that. You don’t have to do a huge number of complex things to allow a hugely complex thing like development to occur. What you have to do is reasonably simple to do and what is more, is generally known to a fairly large number of people.

Allow me an analogy. The development and growth of a baby in the womb is perhaps the most complex process in the whole universe. From a single cell emerges a living being with trillions of cells that are awesomely specialized to do mind-bogglingly complicated stuff. We cannot even begin to imagine how this happens. A PhD in embryology only allows you to appreciate how pathetic our understanding of the process is relative to how much there is to know. We just don’t know to much about that complex process. Therefore, if someone thinks that he can direct that process, he is clearly out his mind.

(Please make appropriate gender identification substitutions as needed — I just don’t want to write “he or she”, etc.)

The point is that in the process of making a baby, you can only initiate the process (which is fairly easy to do since people have been doing it for a while), and take care of a few minor things. Such as, seeing that the mother has adequate nutrition; does not do things that can harm the baby such as smoking and drinking; has the required rest, exercise, and peace of mind, etc. In short, initiate the process, make sure of a few simple things, and then get out of the way. In a few months, the most complicated process in the world will take place all on its own and you will have a bouncing baby.

(Why babies bounce is not entirely clear.)

Let me repeat that. We don’t know how it works actually at the detailed levels. So let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that we can somehow direct it. What we can do is to make sure we understand under what circumstances does the process work best, then try to make sure that we provide those. And most importantly, don’t mess around in the process itself — it will happen and it will happen as best as it can provided we get out of the way.

(As the Buddha said to Shariputra, “Stop messing around with things. Just sit on your hands. The world will evolve as it should.” And talking of the Buddha, he said some other cool stuff as well, which I have recorded on this blog. There’s the “Tathagata’s Sermon on Economics.” Read that first. And then, “It’s the small stuff, stupid.” They are from 2004.)

Now back to development.

Development is a complicated and complex process. A PhD in development makes you realize how friggin’ complicated it is and that no one has too much of a clue as to how it all works. It makes you appreciate that the best thing you can do is to get out of the way. Only clueless people imagine that their interference in the process will improve things.

For development to occur, there are a few things that are needed. These are fairly well known, and does not require that you have a PhD to appreciate. Top of the list is that there is economic freedom. If people don’t have economic freedom, no development is likely to occur.

Then there are a few other things. Education, energy, transportation, urbanization. Basic infrastructure. An efficient legal system. That’s about it. Not embryology at all.

The point here is that there’s nothing really esoteric or mysterious about what we have to do to get India developed. Like I said before, what needs to be done can be articulated by any competent economist, and indeed volumes have been written on it already. Even on this blog, I have written about what India needs to do to develop.

Knowing what should be done and actually doing it are entirely different things. The problem is that those who are in charge making those things happen don’t have an incentive to do them.

Which brings me to the matter at hand. India needs development. Therefore, it needs to get those bits done that are necessary for development. Therefore it needs policymakers (political leaders and bureaucrats) whose objectives are development oriented. But India has policymakers whose objective is personal enrichment, development be damned.

Therefore we — you and I — have to see that we have a different set of policymakers. This we can do if we use the only thing we have: our numbers. If we can organize and take collective action, we can replace the current set of crooks with people who care about India.

I focus on corruption, the evil that the Nehru-Gandhi family represents, the handmaiden of the whole bunch of corrupt politicians Dr Manmohan Singh, to make people aware that we have to bring about political change. I have written already more than enough about what needs to be done. What I pay attention to now is how to get leaders who will actually do what needs to be done.

Let me repeat that. (I am doing a lot of repeating today.) If the problem was that we really did not know what we had to do to become developed, it would have been a simpler matter: we could have learned from others. The matter is that we do know but that knowledge is useless since our leaders the crooks will not do what is needed. I am done with exploring what needs to be done on this blog. These days I focus on how we can go about replacing the crooks with people who care.

Mama Maino Brand Pickle. Now available all across India. 100% Free of Honesty, Decency and Integrity. Produced by UPA. Marketed by Manmohan.

{The picture is doing the rounds in the interwebs. It was forwarded to me by my friend Yoga. Feel free to distribute it as widely as you can.}

Dear Atanu,

I have been reading your blog since past few years but commenting for the first time. Although I personally don’t endorse many of your viewpoints but I generally like your perspectives, insights and analysis, which are often fresh and radical, on many subjects. Now, why I don’t endorse certain views of yours is a debate for another day and the reasons may not be new to you.

However, I feel that the tone of your blogposts is increasingly getting personal with people when criticizing them. This is especially true for Dr. Manmohan Singh. He may be the most spineless PM we had till date who actively or passively let corruption brew but calling him “turbaned clerk” (from one of your old posts) or allowing comments like “MMS is a fucking dickhead” on your posts, is in my opinion taking things too far. Let us attack the policies, the behaviour but not the person. What we need is intelligent debates to shape ideas and not personal attacks.

To be honest, I expect better standards from people who claim (or attempt to claim) to have the blueprint of and roadmap to India of our dreams.

With Best Regards,
Rajarshi

Thank you, Rajarshi, for taking the trouble to provide feedback.

I appreciate all feedback, even though I neglect to acknowledge them all. Allow me to say thank you to all who write comments here and apologize for not writing back.

I single out this comment for a public response because I must explain my deep antipathy towards Dr Singh. But first I must set the record straight. I have never called him a “turbaned clerk.” I have called him many names that I think he richly deserves but not that.

He’s not a clerk. Clerks are mostly harmless. He’s a scheming, sly, mendacious, power-hungry politician. Scheming and sly in the way he deflects all blame from himself by claiming that he is compelled by circumstances for enabling the unimaginably jaw-dropping massive corruption going on under his watch. He’s power-hungry since he continues to cling to his position regardless of how much his actions damage the country’s interests.

Of late, there’s been quite a lot of public criticism of his character and his actions in the press. But clearly that is insufficient for him to take notice and mend his ways. What would it take? That citizens drag him out of his home and lynch him?

Perhaps we should but we don’t. And in our not doing what should properly be done to him, we are complicit in the crimes that he is clearly guilty of. Yes, he is guilty beyond doubt. As the prime minister, constitutionally he wields sufficient power to stop corruption any day he wishes. He should stand and deliver — and if unable to deliver, he should resign and let someone else who is willing to take responsibility take over.

You may object saying that he is not the real prime minister; that he’s the appointed prime minister and the real power rests with the woman whose tunes he dances to. I would agree. But does that not go to attest to the previous point that he is power-hungry and has traded in his integrity (assuming he had any) for the chance to be the puppet prime minister? In a party that values sycophancy over merit, a party in which how high one rises depends on how good one is at brown-nosing the members of the Nehru-Gandhi family, he has attained the highest rank. He is the top champion sycophant in a room full of consummate hardcore sycophants.

Why do I feel outraged? Let me answer by asking why you don’t feel outraged. People in positions of high power and influence as he occupies are ultimately responsible for the consequences of their actions. He has blocked the economic liberalization of the economy. Lest we forget, in 1991, it was PV Narasimha Rao who forced Manmohan Singh to do liberalize the economy. Manmohan Singh is a statist and liberalization of the economy goes against his very core. Yet, the man’s mendacity is revealed in how eagerly he grabs all the praise about being the architect of India’s economic liberalization.

If you don’t believe that it was PVNR and not MMS who is responsible for whatever little economic liberalization India had, just ask yourself why hasn’t India seen any more liberalization. Surely, seven years in the prime minister’s chair would have been enough time to show where he stands on liberalization. On the contrary, MMS has made every attempt to increase the state’s control of the economy, to shackle it back into the moribund state that it so desperately needs to escape.

I feel outrage, why don’t you? I feel outraged that India is a desperately poor country. Outrage that our children are malnourished, and our people abjectly poor. Outrage that people are committing suicide by the hundreds of thousands. (Farmers are people too. If there had been alternatives to doing subsistence farming, they would not have had to kill themselves.)

Every aspect of the dire straits that India is absolutely due to government policy. Every one of them — farmers killing themselves, children starving, school and colleges failing, massive public corruption, loss-making public enterprises, communal conflict, terrorist attacks, weak borders, military insecurity, you name it. Just ask and I will show step by step why government policy is at the root of India’s troubles.

The Congress government at the center has been at it for most of the time since 1947. What have they achieved other than the deepening of poverty? India is poorer than many sub-Saharan African countries. While other countries have raced ahead, India has fallen behind.

China, ravaged by decades of communism, an equally desperately poor country as India as late as 1978, has moved on. Today China has an economy four times larger than India. Its economic dominance over India gives it the military might to practically take whatever it wants from India. The Congress government has made India so weak that China can easily grab parts of India whenever it wishes to. One hates to admit it but that’s the bitter unarguable truth.

The Congress government — actually the Nehru-Gandhi family — has not only irreparably damaged India economically, it has also damaged it psychically. Indians are the laughing stock of the world. Scams amounting to billions of dollars are reported with sickening regularity. They say, “India aspires to super power status but look at what it really is — the world’s largest banana republic, the world’s largest kakistocracy.” (Kakistocracy means rule by the least competent and the most corrupt.)

Indians are psychically damaged because they are forced to hang their head in shame that India is so poor that it accepts handouts from its colonial masters even today after nearly 70 years of independence.

Rajarshi points out that I have allowed a comment which calls Manmohan Singh a “fucking dickhead.” Yes, I have allowed that comment as it is my policy that I don’t edit out comments unless they are gratuitously insulting or pointless. But I have to admit that that comment is inaccurate.

You call the creep who cuts you off on the freeway a fucking dickhead. The thoughtless roommate who leaves dirty dishes in the kitchen sink deserves to be called a fucking dickhead. Their actions are at worst minor irritants and the inconvenience they caused disappears in the background noise of mundane living. Nothing earth-shattering occurs.

Manmohan Singh is not a fucking dickhead.

Manmohan Singh is a major criminal in the sense that he is responsible for the miserable lives and deaths of millions of people because of his mis-governance. The starving children, the illiterate adults, the suicidal farmers — ultimately all of it is due to what he has done and is doing today.

The other day in New Delhi, I was talking with Arvind Kejriwal. Arvind is founder of “Indians Against Corruption.” A highly motivated hard working public-spirited person, Arvind was responsible for the “Right to Information Act” (RTI) and is now working on the “Jan Lokpal Bill” which seeks to pass laws that will severely punish corrupt public officials. While I admire him and his work, I disagreed with him on what has to be done. What, he asked, do I recommend?

I told him that we have to make it personal. We are not fighting against some anonymous shadowy enemy. We have to give our enemy a name and a face. It is not some vast bureaucracy that we have to confront, not some nameless bunch of corrupt politicians; we have to hold that one person responsible who is in charge. His name is Manmohan Singh and he has to pay for the all the crimes that he is an accomplice to.

Indians are not given to violent revolutions. I would like to see every corrupt politician dragged out and lynched but that’s not how it should be done. It is better to force them to quit through non-violent means, however satisfying to may be for the soul to see them suffer for their crimes.

I suggested to Arvind Kejriwal that we should get around 10,000 or so people to sit-in outside Manmohan Singh’s home and force him to quit. But what would that accomplish, he asked. What it would do is it will send a message to all that we are not going to tolerate him, and others like him, to continue to destroy the nation.

I am astonished that I am taken to task for not being nice to Manmohan Singh on my blog. Why should I be nice to him? I am outraged that the movers and shakers of the mainstream media don’t hold Manmohan Singh’s feet to the fire. It is pathetic the way they regularly let him get away with bullshit, as they did at that press conference last month. The least they could have done is to tell him to his face that he either take responsibility for the corruption and mis-governance or quit. But the press honchos did not do that. They are as spineless as the guy they were supposed to ask tough questions to. If they are unable to tell truth to power, shouldn’t we start telling it like it is?

You may ask, why do I take it personally. I take it personally because it breaks my heart to see the ubiquitous and awful poverty in India. The other day in India, I was waiting at the Nashik railway station to catch a train to Mumbai. A very feeble old man in thread-bare clothes was shuffling among the passengers waiting for the train, his thin bony hand extended, his face a portrait of tired distress, begging wordlessly for a few coins. He was getting shooed away by the people he approached.

I went up to him and gave him a five-rupee coin. He looked at the coin and then at me, his face revealing relief and immense gratitude. I nodded my head and hurried away, unable to bear the heartbreaking implications of that scene.

What have we come to? We have been diminished as a people. Our society is so impoverished that the old and infirm have to beg for a living. As a society, we are not just poor; we are impoverished — meaning reduced to poverty, deprived of richness, vitality and strength.

How did we get here? We are not evil people; we are not stupid people; periodic natural calamities have not reduced our work to rubble; foreign forces have not robbed us of our wealth; divine curse has not condemned us to hell. So why then all the misery?

I have sought an answer for many years. And here’s my answer. India’s government is the greatest evil force that is destroying India. Manmohan Singh epitomizes that evil since he heads that government. So I believe that unless we wake up and destroy those who seek our destruction, we would be responsible for our demise.

It’s all karma, neh?

Oh what a fall there was my countrymen.
Then you and I and all of us fell down,
whilst bloody treason flourished over us

as Mark Antony later orated. (I had memorized that speech for a school elocution competition and I can still recite it in its entirety.)

On March 14, 1879, a day before the ides of March, Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, Germany. The man who transformed most radically our view of the universe. A man who sets the gold standard for genius and humanity. Did you know he did miserably in school? Imagine a guy who was poor in maths and goes on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on General Relativity?

Just kidding. Einstein was one heck of a sharp cookie and was brilliant in school, and he did not win the Nobel for the theory of relativity but for his discovery of the photo-electric effect. (See: Einstein’s Failed School.)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Caesar ignored the soothsayer’s warning and was attacked and assassinated. Cassius was among the attackers. Caesar knew that there was something suspicious about Cassius. He had remarked to Antony:

Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

Be very wary of people with lean and hungry looks who think too much.

[Here's Act 1, Scene 2 of The Life and Death of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare.]

All sorts of bad things happen on the ides of March. In 1876 on the ides of March, test cricket was born with a match between England and Australia.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Confession time. This is a lazy post. It is a consolidation of posts from 2007 and 2008.

Vivekananda had inspired Sir Jamshetji Tata to set up a research and educational institution when they had travelled together from Yokohama to Chicago on the Swami’s first visit to the West in 1893. About this time the Swami received a letter from Tata, requesting him to head the Research Institute of Science that Tata had set up. But Vivekananda declined the offer saying that it conflicted with his spiritual interests. [Wiki.]

I generally despair about India but then I check myself by reminding myself that a land that gave birth to such people as Jamshetji and Vivekanand can never really go down for good. India will rise once again from the depths that people like Manmohan Singh and Antonia Maino have dragged it down to. India is too precious to be sold so cheaply as Mr Singh and Ms Maino have tried.

Will Durant, the American historian and philosopher, observed —

India was the mother of our race and Sanskrit the mother of Europe’s languages. She was the mother of our philosophy, mother through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics, mother through Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity, mother through village communities of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

Let’s keep that in mind.

I am sorry that I have put the names of Dr Manmohan Singh and Antonia Maino in the same blog post as Swamiji’s and Jamshetji’s — but I had to do it. My apologies.

The representatives of the sheep were granted an audience with the public-relations head of the gang of wolves. The complaint was that the wolves are starving the sheep — which is unacceptable since while wolves eating sheep was consistent with the law of the jungle, starving them was not only cruel and unnatural, it was a short-sighted policy since in the end, the wolves would have to eat tough skinny meat.

The PR head of the gang of wolves — named the Main Misdirector of Sheep, or MMS for short — deeply sympathized with the demands of the sheep representatives. MMS had been appointed PR head by the leader of the wolf pack for his unique qualities. He appears pathetic and a pitiably sad specimen of wolf. A look at him and you cannot but feel sorry for him.

MMS protests that he personally has never starved a sheep, leave alone eat any. He only eats gruel. To prove his point, he opens his mouth and the sheep notice that he’s been defanged by the leader of his pack. He says he is powerless to do anything. They find that admission of his credible as, aside from the lack of fangs, he appears to lack a spine and guts as well.

The excuses come thick and heavy out of the sorry excuse of a wolf. But the sheep will not be deterred. They threaten to go on a hunger strike. MMS says that he’ll take the matter up with his boss and will appoint a committee. The committee will determine if there is cause for an empowered group of wolves to investigate the environmental effects of any policy change regarding the alleged starvation of sheep. If that committee recommends such an empowered committee, perhaps the matter will be settled in about 12 years or so.

The sheep tell MMS that the empowered committee must have sheep represented on it. MMS flatly refuses to even consider that.

This story does not have a happy ending, unfortunately. The sheep representatives will continue to meet with MMS. The wolves will continue to eat the sheep. The killings will continue. Until the sheep organize, there’s no hope. But sheep organizing to overthrow the wolves is against the natural order. C’est la vie.

In other news, Indians Against Corruption (a group of well-meaning citizens led by social activist and Magsaysay award winner Arvind Kejriwal) and others finally got a meeting with the appointed prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh. Thus have I heard.

Dear Friends,

The meeting yesterday evening between IAC representatives (Anna Hazare, Shanti Bhushan, Prashant Bhushan, Kiran Bedi, Arvind Kejriwal, Swami Agnivesh, Archbishop Vincent, Dr Kuldip Chikara (Bharat Swabhimaan Nyasa), Darshak Hathi (Art of Living) and PV Rajagopal) and the PM and Law Minister, Veerapan Moily was not very encouraging.

The PM said that the govt has no time to consider the issue of corruption till the 13th May due to the ongoing parliament session and the impeding elections in five states. The IAC representatives requested to take immediate action because the country was seething with anger and bleeding with corruption.

After great persuasion, he agreed to bring a Lokpal bill in the monsoon session of parliament. How would the bill be drafted and which bill would it be? He was informed that the govt bill was extremely badly drafted. The PM suggested that a subcommittee of “Group of Ministers (GOM)” will be constituted which will have two meetings with representatives of IAC after the 13th of May. The GOM will draft the bill accordingly after the interaction. When he was told that we were not willing to wait so long, he offered to have one symbolic meeting after 25th march when parliament session ends.

When he was requested to set up a joint committee consisting of half members from IAC and half from the government’s side to prepare the draft Lokpal Bill by the 13th May when the elections end, the govt simply refused.

In effect, we stand where we were before the meeting. The meeting served no purpose except made the intention of the government clear. Annaji has decided that the whole country desperately needs to act immediately on corruption. He said that it was unfortunate that the govt does not have time to address this burning issue and therefore the movement would continue and intensify. His decision to go on fast on the 5th April stands as it is.

Annaji will write a letter to the PM today which will be shared with all of you.

It looks as though the democracy movement in the Islamic countries of the Middle East is failing. Gaddafi appears to be suppressing the protesters in the same brutal way that Ahmadinejad did in Iran in 2009. The Tunisians presently fleeing their country for Italy in boats suggests that their new provisional government is no better than Ben Alis’s was. In Egypt, despite the resignation of Mubarak and the apparent success of the democracy movement three weeks ago, there is no sign that anything constructive is emerging from the army council. In Yemen, Bahrein and Saudi Arabia, any democracy protests are either snuffed out quickly or are prevented from happening. Pakistan kills Christians to popular acclaim. Afghanistan buries women to their necks and stones them to death so we are pretty reliably informed.

The irony is that the only Middle East country where secularists had successfully wrenched control away from Islam, where its Foreign Secretary was a Roman Catholic and where a Jewish synagogue still operated in its capital, was also the country that President Bush chose to invade in 2003. It was in Iraq also where women could dress without the veil, where academic freedom was largely tolerated and where the professional middle class (and the scientist class) was the largest in the Middle East (proportionate to the population). Iraq is now back in the Middle Ages where Sunnis are terrorizing the Shias with bomb attacks and the government looks on helplessly.

I could go on. The fact of the matter is that no country can hope to achieve a Western way of life for its population unless it first prevent mass thought-control by organized religion. In particular, scientists must be allowed to change their doctrines as frequently as their experiments tell them to. They must not be subject to religious doctrines which take generations, sometimes centuries, to adjust to reality.

Unfortunately, history seems to be telling us that predominant religious power can only successfully be put down by brutal methods. Emperor Qin did so in 200BC and China has remained secular ever since. In the 15th and 16th centuries various kings and princelings of Europe had to defeat the Pope in battle many times before sufficient freedom of thought finally emerged.

Whether Gaddafi wins or not in Libya, the whole of the Islamic Middle East is still generations away from any hope that free expression in both science and politics (and religion when kept within modest bounds) will be tolerated. Iraq might have done so in another one or two generation’s time, but no longer it seems. Otherwise, there can be little hope for a long time to come for most of those — women particularly — who live in the indoctrinated countries of the Middle East.

This is more than a little irritating. My laptop power is long over and it is a hassle to use public computers. What the world needs is more standardization, especially since the world is getting more integrated.

Talking of standards, the terrible thing about the US is that it still uses the British system of weights and measures (foot, pound, gallon, etc) instead of the Metric system (meter, kilogram, liter, etc.) God alone knows when the US will bite the bullet and just do it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It is quiet around here, as I mentioned before. The place is lightly occupied and some people are having conversations, but they don’t talk loudly here. That may be because there are no public announcements at all. There are TV monitors around but their sound is turned very low. Their sound does not intrude.

This is in sharp contrast to say Mumbai airport. First, there are those long drawn-out incessant flight announcement. You cannot do anything like some quite reading and writing while waiting for a flight. People talk loudly — but that could be because they want to be heard over the loud TVs and announcements.

Noise pollution in India is not funny. Constant honking. The mosques with their insane howls. Elevators announcing the opening and closing of doors and floor level. On airplanes too, they play muzak. Loudly.

Anyway, enough of this rant. I should sign off now. The last leg of my journey will start in a few hours. ZRH to SFO will take around 14 hours. I will be landing at 4:30 PM PST and expect to be home by 6 PM. Door to door, it would have been 33 hours in transit.

Today is going to be a busy day. Lots of stuff to do before I leave tonight for California. The last open thread has lots of comments which I need to address but they will have to wait till I am back home.

In the meanwhile, I suggest “On Being an Armchair Intellectual ” as a quick read. Also, check out “Aping for Fun and Profit.”

That’s it for now. If I get internet access at Zurich airport, I will write.

There is no opportunity for any difference of opinion, except for Socialists who are allowed to differ provided they don’t seriously differ. Whatever resolutions they pass are obligatory on all the provinces whether the resolutions suit the provinces or not; there is no room for any other independent opinion. Everything is fixed up before and the people are only allowed to talk over it—like Stalin’s Parliament. When we started the [Nationalist] movement we began with the idea of throwing out the Congress oligarchy and open the whole organization to the general mass.

Srinivas Iyengar retired from Congress because of his differences with Gandhi . . .

He made Charkha a religious article of faith and excluded all people from Congress membership who could not spin. How many even among his own followers believe in his gospel of Charkha? Such a tremendous waste of energy just for the sake of a few annas is most unreasonable.

. . .

Give [people] education, technical training and give them the fundamental organic principles of organization, not on political but on business lines. But Gandhi does not want such industrial organization, he is for going back to the old system of civilization, and so he comes in with his magical formula “Spin, spin, spin.” C. R. Das and a few others could act as a counterbalance. It is all a fetish.

Talking of fetish, I have always been fascinated that Gandhi had more than a few himself. Imaginary idyllic villages is one of them. And among a large number of Indians, Gandhi is a fetish. So villages are fetish-squared for many Indian even today.

Here’s a related post: Moving Mountains. Dec 2007.

We start on Sunday at 10:30 AM. “What should be the bases of government policy” is the matter under discussion in the first session. The leading discussants are Bibek Debroy, Ajit Ranade, and yours truly.

As I see the question, the most fundamental basis for government policy has to be the individual. If you think about it, much of the murky thinking, and the subsequent disasters of wrong-headed policy, arise from considering groups as the object of attention. An individual matters. He or she has rights, responsibilities, needs, desires, capabilities, handicaps, and so on. Groups, in contrast to individuals, are abstractions. That’s a critically important distinction and conflating the two is at the root of many of our problems which arise from misguided public policy.

I hope to report back on the roundtable. Perhaps I will be tweeting. You can follow my tweets at twitter.com/atanudey.

I get back to Mumbai on Monday. I have to pack my bags and get a boat-load of stuff done. I have left too many things for the last minute being the inveterate procrastinator. I leave for sunny California on Tuesday night.

I am flying Swiss Air. Mumbai to Zurich, and after a lay-over of 7 hours, Zurich to SF. I suppose I should get my Swiss banking done while I am there. I am sure that a few dozen of my fellow travelers in the BOM-ZRH sector will be making the trip to do some banking business. I hope all my money is still in my account, unlike Mr Hasan Ali’s account which appears to have been emptied out. I am sure he is a very troubled man these days.

Laters, alligators.

The story goes thusly. Once upon a time there was a king. One day he got really really upset with his minister and in a fit of anger ordered that the minister be shot at dawn the next day. The minister pleaded with the king to spare his life for just three years. Why, demanded the king. The minister said that he will develop flying horses and that will take three years. He reminded the king what a great advantage his armies would have with flying horse technology. The king thought about it and said, OK but if there are no flying horses in three years, his (the minister’s) ass is grass.

So then, the minister goes home and his wife says to him that he’s really dumb. How the heck can he develop flying horse technology in three years, she laments. The minister said to his wife, “Three years is a long time. In three years, the king could die, and if he does his orders are no longer valid. In three years, I could die. And who knows, perhaps in three years someone will develop flying horses. We don’t even know what will happen tomorrow, forget three years.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Predicting the Future

Cast your mind to, say, 1980. What would you have said if someone had told you that by the end of 1991, the USSR will be dissolved — gone, kaput, expired? You would have told the person to lay off the drugs. What if someone has told you in 1975 that China would become a manufacturing giant in a few decades and that the US would be indebted to China? You would have had that person committed to a mental institution.

What if in 1947 someone said that India will be ruled by an Italian-born practically uneducated, grossly corrupt woman whose only claim to fame was that she had married the grandson of one of the present set of politicians?

What if you were told in 1947 that in about 50 years the number of abjectly poor people in India would be three times the number then?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Horse Doo-doo

Only very deluded people make projections into the far future. The only long-term forecast one can believe in is the one which says that the future will be unimaginably different from the present. No one had predicted the revolution in the information technology — not the cell phone, not the computers, not the internet.

James Burke likes to put it this way. He says that if you, in the year 1700, had told your drinking mate that in a few centuries, every Londoner will have his own personal transportation and that he would be able to go wherever he desired, your friend would have fallen off this chair laughing — the image of London streets six-feet deep in horse dung would have been too ridiculous.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Pile of H S

The projections like the one CITI is peddling are worth less than horse dung. People who take them seriously are intellectually challenged, to put it most politely. I don’t have the patience to point out all the errors built into its conjectures — which are piled high and dry — but let me just point out the most glaring. Its projection are reported in “purchasing power parity” or PPP, terms. PPP is itself a steaming pile of horse dung. So there.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than to be ignorant.

Go read the rest of this great quote from Mencken.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad, observed old Euripides. I am afraid that insanity is spreading rapidly in India.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Per capita GDP Time Equivalent of Cost

A better measure for comparing incomes across economies is based on time.

Time is a great measure for all sorts of things once you have an invariant in hand. For measuring distances, the speed of light provides an invariant measure. Thus, you can say that the sun is about 8 light minutes away and the nearest galaxy to the Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy, is about 2.5 million light years away.

Costs can be measured in terms of time, provided we have an invariant. In our case, we really don’t have an invariant because the time to earn a unit of money varies from person to person, and from region to region. However, there is already a measure of average incomes in a specific location. That is the total production of final goods and services measured in monetary terms over a year for a specific collective of people that is called the gross domestic product (GDP). GDP divided by the number of people gives you the GDP per capita.

GDP per capita is a handy “local invariant” of sorts. India’s GDP per capita is about $450 per year. In a sense, you can say that the average person earns $450 a year and that is a local invariant. Now if something costs $450, then one may say that it costs one year. The “Per capita GDP Time Equivalent of Cost” is what I am provisionally proposing, or PGTEC. (The stress is on the word “provisionally.”) The units are time: so you could measure PGTECs in hours, days, months, years, and life times.

I can now denote the cost of an 800 sq foot apartment in my neighborhood for a laborer as 200 years. Since the working life of an average person (given the life expectancy of about 65 years and a productive life of about 40 years), the cost of the apartment would be five laborer lifetimes. Astounding.

What good is the PGTEC measure? Well, for one thing, it is easy to understand and compare costs across regions. The median house in the US costs around $70,000. And the per capita GDP is around $23,000. So the average house cost in terms of PGTEC is 3 years. Compare that to 200 years in India. India is therefore about 70 times more expensive than the US when it comes to housing.

That is from a post from nearly five years ago: The High Cost of Living. (March 2006).

The thing is, as Yogi Berra pointed out, you’d be astonished what you observe if you care to see. (I don’t know if Yogi Berra actually said it but it sounds like something that he may have said.) I saw without distorting glasses and I observed that India is a disaster zone. There were people who directed it since its political independence in 1947. They were in control. They — what’s the word I am looking for — yes, fucked up. Pardon my French.

My reasoning was syllogistic:

Major premise: India is evidently in dire distress.
Minor premise: India was led by Cha-cha and friends.
Conclusion: Cha-cha and friends were retards.

Those worthies — Cha-cha Nehru and his gang of retards — are definitely to blame. Cha-cha. Don’t you just feel like getting up and doing a bit of a dance. One-two-cha-cha-cha. Let’s do the cha-cha-cha.

The other day I was thinking. (A different other day than the other day mentioned previously.) In his book, “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution“, Richard Dawkins makes a point that I had not pondered before. He argued that circumstantial evidence is not the poor county cousin of eyewitness evidence, but rather circumstantial evidence can be more solid than eyewitness evidence.

Did you see that man enter the house at 7 PM? Yes, says the witness. But memories can be very unreliable at times. People make mistakes in identifying people. Circumstantial evidence, if available, can be quite foolproof. The finger prints on the knife, the shirt of the accused with the bloodstains that DNA shows to be the victim’s blood, the motive that the accused had, etc.

I pondered that matter at some length. I realized that the history we are taught in school about how great a person Cha-cha Nehru was is like an eye-witness account which has been retold a few thousand times. Someone somewhere made the assertion that Nehru was smart — and then it got repeated uncritically by others.

The circumstantial evidence says otherwise. Nehru was clueless about economic policy. Fabian socialism was known to be a disaster. Nehru was clueless about military policy. Thousands of Indian soldiers died in the disastrous war with China, thanks to Cha-cha. He was clueless about industrial policy. Import substitution industrialization (ISI, not to be confused with the Pakistani organization that DiggyVijay Singh moonlights for) chained India’s growth to what is now rightly called the “Nehru rate of growth.” Nehru was clueless about military strategy. He told the Indian army to halt their campaign to throw out the Pakistanis from Kashmir and took the matter to the UN. Tens of thousands of military and civilians have died as a consequence, and a few million Kashmiri Hindus are languishing in refugee camps in their own country.

I’d love to continue on the subject of the Nabob of Cluelessness, Mr Nehru. But I am sure you have better things to do and I don’t have the time to list all the cluelessness of Mr Nehru. India’s pathetic education system is his doing. The IITs are a prime example of that. But I will go into why the IITs have been a curse to India later.

Anyway, if you need convincing that Nehru, Gandhi and the rest of the unholy bunch were crazily mistaken, take a look at India — and weep.

So here’s what I learned today. India owes a debt to Savarkar. Taken from The Daily Pioneer. Reproduced in full since it is hard to find the piece when you need it in a hurry. If they come after me for copyright violations, I will take this down.

India’s debt to Savarkar
Thursday, May 29, 2008

Second opinion: Priyadarsi Dutta

His Irish admirers fondly misspelt him as ‘Sawarkar’, and politely declined to make amends when Shyamji Krishna Verma, his sponsor in England, clarified the point. It was difficult for his readers to imagine him without invoking imageries of war. His pen, dipped in blood, breathed so much fire that it was a wonder that “why the paper did not burn”. In those days, India’s freedom movement was not stricken with the phthisis of non-violence and obsessive compulsive disorder of Hindu-Muslim unity introduced by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, whose 125th birth anniversary was marked on May 28, was 14 years junior to Gandhi. But he was years ahead of him on many counts. He set the goal of absolute independence for India in 1900; Gandhi asked for it in 1929. He performed a bonfire of foreign clothes in 1905, during the movement against Bengal’s partition, an idea emulated by Gandhi for his noncooperation movement.

India could have been spared of its emasculation had it abided by Savarkarite clarity rather than Gandhian absurdities. To Savarkar, as he succinctly put down in his last book, Six Glorious Chapters of Indian History, no nation could aspire for civilisational greatness without acquiring military strength.

Savarkar lived to see the vindication of his proposition in contemporary India. Gandhi’s policy of pacifism failed to buy peace with Muslims, leading to carnages and expulsion of Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan. Jawaharlal Nehru’s dream of “talking his way to leadership of the world”, and forging Hindi-Chini brotherhood through slogans failed badly. Slapped hard by China, he was exposed for what he was — a meek leader of a Third World country.

Independent India scarcely realises the greatest debt it owes to Savarkar; turning a Muslim dominated Indian Army into a predominantly Hindu-Sikh Army with his whirlwind recruitment drive during World War II. If it were otherwise, Pakistan, even after partition, would have 60 per cent to 70 per cent of soldiers, enough to overwhelm West Bengal, East Punjab, threatening Delhi, let alone much talked about Jammu & Kashmir.

Number of people who pledged support: 22

Amounts raised:
US$ 1,425
Rs 23,300
Euros: 25

I have written to all thanking for the support. I have received some of the money through PayPal. Others are either sending checks in the mail or doing a bank transfer.

I have learned a few lessons. I always knew that people are generous. Now I know that given a specific need, people are eager to help. The kindness of strangers is a blessing we all enjoy.

I also learned that collecting money is hard work. I have spent around 10 hours corresponding, writing posts, doing sums, etc. I am a lazy bum and the next time around I will get someone else to do the hard work. {insert smiley here.}

I was tempted to just take one reader’s generous offer — to send me the entire amount. The reader requested anonymity and I appreciate that. But I will give you a small hint: a frequent commenter. I declined that kind offer because I believe that we all deserve a chance to do our little bit. We all get to feel good about having made it possible.

One contributor wrote to me that things have come to a sorry pass when scholars have to scrape around for support while crooks are raking in billions of dollars in scams all around. That’s disheartening of course but this small venture of ours suggests that all is not lost.

We can still prevail. Satyam eva jayate.

Update Saturday 8 AM:

I have not done the exact calculation, but I suspect that the goal has been reached. Thank you all. Please do not pledge any more. I will do the sums shortly and report back.

Thanks to all who have responded to my previous post seeking financial support for Chandrasekaran. The details of support pledged so far is as follows.

I am recording the initials of the contributor and their location (if known). All donations are in the range $50 – $200. If you have written to me but do not see your initials listed, please do email me once again. I intend to email contributors individually later today.

Here’s the list as of 7:30 AM Friday IST.

Y.S. Sunnyvale
R.J. Mumbai
M.R. Manhattan Austin
S.S.
S.M.
R.A.
R.M. Washington DC
V.N. Chicago
R.B. New Jersey
N.J. SF Bay Area
R.S. Toronto
A.D. Santa Clara

N.P. & 3 of his friends (Singapore)

[I will edit this list once again later today, Friday. Until then, the list is probably out of date.]

Adding up all those, the pledged amount now stands at $1500 and Rs 5K. Once again, if you don’t see your initials listed, please get in touch.

Now for some administrivia:

1. I will write Chandrasekaran a check or do wire transfer from my ICICI account to his bank account on Monday when I get back to Mumbai. I will use the current Rs/US$ exchange rate and wire the entire amount pledged to Chandra. I expect that the pledged amount will be redeemed in a week or two.

2. If you have pledged in US$, you can send me a check (made out to me) or use paypal. I am atanudey@gmail.com in paypal. My mailing address is:

1988 Bellomy Street, Apt #1
Santa Clara, CA 95050.

3. If you have pledged in Rs, please make the check to Atanu Dey and mail it to

Shrikant Patil
6 Pallavi Housing Society
Senapati Bapat Road
Pune 411 016

Shrikant has kindly agreed to deposit the checks into my account.

Thanks

The web of connections we have built in cyberspace is simply astonishing. The trust and caring that we see in cyberspace is only a faint reflection of what exits in the real world.

In much less than a day, we have collected nearly 3/4ths of our target amount. I am sure that we will be able to successfully close the campaign by today evening.

Thank you all.

I have said this before but it is worth repeating. The corruption of Indian politicians such as the appointed Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh is made possible by the collective — which if it had been honest would not have allowed the politicians to be corrupt.

I hope that Indians will muster up the courage to admit that they are complicit in the whole sorry mess and grow the moral backbone to fix the system. If they do, the politicians will get lynched. A bit of lynching and the rest will figure out that there’s little profit in being in the government.

Non-violence is great but it only works when the criminals are ready to leave. If they are reluctant, the way to motivate them is to make them feel the pain that the citizens mutely suffer.

{If you have not read “THE POLITICS OF OBEDIENCE: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude” from May 2010 on this blog, please do so now.}

My friend Keith Hudson had a very interesting post on a related matter a few days ago on his blog. He wrote

My own view is that, in the coming years, the energy technology that will steadily take over from fossil fuels as they decline in quantity and go up in price is the production of hydrogen from synthetic bacteria, probably hybridized from existing natural bacteria. This immensely complex research is being led by the iconoclastic Carl Venter and the Nobel Laureate, Hamilton O. Smith, The principal technology will move from engineering (metal-based or electronics-based) to biology.

What effect will that have on the present growing divide between an elite class and the majority of the population? Or the present unequal divide between countries? Of course, this question begs the other question of whether the masses will survive at all. In future years, governments might not be able to pay welfare benefits to most of their populations. Besides, of their own volition, the masses might follow the present trend of Western parents in not replacing themselves with sufficient numbers of children.

But whether it’s the masses-plus-elites or the elites alone that will survive in the further future, it is the nature of the productive process itself that has the major effect on the structure of governments and their relative military powers. Karl Marx first said this—and it’s been about the only thing he got right. However, the new H-bacterium technology will have radically different effects from now because its inputs are far more equally dispersed over the face of the earth than fossil fuels are at present. The necessary ingredients, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and solar energy are freely available from the air and water is abundant. (There will probably be two major variants—H-bacteria fed by freshwater and that fed by seawater.)

Thus a great equalization is likely to occur between the economies of different populations.

I wrote a brief comment on his blog, which I quote here in full.

Keith,

I agree with much of what you write. However, I do not see the great equalization happening. Here’s my intuitive reasoning, not backed by anything at all.

From the largest scales to the smallest in the universe, there is a trend of greater differentiation. What began as a plasma soup condensed into clumps such as galaxies, and within them into stars and planets. On earth, life started off as single-celled entities and evolved into an almost infinite variety of living organisms. The diversity of stuff in the universe increased with time — clearly a process with a strong bias towards un-equalization.

Narrowing our focus to the economic sphere alone, I note that as human civilization has progressed, the inter-group and intra-group inequality has increased monotonically. Hunter-gatherer groups were not as unequal as any group (village, cities, states) today. Our technological society accentuates the differences among people, and these accumulate over the generations.

In primitive societies, a man with a spear and strong arms would have been more powerful than another with a weaker build, but not by a few orders of magnitude. Today a person with the right sort of equipment can destroy a city full of people just by the push of a button.

Previously, say a couple of centuries ago, a rich person would have had a more comfortable life compared to that of a poor person but both would have been powerless to deal with even simple medical problems. Today the rich have access to medical procedures and technologies that are not available to the poor.

You can arbitrarily expand the set of examples which show that the world has become more unequal with time. This increase in inequality will only accelerate with time because of the speeding up of the rate of technological change.

I imagine a time in the not too distant future when poverty as we understand it today — lack of basic nutrition, education, entertainment — will be over. But I feel that the divide between the rich and the poor will only continue to widen. The poor will always be with us.

BTW, for high quality content that will make you think, I recommend Keith’s blog.

Shakespeare, as always, puts our unfortunate tendency to deflect blame from ourselves with his usual awesomeness. Listen.

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune, (often the surfeit
of our own behavior) we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: An admirable evasion
of whore-master man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star!

King Lear (1.2.132)

{This is an excerpt from a November 2010 post — A Tale of Two Countries — Part 2 which is worth repeating.}

It was 1994. An American expatriate in Singapore was convicted of vandalizing property. Not a big deal in the overall scheme of things — an 18-year old doing what teenagers sometimes do — but the law in Singapore was clear on the matter of vandalism. The sentence was four months in jail, S$3,500 in fines, and caning — six lashes on bare buttocks.

The US president, Bill Clinton, appealed for clemency. Two dozen senators wrote to the Singaporean government for mercy. But the sentence was carried out. Michael Fay was convicted of a crime and he paid for it, which was the law of the land. (The lashes were reduced to four from six — out of respect for the US President’s appeal.)

Singapore and India are entirely different states. Though both were neck and neck economically around 50 years ago, today Singapore is a prosperous state while India is pathetically poor. In global rankings of corruption in nations, India ranks as one of the most corrupt and Singapore one of the least corrupt.

In Singapore, the powerful and the powerless are all equal before the law. In India, depending on who you know, you can get away with murder — literally. In Singapore, they have rule by law, and in India we have rule by people.

Yesterday Indians had the most impressive demonstration of how deep-rooted corruption is unavoidable in a system where things are done according to the whims and fancies of those in power, and not according to rules. The prime minister of India deflected all blame away from himself for the many multi-billion dollar corruptions he has enabled by saying that he is helpless.

What that says is that in a tussle between the law of the land and powerful but corrupt people, the corrupt win and the law is powerless.

What Mr Singh demonstrated is not just his personal moral turpitude but also that the nation is morally bankrupt. The people know that the corrupt rule the roost and yet they tolerate it. Honest people with any sense of right and wrong would be outraged enough to force the legal system to punish the guilty. But Indians don’t care and the corrupt flourish while the country sinks deeper into unimaginable poverty.

Alfred North Whitehead once observed that “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.” If you ponder that for a bit, you see that to perform important operations without thinking about them requires learning, the acquisition of habits through repeated performance of that operation till it becomes second nature.

Honesty is a habit. Dishonesty is also a habit. There is a social compact which says that I recognize that you are dishonest, and you are at the top of the heap for now. It says that I aspire to someday get to your position and when I do, I will so exactly what you do and make my personal fortune. So I have to allow you to do what I hope to do myself when I get there. I cannot begrudge you what you do since I hope to there someday myself and do what you do.

We Indians tolerate corruption because we aspire to make our fortunes the same way if we ever get that chance.

There’s a cost, however. When you look into the eyes of the next malnourished child begging at a traffic light, you should know that it is your acceptance of gross corruption which enables that injustice. You make this state of affairs possible that the economy is so compromised that it accepts the starvation of children as a matter of fact.

We are all collectively responsible. We have not developed that habit of rule of law that makes a caring society possible. We have made it possible for the corrupt to flourish because we are ourselves corrupt.

What is it that distinguishes a person who is an alcoholic but knows that he is one, from another who is as much an alcoholic but steadfastly refuses to acknowledge his problem? The former has the possibility of seeking redemption but the latter will continue to sink further into oblivion. Who knows how long it will take for us to admit that we as a collective are dishonest and as a consequence of our collective dishonesty we are poor.

It is all karma, neh?

Related Posts:

The Ownership Society. October 2005.

The Tangled Web — Part 3. June 2007.

While in office, political corruption in the Mubarak administration’s Ministry of Interior has risen dramatically, due to the increased power over the institutional system that is necessary to secure the prolonged presidency. Such corruption has led to the imprisonment of political figures and young activists without trials.

Hmm. What does that remind me of? Rise of corruption, imprisonment of political figures? Think Think. Ah, yes! Indira Gandhi. Let me read on.

Egypt is a semi-presidential republic under Emergency Law and has been since 1967, except for an 18-month break in 1980s (which ended with the assassination of Sadat). Under the law, police powers are extended, constitutional rights suspended and censorship is legalized.

Ah so. Reminds you of Mrs Gandhi’s ghost, doesn’t it? Corruption and heavy-handed autocratic rule. Still, I am sure that no one in India would approve of a corrupt and autocratic ruler.

Waittaminit. Hold on. I spoke to soon. It seems that the Indian government awarded Mr Mubarak the Jawaharlal Nehru Award in 1995. The award is awarded to people “for their outstanding contribution to the promotion of international understanding, goodwill and friendship among people of the world”.

What a joke, as my friend Rajan remarked. You can always depend on the Congress Party to support corruption, not only at home but also abroad.

The Congress government in power (as the senior partner in the Unholy Parties Alliance) is keeping its avowed promise of supporting corruption. So in that sense, giving the Jawaharlal Nehru Award to Mubarak is appropriate and in keeping with the hallowed tradition that Nehru started.

Mubarak is a great statesman, much like Nehru and his daughter were. They all figured out a way to keep the Third World miserably poor and backward.

“Do not buy Petrol on Feb 14th – we should start thinking about things like this.”

IT HAS BEEN CALCULATED THAT IF EVERYONE DID NOT PURCHASE A DROP OF
PETROL FOR ONE DAY AND ALL AT THE SAME TIME, THE OIL COMPANIES WOULD
CHOKE ON THEIR STOCKPILES.

AT THE SAME TIME IT WOULD HIT THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY WITH A NET LOSS
OVER 4.6 BILLION DOLLARS WHICH AFFECTS THE BOTTOM LINES OF THE OIL
COMPANIES.
THEREFORE ”
Feb.14 th” HAS BEEN FORMALLY DECLARED

“STICK IT UP THEIR BEHIND ” DAY AND THE PEOPLE OF THIS NATION SHOULD
NOT BUY A SINGLE DROP OF PETROL THAT DAY.

THE ONLY WAY THIS CAN BE DONE IS IF YOU FORWARD THIS E-MAIL TO AS
MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN AND AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN TO GET THE WORD
OUT. WAITING ON THE GOVERNMENT TO STEP IN AND CONTROL THE PRICES IS
NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE REDUCTION AND CONTROL
IN PRICES THAT THE ARAB NATIONS PROMISED TWO WEEKS AGO?

REMEMBER ONE THING, NOT ONLY IS THE PRICE OF PETROL GOING UP BUT
AT THE SAME TIME AIRLINES ARE FORCED TO RAISE THEIR PRICES,
TRUCKING COMPANIES ARE FORCED TO RAISE THEIR PRICES WHICH AFFECTS
PRICES ON EVERYTHING THAT IS SHIPPED. THINGS LIKE FOOD, CLOTHING,
BUILDING SUPPLIES MEDICAL SUPPLIES ETC. WHO PAYS IN THE END? WE
DO!

WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE.IF THEY DON’T GET THE MESSAGE AFTER ONE
DAY, WE WILL DO IT AGAIN AND AGAIN. SO DO YOUR PART AND SPREAD THE
WORD. FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW. MARK YOUR
CALENDARS AND MAKE* * *Feb.* 14 th

Even if you don’t read the email, the all CAPS text is a dead give away that the person forwarding the email is a retard. But reading it reveals much more than that. “Waiting for the government to step in and control the prices . . .” The person thinks that controlling prices sets everything alright. It is as if prices can be set at whatever suits one’s fancy. The word retarded is inadequate to describe this mentality.

Does the person know that petrol is a non-perishable consumption good and that in general the average person does not buy gasoline every day, etc. I will not abuse the readers’ intelligence by spelling out the illogic.

OK, moving on, here’s another instance of stupidity. Someone noted on a mailing list that there is an imbalance in the sex ratio in a particular community. One explanation given was that people selectively abort female fetuses. That explanation was countered by another person who wrote that that particular community does not abort fetuses. The alternative explanation was that couples stop having kids once they have a son. Therefore, the person reasoned, the lop-sided sex ratio.

I wrote saying that as long as the chances of having a son or a daughter was even, and no interventions such as selective abortion are involved, then it does not matter what strategy couples follow regarding the decision to continue to have children. It is like a toss of an unbiased coin. The trials are independent and the outcome of a large number of tosses of the coin will show nearly equal number of heads and tails.

If every couple were to have only one child and stop, then in any large population, the number of sons and daughters born will be roughly equal. If every couple stops randomly after one, two, three, . . . , number of children, then too the sex ratio will be equal (given a large number of couples having babies.) It does not matter since the sex of a baby is a random draw with equal probability.

My argument was countered by someone who wrote that statistics and probability does not work.

. . . such calculations have gone awry several times – just look at the financial markets or better ask any experts on fin markets. There are some other cases where probability does not work – e.g. road accidents, spread of endemic diseases etc.

That is when I concede defeat. I can supply the argument but comprehension has to come from within and cannot be supplied from outside.

We are all born with the ability to learn how to reason, just as have an innate ability to learn a language. But having the ability to learn something is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for having the skill. Reasoning has to be learned as much as languages have to be learned. And like with languages, one loses the ability with disuse.

The Sawai Gandharva Sangeet Mahotsav (informally known as Sawai Gandharva or simply Sawai) is one of the largest and most sought-after Indian Classical music festivals in India. Held annually in Pune, Maharashtra since 1953, this festival was founded by the Arya Sangeet Prasarak Mandal and Pt. Bhimsen Joshi, who led and organized each festival until 2002.

The festival used to last several nights. Starting at 10 PM, it would last the whole night. As a matter of tradition, Bhimsen-ji would be the final act of the final night. The crowning event of the festival.

I was at the Sawai in 1991. Panditji was sitting in the front row among the audience one evening, waiting for the performances to start. I decided to go up to him and pay my respects.

I introduced myself. He asked where I was from. I told him I lived in California. He asked, “Do you know Ramesh Mehta?” Mr Mehta was someone that Panditji knew in California. I said that I did not.

That gave me an idea. Sitting next to Panditji was the chief minister of Karnataka. I forget who it was. Anyway, I said hello to him and asked here he was from. He said he was from Karnataka. So I asked, “Do you know my friend Prakash? He lives in Bangalore.” Heh, heh.

While I am sad that Bhimsen Joshi is no more, I am grateful for the treasure that he leaves behind. His divine singing will live on. This morning I listened to Raga Ramkali by him.

He truly was a Bharat Ratna.

The village nut-case, when offered a choice between a dime and a nickel, always took the nickel. The villagers were much amused and just for the laughs they played the trick on the poor fellow dozens of time every day.

One day, a kindly villager took the fellow aside and said, “You really are an idiot. Don’t you know that although the dime is smaller than the nickel, it is worth two nickels. You should take the dime.”

The guy said, “The first time I take the dime instead of the nickel, that will be the last time I will be offered a choice between a nickel and the dime. I may be crazy but I am not stupid.”

Choosing the nickel was merely a means, not an end.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

A friend just mailed me about a new book by a very erudite author, and I was reminded of that story.

I have not read the book but going by its short blurb, I am totally convinced that the book is extremely valuable. Or rather, the message and the main thesis of the book is timely and important, and must be understood by tens of millions of people.

The book is 650 pages long and priced at Rs 795. Too bad it will be bought by only a few thousand people, if the author is lucky. Of that very small number, an even smaller percentage — serious scholars perhaps — will actually read the whole book, and the author will be extraordinarily lucky if more than a couple of hundred ordinary people read the book in its entirety.

If the end was to publish a big fat book for scholars to admire (and perhaps read), then it is brilliant. But if the end was to get the message across to the millions who need to get it, the big fat book is absolutely the wrong way to go about it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Imagine if the message of the book was delivered in a handy little package of 50 pages, and modestly priced at Rs 30. Most messages can be condensed without loss of meaning or comprehensibility. Further imagine that the first 5 pages of the book expressed the main story even more compactly.

Standing in the aisle at the bookstore, you read those first few pages and buy the book. You finish reading the book later that day. You love the ideas, they make you think, and you determine that you are going to take some action about the matter discussed in the book. The first action you take is to spread the book around.

You give it to your wife. She reads it and passes it on to her friend who after reading it passes it on to her son. By the end of the week, the book you bought on an impulse has been read by a dozen people.

In the end, that one book which cost Rs 30 at the store influenced 30 people by the end of the month. Cost of message delivered only one rupee per person.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

There are many books which are important enough that they should be available in a wide range of languages. Translating large works is expensive. But since the main theses of most most books can be condensed into short books, getting the message across to people in various languages becomes easier.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Here’s an idea. I am going to start a press called “Not a Big Fat Book Press” — the NBFB Press. It will take big fat books with important messages, condense them to 50 pages, and publish them in handy little packages. You could carry a couple with you to read any time you find a few minutes to spare. The price of each book will be a modest Rs 30.

The NBFB Press will also publish translated versions of the books. And all of these will be available both in hard copy and soft copy.

We could also have special lending libraries based out of neighborhood grocery stores. They will keep a collection of NBFB books in the local language. For Rs 2, you could borrow any book.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Why do we need NBFB?

Because we need to get ourselves a decent education. The government has ruined our education system and while it will be a long time before we fix it, we can at least enable people to learn what they need to learn by making good content available and accessible.

I believe that a reasonable remedial education programs would require us to read around 100 books. At 400 pages each on average, that would mean 40,000 pages. At one book a month, that means it will take 8 years to read them.

Using the NBFB versions of the book, it will take only one year to get nearly the same education.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

What BFB would you like to see NBFB Press publish?

UPDATE 24th Jan 9 AM IST:

Thanks for the excellent suggestions and comments. A bit of clarification in response to some of the comments posted.

The NBFB Press is only for works that convey important ideas so that they become more accessible. It is not meant for works of literature, although one can have condensed versions to serve as an introduction to important works of literature. Shakespeare has to be read in the original, for instance, and shortening it makes no sense.

Amazon Kindle Singles is something along the lines of what I am suggesting. But they are not suitable for the masses in India — too expensive and not really accessible since only a few in India can afford a Kindle. More importantly, the value addition would be the selection of books which the NBFB Press will publish.

The books have to be those which correct the distortions that a government-controlled education system has introduced into the brains of the masses.

Corruption in India today permeates every strata of economic and political life. But its fountainhead is at the top of the political structure, and from there it flows down into every place. It starts off as a trickle. Perhaps a few at the top take a few million while handling money with sticky fingers. Word gets out that so-and-so made so much money.

“That housing deal in the capital was crooked. Did you know that he made $7 million in that deal?”

“No, I did not. That’s bloody amazing.”

“He got away with it.

“Really? How?”

“He paid off the investigators with part of the money. If you have to steal, steal so much that you can bribe the cops.”

Just a few bad people at the top who steal a significant sum is enough to set the ball rolling. It can be stopped. Hang the first person who steals from the public. But if the first guy who steals a significant enough amount that he can buy his way out, the game is well under way.

Others note that stealing big is the way to go. Petty thievery is not very attractive and what is worse, if caught, you can go to jail. But engage in grand larceny and you can be confident that you will not be punished for it. When the amounts get large enough, you can even buy the supreme court judges.

Yes, the amounts do increase with time. Here’s how. The first few steal $7 million or so. They get away because they are politically connected. Other potential crooks are paying attention. They note that no one went to the gallows. So they get into the game and escalate it. In the next years, the corruption amounts hit $70 million. And once again, no one gets to spend time in jail. The word spreads.

The ante has been upped. More crooks join the game. There’s competition and with it, the more successful ones make out with $300 million in the next few years. The time has come when the newspapers don’t even mention $7 million corruption schemes. The game now is with $300 million prizes.

Time goes on. Crooks note that they have been helping the politicians get elected and in turn the politicians are providing them (the crooks) the cover for their theft. Why not become politicians themselves and cut out the middle-men?

So in about 15 years or so since the start of the small trickle of corruption, crooks start to get elected to office. At first, a few members of parliament and a bunch in the state assemblies. They get there and make money. And no one goes to jail. The word gets around.

More crooks enter politics. It’s the easiest way to make money. The competition among the crooks for higher political office intensifies. The winners start climbing the political hierarchy. Used to be that about 10 percent of the members of an assembly were crooks. Then when that became 20 percent, a crook gets to be the chief minister.

Time passes. The corruption is at a level that the prime minister is a crook. He shields the crooks immediately below him. The crooks at the highest level make $7,000 million. That’s sufficient money to buy the allegiance of the police, all sorts of investigative agencies, and all the judges that are needed. That is sufficient to buy all the journalists. That is sufficient to buy all the expertise needed to tamper with electronic voting machines.

At any level of the structure, except for the very top, corruption exists only because the level above it is corrupt. If a person is not corrupt, he will not tolerate corruption among his subordinates. At the first sign that there’s corruption in his organization, a non-corrupt person will fire those involved.

Conversely, if the top level is corrupt, it gives license to the next level to be corrupt — all the way to the bottom. There is a direct connection between the policeman in the corner accepting a bribe of a few hundred rupees and the chief executive of the country enabling a scam of a few billion dollars.

The policeman reads about the multi-billion dollar scams and trillions stashed away Swiss banks. He knows they get away with it, and justifies his taking a small amount saying that he needs it to make two ends meet. All petty bribes given and taken are given cover by corruption in high places, and justified on grounds that if it’s ok for them, it must be OK.

Corruption affects the economy along multiple dimensions and in complex ways. First order effects are easy to see. The chief engineer of a state electricity board takes bribes from the suppliers of equipment. The suppliers supply inferior parts and the power plants are not maintained.

Lack of power affects the economy of the surrounding area. More money changes hand for getting more of the scarce electric power. Costs go up. The economy produces a bit less than it could have.

The second order effects are more serious. Because corruption is a criminal activity that pays so well and does not extract a penalty, criminals get into politics. In India, politicians eventually make policy. Criminals are not very good at making policy that will help the country. In fact, their goal is to use the system for their benefit, and if that imposes costs on the people, it is not skin off their backs.

The second order effect is therefore lousy policy that retards economic development even more than the first order effects.

India is now at a stage that it is saturated with corruption. The prime minister enables corruption and gets away with it because it is said that he is “clean and honest.” The judges are for hire. The courts get into “telephone justice,” as Justice Stephen Breyer of the US supreme court put it. That’s when a political boss calls a judge to tell him how to rule.

India is at that stage when the politicians and journalists have figured out a business deal to protect each other. The government hands out awards to journalists and the journalists make sure that the masses are misled.

India is at that stage that the only reaction from the masses is “chalta hai.” It has become fatally wounded and does not have the will to stop the life blood spilling out of its guts.

India’s dire situation is a consequence of a very large number of very bad policy decisions taken over decades by people who, around mid last century, were not very smart; and after that by people who were not only not smart but were criminals.

Those acts of commission and omission have killed tens of millions. It will be impossible to estimate very accurately but the lower limit must be at least 100 million people who have died prematurely due to starvation and malnutrition in India since 1947 because of bad people at the top.

That’s more than Pol Pot, Hitler, Leopold II, Stalin, Mao, and all the other tyrants of the world put together killed.

Those leaders of India that killed so many must be charged with crimes against humanity. They must be made to pay for their criminality.

But instead their names are plastered all over the country. Airports, universities, roads, ports, bridges, institutions and every conceivable scheme is named after those same criminals.

Their descendants are getting ready to steal in the hundreds of billions. That will bleed the country even more. Tens of millions will die, slowly starving to death. Half the children of age below five in India are malnourished. Thousands of farmers commit suicide. India has the largest number of illiterates in the world.

And there are people who wonder why India is so pathetically poor. I sometimes wonder: of the two — the criminality of India’s leaders or the stupidity of its people — which is the greater curse.

What say you?

1 Lac = 1 Peti
1 Crore = 1 Khoka
500 Crore = 1 Koda
1,000 Crore = 1 Radia
10,000 Crore = 1 Kalmadi
100,000 Crore = 1 Raja
10 KALMADI + 1 RAJA = 1 SHARAD PAWAR
10 SHARAD PAWAR = 1 Madam

Item: Mr Lallu Reddy, 61, the prime minister of the People’s Democratic Banana Republic of Pooristan, was assassinated recently. Mr Reddy’s corrupt governance kept Pooristan among the least developed countries in the world. Following his demise, his son Ballu Reddy, 22, was popularly elected as the prime minister. Ballu will make time from his occupation of womanizing and general debauchery to take up his father’s job of ruling Pooristan.

You know that the first two scenarios are as unlikely to happen as pigs growing wings and flying. Not in the wildest fantasies would it happen that people’s lives are put at risk by giving a job that requires years of hard training to someone’s son or daughter. It never happens that way.

The third scenario, however, is not far-fetched at all. In your average banana republic, it is rather common for the son or daughter of a corrupt tyrant to inherit the job of misruling the country. The only special talent required for the job is that one is especially devoid of all morality and conscience. It is not as if keeping a desperately poor country desperately poor takes any effort. If your father could steal billions without too much trouble, you too can do it. You know how he did it, and so can you. He developed that skill and you got to see how it works. You got to know all the crooked people that your esteemed dad did business with. You inherited all the contacts that he had. That’s perhaps as striking an example of Lamarckian evolution — the inheritance of acquired characteristics — as you can find anywhere.

It would have been a different matter if the prime minister of a country had done a great job of hauling the country from poverty to prosperity. That would be a tough act to follow, and it is unlikely that the progeny of an able leader would also be a great leader. That unlikeliness or improbability gets compounded when successive generations of the great leader’s descendants are considered. Abraham Lincoln, for example, was a great leader. I doubt that his great-grandchildren are anything but average.

Leadership through inheritance is a compelling sign of a poor or a declining nation.

Consider this. Jawaharlal Nehru first, and then his daughter, and then his grandson, and then his grandson’s Italian wife, and then quite possibly his half-breed great-grandson — a succession of inept corrupt people ensuring that India remains impoverished. It’s a job that does not require any special talent; only a marked lack of morality and conscience.

One wonders which came first: corrupt leaders or the poor country. Nehru was perhaps not corrupt. He was certainly incompetent. Incompetent and how. He was not just clueless in this or that. His incompetence was all encompassing. Domestic affairs, international affairs, economic policies, military policies, international trade, social development — you name it and he was a royal screwup. But in all likelihood he was not corrupt.

His progeny did not rise above his incompetency, but certainly descended into corruption. With each successive generation, they sunk deeper into unfathomable corruption. Indira was corrupt but it did not make the newspaper headlines. She had a firm grip on what the public was allowed to know. But when the going got tough for her, she did what the dictators of banana republics do: ruthlessly suppress any dissent.

The level of corruption goes up a few orders of magnitude with each generation. Under Antonia Maino, aka Sonia Gandhi, the current corruption deals are of the order of tens of billions of dollars. During her husband’s rule, it was only in the hundred million-dollar range. One doesn’t know for sure but my guess would be that her son’s reign may push the numbers to hundreds of billions of dollars. India is after all a growing economy, and if someone does not rob the country of its wealth, it is in real danger of getting out of poverty. And if that happens, it would be an unmitigated disaster for the Gandhi family. Their rule depends on mass poverty and ignorance.

But let’s get back to our story. Thanks to her son, Sanjay, Indira exited stage left. The story is complicated. It is said that Sanjay was dictating to her. He was a loose cannon. He started getting on her nerves, it is rumored. It is rumored that one or the other had to go. No one knows for sure but many people believe that she had him killed. So many third world dictators end up in airplane accidents. It’s par for the course, it seems.

Some say that after bumping off one’s own husband, it becomes easier to bump off one’s son. I don’t know. I have never bumped off anyone. I am not married and I don’t have any children.

But anyway, it is remarkable how the corrupt leaders of third world countries meet very sticky ends. It is especially so in the Indian subcontinent. Bangladesh, Pakistan, India. Military coups are routine in the two Islamic republics. In India, if your last name is Gandhi, you are more likely to be a leader and commensurately more likely to die violently. It is like being in the mafia. While you live, you live high on the hog. When you die, you die like a stuck pig.

So back to the question. Which came first: the poverty or the corrupt leaders? I think that they are both involved in circular causation. But the start of the cycle must have been incompetence. Incompetent leaders cause poverty which leaders to corrupt leaders which cause poverty . . .

Talking of circular causation reminds me of a dog chasing its own tail. Mr Manmohan Singh comes to mind.

Well, so that’s that. Thanks to Sudipta for sending me the link to a article in Outlook India. The Princely State of India. If you are interested in the details of the cargo-cult democracy of the rapidly ascending banana republic-dom of India, go read that article.

Remember that running a banana republic requires less talent than running a corner pan shop. In fact, I doubt that Raul Vinci can run a pan shop.

It’s their written language that’s the main part of their problem. It’s non-phonetic. It means that in order to acquire a basic vocabulary—of, say, 2,000 or 3,000 words (the content of their average newspapers)—- children have to learn uniquely-shaped characters (whole words) which have no, or very little, relationship with their utterance. A Chinese or Japanese child can learn to speak his language quite as readily as children do the world over, but learning how to read or write each individual word takes many years. And there’s only one way, unfortunately for children, and that’s by rote learning. And thousands of hours of rote learning over many years under the strict discipline of slave-masters in the schoolroom doesn’t do anything for the creativity of young minds—or for older minds for that matter because the basic mental skills are aptitudes are thoroughly laid down before puberty.

The Chinese and Japanese governments are well aware of the damage that rote learning is doing to them—and say so quite frequently. Although both countries can churn out ten of thousands of science and engineering graduates every year, there’s scarcely an independent mind among them. Independent ‘garage inventors’, as we have in the West, are as rare as hen’s teeth in China and Japan. For example, Japan has been industrialized for over a century—only a decade or two less than other Western countries—yet it has only won 15 Nobel prizes in the science subjects. Compare this figure with those of America (261), the UK (91) and Germany (88). China has only won 10! However, this comparison is unfair because China’s have only been won since it woke up in the 1970s. America’s number also needs to be modified because about a third of its prizes have been won by foreign-born scientists who became American citizens after migrating there.

It’s all Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s fault (yes, the same as is famed for his terracotta army). Once Qin had conquered several countries and unified China in 221BC, he standardized as many things as possible—from weights and measures and currency through to the written language. All the various scholars throughout his empire, speaking scores of different languages (some with and some without a written form) were forced—on pain of death—to produce a composite, but common, written language. And this could only be non-phonetic, of course. Even the mighty power of Emperor Qin couldn’t force millions of his subjects to learn a new common spoken language but he could certainly force his relatively few scholars to produce a new common written one. One popular penalty in those days was to cut someone through his midriff, mount him on a platter of hot tar and take him around the town, gesticulating and shouting before he expired.

And herein lies a paradox, because the industrial revolution in Europe would never have happened without starting from a basic stock of scores of innovations—such as canal locks, differential gears, sowing grain in rows and so forth—that had drifted in from China along the Great Silk Road over a period of centuries. However, this doesn’t signify that the Chinese had been more inventive than Europeans. But its common written language had meant that when one innovation—say a wheelbarrow (very important indeed for both China and Europe)—had been invented by a genius in one tucked-away corner of China, then the local mandarin could write and tell hundreds more all about this wonderful new device.

But what once had been an accelerator for both Chinese and European civilizations actually became a retardant for China when the Western Enlightenment and scientific revolution stirred into life in the 1600s and 1700s. The Chinese had no way of encapsulating these new ideas. A Chinese mandarin visiting Europe in, say, the 1700s or 1800s, and learning about the new exciting scientific ideas (if he’d learned Latin or another European language of course) had no way of disseminating them widely in China because there he had no method of writing them down in Chinese words that would have been instantly recognizable by fellow Chinese scholars or engineers. He could only convey the new ideas vaguely by speaking of them face-to-face when he returned home.

Thus Japan (which had inherited thousands of Chinese words) and China were left behind by the industrial revolution in England, Germany and America. They didn’t begin to catch up in earnest until the the 1870s (the Meiji Revolution) and the 1970s (the Deng Xiaoping Revolution) respectively. And this is still—largely—where they are today. Both the Chinese and Japanese governments are trying to phoneticize their written languages but only very slowly, such is the cultural conservatism of two thousands years to contend with.

What might be significant in China (though not yet happening in Japan), is that all their college and university entrants have to learn spoken and written English these days. All their top government officials speak English and most business and science faculties in their universities use English widely in their seminars. Also, thousands of their brightest young post-grad scientists go to America or England for research experience and qualifications. Indeed, once they are here for a few years they become quite as inventive as Western scientists (if not more so when you look at the authorship of many papers in heavyweight subject, say genetics or particle physics). Unfortunately for the Chinese and Japanese governments many, if not most, of the most innovative scientific minds elect to stay in their adoptive countries rather than to return.

But the problem is even more serious for China and Japan. Almost as important as are the original ideas of innovative individuals is the necessity of other individuals who will give a welcome to new ideas and help to develop them. And it’s this open-minded hinterland which is still limited because of their deep, conservative, authoritative cultures. Goodness knows, new ideas often have a hard time being accepted in the West. Even here, the crazy ideas of yesteryear sometimes have to wait until its die-hard opponents are dead and buried and a brand new generation appears. Only then are the ideas seen to be not so crazy after all.

There we are then. Japan came close to hollowing out America and Western Europe 30 years ago with its superbly made (Western-invented) products. China is threatening to do the same in the coming years. But the innovative momentum is still with the West and this sort of cultural momentum takes a century or two to die down—if it ever does—or a century to acquire—if it ever does in China and Japan.

Just BTW, many Indians would read the title of the post “Why China won’t win . . .” and subconsciously insert India in the context. India’s chances of going anywhere has been put paid to by the Congress-led UPA governments. That’s a shame but then it is hard to avoid the realization that Indians elect criminals to government.

It’s all karma, neh?

As productivity increases, we seem faced with a choice between environmental disaster or massive unemployment. Unless, of course, we slow down by reducing working hours and sharing the work. Half a century of economic growth has not increased our happiness. More free time might well do so. It will certainly improve our health.

Americans will exercise more, sleep more, garden more, volunteer more, spend more time with friends and family, and drive less. We need full employment, but not by returning to the unhealthy overwork of recent decades As Derek Bok puts it in his new book, The Politics of Happiness:

“If it turns out to be true that rising incomes have failed to make Americans happier, as much of the recent research suggests, what is the point of working such long hours and risking environmental disaster in order to keep on doubling and redoubling our gross domestic product?”

. . .

Reducing work hours and sharing available work is essential for our families, health, economic security, and the environment.

It’s time to get on with it.

Wendell Berry has a different take on work. He wrote that is response to de Graaf’s article. I think it is an awesomely good article.

It is true that the industrialization of virtually all forms of production and service has filled the world with “jobs” that are meaningless, demeaning, and boring—as well as inherently destructive. I don’t think there is a good argument for the existence of such work, and I wish for its elimination, but even its reduction calls for economic changes not yet defined, let alone advocated, by the “left” or the “right.” Neither side, so far as I know, has produced a reliable distinction between good work and bad work. To shorten the “official workweek” while consenting to the continuation of bad work is not much of a solution.

The old and honorable idea of “vocation” is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted. Implicit in this idea is the evidently startling possibility that we might work willingly, and that there is no necessary contradiction between work and happiness or satisfaction.

Only in the absence of any viable idea of vocation or good work can one make the distinction implied in such phrases as “less work, more life” or “work-life balance,” as if one commutes daily from life here to work there.

But aren’t we living even when we are most miserably and harmfully at work?

And isn’t that exactly why we object (when we do object) to bad work?

And if you are called to music or farming or carpentry or healing, if you make your living by your calling, if you use your skills well and to a good purpose and therefore are happy or satisfied in your work, why should you necessarily do less of it?

More important, why should you think of your life as distinct from it?

And why should you not be affronted by some official decree that you should do less of it?

A useful discourse on the subject of work would raise a number of questions that Mr. de Graaf has neglected to ask:

What work are we talking about?

Did you choose your work, or are you doing it under compulsion as the way to earn money?

How much of your intelligence, your affection, your skill, and your pride is employed in your work?

Do you respect the product or the service that is the result of your work?

For whom do you work: a manager, a boss, or yourself?

What are the ecological and social costs of your work?

If such questions are not asked, then we have no way of seeing or proceeding beyond the assumptions of Mr. de Graaf and his work-life experts: that all work is bad work; that all workers are unhappily and even helplessly dependent on employers; that work and life are irreconcilable; and that the only solution to bad work is to shorten the workweek and thus divide the badness among more people.

The point then is to do good work — where good is defined by the person concerned. As the Moody Blues’ song goes, “Do what makes you happy, do what you know is right.” I know many people who work like that, and for them there is no contradiction between working and living. They don’t have to seek a balance between work and life since their life is in balance.

On a different note, here’s a piece by Ricky Gervais in the Wall Street Journal: A Holiday Message. (Thanks to JP for the link.) He explains why he does not believe in the monotheist god. When he lost his belief in Jesus, he found lots of gifts.

The gifts of truth, science, nature. The real beauty of this world. I learned of evolution -– a theory so simple that only England’s greatest genius could have come up with it. Evolution of plants, animals and us –- with imagination, free will, love, humor. I no longer needed a reason for my existence, just a reason to live. And imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer and pizza are all good enough reasons for living.

But living an honest life -– for that you need the truth. That’s the other thing I learned that day, that the truth, however shocking or uncomfortable, in the end leads to liberation and dignity.

As expected he got a lot of flack for that piece from religious people. The WSJ asked him to respond to some in a follow-up article. At one point in the article, when writing about his mother, he started crying. Here’s that bit.

How do you plan on celebrating Christmas?

Eating and drinking too much with friends and family. Celebrating life and remembering those that did, but can no longer.

They are not looking down on me but they live in my mind and heart more than they ever did probably. Some, I was lucky enough to bump into on this planet of six billion people. Others shared much of my genetic material. One selflessly did her best for me all my life. That’s what mums do though. They do it for no other reason than love. Not for reward. Not for recognition. They create you. From nothing. Miracle? They do those every day. No big deal. They are not worshiped. They would give their life without the promise of heaven. They teach you everything they know yet they are not declared prophets. And you only have one.

I am crying as I write this.

It usually gets me this time of year. That’s what’s special about Christmas. It’s when you visit or reminisce about the ones you love. And reflect on how lucky you are. How they helped shape you. I remember the first time my mum took me to see a movie. I’d never been to a cinema before. I can still remember the place to this day. Everything seemed carpeted. The floors, the walls, everything. I had sweets and Pepsi and the biggest screen in the world, I thought. I was blown away. I lived a life in a couple of hours. When I thought Baloo was dead I was sobbing uncontrollably but trying to hide it. My mum was consoling me but didn’t seem as distressed as me. Then when it turned out that Baloo was still alive I was f—ing euphoric.

But it made me think. On the way home I asked my mum how old I’d be when she died. “Old,” she said. “Will I care?” I asked worried about my far off future feelings. She wasn’t sure what to say. She knew I wanted the answer “no” in some ways but as usual she chose honesty. “Yes,” she said. “But it won’t happen for a very long time.” That was good enough for me.

Ricky is a funny man. In a post in April 2008, I had embedded a video of his explaining the bible. YouTube has removed that one due to copyright reasons but the same content is available on YouTube anyway. Here it is. Enjoy. And happy new year.

So off we went. The lecture hall was packed to the brim. Prof Dixit’s lecture went over my head. He was talking about agency theory. I did not have the vocabulary to fully understand what he was talking about but still I got quite a bit of it because he is a great teacher. It has to do with principals and agents, etc. What I found delightful was his heavy Marathi accent. Later I went up to him and introduced myself saying that I too was from Maharashtra.

I have been recommending “Thinking Strategically” which Dixit co-authored for all who care to understand game theory and its applications for years now.

Recently, the Finance&Development site of the International Monetary Fund carried a profile of Avinash Dixit. (Thanks to Rajan Parrikar for the link.) I loved reading it.

It’s interesting that the article records that Dixit was drawn to game theory after reading Thomas Schellings The Strategy of Conflict. I was drawn to economics after reading that book. Later I read Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Schelling. You must read it.

Anyway, Prof Dixit has a great mind. Check out the profile. Here are a few excerpt, for the record.

Teaching game theory, he insists, must be fun—he has won awards for his teaching prowess—and he tries to illustrate key concepts with tales from films, books, and real life.

Dani Rodrik, professor of international political economy at Harvard, says Dixit was the best classroom teacher he ever had—he never treated anything as silly or obvious. “No matter how stupid a question seemed, he would stop, raise his hand to his chin, narrow his eyes, and think a long time about it, while the rest of us in the classroom would roll our eyes at the stupidity of the questioner,” said Rodrik. “Then he would say, “Ah, I see what you have in mind . . . ,” and he would roll out an answer to a deep and interesting question the student had no idea he had asked.”
“What makes him special,” says former student Kala Krishna, now an economics professor at Penn State, “is that more than anyone else I know, he sees economics as an inescapable part of life: from books, movies, negotiating with a taxi driver—everything has economic content. He truly loves economics, and you can see how much he is enjoying himself doing it.”

Others praise his wit. “Avinash Dixit is one of my favorite economists, in part because he has a trait that is extremely rare among economists: a good sense of humor,” said Steven D. Levitt, coauthor of the best-selling book Freakonomics.

. . .

He is also famous for his textbook on trade with Norwegian economist Victor Norman, The Theory of International Trade, which was enormously influential, and his work on oligopoly and industrial organization.

Path-breaking model

What became known as the “Dixit-Stiglitz” model underpins a huge body of economic theory on international trade, economic growth, and economic geography—a model tapped by Paul Krugman, who won the Nobel Prize in 2008.

The model, first published in 1977, became a building block for others in the new fields of endogenous growth theory and regional and urban economics—what journalist David Warsh described as “one of those economical and easy-to-use ‘Volkswagen’ models that were the hallmark of MIT” (Warsh, 2006).

Monopolistic competition was pioneered by Joan Robinson and Edward Chamberlin in the 1930s and was the stuff of basic economics for years. But Stiglitz—who went on to win a Nobel Prize in 2001 for his work with Michael Spence and George Akerlof on the analysis of markets with asymmetric information—and Dixit took it to a new level.

“The success of the Dixit-Stiglitz model of monopolistic competition might have come as a surprise to students of the history of economic thought, as it was by no means the first attempt to deal with imperfect markets or monopolistic competition,” said Steven Brakman and Ben Heijdra in a book analyzing what they termed a revolution in the analysis of imperfect competition.

“However, where the earlier attempts failed, the Dixit-Stiglitz approach turned out to be very successful and has the potential for ‘classic status.’”
Huge impact

The theory of monopolistic competition shook up modern trade theory, which Oxford economist Peter Neary attributed to “one factor above all others”: the development of the “elegant and parsimonious” model by Dixit and Stiglitz.

. . .

What drives development?

Dixit has spent the past decade watching what drives economic development, including governance and institutions, and has studied fragile states—poor countries recovering from conflict or disasters. “Governance was neglected by economists for a long time, perhaps because they expected the government to provide it efficiently. However, experience with less developed and reforming economies, and observations from economic history, have led economists to study non-governmental institutions of governance,” he says (Dixit, 2008).

To this he brings his habitual skepticism.

While Dixit acknowledges the importance of democracy, property rights, contract enforcement, and the provision of public infrastructure and services that support private economic activity, he is scathing about attempts to draw up a menu of items that underpin development in low-income countries.

“There’s a long, long tradition of people offering recipes which don’t work out,” he says. He stirred things up with a lecture at the World Bank in 2005 that he said he hoped would be provocative and critical, but “evenhandedly so.”

In many cases, he argued in that lecture, the accumulated research on the role of institutions in development stopped short of giving useful or reliable policy prescriptions. “I hope to give everyone some incentives to think further and harder.”

In a subsequent talk at the Reserve Bank of India (Dixit, 2007), he said that in general “bottom-up and organically generated reforms will work better than imposed top-down ones.”

The World Bank’s Philip Keefer, who was Dixit’s respondent at the 2005 lecture, said the Princeton professor was right to be skeptical, but “big ideas” could help guide a country’s reform agenda.

To work effectively, Dixit said, change must be coordinated and take place across several fronts. “The one recipe that works is what I call ‘strategic complementarities.’ That is, if 15 things need to be done, doing 3 of them is not going to get you 20 percent of the way there. It’s going to get you much less. You’ll need to get all 15, or at least 13 or 12, right before you start to see any big effect. So that’s one thing, strategic complementarities, and the second is luck.

“Napoleon supposedly said that the quality he most admired in his generals was luck, and the same goes for governments and countries.”

Go read it all.

Post script: When Rajan sent me that link to the IMF article, he wrote

“You won’t find the name in an India Abroad “Indians of the Year” list, or in the bozo chain emails Indians slosh around. He is ‘unknown’ except to those in the know. And unlike that imposter Amartya Sen, this is the real deal. Ladies & Gentlemen, Professor Dixit -”

Hear, hear.

Closer to home, I see some comments on this blog which makes me wish that the reader had not bothered to comment. It embarrasses me. I struggle with my policy of not deleting comments unless it is spam or totally abusive.

Language matters. It matters regardless of which language it is. Once I was at a conference where the presenter was mixing Hindi and English. For instance, “ab hamen yeh RED COLOR ko dekhna hai BUT BLUE rang bhi bahut SIGNIFICANT hai. Pur yahan POVERTY kum hotay gaye hai. Jyada say jyada paanch PERCENT hogi…”

I finally lost it. I interrupted the speaker to tell him that he should stop screwing Hindi. It is a perfectly good language with an adequate vocabulary and if he does not know the Hindi words for what he has to say, he better switch to English. Fact was that he did not know English either.

Why the decline in language skills? Is it so or am I imagining it? Are schools failing to teach languages?

Don’t people know that if you don’t have the vocabulary, you cannot think properly? Don’t they know that rather than being at the periphery of our cognitive abilities, language lies at the core?

I believe that it takes effort to express oneself in such a way that one means what one says and vice versa. It takes time and energy. It often takes revisions. It takes care. And it shows.

Reading some of the comments makes me cringe. Like I said, it embarrasses me and I marvel at the writer’s total lack of self-consciousness and willingness to present evidence that he or she is not worth taking seriously.

What says you? Say what you will as this is an open thread.

Related post:

Rajivspeak is Getting out of Hand. March 2008. You must read this. It’s pretty funny, actually.

Did the author even for one moment consider that you cannot make people who are intrinsically bad behave well by forcing them to take an oath? If oaths would work, wouldn’t airport security be a simple affair of making people swear an oath that they will not blow the airplane into smithereens? Wouldn’t that be better than getting the TSA to grope little children and senile old ladies to prevent the Islamic terrorists from mass murder?

The mind really boggles. This epitomizes what is truly wrong with our world. What’s wrong with the world is the extent and pervasiveness of stupidity.

The fact is that people do what is consistent with who they are. You could hand a bazooka to a Buddhist monk boarding a plane with the complete assurance that nothing will go wrong — aside from the hassle of having to put it away in “the seat in front of you or in the overhead compartment.” But even box cutters in the hands of Islamic terrorists can bring down airliners. The lesson is that who you are matters, not what kind of paper you sign.

People who put their heart and soul in gaining political power in banana republics (such as India) are not in that cut-throat business for nothing. They are in it for the moolah — now a days counted in the tens of billions of dollars. They don’t care about the laws of the land. They couldn’t care less about signing a stupid oath. After all, a very large number of them are criminals. They have broken laws by the score. So why would signing a “code of ethics” stay their hand for even one millisecond?

I tell you, against stupidity even the gods struggle in vain. We just don’t have a hope. Squeezed between do-gooder stupid people and the essentially criminal, we are supremely effed.

It’s a long video and you probably have stuff to do. But watching this video was a good use of my time. There’s nothing new in it for me but from time to time, I like to be reminded of what I know only because it puts things in perspective for me. It helps me see my concerns for what they are: trivial in the overall scheme of things.

I don’t know who made that video. Whoever he is, I think he has the same antipathy towards monotheism as I have. Organized religion — especially the three major monotheistic ones — is humanity’s major curse. It continues to cause immense suffering. Fortunately these are only a few thousand years old and in about a hundred years, they would be dead. They will not matter anymore.

What matters is that we at least get a glimpse of a vision that tells who we are from a cosmic perspective. In June 2005, in one of my letters to Abhishek, I had touched upon this same topic. In there, I wrote,

They call it the Big Bang, an event which gave birth to Time, Space, and Energy. Right after the Big Bang (whatever it was), the universe was very very tiny. And it was very very hot. The tiny hot universe began to expand, that is, space began to grow. As the universe grew bigger, the temperature dropped. As the temperature dropped, some of the energy began to “condense”. Little bits of energy condensed first into what is called quarks and electrons and other little bits. There are just a handful of quarks. Then these itsy-bitsy quarks combined together to form bigger units such as protons and neutrons. As the universe expanded and cooled further, protons and neutrons combined and formed elements.

The early universe was simple. You had space, energy, and matter. Most of the matter was Hydrogen (about 75 percent) and Helium (about 25 percent). I am simplifying all this and leaving out details such as neutrinos, electrons, and all sorts of exotic stuff. What is important is to note that to start off with, there was just energy. And some of that energy became matter. Matter and energy are one and the same, as pointed out by one guy called Einstein.

Anyway, as time went on, the universe moved from begin featureless to a state where interesting structures started arising. Huge clouds of hydrogen and helium condensed into stars under the influence of gravity. Within the stars, hydrogen got converted by nuclear fusion into helium. The energy released by this reaction balanced the crushing force of gravity. But when all the hydrogen was converted into helium and other somewhat heavy elements such as carbon, oxygen, and iron, gravity won and the star exploded and became a Supernova. In that violence, even heavier elements were synthesized.

The stuff that was thrown off by supernovas again collected into stars with hydrogen and a new star went through its life. Every element that you have on earth (except for hydrogen and some helium) was manufactured in stars over many billions of years. We are made of elements that were cooked in stars: we are star stuff. Every atom in our bodies started off as a bit of energy which condensed a long time ago and came to us as the grandchildren of may generations of stars. The most basic description of anything anywhere in the universe is that it is a bundle of energy.

But then, you may say, that this basic description is lacking a certain something. It does not explain the distinction between equivalent amounts of energy with different forms. You may say that there may be exactly the same amount of energy in a sack of coal and you, but the sack of coal will not have the cuteness that you have. How does this cuteness come about, you ask. That I can tell you in one word: Information.

Let me see if I can explain what I mean. At some point in your life you will doubtless ask, “Where did I come from?” One answer (amongst many others) is: “From a store, mainly. You have been bought at a store.” Here is a thought experiment. Put a man and a woman in a suitable container and stock it with all that they need such as food and air and water. After sufficient time, if all goes well, some of the food would be converted into a baby just like you. Since all the food was bought from stores, the baby came from the stores in brown-paper bags in bits.

What happened was that some of the elements of the food was rearranged into a different organization according to instructions which are biologically encoded somehow at the cellular level. Those instructions you inherited from your parents, who in turn inherited it from their parents, all the way back to the beginning of organic life on earth. In creating you, no new matter was created; only a re-arrangement was done. You are a bundle of energy organized in a certain unique way.

To recap, everything material (including the food that became re-organized as you) is made up of a handful of elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, etc. You start off with sufficient amounts of about a 100 odd elements and you can build yourself everything you see around in the universe. The elements themselves are made up of even fewer more fundamental bits such as protons, neutrons, electrons, etc. These bits themselves are made of still fewer bits called quarks. You get the idea: the deeper you go, the simpler the bits become. The immense variety you see in the universe emerges from complex arrangements of simpler bits. At its most complex, at the highest levels of organization of the elements, life appears.

So we have elements organized in specific ways. The blueprint of that organization is information. You take some stuff (elements) and arrange them according to some blueprint (information) and you get all the structures, from stars (very little information content) to babies (very high information content.) To fully specify a baby, you need gigabytes of information about the DNA of the baby.

The whole universe is nothing but information and energy. Your fundamental nature is the same as everything else in the universe — it is all energy organized in special ways. Perhaps that is what the ancients in India realized when they figured out the philosophy of Advaita (non-duality) and said “Tat Tvam Asi” — That You Are. You and the Not-You are the same. When you attain enlightenment, you will see beyond the duality and realize that all things have the same nature but only the form differs.

Alright. So here’s one more from the same guy.

Thank you, good night, and may your god go with you.

Non-Christians paying for the benefits of Christians. Does this amount to the state providing a financial incentive for non-Christians to convert to Christianity?

Moorthy writes:

If the percentage of missionary-controlled educational institutions is proportional to the Christian minority population percentage, these discriminations, while hardly justifiable for a nation that calls itself “secular,” are unlikely to have an adverse impact. However, here’s the gist of the problem: the 2.3 percent (2001 census figures) Christian minorities control over 22 percent (almost ten times their population percentage) of all educational institutions in India (i.e., over 40,000 of them).

In combination with Article 30, the above statistics state the obvious: The Christians are a privileged minority in India, with the government’s resources — inadvertently, it seems — allocated for their preferred empowerment. Not surprisingly, literacy rate of the Christians in India stands at 80 percent, compared to 65 percent overall. With the missionaries providing nearly 30 percent of the healthcare services in India, employment possibilities for those who convert to Christianity are significantly more than those of non-Christians. In addition, the minority status of missionary-controlled institutions helps them get tax, land allotment and many other benefits.

Does it matter that non-Christians are systematically discriminated against in India? Here’s Moorthy:

The magnitude and scale of these discriminations are staggering. If each missionary-controlled institution has on the average a total of 300 students and staff, and if it discriminates on the average against 10 non-Christian student enrolments and youth employments every year, it translates to about a quarter million discriminatory acts every year. For instance, St. Stephen’s, which has an incoming class of about 400 students every year, allots nearly 200 of these seats exclusively for Christians — i.e., nearly 200 acts of discrimination every year [in just one college alone].

There is a word for this kind of thing. Apartheid.

It is pertinent to contrast here the scheme implemented in South Africa by the ruling white minority during the apartheid era. The black majority was deliberately denied education and employment opportunities through a racial system designed to favour the whites. This, in a nutshell denied the black majority empowerment in their land. Of course, in the case of South Africa, the white ruling class’s apartheid practices were deliberate and by design, in order to keep the black majority away from power. However, in the case of India, the egregious religious discriminations are an unintended consequence of Article 30 of the Indian constitution. Or so it seems.

World over, people began to raise their voices against the cruelty and immorality of the apartheid practices in South Africa. But in India, the larger-than-life implications of similar practices have yet to be realised — and, let alone be addressed. Indeed, best-selling author Ramachandra Guha himself an alumni of St. Stephen’s gets it only half right when he calls the reservation policies of his former college, “unethical.”

The discriminatory policies induced by Article 30 of the Indian constitution, arguably, violate Articles 23 and 26 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN Charter) to which India is a signatory. Specifically, “the right to work, to free choice of employment,” mentioned in Article 23 and, “higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit,” mentioned in Article 26 appear to be violated. Therefore, Article 30-induced discriminations constitute human rights violations as well.

How is it that in Hindu majority India, Hindus are discriminated against like this?

The Hindu majority has become under-privileged in part due to centuries of alien rule in which they were shut out of power and were discriminated against. It is indeed true that at the present time the Muslim minorities are relatively under-privileged compared to the Hindu majority. Even still, one has to wonder how much of that is self-inflicted, considering the well-established reluctance of the Muslim community in India to embrace modern education by choosing madarasa (Muslim religious school) education. The regressive evolution of the Muslim majority Pakistan, despite sharing much with India also substantiates the role of self-infliction.

Moorthy presents chilling evidence of discrimination and its effect.

Article 30-Induced Deprivations

Post 1990s, the religious apartheid practices permitted by Article 30 of India’s constitution have played a primary role in devastating the majority community economically in the southern Indian state of Kerala by marginalising their educational opportunities. The article has given minority-controlled institutions in Kerala legal power to discriminate and to regulate educational access at the expense of the taxpayers. According to Indian academic C. Issac:

“[The] 55 per cent of Hindu population of Kerala controls 11.11 per cent of the state’s bank deposits. On the other hand, the 19 per cent Christian community commands 33.33 per cent and 25 per cent Muslim population retains 55.55 per cent…. The education is one of the major sectors where the organised strength of the minorities in Kerala is used in a covert manner. In this sector the majority [Hindu] community as well as the government together control only 11.11 percent, on the other hand, the church controls 55.55 percent and Muslim religious organisations 33.33 percent of all institutions. At present the professional education sector of Kerala is almost under the full control of the minorities. About 12,000 engineering enrolments and 300 medicine enrolments are in the minority institutions and they are fully controlling the admissions. At present 60 percent of the enrolments in paramedical courses are controlled by the organised minority religious leadership…. In this situation the successive governments are functioning as mere onlookers…. A lion’s share of these aided [government-funded] schools is under minority management.”

Can a parent belonging to the majority community expect his/her sons and daughters, even if they are well-qualified, to receive college education in Kerala? Difficult as it is to get admission in a college, it is unlikely to be lost on many Hindus that they stand a much higher chance, should they convert to one of the privileged minority faiths.

A resident of Kanyakumari — a southern district in the state of Tamilnadu that has newly become Christian majority — has commented below on the infringing of the rights of the Hindu community. Here again, the issue of concern is enhanced government-sponsored empowerment opportunities available for those who belong to minority religions through Article 30, and their denials to the majority community:

“There are so many scholarship programmes for minorities and backward classes, but there is no such scholarship for Hindu students. The poor are not able to afford children’s education. We will have to vote for Radhakrishnan [a Hindu legislator contestant] to get our rights back.”

Not surprisingly, in many parts of India, there have been anecdotal instances of entire families converting to Christianity in order for their children to receive education and scholarships. This is creating destabilising social tensions, with the ill-informed majority community unable to enact measures to modify the existing minority-favouring system of quotas, and instead, directing anger unfairly at the minority Christians.

In other words, Hindus are forced to pay (through taxes to their government) for their own religious conversion. As a Hindu, I find this unacceptable.

Evidence-based reasoning suggests that India is undergoing a civilisational transformation – a process of de-hinduising, powered by Article 30-induced egregious deprivations. This shows that the majority community in India has not yet matured enough to protect its core interests from being unfairly trampled. While the minorities’ politisation of their religious institutions have helped them mobilize their community to vote and to leverage the voting power to advance their interests,[51] the lack of politisation of the majority community’s religious institutions has not helped. These contrasting roles played by the religious institutions of the minority and majority communities can be traced to centuries of rule by alien powers. In order to mitigate potential challenges to their hold on power, the alien entities ensured de-politising of the majority community’s religious institutions.

It’s a long article — and rightly so since it touches on a important matter which cannot be discussed meaningfully in sound-bite sized pieces. Here is a bit more from it.

Among the capable segments of India’s population, the middle class, upper middle class, and even the rich members of the majority community have remained apolitical — by largely shying away from voting — due to their disappointment with the political process in the nation.[52] They could afford to, as the booming economy of the past two decades has created educational and job opportunities for them. . .

It has become quite clear that the apolitical, and yet the capable segments of the majority community now have to involve themselves in the political process, in order to ensure a future for themselves and their progenies. . .

Clearly, modern and “emergent” India has to do away with Article 30 in the present form. The question remains what should replace it. A window into answering this question comes from the United States of America, arguable among the most developed secular democracies and home to a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. Discriminations faced by the black minorities and to a lesser extent by non-Christian and non-white immigrants from abroad (in employment, educational, social and professional settings), compelled the United States to enact the cornerstone anti-discrimination legislation: The Civil Rights Act of 1964. . .

This article shouldn’t be viewed as an attack on Christian minorities or a call for undermining their rights, or an effort to stop conversions altogether. The focus of this analysis is about the egregious human rights violations of the 80 percent majority community. By tracing these violations to Article 30 of the Indian constitution, this piece offers ways of addressing this issue objectively and fairly without infringing on anyone’s rights. As a modern and free nation, India ought to uphold the right of its people to practice and importantly, change a faith as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, . . .

One could justifiably argue that India doesn’t deserve to be called a modern democracy unless it takes steps to stop the constitution-based egregious discriminatory practices and unfair denial of empowerment of one eighth of entire humanity. . .

If biodiversity is viewed crucial for the well-being of humanity, so should cultural-religious diversity. For instance, India’s western neighbour Pakistan’s relentless drive to eradicate cultural-religious diversity within may have left it highly vulnerable to dead-end ideologies. It is incumbent on humanity to ensure that ancient ways of life are allowed to evolve, and not be extinguished by apartheid practices.

Go read it all. It deserves to be widely appreciated. (There’s a slightly shorter version of the article at the South Asia Analysis Group site.)

NOTES:

[1] I have not read Dr Muthuswamy’s “Defeating Political Islam” yet. It is on my reading list though. I am a very slow reader, unfortunately. Last year, I had mentioned the book in a blog post in May 2009. After that, I had the privilege of speaking to Dr Muthuswamy over the phone.

In the first part of his article, he quotes from a letter he wrote to Antonia Maino[2], aka Sonia Gandhi, the day after Nov 26th, 2008 deadly Islamic terrorists attacks in Mumbai.

Yesterday’s incidents in Bombay are proof of your government’s incompetence. The names of your corrupt Ministers are freely circulating. Don’t think that you are not yourself the target. The country is on fire and it needs consolation and security… Neither you nor your son whom you are projecting as the future Prime Minister of India are the solution or even a ray of hope…

He correctly notes that the Congress Party is essentially a bunch of cattle. Driven cattle. Actually, I don’t fault Antonia, aka Sonia, for that. The cattle starts at the level of the people. They vote for anyone with the last name “Gandhi.” This is known by all those who want power. So they — such as Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram — make it their business to suck up to the Nehru-Gandhi Dynasty so they can make hay from the reflected glory of the nasties.

Things did not register any significant change. I watched with dismay how the party of illustrious statesmen who led India into freedom has virtually turned into a party of dumb, driven cattle, without courage to call their leaders to account. I was more contemptuous of large sections of the press, which had lost its critical faculty and wholly jettisoned the obligation to disseminate the truth, however unpleasant, to keep the political sovereign updated and informed.

Mr Jethmalani ends his piece with a few obvious questions that Raul Vinci, aka Rahul Gandhi, should be asked but the journalists don’t.

Mr Jethmalani obvious questions have equally obvious answers. Perhaps we should answer them on behalf of Mr Raul Vinci aka Rahul Gandhi.

1. We have no objection to your mother’s ambition to see you installed as India’s Prime Minister. Obviously she did not entertain this ambition either for herself or any of her children in 1991. Are you prepared to take the nation into confidence and disclose the qualifications you have acquired since then to take into your hands the destiny of this complex and most populous and poverty stricken democracy?

2. Do you agree that the best available statesman in the country should fill that post? If yes, how have you convinced yourself that you are the one? We would not mind if your mother answers this question. We hope you will not turn to our dear friends Mani Shankar Aiyar or Abhishek Singhvi to ghost write the answers.

3. We are highly appreciative of the Election Commission which compels candidates for public office to disclose their material assets.

We wish they logically mandate the disclosure of intellectual assets as well. But if democracy is all about transparency, would you kindly let the nation know what academic qualifications you have acquired, when, how and from which institutions. It will help if you also tell the curious Indian nation what books you have read during the last five years; have you published any articles or any readable material on politics, economics, terrorism, war and peace? Is there any speech in Parliament, to the local Rotary Club or to a bunch of tiny toddlers with a single quotable quote that illumines or inspires and gives us some clue to your intellectual attainments? We know quite a few talented young men in the Congress party and naturally people would like to be satisfied that you are better endowed than them all. That your mother is Soniaji or your father was Rajivji is not enough evidence.

4. There have been oft-repeated charges of financial impropriety and worse against your family, including by the president of Janata Party, Subramanian Swamy, Swiss magazines and, most unusually in a book on the KGB. Why have you not responded?

If you plead ignorance of all the stuff mentioned in the questions you do not deserve to be India’s Prime Minister any way.

I think that the journalists — like Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai, Vir Sanghvi — also know which side of their bread is buttered. So they are busy brown-nosing and cannot be bothered to ask these questions.

I therefore disagree with what Mr M J Akbar, a journalist of some distinction, wrote in his blog post, Scripture of Deceit (Dec 5th), about journalists.

I am continuously amazed by how little journalists understand politicians. Perhaps it hurts their sensitive and inflated egos to get the simple fact that politicians treat most media with disdain, precisely because they understand how it works. And they have nothing but contempt for cozy collaborators who think they have arrived because they were invited to the parlour for cocktails, although they were never permitted into the dining room for dinner. A few of them indulged the hallucination that they were enjoying the intimacies of the residential bedroom. You could hear the sound of hearts being broken when the tapes revealed that it was only a transactional exchange rather than true love.

That purr in the ear isn’t the music of your back being scratched, darling; it’s the crackle of your slim wallet being emptied of ethics.

Mr Akbar sets himself apart from other journalists as if he alone is immune from the blindness he attributes to them. I read the first line quoted above as “I am continually amazed by how little journalists (except myself) understand politicians.”

Journalists are also humans. They are routinely bought and sold. The prostitution of journalism is perhaps as old as the second oldest profession in the world.

Mr Akbar then claims that businessmen don’t understand politicians. I cannot fathom that. The most successful Indian business people are successful precisely because of their understanding of politics and politicians. It is a consequence of the licence-quota-permit-control raj that our dear Cha-Cha Nehru and his progeny love so much. If you can somehow get the licences, you make huge money. I don’t believe that Mr Akbar does not know that. So my conjecture is that here he is being a journalist of the kind that he bemoans in his piece.

By the time dessert is served the dinner party has become completely exclusive, for it is offered only to a chosen few. That is why Prime Ministers, of all parties, and super Prime Ministers like Mrs Sonia Gandhi, take a personal interest in selecting which journalists are given Padma awards and what is the pecking order of the deemed honour. These are personal grace-and-favour anointments.

The other great mystery is the naïveté of successful businessmen. They simply do not understand the labyrinths through which political power travels towards a decision, and hence their endless quest for either a presence or a guide through the maze. They are bewildered by the systems of Delhi’s crime and punishment, reward and banishment, and frustrated by the numerous Chinese walls that block their approach. They deploy cash, but are uncertain about what they have purchased. A few think that the Rajya Sabha opens the door to Delhi, and discover that it was constituted for something quite outside their requirements. This is why the allure of a corporate lobbyist becomes irresistible.

I think that the next time Mr Akbar interviews Raul Vinci, aka Prince Charming & Rahul Gandhi, he should take the time to ask the questions that Mr Jethmalani has so helpfully supplied for journalists to ask.

Until then, I will have to believe that Mr Akbar’s lament is not sincere.

NOTES:

[1] The old joke goes, “What do you call a flying Sindhi?” The answer is, “jetmalani.” I claim that here I have updated that joke — included “Ram” in the answer. Now do you believe me when I say that I am really clever?

[2] I mention the real names Antonia and Raul for the same reason that newspapers while referring to people and organizations with several identities routinely mention the aliases they go under.

The telecommunications infrastructure of an economy is the equivalent of the nervous system of a body. Without a robust, affordable, efficient and reliable telecommunications system no economy can prosper in what is called the “information age.” Corruption in the licensing of spectrum can be expected to damage the roll-out and use of the telecommunications infrastructure. Telecommunications have significant backward and forwards links with all other sectors of the economy. The economic cost to India could well be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Corruption has unfortunately become an all-encompassing feature of India. Indians are all too familiar with it. For citizens dealing with all levels of government, routine abuse of power has lost its ability to shock or even to evoke comment. Most people accept corruption as a fact of life. What should truly disturb us is corruption in the public sector. The telecom scam is a terrible example of public sector corruption which Transparency International (TI) defines as “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.”

The magnitude of the telecom scam is massive, but it is hardly unique. In resource-rich states, scams involve mining rights; in major cities, they often deal with real estate. The details vary but the underlying story is the same.

Just in the last few months, the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi were marred by allegations of massive financial corruption amounting to billions of dollars. Another case of high corruption that recently came to light — called the Adarsh Housing Society scam — involved politicians, builders, and defence top brass. These financial misappropriations are nothing new. The Washington, D.C. based Global Financial Integrity report, The Drivers and Dynamics of Illicit Financial Flows from India: 1948-2008, released this month estimates that the present value of India’s total illicit financial flows is at least US$462 billion, an amount that is twice India’s current external debt of US$230 billion.

Rajesh concludes the piece optimistically.

In the final analysis, the prevalent level of public probity and integrity is a function of society’s demand for them. In a democracy, the people ultimately decide who gets to govern. The solution to the problem of corruption of public officials lies absolutely with the public. The kind of leaders and policy makers that people demand ultimately determine who gets to make the rules by which society functions.

India is a democracy. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, the country has a “government of the people, for the people, and by the people.” But Indians have to understand that most of India’s maladies are a consequence of their abdication of the responsibility that necessarily accompanies the rights Indians have in a democratic system. Democracy is not just about voting but rather informed voting. Citizens have to act collectively against those who have brought ignominy and shame to the country. They have the responsibility to clean up the corruption. This they can do most effectively by refusing to vote for criminals.

The news is not all bad. Citizen groups are springing up that seek to address the problem of corruption. It is a collective problem that can only be solved through the mobilization of informed voters. Among many others, one such nascent group, called “United Voters of India,” is an association of people who agree to vote only for candidates who are capable and clean.

Our problems have to be solved within the system through the democratic process. The good news is that advances in information and telecommunications technologies have shifted the balance of power from the government to the people. People now have the means to inform themselves and collectively organize to force reform on the system. The telecom scam should serve as a wake-up call to all Indians that it is time to take action. If it does that, perhaps the scam will have served a positive purpose after all.

Go read it all here.

New Delhi, Dec 2: The Supreme Court today took strong exception to an NGO and petitioner in the 2002 Gujarat riots cases sending copies of its letters, addressed to the special investigating team (SIT), to a Geneva-based UN human rights organisation.

“We will not allow the outside agency to interfere in the affairs of our court,” said the special apex court . . .

Counsel for NGO Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), Kamini Jaiswal said that the United Nation Commissioner for Human Rights (UNCHR) was an international body to which the country’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) was affiliated. The NGO’s communication with UNCHR were regarding witness protection, she said.
. . .

“We are hearing you and passing orders. What is your grievance?” the court asked Jaiswal.
. . .
The court asked Jaiswal to seek instructions from the CJP on its action related to forwarding the communications to the UNCHR.

So far so good. The writer is reporting facts. In the next part, mark the bits I highlighted.

The cases relate to Godhra and post-Godhra riots which engulfed Gujarat in the wake of fire in a coach of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra railway station on Feb 27, 2002, killing 58 people returning from Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh.

On the petition of the wife of a riot victim seeking the transfer of trial in Ahmedabad’s Gulberg Society carnage during the post-Godhra riots, the court said that it would hold hearing on Dec 15.

On Feb 28, 2002, the Gulberg Society faced the fury of Hindu fanatics who killed 69 people, including former Congress MP Ehsan Zafri.

Note how no agency is attributed in Godhra train burning. It is as if the coach spontaneously caught fire. No conspiracy was involved. No gang of hundreds of blood-thirsty Islamic fanatics torched the coach killing innocent people. The coach simply burst into flames, just like that, and the automatic doors just sealed themselves trapping men, women and children. Happens all the time. Perhaps Martians attacked the train. We just don’t know and cannot assign blame to anyone. There’s nothing to see here, folks. Just keep moving.

But in the next bit, there is no hesitation in identifying “Hindu fanatics” who killed people. When it comes to identifying Hindus as fanatics, the press goes ape-shit crazy.

If I were the praying kind, I would hope and pray that the next time the Islamic terrorists attack — we don’t have to wait too long for that to happen — they take with them to the Islamic paradise some ranking members of the pseudo-secular press of India. If they take a few politicians with them as well, it would be icing on the cake.

Radio spectrum is a very special kind of stuff. It was entirely worthless not too long ago. Now it is not only an extremely valuable resource but it is nearly impossible to properly price. The price continues to increase with advances in science and technology. There are two broad generalization I make. First, that the more advanced an economy is, the more important the use of radio spectrum becomes. Second, the more efficiently the radio spectrum is used, the more advanced the economy becomes. In short, a virtuous cycle exists between spectrum use and economic growth. Therefore mistakes in the use and allocation of spectrum can have far-reaching consequences with damages that are impossible to estimate.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.” [1]

The time has come to talk of many kinds of stuff that the world is made of, the economist said.

There are physical goods (cars, pizzas), and there are intellectual goods (a novel, musical composition, the idea of double-entry bookkeeping). There are private goods, public goods and club goods. Private goods are rival in consumption (either you or I, but not both, can consumer the same piece of cake), while public goods are non-rivalrous. There are durable goods (ships) and consumables (shoes and sealing-wax.) Physical goods can be sold outright or rented out for specified periods of time. You can buy a car or rent one.

So what’s spectrum? It is not strictly not a public good since you cannot simultaneously use the same slice as I am using. It is not a private good since its use now does not mean that it cannot be used again later. It is neither a physical good but neither is it an intellectual good. It is a natural resource but unlike petroleum, air or water, the “stock” of spectrum is not limited since the stock grows with technological advances.

Spectrum is special in many ways and that make it very difficult to properly price. The practical way out of this is to rent it out for use for short periods of time. What’s short? A period during which the technology does not change radically, in my opinion. A generation, as is generally understood in the terms 2G, 3G, etc.

Note that the length of a generation depends on the rate of technological change. Thus a generation in the 1950 may have been 20 years, but now in 2010, it may be only five years. If you rent out spectrum for 20 years now, you may mis-price (most certainly an underestimate) it and those lucky enough to rent it at current prices will make windfall profits. This also implies that it should not be sold outright.[2]

OK, so spectrum should be rent out for short periods. But for how much? The answer to that is always straightforward: auction.

A word on auctions. At the bottom of it all, they are all auctions in a generalized sense. When you buy a tube of toothpaste, you are actually engaging in an auction. The store sets the price (ask) and if it is lower than what you would pay (bid), the trade takes place. In this case, there are tons of tubes of toothpaste being sold by various stores (auctioneers) and being bought by millions of buyers (bidders). So it does not look like an auction at Sotheby’s. But from a process point of view, they are all auctions.

What should be the asking price for the auction of spectrum? As we noted before (see part 6 of this series), much depends on the objective of the government. If the objective is (short-term) revenue maximization, it should sell spectrum in a competition for the market and guarantee that there will be little or no competition in the market.

Revenue maximization in the short term is a very short-sighted policy. It is also a policy that the government of India is particularly good at. Why do they do it? Because they (the politicians and bureaucrats) are there for maximizing their private wealth and they have to make the most of their short tenure. So if they make a percentage of the take, their incentive is to increase the sale price as much as they can.

Short-term revenue maximization is really a very bad idea from the point of view of the economy. The efficient use of spectrum is an indispensable input to nearly all production processes. If the cost of spectrum use is too high, then all these processes will suffer and eventually the economy will suffer.

Perhaps we will go into details some other time. But for now, a story. In some banana republic, telephones were considered a luxury. So the government priced telephone calls way way above cost. The marginal cost of a telephone call was only one penny but the government priced it at $1. The idea was revenue maximization.

Did people make lots of phone calls? No. To avoid a $1 phone call, they would take the bus for 20 cents and deliver the message. The bus trip was however subsidized from revenues earned from telephone use. The actual cost of the bus ride was 50 cents but subsidized to 20 cents. If you do the arithmetic, you will see how utterly stupid the whole scheme was.

To state the obvious, the stupidity compounded with cupidity of leaders of banana republics is the main reason for the country to be a banana republic. India is the world’s largest banana republic (thanks to Mr Nehru and his clan).

Anyway, let’s move on.

So if not revenue maximization, then what?

Let’s try this. Suppose spectrum was auctioned off to telecom companies (telcos, for short) for free. The winners would be telcos which provide specific services at the lowest prices.

To make that concrete, let’s put some numbers. TelcoA’s bid, “Will provide high speed internet services for Rs 100 per month” and TelcoB’s bid is “Will provide high speed internet services for Rs 120 per month.” TelcoA wins.

This is to give you a sense that there are different ways of doing this which make more sense in the long run. Of course there are ways to sabotage this sort of scheme as well but mechanisms can be designed to minimize corruption and collusion between firms.

I think this is all for now. I will have to continue this because we are certainly not done. We have to look at the distributional aspects of the various schemes. Let’s get to it later.

NOTES:

1. “The Walrus and The Carpenter” (from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872) is one of my favorite poems by Lewis Carroll.

2. The cautionary tale of Manhattan is worth mentioning here. It was sold to the Dutch in 1626 by “Native American Lenape people in exchange for trade goods worth 60 guilders, often said to be worth 24 dollars, though (by comparing the price of bread and other goods) actually amounts to around $1000 in modern currency.” [Wiki.]

Dr Swamy is indefatigable. Check out the letter the wrote to the appointed prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, on Nov 24th. I quote it in full, for the record.

November 24, 2010.

Dr. Manmohan Singh,
Prime Minister of India,
South Block,
New Delhi.

Dear Prime Minister:

You may by now have realized that the 2G Spectrum scandal is not only bad for the country in the dimension of corruption, but now it emerges that there is a national security dimension too. The RAW, IB, CBI, ED all have enough material which they may have placed before you regarding the dubious aspects of the principal player in this scam.

According to my information two sisters, Anushka and Nadia, of Ms Sonia Gandhi had received sixty percent of the kickbacks in this deal i.e. Rs.18,000 crores each. The frequent travel of Sonia Gandhi and her immediate family to Malaysia, Hongkong, Dubai and parts of Europe including London requires to be probed under the law. What requires your special attention is the mode of the travel, not by commercial airliners, but by jets provided by the corporate sector which itself is illegal under the DGCA Rules. I find that often Ms.Sonia Gandhi and family have traveled to Dubai and then traveled onwards on private jets provided by dubious Arab business interests to Europe. It is not clear on what passport they have traveled. In Dubai they were felicitated by agencies of countries which are hostile to India including that of Pakistan.

You can no more not take a stand when evil is permeating in the country in the form of terrorism, religious conversion and demographic infiltration. The ill-gotten money in billions of dollars equivalent, the money laundering and Participatory Notes have all undermined our national integrity. The time is come for you to take a stand.

I am familiar with the information and data with our intelligent agencies. I also know that you can seek cooperation of other countries especially the United States in pooling information especially from inter Intelligence interaction that take place regularly. I hope therefore you will rise to the need of the hour and take effective steps to set right the sorry state of affairs in the country caused by overtly and covertly resident foreigners. In this connection I would like to meet you at the earliest. My Secretary will be in touch with your Secretariat to fix a time.

Yours sincerely,
(SUBRAMANIAN SWAMY)

It appears to me that Vir Sanghvi has the morality of pond scum and the mentality of a cretin. You will have to read the column to see what I mean but don’t blame me if you feel nauseated. Self-righteous smugness and outrage oozes like puss out of an infected wound. He attempts to whitewash his influence peddling as routine journalistic procedures entirely above board, and fails miserably. In the end, the sole effect of his column is that it shows him to be a pathetic caricature of a journalist too far removed from reality.

My friend was wrong. Sanghvi is not brain-dead. He’s merely suffering from delusions of grandeur, as often happens when one’s senses of morality and ethics have been anesthetized by all the money that is floating around in high places.

Here’s a favorite from the Moody Blues. The Dream.

The words —

When the white eagle of the North
Is flying overhead
And the browns, reds and golds of autumn
Lie in the gutter, dead

Remember then, the summer birds
With wings of fire flaying
Come to witness Spring’s new hope
Born of leaves decaying

Just as new life will come from death
Love will come at leisure
Love of love, love of life
And giving without measure

Gives in return a wondrous yearn
Of a promise almost seen
Live hand-in-hand
And together we’ll stand

On the threshold of a dream….

Happy Thanksgiving!

“Oh! what a tangled web we weave; When we first practice to deceive,” lamented Sir Walter Scott. I suppose the web of deceit becomes less tangled with practice. Politicians and their handlers — I am talking about the likes of Niira Radia, Vir Sanghvi and Barkha Dutt — have over the decades gained such sophistication and finesse that they weave elegant webs of deception worthy of stunned admiration. Gone are the days when a few million dollars quietly taken from the public till was sufficient cause for massive public outrage. Now the sheer awfulness of the crime has transcended human comprehension.

It’s beyond our mental capacity to understand what astronomically large numbers like $40 billion mean. What is worse, that figure being tossed around probably underestimates the actual injury something like the recently exposed telecom scam inflicts on the economy. Crimes of such magnitude by those entrusted with guarding the public interest defy easy estimation of the damages.

When you lose your mobile phone to a pickpocket, the loss is easy to quantify and fixed quite quickly by getting another phone. You are out of pocket for $100 or so, and you make it up by cutting down on a couple of evenings out with friends. Your opportunity cost — what you could have done with the money you were forced to spend to replace your phone — is small, and the effect of that loss will not reverberate down the years. Your children’s welfare will not be jeopardized.

But it’s an entirely different story when every one of a population of 1.2 billion people find that they have been robbed of $1000. That sort of cost has the potential to put the brakes on economic development, thereby preventing hundreds of millions of people from climbing out of poverty.

So how much damage did the telecom scam do? It is hard to estimate the total damage, as I mentioned before. We have to resort to algebra to get a grip on the matter since arithmetic is ruled out. In other words, we will use symbols instead of numbers. We will talk hypotheticals. Let’s get started, shall we?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Generally, as opposed to private theft, massive corruption by public officials is inefficient.

Previously in this series, we touched briefly on the notion of inefficiency by illustrating it with the division of a cookie. Now let’s consider the pickpocket and your cell phone story. The pickpocket got a phone worth $100, the same amount you lost. His gain is your loss. It is an efficient transfer of wealth. There are very small, if any, secondary effects.

But consider that bit again. What if the pickpocket does not have any use for the phone and the most he is able to get is $20 from someone? That means, the buyer values the phone at $20. You lost $100; the pickpocket gained $20. Total social loss: $80.

Alternatively, suppose the pickpocket sold it for $200. Then you lost $100; pickpocket gained $200. Total social gain: $100. In other words, someone paid $200 because he or she could get more value out of it than you could. In that case, the transfer of wealth increases welfare. This can happen.

(Example. I forget a pack of cookies on the park bench. I did not eat them while relaxing in the park since I was not hungry. Later, an extremely hungry person finds and eats them. The transfer is efficient and welfare improving because his marginal utility of those cookies is greater than mine.)

Now to a hypothetical case of inefficient transfer of wealth. Suppose a certain large software corporation MuchoSoft persuades the minister in charge of education of a state to buy their fancy software for 10,000 schools in the state. Cost of the software: $2 million per year. Total cost for 10 years: $20 million. Assume that for educational purposes, Linux software is totally free and functionally indistinguishable from MuchoSoft’s. Now if Muchosoft gave the minister $100 thousand to persuade him to make MuchoSoft software mandatory in schools, the social loss is $19.9 million.

The minister’s gain is much much smaller than the loss to the state. This is an extremely inefficient transfer of wealth.

So also in the spectrum sale case, a public servant sells a public asset for a low price thus imposing a cost X to the public but gains Y (which is much much less than X). It can easily be the case — we will go into this later — that the cost to India is $100 billion but those involved got a kickback of only $100 million in their offshore bank accounts.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

How much should spectrum be sold for by the government?

That depends on what the objective of the government is. If the objective is short-term revenue maximization, the government should sell off the entire bit to the highest bidder. Why? Because a monopolist in the market makes the largest profits and therefore will be willing to bid the most to get monopoly access to the market.

Suppose as a monopoly supplier of telecom services, HutTel can a profit of $10 billion a year, for a total of $100 billion over 10 years (the period for which HutTel is given exclusive access to the market.)

In an auction, how much HutTel actually pays depends on how much competition it faces for the market from other providers. Suppose the others drop out when the bid reaches $20 billion. So the government gains $20 billion, and HutTel becomes the monopoly supplier.

In this scenario, the consumers lose because there is no competition in the market; all the competition was for the market. How much do they lose? We will go into that in a bit. But for now, let’s see what else the government can do. It can allow some degree of competition in the market.

Suppose it allows two firms to provide service. So now there will be some competition in the market. And that means that there will be lower competition for the market. In this case, the government will collect less than the $20 billion we estimated above. Let’s say it gets a total of $10 billion from the two winning companies, HutTel and TatComo.

The government is not revenue maximizing in the short term in this case. In the long run, this strategy may indeed give higher government revenues than short-term revenue maximization, though. We will also go into the details of how later. For now, let’s use an old analogy we are all familiar with.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The man with the goose that lays golden eggs. One day, being impatient, the man decides that he’d rather have all the golden eggs now. He kills the goose and gets five eggs. Was it smart of him to do that or not? That depends on his planning horizon. If he was planning for the long haul, then of course five golden eggs are much less than the hundreds of eggs he would have got over the years. But if he knew that his ownership of the goose was limited to only a couple of months, then his is better off killing it to get those eggs.

Public officials have a limited time during which they have the opportunity to make the most of their privileged positions. Given two scenarios, (A) they make $10 million but at that imposes a cost of $10 billion on the nation, and (B) they make nothing but the nations gains $100 billion, it will be the rare public official who will sacrifice $10 million private gain for $100 billion public gain.

This happens quite frequently. Decision makers are bribed to buy substandard equipment (say, artillery guns), and the country ends up with a rotten deal that costs the country many orders of magnitude more than what the decision maker gains. The benefits of being corrupt are concentrated, while the costs are distributed over a very large number. The public official makes $10 million but the cost of $100 billion is distributed over a billion people, and what is more, the costs are invisible. So the public official generally gets away with the crime since it is costly for people to organize and prosecute the official.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Spectrum is public property. The government does not own it. The government is only the agent that manages the property on behalf of the principals who own it. It’s the citizens of the country who collectively own the spectrum.

The managers of the public property can, and indeed do, use the public property for private gains. It should not come as any surprise that they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. It is not that they are stupid, and don’t fully appreciate the extent of the harm they cause to the general welfare. They can get the best advice from the most capable economists if they so desire. But they don’t because they are not in the game for public welfare. They have worked hard to get to a position of power where they can make a killing. They would be stupid to give up the perks of power.

In the next bit we will look at how spectrum should really be rented out, and what are the welfare implications of different schemes. We have to pay attention especially to how what you sell spectrum for has welfare consequences for the poor.

That’s it for now.

[Continued in Part 7.]

The investigating agency, which admitted for the first time that the tapes were given to it by the income tax (I-T) department, said it had heard around 3,500 call records. CBI counsel and senior advocate KK Venugopal told the SC that the agency will take two months to complete the investigation, and another month to reach a conclusion and file a charge sheet. “There has to be evidence and documents for each charge. The CAG report is about financial impropriety and not a criminal act,” Venugopal told a bench of justices GS Singhvi and AK Ganguly.

“The recordings are being subjected to a detailed examination, which is a long and painful process because each of the incriminating statements is to be connected with the statements/ records, so that a comprehensive picture of the transactions…could be obtained,” an affidavit filed by Suresh Kumar Palsania, deputy director, CBI, reads.

The CBI said, “The case is of enormous magnitude which requires the agency to deploy a team of officers for the investigation. It is not confined to India alone; it has ramifications in various foreign countries.”

The more eyes (or ears, if you will) examining the evidence, the more likely it is that wrong-doings will be exposed, and as quickly as possible. The CBI will not be able to use the excuse that their ‘team of officers’ are overloaded with work. It will also ensure that the CBI’s experts are not improperly influenced. If the CBI knows that others are also examining the information, they would be more diligent in their sleuthing.

I am sure that hundreds, if not thousands, of people would be delighted to listen to the thousands of intercepted calls. Here we have an opportunity to demonstrate what democracy is all about — public participation the functioning of society.

Please write to the appointed prime minister Mr Manmohan Singh to make the tapes available on them interwebs. Unless Mr Singh’s government fears that what the tapes reveal would be damaging to its image, it must put them in the public domain.

Paging wikileaks. Wikileaks, please pick up the white courtesy telephone. We have an urgent message for you.

Here’s what I wrote a few years ago (“Denying Reality,” March 2007) on the same matter.

The business plan was about creating a business which would help the blind become more productive. But the presenter took elaborate pains to avoid the word “blind”and instead constantly referred to the “visually challenged.” I suppose the PC police would have immediately handcuffed and hauled off anyone who was so insensitive as to directly point to blindness and call it such. No, a person is not blind but is visually challenged. And I wondered how long it will be before the PC police decree that “visually challenged” is itself un-PC and now you have to refer to blind people as “visually differently enabled” and in due time, it would have to be “non-visually enhanced” and then to “non-visually gifted.”

There is something perverse in the verbal contortions attempted to appear politically correct. Being blind is abnormal but it is not a stigma. Making the word unacceptable needlessly stigmatizes the person. If it were possible to alter reality by denying it, I would be wholeheartedly in the business of denial. If we could get rid of poverty by calling poor people “economically challenged,” you bet I would never ever talk about poor people but go one step ahead and call them “economic opportunity group.” Short people would first be “vertically challenged” and then “horizontally gifted” and finally perhaps “potential vertical opportunity group.”

This phenomenon of attempting to alter reality by denying uncomfortable aspects of it reaches it pinnacle in the automatic replacement of certain words. In the US, the word “black” to refer to people of African descent was considered an improvement on the racial term “negro” (which etymologically means black in Spanish and Portuguese). Then black itself got demoted to being a derogatory term and the new correct way was “colored” and then colored became “African American.” Every instance of black was automatically replaced by “African American” in word processing software of some PC newspapers. So a black and white photograph now became “African American and white photo” or the company’s bottomline was finally in the “African American.”

All this verbal gymnastics would be amusing were it not that there are real world adverse consequences that arise from it. Terrorism, for instance, is a reality which cannot be confronted by denying the root causes of terrorism. Poverty, similarly, has very easy to identify causes but which must not be named. There is an infantile superstition that makes some people believe that by naming something, that something comes into being. It is like African American black magic.

It is not hard to look squarely at reality and admit that things are not perfect. That acknowledgment is a necessary first step on the long journey to change whatever we can change. Yes, poverty exists because poor people exist. By calling them “economically disadvantaged” you do not reduce poverty. As the Buddha taught, we have to mindfully observe the both the internal and the external world so that we can comprehend the nature of reality. Only then can we hope to be effective. We need to acknowledge that we many of us are metaphorically blind and a few of us are literally blind, and only then we can make progress on our path of enlightenment.

Here endth the rant.

There’s a saying in Hindi. “Raja vyapari toh praja bhikari.” If the ruler involves himself in business, the citizens are reduced to begging. Good old fashioned down to earth practical wisdom. Astonishing isn’t it that a people whose ancestors include Kautilya are reduced to such a sorry state that they allow the government to mess around in business and they don’t even understand that to be the cause of their immiserization. It’s something of a mystery. Well, not really. There are plausible explanations of how this came to be. For now, let’s look at the telecom scam and the press has been reporting on it. If you know the details already, there’s nothing new for you in this post.

Chandan Mitra of The Pioneer (Nov 19th) in conversation with J Gopikrishnan who doggedly investigated the spectrum deals and unearthed the scam:

Q: Did any political or corporate entity offer you financial inducements to stop writing on this?

A: Yes, they did. The figures were mind-boggling. Corporate lobbyists and Raja’s people even asked me to stop informing the Editor and end the series abruptly. I told them even the meeting with them was in the knowledge of the Editor and the Bureau chief. Some shameless fellows tried to access Raja, claiming friendship with me. Some were acting as double agents. One top lobbyist was actually a double agent. That person was leaking information against Raja while providing information to him too. Pressure on the whistleblower was enormous by now, but he stood by us fearlessly. There were several politicians who enlightened and encouraged me. Some bureaucrats and police officials also guided our investigations.

Q: Do you think the matter will end with Raja’s resignation or will more heads roll?

A: I personally feel the court cases filed by Subramanian Swamy and Prashant Bhushan would come to logical conclusions, leading to the cancellation of all licences which were found illegal by CAG. The court may direct auctions to be held like the old petrol pump scam of Satish Sharma. I don’t expect anything from the Government in this matter. Some persons, including Raja, may face the wrath of the law. I don’t think anything harsh will happen to corporates from the Government’s side. After the CAG report and PAC findings, if the Government has the willpower, it can — by executive order — cancel all licences and order auction, which will definitely fetch around `2-3 lakh crore.

Q: How do you think the Government can make the spectrum policy transparent and above board?

A: Spectrum management should be handed over to ISRO, but no politician would like that for obvious reasons. In India, spectrum is not yet audited. No one knows how much spectrum is available. This was purposefully done for making easy money. First the Government should ask an organisation like ISRO to audit spectrum availability in all departments. Only then will transparency come.

R Jagannathan’s article, Not just Raja; the buck stops with Sonia and Manmohan (DNA, Nov 18th), as usual is excellent.

The Supreme Court (SC) asked the right question of Manmohan Singh. Why did you sit for so long on Subramanian Swamy’s request to prosecute A Raja, the now-disgraced former telecom minister? The key to unravelling the spectrum mess lies in the answer to this. That Raja has resigned is neither here nor there. It’s obvious he quit to save his boss, M Karunanidhi, the blushes.

The media is barking up the wrong tree because it has put three people — the PM, Sonia Gandhi and Karunanidhi — in the “beyond reproach” category. Going after them, and the businessmen involved, has consequences for journalists and the media — loss of access to the dynasty, harassment of Tamil Nadu-based journalists, etc. This is why the focus is on Raja and some faceless bureaucrats.

Raja is the symptom of the underlying rot. The disease is something else.

Actually this is true of all scams: they are all symptoms of the real problem. In my considered opinion, it is the problem of too much too big government. At the end of this series of posts, we will look at that a bit more in depth so that we have a good handle on how to fix these scams once and for all.

Back to Jagannathan.

Meanwhile, Manmohan did what he could. He bleated on about transparency, but could do zilch about reining in Raja. In 2009 he even tried to keep Raja out of the ministry, but failed when Sonia buckled under Karunanidhi’s pressure tactics. The reason why Singh could not reply to Swamy’s request was that he could not cross Sonia’s advice. If he had said go ahead, Karunanidhi would have rocked the boat. If he had done nothing, Singh would have been complicit in Raja’s crimes.

This is what I find most puzzling. Why does Manmohan Singh bleat? Sardars shouldn’t bleat.

[Manmohan Singh] did the next best thing. He played for time, and sent the CBI in to probe in the hope that when things got really hot, Raja will quit. When the time was ripe, the Congress ensured a few strategic leaks, and the CAG report was used to raise the level of pressure on Raja.

Now let’s look at the crime from the side of the likely guilty parties: Raja and his party boss. . .

Raja took his place because he was someone Karunanidhi trusted. It is thus reasonable to assume that Raja’s tenure was used to serve Karunanidhi’s interests.

What next? With Raja out, will the truth finally emerge? Will the CBI go after the culprits? Most unlikely. For one, the Congress is gaining the upper hand with DMK. It has no reason to let go of it. Two, the nexus between businessmen and politics is so strong, that any hasty prosecution will have huge political and economic ramifications. Three, the business rivalries that allowed the telecom scam to surface in the first place cannot be allowed to go too far.

On Nov 16th, the New York Times reported the claim that spectrum allocation was rigged.

The comptroller and auditor general of India say in a 96-page report that the agency in charge of cellular licenses, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, arbitrarily moved up deadlines in a 2008 auction of new bandwidth for phone operators.

The Communications Ministry also rejected calls from the prime minister and the Ministry of Law for greater scrutiny and awarded licenses to operators in a way that “lacked transparency and fairness,” the report says.

The questionable practices cost the Indian government 1.76 trillion rupees ($39 billion) in revenue, auditors say. The report, issued after a nine-month investigation by the auditor and the Central Bureau of Intelligence, seems to focus on the Communications Ministry and a handful of operators, including Reliance Communications.

. . .
In October, India added more than 18 million new cellphone customers, bringing the total to 671 million. China has 830 million.

. . .

With the industry’s fast growth has come competition. More than a dozen mobile companies operate in some major urban areas, and operators have become desperate for new bandwidth to support their growing subscriber bases.

An auction of 3G, or third-generation, telecommunications licenses in January raised $11 billion, much more than original government estimates. The high prices those licenses fetched helped increase pressure by opposition political parties to investigate the 2008 auction. Officials from the Bharatiya Janata Party, the main opposition party, called Tuesday for a criminal investigation into the report’s accusations.

Of 122 licenses granted in the 2008 auction, 85 went to companies that “suppressed facts, disclosed incomplete information and submitted fictitious documents,” and therefore did not comply with requirements for the licenses, the auditor said. In at least one instance, the ministry’s Department of Telecommunications “miserably failed to do the necessary due diligence in the examination of the applications,” the report says.

Here are some numbers from an ExpressBuzz piece by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta.

The CAG report categorically states that the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) under Raja actively colluded with a clutch of companies that included not just companies in the Unitech group, the Swan group and the Shyam group. Another set of corporate entities that are part of the Tata, Reliance, Bharti and Videocon groups, among others, also gained indirectly. There were three clear dimensions to the scam. Some companies gained because of undervaluation of spectrum. Others benefited from the DoT’s decision to have a ‘technology neutral’ licensing regime — wherein operators using either the Global System of Mobile (GSM) communications or the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) could use both technologies to provide telecom services. The third category of beneficiaries included existing operators — the so-called ‘cartel’ that Raja claims he tried to break — who received excess spectrum.

By adding up the losses to the exchequer under these three heads, the CAG arrived at the figure of Rs 1,76,379 cr. One bidder, S Tel, had offered Rs 13,752 cr for 6.2 MHz of spectrum against Rs 1,651 cr for 4.4 MHz of spectrum charged by the DoT. The CAG concluded that the government could have raised Rs 65,725 cr against Rs 9,013 cr that it actually obtained. Using the amounts obtained for third generation (3G) spectrum through a transparent public auction as yardsticks, the CAG concluded that the government could have got an extra Rs 1,11,511 cr.

If spectrum for dual technology firms (Reliance and Tata) was also auctioned, it would have fetched an additional Rs 37,153 cr. Finally, the third part of the scam is that if the government had charged incumbent operators (like Bharti) market rates for holding spectrum in excess of 6.2 Mhz, another Rs 36,729 cr would have accrued to the exchequer. The grand total was thus arrived at. The CAG not only highlighted the loss to the exchequer, its report described in excruciating detail what happened on the fateful day licences were issued on a first-come-first-served (FCFS) basis.

On January 10, 2008, the DoT issued a press note indicating its intent to provide letters of intent (LoIs) to all applicants who had applied before the arbitrarily forwarded cut-off date of September 25, 2007. The press release stated: “(The) DoT has been implementing a policy of FCFS for grant of UAS (unified access services) licences under which initially an application, which is received first will be processed first and thereafter if found eligible will be granted (an) LoI.” Thereafter, a new clause was inserted saying “…and then whosoever complies with the conditions of (the) LoI first will be granted (an) UAS licence.”

Later the same day, another press release was put out by the DoT asking all applicants to authorise one representative to collect LoIs thereby making irrelevant an earlier condition giving 15 days time to each applicant to deposit fees. The one who paid first was given a licence first. Swan was the first to make the payment followed by Unitech. From fourth and eighth position respectively, they jumped to the first and second positions in the long queue.

Another significant finding of the CAG was that over two-thirds of the applicants for LoIs should not have been allowed to apply in the first place for they did not meet the eligibility criteria specified by the DoT itself. What was worse was that in the name of breaking a cartel, Raja favoured particular companies who had no prior experience in telecommunications (including real estate concerns, Unitech and Swan).

The CAG did not spare the regulator as well, the TRAI. Here’s how the damning last paragraph of the CAG’s report reads:

“The Hon’ble MoC&IT (meaning Raja) for no apparent logical or valid reasons ignored the advice of (the) Ministry of Law, and (the) Ministry of Finance, avoided the deliberations of the Telecom Commission to allocate 2G (second-generation) spectrum, a scarce, finite, national asset at less than its true value on flexible criteria and procedures adopted to benefit a few operators. (The) TRAI, the regulator, also stood by as a helpless spectator when its recommendations were being either ignored or misused.”

Arun Shourie claimed that the CBI knows who handled the bribes.

[Arun Shourie] said that Raja had “personal relations” with some of the firms who bagged licenses. “It is now well known to the CBI through the officers who were dealing with the matter. A pattern was also visible.”

Asked whether he thought the CBI knows exactly what has happened, he said “I have no doubt at all. Because in some cases, the very officers who were handling the material….manipulation have testified to the CBI…The officers have told me what they had told the CBI.” He claimed that he had conveyed this to “higher persons” in the government, but nothing happened.

Shourie asserted that the CBI knows who the person is and said if the investigating agency questions him now, he may reveal what had transpired. The CBI, however, was caught in procedural wrangling over seeking permission to question that person. He said the CBI should go ahead and if the “government refuses (sanction), that, of course, will prove the point.”

Shourie also criticised Prime Minister Manmohan Singh saying that without his knowledge, the pricing of spectrum would not have been kept out of the purview of the Group of Ministers which was set up to decide on the release of spectrum during UPA I.

“The accommodation of allies by the PM…because in the terms of reference with these Group of Ministers the pricing of spectrum was included and Raja insisted that no, this should be taken out and somehow this was taken out from the reference of the Group of Ministers. It could not have been done in our system without the knowledge of the PM,” he said.

He said he would be surprised if the Prime Minister did not have knowledge about it. In any case, he said Raja would use the argument about the PM’s knowledge to defend himself in court

OK, that’s it. In this post I have merely recorded some of the details of the telecom scam as reported in the main stream media. With that out of the way, I will get back to considering in some depth the economics of telecommunications, corruption, government control, etc. I will also propose a couple of alternative ways of allocating spectrum.

Thank you, good night, and may your god go with you.

[Continued in Part 6.]

To the rather distinguished list of superlatives about India — the largest democracy, etc. — we can add “India is the largest banana republic in the world.” The Wikipedia notes that “the purpose of a banana republic is commercial profit by collusion between the State and favoured monopolies, whereby the profits derived from private exploitation of public lands is private property, and the debts incurred are public responsibility.” Generalize “public lands” in there to mean “public resources” and you have a pretty good description of what we have going on in India.

How did India end up to be a banana republic? Was it inevitable? Was India endowed with so little social capital that it is ruled by a small band of especially corrupt politicians? What is striking is that the highest ranking members of the Indian political class come from a small group of families. The closest parallel that comes to mind is the mafia.

At the head of each mafia family, there’s a don, the godfather. These families fight it out for control of territory. Bloody battles are fought and power shifts from one family to another. Fortunes are made by the families, and regardless of who wins in any conflict, the losers are always the ordinary people who just pay “taxes” to keep from getting their knee-caps broken.

The most powerful family in India is the “Nehru-Gandhi” clan. A son or a daughter or an in-law takes over after the assassination of the don — which happens fairly regularly. (India shares this feature of family succession following assassinations with its neighboring Islamic states.)

Then there are the regional families. For example: M Karunanidhi is “the Leader,” the chief minister of Tamil Nadu. His eldest son, M K Azhagiri is the Union Minister in charge of chemicals and fertilizers. The Leaders’s younger son, M K Stalin (named no doubt in honor of the mass murderer), is a deputy in the TN government.

It would take too long to list out all the families that control India. Since the pattern is the same, when you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

The succession usually goes to a spouse (or a mistress), son or daughter, or an in-law. No special skills are required. You can even be totally illiterate and the only skill you have is of milking cows and cooking. But if you are related to the king, you can be the chief minister of a state that is larger than a a few Western European countries combined. One day you could be a glorified bus driver and the next day you are deciding the fate ofhundreds of millions of impoverished people.

There is nothing in the laws of the universe which says that the offspring of someone extraordinarily skilled cannot be also exceptionally skilled. It is possible although not very probable. So also, it is possible that the most able leader in the land happens to be the daughter of the Great Leader. Unlikely but can happen.

You start to climb mount improbable (sorry Richard Dawkins) when you try to figure out how probable is it that the Great Leader’s daughter, and his grandson, and his grand-daughter-in-law, and his great-grandson are also the ablest leaders out of a population of around one billion people.

On analyzing this “running the country as a family-owned enterprise along the lines of a mafia family” I have to sadly accept that perhaps India lacks social capital. Lack of financial capital or physical capital can be fairly easily overcome by the simple expedient of borrowing from abroad. Social capital cannot be so easily imported. It has to domestic.

But let’s move on. The organizational structure to control a large economy like India has to be large and complex. However, to help in our understanding, we can model it as three separate — but inter-related and interacting — subsystems.

One of them is what we pointed to: politicians, usually grouped into mafia-like families. The second is a small set of large corporations. The third is a small set of big news and information companies which control information flow to the people.

Let’s briefly look at the small set of large corporations. India’s industrial structure is fairly small. How small? Only about 7 percent of India’s labor force is organized labor. The organized labor is partly in the public sector. The public sector is naturally controlled by the government. The families control the government, the government controls the bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy controls the public sector corporations such as the railways, power corporations, etc.

The private sector corporations are also controlled by the government, although indirectly. In a license-control-permit-quota raj, who gets to produce what, when, where and how much is determined through a bargaining process involving big corporations and the government. Big businesses cannot afford to antagonize the government, and the government (the families, really) depend on the corporations for part of the funding required to win elections. It’s a symbiotic relationship and it is not in the interests of either party to throttle the other. It’s a live and let live world.

The third important subsystem is the press. The press is actually a catch all for print, radio and TV. (The internet is not part of the press as I define it here.) The government controls radio, directly through ownership of “All India Radio”, and indirectly through regulation of private radio. It restricts private radio stations to broadcasting mindless fluff.

The government also controls private TV channels, aside from its own TV channel “Doordarshan.” Doordarshan is part propaganda, part government mouth piece, and part entertainment. You pay for what the government wants you to watch. The commercial TV corporations operate under government dispensation. They know which side of their bread is buttered and behave accordingly. In exchange, they are rewarded with public awards such as “Padma Shree” and “Padma Bhushan” for services rendered.

The newspapers that toe the government line are rewarded by the government. The government spends large amounts of ad money. The government taxes you, then uses part of it for promoting its interests by paying newspapers to print what it (the government) wants you to read. It’s something like the mafia sending you a bill for the bullet it will use to dispatch you to the great beyond.

One could object to this model saying that it is too simple. Yes, indeed it is. Merely because a system has a large number of components does not mean that it cannot be understood as a small set of mutually interacting subsystems. At the level at which we need to understand a car, our understanding that it has an engine, a power train, a steering mechanism and a body is sufficient for us to know how it works.

The telecom scam is the latest in a series of scams that has characterized the Indian economy. Every major process or event, including the biggest scams, have to have all three subsystems outlined above working in concert. The press was intimately involved in the decisions relating to who controls the government ministry; the ministry decided which corporations were to be awarded licenses.

It is probably the case that there must have been some quid pro quo between those who controlled the licenses and those who got the licenses. Selling spectrum licenses cheap to corporations (which then indirectly resell them for huge profits) is an easy way to extract some of the gains that use of telecommunications makes possible.

In the next part of this series, I will explore that last statement a bit more.

I will also like to quote some of the recent articles related to the telecom scam in a post so that we have some easy reference to the particulars of this case. I want to do that as part of the record for this blog.

See you later, alligator.
In a while, crocodile.

[Next: Part 5.]

Success is defined in terms of the objectives of the organization. A Buddhist monastery’s objective differs from that of a terrorist organization, and so does the incentive structure. Different kinds of people get attracted to them. In one, success may be defined as the mastery over one’s own mind, and in the other, how large the massacre is; in one, the incentive may be enlightenment and release from the cycle of births and deaths, while in the other attainment of supernatural potency and a huge harem of virgins in the after-life. In response to incentives, in one people sit around meditating on the impermanence of life, and in another, it makes people strap on explosive vests and commit mass murder.

So if you want to achieve a specific objective, you have to have an appropriate organization, and that means you have to figure out the incentive structure. Get that incentive structure right, and you will get people to behave in ways that achieve the objective. Simply stated, the story is that if the incentive structure is built correctly, then the objectives are achieved.

Governments are organizations too. At some point, the objectives of the government and the related incentive structure are determined. From then on, the system evolves as people respond to the incentive structure. A colonial government, for instance, has the objective of resource extraction and exploitation of the colonized economy. The British colonial government is an example of this. A development oriented government could have general welfare of citizens as its objective. Many advanced industrialized Western European governments fit this description. If the objective is the private gain of the leaders of government at the expense of the people, then it is best achieved by concentrating power at the center to control the economy.

The India story is really interesting. While the objective enshrined in the newly minted Constitution of India may have changed from that of the British, the incentive structure remained the same as before. The citizens were given the power to choose whom they wanted to be ruled by but not whether they wanted to be ruled and to what extent. India’s post-independence government inherited the British government’s severe control of the economy.

As Lord Acton stated it succinctly: power corrupts. By corruption is meant a weakening of moral and ethical standards. Add to that a bit of positive feedback and you have a rather predictable story. The people in government have power; it corrupts them to some extent; they acquire more power; they get a bit more corrupt; people who are corrupt to begin with see the advantage of becoming leaders of the government; the more corrupt from the population get to positions of power; they expand the government’s power; that leads to even more corruption; which in turn attracts the more criminally corrupt to seek power by being in the government, and so on.

In physics, there’s the idea that the entropy of any closed system (the universe is the largest closed system), inexorably increases with time, and a prolonged heat death is the ultimate fate of the universe. That’s one of the laws of thermodynamics. An analogous idea would be that government power increases with time. At some future time, one can imagine that the government finally attains near absolute power. Near absolute power tends to corrupt near absolutely.

The government of the newly independent India had quite a bit of control, and therefore the leaders who took over had quite a bit of power. That power corrupted those in power. Indira Gandhi is a particularly interesting case. She increased government control by nationalizing important bits of the economy. More control, more power, more corruption.

Now we are at a stage that the incentive structure of the government has evolved to be such that the government is the biggest magnet for criminals. Criminals either get elected themselves, or else have pawns that they control in the government. To become fabulously rich in India, you don’t have to invent or create. You have to have control over the government. It can be direct — as when you become a minister — or it could be indirect — as when you pay off a minister for bending the rules in your favor.

This story is immensely depressing. It suggests an inexorable slide into deepening poverty, untold misery and ultimately death of civil society. But there’s hope and it lies in taking away power from the government.

Imagine if the government was limited to being a referee and prohibited from becoming a player in the economic game. That is, it did not have the power to influence the outcome but only to judge if players were following the rules, and to punish those who broke the rules. In that case, being in the government would not be financially rewarding. Lacking that incentive, criminals would find it pointless to be in the government.

In the two previous posts in this series (part 1, and part 2), I presented a bit of vocabulary to help with an argument that I propose to make in later parts. Here I looked at the big stage within which every sordid tale of corruption is played out. A telecom minister is merely an actor playing out his role on this stage. His resignation does not change anything substantially. Another actor will take his place and play the same role. The script has not changed, only the actor.

In the next bit, I will get back to the telecom story. The matters we have yet to explore are really interesting. How should spectrum be priced? As a commenter, RM asked, what about a revenue neutrality policy for the sale of spectrum. What we will find is this. It all starts with the objective of the government. Depending on that, it is easy to figure out whether to sell spectrum to the highest bidder or to give away spectrum for free. That matter is informed by economic analysis. Specifically, it has to do with fixed costs, competition, multiple equilibriums, distributional equity, linkages of the telecom sector with other sectors of the economy, the state of the art of telecommunications, the rate of technological change, income and wealth distribution of the population, and a whole host of other matters.

[Go to Part 4.]

A Robinson Crusoe Economy

Consider a Robinson Crusoe economy. It has a population of one, Mr RC. RC “owns” the spectrum. He sells it for $100 bucks to Hutchtel, a massive telecom giant which wants to provide telecom services to the RC economy. More accurately, the spectrum is only leased out for a period of 10 years. Hutchtel wants to at least break even. The telecom infrastructure needed will cost Hutchtel $50. There are no other costs. Total cost to Hutchtel is therefore $150. Hutchtel has $150 in their pocket. Instead of providing telecom services to RC, Hutchtel could put $150 in a fixed deposit in a bank and at the end of 10 years, get $50 as interest. That’s the only alternative investment available to Hutchtel. Therefore the total cost (including the $50 opportunity cost) to Hutchtel is $200.

Suppose at $1 per call, RC is willing to make 200 calls in the next 10 years. Total revenues to Hutchtel is thus $200. Hutchtel makes $50 in accounting profits but zero economic profits because the alternative that Hutchtel had of sticking the $150 in the bank would have resulted in the same $50 earned on an investment of $150.

Hutchtel buys the rights to use RC’s spectrum and then RC buys telecom services from Hutchtel. The price that RC pays per call to Hutchtel depends on how much RC demanded from Hutchtel for spectrum use. RC gets $100 now but eventually over the next 10 years pays back that — and more — to Hutchtel.

In the case of an RC economy, it does not matter at what price the spectrum is sold. Selling it at zero price is the same as selling it for billions of dollars.

If instead of a RC economy, imagine that the economy is made of millions of people but all of whom are clones. They have the same abilities and preferences, wealth and incomes, and the need to make phone calls, and so on. In that case also, the story remains the same.

But if you have an economy with a heterogeneous population, we have a different situation. Distributional and equity aspects of the deal creep in. Even if we agree that all citizens equally-shared ownership of spectrum, we still have to figure out how the proceeds of the sale of the spectrum are to be allocated. Does every citizen get a check in the mail for a sum equal to the revenues divided by the total population? Call this Scheme A.

How about Scheme B? The government takes the proceeds of the sale and funds a kind of “national rural employment guarantee scheme” which pays people to just sit around. In that case, it is a transfer of resources from the productive people who have to use telecom services to unproductive people who don’t use telecom services and are only valuable as a vote bank for the government.

How about Scheme C? The government uses part of the proceeds to subsidize universal primary education, and the rest for building non-telecom related infrastructure.

The variety of schemes one can dream up are myriad, with different efficiency and equity outcomes. Depending on the objectives of the society, the objectives of the government, the planning horizon, etc, these schemes can be ranked. They are all context sensitive, and therefore what should be done depends on our understanding of the specifics of the case.

There are some very important questions. How much should the spectrum be licensed for and for how long? What should be done with the revenues? How many companies should be allowed to provide telecom services?

Getting back to the question of “Who actually pays for the spectrum?” That’s a hard question to answer in general but you can be certain of one thing:

The telecom company is NOT paying for the spectrum. You — the end user of the spectrum which you actually have shared ownership of — are the one who is actually paying for the spectrum.

Multiple Equilibria

Before moving ahead, a quick note on multiple equilibria. An equilibrium is price/quantity pair at which the “market clears” — in other words, at that price, the quantity supplied to the market by suppliers is equal to the quantity demanded by consumers. The main function of the market is to determine the price at which the market clears. The market, so to say, discovers the price at which there are no shortages or surpluses. In a competitive market, one which has a large number of sellers, the market determines the price, and suppliers don’t have the power to dictate the price.

(Compare that to a monopoly situation. The monopoly seller dictates the price. The consumers take what they can get. Think of say the Indian government and its monopoly control of certain markets. Railways is a good example, as was air travel until the liberalization of that sector. In general, a monopolist has the freedom to choose the price and/or set the quantity that it supplies to maximize its profits.)

In ideal competitive markets, there is only one equilibrium. In the real world, however, the presence of things like scale economies, imperfect information, etc, you can have more than one equilibrium. Suppose you have the blueprints of a certain car yet to be produced. You figure that if you produce only 100 of these, you break even (and make a normal profit) at $250K for each. If the demand for these cars at $250K each is 100 units, then you have an equilibrium. But wait. If you produce 500,000 of these cars, then you break even (and make a normal profit) at $20K for each. And if at $20K a car, you can sell half a million cars, that is another price-quantity pair at which the market clears. Scale economies enter in this case due to the high fixed costs of car mass production.

In telecommunications, there are very high fixed costs and therefore you can have multiple equilibria. Priced at $1 per minute, the quantity of mobile minutes demanded will be low, and at $0.02 per minute, the quantity could be huge. The revenues in both cases may end up to being the same, and so you have a choice of two equilibriums — one that is high-price-low-quantity, and the other low-price-high-quantity.

So what’s all this about? We are building up some simple vocabulary to understand the economics of telecommunications. A couple more concepts and then we can fully appreciate the recent “telecom scam.” Let’s see the distinction between “competition in the market” and “competition for the market”.

If there are a large number of firms — dozens of them — supplying something to a market, there’s competition in the market. In this case, firms cannot set prices, and therefore cannot make abnormal profits. Life’s tough but one gets by. Firms don’t have market power. Other firms can enter the market if they so desire. There are no barriers to entry.

Now suppose that if somehow only a few firms — two or three — were supplying to the market. The market would have limited competition and therefore the firms will have the power to set prices, and therefore make above-normal profits. It will be good to be a supplier to a market with little competition in the market. Which implies that firms could be made to compete for the right to be a supplier in the limited competition market. That’s competition for the market.

So if you have the power to restrict entry into a market, you have the power to shift the firms’ competition in the market (which is a good thing for the consumers because it leads to low prices) to the firms’ competition for the market (which is not good for consumers because of high prices.)

Why would you make firms compete for the market, instead of competing in the market? Because if you have that power, you can auction off the license to operate in the market and thus extract some of the profits that the firms expect to make in the market.

Suppose a firm expects to make $100 million in profits in a limited-competition market, it should be willing to pay at least a part of that to get the license. Who gets to keep the money? If it is a transparent auction (such as occurs in developed economies), then the money goes into some public kitty; if it is a banana-republic, then the dictator and/or bureaucrats get paid under the table. Mining, mineral rights, logging rights — all these are often given out to the highest bidders.

The major source of very high corruption occurs in the awarding of licenses in third world countries and banana republics.

Talking of natural resources (such as minerals and spectrum) and corruption, it is easy to understand the connection between resources, government control, corruption, poverty and the so-called “natural resource curse.”

The greater the opportunity to make money by gaining control of an economy, the greater is the incentive to get that control. Once you become the minister for “Steel and Mines” or telecom minister, or the minister for industrial policy, etc., you have no competition. That is, no competition IN the market. Hence intense competition FOR the market. People spend huge amounts to win elections because of that. If you are going to make a billion dollars a year as the minister, you could easily spend a few hundred million seeking that position. That is at the core of India’s million problems.

With this brief introduction, it is time to move on to the Raja telecom scam and see what exactly was the loss to India’s exchequer and what are the welfare consequences of the deal. I will argue that massive corruption is involved, that there are deeply adverse social welfare consequences, and that this pushes India a few steps closer to the brink. One important lesson among others is that for petty personal gains, immoral and unethical persons can impose disproportionate costs on others. One may receive only a few million dollars worth of kickbacks but in the process end up costing the country a few billion dollars.

[Go to Part 3.]

For example, petroleum was not a scarce resource around the early 19the century CE. Where it was found, close to the ground, it was a pollutant. The supply was low but the demand was even lower. But technology come around and suddenly demand increased. More supplies are located. With time, supply and demand both take off. Depending on which one grows faster, the price goes up or down. Technology gets even better and you get more bang out of a gallon of petroleum. But demand goes up even more while the stocks start depleting as it is pumped out of the ground at a rapid rate. The price goes up.

Once again technology will step in. Different energy sources will be developed (direct or indirect solar, fusion, etc) and once again petroleum will become irrelevant. The wheel would have turned full circle.

Technology is funny like that. It giveth and it taketh away. Copper demand increased because telephone systems used twisted copper pairs for carrying the signals. Then fiber-optics and wireless technologies made copper wires obsolete.

Spectrum used to be absolutely free at one time. Imagine the year 1900 CE. You could not give it away because generally people did not know what it was. The technology did not exist. Later, technology made it valuable because the demand exceeded the supply. But with even more technology, the efficiency of use of spectrum went up.

Spectrum is funny like that — it is almost infinitely elastic. You can burden more and more information on the same bit of spectrum with better technology. That is both good news and bad news.

Good news because it means that in the long term, we are not likely to ever run out of spectrum (unlike say petroleum, which in some sense we will actually run out of.) The bad news is that it is hard to “price” spectrum.

Spectrum, like any other resource, can be priced using the standard method of asking what anyone is willing to pay for it. That willingness to pay depends on the benefit derived from its use. The end user has a downward sloping demand curve — which basically says that the higher the price per unit, the lower will be the quantity demanded by the user. The user will not pay a price that exceeds the benefit the user derives from consuming that unit of resource. At some price point, I will simply not make that call.

How much the consumer values something determines its value and consequently (through a set of filters imposed on it through various factors such as regulations, technology, etc) the prevailing price of that something.

Then from consumer behavior, one can figure out through a series of simple steps how the producer will behave. Profit maximization (or some other optimizing strategy) will be used — depending on various factors such as the cost of production and the degree of competition. We don’t need to go into the details here. I only mention this to indicate that all this is quite well understood and therefore predictable.

Now comes the interesting bit. Actually this is the most important bit in this post. If you know this, don’t bother reading any further. Here it comes. Ready?

There is no such thing as a price for spectrum. The price of spectrum is indeterminate. It can be anything — from zero to infinite.

The rest of the post will explore those interesting bits. Why? Because if we understand that, only then we can understand that the claim that a minister of the UPA government “scammed” the nation to the tune of untold crores of rupees is a meaningless notion. In other words, the harm that Mr Raja did is not as easy as the press would have you believe.

But you will say, “Wait a minute. I don’t have the time to go into this. Just give me a short answer. All I want to know is where did Raja stash the Rs 1.7 lakh crores loot? Did he put it in a secret Swiss bank account? If he had not stolen that money, India could have built one crore (10 million) houses for the poor each costing Rs 1.7 lakhs? Isn’t that the greatest theft in the history of mankind?”

Actually no. What Raja did was mis-price a public asset. That is economically wasteful in the sense that it is inefficient, regardless of whether it is illegal, or fair, or moral.

(Digression: What’s economically inefficient? And how is it different from “fair”? Suppose there’s a cookie we wish to divide between the two of us. If we agree that we have equal claim to the cookie, a 50-50 division will be fair. But when breaking the cookie, I take 70 percent of it and hand you only 30 percent, it will be unfair but the division will be “efficient” — no bit of the cookie is wasted. The process of division would be inefficient if when dividing the cooking, I clumsily let 20 percent of it fall into the the garbage can. Regardless of how we divide the remaining bits of the cookie between the two of us, the process is inefficient because it leads to “social waste” — that no one gains and at least someone loses.)

Mis-pricing spectrum leads to inefficiency or social costs. There are several avenues. First is a loss to public revenues. This is not an easy one at all. Why? Because it is a public asset which the public is selling — thus getting revenues — but then it has to pay rent for the of the asset that it has sold.

Imagine that I sold my house and then rented it back from the new owner. Assuming that I had to continue to live in the house (for some reason I do not have the choice of renting elsewhere), the higher the price I got for my house, the higher the rent I will have to pay to the new owner. That is, the buyer will only get into the deal provided the flow of rents at least covers the price of the house.

Sure you can sell spectrum very dearly but eventually that cost is passed on to the average citizen in term of higher price for using spectrum. You see, the telecom firm is merely facilitating your use of your own spectrum. It’s just an intermediary. The higher the firm’s costs, the higher the price.

Think about it. And we will continue to inquire into this fascinating subject in later posts. This is a fascinating case study which has the potential to teach us essential basic economic reasoning.

[Go to Part 2.]

TiredProf chimed in with “Successful politicians do not have ideology. They tell people what people are happy to hear. There is no Nehru-Gandhi ideology controlling India. Nehru-Gandhi exploited their initial family position and people’s stupidity to line their coffers. Who, in a democracy with 90% literacy and 40% college graduates, would hire a family without any college degree for 50 years straight?”

In reply to Deodhar’s “How do we get millions and millions of people to change their attitudes so fundamentally?” larissa wrote,

“You don’t. You need a band of people ruling who are loyal to principles, and they inspire obedience on account of their integrity as they will be willing to take action (stern steps which might be necessary in the case of India) to maintain order and not let things run riot. But they need to have discipline of steel to inspire obedience in people. Discipline in lower levels follows as the top maintains it. But such people requires real men in a nation.”

Ashish Deodhar replied —

All these criticisms of the Nehru-Gandhi family would’ve stood had the family been running a dictatorial regime. But that’s not the case. India has had elections every five years (even less than that at times) and the country has time and again voted the Gandhi family to power. I just don’t accept that a country of over a billion people could be bullied by one family to regularly vote for them for over half a century.

Besides, the Gandhis don’t even always have to aspire to rule the country. Sonia Gandhi avoided politics for many years before she was practically coaxed into taking the Congress leadership. . .

So it’s the people who vote them time and time again in power. So if the elected governments fail, the responsibility lies with the people who voted for that government, over and over and over again, and not with those who they elect to fail. Remember, people only get leaders that they deserve! Additionally, a fair share of responsibility lies with the opposition parties who are just poor clones of the Congress party.

Oldtimer was not going to put up with that —

This argument that the fault is with the voters, not with the Nehru clan (or rulers in general) is hogwash.

Telecom minister A Raja’s constituents did not vote him into power to help him mint money for himself, to cite one example.

The flaw in a similar argument in another context would be readily apparent to us, so for seemingly intelligent people to make excuses for the Nehrus or Congress is pathetic. All opportunists and con-artists tend to shift blame from themselves to their victims.

Loknath disagreed with Ashish —

People didn’t vote “Congress” to power, people voted their leaders who gave them carrots to power and these people are bought in an auction led by the congress themselves. UPA Govt. led by the Indian National Congress is an unholy communion of rascals led by Antonia Maino. To quote Atanu..leaders who are fed on kitchen scraps of 10 janpath. Over the decades many independent and small local parties have become integral part of congress. The disturbing fact that people have voted congress to power again and again rests on the fact that congress workers have mastered the art of buying votes for as little as a packet of Biryani, a quarter bottle of rum and few hundred rupees cash.

TiredProf was not having any of it —

And why are generations of Indians content to be bought that cheap?
. . .
And keep procreating, knowing full well that their progeny will be exploited by a similar set of scums.

The victim deserves to be blamed. Condoms cost 25 paise back in 1980s. Someone who couldn’t afford even that decided to be a parent.

And NRI bloggers in AC rooms “analyze” the situation and blame, who else, Congress.

Perhaps that bit about “NRI bloggers in AC rooms” was aimed at me. Truth be told, I am not an NRI and my room is entirely devoid of ACs. California weather is good. But whatever.

Larrisa once again addressed Ashish Deodhar —

Actually even Nehru noticed that Congress was becoming very corrupt even in his time. He made a lot of missteps, and was clueless as to the realities of the world, but actual criminilization of politics occurred after him during the daughter’s rule and thereafter when the failed policies where not changed.

Stuffing polling booths began with Indira Gandhi in places like Bihar and UP with the help of thugs. This is general knowledge. Then thugs in these places realized they could themselves win elections, as Congress would support them if it is able to win in these places. Criminilization or goonda politics began with Indira Gandhi. Why do you think there are so many in Parliament with criminal records? Can you tell me one democracy where this is allowed to happen? I am speaking of convictions, not even accusations of criminal behavior.

To round it all off, Oldtimer pointed out that “the argument that scumbags have a right to be scumbags because suckers can’t help being suckers, has no merit.” And TiredProf replied, “No one claimed that scumbags have a right to be scumbags. Because statistically India is almost entirely composed of suckers, there is no one left to make life miserable for scumbags. That’s all.”

So there you are. Lots of great points. Now here’s how I look at it. First of all, the scumbag politicians and clueless citizens are matched pairs. You cannot have one without the other. The criminality of the one is enabled by the cluelessness of the other — and the two are entwined in a dance macabre the end of which can only be the destruction of India.

The interesting question then is what gives rise to this situation? Indians are fairly unremarkable in that they are not genetically programmed to be stupid. They are as flawed as any other large segment of humanity. India is not spectacularly gifted natural resource wise but neither is it entirely devoid of them. India has not been repeatedly visited by natural catastrophes that periodically sends it back to square one. Over the centuries, India has had a fairly stable existence — barring the occasional Islamic invaders who killed a few million infidels every so often. All things considered, India had all the material and human resources to make a go of it. What went wrong?

I place great store in the cooking analogy. How good a dish you cook up depends on the ingredients and the recipe you use. In the case of an economy, the set of rules is like the recipe. A bad recipe can ruin even the best ingredients.

If the rules of the game are such that crooks don’t get to power and continue in power, the country will have good policies. Good policies will in turn help increase the stock of human capital. Human capital in turn will create physical capital.

Who makes the rules is a bit of a crap shoot. At the time of the American Revolution, the rules were made by a handful of extraordinarily smart people. The US lucked out.

Luck varies. As they say, some are lucky in love, some in cards. Some countries are lucky in the kind of rule-makers they get. For Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew made the rules, and it turned out extremely good for it. For the US, the so-called “Founding Fathers” made the rules, and it became the most powerful nation ever in human history. Some countries are endowed with huge natural resources — which contrary to expectations, is not all that lucky. Economists call it the “natural resource curse.” Sometimes the natural resource curse is compounded with an ideological curse. Saudi Arabia and some other Arab states have that double whammy curse.

India’s curse was that at a very critical time around India’s independence from Britian, the rule-makers were an incompetent bunch. It all starts with a supremely arrogant man, Gandhi. An able dictator but a very poor thinker, he chose as the rule maker someone who was largely incapable of figuring out his own incapacity to make sensible rules. This is the Dunning–Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which people make unfortunate choices but they lack the metacognitive ability to realize that they cannot make good choices.

If the rules of the game are bad, then the outcome is unlikely to be good. India’s poverty — material and otherwise — is a consequence of poor rules.

So here’s my thesis. India has corrupt politicians because the rules of the game allow criminals to come to political power. Once they get political power, they can then game the system to continue to be in power. Part of the gaming of the system is to make sure that the people don’t have any way of getting criminals out of power.

Take the resent set of politician-criminals. The guy whose job should have been to make sure that criminals should be behind bars, instead makes sure that the criminals continue to be union ministers. That guy got that job for being extremely flexible — no rigid moral or ethical rules to prevent him from bending to the will of his master.

But his master did not get to be the master without the public actually allowing it. India is too big for any invader’s army to hold it against the will of the people. In the present case, a more or less “democratic” process has ensured the power that the master has. Theft on a colossal scale goes on under the protection of the master and the appointed minion, and the apathetic public goes about its business as if this was divinely ordained.

In a comment to the post, Sriram recalled an earlier post which referred to a book by Étienne de La Boétie The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (1576). In an introduction to a modern edition of the book, Murray Rothbart wrote:

This fundamental insight was that every tyranny must necessarily be grounded upon general popular acceptance. In short, the bulk of the people themselves, for whatever reason, acquiesce in their own subjection. If this were not the case, no tyranny, indeed no governmental rule, could long endure. Hence, a government does not have to be popularly elected to enjoy general public support; for general public support is in the very nature of all governments that endure, including the most oppressive of tyrannies. The tyrant is but one person, and could scarcely command the obedience of another person, much less of an entire country, if most of the subjects did not grant their obedience by their own consent.

A large country like India cannot be ruled without some degree of popular consent. That the population gives that consent despite the enormous harm the tyranny does to them would be inexplicable but for the fact that the tyrants make sure that the population does not ever become informed enough to know that they are living under a tyranny.

If I were to rule as a tyrant in India, I would do the following. First, make sure that the population is extremely poor. Starving people can be easily controlled. How to do that? Take control of all economic activity. Put things in the public sector. And then keep the private sector under control. Make sure that only a few large firms constitute the private sector. If any large private sector firm steps out of line, punish disproportionately so that it is a lesson for the others. This will keep the population poor and under control.

Next, keep control of the press. Punish and reward the press, depending on whether they toe the tyrant’s line or not. Then get the courts under control. Don’t like a particular court verdict? Overturn it.

Next, keep absolute control over the education system. Too often educated people get uppity. Not a good thing for the tyrant.

In short, have a ruthless license-control-quota-permit raj.

If I had the chance to be India’s ruling tyrant, I would do all that and more. Actually come to think of it, that’s exactly what the India’s ruling tyrants have been doing all along.

In conclusion, sure it takes two to tango. But in the end, it is not the dancers but rather the dance that determines what the dancers do.

It’s the rules. The rules rule.

This is the bit of text that I am quoting.

This is particularly aimed at those who frequently post comments in which they refer to bits from other comments. I will not mention names here as you know who you are. (I should mention that I appreciate the trouble frequent commentators take in furthering the discussion. Thank you.)

Another way to distinguish the quoted bits is to simply italicize the quoted bit, and also indicate whom you are quoting.. How do you do that? Thusly. Type — <em>This bit is italicized</em> — and it will show up as This bit is italicized.

Next, this blog uses “Akismet” spam control. Which means, the system automagically holds spam comments in a spam folder. Most of the time, it works quite well. But on rare occasions, it tags a legitimate comment as spam (false positive) and sticks it in the spam folder, and so the comment does not show up immediately.

Therefore if you post a comment and it does not show up right away, please be patient. The comment will show up when I get around to rescuing the comment from the spam folder. Please feel free to email me alerting me that your comment did not show. My email address is my simple: atanudey at gmail dot com.

Thank you for your help.

The accordion has always fascinated me. How the players manage to hit the keys is a mystery to me. Anyhow, the kid is talented. Listen.

His tempo is really very fast. Compare it to this version played with the full string orchestra. The fast bit starts around 7:10 mark.

And while you listen, enjoy the exquisite sand animation.

Ah the sand animation is exquisite.

And finally, here’s a Danish (I guess) orchestra playing Summer. Just listen to the Presto part beginning at the 8:00 mark. But listen to the entire piece — I especially love the slow bits that lead up to the climactic crescendo. C’est magnifique.

Isn’t it just marvelous that we can watch and listen to such talent. Ah the Wonders of the Brave New Internet World.

We have to be cautious when it comes to patting ourselves on the back for our GDP growth rates – it is remarkable because of even poorer performance in the past, and because India was so poor to begin with.

Granted India has moved beyond the “Nehru rate of growth” of the past and is growing in the high single-digit rates since the mid-90s. But it is worth keeping in mind that that growth rate is on a very small base. Adding $50 to the annual per capita income may look good in percentage terms – only if the base is $500. That same increase in absolute terms will be only 1 percent if the base were $5000.

Back to the question that I have been exploring in this series. What is the reason for India’s lack of development? Singapore was only an interesting counterpoint and does not really matter in the big picture. I used it only to evoke the predictable outrage that you cannot compare the two.

I have argued that India has major advantages compared to Singapore. First and foremost, India is a large country. Size is an advantage. So India’s failure relative to Singapore is even more of a shame than if they had been of comparable size.

Talking of comparable size, China can be easily compared to India is size. It has been growing at double-digit rates for around 30 years. That has put China in a league of its own – a league that India will not be able to join in the foreseeable future – when in fact it was poorer than India as late as 1978.

Humongous China is no tiny Singapore. So what gives? The facile answer is that China is an authoritarian nation while India is a democracy. That’s a huge pile of horseshit. Democracy is a far better system of governance than authoritarianism in the context of large economies.

Democracy or Authoritarian

Want proof? Compare the US and the erstwhile USSR. The US apparently did not suffer for its 200-year long history of democracy. Authoritarian USSR literally imploded. Western European countries did not fare too badly either, compared to the authoritarian Eastern European countries. Which of the two did better in economic development – democratic West Germany or authoritarian East Germany?

India had two great things going for it: its size and the democratic structure of government. So the question that we should ask ourselves is what is the missing ingredient? What is the secret sauce that makes the Indian dish to poisonously unpalatable?

As I had argued previously, explaining away India’s failure to develop by saying “India is a democracy” or that “India is a big country” does not amount to much more than a pile of – to put it most delicately – horseshit.

If instead of India and Singapore, had I compared the success of the US and the obvious failure of some small African nation, the arguments could have been made that the comparison was unfair since the US was, first a large nation, and second, it was a democracy. These “just-so” arguments can be safely ignored.

In light of the facts that India is a democracy and it’s a large economy – both decidedly good for development – India’s failure to develop becomes an even more unfortunate story.

Comparative studies of economies – democratic or not, large or small – have revealed many regularities and lessons. But that is in some sense orthogonal to our main concern. The most important question we should address is this: if it were not its size or its political structure, what other factors can explain India’s dismal failure to develop?

A Question of Life and Death

That question is important not merely as an academic exercise but it is a matter of life and death. If we had some handle on it, perhaps we can figure out how to fix the problem. We would at least have some hope of implementing a solution. Because as matters stand now, if we continue to stumble around in the dark without any illumination, it could be too late for India.

I have my own prejudices, hypotheses and conjectures about what went wrong, and what we need to do going ahead. They all start with the rather distasteful recognition that India is a desperately impoverished country. It does not give me pleasure to repeatedly mention this – and I am sure that no patriotic Indian can even read that characterization of India without feeling a stab in the heart.

Behind all the talk of India being (or becoming) a superpower, of India being a nuclear power, of India straining to get a seat on the UNSC, of India having so many billionaires, of India having IITs, of India being the largest democracy, of India being the a secular (whatever that means) state, of India sending a probe to the moon, of India exporting Bollywood movies, of India being an ancient civilization, of India’s past glories – behind all that lurk the terrible facts that India has the largest number of extremely poor people, that India has the largest number of illiterates, that India gets bullied by a failed Islamic state, that India’s education system is so flawed that its universities don’t rank even in the top 300 globally, that half of India’s children below five are malnourished, that . . . the list goes on.

You will no doubt see the problem differently (if you see any problem at all, that is) and consequently have a different set of recommendations from mine. So allow me to state my point of view here. Everything in these pages has had the implied disclaimer “These are my opinions and you are not obliged to agree with them.” Take it or leave it, is the offer.

I separate the sources of India’s failures into these categories.

* Structure of government
* Economic structure
* Social attitudes

They are interrelated, of course. The binding element is “Indians.” Indian social attitude determine what type of society India evolved, and how that society decided to govern itself, and hence the type of economic structure that the government put in place.

Each of those three deserve to be the subject of a blog post. For now, here are some random thoughts about them.

Structure of Government

India is a democracy. The voice of the people matters. Their votes give legitimacy to the government. That’s all very fine and good. What we have to keep in mind though, is that the people get to choose whom they wish to elevate to which rank. But the electorate does not get to choose what the rules of the game of governance are. Those rules are more or less hardcoded, and that was not democratically determined.

(Like in most cases, the rules are made by a handful of powerful people. Besides these rules are not made from behind a “veil of ignorance”, as John Rawls would have you do.)

Where did the rules come from? Who made those rules? When were they made?

Most of the rules were made by the British. They made them for their own benefit. The rules they made stacked the deck in the favor of the rulers, not the ruled. The British eventually left. But the rules they made suited the new rulers very well.

There was no violent overthrow of the British colonial government. There was no war – or even a battle – of independence. The British simply upped and left. The higher offices occupied by the British were seamlessly transferred to a few high ranking Indians. Gandhi was the king-maker and Nehru became the king.

The lower offices were any way in the hands of the natives. So no changes were required there. A few names changed here and there. ICS, for instance, became IAS. Instead of the queen of England, the president of India became the head of state.

Compare that to what the Americans did when the colonies declared independence. They rewrote all the rules from scratch. That’s instructive.

Economic Structure

The British considered the best way to extract and exploit resources from India was to control all aspects of the economy. And rightly so, since they were in India as colonial masters. They were not on a charity mission, or on a mission to develop India for India’s sake.

Command and control suited the new “brown masters” very well. The brown British intensified their hold on the economy.

(I should mention here that Nehru was not all that brown. Kashmiris are fair-skinned by Indian standards. His progeny continued to be fair-skinned. His grandson, Rajiv, married an Italian – further ensuring fair and lovely skin of his children – which basically means that they have an unfair advantage in a society which implicitly accords god-like stature to anyone white. But more of that later.)

So where were we? Oh yes, the British left. The new rulers intensified their grip on the economy. The license-quota-permit-control raj promoted enthusiastically by Nehru was taken to new heights by his daughter Indira Gandhi.

(I have heard that it was Mohandas K Gandhi who advised Feroze to change his name from Ghandi to Gandhi. Perhaps Gandhi had understood too well that he was like a god to Indians and that the Gandhi name will forever enthrall the Indians into obsequious obedience. Mix that with fair skins — which Gandhi could not have foreseen – and you have a winner!)

Anyhow, Nehru and later his daughter, firmly set the country on – to Hayek’s awesome phrase – the road to serfdom. Indians are economic serfs of their political overlords. Stripped of economic freedom, India slipped further behind in the race to development.

[Abrupt End: This has gotten too long. I will go into the details of this in a separate article. Also, in the next bit, I will explore the third bit – Social Structure – and then wrap up this one. And answer some of the comments that raise interesting questions. Thank you for your patience.]

He talks about the Hindu conception of the universe (beginning around the 35 minute mark.)

From an interview he gave in the early ’80s (published in Rediff at some unspecified time.):

The tenth episode of COSMOS is largely about cosmology – the study of the universe in a perspective in which the Earth is like a grain to stand in vast beach or desert – and the way we approach the subject is through Hindu cosmology.

We have done that for several reasons. We went to Tamil Nadu for the festival called Pongal. Like festivals all over the world, it celebrates the changing of the seasons, and remind us that our ancestors were astronomers, who kept calendars and watched the skies. It was essential for extremely practical matters: when to sow seeds and to harvest grain. It was a matter of life and death to be an astronomer.

But the main reason that we oriented this episode of COSMOS towards India is because of that wonderful aspect of Hindu cosmology which first of all gives a time-scale for the Earth and the universe — a time-scale which is consonant with that of modern scientific cosmology. We know that the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, and the cosmos, or at least its present incarnation, is something like 10 or 20 billion years old. The Hindu tradition has a day and night of Brahma in this range, somewhere in the region of 8.4 billion years.

As far as I know. It is the only ancient religious tradition on the Earth which talks about the right time-scale. We want to get across the concept of the right time-scale, and to show that it is not unnatural. In the West, people have the sense that what is natural is for the universe to be a few thousand years old, and that billions is indwelling, and no one can understand it. The Hindu concept is very clear. Here is a great world culture which has always talked about billions of years.

Finally, the many billion year time-scale of Hindu cosmology is not the entire history of the universe, but just the day and night of Brahma, and there is the idea of an infinite cycle of births and deaths and an infinite number of universes, each with its own gods.

And this is a very grand idea. Whether it is true or not, is not yet clear. But it makes the pulse quicken, and we thought it was a good way to approach the subject.

And then the Chola bronzes in Tamil Nadu were very lovely to film, and gave us a visual approach to go along with the intellectual approach. It was also a way of de-provincialising our presentation. After all, we claim that science is an endeavor of the human species. To shoot the whole film in the United States or Western Europe would have been extremely provincial. We shot in Japan and 12 or 14 other countries, besides India. Let me also say that the subsidiary benefit for my wife and me is that we had a chance to visit India for the first time, and especially Tamil Nadu which we enjoyed enormously.

You mentioned the Chola bronzes and I see also that in your book COSMOS one of the chapters called ‘The edge of forever’ begins with a picture of Nataraja. Could you say something to explain its relevance in that chapter?

The traditional explanation of the Nataraja is that it symbolises the creation of the universe in one hand and the death of the universe in the other – the drum and the flame – and after all, that is what cosmology is all about. So in addition to being artistically exquisite, the Nataraja provides exactly the kind of symbolism that we wanted. The Nataraja that is photographed in the book COSMOS is in a museum in Pasadena, California, but it will be returned to India at some specified time within the next decade.

Talking of the Nataraja, I recommend this piece which explains the symbolism of Shiva as Nataraja dancing the Tandava, the dance of creation and destruction.

I believe that a person is at his most pathetic when he makes excuses for his failures and justifies them saying that they are primarily due to circumstances beyond his control. It is not merely an abdication of responsibility but what is worse, it precludes the possibility of corrective behavior. If it was not his fault, there’s no reason for him to change. He believes that when circumstances change, he will not fail.

I call this failure to own up to one’s failure “meta-failure.” I am only too familiar with my failures, and at times I have taken the easy way out by making excuses. But even when I try to fool others by shifting blame away from myself, I am not so deluded as to really believe my own excuses. That leaves me the opportunity of fixing my failures in the future. In other words, I fail but I don’t meta-fail. Redemption is possible but only if one is not asleep or self-deluded.

Shakespeare, as always, puts our unfortunate tendency to deflect blame from ourselves with his usual awesomeness. Listen.

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune, (often the surfeit
of our own behavior) we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: An admirable evasion
of whore-master man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star!

King Lear (1.2.132)

These ruminations are a result of the “Yaabutt Singapore is a small country and cannot be compared with India” idea that I claimed was bogus at the end of my post, “A Tale of Two Countries“. It’s bogus because at best it is a meta-failure, an attempt to explain away India’s failure and thus absolve oneself of responsibility.

Not just poor, but impoverished

As I constantly remind everyone, India is a large country of extremely poor people. More accurately, India is a large country of extremely impoverished people. Impoverished because it has been reduced to poverty, deprived of all vitality and creativeness, driven to mass misery. India need not have been this miserable but it has been made to be so. It can be something else, something vital and rich in all senses of the word. But that possibility is precluded if Indians make excuses. That meta-failure is what I rail against in these pages. (The best way to become unpopular is to strip people of their comfortable delusions.)

The list of excuses advanced to explain away India’s backwardness is not long. Heading the list is the popular, “India is a democracy.” Then there’s “India is a large country and cannot be compared to small rich countries.” When compared to China’s rapid transformation, the excuse is “India will surpass China because China is authoritarian.”

Aside from the excuses list, there is a list of comforting delusions. The top of that list is “India has a demographic dividend coming due and will beat China.” Also on the list is, “India is a superpower.” Sometimes the super-powerdom is specified: “India is an IT superpower.” At other times, it is economic: “India has N billionaires.” At times it is based on an inability to do arithmetic, and not being able to understand the distinction between gross measures and per capita measures: “India is the largest producer of milk.”

Excuses and delusions. Where would we be without our excuses and delusions? Without our popular delusions, I think we would be on the road to success.

Bigger is Better

Here I will address, as promised, the matter of why the argument — that India’s failure to develop cannot be compared with Singapore’s enviable success due to differences in size — is meaningless. It is based on an absolute misapprehension of the way the world works. All we need to do to see through the matter is a little bit of common sense, a quiet place, and a bit of time to turn things around in one’s head.

Being large confers benefits. Look at it from any angle, and you will see the advantages. Large entities live longer. Compare a mouse to an elephant. Large corporations persist, and can weather downturns better than small firms. Large ships do better in storms than small boats. Large objects can affect the environment to their own benefit. A candle in the wind goes out; a large forest fire creates its own environment and whips up a storm. Large corporations can influence policy. Large suppliers can dictate prices and change the market equilibrium. Large universities have access to better faculty and students. Large cities attract the more talented compared to small towns and villages.

Look at it any which way, and you find that large entities have advantages over tiny ones. Especially being “economically” large is a great advantage.

When it comes to economies, larger is better because of some fundamental principles. First there is the notion of specialization. As Adam Smith reasoned over 200 years ago, division of labor and specialization allows the greater creation of wealth. The degree of specialization possible increases with population, which translates into greater productivity and production.

The second matter that confers advantage to size is that large economies have large domestic markets. There are scale economies in most modern production. The more you manufacture, for instance, the lower is the per unit cost. So if you have a large domestic market, you will achieve economies of scale, which lower your costs, and that enables you to be competitive in the world market. Not just competitive but you can even create a comparative advantage for yourself. Large economies have power to change the terms of trade to their advantage.

As human civilization has progressed, the size of the interacting group has increased. From small tribes, to city-states, to nations, to blocks of nations engaged in mutually beneficial trade arrangements.

The Western European economies not too long ago became part of a large economic union — to obtain those benefits that large size affords. They would not have done so if the benefits did not out weigh the costs.

Scale Economies

It is true that there are disadvantages to size as well. Very large organizations — like oil supertankers — cannot turn on a dime. Their momentum is hard to dissipate. But that is can also be an advantage. Long after they engines have stopped turning, they can coast along for quite a while. A large corporation can typically survive economic turmoil better than little shops.

Large organizations turn out more complex manufactured goods. You cannot have a small firm turn out superjumbos like the Boeing 777s or the Airbus 380. These superjumbos exist because they are super efficient. Once again, scale economies kick in.

There’s one thing we have to bear in mind, though. Merely being large does not confer any advantage. Size is necessary condition but not a sufficient condition. For a large entity to be successful, it also has to have a complex nervous system. For proper functioning, the brain has to be sufficiently large as well.

The large dinosaurs, we are told, had small brains for their physical size. That’s a recipe for disaster. Some of them evolved to have large bodies but really tiny brains. In a sense, the same can be said about India — large body and a tiny brain. We will explore this incongruity a bit later.

Cooking Up a Good Economy

Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that are more valuable. A useful metaphor for production in an economy comes from the kitchen. To create valuable final products, we mix inexpensive ingredients together according to a recipe.

Paul Romer.

Previously on this blog I explored the idea that at the bottom of it all, what matters is “stuff.” I am a stuff fundamentalist.

I believe in stuff. First of all, I am made of stuff. Second of all, I use stuff. I eat stuff, wear stuff, use stuff to get around, need stuff to shield me from the natural elements, etc. We all do. Those who don’t have stuff that they can use, are poor. Poverty is the lack of stuff. Everything that we do, ultimately involves stuff.

From the composition of sublime music to mind-blowing accomplishments of theoretical physics—they all involves stuff because they are all produced by people who, as we can easily appreciate, need stuff. Any system that produces lots of useful stuff has the necessary condition for producing all sorts of things. Conversely any system that is unable to produce stuff in sufficient quantities is one that is characterized by poverty.

Romer’s analogy of final products as the result of the operation of a recipe on inputs is instructive and accurate. You need good recipes and you need ingredients. If you do, you produce good stuff. If you have a lousy recipe, you can make a mess of even the finest ingredients. Conversely, if you have a good recipe, you can make delightful stuff with even modest ingredients. Broadly speaking you need three bits — the cook, the recipe and the ingredients — which then have to come together well for a good outcome.

You’d notice that the three bits are actually quite different in nature. The recipe is an “information good” and therefore falls in the category of “public goods.” You can not “use up” a recipe. Any number of people can simultaneously use a recipe. On the other hand, the ingredients are “private goods.” If you use that pound of butter for your dish, that same pound of butter is not available to me. Butter is a “private good.” The cook embodies “agency” — she has a purpose, makes choices, acts to achieve her goal, mixes and chops stuff, determines when the batter is just right, and when to stop the cooker. The cook “implements” a recipe and uses up ingredients (input stuff) to produce a dish (output stuff.)

So let’s see their analogues in the case of an economy. The government (cook) chooses and implements policies (recipes) to combine resources (ingredients) to produce final goods and services that the economy consumes immediately, or intermediate stuff for use in the production of final goods and services.

This general description of how an economy functions applies to economies of all sizes, large and small. If an economy fails to produce sufficient amounts of goods and services relative to its population, it is poor. This failure can be attributed to a lack of any or more of the three basic bits. Even with the best recipe and ingredients, a lousy cook can mess it all up by not choosing the right recipe, or not correctly following the right recipe.

So far we have not seen any reason for why a large economy cannot be as equally successful as a small one. The government and policymakers are taken from the population. There is nothing to suggest that in large populations, the percentage of smart people is lower than that in smaller populations. Public policies (recipes) are chosen from a large set of available policies. Being public goods, these can be taken from anywhere at all. With a little bit of care, one should be able to look around and distinguish between those policies that have proved good and those that haven’t. Take those that work for your specific circumstances. It’s a matter of public choice, and that depends on the competency of the policymakers and their objectives.

The Bogus Argument

With that background established, now we are ready to discuss why the objection, “yeah but Singapore is a small country, and India is large,” does not make sense.

First, large size is an advantage rather than a handicap. Singapore does not have the diversity ant the geographical extent of India. One or the other regions of India has any of the resources required for economic production, and it also has a large domestic consumer market. The number of smart people in India’s population of 1.2 billion far exceed the number of smart people in Singapore’s 5 million population (although in percentage numbers they may be the same.)

The public policies that Singapore uses — whether home grown or imported from abroad — are also available for India to use. The stock of public policies available is the same for all countries. It is a matter of which to choose with regard to the specifics of the country.

Singapore has access to limited domestic resources — human or physical. India has a wider choice since India is large. Granted that the per capita stock of resources for India is low. For example, India’s per capita availability of arable land, water, and other natural resources are lower than many other countries, large and small. But India is not entirely devoid of resources either. (Then of course there is no reason why India’s population should have been allowed to balloon to the point where it overwhelms the available resources. That itself speaks to a failure of public policy.)

In international forums, large size gives more bargaining power. In trade, it gives the ability to dictate terms. Large populations allow greater degree of specialization. Large economies can afford large fixed costs — thus allowing lower average costs in industries that have low marginal costs.

Conclusion

All things considered, large size is an advantage rather than a disadvantage in most cases. But even in those areas where size is a disadvantage, the large economy can (almost costlessly) disaggregate to the extent required to reach optimal size.

Here’s what I mean. Let’s take an analogy. Suppose in the manufacture of widgets, the larger the factory producing them, the per unit cost is lower — but only up to a certain point. So a factory producing 1 million widgets has a lower per unit cost than one that only produces half a million widgets. But suppose this advantage on the side of the large peaks at 2 million units. That is, beyond 2 million units, the cost per unit starts rising. At 10 million units, the cost per widgets rises to be the same as the cost of the factory producing half a million widgets.

Now consider two countries. Singapore needs only 1 million widgets domestically, and cannot export any. India needs 10 million widgets. So if India builds a factory to produce all 10 million widgets, it will be paying more per widget than Singapore which is using one factory to produce the 1 million it needs. Singapore does not have the option of scaling up the factory to 2 million units to get a lower cost per unit. Therefore its small domestic market has handicapped it. India, on the other hand, has a way out. It can produce the 10 million widgets in five factories of the optimal size — 2 million unit.

This is an important point worth repeating. A small economy cannot scale up it operations to that of a large economy, but a large economy can scale down if necessary.

If the optimal size for the administrative efficiency of a population is say 10 million, then a population of 100 million has the choice of splitting itself into 10 units of 10 million.

I think I have given sufficient reasons to believe that the objection that Singapore cannot be compared to India for the reason of size is bogus. Indeed, in the ordinary course of events, one would expect that given India’s size, India would be the more successful of the two, not Singapore.

But why is India so desperately poor relative to Singapore? What explains India’s poverty?

I think that would be a good topic to explore in a future post. I am sure that you already know the answer. In terms of the analogy, the answer is incompetent cooks. Let’s talk about that next.

Thanks

Thanks to all who have posted comments to “A Tale of Two Countries.” I will address them shortly in a separate post.

The blog in question is MUKT AAKASH, which republished in its entirety my post “We Just Don’t Care.” Here’s a screen capture:

I am quite sure that the person who posted that is not plagiarizing. But what I find surprising is that she is likely a journalism student and is unaware of proper journalistic etiquettes.

I wrote a short comment requesting her to make appropriate changes to the post.

Which reminds me. Did you follow the fracas about Aroon Purie’s plagiarism?

What can be more pathetic?

Manmohan Singh, the sad little pathetic man, the man who does not have the least shame in being the paid enabler of instituting dynastic rule in a democracy, knows very well that regardless of how much pain Pakistan inflicts on ordinary Indians, it has nothing to fear. India will not retaliate.

Indians have a lot of things to be ashamed about. But I think nothing compares to the shame of having a weak man as the prime minister who is a minion of an uneducated Italian. Given that state of affairs, Pakistan indeed has nothing to fear. It can go about killing Indians with impunity — as long as the dynasty is not attacked. People who attack the dynasty, however, better watch out.

The more I think about it, more I am convinced that the fatal character flaw in Indians is that they simply don’t care. Sikhs getting slaughtered by Congress goons, and not just non-Sikhs, but Sikhs themselves carry on unperturbed. Innocents being raped and killed in Deganga in West Bengal? Not a problem. In fact, I doubt that too many Indians even know about what happened there. And the ones that do know, couldn’t be bothered. They don’t care.

Soldiers dying in the frozen wastes of Kargil? Ho hum. Pakistan sending the mutilated bodies of tortured Indian soldiers? Oh well, let’s just forget all that and play cricket with Pakistan. And invite the soulless evil bastard of a dictator to India and feed him biriyani and deferentially interview him on TV.

“We Just Don’t Care” should be the Indian national motto instead of “Truth Alone Prevails.” Actually, I sometimes think that Indians would not recognize truth if it came up and bit them on their behind.

Union Carbide and 20,000 dead, and Rajiv Gandhi let’s the head honcho responsible get away? No skin off my back. I don’t care.

Over four hundred million abjectly poor people in the country? Don’t care. Let’s have that Commonwealth game. Did the Congress lackeys actually loot most of the money spent on the games? We just don’t care. Not my money. Did A Raja actually cost the Indian public around $30 billion? Maybe. But the prime minister does not care. So why should I care?

Anyway, talking of the appointed prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh, here’s an article from the Times of India: Does a Sikh PM absolve the Congress of ’84?:

. . . a court is, in 2010, discussing whether a chargesheet filed in 1992 about the 1984 riots should be formally filed before it! Engaging. A colleague said to me recently that essentially, it’s all about the “we have moved on” mindset. Nobody’s really making a hue and cry any more, it’s not a recurrent political embarrassment for the government, and protest groups are of little consequence. So why take any real action, when the pretence suffices? Truth is, not even the victims expect any justice. It’s been so long, anyways, it’s not politically relevant.

We just don’t care. Knowing that, the appointed PM Dr Manmohan Singh does not care also. An uncaring appointed prime minister of a country of mostly uncaring people. A voice of protest is heard once in a while — which is quickly ignored and the people move on.

Here’s a voice of protest from Satbir Singh Bedi. He wrote a comment in response to the TOI article. The comment — 1984 riots: Congress took revenge on Sikhs and Manmohan Singh is a Congressman”

Manmohan Singh is not a Sikh just as I am not a Sikh. We both were born into Sikh families but I have gone to become Pro-Hindu and he has gone to become Pro-Muslim. He is least bothered about the victims of 1984 riots. He might have felt otherwise had his relatives been killed and burnt alive in those riots. Actually, it was Rajiv Gandhi who ordered that these Sikhs should be killed for they have killed his mother. It was an act of revenge. It succeeded because people voted Rajeev Gandhi to power. However when Rajeev Gandhi died and was actually killed by an LTTE worker, no Tamilian was killed and no revenge was taken because Congress was not in power at that time. Sikhs can never have justice under Manmohan Singh’s Pro-Muslim regime. Manmohan Singh even favours an Islamic Banking system as per news reports. He has been chosen by Sonia Gandhi to become PM of the country not because of his being a Sikh but simply because he has no mass following and could not defy her. He is a perfect sychophant and would go on doing the bidding of Sonia Gandhi. Sonia Gandhi too does not want justice for Sikhs because her mother-in-law was killed by two fanatical Sikhs. She is a very revengeful lady and taking it out on Sikhs.

Well, we don’t care. We see the images of criminals plastered all over huge billboards announcing yet another scheme cooked up by the Congress party to buy votes, and we just go about our business without comment.

I am getting convinced that the root cause of our misery is that we just don’t care. Only if there is a way of making caring people out of Indians, only then can India progress. I don’t know if there is such a way.

It’s all karma, neh?

Within one lifetime, Singapore transitioned from third world to first world status. India, during the same time, moved from being a state with great promise to . . . a state with great promise. Lee Kuan Yew said not too long ago, speaking for Singapore’s leaders (himself being the most important), “We did not become rich, but Singapore became rich.” Flip the statement around, substitute India in there, and you will have the equivalent statement which any Congress leader can make, “India did not become rich, but we became rich.” Exhibit #6397 the CWG loot. (Subramanium Swamy alleges that someone called Raul Vinci got a rather large chunk of it.)

Let’s recall that economic policies matter. They determine to a very large extent whether an economy prospers or not. For nearly all its existence as an independent state, the Congress party (nearly always with a Nehru-Gandhi clan member at its helm) has made economic policies. And the outcome? Well, we just did the numbers. They speak volumes if only we are willing to listen.

Mrs Gandhi introduced the word “socialism” in the Indian Constitution. She presided over the nationalization of banks. She intensified the disastrous policies that her fabian-socialist father, Mr Nehru, had initiated. The license-quota-permit-control raj that the Congress instituted resulted in India’s descent into ever deepening poverty. India’s poverty beats the poverty of sub-Saharan Africa hands down.

The unfortunate fact is that if the Congress continues to rule India, and if the Congress continues to be controlled by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty (they put the “nasty” in the word “dynasty”), as far as economic policies go, it will be more of the same disastrous socialistic insanity. They cannot change course because to do so will be tantamount to repudiating the failed policies of their ancestors. Their creed appears to be “The FAMILY before the COUNTRY” — they would sacrifice the country for enriching themselves.

India must have some terribly bad karma, and is paying for it by being ruled by the Congress. How many more hundreds of millions of Indians have to live lives of utter destitution before that karma is wiped clean?

It’s all karma, neh?

PS: One of the main reasons why I chose Singapore to compare with India is that invariably someone is going to say, “Yaabutt, Singapore is a small country of 4 million and India is 1,200 million. You cannot compare the two.” Only then will I explain why that objection is a pile of hooey. Thank you.

PPS: Major thanks go out to Nitin Pai for providing the numbers on which I did arithmetic to get the exchange rates. This post is also made possible by contributions from viewers like you.

Democracy has its failures. All institutions have failures. They are imperfect creations of imperfect beings. Take markets, for example. An absolutely astonishing mechanism for facilitating trade. That’s important because trade is at the bottom of what humans do, and which makes all of us better off. But however marvelous the idea of markets is, actual markets have failures. Ideal markets grind out the best possible outcome. Real markets deviate and churn out not so perfect results. When certain conditions for the working of perfect markets are not met, markets fail.

Market failures are not rare. Indeed they are the norm. Very bright people have worked long and hard at studying them to find ways to fix market failures thus making them function just that much better. The institution of markets is too precious for it to be discarded because they have failures. We have to keep using markets because the alternatives are worse. But there is a constant struggle to fix the failures. The first things of course is the recognition that markets fail.

Democracy fails too. You don’t have to look too far to see its obvious failures. Indian political leaders are elected democratically. Can anyone seriously claim that they are in any sense good? They are generally the dregs of society. Surely they are not the best that society has to offer. There are people who are more moral, more competent, more intelligent, and more sincere than the average political leader. It is rare to the point of non-existent to find truly visionary, honest, and hard-working people in the whole lot.

If that’s the best that democracy can do, then democracy as an institution is a total failure. But putting the blame on the idea of democracy is wrong. What we have to do is to correct for the failures of democracy. It’s not that the idea is flawed but rather the way it is implemented that is wrong. We have to seriously examine why democracy fails so consistently in India and do something about it.

The claim that democracy has failed in India is easy to illustrate. Here’s an example. “Kerala man accused of chopping hand wins poll,” says a news item of Oct 28th. The man is an accused, lodged in jail, more than likely guilty of a heinous crime — and wins an election. I can confidently assert that had I contested that election, I would have lost to that man. I am not a paragon of virtue but it is hard to imagine that I am less than a man who is suspected of being a viciously violent person.

I don’t know you, dear reader, but I can bet my bottom dollar that you are not as ethically challenged as that minister of telecommunications accused of a spectrum scam that has probably cost the country billions of dollars. I bet that you have more integrity than the prime minister who shields corrupt politicians from being brought to justice. I wager that you are not so greedy as to siphon off thousands of millions from funds allocated for organizing a games event. Yet you, and thousands like you, don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being elected to any political office. Indeed it is your scruples, your sense of decency, your moral values, your integrity and intelligence which will be your handicap in getting you to any political office.

If the good and the competent fail to win in a democracy while the seriously depraved do so routinely, it is time to take a good hard look at how inadequately the idea of democracy has been implemented in India.

My report card on democracy in India is a solid F. This must change. I want us to consider how we can address democracy failures. In a previous post on an initiative we call “United Voters of India,” I explored some avenues.

I considered three scenarios. One was to raise the bar on who can contest in elections; another was to raise the bar on who could vote; and the third was a combination of the two. I rejected all these on grounds that they required changes in the rules of the game. These changes will not happen since the status quo is totally acceptable to the rulers and the rule-makers. The system allows the corrupt to flourish and they have no incentive to change the system to their disadvantage.

The change has to come from a section of the population that has the capacity to appreciate the need for change and the ability to organize themselves into a voting block. Urban educated voters who understand that good policies are necessary for good outcomes could be a powerful force to change the system from within. These are productive people who have the capacity for long-term thinking, and have an incentive — leaving a better society for their children — to change the system. They understand that policies that merely redistribute resources from the productive to the unproductive, and that do nothing to increase production, are doomed to increase poverty in society.

Changing the rules of the game while playing by the current set of rules is an uncertain proposition. But that’s the only avenue open to those of us who are not inclined to mindless violence. I proposed UVI as a mechanism that could possibly change the outcomes of elections at the margin by forcing political parties to address the concerns of voters who want government to be effective, efficient and clean. The idea is that over a few election cycles, UVI will have helped a sufficient number of honest and competent people get elected, and they in turn will help clean the system from the top.

UVI is about using the currently flawed democratic setup to fix its failures. It is a bootstrap process, much like the one that gets the operating system up and running on your computers.

Not surprisingly, the outlines of my proposal did not meet with universal acceptance. Anshuman Goenka, for example, wrote a comment (which I reproduce below, for convenience.)

Not sure whether I understand the intent (not feasibility) clearly of what you have said. You are suggesting that we roll back democracy, and limit it to “highly qualified people.” What does that mean – matriculates, graduates, PhDs? Who decides?

Besides the ethical dilemma this poses, there is also the slight problem of historical precedent. Going by the case history of the scatter in the Indian legislative bodies, qualifications do not correlate highly to quality of contribution. Remember Natwar Singh? And contrast that with the homespun modesty of Bhairon Singh Shekhawat from the same state. I can think of similar pairs from almost every state of India (Digvijay Singh v Shivraj Chouhan in MP, Veerbhadra Singh v Shanta Prasad in HP — are two that first come to mind; in each case the former was better and formally educated but the latter had, in my view a greater and more positive impact).

Unless of course, you are proposing that decisions about who should vote and who should be a candidate are also decided by the “group” at “suitable levels” – a suggestion that you make later when talking about limiting voting rights of your suggested political platform.

A small bit of history: this is not the first time such a suggestion is made. Almost eighty years back, MA Jinnah suggested that the membership of the Congress be limited to matriculates – a view that was quickly and, in my view, wisely rejected by his highly qualified peer group at the helm of the Congress.

The motley mess of Indian politics, with its warts (corrurption, chaos, nepotism and dynasty) is far superior in my view to what teh limitations on franchise that you propose; which I fervently hope will have only a limited, quasi-academic appeal beyond the readership of this blog!

My responses. No, I am not proposing rolling back democracy. I would like to see the rules of the game changed so that there is quality control in who gets to vote and who gets to contest in elections. But then there are lots of changes I would like to see — which will not ever happen. The rules about who can participate in the democratic process in India are not going to change because of, among other things, what is called the “endowment effect“[2] — once you give people something, you cannot say, “oops, that was a mistake, so give it back to me” and expect them to give it up.

I can argue why it would have been better if India had not had universal adult franchise but I will not do so here.[3] Perhaps at some later time. For now, I focus on the UVI proposal.

Who decides whom should one vote for? I guess the voter decides. In the UVI context, the group collectively decides. Membership to UVI is voluntary but the condition is that the member adhere to the sworn duty of voting, and voting only for the candidate chosen by the association. The members choose whom to vote for through “primary” elections in which all members are eligible to vote — but it is neither compulsory nor mandatory. The only compulsory bit is that the member eventually vote at the real elections for the candidate chosen by the group.

To answer Anshuman, there is no ethical dilemma. UVI does not restrict democracy. Not at all. One chooses to become a member. It’s a club, not a prison. Exit is voluntary and costless. But as long as one is a member, the honor code applies.

Whom would the association choose as the candidate to vote for? The candidate and/or political party that most closely approaches the principles of the association.

UVI is a club with a strictly political objective. Like the Rotary or Lion’s Club, it has rules and bylaws, and rights and duties, and membership conditions and dues. You are free to apply for membership, and any member can exit any time without penalty. The ‘club good‘ [4] that UVI provides is the ability to make one’s vote count for the benefit of society.

NOTES:

[1]. I wish I had a dollar for every Christian I have met who believed that the “immaculate conception” refers to the birth of Jesus. It does not. The immaculate conception refers to the belief that Mary was born without sin, not Jesus.

[2]. Endowment Effect:

‘Thaler (1980) coined the term “endowment effect” to refer to the finding that randomly assigned owners of an object appear to value the object more than randomly assigned non-owners of the object. For instance, in one well-known series of endowment effect experiments, Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler (1990) found that randomly assigned owners of a mug required significantly more money to part with their possession (around $7) than randomly assigned buyers were willing to pay to acquire it (around $3). Kahneman et al. (1990, 1991) and Tversky and Kahneman (1991) attributed this result to loss aversion: owners’ loss of the mug loomed larger than buyers’ gain of the mug.’
Gal (2006)

‘The endowment effect (Thaler 1980), also known as “status quo bias” (Samuelson and Zeckhauser 1988), is the phenomenon in which most people would demand a considerably higher price for a product that they own than they would be prepared to pay for it (Weber 1993).’
Goldberg and von Nitzsch (1999), page 99

[3]. If I were making the rules, I would have put in a lot of restraints on who can contest in elections. For example, I would make a rule which I call “Family Limits”: if you hold a political office, then your family members cannot hold that office. Which members of your family are debarred depends on the level of the political office. The width and the depth of the debarring increases with the importance of the office.

For instance, if you are a local municipal elected official, your immediate family cannot hold that post after you vacate it; someone else other than your immediate family has to hold it before your immediate family becomes eligible for the post. This is level 1. Width and depth of debarring is 1.

Level 2 corresponds to state assembly. Level 3 to member of parliament, and to state ministers. Level 4 to union ministers. Level 5 to the prime minister. This is not exhaustive, only suggestive.

So level 5 means, the width of debarring is 5. Your immediate family is debarred; so are your first cousins, and cousin’s cousins. Level 5 depth means that your children cannot hold that office; nor any of your grandchildren, all the way 5 levels down.

This is similar to term limits that exist in the US for presidents — two max.

This makes intuitive sense to me but I am aware that others will disagree. So I will spell out the advantages of “Family Limits” in a later post. For now I will mention only two examples. In the US, we would not have had George W Bush. Which means the world would have been a better place now. We have the current disastrous administration thanks to the inept GW. In India, we would not have the specter of the Nehru dynasty haunting India and leading it to an early demise.

But I will go into all this later.

[4]. For an introduction to club goods, see my post on “Kakistocracies, principals and agents“. February 2008.

I will no longer manage money for other people or institutions. I have enough of my own wealth to manage. Some people, who think they have arrived at a reasonable estimate of my net worth, might be surprised that I would call it quits with such a small war chest. That is fine; I am content with my rewards. Moreover, I will let others try to amass nine, ten or eleven figure net worths. Meanwhile, their lives suck. Appointments back to back, booked solid for the next three months, they look forward to their two week vacation in January during which they will likely be glued to their Blackberries or other such devices. What is the point? They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Balmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten. I do not understand the legacy thing. Nearly everyone will be forgotten. Give up on leaving your mark. Throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life.

So this is it. With all due respect, I am dropping out. . .

On the issue of the U.S. Government, I would like to make a modest proposal. First, I point out the obvious flaws, whereby legislation was repeatedly brought forth to Congress over the past eight years, which would have reigned in the predatory lending practices of now mostly defunct institutions. These institutions regularly filled the coffers of both parties in return for voting down all of this legislation designed to protect the common citizen. This is an outrage, yet no one seems to know or care about it. Since Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith passed, I would argue that there has been a dearth of worthy philosophers in this country, at least ones focused on improving government. Capitalism worked for two hundred years, but times change, and systems become corrupt. George Soros, a man of staggering wealth, has stated that he would like to be remembered as a philosopher. My suggestion is that this great man start and sponsor a forum for great minds to come together to create a new system of government that truly represents the common man’s interest, while at the same time creating rewards great enough to attract the best and brightest minds to serve in government roles without having to rely on corruption to further their interests or lifestyles. This forum could be similar to the one used to create the operating system, Linux, which competes with Microsoft’s near monopoly. I believe there is an answer, but for now the system is clearly broken. {Emphasis added.}

The system is clearly broken appears to be a common refrain. But the modes of breakage are different, and what is considered broken depends on what it was to begin with. The American system is showing major signs of breakage but most of the world would give an arm and a leg to live in this broken system.

I emphasized in the quote above those bits that especially resonate with my way of thinking. I believe that the more advanced and complex the system, the more is the need for experts in managing it. This is obviously true in the case of commercial airliners (their design, manufacture, and operations), corporations, nuclear power plants, pharmaceuticals, brain surgery, particle physics, genome sequencing, and a zillion other complex systems. These require specialized training and expertize, which are not coded in our DNA and which cannot be easily acquired.

Policy making at the highest levels of any large economy requires the skills acquired through the training of very gifted individuals. There is nothing to suggest that merely being popularly elected makes a person suddenly capable of making great policy, any more than popular election would make a virtuoso concert violinist out of someone who has never had a lesson in music.

Ladhe concludes his little letter with a call for the revival of hemp (the male Cannabis plant, the female plant being marijuana) as a source of fiber and energy. Worth reading.

At a time when rhetoric is flying about becoming more self-sufficient in terms of energy, why is it illegal to grow this plant in this country? Ah, the female. The evil female plant — marijuana. It gets you high, it makes you laugh, it does not produce a hangover. Unlike alcohol, it does not result in bar fights or wife beating. So, why is this innocuous plant illegal? Is it a gateway drug? No, that would be alcohol, which is so heavily advertised in this country. My only conclusion as to why it is illegal, is that Corporate America, which owns Congress, would rather sell you Paxil, Zoloft, Xanax and other additive drugs, than allow you to grow a plant in your home without some of the profits going into their coffers. This policy is ludicrous. It has surely contributed to our dependency on foreign energy sources. Our policies have other countries literally laughing at our stupidity, most notably Canada, as well as several European nations (both Eastern and Western). You would not know this by paying attention to U.S. media sources though, as they tend not to elaborate on who is laughing at the United States this week. Please people, let’s stop the rhetoric and start thinking about how we can truly become self-sufficient.

Public Radio

Moving on, if you know even the least bit about my daily life, you would know that I love public radio. I have never made it a secret that I rarely read newspapers. I could go on for years without touching one. But I would be lost without public radio. In the SF Bay area I listen to KQED 88.5FM and KALW 91.7FM. KQED carries NPR, PRI, some BBC programs. KALW carries a greater variety — CBC and AR, for example.

My favorite shows are Terry Gross’s Fresh Air; Ira Glass’s This American Life; from WNYC, Selected Shorts, Micheal Krasny’s Forum (a KQED production), and Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan. Also on the list is The Commonwealth Club of California, The National Press Club, and the like. The magic of the internet brings most of these online and as podcasts.

Talking of NPR, I should add that I am disappointed at NPR’s firing of Juan Williams for his remarks on FOX.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Longtime NPR news analyst Juan Williams has been fired following remarks made about Muslims on Fox News.

National Public Radio issued a statement late Wednesday saying Williams’ contract as a senior news analyst was being terminated after his comments Monday on “The O’Reilly Factor.”

. . .

Williams, 56, who is a regular Fox commentator as well as one of NPR’s most prominent African-American analysts, responded that too much political correctness can get in the way of reality.

“I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the Civil Rights movement in this country,” Williams said. “But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Williams also warned O’Reilly against blaming all Muslims for “extremists,” saying Christians shouldn’t be blamed for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

This is not a hopeful sign.

Meanwhile, Aayan Hirsi Ali was the lunch time speaker at the National Press Club on Oct 25th. I look forward to listening to her talk when it is broadcast on KQED. Here’s an excerpt from the write-up on her talk “Advocate Says Islam Not a Religion of Tolerance“:

Islam is not a religion of tolerance, but one that defines peace as total Islamization of the world, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said at an Oct. 25 NPC luncheon.

She identified three groups of actors she said are working toward that end: One is the revolutionaries, such as Al Qaeda, who have short- term, violent goals. Another set of groups, such as the Egyptian Brotherhood, renounce violence and take a long-term “termite” approach. A third set of state actors, specifically the Organization of Islamic Conference, take both long- and short-term approaches. The Conference is an association of 56 Muslim countries, including the U.S. allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

The United States focuses only on the revolutionaries, she said.

The goal of the more moderate groups is to divide and conquer, as in Europe, she said. Hirsi Ali said they they have succeeded in Europe by stigmatizing those who criticize Mohammad, as in the case of cartoonists who mocked the prophet. She saw a similarity in NPR’s firing of reporter Juan Williams for comments unflattering to Muslims made on Fox News.

And finally, an essay by Bill McKibben in the New York Review of Books, titled “All Programs Considered,” about public radio. It’s a long piece but I would like to include here the bit that deals with Ira Glass and his show, for the record.

The most important name in that other world is Ira Glass, the inventor of the show This American Life. He learned his craft at the big NPR news shows and slowly developed a powerful style that centered on storytelling. . . The best ones came to be called “driveway moments,” because listeners were so hooked that they would linger in their cars to hear the end of a piece even once they’d gotten home. In fact, NPR now packages CD collections of these beloved pieces.

But Glass figured out that he could make a weekly hour entirely of this kind of radio, dispensing with traditional news and talk; and since 1995, under the wing of Chicago station WBEZ, that’s what he’s done in This American Life. “During the early days, Ira would always say, ‘I just put a piece on our show that was rejected by All Things Considered.’ He was really proud of that,” recalls Torey Malatia, president of WBEZ. The pieces were often long—sometimes one would fill an entire hour. And they sounded odd: Glass himself doesn’t exactly have a Bob Edwards radio voice, but some of the people who joined his ensemble (the wonderful Sarah Vowell, Joe Richman, Scott Carrier, and others) wouldn’t even have gotten an interview at the smallest commercial radio station. What they shared, besides wit and intelligence, was a commitment to covering the 330 degrees of life that didn’t show up on the newscasts. It’s about life the way most of us experience it, where heartbreak or lunch is as important as stock prices or distant revolutions.

In Robert Krulwich’s account, “Ira comes along and says, ‘Why don’t I cover things that don’t involve governors?’” In its first year This American Life did shows on themes like “Simulated Worlds,” which included a nineteen-minute segment where Glass took the University of Chicago medievalist Michael Camille to dinner at a restaurant in a fake castle called Medieval Times, where you ate with your hands and watched jousting contests. (Camille concludes, with the generous spirit that usually marks the show, that “despite inaccuracies the restaurant captures something essential and interesting about the Middle Ages.”) Right from the start, word spread quickly, especially since the launch of the program more or less coincided with the ability of the Internet to spread audio files, albeit slowly and clunkily at first. The program shows no sign of weariness fifteen years later. This past season has a classic hour-long report on the life of a rest stop along the New York State Thruway and an account of a Chinese man who spends every weekend talking suicides off a high bridge near Nanjing. “It turned a lot of people my age and younger on to radio,” I was told by a prominent young producer. “Now young people come to the radio with the idea that it’s cool. ‘Cool’ and ‘radio’ in the same sentence is a whole new phenomenon.”

Glass himself is more modest, but he does note that a generation has grown up listening to the show, which means that when new interns arrive it no longer takes a year to train them. “Now they get it right away,” Glass told me. “They understand it’s unlike the old public radio reporting where characters weren’t characters. They get that we need arc, emotions. That’s now not a crazy thing.”

The years since have seen a cascade of new work emerging, some of it confined to a single radio station but all of it available quite easily via podcast. You can hear much of the best on shows like Studio 360 (which covers culture from Iranian rock and roll to novelist Gary Shteyngart to a convention of black banjo players in rural North Carolina) or Hearing Voices (tour a mosque, visit the Crow Reservation), or in NPR features like Radio Diaries, or in documentaries from Homelands Productions about the daily grind of work for people ranging from a thirteen-year-old Bangladeshi in a shipbreaking yard to a low-end Bulgarian nightclub singer.

It’s not all about or by newly minted hipster urbanites. Wisconsin Public Radio has for many years produced and syndicated the low-key and in-depth To the Best of Our Knowledge, and from Alaska comes from the remarkable Encounters, which is mostly just nature writer Richard Nelson out in the Alaskan wild with a microphone. Radio Open Source features the passionate radio veteran Christopher Lydon in conversation with a variety of contemporary intellectuals, among them David Bromwich, Nicholas Carr, and the psychologist Paul Bloom.3 “There’s a small world of heartfelt passionate people trying to do big work,” says Julie Shapiro, who runs the Third Coast International Audio Festival, a yearly gathering of the audio tribe in Chicago. Her Third Coast colleague Gwen Macsai hosts Re:sound, an ear-opening weekly show of the best material from around the English-speaking world: a recent show on “water,” for instance, featured the story of an Adriatic ocean liner turned into a Toronto restaurant and an “audio composition featuring bell buoys recorded while kayaking in Portland Harbor.” You can listen to people starting out at Transom.org, a website designed to teach newcomers and showcase their work, and if your local radio station doesn’t air much of this material, you can assemble your own listening schedule quite easily at PRX.org, the Public Radio Exchange, which serves as a middleman for independent producers and local stations. The sheer abundance of programming will stun you—dozens of new shows are uploaded every day, most of them owing at least a little to the aesthetic unleashed by This American Life.

American officials who have briefed the media on the subject ahead of the “strategic dialogue” say the package, totaling as much as $2 billion over five years, is aimed at helping Pakistan fight extremists on its border with Afghanistan.

The package will be in the form of financial aid under the American Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program, which in turn will help Pakistan purchase weapons and defense equipment like helicopter gunships and communication equipment produced in the United States.

It is aimed at addressing Pakistan’s insistence it does not have the capability to go after terrorists, and needs more support from the United States, according to the New York Times and CNN, which both reported the development on Monday.

The latest US largesse for Pakistan, which is separate from the five-year, $ 7.5 billion aid under the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill, comes even as Washington is lobbying fiercely for greater Indian defense purchases worth billions of dollars as New Delhi seeks to shore up its military.

India has finalized nearly $ 10 billion worth of military purchases from the US in recent months, including a deal in 2009 for eight Boeing P-81 maritime patrol aircraft worth $2.1 billion and the sale this year of 10 Boeing C-17 Globemaster III Aircrafts worth $5.8 billion, the largest defense deal with India in US history.

An even bigger piece of action is in the pipeline – a purchase worth more than $ 10 billion for 126 Multi-Role Combat Aircraft that New Delhi is seeking, and for which US companies Boeing and Lockheed Martin are in the race.

While India’s will be paying hard cash for all these transactions, Pakistan, which was already broke before it was overrun by floods of biblical proportions and reduced to begging, will essentially be getting freebie military hardware from the US in the name of fighting terrorism.

Pakistan gets free stuff that India has to buy to keep up. That news item is dated October 19th. Here’s one from Oct 20th: US Confirms $60 Billion Arms Sales Package for Saudi Arabia.

The outlines of the arms deal – the largest in U.S. history – had been known for some time, but the administration withheld an official announcement pending consultations with the U.S. Congress. Under its terms, the United States will provide Saudi Arabia with 84 advanced F-15 fighter planes with electronics and weapons packages tailored to Saudi needs. An additional 70 F-15’s already in Saudi hands will be upgraded to match the capabilities of the new planes.

Saudi Arabia will purchase a huge fleet of nearly 200 Apache, Blackhawk and other U.S. military helicopters, along with a vast array of radar systems, anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles, and guided bombs.

F-15s for Saudi Arabia. Israel already has some, as that news report mentions.

Israel has long had U.S. F-15 fighters in its arsenal and recently has committed to purchase new F-35 strike fighter jets, which U.S. officials say will preserve Israel’s qualitative military advantage in the Middle East.

Give military aid to Israel. They get US F-15s. Then Saudi Arabia pays for its F-15s. Some old story. Give freebies to Pakistan and it forces India to buy to keep up in the arms race.

There’s nothing new in all this. Even a casual observer can see what’s going on. I have been writing about the game the US plays for a while. Right after the Sept 11, 2001 Islamic terrorist attack on the US I wrote in a post, “The Looking Glass War“:

In his quest for magical power, Dr. Faustus makes a pact with the devil in which he barters away his soul. It is a powerful tale of the dangers of hubris that compels the powerful to seek even more power and are willing to make deals with devils. Dr. Faustus squanders away many opportunities where he could have redeemed himself but didn’t. It appears that the US is all set to make a larger faustian bargain with Pakistan. It is possible that the other half of the latest deal with the devil will be a nuclear bomb in the financial district of San Francisco a few years from now.

. . .
There are certain facts that get buried in all the hand wringing and the breast-beating and the calls for a war against this ‘new kind of evil.’ First the fact that the US is the largest arms exporter in the world; second, the US has the greatest appetite in the world for the energy resources in the Middle East. To maintain its insatiable thirst for the Arab oil, the US is willing to wage wars. And to finance these wars, the US is willing to sell weapons to both sides of any conflict, as in the Iran-Iraq war.

In Oct 2004, I again visited the issue since the US giving Pakistan $1.5 billion in military supplies. The True Weapons of Mass Destruction:

A report by Josey Joseph in the Oct 14th Times of India warmed the cockles of my heart. The story is about the supply of military equipment from the US to Pakistan.

… On the pipeline are more than $1.5 billion worth of military supplies over five years. Plus, numerous futuristic deals.

The arms supply is now in full flow and icing on the cake is the F-16 fighters that Pakistan Air Force has been dreaming of for long. The Navy can look forward to a new generation of torpedoes to maritime aircraft.

But the biggest gainer would be the Army: a generational upgrade in almost its entire armoury including top of the line attack helicopters, radars.

Richard Armitage in a recent interview to a Pakistani TV channel said there are “more helicopters in the queue. We have gotten now a steady stream of dependable funding to help the Pakistani armed forces… We realise they need the proper equipment, so we have embarked on a five-year programme of support.”

Armitage was referring to the $1.5 billion military aid that Pakistan is receiving over the next five years.

While Americans justify them in the name of terrorism, the supply is adding teeth to Pakistan’s offensive capabilities that are almost completely focused on India.

Why is the US so hell-bent on supporting the terrorist nation of Pakistan? What is in it for the US? After all, Pakistan is also broke. Why, one could ask in puzzlement, would anyone want to sell military hardware to Pakistan? My answer is this: so that India would be forced to buy weapons from the US to keep up with the terrorist nation of Pakistan.

The story goes like this. The US gives away $1.5 billion worth of weapons to Pakistan. In effect, the US is paying its own producers of weapons, who in turn support the US policy makers by locating their factories of weapons of mass destruction in the policy makers’ constituency. Read more jobs for the merchants of death. Then India’s defense establishment looks over the border and says we now need $2.5 billion worth of stuff from the US. More jobs for the merchants of death. Total benefit to the merchants of death: $4.0 billion. Total cost to the impoverished populations of Pakistan and India: $4 billion.

Sept 2008, I had to write that old story once again. Why Pakistan is Useful Just the Way it is.

The “Friends of Pakistan are “Britain, France, Germany, the United States, China, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, Turkey, Australia and Italy plus the United Nations and the European Union.” Among these are nations — US, China, the Arab states, France, Britain — that give aid to Pakistan. The military component of the aid is what Pakistan uses to initiate and fight bloody wars with India. India, a desperately poor country, cannot afford these costly wars but it has to fight them because the Friends of Pakistan want that India bleeds. Pakistan is the instrument.

I can see the reason why the economic meltdown of Pakistan is certainly not in the interests of the Friends of Pakistan. The biggest dagger stuck in India’s rib would be pulled out and with it will disappear the prospects of selling arms to India, of keeping India engaged in 1,000-year jihads which Pakistan regularly declares against India. The Friends of Pakistan more certainly do not want Pakistan to fail. You too would get worried if the pit bull you have trained for years to attack suddenly is in danger of dropping dead.

The Friends of Pakistan have an interest in keeping the conflict between India and Pakistan alive. Why do I say that? I use the revealed preference argument. Basically it says that by freely choosing something, you reveal what you prefer. If you have the power to choose a “Pakistan Friendly to India” but instead choose a “Pakistan as a Sworn Mortal Enemy of India”, you have revealed that you prefer that. I take it is obvious that the Friends of Pakistan could have easily enough told Pakistan that it should stop its belligerence towards India and concentrate on economic development. But they do not and that is why I believe that they have an interest in keeping Pakistan dependent on their money because Pakistan does their bidding.

Absent the conflict, the Indian subcontinent will develop differently and could in fact become economically prosperous and consequently exert an independent influence on the world. That independent influence could potentially alter the current power structure. As it is, controlling China is out of the question. They have had to make space for China. But they will be damned if India also becomes powerful.

April 2009, “The War and the Circus“, I again wrote about the problem of the global war machine.

Every nation on earth is involved in this insanity, directly or indirectly. The desperately poor third-world nations starve their own people to buy ever more expensive weapons from the advanced industrialized countries. By keeping these nations fighting amongst themselves, the advanced industrialized countries achieve two goals. First, income.

The desperately poor third-world countries pay the advanced industrialized countries for weapons they cannot afford. If one side of a particular conflict involving two desperately poor third-world countries is unable to afford the weapons, the advanced industrialized countries give out “aid” to prop it up so that it does not lose and thereby end the conflict. The other side, to maintain balance, then has to become a paying customer and buy an equivalent set. This is a source of income for the advanced industrialized countries, and more damagingly, a transfer of wealth from the desperately poor to the amazingly prosperous.

The second goal of the advanced industrialized countries (AIC) is the disposal of obsolete weapons. Weapons age and become useless to the original developers. Instead of scrapping them, they are sold to the desperately poor third-world countries. (As the saying in Hindi goes, “आम के आम, गुत्लियो के दाम!”) This provides them the space and the funds required to develop the next round of more expensive weapons — which when the time comes, will similarly be sold to the desperately poor third-world nations.

In effect, to a large extent the poor of the desperately poor third-world countries fund each round of successive advanced weapons development. Of course, the poor of the DPTWC (shortened now since I have repeated “desperately poor third-world countries” enough times to get the idea across) often cheer when their leaders buy these weapons. Their jubilance at what grinds them into further poverty arises out of the same attitude that dragged them into poverty in the first place: an astounding stupidity that is matched only by the immorality of the venal bastards in power.

I should note here that the venal bastards in power (VBiP) are not men of any specific skin or eye color. The VBiP occur in all nations — whether in DPTWCs like India and Pakistan or in AICs like the US and Russia. All these VBiP have their incentives aligned and act accordingly. They are the politicians, the generals, captains of the military-industrial complex, and weapons dealers. They are found in Washington, DC, New Delhi, Moscow, Islamabad, Beijing, and other such fine places that the poor of the DPTWC do not inhabit. The names of the politicians are all over the newspapers and their faces on TVs and magazines: Bush, Clinton, Putin, Manmohan Singh, Sharif, Mugabe, . . . The generals, CEOs of the military-industrial complex, and weapons dealers are not usually household names but they are there from all parts of the world, rich or poor.

Talk of poverty, inequality, development, and such have been all the rage for the past so many years. There are those who are convinced that entrepreneurship and innovation will solve these pressing problems. Some lean heavily on hi-tech gizmos and declare that One Laptop Per Child is the obvious answer to poverty; some others flog the horse of micro-finance mercilessly convinced that it will pull the poor out of poverty; some high-mindedly declare that taxing the rich and re-distributing the proceeds to the poor will be best (whilst all the while handling the money with very sticky fingers); some others believe that the only way out of any problem is killing sufficient numbers of bystanders through suicide bombing in accordance with their religious beliefs; the nuttiest argue that globalization, capitalism, and the market are the real villains and the best way out of poverty is to prevent any sort of industrialization, and so on. The notion that perhaps the poverty of the poor in the DPTWCs is related to the weapons (that the AIC build, operate and sell, and which the powerful in the poor countries so eagerly buy) is not advanced frequently, if at all.

I am conflicted when I consider this issue. Is it the stupidity of the poor, or is it the greed of the rich and powerful that is the primary source of this state of affairs? Perhaps it is a tango and both have to be involved for the dance to happen. Whatever it is, though, it is all karma. Or as they say, you makes your bed, you perforce has to lie in it.

If you are getting tired of reading the same old story, you are not alone. But remember the numbers — the numbers of the desperately poor in the world, and the numbers that speak of the true weapons of mass destruction. Here are some numbers for Pakistan, our friendly neighbor on whom Dr Manmohan Singh often showers “humanitarian aid”, money taken by force from Indians.

The Pakistani-scripted Mumbai terrorist attacks, far from putting Islamabad in the international doghouse, have paradoxically helped open the floodgates of international aid, even if involuntarily. Between 1952 and 2008, Islamabad received over $73bn as foreign aid, according to Pakistan’s Economic Survey. But in the period since the Mumbai strikes, the amount of aid pledged or delivered to Pakistan has totalled a staggering $23.3bn. This figure excludes China’s unpublicised contributions but includes the IMF’s $7.6bn bailout package, released after the Mumbai attacks.

Just last week, Islamabad secured some $5.2bn in new aid at a donors conference — the first of its kind for Pakistan. At that conference, host Japan and America pledged $1bn each, while the EU promised $640 million, Saudi Arabia $700 million, and Iran and the UAE $300 million each. [Source: Fail then reap rewards. Brahma Chellany in the Deccan Chronicle.]

The US is the real dealer in true weapons of mass destruction. The 1987 Nobel Prize winner Oscar Arias wrote in a NYTimes editorial of June 1999: “While the arms industry profits, people throughout the world suffer… the true weapons of mass destruction are the jet fighters, tanks, machine guns and other military exports that the United States ships to non- democratic countries–a record $8.3 billion worth in the 1997 fiscal year, the last year for which figures are available.”

The US behaves like the auctioneer in a “dollar auction”. It is a profitable game for the auctioneer but utterly destructive for the players. India and Pakistan are engaged in a dollar auction. After the Kargil war in 1999, I wrote a piece which I believe explains the nature of the conflict between India and Pakistan, and why it persists. “Dollar Auctions and Deadly Games“:

The dollar auction is a perfect model of the conflict that India faces against Pakistan, with Kashmir being the dollar being auctioned. The bids in this auction are the military expenditure of each nation and the auctioneer is the one who collects the spoils of the military expenditures of the two nations. Since advanced industrialized countries are the major suppliers of arms, they play the role of the auctioneer quite well.

Models are abstractions of the real world and their utility derives from their ability to predict outcomes that obtain in the real world and to the extent that they explain observed behavior, they are useful. Does the dollar auction model explain the observed behavior of the participants of this Kashmir conflict? Consider the motives of the auctioneer in the model. The auctioneer has an incentive to see that the conflict is not terminated. The imminent bankruptcy of one of the participants could end the game. The auctioneer could offer to lend money to the party on the verge of bankruptcy and at the same time encourage the other party to continue with the bidding. The recent IMF loans extended to Pakistan is an instance of this move in the real world that the model predicts. The intervention of the AICs to end the conflict would be parallel to the auctioneer, contrary to his interests, stopping the bidding game. This would not happen in the model and it does not happen in the world it attempts to model. One could be puzzled by the seeming irrationality of the IMF lending money to Pakistan while at the same time the AICs agreeing that India is the aggrieved party. All puzzlement disappears once one notices that this strategy precludes the possibility of the game ending too soon.

The repetition of this depressing tale is unavoidable as long as the US has an economic interest in continued global conflict. The terror is now compounded as the US is now in partnership with global Islamic terrorism. A Faustian bargain if ever there was one.

It’s all karma, neh?

He writes,

Even today, apart from the occasional blue sky claim from the Planning commission, the country has no clue about a predictable and definite timetable to eradicate poverty! Given that we seem to be a nation where geniuses abound as Economists, Media and Business visionaries – why are we not able to plan a clear Timebound path to a Poverty free India? A decade or 2 decades – whatever the case may be, but we should be able to have a national Plan.

His urgent call for figuring out a definite timetable to eradicate poverty is unexceptionable. Poverty is the most ubiquitously and evidently inescapable feature of India. We have to figure a way out of poverty.

But to get to the answer to “how to get out of poverty” we have to begin with a more fundamental question: “Why is India poor?” Only if we can honestly seek an answer to that, and only if we admit the causes of the persistent poverty, do we have a hope of emerging out of poverty. We have to know the “why” before we can get to the “how.”

Indeed I would frame it even more strongly and say that if we genuinely understood the causes of India’s desperate poverty, we would have little trouble hauling India out of poverty in a couple of decades. If you know the why well enough, the how will be trivially obvious.

Conversely, I maintain that if we refuse to explore, understand and admit the causes of India’s poverty, there is no hope in hell that we will be able to get India out of its present dire circumstances. If you don’t know the why, you can forget about figuring out the how.

I think it stands to reason that diagnoses of causation precede any remedial action — be it poor health in an individual or in an economy. The rub is that diagnosis is often hard to do and at the very least it is more than a little embarrassing to all parties concerned, both the doctor and the patient. Uncomfortable questions have to be asked, indignities suffered, and painful admissions have to be made.

Let’s continue with the medical analogy for a bit to illuminate the case I wish to argue. The patient has been suffering for a while with obvious distress due to some disease. As dispassionate but interested observers we can legitimately ask if he has been under any medical intervention? If so, which medical regimen exactly was he following? Who was the doctor and what were his qualifications? What did he advise the patient? Did the patient follow the regimen proposed? Did the doctor’s recommendation help to any extent? If not, was an attempt made to get a second opinion from another physician? If not, why not?

Did the disease worsen under this doctor? Should the patient continue under the same regimen or even under the same doctor? Should the patient actually move to a different doctor altogether? To what extent is the current problem of the patient due to the incompetency of the doctor who’s been treating the patient? Have the doctor’s recommendations been contrary to accepted medical consensus?

Now if you were to ask the doctor to investigate and answer all those above questions, it would not be very wise. The doctor has an obvious conflict of interest in not furthering that sort of investigation. Indeed, even if the doctor were not malicious, sheer incompetency could explain that the doctor under whose care the patient’s condition worsened would be unable to admit that there were alternative treatments that could help the patient. The admission that he made major mistakes cannot be expected from any doctor who is less than an enlightened selfless being, a buddha; all lesser beings will insist that the fault lies in circumstances outside their control.

So here we are. India is desperately poor and India’s economic health has actually deteriorated over the decades since its independence in many important — but not all — indicators. Some of the symptoms are acute and others chronic. It is time for the parliament to discuss and debate the question of why this is so, before it addresses Rajeev Chandrasekhar’s question of figuring out a timetable for eradicating poverty.

Allow me to lay out my analysis of the situation. Mine is just one of the many opinions and I don’t claim to any privileged position as a dispassionate but interested observer (except that I am a student of development economics trained in the neoclassical tradition and therefore have the natural biases associated with that.)

I think that one of the primary causes of India’s economic troubles is that of needless government control and interference in economic affairs that it has no competency in. By that I mean that the government interferes in businesses that it has no business to be in. It has no business in the production of goods and services that a competitive private sector can efficiently, effectively and adequately provide.

It does not have to run railways, airlines, commercial banking and finance corporations, hotels, schools, educational institutions, steel firms, automobile companies, power generation, telecommunications, bakeries, grain warehousing, TV and radio stations, petroleum corporations . . . the list goes on.

To be sure, it is not a matter of cosmic tragedy that the government of India nationalized an airline and ran it into the ground while raking up losses of billions of dollars. That is not a big thing at all, considering that India is a very large economy. But as the man said, a few billion here and a few billion there, and soon we will be talking real money.^[1]

It is the accumulated losses of few billion every year, in each of the hundreds of activities the government needlessly involves itself in, aggregated over decades that eventually add up to vast numbers that show up in the bottom line as hundreds of millions of abjectly poor people.

But note that all these businesses that the government involves itself in and loses money over, they are all undertaken with the expressly stated purpose of protecting the poor. Not a single politician, leave alone a political party, has ever done anything in India without justifying it on the grounds that it will help the poor. All policies ever proposed and implemented have always been pro-poor.

Labor laws? Pro-poor. Agricultural policy? Pro-poor. Industrial policy? Pro-poor. Education policy? Pro-poor. Show me any budget that any Indian government has ever proposed and I will show you a pro-poor budget.

The cynic in me says that indeed India’s governments have all been pro-poor — they have increased the number of the poor, haven’t they? Starting with about 200 million abjectly poor people in 1947, Indian governments have succeeded in increasing the number to around 800 million today.

It is not my case that around 200 million Indians do not enjoy a modest degree of prosperity equivalent to what the around 50 million or so at the top of the heap at the time of independence. I am merely stating the oft stated number that for the vast majority of Indians — whose numbers have quadrupled — life is as hard now as it was before and that too after decades of ostentatiously strenuous government effort to fix the problem.

My conjecture is that most, if not all, of India’s problems are created by the government of India. This claim of mine would of course be not welcome by many who have been brought up on a belief in the benevolence of the government. This is unavoidable since it is the government which controls what is taught in the schools, and what is broadcast over the airwaves. They are the unwilling prisoners of what is called “contextual constraints” — the inability to imagine alternatives to the context that they are embedded in.

Large segments of the society have internalized the myth that the government is capable — and willing — to solve to problem of poverty. This is one of the greatest binding assumptions that imprisons the population. This is an absurd notion, and as long as a large segment of the population believes in this absurdity, poverty will continue to be a reality. To escape this predicament is hard because it is in the interest of those in government to perpetuate this myth.

That a large segment of the population believes in the benevolence and competency of the government to solve economic problem is extremely unfortunate. What is worse is that the government has no incentive to disabuse that segment of this illusion. Those in government derive their livelihood — and what a splendid livelihood it is indeed — by making sure that the people don’t get educated out of this mistaken notion.

Take literacy, as another example of India’s primary failures. India had around 250 million illiterates in 1950. Now it has 650 million illiterates. It does not take much to make someone literate and numerate. Yet, the dismal statistics are an unavoidable reality. Why? My conjecture is that if the population were indeed fully literate, then it would be very hard to keep them from the realization that much of their misery is engineered by those who control the levers of the government.

The demand from a large segment of the population that the government solve their problems is mirrored on the supply side by unscrupulous governments. The people in the government get to tax the productive segment of the population, and then spend the revenues on the give-me-more segment of the population, all the time handling the money with very sticky fingers. They buy the allegiance of the vast number of the poor by robbing the productive and ostensibly the rich. This of course is a way of assuring the support of the poor at the polls, but it also has the unfortunate and predictable side-effect of impoverishing the economy as a whole. India, as it is so loudly and repeatedly proclaimed, the largest democracy in the world. It is also, not coincidentally, the largest poor country in the world.

In the above I say “ostensibly the rich” because even the rich in India are by world standards demonstrably quite poor.

I have written previously here on what the basic problem of poverty is: the engineering of shortages by the government as a method of extracting monopoly rents from the economy. (See for example, “Power, Shortage, and Corruption.” Sept 2007.) So I will not repeat those arguments here. But the summary conclusion is worth repeating. The source of Indian backwardness is the government of India.

Which brings me to Rajeev Chandrasekhar’s proposal. Yes, the Parliament should convene a special session to discuss the matter of figuring out a timetable for eradicating poverty. But will the Parliament ever convene a special session to inquire into the matter of why India is poor?

Will the Parliament seek expert opinion outside of the Parliament to tell it whether the Parliament is at fault? Will the government be willing to discuss government failures? Will the government be willing to try out solutions that do not involve the government? Will the government be open to the proposition that since it has been in the driving seat for so many decades and has driven the country to perdition, that it should give up the steering wheel to those outside the government?

The answer to that question in my mind is no. The government cannot afford to seek an alternative to the present state of affairs. Yes, things are bad for the country now. But if fixing the problems of the country requires those who currently hold power to relinquish their control, they would be damned to do so. They would rather see hundreds of millions in dire poverty just so that they can continue to rake in their billions that they can stash away in off shore bank accounts.

I can see exceptional optimism and profound faith in the goodness of people in Rajeev Chandrasekhar’s proposal. The belief that a set of people who have the power to bring about radical change will do so at their own expense is faith in the essential goodness of powerful people.

I would like to see that essential goodness tested. I would like them to investigate the proposition that they — the government — are the root of all the evils that plague India. I would ask them to debate how is it that after 63 years of governance by a government that is of the people, by the people, for the people, that India has not made much progress.

I would like them to call in experts to discuss the proposition that “The government of India has prevented India from achieving its full potential.” I would like them to hear arguments for and against that proposition. I would like that proposition being debated and broadcast for all to follow, to discuss it among themselves in schools, colleges and neighborhoods.

I would like them to call in experts to discuss the proposition that “The extreme corruption among the politicians in India is due to the excessive control that the government has on the Indian economy.”

I would like them to discuss in the Parliament of India the proposition that “The dismantling of government control over the education sector is the best alternative to make India educated.”

But I am afraid that that is not likely to happen. That would expose us to what Indians need to understand — understand how much is the state implicated in the creation of poverty that it aims to always address.

For now, we will continue to do insist that only the government has the will and the resources to fix our problems. We just don’t understand that the problems India suffers are largely created by the government, and that depending on the government to solve our problems is the equivalent of drinking sea-water to quench our thirst. It only makes the problem a whole lot worse.

Yes the Parliament may meet to discuss a timetable for India’s path out of poverty. Yes, it may even make major plans. Yes, it may even create another large bureaucracy to eradicate poverty, much like all the others it has created since independence, and fund it with a few tens of billions of tax payer money, and name it after the Gandhi-Nehru family.

It is useful to remember Finagle’s Law, a corollary to Murphy’s Law. It says that when a job is fouled up by someone, anything they do to make it better only makes things worse. The government is the last agency to figure out what went wrong and why. And in the end, when they try to fix the problem, even if well-intentioned, they just make it a great deal worse.

Special Parliament session or just ordinary session, I am afraid of what that old rascal Mark Twain had warned: No man’s life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.

NOTES:.

1. “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money.” Misattributed to Everett Dirksen.

Related Post: Of Kakistocracies, Principals, and Agents. Feb 2008.

[See the first of six parts here.]

His arguments are not difficult at all to follow. Anyone with a modest degree of common sense can appreciate them. But I am afraid that that puts them out of the intellectual reach of mullahs and secularists. I imagine that people like Rajdeep Sardesai, Barkha Dutt and their ilk are incapable of understanding Dr Elst.

Here are transcripts of two short segments from this part:

[The people of the Babri Masjid Action Committee] simply didn’t understand anything about historical scholarship. They were these theologians living in their own world of religion. . . The secularists historians had told them that ‘see these Hindus – it was all mythology – they have no evidence – you don’t have to be afraid of them’ . . .

I can understand that the BMAC mullahs will have difficulty appreciating the importance of evidence. They are to be pitied for the limited comprehension of the world, seeing as they are programmed to believe in the triumphalism and the inerrancy of Islam. But what excuse do the secularists have for refusing to see reason? What motivates them to provoke even more vile hatred of the “infidel” Hindus among the already hateful gang of mullahs?

Listen to Elst around the 7 minute mark:

Why [are moderate Muslim] voices not taken into account by these secularist busybodies who insist that any settlement, any verdict should be as anti-Hindu, as humiliating for the Hindu side as possible when in fact there are Muslims around who are willing to come to a reasonable settlement? So it is important to see that the secularists always prefer the Muslim hardliners.

I sometimes think that perhaps these secularists have a particularly nefarious agenda, a conspiracy. They actually want to make the lives of Muslims in India miserable. By constantly pushing a story of Muslim victimhood, they are ensuring continued friction between Muslims and non-Muslims. This provokes Muslim extremists to erupt into murderous rage such as burning innocent passengers on a train. Then the retaliation happens in the form of riots in which both Muslims and Hindus are killed but generally in the end more Muslims than Hindus die because the numbers are against them. The secularists are really the enemies of society at large, not just of Muslims and Hindus.

In a just world, the secularists should be the ones to die for their sins. But they get to stir the hornets nest from the comfort of their TV studios and newspaper offices, and then watch the carnage with smug satisfaction.

The French philosopher Diderot (1713 – 1784) had written in his despair that “man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” India, I am afraid, will continue to be ravaged by communal conflict until the last secularist politician is strangled with the entrails of the last TV and press secularist.

The above is from Aldous Huxley in “The Doors of Perception” (1954). He continues:

“For the intellectual is by definition the man for whom, in Goethe’s phrase, “the word is essentially fruitful.” He is the man who feels that “what we perceive by the eye is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply.” And yet, though himself an intellectual and one of the supreme masters of language, Goethe did not always agree with his own evaluation of the word. “We talk,” he wrote in middle life, “far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future-all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills.” We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s.

The maintained assumption is that all this is a rough calculation done to estimate something. As long as one is making reasonable estimates, the answer is robust and well within an order of magnitude.

1. One pound of coal has 1 kwh of energy [Source], or 3.6 mega Joules (mJ). One lump of coal is one ounce, say. Its energy content is therefore 225 kilo Joules (kJ).

2. Assume, as claimed in the TED presentation, that it takes the energy equivalent of one lump of coal to move one MB of data across the internet.

3. So combining (1) and (2), we get that it takes 225 kJ to transport one MB.

4. “As of March 2010, the global monthly Internet traffic is estimated to be 21 exabytes.” [Source: Exabyte.] Annual traffic is therefore 250 exabyte (250×10^18 bytes.)

5. Combining (3) and (4), the total energy required to transport bytes annually is 5.63×10^16 kJ.

6. The total annual world energy consumption is 43.7×10^16 kJ. [Source.]

7. Combining (5) and (6), we see that transporting bytes on the Internet takes around 13 percent of the total energy consumed by humanity.

8. World energy consumption by sector:

Industrial users (agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and construction) consume about 37% of the total 15 TW. Personal and commercial transportation consumes 20%; residential heating, lighting, and appliances use 11%; and commercial uses (lighting, heating and cooling of commercial buildings, and provision of water and sewer services) amount to 5% of the total.

9. In light of (8), the fact arrived at in (7) makes no sense at all.

10. Therefore by reductio ad absurdum, (2) is patently untrue. QED.

(You are welcome, Mr Karma Yogi.)

I have not done the calculations on exactly what percentage of total energy use is used in transporting bits. My sense is that it is of the order of 1 percent or so — which is an order of magnitude lower than the TED presenter’s claim.

Now here’s a more serious point that I want to make. I have noticed that in Indian schools and colleges, they do not teach people how to estimate quantities.

If I were to ask the average engineering graduate, for instance, what is the total market value of cars sold in India, I don’t think they will be able to give me a rough figure. Or say the size of the market for shampoo in India. Or how many pairs of shoes are sold, etc.

Once I asked a bunch of students at a very highly rated MBA school in India these sort of estimation question. Some did not even understand the question. One said, “But how can we know what the answer is without looking it up in the data bases?”

They don’t understand the notion of “order of magnitude” or the importance of “significant digits.” That innumeracy is quite widespread, unfortunately.

I have read stuff like this in newspapers:

“It is estimated that by 2014, the number of NRIs returning to India will be 205,473.”

How the heck do they know that it will not be 205,472? Or 205,474?

Recently seen on a billboard related to one construction site (weight lifting event site, if I recall correctly) for the CWG in New Delhi:

“Total project cost Rs 65,37,29,452.”

Thoroughly retarded. They don’t understand that the significant bits are just the 65 crores bit, not even the lakhs bit.

(With that kind of brains, is it any surprise that the CWG preparations were a mess.)

Anyhow, I think people should be taught these things. They should be able to consider a spherical cow. Too often we have to quickly decide if what we are reading or hearing is plausible or not. If these things are not taught, society ends up being overrun by gullible people — which of course is a sure recipe for disaster in a democracy.

The shortlist for YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video has been announced! Selected from more than 23,000 submissions from 91 countries, the 125 shortlisted videos can now be seen on the YouTube Play channel.

The jury will now select their top choices to be revealed and presented at a special YouTube Play celebration event at the Guggenheim Museum on October 21 and on youtube.com/play. The final videos selected by the jury will be on view to the public at the Guggenheim Museum from October 22 through 24, and available to a worldwide audience on the You Tube Play channel.

Here’s one that I especially like — Lucky by All India Radio:

Details:

All India Radio/ Dee Pee Studios

From: DarcyPrendergast | August 02, 2009 | 375,527 views

Lucky by All India Radio, is the viewable blood, sweat and tears of Australian based animation company ‘Dee Pee Studios’.

It involves a painstaking animation technique, whereby the team paints in the air with glow sticks, frame after frame to create entire sequences of animation, usually taking a whole night to shoot.

For more info, please check out:www.deepeestudios.com and www.allindiaradio.com.au

I find the RTI — the Right to Information — rather puzzling. The need for an RTI law merely shows that the system is deeply flawed. The RTI is a patch to a buggy system. What it shows is that in the normal course of events, the government owns the information, and citizens have to exert themselves to extract information out of the government as a special favor.

Think about it. The government in a democratic setup is actually there to serve the public. In other words, the government is the agent and the citizens are the principal. Or if you like, the government is the servant and the citizens are the masters. Only when this fact is forgotten by the citizenry is the government able to act as the principal and the citizens meekly submit to it. It should be the norm that the government does what the citizens permit it to do, rather than the other way around where the government lords it over the citizens.

All information of public interest should be available to the public as the default. No special effort should be necessary for a citizen to know what the government is doing with his or her money. Perhaps in the olden days it would have been prohibitively expensive for the information to be freely available. But information technology has advanced sufficiently that it is trivial to publish all the information to be made available without anyone having to petition a government agency to extract some bit of information.

It is time we stopped congratulating ourselves about how wonderful the RTI is and started realizing that we have degraded ourselves to the point where we are actually grateful for the few scraps of information that is thrown our way in response to considerable groveling in front of those whose salaries we pay.

If democracy has any meaning at all, it means that the people are the rulers, and not those who are in the government who actually serve at the pleasure of the people.

The subtitle of the piece mentions, “INDIA’S famously inept organising style means a disaster is on the cards.”

“We were told the Games would help us showcase the true picture of modern India,” says Mani Shankar Aiyar, a former sports minister and senior member of the ruling Congress party.

“I must congratulate Suresh Kalmadi [a fellow Congress MP and chief Games organiser] for having successfully projected the real picture: an India of corruption and inefficiency.

Chetan Bhagat, a top-selling author, says the Games are a “loot-fest”. “The CWG 2010 is by far the biggest and most blatant exercise in corruption in independent India’s history,” he says. “Not only have they stolen public money, they’ve made a mess of the job at hand.”

Corruption and inefficiency has come to define India at home and abroad. The injury is great in terms of material welfare. What is worse is the gratuitous insulting that is going on as part of an attempt at covering up by those who are to blame. Here are a couple of examples of the insults.

Lalit Bhanot, the secretary general of the organising committee explained away the filthy games village by saying:

“According to us the room may be clean, but the foreign officials may require a certain standard of cleanliness and hygiene which may differ from our standards. So in order to bridge this gap, we have appointed people to ensure the kind of hygiene they are looking for is done.” (Hat tip: Sahir Sait).

In just a couple of sentences, Bhanot has trashed Indians. We are like that only.

A footbridge collapsed injuring 25 workers, some seriously. And Sheila Dixit, the Congress CM of New Delhi explained it away saying that it was not intended for athletes. Hence it was not a big deal. We have lots of people and we don’t really care how many die. See, we don’t even get worked up when terrorists kill us by the hundreds. What me worry?

Here’s a bit from a rediff.com column by Sheela Bhatt:

The negative publicity and whatever muck is being raised against the CWG is due to the lack of ethical political leadership in the country. . .

The CWG caught the people’s attention when the Organising Committee and its head Suresh Kalmadi were named in a damaging report by the Comptroller Auditor General. The first thing that percolated to the people was that the CWG was a massive no-holds-barred money-making exercise.
. . .
You don’t even need the CAG to tell you that CWG was synonymous with corruption. For upgradation of the JNS, Delhi, the government led by Sheila Dixit and the Jaipal Reddy-led Group of Ministers (who were overseeing the CWG planning and execution) approved spending Rs 900 crore. One understood that this was a vulgar show. Even this is not shocking news in India where corrupt people win in election after election. But inspite of huge corruption when people saw that delivery is absent, the frustration peaked.

Kalmadi became the face of what all that has gone wrong but one must mention Chief Minister Sheila Dixit who must face public scrutiny once the Games are over. . .

Before the general election of 2009, Rahul Gandhi’s popularity was ascending. He was going to home of Kalawatis and other Dalits as well as many college campuses around India. He was rediscovering India and searching for suitable issues.

Then, rediff.com had asked two senior members of the Congress Working Committee why Rahul Gandhi was not taking up the leadership of CWG . . .

The response for the two leaders was similar. They said that CWG was much behind schedule and in a mess. Kalamadi’s control over the OC was total and he was difficult to replace. The senior leaders also said that “it’s risky to jeopardise Rahul Gandhi’s prestige by providing leadership to the CWG.”

There are a bunch of lessons one can learn from the CWG disaster. First, the Gandhis (or perhaps their handlers) are as clever as the people who vote the family into power are stupid. They stay behind the scenes and do the directing. Whatever they do, most of the time ends up a failure. They then don’t even have to hunt around for a scape-goat. They have a few ready even before they get started. This time around the scape goats will probably be Kalmadi and Dixit. But the scape goats are not unwilling victims as they know full well that they are handsomely paid for taking on the job.

If there is any degree of success in some scheme (which is not often), the Gandhis take the credit. The liberalization of the Indian economy that brought it out of the disastrous “Nehru rate of growth” was the doing of one Mr PV Narasimha Rao. So what happened? His name was erased and the credit was given to dear departed Rajiv Gandhi.

Take the credit, and deflect the blame. That’s the name of the game that the Gandhis play. Nehru himself was good at it. Nehru’s socialism impoverished India and they called it “Hindu rate of growth”. Can it get any more blatant than that?

The second lesson is that corruption is congruent with the Congress party. But that’s a lesson too late for the learning. For over 60 years the Congress has been bleeding the country. Yet there is a significant segment of the population continues to vote for the Gandhi family.

I cringe when I see the failures of the Congress party referred to as India’s failure. The CWG’s will paint India in very unflattering colors, even though actually it is a failure of the Congress and its leadership. But then I have to remind myself that it is a democracy. Decade after decade, some Indians have elected these people to power, instead of discarding them in the garbage heap of history.

I hope that the CWG is such an unmitigated disaster that it wakes up the middle-class Indians. If it does, the failure of the CWG would be the greatest boon for India and Indians.

The CWG may serve to reveal to the Indian voter the cesspool that is concealed in India’s basement. But the crocodiles have to be removed before the cesspool can be drained. Time for the Indian voter to use the only weapon they have: their votes.

So in conclusion, here’s my take. If after seven years and $4 billion you still cannot organize a sporting event in the capital of your country, you may be the leaders of a Third World country.

Related Posts: You might be a third world country if …

OK, now that I have dispensed with the mandatory dig at the “Leland Stanford Junior University” aka Stanford University, the arch enemy of my alma mater UC Berkeley, let’s see what the list says.

In the top 20 of this list, the US has 15, UK has 3, and one each from Canada and Singapore.

In the top 200, the US appears 72 times, UK appears 29 times, Germany 14, Netherlands 10, Canada 9, Australia 7, China 6 (including Hong Kong, the total is 10), Sweden 6, Taiwan 5, Japan 5, France 4, South Korea 4, Denmark 3, Singapore 2, Spain 2, Belgium 2, Turkey 2, . . .

Where on earth is India? Isn’t India an IT superpower? What about the IIT’s? Where on earth are the IITs? Why isn’t Chacha Nehru’s great experiment in socialism working as advertised?

In fact, the page listing the top Asian Universities in the Times Higher Ed rankings lists 27 universities: India 0 out of 27.

India not showing in rankings is not new. Here’s something from Dec 2006, “Desperately Seeking India’s Google“:

The Silicon Valley in California is an incubator for world class innovative technology companies. Why is that? Perhaps it has something to do with the presence of world class universities. The August 21/28th issue of Newsweek has an article titled “World of Knowledge” which focuses on education and global universities. Newsweek’s ranking which shows “that the world’s top 10 includes eight American universities plus Oxford and Cambridge.” It goes on to note that “of the next 40, 22 are American, five are British, five are Swiss, three are Canadian, two are Japanese, two are Australian, and one is Singaporean.”

Curiously, the combined populations of the countries that account for the top 50 global universities in the Newsweek ranking approximate the population of India. Not one of the 272 universities in India figures in that list, however. Four of the top 10 universities are in California. Stanford (established 1885) ranks 2nd, California Institute of Technology (est. 1891) is 4th, UC Berkeley (my alma mater, est. 1868) is 5th, and UC San Francisco (est. 1873) is 9th.

Of the top 50 universities, 30 are American. Is it any wonder that the US leads the world in innovation and technology? And of the top 10, four are in California. Is it any wonder that within the US, California is the home of the Silicon Valley? Not just that, Yahoo!, Google, SUN, and a whole host of lesser known global firms have been born at Stanford University. Something in the water in northern California? Or does it have something to do with the universities?

In June 2008, I noted in “Ranking Universities on Web Visibility”

In the final 5,000 rankings, there were 30 Indian institutions. The top ranked Indian university was IIT Bombay (ranked 559 of 5000) and last to make it into that list was IIIT Allahabad (ranked 4723 of 5000). In the top 1000, US had 369, India had 4, and China had 17.

Unsurprisingly, 44 US institutions were ranked in the top 50. After all, the web and the internet were not only born in the US but the midwives were US universities.

(I am especially pleased to note these rankings: IIT Kanpur (995th in the world), Rutgers (28th), Berkeley (5th), and Stanford (2nd) — schools that I attended.)

As India is around a sixth of the world population, to be at par, India should have had around 600 universities in the top 5000 instead of the 30 it has. We do hear all the time that “India is an IT superpower.” Well, that claim will be more credible if its educational institutions actually did have something to do with the use of IT.

Wakey, wakey, Mr Sibal. It is time to think for a bit instead of wasting time doing stupid things like announcing $10 “laptops” and $35 “tablets.”

Post Script: Here’s a wonderful short introduction to the history of Stanford University. The urban legend mentioned in it is one of the best that I have ever heard.

One of my basic convictions is that symbol manipulation ability is what distinguishes intelligent entities from non-intelligent ones. For manipulating increasingly larger chunks of symbols, we create higher level symbols which encode a number of lower level symbols. Vocabulary is then that set of symbols. I would define an extensive vocabulary as one with a large number of symbols, that is, the width of the vocabulary. Vocabulary can also be more or less intensive, depending upon the complexity – or depth – of the symbols. Higher intelligences have the need and the capacity to handle more extensive and intensive vocabularies.

Vocabulary matters. It allows us to reason about the real world more effectively. It allows us to avoid illogical constructs arrived at through ill-defined and vague ideas poorly understood and consequently improperly communicated.

One of my pet peeves (which stimulated this comment) is the conflating of ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’. They are cats of two distinct breeds and are not interchangeable. The first does not require a brain whereas the latter cannot exist outside a brain. A telephone directory does not have knowledge of my phone number; it merely represents that data as information. When you look up and internalize that information, you have knowledge of my phone number.

Here’s another one on language that I would especially like you to read — “Rajivspeak is getting out of hand” from March 2008:

One of my pet peeves is the idiotic mixing of English and Hindi words in advertising copy which is cropping up everywhere on billboards and in print. Perhaps it is considered cool. But it is cool in only the way that displaying abysmal stupidity and illiteracy is cool–which is to say it isn’t. What it advertises is that that both the writer and the readers don’t quite know either of the languages and perhaps don’t even know that they don’t know the distinction between the two. I call it “rajivspeak” in honor of the man who was a master in this regard.

The post had an example of rajivspeak: “country ki economic situation detriorate hotey jaa rahi hai. Five year plan ke allocations properly distribute nahin huey, jissey problems exacerbate ho gaye. hum poori tarah vigilant rahenge ki plans ka proper implementation ho. agricultural subsidies jo hain, unhey hum appropriate tareekey se apply karenge aur vested interests ko mil kar confront karenge. humein dekhna hai ki jab hum firmly united hain aur hamarey interests ko firmly defend karte hain to duniya ki koi bhi power hamein subvert nahin kar sakti . . .”

What brought this to mind? Recently I had made a few tweets about my pet language peeves–

Listen up. “Loosing” is not the spelling of “losing.” Spelling matters because language matters.
6:52 AM Sep 7th via web from Downtown, Washington

“Could care less” means “I care”; “couldn’t care less” means “I don’t care”. Saying the exact opposite of what one means is retarded.
10:46 AM Sep 7th via web from Downtown, Washington

“Begs the question” does not mean “raises the question” even if you’re an Indian http://bit.ly/bC4BMH
8:20 AM Sep 8th via web from Downtown, Washington

Just by the by, my tweets are @atanudey. Today @suraj_jt tweeted a link to this video by David Mitchell in which he says that the Queen wants Americans to please stop saying “could care less” when they mean the exact opposite. Queen’s English and all that.

I checked out another video by Mitchell. Here it is:

He’s funny and articulate. The point he makes is summed up in the old saying, “A swallow does not a summer make.” That bit of folk wisdom is very important for us to keep in mind. Too often the outliers are just outliers and are not all that relevant in the larger scheme of things. Sure, India has a number of billionaires. But that fact is immaterial to the fact that India is an extremely poor country. What should be a matter of concern to us is why is India so.

That’s all.

Just those few lines explain quite a bit about what’s happening in India. The UPA is headed by an Itlaian Catholic. She is bound by her faith to follow the dictates of the pope, the highest authority in the Catholic church. She in turn dictates to her minions, particularly Mr Manmohan Singh. He, and the other lackeys that she has in her stable, obey.

The evangelisation of India is going on full steam. The northeast is pretty much done. Even Bollywood is getting into the act. “Bollywood to make young Jesus movie (NPR).”

The Associated Press reports that Indian filmmakers were in Jerusalem Tuesday to announce their project. An excerpt:

Director Singeetham Srinivasa Rao says his production will have an all-Indian cast of child actors, featuring seven devotional songs.

Producer Konda Krishnam Raju said at a news conference Tuesday that the film focuses on the childhood of Jesus, a contrast with other movies that depict his later years.

“This is the first presentation of this type in Bollywood history,” he added.

At $30 million, the filmmakers say, it’s one of India’s highest budget movies. An average Indian movie costs about $500,000.

The story adds that there are 24 million Christians in India, suggesting there’s a market for the movie although given the amount of money reportedly budgeted to make the movie, the filmmakers have to be hoping that its appeal will be far larger than Christians alone.

The story also suggests that there are Bollywood movies based on the life of the older Jesus. If anyone out there can point us to some examples, that would be appreciated.

The UPA is headed by an Italian Catholic. She cannot be held responsible for being Italian (very few people have a choice in where they are born), and to some degree cannot help being a Catholic (most of us adopt the religion of our parents). Being an Italian Catholic, she has to follow what her religious authority, the pope, dictates to her. The pope in no uncertain terms calls Hindus inferior to Christians and in the clearest of terms lays it out that evangelisation is not optional.

So let me also spell it out: the UPA head has to promote evangelisation of Indians because it is mandated by her religion.

But let me hasten to add that it is not her fault. I would do the same if I were born an Italian Catholic. The fault, boys and girls, lies with the brain-dead stupid cretinous retarded moronic non-Catholics who vote the Congress party. That group largely consists of Hindus. In effect, these retards are making sure that their heritage is totally lost, that their culture is destroyed, that they repudiate the tradition of their ancestors. These are the real traitors of the motherland, these are the real rapists of mother India.

The next time you see a Congress supporter on the streets, remember that these are the people who are responsible for the dire straits that India is in, and that there is much worse to come if these unmentionables continue to vote the Congress into power.

Frankly, my dears, I am disgusted by the rank stupidity of Indians who support the Congress. They deserve the crap that they endure day in and day out.

Acknowledgement: The images of the former Nazi is from What would you do with £20 million? site which states

On the 16th September, Pope Benedict XVI will descend upon the United Kingdom. The cost of his visit, not including security, is £20 million. Many people in Britain object to public money being spent on this visit, particularly given the abundant wealth of the Catholic Church. Imagine what could be accomplished if this money was spent on a worthwhile cause.

The British are Christians too (not the Catholic type mostly, though) but even they have some sense that the pope must be resisted. Indians? I see that the evil woman “Mother” Teresa is being celebrated in Kolkata. Some Indians evidently delight in wallowing in their own debasement.

If your city has 7.5 lakh cars and their average length is five metres, what road length would you need to park them? Answer: 3,750 km. What if your city has just 2,045 km of roads? Gridlock of course. That’s Mumbai, and every time I visit our financial capital, I wonder how India became the economic envy of the world.

It comes as news to me that India is “the economic envy of the world” — whatever “economic envy” means. Be that as it may, let’s see what’s wrong with what he writes.

First, the average length of Indian cars is not five meters. Indeed, I doubt that Indian cars on average are longer than American cars — which are only 4 meters long on average. So a reasonable estimate for the average length of Indian cars would be 3 meters. Itty-bitty marutis and padminis and hyundais don’t grow all that big. So if you were to park all the Mumbai cars bumper to bumper in a single-file, they would stretch only 2,250 kms, not 3,750 as estimated by Mr Purie.

Second, roads are not single lane. They are at least double lanes. So you are unlikely to run out of Mumbai road surface to park all the cars Mumbai. Leading a story on traffic congestion by comparing the total length of roads to the total length of cars is meaningless at best. But that is neither here not there.

People don’t just park cars on the roads. They drive cars. Congestion has something to do with the traffic handling capacity of road, not how many kms of roads will be required to park cars in a single file.

Traffic handling capacity has to do with road condition (pot holed roads, roads dug up for this or that reason), traffic control (appropriately timed lights, for instance), traffic type (people, cattle, bicycles, autos, two-wheelers), other uses of the road (vegetable vendors, families living on the streets, kids playing, kids begging), etc.

Too many cars can of course lead to congestion. But anyone familiar with any city in India should know that it is not just the number of cars that is the problem. The problem is incompetency and corruption.

Incompetent traffic engineers make roads that make no sense. I have written about that in the past. (I highly recommend this post, Triple-point of the world at Zero Degrees Humanity, even if I say so myself.) Then there are dug up roads and pot-holed roads. That’s where corruption comes in.

You may say that I am making a mountain of a mole hill. Actually it is not a trivial issue. We are not experts. We depend on people to reason things out and tell us what’s wrong and what needs to be done to fix the problems. The editor of a major news magazine, if he takes on the task of helping us comprehend the world, has the responsibility to make sure that he himself understands it properly.

All too often people just uncritically accept what is being reported. It is important to point out silliness when you see it. It will reduce the quantity of silliness going around.

Anyway, it is a confederacy of dunces — the planners don’t really understand their job and the reporters don’t understand the problem.

Osama Abu Baker Mohammad Omar on August 23, 2010 wrote:

What a shame, look what Pakistani society has come too. it is all because of Islam and the cruel and barbaric teaching of Islam, Islam is a religion of violence and bloodshed, they have done it from Mohammad’s time, just study this stupid religion’s history and you will understand what every is happening in Muslim countries now a days, where every they go rather than convincing people they forced people to follow them and as a result today the entire Muslim world is fucked up. Even they did it to the people closest to Mohammad such as Mohammad’s own grandson. We cannot expect anything good from Pakistani’s, they deserve this. Punjabi’s used to be hindus before they were forced by muslim rulers to become muslim, Hindus are animal and on top they became muslim which made it worst, Pakistan should not exist at the first place. British rulers made and planted Jinah (who was not a muslim himself, he was a Parsi) in Indian Society. Pakistani’s killed their first prime minister, than Punjabi’s thought they were very smart by supporting monster Islamic Jihadies to kill innocent people in Afghanistan and around the world. Now Punjab is paying for it so as the entire Pakistani society. Look at what is happening all around you, Pathan is killing Muhajir in Karachi, Punjabi is killing everyone all over Pakistan. In NWFP they are killing Pathans, in Baluchistan they are killing Balochs and other Shia Minorities. Whatever is happening in Pakistan it is a PAYBACK you do bad YOU GET BAD. Punjab will burn and so all Pakistan. {Emphasis added.}

Zahid H. Bokhari wrote August 22, 2010

They were killed by the Police in civilian dress. The objective was to intimidate the people so that no one dares talk against the Politician who authorized this brutality. Nothing will happen to anyone who killed them. Absolutely nothing!

This can only happen in Punjab. The whole of Punjab are sons and daughters of the Hindu untouchables. They are not human and should never be treated like one. Never! Emphasis added.}

You see there are three types of people. There are the Muslims who are the best of people; then there are kaffirs, the ones that Allah hates and will torture forever in hell; and then there are people who are even worse than kaffirs — the ones who murder Muslims.

Hassan commented on Aug 26th:

As a british born asian of pakistani heritage this is merely indicative of the backward, illiterate and savage mentality of you pakis in pakistan.

You murderous savages have failed to progress and remain a backward and savage nation. You bleat on about islam but you are worse than the ‘kaffir’ you detest so much. God has cursed you with the floods and i sincerely hope to god your disgusting country implodes and you are wiped off the face of the earth.

May Allah swt’s lanat and wrath be visited on you a thousand times as after watching this sickening video you thoroughly deserve your fate. {Emphasis added.}

Labeling someone “worse than kafirs” is the strongest condemnation imaginable. That’s why the way to protect oneself from any criticism is to say that the Hindus did it.

The Indian election authorities claim that the EVMs are tamper-proof. That’s as stupid a claim as any made by government officials. It is impossible to make anything perfectly safe. It cannot even be theoretically done, leave alone achieve it in practice. In the face of all contrary evidence, if someone keeps insisting that EVMs are not vulnerable, the implications are fairly serious. Here are four conjectures.

First, these people are not too clued into reality. They don’t know how the world works. These people are in positions of responsibility and power. That’s not a good thing.

Second, these people are not that stupid and know that EVMs are vulnerable to tampering. But they think that the people are stupid and gullible, and therefore they can lie to the people with impunity.

I don’t doubt the stupidity and gullibility of the average voter. Still, officials should not lie. Simple ethics and basic morality demands that they tell the truth as they know it.

Third, they know that EVMs are not fool-proof but they know that there are sufficient checks and balances in place that it does not materially affect the outcomes of elections. If that is so, perhaps they should honestly make that case to the people. But perhaps they hold the people in such contempt that they believe that the people will not be able to appreciate this simple argument.

Fourth, perhaps the officials want the EVMs to be NOT tamper-proof. They want backdoors and traps built into them so that when needed, the officials can fix election.

How would the officials behave if the last conjecture is true?

A. 100% Safe. They will loudly proclaim at every instance that the EVMs are 100 percent safe. Check.

B. Secrecy. They will insist that the EVMs’ software code cannot be made public. Check.

C. Silence. They will try to gag anyone who shows conclusively that the EVMs are not 100 percent safe. Check.

D. Off to the gulag. They will arrest anyone who steps out of line. Check.

If the officials really wanted to have a good tamper-resistant EVM, how would they behave?

A. They will tell people that nothing is 100 percent tamper-proof.

B. They will make the source code of the software open to public scrutiny.

C. They will seek out people who can point out the points of failure.

D. They will move quickly to fix any problems found in the EVMs.

I had been following the EVM controversy for a while but it was just a side-show for me. It is only after Hari Prasad got arrested that I started realizing that there is much more to this than meets the eye.

If the current government has planned to rig the elections using those EVMs, then it cannot afford people like Hari Prasad going about blowing the whistle. If EVMs are not used, it will be hard for the government to rig elections — they will have to go the old fashioned way of employing thugs to capture booths and ballot boxes.

Mind you, it is not that the government does not have sufficient money to pay thugs and that there are not enough thugs to do the government’s bidding. The Congress is a past master of the game. Who knows how many elections they have rigged before. I don’t.

Anyway, times have changed. It is a modern world of internets, and mobile phones, and electronic books, and mp3 players, and facebooks and linkedins, and tweets and blogs, and what have you. It’s a digital world out there. You have to keep up with the times.

You can no longer take a chance with booth capturing and fixing the voter registration lists. EVMs are the perfect (alright, not the perfect but pretty close to being perfect) way to rig elections. A few clicks of the mouse, a few well-kept secret trapdoors in the code, and voilà, you have won yourself the right to rule the people and steal from the public.

Paranoid? Moi? Perish the thought.

But wait a minute. Why are they arresting a guy for borrowing an EVM? They did not bother to arrest anyone when the theft was in thousands of crores (equivalent to billions of dollars). So why now.

The answer is simple. It is now because the billions of dollars stolen help those in the government. After all they are the government. But one single EMV in the hands of the competent can throw a spanner in the whole rotten works. That you cannot have.

“String up the bastard,” is what the powers that be cry.

Additional links: (post script)

1. Indian EVM.

2. Save Indian Democracy.

3. EC defends arrest of engineer who exposed EVM flaws.

Pakistan, you are a failed state. Not because of Zardari. Not because of America. But because you are a failed people, all of us undeserving of sympathy. We are diseased, rotten to every brain stem, world please make an impenetrable fence around us, keep us all in so we don’t spread it to other people, other countries.

Thankfully I have not seen the video which prompted him to write that. I continue to quote him —

I have an unusually negative mindset these days. It happened after I saw the video of the two teenage brothers brutally clubbed to death by a crowd frenzied with blood thirst in Sialkot. The police watched gleefully. The video has blurs at certain parts, but even this sensible sensitivity does not prevent one from seeing mists of blood flaying from the heads of these teens as they are hit relentlessly, and remorselessly, again and again.

The murderous crowd was truly representative of the richness of Pakistan. Some wear jeans, others shalwar kameez, some were bearded, others clean shaven. The Pakistanis had gotten together to have some fun.

Do not be shocked. This wasn’t isolated, it’s just that the crowd wanted to make sure their orgasmic moment could be captured for later viewing, at one’s pleasure. We blame our ill-educated brethren for the barbarity we witness, but that’s a self-serving lie.

The middle and upper classes are immune to education it seems. They hold opinions of everyday violence even if they have never raised their hand at anyone. If you believe Jews are the scum of the earth, all Ahmadis deserve to die or that Hindus are inferior, well why not two teenage boys?

Then he writes something that I have always felt to be so true: democracy without constitutional guarantees such as the Bill of Rights can lead to horrible outcomes if the society itself is sick.

The fact is, if we had real democracy, there would be no internet in Pakistan, women would not be allowed out of their homes, education would come to a standstill and we would begin a programme of killing off every minority. Thank you corrupt generals and politicians, you keep this at bay with some sense of being answerable to a world that still has some humanity in it, even if you don’t.

Go read that piece and feel compassion for the victims and rage at the cruel monsters — not cockroaches — that do such things.

The brutal inhumanity of Islam poisons societies. The evils of an ideology that turns males into misogynistic monsters is as obvious as the nose on your face. Read the TIME report of July 29th: The Taliban and Afghan Women:

The Taliban pounded on the door just before midnight, demanding that Aisha, 18, be punished for running away from her husband’s house. They dragged her to a mountain clearing near her village in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan, ignoring her protests that her in-laws had been abusive, that she had no choice but to escape. Shivering in the cold air and blinded by the flashlights trained on her by her husband’s family, she faced her spouse and accuser. Her in-laws treated her like a slave, Aisha pleaded. They beat her. If she hadn’t run away, she would have died. Her judge, a local Taliban commander, was unmoved. Later, he would tell Aisha’s uncle that she had to be made an example of lest other girls in the village try to do the same thing. The commander gave his verdict, and men moved in to deliver the punishment. Aisha’s brother-in-law held her down while her husband pulled out a knife. First he sliced off her ears. Then he started on her nose. Aisha passed out from the pain but awoke soon after, choking on her own blood. The men had left her on the mountainside to die.

Had enough of the brutality of the followers of the religion of peace? Here’s another story of Islam and sharia in action. It turns humans into pure evil. It literally made me sick to my stomach and I very nearly threw up. It involves the taliban. The taliban are students of Islam and know what Islam demands. It demands blood.

The NY Times of August 16th reports that the “Taliban Order Stoning Deaths“. The story is about a 25-year-old man named Khayyam and a 19-year-old woman named Siddiqa. They eloped because they were in love.

The punishment was carried out by hundreds of the victims’ neighbors in a village in northern Kunduz Province, according to Nadir Khan, 40, a local farmer and Taliban sympathizer, who was interviewed by telephone. Even family members were involved, both in the stoning and in tricking the couple into returning after they had fled.

Family members killing a couple whose only crime was that they wanted to be with each other.

After the Taliban proclaimed the sentence, Siddiqa, dressed in the head-to-toe Afghan burqa, and Khayyam, who had a wife and two young children, were encircled by the male-only crowd in the bazaar. Taliban activists began stoning them first, then villagers joined in until they killed first Siddiqa and then Khayyam . . .

. . . about 200 villagers participated in the executions, including Khayyam’s father and brother, and Siddiqa’s brother, as well as other relatives, with a larger crowd of onlookers who did not take part.

Read and weep. And be very afraid. The Islamization of India under the careful ministration of the Italian Sonia Gandhi and her minions is proceeding rapidly. Death by stoning and the mutilation of women — coming soon to your neighborhood.

Are humans inherently evil? The answer is an unqualified NO. Humans are infinitely pliable creatures: we must be because that is the feature that allows us to be all that we are — from murderous savages to joyful civilized beings.

Take a child. Take any child. Put him or her in a Jain or a Buddhist household, and you are likely to get a vegetarian pacifist, not a suicide bomber. Take the same child and immerse him or her in the study of the holy book of the religion of peace, and you can make a human bomb out of him or her. As the Jesuits say, “Give me the child for seven years, and I will give you the man.”

Humans are not born evil. Here take a look at some videos of humans not stoning or maiming.

There they are making music and dancing, expressing joy. They are as much a community as the ones in Afghanistan or Pakistan that got together to kill. In all these cases, someone had to organize the events, someone said, “Hey, this is what we should do, this is how we will express our humanity, this is how we will as a community express our deepest social feelings.”

They clapped and they cheered.

So what gives? What accounts for differences in how societies behave? Some societies are rich, prosperous, and joyful, while others are poor, miserable and hateful. Clearly the foundational principles differ: Buddhist societies are different from Protestant Christian societies which are different from Islamic societies. Savage societies have savage ideological foundations and are poor.

The question then is which came first: the poverty or the savage ideology?

My feeling is that it is a bit of both. Bad ideology creating poverty, which in turn intensifies the malignancy of the ideology — and then the downward spiral. A natural experiment has been going on in the Indian subcontinent. The people in the west of India are very similar to the people across the border in Pakistan. So also, the people of West Bengal and Bangladesh. But economically and socially they are diverging as time goes by. Those who follow the religion of peace appear to be regressing.

Another natural experiment comes from abroad. There are immigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to the UK. The Indian immigrants are above average in education, income, and other positive indicators; they are below average in crime, unemployment, etc. In other words, they are near the top of the heap. The immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh are near the bottom of the heap: high crime, low employment, low income, etc.

So there you are. My apologies if you found any of the above disturbing. To reinforce my faith in humanity, I will watch once again another of the joyful videos of people dancing and partying.

(Note that in Islam, dancing and music is forbidden (‘haram’). It also forbids women from appearing in public generally, and Islamic societies insist that women should be encased in a black tent. This video goes against everything Islamic.)

{Thanks to my friend Dr O’Neill for the video links.}

Those lessons need to be cautiously interpreted in the case of India. There are significant differences between India and the US. First, the US has a 2-party system, and most people identify with one or the other. There are independents of course but at the time of voting, these have to choose one or the other. The choice is between Tweedledum and Tweedledee mostly but still there are only two of them. There is some fracturing of votes to green party or libertarian party candidates but those are mostly marginal. In India, we have a large degree of fracturing and therefore the dynamics are different.

Second, the US is a lot more homogeneous than India. Though there are regional differences in the US, people are really not linguistically divided or divided along “caste” lines. There are regional special interests but they are restricted to state legislator elections of assemblymen and state senators. During federal level elections — presidential and senators — the people choose candidates based on national interest policies.

In India, all interests are regional interests. The people vote for MPs and not for governors or chief ministers or for prime ministers. People vote for either the parties (and hence the importance of getting a ticket from a locally successful party) or for some local MP.

Third, the US has a greater degree of participation in the democratic process. Based on the fact that a larger percentage of Indians vote in the general elections than the percentage of Americans vote in their elections, one can be misled into believing that Indians are somehow more into the democratic process. The truth may be different.

Indians vote and then forget about it. But Americans get more into the process — both the width and depth of the process. The US voters participate more actively in all levels of the institutional structure of governance: the ward, the city, the county, the state, and the union. Their elections are regular and predictable — first Tuesday of November. They go to town hall meetings, they invite the local legislators to come address them in local events, they write to their senators and representatives, they petition others to support or oppose specific policies.

Fourth, in the US, the executive and the legislative branches of the government is clearly demarcated and distinct. In India, there is no distinction. This has the effect in the US of weakening the power of the executive and keeping it in check. As a consequence, the power balance between the government and the people is more in favor of the people (than is the case in India.)

As an aside I should note that this distinction between the US and India is historically conditioned. The US had a revolution that freed it from British domination. They fought the British and replaced the rules that the British had made for the US with rules that the Americans made. The revolution was first and foremost a change of the rules of the game. It was not about replacing people but about replacing the institutions. The rules prior to independence gave more powers to the government (British) and less to the people; the rules after the revolution put the people in power.

Contrast that with India’s story. There was no revolution in India. The British left but the rules remained the same. Before independence, the power was with the government (British) and after independence, the power continued to be with the government (nominally Indian). The institutions remained and only the people changed. Nehru took over as the imperial ruler of India from the British. As he himself noted so proudly, he was the “last Britisher to rule India.” Imperial rule often involves a family succession. His daughter was next in the imperial rule line. Then came her son. Then the son’s wife, who is the “first Italian to rule India.” Next will be the son of the Italian who rules India.

India continues to be under imperial rule of foreigners. It is no longer a British colony but it is still a colony nonetheless.

The government still holds all the major cards, and therefore the intense struggle to get into the government. Once you get into the government, not only do you get to make the rules in your favor, and so decide what is going to be done, but you also get to decide how it is going to be done. This is due to the previously noted fact there is no distinction between the legislative and executive functions of the government in India.

Now back to the main theme. Important distinctions arise from the difference in the power balance between the people and the government in India as compared to the US. For instance, Indians have a paternalistic relationship with the government. They take orders from the government and expect to be given stuff in return for their obedience. Government is the mai-baap. In principal-agent terms, the government is the principal and the citizens are the agents. This is the socialistic model. The government commands and the people dutifully obey.

In contradistinction to that, in the US, the government is the agent of the people and the people are the principal. The people command and the government obeys. The congress makes the rules and the executive (the governor and his staff, at the state level; the president and his staff, at the federal level) obeys. People control the congress and the congress controls the executive. So the executives have to take their case to the people, so that the people can decide and tell congress what they wish, and then the congress tells what the executive has to get done. The executives have control over how to get things done, not what things need doing.

The bottom line is that Indian democracy is about the citizens choosing who they will obey, while American democracy is about the people choosing who they will employ to carry out the wishes of the people. In the former case, it is servants choosing their masters, and in the latter case, masters choosing their servants.

Let me put it another way. The rules governing India were made by the British, for the British, and of the British. The British left and those who took over the role of masters found the rules to be very convenient since they were the new masters. The British overlords have been replaced by other overlords, and the sad fact is that not all of these overlords are even Indian.

If my analysis is correct, then it means for India to have a more democratic system, there has to be a fundamental change in the rules of the game. That is unlikely to ever happen because it requires a revolution — which in our case we have not a snowball’s chance in hell.

Since we are forced to play under rules that tilt the playing field in favor of the government, our strategy has to be quite different from those that Americans use.

Our challenge is to figure out that strategy.

Contrast this with, say, the roads in the US. They are occassionally named after some personalities (Lincoln Expressway, Martin Luther King Jr Way, etc) but mostly they are not people centered. They will have their University Avenue, College Street, Telegraph Ave, 42nd Street, Avenue of the Americas, Vine Street, Cedar Lane, Delaware Ave, Oregon Expressway, NJ Turnpike, . . . and more recently Disc Drive, Micron Lane, Internet Alley, and so on. The important point is that they are not hung up on personalities.

You may ask, what is so terrible about the naming of roads after people. Nothing on the face of it, but it reveals a deeper dysfunction of the society. It indicates that we raise people on pedestals and value personalities and not institutions. My point is that institutions matter and not people. In India, we neglect institutions and that is partly responsible for the decay of our society.

Institutions matter because they are rule based. They are not dependent on subjective arbitrariness — the whimes and fancies — of personalities. Institutions persist and outlast individuals and therefore have alonger memory. They are also less likely to be hijacked by narrow personal interests and can pursue socially beneficial objectives.

When institutions are hijacked by personalities, they decay. The Indian National Congress was a reasonable institution until the Nehru-Gandhi family made it into their personal fiefdom. The tranformation was tragic and it will continue to be a dysfunctional political party as long as it persists in elevating personalities over the institutional character of the party.

One can conjecture that it is the legacy of our feudal social system that is the cause of our dysfunctional emphasis on personalities rather than on institutions. After all, the raja ruled at his pleasure and did not bother with constitutions. The serfs realized that the law was basically whatever the raja said it was. Survival in this sort of a system depended on unquestioning loyalty to a person.

A modern highly complex economic system requires the rule of law, rather than the rule of men (or women). Arbitrary decisions based on personal prejudices cannot in general lead to socially beneficial outcomes. One can imagine an enlightened benevolent dictatorship but they are rare and rarer still is the possibility of a long succession of benevolent dictators. The odd raja may be good personally but his successors are as likely to be rapacious murderers as they are to be able rulers.

Sadly, rajas continue to exist in India. They go about in cars with led lights flashing. They consider themselves above the law (just another institution). They grant or withhold favors depending on whether they personally gain from the deal. The license-permit-quota-subsidy raj is the only institution that these rajas find worthwhile.

It is a curious fact that some of these neo-rajas live in places named after previous plunderers of the land — Aurangzeb Road, Ghaziabad, Victoria this, King George that. How long will it be after the masters have left, that the slaves will declare themselves free?

{This was originally posted Nov 2003. Minor edits made.}

Bloomberg reported recently “India to Top China as Fastest Growing Economy by 2015.”

India may overtake China as the world’s fastest growing major economy by 2015, as the South Asian nation doubles infrastructure investment and adds six-fold more workers than its northern neighbor, Morgan Stanley said.

India’s growth may accelerate to 9.5 percent between 2011 to 2015, Morgan Stanley economist Chetan Ahya said in an interview from Singapore today. India’s gross domestic product has expanded at an average 7.1 percent over the decade through the third quarter of 2009, compared with 9.1 percent in China, which surpassed Japan as the second-largest economy last quarter.

So what? Over the last decade, the growth rate of my wealth has been significantly higher than the growth rate of Bill Gates’ wealth.

I have never understood that fascination that some people have with aggregate measures. Here’s one example from a few months ago published in Rediff: India to be top economic superpower by 2030: Survey.

The Indian economic tiger is set to roar and become the most important economy in the world by 2030, says a survey. . . India is already moving up the economic league tables as the 12th largest economy in the world, as per the World Bank.

Why should it matter to anyone’s well-being how large India’s economy is? Per capita measures are more meaningful than aggregates. Let me put it this way. Take any of the small developed economies such as Finland, Switzerland, New Zealand, etc. They will never become an economic (or any other sort of) super power on this side of eternity. But given a choice I would rather have a Swiss per capita income than the per capita income of “economic super power” India now or even in some mythical future when it becomes the “largest economic power.”

Allow me to locate India in the present global context a little more realistically. The picture that emerges is not as rosy as as the newspapers would have your believe. There’s a very sensible reason for a reality check, which I will go into presently.

The Global Competitiveness Report 2009-10 published by the World Economic Forum ranks India in the 89th place out of 133. India is listed in the group “The First Stage of Development” — per capita income less than $2,000 — in the company of such countries as Burundi, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Mozambique, Uganda, Zimbabwe, etc. Those countries are not in any danger of becoming superpower any time soon.

I suspect that those countries in the “Stage 1″ of development share more than just low per capita income. I think “per capita” corruption would be another tie that binds.

We Indians of course can take some comfort that India is not as economically backward as, say, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Unfortunately, that is not quite true.

Newsweek has an interesting interactive infographics titled “THE WORLD’S BEST COUNTRIES: A Newsweek study of health, education, economy, and politics ranks the globe’s true national champions.”

I checked out how India fared relative to Pakistan. Why? Because Pakistan really sets a very low bar and I wanted to see how far above India sails over it. Anyway, you be the judge. I state here some of the numbers that you will find if you were to click on the many little drop-down list in the graphics.

India is ranked 78 overall (in the Newsweek study); Pakistan comes in at 89. No surprise there.

In the “Education” sector, India’s literacy rate is higher at 61.4% (Pakistan 50.4%), but surprisingly India’s average years of schooling is 10.3 — lower than Pakistan’s (13.2).

Life expectancy is marginally higher in India: 56 years (55 years). Here are “Quality of life” indicators:

{Click on image to go to the source page.}

Note that the per capita incomes are not too different. But income inequality (GINI) is worse in India: 36.8 (31.2). Not just that, 75.6% of Indian’s live on less than $2 a day, as compared to 60.3% in Pakistan.

We all know that Pakistan has been under military dictatorship for almost all its existence. That is not conducive to economic growth. Couple that with the burden of Islam, and it is easy to see why Pakistan is essentially a basket case.

But how do you explain India’s basket-case-ness? Consumption per capita in India, $632, is lower than in Pakistan ($789). Manufacturing as a percentage of GDP is 14.7% in India; it is 34.1% in Pakistan. It takes 7 years to resolve insolvency, only 2.8 years in Pakistan. It takes 30 days to start a new business in India; it takes 20 days in Pakistan.

Here’s another graphic on “Economic Dynamism.”

The reason for India’s basket-case-ness is because for almost all of its existence since 1947, it has been under Nehruvian socialism. Nehru gave India the so-called “Nehru rate of growth” and his clan made sure that India stuck to that growth rate.

There were two brief episodes of hope: PV Narasimha Rao ditched Nehruvian stupidity. His reward for freeing India? He has been erased from the history of India by Nehru’s clan. Then there was Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He carried on the liberalization of India that PVNR started. But as bad luck would have it, the incompetent came back to power and Mr Manmohan Singh (fake prime minister but real toady to the Italian Sonia Maino) is presiding over India’s back slide into Nehruvian stupidity.

In summary, India’s present condition is not significantly different from Pakistan’s. Pakistan has the curse of Islam and military dictatorship. India has the curse of Nehruvian socialism and Congress mismanagement. The future of the two nations could be different, however. The Indian voter has the opportunity to kick the Congress out lock stock and barrel. But I will not go into that right now.

What’s the Point?

Why am I raining on someone’s parade? Actually, I am interested in seeing India progress beyond where it stagnates today. Major mistakes were made by powerful people that led to this awfully miserable situation. How did India come to have about 800 million desperately poor people? Why do just 8 of India’s poorest states have more poor people in them than the poor people in 26 poorest countries in Africa?

Why are half of India’s children below 5 years of age malnourished? Childhood malnourishment causes mental retardation. What is going to be the future of these over 100 million children? How will they ever get out of poverty?

India had an estimated 200 million poor people when Nehru took over the ruling of the country. Since that fateful day, India’s poverty has deepened and widened. How many hundreds of millions of Indians have died prematurely after living lives of untold misery since Nehru took over as the dictatorial authority?

Surely all that has to be laid at the feet of the Nehru-Gandhi clan — people whose names are attached to thousands of institutions, roads, ports, airports, government schemes, buildings . . . It is heart breaking to see that the very people who dragged India to its knees and strangled its very life breath consider it their birth-right to continue to misrule India.

When will India wake up? How will it wake up?

This is important because unless we understand that mistakes were made, we are unlikely to know what to do to repeat them. Unless we get the people who did this to India out of power, there can be no hope for India. Note the operative word “we”: it is we who have to get these blood-sucking parasites out of power.

I would like to go into that tomorrow. And I will argue that ultimately we, the people, are to blame. And therefore we have to fix the problem.

Further Readings:

1. Manmohan Singh is a Despicably Dishonest Man.

2. Manmohan Singh is really and truly a despicably dishonest man.

Yes, all this is happening under Mr Singh’s watch. But I maintain that he is not responsible. He is not responsible because he does not have the authority. He is a minion, a rubber-stamp, a cardboard cut-out of a man. He is not an evil man although he presides over evil. He is not a corrupt man, although he shields scores of immensely corrupt criminals. He is not responsible.

He takes orders as he is not capable of figuring out what needs to be done and cannot give orders. He’s a weakling put in a position of power.

In school I had learned the story of the judgement seat of Vikramaditya. A cowherd sitting on the mound over the judgement seat of Vikramaditya could give wise counsel. But an unworthy king who unearths the seat so that he could use it himself in his palace finds that the seat does nothing for him because he does not have a clean conscience.

Mr Singh occupies the seat but that’s clearly not enough for him to become wise or powerful.

Back to Mr Prakash’s article. At one point he writes,

. . . the stench of corruption is very much in the air, we now run the risk of being dubbed a corrupt, incompetent nation.

Risk of being “dubbed a corrupt incompetent nation”? That train, I am afraid, has long reached its destination. India is a kakistocracy: defined as government by the most corrupt and the least principled.

He ends his piece with “Where are you Mr Prime Minister?”

Mr A Surya Prakash, I am afraid that the lights are on but there’s no body home.

Kerala’s ‘Arab Pardha’ billboards are a taunting reminder that in ‘secular’ India we must remain mute witness to the communalisation of culture, politics and society by peddlers of Islamism and its offensive agenda that is rooted in the most obnoxious interpretation of what Mohammed preached millennia ago. Even the economy has not been spared: Islamic banking, Islamic investments and Islamic financial instruments have surreptitiously entered this country under the benign gaze of an indulgent UPA Government whose Prime Minister spends sleepless nights agonising over the plight of Islamic terrorists and demands that all Government initiatives must be anchored in his perverse ‘Muslims first’ policy. The Prime Minister’s admirers claim he is a “sensitive person” who is easily moved by the “plight of the helpless”. Had he been moved by the pathetic sight of a Muslim woman, as much an Indian as all of us, forced to wear an ‘Arab Pardha’, his claimed sensitivities would have carried conviction. But such expression of sympathy, if not resolve to combat the insidious gameplan of Islamists inspired by hate-mongers and preachers of intolerance who draw their sustenance from the fruit of the poison tree of Wahaabism that flourishes in the sterile sands of Arabia, would demand a great degree of intellectual integrity and moral courage. The Prime Minister may be an “accidental politician”, but he is a practitioner of politics of cynicism. For that, you neither need intellectual integrity nor moral courage.

Every time there is criticism of the Islamic veil, which comes in various forms of indignity — the hijab, the niqab, the burqa, the chador — whether from within or outside the Muslim community, we hear the frayed argument: It’s a matter of personal choice; it’s an expression of religiosity; it’s culture-specific; it’s a minority community’s right, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. All that and more is balderdash, not least because there is no Quranic injunction that mandates a Muslim woman to wear an ‘Arab Pardha’. Given the nature of the community’s social hierarchy and the grip of the mullahs, rarely does a woman protest, leave alone rebel. Those who do, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalian activist whose book The Caged Virgin provides a revealing insight into Islamism’s warped religio-political ideology, are hounded and live in perpetual fear of losing their lives. Blasphemy is not tolerated by those who live in a world darker than the darkest burqa, a world in which even Barbie wears the Islamic veil lest her plastic modesty be compromised.

But this is not only about the denial of an individual’s liberty, nor is it about the suppression of human rights in the name of faith. It is about the in-your-face declaration of Islamists that they can have their way without so much as lifting their little finger. It is a laughable sight to watch Malayalees trying to navigate crowded streets in Kochi wearing white Arab gelabayas, the loose kaftan like dress that along with the kafeyah — or ‘Arab rumal’ — has become a symbol of trans-national radical Islam, their ‘Arab Pardha’ clad wives and daughters in tow. But it is not a laughable matter.

Increasingly, we are witnessing a shifting of loyalties from Malabar to Manipur. Faith in India is being transplanted by belief in Arabia. This should alarm those who believe in the Indian nation as a secular entity.

How long before the call for the “Islamic Republic of Kerala” goes out? How long before the infidels of Kerala are ethnically “cleansed” and made refugees in the rest of India like the Kashmiri pundits of today? How long before the Arabization of the states like West Bengal is total like the Arabization of the eastern part of the undivided Bengal state (now the Islamic Republic of Bangladesh)? How long before the infidels of India become a pathetically cringing minority?

Pakistan’s nukes will not destroy India — because there are too many Indians. But the Arabization of India will destroy India, just like it has already destroyed other bits of the Indian subcontinent — like Pakistan and Bangladesh.

We the remaining infidels of the Indian subcontinent have a choice. Stand up and fight against the Arabization of India or else prepare to be annihilated like the infidels who lived in what is today Pakistan and Bangladesh. Never imagine that what happened to the Kashmiri pundits will not happen to us. Never imagine that what happened to the Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh will not happen to those who so far have managed to survive in India so far.

We can stand up and fight, or we should be reconciled to seeing our women in black tents and our children becoming suicide bombers willing to kill infidels such as ourselves for the greater glory of their bloodthirsty god.

There are also significant differences in how entrepreneurs see themselves relating to their policy environments. In India, 81% of business owners say that jugaad, the ability to improvise and find ways around prohibitive rules and institutions, is important to business success. In China, 93% of business owners say guanxi, the networks and relationships (primarily with the state) necessary to succeed in business, are important to their own success. Generally, enterprising individuals in India believe they succeed in spite of the state, while in China they think they succeed through their connections to it.

So far, our findings suggest entrepreneurship in India is marked by a kind of sustainability that is less evident in China. Because India’s entrepreneurs have succeeded amid dysfunctional government and financial institutions by developing a kind of independent and experimental ingenuity, it stands to reason that the enterprising class would prosper even more were India to reduce barriers to business and clean up corruption. In China it is unclear what will happen if state efforts are no longer sufficient to entice and groom the entrepreneurs its economy needs. [Emphasis added]

Note “reduce barriers to business and clean up corruption.” Reduce business barriers? OK, the government erects them; only it can remove them. But it does not have an incentive to do so because those in power actually gain from them while the country loses. The story is the same with corruption. Sure the average smalltime crook is into corruption. But for massive multi-tens-of-thousands of crores corruption, you have to be in government. The high level corruption eventually trickles down and gives support to the petty corruption that the average person encounters daily.

I think a reasonable case can be made that the biggest enemy of India is the government of India. It began with the British, and the job was eagerly taken over by FNehru, and from then on, with only a short few breaks, the FNehru clan has presided over the destruction.

All things considered, twitter is useful but it also blunts the desire to blog. It’s like junk food just before dinner time. I will resist the temptation.

So here are some topics that caught my attention over the last few days and which I mentioned on twitter.

Aug 6th I: Under the evil ideology, people lose humanity & descend into organized homicidal insane savagery

That referred to this:

Come out into the Streets to Save Sakine’s Life!

In the face of immense international opposition, the Islamist regime in Iran was forced to retreat from stoning to death Sakine Mohammadi-Ashtiaani, a 42-year-old Iranian woman, for ‘adultery.’ But it now seeks to kill her by other means! It has rejected even the offer of its associate, President Lula Da Silva of Brazil, who had officially announced that his country would grant asylum to Sakineh and her family. What the regime did instead was to refer her case to Saeed Mortazavi, nicknamed ‘the torturer of Tehran,’ now the Deputy Prosecutor-General.

Stoning to death is the standard response in some countries stuck in the 7th century CE. Here’s another instance I tweeted the same day:

Evils of an ideology that turns males into misogynistic monsters as obvious as the nose on your face

That referred to a TIME report on “Afghan Women and the Return of the Taliban“:

The Taliban pounded on the door just before midnight, demanding that Aisha, 18, be punished for running away from her husband’s house. Her in-laws treated her like a slave, Aisha pleaded. They beat her. If she hadn’t run away, she would have died. Her judge, a local Taliban commander, was unmoved. Aisha’s brother-in-law held her down while her husband pulled out a knife. First he sliced off her ears. Then he started on her nose.

Taliban are “students” — students of Islam, to be specific. In this age of the internet, Google, and Twitter, it is impossible to avoid knowing about the horrors that an ideology is unleashing on humanity. It is as impossible to not be afraid of that ideology. Basic self-preservation elicits the fear response. I am an Islamophobe — one who is afraid of Islam. If you are not, you are made of sterner stuff.

Talking of horrors, yesterday was the 55th anniversary of the Aug 6th 1945 bombing of Hiroshima by the US. In an act which can only be described as state terrorism (not the first of its kind in the history of humanity, unfortunately), the US initiated the use of nuclear bombs on civilians:

On Monday, August 6, 1945, at 8:15 AM, the nuclear bomb “Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima by an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, directly killing an estimated 80,000 people. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought total casualties to 90,000-140,000. Approximately 69% of the city’s buildings were completely destroyed, and about 7% severely damaged. [Wiki.]

Hiroshima was only the first. Three days after the Little Boy’s visit to Hiroshima came the Fat Man’s visit to Nagasaki.

By executive order of President Harry S. Truman the U.S. dropped the nuclear weapon “Little Boy” on the city of Hiroshima on Monday, August 6, 1945, followed by the detonation of “Fat Man” over Nagasaki on August 9. These two events are the only active deployments of nuclear weapons in war. . .

Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki, with roughly half of the deaths in each city occurring on the first day.

. . .

According to the U.S. Department of Energy the immediate effects of the blast killed approximately 70,000 people in Hiroshima. Estimates of total deaths by the end of 1945 from burns, radiation and related disease, the effects of which were aggravated by lack of medical resources, range from 90,000 to 166,000. Some estimates state up to 200,000 had died by 1950, due to cancer and other long-term effects

Mass death merely becomes statistics. Nuclear bombs are not the only way to develop cancer. Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer recently. He wrote a piece titled “Topic of Cancer” (no doubt the reference to Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer”) for Vanity Fair. I can think of few celebrities whose personal health matters more to me than Christopher Hitchens. His piece is as always fiercely and fearlessly honest. He cares deeply about the world and he fights without pulling his punches. With his heavy smoking and drinking, it is not surprising that he has cancer but I still think it is unfair:

I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?

Here’s a bit from a Slate article from Hitchens, “Why Does Pakistan Hate the United States” (Dec 2009):

Why do the Pakistanis hate us? We need not ask this in a plaintive tone of “after all we’ve done for them,” but it is an apparent conundrum nonetheless. The United States made Pakistan a top-priority Cold War ally. It overlooked the regular interventions of its military into politics. It paid a lot of bills and didn’t ask too many questions. It generally favored Pakistan over India, which was regarded as dangerously “neutralist” in those days, and during the Bangladesh war it closed its eyes to a genocide against the Muslim population of East Bengal. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Washington fed the Pakistani military and intelligence services from an overflowing teat and allowed them to acquire nuclear weapons on the side.

This, then, is why the Pakistani elite hates the United States. It hates it because it is dependent on it and is still being bought by it. It is a dislike that is also a form of self-hatred of the sort that often develops between client states and their paymasters. (You can often sense the same resentment in the Egyptian establishment, and sometimes among Israeli right-wingers, as well.) By way of overcompensation for their abject status as recipients of the American dole, such groups often make a big deal of flourishing their few remaining rags of pride. The safest outlet for this in the Pakistani case is an official culture that makes pious noises about Islamic solidarity while keeping the other hand extended for the next subsidy. Pakistani military officers now strike attitudes in public as if they were defending their national independence rather than trying to prolong their rule as a caste and to extend it across the border of their luckless Afghan neighbor.

This is, and always was, a sick relationship, and it is now becoming dangerously diseased. It’s not possible to found a working, trusting, fighting alliance on such a basis. Under communism, the factory workers of Eastern Europe had a joke: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” In this instance, the Pakistanis don’t even pretend that their main military thrust is directed against the common foe, but we do continue to pay them. If we only knew it, the true humiliation and indignity is ours, not theirs.
. . .
This will continue to get nastier and more corrupt and degrading until we recognize that our long-term ally in Asia is not Pakistan but India. And India is not a country sizzling with self-pity and self-loathing, because it was never one of our colonies or clients. We don’t have to send New Delhi 15 different envoys a month, partly to placate and partly to hector, because the relationship with India isn’t based on hysteria and envy. Alas, though, we send hardly any envoys at all to the world’s largest secular and multicultural democracy, and the country itself gets mentioned only as an afterthought. Nothing will change until this changes. [Emphasis added.]

I am saddened to realize that he will not live to be an old man. Here’s a brief video of a CNN interview of Christopher Hitchens where he talks “about his cancer diagnosis and religious beliefs. He also discusses the two types of prayer groups that have formed — those praying for his recovery and redemption, and those praying for his death.”

We all will die one day. So will everyone we know. So will everyone who will ever be born. The Buddha’s final words on his death bed were, “All composite things pass away. Strive for your own liberation with diligence.”

Hitchens will be missed most in the matter of Mother Teresa. He was her fiercest critic. There are scores of critics — even many who have worked for her missionary charity. One such former supporter of Mother Teresa working to bring her mission under scrutiny is Hemley Gonzalez.

The Facebook page on “STOP the Missionaries of Charity” has more on his work. A FORBES India article “Mother Teresa’s Legacy under a Cloud” reports that Hemley went to Kolkata in December 2008 and stayed for two months.

“I was shocked to see the negligence. Needles were washed in cold water and reused and expired medicines were given to the inmates. There were people who had chance to live if given proper care,” says Hemley. He narrates incidents of an untrained volunteer wrongly feeding a paralysed inmate, who choked to his death; and another where an infected toe of an inmate was cut without anesthesia. “I have decided to go back to Kolkata to start a charity that will be called ‘Responsible Charity.’ Each donation will be made public and professional medical help will be given,” says Hemley, who now runs a campaign on Facebook called ‘Stop Missionaries of Charity,’ and has over 2,000 members.

Closer to home, my friend Sandeep has an excellent post on his blog, “Celebrating the Century of a Fraud“:

The deeds of the deceased “champion of the culture of life” can very briefly be summed up thus:

* Sided with dictators
* Took money from known swindlers of public money
* Failed to return such money that she had received as donation
* Didn’t submit any account of the bountiful donations she received
* Didn’t really care for the “sick” and “dying” but used their condition as an opportunity to convert them to Christianity.

For a sickening blow-by-blow account of this incredible Christian zealot’s life and deeds, I refer you to Hitchens’ masterly The Missionary Position and this book available online for free. That said, it’s fairly easy to create a myth but tougher to propagate and sustain them for decades.

Moving on, here’s an interesting item: WikiLeaks posts huge encrypted file to Web.

LONDON — Online whistle-blower WikiLeaks has posted a huge encrypted file named “Insurance” to its website, sparking speculation that those behind the organization may be prepared to release more classified information if authorities interfere with them.
At 1.4 gigabytes, the file is 20 times larger than the batch of 77,000 secret U.S. military documents about Afghanistan that WikiLeaks dumped onto the Web last month, and cryptographers say that the file is virtually impossible to crack — unless WikiLeaks releases the key used to encode the material.

No one other than wikileak people know what that file contains. But I guess it contains what the title says: insurance. People who may wish the people who run wikileaks harm may reconsider because that file may have information that could ruin their (people who wish to harm wikileaks folks) day.

And now for some light-hearted fun. Air is the answer to power woes in Bangalore, says a report on NDTV. What’s the big deal? Someone uses compressed air to drive some equipment.

Nanjundaiah K, a management student, plans to provide uninterrupted power supply to his village using air power instead of electricity.

After designing city’s first phoenix air engine car, he plans lighting his village using the same technology.

“Preparations are on to light up my village using this technology,” said Nanjundaiah. “The technology has proven handy in making of my dream car. I hope to repeat the same on a larger scale.”

I know this is NDTV. You cannot expect journalistic excellence or even plain old-fashioned honest reporting. It is by the retards, for the retards, of the retards. In this case it is hard to tell whether the reporter or the “inventor” is the greater retard.

But this is not new. This happens fairly regularly in India. See this post on “Extraordinary Claims Investigated by the Profoundly Stupid”.

Have a good weekend.

David Cameron has risked inflaming international relations after suggesting Pakistan is promoting the ‘export of terror’ in Afghanistan and around the world.

In words which will be greeted with alarm in Islamabad, the Prime Minister also suggested that Pakistan had links with terrorist groups, and was guilty of double dealing by aligning itself with both the West and the forces it was opposing.

Mr Cameron’s attack will be even more unwelcome given that he was speaking during a visit to India, Pakistan’s neighbour and great military rival.

So it is OK for Pakistan to receive billions from the US and UK, and then turn around and use part of the money to promote terrorism and the taliban. But it is not OK for Pakistan’s patrons to announce that Pakistan is using the money to kill and terrorize. And so what does Pakistan do in response to Cameron’s comments?

It whines. It whines the way it always does whenever anyone speaks the truth about Pakistan’s promotion of Islamic terrorism. Pakistan’s foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi whined, “Pakistan was itself a victim of terrorism and its efforts against violent extremism could not be negated.”

You know that story about the guy who killed his parents and at his trail pleaded that as he was an orphan, he was actually a victim and so deserved the court’s sympathy.

That’s the stuff of petty farce. On balance, I believe that the US, the UK and Pakistan are players in a global farce that is really not very funny.

“Isn’t China Socialist? How is it working for them then?”

A few months ago I met an author who is writing a book on China. He was being shown around by a Chinese guide during a visit to China for research. They were checking out a gated residential area where the houses cost millions of dollars. The author asked his guide how it was possible to have such expensive housing in a country committed to communism. The guide said, “In China, we do what we have to do. If it works, we call it communism and get on with doing what needs done.”

That’s good old fashioned Confucian pragmatism. Deng Xiaoping was led by that spirit when he said, “No matter if it is a white cat or a black cat; as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat.”

China is working because its leaders like Deng Xiaoping have brains, guts, spine, and vision — four things that are missing in India’s leaders in general but are particularly absent in Congress leaders. The lack of brains, guts, spine and vision is epitomized in the person of Dr Manmohan Singh.

See Prof Pranab Bardhan’s quote from Authoritarianism and Democracy:

India’s experience suggests that democracy can also hinder development in a number of ways. Competitive populism– short-run pandering and handouts to win elections– may hurt long-run investment, particularly in physical infrastructure, which is the key bottleneck for Indian development. Such political arrangements make it difficult, for example, to charge user fees for roads, electricity, and irrigation, discouraging investment in these areas, unlike in China where infrastructure companies charge full commercial rates. Competitive populism also makes it difficult to carry out policy experimentation of the kind the Chinese excelled in: for example, it is harder to cut losses and retreat from a failed project in India, which, with its inevitable job losses and bail-out pressures, has electoral consequences that discourage leaders from carrying out policy experimentation in the first place. Finally, democracy’s slow decision-making processes can be costly in a world of fast-changing markets and technology.

Bardhan is a keen observer of India and China. In 2003, I had posted excerpts from an essay of his titled, “Crouching Tiger, Lumbering Elephant.” Worth re-reading.

I recommend another article by Bardhan. In the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of Boston Review, he wrote, “What Makes a Miracle: Some myths about the rise of China and India“:

When I grew up in India, I used to hear leftists say that the Chinese were better socialists than us. Now I am used to hearing that the Chinese are better capitalists than us. I tell people, only half-flippantly, that the Chinese are better capitalists now because they were better socialists then!

Moving on, back to the comments. DK wrote:

It rewards a lack of merit. And since the majority would like to get something for nothing, they prefer Socialism. Of course you know this, but this point should have been brought out in your post.

This is also the reason why India remains, at its heart, a socialist nation. It is very difficult to convince someone with minimal knowledge of economics (which even our most “educated” people have) that competition and choice is good. We are hardwired to believe that there is always one single pie and more competition means that one’s own share of the pie will be reduced.

And the only way, we can challenge this is by making people (and I mean the ones who vote) very clearly understand that Govt. handouts and doles are simply a way of making them progressively and increasingly dependent on these. Again, the typical Indian would rather look at short term benefits rather than long term ones.

Thanks, DK.

Rex’s tongue-in-cheek comment was

“Socialism? But Chacha Nehru recommended socialism for India, therefore it must be good!”

No, can’t argue with that, can you? Chacha Nehru’s shit didn’t stink, if you were to go by what the followers of the Congress party say. India’s misfortune is that his followers continue to rule the land. It’s all karma, neh?

Thanks to Ketan for referring to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Agree totally.

Dinesh Darme started off his comment with

Incentives are ok. But upto a certain point. Just ask what compelled mathematicians, physicist, writers, etc to work much harder, to burn the midnight oil. It wasn’t fame/material riches/facilities. They did so because of their love for specific fields. They were in pursuit of knowlegde.

I think there is a simple misunderstanding here. The words “incentives” and “motivations” are not synonyms. We all are motivated by incentives. That is tautologically true. If the incentives are missing, we are not motivated to get things done.

Motivations can be internal or external. For a person to burn the midnight oil, regardless of the kind of work, the person has to be motivated. For some, the work is its own reward because they are internally motivated. Einstein wanted to know how the bits that make up the universe work. He was not really “working”; he was playing.

Most of us, especially in poor countries such as India (thanks to retarded leaders like our beloved Chacha Nehru), don’t have the luxury of doing things that are merely internally motivated. Most of us have to work, not play. But I do think that in the not too distant future, more people would have the opportunity to play. See my article, “The End of Work: An Essay on the Dawning of the Post-work World”, for a wild-eyed speculation of that future.

What sort of incentives work depends on what you need to get done. For motivating people to blow themselves up and kill infidels in the bargain, brainwash them with visions of virgins and rivers of wine. This will not work for anyone who is not brought up to believe in fantastically stupid ideologies.

For someone who has a few billion dollars of wealth, the incentive to make another million will not work. But an entrepreneur will work ceaselessly to make her first couple of million bucks.

Love, fame, money, affection: all these are powerful motivators but what works for one may leave the other cold. Still, like all living beings, we are motivated by “rewards” whether internal or external. Remove the reward, and you can be sure that the action will not take place.

Any system which neglects to take into account this fundamental truth falters and fails. The carcass of communism is proof that disregarding the fact that incentives matter is fatal.

Finally, Kaffir asks

Atanu, and what are your incentives (in the sense you used the word in your post) that keep you writing this blog?

Good question. I have mentioned this before but I am too lazy to dig up the references. So here it is in a nutshell.

I am a student of economics because I want to understand why India is poor. It bothers me that India is poor because I find the sight of poverty truly distressing. I feel sick to my stomach. Why? Because I empathize with the poor and I vicariously feel the pain. Why? Because I love comfort, I like good food and drinks, I love music and reading and visiting places — all of which I would not have had had I been poor.

I am primarily motivated by internal motivations. I strongly identify with Bertrand Russell’s motivation:

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

[See this.]

Money does matter to me but not too much. I don’t have too much of it, and neither do I have too little. I have just the right amount. I have no personal ambitions.

I write this blog because it is play, not work.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

An economics professor said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said ok, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism.

All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A. After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.

But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied only a little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied less than what they had. The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great; but when government takes all the reward away; no one will try or want to succeed.

[I am not entirely sure which source to credit for the story. It seems that this could be it but I don't know.]

The idea of sharing stuff equally is not a bad idea, actually, if it is confined to a small closely-knit group of people who all care for each other deeply – as in a family. The usual problems associated with interactions among large anonymous groups of people, problems identified as “prisoner’s dilemma”, or “the tragedy of the commons”, don’t usually arise in such small persistent groups. In any case, free-riders in small groups can be easily identified. Also, most people value the welfare of their own family members more than they value the welfare of strangers. That curbs any impulse to free-ride.

Indians need to understand why socialism fails. That is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for India to get out of poverty.

I too would be upset if my hometown was taken over by a bunch of immigrants who were not people like me. That’s human nature: we like people like us. So I can easily understand where Mr Stein is coming from. That he expresses his xenophobic thoughts in his column read by tens of thousands is surprising and refreshing in an age of hyper-active political correctness.

Here’s the odd part: the vast majority of people — including those who took offense at the column — will feel the same way if they were to put themselves in Mr Stein’s shoes. So, I think it is at least a little bit hypocritical that they are throwing stones at him. They could empathize with him and get on with their lives.

Instead, they are demanding that TIME remove the column and Stein apologize. (See this news item in The Pioneer of 7th June for more. I should mention that the item heading — “TIME apologizes to Indian-Americans” — is misleading. TIME regretted that the article upset some people; it did not regret the publication of the article. That distinction does make a difference.)

Anyhow, there you are. People not happy that someone has expressed an opinion that makes them a wee-bit uncomfortable. I suspect that there’s more than a little bit of truth in what Stein claims, and that is what is upsetting about the piece.

In the list of things that one should get upset about, Stein’s column must rate very low. His was just an opinion frankly — although a bit awkwardly — expressed about a matter of fact. If you consider the matter for a bit, Indians are immigrants in the US in such large numbers because they seek economic opportunities not available to them in India. The reasons for India’s backwardness and poverty should be the primary concerns of Indians and there’s where all the upset and outrage ought to be.

I don’t know why we Indians don’t get outraged by reports of massive endemic corruption by politicians. Why isn’t there huge popular protests about that? Why do people tolerate that? Why don’t Indians refuse to vote corrupt and criminal people into political office? Why does the country as a whole tolerate a despicably dishonest man as the prime minister who takes his orders from an Italian woman?

The reason India is poor is because the collective wisdom of the Indians elects “leaders” who are incompetent and cannot make choices that would create wealth. Immigration to developed economies is a way out for a tiny minority. They do that despite facing many hardships — including vicious attacks against them in print and in person.

We have to get our priorities right and get outraged by what the politicians are doing to the country, not by an opinion piece by a columnist who is merely pointing out that his hometown is not what it used to be.

I have nothing per se against dictators. In small or large measures, organizations and institutions have people at the top who make decisions and enforce their dictates either through force or through persuasion. There’s nothing in a flawed democratic setup that recommends it over the rule of an enlightened dictator. What I am against is the rule of ruthless selfish myopic unintelligent dictators.

Mrs Gandhi’s dictatorship is not the kind that recommends itself to me.

I was not thrilled by the dictatorship of the original Mrs Gandhi. I am even less thrilled by the dictatorship of the Italian Mrs Gandhi. For now, she’s just dictating to her lackeys such as Manmohan Singh and Pratibha Patil, and the party she heads. But if the Congress ever gets a majority in the parliament, we can expect a full-blown dictatorship for India.

Italy gave the world fascism. Mussolini was an Italian. Worth keeping in mind.

But we should pause here to remember that dictators and dictatorships are endogenous, not exogenous, to the population.

In an introduction to Étienne de La Boétie’s Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (1576), Murray Rothbart writes that the fundamental insight was

. . . that every tyranny must necessarily be grounded upon general popular acceptance. In short, the bulk of the people themselves, for whatever reason, acquiesce in their own subjection. If this were not the case, no tyranny, indeed no governmental rule, could long endure. Hence, a government does not have to be popularly elected to enjoy general public support; for general public support is in the very nature of all governments that endure, including the most oppressive of tyrannies. The tyrant is but one person, and could scarcely command the obedience of another person, much less of an entire country, if most of the subjects did not grant their obedience by their own consent.

India needs enlightened leaders, whether dictators or democrats. But it has been getting stupid leaders — dictators and “democrats” — not because of some unfortunate accident but because the population at large is not “enlightened.”

For India to get decent leadership, Indians have to change. At a minimum, Indians have to stop being impressed by charlatans and crooks. Indians have to demonstrate that they can take the long view, that they are not willing to vote criminals into office.

Indians have granted “their obedience by their own consent” to dictators for a long while. The most recent in living memory is Mrs Indira Gandhi. Before that it was to their British overlords. Before that to the Islamic invaders. It goes into remote antiquity perhaps.

On the 35th anniversary of Mrs Gandhi’s revelation of her true nature as a dictator, it is absolutely important that we remind ourselves that it is high time Indians gave up voluntary servitude.

[See also: "THE POLITICS OF OBEDIENCE: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude.".]

Letter Word Pronunciation
A ALPHA AL fah
B BRAVO BRAH voh
C CHARLIE CHAR lee
D DELTA DELL tah
E ECHO ECk oh
F FOXTROT FOKS trot
G GOLF GOLF
H HOTEL HOH tell
I INDIA IN dee AH
J JULIETT JEW lee ETT
K KILO KEY loh
L LIMA LEE mah
M MIKE MIKE
N NOVEMBER NO vem BER
O OSCAR OSS car
P PAPA PAH pah
Q QUEBEC KWEE beck
R ROMEO ROW me OH
S SIERRA SEE air RAH
T TANGO TANG go
U UNIFORM YOU nee FORM
V VICTOR VIK tah
W WHISKEY WISS kee
X X-RAY ECKS ray
Y YANKEY YANG kee
Z ZULU ZOO loo

For some, it’s been a lonely trek so far. They have persevered for years trying to shine some light on the lies. Dr Subramaniam Swamy, National President of the Janata Party, has been tireless in his efforts to reveal the truth. “Do you know your Sonia?” asks Dr Swamy and then goes on to expose, among other things, Three Lies about Edvige Antonia Albina Maino aka “Sonia Gandhi”.

But them internets (or interwebs, if you like) is an awesomely mighty weapon against lies. Too many Indians are getting access to the internets and it is getting rather hard for the Congress to keep things under wraps. Just as an aside, the Congress will try its best to retard the growth of the web in India.

Anyway, the Congress is once again up and about trying to censor a book by a Madrid-based writer, Javier Moro, titled “El Sari Rojo” (The Red Sari). MSN News reports that “Cong targets Sonia’s ‘Red Sari’“:

First published in October 2008, the book has already been translated into Italian, French and Dutch, and an English translation by Peter Hearn is ready for publication.
. . .
In an email, Moro, 55, said that Sonia’s lawyers, including Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi, “have just written to my Italian and Spanish publishers to demand the withdrawal of the book from the stores. Nobody understands very well why, but that’s what they are up to”.

Moro thinks that the Congress leaders “did not like the recreation of her life in Italy as told in my book”.
. . .
The novel mentions Christian von Stieglitz as “the friend who introduced her to Rajiv when they were students”, describes Congressmen persuading a reluctant Sonia to accept the presidency of the party, and then, in flashback, goes to the “village of Lusiana in the Asiago mountains in the foothills of the Alps”.

There, “in accordance with tradition the neighbours tied pink ribbons to the bars on the windows and doors” when Sonia was born in December 1946, a post-war child. Writes Moro, “A few days later, she was christened by the Lusiana parish priest and given the name of Edvige Antonia Albina Maino.” But her father Stefano called her Sonia. “In this way, he kept the promise he made to himself after getting away from the Russian front with his life.”

According to Moro’s book, Stefano was part of Mussolini’s army that was defeated by the Russians. “There were thousands of prisoners, among them Stefano, who managed to escape together with other survivors. They succeeded in taking shelter in a farmhouse on the Russian steppes, where they lived for weeks under the protection of a peasant family…. As a tribute to the family that had saved his life, he decided to given his daughters Russian names.”

You will not find the above very surprising if you have been following what Dr Swamy has been saying for years. It is not news that Antonia Maino’s father was a soldier in a fascist (in the original sense of the word) army. The Congress cannot afford that that becomes common knowledge.

Although just because her father was a fascist need not imply that Antonia Maino is a fascist. What is worrisome is that a foreign-born person wields so much power in India. Naturalized citizens are all good and fine but they should not be allowed to be in positions of high power. The US recognizes this and does not allow non-native born citizens to become the president of the US.

It is undeniable that humans have loyalty to their place and nation of birth. Only psychopaths and severely mentally handicapped people can totally sever the ties to their motherland. To the average human, loyalty to one’s faith, one’s place of birth and one’s family comes naturally. So claims that she does not have loyalty to her nation of birth are either false or she is a psychopath.

Indians take great pride in the achievements of not just of Indians abroad but even those whose ancestors were Indians. This is a two-way street: Indians or people of Indian origin care about India and feel a deep connection with it. This is all natural and good — and expected.

I speak from personal experience. More than half my adult life was spent in the US. I voluntarily got myself an American passport. I love living in the US, most of my friends and acquaintances live in the US, and I miss living there. Both India and the US are home to me. But my feelings for India are most certainly deeper than my feelings for the US. Every time I arrive in India from abroad, I get goosebumps recalling Sir Walter Scott’s poem:

Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand!

What does Antoina Maino feel when she steps on her native land? Does her heart within her burn with feelings of coming home? Which side will she be on if there’s a conflict between Italy and India?

I cannot imagine her not putting her own children’s interest ahead of any adopted children. It is natural and commendable. I cannot imagine her not putting her native land’s interests ahead of her adopted land.

Indians need to understand this.

A few quotes from the video:

Sarah Palin is an evil dingbat who thinks god opens doors but she never tried to poison gas a girls’ school as the taliban did this week in Afghanistan. . . Speaking of Muslims, it must be said in all fairness that the vast majority are law-abiding loving people who just want to be left alone to subjugate their women in peace. But I gotta tell you that civilized people don’t threaten each other; we sue each other. Threatening — that’s some old school desert shit. And I’m sorry you can’t bring that to the big city.

. . . The Western world needs to make it clear that some things about our culture are not negotiable, and can’t change. One of them is freedom of speech. Separation of church and state is another. Not negotiable. Women are allowed to work here and you can’t beat them. Not negotiable. . . This is why our system is better. And if you don’t get that, if you still want to kill someone over a stupid cartoon, please make it Garfield.

• Why is India still poor?
• Why have the numbers of Indians below the poverty line doubled to more than 500 million since 1947?
• Why doesn’t India have a decent education system?
• Why are 70 percent of Indians still stuck in tiny villages in the 21st century?
• Why is 60 percent of the labor force involved in agriculture?
• Why is India’s industrial base so small?
• Why doesn’t India generate sufficient electrical power?
• Why doesn’t India have a modern rail network?
• Why doesn’t India have a serviceable road network?
• Why is India so unfriendly to business and entrepreneurship?

As I have noted before, economic development is neither inevitable nor impossible. More often than not, it is a consequence of the right policies executed sensibly by dedicated people. India’s failure to develop was not inevitable. By now, after over 60 years of political independence, India could have conceivably achieved at least middle-income status if India’s leadership had even been half-way competent. India had pretty much all that was needed to climb out of debilitating poverty, as Rajesh notes in his post.

The global conditions for economic development of a labor-surplus economy such as India around mid 20th century were as good as it gets. The advanced industrial countries had by then figured out the solutions to many of the problems that face developing economies. Economists understood quite well how the transition from agriculture to industrialization happened, how an open economy made rapid progress, how and why command and control of large economies was doomed to failure, etc. India had access to brilliant minds who would have been thrilled to help India make good policies.

Not just that, India had good-will among developed nations. They were cheering for India’s success and were willing to lend a helping hand. They would have helped but they were told to mind their own business. It must take an infinite amount of hubris to rudely spit on those who were eager to help. India’s leader at India’s independence set India on a path that led it to become a huge nations of 1200 million people, two-thirds of whom have to live on less than Rs 100 a day. Note “less than” — that means that there are a few hundred million people who survive (if it can be called survival) on less than Rs 50 a day.

Let me put that in some perspective. About 300 million people live on less than $1 a day. That’s equivalent to the population of the US. Now compare $1 to the $126 per capita income per day of the US. Imagine if you had $1 to spend on your daily food, clothing, shelter, education, health services, entertainment. Your life would not be fun.

I am not saying that Indians would have been as rich as the US — clearly that is not possible since India is very small in land area relative to the US (and land matters.) But it could have been a middle income country like say Mexico if its leader had not messed up.

But all that promise and potential was wasted — solely due to bad economic policies made by people of little understanding and even less wisdom.

India needs to change tack. To do that, India needs leaders who are not wedded to socialism that produces little, and then mindlessly redistributes the scant production. India needs leaders who understand that increased production must precede any attempts at redistribution. India needs leaders who understand that social justice is predicated on economic prosperity, and not the other way around. India needs leaders who understand that economic prosperity arises from an open market-friendly liberal economy.

The time has come for us to give the socialistic PPP model (planned perpetual poverty — much beloved of the Congress and the Dynasty that leads it) a decent burial. Like Count Dracula, the Congress-PPP have sucked India’s life blood for decades. Actually, to make sure that it is never going to rise again, what we need to do is to drive a stake through the PPP heart of the Congress, then cremate it, then load up the ashes in one of those interplanetary probes and put a warning for extra-terrestrials who may discover it in 40 million years that the contents are hazardous and should not be opened.

It’s all up to us now.

I wonder if you would help me out here. My question is, has the Indian media connected the destruction of the Babri Masjid and post-Godhra riots the Times Square bomber? Has the Sangh Parivar been held responsible for what Shahzad did? Has the media reported that Blue Turban has been losing sleep over what’s to happen to the terrorist Shahzad? Have there been candle-light vigils at the Wagah border by bleeding-heart pseudo-secs yet? In other words, what’s the word on the streets, and how has the hunt for the wonderful scapegoat going?

Inquiring minds would like to know.

It is clear that Pakistan lies at the center of the global network of Islamic terror. The connection between Pakistan and Islamic terrorism is by design and not by accident. Here’s Moorthy Muthuswamy, author of the new book: “Defeating Political Islam: The New Cold War.”

Some interesting statistical analysis of the Koran and other Islamic foundational texts carried out recently may explain the gradual descent of countries such as Pakistan into extremism. Importantly, this analysis may also teach us how to nudge Pakistan toward a moderate path.

Bill Warner of the Center for the Study of Political Islam has done some pioneering scientific analysis of Islamic doctrines. He has found that about 61 percent of the Koran speaks ill of unbelievers or calls for their violent conquest and subjugation, but only 2.6 percent of it talks about the overall good of humanity. The overwhelming measure of the stats — 61% vs. 2.6% — likely makes their implication impervious to subjectivity.

These statistics may explain the empirical observation that increased funding for propagation of Islam around the globe by the likes of Saudi Arabia for the past 20-plus years has coincided with increased violence conducted in the name of Islam.

This is particularly true of Pakistan which has seen an extensive network of madrassas or Muslim religious schools set up with Middle Eastern funding. The special circumstances surrounding the birth of Pakistan too have contributed to the conundrum Pakistan has become.

Created in 1947 as a nation for Muslims living in British-ruled India, Pakistan has found itself having to define its national aspirations in terms of religion. One could argue that the Koranic statistics discussed above would favor Islamists in their ideological battle with secular democrats in defining a vision for the nation. Indeed, this appears to be the case. When Hindu-majority India, the other nation created from British-ruled India, was building quality higher educational institutions of learning, Pakistan was focusing on jihad or a religious war. Even its army’s focus is jihad – the motto reads: “faith, piety and holy war in the path of Allah.” [Source a Washington Post article -- will post link later.]

One can do worse than quote Muthuswamy on the matter of jihad and Pakistan. In a recent article in Frontpage, “The Pakistani Third Reich“, he wrote:

In a recent Frontpage Magazine piece titled “Is Wilders Wrong About Islam?” I explained how jihad (holy war) waged on unbelievers forms the dominant thrust of the Koran and Muhammad’s biography. This theological basis continues to inspire modern constructs of jihad. Pakistan’s broad-based commitment to jihad is reflected in the contents of its school syllabus. The motto of the Pakistani army is “faith, piety and jihad in the path of Allah.” In the 1980s Brigadier S.K. Malik of the Pakistani army produced an authoritative military manual on jihad called The Quranic Concept of War. It is a required reading of Pakistan’s military officers.

Malik writes: “the Holy Prophet’s operations …are an integral and inseparable part of the divine message revealed to us in the Holy Quran… The war he planned and carried out was total to the infinite degree. It was waged on all fronts: internal and external, political and diplomatic, spiritual and psychological, economic and military… The Quranic military strategy thus enjoins us to prepare ourselves for war to the utmost in order to strike terror into the heart of the enemy, known or hidden… Terror struck into the hearts of the enemy is not only a means; it is the end in itself.”

The above theological thrust has not only ensured military domination of the civilian sphere, but also drove the military to commandeer all instruments and disproportionate share of the resources of the state in order to impose a violent jihad on unbelievers. In other words, Pakistan has become a modern Third Reich, armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and sophisticated delivery systems.

Theological motivations enshrine Pakistan as an aggressive jihadist state, no matter the extent of financial and other incentives given to it to stop its jihad. Indeed, it appears that the Western aid and arms given to Pakistan since 2001 in good faith, have instead, mostly gone to further its jihadist agenda.

The “financial and other incentives given to Pakistan to stop its jihad” by most accounts amounts to around $18 billion from the US since Sept 11th, 2001. That’s just from the US. There are other sources of financial assistance to the Terrorist State of Pakistan– not just Saudi Arabia and what I call “the newly Islamising states of Western Europe,” but India as well. If you think that Islamic terrorism is bad now, wait till the “States of Urabia” get in on the act.

For now let’s just focus on the US funding of Pakistan.

Pakistan is a failed state. Its people are starving today. Its children don’t have any possibility of getting an education that would equip them to survive in a modern world. If Pakistan’s present is dire, its future is too horrible to contemplate. It is so poor that it cannot survive without the constant infusion of aid from abroad. And yet it has the largest arsenal of nuclear bombs in the Third World (which is an euphemism for “desperately poor extremely underdeveloped starving nations utterly misgoverned by unimaginably corrupt kleptocrats” of which India is the largest member), and spends huge amounts of money it does not have on sophisticated weapons.

Given its Islamic genesis and character, it is not surprising that Pakistan is a failed state in the modern world. It appears to be a widely recognized fact that Islam leads to poverty. Even in India, various committees have reported (the Sachar report, for example) that Muslims in India are more uneducated, illiterate, poor and unskilled than the average. It should be shocking (but apparently it is not) that the prime minister of India routinely tars Indian Muslims with a broad brush by begging non-Muslims to give more to support the Muslims. I find it very peculiar that Muslim leaders (political and intellectual) don’t see how demeaning this is towards the Muslims. Be that as it may, the evidence is that the followers of Islam, not just in India but around the world, are unable to compete against the non-Muslims in all spheres of human endeavor except in murder, terrorism and mayhem.

But I should get back to the main point. Pakistan elects to spend on weapons of mass destruction and ends with the destruction of its masses through starvation and lack of any real education. Pakistan funds jihad to the tune of untold hundreds of millions, money which could have been used to feed and educate its citizens. I don’t know for sure but it is possible that Pakistan must have spent less than $18 billion dollars in funding global terrorism and building its weapons of mass destruction since 9/11/2001. Therefore, since money is fungible, this means that the US which has given $18 billion to Pakistan has funded all the global terrorism that has emanated from Pakistan.

Which means that the US has also funded the most recent most highly visible act of (attempted) terrorism — Faisal Shahzad’s attempt at killing and maiming a few hundred New Yorkers last week at the Times Square.

Why does the US fund Islamic terrorism? My tentative answer is this. The response to Islamic terrorism in the US is predictable. Everybody in the US loves a good terrorist attack. Well, not everybody really. The ones who are maimed by it and the loved ones of those killed by it certainly don’t love Islamic terrorism. Only those in the US who benefit from Islam terrorist attacks. Every terrorist act — successful or otherwise — leaves in its wake billions and billions (pardon me, Carl) to be picked up defense contractors and other agencies who “protect” the US from terrorism. Sometimes, those billions and billions add up to trillions — as seen in the invasion of Iraq after the terrorist attack of 9/11.

The short story is this. The US funds Pakistan to the tune of a few billion dollars — Pakistan uses the money to support global terrorism — once in a while the Pakistani terrorists hit the US — the US pours in additional billions to fight terrorism at home and a few billion to Pakistan to “stop” terrorism in Pakistan — the defense contractors pick up the billions and billions — the defense contractors buy political patronage using the money — the politicians vote for more money for Pakistan — the circus goes on and on.

On the side lines, learned pundits write convoluted articles analyzing the latest terrorist act and studiously avoid mentioning the elephant in the room. TV channels put videos of gory aftermaths of Islamic terrorism on endless loops as talking heads do their talking. The president of the US makes some well-rehearsed speeches about how the US will not tolerate terrorism, and how terrorists have no religion, and how the terrorists are just misunderstanders of the religion of peace, and other such patent nonsense. The speeches are well-rehearsed because it is a routine matter and can be prepared in advance — like newspapers keep prepared obituaries of well-known older people to be pulled out without a moment’s hesitation when the guy or gal suddenly shuffles off this mortal coil.

The US can stop global Islamic terrorism — any day of the week it wants to. The thing is that it is not in its interest to do so. That is why it does not exercise that power. That’s as simple as it gets. This is called the “revealed preference” argument, much beloved of economists. Don’t bother listening to people talk about what they prefer; just see how they act. Talk is cheap. What matters is how people behave.

I repeat myself. Pakistan funds global terrorism but since it does not have the money, it uses the money it is given by the US to fund terrorism. India does similarly, but is too poor to fund Pakistani terrorism to the tune of billions of dollars. But India does what it can to help Pakistan terrorize Indians. For instance, it gave Pakistan $25 million in one case. The whole Mumbai attack of Nov 26, 2008 costs much less than $25 million. That means that not only did India fund that awesome act of Islamic terrorism, but there was money left over for funding more killings of infidels in Kashmir and elsewhere. (See “India Funding Pakistani Jihadi Groups” from Oct 2005, and its follow up on this blog.)

How is this going to end?

I don’t know for sure but it ain’t gonna be pretty. One scenario is this. Pakistani leaders — the generals and mullahs — finally go totally insane. They allow one of their talibani groups to get their hands on a dirty bomb, help them transport it to the US, and explode it in say New York city or Los Angeles (not San Francisco Bay area, since it’s not all that important — and I live in Berkeley). A couple of thousand Americans are killed. The outrage among Americans is awesome. The US finally goes ape-shit crazy. It nukes Iran.

OK, that’s not original at all. It’s just the same old story with new names. Pakistan helped the 9/11 event. They used US assets to hit US assets. A few thousand were killed. The US bombed Afghanistan back to the stone age. Now change the names and you have the next story. The news papers should have the articles written already and kept ready to be published when — not if — the time comes.

A few days after Sept 11, 2001 I spoke at a panel discussion at UC Berkeley. The main thrust of my argument was that the US was making a Faustian bargain by associating with and assisting Pakistan. Nothing that has transpired since then has given me the slightest reason to revise my argument. (I will dig up the transcript of what I said one of these days and publish it here.)

Anyway, I am getting tired of all this. And I am sure that you are also tired of reading this crap. So I will bring it to a close.

The US can stop global Islamic terrorism. Here’s how. First the short term, and then the long term.

Short term it must stop with the carrots and start with the stick. It must write a nice letter to the Pakistani leaders:

Dear Pakistani Generals and Mullahs:

With kind regards we remain sincerely yours,
The US Administration.

Now you may say that all that is fine and good. You may say that that will certainly stop the Pakis from terror attacks on the US, but it does not stop the Pakis from continuing their jihad against India. If you said that, you will be right. But here’s the cunning bit.

The Paki generals and mullahs actually are rational people. They care about their own survival and don’t really believe in departing too soon for the share of the virgins in paradise. So if the US made them that offer, they will have to take the US seriously. To make sure that no Paki-trained terrorist gets to the US, they will have to shut down their schools of Islamic terrorism. They would love to keep those training facilities open so that their graduates kill infidels in India but there is no way they can guarantee the pigeons may not end up shitting on their masters’ head.

Enough said. The bottom line is that there is a powerful constituency in the US that loves Islamic terrorism. That is why they fund Pakistan. That is why there is so much of it around.

Post Script: I replaced “STOP ISLAMIC TERRORISM” in the above with “STOP ISLAMIC TERRORISM IN THE US” since the US doesn’t particularly care if the Islamic terrorists kill Indians by the hundreds.

Francois Gautier: A New History of India

I have not had an opportunity to read A New History of India by Francois Gautier (Har-Anand Publications, 2008) but I intend to since I got this brief review of the book in an email from a colleague. I post it below the fold with permission.

India’s contemporary problems go back to decisions made around 100 years ago — by one party, and subsequently by one family that controls that party. In doing the things they did, and the decisions they made, they nearly overturned and laid waste an Indian spirit and culture that has endured for millennia.

That’s the legacy we need to reclaim. For without the foundation of one’s past — the real past — we will never be able to build the future we want.

To make this happen, India needs a leader who combines within himself or herself the best qualities of an Abraham Lincoln, a Swami Vivekanand, a Sri Aurobindo, and a Lee Kuan Yew. India needs a leader who had demonstrated that he or she can lead. A leader, unlike other Indian leaders, whose personal ambitions begin and end with doing what is good for the nation.

The book by Gautier is essential reading for people to understand why India needs a change of leadership. We don’t have much time. We have to get that leader in power by 2014. We need a leader who will stop the rapid slide of the country into deepening poverty, and lead India out of the swamp that Congress has dragged India into.

The books informs you of the systematic plunder and the “planned poverty” of India, and it talks about the future that can be created. It’s about what can be termed “Mission 2014 to Reclaim India.” If you want to be part of this mission, you have to spend a few hours reading this book. The book will propel you to action.

I like the expression “planned poverty.” That’s what the Congress (and the UPA) does so well.

On my part, I plan to read the book. I will post excerpts from it on this blog. One of these days I will have to get in touch with Mr Gautier.

THE DISCOURSE OF VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE is lucidly and coherently structured around a single axiom, a single percipient insight into the nature not only of tyranny, but implicitly of the State apparatus itself. Many medieval writers had attacked tyranny, but La Boétie delves especially deeply into its nature, and into the nature of State rule itself. This fundamental insight was that every tyranny must necessarily be grounded upon general popular acceptance. In short, the bulk of the people themselves, for whatever reason, acquiesce in their own subjection. If this were not the case, no tyranny, indeed no governmental rule, could long endure. Hence, a government does not have to be popularly elected to enjoy general public support; for general public support is in the very nature of all governments that endure, including the most oppressive of tyrannies. The tyrant is but one person, and could scarcely command the obedience of another person, much less of an entire country, if most of the subjects did not grant their obedience by their own consent.

This, then, becomes for La Boétie the central problem of political theory: why in the world do people consent to their own enslavement? La Boétie cuts to the heart of what is, or rather should be, the central problem of political philosophy: the mystery of civil obedience. Why do people, in all times and places, obey the commands of the government, which always constitutes a small minority of the society? To La Boétie the spectacle of general consent to despotism is puzzling and appalling:

I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. Surely a striking situation! Yet it is so common that one must grieve the more and wonder the less at the spectacle of a million men serving in wretchedness, their necks under the yoke, not constrained by a greater multitude than they . . .

And this mass submission must be out of consent rather than simply out of fear:

Shall we call subjection to such a leader cowardice? . . . [I]f a hundred, if a thousand endure the caprice of a single man, should we not rather say that they lack not the courage but the desire to rise against him, and that such an attitude indicates indifference rather than cowardice? When not a hundred, not a thousand men, but a hundred provinces, a thousand cities, a million men, refuse to assail a single man from whom the kindest treatment received is the infliction of serfdom and slavery, what shall we call that? Is it cowardice? . . . [W]hen a thousand, a million men, a thousand cities, fail to protect themselves against the domination of one man, this cannot be called cowardly, for cowardice does not sink to such a depth. . . . What monstrous vice, then, is this which does not even deserve to be called cowardice, a vice for which no term can be found vile enough . . . ?

It is evident from the above passages that La Boétie is bitterly opposed to tyranny and to the public’s consent to its own subjection. He makes clear also that this opposition is grounded on a theory of natural law and a natural right to liberty. In childhood, presumably because the rational faculties are not yet developed, we obey our parents; but when grown,
we should follow our own reason, as free individuals. As La Boétie puts it: “[I]f we led our lives according to the ways intended by nature and the lessons taught by her, we should
be intuitively obedient to our parents; later we should adopt reason as our guide and become slaves to nobody.” Reason is our guide to the facts and laws of nature and to humanity’s
proper path, and each of us has “in our souls some native seed of reason, which, if nourished by good counsel and training, flowers into virtue, but which, on the other hand, if unable to resist the vices surrounding it, is stifled and blighted.” And reason, La Boétie adds, teaches us the justice of equal liberty for all. For reason shows us that nature has, among other things, granted us the common gift of voice and speech. Therefore, “there can be no further doubt that we are all naturally free,” and hence it cannot be asserted that “nature has placed some of us in slavery.” Even animals, he points out, display a natural instinct to be free. But then, what in the world “has so denatured man that he, the only creature really born to be free, lacks the memory of his original condition and the desire to return to it?”

La Boétie’s celebrated and creatively original call for civil disobedience, for mass nonviolent resistance as a method for the overthrow of tyranny, stems directly from the above two premises: the fact that all rule rests on the consent of the subject masses, and the great value of natural liberty. For if tyranny really rests on mass consent, then the obvious means for its overthrow is simply by mass withdrawal of that consent. The weight of tyranny would quickly and suddenly collapse under such a nonviolent revolution.

La Boétie wrote that over 500 years ago. His observations in this matter were, unfortunately for us, universal across time and space. “Voluntary servitude” describes the Indian masses too closely for comfort.

We have to work together to overthrow the despicable rule of the utterly corrupt.

David Hume recognized that over 240 years ago:

Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as FORCE is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.

(David Hume, “Of the First Principles of Government,” in Essays, Literary, Moral and Political.)[1]

Opinion is easy enough to manipulate if you control the channels of information. First of all, control the schools, and ensure that only those texts are allowed that the government approves of. Does this happen in India? You bet.

Next, control the newspapers with sticks. How? Well, you can always shut them down for some reason for the other and make the life of the editors miserable. Does this happen in India? Yes.

Next, control the newspapers with carrots. How? Take the tax payers’ money, then spend on advertisements in those newspapers (and magazines.) Does this happen in India? Yes. Check out this annual report of the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity. In the year 2008-09, they spent over Rs 277 crores advertising in 4054 newspapers.

I don’t have the figures on hand, but remember that those Rs 277 crores is the spend from only ONE agency of the government — DAVP. There are scores of ministries — a few hundred — of the central and state governments. Together their ad budget must exceed Rs 2,000 crores. (Finding the actual numbers is left as an exercise for the really interested reader.)

Now let’s talk about the TV channels. TV is very popular. So the government makes sure that nothing bad about the government is ever broadcast on TV. How? Make sure that there are lots of circuses on TV.

How about radio? Well, the government only allows idiot DJ to talk on commercial FM. It does not allow current affairs and news. The government controls the radio that is heard by most Indians — All India Radio. And the government also owns the public TV channels — Doordarshan.

So there you have it. Indians are brainwashed into thinking that the Nehru-Gandhi family is destined to rule. Even the prime minister believes so. And if anyone ever doubts the honesty and rectitude of the prime minister (or the president), the brainwashed get their hackles up.

In my last post, I claimed that Blue Turban is a despicably dishonest man. I made the case that he shields crooks. He has done it repeatedly and no one ever pays for their corruption under this watch.

But is there a debate about this topic? No. Do some people find it unpalatable that I should call the Blue Turban a dishonest person? Yes. But they don’t argue the point. They just want to shoot the messenger.

I think that those who refuse to see that Indian politicians (Blue Turban not excepted) as corrupt are brainwashed. Nothing can penetrate that.

NOTES:

[1] David Hume quoted in THE POLITICS OF OBEDIENCE: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by ÉTIENNE DE LA BOÉTIE. (Hat tip: Abhijeet Singh.)

When I was small, and Christmas trees were tall,
we used to love while others used to play.
Don’t ask me why, but time has passed us by,
someone else moved in from far away.

Now we are tall, and Christmas trees are small,
and you don’t ask the time of day.
But you and I, our love will never die,
but guess who’ll cry come first of May.

The apple tree that grew for you and me,
I watched the apples falling one by one.
And as I recall the moment of them all,
the day I kissed your cheek and you were gone.

Now we are tall, and Christmas trees are small,
and you don’t ask the time of day.
But you and I, our love will never die,
but guess who’ll cry come first of May.

Sarah Brightman’s cover is definitely worth collecting.

The Dawning of the Post-Work World

All progress in human affairs results from the actions of people who do not work.

Progress does not arise from work. Here I define work as things that have to be done and in which there isn’t much choice whether to do them or not. All progress arises from actions that don’t have to be done.

In the present condition of the world, most people do things out of necessity. Which is another way of saying that most people work. At the individual level, if a person did not work, he will not be able to survive. Collectively if most people did not work, human society would collapse. This situation is changing and will change very fast.

The progress of civilization can be measured by how many people are available to not do any work. The trend has been that of an increasing number of (as well as a larger percentage of) people that don’t have to work. The smaller the percentage of people in it that work, the better off the civilization.

In primitive hunter-gatherer societies, everyone worked. All actions were in aid of survival. What they did was get food, seek shelter, fight off predators, procreate – all of which was work because they had to do these things and could not get by otherwise.

In the future, perhaps in a hundred years or so, no one will have to work.[1]

Along the continuum of everyone working to no one working, we are by my estimate about 10 percent of the way to the no one working end. I mean, about 10 percent of the people don’t work. They do things that are not work. The rest have to work.

Work is not a good thing. It is a necessary thing but not a good thing. Or rather, work is not a good thing precisely because it is a necessary thing. It’s not a good thing for many reasons. The most trivial reason follows from how I have defined it as something that you don’t have any choice about. But the most important reason is that work does not lead to progress.

All progress arises from the freedom from work.

As human civilization progresses, more and more people will attain freedom from work. And the more the number of people that are free from work, the faster will civilization progress. It’s a positive feedback loop.

Most people in poor societies work. The richer the society, the fewer the people who work.

We are at a boundary. We are witnessing the dawning of the post-work world. We have witnessed other transitions before. There was the transition from the hunter-gatherer to settled agriculture. That was followed by the transition to the industrial from the agricultural. The post-industrial world is going on but will be over in a few decades.

Though distinct in their detailed features, all the previous stages – hunter-gatherer, agriculture, industrial, post-industrial – can be clubbed together into what can be called the Work World[2]. They all share the broad feature that majority of people living in them were engaged in work.

What will follow is the Post-Work World[3] in which no one will work.

What will People do in a Post-Work World

What many people will do in a Post-Work World is what people who didn’t work have always done: do things that lead to progress.

Work does not lead to progress. Non-work – defined conversely to the definition of work – is that which does not have to be done and in which one has a choice about doing or not. All progress arises from non-work.[4]

Some specific examples of progress arising from non-work would be in order here. Since all progress arises from non-work, and there have been thousands of instances of progress, finding examples is trivial. So I hope that I am not abusing the reader’s intelligence by citing a few examples.

Let me start off with a man I admire very much in the field of science. Albert Einstein was a great physicist. He worked as a patent examiner (3rd class) in the Swiss Patent Office in Berne. He had to examine patents to earn a living. Fortunately, his work did not occupy him full time. So in his spare time he did what was absolutely unnecessary and therefore cannot be considered work. He worked figured out the theories of relativity, among other unnecessary things like the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion.

Imagine now if he had to work full time. Of course, eventually all scientific advancements that Einstein made would have been made by other people. But it would not have been him because all work all the time means that there is no time for doing things that lead to progress.

Another man I admire mightily in the field of fundamental philosophical questions went by the name of Gautama who later went on become “the Buddha”. Born in a royal family, he did not work much. But he had a wife and a son. That involved work. Also, he had to rule his little kingdom. That was also work. He wanted to do stuff that did not need to be done. Such as, figure out the cause of the suffering in the world and therefore find a solution.

So Gautama left everything behind. He gave up all work. So he had all the time in the world to do non-work. He wandered around thinking. To keep body and soul together, he worked only a tiny bit. His work was that of a bhikshu, a mendicant. Since his needs were simple, he had to beg for sustenance for only a little bit of his time. The rest he used in non-work. Eventually he became awakened.

If Gautama had to work, he would never have become a buddha. And the world would have had to wait for another person of his intellectual capacity but free from work to figure out the answers.

All great discoveries in every field of human endeavour were made by people who did not have to do them. There was never a trivial matter of survival for them. It was pure play. Work and play are antithetical to each other.

All creativity arises from play. Indeed, the universe – the ultimate expression of creativity – according to the Hindu conception is simply a play that the mind of the ultimate consciousness dreams up. It does not have to create a universe. It just creates a universe just for the heck of it, without any compulsion.[5] It created the universe in play and in the end will uncreate it also out of pure play. The universe is not work, it is play. That’s why it is perfect.

But let’s examine more down to earth and contemporary examples of people not working.

The best people in every field of human creativity don’t work. Which is not to say that they don’t get paid or that they are unemployed; often enough they are employed and get paid for what they do. But what they get paid for is not work for them.

Tilling the field is work. Assembling cars in a factory is work. Writing code for a corporation is work. All essential for getting things done. This is maintenance.

Maintenance involves work. Creation involves non-work.

A maestro exploring a raga is not work. Writing a great novel is not work. Figuring out the laws of motion or the laws of electrodynamics is not work. Understanding the mechanism which explains the near infinite variety of life on earth is not work. None of these – and countless other activities – have nothing to do with the preservation of civilization. It is pure play. But they all form the foundation upon which all human progress is built.

The End of Work

The ultimate aim of humanity is the elimination of work. The freedom from work is the real freedom that will eventually happen.

In the early days of human history all had to work, as I noted before. Production was limited and therefore everything went into consumption. There was no surplus. Then with settled agriculture came a bit of surplus. That allowed a very small segment of the population to not work. That was the foundation of the subsequent progress. That foundation was built by people who did not work and upon which rested the industrial revolution.

The industrial society did not eliminate agriculture. People need food. What happened was the industrial revolution made agriculture more productive. Only a small segment of the labor had to be in agriculture to provide food for all. The rest of the labor went into industry. More stuff was produced and more surplus resulted. That meant society could afford more people not to work. Once again, more progress happened because of these people not working.

Automation in agriculture and industry kept increasing labor productivity – fewer people were required to work – and at the same time increasing production. So even more people did not have to work. Some went into services – making movies, providing haircuts, doing tax returns, building social networks on the internet, etc – that helped to increase the production of stuff.

So this story has a predictable end: the end of work.

The day will come when the people who are currently working in agriculture, manufacturing, and services will no longer be required to work. All production will be done by machines. Machines work because they are not capable of creativity.

People will be free from work. Of the billions of people, there will be some who will do things of such incredible beauty and creativity that we cannot even begin to imagine.

The rest of humanity will do things that keep them busy and out of trouble. They may end up playing video games, socialising or building social networks or tweeting (or whatever the equivalent of those things would be in a post-work world.)

It’s possible to imagine that some people even in the Post-work World would be pathologically trying to destroy civilization, as they do today, due to ideology.[6] But perhaps by then evil ideologies would have disappeared because all people would have had the opportunity to get an education and ignorance would not be an issue.

The Implications

I have laid out an outlandish theory. But I am fairly convinced that that is where it is all headed.

The first implication is that the obsession with employment has to be buried. Employment is not the goal of civilization. It is merely a means for getting stuff made. If one can get the same amount of stuff made using less labor, it means that on average there is less work involved without having to sacrifice the standard of living. Or by using the same amount of labor if more stuff gets produced, it means that it will allow more people to not work and still have higher living standards for all at the same time.

The second implication is that society should generate surplus so that it can support more non-working people. Take educational institutions. In the best educational institutions around the world, you will find many non-working people. What these non-working people create is valuable for society. They generally create what economists call “public goods” (as opposed to private goods.) Everyone gains from public goods.

[This was first posted to my blog "Life is a Random Draw" on Nov 5th, 2009.]

End Notes

[1] Unfortunately for me, though. I was born too soon. [return]

[2] Work World or Wowo. [return]

[3] Post-work World or Powowo. [return]

[4] All progress arises from non-work but all non-work does not lead to progress. Non-work is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for progress. [return]

[5] It did not do any work and therefore it could not be tired and therefore did not have to “rest on the 7th day.” [return]

[6] They are trying to drag civilization back to the 7th century CE. In many areas of the world such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, etc., they have indeed been partially successful. They want to remake the world into a homogenized global version of a particularly barbaric 7th century desert culture. [return]

We behave to a large extent on how others expect us to behave.

It is interesting to understand how expectations are formed. Within a closed system, expectations are endogenous by definition. In open systems, at least part of the expectations must be exogenous. Since individuals are not closed systems – that is, they are influenced by events and things outside of themselves – there is a role for others to influence the expectations that individuals have. For now, I will not go into how expectations are formed. I am only asking how the aggregation of individual behavior influenced by expectations gives rise to macro phenomenon.

People expect trash on the streets in India. That is they expect others to throw trash. That expectation allows them to feel free to add their own (small amount of) trash. Aggregated over many people over an extended period of time, the trash accumulates as the expectation itself gets reinforced. Eventually you have Singapores and Mumbais.

People expect the politicians to be crooks. Their expectation of a lower moral standard allows the politicians to be immoral scum. The immorality of politicians is widely known. The pile of immoral acts grows and at any time there is an average level of depravity. The next politician seeing the huge pile, feels free to add to the heap and indeed goes a little deeper in the depravity department. The average sinks further and people adjust their expectations downwards even more and the vicious cycle continues.

Go read the rest in a July 2007 post — The Tangled Web: Part 7.

A Scientific American article exploring the matter of choice and what it means makes interesting reading. You have to choose whether to read it — The Tyranny of Choice (pdf) — or go do something else.

The article by Barry Schwartz notes, “it seems that as society grows wealthier and people become freer to do whatever they want, they get less happy. In an era of ever greater personal autonomy, choice and control, what could account for this degree of misery?”

A SURFEIT OF alternatives can cause distress in yet another way: by raising expectations. In the fall of 1999 the New York Times and CBS News asked teenagers to compare their experiences with those their parents had growing up. Fifty percent of children from affluent households said their lives were harder. When questioned further, these adolescents talked about high expectations, both their own and their parents’. They talked about “too muchness”: too many activities, too many consumer choices, too much to learn. As one commentator put it, “Children feel the pressure … to be sure they don’t slide back. Everything’s about going forward. . . . Falling back is the American nightmare.” So if your perch is high, you have much further to fall than if your perch is low.

. . . The news I have reported is not good. We get what we say we want, only to discover that what we want does not satisfy us to the degree that we expect. Does all this mean that we would all be better off if our choices were severely restricted, even eliminated? I do not think so. The relation between choice and wellbeing is complicated. A life without significant choice would be unlivable. Being able to choose has enormous important positive effects on us. But only up to a point. As the number of choices we face increases, the psychological benefits we derive start to level off.

Worth pondering.

There are those who call themselves leaders but they are a sorry bunch. They are leaders because India does not have real leaders: men and women of vision, passion, intelligence and integrity. Just consider the man (I use that word loosely and with some hesitation) who heads the government. Hard to use words like vision, passion, intelligence, and integrity in connection with him, isn’t it?

Leaders inspire, they move the people to action, they make people get up and get the important bits done. In our case, we have ersatz leaders. They bear the same resemblance to a real leader as a cardboard cutout of the Superman bears to a man.

That brought to mind the speech that General George S Patton, Jr gave to the American soldiers of the 6th Armored Division in England on 31st May 1944.

Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

Men, all this stuff you’ve heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans, love the sting of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big league ball players, the toughest boxers …

Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in Hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. Because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.

Now, an army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality stuff is a bunch of crap. The Bilious bastards who wrote that stuff about individuality for the Saturday Evening Post, don’t know anything more about real battle than they do about fornicating.

Now we have the finest food and equipment, the best spirit, and the best men in the world. You know … My God, I actually pity those poor bastards we’re going up against. My God, I do. We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Hun bastards by the bushel.

Now some of you boys, I know, are wondering whether or not you’ll chicken out under fire. Don’t worry about it. I can assure you that you’ll all do your duty. The Nazis are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood, shoot them in the belly. When you put your hand into a bunch of goo, that a moment before was your best friends face, you’ll know what to do.

Now there’s another thing I want you to remember. I don’t want to get any messages saying that we are holding our position. We’re not holding anything, we’ll let the Hun do that. We are advancing constantly, and we’re not interested in holding onto anything except the enemy. We’re going to hold onto him by the nose, and we’re going to kick him in the ass. We’re going to kick the hell out of him all the time, and we’re going to go through him like crap through a goose.

Now, there’s one thing that you men will be able to say when you get back home, and you may thank God for it. Thirty years from now when you’re sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee, and he asks you, What did you do in the great World War Two? You won’t have to say, Well, I shoveled shit in Louisiana.

Alright now, you sons of bitches, you know how I feel. I will be proud to lead you wonderful guys into battle anytime, anywhere. That’s all.

[I have added the emphasis in the quote above. You will find an MP3 audio of the speech here.]

Patton was a warrior and an American hero.

India too has warrior heroes by the truckloads — from the fabled Arjuna who fought on the battlefield of Kurukshetra (with a little bit of help from his friend and mentor Sri Krishna), to Emperor Ashoka, to Shivaji Maharaj, to Jhasi ki Rani, to Subhas Chandra Bose, to the unknown soldiers that fought bravely in the many wars that India was forced into by its friendly neighbor.

I find it curious that Americans make movies about heroes like General Patton. But when it comes to India, the movies are about Gandhi and his pacifism in the face of the enemy. This needs to change.

What India needs now is the emergence of a leader who is a true warrior. We need a leader who is not afraid, and who can light a fire in the bellies of Indians.

These so-called scientists don’t understand the most fundamental of universal laws — that of conservation of energy. All processes in nature involve the exchange of energy. If the yogi walks up the stairs, he is using energy. If the yogi is breathing, he is using energy — besides, the only reason for breathing is that it gets oxygen into the blood which then circulates it for the various processes within the body which generate energy through oxidation.

From time to time, we get these charlatans. There are IIT profs who investigate how some idiot converts water into petroleum using some sticks. Then these investigate milk-drinking Ganesh statues.

The claim that a living being can live — which involves the expenditure of energy — without any input of energy — through food and drink — goes against a fundamental feature of the universe. These claims are made by people, perhaps including the yogi himself. It is of course possible that the yogi indeed has some powers that allow him to tap into some form of energy that is unknown to the current state of physics knowledge. It is also possible that these claims are false. The latter is more probable. Indeed, it is more likely that those making the claim are telling lies than the likelihood that there is a yet undiscovered source of energy and further that humans can tap into that source.

Let’s remember what David Hume wrote about 250 years ago: “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.”

This is clearly a case of extraordinary claims being investigated by the extraordinarily gullible.

I was imagining what would happen in the next hostage situation. Terrorists from our good neighbor Pakistan (according to SRK) take say 100 Indians hostage — a plane hijacking perhaps. In return for the hostages, they demand that Kasab, the butcher of Mumbai, to be released.

My thought was that India should then in exchange for the hostages, offer them the people who are responsible for not hanging Kasab now that the trial is over. I would suggest MMS and his boss. In any case, the damage that Kasab has done is infinitesimally small compared to what the Congress rulers have done over the last half century. Who needs Kasab when these people rule?

With that thought, I takes your leave for nows. Will be back shortly.

Light and Shadow at the Trona Pinnacles .(Click to see the whole lot.)

My friend Rajan Parrikar’s recent photo shoot in the Mojave Desert. He calls it Light and Shadow at the Trona Pinnacles.. “During a recent visit to Death Valley in California’s Mojave Desert, I overnighted in the desert town of Ridgecrest to shoot at the nearby Trona Pinnacles. This atmospheric locale has served as a setting for several well-known sci-fi movies and commercials. The basin with its Trona Pinnacles, the adjacent Searles Lake salt pan serviced by an unlikely railroad, and flanked by the Slate Range to the east and the Argus Mountains to the west, evokes an ambience that is at once enchanting, eerie, and alien.”

That brought to mind my visits to Death Valley. One winter night we had camped in the Valley. Whenever I hear the 10,000 Maniacs song “The Painted Desert,” the line “The stars were so many there, they seemed to overlap,” always reminds me of that still, moonless, cold night. Once I passed through the Mojave Desert on my way to the Grand Canyon in the summer. It was so hot that you can die within a couple of hours if you don’t have shelter.

I am hoping to go back there on my Great American Road Trip 2010. (A couple of spots still open for that one!)

“I wanted to be there by May at the latest time
isn’t that the plan we had or have you changed your mind?
I haven’t read a word from you since Pheonix or Tucson
April is over, will you tell me how long
before I can be there?”

Teh Twins

Actually, what I wrote above is not original. I was reading Hendrik Hertzberg’s column in the New Yorker about sexual abuse and the Catholic church, and it seemed to me as if the vile Catholic church and the Congress party were twins separated at birth. Here’s the original quote from that article.

The Catholic Church is an authoritarian institution, modelled on the political structures of the Roman Empire and medieval Europe. It is better at transmitting instructions downward than at facilitating accountability upward. It is monolithic. It claims the unique legitimacy of a line of succession going back to the apostolic circle of Jesus Christ. Its leaders are protected by a nimbus of mystery, pomp, holiness, and, in the case of the Pope, infallibility—to be sure, only in certain doctrinal matters, not administrative ones, but the aura is not so selective. The hierarchy of such an institution naturally resists admitting to moral turpitude and sees squalid scandal as a mortal threat. Equally important, the government of the Church is entirely male.

I would have categorized this post as “Humor and Silliness” except it is rather tragic that the Congress party continues to destroy India’s future just like the priests destroyed the lives of the choirboys whom they raped. Unfortunately, the main stream media is silent and indeed complicit in the rape of the country by the Congress. But soon enough there will be hell to pay.

One knows that the pope is the leader of one of the most powerful evil organizations of the world — even if one is not a Dan Brown fan. It’s all connected: the pope, the Catholic church, mafia, Catholicism, Italian, fascism, authoritarianism, the Congress party, its leadership.

Some years ago, it is said that someone suggested that the US patent office should be shut down because everything that was discoverable about the world was already done and it would be pointless to keep the office with nothing to do. As it happens, it is just an urban legend.

The story that’s most often told is that in 1899 the head of the U.S. Patent Office sent his resignation to President McKinley urging the closing of the office because “everything that could be invented has been invented.” It’s been told and retold so often that even President Reagan used it in a speech.

I bring the story up to illustrate a point and it is this: some stories get repeated because they are believable. It is believable because people subconsciously feel that somehow we have reached a plateau in the progress of humankind and things are not going to change very much from now on. Perhaps this subconscious feeling is a result of insecurity about being able to deal with change. Change is good for the collective but it is not necessarily good for individuals.

This story may appear to be irrelevant in the context of things that needed done and how many people are required to do them. But there is a connection. Just as there are no foreseeable limits to what can be invented, there are no limits to what can potentially be done.

The productivity of labor has increased several folds ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution. In other words, each unit of labor today produces tens or even hundreds of times more stuff compared to before. It used to take 100 people to do something; now that same thing can be done by one person. So it would appear that phenomenal increases in labor productivity would put 99 people out of 100 out of work. But that is not how it works.

Parkinson’s law about work expanding to fill the time given for its completion is a specific case of a more general feature of the world: given the appropriate conditions, everyone can be productively employed at some job that needs to be done.

So we have to square the fact of unemployment — disguised or plain — with the fact that there are jobs that are not being done.

Let me digress once again. Take telecommunications. About fifty years ago, there were 400 million people in India. India had about half a million phone lines, and for that job India employed 50 thousand telecom workers. Since then, productivity of telecom workers have increased 100 fold (except in the state owned enterprises such as BSNL.) So it would appear that for half a million phone lines, India would need only 500 telecom workers and there would be 49,500 formerly employed telecom workers would be out of jobs. That’s not what happened.

What happened was that from about half a million phone lines, we have 500 million phone lines. And telecom employment increased to half a million — even though productivity increased by two orders of magnitude. Instead of lowering employment, because of the increase in the size of the telecom services sector, it led to an increase.

Not just POTS — plain old telephone systems — we now have PANS — particularly amazing new services. PANS are too well-known to bear repeating.

There is no dearth of things that need to be done in India. India does not have a good transportation system. What it needs is a fast rail network. That means we need 10 million people working for decades to build one. India needs manufactured goods. Our manufacturing sector is puny. Naturally so because around 800 million people subsist on less than US$ 2 a day. They cannot possibly afford manufactured stuff that you and I cannot imagine living without. But these same people, if they were to work in the manufacturing sector, they would be able to afford the manufactured goods.

We are caught in a vicious circle. There are no jobs because there is no need to produce lots of stuff. There is no need to produce lots of stuff because people don’t have the buying power for the stuff. They don’t have buying power because they don’t have jobs. It can become a virtuous circle. But that would require good policies by good policymakers — which in our case we have not got.

India needs houses for people. India needs cities for people. India needs schools, colleges. India needs hospitals and gardens. The list is long. For all these things, because it has a large population, it needs a lot of people to work to produce all these things.

Just to be sure, let’s keep this in mind. Material poverty is about the lack of stuff. What’s stuff? Everything that we use. Food, clothes, shoes, houses, books, a whole lot of services from education to dentistry to entertainment. When an economy does not produce enough of that stuff, the people are poor.

What distinguishes an advanced industrial economy from a desperately poor economy like India’s is that the former produces a lot of stuff and the latter produces little. And remember, stuff has to be produced for it to be consumed. To produce stuff, economic policies matter.

If you have a socialistic economy, it produces little. Talk to the Russians and former citizens of the USSR. If you have a market based capitalist economy, you produce a lot of stuff. Ask the rich Americans. Being productive, they are rich and because they are rich, they rule the world. India’s population is four times that of the US but yet India is a weakling in the world dominated by the US.

Let me stress again. Economic policies matter. What distinguishes the Indian economy from the American are economic policies.

Back to the original point. If India were to have good economic policies, India would be able to employ all of its human resources to produce the goods and services that India’s immense population needs. There is no way that India will ever run out of things that need done.

Real Poverty

To set the context, allow me to stress one central fact that we tend to forget. We forget because it is too pervasive and its persistence makes it appear akin to a fact of nature, as if there is a certain inevitability about it. I am talking of India’s desperate poverty.

I am assuming here that India’s desperate poverty is common knowledge. Actually it isn’t. I have spoken to many educated Indians and after only a bit of probing realized that they don’t have a clue about how desperately poor India is. I tell them that if by some miracle (or disaster) we were to distribute all the resources (wealth, income, land, water, etc) absolutely equitably, it would of course eliminate inequality but all Indians will still be desperately poor. We can all agree that there are rich people in India but the numbers are relatively small, and their exceptional condition does not negate the basic truth that India is horrifyingly poor.

That it does not horrify the average Indian is a marvel to behold. I think they don’t find it horrifying partly because they accept it as a natural condition, partly because they have become inured to it, and partly as a coping mechanism through denial.

Poverty not Inevitable

Poverty is not an impossible problem to solve. For most of human history, poverty has been a persistent fact but it does not have to be anymore. The stock of knowledge, the technologies, institutional arrangements, resources both material and financial — all these essential ingredients for the elimination of poverty exists today, and which did not exist say a hundred years ago. One may have been forced to accept widespread poverty then but now accepting it is tantamount to helping in poverty’s persistence.

India has access to the knowledge required to make good policies that will help solve the problems India faces. Technology is easy enough to create, to import, to adopt, to adapt. Resources too India has: land, water, minerals, human capital. Admittedly, it is not too abundant but the resources are more than sufficient for India to be at least a middle-income country (say with per capita annual GDP of around $10k). Some rudimentary institutions are also there. There’s a judicial system. It works at times but it needs major re-engineering. It is overburdened and in some cases corrupt. There are legislative bodies but they are ridden with corruption and ineptitude.

All in all, most of the necessary ingredients exist for India to not have been a desperately poor country. (I keep repeating “desperately” in the hope that it sinks into the subconscious.) So what’s been missing from the list of ingredients?

Flawed Economic Policies

Perhaps the most important lesson that a study of economics teaches is that economic policies matter in how an economy performs. Think about economic policies as a recipe. You may have the all the best ingredients to make a mouthwatering dish, but if your recipe is bad, you are stuck with an unpalatable mess. Or you may have the best ingredients, and the best recipe, but if the cook is third-rate, you are once again looking at one hell of unappetizing disaster.

India is poor. It need not have been. Bad economic policies were followed. These bad economic policies were made by people.

Allow me to quote a couple of smart observers in this context. Brad DeLong, professor of economics at UC Berkeley (whom I admire immensely) wrote in 2001:

The conventional narrative of India’s post-World War II economic history begins with a disastrous wrong turn by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, toward Fabian socialism, central planning, and an unbelievable quantity of bureaucratic red tape. This ‘license raj’ strangled the private sector and led to rampant corruption and massive inefficiency. As a result, India stagnated until bold neo-liberal economic reforms triggered by the currency crisis of 1991, and implemented by the government of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, unleashed its current wave of rapid economic growth – growth at a pace that promises to double average productivity levels and living standards in India every sixteen years.

Disastrous wrong turn by . . . Nehru. Keep that in mind. Here’s another assessment made by The Economist in 1991.

The hopes of 1947 have been betrayed. India, despite all its advantages and a generous supply of aid from the capitalist West (whose ‘wasteful’ societies it deplored), has achieved less than virtually any comparable third-world country. The cost in human terms has been staggering. Why has Indian development gone so tragically wrong? The short answer is this: the state has done far too much and far too little. It has crippled the economy, and burdened itself nearly to breaking point, by taking on jobs it has no business doing.

India achieved less than virtually any comparable third-world country. Staggering costs in human terms. Think about those bits. Why?

Arrogant, Ignorant, Dictators

The short answer it that the people at the helm of affairs have been arrogant, dictatorial, ignorant, and stupid. Nehru never listened to wise counsel. Once his mind was filled with socialistic nonsense, he did not deviate. He dictated, and the Congress party which was his fiefdom, followed. When Nehru died, within a short time his daughter Mrs Indira Gandhi (not related to Mahatma Gandhi although I have heard it said that M Gandhi had forced Feroze to change his Khan last name to Gandhi — for what reason I cannot fathom), another dictator, went about mercilessly strangling the Indian economy. She introduced the word “socialist” in the Indian constitution — thus adding steel straps to the straight-jacket that her father had fitted India.

Nehru-Gandhi family’s high-handed, wrong-headed, arrogant, ignorant policies have been entrenched in the Indian economy. The Congress party cannot change those policies. Why? Because to change policies they will have to admit that Nehru was an ignorant dictatorial failure. This they cannot do because their highway to power is built on the myth that Nehru and his descendants (and whoever they happen to be married to) are the wisest leaders that India ever had.

They Cannot Afford to Change

So also, no Nehru-Gandhi descendant can ever advocate policies that are actually good for India. Because any policy that are good for India is antithetical to the policies of the Nehru-Gandhi policies. Implementing good economic policies would be tantamount to committing political suicide for anyone from the Nehru-Gandhi, and by extension, the Congress cannot but continue with the failed policies.

For more on the failed policies, please see “THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF INDUSTRIAL POLICY IN INDIA: ADAPTING TO THE CHANGING DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL
ENVIRONMENT” University of Cambridge, Working Paper No. 376 by Ajit Singh. Dec 2008. (The two quote above are from that paper.)

Here’s a bit from the abstract of the paper.

The paper suggests that industrial policy and planned economic development did not come to an end with the deregulation of India’s traditional investment regime in the 1980s and 1990s. . . . India requires a somewhat different industrial policy than that pursued in the Nehru-Mahalanobis era, or that has been followed since then.

I am sure that most of us don’t have the time or the inclination of reading economic papers. What we can do however is to think seriously about what we see going on around us.

Divide and Rule

As I wrote in a previous post, the Congress party inherited the rule of India from the colonial British. They inherited not just the institutions or the legal structure or the economic system: they also inherited the mindset of the British.

The British had a policy of “divide and rule.” The Congress does the same. It is forever dividing the country along caste and religious lines. One of the Nehru-Gandhi family house-boy, Dr Manmohan Singh, even went so far as to state baldly that people of one specific religion have first claim to India’s resources.

But let’s not soil our hands touching filth. So no more about Dr MM Singh.

Redistribution without Production

What really bugs me is the maniacal zeal in redistribution that the Congress has. It just does not understand — just like the communists — that the first thing to do is to create the conditions that will increase the production of goods and services; then redistribution makes some sense. But the Congress does not do so. Why?

My conjecture is that if production increases, then people will not be desperately poor. And if they are not desperately poor, they will become educated. If they become educated, what is uncommon knowledge (that the Nehru-Gandhi family screwed India over) will become common knowledge. If that becomes common knowledge, the people will vote them out.

The Nehru-Gandhi family are not professionally qualified. I doubt that any of them can actually even do a bank teller’s job. (Although they have sufficient stuff stashed away for a comfortable life till the end of time.)

The challenge we have is public education. Some how we have to make sufficient number of voters aware of the immense harm that the Congress party has done and why that party cannot but go down the same track of keeping India desperately poor.

Can Al-Qaeda Solve the Terrorism Problem?

The Congress party led by the Nehru-Gandhi family cannot and will not solve India’s problem because they created the problem in the first place and it was in their narrow selfish interest that they did so. Expecting them to solve the problem is like expecting Al-Qaeda to address the problem of terrorism.

We have a choice: either we bury the Congress party or we bury India. One or the other will happen. Which one is what we have to decide.

Earlier that day I had stepped on to the streets outside our Peninsula Corporate Park offices in Lower Parel in Mumbai. The sidewalks — 3-foot wide to begin with – are congested with shops spilling on to them, forcing people on to the road where they compete with bicycles, trucks, buses, cars, 2-wheelers, cows and dogs. The roads are dug up for various reasons ranging from laying of pipes and cables, to building of some fly-over to help ease the congestion. Progress is at a slow walking pace for all: fat cats in Mercs and BMWs, the commoners in dilapidated black-and-yellow taxis, yuppies in Suzukis and Hundais.

II.
It’s always congested. There’s never enough capacity. The local trains in Mumbai run at 300 percent capacity. The long distance trains aren’t as bad if you can afford air conditioned class but the unreserved compartments are unbelievably congested. Even in the upper classes of the railways, reservations have to be made weeks or months in advance. Too often trains run late because the system is congested and one unfortunate delay propagates through the system affecting dozens of trains.

Congestion appears to be the defining characteristic of much of daily living. Prices are high, quantities limited, and quality is poor. Those features are normally associated with unregulated monopolies. A moment’s reflection is sufficient to see that much of what we suffer from in India can be explained by what is known about monopolies.

Monopolies are generally not good, even when there are justifications for their existence. The owners of a monopoly always have the temptation to restrict quantity in order to raise prices, and thus get super-normal profits. Monopolies make a simple offer: take it or leave it. “Don’t like what we have? Tough luck.” Monopolies have market power — they can set the prices and quantities and do so to maximize profits and don’t really care about the welfare consequences of their actions.

Nobody likes competition but in a competitive marketplace, no one has the kind of power that monopolists have. In a competitive market, no one has the luxury of setting prices. All are “price takers” — they take what they can get.

III.
Monopolies exist for a variety of reasons such as scale economies and technological advantages. I call them “natural reasons.” Then there is one “unnatural reason” — where a monopoly is created by government fiat. The government legally restricts the production and sales of goods and services to one firm, which is generally a government firm.

The fun in being a monopolist lies in the control that one has. One controls the price and therefore can set the profit-maximizing quantity knowing what the demand patterns are like. The steeper the demand curve, the greater the wedge between the cost and the price, which means greater profits. The more essential some good or service is, the steeper is the demand curve. So it makes sense to be a monopolist for a good or service that has no close substitutes.

It’s good to be a monopolists, just like it is good to be a dictator.

As a monopolist, you control how much you will produce and at which price it will be sold, and you produce the quality that suits you, not the customer. You dictate, you rule. You reign. It’s your raj. It’s a license-control-permit-quota raj.

IV.
Talking of raj, the supreme example of a monopolist is the government. If you don’t like the government, you have no option other than migrating. Sure, you can vote this government out of the office – but then you are replacing one monopoly with another. The new monopolist has the same incentives to screw you over as the previous one.

Markets are magical things. Competitive markets are amazing things. Magically, competitive markets solve the most astonishing problems that no human agency can solve: they discover prices, determine the quantity to be produced, how productive resources are to be allocated, etc., and in some sense maximize social welfare. Monopolies leave much to be desired in terms of social welfare. They are good for the monopoly but not for others.

Of course, there are real world conditions under which markets fail to grind out the social welfare maximizing outcome. These failures are as well-known as the mechanisms for fixing them. But generally, even an imperfectly competitive market’s welfare implications trump that of a monopoly.

No firm in a competitive marketplace can make economic profits. For profit, one has to be a monopoly. That is why it makes sense to become a monopolist. How much would you be willing to pay to become a monopolist? Well, that depends, doesn’t it on how much profit you will be able to make as the monopolist?

V.
One important bit about markets before we move ahead. Well-functioning markets have one characteristic: there are no persistent shortages. There may be acute episodic shortages but they disappear soon enough. You never have to queue up to buy some commodity in them. In response to demand, the price goes up or down, signaling to producers whether to expand or contract their production.

You have to engineer shortages that persist for years and decades. Careful planning is required to keep production low so that a rationing mechanism can be put in place for distributing the production. Monopolists can and do keep quantities artificially low – and somehow or the other, the government is involved in this. The implications of this are profoundly interesting.

Suppose you could make $10 billion a year profit as a monopolist. And suppose you are reasonably certain that your tenure will be around 10 years. That’s $100 billion in profits. You would be willing to pay say $10- or $30- or $70 billion or anything less than $100. In actuality, you may get the monopoly for much less than that provided you don’t have too many competitors for the monopoly.

The lure of monopoly profits induces competition. It is competition for “the market” because once you get control of the market, there is no competition in the market. Competition for the market is a substitute for competition in the market.

The government is a supreme monopolist, as I mentioned before. Whoever (or whichever group) is the government stands to gain immense amounts of profits. The greater the profits, the greater is the competition for being the government.

VI.
There are legitimate reasons for why we need a government. In one word, government is necessary for solving the coordination problem. Without defining it here, let’s just say that there are some things that only something like a government can ensure – such as external security, internal law and order, some form of central bank, some legislative functions, etc. But that’s a very limited set of activities.

The government is not required for a whole host of other things. Private parties can and indeed do produce goods and services, from shoes and ships and sealing wax and whatever. A competitive private sector can produce practically all the stuff that we need – transportation, food, clothes, entertainment, education, . . . the list goes on. And they can do it efficiently and effectively.

Firms that cannot compete in the competitive market, go out of business. In the competitive market, shortages disappear because the incentive to remove the shortage is that one can make some profits – and that is self-limiting because they all rush in and soon the shortage disappears.

When the government decides to become the monopolist-supplier of some good or service, suddenly shortages become an enduring fact of nature. Recall that only by restricting quantities can the monopolist make profits. If a monopolist were to produce the output quantity that a competitive market would have produced, then the price would also be that of the competitive market, and there would be no profits and it would not be worth being a monopolist.

VII.
So there it is. India is a congested shortage economy because it is profitable to be a monopolist. The government is the supreme monopolist. The larger the government, the more the profits. And that’s why the government runs airlines, railways, schools, bakeries, hotels, steel, coal, . . . wherever you see shortage and congestion, think of the government.

Is that all there is to it – shortages? Unfortunately no. There’s something worse. Corruption. Corruption is a function of how big the government is. That is the core thesis of this post.

Suppose the government were only into legislation, law enforcement and security. More specifically, say it was not into running a million schools, or in the business of granting licenses to firms to run schools and colleges. Then being an official in the government would not be all that attractive. But since there are licenses required, and the quantity is limited, getting the licenses induces competition for the market for education. Competition in the market is limited by limiting the licenses. So education becomes a very lucrative business.

Note, private providers of education in a competitive market would not make any profits, the quantity will not be limited, the quality will not be poor, and there will be no shortages.

VIII.
The only reason for what we have in education today – lousy quality, low quantity, and high prices – is because of government control. And we have government control because the government extracts rents (the super-normal profits) from the firms that provide education.

Continuing with the education theme for just a little bit more, here’s the scary part. The lousy education sector is going to become worse. I was at a roundtable meeting at the Observer Research Foundation in Mumbai a couple of weeks ago. One member of the Planning Commission who was instrumental in the new draft bill for the creation of an apex body called the NCHER – National Commission for Higher Education and Research – made a presentation. It was the stuff of nightmares.

The AICTE and UGC are regulatory bodies that have brought ruin to the country’s education system. Now they are going to be replaced by NCHER which is essentially AICTE and UGC on steroids with two solid-fuel rocket boosters strapped on the sides and supercharged with high octane aviation fuel turbo charged nuclear nanotechnology quantum super collider super cooled magneto-spherical resonating chamber horror.

IX.
The more control the government has, the more money it makes. Auctioning of the radio spectrum gets one say Rs 26,000 crores (or about US$ 5 billion.) That is a pretty penny. It makes sense to become the telecom minister. So you can afford to spend US$ 1 billion in making sure that you get to be the telecom minister.

Anyway, the problem of corruption is simply ingrained in this democracy (which I call the cargo-cult democracy – google for more). Becoming a minister is a sure-fire way of getting billions of dollars in overseas accounts.

The larger the government grows, the larger is the reward for being in it. The nation becomes poor because of the shortages and congestion. But those in the government make money because they engineer the shortages. Prices rise, poverty deepens.

And that deepening of poverty is the reason that the government says that it needs to expand. It enlarges itself to provide NREGA or some such mumble-thousand crores scheme, for instance. Of that, it siphons off 50 percent. That’s about US$ 30 billion every year. Nice pot of change, if you can get your paws on it.

X.
Lee Kuan Yew said last year that Singapore became rich but its leaders did not. Indian politicians can make a similar claim: India did not become rich, its leaders did.

There is more but this has been a long post. I have not gone into the details of the linkage between multi-billion dollar corruption of India, the reason the democratic setup of the country will not allow good people to become leaders, why the middle-class is ignorant and apathetic, why the Congress party is a close substitute for the colonial British rulers, and so on.

XI.
I argue that the Congress party inherited the government of India from the British Nehru and his descendants found the conditions very good. They did not dismantle the institutions that the British had used to control the Indian economy for the purposes of extracting all they could out of India. They kept the economy in shackles. As time went on, they tightened their grip on the economy to the point that it was dying.

Fortunately, PV Narasimha Rao was not as crooked as the Nehru-Gandhi family. He freed the economy a bit from the chains that the GA-ndhi-Nehru-Hangers-on had forged for India. It is called “liberalization” – the freeing of something.

It is hard to fathom how people can hold the GANDH in such esteem as to actually vote for them. But then one must remember that half the population is absolutely illiterate and probably the large majority is totally ignorant of the truth – since the government controls what the people are told.

I think the chances are fairly low that India will actually get out of the hole that the Congress party and the Family has dug for India. From where I am, I see the stranglehold of the government only increasing. As the body thrashes more in desperate need for air, they will increase the pressure so that the body passes into a coma. Then they will eat the dead.

There is only one hope. That the people realize what horrors that party has committed against India and Indians, and what further horrors they have in store for India. If we have to save India, the only hope is public education.

But first, here’s how I understand the proposition. It is in the present tense — that investments are wasted. It does not say that investment in technology should not be made, or that investments in technology can never be useful. It just says that at present — and implicit in there is the qualifier “in India” — most investments in technology are wasted. What I will do is to argue that this waste is because technology requires a deep back-end to support its use for it to be worth the money. Furthermore, one has to be wary of the siren call of fancy technology when even the basic conditions required for learning are not met.

I am looking forward to the debate. It is a free event but registration is required. There are some tickets available for in person attendance and also for the Webcast. You can sign up here.

Dawkins and his unholy comrade in arms Hitchens are hatching a very cunning plan to have Papa Benny arrested when he visits UK in September. Warms the cockles of my heart that they are working to bring the satanic head of the evil empire to pay for his “crimes against humanity.”

Mr Puppet and his Italian Handler

Talking about crimes against humanity closer to home, PRAJATANTRA has a post on “living in the shadow of insecurity“. Included in that post is an image of an advertisement (paid for with your tax money) which has the pictures of His Master’s Puppet and the Puppet Master. I include that picture here to add some color to this post.

The Puppet — aka Blue Turban — has made it so easy for India’s enemies that a bunch of jihadists — just 10 of them, not a nuclear bomb, not a flotilla of warships, not a huge squadron of American-gifted bombers and fighter planes, not a thousand China-gifted tanks — no, just 10 guys with backpacks — launched “an Audacious Assault on India’s Prestige and an Affront to its People.”

What has brought us to this that 10 semi-trained, crazed Islamic terrorists can launch an “audacious assault” and that too keep it up for 3 f**king days! The “Land of Gandhi”! Yes of course, the land of Gandhi, and Nehru, and the Italian Gandhi.

Pardon my cynicism, but the people deserve all this shit and more because they voted for the Congress party (and also those who tacitly allowed this party to rule by not voting at all). Karma is a bitch.

And it is all karma, neh?

Talking of karma, here’s a restaurant that takes the idea of karma seriously — the Karma Kitchen in Berkeley.

Karma Kitchen first opened in Berkeley on March 31st 2007, by several volunteers inspired to seed the value of a “gift economy”.

Run by volunteers, our meals are cooked and served with love, and offered to the guest as a genuine gift. To complete the full circle of giving and sustain this experiment, guests make contributions in the spirit of pay-it-forward to those who will come after them. In keeping this chain going, the generosity of both guests and volunteers helps to create a future that moves from transaction to trust, from self-oriented isolation to shared commitment, and from fear of scarcity to celebration of abundance.

More food for thought, now. Gandhi was whitewashed by people who used him to further their own cause. For decades the Congress party has used Gandhi as its mascot, and so nothing unsavory was ever allowed to be published in India. Censorship in today’s age of them internets is as effective as praying for the suspension of natural laws. So Congress can do f***-all about the truth coming out — in little trickles right now and later as a flood that will drown the whole unholy edifice that the Congress party erected over the last 60 years.

“Thrill of the chaste: The truth about Gandhi’s sex life” reads the headline of an article published in The Independent of UK. Some excerpts:

Gandhi with the Young and Lovelies

Gandhi found it easy to embrace poverty. It was chastity that eluded him. So he worked out a series of complex rules which meant he could say he was chaste while still engaging in the most explicit sexual conversation, letters and behaviour.

With the zeal of the convert, within a year of his vow, he told readers of his newspaper Indian Opinion: “It is the duty of every thoughtful Indian not to marry. In case he is helpless in regard to marriage, he should abstain from sexual intercourse with his wife.”

Meanwhile, Gandhi was challenging that abstinence in his own way. He set up ashrams in which he began his first “experiments” with sex; boys and girls were to bathe and sleep together, chastely, but were punished for any sexual talk. Men and women were segregated, and Gandhi’s advice was that husbands should not be alone with their wives, and, when they felt passion, should take a cold bath.

The rules did not, however, apply to him. Sushila Nayar, the attractive sister of Gandhi’s secretary, also his personal physician, attended Gandhi from girlhood. She used to sleep and bathe with Gandhi. When challenged, he explained how he ensured decency was not offended. “While she is bathing I keep my eyes tightly shut,” he said, “I do not know … whether she bathes naked or with her underwear on. I can tell from the sound that she uses soap.” The provision of such personal services to Gandhi was a much sought-after sign of his favour and aroused jealousy among the ashram inmates.

As he grew older (and following Kasturba’s death) he was to have more women around him and would oblige women to sleep with him whom – according to his segregated ashram rules – were forbidden to sleep with their own husbands. Gandhi would have women in his bed, engaging in his “experiments” which seem to have been, from a reading of his letters, an exercise in strip-tease or other non-contact sexual activity. Much explicit material has been destroyed but tantalising remarks in Gandhi’s letters remain such as: “Vina’s sleeping with me might be called an accident. All that can be said is that she slept close to me.” One might assume, then, that getting into the spirit of the Gandhian experiment meant something more than just sleeping close to him.

It can’t, one imagines, can have helped with the “involuntary discharges” which Gandhi complained of experiencing more frequently since his return to India. He had an almost magical belief in the power of semen: “One who conserves his vital fluid acquires unfailing power,” he said.

Meanwhile, it seemed that challenging times required greater efforts of spiritual fortitude, and for that, more attractive women were required: Sushila, who in 1947 was 33, was now due to be supplanted in the bed of the 77-year-old Gandhi by a woman almost half her age. While in Bengal to see what comfort he could offer in times of inter-communal violence in the run-up to independence, Gandhi called for his 18-year-old grandniece Manu to join him – and sleep with him. “We both may be killed by the Muslims,” he told her, “and must put our purity to the ultimate test, so that we know that we are offering the purest of sacrifices, and we should now both start sleeping naked.”

Such behaviour was no part of the accepted practice of bramacharya. He, by now, described his reinvented concept of a brahmachari as: “One who never has any lustful intention, who, by constant attendance upon God, has become proof against conscious or unconscious emissions, who is capable of lying naked with naked women, however beautiful, without being in any manner whatsoever sexually excited … who is making daily and steady progress towards God and whose every act is done in pursuance of that end and no other.” That is, he could do whatever he wished, so long as there was no apparent “lustful intention”. He had effectively redefined the concept of chastity to fit his personal practices. [Emphasis added.]

I don’t care who sleeps with whom. It’s hypocrisy that I cannot tolerate. It’s the “do as I say, not as I do” that rankles. It’s Gandhi’s holier-than-thou image gets my goat. I am eagerly looking forward to the day when the carefully crafted oh-so-pure images of Nehru, Mrs Indira Gandhi, Mr Rajiv Gandhi, Mr Rahul Gandhi and other assorted members of the whole sordid family is finally revealed to be as fake as a three-dollar bill. It won’t be long.

That little news item doesn’t reveal anything spectacularly new. In practically all matters having to do with Pakistan, the US treats India with barely concealed contempt and makes sure to equate India with — and at times relegate India below — Pakistan. Pakistan whines and the US tells India to “stop it.”

I have seen this happen at the family level. Seven year old girl being seriously bothered by a very bratty five year old brother. Finally she tells him off and he starts crying. Mother comes into the room and gives the girl a beating. Over repeated instances the girl comes to believe that she’s at fault and soon enough learns that she is a girl and has to do what the boy says because the mother will always favor the boy over the girl.

Like all analogies, it is not an exact fit but it is close enough.

India and Pakistan have been dependent on the US for over half a century. India had to go with a begging bowl to the US when starvation stared it in the face. India begs for technology from the US. It begs the US to sell it arms. The US demonstrates who is the boss by withholding favors and then after a great deal of groveling by India, granting them with great fanfare and making sure that they come with strings attached. And to really rub it in, the US cultivates Pakistan as its client state and gives it aid amounting to billions of dollars so that it can continue to limp along and be a dagger at India’s side.

It could have been otherwise. India could have been more powerful than China is today and if that has been so, the US would have treated India with respect, like it does China today. There was nothing in the stars that condemned India to being an irrelevant third world country with delusions of becoming an “economic superpower.” Nothing except the leadership. Starting with Nehru (the Nabob of Cluelessness), and continuing on to his daughter (eventually a dictator who was outsmarted by the Pakis), then on to his grandson, and then to his grandson’s Italian wife — they all have systematically dug a hole so deep for India that it is hard to tell if they or the Pakistanis are the real enemy.

Here’s a post I published on Nov 23, 2009 which is relevant here:

The evil that men do lives after them. That’s Shakespeare’s conjecture. The remaining good bits can be buried in a matchbox. That’s with apologies to Christopher Hitchens.

In 1947, the men who took command of India did many things. Sixty-two years later, what they did lives on. India had great promise. It could have become at least a second world economy (per capita income of over $10,000 per annum) and – given its huge population of over a billion – it could have been a formidable economic force.

Where’s India actually? China and the US are the world’s “two leading powers,” wrote our favourite NYT columnist Thomas L Friedman. How much more blatantly obvious can it be that India does not bat in the big league when even Tom Friedman figures it out.

How irrelevant is India? The US president in a speech delivered recently in Tokyo on US relations in Asia did not even mention India. China matters because China is rich compared to India. The leaders of China figured out that communism leads to poverty and decided to develop their economy. Its leaders chose the right policies and China became the manufacturing superpower of the world. The US goes to China with a begging bowl in its hands. The US knows that the US dollar continues to limp along instead of crashing only at the pleasure of China.

China is powerful. It dictates to the US president whom he can meet and whom he cannot. The Dalai Lama was not welcome to the White House recently – the first time this has happened. But China has been telling the US what to do for a while now. It’s becoming more obvious.

You may recall that Bill Clinton also bowed to the demands of the Chinese leaders when he was the president. He had wanted to make a quick stop in India on his way to visit China. The Chinese told him that he need not bother coming to China if he was going to stop however briefly in India. When you come to China, come to China only, they told him. Clinton said, yes Sir.

When China says jump, the US politely asks how high.

A little later came Clinton’s visit to India. He decided that he will stop by Pakistan on his way back from India. India begged him to not do so. India begged, not demanded. He told India to shove it and stopped in Pakistan.

India is powerless. The Washington Post reports “two missteps” by the US in relation to India. Misstep is a nice – what’s the word that I am looking for – circumlocution. Or maybe euphemism. Whatever. Misstep is when without intending to, you hurt someone’s toe; a couple of tight slaps on the face is not a misstep. Anyone with half a brain can tell it is calculated and deliberate. India has to silently endure the indignity that the US routinely subjects it to.

Why does the US do so to India? I don’t know but it could have something to do with India’s relationship with the US since (India’s) independence. India’s sainted dear leader allied India with the USSR and against the US. The US is unlikely to forget that.

But there’s another reason. India has to suffer indignities because it is poor. India is poor because its policies suck. India has bad policies because it got bad leaders right from the start.

One cannot fault small countries such as say, Burundi or Zambia, for not being a world power. They just don’t have the population, the human capital, the size or the natural resources for that. No one expects small marginal countries to be of any consequence.

But India had (almost) all the necessary components for becoming a nation of some consequence in a few decades after independence. What it did not have was enlightened leadership. The names of those leaders – leaders that through their abysmal stupidity, short-sightedness, arrogance and ignorance made India virtually irrelevant – can be found in the tens thousands of institutions, government schemes, roads, ports, airports and universities named after them in India.

Are those leaders alone to blame? Actually no. Leadership is largely endogenous and reflects the nature of the population. The ultimate cause of poverty of any large group is the group itself.

Sometimes, just by the luck of the draw, some states, large or small, get good leaders. The US had great luck when it became independent in 1776. Intellectual giants – Franklin, Jefferson – guided the nation. Singapore, a tiny nation of absolutely no special promise, got Lee Kuan Yew and became a powerful country. Enlightened leadership makes a difference.

India too got an authoritarian dictator at its independence. What was missing was enlightened leadership.

As an Indian, I feel envious of the power that China has and uses ruthlessly. Even when it was just another extremely poor country, it gave India a drubbing in 1962. China had been provoked by the hubris of Indian leaders. Now that it has trillions of dollars in the bank and has the US kowtowing to it, China can severely damage India. Arunachal Pradesh is as good as gone. China is encircling India. Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan.

What’s depressing is that India could as well have been referred to as one of “the two leading world powers.”

As the American poet John Whittier wrote, “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”

India’s leaders are ensuring that it continues to be an irrelevant third-world country by keeping it poor. India suffers indignities, and more can be expected when China overtakes the US as the largest economy in the world in a few years. Poverty is like that – not just injury, it also brings insults in its wake. Those who made India poor did not just condemn hundreds of millions of Indians to lives of extreme deprivation and premature deaths, but they also weakened India externally and internally.

India is so weak externally that even a failed two-bit tinpot Islamic dictatorship can cause immense harm to India. Another failed Islamic state – one which India saved from being butchered further by its Islamic brother and helped it gain independence – routinely sponsors terrorism in India and is engineering a demographic change in India’s eastern states. India responds with weak protests.

India is so weak internally that its citizens die by the hundreds each year from Islamic terrorism and all it can do is to run to the US and complain that Pakistan is being bad to India. India whines and asks the US to declare Pakistan a state that supports terrorism. The US, in response, declares Pakistan to be a frontline ally of the US’s “war on terror.” That’s not a slap on the face of India. That’s a steel-toed military boot shoved deep in the head.

All this need not have been. It could have been different. We all know it but we cannot do anything about it. India has been ruled by the Congress for nearly all of its existence since independence. India has been reduced to a rather pathetic state that its prime minister feels grateful for the little attention that the US administration magnanimously throws his way. He, of all people, should know because the family he serves so loyally is the one that has reduced India to this.

The evil they did lives on. The good is vanishingly small and hence really irrelevant.

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Profound stupidity mixed with infinite hubris served up with astonishing confidence. The piece starts off with three quotations — from Albert Einstein, Steven (sic) Hawking, and — hold your breath — Deepak Chopra. The man certainly gives himself airs. But perhaps I am wrong. Maybe he was just setting up the scene and showing the gradation from the great to the good to the utterly stupid.

The first sentence itself is a shining example of the inanity that pervades most of Chopra’s writing.

Today, 3/14 , is Einstein’s birthday and the day of the debate at Cal-Tech on the Future of God. (3.14 is also Pi, another amazing coincidence.)

I am sure that he does not know that Pi is an irrational number and within its infinite decimal representation you can find whatever number you are looking for. But that’s just the start of it. He pulls bombastic claims out of his butt without a moment’s hesitation.

“God is Infinite Consciousness,” he asserts as if he stood outside creation and having surveyed the entity that created the universe, is reporting what he saw on the 6 o’clock evening news. “The stock market is heading up.”

Then he is on a roll. “God is the agent of downward causation. God is the consciousness that differentiates into space, time, energy information and matter.”

We all know what downward causation is, don’t we? He pulled that one out without even taking a breath, followed with consciousness differentiating all over the place.

I only marvel at how deluded the guy is for him to keep going on spewing utter nonsense without the least shame. His next gem goes,

Cosmogenesis, Biopoesis Evolution : The principle of parsimony (Occam’s razor) dictates that God is the author of the Big Bang (neither big nor noisy) a moment where a point of infinite density and zero volume starts creation in an instant.

I am impressed by all those big words. Big and noisy words. How he drags in Occam’s razor is a mystery though. His next howler comes close behind. Quote:

10 billion years later our sun appears and starts to fragment pieces of itself to create its own solar system, including planet earth 30 million years after the formation of the sun.

Dear god in heaven! Where the heck did that come from? The sun fragments pieces of itself? Does the man have any general knowledge at all? Does he not know that the sun is essentially hydrogen, whereas the earth and other rocky planets are far up the periodic table? He is ignorant and does not hesitate to demonstrate his ignorance.

He has read big words and thinks he understands what they mean. The nonsense he constructs out of words is a wonder to behold.

Each moment of time a new universe is created. Fundamentally the universe is a discontinuity. In each moment of time the universe is not only recreated but also evolves. This recreation happens in the Gap where consciousness resides. The Gap is:
(a) a super position of possibilities
(b) a field of infinite non local correlation, dynamic and kinematic
(c) a field of quantum creativity
(d) an intention field, (the observer effect) — where consciousness collapses its possibility waves into space — time events, which are measured out as motion, energy, information and matter.

Someone quoted Bertrand Russell in one of the comments to that article, “A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”

Deepak Chopra is a stupid man.

But he is a famous man. He is even featured in comic strip. (Click on the strip to go to the site “Ape Not Monkey” and check out the rest of the story.)

[Hat tip: Rajan Parrikar for the Huff Post link.]

There is a very famous woman in India who is a Roman Catholic. Roman Catholics take as their undisputed leader the Bishop of Rome, aka the Pope, or Papa. You’d have thought that in this day and age, people would have given up on medieval superstitions. Most have but some — even some very powerful people — are superstitious. How superstitious?

The Devil is lurking in the very heart of the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican’s chief exorcist claimed on Wednesday. I am not making this up. It’s from the BBC.

Father Gabriele Amorth said people who are possessed by Satan vomit shards of glass and pieces of iron. . .

“The Devil resides in the Vatican and you can see the consequences,” said Father Amorth, 85, who has been the Holy See’s chief exorcist for 25 years.

“He can remain hidden, or speak in different languages, or even appear to be sympathetic. At times he makes fun of me. But I’m a man who is happy in his work.”
. . . The evil influence of Satan was evident in the highest ranks of the Catholic hierarchy, with “cardinals who do not believe in Jesus and bishops who are linked to the demon,” Father Amorth said.

In a rare insight into the world of exorcism, the Italian priest told La Repubblica newspaper that the 1973 film The Exorcist gave a “substantially exact” impression of what it was like to be possessed by the Devil.

People possessed by evil sometimes had to be physically restrained by half a dozen people while they were exorcised. They would scream, utter blasphemies and spit out sharp objects, he said.

2,000 year old desert death cults still have an influence on people. Deva, deva!

It is true that “@” stands for “at the rate of” in certain contexts but when it is embedded in an email address, it is simply “at”. It is worse when someone who works at some IT related job makes that stupid error. I sometimes take the time to explain that it is a symbol and that symbols are interpreted based on the context, and then pronounced appropriately. The “.” at the end of a sentence is read as “period”, or “full stop”; but in arithmetic, it is called “point”, not period.

Another thing that bugs me no end is when someone writes “sirjee” or “sirji”. WTF is that? What next, “shri sir ji”? Or even “sri sri sir ji”?

This is the shortest rant I have ever written.

In an article, Don’t Block the ‘Internet Hindus’, Mr Kanchan Gupta reports statistics from an online survey, open to Hindus on the internet:

Of those who have responded, 88.9 per cent have identified themselves as ‘Internet Hindus’, indicating they attach no shame to the term though their critics would want them to feel ashamed. Of the respondents, four per cent are aged 20 years and below; 55 per cent are aged 30 and below; 31 per cent are 40 and below; and, only 10 per cent are aged above 40. In brief, 90 per cent of them are young Indians.

Nitpicker that I am, I note that the numbers above don’t quite add up. If 55 percent are aged 30 and below, there have to be more than 55 percent who are 40 and below — not the 31 percent reported by Mr Gupta. By my arithmetic, if it is true that 10 percent > 40 years of age, then those who are 40 years and below have to be 90 percent, not 31 percent. Anyway, all this is pretty trivial since the main point is that them Internet Hindus(tm) are a pretty cool lot.

So how cool am I as an Internet Hindu(tm)? First, I am in the top 10 percent age wise. Then I am in the top 11 percent education wise: those who have a PhD. I am not that special earning wise as I belong to a fairly large group — 26.5 percent — who earn more than Rs 24 lakhs a year. And when it comes to foreign travel, I am in the majority 60 percent who have traveled abroad at least once. I hate being in large groups.

I am happy to note that I differ most significantly with a very large segment. Mr Gupta writes:

Contrary to the impression that is being sought to be created by their critics, ‘Internet Hindus’ are open to ideas, believe in a plural, law-abiding society and swear by the Constitution. They are often appalled by the shenanigans of our politicians, including those of the BJP, and are ruthless in decrying politics of identity and cynical vote-bank policies. They have no gender prejudices and most of them think banning FTV is downright silly in this day and age. The ‘Internet Hindus’ will not countenance denigration of their faith or biased media coverage of events, but 91.9 per cent of them respect and accept other religions. Asked if India is meant only for Hindus, an overwhelming majority of them, responding to the survey, said, ‘Hell, no!’

I am not among the 91.9 percent that “respect and accept other religions.” Respecting and accepting other religions is idiotic and silly. I am an anti-theist. I don’t have any truck with gods or God. I respect only those religions that admit the possibility of there being no god or gods — which includes Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. All other religions are by the retarded, of the retarded and for the retarded. I have an antipathy towards the monotheistic religions — with particular disdain for Islam. I think the desert religions are hateful ideologies that would have died out but for the fact that the majority of humans continue to be ignorant, myopic and stupid.

Anyway, so the bottom line is that I am an Internet Hindu(tm) and proud of it. And as Mr Gupta notes (“English language media journalists, long used to fawning praise from readers and viewers, are horrified that someone can actually call them ‘dumb’ in public space and there’s nothing they can do about it”), I take particular delight in calling the pseudo-secularists dumb and retarded. And stupid to boot.

Now all I need is an official laminated genuine card so that I can be a card-carrying Internet Hindu(tm).

There they learned about the evils of Hinduism and Hindus. Such as

. . . sixth-grade Punjab provincial textbook called “Social Studies 6.”

In one chapter it explains the forefathers of Hinduism “were fond of gambling, drinking and dancing … the foundation of Hindu set up was based on injustice and cruelty.”

Another textbook used by students throughout Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous state, is called “Social Studies for Class V.” It begins: “Islam gives women a high position of respect whereas Hinduism gives a very low place to women.” The same book outlines the concept of jihad.

Texts for older students offer more of the same.

“Social Studies for Class VIII” describes how during the 19th century, “the Hindu racists were not only against Muslims but also against all other minorities …” The book charges Hindus and Sikhs practised ethnic cleansing during partition in 1947 when India and Pakistan were carved out of British India and became independent states. [Source: The Star.com]

Hat tip: Pankaj Pradhan.

Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.

See this NYT article “Building a better teacher.” Then use Readability on it and see the difference.