The Supreme Court intervenes and orders the court to do something. The wrongly accused — and convicted — persons are let out on bail. Not freed but let out on bail.

I suppose the court figured that it must be a simple case of resurrection — which is why the original sentencing must stand and the only accommodation required is to let them out on bail.

I struggle to imagine the mentality of the people who sat in judgement in this case. Are they even human? Do they have empathy? Do they have any sense of justice or fairness?

Some judge, I presume, convicted three people for murder without a body. What kind of judge was this? How much money was the judge paid to pass that judgement of murder without a body? Were the police in on it and did they drag some corpse to court?

Why did it take so long — nearly a year — after it was discovered that person B was in fact alive and well for anyone to move the court to release the convicted prisoners?

And finally, why were they released on bail? Isn’t the fact that they are patently innocent of murder and that they had already served 11 years in prison sufficient grounds for an immediate release followed by some kind of compensation?

When I first read about this in the papers recently, I could not believe that this Kafkaesque drama was real. But on further reflection, I realized that this is what happens in the final stages of a society’s collapse. This is indicative of insanity at the level of the collective.

The Greek poet Euripides (484 BCE – 406 BCE) declared “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”

The Indian legal system is in dire straits. From what I get to hear, it appears that judges are easily bribed. There are millions of cases pending in the courts. Cases go on for decades and sometimes the litigants pass into the great beyond before the cases are concluded.

Why is this so? Why is the legal system in such a state?

This is my conjecture. I stress that I am only guessing and I have no hard evidence to back my claims. I think that Indians generally lack empathy. Empathy allows one to put oneself in the other’s position and realize how the other feels. Empathy tells one that one should not treat another the way one would not want to be treated. Empathy is the basis of the Golden Rule. Empathy is essential for one to have a sense of justice and fairness.

Empathy stops one from gratuitously causing harm to other sentient beings. Because of empathy, one feels outraged at injustice and unfairness. Empathy, more than any other feeling, makes us truly human.

Empathy drove Abraham Lincoln to declare, “Just as I would not wish to be a slave, so I would not be a master.” When Bertrand Russell wrote, “The mark of a truly civilized human being is the ability to read a column of numbers and then weep,” he was pointing to the ability to empathize with others in their misfortune.

All those who wrongly convicted those three in the present case clearly lack empathy. They lack a sense of fairness and justice. If the society is not outraged, it can only be because it does not care about justice and fairness.

A society which values justice and fairness would not tolerate judges of the kind that condemn innocent people. In fact, it would not tolerate a government which is so incompetent that the courts don’t actually function.

There are many indicators of India’s backwardness: lousy infrastructure, third rate educational system, dishonest public servants, poor governance, outdated laws, overcrowded cities, . . . the list goes on. But one of the worst is the legal system which in a sense incorporates within itself all of the above maladies.

There are not enough judges, not enough court rooms, the whole system is massively corrupt, the laws are archaic and senseless, . . . and so on.

I wonder what went wrong. The Indian civilization is thousands of years old. Its people have figured out answers to some of the deepest problems of existence. It used to be culturally and materially rich. It gave the world some of the most exalted philosophical ideas and ideals. What went wrong?

Why don’t Indians fight injustice and unfairness? Who brainwashed Indians that it is ok to tolerate the intolerable? Who is responsible for Indians becoming a bunch of unthinking sheep? Who taught them to tolerate injustice?

Here’s what happened after Gandhi’s “Dandi March” in the event called the “Dharasana Satyagraha” in May 1930. The following is a quote from a report filed by an American journalist Webb Miller:

Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten-pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls. The waiting crowd of watchers groaned and sucked in their breaths in sympathetic pain at every blow.

Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing in pain with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. In two or three minutes the ground was quilted with bodies. Great patches of blood widened on their white clothes. The survivors without breaking ranks silently and doggedly marched on until struck down. When every one of the first column was knocked down stretcher bearers rushed up unmolested by the police and carried off the injured to a thatched hut which had been arranged as a temporary hospital.

There were not enough stretcher-bearers to carry off the wounded; I saw eighteen injured being carried off simultaneously, while forty-two still lay bleeding on the ground awaiting stretcher-bearers. The blankets used as stretchers were sodden with blood.

At times the spectacle of unresisting men being methodically bashed into a bloody pulp sickened me so much I had to turn away. . .I felt an indefinable sense of helpless rage and loathing, almost as much against the men who were submitting unresistingly to being beaten as against the police wielding the clubs. . .

Bodies toppled over in threes and fours, bleeding from great gashes on their scalps. Group after group walked forward, sat down, and submitted to being beaten into insensibility without raising an arm to fend off the blows. Finally the police became enraged by the non-resistance. . . They commenced savagely kicking the seated men in the abdomen and testicles. The injured men writhed and squealed in agony, which seemed to inflame the fury of the police . . . The police then began dragging the sitting men by the arms or feet, sometimes for a hundred yards, and throwing them into ditches. {Emphasis added.}

One should feel “rage and loathing” on witnessing how people acquiesce to violence and thus willingly participate in it. The policemen wielding those steel-tipped lathis were Indians following orders. They did not have the empathy, the sense of justice and fairness, to resist evil. The satyagrahis did not have sense to say no to violence.

They were complicit in the brutality. They accepted brutality and in their acceptance they also became capable of brutality. They suffered violence gladly and became capable of inflicting violence gladly.

I am not a “Gandhian.” I will resist violence with every fiber of my being. And just as I would not accept violence, so also I will never initiate violence. I will never be complicit in the crime by enabling another to be violent towards me.

India and Indians need a lot of things. But the two things Indians definitely need are, one, a sense of fairness and justice, and two, a backbone. They have been robbed of them by the idol they worship called Gandhi.

Here endth the rant.

PS: Here’s a news item of Nov 5th about the case of the resurrected man.

We are now in an age where knowledge is paramount. What you know determines who you are and how successful you will be in the world. What matters now is not the control of muscles but rather the control of minds. Knowledge is our greatest weapon and information is the tool for crafting that weapon. Want to influence minds? Make use of the information out there to make people see the world as it actually is and not as advertised for the convenience of those in power.

Previously the government controlled the flow of information. That control has almost entirely vanished and with it the power of governments to control minds has eroded. The fact that the control is over is not fully appreciated. We need to first of all understand that with the loss of government control over the flow of information, we are at the threshold of getting our independence.

Our weapon is knowledge. Our challenge is to wield our weapon with ruthless efficiency. We have to bring out into the open all that the government has hidden from public view.

Those in power are people who have committed humongous crimes against India and Indians. Indians need to know that and understand that their greatest enemy has been — and still is — the bunch that has controlled India since 1947. India’s potential and promise has been systematically destroyed by a ruthless bunch of self-serving power hungry myopic imbeciles. The government control of the channels of information has presented a totally whitewashed, sanitized and fictional portrait of these imbeciles. The control of the education system, the control of radio and TV, the control of research institutions — all have been to one end only: brainwash the people into believing the totally false.

But all things must pass. With the loss of control over the flow of information, the apparatus that has been so successful up till now in concealing the truth is finally on its last legs. That machine is broken and with it has broken the power of the government to manipulate the masses into submission.

I want to know what were the blunders each of the major leaders committed. But first, how do I know that blunders were committed at all? I look around and see India for the disaster it really is. No amount of glossy advertising of how India Inc is a superpower can conceal the rot. India’s borders are not intact. Military blunders must have been committed. It’s education system is a crying shame. Someone is responsible for this disaster; someone who had dictated what the education system is to be. I want to know who that someone was.

India is categorized as a Third World country. It did not have to be so. Indians are not systematically stupider than any other group. India is adequately gifted with natural resources. India has not suffered any large scale natural disaster lasting decades and which destroyed its infrastructure. There is no reason for the absolutely miserable state that India is in today. Except for the policies that were adopted by some people. Bad economic policies must have been advocated and adopted by someone in power and that must be the reason for India’s economy being near the bottom of the economic pyramid.

No natural factor can be held responsible for India’s sorry state. What India is today has to be explained by man-made factors.

India is a country where around 800 million people — larger than the US and Western Europe combined — live lives of absolute destitution. Over half of India’s children below the age of five are malnourished. Their chances of ever attaining their full physical and mental potential is dead. This is India and someone must have enforced economic policies that has reduced India to be a desperately poor country.

I want to know who were the people responsible for this disaster. I want to know their names. I want to know the names of people who have committed crimes against Indians that are so immense that an almost impossible-to-believe number of Indians have lived lives of utter deprivation and died prematurely of preventable sickness. I want to know how many children die every day. Is it 10,000 children or is it only 5,000 that die of water borne diseases in India daily?

I want to know who I should hold responsible and when I do learn, I want every Indian to know who were the people that brought this nation to ruin. I want to then ruin those people by revealing to the world how horrible their crimes are. When I know their names, I am going to put up their statues in every city. I want people to come to those statues and spit on them. I want people to spit every time one of those names is mentioned. I want them to say “ach poo!” every time (just like the followers of one particular monotheistic faith say a certain phrase when they mention the name of the founder of that religion.)

Time’s up. Time’s up for those who charted India’s descent into hell. Now it is time for me to drag those unmentionables to hell.

I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore.

But anyway, India cannot do much about this blatant slap on the face. The Indian government headed by Manmohan Singh works for Sonia Gandhi, an Italian by birth and a Roman Catholic by faith. The head of the state, the president of India, is Pratibha Patil. Ms Patil occupies that position at the pleasure of Sonia Gandhi. Neither Manmohan Singh nor Pratibha Patil can criticize the Italian government or the Vatican because Sonia Gandhi would not allow it.

Divided loyalties is the main reason that people of foreign birth are not allowed to hold high office in most civilized nation states. What a sorry state of affairs. Sad, very very sad but then one has to remember that Indians voted to put a foreigner into the driving seat. The mentality of an occupied people is not easy to change. The British left over 60 years ago but the mentality that elevates white-skinned people other brown-skinned ones is too deeply rooted into the collective psyche.

We are, as the song goes, prisoners of our own device.

And the result? There’s talk of disciplinary action against Tharoor. India Congress Committee spokesperson Jayanti Natarajan:

Asked whether Tharoor’s selection as a minister was a wrong decision, Natarajan said: “It is the prerogative of the prime minister and I will talk only about his (Tharoor) statement.”

To a question whether disciplinary action will be taken against him or any clarification will be sought, she said it is for the high command to decide. “I am only commenting on his statement. It is absolutely insensible,” she said.

It’s a joke, you silly unmentionables. Getting worked up about it is epitomizes ass-backwardness that permeates Indian policy making.

Here’s what I mean.

A minister of the Congress government announces a few million dollar reward for the murder of Danish cartoonists. Not a big deal.

Public figures routinely suspected of scams to the tune of millions (or billions) of dollars. Not a big deal.

Prominent elected leaders suspected of serious crimes. Not a big deal.

A minister cracking a harmless joke on twitter. Questions being raised about disciplinary action and whether it was a mistake to appoint him as a minister. That’s priceless.

Come to think of it, Tharoor should now realize that a person is known by the company he keeps. He cannot wallow in pig-shit and not expect to stink up to the high heavens.

Related post: The Banality of Corruption. (Dec 2007)

No student of computer science can avoid learning that Turing was an intellectual giant in the field. I recall the excitement I felt when I first understood the power of Turing machines, those abstractions that define the limits of what is computable, and which are the idealized prototypes of all digital computers.

He was just 41 years old when he died. It is as hard to fathom the horrors the man must have endured as it is to estimate the loss humanity suffered from the premature extinguishing of his genius. According to the TIME magazine estimation in 1999, Alan Turing was one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. I think that Turing will also make the list of the top 100 people in the last 2000 years. Our lives are better for him having lived.

That he was forced to kill himself is a damning indictment (as if yet another reason was needed) of the unspeakable brutality that monotheism imposes on humanity. The Western world has to a large extent weaned itself from the ideology that condemns the innocent to torture and death. But the most virulent form of the ideology persists in other parts of the world and the discouraging signs are that it is spreading. They routinely torture, stone, and hang homosexuals in Islamic countries today, just as they did centuries ago.

Alan Turing was born in England but, as the wikipedia entry helpfully informs us, he was conceived in India. He would have been persecuted in India as well, since the bigoted laws of monotheistic Britain were imposed on India. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code is exhibit A. It is a crying shame that a civilizational ethos that is so extremely accepting of individual differences should have such bigoted laws on its books. Indians should hang their head in shame that they accept the bigoted narrow-minded medieval attitude of the West and reject the ancient wisdom of their own land. Fortunately, things are changing. There’s been some move towards removing Section 377 from the IPC.

In the West, they are recognizing Turing’s greatness.

A 1.5-ton, life-size statue of Turing was unveiled on 19 June 2007 at Bletchley Park. Built from approximately half a million pieces of Welsh slate, it was sculpted by Stephen Kettle, having been commissioned by the late American billionaire Sidney Frank.

Brings to mind those lines of Samuel Johnson, “See Nations slowly wise, and meanly just, To buried Merit raise the tardy Bust.”

In closing, I quote a few lines from the beautiful song by Don McLean about Vincent Van Gogh but which could as well have been written for Alan Turing:

For they could not love you,
But still your love was true.
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night,
You took your life, as lovers often do.
But I could have told you, Vincent,
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you.

Links:

This blog: The Catholic church back-peddles on Charles Darwin.

NPR: All Things Considered (audio).

BBC: PM apology after Turing petition.

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About 350,000 foreign students study in Australia. India gets 8,000.

Adjusted for population size, relative to Australia, India gets 133 foreign students. That is not a typo. Let me spell it out: it is a hundred and thirty-three, not one hundred and thirty-three thousand. Australia get around three thousand times the number of students per capita compared to India. (India is approximately 60 times Australia’s population.)

How much do Indians spend in studying abroad? Estimates range from a conservative $5 billion to a generous $10 billion per year. That a humongous sum. Why do Indians go abroad to study? Because they are forced to. India does not have the colleges and universities for them. Why? Because the government does not allow free entry into the education system. It’s the Congress party with its Nehruvian licence-quota-permit-control raj. It makes them money. It helps them get votes by restricting supply and then doling out the limited supply to favored vote banks based on religion and caste. They — the people of the Congress party — make money while the country suffers huge losses.

What sort of losses? First, there are the obvious financial losses of the order of billions of dollars. And that too the expense is in foreign exchange. A sh*tload of stuff has to be exported out of India to earn the dollars that go to pay for the education abroad. Then there is the loss of human capital. Many students who study abroad — especially the most competent and talented — end up migrating to the developed countries such as the US and Australia. The estimated loss has to be in the tens of billions of dollars a year. Add to that the personal costs that students have to bear in xenophobic societies that they are forced to live in.

What are the root causes of all these losses? It is government policy. Who made the policy that has reduced India to this horribly dire straits? The party that has ruled India for practically all its existence as an independent country — the Congress party led by the Nehru-Gandhi family.

How can we be sure that it is the policy that is to blame and not some inherent characteristic of Indians that make it impossible for Indians to create and run educational institutions that will serve the needs of the citizens? I don’t know. It appears to me that Indians are fairly average as far as human standards go. They do well when they are given the opportunity. They can become artists and engineers, scientists and philosophers, dancers and carpenters as easily as anyone elsewhere in the world. They do well in practically all spheres of human endeavor anywhere they are in the world — except in India. So there’s something special about being in India that makes Indians end up in the bottom of the barrel.

Let’s get back to education. Do Indians have the money to pay for education? Certainly. See they privately spend billions of dollars in India and abroad to get an education. Even very poor people spend a significant amount on education. A recent study revealed that middle class families spend as much as a third of their household income on education. The demand is undeniably huge. And the supply is also undeniably meager. Just to get into those average (by international standards) engineering schools called the IITs, superhuman effort is required. Families spend years of income and undergo years of stress and worry for the 2 percent chance that the kid will get admission to an IIT.

So the ability and the willingness is there among Indians for education. One side of the market exists without a doubt. The other side of the market, the supply side, would have been there naturally but it is artificially constrained from operating. That is what policy does. That, we must never forget, is the policy that the Congress party has instituted from Nehru onwards to the most recent prime minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh.

The bottom line is that India lacks a decent education system because the government has seen to it that the education system is as pathetic as it can possibly be. The system guarantees India’s backwardness and makes it pathetically poor but it enriches the people who run the government. The money extracted through the pathetic government-controlled education system ends up in foreign banks, and must account for at least a part of the reported $1.5 trillion stashed away in Swiss and other off-shore banks.

Manmohan Singh is an economist. He of all people should know the value of human resources and therefore education. That he fails in his job despite being an economist is the most blatant indication of his incompetence and general spinelessness. And talking of Manmohan Singh, the next time I read how decent he is, I am going to throw up. The man is as lacking in ethics and morality as the moon lacks oceans and forests. His is a barren landscape littered with sterile craters devoid of any humanity. That’s Dr Manmohan Singh for you.

And the next time I read that he was the architect of any economic reforms, I am going to blow a friggin’ fuse. It was his boss, Mr Narasimha Rao who gave the orders. Dr MM Singh follows orders. His present boss is not so smart as Mr Rao.

Do you know what the unspeakably pathetic specimen of the human species did about the attacks on the Indian students in Australia?

The attacks have been the discussion of talks at the highest levels of government. The Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed concern in a phone conversation with the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd late on Friday.

Expressed concern? EXPRESSED CONCERN? How about covering your head in shame, you pathetic loser! I suppose you cannot lose sleep over this matter — losing sleep appears to be the limit of your abilities to do something about something — since that is already done for the families of Islamic terrorists.

But let’s be clear about one thing. Where is the outrage? I am not talking about the outrage on the matter of Australian attacks on Indian students. I am talking about the outrage that the population should feel about the disastrous condition of the education system that the Congress governments have brought about. Should the people not be literally dragging the unspeakable bunch of immoral greedy lousy cretins that rule the country on to the streets and flogging them to an inch of their lives?

Forget the outrage, the people actually go and elect them to run the country.

It’s all karma, neh?

Still the impression of an overwhelming victory by the ruling coalition is somewhat exaggerated. The Indian electoral system is a first-past-the-post system.

There is no exact correlation between the share of votes a party wins and the number of seats it gains, especially because there is no bi-party system.

The all-India vote shares do not in fact show a tidal wave in favour of the Congress. Between the previous general election and this, Congress’ vote share increased by just 2 per cent and the BJP’s vote share fell by around 4 per cent. The differential in the seats they won is disproportionate in comparison to their vote shares.

The 13 reasons the article lists sound plausible to me. It concludes with –

Five years in opposition should have led to soul-searching within the BJP and the enunciation of a clear strategy to tackle the Congress. That did not happen. The Congress managed public relations and the media better than the BJP.

The Congress managed the media better than the BJP for the simple reason that the Congress has enough money to buy the media. Now it will have even more money and buy even more TV anchors, reporters, journalists, etc., and those that it cannot buy — such as independent bloggers — it will gag and, like Mrs Indira Gandhi did to her opposition, perhaps imprison them.

I sometimes wonder. Do Indians collectively really like freedom and prosperity? The fact that a party like the Congress — a party which is against basic human freedoms, a party that is against development and progress — gets voted into power repeatedly makes me doubt that there is much demand for freedom and prosperity in India.

I think that the most important and enduring reason that the Congress won is that Indians don’t really value freedom and prosperity. The evidence? India has been ruled by foreigners for centuries and India is desperately poor. No freedom and no prosperity. The Congress party is not to blame for India’s disastrous journey after the British left. The Congress party is merely the expression of the will of the people and they will themselves servitude and destitution.

I am reminded of the words from the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. The scene is the trail of Jesus before Pontius Pilate. Pilate is disgusted with Jesus’s obvious demand to become a martyr and says to him:

Don’t let me stop your great self-destruction.
Die if you want to, you misguided martyr.
I wash my hands of your demolition.
Die if you want to you innocent puppet!

I cannot stop India’s great self-destruction. So I wash my hands of India’s demolition.

A short century ago the US and Argentina were rivals. Both were riding the first wave of globalisation at the turn of the 20th century. Both were young, dynamic nations with fertile farmlands and confident exporters. Both brought the beef of the New World to the tables of their European colonial forebears. Before the Great Depression of the 1930s, Argentina was among the 10 richest economies in the world.

That’s from a fascinating article by Alan Beattie in the Financial Times of May 23rd titled “Argentina: The superpower that never was.” The article continues with —

A hundred years later there was no choice at all. One had gone on to be among the most successful economies ever. The other was a broken husk.

There was no individual event at which Argentina’s path was set on a permanent divergence from that of the United States of America. But there was a series of mistakes and missteps that fit a general pattern. The countries were dealt quite similar hands but played them very differently. The similarities between the two in the second half of the 19th century, and in fact up to 1939, were neither fictional nor superficial. [Emphasis mine.]

It’s a very well-written and instructive article. Pankaj Narula sent me the link and wrote that his favorite part of the essay was —

Economies rarely get rich on agriculture alone and Britain had shown the world the next stage, industrialisation. America grasped that building a manufacturing industry would allow it to benefit from better technologies, while trying to squeeze a little more grain out of the same fields would not. It was not as if Argentina consciously rejected the same course. It could scarcely avoid growing its own manufacturing industry. But when industrialisation did come, prevailing prejudices ensured it was limited and late. Argentina’s elites saw no reason to risk their status and livelihoods in the fickle new sphere and anyway there were not enough new workers to fill the factories. Argentina brought the same tendencies that it had to the ossified agricultural sector, preferring cosy, safe monopolies to the brutal riskiness of competition. Its wellbeing rested on farm prices holding their own against the prices of manufactured goods, and on global markets remaining open.

While reading the piece, I could not resist thinking about India and China. In about 20 years or so, say in 2030, someone will surely write a similar article. They would note the similarities between the two: ancient civilizations, deep culture, large populations, somewhat equally endowed with natural resources, etc. They will note that around 1978, India was just a bit ahead of China. Then China changed its policies and took the path to development.

That future article will note that India continued with Nehruvian socialist policies that retarded economic growth and grew at the “Nehru rate of growth” which made it fall behind China. By 2008, China’s per capita income was three times that of India’s. By 2030, the gap had increased to 10 times. India continued with Nehruvian socialism, which is another name for the process which enriches the government officials and impoverishes the economy. China had learnt its lessons that socialism is a guaranteed path to poverty and changed its course.

It does not bode well for India. The political party that made the policies that shackled India to the “Nehru rate of growth” are unfortunately in the driver’s seat like they have been for most of India’s post-independence history. They cannot change because that would be tantamount to admitting that Nehruvian socialism failed. They cannot tell the people that their poverty was engineered by the party. The party depends on the poor and illiterate to continue to rule.

C’est la vie, and all that sort of thing.

He does offer a few practical suggestions: Suspend politicians facing criminal charges, as civil servants are suspended pending trial. Establish a fast-track court just for government officials so that cases are resolved expeditiously. Persuade judges to make an example of a few political wrongdoers as a public flogging for the rest. [Emphasis added.]

Public flogging as a deterrent, eh? How quaint. Now where have I read that before? Ah yes, over here! In October 2005, in a post titled “The Ownership Society” I wrote:

Imagine for a moment the following rules. The CEO of the state electricity board is given the ownership of that entity. The job description: “provide power now and build capacity so that there is sufficient capacity for the next 5 years” (assuming that it takes 5 years to build capacity.) If the CEO fails to do that, the entire salary paid to the CEO will have to be repaid and the person—who may have left the job by the time the shortfall is detected—will be publicly flogged in the town square.

Now this rule should be made fully clear to the prospective candidates and anyone who takes up the job must know the consequences of failure. It is because people know up front that they are shielded from the consequences of their failures that they fail in the first place.

I really don’t care whether the power I use in Pune is provided by a public firm or a private firm. As long as I know that if I suffer, those who are responsible for my suffering also suffer, I would be quite content. More importantly, I believe that if the penalties are made sufficiently appropriate, these failures will not happen very frequently.

I don’t really care if there is a Ministry for Power in India or not. What I would care about is that if there is one, the man or woman who wants to have the power and the glory of being the minister, would also be flogged publicly for any problems that arise as a result of their tenure.

I don’t really care whether the railways are run by the government or not. But if there is a train accident, the rule should be that the railway minister will be flogged publicly and given as many lashes as there are deaths due to that accident.

Public flogging of public officials is the answer to the problem of public officials not taking their charges seriously. Not just corporations. Take politicians. Any election promises they make about how they will change the economy must be taken seriously. And then if they fail to deliver, hold their feet to the fire. Candidate A claims that he will make something happen, then as elected leader A, he becomes the owner of that something. If he does not deliver—you guessed it—public flogging.

Want to be the prime minister of India? No problem. Take ownership of the country and set goals that you say you will achieve. If the goals are not achieved as promised by you, public flogging over an extended period of time. What this will do is to bring the right sort of people into public life. People who know what they are capable of doing and who will not mess with the fate of millions knowing that their behinds —literally— will be on the line.

Flogging is a simple enough measure to implement. It does not require high tech equipment. What it does require is a judiciary that can impose the punishment and carry it out.

Corruption in an organization? Here is my solution which will fix it pretty fast. Suppose Mr A has been involved in corruption. Don’t just flog Mr A, get his boss (Mr B) and his boss’s boss (Mr C) and flog them as well. Why so? Because Mr C will be extra vigilant and keep on Mr B’s case and tell him to be on the lookout that no one under him is into corruption.

What this multi-level flogging does is this. It makes managers liable for corruption in institutions that they control. That is, it gives the managers ownership of the organization they control. Irrespective of how deep the organization is, if a person at a certain level is corrupt, include the two higher levels and flog those two individuals as well.

You may think that I am not really serious. But I am. I am dead serious about this. You want to make India the least corrupt economy on earth, get serious about dealing with the problem for just a few years. After a few dozen high level officials have been publicly flogged, corruption will be a thing of the past which children will read about in their history books.

You may say that instead of flogging, why not just impose a fine on them. That would not hit where it hurts. Merely fining someone who has lots of money is not pain enough. The penalty has to have a sting. Here is what I mean. In Finland, the penalty for a moving traffic violation such as speeding is monetary but it is indexed on the income of the person. A dotcom millionaire was fined $93,000 for speeding.

So flogging should do very well in India. Those in high positions value their pride. They depend on their image. If they penalty is public flogging, they would cease and desist from doing what exacts that penalty.

Public flogging of public officials is a proposal which can transform Indian society more than all this talk about empowering the citizens that we are getting dizzy from reading in the newspapers. Everyone and his brother is advancing all sorts of wooly ideas about how to transform India. Here is an idea that will not see the light of the day of course, but it has the real power to transform.

I once again argued for public flogging in Mar 2006 in a piece titled “Terrorism, the way out” and wrote,

Dr Manmohan Singh and the leader of the Government of India, Ms Sonia Gandhi, would never feel the pain of terrorism. A thousand – or even a million – Indians could perish at the hands of terrorists without having the least effect on those leaders. At most their security will be strengthened a bit more, more public funds will be spent on getting them more black commandoes as bodyguards, more road and air traffic disrupted when they travel, more citizens will be inconvenienced to protect the leaders from terrorists. The leaders will never be inconvenienced to protect the people, however.

Is there a way out? An economist would respond, “Yes, get the incentives right.” My proposal is to create the mechanism which would transmit the pain of terrorism to the leaders. In a sense, I advance the creation of a nervous system that carries the pain signals to the brain. The incentive mechanism I propose involves public flogging but is not limited to that.

After every terrorist attack, the Prime Minister, the head of the government (if not the same as the PM), the Home Minister (who is in charge of security), the police chief in whose jurisdiction the incident occurs, and the Defense Minister should be publicly flogged, with the number of lashes equal to the number of deaths, within two weeks of the incident. So for the Varanasi terrorist attack, Dr Singh, Ms Sonia Gandhi and the others listed above (I don’t know their identities) should be flogged by 21st of March in the courtyard of the Rastrapati Bhavan.

Aside from the public flogging, the other measure would be to fine them 1 percent of their wealth for every 100 deaths. This means, after 10,000 deaths under their watch, they will have all their wealth confiscated.

What would this accomplish? Firstly, it would put the fear of the lash into them. They would have the incentive to actually reduce the chances of terrorists succeeding. For instance, right now they would for political reasons molly-coddle Islamic preachers sermonizing the slaughter of infidels. Or they may be considering increasing the number of buses and trains between India and Pakistan. Or they may be advocating more porous borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh. When they know that these measures will increase the incidence of fatal terrorists attacks, they will not be so careless with the lives the citizens.

Second, the fines will help with the compensation to the families of the victims of terror attacks. Indian leaders have enormous wealth – from foreign gun deals, from cattle feed, from handing out licenses and permits, and from dipping extremely sticky fingers into the public till. Some of that wealth could be given back to the people.

Insult to their dignity and their behinds combined with injury to their pockets will work wonders.

Now let’s be realistic. Public flogging of the criminals occupying the highest levels of the government will happen a little after hell freezes over or a certain blue-turbaned man grows a spine, whichever comes later. Criminals don’t have an incentive to create incentives that deter criminals. We do have criminals in government, don’t we? A public watchdog organization reports that the new parliament of 543 members will have 143 MPs who have criminal cases pending against them. Of these, 71 have serious criminal charges such as murder. Being charged is not the same as being guilty, of course. But guilt can be established pretty efficiently and quickly, if the system was designed properly. But why on earth would criminals be interested in putting that system in place which would condemn them?

Let’s repeat what TSR wrote (quoted right at the top), “Since no part of the Establishment has an interest in punishing corruption, trying for a more sweeping solution quickly leads into the realm of blind hope.”

Deva, deva!

New Delhi, May 27: India has asked Britain for financial and technical assistance to set up a new “world class” university (WCU), nearly half a century after it last asked for foreign help in starting a premier education institution.

Junior higher education minister Purandeswari Devi has also asked her British counterpart Bill Rammell for assistance in upgrading facilities and teaching standards at the Indian Institutes of Technology, government officials told The Telegraph.

I hang my head in shame to see India debased so pathetically. Indians are second to none when it comes to talent, drive, hard work, and entrepreneurial ambition. Whenever they have had the freedom to do so, Indians have demonstrated all those through their considerable success. Until very recently, those success stories have mainly been associated with Indians abroad because it was in free countries such as the US that they had the freedom to achieve their destiny. The government of India, until very recently, following the enlightened policies of socialism, denied its citizens the freedom to achieve, to build, to compete in the world, to serve domestic and foreign markets. To the limited extent that the government has deviated from its avowed socialistic goals of scaling the commanding heights of the economy by controlling every minute aspect of the economic lives of its citizens, the people and corporations of India have prospered and gained global respect and attention.

Why does the government of India continue to imprison the educational system even now? What is the reason that it will not allow Indians the freedom to build educational institutions in India? Why does the government then go out with a begging bowl to foreign governments asking for help with building “world class universities” when Indians are quite capable of doing so?

Do you have any doubts that Indians can build world class institutions of learning? Let us recall that the world’s best universities were in India once upon a time. That was a time when India did not have “The Ministry of Human Resource Development of the Government of India” and did not have a minister for higher education or an education minister. Do you have any doubts that India has world class scholars and professors? Just two days ago I had the honor of meeting two celebrated Indian professors — both working in world class universities abroad. You cannot examine the faculty list of any top class American university without picking out dozens of Indians on it.

Why, oh, why does the government of India have to imprison the education sector? There may be many reasons for India’s pathetic economic performance. (Yes, ladies and gentlemen, let’s be honest about this. India is pathetically poor. Sure the GDP is growing at a respectable rate after decades of 2 and 3 percent Nehru rate of growth but that growth rate is on a really small base. India’s per capita GDP of US$700 cannot be compared to the per capita GDP of the US of US$28,000.) It is my opinion that one of the primary reasons is that its education system is flawed. It is also my considered opinion that the reason for India’s pathetic educational system is that the government has total control over it.

So back to the question: why does the government control the educational system? I believe it does so because it is the life-blood of the economy. By controlling that, it gains a stranglehold on the economy which it can exploit for its objective of extracting every bit of rent that it can. Let’s remember that government is made up of people — the bureaucrats and politicians. People are motivated by self interest. Through their control, they gain personally in terms of power, prestige and most importantly money. Like any monopolist, these people limit the supply of educational opportunities and then ration out the limited supply to favored groups to buy their allegiance. Reservations based on caste, religion and other non-relevant criteria are obvious symptoms of this rent-seeking rationing.

Control is the operative word. The last paragraph of that Telegraph article is revealing. It says,

The universities will be controlled by the Centre but kept distinct from existing central universities, and will be nurtured to compete with institutions like Harvard and Cambridge.

Centralized micro-level control is inimical to growth and development at the macro-level. We have to continually refer to those sectors where the government has relinquished control (even partially) and note how those sectors have prospered. And why shouldn’t they prosper? As I never tire of pointing out, there is nothing inherently lacking among Indians that they cannot build world class companies. It need not be necessarily so but the broad generalization is forced on one after even a cursory examination of India’s economy that the Indian government is the greatest impediment to India’s economic growth, and that the government of India is perhaps the greatest enemy of the Indian people.

Allow me to quote some more from the Telegraph:

Sources said Purandeswari told Rammell at a meeting in Delhi yesterday that India needed assistance in modernising teacher-training programmes in higher education.

Faculty support — a euphemism for greater participation of guest lecturers from the foreign country — was another request put forward by Purandeswari, the sources said, adding that she also dwelt on skill development — educating students for the job market — as a “key issue”.

Rammell is learnt to have told the minister that the UK was in the process of restructuring its own skill development process, and was willing to share its experiences.

The two ministers are expected to meet again in London on July 18 or 19.

The sources said India, at yesterday’s meeting, indicated its desire to firm up details of the plan before the end of the year. Higher education secretary R.P. Agrawal asked Rammell if the deal could be finalised by July, but the British minister evaded any commitment to a timeline. [Emphasis added.]

Now why would the British government official not be overly eager to help India in this regard? Let me try to answer that. If my allegiance were to Britain, the last thing I would like to see is that India become so successful in the education sector that it hurts British interests. In fact, I would wake up every day and give thanks to the gods that the Indian government has crippled India’s education system and thus ensured that Britain continues to gain from the flight of human capital from India. Lacking educational opportunities in India, those among the talented Indians who can afford it are forced to go to the UK and the US for higher education. Once there, they add to the human capital of those foreign countries as they settle down and further enrich their adopted countries. I don’t blame them. Humans value freedom like they value the air they breathe: without it, they suffocate and die.

(Aside: Just moments ago, the power failed. Yesterday afternoon where I live in Pune, the power failed about a dozen times, with outages ranging from a few minutes to half an hour. God alone knows how long this failure would be. Power here is predictably unpredictable. My laptop power will last about 3 hours and I just hope that the power returns before too long. You need not ask which agency is responsible for power in Pune. It is the Maharastra State Electricity Board — a government undertaking. Now back to the current rant.)

So will the US and the UK help out India build world class universities in India? Like hell they will. Indians are forced to spend billions of dollars each year in education abroad. (Estimates are of the order of US$10 billion annually.) They have to be stupid to do something that will hurt their national interest. They will not only lose the income from providing education to India, they will lose out on the added human capital. And most of all, they will lose jobs that Indians educated well in India can do in India.

Here’s a story from the NY Times of April 4, 2007, which should scare the pants off of the Americans: India’s Edge Goes Beyond Outsourcing. They are witnessing job flight to India on a scale that they had not anticipated. Corporations such as Boeing, Morgan Stanley, Eli Lilly, Accenture, IBM, Airbus, Cisco, and Microsoft are mentioned in the context of the number of jobs they are transferring to India. Here’s a bit:

With multinationals employing tens of thousands of Indians, some are beginning to treat the country like a second headquarters, sending senior executives with global responsibilities to work there. For example, Cisco Systems, the leading maker of communications equipment, has decided that 20 percent of its top talent should be in India within five years; it recently moved one of its highest-ranking executives, Wim Elfrink, to Bangalore, the center of the Indian industry, as chief globalization officer.

(Just by the way, last month I met Wim Elfrink at the opening of a Cisco Systems training and development center in the Zensar campus in Pune.)

So what is happening over here? Globalization. It is the erasing of national boundaries with respect to jobs that can be outsourced through the magic of the recent revolution in information and communications technologies (for services) and manufacturing jobs through the magic of the 52-year old shipping container revolution. Transnational corporations shifting jobs wherever they find labor-cost arbitrage opportunities.

Yes jobs are moving to India. So far, the foreign corporations are picking up the low-hanging fruits among the employable in India. But that well (to mix metaphors shamelessly) is going to go dry very soon. From the NYT article:

. . .specialists warned that a continued flow of work to India required drastic improvements in its educational system and basic facilities. Water and power shortages are endemic, and industry experts predict that India could lack 500,000 engineers by 2010. Yet the country has already tapped a deep well of English-speaking engineers, attracting more outsourced work than any other country.

(Oh goody, the power just came back on. Now I can save this draft and continue my rant.)

Within just two years, India will face a shortage of half a million engineers! If that is so, the labor-cost advantage of India will most certainly disappear as the price of engineers will be bid up. As it is the reported churn among software engineers in India is phenomenally high and wages are going up 30 percent per annum by some estimates.

Wouldn’t liberalizing the educational system be the most rational response to solve the shortage of skilled manpower? Yes, it would. Will it be done? Not if India continues to have a ministry of higher education and a minister of education of the likes of Arjun Singh.

Economist Alan Blinder has characterized outsourcing as “the third Industrial Revolution.” The first one was missed thanks to the British: they were the colonial power ruling India and it was not in their interest to see that India become an industrial giant. I don’t blame the British. If I was a loyal Britisher, I too would not like to hurt Britain’s interests. The second industrial revolution (I am guessing) that Blinder refers to is the off-shoring of manufacturing that mainly happened to the East Asian tigers and later to China. India missed that because of the Nehruvian socialist policies of barriers to foreign investment, archaic labor laws, xenophobia’s, and plain old fashioned stupidity.

This third industrial revolution bus is about to depart. India does not seem too eager to get on that one. No, I take that back. Indians are desperately impatient to get on this one. They are struggling to get on board. But the government of India is doing its best to prevent that from happening. It is as if the government is saying, “Just try to get on that bus and we will break your kneecaps for you. Don’t you dare escape from our clutches.”

If I had my way, I would charge junior higher education minister Purandeswari Devi with treason for having debased the country by begging a foreign nation for assistance with doing something that Indians can do. She has shamed Indians and implied that Indians are incapable of creating world class universities. I think that all Indians in the education professions — both at home and abroad — should tar and feather her for her direct insult at them. Shame on you, Ms Devi. Just resign from your post and go beg for a living instead of feeding at the taxpayers’ expense — the tax payers whom you insult so deeply.

End of rant.

The Acorn reports that Aamir Khan has decided to carry the Olympic torch on its journey through India. He is paid by the Coca Cola company to do so. Whoring for the Chinese government indirectly through the commercial interests of a peddler of soft drinks is no shame. Aamir Khan is a past master of the game.

Aamir Khan is especially notable for his ability to make movies that press the right buttons — and the idiots the general public just laps it up with great relish. I am sure that quite a few bucks change hands under the table for a movie to be given the “tax free” stamp. Both parties — the political whores and the bollywood whores — must have quite a hearty laugh at the clueless millions who fall for the tripe.

What does Aamir Khan take the general public to be — stupid? Actually, yes, and correctly so. Honestly, I am not the one to take the holier-than-thou attitude towards this. I am sure I would readily support anyone who is willing to pay me a few million bucks. Oh that reminds me of a joke that reveals human character rather starkly.

Thus have I heard that George Bernard Shaw once met a famous actress (if memory serves, it may have been Isadora Duncan) at a party. He asked her if she would sleep with him for five million dollars. She thought for a moment and said perhaps she would. Then he asked her if should would do so for a hundred dollars. She indignantly replied, “Most certainly not. What do you take me for, a whore?” To which he said, “My dear, we have already established that fact. Now we are just haggling over the price.”

Anyway, the Tibetans are being raped by the Chinese government and the Chinese government has enough money to buy a lot of goodwill. Aamir Khan is not all that expensive. He will bend over as directed. B Raman has wasted a lot of words thinking that it is ignorance of history that Aamir is guilty of. Ignorance is only part of the explanation. In fact, but for the ignorance Aamir would find his position psychologically quite painful. After all, his rhetoric about patriotism is quite elevated and his opinion about India’s human right record very low. Telling him some home truths is most likely not going to suddenly make him see the light.

OK, enough of this rant. Note to self: Watch “Taarey Zamin Par” soon.

Let’s pause for a moment and figure. $13 billion every year. Or in the last 10 years, about $100 billion. Imagine what you could buy for that money. How about 100 colleges with first class infrastructure with housing, classrooms, labs? Each year India could have an additional capacity for 10,000 college students and in 10 years you could have 100,000 additional capacity. Imagine the multiplier effect of that spending — in construction, in salaries to teaching and non-teaching staff. Imagine the boost to the industry from creating human capital. The imagination boggles at the sheer waste.

Imagine how much infrastructure you could build for $100 billion.

One of the principal lessons one learns as one studies economic development is that success or failure depends largely on the set of economic policies that govern the economy. India, for instance, is poor and economically a failure because its economic policies are extremely brain-dead. Of course one can explain why these brain-dead economic policies exist. We will not visit that now. Here I would only mention that the policy on education is the most brain-dead and that educational policy is largely to blame for why India is poor today, and if the policy is not changed, then it will certainly doom India in the future.

In other words, India is poor because Indian policymakers are either (1) morons who are too bloody stupid to realize that they are continuing to keep India poor and are killing any future that India may have, or (2) they are evil immoral bastards that know what they are doing to the country but do it anyway because by controlling the system they line their own pockets. Or perhaps a combination: some policymakers are of the first kind (morons), and some of the second (bastards.) In end result is the same, however.

Here’s the text of that article — for the record.

Industry body Assocham said on Monday that over $13 billion is spent every year by about 450,000 Indian students on higher education abroad.

Over 90 per cent of students appearing for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) entrance examinations are rejected due to capacity constraints, of which the top 40 per cent pay to get admission abroad.

“Over 150,000 students every year go overseas for university education, which costs India a foreign exchange outflow of 10 billion dollars. This amount is sufficient to build more IIMs and IITs,” it said.

The primary reason for a large number of Indian students seeking professional education abroad is lack of capacity in Indian institutions. The trend can be reversed by opening series of quality institutes with public-private partnership by completely deregulating higher education, Assocham President Venugopal Dhoot said in a statement.

Higher education in India is subsidised as an IIT student pays an average 120 dollar monthly fee, while students opting for education in institutions in Australia, Canada, Singapore, the US and UK shell out 1,500-5,000 dollars as fees every month.

Deregulation of higher education in the country will result in creating annual revenues of 50-100 billion dollars, besides providing 10-20 million additional jobs in the field of education alone, the chamber said. India has only 27,000 foreign students, as compared to four lakh in Australia.

Assocham further said vocational education in India is a meagre five per cent of its total employed workforce of 459.10 million as against 95 per cent in South Korea, 80 per cent in Japan and 70 per cent in Germany.

[See follow up article on Educational Spending.]

Despite such [Quranic] instructions, beating is considered a type of violence, according to human rights organizations, which urge women to complain to the police. I just wonder what kind of families our societies would have if Muslim women started doing this regarding their husbands.

Relationships between fathers and daughters or sisters and brothers also provoke argument from human rights organizations, which propose the suggested solutions for all relationships. Personally, I don’t think fathers or brothers would undertake such behavior unless there was a reason for it.

The above quote is from here.

There are always good reasons for violence against women. Take for example, the case of 16-year old Aqsa Parvez in Canada, strangled by her father last month because she refused to wear the hijab. Or the case of the Egyptian taxi-driver in Texas who shot and killed his two teenage daughters on Jan 1st because they were seeing non-Muslim guys.

Human rights? Oh come on, human rights have nothing to do with it as women are sub-humans anyway. OK, subhuman rights activists could get into it but human rights activists have no business in these matters.

Related to the above:

A 57-year-old Oak Forest man set a fire that killed his pregnant daughter, her husband and the couple’s 3-year-old son because he was angry that the son-in-law came from a “lower caste system” and had not asked for the daughter’s hand in marriage, prosecutors said Tuesday.

In a hearing at the Markham courthouse Tuesday morning, Subhash Chander was ordered held without bond by Cook County Judge Martin McDonough in connection with the arson and murder of Chander’s pregnant daughter Monika Rani, 22; her husband Rajesh Kumar, 30; and their son Vansh. [Source.]

So here’s my advice to “All” — just sit on your hands when you get the urge to send out gratuitous messages. If you really care about someone, write him or her a personal email expressing your appreciation and your best wishes. If it so happens that you are writing an email to someone as a matter of course — such as in business communications — then it is fine to end it with new year wishes.

An easy test of a content-free gratuitous email is this: ask yourself, that if you were to remove the greetings part of it, would the email still mean anything to the recipient? If the answer is no, then it is best not to send that email. By all means send out an end of the year email telling me or even half the town of something that is of significance to you or to me. Tell me how you did in your personal or professional life. Inform me of your achievements, failures, hopes and dreams. Tell me something that I did not know. Don’t tell me what I already know: that you wish me well for the coming year. The only people who I want to hear from are those that matter to me. My enemies certainly don’t wish me well, and my friends do wish me well. So just emailing me to tell me “Happy New Year” is meaningless at best. The whole point about communication is that it should have surprise value. It should convey something that I did not already know or could not guess at. Stating the plainly obvious means that you did not recognize it to be so. It is embarrassing.

I am writing this one with the hope that it will raise the etiquette level in our internet lives. Be considerate. The web has been around for a few years and we should learn by now that spamming people (however well intentioned) is not a good thing. I say this as the chief economist (and therefore the chief curmudgeon) of Netcore.

With that rant, let me close by expressing my best wishes to you and yours for a wonderful New Year 2008.

ABHAY…..wat cn i spk bout diz person nw….hez a lil sensitive but very adventerous guy…hez got gr8 potential in him and alwayzz aimzz 4 d best(datz y he got me as a frnd )……hizz my super snr bt nevva made me feel so… …hiz soo gud n down 2 earth…n btw u al kn wat i call him wid many nick name lemme mention few o dem…hmmmmmB____ (he getzz on hiz nervezz weneva i cal him so )many more 2 mention…bt i hnk one iz sufficient 2 make him ngry hehehe…. nywz last bt nt least he getz ngry very soooooooon…i thnk even nw hiz ngry on me(n i thnk he knzz y)….. uff ders sooooo much to say abt him bt i’ll stop it here… finally mr.dynamic r u satisfied nw???? …

Since I was on the Orkut site, I wrote to her a simple email:

I am perhaps being optimistic but maybe — just maybe — you are not an actual idiot. Perhaps you could — if you tried — you could learn how to write.

Sincerely,
Atanu

I admit that I was feeling singularly ornery. It has been an unproductive day and I was not in a good mood. But one has to admit that it is a bit stressful to land on a page which displays idiocy so blatantly and with so much self assurance. I wrote once again:

Sorry about the last email. I forgot to put a subject line. Anyway, please do understand that if you are pretending to be stupid merely to appear cool, it ain’t so. Stupid is not cool. If you cannot write coherently, it just means precisely that — that you cannot write a single sentence without mangling it all up. It does not mean you are cool.

Grow up, for fuck’s sake. You are 20 years old, by your own admission.

Sincerely,
Atanu

The dumbing down of the population would not be so intolerable if the dumb idiots were not so proud of being so friggin’ proud of being so stupid.

Here’s Hitchens (from one of his live debates):

What’s motherly about her? Hideous virgin and fraud, and fanatic and fundamentalist, shriveled old bat. [She was] as far from the nature of motherhood as a woman could decently get. . . We have to have the fortitude to say… to those who are afflicted, to those who are poor, to those who really are suffering, we should say honestly that those who offer them false consolation are not there friends. Who doesn’t know by now that the cure for poverty is not charity in Calcutta. Who doesn’t know that? Why did we decide to forget what we learnt over the generations that charity is an insult to the poor and a way of prolonging poverty; that Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor, she was a friend of poverty. That there is only one cure for poverty, and that is, by the way, the liberation of women. And which works every time and against which all religions have set its face every time. And against which Mother Teresa has spent a lifetime campaigning, to ensure that misery and poverty and dirt and disease and ignorance would be continued so that there would be ever more people to testify to the Catholic faith.

Hitchens is accurate in his description of Teresa being a fraud. It has recently been revealed that she did not believe in the tripe she was peddling pretty much all her life. She did not have faith in her god. This did not come as a surprise to me because I had concluded that she was a supremely shrewed, cunning, and intelligent person. The way she manipulated the press, the way she used the high-ranking politicians (and the way she allowed herself to be used by them in turn), the way she rubbed shoulders with convicted frauds as long as they enriched her order, the way she handed out indulgences to mass murderers — it all indicated that she was nobody’s fool and she could not have possibly believed in the simple-minded nonsense that the Catholic church expects its flock to believe.

But apparently she wanted to believe in that vile nonsense. And being unable to believe, she was a tortured soul. Perhaps there is some justice in the world after all: at least she suffered a bit. Not a whole lot compared to the suffering that she inflicted by her evil machinations but still suffered. There is no hell but perhaps she did inhabit a bit of hell on earth. Unfortunately though, it is possible that if she had not been so tortured by her lack of faith, perhaps she would have been a little less merciless in her actions. A good person does not even unintentionally harm innocent humans. The evil she represents is absolute because she knowingly increased suffering and pain.

If she had toiled in obscurity whatever her motivation, if she was just another misguided monkey trying to save fish, if she had been just one more missionary hell-bent on converting the heathens — I would not waste my breath on her. But she was celebrated by the powers of the Western world, and celebrated by the morons in the Indian press, awarded all kinds of honors by the stupid Indian government, and finally given a state funeral. The louder these powers speak about her holiness, the more the general population gets brainwashed into believing a falsehood. So I consider it my duty to expose the evil she embodied. I am laying out the evidence and voicing my opinion. To this end, the best spokesman I have found is Christopher Hitchens. May his tribe increase.

Here is part 1 (of 3) of one of Hitchens’ documentary on Teresa titled “Hell’s Angel”.

Here are Part 2, and Part 3.

Teresa was absolutely against abortion, and even just plain contraception. At the very least, if one opposes abortion, one should at least be absolutely for contraception. She was vile. And absolute opposition to abortions leads to murder. Don’t believe me? Read this report in the Guardian titled “Killer Law” on Nicaragua’s anti-abortion legislation. Not pretty, is it? Check your pulse if it does not make your blood boil.

I am sure that I will continue to write against Teresa. For now, let me close with a letter that a friend of mine forwarded to me. It is part of a letter-writing campaign addressed to those in charge of the international airport in Kolkata.

4 November 2007

To
The Director
NSCBI Airport Kolkata
Kolkata 700052

Dear Sir

As a lover of Kolkata and frequent visitor to your city I was shocked to see, just at the entrance to the check-in section of the international airport, a large portrait of Mother Teresa.

The late nun has caused and is causing IMMENSE harm to Kolkata’s reputation through the worst kind of negative publicity. Most people in the world believe that Kolkata is one mass of disgusting slums where nothing except the most dire poverty exists. This belief system cuts through national, religious and social boundaries.

Let me assure you that without the oppressive yoke of the Teresa myth Kolkata would have enjoyed many many more visitors. Also Kolkata’s business prospects have been irrepairably harmed by the Teresa association.

We, the undersigned, therefore, ardently request you to remove the portrait of Mother Teresa from such a vantage point. We do not have any religious issues about her, as we are drawn from many religions (and none). But we deeply care about Kolkata and its honour and dignity.

Yours faithfully
Dr Z K Kittler

Copy: Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Chief Minister, West Bengal

Kolkata, whatever its miseries, does not deserve the punishment that Teresa so mercilessly administered it. I do pity Kolkata but I also feel contempt for the ignorance of the people of Kolkata that they so shamelessly acquiesce to their own debasement.

I don’t have a very high opinion of the Indian masses (and that goes for the vast majority of humanity — Indians are not special) but this is simply untrue. Shuchi Pandya should speak for herself/himself and not generalize that all Indians lead lives of such pathetic and unrelieved shallowness that the only matter animating them is Bollywood movies. The writer of the article is an idiot sensationalist willing to convey the impression to his firangi readers that all Indians are empty-headed morons.

I feel embarrassed by all this because this gives India and Indians very bad press. A friend in the US, Myke, wrote to me informing me that a radio station in LA carried a news report which said:

Gere Faces Arrest in India

Ricardo Vazquez Reporting
LOS ANGELES, CA (KNX) — Last week protestors took to the street and burned effigies of Richard Gere and Shilipa Shetty, an Indian pop star that won “Celebrity Big Brother” in Britain. The protests erupted after Gere repeatedly kissed Shetty on the cheek at an event aimed at increasing HIV awareness.

Protestors said that Gere’s actions were “an attack on our cultural ethos”, according to a report in the Times of India. The matter has now landed in the courts.

An Indian judge watched a video of the incident and ruled that Gere violated India’s laws against public obscenity. The court ordered Shetty to appear on May 5th and that Gere be arrested.

Gere is not currently in India, but if he returns he can be detained and would face up to three months in jail, fines, or both.

Myke added that the government was protecting me and that I should be grateful. My response was to play down the damage. I wrote back:

“Yes, I am grateful that the people care so much about morality. Seriously though, it is making a mountain of a molehill. Sure a bunch of jobless idiots are protesting something — but the report gives the mistaken impression as if hundreds of millions of people are invovled. True, there are idiots in India but in pretty much the same relative numbers as are found in any other population. Because of India’s size, even vanishingly small percentage numbers translate into very large absolute numbers. That makes news, while the big story that the large majority could not care less would not be interesting at all.”

I think the true obscenity is when our courts have a backlog of 300 years of cases; I think it is obscene the way the people at large and the courts don’t take cognizance of the corruption that pervades the body politic; I think it is obscene that some people protest public kissing but have little to say about public molestation of women.

At some level I don’t really care if the rest of the world sees Indians as a bunch of puritanical repressed retards. What I care about is that we appear to have lost our sense of balance and forgotten what our priorities ought to be.

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, err, I mean 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.

Dear Diary:

Got here too early for my 10 AM meeting since I could not accurately estimate the time it would take me to find the place.

Immediately upon entering, stopped by security. One man in civilian clothes, apparently the receptionist, rudely commanded me to wait. He did not display the least hint of common courtesy.

In the area which I suppose one can call the lobby, a set of moldy overstuffed broken chairs are scattered around haphazardly. Near the door, are piled a few wooden mail boxes bearing the names of different departments. They had seen better days, and one has its door dangling from one remaining hinge and the letters are spilling out of it. A man comes by and opens one of the mail boxes and selects a few letters, stuffs the rest in the box while spilling a few on the floor and walks away without bothering.

A man with a dirty wet mop comes and starts wiping the floor, distributing the muck and wetting the spilled letters.

It is hot and humid already. There are two desert coolers in the area. Both are rusted and broken down, the side panels are stacked on the top. The walls are dirty and one can see evidence that sometime in the past, a conduit for wiring running all along the area was embedded into the wall and then plastered over roughly. Looking up, I see the high ceiling is cobweb ridden. There is a cobweb-sweeping zhadu tied to a bamboo pole leaning against the wall in the lobby.

The security guys are dressed in dirty khaki uniforms, their bellies hanging over wide belts holding up their trousers. People are walking into the building.

Off to the left and to the right are grimy corridors dimly lit with florescent tube lights. Only some of the installed tube lights work. Wires hang out of missing ceiling tiles along the corridors like the spilled guts of a cyborg.

I sit here desperately seeking a small indication — a sign — of caring, of professionalism, of pride, of thought. I see none. The lobby is a place of unrelieved squalor. It is depressing to have to sit and observe it.

Dear Diary, who are the people who work here? Who are the people who are in charge of this place? What does this decay and total lack of care imply about the institution which this building houses? Can people who are incapable of taking care of their front office do much for development, rural or otherwise?

Atanu

Banning books and movies is a hoary tradition in India when it comes to the sentiments of the so-called “religious minorities.” Dhimmitude apparently is a part of the DNA of some Indians.

The main stream media will probably not have the guts to tell it to the leaders like it should. We, the average citizens, have to speak up and express our disgust at the craven surrender of our freedom that is at the core of being a free human.

Back in 1995, the US congress had attempted cybercensorship by inserting language in a telecommunications reform bill which would ban “indecent speech” which is “harmful to minors.” One cyber newspaper, the American Reporter, took the principled stance that it would challenge the bill because it violated the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The Founding Fathers of the United States of America were not slaves and gave themselves the freedom that free people enjoy. The attempt to erode that freedom drew vigorous response from free people. I especially like the way the American Reporter editorial said it in an Indecent Comment on an Indecent Subject. I think Americans are a free people because they are willing to fight for their freedom.

We, on the other hand, are only too eager to roll over. They will ban the movie The Da Vinci Code. The road out of serfdom is an uphill road too difficult for the shackled to traverse.

[See previous related post "Fragments--13." The Acorn writes about the topic and warns of the dangers of competitive intolerance.]

Atanu: You are a Phd in economics, I am sure you know enough how the world works. There isnt always a meaningful reasoning to everything more so in the world of politics. BY your logic since India itself spends so much on nuclear weapons it has no right to recieve any kind of aid. And since the US spends more on military than the rest of the world put together it has no right to talk of peace. Yet it also funds the UN and then bypasses it when it suits her. No country that spends on military should have recieved any aid during the devestating tsunami. But thats not the way the world works. As for your comments on muslim invaders you should remember “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind” Also, if we are so concerned about our past we should shut down the british high commission . At least till the british arrived india was still the richest country. Just by changing the name of the missile doesnt change its character. Be it Prithvi or ghauri they’ll still kill an equal number of people.

One really does not have to have a PhD in economics to know how the world works. Anyone past puberty and of average intelligence is equipped to figure out how the world works given a bit of pondering. The basic principle upon which the whole argument hinges I stated in the first line of the post: Money is fungible.

There are limited resources available to any entity, be they an individual or a nation state. It is a matter of choice which uses these resources are employed in. If the entity chooses to waste resources into destructive activities, there is no moral ground for anyone to promote those by providing additional resources to the chooser. It is a shortsighted ethically unsupportable act. As long as a country is wasting resources arming itself to wreak havoc on another country, that country does not deserve any sympathy or material help, irrespective of the circumstances. I would apply this principle to all states, but I would be especially vehement in my objection when it comes to terrorist states.

By this standard, I would argue that India should not be offered, nor should it accept, any material help from any other state, as long as India is spending any resources stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. I am quite aware of the fact that India lives in a dangerous neighborhood and needs nuclear weapons to deter its nuclear-armed neighbors who seeks its destruction. India has to do what it has to do–stockpile nuclear bombs and missiles to deliver them as a deterrence. But as a matter of principle, India should not accept any charity from any other nation.

More importantly, India should not offer charity to nations that use their limited resources to arm themselves with weapons for India’s destruction. There are two reasons for this, the first of which is that money is fungible: what India gives to Pakistan–even if ear-marked for feeding the poor–is indistinguishable from a gift for Pakistan to employ and equip a huge army of jehadis to kill innocent average Indians. This is unconscionable and irresponsible. The reason this sort of insanity happens is simple. Those who are incharge of this insane magnanimity are shielded from the effects of their folly. The politicians are not the ones who will have to pay with blood, sweat and tears when the next jehadi terrorists–funded by the Indian politicians–strike and kill by the scores in India. It is a sad and lamentable fact that the politicians have security (unlike the average guy on the street) and are immune to the consequences of their actions.

The other reason for my opposition to state-directed charity is based on the recognition that charity should be voluntary. If I pick your pocket and then even if I give the proceeds to charity, there is no virtue in it, is there? It gets worse if I take your money under the threat of violence and then give the money to someone you may not wholly approve of. That is in effect what the government of India is doing when it takes tax payer’s money and gifts a part of it to Pakistan. I think that the people of India should have the freedom to decide which charity they wish to support. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as a citizen of India, is entirely free as much as the next guy to take his money and gift it to Pakistan. But it is absolutely immoral and unprincipled of him to take my money and give it to Pakistan. He did not ask my permission and even without asking it is easy to figure out that I would not approve of his taking my money to fund Pakistani jehadis. I am sure that the Prime Minister is capable of this simple thought experiment: if he were to ask the 400 million Indians who live on less than $1 a day if it is alright with them if $25,000,000 were given to fund terrorism, what does he imagine their response would be?

With all due respect to the Prime Minister of India, I think it is totally stupid and asinine and I hold him responsible for such blatant idiocy. You can quote me on this one.

I should hasten to add that this is nothing new. Indian prime ministers have had a particular penchant for their asinine policies with regard to Pakistan. It starts off with Nehru (ack-poo!) and his refering the Pakistani invasion of Kashmir to the UN. It continues with his daughter Indira not negotiating the mess that he father created when she held all the chips following the humiliating defeat of the Pakistani army in Dhaka and the taking of over 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war. Then Vajpayee continues that tradition so well-associated with Prithviraj Chauhan. He goes on a “bus yatra” and is amply rewarded with a knife in his back planted by General Musharraf. No, I take that back. He is not the one who got a knife stuck on his back–it was a thousand poor soldiers who died in the icy wastes of Kargil who paid the price. Vajpayee was safe and comfortable at home, just as all his predecessors were. Neither Nehru (ack-poo!) nor his kin paid for his Himalayan Blunder. It was the poor sods who enlist in the Indian army that pay with their lives. In the meanwhile, Nehru (ack-poo!) sheds crocodile tears while listening to Lata Mangeshkar sing “Aye Mere Vatan Kay Logo“.

Economists always stress that as long as we get the incentives right, the world will work out the right solution to any given problem. I sincerely and totally believe in that. The problem of modern state warfare is a problem of incentives. How eager would Bush the Idiot have been to attack Iraq if his children were among the first to be sent to Iraq? How eager would the US Senate be to authorize invasion and wars around the world if the necessary requirement for being a senator was that you have to have your children in the military? How eager would any government be to wage war if the requirement was that to be in government, you have to have all your children in the military serving at the front? It is only because the politicians and often the generals don’t have anything to lose that they wage wars.

Coming back to Tanveer’s comment: yes, no nation that is engaged in arming itself against any threat is incapable of helping its own citizens when faced with a tsunami or an earthquake. If Pakistan wishes to spend five billion dollars ($5,000,000,000) buying F16s from the US and then go about with a begging bowl for a hundred million dollars to provide relief to its citizens, it is a pathetic hypocrite and scorn should be heaped upon it rather than pity and money.

I have always been amazed at the well-meaning stupidity that most NGOs display when they beg around the world for a bit of money to help the needy and do nothing about the insane waste of resources by militaries around the world. I have volunteered for some of these–and yes, it was stupid of me. In one organization, hundreds or even thousands of volunteers in the US would spend enormous amounts of time raising money. Their take? About a few hundred thousand dollars. And they would congratulate themselves for it. That same time could have been spent in lobbying the powers that be to reduce military expenditure, to think beyond war, and that would have resulted hundreds of millions of dollars–not a hundred thousand–being available for education or whatever. But no. Stupidity is the defining characteristic of the charities that work to raise a few dollars while not working to change the dysfunctional system.

>>>>>>>

I took a break from blogging. The primary reason is that I am totally disheartened. Of late I have been thinking that the system is so badly flawed that there is no way that any good will come out any attempt to change it. It is a vicious circle: the government is bad because the people from which the government is drawn are ignorant and stupid. And given a bad government, there is no way that the people will find a way out of their ignorance and stupidity. I am sure that some readers with over-active PC sensibilities will be offended by my characterization of the majority as ignorant and stupid. But where is the argument that will persuade me that the majority are not stupid and ignorant. What accounts for the sorry scheme of things? Surely there has to be some reason. India has 250 million who are below a poverty line which is so low that all it requires is that you can purchase 2000 calories a day. Imagine: if all you have was about seven rupees a day to buy just 2000 calories, you are above that poverty line. You are, by that definition, not poverty stricken. And yet there are a quarter billion people, the size of Western Europe, who have less than that in India. How did we get here? When India gained independence, there were only 350 million people, half of which were poverty stricken. So after all these years of advancement, growth, progress, poverty alleviation schemes, amazing Nehruvian (ack-poo!) socialistic schemes, we have increased the number of the abjectly poor by about 75,000,000. What was the reason if not the collective inadequacy of the nation? Were the leaders stupid? Or was it the people who consistently vote these thugs into power?

The same policies that have brought us to this unimaginably pathetic pass, there is more of it coming down the pike. And why not? The incentive structure has not changed. The politicians and bureaucrats have the same incentives to continue implementing the same failed policies. The economy loses but they don’t. Until that incentive structure is changed, there is no hope for India.

I am sorry that I am unable to sign a happy song and talk glowingly of the amazing Indian consumer and how that growth is going to transform India. Those who join that chorus are generally anaesthesized. Perhaps I should also swallow a happy pill. But until then, I will write a bit more about how to bring the incentives of the policy makers in line.

Couldn’t you make the argument Indian charity and compassion during Pakistan’s time of need might make a positive impression on at least a few Pakistanis. Maybe the aid provided will change a couple of hearts and minds and they will be less likely to “throw a bomb over your fence.

Dan, unless you are kidding, your naivety is touching. If $25,000,000 were to change a couple of hearts, then to change the few hundred million hearts that need changing would require a brazillion** dollars (which is more money than the entire debt–foreign and domestic–of the United States which is merely in the order of thousands of billions of dollars.)

Dan, Pakistan military policy is dictated by the Pakistani military. Heck, everything there is dictated by the military. With the exception of a few years, Pakistan has existed as a military dictatorship its entire existence. So what the average person feels does not amount to a hill of beans. But even if it were otherwise and the average person were given a choice, I am not sure if that average person would not choose to eat grass if that meant “the infidel nation of evil devil-worshipping” Hindus could be wiped off the face of the earth. Pakistani leadership have gone on record and promised 1000-year jihads against India on several occasions. Assuming that these 1000-year jihads run concurrently, I would say that they have about 950 years of jihad left against infidel India; if the promised 1000-year jihads don’t run concurrently, then kuffar India has about 3000 years of war coming to it.

You may say that as an infidel idol-worshipping Hindu, I am being overly paranoid. Perhaps I am. But even as we debate my paranoia, Pakistan is acquiring $5,000,000,000 (that is five billion dollars) worth of F16s from the US. And all sorts of other military hardware which you can bet it is not going to use against Afghanistan, or China, or Saudi Arabia, or Iran, or the republics of the former Soviet Union. The target, dear Dan, is India.

My ancestors, being polytheists, were the target of dreaded Islamic invasions led by people bearing names such as Babar, Mohammad of Ghaur (Ghor), Mahmud of Ghazni, Ahmed Shah Abdali. These worthies have gone but their legacy lives on. Pakistan has named its ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads after these invaders who came to destroy India. These are not targeted at Saudi Arabia or China or Afghanistan. These missiles are aimed at Mumbai and New Delhi and Bangalor and Nagpur (my home town) to finish off what their namesakes left unfinished centuries ago.

Coming back to the point about India funding Pakistani jihadis, let me repeat the main point which I put at the top of my last post: MONEY IS FUNGIBLE.

It does not matter what you send the money to Pakistan for. As long as Pakistan is funding terrorism worth more than $25 million, then the entire amount that India gives as charity can be considered to go into funding terrorism. Here is the arithmetic. If Pakistan were only spending $10 million on arming terrorists and itself to destroy India, then sending $25 million to them would mean that India was funding the destruction of India to the tune of $10 million and the remaining $15 million is for, say, feeding the hungry. But if Pakistan is spending $5 thousand million on buying weapons to destroy India, then India sending $25 million to Pakistan can be seen as contributing half of one percent of the cost of destroying India, and none of it goes into feeding the hungry. In other words, it is a stupefying act of astounding idiocy.

Just in case my argument is not entirely clear about the fungibility of money, let me put it this way. If Pakistan were to just buy one F16 less from the US, it would have an additional 100 million dollars to pay for the rehabilitation of those affected by the earthquake. As long as they have money to buy weapons, they really don’t need charity from the country that they have sworn to destroy.

Here is a clue to the Indian government which I offer gratis: Charity begins at home. If you care to look into the slums of New Delhi, and in the rest of India, you will find hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris who have been ethnically cleansed from the state of their ancestors. Try giving them $25 million first, you clueless retards.

** [Brazillion is a very very humongously large number. The genesis of the word goes thusly. President George W Bush was told that in a military encounter three Brazilian soldiers were killed. He bowed his head in stunned silence. His aides were rather puzzled to see the show of emotion. Then he raised his head and asked, "How many exactly is a brazillion?"]

[Final Part of this series: Part 3 of India Funding Pakistani Jehadis.]

If I give money to my neighbor to help out with his grocery purchases, I may be acting out of good neighborly feelings. But what if he is an alcoholic? By giving him money, I could as well be funding his alcohol purchase. Even if I were to buy groceries and have them delivered to his home, I am again freeing up his own money for booze. Worse yet, what if my neighbor actually builds bombs in his basement which he frequently lobs over the fence and destroys parts of my house? Surely, giving him grocery money out of misplaced pity is the same as my paying him for his bombs which he uses against me.

Easy enough to understand, isn’t it? But which part of this simple argument do the sainted leaders of India don’t understand? Giving Pakistan US$25,000,000 is the same as partly funding jihadis that terrorise India. Let’s be clear about this. India is a generous country. It sent US$5 million to help the US with the recovery post Katrina. Now it is giving $25 million to a country which is buying 80 F16s from the US. The cost of these F16s would feed, clothe, educate, and entertain hundreds of thousands of impoverished Pakistanis. Instead, Pakistan is spending scarce resources and starving its own people just so that India can be bombed if the need arose in the near future. And just to help the Pakistanis out with their avowed goal of destroying India, India is sending them a $25 million check!

Centuries of being a dhimmi does that to one. Dhimmitude is hard-coded in the Indian psyche. There is no compulsion right now to pay the jaziya (the tax that non-Muslims pay to Muslim rulers) Indians used to pay. But old habits die hard and I am sure that however disguised, the $25 million is a simple jaziya that dhimmis must pay.

There are millions of children running naked and hungry around in India. Twenty-five million dollars would have helped them live a somewhat human existence. But now we are funding Pakistani jihadis who will bomb a few more cities. Seriously, we deserve what we get because we are really abyssmally and eternally stupid.

Update Nov 3rd: See the followup here in response to the comments.

Susan Shields, formerly a senior nun with the order, recalled that one year there was roughly $50m in the bank account held by the New York office alone. Much of the money, she complained, sat in banks while workers in the homes were obliged to reuse blunt needles. The order has stopped reusing needles, but the poor care remains pervasive. One nurse told me of a case earlier this year where staff knew a patient had typhoid but made no effort to protect volunteers or other patients. “The sense was that God will provide and if the worst happens – it is God’s will.”

The Kolkata police force and the city’s social welfare department have promised to investigate the incidents in the Daya Dan home when they have seen and verified the distressing footage we secretly filmed. Dr Aroup Chatterjee, a London-based Kolkata-born doctor, believes that if Daya Dan were any other care home in India, “the authorities would close it down. The Indian government is in thrall to the legacy of Mother Teresa and is terrified of her reputation and status. There are many better homes than this in Kolkata,” he told us.

Nearly eight years after her death, Mother Teresa is fast on the way to sainthood. The great aura of myth that surrounds her is built on her great deeds helping the poor and the destitute of Kolkata, birthplace of her order, the Missionaries of Charity. Rarely has one individual so convinced public opinion of the holiness of her cause. Her reward is accelerated canonisation.

But her homes are a disgrace to so-called Christian care and, indeed, civilised values of any kind. I witnessed barbaric treatment of the most vulnerable.

Actually, it’s boasting to say that I “discovered” any of this. It was all there in plain sight for anyone to notice. But in the age of celebrity, nobody had troubled to ask if such a global reputation was truly earned or was simply the result of brilliant public relations.

“Wait a minute,” said a TV host in Washington a few nights ago, when I debated all this with Mr John Donahue of the Catholic Defence League. “She built hospitals.” No, sir, you wait a minute.

Mother Teresa was given, to our certain knowledge, many tens of millions of pounds. But she never built any hospitals. She claimed to have built almost 150 convents, for nuns joining her own order, in several countries. Was this where ordinary donors thought their money was going?

Furthermore, she received some of this money from the Duvaliers, and from Mr Charles Keating of the notorious Lincoln Savings and Loan of California, and both these sources had acquired the money by – how shall I put it? – borrowing money from the poor and failing to give it back.

How could this possibly be true? Doesn’t everyone know that she spent her time kissing the sores of lepers and healing the sick? Ah, but what everyone knows isn’t always true. You were more likely to run into Mother Teresa being photographed with Nancy Reagan, or posing with Princess Diana, or in the first-class cabin of Air India (where she had a permanent reservation).

You could see her in Ireland, campaigning against a law which would permit civil divorce and remarriage (though she publicly defended Princess Diana’s right to be divorced).

You could encounter her on the podium in Stockholm, accepting yet another huge cheque and telling the Nobel audience that the greatest threat to world peace was… abortion. (Since she added that contraception was morally as bad as abortion, she essentially held the view that condoms and coils were a deadly threat to world peace. The Church does not insist on that degree of fundamentalism.)

And when she got sick, she would check herself into the Mayo Clinic or some other temple of American medicine. As one who has visited her primitive “hospice” for the dying in Calcutta, I should call that a wise decision. Nobody would go there except to check out, in one way or another.

“Give a man a reputation as an early riser,” said Mark Twain “and that man can sleep till noon.” Give a woman a reputation for holiness and compassion and apparently nothing she does can cause her to lose it.

I have been a severe critic of Mother Teresa ever since I came to know of what her mission was all about. Christopher Hitchens was one of the first to provide a devastating critique of her. The Ghoul of Calcutta, as he called his piece on her, is as honest an appraisal of her as anyone has ever done. His book The Missionary Position was a welcome counterbalance to the hagiography that was built around her myth. I started a small collection of critical pieces about M. Teresa some years ago. Through my interest in her, around 1997 I came to meet Hitchens when he was visiting Berkeley for a conversation with Gore Vidal. Last year I met Chatterjee in London, again in connection with a review of his book that I had written on my blog.

What exactly is my main grouse with M. Teresa? I think that she was evil. She manipulated others and cheated them, and she did so on the backs of Kolkata’s miserable. She was the most famous “beggar lord” – a person who makes a living by taking the money that people give to beggars and using that money for some other purpose. In her case, it is suspected that the money is funneled to the Vatican so that she would get on the fast tract to being canonized.

But siphoning money to the Vatican does not immediately brand her as evil, in my book. Hitler also supported the Vatican and that was not his most egregious fault. No, M. Teresa did far worse than just steal from the poor to enrich the fabulously wealthy. She compounded the problem that is the root cause of many of the world’s miseries. She cynically campaigned against birth control and contraceptives and did everything that she could to make the population problem more acute. The more born in misery and hopelessness, the more souls she would be able to save and more the brownie points that she would have to win the prize in heaven (sit next to Jesus Christ) and on earth (made into a saint by the bishop of Rome.)

My hope is that one of these days soon the Indians at least will wake out of their deep slumber of ignorance to realize that she has done incalculable harm to India, both in terms of the image that she advertised to the world about India, but even more tragically by catalyzing tens of millions of excess births that will result in decades of needless suffering and pain.

Too bad I don’t believe in hell and in a just power governing the universe. Otherwise I would have consoled myself with the thought that she would definitely end up in hell and suffer for all of eternity what she imposed on others.

Update: (Oct 26th, 2005) Here are two more articles, both by Christopher Hitchens, on Mother Teresa. In Oct 2003, Hitchens wrote The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.

One of the curses of India, as of other poor countries, is the quack medicine man, who fleeces the sufferer by promises of miraculous healing. Sunday was a great day for these parasites, who saw their crummy methods endorsed by his holiness and given a more or less free ride in the international press. Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. More than that, we witnessed the elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.

Earlier that year, he had argued why teresa should not be a saint in the Mirror (UK):

“Wait a minute,” said a TV host in Washington a few nights ago, when I debated all this with Mr John Donahue of the Catholic Defence League. “She built hospitals.” No, sir, you wait a minute.

Mother Teresa was given, to our certain knowledge, many tens of millions of pounds. But she never built any hospitals. She claimed to have built almost 150 convents, for nuns joining her own order, in several countries. Was this where ordinary donors thought their money was going?

Furthermore, she received some of this money from the Duvaliers, and from Mr Charles Keating of the notorious Lincoln Savings and Loan of California, and both these sources had acquired the money by – how shall I put it? – borrowing money from the poor and failing to give it back.

How could this possibly be true? Doesn’t everyone know that she spent her time kissing the sores of lepers and healing the sick? Ah, but what everyone knows isn’t always true. You were more likely to run into Mother Teresa being photographed with Nancy Reagan, or posing with Princess Diana, or in the first-class cabin of Air India (where she had a permanent reservation).

I will be traveling till the 25th and will not have access to the web. That is why I will maintain web silence and not because I am done with the topic at hand.

I stand corrected by TTG on the point about the entire khandaan of Nehru-Gandhi family not having one single solitary degree. It appears that Cha-Chaji was not entirely untutored. Thanks to TTG I actually came to learn another fact about another hero of mine — Mother Teresa, the Merciless — she had supported Indira Gandhi’s dictatorship. I had known that Teresa the Merciless used to hobnob with dictators, but that she was in the thick with Mrs Gandhi is news to me.

I will have to devote a few keystrokes to the devastation of Teresa the Merciless one of these days and I expect the usual deluge of hate-mail. But all that hate mail is worth it because in the end I get to change a few people’s opinion about the true nature of Teresa the Merciless.

Please do visit the archives if you are new to this blog. Recommendations: Agriculture and Development from Jan 2004. Or from Feb 2004, Why don’t they feel the pain. The part 2 of Agriculture and Development is also worth a read.

One final point: Please do include an email address if you post a comment. If you don’t wish to post the email address (because of possible spam), please do send me a copy of the comments to atanudey at gmail dot com.

It is interesting to note that the arguments against my view of Nehru and his failed economic policies are generic. I will repeat them and my counter-arguments here.

My argument. Economic policies matter. If you have sound economic policies, you get commensurate economic performance. India’s economic performance sucks. It performs dismally in any sort of ranking of human development and economic performance tests. Half the illiterates of the world call India their home. A third of all global poverty is in India. All things considered, India has been a colossal failure so far.

Why has India been a failure? Are Indians collectively stupid? Unlikely.

Did GOD decree it? I asked him and he categorically denied it.

Did nations around the world gang up and rape India for the last 60 years? Not that I know of.

I am left with the hypothesis that perhaps India’s economic policies sucked chrome off a bumper of a pickup truck parked at 400 yards.

Who makes economic policies? You? I? No, economic policy is made by the so-called leaders and visionaries of this sainted land. Who were the most powerful leaders of this land since its independence from Britain? Nehru and his descendants. He dictated policy—economic, foreign, domestic, you name it. The most charitable way of putting the matter is to say that Nehru was clueless.

He wasn’t just clueless about this or that. His cluelessness was all encompassing. He was clueless about foreign policy, military strategy, domestic development — you name it and he is the greatest screw-up that India has ever produced.

Then come the rebuttals which often start with the admission that Nehru was clueless but . . .

. . . but during his time, many others–including a few people one cannot dismiss as being clueless thought that Central planning was beneficial for countries like India. These included Nobel winner Gunnar Myrdal (Asian Drama, an Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations) and Mahalanobis.

The argument above says that it wasn’t the man, it was the circumstances. By that logic, everything is justifiable. Every crime can be explained away as the result of compelling circumstances and hence there can be no accountability.

Take, for instance, the WorldCom and Enron cases where executives committed theft on unprecedented and unimaginable scale. One could point to the fact that other companies were also doing shady accounting, that the internet boom was going strong, that the economy was very strong, that the GAAP was being followed. All those explanations would also paper over the fact that the crime arose out of the greed of the perpetrator. Given all the circumstances but absent the greed of the executives, the grand theft would not have taken place.

Now back to Nehru: even if one were to grant all the circumstances that you cite above (but only for the sake of argument), the fact remains that central planning was personally very convenient for the Cha-cha.

The children of Imperialism are not weaned on the milk of humility; they are brought up on heady diet of hubris. Nehru was an imperialist who believed that his destiny was to rule the brown masses and he continually rejected sane advice. Look deeply into any problem that India faces and you will see Nehru’s finger-prints all over it.

Take Kashmir. Who was it who let the matter get out of hand? Nehru with his idiotic insistence that the UN be called to mediate the dispute. Talking of the UN, who was it who rejected the proposal that India take a seat in the permanent security council? Nehru. There is not enough space here to go into all the horrendous mistakes.

Then there is the argument that says, “Don’t blame Nehru for the screw-up that India is. We, Indians, are to blame.” That line is similar to the one Niket made in the comments in the last post.

Yes, in fact, we are to blame. Indians are basically collectively a bunch of clueless retards. They collectively elect leaders who are clueless retards and these clueless retards choose policies that keep the country of hundreds of millions of people in abject poverty. No argument there. A country deserves the leaders it gets, especially so in a so-called democracy. I agree that Bihar deserves and gets Rabri Devi and Laloo Prasad Yadav.

So if the collective is to blame, why is Nehru elevated to the position of a demi-god? Not just that, anyone associated with his family is elevated as well. With very rare exceptions, everything in India which has a personal name associated with it is named after the Nehru-Gandhi family. The Borivali National Park close to my abode is named “Sanjay Gandhi National Park”. All sorts of educational institutions are named after the members of a family that collectively have fewer educational achievements than yours truly.

Allow me to repeat that: The entire Nehru-Gandhi family — Cha-chaji, Indira, Rajiv, Sonia, Sanjay, Rahul, Prianka – collectively haver fewer educational qualifications than I (an average person) do. If I am not mistaken, they don’t have one solitary single college degree among the whole lot of them.

{To be continued.}

After independence, however, Indian policy was in the hands of Indians. What were the objectives of these Indians who stood at the helm? I really don’t know. What motivated them? I don’t know for sure. What were their declared motives? I believe it was to lead India to prosperity. Cha-cha Nehru said as much in his famous Tryst with Destiny speech. Talk is cheap. Especially pretty talk. Talk about scaling commanding heights is pretty as a picture, and as cheap as a picture. I have written critically about Cha-cha Nehru and his talk elsewhere. (See Nehru, the Nabob of Cluelessness, for instance.)

Justice Louis Brandeis wrote (Olmstead v US, 1928):

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

I remind myself that the British were the evil minded rulers that all were naturally wary of. What Indians did not realize is the danger of men like Nehru and his descendents.

Despite all Nehru’s pretty speeches, I believe he was motivated by a deep megalomanical zeal to command and control.

Shakespeare’s Mark Anothony says at Ceasar’s funeral, “The evil that men do, lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.” Well, we do have the evil they did living after them. My wish is that their pretty speeches were also interred with their bones.

Dear Chief Minister of West Bengal Mr. Buddhadev Bhattacharya:

I have come to learn that there is some possibility of renaming Park Street as Mother Teresa street and erecting her statue.

I think this is a very bad idea. The image of Kolkata has been forever tarnished as a result of Mother Teresa’s activities. For greater details on why this is so, I would urge you to read what some neutral observers have to say about the lady. I have a few articles on the subject and I recommend a book by a son of Kolkata — Dr Aroup Chatterjee’s “Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict” which I have reviewed here.

We in India are totally brainwashed to accept uncritically anything that is Western and white. Mother Teresa, motivated by missionary zeal, used the poverty of the poor of Kolkata to enrich her mission. While I do not deny that India has abject poverty, she used that poverty and showcased it around the world not to solve the problem but to evoke pity from affluent people so that they would contribute to the welfare of her mission, not for the welfare of the people she so ruthlessly used.

I urge you to carefully review the evidence and reconsider.

Sincerely,
Atanu Dey

I have followed the Mother Teresa phenomenon with a sick feeling in my stomach because of a number of reasons. The primary reason for me is that she epitomizes what is the fundamental flaw that led to what we see in India around us today. The flaw is in not thinking through things, of busying ourselves with the symptoms of an ailment rather than eradicating the cause.

Mother Teresa ceaselessly championed for uncontrolled breeding. She did her best to derail any serious attempt at addressing one of the primary causes of poverty in the developing countries, namely, the growth of human populations way beyond that which can be sustained at a humane level. All she wanted was that there be sufficiently large number of abjectly poor in a place so she could gather brownie points to assure her place amongst the sainted. As she honestly put it, if there were no poor, there would not be any reason for hermission to exist. The poor, she held, were blessed because they suffer.

I feel that she should be called Teresa, the Merciless. Millions will be forced lead miserable lives because of what she has done and the institutions she supported (the Vatican, primarily) and the institutions she has created.

I expect hate mail as a result of this post. But I hope that the writer of hate mail at least read some of the articles which I have provided the links to above. My request is that you send me hate mail only after you have honestly read the articles.

Rajesh Jain’s blog has an item on lessons from India’s elections which got me thinking. The claim made by Shekhar Gupta of the Indian Express is that India’s voter has become smart.

Compared to whom? I ask. Compared to Shekhar Gupta?

I guess so since Shekhar Gupta claims that the Indian voter has become smart. For I don’t see any reason to believe that the Indian voter has changed in any substantial way. The Indian voter continues to be a narrow-minded, ignorant, casteist, bigoted, vacuous idiot it has always been.

Here is my reasoning.

• Exhibit A: I look at the politicians of this country. To a first approximation, they are ignorant, bigoted, casteist, vacuous idiotic criminals. These bunch of unspeakable criminals (where I use the word in its literal sense) are consistently voted into power by the Indian voter.
• Fact B: A population of wise, informed, well-meaning, broad-minded, intelligent voters cannot continue to vote a bunch of corrupt ignorant bigots as their political leaders.
• Major Premise C: Voters reveal their character by expressing their preferences at the polls.
• Minor Premise D: Leaders are endogenous to the group, that is, they emerge from within the group and so reflect the dominant traits of the group.

Mr Gupta writes that the voter is not swayed by charisma. Well, how would we know? We need charismatic people first and then if the voter is unmoved, we can say that it is true.

We do know that the Indian voter is swayed by “big names”, though. Why else would they trot out an uneducated chap (Rahul Gandhi) as the Congress mascot unless they were confident that the Indian voter will be swayed?

What else explains the tenacity with which the entire Nehru-Gandhi clan is totally into getting into the highest political positions? By their indomitable courage? No. Their astonishing brilliance in academics? None are really even educated. Their thorough understanding of the problems of development? Never done an honest day’s work. Their undying dedication to the hard task of nation building? Shirley, you jest. Their selfless sacrifice demonstrated by their social work? Not a bloody chance in hell.

What then explains the astonishing idiocy of the Indian voter to continue to vote the Nehru-Gandhi clan to power?

Let’s face the facts. I would have loved to report that we are a great democracy. We are not. If we were, we would not be facing the prospect of having an Italian aupair as the prime minister of a country of 1000 000 000 people. She says that she is loyal to her adopted country (never mind that she did not apply for Indian citizen for over a decade). Well, I would ask her whether she has any loyalty to the country that she was born in. No? If a person has no loyalty towards the land of one’s birth, I would not pay a tinker’s damn to any other oath of loyalty that the person takes. If you change your allegiance once, it is all too easy to do it once again. Indians who don’t understand that simple concept are idiots and I don’t care how accomplished they may be in their respective fields. If an Indian says that Sonia’s origin is not an issue for the prime minister’s seat, I would say that Indian is a moron.

I have met only a handful of politicians personally. I have known some of them well and all of them — every one of them to the last person — has accumulated vast sums of money through bribery and corruption. It is a random sample. I have no doubt that the vast majority of Indian politicians are corrupt. Politicians are endogenous to the population. They are random samples drawn from the underlying population. In other words, the sample characteristics give an indication of the population characteristics. The corruption of the politicians is the single most damning evidence that the voters are corrupt.

That is the law.

Today’s Times of India editorial calls it a senseless subsidy. {In the original draft, I had expressed my opinion of the Supreme Court in blunt language. A friend called up to say that in India one is liable to be thrown in jail for doing so since it a non-bailable offense. It seems that one cannot freely express one’s opinion of the President of India and the judges of the Supreme Court. I don’t know for sure but this must be the legacy of the British — royalty being above criticism. Be that as it may, I am removing the honest criticism from here and publishing it elsewhere where one can freely express one’s opinion.}

India is poor by choice. The policy of subsidizing higher education and neglecting primary education is one such policy choice that has condemned India to being a poor third-world irrelevant nation which has the highest number of impoverished illiterates in the universe.

We are poor by choice. We don’t need adverse external shocks to keep us illiterate and poor; India’s leaders and its courts will do the job of keeping India a chronically ailing over-populated collective of starving illiterates without any help from abroad.

The importance of primary education cannot be overstated — ever. No amount of India Shining campaigns can paper over the fact that India is doomed unless it focuses on primary education. I have been writing about the shocking neglect of primary education and the regressive subsidy of higher education for years. (See Who Paid for my Education? for instance.) It is not rocket science. A moment’s reflection is all that it takes for one to realize the importance of primary education. Allow me to quote from Venkatesh Hariharan in a recent exchange at the India-gii mailing list:

… How can India be shining when we have [an education] minister who doesn’t care a damn for the pathetic lack of a primary education? The man is, instead, taking a sledgehammer and applying it diligently to what are the crown jewels of India–the IITs and IIMs. Our current success is IT is just a “flash in the pan,” whatever NASSCOM may say. We happened to be in the right place at the right time when the IT and BPO booms happened but to sustain it we need more than luck. In the knowledge economy, our lack of a primary education system is a serious handicap.

Many years ago, I met with MIT’s noted economist, Lester Thurow and he said that India’s lack of a primary education system was one of its biggest handicaps. I recently met him again for an extended interview that appeared in MIT’s Technology Review. Here are some excerpts from the interview:

1. In the knowledge economy, Thurow says, countries that wish to stay ahead must pay great attention to education. “Ask yourselves this question–30 or 50 years from now what job will an illiterate do? By that time you will have robots to do what an illiterate does now.”
2. “When we talk about the knowledge economy, we are not talking about just information technology or programming,” says Thurow. “Every job will have a big knowledge component. For example, in a modern steel mill, a worker is more likely to sit behind a computer screen than lift anything physically. When we are talking about knowledge workers, we are talking about any job that has a knowledge component.” Fewer and fewer jobs fall outside of that description, he says. Countries that aim to progress in the global economy therefore have to ensure that everybody becomes literate as fast as possible.
3. According to Thurow, the lack of widespread, basic education is one of the reasons that India has problems competing with China. “The worst educated province in China is better than the best educated province in India. Indian universities are better than Chinese universities but more people are in Chinese grade schools than are in Indian grade schools. This will hurt India and you cannot allow this to continue in the long-run. You have a top-down strategy versus the bottom-up strategy that China has. You better have a strategy that gets everybody educated,” he says.He praised China’s approach of getting everybody educated up to the third grade, then to the sixth grade, tenth grade, twelfth grade and so on. Globalization strategies have to carry the masses with it or they would not succeed. A knowledge based economy is not one where only the elite get educated, he says.

Our education system, our national IT strategies are all deeply elitist. As a country, we need to broadbase our education system and leverage IT for the dispersion of knowledge. Instead, what we have are crumbling schools, absent (and often underpaid) teachers, and students who will emerge completely unprepared for the kowledge economy. And what we have is a thin elite layer that is happily using IT as a milch cow that showers dollars and pays scant attention to how it can be deployed for our country’s benefit. India shining? Not unless you are smoking pot!

When one ponders the factors that account for India’s backwardness, one is struck by how significant is the role of luck. It is sheer bad luck that India got saddled with mostly self-serving ignorant power-hungry narrow-minded short-sighted bunch of leaders and policy makers. How long it will be before the billion plus people of India find within them enlightened leaders is hard to tell. If ever there was a time for good leadership to emerge, now it is.

[I have written earlier on Pricing Management Education in this blog which looks at the arithmetic of subsidizing IIM education.]