Now Now

The chip stretch

2012-01-24T13:12:00.000+05:30

It’s a common situation.

You have the most brilliant idea anyone ever came up with - at least you think so. And you do need to think so, even if just to sustain interest in it for a few hours longer until you can pen down your thoughts, before they melt into the atmosphere.

So. The idea seems perfect. From every angle. Even your brainstorming partner - just anyone who happens to be with you at that time - plugs in her ideas and adds to your concept. It seems like a festival of brilliance. The stars will seem to have aligned themselves just so, to shine their combined light on the tiny spot of planet that you happen to be occupying at that moment.

In a frenzy, you create a plan.

In 2 days you find that someone has already thought about ‘your’ idea and proceed to modifying your plan.

In a week your plan is beginning to look elaborate and bulky

In a month, your plan is extremely detailed but your idea appears lame. You get back to watching TV.

In 2 months you find that someone else has implemented your idea. You check it out and get back to watching TV if only to replace remorse with fast moving images.

In 6 months, you look back at your idea as though it were the Sphinx - Familiar, but having nothing to do with you.

Of course, you might be a person who managed to start something and actually finish it and succeed in the bargain. You are needed too, I guess, because we can’t all sit around watching TV. We need someone to create programs for the rest of us to waste our lives watching. So, please keep it up.

In bookshops, they have shelves just to stack books written by people who are dying to tell you how to be guy who doesn’t dissipate himself and his ideas.

Such books are always boring and following what they say is way harder than watching TV.

How then do we realize our ideas while indulging in activities that rival the comfort of watching TV?

The most obvious things are sometimes the hardest to spot, because their obviousness makes us oblivious to their existence. I realize that the word play in the previous sentence is most certainly a put off, but I’ll let it stay for a reason that I hope, will become obvious as you read on.

You’d like to go on a trek. The planning is great fun - choosing the route, packing essentials, just dreaming about it the night before. You pick a route that you think you can manage to complete and to push the limits a little you factor in a diversion or two along the way. Once you start, if your plan is simple enough, chances are, you will have reached your destination without too much trouble and returned from your trek in one functioning piece.

Now, if you introduce a few random variables into the trek - like a landslide or bad weather - which you cannot plan for too accurately, two things are diminished. Firstly, your chances of executing your plan fully and secondly your chances of survival. The extent of both, though, are linked to the same factor. And this factor, stamina, is the one we become oblivious to on account of its being obvious.

I think this is true of any human venture - from something like running where stamina is more easily appreciated to something like creating a business - where stamina isn’t an obvious planning parameter.

Stamina is generally associated with going on for long, doing whatever one wants to do. Looking at it in this way makes it quite boring and difficult to achieve. On the contrary, I think stamina needs to be looked at as a moderator of all the qualities that are required to embark upon a journey and reach a destination.

And stamina is a physical parameter. Which is much easier to quantify and comprehend than say something like talent or experience.

How does all this help me ‘effortlessly’ realize my ideas?

Quite simply, by being driven only as far as stamina allows. Actually by doing a little less - like stretching for that bag of chips rather than getting up to fetch it.

The chip stretch, when implemented to non-food situations, will allow one to do more without wasting too much energy and hence conserve much valuable stamina.

But naturally

2012-01-17T18:17:00.002+05:30

I have often faced situations while designing systems and processes where after a point things start going wobbly in my mind..

Here's a simple example:

- Say there's a system with 3 types of users - administrators, managers and users (administrators at the top, managers below them and users below managers)

- each one of these users (including the administrator and managers) has a manager

Now, to change a user's manager, you need to send a notification to the administrator, who then approves (or rejects) the operation

What do you need to do if the administrator's manager needs to be changed?

The administrator chooses a manager and is sent a notification that his manager has changed, and then approves it himself? Sounds superfluous, no?

Such problems are always a pain and make me want to quit my job and start a tea shop called P&T on the highway.

But who knows - I might face a similar problem while managing my inventory of tea at P&T.

Back to the problem then.

The pain, then needs to be addressed.

I turn to nature for help. Because such painful situations must exist in nature and nature must have a way of solving them, for if anyone has been there and done that, it has got to be nature. And I too am of nature, after all.

Hang on. Did I just say pain, twice?

The brain, apparently, does not feel pain, even as it inflicts above mentioned inconvenience on other body parts.

And pain is pleasure taken to absurd limits, but that is completely besides the point - so let me leave this rather tempting diversion alone and get back to the main pain at hand.

If damage has occurred in the hand, the brain finds out and inflicts pain in it, in the hope that the possessor of the hand might use said brain and proceed to salvage what remains of said hand.

Now, If damage has occurred to the brain, who can save it? The hand? Probably not, unless the brain has already instructed it to assist but that too is besides the point.

Nature, it seems, assumes that if the brain is damaged, nothing is worth saving and hence there's no point in inflicting pain in it.

That's a tantalizing conclusion, but wait. It is also possible that the brain is not capable of inflicting pain in itself - because it wouldn't know whom to tell - unless it told itself and since it is the originator too, it would call its own bluff and go nuts in the process.

If you come at it from the opposite end, you'd think the brain is interested in preserving itself. By inflicting pain on other body parts, it is motivating the organism to get moving - to do something - to protect it.

So, the fact that the brain does not feel pain is either a design limitation or a feature.

If it is a feature, there must be a superior authority that designed it. This too is quite besides the point at hand, so I leave another jewel by the wayside as I continue in my pursuit of truth.

Actually, it is not besides the point. The fact that brains (and the rest of organisms) exist is proof that the brain has managed to preserve itself over time.

So, rather than a limitation, I think the painlessness is a feature.

Actually, the earlier point about pleasure being exquisite pain, too, was not besides the point - the pleasure is the feature.

The summary then, for the benefit of the impatient reader who has skipped this far without reading the bulk of the essay:

The brain is designed to preserve itself and have a good time and it uses the same pleasure it enjoys, to inflict pain in other body parts to motivate them to aid in its preservation.

To go one step further and alienate my audience completely, I'd conclude that the possibility of perishing is probably what provides the potential energy and hence the motivational force that propagates species and intelligence is only a by-product

Intelligence, then being quite visceral (to the extent that it would require the definition of visceral to be changed), if we are interested in creating artificially intelligent systems, we should, like nature, be building systems that can perish, rather than building systems that are designed to last forever.

An indestructible silicon hearted beast is probably not going to be motivated enough to create another in its own image no matter how much data you stuff into it. It's just going to eat all that data and emit a mega burp - that smells somewhat like the world wide web.

Uncomfortable truth about an everyday event

2011-12-17T12:28:00.000+05:30

I go to a supermarket to buy a few things. I zip between rows of shelves (or are they columns?), trying to avoid uniformed sales persons trying to sell me things I don't need. But that's impossible. Not the zipping, but the avoiding of sales persons. There are too many of them and some of them are in plain clothes. Even if I do manage to avoid them using tact, there is bound to be at least one item on my shopping list that I cannot find by myself - simply because there's something about supermarket air that makes my brain go numb. So, I ask the sales person where I can find a bottle of the brand of juice that I'd bought last week. I had really liked it to the level of being addicted enough to add it to my shopping list. The sales person starts looking, rather lazily, in the very same shelf where I've already looked. I know it isn't there. That's why I asked the sales person, hoping that they have some stocked in some secret cellar somewhere. But there never is a secret cellar, is there? So, that bottle of juice - they probably stopped making it, or the supermarket stopped stocking it.

I move on to the next item on my list. But the problem is, I am, juiceless, in the middle of the juice section and the next item on my list belongs in the laundry section and there's no simple way of finding the shortest path from juice to laundry. I have to pass through rows of items that might or might not be on my list. There's no avoiding that. So, I navigate my large empty cart begging for pardon as I dash against similarly lost fellow shoppers and completely by accident, spot the shelf holding the hundred thousand varieties of chips. I know for sure that I want to avoid the chips. So, I make a u-turn, dash against an avid seeker of chips, excuse myself and escape. Or so I think.

By now, I'm slowly losing track of what it was that I'd been looking for, but I am still confident. My trusted list comes to the rescue. Laundry - that's where I need to get. And realizing that I need to stay focussed, I increase my speed. Shelf upon shelf of things flash by. My mind takes note of everything. The rice that is somewhere down there in my list, the toothpaste on page 2. Now, I am faced with a choice. Either stop and pick up the items in no particular order, as I pass them, or stay focussed and head for laundry. I am still energetic, so I think I can beat the system. I'll do both, I say - pick up things as I pass by them until I hit laundry and tick off items smartly from the list. The problem though is that the supermarket is designed with one thing in mind - to pick the money out of my pocket and the supermarket is bigger than me.

Let's look at the two options carefully. If I pick things up as I pass by them, after a shelf or two, it will seem as though every item on the shelf is on my list, unless I check every item that I pass by against my list - which is impractical and tiring. On the other hand, if I head straight for laundry, when I get to the next item on the list, I will need to repeat the hunt, passing by the zillion shelves - at greater speed now, as I realize that my cart is still pretty much empty, my list is still long and it's getting dark outside. Now, what I am attempting - to combine the two strategies to beat the system, is exactly how the supermarket wants me to think. Unless I am filled with performance enhancing chemicals, my running between the shelves, looking up and down my list and focussing on the thing I want, all under the gaze of bright lights and much breathed air will drain my energy and gradually turn me into a compliant shopper.

Shopping, if you really think about it, is mostly about obedience.

Mystery of little consequence

2011-11-10T17:27:00.000+05:30

How many times have you looked at a picture of P.Chidambaram - in newspapers, on the tv, on the internet? Have you ever wondered what that funny little thing on his shoulder is?

Yes. I’m talking about that neatly folded woolly, glossy piece of cloth that you’ve probably assumed to be just a boring shawl he bought at some ‘Kashmiri shop’.

I have this gnawing suspicion that it’s not really a shawl.

Let me try and explain why I think so.

Firstly, it’s the way it sits around his shoulders - as though it was tailored to fit them. The collar area seems stiffer than the rest of the costume which falls perfectly from his shoulders.

Secondly, It is tucked beneath his collar quite inelegantly, like the much re-cycled drape at the barber shop. Actually, it is more than tucked. It sits too perfectly inside the collar. Now, if it is indeed a standard sized shawl and he has folded it thrice over to bring it to a manageable size, shoving portions of it between the neck and the shirt collar would be quite cumbersome and would hardly result in such a fine finish as he has been able to achieve. In his case, it looks as though the costume is gently oozing out from the back of his neck. There have got to be some craftily placed pins holding up the contraption.

Thirdly, it wasn’t always like this. His earlier photos had him wearing a regular shawl, rolled up, but still looking like a shawl.

If you focus on the costume alone for about 10 seconds, without being distracted by the straight face which PC wears with as much aplomb, you will see, like those optical illusion pictures where patterns emerge out of patterns, that it is in fact a cape. Like batman’s cape, but cut off at the height of the rib cage.

I suspect that it is a carefully constructed PR move on the part of PC that serves no purpose other than to intimidate people; by appearing to be bigger than he really is.

Here I was thinking PC’s cloak looks pretty ridiculous, when I chanced upon these guys, wearing a similar monstrosity, but in fluorescent colors!

If one inspired the other, I wonder who the inventor of this mutant costume is.

Diddly Squat

2011-11-08T15:00:00.001+05:30

This 99% that the wall street squat is supposed to represent is within the 1% of the world's population whose stress in life is caused by having to eat misshapen bananas rather than picture perfect ones, or not being able to go on that cruise to the antarctic to swim with the whales (I'm assuming there's at least more than one whale left) this year, just like they did last year.

The really poor 99% isn't 1% certain about where the next meal will come from. They would probably give an arm to own one of those all weather tents parked in front of St. Pauls.

So, each one of these squatters - all they're complaining about is the fact that they - not someone else should be making all that money.

They are in fact living in the glass house of discontent and flinging large rocks tainted with greed at everyone else.

The real way to fight the 1% would be to stop consuming what it produces. But does the 99% have what it takes? Maybe not. Because the 99% is no different from the 1%. They are human.

The distraction economy

2011-09-21T20:19:00.000+05:30

Before the shiny happy days of theinternet, life was quite hard – we just hadn't realized it then.When you had a strange pain in your abdomen at 10 in the night, therewere very few ways for you to learn more about it. Today, all youneed to do is google it and surf in febrile uncertainty as one pageleads to another and it looks like your worst fears are coming true,very rapidly. What you perhaps take for granted at each page that youvisit, is a tiny innocuous looking piece of text. This text is atentacle from google's dark underbelly. Without it, google would nothave been able to find you the page in the first place. No. I am nottalking about some analytics tracking code. I refer to the annoyingadvertisements that appear to know what I want, even before I do.

It takes effort to place them on theright pages at the right time. But those ads just sitting there donot do anything. You are required to click on them. And when you do,the economy is fueled that little bit. But there are billions likeyou. And thus come google's billions.

Just clicking on ads wouldn't obviouslyprovide for a sustainable business model. One would need to paysomeone something somewhere so the wheels can keep turning. So,millions of people click on links and enter into contracts with thecompanies that pay google to distract you with said links while youwaste your time searching for something you don't really need.

What google does then, is harvestdistraction. Logically, since it's survival depends on maintaining a dissipated audience, it will support activities that promotedistraction. Limited attention spans are much in demand. Now you knowwhy facebook and twitter are all the rage. They make distraction lookpurposeful. And they too shall create micro-distractions to distractyou from the main distraction – for they too need to survive.

This being the situation, the currenthope is that amidst all this noise there might be wisdom. Wisdom thatcan be congealed – strangely enough, using artificial intelligence.As we humans spew out whatever comes to our progressively weakeningminds, there is a rush to create machines which will help us makesense of the coming madness.

Note: I wrote this... in one sitting... in under 30 minutes... without being distracted by the internet!

Human endeavor 2.0

2011-09-02T17:56:00.000+05:30

The greatestideas originate in the dark and solitary minds of individuals; Social activity,aka chatter, only helps commodify, propagate and hence simplify greatideas.

The economy, aswe know it today, thrives on this simplification and yet opens itself to amassive risk; of compounding mediocrity that over time dries up the well and stopsthe flow of its own nourishment; killing itself in the process. A reprobate andexploitative economy killing itself may not be such a tragic event; it couldperhaps be an event to celebrate, but what is tragic is the dilution andmisrepresentation of human creativity.

Being alone letsyou digest the information you have consumed, become a better person and if youhave a creative bent of mind, create something that is useful to the world.

With each newgeneration, the bar is being lowered. With information constantly beingthrown at us, there is an ever increasing need to be able to superficiallyskim the surface of understanding and move on to the next piece. We are adjustingto the speed, nausea caused by information overload is redefined as ahigh, humanity is well and truly on the information superhighway. Only problem is,with the decreased capacity and motivation to digest

information, weare the pedestrians - future road-kill.

So, the economywhich will only allow 'monetarily useful' things to survive, andpeople conditioned tothirst for increased simplification, are together creating a society that is gettingslow cooked in its own mediocrity.

Things cannot,quite clearly, carry on in this fashion for much longer.

A point will bereached when the junk we produce will become completely devoid of all meaning and our minds will be diluted to a point where we consume thejunk automatically.

Chances are, we are nearly there.

Fresh produce

2011-08-22T17:37:00.001+05:30

Imagine a family. One where all members live in amity, share what is available and believe that spending quality time with the family does not require anything other than the family.

Now imagine a family where the members constantly quarrel with each other on some matter or the other, do not share resources and believe that the new monster sized television with rock concert scale speakers will help the family spend quality time together.

The second, being the greater consumer, is too easy for businesses to exploit. They aren't the problem. You produce, they consume. The goal then, of all business, is to convert the first kind into the second.

This is essentially a problem of creating disorder from order. It's not as easy as it might appear.

A number of things need to happen before stability, contentment and harmony in a unit such as a family can be replaced with uncertainty, discontent and disharmony.

It will take time before the destruction is complete. Sometimes, a small seed of contentment that is left behind might spring back and spawn another contented unit – which will again need to be targeted. And all the while, raw materials are becoming scarce. These are the kinds of risks that businesses endure just to ensure that the world can continue consuming.

The first line of offense is misrepresentation. It is easy to cheat people who thrive on trust. The simple folks fall for this and start consuming petrochemical filled detergents quite quickly.

The second line of offense involves selling dreams. Wearing a pair of shoes made from petrochemical waste will never help you run a mile under 4 minutes, if you couldn't already. But wearing one will make you feel like you could, if you only tried and just did it.

The third line of offense is the instilling of fear. You are encouraged to plan for the future of your loved ones, by spending less time with them so that you can work harder to invest the extra money in complex stock linked insurance plans, the future of which the company promoting them cannot determine. The company though, expands, using your contribution.

The fourth line of offense is the spreading of hopelessness. Research, a word that signified thoroughness, honesty and humility (for no-one knows everything) has now been hijacked to promote sensational 'conclusions' like 'fighting couples will continue to fight until they die'.

The final line of offense is anarchy. Once humanity is out there, delirious with dreams, scared of the future and buying things without hope, there is a real risk of the smarter among them realizing that they are being had. One way to beat such a minority into eternal submission is to sponsor anarchy. By doing so, businesses obtain access to the revolutionary spark within each human – the one that springs hope for humanity – and convert it into a propaganda machine.

When anarchy has run its course, I believe, simplicity and contentment will seem refreshing.

Corruption cloud

2011-06-20T12:10:00.000+05:30

Corruption cannot be the sole preserve of Indian politicians, who are but a small subset of a largely self respecting group of Indians living in India.

The fundamental reason why corruption is so hard to isolate, let alone fight, is that it transcends boundaries, geographic and cultural.

Let's take an example. It would be naive to think that Britain, or any other country sending aid to India, or any other country, is an exercise in altruism. 'Global aid' is an inter-connected conglomerate of investment funds, which demands returns and expects profits. If it didn't, Britain or any other 'benevolent' society would soon run itself to the ground - something the British empire has managed to steer clear of for hundreds of years. The logical conclusion then, is that the British empire is reaping whatever it wants to reap and will continue to do so without complaining for many more centuries if it can get away with it. The problem today is that the global economy is going through an identity crisis and experts of all flavors are trying to find fall guys to take the rap, even as the really big guys, who control much of the world's wealth get increasingly cautious, selfish and greedy.

Then there are arbitrary, and dubious statements such as "280 Lacs crore of Indian money is deposited in swiss banks which is enough to pay each Indian citizen an amount of Rs. 2000/- for 60 yrs". While being sensational and eyeball grabbing, invoking self righteous exclamations at cocktail parties, which sink into oblivion as the next guest walks in and starts talking about the new car he bought, such tripe does not really serve any practical purpose. It would not take very long for a semi-decent and sufficiently motivated accountant to crunch numbers to come up with a statement along the lines of, "If the British returned all the wealth they siphoned off from India, India could pay its current and future population at least the current British minimum wage for the next 500 years". Such a statement too would be useless to the citizen, present or future, who is never going to have that money deposited in her bank account.

Further, statements like "... Indian money is deposited in swiss banks can be used to execute a 'taxless' budget for 30 yrs", while being patently inaccurate in the face of scrutiny, also seem to consider a country's economy in isolation. If India were to stop collecting tax, the implications cannot but be global, which in turn will affect India's economy which in turn will affect the effectiveness of the so called 'taxless' budget. Yet another useless statement that does not help address corruption but rather confuses the issue further. I even wonder if the people who would like to cloud corruption are the ones who generate such nonsense.

What is required, instead, is a holistic understanding of the problem (if it is indeed one) of corruption before we even attempt to decipher it.

It is more likely that corruption is just an undesirable but unavoidable consequence of economics; like toxic fumes are a necessary consequence of the convenience of burning fuel. Whether one tries to ignore the fumes or sequester it deep underground, the fact remains that unless you stop burning fuel (which in today's world equates to 'stop living') the rot will spread. Similarly, unless you stop the economy in its current shape and size (which too in today's world equates to 'stop living') the rot will quite obviously proliferate.

I think what the world needs is a change in the attitude to consumption. An attitude of contentment could possibly eliminate the soil that fertilizes corruption. Such a change in attitude, on a global scale, will probably occur only over an extended period of time, or suddenly if forced by a massive global catastrophe. Either way, without that attitudinal change, copious amounts of self righteous finger-pointing are likely to be useful only for mildly entertaining news coverage.

Starve the corrupt, not yourself

2011-04-07T13:55:00.002+05:30

Scores of people led by Anna Hazare are starving themselves and collapsing from fatigue and dehydration in the pursuit of fairness and a sense of justice. It's an amazing turn of events - resembling a revolution of sorts - spurred on by a salivating media industry. The media could not have asked for a better story, waking up from the world cup hangover, as it were, and waiting for the IPL matches and the assembly elections.

While any voice raised against corruption is better than silence, I think the satyagraha in its current shape and form could use some strategic thinking if it is to have even a fighting chance of making a positive impact. After all, the system that it is up against is one that was elected by people who are not too different from the satyagrahis themselves.

The problems I see are related to the fact that the protest uses a technique that Gandhi perfected over time - against clearly 'foreign' overlords, at a time in history when information traveled slowly.

Every satyagraha needs a clearly identifiable enemy and in the current context, it appears as though that badge is being pinned on the government. It would be naive to think that the Indian government operates by and for itself. Yes, people in government use their positions of power to reap personal gains, but we all know that the real power, of capital rests with industry. Indian industry has over the last few decades managed to create a symbiotic relationship with the Indian political system. A relationship that sanctions and executes the exploitation of the country's wealth. The rest of us are employed by this nexus and have come to depend on it for our sustenance. Unless we go back to the roots, do a real satyagraha and reject all factory produced goods that are sold for profit alone, we will remain dependent on this nexus.

Coming to the flow of information, in today's mad world of TV debates anchored by self-appointed self-righteous keepers of the nation's conscience, it is easy for opinion to be shifted by either party. Yet again, the one who wields the capital will eventually win. The internet has been a great enabler and

consolidator of public opinion, but what happens after the villain has been de-throned? Is the collective intelligence of the Facebook and Twitter 'mob' enough to build a new system that is not half as rotten as the one they denounced? Looking at the example of Egypt, we clearly lack the technology tools to coalesce the public rage and opinion into constructive nation building activity.

So, we have a situation where the satyagraha is taking place with a system; the guys with the power within that system also wield the power to shape public opinion. If the satyagraha manages to overcome the power bias, it is still left with no tools (comparable to the ones that upset the status quo) to use the victory constructively.

What we need then is a two pronged strategy. First, starve the system of power, not yourself. And second, create tools that make the day after the victory pleasant, not seem like a bad hangover.

To starve the system of power is simple. Deny it the funds it requires to function the way it does. While giving up wants and living frugally would help, I think it will not be necessary. All that we need to do is to stop paying tax.

If the belief is that corrupt government officials are looting money, stop giving them the money.

Now to the tools, what we need are simple ones that allow every citizen to play an active part in deciding the fate of the society he or she lives in. The time is ripe to create such tools.

Organic trading

2011-01-31T15:59:00.000+05:30

If I leave the internet aside for a minute and look at the world around me, in an Indian city like Delhi, I see a whole new dimension to life, commerce and trade; one that is vastly different from the virtual tools with slick interfaces that abound on the internet and attempt to make life easier for the one whose lives are already too easy.

The most obvious deduction from this is the inequitable distribution of wealth and how a few are getting more prosperous while the majority breathe in the fumes left in the wake of the speeding economy. Moved by this deduction, one's charitable streak might be awakened; and we have countless NGOs and pseudo-charitable institutions that start with noble intentions and end up nowhere.

This, I think, is precisely where the problem lies. Nobody would indulge in charity if it were not convenient and rewarding, in some way. Charity requires a certain relative degree of downtrodden-ness to exist. If there is none, we humans would artificially create one; so that there would be someone to save. The definition of homeless, for example, is quite different in different societies. Now, a recipient of charity is bound to change with the arrival of aid. It is inevitable that he will begin to look more and more like the donor. As the gap is closed, the downtrodden-ness decreases, the donor is progressively less motivated to be charitable; and starts looking for opportunities where the efforts at charity will result in a greater sense of fulfillment and reward; leaving the earlier recipient hanging in a half saved state.

So, charity as a means to achieve a just future, is part of the problem. It depends on a fix. And like any drug, it requires newer cells to kill.

Having eliminated charity, what remains is trade. sell what you have to others who are willing to reward you for it.

Simple as that appears, there are a few problems that make it difficult for everyone to know how to be rewarded in an optimal way. In a small, insular town, things are simple. Everyone knows whom to call when a pipe bursts; and the plumber can only charge what the people can afford to pay.

With millions of people moving from those small towns to the cities, we are back in an Indian city like Delhi. Walk along any busy street where brisk trade occurs, and usually where bargains are to be had, and you will find hungry bunches of people squatting by the side of the road with the tools of their trade before them - plumbers with their wrenches and pipe bits and painters with brushes and paint mixing cans. It is like a marketplace for casual labour. These people, called naka (street corner) workers, wait for work to come their way. It is most likely an organic evolution of a marketplace, which started with two people engaging in trade, both of whom nobody remembers. There is no entry barrier to trade at this market. OK. Perhaps the mafia regulates the market, but the mafia by its very nature is organic too.

Far from being an unorganized sector, the naka workers and domestic help in India are quite organized. Just that they are organized in organic ways, which are self-regulated. While this is probably a more 'sustainable' way of conducting trade, it does not fit with the inorganic evolution of marketplaces in urban society. Thus you have a home improvement store in a mall that provides plumbing services to people who visit such malls at rates that are not even on the same planet as the rates charged by the naka plumber, for the same amount and quality of work. The quality has to be the same since the store's plumber was sourced from the same milieu as the naka plumber.

The naka worker, squatting in his organic marketplace, charging the same fee to buyers from all strata of society is quite clearly the loser.

So, what is it that differentiates the naka plumber from the store? I think it is the availability of information that would enable trade.

Matchmaking - between the one who wants his wall painted and the one who would like to paint it and be paid for it.

The internet is a great place for matchmaking - of all sorts. However, I get the feeling that internet based matchmaking is restricted to urban and/or inorganic marketplaces. And since there always is a gatekeeper, any marketplace that is purposefully created on the internet will by necessity, be inorganic and hence tend towards inequality.

There are two problems in the above paragraph - One of enabling works in organic marketplaces to better their lives and the second of achieving justness.

Justness, I believe, can come about from transparency of information and I had written about this in an earlier post.

Enabling organically evolved (or evolving) marketplaces to trade with the more rigid forms of business is a challenge.

To give an example, how do you get the naka plumber in touch with a prosperous urban and (normally exploitative) client and help him quote a 'market price' for his services and land the contract?

Information potential difference

2010-11-29T17:48:00.000+05:30

So, wikileaks has leaked tons of potentially embarrassing documents and Nira Radia's lobbying efforts are out in the open.

Like all events, they will have effects, but what do they change fundamentally for the world?

Businesses lobby to get preferential treatment – on policies – policies framed by bureaucrats and executed by politicians – politicians elected by citizens – citizens who work for and use the products made by the businesses.

So, business is the prime mover in our society, and what is the economy but a bunch of businesses?

Business is also, quite simply, the art of optimization. This optimization can happen at both ends – procuring resources for less and selling products for more than they are worth. The better you are at both of these, the bigger your business.

The selling end is relatively easier to understand – in one word, advertising. The procuring end is a little more involved. Recent unmasking has revealed the machinations behind the procuring that have hitherto gone unnoticed and been taken in the common citizen's stride, the fallen crumbs accepted as shiny products worth paying for with one's sweat and blood. This is not nasty per se - exploitation will always appear cruel to those who are not on the right (or wrong, depending on your views) side of the exploitation workbench.

The first deduction, then, is that there is no nexus between businesses, politicians and bureaucrats. There is business and then there is everything else that facilitates the large scale exploitation of resources that the economy requires.

The interesting thing, for me, is not the mechanics of the backroom dealing itself but the mask of propriety behind which people are required to hide. Why the backroom?

I think the answer lies in the nature of exploitation itself.

The exploitation of resources requires capital. Not everybody possesses or has access to capital. The generation, distribution and use of capital is controlled by a few people. Everyone wishes to be among those few. The fact that there is an entry barrier shows that there is an information 'potential difference' between the two sides. Those on the profitable side, the ones who possess valuable information, guard it - to protect their interests and prevent the dilution of the value of their assets.

Now, while these potential differences are critical for doing business, they are also dangerous. Sparks, as we know, can fly if the difference crosses a threshold. Hence it is in the interest of the haves to present an illusion of a smaller potential difference to the have-nots. This strategy was easier to execute when information did not travel too fast and leaks could be plugged before they breached the dividing line. Not so anymore.

The near instant spread of information across the globe reduces the potential difference by making the same information available to everyone at the same moment.

But how does one do business under these circumstances, if the very tools that sustain business are disabled, exposed and made to look vile? How can the economy function?

Recent trends seem to suggest that we are in the midst of an evolutionary process which will fundamentally change the way resources are exploited and as a result, the way business is done.

Rather than a huge potential difference that separates the haves and the have-nots, there will be numerous potential differences between individual citizens that they can choose to utilize for profit.

A move away from a few exploiting the many to a scenario where many exploit many. A more equitable future.

India - A tall-errant society

2010-11-26T16:02:00.003+05:30

The pattern is simple: looting, the indignation accompanying it, biased investigations and criminals being let off, repeated until death.

The solution, according to those in power, is simple too: Show zero tolerance to corruption

The result: is out there for all to see.

I wonder if I am missing something fundamental.

What the hell is Yorkshire pudding?

"Political corruption" is a western, renaissance-ish concept related to social consciousness.

A version of a democratic political system was thrust upon the Indian people by people tutored in universities which grew out of that European renaissance. Indian society itself never experienced a renaissance. Thus, in the interest of adapting to an alien system to survive, we introduced cultural concepts that we were familiar with. We looked up to our elected leader as the king, and his henchmen as ministers who could grant us small favors in return for loyalty and obedience. When loyalty and obedience did not pay, we discovered that bribes worked.

The concept of a king or emperor is political corruption taken to its logical conclusion. A king will get you to till your fields to produce grain and hand over most of it to him, in return for services you did not really ask for or need - and even better, you have no right to question him about the quality of the services he provides. Now, why does that sound exactly like the state of affairs in India today?

They the people, solemnly resolve....

It is hard to imagine a society where only those who happen to find themselves in positions of power lack integrity, notwithstanding the fact that power corrupts etc.

When one visits a temple, a supposed bastion of equality, god being the great leveler, the amount of money one is willing to spend is directly proportional to the 'quality' of the experience. But wait, the 'kings' are the ones who build temples in the first place and one's 'proximity' to god varies depending on how close one is to the king.

The trend having been set, each one of us tries to use whatever influence we possess to achieve whatever goals we might have, lofty or minuscule in the grand scale of things.

We are only the products of whatever came before us. Having sprung forth from a society based on kings, ministers, intrigue and favors granted for loyalty and obedience, it would be naive to expect ourselves to suddenly, without precedent, raise ourselves above personal gain and look to the betterment of all.

For such a change to happen, we would need a revolution of sorts. However, for a revolution to occur, there needs to be a small strata of society against which a large number of oppressed can revolt. Since each one of us indulges in whatever it takes to get by and the society allows us the space to do so, there is no essential difference between the politician who loots tax money and the rickshaw driver who charges an arbitrary sum depending on the weather and the honest citizen who will not hesitate for a moment to ask his cousin, who works at the passport office, to submit an application for speedy processing.

While India has witnessed revolutions, in spiritual thinking, religion and culture, it has never seen a revolution which demanded an improvement in the quality of people's lives, and possibly never will, thanks to our society's DNA. It is a very accommodating and tolerant society, where aberrations are seen not as vile things that need to be eradicated, but as beautiful nuances that make life worth living. This accommodation of diversity, in all forms, is what makes India a great civilization.

How, then?

We need to stop calling what we indulge in, corruption. It is like calling honey, 'bee spit'. It is what it is and we indulge ourselves. This is our take on economics. If you don't want the politician to steal your tax money, there are proven ways of evading tax and getting away with it. We need to stop comparing ourselves to enlightened societies (wherever they might exist, if only in our books). We need to stop acting concerned when transparency international releases a report stating that India is among the most corrupt countries. If the world economy really did care about our corrupt practices, it would stop trading with all 1.2 billion of us and hurt itself in the process. Since every society is designed to protect itself, to the best extent possible, we can count on the essential selfishness of man and in effect each country to try and benefit from our resources; you, me and the land.

Imperial Democracy

2010-10-19T23:57:00.012+05:30

Before the idea of India was concocted, it was not as though civilized society did not exist. There were kings and chieftains and their cronies of various sizes and flavors.

When the Mughals and British took over, there wasn't much of a change. It was a monarchy, plain and simple. Just that now there was an emperor - a super king who ruled over other kings.

As long as the British were calling the shots, 'Indians' had no say in how things were run. In the interest of survival, Indians proceeded to work for the Ruler and learn the ways of the world according to the ruler's guidebooks.

Then, when the British left, we had to figure out a system of governance for ourselves. What that meant in the most practical of senses was that a document had to be written. This was a natural consequence of 300 years of British rule. The British perfected the art of colonization by contract - their true contribution to modern society. You walk into a a stranger's house, make a deal that is favorable to you and get him to sign on the dotted line. when he protests, you unleash your entire machinery of judges and the military on him. So, having got used to doing everything according to a document, Indians proceeded to write that document that would define how India should function.

There were two glitches. Firstly, since India had never existed until 1947, there was no precedent for a system of government, for a giant pudding of city states, other than a monarchy. This meant that the document creators had to create a theoretical model of a system of government that would be a near fit to the problem at hand. This lead to the second glitch; the people who could write were the ones who were trained at the universities of the colonial rulers.

Thus it happened that India became a representative democracy. On paper.

In a country where half (even more just after independence) the people don't know where their next meal will come from, people would be willing to do anything, let alone vote, for the person who comes along and doles out some rice. How on earth could anyone have expected that a model like representative democracy would work in a newly constituted nation like India?

Coming to think of it, the concept of electing an individual who will represent a bunch of people at a group of other representatives is actually quite complex. More so because Indians did not have a chance (thanks to incessant invasions) to learn what election, representative or government meant.

Perhaps the hope was that the country would grow up and mature into a democracy.

How well the theoretical model fits reality is demonstrated by the workings of India's establishment today:

Political parties are exclusive clubs, elected leaders are not accountable to anyone and leadership is inherited

Doesn't this smell exactly like a monarchy? The only apparent difference is the quadrennial charade called an election. But with <50% of the population participating in it and 90% of the participating lot being coerced into voting for one or the other political party, the election is nothing more than an expensive coronation.

Monarchies can be good too; if there is a 'just' leader at the top. But that feeling of justness can be easily eroded if the populace are made to believe that they were the ones who elected the king. By participating in an election and electing a leader, the people are stating that they know what's good for themselves and their country. The leader is subliminally absolved of all responsibility. Once the people have made that commitment, it would be difficult for them to doubt their own choices, and hence they entrench themselves deeper into the political game to try and get closer to the king. This is exactly what is happening in India today.

Politicians and the businesses that prop them up hide behind veils of civility

The rule of law is but a facade created to fool the general populace into complacence so that the looting can continue.

The government expects me to pay taxes. If I fail to do so, it threatens me with violence. If I pay up, I have no way of finding out where the money goes, but I have a faint suspicion that it goes straight into the pocket of the guy driving the inordinately large car, who has not done a single day's honest work to date. How am I to think this is not exactly similar to what the mafia does?

Ah , yes. The mafia does actually protect you when it says it will.

Scams get bigger but our ability to tolerate them seems to grow proportionately

A ruffian in some corner of the country aligns himself with a political party. He gets himself elected by threatening the people into voting for him. The party, consisting of other such ruffians aligns with a bigger party which has more such unsavory specimens. The coalition of parties 'wins' the election and crowns the monarch. our friendly neighborhood ruffian gets to decide what the country's telecommunication strategy should be. Remember that he is a person who has no clue about anything other than taking what does not belong to him. No wonder we are not too surprised by the magnitude of the scams that unfold almost every day. We believe that 'we the people' put him where he is - and have no way of evicting him.

We have started taking inefficiency and slip shod work in our stride

Trains crash into each other more often than they arrive on time, even as a strange and angry woman in a white sari goes around acting like the railways portfolio is her birth-right. Her full time job is politicking. Pure politics unadulterated by work of any sort.

The pavement tiles that were laid (only along the routes which the athletes were ferried over) in haste during the CWG-2010 have not even been cemented in place and await the next monsoon to float away. And the elected leaders claim that the infrastructure created for the games will be Delhi's pride.

After 60 odd years of trying self rule, we are now left with a situation where chieftains and minor kings are roaming free in a capitalist economy and plundering the country from within.

Rather than continuing to imitate a western system (that does not work too well even in the west), we should seriously try and invent a system of government that we can comprehend and implement, keeping the Indian reality in mind.

Perhaps a mix of chieftains and kings is what works in India. We should then just formalize that system and start building this nation for real.

Dig this

2010-10-18T15:24:00.001+05:30

To begin with, we used whatever was already available on the earth's surface - water, plants, animals, rocks.
Then we used those things to build tools to get to the source nature's bounty. We dug.
The problem with pollution starts from this digging. We are digging stuff up from the bowels of the earth and burning it. the smoke from the burning fills the atmosphere and we try to stuff the residue back into the earth. What on (and above and below the) earth are we up-to?

Why dig?
Nature assembles a molecule using the available resources. When nature assembles a molecule, it creates a whole bunch of them until it cannot do so anymore. And then those molecules assemble themselves into bigger molecules and so forth. competing sets of molecules fight for resources and arrive at a 'natural' balance. Thus we are told by evolutionary biologists and is probably the most logical explanation we've got so far.

So, the human set of molecules digs because:
- It can.
- that is what nature intends (aka because that's the way our minds work.).
- The competition is weak

The end result is that the human race has become one of nature's runaway processes.
There is no set of molecules strong enough to contain our expansion except ourselves. Common sense dictates that a lack of competition leads to complacence and weakening until a point where a competitor emerges, thereby restarting the game.

How do we use the bounty?
Between the dug up earth and the polluted atmosphere, we have made the earth's natural produce unusable without "purification" but have 'pure' fizzy drinks and packaged food, both filled with chemicals from the earth's bowels. We have also increased our chances of survival, but all we can do with our extended lives is consume more fizzy drinks and packaged food while sitting inside our climate controlled houses. Having eliminated all competition, we laze around and weaken ourselves. This recipe for weakening the species is actually the human race's heart rending cry for companionship. We have made disease our competitor.

Free lunch?
If you mess with the source, you are obviously altering the produce. I find it hard to believe that digging for oil thousands of feet below the surface of the earth will not necessarily have an effect on things on the surface of the earth. Plundering the earth cannot be a free meal. there is a price to be paid and humanity is only beginning to realize this, in fits and starts. But we are limited by our imaginations and can only think of danger and calamity in terms of what we see and feel.

Digger

Go, stop or escape
Escape is an option, but sadly, glorious visions of the human species plundering planet after planet in the limitless universe remain fantasy fit for celluloid.

What we've got is this one planet. So, our options are to either stop (not slow down) or go full steam ahead. Slowing down is useless unless we extract oil at the same rate at which it is created, which means that we can produce one automobile only every 2,00,000 years or so.

Stopping means leaving all dug up holes as they are and consuming only things that are on the surface. scraping rather than digging. Then we can talk about sustainable scraping, which would be closer to the realm of what is possible than sustainable digging.

The other option, which is the one we are currently practicing, is to have one big party and discuss sustainable development during brief periods when we are hung over from too much consumption.

So, why is it so difficult for us to comprehend the perils of plunder and loot? Is it a limitation of our senses? Perhaps we are at a stage in evolution where a new sense is being developed - one which will alert us to dangers not seen by the existing senses.

The Great Indian Void

2010-10-04T14:33:00.001+05:30

The CWG-2010 opening ceremony was a boring and unnerving mess that attempted to portray the diversity of India and, inadvertently, ended up manifesting the insincerity and chaos that reigns in India today.

If this is what we can come up with in 7 years, we'd better stop; before we do any more damage.

The barrage of drums, of all sizes and shapes being beaten by thousands and one 7 year old. Where's the theme in that? It might have made a bit of sense if the drum beating started with the kid and was lead by him.. a sort of projection of a young and talented India. But just like everything else in India, the massive drums virtually drummed the poor little kid out and we had to be given a visual clue to learn that he too was indeed trying to make some noise.

I'm trying to recollect the next spectacle that unfolded, but am getting this suffocating feeling, of something hovering above me and making me feel like I'm on the sets of a cheap sci-fi movie, the kind made by the likes of Rakesh Roshan, if i might add. The balloon. I must admit, my mind made valiant efforts to rationalize the use of the contraption - the changing colours, the moving projected images, the stuff being raised from beneath it, the thousand reflecting eyes on its ventral side. But it could not. Somehow, a massive balloon that starts to float up and then just sits there, tied down by wires elicits a feeling of being trapped. Perhaps Rahman's screeching rendition of "jiyo utho badho jeeto, let's go" was an entreaty to the balloon... to set itself free and fly the hell away like helium was meant to. All through the ceremony, this monstrous floater continued to be a distraction and added to the chaos that unfolded below it. To make matters worse, the irony seems to have been lost on the organizers when the Dandi march was sand painted for the prince of wales and its image projected on a balloon rented from a British company. What were they trying to say?

The delicate eye movements and the finely nuanced hand gestures of Indian classical dance are meant to be observed closely to be appreciated. The massing together of dancers from different traditions, all of them attempting to stay in tune with the cacophony reduced our finest art forms to pitiful acts of comedy. I get this nauseous feeling that pop culture in India, today, is a nebulous entity that vacillates between abusing traditional forms and reveling in blatant consumerism and the worst comes out when the two are forced to meet.

The railways display has been lauded by the press as, among other things, portraying an India unafraid of its quirks. What is the need to spend money to create an incomplete capsule of the Indian mess, when just outside the stadium, a more complete chaos reigns? What could be a more amusing spectacle that depicts India than the convoy that ferries the 'foreign guests' from A to B? There is a lane dedicated for CWG traffic, which is mostly empty. And as in everything else, we have made it a punishable offence for non-CWG traffic to trespass into this lane. And as in everything else, it is a rule that we can never enforce; thus making the situation worse than it would have been without a rule. We now need a police pilot on a motorcycle, followed by a jeep full of police belting out a siren behind which a bus carrying stunned athletes moves ahead like a silent island in the midst of the heat and dust.

The public display of a complete lack of depth in thinking does not bode well for the wisdom of a 5000 year old civilization. Why yoga and not avurveda? Why some disconnected guru-shishya metaphor and not the isolated rishis in the Himalayas. Why Kundalini and not Ramana Maharishi? Where do the tribals with their peacock dances and dravidians with their karagattam figure in the 5000 years of the "Indian" civilization? This does seem to be a season of sweeping statements - from judges declaring that Rama was born at the spot marked X to self proclaimed keepers of Indian culture declaring that India has always existed and Yoga is its pinnacle.

The intention was probably to say that India is a very old civilization that is waking up to the modern world and has much wisdom to offer to the world. The reality, I suspect, is that the world is interested in our population (aka market). People who force themselves into saying that the CWG-2010 opening ceremony was good, when for all practical purposes it was shoddy, do themselves and the country a disservice - by promoting the mediocre and hence playing into the hands of those who would make them mere consumers, of anything.

The ultimate consequence of yesterday's avoidable display of misplaced pride is that the world will be left a little more confused (which is good in a convoluted way) and thinking Indians left a little more marginalized by the mediocrity of it all.

Update: While my post drew parallels between the opening ceremony and Indian society, P. Sainath's article in the Hindu, draws parallels between the entire CWG-2010 and Indian society.

Aadhaar - A Foundation without Soul

2010-09-28T17:26:00.000+05:30

The Raison d'être of a business is profit. Profit involves getting more out than you put in.
Social projects involve doing something for the betterment of people. This involves putting in more than you get out.
Aadhar is touted as an undertaking for social betterment.
The entities involved in the Aadhaar project are all big businesses.

While cash rich body shops consume your (and my) tax money to setup servers and create software, what does the starving semi farmer in the village get? A number that uniquely identifies him. If only he could eat it. How much more insensitive could the establishment be towards the common man's reality? Perhaps a system of geo-stationary satellites that hover above India and observe the shrunken hungry to get an exact count of the number of tonnes of rice required to be produced during the next monsoon which will be predicted (wrongly) by a set of weather satellites imported from Israel? Imagine the guy in a disconnected village somewhere in Orissa, enslaved for generations by zamindars, when he is handed a plastic card. I'm sure he's going to try and bite it first.

The UID is meant to be a super layer above every other ID there is in India. One existing layer, like ration card system, is wrought with corruption, waste and mismanagement. Another, the PAN is nothing but an institutionalized protection racket. How will the cheating manager of the ration shop be motivated to stop cheating when he is handed a unique ID? How will the UID stop politicians from siphoning public money into their own private accounts?

Companies Infosys and Mindtree maintain clean and secure campuses. The roads just outside their campuses are a world away. Whatever happened to fixing one's own backyard before trying to fix the country? What silly notion of responsibility prompts corporate honchos to pretend to understand what needs to be done to fix India's problems, when none of them have experienced a minute of hardship in their lives? I forget, they are not playing this game to address fundamental issues, they are here to gain as much as possible for their businesses. If the Indian state collapses tomorrow, they will be the first to pack up and run to the next available brain farm.

In India everything is an illusion. Perfection is no exception. I think the approximate-ness of things is what makes India what it is, with countless possibilities. This is a double edged sword. The ones that are rewarded will be the ones that persist. The current culture is one of rewarding the rotten possibilities.

The UID is yet another rotten possibility that sounds like a great idea when in reality it is nothing more than an IT project designed to bleed the customer. In this case the customer is the Indian government and by induction, you and I. The people behind the project will move on to other projects, there will be fat support contracts with soap makers like Wipro to maintain the unwieldy and useless systems. And you and I will need to fork out more money to fund this extravagance.

Identifying the good possibilities and backing them requires the right combination of clear thinking and a sense of moral uprightness, something which seems to be in scarce supply among the ruling elite in India today.

Why is it not possible that businesses are indeed attempting to help the society around them evolve? Doesn't it benefit the businesses by making a larger workforce and consumer base available?

Logical, but I think the UID is an example of the types of things Indians are indulging in, not as a reflection of self worth but of self loathing. We want to eliminate poverty because we hate that India has poor people; that there are people dragging down the rising sun of India's 'progress'. There is constant talk and counter-talk about the degree to which India is a world power. If India were indeed shining, there would be no need for us to go around screaming that it is. That alone should be proof enough that there are countless variables that need to be identified, understood and correlated before the average Indian can lead even a marginally better life. We wish that our country were at a point where assigning every citizen a unique number will automatically lead to a better quality of life. In truth, such a thing can happen only if the foundation is strong. The UID is not and cannot be that foundation, in-spite of it being called Aadhaar. We would like to leap forward from a society based on eastern contentment directly to a fully established western democracy in one sweep.

While Indians have created large businesses with Indian workers and a western ethic (which, incidentally, is maintained only within the office premises), What people perhaps fail to understand is that a country is not a company like Infosys and cannot be governed by the same methods. Projects like the UID will remain mere window dressing until we look within to find the real problems to solve.

Update: I stand partially vindicated by this article in the Hindu dated 29Sep2010:

Delhi - City of Intrigue

2010-09-23T15:55:00.000+05:30

I think the cycle rickshaws in Delhi say a lot about the city and its culture. It is an expensive (costing about INR 15k) vehicle with no shock absorbers, is difficult to get on and off, offers no protection from the elements, leased and driven recklessly by starving migrants who have no traffic sense, on badly made roads, locking horns dangerously with buses at crowded intersections and operated by cartels. The hardened citizens of Delhi consume
aloo chat and hold lively conversations while perched high on these contraptions, even as they race down the main roads and dangerously overtake slow moving trucks and buses.

And these rickshaws are not some legacy from a time of bad design. They are being manufactured even as you read this. Based on the same brain dead design.

I've tried hard to understand the basic traits that go into making Delhi what it is. And Delhi is important for India because pretty much every decision that affects the country is made here.

One universal fact that every thinking resident of Delhi will acknowledge is the one-upmanship that underpins everything that happens in this city. Even in the most minor of human interactions. You need to buy a ticket at a metro station and join the queue behind the one guy who's already there. While you wait, some person will appear from the side, seemingly ignoring you completely with the intention of creating his own personalized queue. You make polite attempts to make your presence felt. When that fails, as it undoubtedly will, you make more physical attempts, by waving your arms in front of his face so he sees you. When that too does not yield the desired results, you tap him on his shoulder and raise your eyebrows. He will continue to persist in his bubble. He will raise his eyebrows back at you in accusation. You point your thumb behind you and raise your voice. Guess what? He'll smile back at you and meekly form teh queue behind you. Yes. He will not fight back, but try to act friendly, now that you displayed anger in some fashion. This just blows my mind. The apparent bravado and non-cooperation in the face of logic melting into submissiveness and insecurity in the face of legitimate resistance.

The funny thing is that this is not restricted to random people in crowds. I have found most interactions with Delhi-ites streaked with this trait. Even funnier is the fact that migrants to this city, who are self aware, are conscious of this and are yet forced to play by these rules if they are to get anything done in the city.

Court intrigue

I'd even say that this is Delhi's dominant cultural trait. The fact that recent migrants to this city quickly adapt to the environment (or leave) and contribute to the strengthening of the trait makes me think about tipping points and runaway trains. But more interestingly, it makes me wonder about where it might all be coming from. Delhi has been the seat of power for 100s if not 1000s of years. Could all this posturing and capitulation be a vestige of age old intrigues in courts and palaces?

Retention of power requires innumerable machinations and Delhi has witnessed countless such dealings between all manner of rulers and mercenaries. India's two greatest epics are centered around court intrigue. Closer to reality, look at the 'easy' example of Aurangzeb. He imprisoned his father so he himself could be emperor. The result is simple enough but the execution of the plan must have been filled with intrigue - with lies and subterfuge and counter conspiracies. Shah Jahan must have put up a fight but lost eventually. The thread that runs through this is one of posturing, threat, negotiation and capitulation for one and victory for the other.

The British did pretty much the same thing. They postured, threatened, negotiated and capitulated. Yes, this is universal to any fight for survival, but few places in the world repeatedly witness such events over prolonged periods of time. Repeated enough to become a habit. I suspect that such court intrigues came to define the people who ran and were governed by the court. When the city develops a habit it permeates everything that it does.

To build a house you need a certain set of things to happen; a certain set of people to come together and co-operate. When each of these people plays out a version of the court intrigue of domination and capitulation, the work to be done becomes incidental. The owner tries to cheat the builder who tries to cheat the contractor who tries to cheat the labourer who cheats him back. The end result is something that resembles a house but is not really one. The common thought that binds all of them together though, is bravado - the feeling that they can screw the other guy and get away with it. For capitulation and correction to occur someone needs to actually be right. If everyone is screwing everyone else, nobody retains the moral right to accuse the other. And bravado rules.

Spitting paan on a board that prohibits it or on every stairwell corner in sight is bravado. Throwing garbage on metro rail tracks even as there is an announcement of it being a punishable offence is bravado. Supplying adulterated medicines is bravado.

Just as individuals are unable to build proper houses for themselves, the same trait percolates into anything they do. Be it business or charity or even religion. Contracts are not even worth the paper they are scribbled on and the right connections can make you look like a saint in the eyes of the court. Charity is a mask for cleaning dirty money. Temples in Delhi are the dirtiest of places, with homeless kids defecating next to it while their families wait for fat cats to distribute oil soaked food in the name of charity, even as the middle class ignores the absolute squalor and loses itself in prayer.

Given the way people take care of their own affairs in Delhi, it is no shocker that public infrastructure is dismal. The people who involve themselves in creating public infrastructure in Delhi are in fact, idealists. They would like to maintain the purity of intrigue and aim for the ideal situation where they can raise invoices and be paid without doing an iota of work. Now, that would be something to boast about. 60000 crore rupees being spent on the Commonwealth Games-2010 with very little to show for it at the end is bravado.

Defining India's dominant traits

Every major decision that affects India originates in Delhi. Every person who visits Delhi to take part in some 'nation building' exercise will be infused with the Delhi trait, for without it, he will not be the one who is left standing. He carries it back to his part of the country and creates an island of intrigue which also happens to be prosperous. Prosperity attracts suitors and the island grows. Accountability does not work in anybody's favor since doing things for the public good can never be as profitable as personal gain.

Without the moral fibre to balance greedy consumption, Delhi has lead India into societal diarrhea.

Paradise to Parados

2010-09-15T19:27:00.001+05:30

This post is inspired by a letter written to the editor of The Hindu the other day by my brother, Ramkumar Oruganti, who was in Srinagar, Kashmir when discontent boiled over and the violence started. Nothing seems to have changed in the last 20 years.

People who can elbow their way into our minds via the main stream media would have us believe that a political solution is what is needed in Kashmir. Both the words, political and solution are dicey. Firstly, to a logical mind, suggesting a solution would imply that the problem has been identified; for without a problem how could you propose a solution? If we do assume we know what the problem is, the solution that is being proposed by politicians is bound to be a political one; for even when politicians suggest a military solution it is in reality, a political one.

So, what IS the problem in Kashmir? Do any of us know? The commonly verbalized idea is that Pakistan and Co. wants to keep India busy; so they put money in some people's hands to help them wage a war of attrition against India. The Indian government in response sends in the army to bring back a sense of peace. The army does what it is trained to do. The cycle of violence continues with intermittent periods of peace and public memory is short.

Let's look at the commonality between the areas where the Indian army has been called in to quell 'unrest'. Punjab, J&K, the north east states, and increasingly, places like Chhattisgarh and Orissa. Not in Tamilnadu or Maharashtra. While it would be easy, and incorrect to think that bad governance is the common thread, I think there's something even more fundamental that ties such places together. Innocence.

Most people in these parts are simple, like some of us in other parts of the country still are. They trust and expect to be trusted. Integrity is more valuable to them than material wealth. They take joy in the simplest of things. They live close to the earth and live off its bounty without greed. They see western and urban distractions without fear and absorb cultural traits like children do. Little do they know that the ones peddling the traits are fully aware of what they are doing; like the Christian missionaries - who went around dressing naked tribals and burdening them with western notions of sin and heaven. Today’s politicians and businesses are no different. Now, this is a double edged sword. Exploitation is hard work. The problem for the cultural peddler is that the simple person, on account of his simplicity perceives things very clearly. At the first sign of broken trust, at the first glimpse into the dark underbelly of the transaction, the simple man is angered without restraint. His anger will not be tempered by modern education or social niceties. When the majority wake up to the reality that their way of life is under threat, they resist, with whatever means available at their disposal and accept offers of support without reservations.

Innocent anger is sad to witness and even sadder when beaten down with stronger weapons. But slowly and surely, innocence is broken and callous maturity takes its place. Some mature faster than others and being the only ones with whom the rest of the word can communicate, they are rewarded for colluding. They end up betraying the very roots from which they came forth.

The pseudo military solution

The Indian government's strategy of using guns to shut people up has clearly not worked. In Kashmir, the kids who threw stones when they were 10 are 30 now and throwing bigger stones. The army jawans who shot at the kids 20 years ago have gone home to pensions and security guard jobs. the politicians who were looting the state coffers 20 years ago have handed the state over to their progeny. The money has stayed with the few and the stones with the many.

The Indian army and its various avatars are deployed in large numbers in J&K and the north-east and other “troubled” regions. There are even special units that have been formed to fight "insurgency", not just in J&K but in other parts of the country too. I would think that it takes a hell of a lot of time to put a force like the Rashtriya Rifles together and recruit and train youth to kill other youth. Not just time but dedication, perseverance, diligence and truck loads of money. Had even half that amount been spent on building schools and colleges and encouraging local businesses in places like Kashmir and Manipur, the people would perhaps not be interested in being recruited by wastrels from Pakistan or China. Wait. Did I just say encourage local business and education? I'm sorry; I forgot that those are things that politicians in open collusion with businesses regulate in order to maintain an impoverished population in huts to visit like messiahs and fake a healing experience. The Indian politician, in his current shape and form, will have no reason to exist if he takes on the real problems and solves them. The fear of losing control prevents them from doing anything worthwhile, even if they were remotely capable of doing so. If the government expects you to pay taxes on time, promises protection in return and dubiously delivers the army to your doorstep when you demand justice, I fail to see how the mafia could be worse. Perhaps the only difference is that the government has a stronger army.

Stand up

Ever wondered why there isn't a single person who is able to stand in the middle of Lal chowk and bare himself to criticism and stones, if she must? Why is it not possible for Omar Abdullah, as the elected leader of the state of J&K to stand without guards in the middle of the street and face the kids throwing stones? As the representative of the people, what better work could he possibly have? Couldn't be governance; for sure. Flying to Delhi and acting angry at his bosses are time wasting, debilitating tactics that don't fool anyone. The answer, I think, is quite simple. There are no leaders. There are power hungry crooks, rich kids thrown into politics because they couldn't do anything else, corrupt priests, land and mind grabbing corporate honchos, but no leaders. This guy Omar and his bosses like so many of their predecessors are at a beautiful juncture in space and time; one where they can alter the course of history for the better. They could forge their names in history as the guys who really had the guts to look at Kashmir and do something about it. The Abdullah family, if it really does care about making the common Kashmiri prosperous, would give up its wealth and launch an unbiased cleanup the likes of which India has not seen. But they would rather discuss the nuances of a sub clause in an act relating to a technique of conflict resolution that has not worked for the last 20 years and probably will not if continued for another 20.

It would be silly to think that there are no potential leaders out there with the vision and charisma to stand tall. The tricky part, though, is that mediocrity and cowardice are so rampant that anyone with the guts to stand up and be a leader is sought out and crushed by powerful lobbies for which financial profit is the only kind there is. They then proceed to fill the leadership vacuum with inert people like Manmohan Singh and Pratibha Patil. The rewards for these machinations behind the throne are so great that nobody is interested in sitting on the throne anymore!

Get out of India to be treated with decency

The Indian government used the army to squash the Sikh “problem” in the 1980s. Or did it? I think the reality is that the Sikh community, due to its culture of enterprise and sharing had matured and chanced upon a simpler path to a better life - by becoming refugees the world over and sending money back home to Punjab. There was more money in corner shops in Canada and Germany than there was in the Khalistan movement!

And once you have gained financially, or otherwise, elsewhere, India will welcome you back and offer dual citizenship and incentives for you to deposit your wealth back in India. So, while the fat cat NRIs are feted and garlanded, some poor sod in Chhattisgarh is being hunted down with guns, because he doesn't want the ground beneath his feet to be dug up and himself thrown out like a rat during spring cleaning.

I think, as a people, Indians - at least the ones who still live in India, need to come together in ways that are radically different and collaborate to find ways to move forward. The politicians and their justification of the democratic process are trite. You and I know what a sham the Indian elections are. It’s time we stopped kidding ourselves and if we need to change or junk the constitution, so be it. It’s time to change the flavour of India.

What are we scared of? Things getting worse than they already are?

Percentages

2010-08-11T20:48:00.000+05:30

As the 99% moon stood over Vijayawada, the Rayalguda passenger train noiselessly slid into platform #2. There were no lights on. A few nervous souls hurried into the first compartment even before the train came to a complete stop. They got off just as hurriedly and rushed toward the back of the train. Seeing them, the entire crowd of people on the platform, 99% of whom were tonsured, rose as one and scattered towards the front and back of the train, where one usually finds the unreserved compartments. There was still no noise in spite of the speed and energy with which the crowd tried to find the best seating and sleeping places. They ran, one or two members of each group running faster than the rest of the group, but maintained body to body contact to a minimum. They didn't seem happy or sad. Very neutral, like coconut palms. Most of them would reach their homes late into the night after 2 or 3 a.m.

A eunuch got onto my train. She wore a purple sari. She stopped when she saw me and stretched out her palm. I fished out 2 rupees and placed it there. She took a 5 rupee note from her stash of 5s, 10s and 50s and offered me that and the 2 rupees I had given. Apparently she felt insulted. I wondered why she was exempt from joining the industrial revolution. Perhaps because she wasn't classifiable 100%.
The moon continued to shine down brilliantly as my train left the station.

Vijayawada

Tvlesion

2010-08-08T22:12:00.000+05:30

The Television looked dusty and weather worn, like It had lived in a mud house among aluminum utensils, firewood stoves, cloth cradles and desperation; providing the only window into a world that appeared to offer a vision that something better existed elsewhere for someone and perhaps one day for the inhabitants of the mud house too. If those visions were real, there might have been hope.
By the TV stood various household equipment that humans collect by any means. Flat brown mattresses rolled up like beedis, parts of chairs tied up with string and rope, anonymous jute bags and Chinese fertilizer sacks made of viscose hiding unabandonable items whose worth could only be understood by the one who labored hard to procure them through debt or savings to fill a seemingly urgent need sometime in the past, but were pure baggage which had to be lugged around now. Can't get rid of them, no use in keeping them; dead weight covered in dust.
A woman sat on the railway platform guarding this sordid debris of the industrial revolution. She wore clean clothes and looked proud; whether of herself or her belongings or her having been able at some point to procure these things it wasn't clear. Not nearly as clear as her eyes.
As the train slowly eased its way out of Ongole's only railway station the heat hit like a sickle, sharp and shining.
As I continued to stand at the door to the compartment, fields of what might once have been fertile land passed by in various stages of drying up under the heat of the unrelenting Andhra sun. The sky was a mixture of blue and grey; a sickly industrial sort of globalised air. But for that TV there might have been just a little bit more of blue and the proud woman might have done something a little more fulfilling than watching unreal images of unattainable glamour and avarice.
A group of young and well fed youth stood behind me chatting in a foreign tongue. They looked proud too. They perhaps did not wait until their TVs gathered dust or their mattresses became flat; they bought a new one every 6 months. One of them finished a Coca-Cola® and threw the empty plastic bottle into the wash basin with what seemed like contempt.
The proud woman lugs her television around to guide her in raising her child so that he may one day buy numerous television sets and throw empty coke bottles into public wash basins with contempt.
What an enlightened age we live in, when the petty goals of the decadent are forced down the throats of the poor and sincere.
They have nowhere to run. Even when they run, they carry their Televisions with them.

09-June-2009 - Bangalore to Guwahati (Ongole)

How urgent is it, anyway?

2010-08-07T22:00:00.000+05:30

"He tiptoes in. He's wearing shoes, and yet he tiptoes in; fearing the unknown, like all of us."

There is no record of anyone having entered a toilet on an Indian railways train by just opening the door and stepping in. There is an un-tutored and subliminal dance that unfolds before the entry can be effected.

He stood as far as possible from the toilet door in question, but without getting too close to the door opposite; using the tip of his most infrequently used digit he nudged the door slightly without looking anywhere in particular and expecting the worst. There were visions; unsettling visions of anarchy and bowels gone wild. And hopelessness; for he had been delaying the inevitable until this last moment in the faithless hope that it was all a dream or really nasty nightmare at worst. But he had to go and here he was.

The inevitable had brought him running to the door with less than a minute to spare for reconnaissance, ground clearance and the rest that usually follows.
With the gentle suggestion to the door, to open, he impulsively drew back an inch, bracing, and without an ounce of irritation or disgust. His eyes wandered around the small room, trying not to spot anything untoward. His attempt was not to survey the place and pass judgment, but to identify redeeming factors, like the fact that the window glass exists and is clouded or that there is an exhaust fan, spinning or not. Having spotted the merits and ascertained the unsuitability of the room for the rather urgent purpose, he rushes with vigor and a pained expression; actual physical pain coupled with the mental agony of knowing that he does not possess soap, to the next candidate loo.

Nobody or nothing is perfect. It's all about relative merit. And time is running out. Having eventually settled on the most suitable location that he dares to even enter, he starts stepping in. not in one sweeping motion, but one toe at a time. Yes, he's wearing thick soled shoes, but he tiptoes in. At this point, freely flowing liquid signifies cleanliness. He tries to avoid the obviously solid particles, stepping only in the friendly wet zones, skipping now and then to avoid moving solid waste that is swirled around with the movement of the train. The goal is the raised pedestal. Once he gets up there, he knows, he's safe. By the time he gets both feet firmly pressed on the foot seats, he's almost in tears; and he's still standing, fully clothed.

He slowly prepares for the launch. It's actually quite fast but to him it feels as though time has stopped. His bowels by now have raised their hands in despair , releasing all manner of waste in torrents. Lucky him. Mere mortals would first need to position themselves comfortably before their bowels will consent to anything; in which case one needs something to hold on to, as the train hurtles down the tracks, cutting across lush green fields soaked in fresh clean rain water, peppered with milk white migratory birds that wait patiently by rivulets for that errant leaping fish; they sometimes wait for half a day before moving on to another location. Yes, there are designated handles. The trick though is to squat while holding your clothes above the water level and catch that designated handle with the tips of at most 2 fingers; you wouldn’t want to risk more. All this as the train swings in all directions and the bowels have consented and the business of the day has begun. How did he do it then, if it's all so difficult and troublesome. It's a bit like judo. He used the train rather than oppose it. He goes with the swing, a melodious union of sorts; not some monotonous latin pop hit, but more a nuanced and uptempo jazz jam.

The foreign scents and sights have been overpowered now. All the cares are forgotten; it's almost unreal. I mean, there still is a world out there, but It's beginning to feel like home now. Bliss. At a level one can never hope to achieve in the cleanest toilet under the most pleasant of bowel circumstances.

When he realizes that he's sucked the bliss dry and the flow has stopped, he's brought back to earth and the train with the toilet with it's occupant in it. It's getting dry and he needs to get on with his life. He has to face facts, gather his resolve and… turn around. The tap faces the other way and points vertically down. A somewhat inconvenient location. While the self closing tap and he are in the same room, the relative position and distance between them renders it impossible for him to use the tap in any useful way. He could, for example open the tap and watch the water flow down and ponder the melting glaciers in Greenland. Or he could navigate himself to the tap and just sit there for he would be too close to operate it. Agility, speed and dexterity again come to his rescue. He swings his right hand behind him and uses the strong triceps to keep the tap open. Meanwhile his left hand approaches the falling water from beneath, and when a left-handful of water has collected, he swiftly transports it to the work site. He repeats this process as required until the job is done or the triceps freeze or the water runs out.

Getting up now is easy. He feels lighter and younger.

Having no soap at hand, he stands his palms below the self closing tap, alternating hands every few seconds and when the obvious odors have been washed away he opens the latch and steps out triumphantly. No tiptoeing now.

Wait. There's a guy selling paper soap strips passing by. There couldn’t be a happier ending.

Just after writing this I went and did what had to be done… it wasn’t as bad. And the soap guy passed by before I went into the loo.

09-June-2009 - Bangalore to Guwahati (somewhere before ongole)

Education, did you say?

2010-08-06T11:40:00.001+05:30

Macaulay apparently said many things; one among those was

"..We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population."

More interesting than the fact that this strategy has been reasonably successful, is the fact that he managed to identify such a problem and a solution thereof.

When was the last time you looked at a bunch of people and pondered ways of educating them because you thought they were savages in relation to whatever little you know; To uplift the down-trodden. To lead from the darkness into the light. Darkness is relative. Darkness is what you do not understand. if you want to lead people from what you do not understand into the comfort of what you do, so that you can then start weaving and selling them clothes made of a moral fiber that you are comfortable with, you are displaying your fear and ignorance cloaked in a thin but shiny coat of your arrogance.

The fact that an education campaign works does not vindicate it. charity is performed by people who wish to reassure themselves that they are right.

A Capital mess

2010-05-05T16:35:00.001+05:30

You see the powered window slide down; darkened with a promise of shelter from the searing heat that prevents you from opening your eyes fully.
You see a plastic mug drop out of the window, splattering the froth from a just consumed cup of cold coffee.
You get a glimpse of the girl who made the careless drop. She's laughing.
You see the window slide up again.
You see the car speed away, leaving behind yet another vestige of mindless consumption.

As you walk along a pavement, you try to ignore the puddles of spit and other bodily fluids that assault your senses.
You are able to ignore the fluids only because there are other things to assault your senses to greater degrees.
And then you find yourself being pushed violently from behind.
You might think there was a dire emergency and people were trying to make a getaway.
But no; it is just a fat kid who wants to force his way down the path of mindless consumption
And he will not brook your easy paced walking.

You dart through the traffic to make it to the other side because the traffic lights no not work.
As you press your survival instincts a gush of dust sweeps onto your face and fills your open mouth.
You spit your way through the traffic and survive.
Having made it to the semi clean environment of the metro station, you breathe.
But the train has to stop and you have to get out. Back into the dust and spit.

Platform #16 has been dug up. Fine dust is suspended in the air. a weather worn blue train slides onto the platform. dust re-distribution in full play.
New Delhi railway station has a single counter to sell platform tickets and about 10 ticket inspectors to check if people have valid platform tickets.
The queue is not serpentine. It more river-like; with a large delta near the counter. Morons like me are to be found in a bend in the river,
standing the risk of being cut off in an ox bow lake.

The theory goes that terrorists do not attack as often because their supply lines are cut off by "intelligence".
If this theory holds, it must mean that India is brimming with intellect.
An alternate and more plausible theory is that terror requires the presence of order, and order is scarce in India.

I elect a representative, I pay tax so he gets a salary.
He gets a nicely laid out road and a car to drive on it. I get what?

Art. Not Entertainment.

2009-12-22T12:09:00.001+05:30

The fundamental problem is not information.

The need for information is visceral. Survival depends on it.

Food is absolutely essential to sustain life.
Mc Donalds is classified as food.
Mc Donalds is not absolutely essential to sustain life

It is the human need to store, find, look at, re-use and transfer it, that poses a problem.

Information is absolutely essential for finding food
Mindless blog posts are classified as information
Mindless blog posts are not absolutely essential for finding food

Yes, you could search for recipes, restaurants that serve food, stores that sell food etc. on the internet and that is precisely the point.

This is not to say that Mc Donalds or google is bad. it is, like the tail, just a part of the evolutionary process. To state the obvious, not all evolutionary strategies are meant to be beneficial to the host. Mc Donalds might just be a step in the evolutionary progress of cattle; where, by becoming progressively tastier and irresistible to humans, they ensure the survival of their own species. Nature as the frenetic firefly knows, does not care for how long you live; only that you live.

Mc Donalds is for want of a better word, "meta" food. it refers to food and yet it it is something other than food.
It is a concept. Just as blogging is a concept

These concepts, are essentially, agglomerations of existing ideas;
fries=potatoes+oil+salt+fuel+steel+
blog=pc+cheap bandwidth+html+

html and potatoes are again meta entities going down to the rawest material available on earth.

Perhaps it is the evolutionary direction; earth+water+sunlight+air need to come together just right to create a coconut; without that coconut, there would be no monkey and hence no human.

For debatable reasons, the more "meta" an entity is, the more attractive to our senses it seems; Raw potatoes are not as attractive as golden brown fries drenched in salt and fat and raw tcp/ip packets are not as attractive as rounded corner web 2.0 icons on the www.

When it comes to meta entities created by humans, the entities that are successful in propagating themselves are those that, interestingly enough, align with one or more of the following concepts:

- Pride
- Greed
- Lust
- Comfort

Strangely though, these are the same "principles" that are advised against by all religions and "decent people" in some form or another.

Why?

To answer this seemingly simple question, let us step back in time, to those two or three hunters sitting around a fire, making basic sounds and sharing data with each other; most likely on where the food is available.

To start with, presumably, there was a small amount of information that could be handled by a single human brain.

Then came communities. the information from >1 human had to be consolidated and organized for storage and retrieval; which lead to the development and subsequent explosion of story-telling, song-writing, painting and other art forms. What could not be organized went under religion. god was the information management system of the future.

And art, is divine.

Things were manageable for a while, even when, at the later stages, it got to the "suitable boys" and totally dreary documentary films.

With the explosion of libraries there was too much more information than one human could assimilate, make sense of and derive anything of use from, let alone find food.

Then came Leibniz with his “’Let us calculate, Sir’, and thus by taking to pen and ink, we should soon settle the question.”

When libraries got too crowded or specialized and the silicon chip made itself available; i.e when we could, we took all the information created by all humans and started feeding it to an automaton that was really good at crunching numbers greater than the number of grains of sand on earth. What else could the hapless machine do but crunch the information and churn out countless combinations of the bits of information fed to it. And we connected countless such automatons to each other with a human attached to each.

We had managed to exponentially increase the amount of data; without being sure if there was any useful information within.

Things had gone way beyond what even a community of human brains could assimilate. god had been broken into a zillion pieces and we couldn't put him back together.

"modern" art had become like mental arithmetic. Pointless.

We could have quietly shut down the monster and gone back to the more manageable life, but that's not how human civilization works now does it. we go forward.

To make sense of the madness, we again had to organize the information. How else could we do it but around concepts we already know; that of communities and stories.

And storytelling is art

Art is an exercise in abstracting static snapshots of dynamic entities.
Art abstracts concepts and arranges them into stories
Art is not art if it does not tell a story
Art is not the technique that creates it
Entertainment uses the techniques of art to convey banal messages
Art is never entertaining
Art makes you sit up and take notice
Art is ageless

Art, far from being entertainment, is critical for human survival.

Art is heavy and painful, entertainment is light
Art is to entertainment what pain is to pleasure

"Do art; not entertainment" is probably what the religions and decent people have been telling you all along, as you speed along on the road to confusion and the creation of useless data.

Atheist, did you say?

2009-12-14T17:27:00.000+05:30

An atheist is one who looked for god and did not find him; neither in his closet nor in the mall.

If he did start out looking for god, either he wanted a god to exist or he's a zoologist looking for a new species.

If he wanted god to exist and having failed to find him, starts saying that he does not exist, he assumes the responsibility for having looked everywhere in the universe and found no evidence.

Putting the onus on someone who believes that god exists to prove the existence of god is a schoolboy or at best a pampered diva argument; "I say it therefore it is. You prove it otherwise if you want"

Now to the real question. Would an atheist like to be proven wrong?

If you would, then you aren't an atheist
If you wouldn't, then you are as attached to the idea that god does not exist as a theist is to the idea that god exists. What's the difference?
If you're indifferent, then you're just a cocktail party atheist; a mere piece of plastic from a Lay's® potato chips packet that floats with the squalid current.

Dearth of Leaders - part 1

2007-10-01T09:39:00.000+05:30

IHT recently interviewed LKY. Excerpts from that interview can be found here.

I think the beauty of what an illusionist does is that ...well, you know it's impossible.

Some minor cynical observations follow...[* BTW == Behind the words]

LKY: First, to understand Singapore, you've got to start off with an improbable story. It should not exist

BTW: The classic illusionist opening act...look... no rabbit in the hat

LKY: To begin with we don't have the ingredients of a nation, the elementary factors, a homogeneous population, common language, common culture and common destiny.

BTW: Who does? Not even Burundi.

LKY: Thereafter, we knew that if we embarked on any of these romantic ideas, to revive a mythical past of greatness and culture, we'd be damned.

BTW: Instead we embarked on a mythical future of becoming Caucasian

LKY: ...populating at fast speed (laughs)

BTW: Laughing at the dirty physics? or is he slyly encouraging Singaporeans to procreate faster than the neighbors?

LKY: ...We'll go back to the fishing village we once were.

BTW: Which would be just fine if the entire world turned to fishing?

LKY: I'm giving you the answer of a pragmatist.

BTW: The classic illusionist act 2.... I'm doing it right before your eyes

LKY: I do not see any tribal leader, any democratic leader, any dictator telling his people, "We are going to forgo growth. We are going to consume less. Travel less. Live a more spartan life and we'll save the earth."

BTW: Might not the principal reason for that be that societies based on consumption, like Singapore, do not encourage such leaders?

LKY: For the top 20 percent of the population,
there are no constraints there.

BTW: Um... makes one wonder about the other 80%... whom he does not talk about. I know...they are the ghosts in blue uniforms who clean the streets on Monday morning. lets stuff them with Durian and Kuay teo; then there wont be
any place left for thoughts. Heartlanders. what an endearing term.

LKY: Well, I cannot say that we will not lose it. If we lose it, then we're done in. We go back to where we started, right?

BTW: Is he asking the interviewer from IHT? Nah...he's asking his real audience. The Singaporean people. He might as
well say, "If you buggers start spitting on the streets, I can guarantee that you wont get that shiny new iphone and similar such stuff that I've made you hanker for"

LKY: Let the historians and the Ph.D. students work out their doctrines. I'm not interested in theories per se.

BTW: I wonder why they are encouraging Singaporeans to work out doctrines and get their Ph.Ds. Oh wait... that's a "Doctor of Phalsehood"

LKY: But I see a need to mitigate wherever we can through green technologies. Less CO2 and try to prolong the period of adjustment.

BTW: The word 'adjustment' coming from the clinically precise LKY spells doom for Singaporeans

LKY: ...You can be the greatest leader in the world...

BTW: Ahem...

LKY: It's meritocratic. And it works.

BTW: All merit is relative to my own. And that's really why it works...

LKY: So please do it and do it well. We are ideology-free. What would make the place work, let's do it.

BTW: The closing message from the messiah.. for consumption by all Singaporeans who value their paychecks and don't want to get caned.

Privasee - unbaked

2007-08-24T16:26:00.000+05:30

What is the real problem with the invasion of privacy?

The simplest definition of privacy is: 'The right to be left alone’ [1]
A slightly more useful definition: "..The right to determine the extent to which your thoughts and ideas would be communicated to others." [2]

Where does it come from:
The protection from actual bodily injury was extended to the protection from attempts to do such injury – from the fear of such injury. Thus the action of battery grew from that of assault. Soon qualified protection was available against noises and odors, against dust and smoke, and excessive vibration.[2]

So, the problems with the invasion of privacy:

You are not left alone: someone is always bothering you because they know how and where to find you
People seem to know intimate details about you: they know what will turn you on; they can at least guess
Someone's always watching you: different from #1.
People steal your identity and fool the world into thinking they are you
People say nasty things about you in public based on private stuff they learned about you somehow.

Before we go ahead and deny these petty human rights and wrongs as nothing other than superficial diversions meant for brain dead cocktail parties...

In a place like India (which is a more realistic representation of human values [3]), there is so much noise, smell, dust, vibration and other juicy assaults on one's senses; they are sometimes loud enough to enter your very soul, it would be extremely difficult to determine if your privacy is being invaded or you are just being treated very nicely.

Now, for the benefit of the sanitized global community,

The denial:

White and Yellow pages have been around for some time now ... people could find you by name, get your address and phone number and call you when they wished.. or even pop you a visit in the middle of the night when you are just getting into your wolf suit.
You could choose to not pick up the phone.. or not open the door.
Today, you can choose to not open those emails about enlargement or boyfriends.
There goes crib #1

On the one hand we have people who like to do a 24/7 live webcast of their boring lives ... and on the
other we have people who bicker about how they want to be left alone... they call it the schizophrenic age... what the hell use is it to call it anything...call it the great bear for all i care.
far from it being logical to have a law that allows people to be left alone, can we humans be left alone to start with?
So much for crib #2

You are being watched on the net, they will tell you. Somebody knows every single place you went to, every little picture you looked at..
In the offline world, it's pretty much the same... just that the record of where you went and what you did is distributed across various people's memories... if they all happened to know each other and they happened to discuss you, your entire path of sleaze would be lit up like a jellyfish.
You are better off not raising crib #3

"Defamation must have a tendency to injure the claimant in his interactions with others – and must subject him to the hatred, ridicule or contempt of his fellow men – conditions which an invasion of privacy does not satisfy." [2]
Privacy has almost nothing to do with defamation.
Crib #4 does not follow from facts. Ignored.

Privacy or the invasion of it really becomes important only if A says something about B and B doesn't like what has been said, although it might be the truth.
If A had said something really nice about B, that should still amount to an invasion of privacy, but in most cases B just loves it, although it might not be the truth
It would be interesting to see Gandhi file a case against someone who called him a mahatma...
as comments about one's atma are pretty personal
Crib #5 is just too shallow

As you walk into a casino, you hope to win, but expect to lose

Outside the casino your life couldn't be too different...
you hope to get away doing weird shit, but you better expect that the karma will catch up with you... in one way or another... starting ... now

[1] Olmstead v. U.S., (1928) 277 US 438; Public Utilities Comm v. Pollack, (1952) 343 US 451.
[2] Brandeis et. al., “The Right to Privacy”, 4 Harvard Law Review 193 (1890).
[3] See next post. :)

Breath Control

2007-08-20T14:56:00.000+05:30

Everyone would like to choose exactly the level of civilization that they are comfortable with.
Little do they realize that along with that ever so useful light bulb comes a whole suite of
annoyances; at the very least, someone needed to make the glass and die from it so you can sit in
bright light in the dead of night and consume a little more when you were supposed to be sleeping

The human body is a machine. self repairing to some extent, but there are only so many run cycles that it can do. Each breath you breathe uses some of those cycles and also helps in the self repair. If you control your breath so that you used the least number of cycles, causing least damage and effecting maximum self repair...

You'd still be facked

In the process of controlling your breathing, apparently, something else happens which makes it obvious that you are no different from your washbasin, or that you had imagined your washbasin all along, depending on who told you how to control your breath.
When that dawns on you, you are hopelessly lonely in the conventional sense of the word,
but loneliness occurs only if there was someone around to remind you of it....
Your washbasin cannot remind you ...
anymore....

There is no need to talk ... hell there's nobody left to talk to

Yes... it uncannily looks like a description of death...

Consumption is the basis of life.
Too much is death.
Moderation is slow death.
Very minimal is slower death

What's your choice

Patent == Crock

2007-06-25T17:26:00.000+05:30

Is it possible to see any idea in isolation?
Why do you need credit for something you presumably invented?

Hang on, its not about credit, its about business

If you were the kind of person who felt insecure enough to 'patent' an idea you had, you are probably not the inventor
for the simple reason that you cannot do anything of value while also being scared of how other people are going to steal your ideas. The two are somehow not compatible. I would love to be wrong.

Einstein has patents. Was Einstein made of substances not available in the universe

There is no such thing as an invention. only borrowed and polished ideas with layers added.

Did you say 'references'?

Dear Mr.misinformed patentseeker, how about making that huge list of references, going back all the way to 3500 BC, to the inventor of the wheel (not the australian jackass), and while you are at it, could you please make sure portions of the money you plan to rake in go to his descendants?

Or better still, stay still and listen to yourself breathe.

The language of no words

2007-06-25T16:41:00.000+05:30

The Fluididty of existence is beyond words

You need words to describe a word, each of those in turn require more words. Definition can only reduce the accuracy of experience

Doing nothing is the only way - everything else is futile

genes, brain, electrodes, tissue, regeneration, cells, behavior ... all words

The most accurate means of describing anything is not describing it. Say you wanted to explain why rainbows happen; when you start using words, you go further away from the rainbow... as it slowly deviates from what a rainbow is... when you've stopped experiencing the rainbow, all explanations become mere words... the best way to describe a rainbow would be to not describe it...

As we humans are quite incapable of not describing, the next best thing is to describe something else... and as a result, the rainbow comes into existence in the listener/reader/watcher's mind

You have got to use the audience's mind...not the senses... the sense perception needs to occur as a consequence of the mind imagining an event.

Have you ever read a paragraph in a novel... and completely unintended, you realize something that has nothing to do with the novel or anything it means to convey? unless it was a truly beautiful novel that really intended it?

When was the last time you experienced that

Walk-part1

2007-06-14T11:25:00.000+05:30

There was this mind awakening field of green; and a brown path that wound its way through it; like some dark lightning had laid down to rest on its way to wreck havoc on the blue skies
I was not walking on that path. I wasn't even anywhere in the vicinity
I was imagining its presence, sitting at a small table overlooking a crowded street.
The table itself was quite ordinary. its only striking feature was the absence of legs. Or an overabundance depending on how one looked at it. the table was in reality a box of coffee beans.
The beans had long since been pulverized brewed and consumed. they were currently in various stages of digestion across the village and possibly the country. on this table lay numerous magazines, glossy and
loud. i randomly opened one of them. i had to put the magazine down almost immediately as the polished bodies and pretentious advice seeped out of the pages and dripped onto my trousers like black coffee.
those stains are the worst..

Meanwhile, on that sharp path through the green field a saffron speck moved ever so slowly towards me

life-cycle

2007-04-24T15:43:00.000+05:30

Biodiversity appears to rise and fall in mysterious cycles of 62 million years for which science has no satisfactory explanation says Muller
From the graph it is apparent that it's not exactly 62 million years... it (whatever IT is) varies randomly, but there is an UP and a DOWN.

A possible explanation:

“Comets could be perturbed from the Oort cloud by the periodic passage of the solar system through molecular clouds, Galactic arms, or some other structure with strong gravitational influence,” Muller said. “But there is no evidence even suggesting that such a structure exists.”

Muller also believes:

Physicist Richard A. Muller and others have postulated that the sun has a heretofore undetected companion star in an elliptical orbit beyond the Oort cloud ... which you can read about here

Now for the juice...

If you were to look at the definition of a yuga:

According to early Hindu mythology, the mahayuga or "great age" is a period of time consisting of four consecutive ages, lasting 1728000, 1296000, 864000 and 432000 years for a total of 4320000. They placed themselves and all of humanity in the fourth of these ages. Basically Brahma is breathing. see the numbers

&&

IF you've ever seen one of those books you find on pavements called 'Autobiography of a yogi'...

Well, the dude who was his guru, Sri Yukteswar also writes that our sun has a 'star for its dual', with an orbit around this star. As our sun moves through this orbit it takes the whole solar system closer to and then further from the "grand centre" of our solar system called 'Vishnunabhi', which is the seat of the creative power, 'Brahma', [which]...regulates...the mental virtue of the internal world." He states that the proximity to this grand centre determines which yuga it is. [see this and this]

I'd conclude that:
Brahma is not crazy about meditation and controlled breathing... he breathes like you and me... unevenly.
The answer is either 43.2 or 62 ... unlikely that it is 42

burst and sell

2007-04-24T14:15:00.000+05:30

Google you think has cracked it. No dishonesty no underhanded behavior. Just helping people make money with beatific smiles slapped on their faces
wrong
sponsored ads are the bane of human existence
they are on every darn site out there
what do they do?
they count on a small percentage of people mindlessly clicking links

lets take an example:
you want to find out how plants harness sunlight

Route 1: sit in front of a plant and ponder the mystery
Route 2: google for it
End up at a site that shows the latest research on photosynthesis
About how quantum mechanics is what its all about
You are lost
Your mind is tired from the talk about molecular communication
Your eyes drift
Towards a sponsored links box
That says "photo equipment hire"
You click on it
Someone makes a few cents
You eventually end up at a porno site

Does it matter which route you took

The dotcom bubble burst for the simple reason that it did not make business sense

When an idea starts to make business sense, the idea is facked.
Business kills ideas and sells the entrails
At a premium

A real sieve

2007-04-13T17:55:00.000+05:30

Thoughts colonize humans,
humans are bursting at the seams
they want to tell someone... something ... any damn thing....

As people say things to each other, more thoughts are created.. which then...

How about, you say, something useful ; like news, or medical operations performed across continents

I say, does it really matter?
so you knew 10 seconds after that famous plane ran into a tall building
how on earth did that help anything?

People are facked. all there is to it.

If there were a sieve that filtered crap on the internet...
No. Not a crappy sieve like rss or a search engine that actually makes things worse by duplicating crap
a real sieve that chews all the nonsense, spits out the waste, digests the sensible stuff and gives useful crap
hang on... i forgot ...

... you are that sieve.

In a grand vision, every single thought that ever colonized a human being, if it forced the poor bugger to create something made of earth, wind, fire and the other element, would end up on the internet

Grand is bad. you cant run an economy on grand.
You have to bicker about dollars.

So we can forget grand. at least until we humans can figure a radically different way of looking at ourselves.

bread science butter jelly

2007-04-13T17:12:00.000+05:30

Too much of anything is bad for your psyche and more obviously for your plastic body.

is that for real?

how about science?

is too much science bad?

depends on how one consumes it i suppose

and what the hell is BAD? leading to decay and fact? in which case life is bad

assuming it affects you adversely, and we qualify 'bad' as something that stunts evolution, what would it look like?

gives you a temper and an irritation with people who believe in fairies and djinns

reminds me of a religious fanatic

then again, science questions everything. even itself?

at any given point in time science is the collection of half baked knowledge
and half baked stuff in general tends to be on the dangerous side of things

nothing would progress with this world view, the science fanatic says
erm...who the hell decided that forced progress is the way to go?

an invention a day brings the ipod closer and takes sense further away

is too much questioning bad?

Tomato soup

2007-04-13T16:30:00.000+05:30

Tomes. and more. have and are being written about shaping and consuming earth wind fire water
diagrams would you believe?

Your flush tank. was a tree at some point. and with time it will again turn into one
in between, we sit, brains brimming with thought on how to rip a fellow human off of something he has

X: what have you got that i don't
Y: um... well... there is...
X: give it to me
Y: but i need it
X: no. what you really need is a flush tank that i made
Y: erm... you know.. probably not
Z: here. take my tomatoes and give me the flush tank

A few days later X wants a flush tank too
A few months later the entire town yearns for flush tanks
A few years later there is a commodity market for flush tanks and tomatoes
A few decades later people are killing each other over the river - that will irrigate the tomatoes or cure the flush tank
In 5 decades all people concerned are facked, the stock market lives on
In 7 decades people jump off the 100th storey when the stock market crashes by a few points and land on a truck filled with tomatoes.

Business [biz-nis]: The purchase and sale of greed, jealousy and other juicy desires in an attempt to make a profit

Fact of oblivion

2007-04-12T17:53:00.000+05:30

Every breath you take ... in... out
takes you one step closer to your body's end
that is fact #1
when your body goes, the people left behind have no clue what happened to you
that is fact #2

Hang on... the psychic person says he can see souls flying around
discount fact #2

So, there is the only one fact known to man
everything else is subject to change and interpretation, thereby making them non-facts

If there is only one fact and that is death
They are but synonyms

So when a person dies, he is fact
or facked? which sounds more real

Steed

2007-04-11T17:28:00.000+05:30

Abdul dasher, he got on his horse and kicked the poor beast's rump,
looking on through a veil, milpie santola did smile

wasn't easy, it wasn't, stretching back to kick
as leg met rump, man to horse
invisible cramps sprung through Abdul's unspeakable body parts
through the smoky veil Abdul checked if milpie noticed - the searing pain
santola's daughter's head meanwhile was made to turn towards the vision of ginto jarkey
rearing his dozen heads, some wearing hats others open to the sky
milpie's eyes on ginto's red Ferrari ; another cigarette lit
Abdul saw apparitions of mounts somewhere in the near west
or was that the east now as the horse decided to turn around
lady in bucket seat, ginto and his heads in driver's seat, the stallion leapt
not a whiner, Abdul, no he wasn't
he swallowed the pain and calmly addressed his steed
"let's be heading for the mount of s`ulk
where my friend drowl gik and his profound ilk do reside"

the second hand steed, phat from Abdul's treatment and dreams of food
trudged along the rocky road to the s`ulk

fatigued from the ride, abdul sank into a burning bush as gik glowered in vain
dasher dreamed, or dreamt he did...

gik: ok. screw the painfully long story. just give me the summary.
a: you asked for it: "The meat is inedible"
gik: did the ferrari go east?
a: i knew you were the savior
gik: answer the question
a: i am directionally challenged... but i overheard one of the heads saying "to the sea my trusted stallion!"
g: right. let's go.
a: to the sea?
g: no. the other way. i dont want to be anywhere near the two dozen eyes.
a: why not use your magic towel to blind them
gik: "if towels are meant to be thrown, one also needs to know how to throw them"
a: eh... i thought it was your towel?
g: exactly. and you dont know jack about it. so i advise you to seal it tight

Abdul drifted back to wakefulness and saw gik digging the ground at the foot of a tree.

the wind carried gik's towel

deep below the s`ulk
far into abdul's dream
racing towards the sea
flapping its edges in expectant delight

ginto sat sucking milpie
her toes
hurt from pressing the imaginary brake pedal
sucking, he drooled
and looked for a towel to come clean

and gik's magic towel powered by nothing more than brainlessness is getting closer

mr.santola meanwhile has decided to quit his job
as a railway mechanic
a job he loves
for the simple reason that he wants to protect his daughter
and he can't do that going away from her at 90 km an hour covered in engine oil
while twelve headed monsters suck her toes

half way to hardipad, a tiny forgotten station, he sees the towel fluttering along
faster than his goddamn train
he revs it up, putting the passengers in panic
aunties, cousins and their pets

TO BE CONTINUED...

The energy problem

2007-04-11T11:07:00.001+05:30

Have you ever noticed, reading x number books in parallel, that there is a more than ordinate amount of coincidence? It is almost as though the mind tries to make sense of anything you throw at it maybe its the collective consciousness thing When you think of something, it is already timeless; even if you were the first human (since you voiced it) whose mind the thought happened to colonize

Colonize (v) [kol-uh-nahyz]:

-verb (used with object): Ass f$*k, The US colonized Iraq

-verb (used without object): To settle in the ass, thoughts go to your mind to colonize

Colonization requires energy. if you just sit all day watching TV, you ARE being colonized, but energy is being spent; right from the power to broadcast the signals to crunching the potato chips between your browning teeth.

Thus, we humans have an energy problem.

The problem started when we decided to put our ancestors into turbines. At least one atom in at least one molucule of hydro-carbons that splashes in your fuel tank belonged to one of your ancestors.

There are only so many dead people, and it takes a ridiculous amount of time for one human to become useful to the automobile industry, and not to mention, the sheikhs who cannot believe their good fortune.

The solution: decolonize

Decolonize (v) [dee-kol-uh-nahyz]:

-verb (used with object): to detach from the ass, Mao Tse tung decolonized Nehru in 1962

-verb (used without object): to free from dependency , meditate to decolonize your mind of thoughts

The act of decolonization is gut wrenching, and results in the disintegration of the host organism. which is one step towards powering your automobile.