It's Gonna Be A Bright Sunshiny Day

Human beings are complex creatures.

And being the complex pieces of work that we are, we exhibit some interesting psychological behaviour.

One example of such interesting behaviour is what is known as hindsight bias. This is when we suddenly seem very informed about an event after it has already happened and it seems like the event was inevitable: "I knew it all along." 

Hindsight gives us false confidence because we incorrectly believe that we could have predicted the outcome. Hindsight bias has a side effect because we dismiss the idea that other equally likely outcomes could have happened, and we do not plan for those in the future.

Hindsight bias crops up everywhere. Stock market analysts show plenty of hindsight bias. After a market downturn, many analysts smugly tell us that the market was overdue for a correction. Well Mr. Hot Shot Analyst, why didn't you tell us before?

Another example would be the Kargil War. We were, to put it unkindly, caught with our pants around our ankles. But after the war happened--after the fact--many "experts" suddenly popped up all around us like curious prairie-dogs and told us, in tones of authority, that we were simply asking for it. No shit, sherlock.

It is my contention that we humans not only exhibit hindsight bias, we also exhibit what I am cleverly calling foresight inertia. This can be operationally defined as those times when we foresee a grave future consequence of a present action--using things like collected data, past performance and our educated judgement--and yet do very little about it because the solution is "too hard". Or because we believe that a less energetic solution will work equally well.

Take India's population figures. We are told by demographers that India's population, given the current trajectory of growth of about 1.4% every year, will reach 1.7 billion people by the year 2060. At which point, it will stablize because we will have achieved zero population growth.

[NB: Forgive me for redundancy, but to achieve Zero Population Growth, a country needs to reach Replacement Fertility Rate. This is when a couple has no more than two children and essentially just replaces themselves. The actual figure for Replacement Fertility is slightly higher than 2. It is 2.1 I think, to account for those who die prematurely without having children of their own. India's current fertility rate is about 3.01 children per woman. These numbers may seem quite small and the difference between them insignificant, but remember that these are rates that are applied to very large numbers of the order of a billion, and that too in geometric progression. Even a small difference in these rates can have serious non-convergent effects.]

That number, 1.7 billion, is itself a scary number because it essentially means that we will have about twice the number of people to support, mouths to feed, bodies to clothe. Given that we are currently not exactly doing a bang-up job of doing these tasks, it is only fair to ask if our current rate of GDP growth will cover these bases? I personally wouldn't bet on it.

What if we are wrong and India's population does not stabilize in 2060? And we don't have to be wrong by much; a tenth of a percentage point will do it.Will fertility education work or do we have to do a "China"?

These are valid questions. Those who ask these questions are sometimes seen as pessimistic alarmist doom-and-gloom types. I think that these labels are a little unfair. Because these questions are meant to shake us out of foresight inertia.

In the interests of fairness, let me say that foresight inertia is not always a good thing. Since it is very difficult to predict the future it is conceivable that we will often get it wrong. Attempting to fix a problem that will not occur in the future may very well make the future worse rather than better. It would be a troubled society indeed if everybody always jumped up and acted on every little "foresight" that they had.

But foresight inertia is negligent and immoral, maybe even criminal, in situations where the cost of sitting still is very high.

Let me explain. What if I say to you, "Look here so-and-so, we are heading for a demographic catastrophe in India. If population growth is not checked, it will dilute any economic gains. What do we do?"

You, being a sunnier sort, say, "Well, look at the bright side. Haven't you heard how everybody is talking of India's Demographic Dividend? Lighten up, my friend, and chill. Here, have a gin-and-tonic."

Now either you are right or I am right. If we choose to be alarmist (my way) and implement a contingency plan that I come up with, and turns out that you were right, we should still be ok. A little sheepish perhaps, but basically ok.

But if , perchance, I am right, and we take your approach of doing nothing or too little, we, my bright-eyed friend, are dead.

Yes, this is maybe Pascal's Wager rehashed, but if you are reading this, then you read all the way through, didn't you? Sucker!

Oh Kashmir, My Kashmir

Have you seen a Hieronymus Bosch painting? Or a Dali? Or an Edvard Munch? Or read William Burrough's Naked Lunch?

All pretty surreal stuff. But they all pale, and how, when compared to the surreality of the reports on Kashmir in the Indian media. Take the following rapid-fire series of articles in rediff.com:

(1) Return To Paradise -- in which one Rashmi Bhure tells us in glowing terms how everything, especially tourism, is really looking up in Kashmir because the people there have finally understood how not bloodshed, but peace, will lead to peace. Aaahhh, finally we can all relax.

(2) 14 Dead, 100 Hurt in Pulwama Blast -- in which we are told, rather bluntly, how a huge explosion wiped out innocent lives, including those of two students. You see, the terrorists had, with tender empathy, set up the bomb right outside a school.

(3) Hurriyat backs Musharraf's Kashmir formula -- in which the Hurriyat Conference tells us, in no uncertain terms, that being the f***ing ungrateful weasels that they are, they would very much like for Kashmir to be "autonomous", according to a "formula" that Pakistani President Musharraf has put forward. That, not being simply content with the special status that Kashmir already enjoys, they would further like to distance themselves from the rest of India, presumably in preparation for joining Pakistan. Note to Indian Government: Please send a few more buses to Pakistan, and hurry! We are clearly short a few buses. Or maybe plan on reserving a few more IIT seats for them. How about some free food for them while we're at it? We have plenty. Why, only 60 percent of us are malnourished. We can afford to give away some food, surely.

Leave alone the media. What about us, the thinking, educated Indians? How do we characterize the Kashmir problem? I have heard at least two Indians, among my acquaintances here in the United States, make the nonsensical statement that Kashmir is a political problem and not a religious problem. I am further assuming that unless I move in the wrong circles, my acquaintances are a random sample and thus there are likely many, many more thinking (tongue firmly in cheek), educated Indians who hold similar views.

In my studied opinion, those who say that Kashmir is not a religious but a political problem are functional idiots who likely drool helplessly all over their shoes in the morning. Remember that if Kashmir was simply a Kashmir-versus-the-Central-Government sort of problem, all Kashmiris of every stripe would be involved in the process of a solution. But this is not the case. One of the first things that happened when the knockdown-dragout Kashmir problem started is that the Muslim majority in Kashmir ethnically cleansed Kashmiri Hindu Pandits from the valley. Three quarters of a million of them. Not religious, my behind.

I regret to inform that I have reached a rather sad and disheartening conclusion after spending a few decades on this here earth. Which is as follows.

Hindus have no self-respect. None. And I don't care if Ram or Shyam or Rajesh individually shows spine. The collective dominant impression that Hindus radiate is that of utter, abject, fawning spinelessness in the face of minority posturing and aggression. That is why Kashmir, in spite of egregiously bad behaviour, gets per-capita, ten times the aid from the Central Government that other states receive. That is why a certain, statistically significant number of Hindus, out of a misplaced sense of political correctness and quite possibly grovelling dhimmitude, fail (or refuse) to see the Kashmir problem in proper light.

That is why we Hindus breast-beat and make ten times the noise when 750 Muslims are killed in Godhra and don't bat our secular eyelashes when hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits live in squalor in refugee camps in their own country, or two thousand Sikhs are butchered mercilessly in Delhi. Children of a lesser god indeed are Hindus and Sikhs.

And some of us complain about how Hinduism is (and Hindus are) negatively portrayed in Western media and textbooks. Why the surprise? Why exactly will other cultures respect us when we don't respect ourselves? What do you expect others to make of a culture that suffers more angst and spends more sleepless nights fretting over Sourav Ganguly's current batting average than the fact that we chipped in and voted to be ruled by a half-literate Italian immigrant?

But this is okay, par for the course. Let's get back to worrying over whether Jinnah was secular or not.

All Bruised Up And Nowhere To Go

I face an interesting problem. I can't decide which part of my body hurts the most.

No, I haven't been broad-sided by a semi and am not writing this from a hospital with my body all in traction, though it sometimes feels this way. You see, I went mountain-biking this weekend.

It is disturbing just how often meddling individuals will take two perfectly nice, individually acceptable things, tinker with them and combine them to produce a freakish monster. Mountain-biking is a good example of this. On the one hand, you have a mountain, a perfectly acceptable bump in the ground. And then on the other hand, you have a bicycle, a pretty nifty device that transports lazy humans from point A to point B. Take them, put them together in a medium-size wok, baste with warm butter, and voila, a sure-fire recipe for trauma of the body and spirit.

Now, do let's get one thing squared away. In a dim and masochistic way I actually like mountain-biking. I used to do it when I lived in Dallas and I do it now sometimes. But liking something does not mean that you gorge on it. Or are good at it. 

Being "a moderate enthusiast" (sometimes referred to in scientific circles as "a wussy wuss"), I would usually choose the easy trails when I went biking. Mountain-biking can actually be a fun thing to do. I can think of worse ways to spend your weekend. Maybe not at the moment, but I can.

This time was different though.

My friend J and I went. For the nosy, the trail is called John Muir Trail (for a map, click here) and is about 20 miles long, give or take, if you do all the loops. And since we both are on a bit of a fitness kick right now--hope springs eternal--I thought, "What the heck, let's do the trail twice. That oughta be fun." 

J, being of the male persuasion and being only slightly smarter than I am, agreed. Oh come now, if he were super-smart, would he be my friend?

"That oughta be fun." ...If somebody with way too much time on his hands ever compiled a list of famous last words, it is my wager that those words will surely figure in the top five.

The plan of doing the trail twice was a bad one from the start for several reasons. First, we didn't know the trail and it turned out to be much tougher than any I had seen so far. Second, doing a 20-odd mile track twice with not a break in-between was asking too much of our level of fitness. Third, it was an unseasonably hot and sweaty day.

Fourth, to add insult to injury, my bicycle is not all that good. In fact, that is being quite charitable, putting it that way. It actually sucks ass. It has five gears, only four of which will engage. It has a wobbly wheel that goes every which way, and a not very good brake. Also--and I don't know why I say this but am sure this matters somehow--it is puke-blue in color. If somebody ate a whole lot of blue M&Ms and threw up, that's what my bike would look like, only it would be bigger. I've been meaning to get a new bike for sometime now, but hey, I'm cheap.

We didn't have much trouble going through about 15 miles of the trail the first time. The second time was pure white-hot torture. There was this one section of the track that went up about 80 feet in about a quarter mile--a pretty steep gradient--and to add to the fun, was littered with rocks the size of soccer balls. Well before halfway through the second time, J and I were, to put it kindly, not having fun. Hands raw from gripping the handlebars too long and too tight, thighs and calves screaming in agony, unable to sit straight on our bikes because it hurt so bad, sweat pouring out from places we didn't know we had. We looked like a couple of haggard, punched-out characters from some sort of existential film noir. It was a lesson in humility that J and I will not forget in a hurry.

All we wanted to do, and our minds sang this to us in a sickening refrain, was get back to our cars. Our comfortable, lovely cars. With airconditioners in them.

And to get the hell home.

Aside: The more astute among the readers will make the observation at this point that we should simply have gotten off our bikes and walked. Would have been easier on the bones, they would say. Let me say this to the astute reader: "O astute reader, thou art too clever for your own good. Thou art, in fact, a smart-ass who doesn't account for one simple fact. Both J and I are guys. If I was alone on the trail, or if one of us had been a girl, who BTW are innately smarter than guys and therefore live longer, this is exactly what would have happened. We would have walked. But we were both guys. Heaven forbid that one of us would actually shed our manly macho-musk swagger and be the first to suggest that we get off our bikes and walk."

All things that have a beginning must have an end, and this sorry tale, too, has an end. Just when we thought we would slowly sink and die of exhaustion on that trail and birds whose names we didn't know would pick our bones clean, we turned a corner and through pain-dulled eyes, we saw...on a sign...in gleaming black on egg-shell white...the two sweetest, most exhilarating words ever created by human beings. 

"Parking Area," it said.

I have heard that when Columbus made his rather mixed-up voyage to discover the New World, the sailors under his command, after spending countless days seeing nothing but the ocean, flung themselves on the ground, and kissed the ground when they finally made landfall.

Believe you me, those sailors were pretty button-down, straight-laced, emotionally undemostrative sort of guys. J and I woulda tore our clothes right off and made love to the ground of the parking lot, when we finally saw it, if our deeply ingrained sense of decency (and more importantly, the park authorities) had let us.

Thus and so, to get back to the main point, every part of my body hurts. Some embarassing parts much more than others, if you get my drift. But every trying experience has some insights. This short saga (Look Ma, I just made an oxymoron) has one too. While getting home after biking, I discovered a new stylish techinque that just might catch on and become as popular as Yoga and Tae-bo, given enough time and lack of imagination. 

So help me God, I did come up with a new fad. I haven't thought of a marketable name for it yet, but I am, for the moment, calling it "How to drive a car safely and reasonably well without actually sitting down". 

Necessity, my dear fellow, is a bitch.

For those of you who labored through this post and made it to this point, and also for those shameless, attention-span deficient people who skipped through most of this post and made it to this point--here's the takeaway message from this post. 

Only the congenitally dim, irretrievably obtuse, unabashedly stupid and unfathomably dense will ever, ever, seriously consider taking up mountain-biking as a pastime. Verily have I spoken.

J and I plan to go back next Saturday.

A Long Overdue Economic Analysis

The Indian movie industry is the largest in the world, releasing about 800 movies every year like clockwork. The largest slice of this particular pie, in turn, is the Hindi movie industry, which alone releases a few hundred movies annually.

It is my educated and perhaps generous guess that only about five to ten percent of Hindi movies released in any particular year is worth watching. The rest, in my studied opinion, is little more than raw, steaming sewage. Moreover, it is vast quantities of, raw, steaming sewage.

Anybody with a passing interest in economics would be surprised by the dynamics of the market for Hindi movies. How, we must wonder, can a bunch of people produce and sell copious amounts of garbage with monotony at what appears to be far above the market-clearing price? It would be understandable if the market was a market for garbage (there do exist markets for garbage), but it is not. It is a market for entertainment.

The market for Hindi movies is a relatively free market without any externalities that I can see. For example, there are no constraints placed on the movie industry by the government to limit quantity. It is a private market and laws of supply and demand should operate well enough. On the demand side, consumers are free to choose the amount and type of movies consumed. In any free market, the price mechanism should ensure that the cost of a product is close to the equilibrium price where all products clear the market.

So how much are you, the consumer, prepared to pay for raw sewage? A cursory modeling exercise would suggest that unless you happen to deal with the stuff, the market-clearing price for raw sewage would settle at zero. But surprisingly, this is not the case in reality. Consumers in India regularly pay upwards of Rs. 50/- for the price of a movie ticket. There is even a thriving black market for tickets which suggests that demand actually far outstrips supply in many cases. People are chugging it down and asking for more! Consider further that renting a video in India costs Rs. 15/-. Renting a Hindi video in the US costs $1. Both are sums that we happily pay. There is a huge difference between the predicted market-clearing price and the observed market-clearing price. Why is this so?

In any economic analysis, there are two sides: a supply side and a demand side. There seems to be some consensus among thinking people that it is the supply side of the Hindi movie industry that needs fixing. We all, on occasion, have agreed heartily that the assorted producers, directors, scriptwriters, songwriters, etc. of Bollywood are drooling idiots who wouldn't know a good movie if it came up and bit them on their blubbery behinds. Let us examine this proposition more closely.

In any market for goods and services, suppliers will only supply as much as the market is willing to consume. If demand is low, prices are close to zero and suppliers are forced to get creative in order to increase demand. In the case of the Hindi movie industry, demand is obviously not low and hence suppliers have no incentive to change their methods. On the contrary, the existence of black markets suggests that there is an artifical price ceiling and that prices of tickets could actually be far more if they were allowed to float freely. The supply side of the Hindi movie industry is thus functioning quite well, thank you very much. It is not the source of the problem.

The problem, therefore, must be on the demand side.

What makes up the demand side in this instance? The demand side is us. We, the paying public, who rent these movies and throng to the theaters; we who sing mind-shrivelling songs like Didi Tera Dewar Deewana and What is mobile number, what is your style number and Ande Ka Fanda (I will personally slap anyone who ever sings that song aloud in front of me; that's a promise). It is we who watch, against our better judgement, Devdas and Om, Jai, Jagdish. Do we, I ask in all sincerity, retain the mental makeup of a ten-year old well into our middle ages?

And are the moviemakers really stupid? No, they are pretty smart cookies. They have correctly figured out that whatever swill they serve up will be gratefully consumed by the Indian public, almost regardless of class, caste, religion and levels of education. And that their profit, regardless of quality, is assured. They are not in it for the giggles.

So the next time you are watching a rented Hindi movie and you throw down that remote in disgust and yell at the screen, "What is the guy who made this bloody movie smoking? Is he f**king stupid?", remember that the answer is: No, HE is most certainly not stupid.

Footnote: My apologies to anybody who actually liked Devdas, the movie. I personally thought it was an awful rendering of a pretty good novella.

Out Of Commission

Am hosting a virus. The virus is having a blast. Can't say the same about me. Blog will be down, much like its creator, till virus is banished.

Careful

You must be careful each time you step out of your door, because your front walk is really a road, and the road leads ever onward.

-- J.R.R. Tolkien

We've Been Blessed

We in India are doubly blessed. Because we have two Prime Ministers.

It logically follows of course. We noticed that we haven't exactly been doing a stellar job of running the country since its independence. Therefore, the problem lies with the leadership. The problem is that we don't have enough leaders, we surmised. So here you go, step up with your coupons folks, two for the price of one.

In fact, this was so blindingly obvious all along that it makes me wanna kick myself in the privates (this may be difficult to do from a purely anatomical point of view) for not seeing it before. But of course, what was wrong was not the quality of the leaders; what was wrong was the quantity.

Thus and so, it has come to pass that we have two Prime Ministers. The beaming, grinning puppet known as Dr. Manmohan Singh and the redoubtable (but only because we have made her so) and extra-constitutional Ms Sonia Gandhi. Those born with a stick up their behinds would call them the de jure and de facto Prime Ministers. I call them the Real Prime Minister and the Pretend Prime Minister. You know, like in the US, you have these pretend speed limits posted everywhere that nobody pays any attention to. Well, in India, we have a pretend Prime Minister (that nobody pays any attention to).

It is true: you can take a man out of slavery, but can you really take the slavery out of a man? Please see the article below from www.rediff.com to fully appreciate the import of that aphorism.

Dr Manmohan Singh might have completed one year as prime minister, but the contrasting manner in which Congressmen react to the presence of him and Sonia Gandhi is a pointer to who is more powerful.

Even casual visitors have noticed how Congressmen virtually ignore Singh whenever he moves through the Central Hall of Parliament to go from one House to the other.

Barring a kindly Congressman or two who happens to be sitting on the aisle seats next to which the prime minister moves unobtrusively accompanied by a couple of officials, hardly any one acknowledges his presence.

In sharp contrast, whenever Sonia enters the Hall -- to walk briskly through to her office in the outer corridor of Parliament House virtually ignoring her obsequious followers -- a frisson runs through it. Those who have morsels of food in their mouths stand in their seats while others hotfoot to the path she is bound to take on her way to office and half-bend in salutation.

The other day, the president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, Ranbir Singh Mahendra, who is a Congress member of the Haryana assembly, was learning a thing or two in man management from BCCI Vice-President and Rajya Sabha member Rajiv Shukla when he caught a glimpse of Sonia entering.

He suddenly upped and ran 20 odd paces a la Mohammed Kaif, to stand in the farthest aisle so that he could bow before her. She did not even nod in acknowledgement.

A Prayer, A Song, And A Question

The Prayer Of The Faithful

God, our Father and Keeper, let me do the right thing always. Help me in doing my duty to my spouse and to my children. Let my heart always be filled with love. Let the sublime, holy spirit pervade me in everything I do. Help me, oh Lord, so that I may live an upright, honest life. Chasten me, oh Lord, if I may stray from the path of the righteous. Right me, if I go wrong. Remind me, if I forget my faith.

Om/Amen.


The Song Of The Nihilist

Morality. Values. Chastity. Do the right thing. This is SO wrong. He is so dutiful. She is righteous. Such a noble gesture.

Pretty words, charming thoughts, these.

What is right? What is wrong? We are never right, we are never wrong, we just ARE. And one day, we will cease to BE. These are the only two truths that matter. The rest is fluff.

There are no noble gestures. Every gesture either improves you or degrades you and has an equal and opposite effect on another. Life is a zero-sum game. If you win, someone loses.

Words, the real culprits are words. When we invented language, we invented duty, chastity, morality, love. They are the byproducts of the invention of language; nothing more. Quit kidding yourself.

In a world absent language, we would be bashing at each other or copulating with each other. Come to think of it, if we get to the heart of the matter, this is what we do anyway. The difference--had we not had the benefit of being able to couch it in pompous analeptic language--is that we would have been more honest about it.

Don't lose heart--it ain't over till the fat lady sings. God moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. Love will keep us alive. Do thy duty. Keep the faith.

The fat lady has finished her song and God has left the building. Actually, he never was in the building.

Love? Love can be exchanged for the price of a few coins in dirty, dank alleyways. Or thrown to the sharks for the sake of a convenient compromise. Or sometimes just for the lark.

Duty trumps love. Convenience trumps duty.

Faith--yes, let's keep that. I hear it fetches a good price.


Question

Pick a card, any card--prayer or song? Which is your poison? What's your preferred sedative?

And more importantly, if someone is hungry in the middle of the night, what is the least fattening snack food to keep handy?

Welcome To A Crazy World

This sentence is false.

That innocuous looking statement is the simplest but nonetheless revealing introduction to the world of paradoxes. That particular one, called Russell's paradox (actually, Russell's paradox is quite a bit more and involves set theory and self-swallowing sets), can send one into spirals of self-referential logic. To elaborate, consider the sentence carefully. If it is true, then it cannot be true and must be false as it itself says. And if it is false, then it is clearly true, contrary to what it says.

And if it is true, then it is false, and so on ad infinitum.

Paradoxes are interesting and surprisingly common in mathematics, logic and language. And some of them can be difficult to even think about, even after they have been laid out for you. An example is the Barber's paradox, another non-mathematical corollary to Russell's paradox which goes like this: Consider a town in which there is one barber and he shaves all those men who do not shave themselves, and no one else. Can such a town/barber exist?

I invite you to think about this and it is my solemn guarantee that your head will hurt after a while.

Spoiler: Such a town/barber cannot exist because if the barber does not shave himself, then he is included in the definition of "all men who do not shave themselves" and thus must shave himself according to the rule. Conversely, if he does shave himself, then he cannot be the barber who is being spoken of, because by definition, he only shaves those who do not shave themselves.

Most paradoxes exhibit self-reference. If a sentence or a subject refers to itself, there is a chance that it'll lead to a contradiction. The first sentence of this post refers to itself and this leads to circular logic. The Barber paradox has self-reference because it refers to "shaving himself".

Another example of self-reference:

Last Saturday, Shona and I were driving to Chicago. I like these drives, it gives us a chance to talk of many things. We got to talking about how different people were good at different things. Some people, for example, Shona said, were just so good at music. And some others couldn't make music to save their sorry behinds if you held a gun to their heads.

This is true. I mean, you take two different people and present them with the same notes and one of them takes 'em and creates a symphony while the other creates baboon noises. The reason of course, is that their brains are constructed differently. But what is the anatomy of that difference? We don't know. Because we don't yet fully understand how the human mind works.

When will we ever understand the human mind, Shona asked with a drawn out sigh, and then promptly lost interest.

I don't know the answer to that, honey, and maybe, just maybe we can never understand. Because there may just be a degree of self-reference there. Because we are proposing that the human mind try to understand itself. Can the human mind ever understand itself? Or are we setting ourselves up for a infinite loop in the attempt? Maybe all those crazies in our institutions are not really crazy. Maybe they are among the handful that have really understood how the mind works. And driven insane in the process.

Yet another example. Can we have a list of all lists that do not contain themselves? This is a paradox again, because if such a list listed itself, then it would be incorrect (it would contain at least one list that happens to contain itself, namely itself). On the other hand, if it omitted to list itself, it would satisfy the definition of "lists that do not contain themselves" and thus must list itself.

Self-reference is a general, all-around bitch, but it can actually be quite useful at times. Indeed, many algorithms in computer science depend on self-reference--or recursion, in the parlance--to come up with elegant solutions that would otherwise be ponderous to solve through iterative methods. But such solutions, if designed incorrectly, can run away from you in a rapidly growing infinite loop. We recognize this and always build in a trap-door clause, a clause that will ensure that the algorithm will always terminate for a particular set of input conditions.

Does Irreverence Run In The Family?

In response to my hastily put together theory about how all normative philosophies are or have the potential to become religion, here's a comment from my lawyer sister in New Zealand. She is the li'l one of the family, now not so li'l.

Our mother will be heartbroken to see at least two of her children grow up to be such good little iconoclasts. Well Mum, it's all your fault. Appears you didn't raise us right.

First of all, you forgot to mention one other normative philosophy - " I'll learn to live with other people's normative philosophies".

The hardest bit of practising any religion is to look at another religion diametrically opposite to yours and understand why the twit insists on adhering to it. Oh, and also knowing that the twit has the audacity to think that YOU'RE the twit, and pity him for his idiocy. There's a very thin line that divides unwavering faith and plain fanaticism (and I'm not sure that they're all that different). But the difficult part is understanding it. Not accepting it, mind you.

What is religion? It's trying to explain why certain things happen, to people you love, to yourself. For most people it would be devastating to know that that's it. There's nothing beyond here and now. That they're a meaningless speck in a big cosmic mess which is never going to make sense or give their existence any worthiness.To quote somebody who wrote a Law article (I'm stuffed with them, and sick of it)- "I have immortal longings in me". Religion gives people a way out.

Think about it. All religions keep stressing on that bit - nirvana, salvation, judgement day. It helps people believe that they really matter, that they're not forgotten. Gobbledegook. If I were God, I'd be pissed too.

Writer's Block?

Case of writer's block, I think. Nothing. I got nothing.

Rob, old friend, is there a quick cure? And thanks for your very kind comment on my "Riot #2" post, which is a long-ish post and most people don't have the patience. I'm flattered. Really.

Only the wise can create wisdom, but anybody can steal it. So here it is.

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.” 

— T.H. White, The Once and Future King

True.

Riot #2

My second experience of a riot was right after I graduated from college. Still in Bangalore.

Why were the people mad again? Let's try to keep this simple. There was this bigshot called Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. He was one of the guys that done wrote the Indian Constitution. Like a Ben Franklin, but with a healthier tan. 

He had this big statue in the middle of the city and somebody had vandalized it. Broke it real good. So what, you ask? 

Well...recall how Muslims get all sensitive when someone mucks around with their holy books and prophets. Mr. B here, too, had his followers from a particular caste (a mini-religion, if you will) and they were not going to take this lying down. Burn down the city, they will.

The funny thing is that this riot was a great deal smaller than the Kaveri riots. But I happened to get caught in the wrong place in this one.

It was my first year working after college. I worked for a Japanese Company, Yokogawa Corp. And the office was minutes away from where the statue was vandalized.

I wasn't in the habit staying on top of local events then. So when I headed to work that morning on my motorcycle, I had only heard vague bits of news of this Ambedkar business. 

That was about to change.

Do you know when I do my best thinking? When I'm driving. Even in India, where defensive driving takes on a whole new meaning, I generally find it easy to think when I'm on a set of wheels. So I was thinking deep and hard, when I turned the corner near my office. And ran headlong into a mob.

Pundits will point out that I should have turned my motorcycle around and run like hell in the opposite direction. Maybe this is what I should have done. It would have been the smart thing to do. But my legs, which suddenly felt like they were filled with crushed ice-cubes, didn't know this. I froze. And my motorcycle very helpfully stalled and I just stood there like a dork till the mob was on top of me.

I was maybe a few hundred yards from my office. I could see the gates from where I stood.

There are some small insights that I took away from the incident and one of them is this. Even though your motor functions seize up in moments of danger, a certain part of your brain never stops working. The faithful data-cruncher that it is, it assiduously takes note of all stimuli and happily proceeds to tabulate, collate and correlate them, even as the rest of you takes a holiday.

So as the mob approached me, three possibilities on how this would play out flashed through this hard-working part of my brain.

(1) My motorcycle would be trashed and burnt.
(2) I would get manhandled and beaten up.
(3) Both of the above.

There was a fourth possibility that my brain didn't quite appreciate at the time and it came to me only in retrospect. It didn't occur to me till later that I might have been killed on that lovely, sunny morning in Bangalore.

Philosophical Aside: Do you know why that fourth possibility didn't occur to me at that immediate moment? This is why. It may sound a little bizarre to say this, but we all, each of us man jack, to a lesser or greater degree, believe that we really will live forever.

Let me explain that. Each organism, from almost the moment of its birth, is instinctively aware of its own mortality. It is not acquired wisdom, it is instinct. You don't have to read about it in a book to know it. That is why even an infant's senses are attuned to physical danger, that is why even an animal, following an atavistic hunch, runs away from the first predator that it sees. But we humans, maybe because we are more sentient and complex than other creatures, exhibit a strange duality towards our own mortality. We are fully aware of it, but we don't fully accept it.

Death comes to us all, sadly. It'll come to me one day, and it'll come to you. But do you know the very first feeling we'll feel when that moment of inevitability becomes apparent? It won't be terror, it won't be sadness. It'll be disbelief.

Sorry for the morbid tangent. I'll move right along.

A few people, who looked like they were leading the mob, peeled themselves from the crowd and came over to where I was standing. It looked like they wanted to talk.

Problem was that I didn't know Kannada, the local language. Have you ever mentally kicked yourself? It's not pretty.

Here's a piece of advice to all for what it's worth. If you are planning to live someplace foreign for a period of time, do yourself a favor and pick up the local language, no matter how grotesque it may sound to your cultured ears. Kindly ditch the Ugly American act, or Ugly Bengali act, or Ugly North Indian act (South Indians will know exactly what I'm talking about) or whatever your preferred act is and learn the local tongue. Every community happens to think that their own language is beautiful and you will be doing yourself scant harm by humoring them.

So these guys came up to me. And they spoke to me in Kannada. And when it became clear to them that I didn't understand the local language (remember that had they been in a slightly worse mood, my not knowing the language could easily have been enough grounds for me getting badly beaten up), one of them started speaking to me in broken Hindi.

Did I know who Ambedkar was? Yes sir, I did, he was a great man. Did I know that his statue had been vandalized? Yes I did, and it was a shame, a crying shame. What did I do for a living? I was an engineer. Where was I going? To work, my office was right there, look. Did I know that I should not have been going to work on such a sad, shameful day? Yes I did but my office didn't declare a holiday and I might lose my job, my first job, if I didn't go (You sometimes get creative in moments of crisis).

He looked me over for a little while, a little while that seemed very long to me, and then nodded his head. I was to go. I swung my leg over the seat of my motorbike, preparing to kick-start it. He shook his head. I was to walk my bike the rest of the way to the office. As a mark of honor to Mr. Ambedkar, of course.

Which I did. It was a small bargain to make.

Riot #1

Here's my first experience of a riot.

Year: 1991.

Place: Bangalore, where I went to college.

The reason: Fuck knows. 

No seriously, it was a dispute over a water sharing arrangement with the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu.

A really short lesson in geography, mainly for Rob: The river Kaveri flows through the states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. TN is downstream and suffers severe water shortage if Karnataka decides to not release sufficient quantities to TN during the year. The Supreme Court of India has the tough task of arbitrating a water-sharing plan between the two states. 

In 1991, which was a harsh year with little rain, the Court directed Karnataka to release water to Tamil Nadu. Since Karnataka itself was parched, the result was widespread anti-Tamil riots in Bangalore and the rest of Karnataka, which left one thousand people dead and caused the displacement of a hundred thousand Tamils. Tamils are a hefty thirty percent of Karnataka's total population.

They are right. In the future, wars will be fought over water, not oil.

After two days of rioting, the government of Karnataka got desperate and imposed city-wide curfews. No assembly or congregating outside. City pretty much limped along after 5 PM every day since nobody dared travel anywhere.

I was in my second year of college at the time of the Kaveri riots. But college was closed for summer vacation when the riots started and I needed to get back to my parents in Calcutta. I had a train ticket in my hand. The problem was getting to the train. A taxi or a bus couldn't be had for love or money. The mob had a bad habit of burning down anything within the city moving on wheels. Outbound trains and planes were still running of course, but the catch was that you had to get to the railway station or the airport.

I was not alone in wanting to travel. My college-mate and friend A also had a ticket. His parents lived a few blocks from mine in Calcutta. 

After sitting down and brainstorming all morning, we reached the only well thought out, clear-eyed, mature decision that was possible, given the circumstances. We would make a run for the railway station, hell yeah! A little riot wasn't going to stop us, no sir. 

But what about transportation? No problem. Two of our friends, Sn and H, offered to drop us off at the railway station on their motorcycles.

I would like to request everybody to note at this point that humans are, fundamentally, irrational. Even a simple exercise in cost-benefit is beyond us. Our thinking went like this. If we don't go, we lose the ticket and the money. There is no refund. We also lose the vacation because we won't be able to get another ticket for a couple of days later at such short notice, without paying an enormous amount of money for a ticket on the black market. Case closed.

I would also like to say that this little story gives us a glimpse into one particular model of human reasoning that I simply refer to as "testicular reasoning". There were about fifteen guys huddled together that morning in our apartment. This included my three room-mates and a bunch of guys from the dorm. And not one, not a single one, said, "Wait, maybe you guys should rethink this." They all said, "Go, what's the worst that can happen?"

Thanks guys. With friends like you, ...

A and I wisely decided to not tell our respective girlfriends, who were in Bangalore, of our brilliant plan, because they would have freaked. Girls are not prone to testicular reasoning. They lack the equipment. My girlfriend had already cancelled her own ticket to Delhi. Our plan was to reach Calcutta and then call them up to tell them what a couple of clever geniuses we were (This is exactly what we did later, and let me only say that this was also not a smart thing to do.)

So anyway, in the evening, A and I put our worldly belongings into a couple of small knapsacks and hopped onto Sn and H's motorcycles. I rode with Sn and A with H. And we braved the curfew.

Thinking back, it was an uneventful ride. Anti-climax, eh? We saw a few gutted cars, buses and two-wheelers, and a few fires in the distance and that was it. No howling mobs, nothing. The curfew was doing its work, I think. We were concerned that we would be stopped by cops enforcing the curfew and they would promptly lock us up in jail (or a padded cell) for the crime of being in possession of low IQs. But that didn't happen. Thinking back again, and now that I have a better sense of the scale of the damage of the riots, I would like to say that we were very lucky. And it was an incredibly stupid thing to do.

We took a lot of risk by deciding to make a run for the station. And when I think about it, Sn and H took an even bigger risk because we were safe once we reached the station, but they had to drop us off and go back. I still remember them fondly and would like to take this opportunity to both thank them from the bottom of my heart and to say to them, "You stupid fu*ks, what were you thinking!!"

The second incident was a lot more up close and personal, and scarier. Till the next post.

What a riot

India has seen many civil riots since Partition and Independence. The most severe are those that have happened between Hindus and Muslims. In the United States, it's race. In India, it's religion. To each his own poison.

When it comes to religion, polytheism and monotheism don't mix and Hindus and Muslims have opposite viewpoints. And sometimes, either one group or the other will choose to demonstrate their viewpoint a little forcefully by getting all medieval on the other, and a few bricks and Molotov cocktails will get slung around. All in good spirit, of course.

But seriously, riots are serious and sordid business. People get hurt. And worse.

I have been, twice in my life, been too close to civil riots. The second time was too close for comfort.

More about both these "close encounters" in the next post.

Cue dramatic music, licensed from Twilight Zone

The Art Of Flying

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of flying:

There is an art, it says, or rather a knack to flying.

The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Pick a nice day, it suggests, and try it.

The first part is easy.

All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it's going to hurt.

That is, it's going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground.

Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.

Clearly, it's the second point, the missing, which presents the difficulties.

One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It's no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won't. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you're halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it's going to hurt if you fail to miss it.
It is notoriously difficult to prise your attention away from these three things during the split second you have at your disposal. Hence most people's failure, and their eventual disillusionment with this exhilarating and spectacular sport.

If, however, you are lucky enough to have your attention momentarily distracted at the crucial moment by, say, a gorgeous pair of legs (tentacles, pseudopodia, according to phyllum and/or personal inclination) or a bomb going off in your vicinity, or by suddenly spotting an extremely rare species of beetle crawling along a nearby twig, then in your astonishment you will miss the ground completely and remain bobbing just a few inches above it in what might seem to be a slightly foolish manner.

This is a moment for superb and delicate concentration.

Bob and float, float and bob.

Ignore all considerations of your own weight and simply let yourself waft higher.

Do not listen to what anybody says to you at this point because they are unlikely to say anything helpful.

They are most likely to say something along the lines of, "Good God, you can't possibly be flying!''

It is vitally important not to believe them or they will suddenly be right.

Waft higher and higher.

Try a few swoops, gentle ones at first, then drift above the treetops breathing regularly.

Do not wave at anybody.

When you have done this a few times you will find the moment of distraction rapidly becomes easier and easier to achieve.

You will then learn all sorts of things about how to control your flight, your speed, your manoeuvrability, and the trick usually lies in not thinking too hard about whatever you want to do, but just allowing it to happen as if it was going to anyway.

You will also learn how to land properly, which is something you will almost certainly cock up, and cock up badly, on your first attempt.

There are private flying clubs you can join which help you achieve the all-important moment of distraction. They hire people with surprising bodies or opinions to leap out from behind bushes and exhibit and/or explain them at the crucial moments. Few genuine hitch-hikers will be able to afford to join these clubs, but some may be able to get temporary employment at them.

A Passage To India

I grew up in India.

But not really.

Here's the deal. I lived through my teens in a Bahrain, a middle east oil mecca.

With perfect hindsight, there really is not too much to say about my life in Bahrain. The one word that jumps to mind is "comfortable" when I think of life there. It was a comfortable place, it was a comfortable life. It made you a little pampered, a little self-centered, and perhaps a little silly. But it was comfortable.

I went to India at the age of seventeen. It was a big transition. India is not kind to a self-centered silly bastard. It makes you grow up. Fast. In India, I first understood what loss of innocence means.

India is about the competition. Want that world-class education at the IIT? Yes, you and a million others. Have at it. Want to buy something as simple as a train ticket on a particular day? Get in line, fella, and I hope you brought the baccy 'cause this is gonna be a long day. 

Something as simple as driving is a slugfest because the ratio of motorists to roads is heavily skewed in favor of the motorists. Honking is not considered impolite, it is an essential driving tactic. It's a way of saying, "Gimme back my road, you freak!"

Having money helps but what really counts is who you know. Those who have these things get along just peachy. The rest of us have to duke it out in the arena. But believe you me, the scratching and the clawing teaches you a few valuable things that you never forget.

But India teaches you more than to just compete something ferocious. In India, possibly for the first time in my life, I became aware of who I was. I got a sense of identity and a sense of how I was connected to others. I saw a rich and tolerant culture. I saw a vibrant people. I experienced it because I lived it (No my dear, short two-week visits won't cut it, you have to be there). I fell in love. And of course, sometimes I hated it, because there is a thin line between love and hate. You hate with the most virulence those that you love with the most vitality, yes?

I have seen a few places since. I have travelled. I suppose one can say that I have travelled far. But have I travelled well?

There is a word in Sanskrit, vaastu haara--the dispossessed, the unrooted, the rootless. I am a migrant, a vaastu haara.

Perhaps we all are to a degree.

The Last Word

Creep into thy narrow bed,
Creep, and let no more be said!
Vain thy onset! all stands fast.
Thou thyself must break at last.

Let the long contention cease!
Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
Let them have it how they will!
Thou art tired: best be still.

The Last Word, Matthew Arnold

Vain thy onset! all stands fast. I am amazed and a little touched at the fatalism of that line. Vain have been your attacks. Look around you, my dear child, everything is just as it was before you began. The world has gone its own merry way, dancing its own mincing waltz, oblivious to your frothing and fuming.

The world does indeed have its own irresistible inerita and sometimes it's not within the means of you and I to change that momentum.

Talking about Indian politics is like this. It is a frustrating and painful exercise, uncannily like  beating your head against a solid brick wall. Take the example of India educating Pakistan by giving them IIT seats and whatnot. When I said that they would do this very thing the first time, it's not like I believed it. Sometimes you just say things just cuz. You know, for the effect. You don't actually think that the morons will go ahead and prove you right.

Indian politicians are interesting. It is said that politicians tend to choose public programs with short-run benefits but long-run costs. Indian politicians take this a step further and choose policies with no visible short-run benefits and devastating long-run costs.

Actually, the more I explore Indian politics, the more I am convinced of one lamentable fact: India's political problems are rooted in culture, not politics.

Now don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with the culture itself. In fact, it is a rich and pluralistic culture that is capable of seeing many different views. But the trouble starts when this cultural pluralism is injected into politics and especially into foreign policy. Politics is a strategic game, not a love-fest. Those who exhibit the most hardnosed thinking serve the country and people best, not necessarily those with the largest hearts.

There is an unmistakable sadness in seeing something or someone you love going down the proverbial tubes, and the country of your birth is no exception. And it is sadder to think that there may be precious little that you can do to change that unfortunate reality.

Maybe I'll make this a day-to-day account kind of blog. You know, interesting things like what I ate for lunch yesterday or how my day went. Or some gossip about Britney Spear's latest boytoy. Maybe make it fun, like. Add a little bit of humor, yes?

Yes, that's what I'll do. Yes, yes, absolutely. What fun.

Uh...I don't remember what I ate for lunch yesterday.

I think I need a hobby.

Or maybe find myself a narrow bed.

An Interesting Exercise

For those who even marginally care about terrorism it is instructive to do the following exercise:

Open up your favorite browser, navigate to www.google.com, take a deep breath, and type in the phrase "Pakistan terrorism" in the search box. If you have the time and inclination, go through the articles that result from this search.

To contrast, also try "India terrorism" and note the difference.

What, Me Worry?

I hate to quote myself, but in the post Educating Rita, I asked a question. Do you think that it is a flight of fancy to consider that India will someday actually spend money on Pakistan's education? Here's one thing that I have learned in my years of being an Indian: "Never, EVER, say never."

Almost prophetically, India has made good on that promise. Read the short article below with some patience. My rant follows the article.

India willing to offer IIT seats to Pak. students
Apr. 18, 2005

India is willing to offer seats to Pakistani students in institutions of higher learning such as the IITs and management institutes, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, said today. He saw tremendous potential in Indian and Pakistani scientists working together in the field of bio-technology and attached great importance to promoting cooperation in the field of education. Singh told Indian and Pakistani Editors here that he had mentioned this broadly to President Pervez Musharraf, during their talks here but "he could not do more in a meeting lasting only two hours". Responding to a question about restrictions on the exchange of newspapers, books and magazines between the two countries, Prime Minister said that in the age of internet and communication revolution such restrictions made no sense. When a Pakistani Editor complained about the difficulties in journalists obtaining visas to visit India, Singh said that all irritants affecting people-to-people contact should be removed. External Affairs Minister K Natwar Singh, who was present, promised to have the visa difficulties sorted out.

The gist of the article above is that Pakistani students will now have seats reserved for them at the IITs and IIMs. For non-Indians on this blog, IITs are the Indian Institutes of Technology and IIMs are the Indian Institutes of Management. These colleges are world class and Indians fall all over themselves to get into these colleges because getting into one means that you are set for life, career wise.

To sweeten the deal, these colleges are publicly funded, which means that those who study there get a world class education for practically free. Imagine a Stanford eduction. For free.

The catch is that there are a limited number of seats and the candidates are carefully screened by a pretty challenging entrance examination. Many Indians who try get screened out. If the latest proposal goes through, a chunk of this limited number of seats will be set aside exclusively for Pakistani students. Note that I said Pakistani students, not foreign students. This generosity is aimed squarely at Pakistan. It is not an egalitarian measure to open up the IITs to all foreign students.

It takes all of what little self-control I have to restrain myself from saying what I really feel about this latest gesture of goodwill. I am aware that about a dozen people read this blog including several women, and in deference to that, I will only say that mere words cannot describe the emotion I felt when I saw that article in the newspaper. I have an averagely large vocabulary but it failed me. And maybe it's not my vocabulary's fault.

Words have limited utility in the sense that they are able to describe only a small window of emotions in the spectrum. Events sometimes occur that push the human emotional response beyond the borders of this window. That is why people say things like, "I was left speechless with amazement." or "I was struck dumb by his actions." I now understand exactly what those sentences mean.

So why is this latest move so bad? Here's why.

Most people would accept this as a fair statement that it is wise to reward good behavior (but not excessively) and punish bad behavior (unless there are mitigating circumstances, but if you do, then firmly). This is true at an individual level and so must necessarily apply even more steadfastly at a national level, given the high stakes that nations play for. And most nations play roughly within this framework of reciprocal incentives. Sometimes you may reward somebody just for the heck of it, without a corresponding gesture, but rewarding bad behavior is definitely a no-no, a strategic gaffe that only the utterly politically naive would commit.

Having said that, one would be tempted to think that this latest gesture from India is the result of a corresponding gesture of goodwill from Pakistan.

If you find this corresponding gesture, do drop me a line. Meanwhile, allow me to point out that the Theocratic Fundamentalist Islamic Republic of Pakistan, with sickening frequency, sponsors acts of terrorism on Indian soil. Almost daily, Indians are butchered in cold blood in Kashmir and elsewhere in India by Pakistan-backed terrorists. And what is our response? IIT seats, that's what.

I'll probably bust a blood-vessel saying this over and over in this blog, but here goes again: The divide between India and Pakistan is not an economic divide, it is not an educational divide; it is an ideological divide. And there is nothing, nothing that India can do that will bridge that divide. No amount of IIT seats, no number of buses will close that gap. The burden is on Pakistan to change. The best we can do from our side, as the wise man said, is to speak softly and carry a big stick. And, for the love of god, let's stop handing out the carrots indiscriminately.

Why exactly are we falling all over ourselves to reward Pakistan and to become Pakistan's sugar daddy? The United States is filling that role quite nicely, thank you very much. Let's give it a rest, shall we.

I have one thing to say to the dim-witted earthworms that currently pass for the leadership of India. And I'll say it in a few different languages in the hope that one of them will stick.

Appeasement doesn't work.
Appeasement no workie.
Appeasement nopus workum.
Appeasement no workus, you lobotomized fucks.
Appeasement nochito workibus.
*###&&&**!, you **&##ing miserable troglodytes.

That is all.

Remembering Old Friends

Rhea and Benjamin

I remember this picture from when we were doing that stupid stage show a couple of years ago.

Rhea is doing time in India (working, and she apparently hates the city she's in) and Benjamin is in Germany working. They are getting back together next year. Rhea is my wife's classmate from  kindergarten through high school and those two have been close friends almost forever. Benjamin is her half-Bengali boyfriend. Bengali father, German mother. These two prove that sports can be educational. Rhea paid her way through college in the US on a tennis scholarship and Benjamin played league soccer in Germany to put himself through college.

For those who fancy themselves budding tennis players, as I sometimes do, it is sobering to play a game of tennis with Rhea. You will not leave with your ego intact.

I've never tried playing soccer with Benjamin, and I don't even want to try. I used to be a passably good soccer player myself at one time and was totally crazy about the sport, but now, well...let's just say that I couldn't trap a soccer ball if you slathered it with krazy glue and threw it directly at my feet. I feel like crying every time I see myself play soccer now. All the grace is gone. I look like a small, mentally disturbed dinosaur trying to do a mating dance. Pathetic.

Benjamin and me used to play billiards, though. The rivalry shall continue when he's back.


Postscript:

I need not feel so bad about my tennis game. I've just been pointed to Rhea's official NCAA ranking. It appears that she ranked 12th across the Eastern United States in 2002. Here's the list (Click here) -- Rhea's name (Rhea Bose) is the 12th name in the Eastern Zone rankings. I'm guessing that this means something. So maybe I am not too bad a tennis player after all, eh?

Who am I kidding?

The Price Of Peace? About Seventeen Dollars.

There is a phrase that is gaining currency in fashionable intellectual circles and the Indian media when it reports on the India-Pakistan relationship. It is called "people-to-people contact". 

In fact, there is a little experiment going on right now. This experiment takes the form of a shiny new bus service starting on April 7, between Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, and Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir (or as the Pakis like to call it, Kashmir). 

This service, funded by the Indian government, will now allow Kashmiris to travel back and forth between the two zones in Kashmir. The price of a bus ticket is Rupees 750, which is about $17.

Predictably, there is a lot of chest-thumping going on among the hoi-polloi and chateratti about how this bus service will radically transform the geo-politics of the sub-continent by serving as the first and important step towards peace. Hmmm...now where have I heard that before?

The thinking goes like this: India and Pakistan don't get along. Why don't they get along? Because there is no people-to-people contact. Why isn't there people-to-people contact? Because they don't talk to each other as much as they should. Why don't they talk as much as they should? Because they don't have the facilities to talk to each other. Ergo, we need a bus service from India to Pakistan so that Indians can travel to Pakistan and talk to them about the weather and cricket. Peace is but of course the next logical step.

There is an inversion of cause and effect here that stuns me. India and Pakistan hate each others guts not because of a lack of people-to-people contact. The lack of people-to-people contact is because India and Pakistan hate each others guts.

Those who believe that India and Pakistan don't get along because of a lack of people-to-people contact would do well to remember that Pakistan was, as recently as 1947, not a separate country. It was a part of India. There was plenty of people-to-people contact. And that, dear readers, was precisely the problem. As everybody knows very well, these former Indians suddenly decided that all this contact stuff was not their cup of tea and that they needed a country of their own. Never mind that forming this brand new country would require the mass migration of millions of people at a scale unequaled in history. The mass migration by the way, caused the mass slaughter of one million people (yes, one followed by six zeroes) through a bloody civil war.

That number--one million--rolls easily off the tongue, doesn't it? Let me put that number in perspective: the United States lost about a tenth of that number, a total of 120,000 people, in World War I. They lost less than half that number, about 400,000, in World War II. Even in the Civil War, the bloodiest war in United States history, the number of casualities was a little over half that number, coming in at 620,000 theater and non-theater deaths.

Let me say this again because this bears repeating: India and Pakistan hate each other not because of a lack of people-to-people contact; the lack of people-to-people contact is because India and Pakistan hate each other. And the root cause of this hatred is so plain to see and indeed so well documented that one cannot miss it unless one's head was firmly lodged in one's ass.

The entire existence of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan revolves around one single intolerant idea: the idea that Hindus and Muslims cannot co-exist peacefully. This is a typically Islamic idea because Hindus are idolaters and infidels of the worst sort, you see, and thus abhorrent in the Islamic worldview. They are suitable only for conversion or death. And Hindus, can you blame them, don't buy this. And that, my dear readers, is why India and Pakistan don't get along. 

And I ask again. What has changed between 1947 and now that makes for these ultimately pointless overtures like the bus service from Kashmir to Kashmir which both waste taxpayers' money and create security risks that must be mitigated?

The doves will not sing simply because a bunch of Indians and Pakistanis suddenly decide to get together and talk about cricket and the weather. You can run bus services to Pakistan until you're blue in the face, but it will not matter fuckall, pardon the French, in the grand scheme of things. Until a Hindu and a Muslim can sit down together and respectfully agree to disagree and make an honest effort at understanding each other's point of view without reaching for iron, we are doomed to be at each other's throats. And here's the thing, the majority of Hindus are already sitting down and willing to discuss it. Accommodating and internalizing an Islamic worldview is trivial to a Hindu. In fact, he has already done this. It's your move, my Muslim friend.

Nations and Human Conflict

I have heard the opinion that nation-states are evil. Sure, they can be. A nation is an aggregate of humans, and it seems reasonable that there would be some evil in that ball of wax. I have also heard the opinion that nation-states create conflict and erasing boundaries between nation-states would go far in solving the problem of human conflict. Kumbaya, my lord, no more wars.

I disagree.

There is confusion between means and ends here. The desire is a world without conflict, not a world without boundaries. A conflict-free world may or may not be achieved through the means of a boundary-free world. The end is the invariant, not the means. I would for example find it acceptable to live in a world with boundaries which achieves semi-durable peace through n-way nuclear (or conventional) deterrence.

Humans are territorial and human conflict is a biological problem. The problem is paradoxically amplified by the native intelligence and resourcefulness of the species. Nation-states don't contribute to territoriality. It is the other way around. Confusion of cause and effect is not nice since we tend to treat symptoms rather than cause. Nation-states are a symptom and eliminating them will solve precisely squat.

It is not always true that boundaries create conflicts. Here is empirical evidence. India and Nepal share a boundary but have largely managed to co-exist peacefully. On the other hand, there is no boundary that I see between the neighborhood where my parents live in Calcutta and the Muslim neighborhood that is a few blocks away, but I still wouldn't recommend that my parents take a casual evening stroll in the Muslim neighborhood after, oh...say, sunset.

A Good Blog

I stumbled upon the wonderful blog of Sukanya Majumdar last night. It's easy to spend hours reading the blog. She's intelligent and witty. I really love the way she puts things. Hope the chapatis are working out for her. The link is http://saintfaron.blogspot.com.

I sorta understand and empathize with her about the breathless pace of work. I remember being like that during the first few years of work. I had an inflatable pillow stashed in my office drawer. And I slept under the desk about two to three nights a week. Morning was a quick cup of coffee and a shower at S's place which was nearby. And then it was back to the hacking and slashing.

I have since learned to bring work home.

Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep

This may be an urban legend, but apparently this poem was first found among the belongings of a soldier who died in action in Northern Ireland. Nobody knows who wrote it.

Subsequently, claims of authorship of this poem were made, notably by Mary Frye.

Do not stand at my grave and weep;
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

 

Hitchhiking Through This Dimension

Douglas Adams was priceless. In the third book of the Hitchhiker's trilogy, Life, the Universe, and Everything, a robot called Marvin the Paranoid Android with the "planet-sized brain" demonstrates his immeasurable mental superiority over Zem the Mattress, who is a talking mattress (why not) from the marshy planet of Squornshellous Zeta.

"I gave a speech once," he said suddenly and apparently unconnectedly. "You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number."
"Er, five," said the mattress.
"Wrong," said Marvin. "You see?"

---

Douglas Adams died four years ago. Fans all over the world, saddened by the loss of this comic-philosopher with the biting wit, are left wondering. Is he at peace? Is he in a better place? Is he still with us in spirit?

The answer, of course, is forty-two.

The Meaning of Life

"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."

 In Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, a race of super-intelligent beings constructs a super-intelligent computer called Deep Thought. They then proceed to ask this hypersmart computer the Ultimate Question: What is the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything?

The computer replies that this will take a bit of time and quietly goes into compute mode for the next seven and a half million years. Generations perish and suns collapse before the computer announces that it has finally discovered the answer. The answer, it informs the breathless throng of waiting people, is forty-two.

In algorithm theory, there is a class of problems which are known as NP-hard problems. Problems that belong to this class are mathematically intractable; they have no known solution in polynomial time.

Consider the simple task of searching for a given number within a list of unsorted numbers. We might take a brute force approach and sequentially examine each number until we find the desired one. The upper bound in this case is simply the size of the list. Or we could sort the list and successively divide into equal intervals till we find the interval that contains the number. This is called a binary search, and the worst case performance of such a search is log n, base 2. The run times are polynomial functions.

NP-hard problems, on the other hand, have no known solutions in polynomial time. For example, the classic Traveling Salesman problem goes: A salesman has to visit a certain number of cities as part of a sales tour. He starts at his home city, visits each city on the tour and returns to his home city. There is a cost to travelling between each pair of cities. It is cheaper to travel between cities that are closer together than to cities far away. In what order must the salesman visit the cities so that he visits each city exactly once and the total cost of the tour is the least possible? Alternatively stated, the question is that of finding a least cost spanning path through a graph in which the cities are the nodes and the travel costs are the edges.

The TSP is hellishly difficult to solve for even moderately large values of n, the number of cities. The question seems simple, but the solution is hard.

The most fundamental questions that we ask often seem very simple, yet defy satisfactory answers. I remember reading somewhere that biologists are still in disagreement about what exactly constitutes life. Imagine that. 

Why is there something instead of nothing? 

What is time? 

Why can't we reverse entropy? In Isaac Asimov's words, "You can't turn smoke and ash back into a tree."

We are each looking for personal answers to our own fundamental questions. But as Douglas Adams' computer says, maybe we need to find the right question first.

Or maybe not. Who the heck knows. I need an ice-cream.

A Birthday

The Ides of March happens to be the birthday of my most favorite New Yorker and one of my closest friends.

I got to know Kevin about five years ago, when we were doing a sales call together in Denver--trying to push a softswitch solution to a large telecom company. We arrived in Denver one whole evening early and decided to head to the nearest watering hole. A few hours and a lot of drinks later, we eventually did make it back to our hotel rooms. I think.

If memory serves, we lost that contract in Denver. But we became friends.

We have a lot in common. We are both are involved with technology. We are more than a little interested in ancient and medieval history. We are, in matters of faith, agnostics (on good days) and atheists (on bad days). We both like to go shoot off rifles and handguns on the range on weekends. We both think we know what the "E" in Alfred E. Neumann stands for.

Kevin now lives with his wonderful wife Debbie in Plano, Texas, where we used to live before we moved to this icy wasteland. He occasionally drops me these "eat-your-heart-out-you-twit-whyja-move-to-wisconsin" kinda notes from Plano informing me that the temperature there is a constant 85 degrees. Maybe I'll drag his behind to Milwaukee one of these days and introduce him to the joys of shovelling snow from the driveway.

The historically inclined might find it mildly ironic that he's Irish Catholic, and she's English-Canadian Protestant.

Indian Cricket and American Healthcare

What is the similarity between Indian cricket and American healthcare? They are both rackets. That is the similarity. The difference is that they are different kinds of rackets.

There are two kinds of rackets. I like to call these (a) Orthogonal rackets and (b) Non-orthogonal rackets. Yes, I'm clever like that.

A racket is orthogonal when it doesn't intersect (and therefore affect) our lives directly. An example would be Indian cricket. Indian cricket is a racket by all reckoning. Those on the inside make a lot of money in spite of sustained mediocrity, there is little or no penalty for non-performance and incentive structures exist regardless of results. A classic racket.

One defining characteristic of a racket is that the reward to those who happen to be on the inside is disproportionate to the level of service rendered to those on the outside, and Indian cricket fits this definition quite nicely.

But cricket in India doesn't affect our lives directly. You can always choose to not spend your discretionary income on cricket.

American healthcare, on the other hand, is a racket that intrudes. We have high insurance premiums, high drug costs, and humongous and arcane hospital bills. And healthcare, unlike sports, is not something you can choose to not spend your money on.

To give you an idea of the costs of healthcare in America, here's a personal example. I recently fractured my ankle and needed some fixing. I went to an orthopaedic doctor and he patched me up good. The level of service I received from him would be very similar to what I would receive in India for this particular procedure. But what about the cost? In spite of being one hundred percent covered by my company's health plan, I spent $300 out of pocket for a total of one primary visit (when he put on my cast) and three follow-up visits to the doctor. Converted to INR, $300 would be INR 13,000, give or take. When is the last time you heard somebody in India pay Rs. 13,000 for a non-surgical procedure not involving hospitalization? And this was only my out-of-pocket costs, and not the total cost of the treatment. I haven't calculated the cost of the treatment, but I can imagine how it'll make my eyes bulge if I did.

Studying one of the many bills we got from the doctor during the entire treatment period was enlightening. Here's one item: $1600 for "surgical procedures". The surgical procedure, as far as I could tell, consisted of looking at the X-ray, determining that there was a fracture and putting on the cast. This surgical procedure did not include the cost of the X-ray, or the lab fees, or the cost of the cast. All of these were separate line items. $1600 was the cost of strapping on the darned cast.

I shouldn't be complaining because my company has a health plan that provides 100% medical coverage. But wait, 100% coverage is not to be confused with "covers everything." 100% coverage simply means that whatever the insurance company chooses to cover is covered one hundred percent. For example, when I broke my ankle, I needed crutches to get around. The doctor stressed that I not bear any weight at all on the injured leg because that may cause dislocation of the bones and require surgery. The insurance company refused to cover the cost of the crutches because they deemed it non-essential to the treatment. What were they expecting me to do? Crawl around on my stomach, commando-style, for two months?? The cost of the crutches thus came out of my own pocket. I am sure that a better health plan would have covered the crutches. You get what you pay for, I suppose. But a better plan costs more. I figure that if I choose my own medical plan and forego my company's, I would pay about $500 a month for health insurance out of my own pocket.

I guess I better not get sick much, huh?

Impermanence of Empire

Sic transit gloria mundi, translated as, "The glory of the world passes thus."

History has it that after a Roman general came home after a big victory, he was given the honor of a triumph, a commemorative march through the city.

As the general was towed about in a chariot with the plebs and patricians cheering, behind him stood a slave, whispering into his ear: "Sic transit gloria. This glory will pass. You too, my master, are mortal."

The poem below is Ozymandias, by Percy Shelley. I read it many moons ago. Came across it recently in someone's blog and the memory came back.

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Chaat in Chicago

This Sunday evening after my wife got back from her customary shopping (Ouch!), we decided that we should go have some chaat in Chicago, which is about an hour's drive from where we live. For non-Indians: "Chaat" is an umbrella word for a whole bunch of hot Indian snack food that'll knock your socks off with the heat if you aren't careful. We also wanted to hook up with Parijat, a dear friend who was a junior in my college, and who is now completing his internship at GE.

Parijat comes from an pretty impressive line of soccer players. He is the nephew of P.K. Banerjee, former player and coach of the Indian national soccer team. His other uncle is Prasun Banerjee, a midfielder from the glory days of Bengali soccer. His father used to play for Eastern Railways. Parijat himself is a good player, but did not take up soccer professionally.

But all of that is not Parijat's claim to fame. His claim to fame is that he is an intelligent, mature, witty, and engaging young man who is a terrific friend of mine. Even though he was four years my junior in college when we met, the bond we formed was immediate. A bond of friendship that has endured to this day. Maybe I am getting old, but it somehow touches my heart in a way that I cannot explain when he introduces me to his friends with the words, "Hey so-and-so, this is my brother from Milwaukee." He does not say "friend"; he says "brother."

I have never corrected him.

Anyhow, we met up at one of those hole-in-the-wall chaat places on Devon Ave and sat there and jawed off till almost closing time. We got to talking about Sudip, another dear friend who is back in Bangalore and who, since he was absent and thus unable to defend himself, was mostly in the wrong. Parijat told us about some howlers that Sudip has pulled in the recent past and all of us nearly busted our guts laughing. We laughed till we were almost sitting on the floor and people in the shop were giving us strange looks.

The chaat, unfortunately, sucked. C'est la vie, as the French would say. And the French, I have observed, are usually right about these things.

Educating Rita (and in our spare time, Pakistan)

We Indians collectively spend a lot of time thinking about the shenanigans of our neighbour to the West That would be Pakistan, in case you are geographically-challenged. When the conversation chances on the subject of Pakistan over Saturday evening cocktails, phrases like "nuclear blackmail", "cross-border terrorism" and "airplane hijackings" keep cropping up. Some of us even spend a great deal of time lying awake at night and secretly worrying about who has the bigger...uh, cricket team.

Everybody, including our ever brain-dead government, has a formula for what will succeed in normalizing relations between our two countries. These formulae include, but are not limited to: (1) a bus tour to God Knows Where For God Knows Why, (2) Track II Diplomacy, (3) People to People Contact, (4) lighting candles along the Wagah border (don't laugh, this will help; we just need more candles) and (5) mobilizing a million men along the Pakistan border once in a while. 

The last option in that list does not seem to scare Pakistan, but for some reason seems to scare the Americans. Who in turn, scare the Pakistanis. We live in a strange world.

Well, if everybody can have a formula, why can't I? I therefore declare, without further ado, that I have not one, but two prescriptions for normalizing relations between Pakistan and India. Both are unlikely to work, but are at least as practical as any that I have heard from anybody so far. The first, unfortunately, is rather costly in rupee terms because it involves nuclear weapons (those cost a ton of money), but the second, happily, is rather cheap to implement and involves every non-sterile Pakistani male above the age of eighteen and a blunt pair of garden scissors.

...mu ha ha...mu ha ha ha...mu ha ha ha ha...

Ahem...sorry.

I had a recent conversation with a guy at a party. This guy is a dumb fuck. And yes, he really said this.

He: I believe that Pakistan must develop; this will actually benefit India. It will solve all the problems between us. 

The Wise One, aka Me: What do you mean "develop"? Like develop economically? Will this guarantee that they will suddenly hug trees and beat swords into plowshares? What if they turn out like Saudi Arabia? Saudi Arabia has a per capita GDP four times higher than that of India. But they are still crazy.

He: No, by development, I mean educate them. That is what I call true development. Education will prevent them from being hostile to us and committing acts of violence against us.

I don't know what exactly education does or does not prevent you from doing, but here's something that education apparently does not prevent you from doing: It does not prevent you from making uneducated, ill-thought-out, and bone-stupid motherhood statements.

I wonder about people like this dumb fuck. It is quite possible that they are confusing literacy with education. Or maybe they entertain the hope that education will automatically lead to some sort of enlightenment. I have news for them. People more often tend to wrap their ideologies around their education rather than the other way around. Education is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for the spiritual enlightenment of a bunch of bigoted people in ideological stasis. I present myself as an example--well educated AND with more prejudices than you can shake a middle finger at. But honest enough to know it.

Let us examine the link between literacy and ideology. Here is a short and very incomplete list of countries with literacy rates higher than India's: Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, China, Libya. One immediately sees with searing clarity how literacy has deeply affected the above countries and softened their respective ideologies to the point of oatmeal mushiness.

I have a bunch of questions about of the link between education and ideology.

Was the Soviet Union uneducated? Did being educated prevent them from clinging on to an unsustainable ideology? Were the Nazis uneducated? Was World War II-era Japan uneducated? The British, who colonized and brutalized half the world...were they uneducated? The Americans who believed in Manifest Destiny, stole land and decimated native civilizations...were they uneducated? Did Francisco Pizzaro not know his letters? Was Hernando Cortez uneducated? Were all the Islamic invaders of India uneducated? Did Aleksandros The Macedonian, who carved a path of destruction across much of the Ancient World for no apparent reason other than dick-waving rights, lack a tutor?

The problem seems to be that they don't really teach enlightenment in college, do they? Nope, education is what you pay for, and education is what you get.

Pakistan, IMHO, needs reform. Education will follow. Actually, to be blunt about it, Islam needs reform. Pakistan will follow.

Just to explore this a little further, let us make a concession. Let us say that India will indeed benefit if Pakistan got a lot of education. What exactly will be the mode of delivering this education? Will India provide this? Will the United States provide this? Because Pakistan itself is certainly not showing much of an interest now, is it?

Aside: Do you think it is a flight of fancy to think that India will someday actually spend money on Pakistan's education? Here's one thing that I have learned in my years of being an Indian: Never, EVER, say never. If you think that India's attempting to educate Pakistan, much along the lines of the US trying to rebuild Iraq, is something that is unlikely to happen, think again. Ten years ago, I would have laughed my head off if someone told me that Indians would elect a lisping half-literate Italian immigrant to the highest office in the country, but who's laughing now?

Here is some added irony. From what I've seen, the same Indians who most believe that India can educate Pakistan and help it with its development, mysteriously enough have a tough time believing that the US can rebuild Iraq. Why this inconsistency?

Why the heck do some of us worry about Pakistan's development? We should be worrying about our own development, which is a significant problem in itself. If anything, we should be worrying about increasing the gap between our development and Pakistan's, not decreasing it.

Why do we live in denial like this? Is it more comforting this way? To believe that all that is needed for the species to collectively evolve into a non-violent non-predatory form is a little education? Or even a lot of education?

And am I being uncharitable when I call human beings violent and predatory? Don't shoot the messenger. Humans have themselves documented just how violent and predatory they are. Yes, there is a document! You will find this document in many places. You will find it in public libraries. You will find it in school classrooms. They even broadcast it on cable sometimes. I have heard that they call it "History".

What is your EQ?

I watched the Academy Awards last Sunday. It was the usual grand affair, of course. Plenty of sound and fury.

At some point during the leading up to the actual Oscars, there was a brief interview with Leonardo DiCaprio. In the interests of disclosure, I am beginning to like this guy. I used to think that this guy was always going to be something of a milkdud, going by his early movies like The Basketball Diaries, The Quick and the Dead (if you haven't watched this particular gem, add +1 to your blessings), and Titanic. But watch his recent stuff like Catch Me If You Can and The Aviator and you see a great actor in the making.

Anyhow, it appears that Mr. DiCaprio is an ardent environmentalist. While the other grand poobahs rolled up in fancy stretch limos the size of a city block, Leonardo puttered in driving a gas-electric hybrid car. This marks him as a decent human being in my book, whatever his other faults may be. There are worse things that you can do than care about the environment. One of the perennially sunny anchors asked Leonardo why he cared about the environment. Leonardo's reply was, "Well we must, because this is the one thing that can't defend itself."

Now, now. I think that there is an incredible amount of anthropocentric hubris in the above statement. It paints the environment as this delicate darling that will wither away to nothing if we don't care for it. The unstated assumption is that the environment is at a happy equilibrium at this moment in time and that it desires to continue to be at this equilibrium. If we bump it out of true, it will be hurt somehow.

Let's call a spade a spade. The earth is fine. It is our own welfare that concerns us. The earth will be perfectly happy at other equilibrium points. It won't be upset in the least. But the situation may not be all that hot for us--to use an expression--if the environment shifts to those other equilibrium points.

Consider for example what if the average temperature of the earth rose a hundred degrees. This would promptly turn most of the terrestrial surface, which does not go underwater, into a scorching hot desert. Would the earth care? Would it be happy? Sure it would. Nature, ever bountiful, will simply spawn a whole bunch of species suited to the extreme climate. If species can live in deep ocean biomes like geothermal vents, then this should be a snap. How about us humans though? Would we care if the temperature climbed a hundred degrees? You bet we would.

I repeat. We don't really care about the earth. There is no need to. We care about us.

Or consider this. What if nature "defended itself" by raising the mean sea level by twenty feet? Would nature be at equilibrium? Yes Virginia, it would. It would proliferate marine life out the wazoo. What about us, though?

Many of us say that we care about the environment and I am not saying that this is a bad thing. On the contrary. But in the interest of accuracy, I would submit that when we say that we care about the environment, what we are really saying is that we care about what will happen to us if we don't care about the environment. We don't care about the environment. Not really. What we care about is our own pockmarked hides.

So the real question is not whether the environment can defend itself. Sure it can. Can we afford to play with it, and wait to see exactly how it will defend itself? No, that would be stupid.