An Argumentative Indian

The Greatest Indian Rope Trick

2008-03-30T21:24:00.002-04:00

India has forever been an enigma for the western scholars of politics. Seeped as some of them were in their own theories about what makes a democracy work, they never took post independence India's unique and exceedingly important experiment in self-governance seriously. The faces of these commentators over the years have been different; the words in their columns laced with different degrees of incredulity and dismissal; the events provoking the pronouncements of the impending death of Indian democracy varied but the underlying refrain has always been the same- 'How can a country with India's size, poverty, diversity and complexity hope to survive as one nation, much less a united democratic, secular republic?!'

Obituaries were written, forecasts of looming demise made at every step of the way of the Indian experiment yet India continued to defy those gloomy predictions and charted its own unique path towards her improbable destiny. This march of Indian democracy strengthened the cause of the democratic ideas all over the world in ways that tomes of western volumes on political theory and the success of western democracies could never hope to do. For if the indian democracy had failed, it would have exposed democracy as an ideology that requires punishingly restrictive conditions for it to be of any operational value. Political theorists have maintained a whole gamut of conditions to hold in order for a fledgling democracy to work-- people must be educated enough; they should be economically prosperous enough; they should be politically aware enough; they should have a common dominant culture; they should speak one common language and so it goes. In other words, democracy was pronounced to be too impractical for the vast majority of people even by its most passionate adherents. It was seen much like a complex modern piece of machinery that requires too many independent parts to work together in perfect unison for it to have any practical utility. In this context, the indian democracy is a living and breathing example that democracy is not a machine but an organism which can, given somewhat favorable conditions, continuously evolve itself towards its own better versions.

The story of India's democracy is perhaps the most important story of post war 2oth century. In fact, I will go so far to say that it is the most important political contribution of last 100 years. That is why it is heartening to note that someone finally picked up his pen to tell this fascinating story in its entirety.

Ramachandra Guha's 'India After Gandhi' is a monumental work-- any work detailing the chaotic history of post independence India can not be anything but. It is full of entertaining anecdotes and staggering in the breadth of its research. Despite the inevitable difficulty of tying
together the seemingly varying narratives into a satisfying whole, it never wavers from its underlying theme--an insightful account of the challenges faced by Indian democracy over the years.

At one level, one may not go too astray in choosing to read this historical work as an adventure novel where the protagonist starts his life as a wounded underdog but the strength of his convictions enable him to overcome the apparently insurmountable odds. At another level, 'India After Gandhi' is also a story of the triumph of the ideals of her founding fathers. There can be no question-as the book makes it abundantly clear- that India and moreover the world at large were singularly lucky to have people of the calibre of Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Kriplani, JP, Ambedkar, Rajagopalachari and countless others who sowed the seeds and then nourished the fledgling sprout, helping to grow it into a big tree that now serves as an example for the rest of the world. Admittedly, the generations of politicians following those collosuses were minions but it is a tribute to the greatness of those nationalists that these minions have not been able to uproot the essential ideals of the indian nation from her soul. India continues to thrive, despite all the hiccups, challanges, frustrations, corruption, violence , communalism and a myriad number of regional problems ; it continues to serve as a beacon of hope to the freedom-loving, oppressed souls of the world assuring them that democracy and freedom is not the preserve of the elites; that they too can reap the rewards of democracy if only they can summon the courage to withstand harsh weather in order to sow its seeds. That perhaps is India's most lasting contribution to the rest of humanity and the greatest rope trick its conjurers have ever pulled.

A peerless life

2007-12-28T13:28:00.001-05:00

''There is a difference between a politician and a leader. A politician asks for sacrifices, a leader makes sacrifices''-- Benazir Bhutto

By making the ultimate sacrifice in a life full of great sacrifices Benazir-an Urdu word that translates to peerless- once again showed what a peerless leader she was. It is a tragedy not only for Pakistan but for the whole world that has lost a leader of stature and much promise for a region that needed her more than ever in these perilous times. I hope her sacrifice does not go in vain; I hope it strengthens the resolve of the People of Pakistan and their friends to fight the Jehadi forces that are hell-bent on tearing apart the fabric of civilizations to fulfill their nefarious desires of Islamic rule; I hope her life may mean something, if not in life then at least in death.

Rest in Peace, Daughter of the East.

Another egg on the face

2007-12-04T23:18:00.000-05:00

This is got to be some sort of record-- the number of mess ups that Bush administration has made over last 6 years or so. Barely one month after Bush and his cohorts' saber-rattlings concerning Iran, comes the report that Iran actually halted its nuclear program in 2003 and is years away from any sort of capability for a bomb. Just last month Bush had made his now infamous World War III comments regarding Iran and today once again he is made to look like a fool wrapped in an idiot inside a Moron. I shudder to think that there is still one full year to go before this nightmare ends.

As sick as it can get

2007-11-24T19:59:00.000-05:00

I finally caught Sicko on DVD today. I have heard a lot of people complain about how broken american healthcare system is; its been a strong, emotional issue for the general public for more than two decades and right now after the war in Iraq ranks as the second most important issue in the public consciousness. However, it is all well and good to hear about how bad things are and it is quite another to actually see and hear the stories of the people who have experienced the dark side of the system in all its gory details. Those horror stories are eye-opening and make your heart bleed and as a citizen of a developing country make you wonder - how is this possible in the richest and most powerful country in the world? A country that can come up with hundreds of billions of dollars to fund a war it should not have raged in the first place but can't seem to have enough money to solve its healthcare problems. One statistic sums up the story, America is ranked 37th -yes, not 5th, 10th ,20th or even 30th, a lowly 37th- judged according to the quality of its health care system in the world. It is ranked the lowest in the developed world right beside Cuba at 39th. Costarica, Malta, Portugal, Chile are among the few countries ranked above the most developed nation in the world. A statistic such as this is mind boggling for a country like USA and it should be enough to convince all concerned that there is something very seriously wrong with the healthcare system over here.

How did this sad state of affairs come about? Can America not afford to provide Universal Health Care to all its citizens, most of the developed nations do, so why not America. The reason is that many americans love the idea of universal health care but there are many more that love the idea of low taxes. The Universal Health care systems all over the world have been financed by the higher tax rates in those countries, which means more government control, more government spending and a bigger pay cut for the average worker. Americans want to have their cake and eat it too, lower taxes but universal coverage which certainly does not seem plausible. The market based system in US does not seem to doing its job so is there a market failure in this case? Is it possible to put right incentive structures in place so that the market-based health care system would work as well or may be better than the universal health care for the majority of people or is the health care system is something akin to Police protection which can best be provided by only the government and nobody else. These are the questions, that the hidden economist inside me raises and on the answers a lot is at stake. I hope that somebody soon finds out these answers and put something in place so that sick Americans -and foreigners in America I may add- don't have to cross borders to Canada or worse commit crimes to get into Guantanamo Bay so that they could get decent affordable health care. On that note, Hillary Clinton's plan certainly looks promising.

Nehru's India

2007-11-22T21:40:00.000-05:00

I am currently reading Ramcharan Guha's India After Gandhi, a comprehensive historical account of the modern indian nation state. I have not finished reading it, for at 700+ pages this book is no sunday afternoon light read; it is a book quite ambitious in its scope and extremely detailed in its research. It will surely rank as one of the most important books on the history of modern india. I am still around the 200th page but so far what has caught my eye and the imagination is the detailed account of the early events immediately after independence. The partition of India and the consequent large scale violence are fairly well-documented episodes in history. What is less well-documented and consequetly less well-known is the enormity of the task that the leaders of the new-born nation faced in building a united india. There was the enormous task of convincing 500+ princely states to give up their hereditary privileges and be part of the secular, democratic india; there was the matter of drafting a new constitution; there was the dispute of Kashmir and then there was the task of uniting a nation that was perhaps the most culturally diverse nation-state mankind had ever known. The task was enormous, perhaps the most arduous nation-building exercise ever undertaken, but as Nehru- the principal nation-builder- put it ," We are small men and the cause in front of us is great, but since the cause is great, some of that greatness will fall upon as well."

Nehru was right about the magnitude of the task, but he was self-deprecating while referring to himself as a small man. Great causes need great people to achieve them, and Nehru was exactly the sort of a man this exercise needed. He was India's equivalent of Thomas Jefferson and possessed many of the same qualities the great founding father of democratic ideals did.
He was a master orator, staunch nationalist, committed to secularism, a tireless worker, a wonderful writer and a gifted statesman. During his 14 years as Prime Minister- he strengthened India's democratic institutions, founded modern India's great educational institutions, propelled India towards its irreversible march on the path of a modern, secular, democratic republic and most importantly strengthened the idea of India and democracy in the minds of poverty-stricken, illiterate millions prone to violent outbursts in the name of caste, religion and language. He was a worthy heir to the Great Mahatma and successfully realized many of the ideals that Bapu himself envisaged.

Nehru was a giant of a man and if it were not for men like him India may not have even existed for so long. The fact that India has managed to survive despite proclamations to the contrary among many a great experts- prominent among them being Sir Winston Churchill- and not only it has survived, but despite enormous odds, its march has steadily been forever upwards. India's successes in its short history have been impressive but given its potential not truly spectacular, it could certainly have achieved much more. Many among Indians have blamed Nehru and Gandhi for India's failures in achieving more, they have painted Nehru as a flawed politician who in his hunger for power plunged India into communal chaos and then with his failed economic policies kept India into the darkness of poverty whereas if they had followed American capitalist system India would have been much better off, they argue. To the proponents of the first assertion, I say read your history first but for the second their is much fodder for thought. Nehru got a lot of things right in his tenure as Prime Minister but what he got disastrously wrong was in following the socialist, central planning model to the latter. However, for the critics of Nehru , it would help to have a little historical perspective. Central planning and socialist economy were the zeitgeist of post World War II years. Certainly, indians were justified in distrusting capitalism as they were at the receiving ends of western capitalism for a century or two, but as it were unbridled capitalism was out of favour even among the western economies. Post Great Depression, Roosevelt's New Deal and World War II, 'everybody was a Keynesian' meaning a believer in the policy of active government intervention. Free markets were viewed with distrust even in the bastion of capitalism- America and most economists agreed that active state planning is necessary for better economic development. In fact, P.C. Mahalanobis , architect of India's five year plans, actively sought the advice of western economists for India's economic policy decisions. The only lone voice of some standing who still advocated free markets at that time were great economists and future Nobel Laureates- Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Of course, now we know who was right and who was wrong but this we only know with the benefit of hindsight. Nehru's policy actions at that moment were exactly those that any good economist would have recommended. The only lesson that we can draw from this is that even the greatest of men can not do everything right, they are human too. This is no reason to castigate Nehru for he truly was one of the greatest leaders of modern human history. The ones we should truly be blaming are the subsequent generation of leaders who failed to see the changing paradigms and failed to embrace free market capitalism even when the writing was on the wall. If a person of the stature of Nehru was still around during the 70s , I am convinced that India's economic history would have been very different.

Meeting a Nobel Laureate

2007-11-15T18:57:00.000-05:00

Oh, the joy of unexpected pleasures, what is life without them? Thursday night, the day before Diwali, was probably the only time I truly regretted not having a camera with me, but that regret was more than compensated by the accompanying overwhelming joy I experienced on having a dream fulfilled. Everybody who is remotely interested in finance or economics has certainly heard of the giant name in this field- Nobel Laureate Robert Merton, one of the co-discoverer of Black-Scholes option pricing formula and the founding father of modern finance. Yes, I had the honor of meeting the Robert Merton in a dinner party, standing along side him, hearing him speak and lo and behold having the courage to ask him for an autograph on the back of a ticket stub. That ticket stub is now one of my prize possessions, a better gift for Diwali could scarcely be imagined. Now if I could meet Warren Buffett for next Diwali..

Return of the blogging days?

2007-11-01T13:51:00.000-04:00

Its been a long time since I put a pen to paper for a blog post (No, a few short posts in the whole year do not count). A lot has happened since then - I got a dream job, moved to The City and got a PhD proposal out of the way. Predictably, the turmoil accompanying all these events has left little time or inclination for blogging. However, to the rejoicement of the admirers of this little nook of the cyberworld -which is not an empty set by the way!- this draught of blog posts is about to end now as I have geared myself to be a more frequent contributor to the vast and growing fast world of blogs of no particular importance or interest to anyone. Stay tuned.

America's Burden

2007-08-16T16:06:00.000-04:00

Consider a hypothetical but plausible scenario : A man and a woman are locked in holy matrimony. The marriage actually happened because the man in question is a powerful alpha male who possesed the woman, despite her wishes to the contrary. It is little wonder then that the marriage was an abusive one, the husband made the wife her slave, and regularly gave her deep physical and mental scars. The woman, despite such a horrible life, still was able to eke out a living largely because of the self-interest of the husband. A sworn enemy of the husband saw this as an opportunity. He was a more powerful alpha male , but he also proclaimed himself as a benevolent one. He did not care much about the woman but in fact was eager to get rid of the husband and so he claimed that he actually wishes to rescue the woman from such an abusive relationship and despite good advice against any hasty judgment, gets rid of the husband. So far so good, the story gets complicated when it turns out that the man who died had a number of other enemies who now want to ravage the woman and her children. The powerful victorious alpha male did not anticipate such a turn of events and is wondering whether he should just abandon the woman to her fate and take the exit. The question is -- is the man morally justified to take such a course of action? The answer is obviously an emphatic NO. It is clear who is who in this tale. The woman is Iraq, the husband is Saddam and the benevolent alpha male is America. The most powerful nation in the world, despite all the noises emanating from Washington, just can not abandon its moral responsibilities in Iraq. Iraq is a moral burden for America, it can not be wished away. Of course, people are known to short change morality when facing an adversity and I suspect that this is exactly what America wants to do, shed its responsibility and leave the poor woman to her fate. The story will not end there though, this country will no longer be able to seek a moral high ground for any of its actions and, however cliche it may sound, president Bush is right in saying that it will "embolden the enemy". No matter how bad it gets in Iraq, how much money it costs, how many americans have to pay with their lives for Bush's follies, Iraq is firmly America's responsibility-- they broke it and they have to fix it.

Buffett-speak

2007-08-13T15:36:00.000-04:00

I am an avid admirer of Warren Buffett and his way of life. In addition to being the third richest man in the world, he is the biggest philanthropist the world has ever known and a delightful elocutonist of philosophy of economics, business and the business of life. A completely self-made man, his self-deprecating sense of humor rivals that of the best stand-up comedians in the show business. I had first heard about him back in India and gradually heard and read more about the man as I started to get more interested in finance and economics. I had the occasion to watch him give a speech, or more accurately- a performance, when he came to Georgia Tech as an invited speaker. I fondly remember a very entertaining afternoon when he had audiences in splits with his quips and wisecracks punctuated with his trademark pearls of business wisdom. Warren is known for his unpretentious, bucolic and a very humorous persona which immediately makes his audience drop their guard and drown in his charm. Behind that charm, however, lies a very astute businessman and investor whose grasp on finance and investing is simply peerless. He is famous for his firm understanding of even the minutest of business issues and such a memory for detail that he can reel off all the balance sheet information- from memory -of the companies he has ever bought or is planning to buy . Despite all his wealth and fame, he remains very humble and still lives in his birthplace Omaha in the house he bought about 50 years ago.

Here are a sample of some of his quips that I like and that have been delivered in his speeches and his immensely popular shareholder letters-

'In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it's true. If you hire somebody without the first, you really want them to be dumb and lazy.'

Energy and drive may be the essential qualities for success in many other walks of life but in the business of investing they are likely to get you into trouble. Lethargy, bordering on sloth, should remain the cornerstone of an investment style.

What is popular is not necessarily good. Public opinion poll is no substitute for thought.
When a good manager tries to turn around a fundamentally bad business, quite often it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.

I like to hold stocks for the long term. My favourite holding period is forever.

Much success can be attributed to inactivity. Most investors cannot resist the temptation to constantly buy and sell.

No Credit for you

2007-07-27T13:37:00.000-04:00

Its here finally. After months of speculation and expectation that troubles in the housing market, in particular the subprime market, catch up with the booming stocks , the prophecy seems to be coming close to being fulfilled. Growing worries on the spill over effects of the subprime mortgage market in US have sent the american stock markets in a tailspin and the effects are being resonating all around the world. Indian stocks were down about 3% in one day, Japan's Nikkei shed weight to the tune of 2.36% and British markets were under water 3.5%. It is another stark reminder that in today's globalized world, financial problems have lost their local character. Just a few months ago, when the chinese markets tanked momentarily, the markets all over the world felt the tremors. On the face of it, it seems that markets are only recovering from a hangover after the late night drinking binge of cheap credit and the resultaning M&A activity. As the credit markets tighten a little more and the private equity premium starts disappearing, the stocks should come down even further from their previously unsustainable levels.

Miller on Investing

2007-07-19T14:11:00.000-04:00

Legendary investor Bill Miller has some sound advice on the art of investing. Must read. My favourite nugget, ""There ain't only three things to investing. Knowing the 60/40 end of a proposition, money management, and knowing yourself." As an aside, why is that many of the legendary investors were also philosophy students or enthusiasts, examples- George Soros, Ben Graham, Carl Ichan, Charlie Munger along with Bill Miller. Is it because study of philosophy enables people to gain some special insight about the way the world operates? Who says Philosophy does not pay.

Attack of the Mogul

2007-07-18T11:46:00.000-04:00

Beware, the dark Sith Lord is fast closing in to conquer the poor Jedi Knight. Rupert Murdoch, the big daddy of all media moguls; owner of such fine shining armours of journalistic excellence such as News of the World, Fox News, New York Post is finally close to realizing his long standing dream of owning a major financial newspaper and critics are crying hoarse. Is this another blow to quality journalism? Is WSJ going to go the southbound ways of the New York Post when Murdoch acquired it? These are genuine worries and Murdoch's record does not inspire confidence. He is a staunch conservative and his media outlets have a strong conservative bias to put it mildly. However, whatever Murdoch's personal leanings may be , first and foremost he is a businessman and he is not going to do anything which will make a respected newspaper such as WSJ a losing business proposition. WSJ is the premier financial newspaper in the world and, just like Murdoch's other outlets, is strongly conservative. As far as political leanings go, the Murdoch empire and WSJ are a perfect match. So the worries that the Journal will become yet another vehicle for Murdoch's agenda are not well founded as the journal and Murdoch have the same agenda to begin with. The real concern is whether the quality of journalism at WSJ will suffer for which there is no clear answer. It depends on what Murdoch's ideas are for converting it into a profit making machine. WSJ is one of the few genuine newspapers that are profitable, even though only moderately. Just like all other newspapers, its margins have been under seize from the relentless competition of cable news networks and internet. Still, this new media attack has been less severe on WSJ than it has been on the other major newspapers as the journal dominates the financial news landscape and the readership for this bastion is strongly upper class who want quality financial news. If Murdoch decides to increase WSJ readership by taking it downmarket as he did with New York Post, he risks losing a strong and lucrative readership that is loyal to the journal for its USP, strong financial reporting. Having said that, it seems inevitable that things are going to change at the Journal. Murdoch is certainly not paying a 65% premium for this paper, if he intends to keep the status quo. He will try his best to make a much more profitable business out of it than it currently is, and being a consummate businessman, if that takes a little compromise on journalistic ethics then we all know that Murdoch is no stranger to it. So, am I renewing my subscription to WSJ? Not yet; I will wait and watch and sign up for the Economist instead.

Jhoom with JBJ

2007-06-26T10:44:00.000-04:00

Never ever have I seen a movie so whole-heartedly rejected by the audience and critics alike and still loved it so much. Jhoom Barabar Jhoom has to be the most pleasant surprise of the year since nothing prepares you to expect its dazzling brilliance. To start with, JBJ stars some Bollywood biggies hithertho only known for their eye-candy power (also known as star power) and not their 'acting talents'. The director Shaad Ali is the one responsible for such regular bollywood stinkers such as Saathiya and Bunty-Bubli. And to top it all, which really is a deal-breaker for many movie lovers, the movie is a product of Yash Raj stable who is to the genre of bollywood NRI movies which Ford was to the assembly line production of automobiles.

Jhoom Barabar Jhoom is one of those movies for which the term 'Ahead of its times', if it did not exist already, will need to be invented. The movie dares to be different, too different for its own commerical good perhaps, and in the words of Baradwaj Rangan 'takes the Bollywood song and dance routine to its most logical conclusion--surrealism'. The movie is a joyful ode to the bollywood musicals and you can feel the joy that has gone in its making. Just about everything in the movie shines- the direction is brilliant, performances from the stars are game with Lara Dutta being the biggest pleasant surprise in a movie full of pleasant surprises, music is fitting and choreography is sensational. Most significantly, JBJ is another sign of growing maturity and adventurous spirit among big-budget bollywood film makers; perhaps, a harbinger of even greater things to come in coming years. It is one of those gems that make you fall in love with bollywood again, in true bollywood ishtyle.

A capitalist monk?

2007-04-25T00:58:00.000-04:00

How can this man manage to do what he does? A selfless dedication towards the betterment of capitalism can scarcely be found. Future generations may very well rememberRam Charan as the Buddha of management consultancy.

Demographic-dividend and Infrastructure-deficit

2007-03-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

In my view the recent cover stories in The Economist (subscription required), Fortune and Business Week, focusing a glaring spotlight on India's infrastructural and institutional problems , is a positive development for atleast two reasons. First, one lesson to be drawn from these stories is that India's awe-inspiring economic growth is no longer a news that is worthy of being adorned on the covers of prominent business magazines anymore. Media does not thrive on good news for long. For media, there is no good news like the bad news. As Indian growth story seeps firmly into the western consciousness, the real scoop is to be found in what can possibly hamper this elephant with wings as it seeks to emulate the upward flight of the giant dragon. Secondly, Indian media and politicians have been in the self-congratulatory mode for far too long. They seem to think that high economic growth and rising living standards are foregone conclusions which are going to be achieved under any circumstances. In this tsunami of optimism, some incovenient truths are being conveniently brushed aside and make-believe hyperbole like demographic dividend is ruling the roost. In such an environment, somebody has to provide a much needed sanity check and remind everyone that we are only getting started towards the long road to economic prosperity. The demographic dividend can as easily become a demographic disaster if we fail to do what is needed to be done, namely- improving the quality of country's creeking physical infrastructure and accelerating the economic reforms process. By some estimates, the country's infrastructure-deficit causes it to lose atleast 2 percentage points from its potential GDP growth. If the scatching criticism in the world's premier news publications adds even a 2 percentage points in the sense of urgency to address this problem, then it would have served its purpose.

Joy of India

2007-03-10T17:46:00.000-05:00

Vishy Anand has (finally) become the Number 1 player in the cerebral game of 64 squares and infinite possibilities. The king of intellectual sports finally has a king from its own birthplace. Anand, true to his name, has again brought joy to a nation starved of any notable international competititive sports achievement. Incidentally, I think this is also the first time in a very long time that an Indian team or individual is ranked number one in any international sport ( even if you include a certain sleep inducing pseudo-international sports played seriously only by 3-4 countries). This is a spectacular achievement and a truly fitting culmination of an extraordinary career.

Surnames are now out at IIT Kanpur

2006-07-13T15:07:00.000-04:00

hat-tip Atlanta IIT

OBC students too in 'Bharat' family

Lucknow, July 9: There are no Guptas, Sharmas, Pandeys, Tiwaris, Tripathis, Shuklas, Singhs, Agarwals, Dixits and Hussains left on the campus. The surnames that denote caste have been dropped like leaves in the autumn, and all that remains is a feeling of oneness.

In what is possibly a unique form of protest against reservations, a group of nearly 200 students at IIT Kanpur have dropped their parental surnames,and adopted a common surname - "Bharat". Chandra Shekhar Sharma is now Chandra Shekhar Bharat, Rahul Gupta is Rahul Bharat, Dujendra Pandey is Dujendra Bharat, Nutan Gautam is Nutan Bharat and even Akhlaq Hussain is Akhlaq Bharat.

"We are now members of one family that has the surname Bharat, and no one can differentiate (between) us on the basis of caste and creed," says a member of the "Bharat" family, rather proudly. "When Mandal II came up, we knew we had to protest because the reservation issue goes against the concept of equality for all. We also realised that caste politics - and not the intention to benefit the backward sections - was the intention behind reservations, so we decided to do away with
surnames that denote our castes and adopted a common surname 'Bharat'.

We are against the reservation policy because it makes some more equal than others," says Chandra Shekhar 'Bharat', a Ph.D. student who is a member of the group that is spearheading the anti-reservation programme on the campus. "When we took this decision, most of the students were away on vacation. Now we are planning to persuade other students and the new entrants to follow suit. We have also formed a committee to study and work out the legal aspects of changing our names so that we can transform our intentions into reality. We have informed our parents and there is no resistance from their side," says the student.

The movement against reservations began in IIT Kanpur with the FIR - the Forum of Indians against Reservation - which has now merged into the "Youth for Equality", which has become the national forum on the issue.

"The idea of dropping our surnames has been widely appreciated at the Bangalore meeting of Youth for Equality last month, and we plan to persuade our counterparts in other IITs and IIMs to adopt the practice which has the potential of demolishing caste barriers in society," says Chandra Shekhar 'Bharat'.

Interestingly, the students' decision to change their surnames to "Bharat" has won them the support of teachers on the campus. "Nearly 125 teachers on the campus have sent a memorandum to the President and the Prime Minister,urging them not to impose reservations at the cost of merit in premier institutions,

" he adds. Significantly, even the OBC students on the campus are supporting the agitation against reservations, and some have even adopted the "Bharat" surname.

"It is because these students understand the importance of merit. They have worked their way to up here and would certainly not want that someone gets admission merely because they belong to a certain caste. We have Muslims students like Akhlaq Hussain, who have taken on the 'Bharat' surname and the alumni are supporting our efforts too," says Chandra Shekhar. The IIT Kanpur students now plan to intensify their anti-reservation stir from July 28 when the institution reopens after the summer break.

"We are contacting other IITs and we may start an integrated campaign on the issue. We plan to boycott classes indefinitely," he says. The students are also contacting schools and organising debates to expose the "evils" of reservation. "If in six decades of Independence, reservations have not helped the backward classes in realising their dreams, then there is something drastically wrong with the policy. The average backward caste student is not getting the benefit, whereas some elite sections are taking multi-layered benefits. We demand a review of the reservation policy by a committee that has no politician as its member," the students say

2006-07-03T23:54:00.000-04:00

Francois Gautier sometimes amazes me with his passion. A french born Indian resident, he is married to an indian and is a passionate indophile. He takes active interest in indian politics and has written some very good articles contributing to the raging debate over reservations. In this article, and in a previous one he breaks the myth that Brahmins and other upper castes are the "privileged" ones in India. Infact, they are as economically marginalised as any of the other OBCs if not more. Two hundred years of British rule, fifty years of socialism have acted as a great leveller and distributed poverty equally to all sections of the indian society, brahmins or other upper castes being no exception. Is it justified to indulge in a reverse discrimination now and punish these sections of our society because they are supposedly rich and powerful even though it is clear that they no longer have the privileges of yore.

An economic argument against reservation

2006-05-16T11:37:00.000-04:00

Principle of free markets is the most enduring empirical law in the whole of Economics . This principle is the very essence of modern capitalism. It says that any economic system when left to evolve according to the independent actions of its participants produces the most efficient resource allocation for all concerned. Adam Smith has called this seemingly miraculous mechanism by which the economic systems consisting of selfish participants who have primarily their own interest at heart, produce a generally agreeable resource allocation - the invisible hand. Ofcourse, for this system to function in a socially harmonious way it is necessary that the participants do not engage in activities which are against the spirit of fairness, that they play by the rules which are established before hand. Ensuring fairplay and order is the job of the government. Governments are the super market participants, who should make sure that everybody else is playing by the rules. Their role is that of a watch dog not that of a resource allocator or selfish market pariticipant. Whenever governments forget this role and start acting like any other market participant working for their own selfish ends in the economic system, the results are generally disastrous. An extreme example is that of communism where government was the biggest market participant, who made the decision of resource allocation by themselves rather than let market mechanism decide it.

Union government of India with their reservation policy is going against this basic principle of capitalism. Indian government, blinded in one eye by the failed nehruvian ideology of socialist welfare state and with the other eye firmly on the huge vote banks of backward castes, is not able to envisage the essential roles of government. Governments are not supposed to decide who studies what and where, just as a mere doorkeeper is not supposed to decide who gets to live in the apartment he is watching. Government is a watchman , it does not own social infrastructure it is watching, it merely takes care of it on behalf of society, who is the true owner of its social infrastructure. Government of India is forgetting this essential role of a democratic government and is acting as if they are the true owner of social assets which they can distribute as they please. The current reservation proposal is an expression of this prevalent attitude in the government. Not only this will produce an inefficient resource allocation, for example inevitably it will create inferior engineers and doctors than otherwise would have been produced had there been no reservation policy , this is also an act of intrusion by the government onto the civil liberties of its citizens. A democratic and secular constitution holds that all citizens are equal in the eyes of the law, however reservation policy implicitly assumes inequality between different social groups. It creates different standards of achievements for different social groups in a society implying an overt discrimination and no society can function stably for long where discrimination is official policy.

It is a highly condescending and demeaning thought to suggest that people from a particular social group when given opportunity can not succeed in a meritocratic system. Surely, differences of castes, colour, class etc. exist in every society and in Indian society deeper than most advanced countries. These differences are what an economist would characterise as market distortions, inefficiencies which should be ironed out by the governement. A policy akin to reverse racism is not a solution, it is only going to replace those flaws in the society with different set of problems. The role of a government is that of a facilitator, if a social group like many OBCs in India are disadvantaged because of historical reasons, government needs to make sure that they are presented with opportunties which will help them overcome their disadvantages. Government should provide them with good schools, good teachers enabling them to achieve same standards of excellence which more fortunate groups of society are availing of. An aggressive affirmatory action policy without the mandatory quota system like the one practiced in the United States can be considered as well. The pro-active reservation policy will only dilute the academic standards of the institutions of higher learning which is the last thing a progressive modern society should do especially when it is facing competitive forces from countries like China. Whereas China is modernizing its universities aiming high to compete with intellectual giants like Harvard, Yale and MIT, India instead of creating a modern educational infrastrucure is destroying a few stalwarts it has in the higher education sector. If India chooses to ignore the principle of free markets and government's role in that market, it will do so only at its own peril.

Another politician out of the closet

2006-05-01T18:41:00.000-04:00

I had always thought of P. Chidambaram as a gifted intellectual capable of providing India the kind of enlightened leadership which is sorely lacking in the rest of its political class. I am sorry to admit that even though it took a while, finally he has exposed himself as just another power hungry, sleazy politician nothing more than a Harvard educated version of Laloo Prasad Yadav.

India needs reservations pronounces the revered finance minister. No sir, what India really needs is sensible, prinicipled politicians who can make sound sensible policies to get rid of myriad of its problems. India needs roads, power, clean drinking water for millions of its denizens, corruption free government, a good education system, liberation from its caste based society, liberation from its religious conflicts. It needs more economic growth, more opportunities for its young population, more accountability from its governments, less red-tape, more freedom for businesses to operate, more investments in its social sectors and infrastructure. What India does not need is its power hungry political class to carve it up into million pieces based on caste and creed, institutionalise discrimination, bring down its few excellent educational institutions, stifle merit, reduce opportunities for millions of young and hard-working students all in the name of providing "social justice".

A good friend of mine pointed out that smart people with a dangerous ideology can do much more harm to a society than a bunch of jingoists. People like Chidambaram are those dangerous "educated" hawks who are bent upon destroying the very idea of India for their selfish short term political gains. India will be a better place without people like him.

Quota Raj all set to become reality

2006-04-08T01:06:00.000-04:00

It seems that proposal of introducing 50% reservations in India's central universities is going to become a reality. With no political opposition in sight, India's "government" is all set to see through their nefarious designs. Our 'honourable" Human Resources Minister Mr. Arjun Singh has already said that quota decision is final. To say that Congress government is playing a dangerous game is the understatement of the year. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any sense of rage against it in the Indian media, atleast not in the online editions. This coming proposal is the single most outrageous piece of legislation in the history of independent India and there is not even a whimper of protest against it. If this proposal becomes a reality, we will see a new and far worse India, where people are by law discriminated on the basis of caste and religion. If this doesn't call for a show of outrage then I can't imagine what will.

Update: Rashmi Bansal of JAM magazine has a scholarly article on the subject. It is a long, but enlightening read.

Quotafication of India

2006-04-01T12:43:00.000-05:00

No matter who is in power in Indian Governments they can always be relied to do the wrong thing almost all the time. Coming close on the heels of a constitutional amendment to allow for reservations in private engineering and medical colleges comes the monstority of a proposal where government is "considering" almost 50% reservations for "backward castes and muslims" in IITs and IIMs. India's premier educational institutes are being sacrificed at the altar of caste politics. Architects of a free and united India Nehru, Gandhi, Ambedkar must be turning in their graves. What they envisioned was an India where caste, creed and religion doesn't matter, instead we are looking at a India where caste, creed and religious discrimination is going to be institutionalised. Whether one likes it or not in this new India, the surname matters and matters a lot.

Nobody can argue that the disadvantaged groups of the society do not need a helping hand. Affirmative action is a notion which is employed quite successfully in USA, without an explicit quota system. The disadvantaged sections of the society deserve help, but this should be done the right way, by making them competitive enough so that they can cross the bar on their own. What Indian government is doing is that they are lowering the bar for them, while keeping the bar same for those unfortunate(or fortunate) to be born with the wrong surname . By compromising on excellence and aptitude, the government is not only lowering the overall standards of quality, it is also doing those very sections of society a disservice whom they are claiming to help. Just an IIT or IIM name tag is not going to make anybody a successful engineer or manager. It sure would open some doors, atleast initially, but over the long term they have to have the skills and aptitude necessary to succeed in the real world. If they do not have the right training, no amount of spoon feeding is going to help them in their chosen professions.

A dangerous potential consequence of this retrogade and foolish decision is going to be rise in social tensions among different groups of society. With thousands of castes, sub-castes, religions already in place in India, our great nation has already been divided into many pieces based on "birth defects" of caste and religion . The last thing one needs is hostility between them. Government, instead of encouraging social harmony, is giving people another reason to hate each other by institutionalising discrimination. Imagine if somebody lets say Mr. Pandey gets 95th percentile in IIM exams and is denied admission whereas lets say Mr. Yadav with 75th percentile gets the coveted IIM-A seat, Mr. Pandey is surely going to forever nurse hostility against Mr. Yadav. Furthermore, there is going to be groupism in the campus itself, where people who have made to the campus through general exam will have one group and people with quota category will have another group. It is obvious which group is likely to perform better academically and which group would be looked down upon by faculty and capable students. The seeds of permanent hostility have been sown from an early age itself. Even in the campus recruitment, a company executive would be reluctant to hire somebody who is there mostly because of his caste and creed. Clearly, seeing the name Mr. Yadav in a resume would make him highly suspicious of Mr. Yadav's credentials even if that particular candidate is there because of his hard work and competence. In this globalized world, where companies fight for talent, no executive would knowingly want to hire somebody with questionable ability. It is also not doing any good to Mr. Yadav as well who would have benefited much more from the right training rather than from the act of charity by the government.

This kind of blatant casteism can lead to some very interesting situations. Imagine a situation, where parents of a newly born child in the "wrong caste" are afraid that their child is very disadvantaged. Being good parents, they want to give their child every possible advantage they can afford. One possibility for them is to give-up their child for adoption in the "right caste" or better still if they are well-off, buy the "right caste" for their child by paying someone to give their surname to their "wrong caste" child. Now, the child born to be Mr. Pandey is converted to Mr. Yadav, and has every advantage which any Mr. Yadav has. To take this argument even further, in our enterpreunarial times somebody can actually make a profitable business out of selling caste names. All that enterpreuner has to do is to find people willing to adopt babies on paper , give all "wrong caste" babies a surname with the "right caste", charge the "wrong caste" parents a whole lot of money, pay the "right caste" person some money and pocket the rest as commission or profit. He could probably advertise his company called 'Caste Away' with a tagline like "Cast away your Caste". There could be different rates for conversion to different castes, an OBC may demand the highest premium, a mere BC may have a little less and a marginally backward caste may be the cheapest. So if a "wrong caste" parent has 3 children, one is very dumb, other is marginally dumb and the last one is marginally smart, the parent may decide to convert the first one to OBC, the second one to BC and since he bought two castes, he gets to convert the third one to "only a marginally backward caste" for free. I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation of all kids are born with surnames Yadav and all Pandeys disappear, become extinct. That is one caste less for politicians to exploit.

Consider another scenario where the "wrong caste" people think (rightly so ) that they are being wronged. Now, we being a democratic nation, these "wrong caste" people also have a vote and hence political power. How can they exercise this power and avenge their wrong? By choosing "the right party", which promises that they would also get a slice of the reservation pie if "the right party" comes to power. Sure enough someday "the right party" would come to power and they will have to fulfill their promise. The "wrong castes" will be righted and they will gain their rightful place in society, by being added to the list of backward castes. Soon enough we will have a situation where all people in the country are officially backward. That would be the day when we will achieve true parity with each other. All of us would be officially backward, a true and lasting equity would be achieved.

If the scenario depicted above seems far fetched, then be aware that they are not. I am personally aware of some cases, where by bribing the right people , higher caste people have got their wards converted to lower castes.

Making a section of society competitive enough to let them rise up to the challenges is a far harder task but is the one which is going to have lot of benefits for not only the groups being helped but for society as well. Indian politicians(or politicians in general for that matter) have neither the foresight nor the willingness to make policies for the long term. Afterall, long term planning takes vision and courage and may not necessarily pay in the next byelection. On the other hand, reserving seats is easy, has the apperance of helping a section of society and ensures vote banking by playing one caste against another (e.g. Laloo Yadav) . Our corrupt politicians are employing the british raj tactics at a much broader scale to lead India towards a long term disaster. If things continue, the day is not far when India will be a "quota society", where everybody is granted a reservation, a society where merit takes a back seat and your birth largely determines your fate. Such a society is unlikely to be very competitive in a globalized world even more so because smart and talented people would leave this society for better opportunites abroad. What we are going to see is a resurgence of a caste-based society, a casteist society, something like a Bihar or UP where caste is everything. Is this the legacy we wish to leave for our children?

Europe's fear of globalization

2006-02-21T00:40:00.000-05:00

That Laxmi Mittal is a man of steel, in more ways than one, had long been established. His steely resolve is what exactly is the need of the hour if he has to see his bold bid on European steel maker Arcelor through. Reactions to Mittal Steel's take over attempt for its nearest rival has been hysterically hostile in Europe which is not very surprising. Europe has always been very hypocritical in its approach towards globalization even though globalization is the ideology which has been primarily responsible for its prosperity. It is good as long as it helps European companies acquire assets and markets abroad, but loses its allure if the very same companies are in danger of being gulped by bigger & better rivals. The excuses offered by the French government, of job losses and that Mittal Steel is majority family owned, are difficult to be qualified more than hogwash. Europe has to understand that globalization is not a one way street unlike the old colonial times, when european companies destroyed the local industries of their colonial conquests. The world can no longer function according to the wishes of european politicians, if they expect other countries to open up their markets and assets then they have to reciprocate. Unduly extreme and protectionist measures are going to isolate Europe from rest of the world which in the long run will prove counter productive. In the interest of a better world, let globalization be.

In praise of Rahul Dravid

2006-02-20T00:05:00.000-05:00

Who can doubt that Rahul Dravid is one of the greatest cricketers of his generation? Great batsman, quintessential nice guy , a role model-- you can add a great leader and a very articulate speaker to that list. Is there any more well spoken man in cricket right now? This interview is an ample testimony to his poise and eloquence. As a leader and sportsman , he is bound to scale new heights. How much I wish we can get leaders half as good in politics as well.

Freakonomics

2006-02-12T11:19:00.000-05:00

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Levitt and Dubner' s highly acclaimed book is that although it is freaky in good measure, you will be hard pressed to find any traditional economics in it. May be this book could have been more appropriately titled 'Freakostatistics' or 'Freakometrics', because what this book really is about is Data and its power to give surprising answers if the right questions are asked. This is where U Chicago economics professor Levitt excels at-- asking the 'right' and often unconventional questions. His modus operandi is simple. He looks for a field where there is a wealth of information available in the form of raw data, he lets the data speak for itself by giving it the voice of statistics and asking questions which nobody else thought of asking. What he finds is that data can be a surprisingly insightful speaker revealing both profound and mundane. It can tell you what really brings down crime in society, what is the best way to raise a child or what is common between real estate agents and Ku Klux Klan! A good measure of a book of this type can be gauged from the number of times you find yourself saying "A-ha!". On this test, Freakonomics does not disappoint at all and is an A-class "A-ha!" book.

Armageddon according to Bill Bryson

2006-02-06T18:13:00.000-05:00

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is a wonderfully entertaining and amazingly enlightening book. His insatiable curiosity to actually find out all the things he did and great dexterity as a writer to explain all that in wonderful prose are something to marvel at (For a detailed and wonderfully written review go here). As the title of the book indicates, included in the book is the history of earth and humanity and what is more, a possible end as well! Following passage from the book describes rather vividly how the end of humanity- The Armageddon- in the form of a cosmic collision between earth and a wandering asteroid will look like.

An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the earth's atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn't get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvins or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere , everything in the meteor's path-people, houses, factories, cars-would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame.

One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the earth's surface, where the people of Manson(an impact site of such a collision millions of years ago) had a moment before been going about their business. The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles that hadn't been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. Radiating outward at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it.

For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light-the brightest ever seen by human eyes- followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a rolling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles an hour. Its approach would be eerily silent since it would be moving far beyond the speed of sound. Anyone In a tall building in Omaha or Des Moines, say, who chanced to look into the right direction would see a bewildering veil of turmoil followed by instantaneous oblivion.

Within minutes, over an area stretching from Denver to Detroit and encompassing what had been Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, the Twin Cities-the whole of the Midwest, in short- nearly every standing thing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead. People up to a thousand miles away would be knocked off their feet and sliced or clobbered by a blizzard of flying projectiles. Beyond a thousand miles the devastation from the blast would gradually diminish.

But that's just the initial shockwave. No one can do more than guess what the associated damage would be, other than that it would be brisk and global. The impact would almost certainly set off a chain of devastating earthquakes. Volcanoes across the world would begin to rumble and spew. Tsunamis would rise up and head devastatingly for distant shores. Within an hour, a cloud of blackness would cover the planet , and burning rock and other debris would be pelting down everywhere, setting much of the planet ablaze. It has been estimated that 1.5 billion people would be dead by the end of first day. The massive disturbances to the ionosphere would knock out communications systems everywhere, so survivors would have no idea what was happening elsewhere or where to turn. It would hardly matter. As one commentator has put it, fleeing would mean, `` selecting a slow death over a quicker one. The death toll would be very little affected by any plausible relocation effort, since earth’s ability to support life would be universally diminished.”

The amount of soot and floating ash from the impact and following fires would blot out the sun, certainly for months, possibly for years, disrupting growing cycles. In 2001, researchers at the California Institute of Technology analyzed helium isotopes from sediments left from the later KT impact and concluded that it affected earth’s climate for about 10,000 years. This was actually used as evidence to support the notion that the extinction of dinosaurs was swift and emphatic- and so it was in geological terms. We can only guess how well, or whether, humanity would cope with such an event.

And in all likelihood, this would come without warning, out of a clear sky.

Munich- A fine but biased movie

2006-01-23T16:25:00.000-05:00

Since George's review on Steven Spielberg's latest offering is going to take a while, I thought I may jot down some of my 2 pence thoughts on Munich. Spielberg does have a knack of overdoing things , his previous oscar winning efforts Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List are cases in point, where the scenes of grotesque violence were unbearably long. Thankfully, in this movie he does not harp on the atrocities as much but rather concentrates more on the characters and drama, which is quite intriguing. The backdrop of all that subsequently unfolds in the movie is the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre in which 11 Israeli atheletes were taken hostage and then gunned down by Palestinian revolutionaries. This action played out in all its horror on TV the world over galvanised the Israeli establishment into taking matters in their own hands. Mossad, the Israeli equivalent of CIA, formed hit squads to assassinate all those who were behind the events at Munich. One such hit-squad has Avner (Eric Bana), the story's main protagonist. Rest of the movie is about how Avner and his fellow Mossad agents go about their mission.

A high point of the movie is its realistic portrayal of the events under study. The story has all the elements of a highly charged spy thriller and there are some moments of pure adrenaline rush, but for the most part the movie underplays those sequences and concentrates more on the fate of protagonists. The story is told from the point of view of Avner, who develops a crisis of conscience while carrying out his hatchet job and according to the movie with good reasons. No matter how one interprets the events unfolding on screen, Israel and Mossad come out as villains. For example, most of the palestinian "terrorists" depicted in the movie come across as affable, academic, family men whose only crime seems to be that they are voicing the palestinian cause. They are never shown or even hinted at causing voilent terrorist activities. It is never clear whether those people were actually involved in the terrorist acts or were they merely part of the political arm of Palestinian organizations. The movie does more than hint that Mossad is using Avner and his group as mere pawns to eliminate everybody they perceive as threats- past or future. Towards the end Avner gets disillusioned with Mosaad as well as Israel and refuses to go back to Israel inspite of pleas from his Mossad boss. Unlike the audience, he is convinced that Israel is evil. No wonder pro-Israel groups are up in arms against this film, a fact which no doubt is going to hamper its prospects in the awards season inspite of movie's technical merits.

Its anti-Israel bias not withstanding, Munich is still a finely crafted piece of work which deserves a viewing. The work is largely based on a book, so any biases are probably inherited from there. To this day, Israel has not accepted existence of any assassination squads, a denial which is hard to reconcile with the sudden emergence of body bags containing Palestinian leaders in the aftermath of Munich. Spielberg enhances his reputation as a master story teller. His Munich is a fine effort in bringing one of the most long standing disputes in contemporary politics into mainstream Hollywood's focus.

Most Valuable Three Dollars

2006-01-15T01:45:00.000-05:00

A lot of money is not likely to buy anybody love or happiness, a mere three dollars even less so. Friday, however, was one of the those rare days when those lowly three dollars-that too not my own- bought me immense satisfaction. The reason for this unexpected good fortune was an unscheduled visit to the local public library, which was having a book sale selling some eminently likeabale titles for little over hundred cents. A cursory browse at the biographies section yielded two gems - Abraham Pais's scholarly biography of Einstein 'Subtle is the Lord' and James Gleick's biography of Feynman 'Genius-The Life and Science of Richard Feynman'. I had never been happier parting with three dollar bills, not even after devouring a yummie Brownie Fudge Sunday at Steak & Shake.

Getting the books, even at such throwaway prices, is the easy part, actually getting down to read them is where the challenge really lies. Unfortunately, this is a challenge which I do not wish to undertake any time soon especially with regard to these books which apart from being scholarly biographies are semi-technical journal articles as well lasting well in excess of 400 pages. For now I will not let that worry me. I am just happy to possess these classics much like a vintage car collector who is happy to own some valuable cars without ever testing how they may actually drive.

Politics in Education

2006-01-03T11:56:00.000-05:00

Government of India has passed 104th amendment to the constitution. This amendment overrides the supreme court judgement prohibiting government interference in the workings of privately run educational institution mainly pertaining to the question of reservations for minorities. The new amendment makes it mandatory for all non-minority privately run educational institutions(profit or non-profit) to reserve seats for minority students. Interestingly, minority run educational institutions have been exempted from the law. The motivation for such a law is obvious- politics of votes. Typically, politicians of all hue take up a socially important issue and instead of providing sensible, lasting solutions come up with ideas which are populist and more often than not do more harm than good. This really is the nature of profession of politics. There are a number of things which are wrong with a law of this kind, not least among these is its ineffectivenss-

1) At an ideological level this law is contrary to the principles of free-markets, less government controls and more economic freedom to individuals, which India is trying so hard to embrace. Privatley run educational institutions are like any other business. They are into it for the primary purpose of making money. This government decree is a direct hit on their potential profitability. The likely result is going to be a slowdown in the private investments in higher education meaning less colleges than there could have been and in extreme cases, a shutdown of some colleges because they are no longer profitable. In this day and age where India needs as much investment in education as it can get this law is a backward step.

2) Very interestingly, minority run educational institutions have been exempt from this law! This means educational institutions run by christian or muslim organisations do not fall under this law. At a basic level, this is discrimination against a particular section of population, mainly the majority and at a deeper level it is an assault on the fundamental right of individuals to form associations. The amendment implies that a hindu can not form a Hindu educational institution open only to Hindus whereas Muslims can form a muslim university open only to muslims. It is another ironic example in a "free democratic secular" India, where different laws apply to different sections of population fueling resentment and segregation sentiments.

3) A law like this is not likely to be effective in a country like India where everybody belongs to a minority of some kind. It is very easy to evade this regulation on paper. What we are going to see is a rush by for-profit institutions to register themselves as minority run institutions, which are exempt.

Problems of a society are rarely solved by active government regulations. An imaginative government would try to tackle the problem in ways consistent with the ideology of free-markets. A privately run business needs to be provided with incentives for contributing to higher social goals. For example, government can provide tax credits to an institution which actively engages in affirmative action, earmark funds for institutions which provide aid to poor students or encourage US style student loan markets. There are far better ways to tackle social problems but unfortunately in politics short term political gains almost always take precedence over sensible effective policies.

NYtimes story on India's highways

2005-12-10T00:18:00.000-05:00

NYtimess has done a wonderful series on India's Golden Quadrilateral highway project, the most ambitious road building effort ever undertaken in independent India. Wonder why our mainstream newspapers and magazines fail to do something like this.

Bhiku Mhatre Haazir Ho

2005-12-02T18:37:00.000-05:00

Satya is probably the best mob movie ever made in India and in my humble, relatively uneducated opinion, one of the best mob movies ever made in the world, right up there with the Corleone family saga . It isn't so much about the gangster side of the story, which happened to be the profession of our lead characters, but the human relations depicted in the movie which really mesmerised me. More than a crime-saga it is a story about friendship, love, betrayal, sacrifice, duty, politics and many other themes of human relations which lifted this movie several notches above any regular crime-drama and put it into a pedestal along with the great movies of modern times. It is Ram Gopal Verma and Manoj Bhiku Bajpei at their best.

Speaking of Manoj Bajpei, in my humble opinion, his performance in Satya is the best performance by any actor in Bollywood during past 20 years. Right from his introduction scene, where he picks up his mobile to answer a call from one of his goons, to the scene where he is shot dead by Bhau , you can feel the intensity in his portrayal of Bhiku Mhatre. Like all great actors, more than the words, it is his eyes and mannerisms which do the talking. It is the kind of performance which you can not describe in a blog post, you just have to see it to believe it. He brought the character of Bhiku Mhatre alive on screen in a way I don't think any other Bollywood actor has the talent to do.

I recall he had some really good performances post Satya as well. His portrayal of a psychopath in Kaun and an honest police officer in Shool were great too, even though it did not bring him that much acclaim. Post Shool however, he does not seem to have done anything of substance. A simple search on IMDB tells me roles in Zubeida, Road, Pinjar and some other very forgettable movies. It is a pity indeed that an actor of this amazing caliber has not got the kind of roles he deserves, but this really is a problem with Bollywood , which is nothing more than a glorified crap-machine churning out garbage day-in and day-out having no place for fine actors dedicated to their craft.

India-another missed opportunity?

2005-12-02T15:21:00.000-05:00

Textiles is one of the few manufacturing sectors , where India can hold its own against great Chinese maufacturing machine. It has a huge domestic cotton industry, plenty of expertise and low labour costs which are at par with China's. With the ending of global quotas at the start of this year, India has a golden opportunity to take an early lead in market share for global textile market, however whereas China's exports this year in textile have surged 59%, India's have increased a very modest 5%. The culprit- India's ancient labour laws which are completely out of sync with modern times. For starters, in India you need government permission to fire workers in a factory employing more than 100 workers, which imply that in a labour intensive sector like textile businessmen are afraid to hire in anticipation of demand because firing workers later will not be possible if demand does not materialize. Plus labour laws place restrictions on contract labour and overtime thus unnecessaily increasing labour costs. The result of these archaic laws is that Indian companies are reluctant to expand, operate in smaller units of less than 100 workers which makes economies of scale difficult and in general become less competitive than their chinese counterparts. The macro effect is that India is unable to even take advantage of situations which are apparently tailor made for its strenghts.

I just fail to understand why Indian politicians can not see the obvious example of Chinese model which has been so successful in creating wealth in our giant neighbour. India has almost every advantage which China posseses plus some more like rule of law, large english speaking population and democracy. All politicans need to do is to get rid of old rules and regulations, relics of our Soviet inspired socialist past and take advantage of the globalized world which clearly has the potential of creating enormous wealth for us as chinese have demonstrated. The reason our software or outsourcing industry has grown by leaps and bounds is because senseless government regulations have been kept out. India clearly has the potential of creating the same miracle in manufacturing as well, if only sensible economics can prevail. The stakes are even higher in the battle for manufacturing eminence because manufacturing can provide millions of jobs to vast number of semi-literate or illiterate people in India, which outsourcing and software industries will never be able to provide. A failure to create jobs for these underpriviliged can create social unrest which may hamper India's future prospects. The only way to create more opportunities for India's poor is to open up economy further, allow indian enterpreuners to form companies, allow foreign investors to invest not only in markets but in factories , improve the physical infrastructure. A failure on these fronts has very high cost for our future. We may miss the globalization bus just as we missed the industrial revolution.

The next Bangalore

2005-11-29T00:57:00.000-05:00

Bihar has arrived, in international media that is. India's poorest and most lawless state has voted for development proclaims Business Week. The magazine goes on to state-

Biharis voted for economic development and rejected the candidate who had ruled the state on the basis of caste for 15 years. The meaning is clear: Bihar aspires to be like Bangalore, India's tech capital. That brings Bihar into the mainstream of the new India.

Pardon me for puncturing the unbridled enthusiasm of an international magazine which presumably knows next to nothing about political equations in India's own wild wild west. According to some reports, Lalu Yadav suffered a vote loss of only 0.87%, hardly the stuff of categorical rejection, however this being India's coalition politics, it cost him a very disproportionate share of seats benefiting Nitish Kumar led NDA immensely. India's public has rarely rewarded growth or sensible economic policy focusing on more down to earth issues like who is providing free electricity, what is the caste of the candidate, who is providing daaru for votes or who is building a Mandir at God knows where. I , for one , do not believe that Bihar public which as recently as February voted Lalu's RJD as single largest party is suddenly aspiring to make Patna the next Bangalore. Anybody proclaiming otherwise just needs to look up Marxists' non-stop victorious record in West bengal or NDA's heavy defeat despite a very strong economic growth , which by the way did make a nice omelette on the faces of pollsters or Chandarbabu Naidu's heavy defeat in Andhra. Electoral politics in India is very complex and interplay of many factors decide the final outcome but I doubt that development or growth is a very significant one among them especially in India's most BIMARU state.

Nostalgia revisited

2005-11-27T21:55:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the generosity of my friend Neeraj I have got a very good collection of Sachin Dev Burman's songs . Listening to these unforgettable gems again made me realise what I was missing. The man from whom Sachin Tendulkar got his name is probably the greatest hindi music composer India has ever produced. Only a genius can compose songs like Din Dhal Jaye(Guide), O Re Maajhi (Bandini), Khoya Khoya Chand (Kala Bazaar), Jalte hain jiske liye(Sujata), Waqt Ne Kiya (Kaagaz ke Phool) and many many more. SDB's music is no ordinary melody. Inspite of being within the constraints of a 4-5 minute time-frame of hindi movie song, his music is capable of seeping into your heart & soul and stirs emotions from within. Fortunately I have this great music now. Life is good.

IIM graduate murdered for honesty

2005-11-23T01:55:00.000-05:00

IIM graduate Manjunath Shanmugham shot dead in cold blood by UP's petrol mafia for doing his duty. Manju was 27 years old and a recent graduate of IIM-L. He was working for Indian Oil Corporation where his work entailed checking the petrol pumps in his purview for any adulteration in the petrol they sell. One petrol pump was reported by him for engaging in rabid adulteration and he recommended to revoke the license of that pump. The result- Manju was murdered in cold-blood by the petrol pump owners. At the risk of sounding callous, I would like to say that I am not surprised, yes shocked I am. Shocked at not why this happened but shocked at why this fine young man had to join a Public Sector Company in India when he could have picked and chosen cream of jobs in Indian corporate world, why if he had decided to join a PSU he had to show courage and honesty when he could easily have turned the other way and why unlike everybody else he did not care for his personal safety . But then these questions are the ones which feeble minded people like me who take the easy way out will probably never understand. Manjunath Shanmugham was a great man and deserves a big salute from everybody who values honesty & courage. May you rest in peace, Sir.

PS: Gaurav Sabnis writes about Manju, whom he had the good fortune of meeting during his IIM days

Ode to Prabhuji

2005-11-19T12:38:00.000-05:00

For lesser mortals Mithun may be another flop hero of B-movies however for the true devotees, who have had enlightenment , he is the one and only true God in a world full of false gods. An ode to Mithun aka Parbhuji and the religion of Mithunism can be found here.

Thomas Friedman's talk

2005-11-07T22:25:00.000-05:00

Thomas Friedman of NewYork Times was at Georgia Tech today giving a highly eloquent and entertaining talk on outsourcing and globalization-the theme of his latest book The World is Flat. Personally, I haven't read Friedman 's columns much on NYTimes, ( I usually read WSJ because of its bent on my favourite topic finance & economics), but he is believed to be a very insightful writer & a tremendous speaker. In his talk , he started out with how he got the idea for his book which he attributed to a conversation he had with his friend Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Indian outsourcing giant Infosys. Most of his subsequent talk was focused on how the world has become a level playing field with nobody having a location advantage any more. Any job which can be done in sillicon valley can as well be done in Bangalore and with a fraction of the cost. Thus, the world has become a level playing field hence the term 'Flat'. Much of what he said may have a ring of common sensical familiarity to any follower of world news, however it was laced with humour and interesting anecdotes apart from his interesting analogy with a flat world which made this talk a very worthwhile one to attend. I came away really impressed with Friedman's eloquence and the ability to hold audience's attention for a significant time. All in all, a very well spent 90 minutes.

Other side of China's rise

2005-11-03T18:39:00.000-05:00

China's rapid rise in past couple of decades is undeniable. The country's spectacular success in embracing atleast some of the ideology of free markets is a lesson to many other developing countries like India. However, most of the success of China as a rapidly rising power can be attributed to its unique situation of having a "benevolent dictatorship". Chinese leadership had long ago realised that if it has to maintain its stronghold on power and prevent social unrest then they have to make a serious dent into poverty. It has certainly managed that task extremely well by embracing its own version of capitalism but advances in the free market ideology has not brought commensurate progress in the form of a modern legal and politicial system. Government still is the law, police, judge and jury. This system certainly makes building up infrastructure or bringing about big policy changes much easier than it is in a democracy like India but it also has a huge cost on the ordinary citizens or people who fall on the wrong side of China's all pervasive government. The story of David Ji, a Chinese born american citizen is a case in point . David Ji founded the hugely successful Apex Systems, an importer of Chinese made DVD-players. He ran into a contractual dispute with his chinese supplier Changhong, a government owned company masquerading as a publicly traded one. Ji made the grave miscalculation by deciding to travel to China for settling the dispute even when advised against it by his executives. He was confident that his US citizenship, money & status in US and Chinese connections will guarantee his personal safety. On arriving in China , he was arrested, detained for months without any charges being filed, humiliated and made to sign papers handing over the controls of his company to Changhong i.e. the government (more about this appears in NYtimes ). Ji's is not an isolated example of government high-handedness in China in matters of legal disputes. China's legal system is a far cry from what it should be for a modern , business friendly society. Government rarely loses a case, trials are dispensed with in a day or even less, police routinely tortures citizens to extract confessions and abuses by government officials are rampant. India, for all its flaws in the legal system, still has an independent judiciary and check & balances against the abuse of government power. There is atleast one count on which China can learn from its formidable neighbour, which is how to have a rule of law not rule by law.

IIPM-an educational fraud?

2005-10-12T21:43:00.000-04:00

A few days ago , Mumbai based youth college magazine JAM did an expose on Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) , a "renowned" management institute in India. Apparently, the institute is putting false claims over its credentials in the newspaper ads all across India and JAM exposure seemed credible enough to warrant attention. Another fellow blogman Gaurav linked to this particular story and questioned the qualifications of its dean Arindham Chaudhray, supposedly a "Management Guru". Now, as very eloquently put forth by Ashutosh, if the allegations of Gaurav and JAM magazine were true, all IIPM had to do was to provide a proof contradicting them, which should not be hard to provide if they really have the credentials which they claim. Instead, they resorted to bullying and threats resulting in Gaurav's resignation from his employer IBM (more about this here). From what I have read and heard of IIPM's conduct , they seem to behave more like a cheap gunda outfit than a "renowned" management institute. Arindham Chaudhary' s website, admittedly very snazzy, is full of tall claims for this economist(?), management guru(??), visionary intellectual(????) (more about it here). In my view, IIPM is shooting themselves in the foot with their conduct. IIPM would do their already suspect credibility some good if either they come out with the truth about their claims or else stop playing with the lives of kids who are looking towards them for a quality education and bright future.

Update: The whole matter seems to have evolved into a major issue against IIPM by the blogging community. Here is a blog detailing the latest happenings on the subject.

Indians 4th Happiest in the world?

2005-10-05T10:40:00.000-04:00

A recent news item on Rediff quotes a survey in which indians were found to be the 4th "happiest",
in the world. I just wonder what sample population was chosen for this survey. Surely, it could not have been numerous victims of riots & terrorism, people living in abject poverty in Bihar, UP, MP among others, people living in the slums of Delhi & Bombay, people fed up with corruption or people caught up in the grind of life in India. That must cover almost all the people . I am still wondering who were the people in that survey or is it that we indians are still happy and content inspite of all the hardships we endure in day-to-day lives.

More on India & China

2005-09-29T20:19:00.000-04:00

Here is another article pointing out the no contest between Chinese and Indian infrastructure. There are many who would argue that China being an authoratarian nation can move things much faster than India, a democracy. There certainly is some truth to these arguments when we are talking about fundamental policy changes, where it is extremely hard to get everybody at the same wavelength. This argument does not hold any water when we are talking about issues like building good infrastructure on which I believe there is no contention. Everybody agrees, has been agreeing since last 60 years that India needs good roads, sufficient power, good airports , good railways, but one does not see great urgency in building them. The reality is that path from intent to implementation is a very rocky one in India, marred by red-tape, corruption, lack of foresight& professionalism, apathy, the list can go on and on. Indians certainly can not blame their democratic set up for this, they have only themselves to blame.

India & China

2005-09-27T11:21:00.000-04:00

In past couple of years, international media, especially Business Week ,has placed India's economic status at the same pedestal as China's. If you go through Business Week's recent cover story on these two emerging economies you would get the impression that India is not far behind from China. China is the new economic powerhouse of the world followed 'closely' by India goes the popular phrase from these media houses. The reason for this apparently equal treatment is that China has built its economy on non-glamorous manufacturing industries and has clearly become the factory of the world. India's reputation has been built on the more visible and glamorous high-tech(if you can call outsourcing that) industry. What is forgotten is that while China's manufacturing growth is fueled by sensible policy making by its government, India's growth in high-tech is largely the case of being at the right place at the right time and has very little to do with any sensible planning or vision from its government. This hyperbole of China and India has already led to a sense of complacency in Indian government circles witnessed by a very sluggish growth in economic reforms in past 2 years in India. If anybody thinks that India's economic status is quite close to China then he needs to do the math. Economist Shankar Acharya has provided the numbers . On every important economic parameter, India is not even close to being close to China. On same parameters, it is so shamefully far behind that the only relevant comparison could be with the most backward third world countries. True, India has made very impressive gains in past decade and a half, especially in the information technology industry. The reality, however, is that given its vast population and potential it is just not enough. India needs to do a lot lot more to get anywhere near to where China is today. It needs to build a halfway decent infrastructure, provide a quality of life fitting to humans for a vast majority of its people, remove bottlenecks for enetrpreuners, privatize the inefficient state enterprises, start a crackdown on corruption, introduce some social reforms. The to do list is long. It has those proverbial thousand miles to go before it can so much as take a nap.

Tabloid of India

2005-09-26T14:28:00.000-04:00

Pardon the poor stale headline for this post, but I did not want to waste any fancy words or my precious little grey cells thinking of a nice headline about the junk of which I am about to write. Almost every indian with even half a brain would agree that Times Of India is probably the worst newspaper in the world which still has name of a nation in its name. Normally I would not prefer to write about the cheap sleaze show Times of India really is, but a couple of nice posts on the web convinced me that there are people out there who care about the abysmal lows ToI has hit and is "affectionately" being referred as ToI-let paper of India. Hopefully some kind of buzz can be built on the web which (hope dear hope) may be an agent of change for the ToI-let paper because seriously, name of India on a ToI-let paper burns my heart.

nice article on Indian Classical Music

2005-09-26T11:53:00.000-04:00

A simple google search on Indian Classical Music yielded this highly readable introduction to Carnatic Music, name given to South Indian Classical Music.

Steve Jobs on death

2005-09-21T13:21:00.000-04:00

Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, is, as we all know, a great businessman. What is less well known that he is somewhat of a philosopher as well. As a believer in Karma and ancient eastern philosophy, he certainly is the guy who practices what he preaches. His recent address at the convocation of Stanford University is a very worthwhile read. One quote from this address which I find very illuminating is about death. "Death is very likely the single best invention in life,” Mr Jobs told his young audience. “All external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.” Sums it up for me.

Masterpiece!

2005-09-09T15:32:00.000-04:00

Blessed were those who were awake on Wednesday night to watch the dual between Agassi and Blake. If ever there was a match which lived up to its hype then this was it. The potential match up was being hyped from the day Blake overcame Nadal and fans were not disappointed in the least. The intensity and quality of play were all in evidence from Game 1 of first set. Blake came out firing and with some Federerisque forehands , returns and speed , he was up 2 sets in no time. Agassi, a true champion, was never going to let it go without a fight. The old warhorse switched gears and started playing like the Agassi of yore. His speed, agility , accurate serve and thundorous returns were all in full display in hard fought 3rd and 4th sets which were closer than the scoreline may suggest. The stage was set for an epic fifth set and what a set it was! Blake found the energy and agility of first 2 sets , broke Agassi to lead 5-3 and a chance to serve out the set. Agassi decided to go for the kill , a couple of unplayable returns later , he had a break point which he seized with both hands (no pun intended!)with a two handed backhand winner. Inevitably, the match drifted towards a tiebreaker afterwards. The tiebreaker was as hard fought as everything else before it. Blake got off to a good start again ,was up 3-0 and true to the theme of the night Agassi had to fight back again, which he duly did. At 6-5 , Agassi had a match-point which Blake saved with a thundorous forehand winner, kissing the corners of the sideline, but Agassi was not to be denied a thoroughly deserved victory. Couple of points later, Agassi was one more step closer to realising his dream of retiring with one more Grand Slam title. The bonohomie between the two warriors was evident in the way they hugged each other at the net. As Agassi rightly asserted afterwards, "Tennis was the biggest winner tonight."

Tennis- The toughest sport?

2005-08-28T18:03:00.000-04:00

Is Tennis the toughest sport on the planet? Justin Gimelstob of Sports Illustrated certainly thinks so.

India's Employment Guarantee Scheme

2005-08-22T11:58:00.000-04:00

Poverty is the biggest problem facing 3rd world countries like India. Like almost all governments in these countries, in India too, rhetoric & populism always triumph over practical sensible approach to poverty alleviation. Thus, true to tradition, Indian's coalition government has come up with the idea of providing guaranteed employment to the rural poor (Here is another take on this). If this smacks of long buried communist socialist ideology of yore then this is because it is. If 50 years of India's experimentation with socialist model should have taught us anything then it is that free lunches do not work. How is government going to create those millions of promised jobs out of thin air is anybody's guess. What is really going to happen is, most of the money is going to end up in the coffers of corrupt officials, and whatever is left will go as "salary" for non-existent jobs, thus hardly contributing to any meaningful sustainable employment. It is a pity that we have two of the most brilliant economists heading the government and the ideas they come up with are these socialist nonsenses. They really do not have to look far to find ideas that work. A cursory look upwards towards Beijing or Shanghai is enough to find a model which will assuredly provide much needed employment to millions. India needs to open up its economy more to let retailers and manufactures come in, bring billions of dollars into the economy & give it a much needed boost. Software and outsourcing industries can provide jobs only to high skill english speaking graduates. Inspite of all its hype, this industry provides jobs to only close to a million people out of a potential workforce of 300 million. Manufacturing and retail companies require a large number of low-skilled, low wage people to work at their factories & stores thus automatically creating jobs for low-skilled semi-literate people. If Indian government can just let free market work & get out of the way then those jobs will be accessible to millions of Indian poor. That will be a real "employment guarantee."

Einstein's Cosmos

2005-08-18T01:17:00.000-04:00

A few months ago, I had the good fortune of laying my hands upon Brian Greene's wonderful book, Fabric of the Cosmos. The book fascinated me enough to write a review of sort on my puny little corner of the web world. It turns out that this book had really woken up a dormant physicist somewhere inside me and I have been itching to know more about this wonderful pet subject of physicists called the Universe. A name which is synonymous with physics is that of Albert Einstein, the iconoclastic genius, arguably the most influential scientist of all times. Brian Greene had spurred me enough to know more about Albert Einstein and his revolutionary theories. So, I headed to Fulton County public library to pick up whatever I could find on the Man of the Millenium according to Time magazine. Two books lay there, side by side, both remarkably similar in their outer appearance, similar cover, similar titles and almost the same number of pages. The similarity did not end there, both are written by scientists, one by Barry Parker other by Michio Kaku both physicists, and aspire to fill a gap in the vast popular literature on Einstein by focusing more on his life as a physicist rather than being run of the mill biographies. The book by Barry Parker, though self contained, is part of a trilogy on Albert Einstein and the one by Kaku is not, that probably is the only difference between the two. So reading one book was as good as reading both.

I decided to start out with the book by Michio Kaku, Einstein's cosmos, for no other reason than that his is a name I had heard before. The book is divided into three parts, corresponding to three pictures which Einstein came up with in his quest to understad the Universe. The first picture, that of racing a light beam, inspired him to come up with Special Relativity. The second one , on the equivalence of acceleration & gravity, gave mankind General Relativity and the third one was his unfinished quest for a unified theory combining Quantum Theory with General Relativity. The book is very well written and gives a basic grasp of Einstein's ideas and true magnitude of his genius. Einstein's contribution to science , and consequently to humanity, is unfathomably deep and far reaching. His theories have opened up vistas unknown before his time and so fundamentally shaken the roots of science that modern science would have been decades , if not centuries, behind if not for him. Kaku is successful in his attempt to provide basic insights into Einstein's work and also the thought process Einstein may have gone through during the course of his discoveries.

Equally interestingly, Kaku gives a fairly detailed description of Einstein's personal and public life well enough for this book to qualify as a semi-biography. The anecdotes from Einstein's life are quite informative and entertaining. The book is full of famous quotes from Einstein who incidentally was quite a genius at making a smart quip as well. To sample some of those, when Einstein was troubled by the inherent randomness in nature implied by quantum theory, he quipped "God does not play dice." When asked to describe relativity for a lay person, he replied "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity." Writing about the importance of time, he remarked, "The only reason for time to exist is so that everything doesn't happen at once." Emphasising simplicity in the matters of science Einstein said, "Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler." There were many many more which will need a couple of more posts if I desire to dwelve into them.

One thing which came off as something of a great surprise to me was Einstein's disdain for pure mathematics. Einstein was no slouch in mathematics but his skills apparently were a far cry from the likes of Newton, the scientist & mathematician who alone can qualify as Einstein's equal.To Einstein, abstract mathematics was "superfluous erudition", and the physical picture was the king. After his discovery of Special Relativity, a theory which came in for a lot of attention of mathematicians because of its inherent "beauty", he famously remarked "Since the mathematicians have started to tackle Special Relativity, I myself do not understand it." Einstein was the kind of genius who never thought in terms of mathematics. He always thought in terms of vivid physical pictures , mathematics to him was merely a book-keeping device invoked only when he needed to work out tedious details. It was quite a contrary to his contemporaries who got so lost in intricate mathematics and the intellectual entertainment it provided that they forgot what they were dealing with are physical objects not mathematical constructs.

Another surprising fact is regarding his Nobel Prize. Einstein had done enough work to get 4-5 nobel prizes in his lifetime and his theories are still generating nobel prizes for other scientists. Interestingly enough, Einstein did not get his Nobel for General Relativity, the work he is best known for. His Nobel came for his explanation of Photoelectric effect, a relatively minor work in his long & distinguished career. According to the book, the Nobel committee could not understand General Relativity and did not want to award a Nobel Prize in something they themselves did not understand. In his acceptance speech, Einstein completely ignored photoelectric effect, and talked about his most cherished creation General Relativity instead.

After finishing up the book, I could not help but get philosophical again. The Universe is trillions of light years vast, billions of years old and full of exotic things like stars, planets, black holes, atoms, quarks, electrons and what not. However, inspite of all its apparent complexity , there is a strange order , an order which unbelievably can be described by few mathematical expressions. Isn't it incredible that one man sitting in a quiet room on an incredibly small & insignificant planet can figure out that order underlying the Universe. Not only he can discover an order in a mind numbingly chaotic world, he can make predictions which fly on the face of common experience but are still startingly accurate. To me this is simply exhilirating.

Saving us from ourselves

2005-08-05T09:33:00.000-04:00

Today is the 60th anniversary of that fateful day when Little Boy created the biggest cataclysm known to humanity. The day when time stood still and death danced in all its naked glory. 6th August 1945 was a defining moment in the histroy of mankind as it showed that how much power man has mustered in its short stay on earth. Luckily, the last 60 years have not seen anything like those fateful days in Japan, but is it possible that we will be so lucky for next 60 as well. The major nations of the world have enough nuclear power in their arsenal to destroy the world several times over. The potential to cause utter destruction exists, more than ever, so consequently a threat exists. How far-fethched is the scenario that some day this potential may fall into the wrong hands? Can one ever be sure that this is not possible? It is certainly possible because there are enough nuclear weapons & there are enough mad men on the loose (For an extremely well-written take on this, go here). Some of those mad men have great political power & enough resources to be able to acquire those devil's toys. A positive probablity, however small, can not be ruled out that one mad man may have control over a significant amount of nuclear power one day. On a long enough time line, any event -however improbable- is going to occur. The scary part is that we donot know how long that time line is simply because we can never have a realistically accurate estimate of the threat. The only way to be sure of avoiding another Hiroshima or Nagasaki is to completely destroy all nuclear weapons & impose a worldwide moratorium on their development. Ironically though, it may take another one of those to save humanity from humans.

National Awards

2005-07-14T00:58:00.000-04:00

One would think, and be completely reasonable in thinking so, that when a national award is given in a particular field, the recipient of the award has done something which deserves recognition on account of being of great importance to the country. For example, some works of great national importance & hence deserving of a 'national award' could be laying out your life as a soldier, making a great discovery which solves country's energy problems or spearheading a revolution which wipes out corruption in the country! Less dramatically, in the context of cinema, it would be perfectly 'reasonable' to assume that the kind of movie which may deserve a national award will have some important social, political or economic issue at its heart. However, as it turns out, 'reasonable' could mean different things to different people. Your and my idea of reasonable could be completely different from the idea of a dumb-witted lunatic or the committee deciding the national awards for that matter. So, the commitee in all its 'wisdom'(giggles) has decided to bestow the honour of national award to a movie which displays the lives of the rich & the famous in all its naked glory.To top it off, the national award for acting went to a wooden actor for playing a casanova in a rehash of a stale Hollywood movie. But, what really had me in splits was a comment from one of the esteemed jurors lauding the actor for "his sheer ease, subtlety and spontaneity in portraying a complex and demanding role." I can't help but think what if we put these esteemed jurors in other national award committees. In that case, national award for sports may go to KPS Gill for "his valuable contribution towards Indian hockey", national award for journalism may go to Times of India "for their painstaking & thorough coverage of matters of national importance like sex lives of Britney Spears & Angelina Jolie" and national award for social service may go to Dawood Ibrahim for his "relentless zeal & passion for an extremely difficult job of controling India's population by exploding as many bombs as possible." As I said 'reasonable' can mean different things to different people.

Outlook India's Sci-tech edition

2005-07-14T00:45:00.000-04:00

It is not everyday that a popular magazine considers it worthwhile to devote an entire issue on Science & Technology, so when that happens , the event does deserve some sitting up & taking notice. OutlookIndia's effort is certainly commendable and is guaranteed to sell more copies as well in an Indian middle class society, which covetes scientific & technological achievements.

The Swiss juggernaut rolls on

2005-07-04T23:07:00.000-04:00

Another Wimbledon, another title, another bemused opponent and plenty of happy Tennis fans all over the world. The story reads the same, as it has been for past 2 years running, what made it different this time that Roger played better than what he did at last year's Wimbledon Final (as if that was even possible!), 49 winners, 12 unforced errors, only one service break and plenty of "how did he do that!!" shots. The statistics are notorious for lying but this time they did not. Roger's astonishing game has prompted debate over his greatness, Hewitt calls him "one of the greatest", Mcnore says "the most talented person ever to pick up a Tennis racquet", Laver is honoured to "be compared with him"! Roche calls him "the most complete player of all time" and Roddick hopes "he gets bored or something" so that he may have a chance. Well, he does not seem to be yawning as yet and till then Roddick & co. will have to figure out some way to atleast make him sweat on the court. Until that happens, the juggernaut will roll on, the trophies will pile on and Roddick will have no need to buy that extra seat on his trip back home.

Hazaron Khwahishe aiseen

2005-06-23T14:57:00.000-04:00

There have been very few Indian films , if any, which go into or even touch upon the subject of Emergency in India during late 1970s. Numerous movies have been-and continue to be made-about the pre-independence India, about 3 wars India fought after independence even about Terrorism in Punjab & Kashmir. However, the dark period of late 70s has continued to be taboo in Indian Cinema. Finally, a filmmaker has come up with a brilliant movie covering that period of India's contemporary history. Sudhir Mishra's "Hazaron Khwashishe Aiseen" is a superb movie which dwelves into Naxalite movement of 70s with the emergency making an apperance as a backdrop. The movie chronicles the lives of 3 main protagonists Siddharth, Vikram and Gita from their days in St. Stephens College in Delhi to the life changing transformations they undergo during the course of the movie. The movie is a triumph in all respects. Performances are first rate, story is fascinating & screenplay is outstanding. Even though the movie has a political movement as a backdrop, there is never a dull moment and for sheer enetertainment value too, it is pretty good. Overall, the best movie of the year from the staple of Hindi Cinema . Hope they make more such gems in future.

Fabric of the Cosmos- A fulfilling experience

2005-06-21T09:08:00.000-04:00

Here is something I did not know before I started reading Brian Greene's 'Fabric of the Cosmos'.

(i) Time is not absolute. It is relative, your clock (even the body clock) runs depending on how fast you are moving. Thus, faster you travel slower you age! If you can tavel at the speed of light you will never age! (So you can safely throw away your Botox injections)

(ii) Time at moon moves faster than time at earth, because moon has smaller gravity. So, if you ever have a choice to live on moon, don't, you will live longer.

(iii) The actions you take "now" can effect what happened billions of years ago, light years away from earth or so it seems!

(iv) Universe at scales billions of times smaller than a centimeter, behaves in fundamentally different way to what we experience in our day to day lives. For example, particles at those small sizes(like electrons or protons) seemingly have no definite position or speed , in fact, they don't have a definite anything. The reality at those scales is subsumed in a cloud of uncertainty.

(v) Universe probably started out as a lump of matter weighing a meagre 20 pounds!! That lump of matter gave rise to billions of galaxies and billions of stars in each one of them. The universe at Big-Bang did not weigh more than Brian Greene's dog!

(vi) Gravity can create waves in the fabric of space & time. These gravitational waves can stretch or compress space around you and yourself. Thus, we may get flatten or ballooned if a strong enough gravitaional waves from a distant supernova happens to pass by. Not a great way to get in 'shape':)

Well, Thanks to Greene that era of darkness is over and finally there is light;). Now, I know all that I mentioned above and a lot more.

Brian Greene's wonderful book takes us to a journey called 'Man's understanding of the Nature'. During this journey, we encounter startling discoveries which forever changed the way we (or at least the physicists) look at the universe. All along this journey, Greene is carefully holding our hands, making sure we don't get lost trying to understand the daunting complexities of nature. He is a very kind & gentle explicator, explaining the concepts in a colloquial language with liberal use of metaphors and analogies. His enthusiasm for Physics shines through every page of the book. However, even with a guide as good as Greene, this journey is not an easy one to undertake. Some of the concepts (like Entanglement in Quantum Physics) are so counterintuitive and cause such an upheaval to our intuition towards the world that it takes a great deal of faith, provided in no small measure by staggeringly accurate experiments, to believe in those. However, it does help to know that even as great a scientist as Einstein had a lot of trouble accepting the notions of reality as envisaged in Quantum Theory (Infact, he never accepted Quantum Theory as it is ) .

There are many places in the book where one can't help but get deeply intrigued. For example, during the discussion on the Flow of Time, Greene seems to assert that time does not pass by, it just seems to! Every moment in time is frozen for ever, every moment in time exists as it is, nothing is past & nothing is future, everything just is. This smacks of the concept of Fate, a design which is already in place and all we do is just live through that design without changing it (matrix, anyone!). To me, this was deeply intriguing . It looks like believers in Fate have finally found scientific evidence for their beliefs! However, Greene is kind enough not to thrust his opinions to reader's face, and points out alternative viewpoints & more elaborate explanations at such controversial (and other) junctures.

The book ends with delightful discussions on topics which are more like Science Fiction than Science. Greene dwelves into the topics of Teleportation and Time-Travel. It is encouraging to know that theoretical physics has not ruled out time-travel, yet. So, as of know traveling to the past (traveling to the future is possible, thanks to special relativity) is still a possibility, albeit a highly unlikely one, but if you are thinking that this will give rise to mind-bending paradoxes then think again. The past you may be able to travel will exist in a universe different to what you currently reside in. So, nobody can go to the past and erase you(ala terminator) because that past will take place in a different universe. Thanks to Quantum Physics, teleportation (actually it is more like cloning) is already a reality, although at a much smaller scale. The day when we may have the capability to teleport humans or even small objects "exists"(if it does) somewhere far far into the "future".

Finishing up the book, one is sure to gasp at the wonder nature is. One also can't help but wonder at the distance we have traveled since the dawn of civilization. The distance we have traveled from the days of Copernicus , Galileo or even Newton is surely impressive. Not too long ago, people just used to look at the sky and theorized about what lies out there. Now, we have giant telescopes which can look almost at the edge of the universe. We know that we are part of a solar system which is only one of hundreds of millions in the galaxy milky way, the galaxy we are part of is one of only a billions out there, and if current theories are right, the universe itself may be part of one of only infinitely many universes out there. All this, if it were not true, would have made great science fiction. Achievements like this make me think of the most wondrous thing in the nature , the human mind. The human intellect is the biggest marvel of nature. It is surely staggering to realize what pure thought combined with passionate curiosity can achieve. Physics's monumental achievements are a great proof of that.

iTrip is cooooollll!!

2005-06-05T12:27:00.000-04:00

I am a self-confessed Ipod junkie, just like millions others. Ipod has changed my life for the better. The idea of carrying all my music collection in my pocket and be able to play at anytime anywhere is captivating and thanks to Apple it is a cool reality. However, once all your music collection is at the palm of your hand, there is a strong urge to be able to play that music on the speakers of your choice. The headphones seem too restrictive. If you have "state of the art" music system with yourself (like I do with my Bose speakers!) you want to be able to use it. Enter Itrip, a wonderful little device which attatches on top of your Ipod and transmits a radio signal at the frequency of your choice. That radio frequency can be picked up by any radio device within 30 feet range. The most wonderful thing about the whole thing is that I have my own personal radio station , commercial-free I might add, at which I can play any song of my choosing from my vast 20 GB collection. That degree of control is thrilling to say the least. The device is ideal to play your music in a car. Unlike its bulkier, more general purpose counterparts in market, Itrip doesnot need any batteries. It draws its power from Ipod and is as light as a feather. Moreover, there are a lot more frequencies to choose from unlike some other devices (like Irock) . The only possible drawback is that of a general FM-transmitter. If you are on a long drive through the cities then you may have to change frequencies quite often, however a long drive through countryside should give no trouble at all. If you are playing it at home then there is no problem whatsoever. All in all, a great Ipod accessory.

ESPN- The Villain

2005-06-04T13:26:00.000-04:00

ESPN has done it again. For no apparent reason , they decided not to show live the French Open semifinals. They were happy to show the recordings in the evening though. Makes me wonder whether it had something to do with the fact that the tournament was in France or it had something to do with the fact that no American could make it that far in the tournament. May be it was both, but neverthless Tennis fans were undone again by ESPN. It reminds me of the Australian Open this year when they decided not to show live the epic semifinal game between Marat Safin and Federar thus robbing Tennis fans of one of the best grand slam semifinals games ever. The reasoning at that time -as far as I could make out- was since it was a game involving two non-americans, it was not worth showing, because they did show the other semifinal between Roddick (american) and Hewitt. This strange behaviour from ESPN is baffling because even commercially it does not make sense. Tennis is a very popular game in US and a grand slam semifinal is sure to find a substantial audience, whether an american is playing or not. It is just unfathomable that ESPN can not (or may be does not want to) acquire rights to broadcast live the semifinals games of a Grand Slam event. Even the puny old National TV in India broadcasts grand slam Tennis live.

Pheonix Suns - Loved it while it lasted

2005-06-01T02:13:00.000-04:00

So finally the juggernaut called Phoenix Suns has come to a crashing halt. Phoenix Suns were like a 'breath of fresh air' (cliche alert) in this era of diffensive basketball. They were great fun to watch and played basketball like it is meant to be played, great athletic game full of spectacular dunks, layups and terrific shooting. It worked wonderfully well as Suns managed to win 62 games in the regular season & reached the conference finals. However, their flamboyance could not come to terms with the playoff experience of San Antonio and the awesome talents they possess. My friend Neeraj had pointed out to me that even though Spurs are primarily a defensive basketball team, they can play offensive game as well as any, however, Suns do not have the defense to challenge the likes of Duncan and Ginobili. Spurs proved that beyond any doubt in the first two games as they beat Suns in their own game and that too in their backyard by playing a full throttle fast-paced basketball. Suns did score their customary 100+ points, but Spurs proved more than a match. In game 3, Spurs were back to what they have been doing all along, great defense combined with a measured offense to hold Suns below 100 points for the first time in the playoffs & go up 3-0. Suns did really well in Game 4 to snatch a come from behind victory, but everybody knew that the series was as good as over . Spurs came back to Phoenix and completed the formalities by giving another all round display of basketball. Spurs look really good right now and my money is on them to win the championship for the third time in 7 years.

Even though Suns lost they do take a lot of positives from these season. Getting Steve Nash from Dallas proved a masterstroke as not only he was the MVP for the year but also took his game a couple of notches up(as if that was possible) to give one of the best performances by a point-guard in playoffs. Their draft- pick Amare Stoudemire is finally coming on his own, as he averaged 30+ points in playoffs and gave one spectacular performance after another. The wonderful combination of Stoudemire and Nash ensured one of the greatest turnarounds in NBA history. Phoenix Suns went from 29 victories in 2004 to 62 victories in 2005. Suns are sure going to be a force to reckon with for next few years.

French Open- Federar Vs Nadal

2005-06-01T01:46:00.000-04:00

This one promises to be one of the best games of 2005. Ever since the draw for French Open came out, fans have been salivating over the delicious potential match up between the current number one and the spanish sensation. The last time the two met, at Nasdaq-100 open in Florida, they produced a crackling game of tennis full of flamboyance and elegance. Federar did win the contest but not before sweating it out in sweltering Miami Heat. The upcoming game in Paris promises to be no different only that the stakes are higher this time around. Federar, the world no. 1 by about 100 miles, and Nadal, the most sensational young player in the ATP circuit are players of almost equal calibre & style but contrasting personalities. Federar is the epitome of calm concentration and Nadal is all about letting himself all out in the heat of the battle. Federar, because of his experience and calm head, certainly has more than an edge, however it should be remembered that Nadal is the only player to have come close to beating Federar after the Australian Open. Tradesports has given Federar 60% probability of winning which to me is underestimating Federar's chances, however Nadal has been nothing short of spectacular on clay this year with a 21 game winning streak so far, so even if Federar's chances are being underestimated it probably is not by much. All in all, it is going to be a mouth watering clash between these two supremely gifted players. I just can't wait for Thursday.

Buzztracker

2005-05-31T17:39:00.000-04:00

Came across this interesting site buzztracker by following a link from this one. What this site does is gives a snapshot of places in the news today. The way it is done here is using the indexing approach followed in the Google search engine. The site assigns a weight to different locations, depending on how many newspapers referred to that location in their daily news. Higher the number of newspapers referring to the location, more the weight assigned (in this case a %) and bigger the red circle over that location in the global map. Different locations are linked by a line, this link depends on the number of times the news stories cross reference two locations. Higher the number of cross references, darker the line linking two locations. The idea is to capture places in the news and emphasise the effect of happenings in one place with the other. Overall, an interesting effort.

2005-05-23T03:31:00.000-04:00

blast in delhi over screening of a movie. This again serves as a reminder that even after almost 60 years of democracy , we still have a long way to go before we truly become a democratic, open , modern society. We still have to learn that dissent is essential for the health of society & violence is not the right way to express disagreement.

outraged beyond words

2005-05-19T21:39:00.000-04:00

It takes a lot for an ordinary Indian to be outraged. I would imagine that most of us who are born and bred in India know how it is. Sure we are the largest democracy in the world, we have an independent judicial system and yes we have a rich & ancient culture as we love to tell every american over here. We have that and what we also have is a lot of superficiality, hypocrisy , corruption and utter apathy. Our democracy is a sham and we are a borderline banana republic if we have not crossed the boundary already. This example displays this ugly face of our political and civil system in all its naked glory.

http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20050519&fname=buta&sid=1

Outrageous is the mildest word I can think of to describe this . It doesnot need any reminder to anybody that indian political class is as soulless and corrupt as one can imagine in one's wildest dream but I underestimated their boldness and lack of respect for public opinion. I am sure that even Buta Singh is not stupid enough to realize that this order is going to lead to a wave of protest from all over the world. The fact that he still dared and went ahead with it shows that public opinion does not have any meaning in Buta Singh's(or more appropriately Congress's) dictionary. This decision is a blow to morality & idealism of all right thinking individuals. Buta Singh has just told all honest and upright indians "To hell with you."

2005-05-18T01:01:00.000-04:00

So the summer is here and finally I am getting the chance to catch up on my reading. First on the list is Brian Greene's fascinating account of state of the art Theoretical Physics "Fabric of the Cosmos" written for a well-educated but more or less lay person on advanced physics. I have read only a quarter of some 500 odd pages of the book & to put it mildly I am fascinated beyond words. The concepts covered in the book are not at all easy to convey without use of heavy duty mathematics and mind bending jargon but Brian Greene does an extraordinarily difficult job outstandingly well. He conveys the essential features of such profound concepts as General Theory of Relativity , Special Theory of Relativity and entanglement with amazing clarity without dumbing down the ideas ( I think, or may be he did dumb them down without an explicit realization by dumbos like me:)). So far I have gone through about 120 pages and I feel like I know so much! I just cannot wait to cover the rest of the book. More on this topic will follow soon.

2005-05-11T20:22:00.000-04:00

Ours is a really ban loving country. You may be aware of fundamental rights given to us by the indian constitution like mundane rights of freedom, right of equality before law yada yada, but what you may not be aware of an even more fundmental right given to us as a birthright is the right to ban or atleast right to demand a ban. We really love that right, for most of the political parties it is their favourite right especially of the parties you don't even know exist. Now another of these nonexistent parties have come forward (pun intended) to exercise that right . This is what democracy is all about, right to ban things -doesn't matter whether you like those things or not. Gandhi, Nehru, Bhagat and especially Bose must be really happy that they fought with British so that every once in a while some nonentities can wake up from their deep slumber & decide that they should demand a ban on some particular movie, book or whatever else they can think of. Our governments have also been very encouraging with the idea of bans. Whenever somebody demands a ban, they are more than happy to oblige. Some years ago some very 'religious' fellows decided that a particular book hurts their religious feelings way too much and they demand a ban. Indian central government was very happy to accede to that demand, how can people's most basic right be voilated. A very healthy precedent was set and since then our governments have either banned or censored numerous movies, TV shows, books, plays , onions, tomatos and what have you. We all hope that this great tradition will continue and we as a nation will find more & more things banworthy. As they say, if you can't beat them, ban them.

Indian Aviation ready for takeoff

2005-05-07T11:37:00.000-04:00

A revolution is underway in the domestic aviation market.

http://us.rediff.com/money/2005/may/07spec.htm

Judging by a slew of new players entering the domestic aviation business it would seem a metamorphosis is forthcoming for this important sector of the economy. Consumers never had it so good, with airfares for some routes being 5oo Rupees($10). Are indian skies headed the same way as the mobile phone industry? It could but there are some serious bottlenecks. Airport Infrastructure in India is one of the worst in the world, which automatically increases the cost of flying. Fuel Prices have been hitting the roof which invariably hits private airlines the hardest. Indian market is still not big enough to support 10 doemstic carriers, so for a first few years most of the new entrants will be loss making enterprises.
Airline business is one of the most competitive business all over the world. Very few players have made profits consistently over the years (only one example comes to mind SouthWest Airline in US). Big Size is a big hindrance in this business , as the examples of American Airlines, United Airlines will amply demonstrate. Only a smaller, nimbler player has the best chance to survive in this highly volatile business. Indian private carriers will do well to learn the dos from the likes of SouthWest, JetBlue etc. and from American, United to learn the donts. In the short term, indian market should see a lot of bloodbath with mergers, acquistions, bankruptcies, consoildation but over the long term future is bright. Indian economy is growing at more than 7% a year so a lot of people are having a lot more money to spend. If airline prices can come close to the second class AC train prices in India, then the market would really explode. All in all future of aviation is really bright in Indian aviation sector. The civil aviation minsiter Prafful Patel has done a marvellous job in his brief tenure so far. Now if only he could make indian airports world class, allow more airlines to fly to India then the prices of ticket to & from India would also fall. This would give a big push to Indian tourism industry and international business. Going by his track record, that must be at top of his to-do list.

An addendum on this topic. How to run a low cost airline in India?

Quotes I love

2005-04-24T11:58:00.000-04:00

They say that a wise man can express wisdom of a lifetime in one sentence. Each one of the quotes below make me feel that way. I will keep adding to this list as I unearth more gems.

1)"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." -- Vaclav Havel

2)"There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." -- Albert Einstein

3)"The difference between a smart person and a wise person is that a smart person knows what to say and a wise person knows whether or not to say it." -- Quote found on the wall of a recreation center office in Berkeley, California
.

4)"Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get." -- Dave Gardner

5)"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." -- Talmud

6)"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. " -- Helen Keller

7)"This is the true joy in life: the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no 'brief candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations." -- George Bernard Shaw

8)pain is inevitable but suffering is optional.- unknown

9)"The happiness of those who want to be popular depends on others; the happiness of those who seek pleasure fluctuates with moods outside their control; but the happiness of the wise grows out of their own free acts."
- Marcus Aurelius

The importance of Cricket

2005-04-10T04:47:00.000-04:00

Raju is an ordinary coolie on the Victoria Terminus station in Bombay. He has a hard life, he works 16 hours a day, from 8.00 am to 12.00 am on the station. He is 31, has a wife who is pregnant again , 3 kids in a small kholi in Dharawi. He is oblivious to the world around him, he is just too busy with his life. He doesnot know and care about India-Pakistan peace process, his life is untouched by India's "booming" economy & he could not be least bothered whether it is Congress or BJP who rules Delhi. All he knows is that he has a wife and 3 kids to support & he is doing his best to do just that. He has one passion though, that of cricket. The game has a special place in his heart.This is hardly unusual, most of his friends at VT are avid cricket lovers. He has his own pocket transistor which he listens to in his off hours whenever India is playing Cricket. He is a very happy man today. India has just beaten Pakistan in a cricket game. He is all the more happy because the Man of the Match was Mahendra Singh Dhoni, an up & coming player in this very talented Indian cricket team who belongs to Raju's home state of Jharkand. Dhoni hit Pakistan's bowlers to all parts of the ground today scoring 148 runs. Nobody from Jharkand had ever broken into India's national eleven before Dhoni. Today is a day of great joy for Raju. He can smell sweetness in the air. His mood is very upbeat. For a brief moment, he will forget his daily troubles. He will forget how hard he had to work today to manage food on the table tomorrow, he will forget that there is a no electricity at home today for 4th consecutive day in the middle of a sweltering summer , he will forget that he has to commute back to home jostling for space with 300 other people in a train which has capacity for only 100 people, he will forget that he has to wake up at 3.00 am in the morning to fill up his familty's share of water from a community tap, he will forget how his family of 5 is living in that small kholi & paying half his income for it. Yes, cricket is that important for him, this is the day when he feels content, even happy. For a brief fleeting moment life seems beautiful, there is a feeling of joy deep in his heart, someone up there still listens to his prayers. He still has a place for him. Tonight he will sleep feeling content with himself. Tomorrow is another gut-wrenching day in his hard life but atleast today was worth living.

amazing story

2005-04-02T14:56:00.000-05:00

I had a look at this incredible story today.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/04/02/seeing.no.limits.ap/index.html

Just sets me thinking what is it that humans cannot achieve! The whole concept of "impossible" seems so relative as rightly put forth by Tim Cordes " something seems impossible until it is done." Absolutely amazing and so incredibly motivating for us lesser mortals. Too many times we hamper ourselves by being a victim of our circumstances and not really using the gifts we have been bestowed with. People like Tim Cordes are a gift to humanity. They show us what can be achieved, they inspire us to go ahead & stretch the limits of possibilities a little bit more.

Ganguly and Dravid

2005-03-29T10:25:00.000-05:00

Following exchange takes place between Ganguly & Dravid in the second innings of third test between India and Pakistan just after Sehwag gets out.

Dravid: Ok captain. Its time for me to go. What do you think our strategy should be?

Ganguly : Hmmm. The pitch is a minefield and bowlers are throwing grenades, just look at the
way Sehwag got run out. I want you to go out there, and go into a shell, you are no
strangers to this , are you ? (smiles)

Dravid: But Dada, we are cruising along pretty well. Dont you think we should try and go for the
victory?

Ganguly:(visibly annoyed) Who do you think we are? Australia? We should not kid
ourselves. Just like any other bowling attack these are one of the most dangerous
bowlers I have ever seen. That Shahid Afridi gives me goose pumps. These days even
spinners are throwing bouncers at me, I dont understand why is that? May be
something to do with my dislike for short stuff (sighs).

Dravid: So I go out there and block as many balls as possible?

Ganguly: No, block every ball. No ball should be left behind. Every run you score can be and will
be held against you. One more thing, no matter what happens stand your ground. Do
not come back to the pavillion.

Dravid: You mean I should stand there even if I am given out?

Ganguly: Are you kidding me? This is Bucknor we are talking about. The man is as blind as a
bat. Stay there even if all 3 stumps are upooted. There is no way we will survive this
test unless we have some help from Bucknor. Listen to me carefully, we will have to dig
really deep today and once we have done that we can easily bury ourselves.

Dravid: Dada, I still feel that we should try and chase the target. Even if we lose we may still
have the glory.

Ganguly: How much more glory do you want? There is only so much glory a man can handle.
Remember we consider ourselves number two in the world. We should not do anything
which may look like as if we are number one. The Australians may really get upset,
you know & may clobber us in our next series. Just trust me on this.

Dravid: Ok captain. I think I should get going now lest I am give time-out.

Ganguly: Thats like my boy. Go on , be a wimp. I will see you in a bit.

No Visa Power for Modi

2005-03-21T21:43:00.000-05:00

It is hard to sympathise with the plight of Narendra Modi. The denial of Visa by US government
has reaffirmed the way in which the world and many Indians percieve him, that of a religious bigot who played the role of Nero when Gujarat was burning. Indian government is understandably concerned with this because after all Modi is a constitutional authority elected by the due process of democracy and not a wanted terrorist (though he may well be). However, US governement is well within its rights to deny entry to any person they deem not worthy. Not withstanding the NDA rhetoric calling this 'A National Shame', I believe that NDA's idea of National Shame is a little muddled. The real National Shame was what happened in Gujarat and afterwards, this is nothing but a minor snub to India by US and yes, may be a small justice to Gujarat riots' victims.

Wonder

2005-02-17T23:54:00.000-05:00

I have been feeling a lot philosophical today as it can happen to anyone on a beautiful Saturday morning with a lot of free time to be in touch with your inner self. So, this fine morning, I just started wondering about something incredible which sometimes we take for granted. That incredible is Life, and each one of us has sometime or the other have wondered about the beauty of it, the genius of it & many times about the meaning of it. And though I do not pretend to be anything remotely resembling a poet, I dared to put that sense of amazement into an unpolished draft which sort of rhymes at some places.

Don't you wonder?
that birds can fly
rivers can flow
Sun can set
and moon can glow

Don't you wonder?
that rain can fall
love can enthrall
that heart can bleed
for someone's aching needs

Don't you wonder?
that joy can be spread
pain can be shared
that happiness can grow
with love's constant flow

Don't you wonder?
that a heart can love passionately
and hate with ferocity
The same hands which bring life
can kill with impunity

Don't you wonder?
that man can demystify distant stars
but still be far apart from those on earth
that he can bridge distance to moon
but still may not bridge distance to hearts

Have you ever wondered?
That there is so much to wonder.
Have you ever wondered?
That you can wonder.

Black- a triumph of mind over matter

2005-02-13T10:57:00.000-05:00

Black, the color of darkness, is the story of a girl whose life is defined by darkness. The main protagonist in this latest masterpiece from the very gifted indian director Sanjay Bhansali is a deaf and blind girl, Michelle, who is struggling to establish an identity for herself in a world which is not built for her strengths. Helping her in this struggle is an eccentric, but very dedicated, teacher Devraj played by superstar Amitabh Bacchan. In terms of basic premise, the movie deals with the oft-repeated concept of differently enabled people and their struggle to live with dignity & respect in a world not suited for their different abilities. What sets this movie apart, however, is the emotional punch it packs in frame after frame never letting the audiences' attention waver. For example, in arguably the best sequence of the movie, when Michelle's sister gets married she is overcome with the desire for physical love. She asks for that love from the only man she knew, her teacher, who dedicated his life to her well-being. That was too much to ask for even from the man whose only goal in life was to see his student be able to face the world on her own. He tries to kiss her and is filled with the emotion of guilt. It was a supreme sacrifice, he gave up his self-respect for his student.

Performaces wise, every artist gave their career's best performances in this movie. Certainly so for Rani Mukherjee, playing Michelle, who deserves an award or two for her role. The performance of child artist Ayesha was very good too. Amitabh who has often not got the roles commensurate with his talent finally gets one and doesnot let this chance slip away. Bhansali proves yet again that he is one of the best directors in Indian Cinema, both past and present. Black is his best work so far, a movie rich in color, content and emotions. A must see.

India Diary:Part1

2004-12-13T08:49:00.000-05:00

Its been a week since I have been in India and already feels like a month. Small town India hasn't changed at all. Despite all the hype and hoopla over India's growth, its IT prowess and its rising influence as a world power in domestic and US media, it seems all that is just passing small town India by. The divide between middle class India and poor Bharat is just growing.

I have realized how much of a slave of technology I have become. Internet is the thing I am missing most. Internet to me had long passed the stage of being a mere necessity. It is now to me like dope for a junkie. I am really so badly missing the conveneince of ubiqitous internet in US . The dial-up connection through which I am writing is just a piece of bread to a month long starving Somalian. Cant wait to have my fill of the world of bits and bytes.

Thanksgiving Blues!

2004-11-25T16:13:00.000-05:00

"It is that wonderful time of the year", there goes this beautiful song on the radio. Sure," it is that wonderful time of the year", with joy all around, people rushing home to be with their loved ones on the eve of Thanksgiving. "It is that wondeful time of the year", when old relationships are reaffirmed, old bonds strenghthened, people go that extra mile to show how much they love each other. Oh, "It is that wonderful time of the year", when the holiday season is about to begin, christmas is only a month away, new year is on the horizon, the atmospehere is filled with anticipation, oh indeed "It is that wonderful time of the year". And yes "it is that wonderful time of the year" when everything is up for sale, people are jostling for space at the overcrowded malls, pushing and shoving each other for that hot item , yes it is a wonderful time of the year. "It is a wonderful time of the year", except when you are a lonely foreigner about 5000 miles away from home. Nobody is buying gifts for you, nobody is sending you a happy holidays card, you have nowhere to go for a thanksgiving reunion. "It is that wonderful time of the year", when your sense of isolation is getting reaffirmed, you are reminded that your friends & family are far away from you. "It is that wonderful time of the year" when you ask yourself what am I doing here, why dont I go back, this is not my country afterall. Yes, "It is that wonderful time of the year", when you are seized by thanksgiving blues, joy all around is bothering you, happiness of people around you is making you jealous and you are missing home that much more. Ah, "It is that wonderful time of the year".

Musharraf, the man of peace?

2004-11-25T00:14:00.000-05:00

What is the best thing to have happened in South Asia consisting the countries of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri-Lanka, BanglaDesh and Bhutan. International observers will be inclined to pick peace overtures between India & Pakistan , however, the best thing to have happened is the event which is at the genesis of peace initiatives. That event is elevation of General Pervez Musharraf as Pakistan's premier. This surely is going to strike as an odd choice to some especially to well-informed indians. Isnt he a hawk, a war mongerer who started the Kargil confrontation, a staunch opponent of peace? True, he is all that and he is not about to change but the way events have played out after his overthrow of Nawaz Sharif regime, his elevation has been a blessing in disguise for peace in Indian subcontinent and in Kashmir in particular. To illustrate the point, flashback to 9/11 , second day after that, on 9/12, US made it clear to all the world that it is no longer going to turn a blind eye towards Islamic fundamentalism & terrorism anywhere in the world. Afghanistan and Osama Bin Laden became target number one for US and rest of the world. US gave Pakistan an ultimatum, be with us or be against us. Musharraf facing the music made the most rational choice, he sideded with US. US invaded Afghanistan, drove out the Taliban which till then were hand in glove with the General and were providing him with man & money power for "Jihad" in Kashmir. Imagine if instead of Musharraf it was Nawaz Sharif who were in charge of Pakistan. In that scenario, Pakistan would have been a sitting duck for an inevitable civil war which would have followed if Nawaz had sided with US(not siding with US was not really an option). The breakout of civil war could have started a full scaled war between India & Pakistan which could have turned nuclear. Musharraf being the president and the army chief at the same time allowed him to control the hawks in his government, clean up ISI and rid Pakistan of some of those Taliban terrorists. However, Musharraf did-not do that for free. He squeezed out billions of dollars in aid from Uncle Sam, some of which must surely have gone to him and his lieutinents . That aid money is one of the main reasons that Pakistan's economy is doing so well now (Karachi Stock index is up 100% in last one year). Subsequent events made it clear that Pakistan could no longer allow its territory to be used as a breeding ground for "jihadis". Musharraf carried out a crackdown on jihadi activities, cleaned up the Madrasas and made peace offer to India. Any democratically elected premier in Pakistan could not have done even a fraction of what Musharraf has done without throwing the country into chaos. Make no mistakes Musharraf is not a saint, far from it, he is a hawk but he is a smart & pragmatic hawk. His survival is dependent upon USA and US needs an ally like him for its war on terror. Musharraf is indispensable for both US and India. India have their best chance of peace with Musharraf at the helm. It is said that a man is a product of his circumstances, this could not be truer for Musharraf. History may still remember him as the man who brought peace in Kashmir. Irony thy name is Musharraf.

Thank you for Roger

2004-11-22T11:25:00.000-05:00

If anyone had any doubts about the genius of Roger Federar then those doubts should be put to rest forever after another awesome display from arguably the greatest tennis genius of our time. Playing against, merely supremely talented Leyton Hewitt , in the final of Masters Cup at Houston the genius once again showed how he moves into that extra gear when playing against a top 10 ranked opponent in a final. Case in point, in the first set, Hewitt apparently has total control of a point on his serve. He just hit a fine backhand which Roger did well to return. Meanwhile, Hewitt has reached the net and is in a perfect position to hit a ferocious forehand to an out of position Roger which is sure to get past him & earn Hewitt a well deserved point. He duly hit that ferocious forehand(or so he thought). Roger correctly anticipated the shot, got into position to hit a fatal counter-blow which sails past Hewitt , hits the baseline and score reads 30-30 instead of 40-15 which everybody thought it would read when Hewitt had hit that backhand one shot ago. "That is sick!", exclaimed the commentator, echoing the thoughts of Leyton, who was left bemused once again by the genius on the other side of the net. After that Roger made short work of the challenge from world no. 3 , showing him time & again, who is the boss around here. He broke him once in first set, twice in the second, took home a purse of $1.5 million and earned a well-deserved vacation to Maldives, into the arms of the Indian Ocean, with his girlfriend. In the meantime, he has ruined the vacations for plenty of top-ranked players who must be spending sleeples nights contemplating how to counter this Federar Express in 2005. Roger has ended the year the way he started it, with a bang . While doing this, he has rekindled the passion of millions of Tennis fans who would be eagerly anticipating every tournament King Roger will be gracing with his presence. " Thank you for Roger", proclaimed one banner in the Houston Tennis club. Thank you indeed, tennis fans have said in unison all over the world. For the players, however, its a different story.