Golf Charlie Papa

Movie Reviews (Sherlock Holmes, Tintin, The Iron Lady)

2012-01-24T05:02:00.000-08:00

Since the family is still on vacation, we decided to adopt the philosophy expressed by the title of the movie Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (You Only Live Once) and to do a movie marathon. We saw 3 movies at the cinemas in a span of less than 24 hours.

Sherlock Holmes (The Game of Shadows)
Verdict: Good, but only just.
Action-packed, but unfortunately violates the spirit of the books even more than the last one. There simply isn't as much violence in the Conan Doyle originals. Holmes, while energetic, is not a streetfighter as the movie makes him out to be. And what's with Mycroft's nudity and the frequent sexual innuendo? Victorian decorum has an innocent charm that shouldn't be cheapened by the irreverence and amorality of our own time. [Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park (1999) suffered from the same treatment.] Thumb rule: If the original author wouldn't have agreed with the picturisation, don't do it. Their fans won't like it. I'm letting director Guy Ritchie off with a stern warning.

Tintin
Verdict: Very good.
Absolutely gripping plot with non-stop action. Also largely true to the original comics in its depiction of characters. Animation is getting to be more and more true-to-life, when compared to (say) Toy Story 1. The scenes of the ship at harbour look like actual photos. In a few years, cinema may not need real actors anymore. Looking forward to sequels.

The Iron Lady
Verdict: Very good, but falls short of excellent.
Meryl Streep is absolutely brilliant, and one forgets that one is not actually looking at Margaret Thatcher. Denis Thatcher's constant posthumous presence through the device of Mrs Thatcher's dementia is an interesting one allowing an unconventional angle from which to view her life in retrospect. However, the movie as a whole falls short of greatness because, to someone who isn't already familiar with the life and deeds of Margaret Thatcher, the movie is an incoherent patchwork of events that fails as both biographical narrative and as ideological primer. This is a pity, since with a bit of a narrative voice-over and a visual timeline as backdrop, it might have been possible to educate the new generation about what this extremely influential twentieth century personality was all about. Richard Attenborough managed to do it with Gandhi, an arguably tougher subject.

That's this reviewer signing off.

India Trip 2011-2012 - Chennai

2012-01-22T22:33:00.002-08:00

We visited 5 cities as part of this year's trip, and Chennai was our point of arrival and departure between India and overseas. We spent 3 days there at the beginning and at the end of the trip.

When riding around parts of Chennai, one can't but notice the heavy construction activity going on for the Chennai Metro Rail Project. This should make a major difference to the lives of commuters when it debuts in a couple of years.

Our India trip this year was mainly to attend the Silver Jubilee reunion of my IIM Ahmedabad batchmates (30th Dec - 1st Jan). But when in Chennai, I fortuitously learnt from an email that my earlier alma mater IIT Madras was also hosting an alumni reunion for a junior batch on 28th Dec, and all alumni were invited. So I took the family on a trip down memory lane, and the long-suffering ones came along without a murmur.

The speeches by alumni were fun, but Director Bhaskar Ramamurthi (himself an alumnus and 5 years my senior) should have kept his speech shorter and less boring, especially with so many non-alumni spouses and children in the audience. Lots of people left the auditorium before the end of his hour-long speech.

Walking around the campus, I realised I had almost forgotten one of IIT-M's unique charms. Chital deer and black buck roam freely in the sprawling, wooded campus, and students tend to become blasé about seeing these animals along the way when cycling to class. The male black buck is much darker than the female and has horns, leading many to think they are two different species. A quiz question during my time at IIT asked how many species of deer live on campus, and common answers were either 2 or 3. The correct answer is 1, because only the chital is a deer. The black buck is an antelope. [Interestingly, deer have antlers and antelope have horns. Antlers are shed and regrown, but horns are a permanent fixture.]

I spotted (cough) a herd of chital cross the road a trifle nervously as they spied a break in two-wheeler traffic.

Home, home on the range,

where the nerd, deer and antelope play

The trip down memory lane led all the way to the corner of the campus where Mandakini hostel is located. "Mandak" was where I spent the first year of my 5 year B.Tech. course (Yes, a bachelors degree in engineering took 5 years back then).

[All hostels in IIT Madras are named after rivers (e.g., Ganga, Jamuna, Saraswathi), and the institute's buses are named after mountains (e.g., Nilgiri, Kanchenjunga), which inspired a city quiz question about where in Chennai one can find moving mountains and stationary rivers.]

Room 251 (circled) was my domain from July 1980 to April 1981

In my next post, I'll talk about the second leg of our trip, to Ahmedabad and IIM.

The Weight of Tradition

2012-01-22T04:46:00.000-08:00

One of my friends posted on Facebook about a Japanese custom where the host comes out and stands in the cold when taking leave of a departing guest, waves goodbye to them and only goes back into the house when the guest's car is out of sight. We had an interesting discussion about how spontaneous gestures are touching but when these are cast into concrete and become part of a culture or tradition, they could become onerous. In my response, I said the Japanese in particular have a culture of forced politeness that makes them think they're being rude even if they do perfectly reasonable things, like avoid the chillies in a dish that they find too spicy. I said they needed to be kinder to themselves and not let tradition oppress them so much, and this then set off the cultural antibodies that perpetually lurk in my bloodstream. Hence this blog post.

I've been a bit of an iconoclast all my life, much to the exasperation of my extended family. (My immediate family has been much more supportive, possibly because my parents were themselves no admirers of traditional customs.)

Two examples come to mind.

1. One of the cultural differences between North Indians and South Indians is the practice of touching the feet of elders. South Indians have a practice of not just bending to touch the feet but of prostrating full-length before elders to receive their blessings. However, this is typically done on special occasions only, such as when taking leave of one's grandparents after a month-long stay, or at weddings when the bride and groom seek the blessings of the elders present.

With North Indians, this is more of a "quickie", and is accomplished by just bending down from the waist instead of prostrating themselves on the floor. Since this is a much more "lightweight" action, they can afford to do it more often and they do. One could say they do it at the drop of a hat (almost as if they were bending to pick up said hat ;-). See someone with grey hair, dip and touch! To South Indians, this is amusing to watch. Also very emotionally touching if you're not used to it. I know of a Telugu girl whose family's objections to her marrying a Rajasthani dissolved when he visited their home and executed a machine-gun touching of everyone's feet as soon as he entered. After that, all the elderly ladies would vie with each other to cook dishes for him and wouldn't hear a negative word about him. It helped that he was also a nice guy, but that's the secret weapon North Indians can use to disarm their Southern neighbours.

The dark side of this tradition is of course when it's forced. I know of girls from liberal and westernised families marrying into more conservative ones, who are expected to touch their parents-in-laws' feet every morning when they first see them. Quite a few of them chafe at this because they consider it demeaning.

On a lighter note, the daughter of my cousin (who married a North Indian) refused to touch the feet of her paternal grandmother, saying, "We South Indians don't do this." And this from a girl who spoke no Tamil at all! Identity can be donned and shed as convenient, it would seem.

2. One of the arguments of the neo-conservative Hindu is that if one only takes the trouble to understand "our great rituals", one will understand the wisdom of our forefathers. I call this bullshit, akin to treating scriptures as sacred just because they're in Sanskrit. After all, one can find some pretty bawdy stuff masquerading as ancient Sanskrit literature.

Marriage rituals are believed to belong to this set of misunderstood cultural treasures. I was surprised to learn that the term "decent marriage" as a requirement in Indian matrimonial ads was a code-word for elaborate rituals. Perhaps simple weddings seem indecent to some people. I recognise that every such ritual had an original purpose and meaning, but since Indian society has been traditionally agrarian, these rituals have a lot to do with land, harvests and fertility (fertility both of humans and the soil). Many of these practices are therefore outdated in a modern, urban context. Many practices also have a feudal basis, and I would reject them out of hand. Hindu rituals are riven with casteism and sexism, and the baggage needs to be discarded and the entire culture given a complete and thorough overhaul.

My mother pointed out one such example at a cousin's wedding. There was a ceremony where the bride was seated on the ground and the yoke of a bullock-cart was placed (lightly) on her head. This would of course be trumpeted by the neo-conservatives as rich in meaning, because it is meant to symbolise the responsibility of a wife. I guess my mother's feminist sensibilities were offended at this, because she wondered aloud to me why they didn't seat the bride and groom side by side and place the yoke over both their shoulders. It would have symbolised the fact that they would now have to bear the responsibilities of a household together and share the burden equally.

In short, I am a student of culture but not a blind fan. I hate it when cultural traditions oppress the individual.

And now I've got that off my chest :-).

India Trip 2011-2012 - The Amazing and the Amusing

2012-01-21T06:24:00.000-08:00

I had a good trip to India during the Dec 2011 - Jan 2012 period. Let me record some of the interesting things I saw.

1. English serials on TV have English subtitles, which isn't as laughable as it sounds. While it's just a minor convenience to folks like me who sometimes miss a word here or there, this is probably a godsend for the millions of aspiring youngsters, many in smaller towns, who are trying to learn English to improve their chances of success. As the popular local ad says, "What an idea, Sir ji!"

Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon in Friends,

who might be excused for feeling a bit like that Iraqi guy.

2. I've heard it said that India is the best country in the world to be a vegetarian, but this may be taking things a bit too far:

It comes from a manufacturing plant, get it?

3. We've all seen the Johnnie Walker ad.

Only in India would you see a T-shirt parodying the brand using Mahatma Gandhi.

1930 - a good year

4. Nike has had an unsavoury reputation as a sweatshop, but as George Costanza would say, "suddenly, a new contender has emerged".

Written in the Devanaagari script and interpreted in Hindi
or Sanskrit,"Aadi daas" means "original slave".
Even your sole is not your own...

That isn't the last of my pics. I've been clicking away like a Japanese tourist, and there's plenty more to share. Stay tuned.

India the Afterthought

2011-12-14T19:11:00.001-08:00

Synopsis: The nation-states of India and Pakistan came out of the same civilisational melting pot that has been stewing and bubbling in South Asia for over two millennia. But while modern India has embraced its inclusive and pluralistic heritage through its secular democracy where majority and minority groups enjoy equal privileges, Pakistan has been unwilling to do likewise. Pakistan's need to justify its separate existence from the mother country, India, have caused it to deny its own civilisational heritage of harmonious diversity and embark on a quest for a defining and unifying ideological purity that would be distinct from the Indian character. This quest has taken Pakistan towards more and more extreme and intolerant versions of Islam.

No superficial political analysis of recent decades, however even-handed, can provide the insight that it is in fact Pakistan's civilisational self-loathing that has spawned a cancer of violence that threatens itself, its neighbours and the wider world.

US-Pakistan relations have never been so bad, and the mutual recriminations are mounting. An article doing the rounds now is Bill Keller's "The Pakistanis have a Point", in which he tries to explain the Pakistani point of view to an American audience.

It's a fairly slick narrative, but unfortunately for him in this era of the Internet, there are enough others who know their history and can spot a spin job when they see one. [The comments section of the New York Times, where the article appeared, does an effective job of debunking the whitewash attempt.]

The Pakistanis have a point? I think what the Pakistanis have is an apologist. Or stated in the passive voice, Bill Keller's been had by the Pakistanis. Either that, or he's complicit. There's a lot of history that he provides, but he gives the game away to the cognoscenti by the history that he doesn't provide. Some glaring (and convenient) omissions from the Keller narrative that would be hard for the Pakistani establishment to explain away: The Bengal genocide of 1971, the Kunduz airlift of 2001 and the Mumbai attacks of 2008.

Let's give him the benefit of doubt, though. Even with the presumption of honesty, his analysis fails a basic test. While his effort to provide "couples therapy" to the US-Pakistan relationship by trying to understand the other point of view is commendable, he falls victim to the very mistake that he blames US policy for.

The policy mistake that he identifies is what he calls "Pakistan the afterthought". His point is that Pakistan is by far the more important country when comparing Afghanistan and Pakistan, so Pakistan should be the focus of the US administration in the Af-Pak region. The article ends with a quote that compares a nation of 30 million people (Afghanistan) against a nation of 200 million that also has nuclear weapons (Pakistan), and rhetorically asks which would be more important to the US in the year 2020.

I have a similar question for the author. Which is more important, a nation of 200 million (180 million today) or a nation of 1.2 billion? In the entire article that purports to provide a historical perspective and a policy prescription, India is, well, just an afterthought.

I would submit that the Indian perspective matters.

It's not just that India is a large and important country and its views should be taken into account for that reason.

It's not just that it's Indians who can understand Pakistanis best (the cynical would use the words "see through").

It's not just that the Western world is coming around to understanding what India has been saying for decades, a fact that Tony Blair admitted recently.

It's that in order to understand Pakistan, one must not take the word of the Pakistanis themselves, however honest and well-intentioned they may be as individuals, because very bluntly, the Pakistanis are a people in civilisational denial.

And it's that Indians understand far better both the civilisation and the denial, and the consequent motive for everything that Pakistan does.

Fundamentally, if one wants to understand what is happening in the Af-Pak region, it is not enough to go back a few decades in the history of the various nation-states involved, even if India is included in the analysis. For this is not about nation-states but about civilisations, and how various peoples choose to define themselves. Those definitions, whether authentic or spurious, then drive the behaviour of those peoples, shape national policies, and create and destroy nations.

Let's start from the opposite end for an example. Pakistanis in their various discourses will invariably refer to India as "Hindu". That is a civilisational lens they choose to wear, and we will come to that point later. The interesting thing is that this is not how Indians would describe their country at all! Indians look at India as a secular state. And while the cynics in Pakistan might scoff, "secular" is not just a word on a piece of paper (the Indian constitution). This is something Indians accept in their bones. This is the first lesson in civilisational thinking - India is not secular because the 1950 constitution says so. The constitution says so because Indian civilisation has always been pluralistic and inclusive. Every language is spoken, every religion is followed, every conqueror is absorbed and made Indian. That is India's DNA, making it a melting pot like no other civilisation in history (except one other which I will talk about towards the end). The constitution of the Indian nation-state fits the civilisation, and therefore the modern Indian identity is authentic.

For the opposite example of where a nation-state and its underlying civilisation are at war, one need look no further than over the Himalayas to China. The communist ideology of the Chinese nation-state is often hostile to the traditions of Chinese civilisation, and the worst excesses occurred during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao's communists tried to erase all traces of Chinese civilisation and replace it with an imported Marxist ideology. The Chinese national identity is therefore ersatz.

Self-loathing is a pitiable trait, whether in individuals or in nations. And in both, there are strong indications that self-loathing can lead to cancer.

To any outsider, it would be obvious that Indians and Pakistanis are fundamentally the same people. But such a suggestion is anathema to Pakistanis. (The suggestion is abhorrent to an increasing number of Indians too, for a very different reason. Especially after the unequivocal statement that was the Mumbai attack of 2008, Indians feel no reason to nurture a sentiment of unreciprocated brotherhood.)

The fervent wish of a large segment of Pakistanis is to have their civilisation based on the Arab rather than the Indian substrate. As any advertising professional will tell you, India the nation-state already "owns" the Indian civilisation in a "positioning" sense. Not only would Pakistan feel like an also-ran if it acknowledged its identical heritage, it could also dilute the separate identity that it must sustain in order to justify its very raison d'être.

The justification for the creation of Pakistan was that Hindus and Muslims could never live together. This argument is called the "Two-Nation Theory" (TNT), and has proven to be as explosive as the acronym. All of Pakistan's subsequent actions, not least its treatment of minorities, have clearly supported that argument. India's argument against partition and the creation of Pakistan was that not just Hindus and Muslims, but every minority group, could live as equals in the country. This is the secularist ideal that grew out of India's historical pluralism and found expression in the modern Indian constitution. The presence of a growing and increasingly prosperous Muslim minority in India supports India's secularist argument.

Incidentally, this is the fundamental reason for the Kashmir dispute, which Pakistan claims is the core issue with India, but which is actually more symptom than cause. Pakistan believes that Kashmir belongs to it for the simple reason that parts of it are majority Muslim (Kashmir's Jammu region is majority Hindu, and its Ladakh region is majority Buddhist, so not all parts of Kashmir are covered by this argument). For a Pakistani, the Muslim-majority argument makes their country's case for Kashmir open-and-shut. The argument is often couched in terms of "self-determination for the Kashmiri people", but the fig leaf fools no one.

To an Indian immersed in the secularist ideal, this argument is not just patent nonsense, it's also dangerously sectarian and parochial. Being Muslim is no reason not to be Indian. And although a distant possibility, Kashmir could hypothetically be cited as an example by some future religion-based secessionist movement. India fears fissures in its harmonious diversity as much as Pakistan seems to fear diversity itself.

This is why I believe the Kashmir dispute can never be resolved. It is not a mere territorial dispute, but a clash of two irreconcilable ideologies. Hindus and Muslims can either live together in peace, or they cannot. The two cannot be true at the same time. Therefore, either India is right and Pakistan is wrong, or vice-versa.

It's easy to see that India can only win this argument through a demonstration of lasting peace and stability. Pakistan can only win this argument through a demonstration of strife - within secular, pluralist India. There is a compelling reason why Pakistan must support terrorism and insurgency in India, Kashmir or no Kashmir. Insecurity about their identity dictates that they prove the Two-Nation Theory correct, and if it means hell for India's Muslims, so be it.

The alternative is to admit to an identity that is essentially Indian, which implies pluralism. In other words, Pakistan would be a country that is secular like India, but which happens to have a Muslim majority just like India happens to have a Hindu majority. Clearly, this makes the Two Nation Theory look silly and calls into question the partition of undivided India. Therefore an Indian identity cannot be admitted to.

But if Pakistani civilisation cannot be Indian, what can it be?

There are two answers, both preposterous.

One is the transplantation of an Arab civilisational identity, which is patently false and easily disproved. Only those who fervently want to can believe this. If Pakistan was miraculously transplanted to the middle east and found itself surrounded by Arab countries, I suspect the Pakistanis would very quickly rediscover their South Asian identity (It would be too much to expect them to accept their Indian identity even with this shock!) So much for an Arab civilisational identity for Pakistan.

The other is the substitution of the term "Pakistan" for Muslim-ruled India in the treatment of history, as evidenced by Pakistani textbooks, taught not just in madrassas but in mainstream English-medium schools. ("Previously, India was part of Pakistan [...] By the 13th century, Pakistan had spread to include the whole of Northern India and Bengal…Under the Khiljis Pakistan moved further Southward to include a greater part of Central India and the Deccan".) This line of argument conflates a few centuries of Muslim rule in India with an Islamic identity for the civilisation as a whole, which is then called Pakistan. That which remains Hindu is called India. It is a comforting lie to the faithful, but a lie nevertheless.

India largely accepts its period of Mughal rule as part of its chequered history (with the exception of the Hindu right, who play into the hands of the Islamists by seeing this period as a national humiliation; their sense of shame from historical fact implicitly endorses the Two-Nation Theory.) The secureness of the majority of Indians in their pluralist identity manifests itself in their unqualified pride in the Taj Mahal, a masterpiece of Islamic architecture. This would not be the case if they (i.e., Hindu Indians) saw it as a symbol of their past subjugation by Muslim rulers. Most Indians, regardless of religion, would unhesitatingly name the Mughal emperor Akbar as one of the greatest rulers in Indian history, alongside Hindu kings such as Chandragupta Maurya, Ashoka and Harsha. Indians take pride in all of Indian history, with its various twists and turns. This richness of cultural interplay is denied to more staid monocultures. Contrast this attitude with the insecurity of Islamists like the Taliban, who felt compelled to destroy the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.

Cultural insecurity is a trait common to all Islamists, but in Pakistan it acquires a special flavour, because a purist Islamic identity is an essential ideological bulwark, not against an external enemy, but against the fundamental pluralism of its own original civilisation that must be denied at all costs. This pluralistic ethos must be erased if the idea of Pakistan is to be preserved. As evidence, while any nation would celebrate its Nobel laureates, Pakistan is silent about the only one it has ever produced. That is because Dr. Abdus Salam belonged to the Ahmadi sect of Islam, and Pakistanis refuse to accept Ahmadis as Muslim. Such is their fear of difference.

The psyche that bedevils Pakistan with respect to India is a superiority/inferiority complex. It cannot be explained away by the simple "smaller country defeated by larger neighbour" syndrome. After all, India was defeated by China in 1962, and although Indians are wary of China, the predominant attitudes of India towards China are grudging respect and a desire to emulate China's progress. There seems to be no respect for India in Pakistan (whether grudging or not), no desire to emulate, only a sense of dismay.

This is the dismay arising from the sentiment that goes, "We regal Muslims ruled over these weak, cowardly Hindus for centuries, and now they're bigger, stronger and progressing faster ?!"

Forget the fact that India is not Hindu but secular. That is the lens through which Pakistan sees India, because that is the lens through which Pakistan wants to see itself. If Pakistan must be different, the difference must be between Muslim and Hindu. Secularism is confusing and perhaps even incredible.

Everything that Pakistan has done since its creation has arisen from this primal fear of India as the mirror of truth that will expose their invented identity. Bill Keller can seek the truth all he wants within Pakistan, from "the gated enclaves of Islamabad to the manicured lawns of the military garrison in Peshawar, from the luxury fortress of the Serena Hotel to the exclusive apartments of the parliamentary housing blocks", but he will not find it there.

India is where the truth lies, and India is the reason for Pakistan's perplexing and ultimately self-destructive behaviour. Cancer often springs from self-loathing. The internecine violence consuming Pakistan today can be traced back to the loathing of the image that Pakistan sees in the mirror that is India. India is everything that Pakistan could have been, but could never let itself be, because then there would be no reason for a separate existence. The truth is in this dilemma.

Ironically, the Pakistanis are right to fear India. But it is not the military might of the Indian nation-state that they need to fear, or even its growing economic muscle. The danger that Pakistan faces is the long-term threat to their national identity. In a hundred years, while the lumbering Indian civilisation will continue on like a juggernaut, Pakistani culture will have been swamped and their separate identity erased. Their people hum Bollywood songs today. Their descendants will call themselves Indian in a hundred years. Every invader since Alexander the Great has been absorbed, and this puny challenger will fare no better. That's what a civilisation can do to an ersatz nation-state. The phony sand castle built up in history textbooks cannot stand up to the relentless waves of an authentic civilisational identity that keep crashing upon it in an incessant reminder.

What can be done about Pakistan? This is not a prescription for US policy, for the US is a stranger to these civilisational battles. Indeed, the US is a newcomer in civilisational terms. They are only now building a civilisational identity for themselves that is distinct from the European one that they originated from, a new pluralistic identity that is powerful and authentic, but the exact contours of the American civilisation will only be recognisable a few centuries from now. It is simply not relevant in the South Asian region at this point in time.

For now, the Pakistanis must be encouraged, as gently as possible and as bluntly as necessary, to accept their insignificance before the Indian nation-state. That would be the first step towards realism. Pakistan is not a country that is half the size of India, or even a fourth. It is almost one-eighth the size of India by population and even smaller in economic terms. In hostility, Pakistan can pretend (at great cost) to a semblance of parity. In peace, they will be exposed for the pygmies they are. The attractions of continued hostility are therefore obvious. But this is no good for peace in the region and the wider world. That's why the illusion has to be broken.

In facing up to this bitter truth, and in accepting their long-term fate to be submerged once again within a pan-Indian civilisational identity (regardless of the contours of the nation-states that may make up South Asian geography), lies their salvation. They have nothing to lose but a fake identity, and everything to gain. But they need to take that step, if not by themselves, then from prodding by an increasingly impatient world. Long-term peace in the region can only then follow.

A Label for the Rest of Us

2011-10-23T13:25:00.000-07:00

Every revolution needs a handy slogan, whether it's "No Taxation Without Representation" or "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité". The latest revolution, born of the economic crisis hitting the world, seems to be centred around the notion of "99%" to distinguish the rest of us from the "1%" to describe our oppressors. Now that we have our slogan, the 1% had better start shaking in their boots. The revolution is on.

The slogan of the Occupy Wall Street protesters was "We are the 99%". Now the respected Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has further fuelled the collective ire in a hard-hitting article by identifying "the 1%" as the cause of all of America's troubles.

This in a country so scared of socialism that a presidential candidate got into trouble for wanting to "spread the wealth around". One could argue that the irrational fear of socialism is what has landed Americans in this mess where 99% of the population is worse off than before, and 1% is far better off. I think it's the misunderstanding of the term "free market". It isn't about laissez-faire, it's about keeping markets truly competitive. I don't believe it was capitalism that has brought the US and the rest of the world to this pass. I think it's crony capitalism as perfectly described in Stiglitz's article, which is a horse of a different colour.

Somewhere, the ghosts of both Karl Marx and Adam Smith are laughing.

Redundant Tautologies

2011-10-22T01:56:00.000-07:00

One of the amusing aspects of being an ethnic immigrant in a Western country is encountering repetitive descriptions of things ethnic, mainly food items.

E.g., Chai tea (that's tea tea), naan bread (just naan will do nicely) and raita sauce (ditto).

This is a nice image I found on the web, by the way. I like the stylistic representation of the Bharatanatyam dancer. [And since 'naatyam' means dance, perhaps Bharatanatyam would be 'Bharatanatyam dance'.]

The Japanese might have a similar feeling about the 'Nashi pears' sold in the supermarket (I'm told 'nashi' means 'pear' in Japanese).

I recently came across the latest example of this on the supermarket shelf. Don't miss the handy pronunciation guide ("Arta").

Atta flour is used to make naan bread. Now how about that?

The Influence of Mary Blair

2011-10-20T14:28:00.001-07:00

Thanks to the Google Doodle, I came to understand that today is the 100th birthday of Mary Blair (1911-1978).

The Google Doodle for Friday 21 October, 2011

Illustrator Mary Blair

I had never even heard of Mary Blair before, but a quick Google Image Search of her work was astonishing. I realise I have virtually grown up seeing her style of illustration everywhere, thanks to Walt Disney. I guess when you grow up exposed to a certain style of art, it becomes so familiar that it never even registers at a conscious level. I never thought to wonder about the person behind these illustrations.

Uncle Remus was a cartoon I remember reading as a small child

Even her still life has the same "look-and-feel" to it

She apparently did commercial ads as well

I guess we either hear of "serious" artists or of cartoonists, but illustrators seem to be unsung heroes.

Fortunately, not everyone has been as ignorant of Mary Blair and her work. Mike R Baker is an illustrator who has consciously produced work in her style. He even has her initials.

A very Mary Blair-esque Goddess Kali by Mike Baker

Great Cartoon on Mumbai Security

2011-10-20T04:38:00.001-07:00

So true!

Now What Do They Have Against Liberia?

2011-10-13T04:18:00.000-07:00

I had to laugh when I saw this photograph of Pakistani protesters burning what they obviously thought was the US flag.

Guys, this is the US flag:

This is the Liberian flag.

I don't think the Liberians did anything to deserve this.

The Etymology of a Name

2011-10-10T05:24:00.000-07:00

I attended a technical talk today by a person with the unusual surname of Velummylum. Given that his first name (Piragash) sounded like the Tamil rendering of a Sanskrit word ("Prakash" - Light), I looked closer at the surname to see if that was a Tamil word as well.

Tamil has no simple conjunction word for "and". If you wanted to say, "The Ant and the Grasshopper", you would have to say, "Ant-um Grasshopper-um" (with the Tamil equivalents for Ant and Grasshopper substituted, of course).

So Velummylum on first analysis, seemed to be "Velum Mylum", i.e., the Vel and the Myl. Now Vel (pronounced 'vale') means 'spear' in Tamil and Myl (pronounced 'mayil') means 'peacock'.

"The Spear and the Peacock" may still not mean much to a non-Tamil even when translated, but the symbolism is very clear to a Tamil. They are the symbols of Lord Murugan, the Tamil name for Kartikeya, the warlord god born to Shiva and Parvati to destroy the demon Tarakasura. The spear is his weapon, and the peacock is his mount or vehicle ("Vahana"). Every Hindu god or goddess seems to have a favourite weapon and a particular animal or bird as their mount.

I'm told there is a very famous devotional song "Velum Mayilum Thunai" (Succour of Spear and Peacock), an allegorical appeal to Lord Murugan's protection.

I thought I'd dig around the web for some nice pictures of Murugan. Here's a traditional one, the kind that I would see in shops and homes during my childhood holiday visits to Madurai, where my grandmother lived. The peacock holds down a serpent, symbolic of all kinds of evil in human nature, I guess.

This is the version by Raja Ravi Varma, the famous Indian artist who was influenced by the Dutch portraitist Theodor Jenson. [The fusion of classical Indian and Dutch Impressionist styles made Raja Ravi Varma one of India's greatest artists. As Aatish Taseer rightly observed in the novel "Stranger to History" that I reviewed, the world is richer in its hybrids.] This version shows Murugan in his six-headed form with two consorts and lots of different weapons. The serpent is bigger than before, but the peacock seems to have the situation under control.

Here's a more modern rendition that I really like. I couldn't tell who the artist was, but here's the site I got it from. He missed the serpent, though.

It's the story of my life. I set out to learn about technology, then get drawn into even more interesting research into linguistics, culture, religion and art!

India's Strategic Aikido

2011-10-08T08:57:00.000-07:00

Much analysis has gone into the announcement of the strategic deal between India and Afghanistan. Under this agreement, India will train Afghan security forces to be able to shoulder the responsibility of holding their country together after the withdrawal of Western forces in 2014.

Even though there is no proposal in this agreement to put Indian boots on the ground, most analysts warn that the aspiration is as hopeless as it is ambitious. There is a feeling that Pakistan holds all the cards and can very easily play the spoiler in Afghanistan. India's influence in that landlocked country is handicapped by geography to the same extent that Pakistan is advantaged by it. When push comes to shove, it seems apparent that India is headed for humiliation. The lessons of India's disastrous excursion into Sri Lanka in the early nineties also come to mind. This seems to be a bad idea, no matter who thought it up.

However, there is another way of looking at this. The New Delhi-Kabul axis is bound to whip Pakistan up into a frenzy, and that may be its very intent among the policymakers in South Block. This could do to Pakistan what Ronald Reagan's SDI ("Star Wars") did to the Soviet Union - push it over the brink into bankruptcy by raising the costs of keeping up.

India can afford an arms race. Pakistan can't. Pakistan's traditional donor of military aid, the US, is increasingly reluctant to supply arms, partly out of pique at the duplicitous role of the Pakistani military, but also partly out of the forced frugality of its own internal financial crisis. The Chinese are vocal supporters of Pakistan, but have been pointedly reticent about opening their wallets to actually help. As for the Saudis, they would probably lean towards India in a conflict, as their behaviour during the Kargil war could attest. They do far more business with India than with Pakistan, and money talks. And that about exhausts Pakistan's list of friends.

Aikido is the art of turning one's opponent's momentum against himself with a minimum of effort and no physical contact. By the mere announcement of the agreement with Afghanistan, India has ensured that Pakistan will devote even more frenzied energy into shaping Afghanistan to its own liking, a diversion of resources that it can ill afford at this point in its history. Pakistan has never been economically weaker. Its GDP growth rate last year was an anaemic 2.5%, when it needs 4% to even stay in the same place. Power shutdowns ("load shedding") are a feature of daily life, not because of increasing demand as in India, but because of decreasing supply. Power, or the loss of it, is an economic multiplier, and this does not bode well for Pakistan's GDP growth next year and the year after. Even without an exhausting military race, the Pakistanis are inexorably bankrupting themselves.

There probably is some even greater wisdom in the Indian strategy, because India is also simultaneously holding trade talks with Pakistan to eventually move towards a free trade agreement. That would of course benefit both countries, but it will benefit the weaker economy much more, since the savings would be all the more precious.

In other words, there is a carrot and a stick for Pakistan in the Indian strategy. An adversarial attitude towards India will hasten the onset of bankruptcy and the chaos that will ensue. A thawing of hostility can conversely ease the pain and gradually lead to a return to normalcy and eventual prosperity. The choice is entirely Pakistan's to make. But the path to redemption will require submission to the idea of India's superiority, a swallowing of pride that the Pakistani establishment has never been willing to accept.

They may have no choice. The reality they face is harsh and uncompromising. Pakistan's quest for strategic parity with India was always an unachievable dream. A country with just a seventh of another's population can never aspire to anything resembling parity. It may seem unjust, but India will always dominate South Asia on account of its inherent advantage of relative size. The pygmies (and yes, Pakistan is among them) may understandably chafe at it, but all the rest have come to terms with it. Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and even Burma and Afghanistan further afield, are realising the benefits of warming to an economically resurgent India. [One only hopes that India will resist the tendency to arrogance and hubris, and maintain a "light touch" in its dealings with its neighbours, because India's greatest potential enemy is India itself.]

The economic carrot and stick may be just the tactic required to get Pakistan to accept the reality of its situation. With some deft footwork, India can get Pakistan to lurch to where it wants it. Like with the five stages of grief, Pakistan for its own sake needs to arrive at an acceptance, however bitter, of India's dominance in every sphere. Otherwise, survival itself will become a problem.

Terror Takes Two To Tango

2011-10-01T07:46:00.001-07:00

I have no sympathy for terrorists. In fact, as an Indian, I consider Americans to be johnny-come-latelies to the anti-terrorism party. We in India knew of terror first-hand decades before 9/11, so it's amusing at one level to see how quickly Americans developed a sense of outrage at terrorism once it started to be directed at them. Till that point, Indians were being lectured on patience and restraint, and told to sit down and talk to the sponsors of terror to "resolve differences".

Yeah, we did see a lot of sitting down and talking between the US and Al Qaeda right after 9/11, didn't we?

In fact, after 9/11, we began to hear new vocabulary and new concepts. It was OK to detain people without trial because they were "enemy combatants". Er, wasn't there something called the Geneva Convention that specifically addressed the rights of enemy combatants? No worries there, no less a person than the US Vice-President (Dick Cheney) informed us that waterboarding was not torture. And if you were talking about real torture, that was called "enhanced interrogation" and outsourced to authoritarian allies like Hosni Mubarak's Egypt, because that wasn't something the US did. But then Abu Ghraib entered our vocabulary as well, letting us know exactly how the US itself treated its prisoners. The name didn't quite rhyme with My Lai, but there was a definite resonance.

This week, it appears American hypocrisy has reached new levels.

The radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki has been killed, and it appears that a Justice Department memo authorised his killing. We don't know for sure that Anwar al-Awlaki actually plotted any terror attacks, because State Secrets privilege was reportedly used to keep all discussion of his targetting out of the courts and out of the public eye. Sure, he preached hatred and terror, but one could argue that as an American citizen (he was born in the US) he was just exercising his First Amendment right to free speech. Hate speech is actually protected in the US, as Neo-Nazis are smugly aware.

So how is the Justice Department memo any different from a fatwa, and how is this killing any different from an assassination?

Again, let me repeat that I have no sympathy for a jihadist, because my country of birth has suffered from the effects of a jihadist philosophy from the eleventh century. I'm just pointing out that Western countries lecture others on human rights, the rule of law and due process, so what's happening here? I guess it all just means that when the chips are down, all pretence of being civilised is discarded, and it's the law of the jungle once more.

What a bunch of creeps all around, eh?

However, as they say, the wheels of God grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine.

Now the news every day revolves around how the US is slowly turning on a country that it more and more reluctantly refers to as an ally. Call it nemesis or call it karma, decades of terror directed at India are finally receiving payback from another direction, and that's usually the way things work in this world.

And so, while the US and Pakistan are circling each other, snarling and spitting, Indians are minding their business with a studied indifference, biting their lips hard to suppress a grin. Don't look now, but doesn't that couple look absolutely made for each other?

That's some memo from that Justice Department in the sky!

New Thinking in Australia - The Asian Century

2011-09-30T19:42:00.000-07:00

In a recognition that the Asian Century is upon us, the Australian government has commissioned a policy white paper on the place of Australia in the new Asia.

Let's not be distracted by GFC II or any short-term economic crisis sweeping the world. Over the medium to long term, there is going to be a massive shift in the make-up of the world, from being mostly poor to being mostly middle-class. (Whoopee!)

What's interesting is that the bulk of this middle-class will be from Asia. [What's also interesting is that while the aggregate spending of this Asian middle class will be huge, an individual family will still be highly budget-conscious, because they still won't be as well-off as a Western middle-class family. That calls for a very different product and marketing strategy to sell into this market.]

The rise of Asia is therefore a significant shift in the world's centre of gravity, and Australia would be wise to plan for it. This is in fact a welcome development for Australia, since the historical "tyranny of distance" that the country has suffered from has now been replaced by the "advantage of adjacency", as the Economist puts it. Australia is now closer to the action than any other Western country and should take full advantage of it. Given that Australians still don't have a high awareness of Asian societies, how they work and how to work with them, perhaps the white paper will spur the necessary investments in education and the like to better gear up the country.

The related controversy is around the notion of "Big Australia" (i.e., should Australia aim for a population significantly above its current 20 million?) and immigration policy. The relative advantages of size versus sustainability will be fought over for a few years at least. Regardless of which side is "right", it's important that Australia begin to have this debate. The stakes are high and the potential payoffs enormous.

I like it when debates are about planning for prosperity rather than about problems.

Learning a Different Language

2011-09-30T18:19:00.000-07:00

They say learning a different language, especially in one's fifties, keeps the brain nimble and may prevent the onset of Alzheimer's and other conditions. They also say one should try and learn a language whose script, vocabulary, grammar, etc., are very different from one's own. The logic being that learning similar languages will simply reuse old neural pathways in the brain and not create new ones. That's why many Westerners have favoured learning Japanese. It has until recently been the most "useful" non-Western language. Perhaps Mandarin will overtake Japanese soon in this department.

And this is an entirely unscientific assertion, but perhaps this is why I had never heard of Alzheimer's while in India. Everybody there is at least bilingual. And if an Indian knew English, Hindi and a South Indian language, they would know languages from three linguistic families with completely different morphology and syntax.

I was reminded of all this when I saw an out-of-office autoreply from a person on one of the mailing lists I'm subscribed to. This is in French, and I did attend a semester of French at college, but I would think any English speaker could decipher this using the "neural pathways" they already have:

Bonjour,

et merci de votre message.

Je suis absent du bureau avec peu de d'accès à ma messagerie.

Je prendrai connaissance de votre message à mon retour dès le 10 octobre.
En cas d'urgence, vous pouvez contacter M. _____ ( email address ).

Bien à vous

A few familiar words (if spelt slightly differently) and a well-understood context, and the message becomes completely comprehensible. Even the "Bien à vous" sign-off seems to translate to the Aussie "Good on ya" (though it probably doesn't mean the same thing!)

As Mr Spock would say, fascinating.

Germany's Sacrifice to Save Europe

2011-09-30T09:10:00.001-07:00

Belated war reparations!

Autism and the Engineer's Brain

2011-09-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

The August 29, 2011 issue of Time magazine had an article "Could new marriage patterns explain autism?" I was intrigued, and read it with interest. The full article is only available to subscribers, but a summary can be found here.

The theory is that a certain type of autism (i.e., Asperger's syndrome) is remarkably similar to the normal functioning of an engineer's brain. Quite aside from the ribbing that engineers are likely to receive from their spouses and others thanks to this theory, there is a serious implication to this.

In the late 1990s, [researcher Simon Baron-Cohen had] come to believe that a common cognitive profile — a tendency toward what he called systemizing (focusing on systems and how they work), combined with noted deficits in empathy, or the ability to read and relate to others — existed both in people with autism and, to a much lesser extent, in many of their relatives. He'd begun to theorize that this sort of brain type would be common in any population that brought people with very strong math, science and tech skills to cluster together — and to think that if these high systemizers were choosing one another as mates, they might be particularly likely to have autistic children.

The article goes on to describe research from the Netherlands, where a survey of schoolchildren from three similar regions (i.e., similar by area and socioeconomic profile) - Eindhoven, Haarlem and Utrecht - showed that two to four times as many children in Eindhoven had been diagnosed with autism compared to the other two regions. Eindhoven is known as the Dutch Silicon Valley and has a higher concentration of IT workers and engineers compared to the others.

The article also says the change in marriage patterns (i.e., more marriages between engineer types) does not adequately account for the rise in cases of autism, so one shouldn't rush to conclusions here. However, this could be one of the factors responsible.

The article prompted me to think about myself anew. I'm comfortable with the way I think, because that has always been me, but the article was a bit of a jolt. Did I have a brain that was "normal" for an engineer but also autistic to some degree? The prospect was a bit chilling, because it implied that had I married another engineer, our children, with reinforcing traits from both parents, could very likely have been autistic. As it happened, my wife turned out to be an accountant with a brain that functions (exasperatingly to me) totally unlike that of an engineer! Our son was assessed as moderately gifted but not autistic. Of course, I also derive lots of pleasure from interacting with people, so perhaps I myself have balancing traits. I believe this is referred to in the literature as a "strong female brain" (though why they don't call it a "sensitive male brain" is beyond me).

I began to see myself a bit differently after reading that article. For instance, I have always had a breakfast of eggs and toast in the same way for many years (the routine is itself a telltale sign, I guess). I watched myself recently as an impartial observer as I went about fixing this breakfast, and I realised that "normal" people would go about it very differently. The many steps along the way are probably undertaken unthinkingly by normal people, but to me, they represented problems that had certain solutions that were superior to others. I had to find the "best" solution to each of these problems before I could have a satisfactory breakfast.

Here are three of the "problems" I identified when fixing myself a breakfast of fried eggs on toast. I wonder how many people can identify with this kind of thinking.

Problem 1: How to take two eggs out of a box of twelve

To most people, this is not a "problem". Just take any two eggs out of it and put the box back in the fridge! But this was a serious issue to me. I thought about it in many ways before arriving at the "correct" solution. If someone else takes eggs out of the box anytime in-between, I have to rearrange them to get them back to a "correct" configuration, and I absolutely hate it if an odd number of eggs is left in the box.

Problem 2: How to place a fried egg on a slice of bread

This is a fiendish problem! There is no clean way to place something circular (infuriatingly, not perfectly circular!) onto something square without bits sticking out. But I did find a solution to that, too.

Problem 3: How to apply ketchup to a sandwich

After getting the eggs out of the box correctly and placing the fried egg on the bread equally elegantly, it's time to add ketchup. This is another hard problem, and the many solutions I tried were all unsatisfactory. Finally, I hit upon one. This is not symmetrical (which bugs me a little), but it has characteristics of uniformity on average. I'm pragmatic enough to settle for a "good enough" solution.

This is what I have been doing for years, and this is perfectly natural to me. I solved all of these problems years ago and I enjoy the satisfaction of an elegantly and "correctly" prepared breakfast every morning.

But then I read the article on autism and saw myself doing all this, and I thought to myself, "Oh...my...God!"

Badlega Bharat (India Will Change)

2011-08-25T21:41:00.000-07:00

Renaissance and Reformation. Glasnost and Perestroika. Someday someone will come up with the pair of words that will best describe the twin revolutions sweeping India today.

The liberalisation story came first. Unshackling India's economy from years of socialist low growth was the start of the first revolution. So much so that "10% growth" has become the dream that inspires politician and public alike. Rival parties, normally quick to undo each other's initiatives on coming to power, now build on each other's work. Tamil Nadu's DMK and AIADMK parties and the unbroken industrialisation of the state (in spite of repeated changes in the ruling party) are a case in point. Somewhere along the way, a miracle has happened. Politicians are beginning to put the interests of their states ahead of petty political point scoring. The dream - that India can and will be an economic power - has ignited the collective imagination. Ten percent growth, year on year, will transform the country in half a generation. The BJP's "India Shining" was not the catchphrase of the revolution after all. "Ten percent growth" is.

Which brings us to the other thing that the term "ten percent" often connotes - corruption. Regardless of the merits and demerits of the rival Lokpal (public ombudsman) Bills, the tactics used by agitators to negotiate with the government, etc., one fact remains. Indians are fed up with corruption and are becoming increasingly vocal about it. Politicians are being put on notice that helping themselves from the public coffers will not be tolerated. Petty bureaucrats are now warned that demands for bribes will not go unpunished. Is this a false dawn? Time will tell. But the catchphrase "Badlega Bharat" (India will Change) is as powerful as the vision of 10% growth. It is a warning to the powerful and the corrupt. You have taken India for granted so far, but India will change, tomorrow's India will be different...

I think it was Gurcharan Das who said that corruption drastically reduces when more than half the population becomes middle class. The poor are corruptible and the rich can corrupt, but the middle class neither needs special favours nor is readily bribed. The anti-corruption agitation is a sign of India's growing middle class. That's why the oft-heard dismissal of Anna Hazare's anti-corruption crusade as "just a middle class phenomenon" misses the point entirely. Of course it's a middle-class phenomenon! Since the middle class will keep growing, the pressure on the corrupt will only increase. Regardless of the fate of the Lokpal Bill, corruption in the polity must decrease. It's a law of nature.

I foresee at least one juicy outcome in the near future. The government of India will be forced by public pressure to officially demand a list of Indian holders of Swiss bank accounts. It will be doubly entertaining to watch the proceedings, because many of these account holders are top functionaries of the Indian government, and they will resort to every legal (and illegal) contortion to avoid making that demand of the Swiss. But the truth will eventually be dragged out, and I suspect Indian politics will never be the same again. Of course, rumours are that Indians are moving their money from Swiss banks to banks in Mauritius, Dubai and Singapore, and the dance will no doubt continue. But at least the crooks are on the run now.

Imagine the elimination of corruption (or at least its drastic reduction) and a growth rate of 10% a year. India will be an unstoppable force. The country appears perpetually unstable and ungovernable (Galbraith's "functioning anarchy"), but as Shashi Tharoor put it so eloquently, Indians have evolved a consensus on how to manage without consensus, and the current social revolution is just the latest manifestation of that. 'Tis a perfect storm that blows a world of good.

[Update 28/08/2011: Anna wins]

A Few More Photos of Colombo

2011-08-12T08:54:00.001-07:00

Now this is rush hour in Colombo (Thursday evening, 1730).

And this.

The reach of Bollywood celebrities - Aamir Khan sells mobiles here. (A passerby stared curiously at me, wondering what the heck I saw worth clicking in a roadside poster.)

And Aamir Khan isn't the only one. Priyanka Chopra and Shilpa Shetty stared haughtily down at me from the cosmetics aisle of the Arpico supermarket.

I snagged my bag on a protruding screw inside this autorickshaw. I realised that this sort of workmanship is perfectly acceptable in India and Sri Lanka, but Australians would probably make an OH&S (Occupational Health and Safety) issue out of it.

There's a beautiful Buddha shrine on my street (Park Street), just a couple of minutes' walk from the hotel.

I murmured a 'thank you' to him. This trip has been pure magic.

Reflections on Culture and Tradition

2011-08-08T08:12:00.000-07:00

I had a powerful experience yesterday when shopping at the Arpico supermarket in Colombo. The counter clerk was a friendly and smart-looking youth. When I handed him my credit card, he took it with his right hand, and with his left hand holding his right elbow. The gesture brought back memories and feelings in a rush.

In 2000, when I applied for Australian citizenship, I was surprised when the Australian immigration officer (a Caucasian) took my passport with both hands. This is, of course, the (East) Asian way of showing respect. I guess he had been trained to be culturally sensitive because of the large number of East Asians applying for Australian citizenship. Although I immediately recognised the gesture as one of respect, I was not emotionally touched by it. However, when the youth at Arpico took my card in the respectful Tamil style, it touched and moved me, and this is why.

When taken to visit temples as a child, I was taught to throw flowers on the idol in an underarm movement using my right hand, with my left hand holding my right elbow. I don't know if this is prevalent in the rest of India or even in the rest of South India, but it is definitely part of Tamil culture. The left hand is considered unclean and must never be proffered to others, either to give or to receive anything. Only the right hand may be used in any transaction. This much is common to all of India. When great respect is to be shown, as when showering the idol of a deity with flowers, the left hand must support the right at the elbow. I believe this is a uniquely Tamil gesture.

The incident made me think a lot about my life, especially my ideological choices. In my late teens, when reading about communal riots and killings in the papers, I determined that religion was evil and nothing but superstition that led men astray. I was also studying engineering at the time, and I believed that science and reason were the answer. I guess I still do.

That started me on my journey of conscious agnosticism. I never became a communist, like many other idealistic students, but I did try to be a practising agnostic. This meant consciously violating rules that had been taught to me as part of my culture if they made no sense. I would whistle after sunset, I would ask people where they were going as they were leaving, I would openly blaspheme. (In later years, I would mock my wife for murmuring prayers in Sanskrit, "a language neither she nor God understood.") I inured myself to stepping on paper without flinching, and to moving books aside with my feet, conscious acts to defy Goddess Saraswathi's certain wrath. The heavens never opened to strike me dead, and I have remained an agnostic with a healthy aversion to organised religion. I even composed a couplet to summarise my philosophy:

There may or may not be a God
But religion is a fraud

It has been decades since I even thought about the respectful supported-elbow gesture, and the fact that a young man half my age, from my own culture, in another country, was keeping the tradition alive - no, living the tradition - made me think for a long time.

I have forged a powerful identity for myself by defining what I stand for and stand against, and this has made me what I am. Still, I found myself asking, have I gained or have I lost?

Evening Walk in Downtown Colombo

2011-08-07T07:28:00.001-07:00

The evening was cooler and a lot less sultry, so it was quite pleasant to walk. By the way, this is the sign at the end of my street. The Sri Lankans seem to have mastered the Three Language Formula :-).

I went to a nearby KFC where I found to my pleasant surprise that veggie burgers were available. KFC in Australia doesn't serve veggie burgers but KFC in Dubai did when I was there in 1995-98. It says something about demographics and consumer demand, but I'm not sure what. The burger cost LKR 255, and the counter guy asked if I wanted cheese. I said yes, and the price then came to LKR 285. The burger was only half the size of the Hungry Jack's veggie burger in Sydney, so the PPP equation really holds. For the price of a single veggie burger in Sydney, you can get two half-size ones in Colombo. Hats off to The Economist!

I've been seeing another amusing sight on the roads - buses with the name "Lanka Ashok Leyland" on them. This is amusing because I grew up seeing "Ashok Leyland" buses in India, and I learnt only much later that this was a joint undertaking between Ashok Motors and British Leyland. Now as the model has travelled further, the name has been further localised by prefixing "Lanka" to it.

Looks like the long arm of the Internet equalises the whole world. Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, they're everywhere!

A petrol bunk. Nothing special about it. It's just slightly different from anything I've seen before.

This sign caught my attention for a reason. Long ago, when on a tourist bus in Singapore with my parents, my father pointed to a sign on a ministry building and remarked about the difference between the Tamil word for "ministry" as used in Singapore and in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It was spelt "Amaichchu" in Singaporean Tamil, while in Tamil Nadu, the word is "Amaichchagam" (with the 'g' pronounced almost like 'h'). It was interesting to see from the sign below that Sri Lankan Tamil also has it as "Amaichchu". When it comes to Tamil usage, is the mother country out of step? I wonder how Malaysian Tamils spell the word.

Bollywood-style film posters in Sri Lanka! I love these familiar-yet-different experiences. It turns out this is a hit movie (Mahindagamanaya).

Then I went back to Arpico (the supermarket) for some shopping. I bought some tea for my relatives in India when I go there next week. It was at the shopping centre that I saw my first Buddhist monk in the flesh! He was in brick red robes and was probably doing some shopping himself. I saw another person approach him and bow to him, and I heard the monk say something with the word "Deerghaayu" (Sanskrit for "long life") in it. I love it when I can pierce the veil of another culture, even if only for a moment, and understand what's happening. I'm also grateful that through spending my formative years in India, I've been able to pick up so much linguistic and cultural background without conscious effort. I'm sure if I go to Pakistan, all the conscious and unconscious Hindi/Urdu learning will similarly pay off. I remember reading the phrase "India's cultural penumbra" in some article somewhere that talked about the entire region from Africa to Southeast Asia. It's at moments like this that its meaning comes home to me with full force.

I also bought a T-shirt at Arpico because I found it very interesting. It's part of a series of artifacts labelled "Mother Sri Lanka" (like "Mera Bharat Mahaan", I guess). What I thought was clever was the way they spelt the three words in the three languages of the country - English, Tamil and Sinhalese. In fact, it was the red Tamil "Shree" that first caught my eye.

"Help spread the message of pride and honour of a great nation by purchasing this product."

Done!

Lunchtime Walk in Downtown Colombo

2011-08-07T00:14:00.000-07:00

I took a walk around noon to see some sights. It was hot and muggy. I think it must have rained recently.

There were soldiers standing outside my hotel and I saw them wave down an autorickshaw and ask the passenger some questions, but they took no notice of me. It was a reminder that this is a nation that has very recently emerged from a civil war and the constant threat of terrorist violence.

My driver of last night had recommended a small restaurant near my hotel, so I walked there.

The Sri Krishna Villas (double L!) is a fairly downmarket Tamil restaurant, but like a western tourist, I was interested in an "authentic cultural experience" complete with cuisine. I ordered a standard meal plate. There was no spoon provided, so I washed my hands and went for it. I don't eat with my fingers even at home, so this would have been amusing to my family :-). Surprisingly, there was no yoghurt or buttermilk to have as the last rice course, but there was a sweet dish. The bill came to LKR 115, perhaps AUD 2.30 in PPP terms. Cheap at the price, but it wasn't a great meal all told, and I probably won't go there again.

It was fairly hot and uncomfortable to walk in the sun, but I wanted to buy a street map of Colombo. Again, surprisingly, this proved very hard to do. I was directed from place to place, but no one seemed to have street maps. The last place I visited was a supermarket (Arpico), which seemed very like a supermarket in India. There were guards milling around the supermarket, so I didn't dare take any pictures.

Some street scenes were amusing, and I snapped them. I find it surreal when things are familiar yet different, like my trip to Mauritius in 1991.

The Sinhalese script looks hauntingly familiar, like I should know it. It looks South Indian (although I'm told Sinhalese is related to Oriya rather than to any of the South Indian languages), but I can't read it for the life of me, though I can read two South Indian scripts (Kannada and Tamil) and sort of decipher a third (Telugu).

There are autorickshaws on the streets, just like in India, and they're made by Bajaj too. People refer to them as tuk-tuks, but then the driver of a passing tuk-tuk called out to me, "Auto?", just like in India.

I thought this poster ad for a DVD was interesting.

This is a nice banyan tree at one end of Park Street, where my hotel is.

This is the entrance to Park Street hotel.

The hotel has a colonial style. I think I can understand why the British colonised our countries in the first place ;-).

And this is my room. Ver-ry nice.

Sri Lanka - First Impressions

2011-08-06T21:36:00.000-07:00

I'm in Sri Lanka, on a trip combining business with pleasure. Here are some initial impressions.

When departing Sydney for Colombo (via Singapore), I was struck by two curious facts. One, no currency exchange counter had Sri Lankan rupees. Two, neither of the two bookstores I saw in the airport had travel guides on Sri Lanka. Mind you, there are travel guides for virtually every country from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe and even for cities (San Francisco, for example), but the omission of an entire country was very strange. I put these down to the fact that Sri Lanka is only just emerging as a travel destination after decades of civil war. Let's see how things look next year.

[I did manage to find a travel guide for Sri Lanka at Singapore airport, but the currency exchange counters there had no Sri Lankan rupees either. I had to wait till I reached Colombo for that.]

Coming to currency exchange, an Australian dollar (AUD) trades for about 110 Sri Lankan rupees (LKR), but that still gave me no indication of what I could consider cheap or expensive by local standards. [1 AUD is currently 46 INR (Indian rupees).] Remembering the informal Purchasing Power Parity calculator of The Economist, I asked the driver of the airport pickup car about the price of a burger at McDonalds. He said it was between LKR 250 and 300. A burger in Sydney costs between AUD 5 and 6, so that's a factor of 50. Taking the official exchange rate into account, it means one can buy two burgers in Colombo for the price of one in Sydney. In other words, I should expect things to be half as expensive in Colombo when I convert their prices to Australian dollars.

Cultural curiosities: As an Indian emigré in Australia, I'm gifted with two lenses with which to see the world. My first impression of the streets of Colombo (at least at midnight, which is when I was driven from the airport to the hotel) was that they were definitely not of First World standards, but seemed far cleaner and in better condition than roads in many Indian cities. (Having said that, the roads in Chennai have been getting better the last few times I was there.)

We were averaging 80 kmph, but my driver Harish (short for Harishchandran), said it was impossible to do more than 25 kmph during rush hour.

Harish, as it turned out, was a Tamil, but after an initial attempt to converse with me in Tamil, he decided it was better to fall back to English! I realised the truth of George Bernard Shaw's comment about England and America. Indian Tamils and Sri Lankan Tamils are two people separated by the same language!

Three are huge Buddha statues at prominent roundabouts in the city, which I have never seen anywhere else. The airport also featured sayings and slogans based on Buddhism, and I realised I have never before been to a Buddhist country. [India is culturally diverse but overwhelmingly Hindu, Australia is similarly diverse but predominantly Christian, and even relatively cosmopolitan Dubai is unmistakeably Muslim.]

Talking of Muslim, I saw many groups of young men playing cricket on the main roads at one o'clock in the morning! Harish explained that these were Muslims, and since the month was Ramadan, they were enjoying life at night (when there were no fasting restrictions). The next day was a Sunday as well, so it was Saturday Night Fever for these youths.

The next few posts will have more of my impressions as I see more of Colombo.

Perverse in Verse

2011-07-19T05:52:00.000-07:00

He talks animatedly as he walks,
But there's no one near.

I glimpse a fang above his jawline.
Is he grinning from ear to ear?

Is he a raving lunatic?
My mind begins to fear.

Well, I'm relieved to tell you no.
That's his bluetooth headgear.

(I've been having fun with my LG Optimus One Android phone and BluAnt Q2 headset, hence the inspiration.)

Vandalism of Mailboxes on our Street

2011-03-05T21:26:00.000-08:00

Some examples of what dissolute youth will do after a drinking binge:

Mailbox ripped from its moorings...

...deposited in front of another house...

...and puked in.

I've documented this on Google MyMaps for good measure.

I'm Glad India didn't Boycott the Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony

2010-12-10T13:58:00.000-08:00

So China persuaded a bunch of countries to boycott the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to dissident Liu Xiaobo.

And what a bunch of countries they are!

Afghanistan
Algeria
China
Colombia
Cuba
Egypt
Iraq
Iran
Kazakhstan
Morocco
Pakistan
the Philippines
Russia
Saudi Arabia
Sri Lanka
Sudan
Tunisia
Venezuela
Vietnam

(There are 19 countries in this list but the news reports say 16 countries boycotted the ceremony, so I don't know which of these actually attended. Certainly Serbia changed its mind under EU pressure and decided to attend after all. I hope the Philippines and Sri Lanka attended. They shouldn't belong to this bunch.)

I wouldn't want to live in any one of these countries. They've selected themselves well.

I'm glad India dissociated itself from this bunch and decided to attend. Lord Meghnad Desai feels the same!

[Perhaps India wants to send China a message that its sensibilities aren't to be trifled with. China issues "stapled visas" to Indians from the state of Jammu & Kashmir, while it issues regular visas to Indians from other states. It denied a visa to an army general because his area of command included Jammu & Kashmir. These are pretty pointed statements that it doesn't recognise Indian sovereignty over Kashmir. And it insists that the state of Arunachal Pradesh is actually South Tibet and thus belongs to China.

Well, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. When the very legitimacy of the Tibet annexation is in question, how can "South Tibet" be part of China? I think the world should start to question the Tibet annexation, and also threaten to recognise Taiwan as an independent nation.]

China needs to be asked hard questions, and other countries should have the spine to stand up to its bullying. I'm glad India showed some spine, for a change.

India Takes the Moral High Ground

2010-09-02T06:27:00.000-07:00

At last India has done the right thing and raised the amount of flood aid offered to Pakistan from the embarrassingly low figure of $5 million to a somewhat more respectable $25 million.

This could have been a wonderful opportunity for "disaster diplomacy", but Pakistan blew it by not accepting the aid directly and instead asking for it to be routed through the UN.

Obviously Pakistan's leaders have never heard the saying that a gift blesses both giver and receiver. They have turned away the potential blessing of a new era of peace and prosperity.

India has taken the moral high ground by accepting Pakistan's terms, since the objective is to help the people struck hardest by the floods, whether or not India is allowed to get the credit for it. Pakistan has not covered itself in glory by being so churlish about accepting India's help.

Reading between the lines then, I have to assume that aman door ast (Peace is far away).

Australian Election 2010, and What It Means

2010-08-21T18:21:00.000-07:00

I must say I expected something like this. In fact, a hung parliament with Labor slightly ahead of the Liberals reflects my feelings exactly. It's nice to know the entire country feels the way I do :-).

I daresay we wouldn't be in this situation if we had Peter Costello leading the Liberals. It would have been a slam dunk. Instead, we have the aptly named religious nut Tony Abbott in charge. Call me what you will but I refuse to vote for a politician whose policy manual is religious scripture (and it doesn't matter what religion we're talking about). Abbott has been considered unelectable for a reason, and that is now clear in these results.

At the same time, there's tremendous anger against Labor, and Julia Gillard by extension, for what was done to Kevin Rudd. They were punished for their backstabbery by the loss of 17 seats. I hope the back room boys like Mark Arbib and Bill Shorten are pulled back into the same back room and given a wedgie. (I can't be sure, of course, that other voters have had qualms about Labor for the same reasons. There are some troglodytes even in an advanced Western democracy who oppose Gillard's leadership because of her gender, those who believe that an unmarried person without children cannot understand the problems of Australian families, and the religious right who oppose her for being an atheist and/or for "living in sin".) Still, I like to believe the Rudd factor was the most important.

At the time of Kevin Rudd's victory in 2007, the swing in Labor's favour was so great that psephologists called it a "two-election swing", which meant that the next election was Labor's to lose. And true enough, they lost it. I guess they could still crawl back into government by bribing two independents, but then it'd be official: Julia Gillard as Australia's first female lame-duck Prime Minister.

[See this hilarious Taiwanese spoof on the Australian election.]

Australia now follows the UK into the new era of hung parliaments and coalition governments. India moved into this era in 1989. 1984 was the last time the Indian electorate delivered an outright majority to a single political party. European democracies have seen coalition governments for decades. I think messy as they are, coalition governments more truly represent the views of a diverse society. They're complex and unwieldy, but ultimately fairer.

The Americans seem to have sidestepped the need for coalition governments by splitting the power of the State three ways - into an independently elected executive (the President), independently elected legislative bodies (the House of Representatives and the Senate) and a judiciary that although subject to appointments by the administration of the day, acts like a capacitor in an electrical circuit by slowly absorbing and discharging right- and left-wing constituents over the course of many administrations. Westminster-style democracies like Australia, the UK and India, in contrast, have the executive and legislative arms joined at the hip. The government is formed by the majority party in parliament. Hence the only way for the State to reflect the diversity of its polity is to elect a hung parliament with no single party gaining an outright majority. Coalition governments are then inevitable.

From a historical context, I think the world is therefore progressing. There is greater accommodation of diversity, and our democratic institutions are changing to reflect this.

Pakistan Must Not Refuse Flood Aid From India

2010-08-18T07:48:00.000-07:00

Now this is the flip side of my earlier post.

Apparently, the Pakistani government is still “considering” the Indian aid offer of $5 million.

Wow, that seems to be a really hard problem! What should they do??? Can someone help them make up their minds?

It's sort of like the USSR refusing US aid under the Marshall Plan after World War II. Ideology is far more important than human life and suffering, it would seem.

According to this article, India’s initial offer of just $5 million is to test the waters. If Pakistan responds favourably, India will donate more. That makes sense given Pakistan’s contemptuous treatment of Indian aid during the 2005 earthquake (allegedly letting food rot at the border, ripping off the Made in India tags before distributing aid, etc.) Even now, they seem to want Indian aid to be routed through the UN rather than be made available directly.

All I can say is, this is a really callous leadership that doesn’t have the best interests of their people at heart.

From the article,

“Sources said the [Indian] government has already begun preliminary work on an assistance package with the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA - awful website, by the way) which is resource-rich, and would even be willing to route the assistance through the UN if that’s what Pakistan wants.

But it feels the bilateral approach is better because given the short distances, India would be able to reach assistance much faster to the affected areas in Pakistan. In fact, India is even willing to be the source country for assistance material for other countries, multilateral organizations helping out Pakistan, even NGOs.

[...]

During the civil war in Sri Lanka, India had sent across family-packs that contained everything for a family for a specific time period. In Afghanistan, India supplies fortified biscuits which could be a good source of nutrition for children in Pakistan right now.”

Will Pakistan allow India to fly supplies directly to where it is needed, or will it prefer to let its own people die rather than grant air access to the “enemy”? Courage is not just the ability to face enemy troops in battle. It takes courage to once again venture help to someone who has never been gracious in the past, and it also takes courage to trust someone who is offering to help you.

India has passed the test of courage. Let’s see if Pakistan does.

What Pakistani Schoolgirls Can Teach The Rest of Us

2010-08-14T18:45:00.002-07:00

This is a very touching video (also available with better resolution on YouTube) that starts on a misleading note but has a twist halfway through. I'd encourage everyone to watch it till the end. The part where the young girl says "Hum maafi chaahte hain" (We ask for forgiveness) is particularly touching.

Little snippets like this are what lead me to believe that when Official India and Official Pakistan finally sign a peace agreement, the artificially built-up animosity of over six decades will disappear in an instant, like a bubble.

On a side note, it was amusing to see the stacks of Enid Blyton and Nancy Drew books on the shelves. Pakistan and India are more alike than we imagine...

Kashmir and the Indian Conscience

2010-08-14T09:32:00.000-07:00

Here’s a brutally frank write-up on Kashmir in the UK’s Guardian that should give liberal, educated Indians pause. The author is not a Kashmiri Muslim. Nor is he a biased Pakistani or ignorant Westerner, as our convenient stereotypes go. From his name (Pankaj Mishra), he is Hindu and of Indian origin.

I suffer great moral pangs on the issue of Kashmir, and articles like this only reinforce them. My only quibble with this otherwise powerful article is its complete silence on the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindus (the Pundits). The author should have followed his own advice and dealt with that additional “messy reality concealed by stirring abstractions”, as he put it. But that omission should not cause us to sweep the larger issue under the carpet.

Indians have a certain healthy wariness towards men in uniform (the police more than the army, which is generally invisible in daily life). How many Indians would enter a police station with a jaunty step? One of the luxuries of being part of the middle or upper classes is the relative ability to lead one's life without ever coming into contact with the police. But there is no escaping the constant stream of stories (in the Indian press, not the "biased" Western media) of “death in police custody” and “encounter killings”. There is probably more than a grain of truth to what is being said about the behaviour of India's men in uniform in Kashmir. False notions of patriotism should not prevent Indians from speaking up about it. We are humans first and our national identity comes second. Indians shouldn’t go on the defensive and refuse to look seriously at the issue just because Pakistan raises the Kashmir issue for its own opportunistic reasons.

It would be good if Indians themselves could bring pressure on the Indian government to dramatically improve the situation in Kashmir. Even if we believe that a plebiscite or independence for part of the region (the Kashmir Valley) is a bridge too far, we can at least insist on greater press access and more honest reporting on Kashmir. That may shame the authorities into providing a lighter touch and better administration.

It’s the least we can do.

India Must Not Withhold Flood Help To Pakistan

2010-08-11T00:51:00.000-07:00

It would be very sad if politics came in the way of humanitarian feeling. The floods in Pakistan have not only taken a toll of lives and displaced millions of people, but have also wiped out agricultural crops, threatening the country with a massive food shortage.

Boston.com has some stunning pictures that capture some of the enormity of the damage. BBC has reported on it as well, and this map is from there:

In some ways, this is a golden opportunity for India and Pakistan to mend fences. The cycle of mutual suspicion and hate needs to be decisively broken, and a massive Indian aid effort in the current crisis could go a long way.

It shouldn't be purely government-to-government aid. The Indian government should mobilise contributions from the public and NGOs, so that ordinary people on the Indian side can be seen to be helping their counterparts across the border. That is the only thing that can change mindsets.

India's protestations that it has no evil designs on Pakistan continue to be ignored by Pakistani policymakers in the military, because (rightly from their point of view), they focus on capability rather than intent. A massive popular groundswell of aid may help them see that India has both the capability and the intent to do enormous good.

It's time to set petty quarrels aside and do the statesmanlike thing. Future generations will thank us.

Update 14/08/2010:

India finally broke its silence and offered $5 million in aid to Pakistan. The report comes from a Pakistani news site. The most heartening aspect is the positive response from Pakistani readers (at least the first 7 that have appeared so far).

Good On You, Dr. Haneef!

2010-07-01T06:41:00.000-07:00

I'm glad to read that Dr. Haneef, the Indian doctor wrongly accused of terrorism by the Howard government in 2007, is suing former Immigration minister Kevin Andrews for defamation.

I have written about Kevin Andrews before and even earlier. I think his action in cancelling Dr. Haneef's visa and having him arrested (after he had been granted bail by a judge) was mean-spirited and unjustified.

Now at last, it looks like he's being called to account.

You go, Dr. Haneef! All the best to you.

Australia's Pink Revolution

2010-06-25T18:16:00.000-07:00

It seems that only the sudden elevation of Julia Gillard as Australia's first female Prime Minister has caught the world's eye, but a quiet revolution has been underway for a while.

The pictures here speak louder than words.

Australia's Head of State - Governor-General Quentin Bryce

Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Environment Minister Penny Wong

Deputy Leader of the Federal Opposition Julie Bishop

New South Wales Governor Marie Bashir

New South Wales Premier Kristina Keneally

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh

And that's just the political sphere. There are scores of women in the federal and state parliaments, including some ministers. This is just the set of those who have risen to a position of unquestioned eminence.

Business has been less progressive, but here too, the bastions have begun to fall.

Gail Kelly, CEO of Australia's largest bank (Westpac)

A quiet social revolution has been taking place in Australia, and while the country can obviously lay legitimate claim to the label of an equal-opportunity society (don't let the focus on gender distract you from the ethnicity of Marie Bashir and Penny Wong above), a recent article titled The Invisible Men uncovers a new and possibly disturbing side to modern Australian gender relations.

Watch this space. This is no decadent society. This is social ferment at its best.

Julia's Caesar

2010-06-24T05:18:00.000-07:00

Et tu, Julia? Then fall, Kevin.

It must have been the most unkindest cut of all to have one's hitherto loyal deputy turn so savagely against them.

Today's coup had all the hallmarks of that classic Shakespearean tragedy.

The out-of-touch autocrat, the shadowy conspirators, the honourable front-person recruited to the cause, the treacherous assassination, and so on right down to the "Not that I loved Kevin less" speech.

[...] It’s these beliefs that have been my compass during the three and half years of the most loyal service I could offer to my colleague, Kevin Rudd. I asked my colleagues to make a leadership change. A change because I believed that a good Government was losing its way. [...] I love this country and I was not going to sit idly by and watch an incoming Opposition cut education, cut health and smash rights at work.

She may as well have said her former boss was "as dear to me as are the ruddy drops that visit my sad heart" (Act II, Scene I). One has to appreciate the genius of the bard...

And in the other unremarked tragedy (for Australia at least), Lindsay Tanner, perhaps the most competent minister in the Rudd cabinet, has resigned. Of course it was all for "family reasons", but it seems a bit of a coincidence that Tanner (along with Anthony Albanese - Marc Anthony?) was one of the very few people to support Rudd in the face of the backstabbery hatched by these fine public figures.

I voted for the Labor party in 2007 believing that Kevin Rudd would be PM for the full term of the government. Now some people I don't know have replaced him with someone else for reasons I don't understand, and I haven't been consulted. This voter is angry (and is not alone by the looks of it). If it had been Peter Costello heading the Liberals instead of that clown Abbott, I would have switched loyalties in a heartbeat. [Who knows, it could now very well be the turn of the Liberals' backroom boys to develop cold feet and do a Caesar on Abbot.]

I used to like Julia Gillard and wanted her to be PM someday. Now I'm not so sure. It's hard to like someone who's holding a bloodstained knife.

Even if they are honourable.

Recipe for Mushroom-Baked Beans Curry

2010-06-20T02:35:00.000-07:00

Mushroom-Baked Beans Curry

Whenever the opportunity to commandeer the kitchen presents itself, I put together as many ingredients that are exclusive to my taste as possible, so I can turn out fewer unpopular dishes, if that makes sense. For example, I'm alone in my household when it comes to liking mushrooms and baked beans, so it wasn't going to be long before a combo of this sort made its appearance.

Ingredients:

1 tin of mushrooms in "butter sauce" (Butter sauce? Some kind of maize starch, as it turns out)
1 tin of baked beans in tomato sauce
1 spanish onion
2 cloves of garlic
1 chilli (Jalapeno peppers are my favourite)
2 tablespoons of grapeseed oil
1 pinch of turmeric powder

Procedure:
(Procedure, heh! The procedure is so simple as to be almost mindless.) Chop the chilli and garlic into fine pieces. Chop the onion into slightly larger pieces. Sauté the chilli and garlic first, then add the onion. Add a pinch of turmeric powder to bring out a rich colour.

Add the baked beans and stir well. When that's well mixed, add the mushrooms and stir well.

This is a dish that can't make up its mind whether to be sweet or salty, so you'll have to make its mind up for it. Add salt or ketchup as per your fancy. I chose salt because that was my mood for the day.

Serves one :-/

As If The Big Four Were Not Enough

2010-06-04T22:09:00.000-07:00

It almost makes me laugh in the midst of my rage.

Here I am, arguing that Australia needs a Ten Pillar Policy to bring back competition to the banking sector, and here are banking officials lobbying politicians to accept further mergers. And there are ministers who were "open to the idea". I want to know who these representatives of the people are so we can vote them out.

The arguments take my breath away.

One of the themes pushed was that a merged ANZ and NAB would promise to slash fees and charges across the board.

Yes, I totally reject the lessons of economics and therefore trust the big banks to cut fees and charges as they gain more negotiating power. Like they did during the financial crisis. (Another link here.)

The move, it was argued, would prompt CBA and Westpac to follow suit and deliver customers a major benefit.

A major benefit! Yes, why not have all four banks merge into one massive monopoly that can deliver a major benefit to customers right on their backside? They will be forever grateful.

I guess we dodged a bullet here, but we're all to blame for creating a tolerant climate where such ideas can be entertained. Corporates and politicians must learn that consumers are voters, and that they jealously guard their interests. But I don't see much hope that we can force a Ten Pillar Policy on the government with the citizenry sleeping so soundly.

Mining Companies Fight Dirty Over Tax Proposal

2010-05-30T07:31:00.000-07:00

If you want to know what a mining industry "fat cat" looks like, look no further.

That's Clive Palmer, director and owner of Mineralogy Pty Ltd. and worth a few billion.

Like most mining industry fat cats, Palmer is naturally unhappy with the Australian government's proposed new resources tax. The industry has hit out with a series of ads purporting to show that the new tax will hurt Australia by scaring away foreign investment. And now that the government is striking back with ads of its own, Palmer has attacked the "wasteful use of taxpayer's money".

Hang on a minute! Isn't the mining industry wasting shareholders' money by running its ads? Oh, but that's to shore up shareholders' profits, which will surely be hit if the companies sit by and do nothing.

Why can't the same rule apply to the government, then? The government is merely running ads to shore up its future tax revenue, which will surely be hit if it does nothing to counter the industry's lobbying.

The industry lobby's scare campaign says Australia will lose out on investment with this tax, because investors will take their dollars to more favourable tax regimes. But with reports that other countries are planning to emulate Australia's example, where will those investment dollars go? Still scared? Ooga-booga!

I'm with the government on this one. I own shares in resources companies, but I'm not about to be fooled by the industry's arguments. We need to build back the budget surplus and the resources boom is the best vehicle to do that. The government missed the chance to make some money off the last resources boom. They shouldn't let the next one slip. These companies pay less tax in Australia than in other countries. More importantly, they pay tax at a lower rate than I do. Let them pull their weight, say I. They're not about to go anywhere else. After a bit of bluster, they'll stay on and pay the tax.

I've contributed to GetUp!'s campaign to counter the industry's spin, and I'll be letting the government and my MP know where I stand. Nobody holds a gun to my head. Certainly not a fat cat.

Saving Economics from the Economists

2010-04-20T04:19:00.000-07:00

I just read a column by a purported economist that makes me see red. In case the link isn't publicly available, the comment that Robert Gottliebsen makes in the context of the ACCC's decision to block NAB's takeover of AXA is this:

But when the share analysts start to think more deeply about the issues raised by the ACCC decision to block NAB's offer while giving the green-light to AMP's alternative offer, it becomes clear that, over a wide area, mergers in Australia are now going to be much more difficult. What we are seeing is a dramatic widening of competition policy and shareholders' interests can sometimes be cast aside (italics mine). The best illustration is telecommunications where [ACCC Chairman] Graeme Samuel and the government are reshaping the industry and shareholders in Telstra are the sacrificial pawns.

I can't believe it - Gottliebsen seems to be saying that what's good for consumers (i.e., competition) is bad for shareholders!

On the contrary, Mr. Gottliebsen, you should surely know that the lack of competition benefits neither consumers nor shareholders. Oligopolistic markets are known to be wasteful, paying shareholders less than their due and charging consumers more than their share.

When the US Justice Department broke up AT&T in the early eighties, shareholders actually saw the value of their shares go *up* after a few years, thanks to the improved efficiency forced on the company's parts.

These are not just idle comments by one without skin in the game.

I'm both a customer and a shareholder of Westpac's and I believe the ACCC's lack of teeth with regard to the St George takeover has impacted me adversely on both counts. The spread they gain through their increased oligopolistic position is simply frittered away on inefficiency and waste. Where, indeed, is the impetus to improve when the landscape today is far less competitive than just a couple of years ago?

I'm both a customer and a shareholder of Telstra's and I applaud the government's surprisingly tough stance against it. It couldn't happen to a nicer monopoly!

I'm both a customer and a shareholder of NAB's. I'm happy about the ACCC decision to block NAB's takeover of AXA but I believe the same ban must also extend to AMP. We need more competition in every market, not less. It's not just consumer protection but shareholder protection as well. It shouldn't take an economics degree to see this.

I think Australia's status as one of the most diffused shareholder bases in the world has created a class of shareholder-consumers afraid to revolt at higher prices because they falsely perceive a benefit from that as shareholders. That fallacy owes much to the demagoguery of economists like Gottliebsen who, for reasons known only to themselves, continue to peddle the myth that the interests of consumers and shareholders are somehow opposed. The only real opponent is oligopoly and its resultant waste. Both consumers and shareholders stand to gain when waste is eliminated, and competition is the only way to achieve that. Surely a free-market economist should be able to see that.

To paraphrase Raghuram Rajan, it seems we need to save Economics from the Economists.

Earth Hour Observed (2010)

2010-03-27T19:21:00.000-07:00

Just like the last two years, we observed Earth Hour again.

This time, it was particularly easy. We were going out to a friend's house for dinner, so we just made sure we turned off all the lights before leaving :-).

At our host's place, we finished dinner before 2030, then turned out the lights and had an hour-long conversation by candelight.

The Four Pillars Policy Has Come Home To Roost

2009-12-17T03:53:00.000-08:00

I've been saying this for years to anyone who will listen - Australia desperately needs more competition in its banking sector. The financial crisis only made the Big Four banks the Only Four banks, St George and BankWest having been gobbled up by Westpac and CBA.

And now the other shoe has dropped - onto consumers, hard.

Westpac has raised residential mortgage interest rates by 0.45%, almost double the RBA's rise of 0.25%.

Why? Because they can. No amount of outraged squealing by the Treasurer is any help. This is not a centrally planned economy for the government's opinion to make a whit of difference to the actions of large commercial players. The only thing that can keep commercial players honest is competition, and the Australian government (whether run by Labor or the Liberals) has squandered any chance of having a competitive market through their longstanding and craven Four Pillars policy.

I have always said we need a Ten Pillars policy. Break up the banks and let them compete. All talk of needing to be big to survive is just self-serving talk. In fact, they'll be less wasteful and more profitable as a result. And consumers won't have to put up with the outrageous actions of oligopolies.

Recipe for Potato-Bean Mélange

2009-12-15T04:06:00.000-08:00

Potato-Bean Mélange

I was wondering what to do with a can of beans (Four-Bean Mix), and this dish followed.

Ingredients:

2 Desiree potatoes (the kind you can cook with the skin)
4 medium-sized red (Spanish) onions
1 tin of beans (I used a four-bean mix, as I confessed earlier)
1 red capsicum
1 small cup of green peas
1 cube of vegetable stock
Chilli sauce instead of chilli peppers (for a change)
Ginger powder
Cooking oil (grapeseed oil is best)

Procedure:
Chop the onions and potatoes separately into medium-sized pieces. (I use this very convenient chopper with a coarser setting. The finer setting chops into smaller pieces, which I don't want for this dish.)

Chop the capsicum into finer pieces.

Steam the potatoes and peas in the microwave for 6-8 minutes using a steaming container and set aside. (Sprinkle a little salt onto the potatoes before steaming.)

Heat 3-4 tablespoons of grapeseed oil in a large pan and then sprinkle ginger powder into it. Add the onions and then the capsicum and sauté both well.

Dissolve the cube of vegetable stock in a small cup of hot water and then pour into the pan. (Vegetable stock cubes tend to have oil, so hot water is required to avoid messy fingers.)

Add the potatoes, peas and beans and stir. I prefer to wash and strain the canned beans because I don't trust the liquid they've been soaking in for months ;-).

Add as much chilli sauce as you like. I like lots ;-).

The potatoes may not have fully cooked. So cover the pan and leave to cook on a low heat for a few minutes.

Serve with naan, roti or bread.

[Secret ingredient: If you're South Indian or through some inexplicable means possess mild idli chilli powder (affectionately known as "gunpowder"), add 3-4 teaspoons of it to the mix along with the potatoes.]

Come Back, Peter Costello, All Is Forgiven

2009-11-27T18:46:00.000-08:00

One hardly knows who is doing what to whom in the Liberal Party these days. I like many of the things Malcolm Turnbull stands for (e.g., ETS, the Republic), but I suspect his autocratic and idiosyncratic style will turn off voters just as it's turning off many of his party colleagues. I wouldn't trust either Joe Hockey or Tony Abbott with ten cents, the former because he comes across as somewhat shifty (on TV at least), the latter because he's a religious nut.

I must say I'm fairly satisfied with Kevin Rudd at the moment, although I question his resolve against illegal immigration (Howard was actually much better there) and I have increasing misgivings about his and Wayne Swan's commitment to bringing the budget back into surplus. I don't think these guys really get it on this fundamental economic principle.

So while I don't believe Australia is in a leadership crisis yet, it would be good for the Liberals to get their house in order. It's too late for 2010, because the psephologists tell us the swing to Labor in 2007 was a two-election swing, meaning that 2013 is the earliest the Liberals can hope to make it back. But the earlier they start, the better.

So who do I think is the best leader for the Liberals?

Peter Costello.

I think Peter Costello's journey to the very top has been a series of missed opportunities. He'd been repeatedly stiffed by John Howard who failed (we're told) to honour his promise to stand aside at some stage, and he (Costello) announced his retirement just when things were getting interesting. But who knows, he could yet be persuaded to come out of retirement and take charge.

He's one guy who understands the value of a surplus budget. Heck, he's the only guy in recent history who delivered one. And he took a strong stand in favour of cultural integration as opposed to weak-kneed laissez-faire multiculturalism. I'd vote for him, and definitely if the Labor jokers don't demonstrate serious intentions of fixing the budget soon.

When Looks Improve With Age

2009-11-18T04:37:00.001-08:00

I saw a photo of (Lotus Notes creator and now Microsoft's Chief Software Architect) Ray Ozzie recently, and was struck by how smart and distinguished he looked.

A quick search for other photos of Ozzie turned up this shocker from 1974.

Yes, I know they all looked like that in 1974, but it was still quite a jolt to see.

This reminded me of that other famous person who was known for growing more handsome and distinguished as the years went by - Gianni Agnelli of Fiat.

Here's the young Agnelli...

And the same man after a few decades had worked their magic.

I guess there are advantages to starting off ugly. Things can only go in one direction thereafter ;-).

Recipe for Protein Potato Mash

2009-11-16T04:53:00.000-08:00

Protein Potato Mash

Mashed potatoes taste great, but they're very starchy, and in these health-conscious times, starch is a no-no ("No starch for me," said Tom stiffly). Here's a recipe to take some of the guilt off a deliciously salty mashed potato dish.

Ingredients:
3-4 Desiree potatoes (the kind you can cook with the skin)
1 tin Cannelini beans (you can use any bean or combination of beans instead)
1 cup hommus (chickpea paste)
1 small cup of green peas
A handful of pine nuts

3 cloves of garlic
1 chilli pepper (Jalapeno)
1 piece of ginger (same overall size as the garlic)

Cooking oil (grapeseed oil is best)

Procedure:
Grind the chilli-garlic-ginger mixture into a paste.

Chop and steam the potatoes in the microwave for 10-15 minutes using a steaming container until well-cooked.

Steam the green peas in the microwave for 3-4 minutes using a steaming container.

Heat 3-4 tablespoons of grapeseed oil, pop mustard seeds into it and wait till they start to crackle.
Add pine nuts and chill-garlic-ginger paste and saute for a few minutes till pine nuts turn light brown. Add the steamed potatoes and stir for a while. Drain the cannelini beans and add to the mix, stirring constantly.
The potatoes and beans should start to get mashed. Add the hommus and keep stirring. Add about a tablespoonful of salt little by little, taking care to ensure that the amount is just right for your taste.
I prefer to let the mixture get somewhat dry and powdery before adding the green peas, but you could add them while the mixture is still "wet" and stop after stirring them in.

Serves 2-4. Will serve as a standalone dish or stand in for a daal.

Oh, and hommus tends to be a wee bit bitter, so I also added a tablespoonful of maple syrup at the end without telling anyone ;-). I know, it's whatever meets my eye...

Recipe for Mushroom Soya Pasta Noodles

2009-11-16T04:41:00.000-08:00

Mushroom Soya Pasta Noodles (Satay flavour)

I'm forced to make this combination dish because no one at home likes mushrooms or soya nuggets, and only some like noodles or pasta. So if I'm going to make a dish that most or all others will avoid, I may as well use every hated ingredient at one go and enjoy the dish all by myself!

Ingredients:
1 tin of whole champignons (mushrooms)
1 cup of soya nuggets (e.g., Nutrela/Nutri Nuggets or some such)
1 cup of pasta shells
1 packet of noodles (e.g., Maggi)
1 small cup of green peas
5-6 cloves of garlic
1-2 chilli peppers (preferably Jalapeno)
Red chilli powder
1 bottle of Satay sauce
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
2-3 tablespoons of cooking oil (Grapeseed oil)

Procedure:
Boil the soya nuggets with a spoonful of salt and a spoonful of red chilli powder for about 10 minutes. Drain and set aside.

Boil the pasta with a spoonful of salt and a teaspoonful of oil for about 15 minutes. Drain under cold water for a couple of minutes and set aside.

Boil the noodles without tastemaker in 1 cup of water for about 10 minutes until no longer "wet", and set aside.

Steam the green peas in the microwave for 3-4 minutes using a steaming container and set aside.

Grind garlic and chilli peppers into a paste.
Heat grapeseed oil, pop mustard seeds into it and wait till they start to crackle.
Add garlic-chilli paste and saute for a couple of minutes.

Add champignons and stir for a while, allowing mushrooms to cook.

Add soya nuggets, pasta and noodles one after the other, stirring all the while.

Flavouring options:

Add Satay sauce to the mix, stir well for a few minutes, then serve. Serves 2-4. Satay sauce is a bit overpowering in its flavour, so although the result is quite delicious, the individual character of the ingredients is sadly suppressed. As a milder alternative to Satay sauce, add any masala or herb powder, with salt as required. In the latter case, some chopped spring onions (with stems) or coriander will provide a colourful garnish.

The Indian Blind Spot towards Pakistan

2009-11-05T05:52:00.000-08:00

I realised today that I have been guilty of the same blind spot towards Pakistan as so many other Indians.

For all their sophistication, Indian elites continue to understand Pakistan primarily with reference to the events of 1947. Anything else is incidental, not essential. The established Indian paradigms for explaining Pakistan, its actions and its institutions, its state and society, have not undergone any significant shift since the Partition. The tropes remain the same: religion and elite manipulation explain everything. It is as if the pre-Partition politics of the Muslim League continues to be the politics of Pakistan—with slight non-essential variations. More than 60 years on, the factors may be different but little else has changed.

That quote by Pakistani journalist Khurram Hussain sums it up accurately. He goes on to say

This view is deeply flawed. It reflects a serious confusion about the founding event of contemporary Pakistani society. The Partition has a mesmerising quality that blinds the mind, a kind of notional heft that far outweighs its real significance to modern South Asian politics. The concerns of the state of Pakistan, the anxieties of its society, and the analytic frames of its intellectual and media elites have as their primary reference not 1947 but the traumatic vivisection of the country in 1971 (emphasis mine). Indians have naturally focused on their own vivisection, their own dismemberment; but for Pakistan, they have focused on the wrong date. This mix-up has important consequences.

I would encourage as many people as possible to read this article, especially Indians. It is an eye-opener, because Indians typically do not realise how traumatic the 1971 war must have been to Pakistan. India's own defeat at the hands of China in 1962 is seared into the collective consciousness of more than one generation of Indians and is responsible for a deep and abiding distrust of China throughout the country. And this is even without an event as traumatic as the vivisection of the country. Indeed, contemporary commentary on the Indo-China border war now pins the blame on Indian foreign minister Krishna Menon's aggressive "Forward Policy" which had the effect of provoking China without actually having the military might to back up that aggressiveness. To the credit of the Chinese, they withdrew to their pre-conflict positions after making their point.

If Indians can be permanently scarred by such a relatively minor humiliation, one can imagine how much deeper the psychological wounds must be for Pakistanis, who lost half their territory (in terms of population). Indians have been naively oblivious to the impact of the 1971 war on their neighbours, and hence the entire approach to Pakistan has been one of righteous indignation - a country under attack from a "state sponsor of terror". But this is a great example of the saying, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom-fighter." Pakistan sees itself as the wronged party. India is an existential threat to that country because it has dismembered it once before. Never mind that India isn't interested in doing it a second time. What matters is that Pakistanis believe it can happen again.

Looking at how difficult it is for Indians to trust China after 1962, one can readily understand that Pakistanis would be extremely unwilling to trust India after 1971.

And so I have a curious idea for a solution to the eternal India-Pakistan conflict. I don't believe the peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute will necessarily solve the fundamental issue, because Pakistan needs something stronger to assuage its hurt. Pakistan will have to wrest Kashmir from India in a war that it wins. That is the only way 1971 can be avenged.

My idea is that the Indian government should apologise (yes, apologise) to Pakistan for breaking up the country in 1971. It has nothing to do with right and wrong and everything to do with emotion and moving forward. If the two countries are to move past the distrust, then Pakistanis must be made to feel India's genuine lack of interest in further harming their country. It would be better still if the leaders of India and Pakistan stood on a stage at the Wagah border and alternately apologised to each other's people for a list of perceived wrongs. That would clear the air and make other problems easier to solve, such as Kashmir.

The prize is a South Asian Federation that will be bigger and potentially greater than China.

Cool Slogan for Troubled Economic Times

2009-11-05T04:00:00.000-08:00

I thought of a slogan along the lines of "Make Love, Not War":

Exploit Technology, Not People

Recipe for Bread Upma

2009-11-03T05:18:00.000-08:00

Wondering what to do about that slightly older loaf of bread once you've bought a fresh one? Too much of a waste to throw away, yet a bit dodgy to consume...

Try a bread upma snack. This is another of those offbeat, male-only recipes handed down from father to son :-).

Ingredients:
8 slices of bread (you do use multigrain, don't you? That's the best from both a health and flavour perspective)
4 medium sized red (Spanish) onions
1 red hot chilli pepper (preferably Jalapeno, my favourite - slurp!)
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
Any cholesterol-absorbing butter alternative
Cooking oil (grapeseed oil handles heat much better than olive oil, I'm told)
Chopped coriander

Process (two parallel processes, in fact):

Process 1:
Chop the chilli and onions. The chilli pieces should be really fine. We want a pervasive spicy taste, not islands of dynamite.
Heat a couple of tablespoonfuls of cooking oil, pop the mustard seeds into it and wait till they start to crackle. Add the chopped chilli and saute for a while, then add the chopped onions and stir until well-fried.
Add one or two teaspoons of salt depending on preference.

Process 2:
Toast the slices of bread in a regular toaster until nice and brown (that's to ensure that any nasty effects of the mild staleness are burned away).
Apply small amounts of the butter substitute to soften each slice, then cut the slice into 16 square pieces (3 cuts in each direction).

Merge process:
Add the toasted, "buttered" bread pieces to the fried onion/chilli combine and stir well for a few minutes.
Add chopped coriander, turn off heat and continue to stir for a couple of minutes.
Serve hot.

Serves 2-4, depending on appetite :-).

I would have included a photograph because it looks really yummy, but then it was all gone before I could get my camera!

From Ayn Rand to Antitrust - Alan Greenspan's Remarkable Journey to Enlightenment

2009-10-22T02:05:00.000-07:00

Will miracles never cease? Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand "devotee" and former advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, now favours aggressive antitrust! "Break up the big banks," he says.

“If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big,” Mr. Greenspan said. “In 1911 we broke up Standard Oil — so what happened? The individual parts became more valuable than the whole. Maybe that’s what we need to do.”

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!

I must say it's very flattering when a major public figure reverses position to agree with you! It also invites contempt for the public figure in question.

Is the Australian government listening? We need a Ten Pillars Policy, Mr Rudd.

Neat Slogan for Hindu-Muslim Amity

2009-10-21T05:11:00.000-07:00

I saw this comment on a blog today and thought it was cool.

"When Qaynat* has put Ali in Diwali and Ram in Ramadan, who are we to fight?"

* Nature, the Universe

JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes 2009

2009-10-18T04:36:00.000-07:00

Sunday Oct 18th, 2009: Like we did last year, my wife and I signed up to join the JDRF (Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation) Walk to Cure Diabetes.

This year, the venue was Parramatta Park and not the Sydney Olympic Park. The crowd was decent-sized, but I thought it was half or even a third the size of the turnout last year. Someone told me there were two or three different walks this year at different venues, so the crowd was probably split between them.

The surprise VIP appearance at today's event was NSW Premier Nathan Rees, who said a few encouraging words about Australia being a world leader in several areas of medical research and expressed the hope that Australian research would pioneer a cure for diabetes. He then flagged off the walk, which lasted a little over an hour.

It was a cloudy day, so thankfully it wasn't too hot. There was a relaxed atmosphere throughout. Families with kids in strollers, on bikes and scooters, and with dogs in tow. There had been some fun events in the morning before the walk got started, but we missed them, having arrived with just minutes to spare for the main event.

Disappointingly, no other families could join us this year. We had about four families in our team last year, so we could enjoy a little picnic after the walk. This year, Diwali happened to be just the previous day, so many Indian families had a late night the previous day and couldn't join us for a morning walk.

Though the walk is over, readers are still welcome to donate to the cause through my collection page. It should be open for a few days more. Here's hoping the money raised helps to find a cure for juvenile diabetes. At the end of the day, it's about finding a cure, which is neither a picnic nor a walk in the park.

A Schizophrenic View of the Threat from Pakistan

2009-10-11T03:11:00.000-07:00

I had to laugh when I read this news item, dour as it was. Here's an unprecedented attack by militants on the Pakistani army's headquarters. It signals a strength and reach of terrorism within Pakistan that should unnerve watchers of the subcontinent. Wouldn't a reasonable person be worried about Pakistani nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists? September 11 has made the US absolutely paranoid, as we all know, and the London bombings have given the UK a similar jolt.

But what do we hear from the top diplomats of the Western world about this latest development? One has to wonder what Hillary Clinton and David Miliband are thinking/smoking. If their statements represent the views of the US and UK governments (as they surely do), they invite utter contempt for the leading Western powers.

"Yesterday was another reminder that extremists ... are increasingly threatening the authority of the state, but we see no evidence they are going to take over the state," Mrs Clinton said.
"We have confidence in the Pakistani government and military's control over its nuclear weapons," she added.
[...]
UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Pakistan faced a "mortal threat", but there was no risk of its nuclear weapons falling into terrorist hands.

I have to ask - Is there some magic spell that protects Pakistan's nuclear weapons, such that even though the Pakistani state may be in mortal danger from "militants" (read "terrorists"), those weapons will always be safe?

You know what I think? Here's my conspiracy theory. I think the US swooped down on Pakistan in 1998 as soon as that country demonstrated its nuclear capability, and took away all its weapons. After all, what Pakistan requires for its purposes is just the façade of nuclear capability to bluff the world with, not the weapons themselves. I'm sure the Americans assured the Pakistani generals that this would be their little secret. I can see no other reason for the sanguine response of Western countries to what should otherwise be a very worrisome situation indeed.

Corollary: If this is true, and Pakistan is indeed a toothless nuclear tiger, there should be nothing to hold India back from rolling over that country the very next time there is a terrorist attack launched from there. A risky gamble, though.

Nobel Peace Prize for Obama - A Bit Premature?

2009-10-09T06:26:00.000-07:00

I was very surprised to read the news of President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize. So surprised that I at first thought it was an elaborate April Fool's joke (of course it's October, but still).

Now readers of my blog know that I greatly respect and admire the man, so I don't grudge him the prize at all. I believe that by the time he completes his two terms (which he should if all goes well), he would have achieved enough to deserve the award twice or thrice over.

However, he hasn't really achieved anything yet. All we have so far is hope, because he has made a good start on many fronts. He has adopted a more conciliatory, less arrogant tone in public discourse. He treats even his adversaries with respect and tries to win bipartisan support for his initiatives. US foreign policy has suddenly begun to appear almost benign after decades of being a bag of dirty tricks for the rest of the world. And his personal style is magnetic and charming. No one but the most die-hard Republican/Conservative can fail to be impressed. But it's still only a good start. The results aren't in yet.

I think the Nobel Prize Committee jumped the gun. They really should have waited. This year's prize should have gone to the various relief agencies that pitched in to help victims of natural disasters around the globe. That would have been a more timely recognition of valuable work going on right now. What will the committee do after a few years, when Obama actually achieves some tangible outcomes? Award him a second prize?

In short, I don't think Obama's Nobel is undeserved, just premature.

[The Taliban have criticised the award to Obama. That settles it for me. Now I'm fully convinced he deserves it :-).]

Why Telstra's Shareholders Should Support the Company's Breakup

2009-10-07T06:00:00.000-07:00

Even as I write, forces are gathering to pressure the Australian government to back down from its aggressive posture towards the telecom monopoly Telstra that is forcing the company to voluntarily split into two independent entities if it is to remain a significant player in the Australian economy.

Large shareholder bodies, fearful for their own losses, are attempting to bully the government into letting the status quo remain. Which is both shameful and a shame.

The enormous ongoing costs of a monopoly like Telstra to the Australian economy as a whole is well-known. Australian consumers pay higher prices for services than consumers in other advanced economies, and it really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. The link between monopolistic markets and high prices is well-known. It should be the duty of every government to crack down on monopolies and keep markets free and liquid. That's why it's shameful that Telstra shareholders are ganging up against Australian society as a whole, brazenly asking to be allowed to profit at the expense of everyone else.

I am a Telstra shareholder too, though admittedly not on the same scale as AFIC. By AFIC's logic, I should be joining the chorus against the government's bold action.

Actually, I believe that I would benefit from a breakup of Telstra, both as a consumer and as a shareholder. That's why I support the government's hardline position. This is the point a lot of shareholders don't seem to get, which is a shame.

When the US Justice Department forced a breakup of AT&T in 1984, one would have expected AT&T shareholders to suffer. And perhaps those who sold their shares in the period immediately following the breakup did sustain losses. But it's instructive to see what happened in the longer term. Each of the 8 "Baby Bells" that were carved out of the single entity went on to become bigger than "Ma Bell" within a decade. The shareholders who held onto their shares and waited a few years reaped the benefits.

In similar fashion, when Telstra splits into two companies, I expect to receive equivalent shares in both. Sure, their combined market value will initially be less than the market value of shares in the undivided company. But rather than sell my shares in a hurry, I intend to wait till they both rise. Then I expect to be sitting on more capital than before.

But wouldn't increasing competition hurt Telstra's monopoly profits and therefore depress share prices even in the longer term? Only if the company has been efficiently harvesting its monopoly so far. On the contrary, like all complacent monopolies, I believe Telstra today is fat and lazy. It charges its customers more than it should, and it pays its shareholders less than it should. The differential evaporates as corporate waste. And why wouldn't Telstra be wasteful? It's a monopoly, after all.

As a Telstra shareholder, I want to see the government deliver a swift kick in the pants to this giant sloth to get it to smarten up, work harder and provide better returns to shareholders even as it drops its prices to customers in a more competitive market. I want to benefit both as a consumer and as a shareholder. Is that realistic? It looks like I'm expecting money to appear from nowhere, but what I'm really expecting is an efficiency dividend. When competition emerges in a market, waste disappears, and both consumers and shareholders see more money in their pockets.

That's why every enlightened Telstra shareholder should write to the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy (minister@dbcde.gov.au), and urge him not to yield to the shortsighted bullying tactics of fat cat shareholder lobbies.

As I have done.

Update 09/10/2009: I have written to the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications and the Arts (eca.sen@aph.gov.au) expressing my support for the government's position. It's perhaps more important for enlightened shareholders to have their voices heard by this body than for them to write to the minister.

Economic Principles that Work

2009-10-04T06:58:00.000-07:00

I have had discussions with various friends about broad-brush Economic philosophies such as "Capitalism" and "Socialism", and we have agreed that these labels are largely meaningless because different people understand them to mean quite different things.

We then talked about "goals" being more important than "isms", but again, different people may believe in different goals for a society. For example, is it more important to first eliminate poverty (through government intervention if required) or to set up a functioning market economy without distortions?

The discussions seemed to be getting nowhere, so I decided to take a leaf from the book by Al Ries and Jack Trout, a book called "Bottom-Up Marketing." In it, the authors argue that rather than start with a grand strategy and derive tactics from it, the most successful military and business ventures have taken successful tactics and built strategies around it. The German strategy of Blitzkrieg was based on the observed capabilities of the armoured tank and of newly-improved radio communication. It was not a strategy derived from blue-sky thinking.

Perhaps in similar fashion, we can find examples of economic principles (shorn of ideological "isms") that work, and these can be put together into a coherent economic policy for a country. I admit that I have cheated a bit. I'm fortunate to be living in a country (Australia) that has enjoyed about 20 years of uninterrupted growth even as the rest of the world has undergone boom and bust cycles. The two striking features of the Australian economy are a near-constant budget surplus throughout this period, and a stated policy by the independent Reserve Bank of Australia to manage interest rates so as to keep inflation in the range of 2-3%. So finding economic principles that work has been largely a matter of describing the features of the Australian economy, but of course it wasn't just that.

So here goes. This is my list of principles, some of which have been proven to work, some of which could work under certain conditions, and some of which have been discredited. Obviously this has serious biases. It's my opinion, after all ;-).

1. Principles that are known to work and should no longer be controversial:

Principle: Prudence
Lay description: Don't spend more than you earn.
Label(s): "Fiscal conservatism"
Features: A balanced or surplus government budget, cost/benefit analysis of projects, sound project management
Notes: The Australian federal budget has been in surplus for many years until the fiscal stimulus of 2008-2009 and is projected to be back in surplus by 2014-2015.

Principle: Accountability
Lay description: (1) No one is above the law. (2) Deliver results to stakeholders, or else.
Label(s): "Democracy", "Rule of law"
Features: Institutionalised checks and balances, regular elections, power of recall, strong opposition, independent judiciary

Principle: Transparency
Lay description: Eliminate corruption, build faith in the system.
Label(s): "Transparency"
Features: Formal processes, Right-to-Information laws, office of auditor-general/public ombudsman, free press, legislative review

Principle: Market efficiency
Lay description: Ensure that no buyer or seller (or small group thereof) can skew the market.
Label(s): "Free market", "Liquid market", "Competitive market", "Efficient market"
Features: Competition watchdog (with teeth), strong antitrust law
Notes: Perhaps this is the one area where the Australian economy is wanting. The lack of competition in the banking sector is only just being realised and discussed. At the same time, the telecom monopoly is finally being addressed and will hopefully be dismantled.

Principle: Stable growth
Lay description: A central bank manages interest rates to contain inflation in the 2-3% band.
Label(s): "Responsive monetary policy"
Features: Independent central bank, stated inflation target
Notes: This focus of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) together with a near-constant budget surplus has delivered 20 years of consistent growth even during periods of global recession.

Principle: Risk management
Lay description: Systems to identify and protect against various kinds of risks (mainly economic).
Label(s): "Diversification", "Risk regulation"
Features: Markets with breadth and depth, multi-skilled workforce, demographic diversity, risk management regulation, culture of risk management
Notes: There are many aspects to risk management, but its existence is generally a hallmark of a sophisticated economy.

Principle: Basic education
Lay description: Compulsorily educate all children.
Label(s): "Compulsory universal primary schooling"
Features: Fee-free public schooling upto and often including high school
Notes: All children must be afforded at least primary education, because literacy and numeracy are life skills and uneducated adults are a cost to society.

2. Principles that are controversial but can work provided they don't violate the first set:

Principle: A fair society
Lay description: This is one of the most misunderstood and variously interpreted principles, attracting a number of labels depending on the aspect being highlighted or criticised.
Label(s): "Meritocracy", "Affirmative action", "Equal opportunity", "Welfare state", "Social Security", "Egalitarianism"
Features: Constitution, bill of rights, independent judiciary, unemployment benefits, universal healthcare, tolerant society
Notes: As long as the budget stays balanced, these need not have downsides.

Principle: A skilled workforce
Lay description: Working age people have skills of a high quality that are productive in the economy.
Label(s): "Knowledge society",
Features: Universities, polytechnics, culture of higher education, incentives for higher education
Notes: Higher and technical education help a nation compete, but should not come at the cost of a deficit budget.

Principle: A healthy populace
Lay description: Affordable health care (prevention as well as treatment) for all.
Label(s): "Welfare state", "Universal healthcare", "Socialised medicine"
Features: Various mechanisms - single payer, compulsory private insurance, Medicare, etc.
Notes: Universal healthcare is an emotive issue, but should not be sought at the cost of a deficit budget. Prudence pays better long-term dividends.

Principle: A world market
Lay description: Free trade based on the principle of comparative advantage of nations.
Label(s): "Free trade"
Features: Low tariffs, low administrative/bureaucratic barriers to trade
Notes: Governments need to ensure both competitive/liquid markets and adequate diversification to maximise gains and reduce risk.

Principle: A regulated economy
Lay description: Government intervention in the functioning of the economy through a variety of mechanisms.
Label(s): "Mixed economy", "Public sector"
Features: Government ownership of enterprises, regulation of commercial activity (antitrust, price-setting for utilities, etc.)
Notes: Often criticised by advocates of a "free market" (itself a vague term), government intervention, if done well, can aid market liquidity by keeping commercial players honest, and can also provide much-needed services not provided by commercial players.

Principle: Wealth creation
Lay description: Tax incentives that benefit the well-off rather than those of more modest means.
Labels: "Supply-side economics", "Tax breaks for the rich", "Regressive taxation"
Features: Relatively low tax rates, modestly progressive tax slabs, tax-deductibility of investments, high income disparities
Notes: Taxation can often be a disincentive to wealth creation, but winding back taxation should not result in a deficit budget.

3. Principles that sound great but are observed not to work in practice:

Principle: Job security
Lay description: Legalised protection of jobs.
Label(s): "Socialism", "Protectionism", "Trade unionism"
Features: Strong trade unions, strict labour laws, no hire-and-fire, high import tariffs, tight immigration controls
Notes: Minimising unemployment has instinctive appeal, but the goal may be better reached by focusing on other targets, e.g., low inflation. The direct approach often has the opposite effect.

Principle: Unregulated markets
Lay description: Government stays out of the market altogether.
Label(s): "Capitalism", "Free market", "Laissez-faire economy", "Libertarianism", "Small government", "Monetarism"
Features: Limited government interference/intervention, unchecked market distortions (oligopolies and monopolies)
Notes: Recent failures in several economies with unregulated markets have shown the folly of this principle. Some regulation seems to be necessary, especially around keeping markets open and competitive and subject to risk management discipline.

Principle: Equality (as opposed to equal opportunity)
Lay description: Ensure that incomes, lifestyles, etc., are not too divergent.
Labels: "Socialism", "Communism", "Classless society", "Egalitarianism", "Tall poppy syndrome"
Features: Disincentives to wealth-building, limited private ownership, demonisation of "elites"
Notes: Fairness and equality of opportunity are more pragmatic principles that lead to an egalitarian society, where even the lowest-paid have an adequate standard of living to maintain their dignity and all have equal rights. Force-fitting an entire society into a mould of artificial equality only succeeds in making everyone equally poor, as the example of the communist countries has shown.

That's the lot, as far as I can tell. The question I have for the rest of the world is, if Australia can do it, why can't you?

How Brakes Can Make a Car Go Faster

2009-10-03T07:58:00.000-07:00

I recently attended a talk on Governance, Risk and Compliance at which Forrester analyst Tim Sheedy said something interesting and original.

He likened the Risk Management function in an organisation to the brakes in a car, and asked the audience what brakes do. The answer of course was that brakes slow down or stop a car. He agreed and said that's how organisations have seen the Risk Management function, i.e., as something that slows down business.

He then asked the audience how fast they would be willing to drive their cars if they knew the brakes weren't working. The answer was "very slowly indeed".

And so Sheedy pointed out that brakes actually make it possible for cars to go faster! In similar fashion, Risk Management helps business do more rather than less.

This reminds me of a couple of similar ideas I have heard.

One is around a way to prevent deaths due to car crashes. The conventional solution is to place an airbag in the steering column to protect drivers. The unconventional solution is to place a sharp spike on the steering column, with the effect that drivers will then drive very carefully indeed!

Another idea I have discussed on this blog earlier is about how Economics differs from Physics. You often make something happen by enabling its opposite. If you want to conserve hard currency within your economy, then you don't prevent people from taking it out (that will have exactly the effect you don't want). You should in fact make it easier for people to take hard currency out. That will ease the fears of investors who will then more readily bring hard currency into the economy, because they are assured that they can take it out whenever they want.

The New Vegemite is Quite Nice

2009-09-20T06:16:00.000-07:00

I guess one of the items on the Australian citizenship test ought to be "Do you like Vegemite?", with anyone answering "No" not only rejected but also deported. It seems to be one of those items that definitively differentiate Australians from non-Australians.

I've learnt to sort of like Vegemite. It's an acquired taste. I can tell why a lot of people do like it, but while I can eat a vegemite sandwich without wincing, I must confess it's not my favourite spread either.

That's why I was interested when Kraft came out with a New Vegemite with a lighter taste.

I tried it and was hooked. I've finished my first bottle within a week of buying it, and replenished the kitchen shelf at once.

How do I describe the taste? It's like vegemite mixed with cheese spread. The harsh salty taste of classic Vegemite is softened, so much so that one can eat a spoonful of the stuff straight. Did I say I was hooked?

Kraft had a "Name Me" contest but I saw the notice too late. The contest had already closed, and we have to wait a while to see which name won. I was going to suggest "ButterMite" to suggest a much smoother Vegemite.

I'm sure "real" Aussies will turn up their noses at this imposter and call it "un-Australian". I don't care. I'm a first-generation migrant and my tastes are an unabashed mixture of the Australian and the un-Australian :-). Perhaps the ones who take to the new Vegemite and make it a success will be others like myself. In which case, the morphing of Vegemite will reflect in microcosm the larger demographic changes happening across Australia. The old Vegemite isn't going away. Both brands will co-exist, and that again seems to me symbolic of the peaceful integration of the new with the old.

Update 29/09/2009: I just learnt that Kraft has decided to call the new Vegemite "iSnack 2.0".

With all due respect, Kraft, I think my idea of "Buttermite" would have been better.

Book Review: Stranger to History by Aatish Taseer

2009-08-18T06:28:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Aatish Taseer's "Stranger to History" (subtitle: A son's journey through Islamic lands). I read it over two nights, and it got more and more gripping as it went along.

I won't waste space discussing what the book is about. Amazon has a good description of it. And Amazon's reader reviews can give you more insights.

By the way, the young man on the cover is not the author. This is what Aatish Taseer really looks like:

Here are my impressions from the book.

This is a book from which I think Western readers especially can learn a lot about Islam, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. [I come from the subcontinent myself and I believe that I have a better understanding of many of the things the author is talking about than most Westerners, and there was a lot here that was new to me.] In many ways, reading this book was like wading into a real-life soap opera, and I enjoyed the many thrills of recognition that it generated. Although the author never mentions his mother by name, I learnt from the web that she is none other than the famous Indian journalist Tavleen Singh, many of whose columns I have read off and on over the last twenty-odd years. And his father Salmaan Taseer has recently taken over as governor of the Pakistani province of Punjab. [Update 04/01/2011: Salman Taseer was assassinated by his own bodyguard for opposing the death penalty for a Christian woman accused of blasphemy.] What better soap opera background than for the author of a book to have parents from two traditionally "enemy" countries?

As I ploughed through the first few chapters, I formed the unfair impression that the author was something of a "Western person's Muslim", telling them what they wanted to hear about himself and about the Muslims (the equivalent of what African-Americans call an "Uncle Tom"). However, those early chapters were about countries alien to both the author and to myself. And I hadn't learnt to trust him enough at that stage. By the time he came to Iran and then to Pakistan, I began to understand him much better. I realised that like me, he was at heart a Westernised Indian with liberal-humanist sensibilities. He may be Muslim by virtue of having a Muslim father, but his sensibilities are every bit progressive, modern and intolerant of sham and injustice. As I warmed to the author, I began to enjoy his style and to see things from his point of view.

The chapters on Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia left me somewhat cold. That's not the author's fault. I guess I'm just too emotionally distant from those countries to care very much. My interest picked up when he described Iran. And the excitement reached fever-pitch when he began his travels through Pakistan. I couldn't put the book down from that point. I therefore won't make apologies for concentrating the bulk of this review on the latter part of the book.

There are two currents that this book deals with through the mechanism of the travelogue, and one can take them with a feeling of despair, triumphalism or sorrowful resignation.

One is the larger dilemma of the Muslim world vis-a-vis the world as a whole, the latter now being dominated by Western thought and Western invention. If I may crudely paraphrase what the book tries to say, Islam enjoyed a seemingly inexorable rise since the 7th century, constantly conquering and advancing. But five centuries ago, that growth faltered. Europe took off from that point on, and its power and its reach grew to eclipse that of Islam. So today, the overweening theme of the average Muslim's reaction to the modern world shaped by European civilisation is one of dismay. The conquering hero has been cheated of his prize. World domination by Islam, which once seemed inevitable, now seems equally inevitably never to be. Islam's glory is all in the past. This is not an easy reality for many Muslims to accept.

The second is the subcontinental drama of India and Pakistan (and to a lesser extent, Bangladesh). Again, to crudely paraphrase the book, Pakistan in its own eyes is the un-India. It defines itself in terms of what it is not, which is perhaps why the resolution of the Kashmir dispute will probably not address the core problem in the relationship. India's success will always be seen in Pakistan as Pakistan's failure. For Pakistan to succeed, India must fail, or if it does not do so on its own, must be made to fail. One may bluntly call such attempts terrorism or cloak this in Islamic terms like jihad, but it is essentially a cry for relevance. But the age has passed when violent attacks on India were condoned by the world. That option is no longer available. And so Pakistan is left to drink from two bitter and poisoned chalices, its own spiralling destruction and the growing success of its self-characterised enemy. This is not an easy reality for most Pakistanis to accept.

Intentionally or otherwise, Aatish Taseer has done an effective hatchet job on three groups of people - (1) His father and father's family, (2) Pakistan and Pakistani society and (3) doctrinaire Muslims in general.

(1) From Aatish's description, Salmaan Taseer does not come across as a nice person at all. Even if we take Aatish to be biased, we have the incontrovertible facts of Salmaan's behaviour. A married man with children who cheats on his wife with another woman only to turn his back on her and her child, can't be anything but a schmuck. And the comments of Aatish's siblings about "little black Hindus", "ugly Indians" and how they hate them shows them up as colour-conscious racists. It's a pity Aatish must have burnt his bridges with his father and paternal relatives with this book. But from the picture we gain of them (as bigoted individuals), I don't think he's worse off for it.

(2) I don't think anyone has done as good a hatchet job on Pakistani culture since Om Puri in East is East. With anecdote after anecdote, Aatish exposes the deep insecurities of a society that arrogantly set out to be better than India and ended up being far, far worse. Perhaps understandably, the attitude of those who left India for Pakistan at the time of Partition is even more hardline than that of people who were always there. They seem desperate to avoid buyer's remorse. The reported conversation with a muhajjir in Sind is pathetically funny. The poor man tries hard to tease out every way in which India could possibly be worse than Pakistan. The attitudes of educated people don't seem very different, regrettably.

(3) I hope no outraged cleric issues a fatwa against this young author whose only crimes have been honesty and candour. He has clearly exposed the problems of various types of Muslim societies. The desire for purity in those that went by the book (no pun intended) has led to ugliness and violence. And authoritarian states have abused the religion to consolidate political power, robbing people of the spiritual comfort that it could give them. The Muslim world seems to suffer from a deep inferiority complex. They must rule the world. They cannot coexist as equals with other cultures. It's going to be a long and painful adjustment process for them to accept the fact that equality is the best they can ever hope for. If the failed and failing states across the Middle East and South Asia are any indication, Islamic civilisation is self-destructing before our eyes, thanks to unbending pride and ideological rigidity.

I found this piece on Iran cute, funny and sad at the same time:

"On certain nights cars would collect in a line along the avenue and car-flirting would begin. It was a Tehrani activity in which carfuls of boys rolled past carfuls of girls, looks were exchanged, smiles, paper chits, and if the bearded men showed up, the scene scattered."

There seems to be a pattern with many Islamic societies. In practice, Islam in these societies seems to be all about "bearded men" interfering in people's personal lives and telling them what to do and what not to. It's the very opposite of a free society that I (and the author) believe in.

However, my impression of Iran from this book is one of hope, of a country on the edge of a new chapter in its history, a more tolerant and modern chapter. The next generation is waiting in the wings, and they are as far from Ayatollah Khomeini as can be imagined.

I have wondered about how Iranians identify with Islam, when Persian culture pre-dated Islam and was so obviously rich and proud. I also wonder about whether Egyptians take similar pride in their ancient (pre-Islamic) civilisation. This book doesn't talk about Egypt, but does compare Iran and Pakistan in this regard.

I was gratified to read that Iranians do take pride in their pre-Islamic culture and are aware of their identity as something more than just Muslim.

It's a reasonable question the author asks - Why don't Pakistanis take similar pride in their ancient Hindu past (with its many achievements since the Vedic age)?

There's a telling statement by a Pakistani:

"If all India became Muslim, we might have been able to identify with the Hindu past. We would have modifed something. But since it didn't happen that way, we can't choose something that goes against our taste. You won't wear a T-shirt you don't like."

In other words, the very presence of Hindu (or more correctly, multicultural) India hangs in front of Pakistan like a taunt, preventing Pakistanis from seeing themselves as being from the same culture. They would rather identify with Muslim invaders who converted their Hindu forefathers (at swordpoint) than admit their real ancestry and heritage. The loss is theirs, as it is with all those who attempt to rewrite history to make it more palatable.

It's a sad point the author makes that the youth of India and Pakistan have drifted further apart than even their grandparents. The reason is that Pakistanis have not known diversity for two generations now and have been indoctrinated against India and Hindus from their childhood, whereas Indians grow up with diversity in their subconscious.

[I can't help thinking wistfully of a South Asian Utopia, one where Partition never occurred and where the Muslims of undivided India adhered to the mild Sufi brand of Islam rather than the hardline Deobandi or Wahhabi strain. This India would be the world's most populous country, larger even than China. It would not have known its four internecine wars. Perhaps it would have been militarily softer and weaker as a result. Or perhaps not. At any rate, things wouldn't be the way they are today. If Pakistanis can swallow their collective pride and admit that the basic idea of Pakistan was wrong, they can still enter into a mutually beneficial relationship with India, even if not outright union (I don't think India now has the appetite for union with Pakistan, anyway!) Bangladesh can do the same, and South Asia will be an economic and geopolitical powerhouse to rival China. But I'm not holding my breath. Pakistani pride will never let it happen. To paraphrase Z.A. Bhutto, they will eat grass but never accept a subordinate role to India.]

To return to the book, the writing is good, although not great. I can think of greater writers and thinkers who could have moulded these experiences into a white-hot narrative with far deeper insights. But it is still authentic. The personal angle is interesting in itself. The study of Islamic societies is topical. The two when intertwined make rivetting reading. I think this book deserves recognition through an award (the Booker, the Pulitzer, anything) for the much-needed light it shines on Islamic societies and the fresh angle from which it shines it.

I like the way the author intersperses chapters. The narrative periodically takes a break from the present journey to either talk about something that happened much earlier, or to muse about a concept. It gives the reader an opportunity to pause and digest what the author has experienced.

The moral of the book seems to be simply this: Diversity is difficult to handle - diversity of religions, cultures, thought. But the nations that nonetheless manage to nurture diversity evolve into rich, beautiful and tolerant societies. The ones that shun diversity in favour of ideological purity, whether Islamic, Marxist or any other kind, end up with a grotesque, ugly and violent society that is hell on earth.

Islam in the Indian subcontinent was once capable of synthesising cultures, of morphing to a gentler form (Sufism). But in recent times, that trend has withered in favour of a harsher, purer strain (Wahhabism or the Deobandi school). The loss is that of the societies that have taken this path.

The author's impression of Pakistan at the beginning of his very first visit says it all.

"We drove away from the border in his air-conditioned car. The country that opened up, of mud chimneys, canals full of bathing children and small, congested neighbourhoods, with bright-coloured Urdu writing on the walls, might have been a Muslim neighbourhood in India. It seemed so familiar that one expected the diversity of the Indian scene to reveal itself. And when it didn't, it was unsettling. It really was an India for Muslims only."

Aatish Taseer went to Pakistan with a positive attitude, but for all the Pakistanis' sense of cultural superiority, India's soft power ultimately prevailed. Pakistan may have fascinated him, but could not win him over. And no wonder. India's mongrel culture, much as its detractors may deride it, is in fact its greatest strength. Pakistan's (aspired-for) purity is in fact its downfall. In Harry Potter terms, India is a mudblood country; Pakistan is a Slytherin ideal of purebloodedness. If that makes one shudder, that was my reaction when I read this book. And I believe that's the impression the author intended to convey.

Corazon Aquino Passes Away

2009-07-31T18:03:00.000-07:00

It's with sadness that I read of the passing of former Philippine president Corazon Aquino.

It was 1986. I was a student at management school in faraway India when she became President of the Philippines after an epic struggle against a dictatorship. I shared the revulsion of many around the world at the cowardly way in which Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos (allegedly) ordered her husband Benigno Aquino to be murdered just as he stepped off the plane on his return to the Philippines to challenge the dictatorship. Like so many others, I watched and cheered as Corazon bravely took up her husband's mantle even though she had no political experience at all. She became the focal point of the revolt that represented the people's intense frustration with Marcos's tyranny and misrule. If she had failed to step up at the right time, the movement may well have fizzled out. Step up she did, and it must have taken enormous courage to do so.

In those days, there was no World-Wide Web to follow events in real-time. Time and Newsweek were my two main sources of information, and I devoured them voraciously. Now, when I read reviews of her life, the old familiar names come rushing back - Juan Ponce Enrile (Marcos's defence minister who precipitated the revolt by being the first to break ranks with him), General Fidel Ramos (who lent crucial support to Aquino), Cardinal Jaime Sin (the head of the Roman Catholic church in the Philippines who called on the people to support the uprising against Marcos), Gregorio "Gringo" Honasan (a weird serial mutineer who led coup attempts against Marcos, Aquino and reportedly now against Arroyo), etc.

I think Corazon Aquino faced more than her share of challenges during her term, with both natural disasters and man-made ones confronting her on a regular basis. (She faced down 7 coup attempts in 6 years!) She could not solve all the problems of the Philippines, but I believe she made the greatest contribution of all - not just in deposing a dictator but in systematically dismantling the institutions of that dictatorship in order to make the country safe from a similar dictator in future. In the process, she became a powerful symbol of democracy and "People Power" throughout the world.

At a human level, she symbolises something equally important. From whatever I read, I gather that she never lost her egalitarian touch and did not let power corrupt her. Till the end, she remained modest and unassuming.

Such leaders are very rare. I mourn her passing.

[Update 04/08/2009: It was touching to see that two of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos's children came to pay their respects at Corazon Aquino's funeral. Life's too short for familial blood-feuds.]

The Nehru-Gandhi Dynasty

2009-05-18T04:56:00.000-07:00

I'm not a fan of India's Gandhi family (no relatives of Mahatma Gandhi), much less a fan of the Gandhi dynasty. I think a democracy doesn't need to look to a single family to provide continuing leadership. [Of course, I'm also against reverse-discrimination, so if members of the Gandhi family choose to stand for election and win, I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to rule.]

Well, at any rate, since the international press is going on about Rahul Gandhi being the son, grandson and great-grandson of former Prime Ministers, I thought I'd put together a photo collection of the dynasty, and just for kicks, I've used postage stamps wherever available. We still don't know if Rahul Gandhi will be PM. Maybe his sister Priyanka will. At any rate, here's the clan:

Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister (1947-1964):

He's the only prime minister from the family whom I actually admire. The man was a true democrat. It was thanks to his idealism that India survived as a democracy during its difficult infancy. So many other "great" leaders of newly-independent European colonies went down a very different path (e.g., Nkrumah of Ghana, Soekarno of Indonesia, etc.) Lots of people today criticise Nehru for taking India down a socialistic path (more correctly, a mixed economy), but I think that was the right choice at the time. Government was the only agency with the funds and the vision to develop the country. It was also correct for India to liberalise and move to regular market capitalism after a few decades, once basic economic stability and depth had been established.

Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter, India's third and sixth prime minister (1966-1977, 1980-1984):
(I'm not counting Gulzarilal Nanda, who was twice stopgap PM)

I never liked her. Unlike her father, Indira Gandhi did her best to destroy India's democratic institutions. Fortunately, by then, Indian democracy was mature enough to withstand her attacks and ultimately outlast her. The postage stamp is from the former USSR. The Indo-Soviet love affair was at its height during her reign. Again, I think that wasn't a bad thing for the time. Better Brezhnev than Nixon.

Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi's son, India's seventh prime minister (1984-1989):

I didn't think much of him either. Indira Gandhi was undemocratic, but she was at least competent. Rajiv did not even have competence to recommend him. I was sorry, though, when he was assassinated by a suicide bomber of the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers. [It must be doubly satisfying this week for Rajiv's widow Sonia Gandhi. Her party won re-election, and the Tamil Tigers were finally defeated and their leaders killed.]

Rahul Gandhi, Rajiv's son, future prime minister?

Priyanka Gandhi, Rajiv's daughter, future prime minister?

I don't know much about the Gandhi children. They seem decent enough. But then, so was their father Rajiv, until he became PM. In a few short years, he had turned from "Mr. Clean" into a cynical politician like all the rest.

Now we'll see if PM Manmohan Singh turns out to be a mere seat-warmer for Rahul or Priyanka. Well, the people get the government they deserve.

Notes on the 2009 Indian Election

2009-05-16T07:36:00.000-07:00

So the exit polls have been proven wrong, and India has ended up with a more decisive election result than predicted. The ruling Congress party and its allies will probably be able to stitch together a relatively stable coalition government without having to rely on support from ideologically different groups such as the communists. Perhaps in the present economic climate, India needs decisive leadership more than it needs checks on the government's power.

A few quick observations on the election and what it may mean:

1. Dr. Manmohan Singh was much more impressive in his earlier incarnation as India's Finance Minister under former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao (1991-1996) than as Prime Minister himself in the last 5 years. I'll be charitable and attribute the relative lack of pathbreaking reform during the last five years to the fact that a dependence on leftist coalition partners tied his hands. Now that that excuse is no longer available, the new government had better deliver.

2. The election seems to have strengthened the centrist parties and weakened both the left and the right. I think this is a good thing given these troubled times. Governments need to be pragmatic and relatively unencumbered by ideological baggage. Let's hope the new Congress government is able to do what's right for the country without being caught up in endless ideological debates.

3. Shashi Tharoor, the former (unsuccessful) candidate for UN Secretary-General, said in a speech after his record win in Thiruvananthapuram that these were the "accountability elections". Where governance was good, incumbents won. Where it wasn't, they lost. Tharoor was gracious and honest enough to point out that this was as true for his own party as for others. I agree with his analysis. The Indian electorate certainly seems to have voted for good government.

4. I wonder if there will be pressure on Dr. Manmohan Singh to step aside partway through his term to make way for Rahul Gandhi, the scion of India's "democratic dynasty". Although I'm against dynastic rule, I think this may in some ways be an improvement. I'm no longer young, so I probably shouldn't be accused of ageism when I say India's political leadership is a generation older than the demographics of the country would justify. The old need to give way to the young. Plus, I think Dr. Manmohan Singh would be far better as an advisor than as a leader. As the old saying goes, academics should be on tap but not on top.

5. Lastly, a moment of unabashed gloating in the achievement of my native country. India has shamed all the countries in its neighbourhood with yet another smooth election, all the more remarkable for its sheer logistics and relative absence of violence. These neighbours have a hard act to follow. India has also shamed many western countries that continue to rely on paper ballots. The 2004 and 2009 elections have shown that electronic voting machines can and do work even in large and diverse countries with significant numbers of illiterate voters. The actual voting process necessarily took time to organise (5 voting days spread over a month to cater to over half a billion voters), but the tabulation and announcement of the results got over in less than a day.

What next for India? It's very, very early days yet, with the results having just been announced. The days that follow will show how things unfold.

Wisdom Dawns on the Importance of Market Liquidity

2009-05-15T05:52:00.001-07:00

I've been crying myself hoarse for years about the need for liquid (i.e., competitive) markets. A free market does not mean a laissez-faire market. It means a market that is guaranteed to be liquid, with plenty of buyers and sellers, and with no player large enough to influence prices through its actions alone.

The recent noises emanating from the Obama administration are a welcome indication that this lesson has been learnt. The world has paid - is continuing to pay - a very heavy price for the state of market illiquidity that has resulting in some players becoming too big to fail.

Someone rightly said that if a company is too big to fail, it's too big to exist.

We need aggressive antitrust, not just in the interests of fairness, but in the interests of our very survival. I hate to argue by pandering to practicality over principle, but that seems to be the only argument that works. Monopolistic and oligopolistic markets are unfair, but that doesn't seem to bother people. Monopolistic and oligopolistic markets can lead to systemic collapses that end in a deep recession - that probably gets more people to take notice and act.

The European Union recently acted boldly in fining Intel over a billion Euros for abusing its monopoly in computer chips. We need more such action against all monopolies, not only other IT monopolies like Microsoft but its counterparts in every industry.

By keeping markets liquid, we keep them healthy and our livelihoods safe.

Star Trek Review

2009-05-10T07:41:00.000-07:00

(Warning - spoilers ahead)

I saw Star Trek over the weekend at Castle Towers Megaplex.

In short, the only thing that prevented me from being wowed by the movie was the fact that all the reviews I had read had prepared me to expect something pretty good. The fact that the movie lived up to the hype was ironically a bit of an anticlimax.

I've been a Star Trek fan since the early eighties, when the series started showing on Indian TV. The only thing that managed to knock Star Trek down my list of favourite TV shows was Star Trek - The Next Generation, which began airing in the mid-nineties :-).

The new movie directed by JJ Abrams takes us back to the original story and provides us a newly-minted background to the characters of the Enterprise crew. It's very slickly done, although I do have a few quibbles. I would hardly be a Trekkie if I didn't ;-).

I don't have to provide a standard synopsis of the movie. There are plenty of others available. Here are my quibbles alone, but keep in mind that they in no way detract from the impact and appeal of the movie. You should go and see it on the big screen, even if you aren't familiar with the genre. It's very beginner-friendly.

On to nitpicking, then.

1. A prequel should try and be consistent with its future history. To a large extent, Star Trek succeeds in "backporting" its future characters' idiosyncrasies back to their newly-presented roots, but there are glaring exceptions. In Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home, the crew lands on Vulcan, and Spock has a conversation with his mother. JJ Abrams's prequel not only kills off Spock's mother but all 6 billion denizens of Vulcan, along with the planet itself. It's going to be hard to watch The Voyage Home again without feeling acutely uncomfortable. Abrams shouldn't have done this to us.

2. Captain Pike is in a wheelchair at the end of Abrams's movie, and has already become Admiral. The Cage and The Menagerie are still ahead of him. Is he demoted, does he get out of the wheelchair only to go back to it in time for The Menagerie, or is this another Pike? Highly illogical.

3. The human-Vulcan quandary affecting Spock seems to be resolved too soon. It's not until The Voyage Home that Spock is supposed to "feel" fine.

4. Spock designed the Kobayashi Maru test. I'm fine with that. But the point of it was for the cadets to learn fear? Spock wants Starfleet officers to learn lessons through an emotion? Illogical again.

5. And what's with the Uhura business, anyway? There's not a hint of anything between Spock and Uhura in any of the original episodes, so how are they going to explain the cooling off that surely must have happened after the Abrams movie? Perhaps there will be sequels to the prequel that will resolve this. Advice to the director: don't start anything you can't finish.

There were many nice touches I did enjoy. Bones gives us another variation of his "I'm a doctor, not a " with physicists duly lining up for the honour this time. On the other hand, there were many opportunities for him to say, "He's dead, Jim," but he passed them all up.

Jim Kirk can't resist anything in a skirt, even as he's about to pass out in sickbay. It's pretty hilarious, though I've often wondered if that isn't a fatal character trait for a ship's captain. (Picard, by contrast, is a gentleman who will even carry his guests' bags and he gets my vote over Kirk every time.)

Spock's reluctance to say "Live long and prosper" to his own past self on the grounds that it would be "self-serving" is pretty wry and shows that Vulcans understand humour after all.

The villain Nero is very casual whenever he hails Federation ships. He's so informal you'd almost expect him to go, "How'ya doin'?"

One final nitpick. I would have appreciated an explanation of why there are no seatbelts on starships in the twentythird century. I was hoping the prequel would explain that. Oh, well.

Obama and Nuremberg

2009-04-17T06:31:00.000-07:00

I'm simultaneously admiring and critical of President Obama this week over his handling of the Bush-era policy towards torture.

I'm glad he released documents revealing the extent of torture practised by the CIA, but I'm not happy about his desire to move on without affixing responsibility and culpability for the same.

CIA director Leon Panetta is believed to have told his operatives that "the interrogation practices had been approved at the highest levels of the Bush administration and that they had nothing to fear if they had followed the rules."

“You need to be fully confident that as you defend the nation, I will defend you,” he said.

Someone needs to tell these people that the Nazis' excuse of Befehl ist Befehl (orders are orders) was emphatically rejected at Nuremberg.

No, Mr. CIA Director, your operatives cannot be excused because they "merely" followed orders. Human rights violators must always be punished, from George Bush and Dick Cheney down to the cretins who did the dirty work.

Another Government-owned Telco?

2009-04-07T06:20:00.000-07:00

It's strange how the Australian government has shelved months of effort that went into a tendering process to finally announce that it would be setting up its own company to build a next generation high-speed broadband network for the country.

Part of me rejoices that the Telstra monopoly has suffered a major kick in the groin. Part of me (heck, all of me) always rejoices when monopolies get a well-deserved kick in the groin (When will you double over in agony, Microsoft?).

But I don't know if this was a well thought-out plan or an oh-forget-it act of exasperated desperation. Has Communications minister Stephen Conroy finally done something right after committing gaffe after gaffe? Others are confused too.

Time will tell whether this gargantuan initiative will turn out to be a waste of money or a wise spend that will keep the economy ticking during the global recession and will also provide a much-needed force-multiplier for the smart, networked nation that will arise after the recession.

But I guess the bottomline is that the privatisation of Telstra was a mistake in the first place. If you must privatise a government-owned monopoly, at least break it up into a dozen pieces so there's no more monopoly. If there's anything worse than a government-owned monopoly, it's a privately-owned monopoly. Will history repeat itself with this new incarnation of Telstra?

Education is Cool

2009-04-03T19:14:00.000-07:00

Socialism (beyond the point where it rights historical wrongs) is the great leveller - downwards.

In contrast, I've always believed that education is the great leveller - upwards. One of the saving features of Soviet-era socialism was that it educated its citizens.

Hats off to Michelle Obama for putting this into words. Mrs Obama visited a girls school in London this week and said this:

If you want to know the reason why I am standing here, it's because of education. I never cut class. I loved getting A's, I liked being smart. ... I thought being smart is cooler than anything in the world.

Judging by the news reports, the girls at the multicultural school were inspired by that, especially in the days before their GSC Exams.

Smart behaviour should be seen as cool. Self-destructive behaviour should be seen as something for losers. These are lessons that teenagers need to be taught. As a teenager, I too tended to glorify negative behaviour to an extent, although I thankfully didn't go overboard and ruin my life.

It's great to have positive examples like the Obamas in this world. Youngsters need to see for themselves that working hard to build up one's education and communication skills is something to be admired and emulated, because honest success is not nerdy but cool.

Excerpt from Wodehouse's "The Small Bachelor"

2009-04-03T02:30:00.000-07:00

It'll soon become obvious why I'm posting this excerpt from P.G. Wodehouse's novel.

"Ouch!" cried Mrs Waddington.

She had not intended to express any verbal comment on the incident, for those who creep at night through other people's kitchens must be silent and wary: but the sudden agony was so keen that she could not refrain from comment. And to her horror she found that her cry had been heard. There came through the darkness a curious noise like the drawing of a cork, and then somebody spoke.

'Who are you?' said an unpleasant, guttural voice.

Mrs Waddington stopped, paralysed. She would not, in the circumstances, have heard with any real pleasure the most musical of speech: but a soft, sympathetic utterance would undoubtedly have afflicted her with a shade less of anguish and alarm. This voice was the voice of one without human pity: a grating, malevolent voice; a voice that set Mrs Waddington thinking quiveringly in headlines:

SOCIETY LEADER FOUND SLAIN IN KITCHEN

'Who are you?'

BODY DISMEMBERED BENEATH SINK

'Who are you?'

SEVERED HEAD LEADS TRACKERS TO DEATH-SPOT

'Who are you?'

Mrs Waddington gulped.

'I am Mrs Sigsbee H. Waddington,' she faltered. And it would have amazed Sigsbee H., had he heard her, to discover that it was possible for her to speak with such a winning meekness.

'Who are you?'

'Mrs Sigsbee H. Waddington, of East Seventy-Ninth Street and Hempstead, Long Island. I must apologize for the apparent strangeness of my conduct in...'

'Who are you?'

Annoyance began to compete with Mrs Waddington's terror. Deaf persons had always irritated her, for like so many women of an impatient and masterful turn of mind, she was of the opinion that they could hear perfectly well if they took the trouble. She raised her voice and answered with a certain stiffness.

'I have already informed you that I am Mrs Sigsbee H. Waddington...'

'Have a nut,' said the voice, changing the subject.

Mrs Waddington's teeth came together in a sharp click. All the other emotions which had been afflicting her passed abruptly away, to be succeeded by a cold fury. Few things are more mortifying to a proud woman than the discovery that she had been wasting her time being respectful to a parrot: and only her inability to locate the bird in the surrounding blackness prevented a rather unpleasant brawl. Had she been able to come to grips with it, Mrs Waddington at that moment would undoubtedly have done the parrot no good whatsoever.

It's interesting that I came upon this passage just days after the news item about the parrot that saved a little girl's life. Knowing what we now know about the intelligence of parrots, perhaps Wodehouse's avian character was having a good laugh all the time.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

The Intelligence of Parrots

2009-04-03T02:17:00.000-07:00

When I was at school, we were taught that parrots had no real intelligence. One could not carry on an intelligent conversation with a parrot because the birds only repeated sounds without understanding their meaning.

However, later research seems to show that parrots are in fact highly intelligent creatures that understand what they're saying.

The recent case where a parrot repeatedly cried, "Mama, baby!" to draw the attention of a babysitter to a choking child is just the latest evidence that parrots do not just "parrot" what they have heard. They probably understand the meaning of the words, too.

It takes significant intelligence to recognise that a child is in distress, to understand that an adult human must be alerted to save the child, and a particular combination of words is the most appropriate to describe the situation. Also, it speaks highly of the emotional quality of empathy, to want to save a fellow living being. It makes us pause to think about what it means to be human.

Earth Hour Observed (2009)

2009-03-28T14:47:00.000-07:00

Just like last year, we observed Earth Hour again, this time on Saturday night (28 March, 2009). We switched off all lights and shut down the computers, then took an hour-long walk from 2030 to 2130.

Again, like last year, we noticed that many houses along the streets we saw did not turn off their lights, so it wasn't a total success.

My question remains - how much does this really do for the environment? At what point does tokenism translate to tangible impact?

Stratfor CEO George Friedman Seems Eerily Prescient

2009-03-09T06:44:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a most fascinating book, "The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century" by George Friedman, the CEO of Stratfor (which stands for Strategic Forecasting).

Among other predictions that Friedman makes based on geopolitical considerations is a rather dramatic one about war between the United States and a Japanese-Turkish alliance in about 2050. According to him, the war will begin with a Japanese Pearl Harbour-style attack on US Battlestar satellites. The attack will be launched from Japan's lunar base, Friedman adds.

Today, I read this news item in the papers. Japan plans to sends a robot explorer to the moon by 2020, and a human astronaut by 2030.

It's 2009, and Japan has seemingly begun its baby steps towards war with the US. It was an eerie feeling to read today's newspaper, knowing what I know of Friedman's prediction.

How Can We Trust Science?

2009-03-07T04:22:00.000-08:00

I'm all for the rationalist approach to life. I would like to have science rule my actions and my thinking. But in practice, science often leaves me feeling cheated.

Last year, a glass of red wine a day was good for me. It was rich in antioxidants, which helped to fight cancer.

This year, even two small glasses of red wine a day can cause ... cancer.

Thinking scientifically therefore, the act of pouring wine into smaller glasses seems to be what introduces carcinogens into the system.

Come back, religion and superstition, all is forgiven!

Unit Pricing Cuts Both Ways

2009-01-17T00:14:00.000-08:00

I wrote glowingly of Woolworths's Unit Pricing scheme just days ago, and today I was pleased to see that ALDI's also has it. As an exercise, I decided to compare the unit prices of items on my grocery list, and this is the result:


Item                        ALDI's                Woolworths
----                        ------                ----------
Light milk                  $1.40/litre           $2.63/litre
Wholemeal bread             $0.28/100g            $0.59/100g
Free range eggs             $0.69/100g            $0.72/100g
Low fat yoghurt             $0.47/100g            $0.59/100g
Honey (squeezable pack)     $0.60/100g            $1.00/100g
Cranberry juice             $2.79/litre           $3.86/litre
Carrots                     $1.25/kg              $1.29/kg
Beans                       $7.00/kg              $2.98/kg
Cashews                     $1.74/100g            $1.86/100g
Kitchen towels              $0.75/roll            $0.95/roll
Vit B (Benifex/Berocca)     $0.35/unit            $0.50/unit
--- added 25/01/2009 ---
Pesto                       $1.53/100g            $2.16/100g
Toilet tissue               $0.50/roll (6 pack)   $0.41/roll (9 pack)
Green seedless grapes       $2.00/kg              $3.86/kg
Garlic                      $3.38/kg              $10.98/kg
Frozen stir-fry veges       $5.78/kg              $6.24/kg

I always knew that Woolworths was more expensive than ALDI's, but this was a real eye-opener. ALDI's has fewer brands, but they're cheaper than even the most inexpensive brands at Woolworths. Green beans are probably the only exception. It'd be very hard for me to justify a trip to Woolworths when ALDI's is open. Sorry, Woolworths.

I'll add to this list as I compare more items.

Woolworths's New Unit Pricing Scheme is Great News for Consumers

2009-01-11T02:51:00.000-08:00

In a development that seems to have largely gone unnoticed, Woolworths has introduced a new feature on their shelves that is a great boon to customers flummoxed by the various sizes of goods from competing manufacturers.

When faced with a choice between 110 grams of a product from vendor A selling at $5.60 and 130 grams of a competing product from vendor B selling at $6.10, which one represents better value for money? Not all of us have calculators in our heads, nor do we want to waste time punching in numbers even if we had calculators in our hands, so here's where Woolworths pitches in helpfully.

Along with the price of the item and the weight (or volume, or number of units as the case may be), Woolworths also provides the price per 100 grams that it represents (or the price per 100 ml, or the price per unit, as the case may be).

Now the customer can tell at a glance whether the product from vendor A or vendor B represents better value for money, other things being equal, of course. (In the above example, the two products cost $5.09 and $4.69 per 100 grams, so vendor B's product represents better value for money.) Unit pricing cuts through the clutter and lets you compare apples to apples, sometimes literally.

I've filled in a feedback form and handed it in at the service counter at my local Woolworths outlet. I've said:

I very much like the new unit pricing scheme introduced by Woolworths. It enables me to make smarter buying decisions. Please don't discontinue this scheme even if you come under pressure from your suppliers. This is a pro-consumer step.

I think everyone interested in strengthening the hands of consumers should submit similar feedback to Woolworths management. If other retailers like Coles also do the same, then the petty marketing tricks of manufacturers to shake a few more cents from customers can be thwarted.

The Geopolitics of India

2008-12-19T17:14:00.000-08:00

Of all the articles and opinion pieces about India and Pakistan that I have been devouring in recent times, this one from Stratfor is the most fascinating. It provides a strategic geopolitical basis for understanding the nature of India, its fundamental drivers and its relationship with its neighbours.

I've come away with a deeper insight in one or two areas. One, I have always believed that Pakistan has nothing to fear from India, but according to this article, it appears that notwithstanding the benign worldview of the Indian government of the day, there are fundamental geopolitical reasons why India poses an existential threat to Pakistan. (According to another Stratfor article supporting this view, "geography dictates that Pakistan either be absorbed into India or fight a losing battle against Indian influence.")

Another interesting insight is that in spite of the fact that Indians often speak of the Chinese threat as being potentially greater than the one from Pakistan, the article asserts that India and China are virtually on different planets and pose no geostrategic threats to each other.

In all other respects, it confirms the commonly held Indian view that "we threaten no one and are not interested in anyone else's affairs, nor are we fundamentally affected by others".

It's a pretty compelling line of reasoning and a highly recommended read.

An Audacious Suggestion to the President of Pakistan

2008-12-03T04:37:00.000-08:00

Pakistan is in a bind.

It seemingly faces threats from every direction. Stratfor lists four major operational demands on the Pakistani army:

Defend the border with India, being prepared for possible conventional Indian military aggression.
Combat the home-grown Taliban insurgency raging across the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the Pashtun districts of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).
Combat a much lower-intensity — but nonetheless very real — mounting insurgency in the southwestern province of Baluchistan.
Provide heightened military security in Islamabad and other major urban centers in order to defend against an uptick in radical Islamist suicide bombings domestically.

Stratfor adds that Pakistan maintains 6 of its 9 Corps formations on the Indian border.

To an Indian, something in all this information sticks out like a sore thumb. The "threat" against which Pakistan has deployed the bulk of its army is ironically the one that is not a threat at all!

You see, if India blinks and leaves its border unguarded for a moment, either Pakistani troops or irregulars would move in in an instant and dig themselves in, as happened in Kargil in 1999.

But if Pakistan leaves the same border unguarded, India is highly unlikely to take similar advantage. Frankly, India has far bigger fish to fry than to try and occupy measly Pakistani territory. Indians know this because we're not obsessed with Pakistan and Pakistani territory the way "elements in Pakistan" are obsessed with "grabbing back" "their" territory in India.

So here's my suggestion to President Zardari (who I must say appears to be one of the most sensible leaders of that country in recent times):

Quickly sign a border agreement with India, formalising the line of control as the international border. This has been talked about in India for decades, and the Indian leadership is likely to jump at the offer.

Once the agreement is signed, you can pull your divisions from the Indian border secure in the knowledge that you won't be attacked. You can redeploy your troops where they're really needed instead of wasting them in guarding against a non-existent bogeyman. Heck, in time you can even reduce the strength of your army and use the money for development. It's an excessive military budget for a small poor country, you know.

The cost? You give up territory that you don't have and will likely never get, so it's really getting something for nothing.

It's a deal too good to pass up.

Do you have the guts, Mr. President?

Obama's "Gaffes" - The Truth and Nothing But the Truth

2008-11-17T03:49:00.001-08:00

Conventional wisdom holds that Obama made two major gaffes during his long presidential campaign. The first was during the Democratic primaries when he remarked at a private dinner that many poor whites in Pennsylvania were bitter and clung to guns and religion. Hillary Clinton pounced on him for that bit of political incorrectness and attempted to squeeze every bit of mileage she could from it (not very much, as it turned out). Then, towards the end of the campaign, there was his comment to Joe the Plumber that "spreading the wealth around" was a desirable thing in the current circumstances, a comment that was promptly seized upon by the Republicans to proclaim Obama a socialist.

Now that the election is safely over, and far from the heat and dust of US politics, I have to wonder what Obama said that was so wrong.

Do uneducated poor whites in the Appalachian region bitterly cling to guns and religion? Sweet Jesus, that's God's own truth, so shoot me.

Perhaps as Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessep suggested in A Few Good Men, Americans can't handle the truth...?

And wouldn't spreading the wealth around just be the opposite of George Bush's policy of concentrating wealth in the hands of a few? That hasn't exactly been the best policy as current events have shown, so why the fuss?

I think it would be far better to suffix the word "socialist" every time it's used with the Seinfeldian phrase, "not that there's anything wrong with that."

(My idea of Utopia isn't socialism (not that there's anything wrong with that) and neither is it laissez-faire capitalism, but if we cannot have competitive markets to spread the wealth around in a capitalistically acceptable way, then perhaps a little fiscal spreading through progressive taxation is the way to go.)

After the election, Obama made another "gaffe". He said he wouldn't hold séances to contact dead presidents like Nancy Reagan did. That was untrue only in a literal sense. In spirit (pun intended), it was a fair comment since Nancy Reagan was known to consult astrologers.

All in all, I think I like Obama's gaffes better than his trite statements. They have the clear ring of truth. Keep them coming, Mr. President!

The Smartest US President

2008-11-10T21:30:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama's impressive résumé and obvious intelligence have the world in raptures, but there was at least one President before him who could give him a run for his money in the intellectual department.

That President was Thomas Jefferson, horticulturist, statesman, architect, archaeologist, paleontologist, author, inventor, and founder of the University of Virginia (source: Wikipedia). Rather than reference the tons of material written by and about Jefferson, I will only quote one example of his many prescient words:

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all their property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

Beat that, Barack Obama. Jefferson predicted the current mess in 1802. (And yes, the Fed is a private organisation, not owned or controlled by the US government.)

No wonder Kennedy said when welcoming a group of 49 Nobel laureates to the White House that it was "the most extraordinary collection of talent and human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Ich bin ein Amerikaner

2008-11-06T01:36:00.000-08:00

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Change has indeed come to America. And what momentous change!

Take your eyes off Barack Obama for a minute to see the greater wonder. Michelle Obama enters the White House as First Lady of the country that enslaved her ancestors. Now that is poetic. None of Barack's ancestors was ever a slave. It is in Michelle Obama that I see the wheel of history come full circle.

Still, the world has reached but one milestone. We rejoice that a black (or as my pedantic mind would interject, "half-black, half-white") person has won the recognition he deserves for his talent and potential without regard to his race. That is a triumph of American meritocracy. The next milestone for our collective civilisation will be when such an achievement does not evoke comment.

Personally, my opinion of the US has now soared. Having always looked at the US from outside, I would say it was US foreign policy that has had the greatest influence on my opinion. Specifically, as an Indian growing up in India during the seventies and eighties, resentment was my uppermost feeling whenever I thought of the US. US foreign policy never practised what it preached. It preached democracy and human rights. Yet when asked to choose between democratic India and authoritarian Pakistan, the US always came down on the side of Pakistan. Repeated evidence of Pakistan's sponsorship of terrorism in Kashmir and elsewhere in India was ignored by successive American administrations. In particular, Nixon's shameful partisanship during the 1971 Bangladesh war will remain forever in my mind, and I could not help but feel glee at his subsequent ignominous departure from public life. If I was religious, I would call it karma.

It has only been in recent times (i.e., during the Clinton adminstration) that India has received more favourable treatment compared to its troublesome neighbour. And that's not so much because the US finally saw the error of its ways but because India became economically so much more important. Barack Obama too understands where the threat to peace comes from today. He is the highest-profile American to have talked about possible military action against Pakistan to root out terrorism. One more example of his clear thinking if one was needed. At last, an American President who sees what only Indians could see so far.

Regional politics aside, Obama's election now robs every dictatorship around the world of its last remaining excuses. I remember eighties-era Soviet propaganda and its boast - that it was easier for the descendent of a Russian serf to achieve high office in the USSR than it was for the descendent of an African slave to become a governor or the President of the US. Now, a truly liberal American populace has shown the lie to that sort of thinking. As recently as a couple of months ago, people around the world were muttering that American racism was alive and well, that American voters would never "allow" a black person to become President.

America retorted: Yes, we can. Just watch us.

And the world watched, mouth agape.

I have always resented it when Americans referred to their country as "the greatest nation on Earth." Today, I'll swallow that resentment and grant them the right to say that. As Obama said in his victory speech in Chicago, "the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope."

Meritocracy matters. At least two generations of talented Indians have left India's shores for the US. "Opportunity" is the word most often used to explain their decision to migrate, but what provides opportunity is the undiscriminating meritocracy of American society. You perform, you are rewarded. No wonder Indians are known as the most successful ethnic minority in the US. The entrepreneurial Indian provides the seed, and the meritocratic American environment provides the fertile soil for that seed to become the biggest tree it possibly can. Reportedly, 40% of Silicon Valley's startups have Indian owners. So many Indian names feature in the senior executive level of the American corporate world and in the faculty lists of the Ivy League. In contrast, India's own soil has been sadly barren for several decades, and native seeds could never grow into such tall trees in that soil.

The challenge that Barack Obama's election poses to India is different from the challenge that it poses to many other countries. India is already a democracy with an equally impressive record of righting historical wrongs and empowering its historically disadvantaged minorities. Next year's Indian elections may see the elevation of a Dalit ("untouchable") woman to the highest office in the land. That will be doubly impressive for a society that has historically been both patriarchal and caste-ridden. No, the challenge for India from Obama's election is to develop as an equally visible meritocracy. Can India provide opportunity to all, regardless of personal background? Affirmative action is hugely effective in India in churning and inverting the social pyramid, but it is also hugely controversial and creates its own pockets of unfairness. There is also entrenched unfairness and bigotry in the Indian populace at large of the kind that Americans were so recently accused of. As an example, the leader of the party that formed the current Indian government was effectively denied the Prime Ministership in spite of her Indian citizenship because she was born Italian. Even educated Indians wrote emphatic comments on blogs swearing that they would never accept her as PM. Welcome to racism, Indian-style. India needs to answer the American challenge - Can a white person become prime minister of India? Because meritocracy counts, and change starts at the top (or at the bottom, if you're talking about the mind of an individual).

We will definitely see this election reverberate throughout the world. Obama's greatest handicap now is the weight of expectations that he carries. No one expects that he will sell out US interests in a naive internationalist spirit. He will first and foremost safeguard US interests. If he can see (in a way that past US administrations could not) that US interests are best served by supporting a network of true democracies around the world rather than by propping up acquiescent dictators, he would have achieved a win-win situation for all of us.

I also cynically hope he will renege on his protectionist election promises. Protectionism always harms those it is meant to protect, so I'm hoping he will prove to be as pragmatic (on trade) as he was when he rejected campaign financing after initially pledging support for it.

Great Ad, and Great Advice

2008-11-04T04:49:00.000-08:00

Apparently, this ad saying "Let the issues be the issue" is running in Manhattan on the eve of the US election. It dramatically shows a white Barack Obama and an African-American John McCain. It's a great idea, just imagining how race could be factored out of the election so that voters could concentrate on the really important issues.

Why didn't they do this earlier, and why only in Manhattan?

The McCain Less Known

2008-11-03T05:38:00.000-08:00

I read everywhere about John McCain being "a man of honor", with no one challenging his bravery or his principles, only his policies and choice of VP (if at all). I wonder why this detailed piece on McCain titled "Make-Believe Maverick" by Tim Dickinson hasn't been more widely known. The article was originally published on Rolling Stone.

It's either a brilliant exposé or a smear, and I'm not in a position to say which it is, but it's worth a read anyway. It's also profoundly disturbing.

I've always favoured Obama as US President, and this article has only reinforced my feeling.

Liberal or Conservative, the same rules apply

2008-10-26T22:16:00.000-07:00

All this partisan talk from the right about Barack Obama being a "socialist" who wants to "spread the wealth around" ignores some basic commonsense principles. I don't believe the ground rules change whether a government is "liberal" or "conservative". And this is nothing specific to the US. It applies equally to any country.

Advice to the liberals:

Tax and spend all you want, but maintain a balanced budget. Don't spend more than you can earn.

Advice to the conservatives:

Cut taxes and cut spending all you want, but maintain a balanced budget. Don't give up more in tax cuts than you give up in spending.

Fiscal responsibility is the watchword. You could call it "true conservatism" if you want. I'm a true fiscal conservative, because I abhor budget deficits. They borrow from the future, provoke inflation and reduce our future wealth.

(Somehow, I think Barack Obama will be fiscally conservative, not irresponsible. It will of course take any future US administration years to recover from the trillion dollar deficit created by George W Bush, but I believe Obama will make things better, not worse.)

Separated at Birth - 1

2008-10-24T17:57:00.000-07:00

Twins, separated at birth, both associated with humour and depression. One attained renown as a comedian who struggled with personal depression that found expression in his trademark brand of humour, and the other has now unwittingly become a laughing stock whose past actions (and inaction) now threaten to bring on a severe recession, possibly even a Great Depression.

I give you Woody Allen and Alan Greenspan!

[Incidentally, I don't believe that the entire concept of the "free market" has been repudiated, only one definition of the word "free" in the term "free market". Once again, let me harp on my distinction between "free" as in a lack of controls, and "free" as in protection from the acts of others (i.e., a liquid market with no player large enough to impact the market by themselves). A truly liquid market would not be suffering from the failures of a few players, as has happened in our oligopolistic system with no effective controls on their behaviour.]

US Election - My Prediction

2008-10-23T07:25:00.000-07:00

Less than two weeks to the US election! It's no big deal predicting that Obama is going to win. Everyone's saying that. The real deal is in predicting the margin. I think it'll be an absolute landslide. Obama will pick up more than 400 votes out of 538.

(Here's my reasoning. As of 24-25 October, ABC's electoral map gives Obama 311 votes to McCain's 163, with 64 being too close to call. I believe the states that are labelled 'moderate Republican', 'marginal Republican' or 'too close to call' will gradually be won over by Obama before election day, so I've counted only the electoral votes of strongly Republican or very strongly Republican states in favour of McCain. That only yields a total of 134 votes for McCain, leaving 404 for Obama. See map and table below.)

And why do I think the moderate Republican states will ultimately swing to Obama? Many reasons - Colin Powell's endorsement, Sarah Palin's un-hockey mom wardrobe that should speak louder than her pro-American rhetoric to undecided voters, the lingering fears of an economic collapse and a recession that alienate voters further from the Republicans whose cronies and appointees are perceived as having caused the whole mess, attacks on President Bush by McCain and Palin (!) that may put some Republican voters off voting altogether, my expectations of a high voter turnout that's usually a good sign for the Democrats, and my belief that there is a 'reverse Bradley effect' at work that prevents many people in conservative neighbourhoods from openly backing Obama in opinion polls, understating his actual support.

We've seen a generation of "Reagan Democrats". Welcome to the Obama Republicans. I believe they're called Obamicans.

One more reason to vote for Obama

2008-10-22T14:07:00.000-07:00

Well, Obama's locked up the geek vote, at any rate.

When visiting Google's headquarters last year, he was reportedly asked a question that would have stumped even a few techos: "What's the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers?"

In the thoughtful, deliberate way we've come to admire so much, the Democratic candidate answered that he thought the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go. I'm sure he'll arrive at the correct algorithm with the help of his advisers, but it's good to know that his instincts were correct, as always. And there's at least one country that he could be President of in a heartbeat.

It could be disastrous to elect a person with a poor sorting policy, especially in these difficult economic times when we can't afford to waste resources. I'm told McCain couldn't answer the same question when he visited the Google campus a few months earlier. And I'm sure Sarah Palin's answer would have involved stacking the numbers as far right as they'd go...

Resumption of India-Pakistan Trade - Good News or Bad News?

2008-10-21T05:37:00.000-07:00

With the noise of the US election rising to a crescendo, a development in a faraway part of the world is understandably going unnoticed. After sixty years, a trade route between India and Pakistan has tentatively opened. Reports by the Voice of America, The Guardian and The New York Times cover slightly different aspects of the story.

I have three simultaneous reactions to this development:

There's naive internationalist liberal me: "This is great news! Trade bonds between nations strengthen peace. When countries become economically interdependent, the chances for conflict between them recede. This is the first step towards peace in our time. How wonderful that India and Pakistan can finally enjoy normal relations! South Asia as a whole will now prosper."

Then there's paranoid me: "This isn't about trade between India and Pakistan. It's a lifeline to Indian-controlled Kashmir to help it support itself through trade with Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Never a big fan of India (in spite of the Indian taxpayer-funded largesse continuously poured into that province), Kashmir probably now sees a way to cement its ties to "the other side". It's a wedge that Pakistan is driving between India and Indian-controlled Kashmir. This is the economic unification of Kashmir at India's expense. There's nothing here for India or Indians to rejoice about."

Finally, there's geopolitically cynical me: "India is squandering the chance to do to Pakistan what Reagan's America did to the Soviet Union - exploit its bigger and faster-growing economy to bankrupt its military rival and dictate peace on its own terms. Why throw a lifeline to someone who doesn't like you? As Ray Kroc of McDonald's said, when you see a competitor drowning, you stick a hose down his throat. India should throw Kashmir out into the cold, even into Pakistan's waiting arms, then force the pyrrhic victor to come crawling back a few years later to sue for peace and beg for a chance to share in the prosperity of its (by then) superpower neighbour."

So what do I finally think? I don't know. A little of each of the above, I guess. One thing I'm sure about - Indians are too sentimental a race to elect a Reagan. Even the biggest hawks in the previous Hindu right-wing BJP government turned out to be doves on Pakistan, a reality that India's smaller neighbour cunningly understands and exploits. So fortunately for Pakistan, India will never press home an advantage even against a proven enemy.

Enemy? Surely that's a tad harsh? Well, Pakistan's civilian president blurted out the truth in a rare moment of candour (i.e., that India has never been a threat to Pakistan). If only the reverse was also true...

As always, I'm hopeful about peace in our time and all that, but not optimistic.

The Effect of Race in the US Presidential Election

2008-10-16T07:41:00.001-07:00

I like to think I'm post-racial, and I also like to think the US election has progressed beyond considerations of race. But this comment by Realista over at Boston.com has startled me into understanding just how potent a factor race still is.

Essentially, it's a set of hypothetical questions - what if certain characteristics of Sen. Obama and his Republican opposite numbers (McCain and Palin) had been switched around? Would people still look at the two candidates the same way?

I'm going to repeat those questions verbatim here, because they're so hard-hitting:

What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?

What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?

What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?

What if McCain had only married once and Obama was a divorcee?

What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe disfiguring car accident, when she no longer measured up to his standards?

What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?

What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?

What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?

What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)

What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?

What if Obama couldn’t read from a teleprompter?

What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes? (My note: I understand it was 3 planes, not 7)

What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many occasions, a serious anger management problem?

What if Michelle Obama’s family had made their money first bootlegging, then from beer distribution?

What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?

Amazing, isn't it? Any or a small set of the negative aspects of McCain/Palin might have ended Obama's candidacy prematurely if they had been his flaws. Conversely, any of the positive things about Obama might have been trumpeted far more loudly had it applied to McCain/Palin.

What's often said about women (i.e., that they have to work twice as hard as a man to get the same recognition) may also apply to minorities.

I'm afraid we're still in Kansas, Toto.

Is the War on Greed as misdirected as the War on Terror?

2008-10-15T14:20:00.000-07:00

George W Bush had a response to the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US. He declared a "War on Terror". We all know how well that's going.

I'm not advocating that the US should have done nothing in response to the September 11 attacks. I'm saying that when you suspend clear thinking and honest debate in favour of blind belief and misguided loyalty, you get the totally misdirected Iraq war rather than the focus on Afghanistan (the home base), Pakistan (the training ground) and Saudi Arabia (the financier) that the response should have comprised. A proper response would have been messy and complicated, to be sure. It would have involved embarrassing investigations into two nominal US "allies" and brought out into the open the obvious failures in US foreign policy over the years. I believe that the longstanding US policy of cozying up to dictators instead of strengthening ties with democracies led ultimately and inexorably to 9/11. Yet nobody who knew better could talk sense to President Bush, because those who weren't with him were against him, remember? The world is in a fine mess thanks to expediency and moral certainty, combined with a knee-jerk reaction to crises.

Are we in danger now of reacting to the recent financial crisis with similarly misdirected populism? Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd today essentially announced a "War on Greed", by attacking the excessive pay packets of corporate executives as one of the negative aspects of what he called "extreme capitalism". And sure, he's got a point, a very valid point. But he's also in danger of being way off the mark, to the detriment of all of us.

Attacking excessive remuneration appeals to everyone (everyone, that is, except those in the top levels of the corporate world). Last year, Macquarie Bank's CEO Alan Moss took home 33 million big ones. This year, Macquarie caused quite a few jitters among investors. CEOs take home the big bucks, and when their enterprises threaten to fall over, governments have to rush in and prop them up with taxpayers' money, because the economy will suffer otherwise. It's like the fat cats have a gun to everyone's head.

So attacking executive remuneration understandably attracts animal howls of approval from the gallery. (Mind you, many of those in the gallery don't even pay taxes! They've nothing at stake, and it's probably just petty jealousy at work.)

Let me make my position clear. I'm a taxpayer, and my money is being used in these bailouts, so I have a legitimate right to voice my opinion about the way the system is run. But perhaps surprisingly, I'm against placing limits on executive remuneration. It indicates a mercantile mindset that believes in rationing out scarce resources. What we need is a capitalistic mindset that recognises wealth to be potentially limitless. The capitalist worldview recognises the need for appropriate systems that incentivise us to apply our ingenuity and industry to continue to create wealth out of nothing, exactly as we have been doing since we left our caves thousands of years ago.

Having said that, there are clearly limits to executive compensation that exist, not absolute dollar limits, but limits that are dictated by the ability of the enterprise in question to pay those salaries and bonuses. If an enterprise pays its top executive $466 million and then collapses, then in hindsight, it clearly couldn't afford the payout.

Many people may miss a crucial portion of Rudd's statement: "Regulators should set higher capital requirements for financial firms with executive remuneration packages that reward short-term returns or excessive risk-taking." (emphasis mine) I agree with the way Rudd is proposing to tackle the problem, which is to impose higher standards of capital adequacy on firms that show short-termism or risky behaviour in pursuit of profits, but there is a deeper aspect to the problem, which I'll come to in a moment.

I do believe that one of the fundamental things wrong with the brand of capitalism practised today (apart from its hostility to competition) is that it rewards companies for showing short-term profits. It encourages CEOs (who serve relatively short tenures) to under-invest in the future and show unnatural returns in the short term, then depart with huge payouts as a reward for such stellar performance. Every new CEO announces that things have been left in very bad shape by their predecessor (true), and then proceeds to write off huge losses at the start of their tenure. Not only does this clear the decks of all past losses, it also takes the share price to a comfortably low level, so that the new CEO can demonstrate impressive share price gains from this low point. Repeat ad nauseam. The enterprise and its shareholders bear the brunt of this short-term and self-serving behaviour. The technical term for this is "agency risk". The goals of the agent (the management) are not aligned with the goals of the principal (the shareholders).

To my mind, the problem of "extreme capitalism" (as Rudd would call it) is the tendency to reward short-termism. So it's not executive salaries per se. If a way can be found to link executive remuneration to an enterprise's long-term performance, then by all means, shower your executives with gold. For example, go ahead and give your CEOs generous stock options, but ensure that they vest only after 5 years or later. That'll make them more careful about the long-term effects of their decisions.

So I've no real argument with Rudd's proposal, as far as that goes.

Is this the root of the problem, though? Perhaps there's really no agency risk here! Perhaps the agents' goals are in fact perfectly aligned with their principals' goals.

We need to look within ourselves as shareholders. What kind of shareholders are we? Are we true investors, who buy stock and hold on to it, wanting a share of the profits of the enterprise in the form of dividends? Or are we just speculators, who buy shares in the hope that we can sell them at a higher price? Speculators don't care what happens to an enterprise after they sell their shares.

I think short-term performance benchmarks rule the market because the market is dominated by speculators.

If we want enterprises to be healthy, we need to encourage long-term behaviour from all concerned. The goals of the principals (the shareholders) must themselves be aligned with the long-term health of the enterprise rather than its short-term performance. Then the goals of the agents (the management) of these enterprises will automatically be tuned to the long term.

Executive remuneration is the Iraq of the War on Greed. It's an expedient target, but likely to prove a costly diversion. The real problem is more messy to target. It's short-termism, and we're all guilty of it as speculative shareholders. To quote Walt Kelly, we have met the enemy, and he is us.

Testing Times for the Clever Country

2008-10-13T07:56:00.001-07:00

I guess not many people knew that bank deposits in Australia have hitherto not been guaranteed, until the government announced that they would now be. The other marvel, of course, is that when a guarantee exists, it will probably not be resorted to. The government's statement is purely to shore up confidence in the financial system and prevent a run on the banks.

Of course, there's the fine print. The Australian government will only guarantee deposits in Australian-incorporated banks, so we could still see a run on foreign-owned banks like Citi and HSBC. Still, it's a much-needed affirmation from the government, and will do much to keep the financial system on its feet.

I guess we're entering a phase when the "Australian model" is going to be put to the test like never before. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has said he doesn't consider the budget surplus as something to defend in its own right. He's willing to use up the surplus if that's what it takes to stimulate the economy and prevent a deep recession.

Quotable quote: "How long have you all heard me say it is good to have a surplus ... as a buffer for the future? Well, the future is here."

The biggest fears now are a slowdown in growth and a rise in unemployment. The Reserve Bank has done its bit to stimulate growth by slashing interest rates by a full percent, something normally unheard of. The upside of having had high interest rates in the recent past is that there's sufficient leeway to move rates down, a luxury that the US doesn't have. If the PM and his Treasurer Wayne Swan play their cards right by operating the right fiscal levers (and they can spend a fair bit without running up a budget deficit, unlike the US government, which has dug itself into a deeper deficit hole), they can keep the Australian miracle going, and in the process, ensure their own places in history.

It's a difficult time in world history and no time to be partisan, but if Australia comes out of this crisis in better shape than other nations, it will be a powerful lesson in the benefits of good economic governance. I.e., avoid a budget deficit at all costs and tweak interest rates constantly to encourage growth without provoking inflation higher than 2-3%. (And let me add my Liquidism mantra like a broken record: maintain high levels of market liquidity through aggressive antitrust if need be. A thousand blades of grass will weather a storm better than a few oak trees.)

The Australian financial sector has also been prudently regulated and the "toxic assets" of other economies haven't been ingested to any significant degree here. To some extent, this hides the problem of oligopolistic conditions in the market. I wonder if we will have to wait for a different crisis before we learn that lesson...

JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes

2008-10-12T06:49:00.000-07:00

Today (Oct 12, 2008) was the Walk to Cure Diabetes organised by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) at Sydney's Olympic Park. Not many people know that Juvenile (or Type 1) diabetes is fundamentally different from the diabetes that is more commonly seen in adults.

Let me quote the JDRF website verbatim:

Type 1, or juvenile diabetes is a serious, chronic disease that destroys the body's ability to produce insulin - a hormone needed to convert food into energy.

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that usually begins in childhood or early adulthood, but can occur at any age. People with type 1 diabetes need up to six insulin injections every day for the rest of their lives, just to stay alive.

Type 1 diabetes is not caused by diet or lifestyle and cannot be managed through diet and excerise. Insulin injections keep people alive but are not a cure. There is no cure.

Even when treated, type 1 diabetes can cause serious and devastating long-term health complications such as blindness, kidney failure, heart disease, amputations and stroke.

Type 1 diabetes affects every aspect of a person’s life and managing the disease involves whole families.

There are currently around 140,000 children and adults in Australia living with type 1 diabetes. We have one of the highest rates in the world and every day, five more people are diagnosed, most of them children.

The only way that people with type 1 diabetes will live the long and healthy life they deserve is if more money is invested in research to find a cure.

For further information about type 1 diabetes and current research progress go to the JDRF Website.

I've written before that I'm sensitive to reports that e thnic minorities in Australia tend to volunteer less than the general population, so I've been trying to do my bit from time to time.

This time, I put together a group of like-minded friends and decided to collect money for the JDRF cause and also make this an enjoyable family outing. Most of us being Indians, we called our team the Sydneyside Maharajahs. The team website may not remain in place for long, so here's a screenshot (with the names of my friends and other volunteers blurred out to protect their privacy).

I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues who kindly donated and helped us towards our target (not quite achieved as of the time of writing).

Although the walk is over, fundraising is still open till the 7th of November, I'm told, so if anyone out there would like to donate towards finding a cure for this cruel condition that afflicts some of our youngest, please donate at my JDRF page.

Thanks!