Fight or Flight

Some quotes

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 04:34:00 +0000

"You choose your happiness and sorrow long before you experience them."
- unknown

"What is important is to try to develop insights and wisdom rather than mere knowledge, respect someone's character rather than his learning, and nurture men of character rather than mere talents."
- Inazo Nitobe

"People aren't what others decide they are, people are what they make themselves."
- compilation from various sources

"The more you learn the more you realize how much you don't know."
- Albert Einstein

"The media can't tell you what to think but it can tell you what to think about."
- unknown

"We are all atheists, some of us just believe in fewer gods than others. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
- Stephen F. Roberts

"Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think."
- Benjamin Disraeli

"It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'Always do what you are afraid to do.'"
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There is only one success--to be able to spend your life in your own way."
- Christopher Morley

"We don't live in a world of reality, we live in a world of perceptions."
- Gerald J. Simmons

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."
- Winston Churchill

"Well done is better than well said."
- Benjamin Franklin

"Imagination is more important than knowledge"
- Albert Einstein

"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment."
- Buddha

"Don't say I can't do it. Say how can I do it."
- from Rich Dad Poor Dad

"I will make a million mistakes in my life. My objective is not to avoid making mistakes it is to ensure that they are all new ones."
- Derek Pettigrew

"History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme"
- Mark Twain

"You think education is expensive. Try ignorance"
- unknown bumper sticker

-This collection of quotes was borrowed from a friend's facebook page.

Tryst with Destiny

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 08:27:00 +0000

The speech was made to the Indian Constituent Assembly, on the eve of India's independence, towards midnight on August 14, 1947. It focuses on the aspects that transcend India's history. It is considered in modern India to be a landmark oration that captures the essence of the triumphant culmination of the hundred-year Indian freedom struggle against the British Empire in India.

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.
At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?
Freedom and power bring responsibility. The responsibility rests upon this Assembly, a sovereign body representing the sovereign people of India. Before the birth of freedom we have endured all the pains of labour and our hearts are heavy with the memory of this sorrow. Some of those pains continue even now. Nevertheless, the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now.
That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we may fulfil the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today. The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity. The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but as long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.
And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.
To the people of India, whose representatives we are, we make an appeal to join us with faith and confidence in this great adventure. This is no time for petty and destructive criticism, no time for ill-will or blaming others. We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell.
The appointed day has come-the day appointed by destiny-and India stands forth again, after long slumber and struggle, awake, vital, free and independent. The past clings on to us still in some measure and we have to do much before we redeem the pledges we have so often taken. Yet the turning-point is past, and history begins anew for us, the history which we shall live and act and others will write about.
It is a fateful moment for us in India, for all Asia and for the world. A new star rises, the star of freedom in the East, a new hope comes into being, a vision long cherished materializes. May the star never set and that hope never be betrayed!
We rejoice in that freedom, even though clouds surround us, and many of our people are sorrowstricken and difficult problems encompass us. But freedom brings responsibilities and burdens and we have to face them in the spirit of a free and disciplined people.
On this day our first thoughts go to the architect of this freedom, the Father of our Nation [Gandhi], who, embodying the old spirit of India, held aloft the torch of freedom and lighted up the darkness that surrounded us. We have often been unworthy followers of his and have strayed from his message, but not only we but succeeding generations will remember this message and bear the imprint in their hearts of this great son of India, magnificent in his faith and strength and courage and humility. We shall never allow that torch of freedom to be blown out, however high the wind or stormy the tempest.
Our next thoughts must be of the unknown volunteers and soldiers of freedom who, without praise or reward, have served India even unto death.
We think also of our brothers and sisters who have been cut off from us by political boundaries and who unhappily cannot share at present in the freedom that has come. They are of us and will remain of us whatever may happen, and we shall be sharers in their good and ill fortune alike.
The future beckons to us. Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman.
We have hard work ahead. There is no resting for any one of us till we redeem our pledge in full, till we make all the people of India what destiny intended them to be. We are citizens of a great country on the verge of bold advance, and we have to live up to that high standard. All of us, to whatever religion we may belong, are equally the children of India with equal rights, privileges and obligations. We cannot encourage communalism or narrow-mindedness, for no nation can be great whose people are narrow in thought or in action.
To the nations and peoples of the world we send greetings and pledge ourselves to cooperate with them in furthering peace, freedom and democracy.
And to India, our much-loved motherland, the ancient, the eternal and the ever-new, we pay our reverent homage and we bind ourselves afresh to her service.

Childhood Days

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 04:25:00 +0000

Childhood Days

I made a big decision a little while ago.
I don't remember what it was, which prob'ly goes to show
That many times a simple choice can prove to be essential
Even though it often might appear inconsequential.
I must have been distracted when I left my home because
Left or right I'm sure I went. (I wonder which it was!)
Anyway, I never veered: I walked in that direction
Utterly absorbed, it seems, in quiet introspection.

For no reason I can think of, I've wandered far astray.
And that is how I got to where I find myself today.

Explorers are we, intrepid and bold,
Out in the wild, amongst wonders untold.
Equipped with our wits, a map, and a snack,
We're searching for fun and we're on the right track!

My mother has eyes on the back of her head!
I don't quite believe it, but that's what she said.
She explained that she'd been so uniquely endowed
To catch me when I did Things Not Allowed.
I think she must also have eyes on her rear.
I've noticed her hindsight is unusually clear.

At night my mind does not much care
If what it thinks is here or there.
It tells me stories it invents
And makes up things that don't make sense.
I don't know why it does this stuff.
The real world seems quite weird enough.

What if my bones were in a museum,
Where aliens paid good money to see 'em?
And suppose that they'd put me together all wrong,
Sticking bones on to bones where they didn't belong!
Imagine phalanges, pelvis, and spine
Welded to mandibles that once had been mine!
With each misassemblage, the error compounded,
The aliens would draw back in terror, astounded!

Their textbooks would show me in grim illustration,
The most hideous thing ever seen in creation!
The museum would commission a model in plaster
Of ME, to be called, "Evolution's Disaster"!
And paleontologists there would debate
Dozens of theories to help postulate
How man survived for those thousands of years
With teeth-covered arms growing out of his ears!

Oh, I hope that I'm never in such manner displayed,
No matter HOW much to see me the aliens paid.

I did not want to go with them.
Alas, I had no choice.
This was made quite clear to me
In threat'ning tones of voice.
I protested mightily
And scrambled 'cross the floor.
But though I grabbed the furniture,
They dragged me out the door.

In the car, I screamed and moaned.
I cried by red eyes dry.
The window down, I yelled for help
To people we passed by.
Mom and Dad can make the rules
And certain things forbid,
But I can make them wish that they
Had never had a kid.

Now I'm in bed,
The sheets pulled to my head.
My tiger is here making Zs.
He's furry and hot.
He takes up a lot
Of the bed and he's hogging the breeze.

-Bill Watterson

A lesson in economics

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 05:29:00 +0000

A Quick Lesson in Economics ........

An economics professor at a local college made a
statement that he had never failed a single student,

but had once failed an entire class.

That class had insisted that socialism
worked; that no one would be poor, and no one would be rich, a
great equalizer.

The professor then said, "OK, we
will have an experiment in this class on socialism. All grades would be
averaged, and everyone would receive the same grade; so no one would fail, and
no one would receive an A.

After the first test, the grades were averaged, and everyone got a B..

The students who studied hard were upset, and the students who studied little
were happy.

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied
even less, and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too,
so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering,
blame, and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings, and no one would
study for the benefit of anyone else.

All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism
would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to
succeed is great; but when government takes all the reward away, no one will
try or want to succeed.

Can it be any simpler than that?

Head Hunting

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:14:00 +0000

Hindutva is embarrassed by Hinduness. A new generation of confident Indians has started to move beyond its logic of fear and hate. Will the BJP be able to seize this moment for creative reinvention?

ASHIS NANDY with SHOMA CHAUDHURY

The cascading crisis within the BJP since May 16 and their confused debate on the role Hindutva has played in their electoral defeat tells a fascinating story. It would be premature to read any of this as a signal of either the disintegration of the party or Hindutva, but one could safely say the idea of Hindutva has been defeated by Hindustan for the moment – it has been put on a backburner and challenged to reinvent itself.

The BJP’s dependence on Hindutva as its defining characteristic was bound to turn problematic. Data suggest that at most about 10 percent of BJP supporters vote for the BJP on ideological grounds. The Hindutva project was constructed by tapping into and fostering fear and a psychology of siege among the Hindus—a sense of being a minority in a country in which they are 82 percent of the population.

By itself, choosing Hindutva as its core ideology by a party is not harmful to Indian democracy. If there is a sizeable section of the people who believe in Hindutva — or for that matter Maoism, anarchism or unfettered capitalism — you need political parties to summate these sentiments and even represent them in Parliament, so that you can manage them through normal politics. The Republican Party in America, for instance, always encourages and routinely takes help from the Christian fundamentalists at the time of elections. They know it is a small vote bank but it can be crucial when contests are close. But after the Republicans win an election, they might give their fundamentalist friends some minor, indirect rewards but never cabinet posts, important constitutional positions or even the chance to openly hobnob with the party stalwarts.

The BJP has not learnt this art of political management. They do not know how to treat Hindutva groups like Bajrang Dal, VHP and Ram Sene as merely minor sects to be used only during elections in homeopathic doses. The BJP is stupid enough to allow its lunatic fringe to antagonise its own larger support base of the party. A national party in a highly diverse, plural democracy cannot afford to take its ideology — any ideology — seriously. Nor can it afford to behave as if its entire existence depended on an ideology. This whole ideological stance — making Hindutva their central official line and making the lunatic fringe its official cadre — has been myopic and suicidal. (So has been to take the RSS seriously. The RSS has never been in politics so their understanding of politics is often infantile.)

The Indian genius is to manage contradictions. Most people forget that at one time the Congress Party, the original party of the freedom movement, allowed many of its members to simultaneously belong to the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha or other Hindu nationalist formations. This was quite common in Bengal because a large huge proportion of Bengali freedom fighters came from a background of Hindu nationalism. (For many years you could also be a member of both the Congress and the Muslim League.) It is because such contradictory political impulses were accommodated within the Congress as factions that they were easier to negotiate in the early years. The BJP’s dilemma is that it believes its existence to be predicated on Hindutva; now that they have lost badly, they think Hindutva has become a liability and should be jettisoned. Now the relationship between the BJP and Hindutva will probably become more clandestine.

In itself, such power struggles are healthy and, contrary to all the speculation going on, the BJP is not slated to disintegrate like the Janata Party. In India most parties no longer have power struggles; they are dominated by individuals and families. They only have court politics. The Janata party was a coalition of caste factions; the BJP might turn out to be one of the few parties having political factions. (The CPM is another such party.) With charismatic leaders like Atal Behari Vajpayee and LK Advani past their prime and the second rung of leadership wielding very little charisma, if the BJP wants to survive and do reasonably well, they should “do a Congress”: they should find a Narasimha Rao or Manmohan Singh to lead them. Most of their current and prominent leaders are too high-pitched. They need a low-key leader.

The BJP may be short-sighted in analysing its defeat, but its electoral defeat does point to a defeat for Hindutva itself. At the core of the Hindutva project is a war between Hinduism and Hindutva that is around 150 years old. It began in the middle of the 19th century, when the ideas of Hindutva began to take shape with the Hindu reform movements. These movements were modern and borrowed much from the imperial West. And the new Hinduism that emerged out of these reforms can be considered a colonial product. That is why Gandhi was convinced that all these reform movements, in the long run, would do more harm than good to Hinduism. In this sense, the recent defeat of Hindutva today is also a defeat of the colonizing West in India because the Hindutva project was a gift of the colonial West to Indian consciousness. That does not mean that the globalising West has lost its clout.

Today, both the detractors and defenders of Hindutva are confused about what it stands for. This truth may be unpalatable to many, but Hindutva grew in an atmosphere of admiration of the European nation-state, nationality and nationalism and our attempt to have an indigenous forms of all three. When Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the one who formalized Hindutva by writing a Bible for it, insisted that Hindus must not read the Vedas and Upanishads but read science and technology and western political theory, this is what he had in mind. He was looking for a way to transform a chaotic, diverse, anarchic society into an organized, masculine, western-style nation-state, something akin to Bismarck’s Germany.

To achieve this, the Hindutva project required Indians to repudiate their Indianness, and Hindus to repudiate their Hinduness. That was part of the war. It required a chaotic, diverse society to homogenize itself into something that could be more globally acceptable and would conform to European norms. Public memory is short. Few people remember that Savarkar was an atheist in his personal life – in the western sense. He refused to have his funeral rites according to Hindu custom; he willed that his body had to be taken for cremation in a mechanized vehicle rather than on the shoulders of relatives, admirers and friends. He also refused to give his wife a Hindu funeral, even though women members of the Hindu Mahasabha sat in front of his house on a dharna.

Savarkar’s main criticism of Gandhi, in fact, was that Gandhi was unscientific, irrational and illiterate in modern political theory. By conventional criteria of scientific rationality and political commonsense, Savarkar was not wrong. But Gandhi’s understanding of politics had deeper roots; it came from both his encounter with the bottom of Indian society and with dissenting cultural strands within the West. Gandhi did not believe in the sanctity of the modern nation-state or in conventional ideas of nationality, nation and nationalism. Nor did he care much for the dominant, western, political theories and the West’s concept of scientific rationality. He went on record to say that armed nationalism was no different from imperialism. And some scholars have identified him as a philosophical anarchist. At that point of time, in the high noon of modern colonialism, he seemed a romantic fuddy duddy trying to return to the past.

But the way to the future is often through our past. Gandhi understood that India was particularly well-equipped to craft its own version of a state. It was under no obligation to follow European textbook definitions of the nation-state. He had not read Hegel. The irony is that today many western nations are moving away from the old model and becoming more flexible on issues such as sovereignty, national security and nationality: 14 countries in the world today do not maintain any army and the countries in the European Union have porous borders and have agreed to suspend their sovereignty in matters like human rights and capital punishment. On the other hand, because of our colonial past, India and China are two of the purest forms of 19th century nation-states you can find in the world today.

To begin with, this is precisely what the Hindutva project was about: western political theory telescoped into Hinduism and the West’s political history projected into India. Initially, Savarkar believed in an integrated, secular nationhood and dreamt of a masculine European-style nation-state in India. He was not alone and he was also not the first. Arguably, in the 19th century the idea of Hindutva was first articulated by the Bengali freedom fighter, Bhudev Mukhopadhyay and some would trace to an even earlier period, to figures like Rabindranath Tagore’s friend, Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, a Catholic who called himself a ‘Hindu Christian’. (The protagonists of all three of Tagore’s political novels were partly or wholly modelled on Upadhyay.) Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Vivekananda and Nivedita too expressed ideas that could be co-opted by the Hindutva brigade.

But Savarkar was the one to decide that mere geography was too insipid a basis for building a nationality and began to look for an emotional basis and a national community and found them in Hindu nationalism and in the Hindus. The clenched-teeth hatred of Muslims and other minorities came from him. It was not there in the earlier forms of Hindutva, or was present in some in a muted form.

After its defeat in this election, the BJP feels its middle-class base has moved away from it because the middle classes are disenchanted with Hindutva. This is not entirely true. A large section of the Indian middle-class has a weakness for at least the less strident forms of Hindutva. Primarily, this is because the RSS and BJP have strong links with the Hindu reform movements, particularly the Arya Samaj. Both BS Moonje and KB Hedgewar, founders of the RSS, and the Sri Lankan Buddhist nationalist, Anagarika Dhammapala, were inspired by the Ramakrishna Mission. The reason for this in retrospect is clear. All these reform movements contributed to the growth of a new, reformed Hinduism which was perfectly compatible and comfortable with the European concept of a nation-state.

This continuity has led to a form of Hinduism that is perfectly compatible with a modern nation state – in the same way that Protestant Christianity in Europe was the first religion to feel compatible and comfortable with the nation-state, industrial capitalism and secularism. Ultimately, all Indian religious reformers were trying to produce house-broken, tamed, homogenised versions of religion which would sustain a pan-Indian political consciousness and a form of Hinduism for similar purposes. All these reformers had internalised aspects of masculine, Protestant Christianity and so had Dhammapala’s Protestant Buddhism, which many Sri Lankans find very convenient.

Hindu society, however, is notoriously chaotic, diverse and plural. Anyone wedded to the conventional idea of a nation-state obviously finds it unmanageable and subversive. The idea of Hindutva is supposed to be something Hindus can hold on to – become, docile, obedient citizens of a modern nation-state.

All this makes sense to the middle-class, which has naturally invested in the conventional notion of the nation-state and modernity and also wants to protect its Hinduism. The middle class therefore is a natural constituency for Hindutva and its version of Hinduism. In Savarkar’s novel Kala Pani, the only futuristic novel produced by Hindutva, there is an utopian vision of a future India — a totally homogenous society, in which people marry across caste, sect and language and become good, pan-Indian citizens — almost like the insipid, boring predictable versions of Indians one sees nowadays in India’s metropolitan cities. No difference in language or custom: everyone speaking in the same accent, everyone having the same choice in music, cinema, clothes.

Savarkar was prescient because this does look like contemporary, urban, middle-class India. A class that has access to a globalised economy, speaks English as its primary language, and is shaped by its exposure to a homogenising media. What resonance does a Malayali or Bengali or Tamilian of this generation, if brought up in Delhi, have with the vernacular Hindusim of his grandparents or parents? Do all those myriad gods and goddesses with strange names, family priests, ishtadevs and ishta devis make any sense to them? What is emerging instead is a pan-Indian Hinduism that allows you to dip into a bit of Onam and a bit of Diwali and a bit of Durga puja, and that too not very deeply. Contrary to the 'millenia-old' tradition Hindutva ideologues claim, these young Malayalis, Bengalis and Tamilians are a part of a new Hinduism that is a proper religion in the West’s sense of the term. This new faith is no more than 150 years old. It was born in the middle of the 19th century and was directly inspired by Protestant Christianity. And this faith is also a faith you can carry with you wherever you go. It is a kind of laptop Hinduism.

The ‘millenia-old’ tradition Hindutva ideologues claim is actually a very new faith
The Hindutva project in India is destined not to ever occupy centre space though, because when one talks of a Hinduism which is 4,000 years old, we have in mind a religion or tradition that might be shrinking everyday but which still moves a majority of Indians. Most Hindus live with a concept of faith that is diverse, local, intimate and highly ritualised. Hindutva has no access to that world. Apart from economic reasons and the crunch on jobs and infrastructure, one of the reasons why the Shiv Sena could garner so much support for their opposition to the influx of Biharis in Mumbai was the proliferation of chhat puja. The Mumbaikars felt threatened; the Biharis would have faced less of a hostile backlash if they had participated in the Ganesh pujas instead. Interestingly, there are many more Durga pujas in Mumbai and Delhi than there are chhat pujas, but there is no hostility against Durga puja because it has graduated into an all-India phenomenon. Chhat hasn't – yet.

It would be a mistake to conflate the occasional eruption of these hostilities with the belief that the idea of India's plural traditions is a romantic myth. Different castes and sects within Hinduism and different religions have always participated in each other's religious festivals, but they were not steam-rolled into a portable, anodyne faith. Whatever might its middle-class intelligentsia believe, the rest of India has never opted for the Enlightenment model in which you are deemed cosmopolitan only when you feel the other person to be completely equal to you. In Indian traditions, you are equal to others only in the sense that you have the right to think the other communities as inferior to yours, and grant the other person’s right to think that your community is inferior to his – even though neither of you say so openly. In a homogenised, individualised society, the former is seen as cosmopolitanism. In a communities-based society, it is the latter cosmopolitanism that works.

In this continuing war between the traditional, chaotic, diverse Hinduism and the ordered, homogenising Hindutva of the Hindu nationalists, the BJP's electoral defeat is a sign that Hinduism has probably defeated Hindutva. Hindutva expects Indians to live according to European norms of nationhood. But we are Indians: we are incorrigible, cussed and have learnt to live with contradictions for centuries. We have learnt to live with chaos and ill-defined ideas of our selfhood and we have not learnt to be — in fact, we refuse to be — scientific, modern, well-organized and rational. We want to keep options open for the next generation. These are the attributes that have ensured our survival when so many other major civilisations have died. These are attributes that the BJP has to find ways to accommodate.

There is much Advani has to answer for, but he is quite a tragic figure. No one has read him right
(I once interviewed Madanlal Pahwa, one of the assassins of Gandhi and a hardboiled Hindu nationalist, when he was quite old. It transpired that ultimately his most memorable years were his childhood spent in a Pakpattan in the Montgomery district in West Punjab, which had Baba Fareed's mazar. There was a religious fair every year to which he would go to listen to the qawwalis being sung. He called himself a kattar Hindu but his most nostalgic memories revolved around that mazar, the fair and qawwalis. This tells you something. We Indians are accustomed to living with multiple selves and multiple moral ledgers. He was a Hindutvawalla and his language came from there, but his memories came from somewhere else.)

None of these arguments add up to an assertion that Hindutva will die out. What is true though is that, unless it metamorphoses, it will never enjoy the same vigour it did in the last three decades because it is inherently uncomfortable and embarrassed by Indianness and traditional Hinduism. For a generation newly emergent from colonial dominance, there was a fascination and sense of respectful subordination to things Western. But with this new post-independent, post-colonial generation, things are different. Indians have gone back to their own rhythms of life now, so even for the middle-classes, Manmohan Singh's 'West' — with its hair-brained idea that anyone can be a Tata or Ambani — is more attractive to many than Savarkar's 'West'. Aspiration for a global, material identity has overtaken cultural identity.

Given the perceived, electoral defeat of Hindutva, it will be interesting to see what future route the BJP charts for itself. In many ways, Advani is a tragic figure. It is possible that no one has yet been able to read him correctly. Unlike Vajpayee, Advani had lived in a Hindu minority state and went to a Christian missionary convent. Having lived in a Muslim-majority state, Muslims are not strangers to him, and, perhaps, he did not feel the intrinsic discomfort with them that many Maharashtrian, Brahminic politicians do. He was a part of the RSS — and believed in it — but there is a strong possibility that he also recognised in some ways that Hindutva was a political instrument rather than an all-encompassing ideology.

There is much Advani has to answer for. He is culpable for the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and cannot escape history's judgement by saying he was talking of Ram as a cultural icon and not a religious figure. He knew he was creating a explosive communal situation. But his party's reaction to his statement on Jinnah makes him a tragic figure. There was nothing new he said about Jinnah – it is an indication of the state of our political culture that no one seemed to understand what he was trying to convey. Strangely enough, despite the basic differences in their personalities, Jinnah like Savarkar was a person who thought entirely in western terms. Advani was only recognising that when he called Jinnah secular. Let us not forget that Pakistan's first law minister was a Dalit like ours, its first national anthem was also written by a Hindu, upon Jinnah's invitation, and Jinnah avoided the Mullahs like pest. Both men shared the idea that nationality was crucial to a nation-state and a certain amount of violence and bloodshed was normal in the jostling for dominance. Though, I have to admit, Jinnah probably was less open to the idea of violence than Savarkar.

Advani tried to cast himself as a statesman in the Vajpayee mould, but could not repudiate his past. At the same time, he could not project himself as an ideologue with heroic pretensions either as, say, Narendra Modi has done for the sake of the Gujarati middle class. Advani did wear different masks at different times in his career to gain political mileage, but it is likely that he personally has remained somewhat distant from all of them. For all I know, he may be too human to be a perfect politician.

But this only intensifies the problem for the BJP, for if Advani is not fully convincing in his new incarnation, even Narendra Modi seems to have passed his zenith. This election has revealed the limits to his popularity. And his case in some ways is worse because he has not left any escape routes for himself, not even with a cosmetic, dishonest, hypocritical apology or expression of regret for the events in Gujarat 2002. This is likely to haunt him for years, if not for his entire career. So the search for the right leader for the moment has become the BJP's biggest headache – a leader who can lower the divisiveness and high-intensity politics the party has become associated with.

If the BJP abandons Hindutva, what shape can its right of centre politics take? Its economic program cannot go too far right because a majority of Indians live outside the spoils of the neo-liberal economic system. If only for electoral gains, they have to be appeased. What this means is that the BJP could be headed for a different kind of ideology, in which Hindutva will play a part, but there will be other competing, coexisting concepts. There is no reason why even Hindutva itself cannot take on a more benign form. Some of the early thinkers who toyed with the idea of Hindutva — Brahmabandhab Upadhyay, Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Vivekananda and Nivedita — were not light-weight thinkers. Even Tagore had played footsy with Hindutva during the Hindu mela days in the first decade of the 20th century. His Gora was not only a response to both Kipling's Kim and revolutionaries like Savarkar but also to his own weakness for Hindu nationalism.

Vajpayee, for instance, held Hindutva as a kind of vague, emotional frame. There's no problem with that; in fact, it can in sometimes be a help. Nawaz Sharif once reportedly told Vajpayee that he, as the leader of the Muslim League, and Bajpai as the leader of the BJP, were best positioned to break fresh grounds in Indo-Pak relations as their constituencies could never accuse them of being wishy washy liberals and ignoring national interests. Above all, like the Maoists must be encouraged to come above ground and become part of the democratic process, the Hindu right too must be politically accommodated. They cannot be annihilated or wished away, just as the Naxals cannot be wished away. (The Charu Mazumdar group in Bengal was wiped out by the police rather ruthlessly, but in barely 30 years, Naxalism has come back as a more powerful political formation. These are idealistic people. It is a pity they have opted for the gun, but the problems and grievances they represent are real. Sitting in urban citadels, one might imagine that one can solve these problems and meet these grievances over the next 100 years and wait for the "trickle down" effect to work, but one cannot expect everyone to wait patiently in the meanwhile.) The same way, if there are rump groups that are rabid enough to believe that they must break down the Babri Masjid, they cannot just be wished away. They have to be politically handled and tamed.

India’s pre-colonial states probably have something to say to us. The Mughal empire, for instance, was a quite a successful state and made some interesting experiments. Contemporary India might get some new ideas from them. The conventions of the empire were in some ways so attractive that the British left them more or less intact for the next 100 years or so. Even the Delhi Durbar of 1911 followed all conventions of a Mughal court. One of the most important of these conventions was that the empire allowed different degrees of allegiance to the centre. The Jaipur state, for instance, was more central to the Empire than the sultans in Bengal.

The BJP has been demanding that Article 370 be abolished and the Uniform Civil Code introduced throughout India. These are legitimate demands in a European-style modern nation state. But why must we follow that route? Instead of haggling on Article 370, one should use it more effectively: go the whole hog with it. Could we have deployed it or some variation of it in Sikkim instead of gobbling it up? Maybe we could have used other versions of it at Nagaland and Manipur, instead of opting for 30 years of bloodshed which has made a whole generation bitter? I am giving off-the-cuff, random examples how we might have thought about the Indian state and given it greater manoeuvrability. We could have even used some of the ideas of Gandhi to avoid overloading our State; we are uniquely well-equipped to design our own version of a State. We did not have to build a standardised nation-state. By default, we have gone in for some innovations — Indian secularism is one example. Both secularists and communalists complain about the compromises we have made with our concept of secularism. So, even though I am a critic of the concept of secularism and do not think it is working well in India, I cannot consider it all bad. But we shall have to innovate and experiment with the building blocks of our polity; we cannot allow the core concepts of our polity to harden into ideas that are too defined. Ours is a political culture in the making.

The current upheaval could be a creative moment both for the BJP and the RSS. Unlike earlier RSS heads before him, Mohanrao Bhagwat is neither a charismatic figure nor a conspicuous ideologue. Nobody expects anything from him and he, therefore, has the opportunity to be more creative. But then 19th century Western political thought, combined with self-hating, compensatory nationalism, Brahminism and half-digested modernity, is a lethal combination. It cuts you off from your native Indian genius. So one remains doubtful whether they will be able to cease the moment?

Eddie Vedder Society lyrics

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:11:00 +0000

Oh, it's a mystery to me
We have a greed with which we have agreed
And you think you have to want more than you need
Until you have it all you won't be free

Society, you're a crazy breed
Hope you're not lonely without me...

When you want more than you have
You think you need...
And when you think more than you want
Your thoughts begin to bleed
I think I need to find a bigger place
Because when you have more than you think
You need more space

Society, you're a crazy breed
Hope you're not lonely without me...
Society, crazy indeed
Hope you're not lonely without me...

There's those thinking, more-or-less, less is more
But if less is more, how you keeping score?
Means for every point you make, your level drops
Kinda like you're starting from the top
You can't do that...

Society, you're a crazy breed
Hope you're not lonely without me...
Society, crazy indeed
Hope you're not lonely without me...

Society, have mercy on me
Hope you're not angry if I disagree...
Society, crazy indeed
Hope you're not lonely without me...

Interview of Angel Pui, CEO of My Wedding Notes

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 08:11:00 +0000

Chris Wilkinson, CEO of HabiTECH interviews Angel Pui, CEO of My Wedding Notes

Why did you become an entrepreneur?
Entrepreneurs never plan to become one. We are simply not satisfied with the status quo in our everyday lives and we are arrogant enough to want to scratch the itch ourselves while thinking we are the best person to do it.

What did you want to become as a child?
I wanted to be an architect, to build small-scale models all day. I also wanted to be a race-car driver, a pilot, an olympics athlete, a video games or toy maker, and a fashion designer.

What's your favorite part of a typical day?
End of the day, because I know I've done a little more than yesterday, and just a bit closer to tomorrow.

What skill would you most like to improve?
Concentration. I might have ADHD. I can only spend 10 minutes on one task at a time. So I have a comprehensive system doing task 1, task, 2, task 3, then back to task 1 and task 2. 60% of the time, it works every time. (chuckle)

What is the one skill you'd most like to have as an entrepreneur?
Decisiveness. I am a libra, we are known to be indecisive and evaluate all angles of a situation. I'd like to trust my instinct more, sometimes I question why I think or feel a certain way, when it comes naturally or seem too simple of a solution.

What is the one skill you possess that contributes the most to your success?
My ability to mimic and learn quickly. As an entrepreneur, you are often stuck doing everything yourself, so you must be a great salesperson, fundraiser, strategic planner, cold-caller, innovative marketer and designer, all with the shortest amount of learning curve while outputting world-class work that no one can detect is your first jab at it.

What is the most difficult thing you have learned to do?
To cold-call and in a few minutes, convince someone to invest in time and believe in you.

What is the most successful cold-call you have done?
While driving in LA heading to the airport. I saw the Disneyland billboard. I called their 1-800 number, convinced the front-desk to give me the number of the Director of Disney Weddings and then convinced him to see me that same day. He gave me 2 minutes to pitch him why my business will benefit Disney Weddings. I skipped the exit I intended, missed my flight and headed straight to Anaheim. To collaborate and integrate our website would have costed millions of dollars, even just for insurance. He asked me to revisit the idea next fiscal year when their budget renews, I considered that a success. (I even saved the ticket)

What is the best advice you've given other entrepreneurs?
Whatever you do, do the best you can and never set a limit on how far you can go. There is always a better way, a more efficient, faster, smarter way to do things. It doesn't matter what you do, it only counts when it's the best you can do, always try to achieve more. Don't get comfortable, usually your best ideas and best work come from being challenged and in an uncomfortable state.

What has been the most rewarding moment in your years of entrepreneurship?
When I realized my business or my work has benefited others. When a former team member tells you she learnt most of her skills from working with you, and now she's successful and achieving her dreams. When you know you have inspired someone else, it feels great. Be generous with what you have and know.

What has been the most surprising thing you have learnt?
It always seem tougher than it really is, just take it one step at a time, and it can be done. Timing is as important as any skills.

What inspires you the most?
Children and their imagination. We, as children, have the abilities to live in reality while creating a fantasy world constantly. As entrepreneurs, we have the same abilities to better any aspect of our reality, whether on the net or with a prototype

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 04:24:00 +0000

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the final quarter being dropped into the world’s first commercial video game, for it was in May of 1979 that Galaxy Game was removed from the Coffee House café at Stanford’s Tresidder student union. I spent a good part of five years feeding coins into Galaxy’s wondrous console, and in return it taught me and several other Silicon Valley denizens valuable lessons that laid the groundwork for much of what we have done since.

I met Galaxy Game in the Summer of 1974. My family had just moved to Palo Alto and I had no friends, so my brother and I rode our bikes around the Stanford campus looking for things to do. I was in 8th grade and the bowling alley got boring quickly, but next door, amidst students and lattes (also a novelty at the time) stood two large consoles, side by side, with odd-looking little black screens. Behind those screens sat a DEC PDP-11/20 powering a riveting game built on a simple concept: use a joystick and a couple of buttons (one for torpedoes, one for hyperspace) to destroy the other spaceships. Best of all, unlike its descendants such as Asteroids, Galaxy was a multi-player game. Those opposing spaceships were controlled by the people sitting next to you, and if you won the game you kept your quarter.

I knew a good deal when I saw one, so I hung around the Coffee House and got to know the game’s co-creator, a Stanford grad named Bill Pitts. That's how I got my first job in high-tech: in exchange for keeping the consoles clean, I got a few dollars per day and a bunch of insider tips about how to play. For example, if your torpedo was on course to destroy an opponent’s ship and that opponent escaped into hyperspace, you could follow him there, shoot again, and destroy him. Imagine the face of a graduate student who thinks he has outwitted that annoying kid, only to find when he releases his finger from the hyperspace button that his ship is nothing but fragments of white floating randomly into the blackness of space. Nothing on Wii matches it!

Galaxy's lessons have stayed with me. Its design was simple and easy to use but with the depth to satisfy the most committed players. Its on-screen dashboard fed players real-time information about fuel, torpedoes, and location, my first inkling that data is critical to making smart decisions.

Finally, in Galaxy achieving your goals sometimes required a jump to hyperspace. My opponents thought hyperspace was a last resort, a refuge from a losing path. I discovered that it was a way to win — high risk and scary, but with a huge payoff. So when in doubt, press the button and make the jump! At worst you’ll lose a quarter, but at best you’ll rule the Galaxy.
-From Google Blog
Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP, Product Management, Google.

Pre-Launch Jitters and Then... Liftoff

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Fri, 08 May 2009 07:18:00 +0000

Contributing astronaut blogger Leroy Chiao continues to enlighten us about space travel, backtracking to the pre-launch period of nervous tension—and steak and eggs—then on to that unforgettable moment of explosive truth.

Today, I was going to write about how to do something else in space. But, I changed my mind. Let's back up to the beginning of a mission. What's it like to go through a launch? How does it feel? Are you able to sleep the night before? Do you get scared? What do you eat before?

Steak and eggs. Medium rare and over easy. This is what the first astronauts ate before launch and why not? I remember during one of my launch counts, the ladies were taking our pre-launch breakfast orders, going around the table. I was hearing things like, dry toast. A little yogurt. Cereal. You gotta be kidding me, what kind of pantywaists am I flying with? They got to me and I replied firmly and evenly, "Steak and eggs, medium rare and over easy." Everyone looked at me funny. I stated the obvious. "Hey, we might go out tomorrow and get blown up. I'm going to have steak and eggs!" Immediately, three guys changed their orders to steak and eggs. I was doing all of us a favor, really. You need a hearty breakfast before launch, you're going to be really busy. Yogurt? Come on.

Sleep wasn't really a problem either, although I tended to wake up a few times at night in anticipation, just like when I have other important morning appointments. We usually wake up about four hours before launch, and hit the ground running.

After breakfast and cleanup, it's time to get suited up. Walk down the hall and meet up with the suit technicians. Seasoned professionals, your suit tech has been with you all through training. He or she makes sure that everything is just right, and after the pressure checks are complete, sends you on your way.

From that point, it's a bit of a blur, as you walk out of the Operations and Checkout Building at the Kennedy Space Center, to the applause of the employees who have gathered at the entrance. You climb onto the Astrovan, which is a converted Airstream RV from the Apollo days. Crews typically joke and banter a bit, the atmosphere is lighthearted, during the short drive to the launch pad. Everyone falls silent as the bird comes into view. She is beautiful. She is ready, as are we.

At the pad, we climb out and ride the elevator to the 195-foot level, where we are greeted by the ingress crew. Time for one more quick pee. Maybe for good luck, but more, so that I won't have to use the adult diaper that I'm wearing! After all, we strap into the Space Shuttle about two and a half hours before launch.

Is this when the jitters hit? Actually, no. This is kind of a time to relax a bit. The environment is totally familiar, thanks to the hours upon hours spent in the simulators. For once, nobody is talking to you. Nobody is asking you for something. It's not unusual to doze off.

As the launch count proceeds, there is a point at which things get serious. Certainly as we come out of the T-20 minute hold. After we come out of the T-9 minute hold, the cockpit is sterile. No unnecessary chatter on the intercom. Is this when it becomes real? Not just yet. For me, it is not until the T-90 second point, when the Launch Director says something like, "Columbia, close and lock your visors, initiate O2 flow, have a good flight." Then it very suddenly becomes very real.

What did I feel at T-Zero? The answer might surprise you. I felt relief.

Certainly, I was keyed up. After all, we were sitting on top of a bomb, being accelerated to orbital velocity of 17,500 mph in less than nine minutes. Pretty heady stuff! But the thing of which astronauts are most afraid is not getting the chance to launch into space. What if I get hit by a car? What if the doctors find something wrong with me at the last minute? What happens if…? All of those worries go away the instant the boosters light!

First stage on the Space Shuttle is shaky. You can't really read the instruments and screens very well. At T-Zero it feels like someone kicks the back of your seat really hard, the Shuttle seems to leap off of the pad. You hear the wind noise build into a high-pitched whine. You see the blue sky start to get dark, fairly quickly. You don't so much hear the rumble of the engines as feel them. Everything is oddly orderly, even quiet. That's because we are accustomed to the simulators, when all the warning and emergency lights and klaxons are going off, as we deal with the failure scenario presented to us by the training team. On launch day, pretty much everything usually works!

On my first flight, I was up on the flight deck for launch. I had a small mirror, through which I could look out of the overhead windows, which were pointed more or less towards the Earth. (The Shuttle rolls into launch azimuth and heels over as the ascent proceeds.) I saw the ground rushing away, through the flames of the engines.

After about two minutes, the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) tail off as the last bits of fuel in them are consumed. You feel the deceleration, and then see the flash of bright light as the separation motors fire, peeling them away from the stack. It is suddenly very smooth and quiet. My heart leapt into my throat when this happened to me the first time. My first thought was that the main engines had also stopped and we were about to go down! But, that was not the case, I just hadn't expected second stage to be so smooth.

During the last few minutes of launch, the vehicle accelerates to orbital velocity. You are under three Gs of loading, so it feels like a small gorilla is sitting on your chest. It takes a little effort to breath, but it's OK.

Suddenly, right on cue (you're always watching the clock), the main engines cut off, and you are instantly weightless! As I looked out the windows and for the first time beheld the awesome beauty of the Earth from space, I was almost overcome with emotion. I had made it, I had realized my childhood dream. I allowed myself to revel in this moment for just a few seconds. Yes, I was in space, but it was also time to get to work!

For more click here

Jim Carrey

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 05:48:00 +0000

My favorite Jim quote is: "It is better to risk starving to death then surrender. If you give up on your dreams, what's left?"-Jim Carrey

LIFE
I don't think anybody should go through life without a team of psychologists. I have been through times when I'm literally squatting in the living room, having one of those open-throated cries, where you're crying all the way to your butthole. I always believed I would come out of it, though.

I don't make it in regular channels, and that's okay for me.

My life is not unlike Truman's. I can't go anywhere.

Life is an ordeal, albeit an exciting one, but I wouldn't trade it for the good old days of poverty and obscurity.

I don't think anybody is interesting until they've had the shit kicked out of them. The pain is there for a reason. A lot of times when I was in those depressions, I also had the thing going through my head that this is what I've asked for. I've prayed to God that I would have depth as an artist and have things to say. I've said, No matter what, keep me sane but give me what I need.

RELATIONSHIPS
I'm so wrapped up in my work that it's often impossible to consider other things in my life. My marriage ended in divorce because of this, my relationship with Holly has suffered by this. It's hard for anybody who's been with me not to feel starved for affection when I'm making love to my ideas. Maybe it's not meant for me to settle down and be married.

Creative people don't behave very well generally. If you're looking for examples of good relationships in show business, you're gonna be depressed real fast. I don't have time for anything else right now but work and my daughter. She's my first priority.

MEDICATION
I was on Prozac for a long time. It may have helped me out of a jam for a little bit, but people stay on it forever. I had to get off at a certain point because I realized that, you know, everything's just OK," says Carrey. "There are peaks, there are valleys. But they're all kind of carved and smoothed out, and it feels like a low level of despair you live in. Where you're not getting any answers, but you're living OK. And you can smile at the office. You know? But it's a low level of despair. You know? I rarely drink coffee. I'm very serious about no alcohol, no drugs. Life is too beautiful.

You know, I live a monastic lifestyle. No, I do. I do live in extremes, basically. I go back and forth. Once every six months, I'll have a day where I eat more chocolate than has ever been consumed by a human being.

I've tried everything. I've done therapy, I've done colonics. I went to a psychic who had me running around town buying pieces of ribbon to fill the colors in my aura. Did the Prozac thing.

ACTING
Until Ace Ventura, no actor had considered talking through his ass.

I just want to be killer funny. You know kick ass piss in your pants run out of the theatre and rip you dick off and throw yourself into traffic funny!

I try to do something the audience might not have seen before. Like if I'm gonna kiss a girl I wanna kiss her like a girl has never been kissed. Like maybe I would kick her legs out from under her and catch her right before she hits the ground and then kiss her.

My focus is to forget the pain of life. Forget the pain, mock the pain, reduce it. And laugh.

Before I do anything, I think, well what hasn't been seen. Sometimes, that turns out to be something ghastly and not fit for society. And sometimes that inspiration becomes something that 's really worthwhile.

My performing started out as a mixture of things. It's really not all angst and I-gotta-go-onstage-or-I'm-gonna-kill- somebody kind of thing. Some of it is the anger, but it was born from really, truly, just wanting to be special and to be noticed and wanting to make people laugh. It was really born from that, so it comes from a good place. It's just - the tools are your anger, the tools are your sadness, the tools are your joy, the tools are voices, faces - the tools are all those things.

The comedian's who inspired me are, like, Dick Van Dyke. Loved Dick Van Dyke. Jimmy Stewart. Well, he wasn't a comedian, but he was a character that I really, really liked. I learned how to say 'F***', by listening to Richard Pryor. No. But there's guys like that who opened doors to realms for me. Like Richard Pryor and guys like Sam Kinison. You watch them and then you go, well maybe your gotta give up a little more to, you know, push the buttons these days.

CAREER
It's nice to finally get scripts offered to me that aren't the ones Tom Hanks wipes his butt with.

There was a time when people said, 'Jim, if you keep on making faces, your face will freeze like that.' Now they just say, 'Pay him!'

I don't care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

If I had never ventured beyond being a stand-up comic, then I would be sitting in my house today working on my Leonardo DiCaprio impression.

I absolutely want to have a career where you make'em laugh and make'em cry. It's all theater.

One thing I hope I'll never be is drunk with my own power. And anybody who says I am will never work in this town again.

Life opens up opportunities to you, and you either take them or you stay afraid of taking them. I've never been one to sit back and go, 'I'd better do what the audience wants me to do, because I don't want to lose them.'

It was such a leap in my career when 'Truman Show' came along. It's always been a long process for me insofar as recognition goes, but that's OK because you appreciate it when it comes.

I'm afraid, I guess, that I won't be able to watch anymore. Everything I do comes from watching and observing, and I'm concerned that I won't be able to be the watcher because I'm the watched. I've already had so much success, I could quit now and say, 'Thanks very much, you guys have been more than nice to me,' but I really would like to keep working and, hopefully, growing and challenging myself. HIMSELF

I tend to stay up late, not because I'm partying but because it's the only time of the day when I'm alone and don't have to be performing.

I'm a hard guy to live with. I'm like a caged animal. I'm up all night walking around the living room. It's hard for me to come down from what I do.

I need privacy. I would think that because what I do makes a lot of people happy that I might deserve a little bit of respect in return. Instead, the papers try to drag me off my pedestal.

Most of the time I live with my pain. I have pain but I won't show it around. I think that's the nobility of the character. There's something noble in not spewing on people all the time about your problems. I'm the light guy, so I identified.

I enjoy fame except when I'm with my daughter. Kids stop me all the time and I don't want her to be jealous of the attention. Also, sometimes I just want to be left alone and I refuse to make rubber faces. That's when they start asking, 'What's the matter, man, don't you like your job?' I say, 'Yeah, I like my job. But I also like having sex, and I'm not going to do that in front of you either.

Ya know what I do almost every day? I wash. Personal hygiene is part of the package with me.

What I have in common with the character in ‘Truman’ is this incredible need to please people. I feel like I want to take care of everyone and I also feel this terrible guilt if I am unable to. And I have felt this way ever since all this success started.

CHILDHOOD
I used to draw a lot. If my mother would ask me to do something else, I'd have a hairy conniption. I'd just go crazy.

I praticed making faces in the mirror and it would drive my mother crazy. She used to scare me by saying that I was going to see the devil if I kept looking in the mirror. That fascinated me even more, of course.

SCHOOL
I know this sounds strange, but as a kid, I was really shy. Painfully shy. The turning point was freshman year, when I was the biggest geek alive. No one, I mean no one, even talked to me. I was that weird Jim Boy - you know, ' Stay away from him.' Then I suddenly realized that all the shtick I pulled at home could also work at school. I recall the first day that I stood in front of the school and fell up the stairs. People started self-combusting with laughter. I went from 'Jim's a geek' to 'Jim really is a moron, but we like it!' From then on, there was no stopping me - I was relentless. Every class became The Jim Carrey Show. I was like a disease in the class. I remember being sent out of the room a lot. The hall became my domain.

My report card always said, 'Jim finishes first and then disrupts the other students'.

For some reason I did something where I realized I could get a reaction. That was when I broke out of my shell at school, because I really didn't have any friends or anything like that and I just kind of was going along, and then finally I did this zany thing, and all of a sudden I had tons of friends

My teacher in the seventh grade told me that if I didn't fool around during class, I could have 15 minutes at the end of the day to do a comedy routine. Instead of bugging everybody, I'd figure out my routine. And at the end of the day, I'd get to perform in front of my entire class. I thought it was really smart of her. It's amazing how important that was.

My first experience on stage started in second grade. I was in music class and we were practicing for the Christmas assembly. One day I started fooling around by mocking the musicians on a record. The teacher thought she'd embarrass me by making me get up and do what I was doing in front of the whole class. So I went up and did it. She laughed, and the whole class went nuts. My teacher asked me to do my routine for the Christmas assembly, and I did. That was the beginning of the end.

MONEY
When the first big paycheque with Dumb And Dumber hit, I went: 'Gosh, I wonder if this will affect my performance. Will I do a take and think, was that worth $7 million?' But that never happened. If anything, it made me rebel against that thing when people who get rich start playing it safe.

The money can be a hindrance to someone like me because the danger is that you start thinking, 'Is that a $20 million take?' That kind of thing, and being self-critical.

I'm the first to admit this whole salary thing is getting out of control. In the final analysis, it's still about the work. The whole time I was filming The Cable Guy, I kept reminding myself that if a scene didn't work, the $20 million would bite me in the butt.

I refuse to feel guilty. I feel guilty about too much in my life but not about money. I went through periods when I had nothing, so somebody in my family has to get stinkin' wealthy.

I haven't been as wild with my money as somebody like me might have been. I've been very safe, very conservative with investments. I don't blow money. I don't have a ton of houses. I know things can go away. I've already had that experience.

FAMILY
My mother was a professional sick person; she took a lot of pain pills. There are many people like that. It's just how they are used to getting attention. I always remember she's the daughter of alcoholics who'd leave her alone at Christmas time.

My dad was like a stage mother he always pushed me to do what I wanted.

We had problems like all families but we had a lot of love. I was extremely loved. We always felt we had each other.

I got a lot of support from my parents. That's the one thing I always appreciated. They didn't tell me I was being stupid; they told me I was being funny.

The Big Bang Theory:Part3

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 05:52:00 +0000

Season 1, Episode 10 (The Loobenfeld Decay)
Leonard: How long is [Toby/Leo] going to stay here?
Sheldon: He's a homeless drug addict, Leonard. Where's he going to go? Boy, you have a lot to learn about lying.

Sheldon: (Knocking on Penny's door early in the morning). Penny, Penny, Penny!
(Penny opens the door).
Sheldon: Good morning.
Penny: Do you have any idea what time it is?
Sheldon: Of course I do, my watch is linked to the atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado. It's accurate to one-tenth of a second, but as I'm saying this it
occurs to me once again your question may have been rhetorical.

Sheldon: Artificial intelligences do not have teen fetishes.

Season 1, Episode 11 (The Pancake Batter Anomaly)
Sheldon: We have no idea what pathogen Typhoid Penny’s introduced into our environment. And having never been to Nebraska I’m relatively certain that I
have no Corn Husking antibodies.

Sheldon: Obviously you're not well-suited for three-dimensional chess. Perhaps three-dimensional Candyland would be your speed.

Season 1, Episode 12 (The Jerusalem Duality)
Sheldon: Engineering. Where the noble semiskilled laborers execute the vision of those who think and dream. Hello, Oompa-Loompas of science.

Dr. Gablehauser: Okay, well, speaking of spreads, we're having a small welcoming party this afternoon for Mr. Kim who's agreed to join us here at the
university.
Sheldon: Of course he has. The Oracle told us little Neo was the one. You can see the matrix, can't you?

Sheldon: Today, I went from being Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, to... You know, that other guy.
Howard: Antonio Salieri?
Sheldon: Oh God, now even you are smarter than me.

Sheldon: While Mr. Kim, by virtue of youth and naiveté, has fallen prey to the inexplicable need for human contact, let me step in and assure you that my
research will go on uninterrupted, and that social relationships will continue to baffle and repulse me.

Season 1, Episode 13 (The Bat Jar Conjecture)
Sheldon: What rat have you recruited to the SS sinking ship?
Leslie: Hello Sheldon.
Sheldon: Leslie Winkle.
Leslie: Yeah Leslie Winkle. The answer to the question, who made Sheldon Cooper cry like a little girl?
Sheldon: Yes well I am polymerised tree saps and you are an inorganic adhesive so whatever verbal projectile you launch in my direction is reflected off of
me, returns on its original trajectory and adheres to you.
Leslie: Oh, ouch.

Sheldon: Oh, and one more thing, it's on bitch.

Sheldon: Would you ask Picasso to play Pictionary? Would you ask Noah Webster to play Boggle? Would you ask Jacques Cousteau to play Go Fish?

Sheldon: At this point I should inform you that I intend to form my own team and destroy the molecular bonds that bind your very matter together and reduce
the resulting particular chaos to tears.

Season 1, Episode 14 (The Nerdvana Annihilation)
Sheldon: Are you upset about something?
Leonard: What was your first clue?
Sheldon: Well there was a number of things. First the late hour, then you demeanors seems very low energy plus your irritability...
Leonard: Yes I'm upset!
Sheldon: Oh... I don't usually pick up on those things. Good for me.
Leonard: Yeah good for you.
Sheldon: (walks away and then turns back) Oh, wait. Did you want to talk about what's bothering you?
Leonard: I don't know... maybe.
Sheldon: Wow! I'm on fire tonight.

Sheldon: Dibs does not apply in a bidding war.

Sheldon: In a Venn diagram, that would be an individual located at the intersection of the sets “no longer want my Time Machine” and “need 800 dollars”.

Sheldon: It only moves in time. It would be worse than useless in a swamp.

Sheldon: I disagree. Your inability to successfully woo Penny long predates your acquisition of the time machine. That failure clearly stands on its own.

Season 1, Episode 15 (The Shiksa Indeterminacy)
Sheldon: They were not “friends”. They were imaginary colleagues.

Season 1, Episode 16 (The Peanut Reaction)
Sheldon: 1234 is not a secure password.

Sheldon: What twelve year old boy wants a motorized dirt bike?

Sheldon: What computer do you have? And please don't say "a white one."

Store Clerk: You don't work here.
Sheldon: Well aparently no one does.

Season 1, Episode 17 (The Tangerine Factor)
Sheldon: Actually, I thought the first two renditions were far more compelling. Previously, I felt sympathy for the Leonard character. Now I just find him to
be whiny and annoying.

Sheldon: Oxen are in my bed! Many, many oxen!

The Big Bang Theory:Part2

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 05:48:00 +0000

Season 1, Episode 3 (The Fuzzy Boots Corollary)
Sheldon: (to Leonard, who has decided to give up on Penny) Well, at least now you can retrieve the black box from the twisted, smoldering wreckage that was
once your fantasy of dating her and analyze the data so you don%u2019t crash into Geek Mountain again.

Sheldon: I think that you [Leonard] have as much of a chance of having a sexual relationship with Penny as the Hubble telescope does of discovering at the
center of every black hole is a little man with a flashlight searching for a circuit breaker.

Sheldon: There's always a chance that alcohol and poor judgment on her part may lead to a wonderful evening.

Sheldon: I don't come over to your house changing things on your boards.
Leslie: That's because I don't have mistakes on my boards.
Sheldon: That's...That's...
Leslie: When you think up an adjective text me.

Sheldon: You have about as much chance with her as the Hubble Telescope does of finding in the middle of each black hole a small man looking for the light
switch.

Season 1, Episode 4 (The Luminous Fish Effect)
Sheldon: I'm taking a sabbatical because I won't kowtow to mediocre minds.
Penny: So you got canned, huh? Sheldon: Theoretical physicists do not get 'canned'. But yeah.

Penny: I always say that when one door closes, another one opens.
Sheldon: No it doesn't. Not unless the two doors are connected by relays or there are motion sensors involved. Or if the first door closing creates a change
of air pressure that acts upon the second door.
Penny: (gives Sheldon a long look) Never mind.

Sheldon: I can't believe he fired me.
Leonard: Well, you did call him a "glorified high school science teacher whose last successful experiment was lighting his own farts."
Sheldon: In my defense, I prefaced that with, "with all due respect."

Sheldon: There wouldn't have been any ass kickings if that stupid death ray had worked.

Sheldon: Oh, I'm sorry. Did I insult you? Is your body mass somehow tied into your self worth?

Season 1, Episode 5 (The Hamburger Postulate)
Sheldon: Can't we just go to Big Boy? They only have one burger: the Big Boy.
Penny: The Barbecue Burger is like the Big Boy.
Sheldon: Excuse me, in a world that already includes a Big Boy, why would I settle for something that's like a Big Boy?

Sheldon: Do you realize I may have to share a Nobel Prize with your booty call?

Sheldon: Of course I'm listening. Blah blah, hopeless Penny delusion, blah blah blah.

Season 1, Episode 7 (The Dumpling Paradox)
Sheldon: I don't know how, but she is cheating! Nobody can be that attractive and this skilled at a videogame.

Sheldon: I'll watch the last 24 minutes of Doctor Who, although at this point it's more like Doctor Why Bother.

Sheldon: No, I’m going to ask him to choose between sex and Halo 3. As far as I know, sex has not been upgraded to include high-def graphics and enhanced
weapon systems.

Season 1, Episode 8 (The Grasshopper Experiment)
Sheldon: I'll have a diet Coke.
Penny: Can you please order a cocktail? I need to practice mixing drinks.
Sheldon: Fine... I'll have a virgin Cuba Libre.
Penny: That's... rum and Coke without the rum.
Sheldon: Yes, and would you make it diet?

Leonard: Do you really need the Honorary Justice League of America Membership card?
Sheldon: It's been in every wallet I owned since I was five.
Leonard: Why?
Sheldon: It says keep this on your person at all times. It's right here under Batman's signature.

Sheldon: How often does one see a beloved fictional character come to life?
Wolowitz: Every year at ComiCon. Every day at Disneyland. You can hire Snow White to come to your house. Of course they prefer if you have a kid.

Sheldon: I understand, but it was between you and the Museum of Natural History, and frankly, you don't have dinosaurs.

Season 1, Episode 9 (The Cooper-Hofstadter Polarization)
Leonard: You are not Isaac Newton.
Sheldon: No, no, that's true. Gravity would have been apparent to me without the apple.

Leonard: Are there any other honors that I've gotten that I don't know about? Did UPS drop off a Nobel Prize with my name on it?
Sheldon: Leonard, please don't take this the wrong way, but the day you win a Nobel Prize is the day I begin my research on the drag co-efficient of tassles
on flying carpets.

Leonard: Sheldon, why is this letter in the trash?
Sheldon: Well, there's always the possibility that a trash can spontaneously formed around the letter, but Occam's Razor would suggest that someone threw it
out.

Leonard: (Watching their fight on YouTube) Oh, geez, does this suit really look that bad?
Sheldon: Forget your suit. Look at my arms flailing. I'm like a flamingo on Ritalin.

The Big Bang Theory:Part1

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 05:32:00 +0000

The Big Bang Theory is an American situation comedy created and executive produced by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady, which premiered on CBS on September 24, 2007.

It concerns two male Caltech prodigies in their twenties, one an experimental physicist (Leonard) and the other a theoretical physicist (Sheldon), who live across the hall from an attractive blonde waitress with show-biz aspirations (Penny).

Leonard and Sheldon's geekiness and intellect are contrasted with Penny's social skills and common sense for comedic effect. Two equally geeky friends of theirs, Howard and Rajesh, are also main characters.

Season 1, Episode 1 (Pilot)
Sheldon: I don't know what your odds are in the world as a whole but as far as the population of this car goes you're a veritable mack daddy.

Penny: I’m a Sagittarius, which probably tells you way more than you need to know.
Sheldon: Yes, it tells us that you participate in the mass cultural delusion that the sun’s apparent position relative to arbitrarily defined constellations

at the time of your birth somehow affects your personality.
Penny: (puzzled) Participate in the what?

Leonard: We need to widen our circle.
Sheldon: I have a very wide circle. I have 212 friends on myspace.
Leonard: Yes, and you’ve never met one of them.
Sheldon: That’s the beauty of it.

Sheldon: What if she ends up with a toddler who doesn't know if he should use an integral or a differential to solve for the area under a curve?
Leonard: I'm sure she'll still love him.
Sheldon: I wouldn't.

Penny: (after seeing Leonard and Sheldon pantsed) I'm so sorry. I really thought if you guys went instead of me, he wouldn't be such an ass.
Leonard: No, it was a valid hypothesis.
Sheldon: "Was a valid hypo" - what is happening to you?

Penny: So, what do you guys do for fun around here?
Sheldon:Well, today we tried masturbating for money.

Sheldon:You did not "break up" with Joyce Kim. She defected to North Korea.

Season 1, Episode 2 (The Big Bran Hypothesis)
Sheldon: Ah, gravity - thou art a heartless bitch.

Leonard: For God's sake, Sheldon, do I have to hold up a sarcasm sign every time I open my mouth?
Sheldon (intrigued): You have a sarcasm sign?

Penny: Yes, I know men can't fly.
Sheldon: No, no let's assume that they can. Lois Lane is falling, accelerating at an initial rate of 32ft per second, per second. Superman swoops down to
save her by reaching out two arms of steel. Ms. Lane, who is now traveling at approximately 120 miles per hour, hits them, and is immediately sliced into
three. equal pieces.

Leonard (trying to get Sheldon to leave Penny's apartment in the middle of the night): Sheldon, this is not your home!
Sheldon: This isn't anyone's 'home'. This is a swirling vortex of entropy.

Leonard: I guess we'll just take [a TV cabinet] up [the stairs] ourselves.
Sheldon: We don't have a dolly, or lifting belts, or any measurable upper-body strength.
Leonard: We don't need strength. We're physicists. We are the intellectual descendants of Archimedes. Give me a fulcrum and a lever, and I can move the
Earth. (Trying to move the box) It's just a matter of... I don't have this. I don't have this. I don't have it!
Sheldon: Archimedes would be so proud.

Leonard: If you don't have any other plans, do you want to join us for Thai food and a Superman movie marathon?
Penny: A marathon? Wow, how many Superman movies are there?
Sheldon: You're kidding, right?

Leonard: Most people don't sort their breakfast cereal numerically by fiber content.
Sheldon: Excuse me, but I think we've both found that helpful at times.

Sheldon: Explain to me an organizational system where a tray of flatware on a couch is valid.

Sheldon: I am truly sorry for what happened last night. I take full responsibility and I hope it won’t color your opinion of Leonard, who is not only a
wonderful guy but also, I hear, a gentle and thorough lover.

The Kranz Dictum

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 02:02:00 +0000

Response to Apollo I Launch Pad Fire

Eugene F. Kranz called a meeting of his branch and flight control team on the Monday morning following the Apollo 1 disaster that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. Kranz made the following address to the gathering (The Kranz Dictum), in which his expression of values and admonishments for future spaceflight are his legacy to NASA:

"Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, 'Dammit, stop!' I don't know what Thompson's committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did. From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: 'Tough' and 'Competent.' Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write 'Tough and Competent' on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control."

For the greater good of God

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 01:37:00 +0000

With elections around the corner in India
Its painful to see how shamelessly politicians are playing a religion based card and how the majority of the educated people are falling for it.Reminds me of Iron Maiden's 'For the greater good of God' song.Here are the lyrics:

Are you a man of peace
Or man of holy war
Too many sides to you
Don't know which anymore
So many full of life
But also filled with pain
Don't know just how many
Will live to breathe again

A life that's made to breath
destruction or defense
A mind that's vain corruption
bad or good intent
A wolf in sheep's clothing
Or saintly or sinner
Or some that would believe
A holy war winner

They fire off many shots
and many parting blows
Their actions beyond a reasoning
only god would know
And as he lies in heaven
or it could be in hell
I feel he's somewhere here
or looking from below
But I don't know, I don't know

Please tell me now what life is
Please tell me now what love is
Well tell me now what war is
Again tell me what life is

More pain and misery in the history of mankind
Sometimes it seems more like
the blind leading the blind
It brings upon us more of famine,death and war
You know religion has a lot to answer for

Please tell me now what life is
Please tell me now what love is
Well tell me now what war is
Again tell me what life is

And as they search to find the bodies in the sand
They find it's ashes that are
scattered across the land
And as their spirits seem to whistle on the wind
A shot is fired somewhere another war begins

And all because of it you'd think
that we would learn
But still the body count the city fires burn
Somewhere there's someone dying
in a foreign land
Meanwhile the world is crying stupidity of man
Tell me why, tell me why

Please tell me now what life is
Please tell me now what love is
Well tell me now what war is
Again tell me what life is

Please tell me now what life is
Please tell me now what love is
Well tell me now what war is
Again tell me what life is

For the greater good of God

Please tell me now what life is
Please tell me now what love is
Well tell me now what war is
Again tell me what life is

Please tell me now what life is
Please tell me now what love is
Well tell me now what war is
Again tell me what life is

For the greater good of God

He gave his life for us he fell upon the cross
To die for all of those who never mourn his loss
It wasn't meant for us to feel the pain again
Tell me why, tell me why

If the US is bad, its rivals are worse

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:33:00 +0000

SWAMINATHAN S ANKLESARIA AIYAR

As the world sinks into the worst recession since the 1930s, leaders of the top 20 countries are meeting in Britain to discuss major reforms of the world economic system. There is a consensus that the existing system has failed massively, especially in the US.
The five biggest investment banks in the world (Lehman Brothers et al) have vanished in the financial carnage. The two biggest mortgage companies in the world, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, are under government overlordship. The biggest insurance company in the world, AIG, is on government life support. The biggest bank in the world, Citibank, has survived only with massive government help. General Motors, the biggest auto company in the world, is also on life support. The greatest icons of US capitalism are on crutches.
But hold the dirges. The most vocal critics of US capitalism are sinking too. Look at Latin American socialist regimes (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador), Russia and Iran. For all their socialist rhetoric — President Chavez of Venezuela has long sworn to spearhead a socialist Bolivarian revolution in Latin America — their rival economic models look bankrupt too.
The IMF estimates that Venezuela and Iran needed an oil price of $90-95/barrel to balance their budgets. When the price rose to a peak of $147/barrel, these countries were awash in petrodollars, and made grandiose plans. Chavez offered half his oil to Latin American friends at concessional rates. But now, he is running down his forex reserves to survive.
President Ahmedinajad in Iran planned fancy welfare plans with oil revenue, and switched Iran’s foreign reserves from dollars to euros to teach the Yankees a lesson. His spending plans have come unstuck after oil revenue plunged by two-thirds. Inflation is running at 26%. Ahmedinajad now looks like losing the coming Iranian election to his moderate rival Mohammad Khatami.
The Russian economy soared along with oil prices, is now crashing in tandem. In the Russian model, Putin and his friends own large chunks of natural-resource companies, some of which are nominally state controlled. They allow other oligarchs to flourish on condition that they toe the party line. The Russian stock market has fallen more than any other (almost 80%). Russia has spent one-third of its forex reserves to defend the ruble, which is nevertheless down from 25 to 35 to the dollar.
It is no accident that so many critics of western capitalism are petrostates. A market economy succeeds by providing incentives for raising productivity and incomes. A statecontrolled system is lousy at providing the right incentives, and so is bad for productivity. But a petro-state thrives simply on the geographical accident of mineral wealth, not great enterprise or efficiency.
Socialists bemoan the capitalist emphasis on profit and growth, and focus on distributing wealth instead. This would be fine if money dropped from heaven, and the only task of governments was to distribute it. But if you have to produce the wealth in the first place, markets do it much better.
However, in the petro-state oil revenue is manna from heaven, so the ruler can (for some time) focus on distributing wealth rather than creating it. Under Chavez, Venezuela’s oil production has dropped from 3.2 million barrels/day in 1998 to just 2.4 million barrels/day. His system is manifestly inefficient. Yet, this inefficiency has long been cloaked by the bonanza arising from high oil prices. Ditto for Ahmedinajad’s Iran.
Seen in this light, the biggest critics of the US model are in fact pathetically dependent on it. When capitalist economies decline, so do the supposedly rival models. Clearly, they are not rival models at all but parasites of the capitalist model.
In April 2008, Iran started pricing its oil in euros and yen rather than dollars, anticipating gains from exiting what it regarded as a fundamentally weak currency. Iran switched the bulk of its forex reserves out of dollars into euros and yen. Alas, it weakened only itself, not the US. The dollar has strengthened hugely in the last year — the euro is down from a peak of $1.60 to just $1.26. Countries that switched their reserves to euros and yen have lost heavily.
The true strength of a system is revealed in times of adversity. Today, despite US economic travails, the world views the dollar as a safe haven. The US system has a thousand flaws, but others are no better, and sometimes worse. Certainly the world economic system urgently needs major reform, and the G-20 meeting in Britain needs to kick-start the process. But the reforms must aim at a safer, gentler capitalism, not Bolivarian socialism.

Ode to the Nice Guys

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:50:00 +0000

This rant was written for the Wharton Undergraduate Journal

This is a tribute to the nice guys. The nice guys that finish last, that never become more than friends, that endure hours of whining and bitching about what assholes guys are, while disproving the very point. This is dedicated to those guys who always provide a shoulder to lean on but restrain themselves to tentative hugs, those guys who hold open doors and give reassuring pats on the back and sit patiently outside the changing room at department stores. This is in honor of the guys that obligingly reiterate how cute/beautiful/smart/funny/sexy their female friends are at the appropriate moment, because they know most girls need that litany of support. This is in honor of the guys with open minds, with laid-back attitudes, with honest concern. This is in honor of the guys who respect a girl’s every facet, from her privacy to her theology to her clothing style.

This is for the guys who escort their drunk, bewildered female friends back from parties and never take advantage once they’re at her door, for the guys who accompany girls to bars as buffers against the rest of the creepy male population, for the guys who know a girl is fishing for compliments but give them out anyway, for the guys who always play by the rules in a game where the rules favor cheaters, for the guys who are accredited as boyfriend material but somehow don’t end up being boyfriends, for all the nice guys who are overlooked, underestimated, and unappreciated, for all the nice guys who are manipulated, misled, and unjustly abandoned, this is for you.

This is for that time she left 40 urgent messages on your cell phone, and when you called her back, she spent three hours painstakingly dissecting two sentences her boyfriend said to her over dinner. And even though you thought her boyfriend was a chump and a jerk, you assured her that it was all ok and she shouldn’t worry about it. This is for that time she interrupted the best killing spree you’d ever orchestrated in GTA3 to rant about a rumor that romantically linked her and the guy she thinks is the most repulsive person in the world. And even though you thought it was immature and you had nothing against the guy, you paused the game for two hours and helped her concoct a counter-rumor to spread around the floor. This is also for that time she didn’t have a date, so after numerous vows that there was nothing “serious” between the two of you, she dragged you to a party where you knew nobody, the beer was awful, and she flirted shamelessly with you, justifying each fit of reckless teasing by announcing to everyone: “oh, but we’re just friends!” And even though you were invited purely as a symbolic warm body for her ego, you went anyways. Because you’re nice like that.

The nice guys don’t often get credit where credit is due. And perhaps more disturbing, the nice guys don’t seem to get laid as often as they should. And I wish I could logically explain this trend, but I can’t. From what I have observed on campus and what I have learned from talking to friends at other schools and in the workplace, the only conclusion I can form is that many girls are just illogical, manipulative bitches. Many of them claim they just want to date a nice guy, but when presented with such a specimen, they say irrational, confusing things such as “oh, he’s too nice to date” or “he would be a good boyfriend but he’s not for me” or “he already puts up with so much from me, I couldn’t possibly ask him out!” or the most frustrating of all: “no, it would ruin our friendship.” Yet, they continue to lament the lack of datable men in the world, and they expect their too-nice-to-date male friends to sympathize and apologize for the men that are jerks. Sorry, guys, girls like that are beyond my ability to fathom. I can’t figure out why the connection breaks down between what they say (I want a nice guy!) and what they do (I’m going to sleep with this complete ass now!). But one thing I can do, is say that the nice-guy-finishes-last phenomenon doesn’t last forever. There are definitely many girls who grow out of that train of thought and realize they should be dating the nice guys, not taking them for granted. The tricky part is finding those girls, and even trickier, finding the ones that are single.

So, until those girls are found, I propose a toast to all the nice guys. You know who you are, and I know you’re sick of hearing yourself described as ubiquitously nice. But the truth of the matter is, the world needs your patience in the department store, your holding open of doors, your party escorting services, your propensity to be a sucker for a pretty smile. For all the crazy, inane, absurd things you tolerate, for all the situations where you are the faceless, nameless hero, my accolades, my acknowledgement, and my gratitude go out to you. You do have credibility in this society, and your well deserved vindication is coming.

Fu-zu Jen, SEAS/WH, 2003

Of thank you and sorry

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 04:16:00 +0000

Gratitude and apology are emotional yardsticks of human character. We must not strip them of sincerity, says Harsh Kabra

Thank you and sorry are perhaps the first words we learn. And they stay with us right through our lives as yardsticks of our civility. But when was the last time we said “thank you” or “sorry” without meaning to simply offload our burden of obligation or guilt? Indeed, these words no longer express what they are supposed to. Instead, they are used flippantly, thrown around without care, often reduced to an easy way of getting off the hook and evading meaningful action. They may well be the most used words in times of political correctness. But they are clearly the most abused as well. The emotions of gratitude and apology are vital to the chain of human reciprocity. But in stripping them of sincerity, we also seem to be closing the doors on their benefits for us.
In almost all religious traditions, gratitude is a manifestation of virtuous character. “Gratitude, as it were, is the moral memory of mankind,” wrote sociologist Georg Simmel. Scottish philosopher Thomas Brown defined gratitude as “that delightful emotion of love to him who has conferred kindness on us, the very feeling of which is itself no small part of the benefit conferred”. German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: “In ordinary life, we hardly realise that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.”
The quality of being thankful implies the disposition to turn goodwill into action and the inclination to return kindness. A “thank you” denotes the attitude of positive acceptance, a determination to employ the kindness or blessing imaginatively and inventively. It connotes the humility of considering oneself the recipient of undeserved merit. “He who receives a benefit with gratitude repays the first instalment on his debt,” observed Roman statesman Lucius Annaeus Seneca.
Gratitude comes endowed with the power to help us create the life we want and can be therapeutic. Gratefulness emanates from looking at what someone or something has done for us. It is, therefore, about positivity of outlook, which, in turn, generates optimism and energy. Conversely, the lack of gratefulness breeds negativity and despair. In fact, proponents of positive psychology, a recent branch of psychology that studies the strengths and virtues enabling individuals and communities to thrive, consider gratitude to be a pleasant emotional state like happiness, joy, love, curiosity and hope.
The lack of gratefulness is largely because we take things for granted, brashly presuming that they are either our rightful due or are far less than what we deserve. What holds us back from being grateful is such lack of contentment and an endless craving for more. Often, we insist on waiting for the results of an action or a blessing to show up before expressing gratitude. This indicates a dearth of trust and faith, which pays us back in our own coin.
In a way, gratitude helps us realise the benefits of mindful meditation, which is all about acknowledging and feeling connected with every breath and blessing of life. Invariably, a life with gratefulness as its pivot is also a solution to the ills spawned by insatiable human yearnings.
We might wonder where the need for gratitude is if we pay for goods and services in money. Gratitude doesn’t even fetch us discounts. In fact, there is a subtle line of distinction between gratitude and ingratiation. So much so that when someone thanks us too many times, we start doubting his intention. However, as philosopher Adam Smith averred, gratitude is a vital civic virtue, essential for the healthy functioning of societies. He called gratitude a part of the moral capital required for human societies to flourish.
The act of offering and accepting an apology is as profound and healing a human interaction as that of expressing gratitude. But while the offhand “sorry about that” keeps flying around, our ego prevents us from realising its full potential. The word loses its impact when we refrain from acknowledging our offence (“Sorry for whatever I may have done”) or throw in a self-serving conditionality (“I am sorry if you were hurt”). If the purpose of an apology is only to say, “While I don’t think I was wrong, I will apologise because you say so”, it is best not to offer one, for, the worst we can do is to insult someone’s sensitivity or intelligence by such treatment.
Bestowed with the power to effect reconciliation and mend strained relationships, an apology must involve acknowledging the offense adequately, expressing genuine remorse and offering appropriate reparations, including a commitment to make changes. “A stiff apology is a second insult,” said novelist and poet G K Chesterton. “The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.”
The rewards of an apology can only be earned, not embezzled. With everybody from convicts to public figures seeking its refuge, “sorry” is not a quickfix for things gone awry, but the starting point of restoring order. The use of this word must be backed by sincerity of intention. “Never ruin an apology with an excuse,” advises American poet Kimberly Johnson. Seldom does an apology sensitise us to the responsibility of not repeating the same mistake.
A sincere apology helps both parties achieve greater harmony: While the individual making an apology is disencumbered of guilt, shame and fear of retaliation, the one who accepts an apology heals his own humiliations and grudges, rids his mind of the painful preoccupations of revenge and generates forgiveness to bring about greater peace in his own life and in the lives of others around him.
Expressing gratitude and apology without necessarily being grateful or remorseful people is an exercise in futility. Shallow expressions of gratitude and apology are not emotionally evocative and end up producing the contrary result. Often, they are so disengaged and superficial that they fail to motivate altruistic action and positivity. What matter most here is honesty, generosity, humility, commitment, courage and sacrifice, for these qualities define our true dignity.
(Harsh Kabra is an alternative therapist and a writer based in Pune)

Satyam's lie

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 03:51:00 +0000

Companies ride on market perception and cooking the books can burnish that perception to breathtaking highs. Until someone cries foul. Enron was once billed America’s most innovative company. Then a massive accounting fraud, exposed in 2001, blew up on the US energy giant. In 2009, the script has been revisited in India. Boasting Fortune 500 firms among its clients, Satyam Computers won a top award for corporate governance in 2002 and 2008. Its fall began with chairman B Ramalinga Raju’s aborted buyout of two Maytas firms founded by his sons. Angry shareholders swiftly punished this brazen display of nepotism in India’s fourth largest IT firm. The sequel to Maytas is more sordid. Confessing to a Rs 7,136 crore fraud, Raju said Satyam’s books had been cooked for years to inflate profit and revenue figures. In September 2008, they showed a non-existent cash and bank balance of Rs 5,040 crore and hundreds of crores of fictitious accrued interest and debtors’ position. Liabilities worth Rs 1,230 crore were kept hidden.
These disclosures had a punishing aftermath. The software giant’s stocks crashed 91 per cent, the Sensex tumbled and the rupee fell. The New York Stock Exchange put a trading bar on the firm. Satyam’s clients are exiting, shareholder wealth has been wiped out and 53,000 employees are staring down the precipice. Two class action suits have been filed in the US against the company. All of this couldn’t have come at a worse time. India has been hit by global economic turmoil. The Mumbai terror strike has raised its risk profile for tourists and business. And now there’s the clear and present danger of domestic and overseas investors seeing India as a place where corporate governance is suspect. The resignation of Satyam’s self-confessed figure-fudger is, therefore, small consolation. The credibility of the entire Indian market is at stake. Going by global reactions, mud sticking on Satyam has tainted the corporate big league by association, at least for now. The IT-BPO sector, in particular, is under a cloud.
Admittedly, the world has had its share of corporate con-jobs. Enron apart, WorldCom, Xerox and Tyco were only some headline-grabbers. A 2007 study on fraud’s impact on international business by Kroll, the world’s leading risk consulting company, found that four of five global firms faced in-house malpractice and increased misuse of the very instruments deployed for overseas expansion. Kroll Global Fraud Report 2008 warned of “supply chain” shenanigans as companies globalised, outsourced and reworked business processes. But we can’t relativise Satyam’s criminal breach of trust by placing it in a global context. Corporate credibility is a foundational must for any emerging market economy pursuing high growth.
When fictitious cash balances get certified, it shows the need for investigators to go beyond the letter of the corporate conduct rule book. The Satyam scam isn’t about one individual’s machinations, though Raju deserves exemplary punishment. A fraud of this scale mandates collective responsibility. It is unlikely Satyam can redeem itself under the current management. Any probe must scan the role of the board of directors and of the Pricewaterhouse auditors who gave Satyam clean bills of financial and moral health whether through negligence or connivance. Recall that the A-grade accounting firm Arthur Andersen shared Enron’s disgrace. In Satyam’s case too, institutional checks and balances failed. To restore investor confidence, damage control must involve rapid-fire action against all involved.
A supporting cast enabled Raju’s rise to prominence. His closeness to powerful Andhra Pradesh politicians helped him gain legitimacy in business circles and even among policymakers. Former chief minister Chandrababu Naidu paraded Raju as the poster boy of Hyderabad’s IT business before visiting state heads including Bill Clinton. Naidu’s successor, Y Rajasekhara Reddy, backed Raju even after Satyam’s Maytas foray generated controversy. Did these leaders support Satyam for parochial reasons or is there more to it? They owe an explanation to citizens.
Financial mismanagement at Satyam reportedly began after its promoters began diverting funds from IT to real estate in Hyderabad. In July 2008, Maytas won the bid to construct the Hyderabad metro rail. The AP government backed it even after E Sreedharan of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), consultant to the Hyderabad metro, described the project as a real estate deal. It threatened to sue DMRC, which then walked out of the consultancy. In light of Raju’s confession, the project needs revisiting. The Satyam scam suggests a possible nexus between the political class and business groups, especially in land-related matters. Promise of high returns may have lured Satyam to shift from its core competence in IT to land deals. But it is unlikely Raju was the sole beneficiary. A detailed investigation into Maytas’s activities is necessary to expose the web of deceit that Satyam promoters and their political patrons spun around unsuspecting shareholders and clients.
When the full story comes to light, the lessons drawn must be learnt by corporate India. There is a general perception that government and the public sector have a structural tendency towards rent-seeking and venality. After Satyam, it appears the private sector may be tarred with the same brush. That can have a devastating impact on India’s future. India Inc needs to search its soul.

Things done right in 2008

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 07:08:00 +0000

Year 2008 was rough. It was a year where past excesses and lack of foresight led to perhaps the greatest recession in history; a year of reorganisation of world powers; and a year that ended in terrorist attacks on India that called into question the effectiveness and adequacy of our government, media, police and intelligence forces. The question stands--did we do anything right?

A fiscal cushion

The lack of foresight across the board--among economics experts down to the common man—is perhaps one of the most startling aspects of the global financial crisis. But taking a closer look at the Indian economy and the fiscal policies of the past year, it seems not everything was done in error or without prescience.

Ajit Ranade, Chief Economist with the Aditya Birla group, says the expansionary budget unveiled by then Finance Minister P. Chidambaram in February was a measure that helped stave off some of the crisis.

When Chidambaram announced the budget, it was called ‘populist’ and the BJP said it was a ‘recipe for long term economic disaster’. The budget increased expenditure targets on rural development and education, cancelled loans made to farmers, and offered tax relief to low-income groups.

But Ranade says the criticisms were off-target. “The expansionary fiscal spending had impact on rural purchasing power. No one anticipated what was coming, but in hindsight this looks like it helped us with the slowdown,” he says.

Chidambaram’s budget increased banks’ target loan disbursals to the agricultural sector by Rs. 2.8 trillion ($70.52 billion), and Rs. 160 billion were allocated for employment in rural areas. The health sector allowance increased by 15 percent to Rs. 165.34 billion.

The budget also raised taxes on short-term investments and brought the mutual fund industry under the tax service net. At the time, this hurt market sentiment.

However, looking back, the budget provided a fiscal cushion, says Ranade. “While there was a slowdown in global markets, domestic markets kept up some momentum. We have seen our second quarter GDP show 7.6 percent growth, which was higher than expected. The budget might have mitigated some of the effects and allowed for this growth.”

The realty bubble predicted

While much of the world seems caught by surprise by the popping of the real estate bubble, Ranade says the monetary policy and stance of the RBI proved to be in the right direction in terms of the real estate market.

In December 2007, RBI Deputy Governor, Rakesh Mohan, warned against the real estate bubble in his address at Yale University on India’s financial sector reforms. Mohan said that the elevated realty prices along with non-transparency in the real estate sector might lead to an “asset bubble” and pose risks to the banking system.

He also said that the backlog in housing, growing income, and more urbanisation meant a continued demand for housing and pressure on real estate prices over the next year. “Such developments can easily generate bubbles in the real estate market because of problems in the elasticity of supply and information asymmetries,” he warned.

Mohan didn’t just talk; the RBI did something about it.

Ranade says that the RBI started tightening their policies much earlier than other parts of the world. “The RBI warned against the real estate bubble two years by starting to increase the risk rate on commercial real estate loans. They also put a cap on excessive lending to real estate.”

The policies of the RBI may have also prevented the subprime crisis in India, says Ranade, which is a minimal category in this country compared to the US.

Shift towards a multi-polar world

At a time when the global community is critical of US’ excesses in Wall Street and there is talk of the dollar ceasing to be the dominant world currency, a radical reorganising of world power seems more likely.

This unexpected result of the meltdown may be something else 2008 did right. The G-20 summit in Washington in November to discuss the global financial crisis put India and China centre stage and gave the BRIC countries more of a say as the world powers recognised the need for a global coordinated response to the crisis. The multi-polar world America has dreaded since the end of the Cold War (Vice President Dick Cheney and former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz have repeatedly sworn to prevent it at all costs) seems to be in the not-too-distant future.

The United States National Intelligence Community survey of the world of 2025 in its report, “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World”, confirms this. The survey found that the US was losing dominance, and China and India were lining up to fill its shoes.

In addition to the G-20 summit and other achievements such as the nuclear deal, India has proved itself in 2008 by breaking records. In April India sent 10 satellites into orbit in a single launch, setting the new world record. And at the Olympics in Beijing it received its first gold medal.

With the collapse of established financial systems and the approaching departure of President Bush, records may not be India’s primary expression of clout. As the inflexibility and egotism of larger countries like the US tempers, India’s global role may continue to expand rapidly as it did at the G-20.

Yes, we can

The election of Barack Obama may be crucial to the way world powers reorganise themselves. Countries the world over are not unhappy about it. In an Economist magazine survey of an imaginary global electoral ballot, Obama got the world vote 9115 to 203.

While President Bush may have been more pro-India than any president in US history, most notably with the passage of the nuclear deal and his policies on outsourcing, Obama may prove just as favourable. While there were initial concerns about his views on outsourcing and his promise to intervene in Jammu and Kashmir, he has since toned down those pledges.

Shanthie Mariet D’Souza, Associate Fellow at the Institute of Defense Studies and Analyses, New Delhi, acknowledges that there have been problem areas, but says that with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, there will be better understanding of these issues.

D’Souza also thinks there will not be a drastic change from the previous administration. “We feel that the new Obama administration will understand the strategic issue in South Asia well because Obama is interested in balance of power. He talks of change from a unilateral policy to a multilateral one, including the stand on Iran and negotiation in Afghanistan, and we think he will work to achieve that.”

Obama’s foreign policy advisor, Wendy Sherman, has stressed the future president’s plans for an overhaul in the interface between the US and the rest of the world. “He is going to engage with the world…with smart diplomacy, strong alliances and really bring America’s moral authority back into the world,” she says.

D’Souza says that despite Bush’s pro-India policies, the Obama administration is a welcome change because of a badly-managed Bush administration. “Because Obama is open to different opinions, with intellectual curiosity to absorb different things, we think he can make real change. It’s both his team and vision he has.”

2009 will show whether Obama’s policies will be beneficial to India, and whether his pledges are bonafide. But judging the overwhelming global consensus in his favour, Obama’s victory may prove to be something America did right this year.

A mature reaction to cross-border terror

More than the election of a new American president, or the reports from intelligence agencies indicating a reorganization of global power, the recent terrorist attacks on Mumbai have shaken up the world. The attacks, which battered Indian nationals and Western visitors, have forced the West to take more than a cursory look at India.

Visits by Condoleeza Rice, and officials from the CIA, FBI and NYPD in response to the attacks illustrate the US’ understanding that a closer relationship with Pakistan than India may need to change.

But what has the Indian government done right in light of these attacks? Ashok K. Behuria, Research Fellow at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi, says the policy-makers have reacted in the best way they could.

While many Mumbaikars are angry about the government’s inaction thus far, Behuria says they have been right in advocating restraint. “The government is not doing nothing. They are discussing a lot of options right now: more coordination among security forces, and the possibility of a homeland security agency. Paranoia has set in, but the people at the policy making level have their heads in the right place.”

Devyani Srivastava, Research Officer at the New Delhi-based Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS), agrees. “The diplomatic reaction of the government displays a sort of maturity. They have been able to separate the terrorism issue with other aspects of the relationship of Pakistan and India, which is difficult.”

Many would take issue with this notion, but the next few weeks will prove if the government can present a coherent, effective response to the situation.

The nuclear deal: New-found power

However the policy-makers react to the attacks, one thing they have already achieved in 2008 is the passage of the US-India nuclear deal.

The bilateral agreement for nuclear cooperation between the two countries, exchanging the separation of civil and nuclear facilities in India for full civil nuclear cooperation from the US, was a landmark accord for India after years of being ostracized for not having signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The waiver by the Nuclear Supplier’s Group that followed, allowing India to access civilian nuclear technology, was crucial.

Dr. S. Chandrasekharan, Director of the South Asia Analysis Group, says, “We had hardly done 3,000 megawatts and now by 2020 we may achieve the 20,000 megawatts goal. As our economy grows at 8 or 9 percent, this added power is essential. We had the money and expertise, all we needed was the power from countries willing to give it to us, and now we have it.”

The benefits of the deal extend to newly shared facilities of commercial aircraft manufacture, ship building, factories for power plants, steel making plants, mining and drilling hardware, petroleum and petrochemical plant building facilities. The deal also means availability of the latest technology for nuclear power generation, as well as offshoot benefits for markets which are related to nuclear commerce. New business worth $100 billion for companies at home and abroad over the next decade has been estimated as a result of the deal.

Srivastava of the IPCS says the geopolitical effects of the deal have also been big. She cites the greatest benefit to be the confidence the deal generated about Indian diplomacy and its ability for negotiation.

Chandrasekharan says India has joined the international mainstream as a result of the deal. Experts say India will be less isolated, with a new voice in forums like the UN, WTO, and world monetary lending institutions. India may become a member of G-8. And there will be more frequent inter-government exchanges on matters of mutual interest.

But Chandrasekharan warns against being too optimistic. “It’s too early to say how this will change things. Nuclear power doesn’t come in a day. Of course the general economy will improve because it will sustain economic development. Now we are getting some of the energy needed but this doesn’t completely fill the need. We have to look into other sources of energy.”

The actions of the finance minister and the RBI, the G-20 summit and the election of a new American president, the response of the Indian government to terrorist attacks and the passage of an agreement for nuclear power—2008 may not have been all pandemonium and crisis. We may have done some things right, as a country, and as a world. But like the nuclear deal, it may be too early to tell.

(Elizabeth Flock is an associate reporter with the new business magazine to be launched by Network 18 in association with Forbes, USA. )

FWD: FWD: FWD: The e-war on terror

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:28:00 +0000

In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks on Mumbai, many citizens are feeling the need for community, and to do something. The December 3 rally at the Gateway was rife with slogans against politicians and calls for India to attack its enemies.
“Do we really believe that terrorist attacks can be prevented by citizens’ actions?’’ asks Shailesh Gandhi, who went from being a Mumbaibased RTI (right to information) activist to Central Information Commissioner in Delhi. Gandhi is convinced there’s no quick solution and that a citizen’s role is to improve the quality of governance. He says, “Every citizen has a stake in society. Normally we don’t recognise it, except for immediate concerns at maybe neighbourhood level, if that. We don’t bother whom the nation belongs to, except when there’s a cricket match.’’
Most Indians identify with a community in ethnic or religious terms, which is passive membership. Communities of choice, drawn together by a shared cause, are less common in urban middle-class culture.
Many are now seeking communities in the easiest place?online. Facebook groups have popped up like mushrooms in the monsoon. Some are discussing possible action, but others contain only news updates and opinions. Outraged emails are choking inboxes of those who haven’t set filters to delete anything with “FWD: Fwd: fw:’’ in the subject line. SMSes have been urging people to display symbols of mourning or forward a sarcastic joke until it reaches a certain politician.
Will all this frantic virtual activity amount to anything? Or is it just ‘slacktivism’, which lets people feel as though they’re making a difference without putting in much effort? Perhaps the most comforting thing about slacktivism is the heady illusion of effectiveness, as if thousands of mouse-clicks could clean up corruption, vanquish the enemy, feed starving families, or save polar bears from drowning in melting ice-caps. It does not require one to significantly alter a lifestyle that contributes to these problems, nor to take on the tedious task of making one’s government do specific things.
One volunteer notes with concern that his organisation’s website has 38 e-petitions on its campaigns page?a testimony to slacktivism’s growing popularity. However, e-petitions are ineffective, according to Barbara Mikkelson, who runs Snopes, one of the internet’s most trusted resources for debunking popular myths. Petitions usually fail as instruments of social change, she argues, because few even guarantee that anyone is collating the signatures and will deliver them to someone in a position to influence matters.
Nishank, a volunteer with the Association for India’s Development (AID), feels
e-petitions are at best a subset of public opinion, especially in India, where only about 5 per cent of people have internet access. He describes AID’s campaign to improve public transport in Gurgaon. The original plan was to get as many e-signatures as possible
and submit them to Haryana’s transport minister. But then, he says, volunteers decided to distribute pamphlets in different parts of Gurgaon and collect ink-on-paper signatures from people with no internet access who depended heavily on public transport. Mikkelson notes that paper petitions are more credible than virtual ones, because faking e-signatures is easy.
Mikkelson cautions that the more complex an issue, the more likely a petition will fail. Nishank underscores the need to be realistic. “Terrorism is a sensitive issue, whose solution requires expertise,’’ he points out. “When we talk of changing the system, we need to see where we stand, and how we can be instrumental at a pan-India level.’’
Gandhi emphasises that the problem is not just corrupt politicians, but also us and our inability to see the larger picture. “Why doesn’t it bother us that BMC schools are closing down? Why doesn’t it bother us that our government has downsized in the last 20 years, and a significant proportion of it is contract labour? What does it do to the quality of governance? Our political class is bad because we do not keep on questioning it.’’
The real work of improving one’s country is not exciting, but dull, Gandhi points out.
-Times News Network

Death Of A Salesman And Other Elite Ironies

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 04:16:00 +0000

TARUN J TEJPAL

ROHINTON MALOO was shot doing two things he enjoyed immensely. Eating good food and tossing new ideas. He was among the 13 diners at the Kandahar, Trident-Oberoi, who were marched out onto the service staircase, ostensibly as hostages. But the killers had nothing to bargain for. The answers to the big questions — Babri Masjid, Gujarat, Muslim persecution — were beyond the power of anyone to deliver neatly to the hotel lobby. The small ones — of money and materialism — their crazed indoctrination had already taken them well beyond. With the final banality of all fanaticism, flaunting the paradox of modern technology and medieval fervour — AK-47 in one hand; mobile phone in the other — the killers asked their minders, “Udan dein?” The minder, probably a maintainer of cold statistics, said, “Uda do.”

Rohinton caught seven bullets, and by the time his body was recovered, it could only be identified by the ring on his finger. Rohinton was just 48, with two teenage children, and a hundred plans. A few of these had to do with TEHELKA, where he was a strategic advisor for the last two years. As Indians, we seldom have a good word to say about the living, but in the dead we discover virtues that strain the imagination. Perhaps it has to do with a strange mix of driving envy and blinding piety. Let me just say Rohinton was charismatic, ambitious, and a man of his time, and place. The time was always now, and in his outstanding career in media marketing, he was ever at the cutting edge of the new — in the creation of Star Networks, and a score of ventures on the web. The place was always Mumbai, the city he grew up in and lived in, and he exemplified its attitudes: the hedonism, the get-go, the easy pluralism.

For me there is a deep irony in his death. He was killed by what he set very little store by. In his every meeting with us, he was bemused and baffled by TEHELKA’s obsessive engagement with politics. He was quite sure no one of his class — our class — was interested in the subject. Politics happened elsewhere, a regrettable business carried out by unsavoury characters. Mostly, it had nothing to do with our lives. Eventually, sitting through our political ranting, he came to grudgingly accept we may have some kind of a case. But he remained unconvinced of its commercial viability. Our kind of readers were interested in other things, which were germane to their lives — food, films, cricket, fashion, gizmos, television, health and the strategies of seduction. Politics, at best, was something they endured.

In the end, politics killed Rohinton, and a few hundred other innocents. In the final count, politics, every single day, is killing, impoverishing, starving, denigrating, millions of Indians all across the country. If the backdrop were not so heartbreaking, the spectacle of the nation’s elite — the keepers of most of our wealth and privilege — frothing on television screens and screaming through mobile phones would be amusing. They have been outraged because the enduring tragedy of India has suddenly arrived in their marbled precincts. The Taj, the Oberoi. We dine here. We sleep here. Is nothing sacrosanct in this country any more?

What the Indian elite is discovering today on the debris of fancy eateries is an acidic truth large numbers of ordinary Indians are forced to swallow every day. Children who die of malnutrition, farmers who commit suicide, dalits who are raped and massacred, tribals who are turfed out of centuryold habitats, peasants whose lands are taken over for car factories, minorities who are bludgeoned into paranoia — these, and many others, know that something is grossly wrong. The system does not work, the system is cruel, the system is unjust, the system exists to only serve those who run it. Crucially, what we, the elite, need to understand is that most of us are complicit in the system. In fact, chances are the more we have — of privilege and money — the more invested we are in the shoring up of an unfair state.

IT IS time each one of us understood that at the heart of every society is its politics. If the politics is third-rate, the condition of the society will be no better. For too many decades now, the elite of India has washed its hands off the country’s politics. Entire generations have grown up viewing it as a distasteful activity. In an astonishing perversion, the finest imaginative act of the last thousand years on the subcontinent, the creation and flowering of the idea of modern India through mass politics, has for the last 40 years been rendered infra dig, déclassé, uncool. Let us blame our parents, and let our children blame us, for not bequeathing onwards the sheer beauty of a collective vision, collective will, and collective action. In a word, politics: which, at its best, created the wonder of a liberal and democratic idea, and at its worst threatens to tear it down.

We stand faulted then in two ways. For turning our back on the collective endeavour; and for our passive embrace of the status quo. This is in equal parts due to selfish instinct and to shallow thinking. Since shining India is basically only about us getting an even greater share of the pie, we have been happy to buy its half-truths, and look away from the rest of the sordid story. Like all elites, historically, that have presided over the decline of their societies, we focus too much of our energy on acquiring and consuming, and too little on thinking and decoding. Egged on by a helium media, we exhaust ourselves through paroxysms over vacant celebrities and trivia, quite happy not to see what might cause us discomfort.

For years, it has been evident that we are a society being systematically hollowed out by inequality, corruption, bigotry and lack of justice. The planks of public discourse have increasingly been divisive, widening the faultlines of caste, language, religion, class, community and region. As the elite of the most complex society in the world, we have failed to see that we are ratcheted into an intricate framework, full of causal links, where one wrong word begets another, one horrific event leads to another. Where one man’s misery will eventually trigger another’s.

Let’s track one causal chain. The Congress creates Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale to neutralise the Akalis; Bhindranwale creates terrorism; Indira Gandhi moves against terrorism; terrorism assassinates Indira Gandhi; blameless Sikhs are slaughtered in Delhi; in the course of a decade, numberless innocents, militants, and securitymen die. Let’s track another. The BJP takes out an inflammatory rath yatra; inflamed kar sewaks pull down the Babri Masjid; riots ensue; vengeful Muslims trigger Mumbai blasts; 10 years later a bogey of kar sewaks is burnt in Gujarat; in the next week 2,000 Muslims are slaughtered; six years later retaliatory violence continues. Let’s track one more. In the early 1940s, in the midst of the freedom movement, patrician Muslims demand a separate homeland; Mahatma Gandhi opposes it; the British support it; Partition ensues; a million people are slaughtered; four wars follow; two countries drain each other through rhetoric and poison; nuclear arsenals are built; hotels in Mumbai are attacked.

IN EACH of these rough causal chains, there is one thing in common. Their origin in the decisions of the elite. Interlaced with numberless lines of potential divisiveness, the India framework is highly delicate and complicated. It is critical for the elite to understand the framework, and its role in it. The elite has its hands on the levers of capital, influence and privilege. It can fix the framework. It has much to give, and it must give generously. The mass, with nothing in its hands, nothing to give, can out of frustration and anger, only pull it all down. And when the volcano blows, rich and poor burn alike.

And so what should we be doing? Well, screaming at politicians is certainly not political engagement. And airy socialites demanding the carpet-bombing of Pakistan and the boycott of taxes are plain absurd, just another neon sign advertising shallow thought. It’s the kind of dumb public theatre the media ought to deftly side-step rather than showcase. The world is already over-shrill with animus: we need to tone it down, not add to it. Pakistan is itself badly damaged by the flawed politics at its heart. It needs help, not bombing. Just remember, when hardboiled bureaucrats clench their teeth, little children die.

Most of the shouting of the last few days is little more than personal catharsis through public venting. The fact is the politician has been doing what we have been doing, and as an über Indian he has been doing it much better. Watching out for himself, cornering maximum resource, and turning away from the challenge of the greater good.

The first thing we need to do is to square up to the truth. Acknowledge the fact that we have made a fair shambles of the project of nation-building. Fifty million Indians doing well does not for a great India make, given that 500 million are grovelling to survive. Sixty years after independence, it can safely be said that India’s political leadership — and the nation’s elite — have badly let down the country’s dispossessed and wretched. If you care to look, India today is heartbreak hotel, where infants die like flies, and equal opportunity is a cruel mirage.

Let’s be clear we are not in a crisis because the Taj hotel was gutted. We are in a crisis because six years after 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in Gujarat there is still no sign of justice. This is the second thing the elite need to understand — after the obscenity of gross inequality. The plinth of every society — since the beginning of Man — has been set on the notion of justice. You cannot light candles for just those of your class and creed. You have to strike a blow for every wronged citizen.

And let no one tell us we need more laws. We need men to implement those that we have. Today all our institutions and processes are failing us. We have compromised each of them on their values, their robustness, their vision and their sense of fairplay. Now, at every crucial juncture we depend on random acts of individual excellence and courage to save the day. Great systems, triumphant societies, are veined with ladders of inspiration. Electrified by those above them, men strive to do their very best. Look around. How many constables, head constables, sub-inspectors would risk their lives for the dishonest, weak men they serve, who in turn serve even more compromised masters?

I wish Rohinton had survived the lottery of death in Mumbai last week. In an instant, he would have understood what we always went on about. India’s crying need is not economic tinkering or social engineering. It is a political overhaul, a political cleansing. As it once did to create a free nation, India’s elite should start getting its hands dirty so they can get a clean country.

Why It Won’t Happen in India

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:39:00 +0000

Ashutosh Varshney

On January 20, when Barack Obama is formally inaugurated as president, the US will have a tryst with destiny. As famously defined by Jawaharlal Nehru, a national tryst with destiny is “a moment...when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance”.
Scholars of nationalism agree that the US was founded upon an ideology, not ethnicity or race. The ideology was contained in the Declaration of Independence of 1776. “We hold these truths to be self-evident”, it said, “that all men are created equal”. Europe, the Old World, was horribly tied up in feudal hierarchies.The New World would have political and social equality at its core. As a corollary, rising from below became the socalled American dream. In reality, however, the US has not fully lived up to this ideal. Indeed, the creed of political equality came entwined with a founding ambiguity. The founders did not abolish slavery, an institution diametrically opposed to equality.
This original ambiguity has haunted the US. The election of Obama as president liberates America from its basic contradiction. It is a shining moment in the historical journey of American nationhood and a landmark moment for world history. No society has yet elected someone from its deepest subaltern trenches to the highest office of the nation. Obama is not a slave’s descendant, but he is African-American. It should be no surprise that an international debate about whether other nations can produce an Obama has begun. The debate in India, too, has been vigorous. Can Mayawati become India’s Obama? Can a Muslim be elected India’s prime minister?
A Muslim PM would, indeed, be a celebratory landmark for Indian secularism, but that is not an exact comparison. No community of India has suffered more than the nation’s Dalits. Muslims have historically had a dualistic structure: a ruling class and an aristocracy on one side and a vast mass of poor on the other side. In significant ways, that dualism continues to this day: the Azim Premjis and Shah Rukh Khans on the one hand, and the teeming millions on the other. In contrast, no film and sports stars or business leaders have come from the Dalit community. Though not enslaved, at least in modern times, Dalits, much like the African-Americans, have been segregated, stamped upon, and treated shabbily. India also has a founding ambiguity. Our Constitution abolished untouchability, but it is still widely practised. A Dalit PM would constitute a true parallel to the election of Obama.
Can India produce an Obama? Three great differences between India and the US make it unlikely. First, party establishments cannot easily be challenged until there are open
intra-party elections for the leadership of political parties. American elections start with the primaries, allowing anyone in a political party to stake a claim to leadership. Lacking internal elections, India’s parties today are on the whole family properties. The partial exceptions are the BJP and CPM. But the BJP cannot easily have a leader not approved by the RSS. And the CPM is ruled by an unelected politburo.
The Congress was historically based on internal elections, but with the exception of a feeble attempt in the 1990s, internal elections, suspended by Indira Gandhi in 1973, have not been restored. The institutional decay of India’s political parties means that rank outsiders, like Mayawati, tend to create new political parties, but it is well known that it is much harder to create a new nationwide political organisation than use an existing one. The competition between political parties in India is remarkably vigorous, but competition inside is its exact opposite.
Second, the US has a presidential system, India a parliamentary one. Since a US president is elected by the whole nation, a presidential system creates a national political arena. Every presidential candidate has to think of how to lead the nation. In a parliamentary system, the electorate votes for an MP, but there is no national election for the PM. Only when a parliamentary system has two (or three) nationwide parties, as in the UK, do political leaders tend to compete the way American presidential candidates do. India does not have a two-party system.
Third, to mobilise citizens for vote, one has to speak in a language that the citizens can understand. Political campaigns take place in a linguistic register. Until India becomes more or less fully literate and also bilingual, India’s primary political arenas will be linguistically diverse provincial units. As a result, state-level Obamas will emerge, but national-level Obamas will be extremely hard to come by. Mayawati is at best a provincial Obama, with one major difference. Obama never ran a campaign of bitterness and anger; he subscribed to post-racial politics. In contrast, before the current Brahmin-Dalit brotherhood phase began, Mayawati conflated the politics of dignity with the politics of revenge.
Only movement politics, aimed at putting the various communities together, can tear down India’s institutional constraints. The freedom movement was the last great movement that built unity in India. It produced impressive national political leaders. The JP movement in the 1970s presented an alternative version of national unity, but it could not really take off. The Advani-led rath yatra was also one of the biggest movements of 20th century India. But it did not unite; it only divided. Until such time as India’s political parties become more internally democratic, a national level two-party system emerges, or strong movements of national unity come to the scene, India’s national leaders will continue to come from party establishments, not from the lower reaches of society.
The writer, a professor of political science, will shortly join Brown University.

Wisdom of Nehru's middle path

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:04:00 +0000

November 14, 2008
Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.'

This is how Nehru, the builder of modern India addressed the nation on the eve of Independence in 1947. Six decades later it is good to look back and see whether these dreams have been on the right track.

One cannot help remembering these prophetic words when Chandrayaan I took off on October 22. It is a tribute to Nehru on his birth anniversary today that we pay homage to this great Indian.

After centuries of invasions and internal turmoil, the last occupation of undivided India was by the British. It lasted for nearly a century before the non violent struggle of Gandhi brought it to an end, though with great pain of the partition of the country.

However the British left a legacy in terms of a well connected railway system, the English language in a country of 17 different languages and encouraged the study of science, however limited it was.

It is notable that the country's only Nobel Prize winner in Science (Physics) was C V Raman in 1930 for his work in light scattering which forms the basis of lasers; and Rabindranath Tagore in Literature in 1913 -- both in pre-independent India.

In post independent India, Amartya Sen was awarded for Economics in 1998.

Jawaharlal Nehru trained in Oxford but was influenced by the then Soviet model of industrial development. He was an active participant in the freedom struggle. Prior to achieving Independence, he already had formed a vision for the country's development and passionately believed that science was the only way to eliminate poverty in India.

Thus soon after the now famous 'Tryst with Destiny' speech in 1947, he embarked on an economic policy which many economists now believe laid the firm foundation for liberalisation in the 1990s.

It was socialistic in name but left enough space for the private sector. The commanding heights of the economy like the railways, steel and heavy machine building industry, and the power industry were all in the public sector with meaningful technical collaborations with the West and also the then Soviet Union.

The conditions of collaboration were that there must be a transfer of technology and not just turn key operations as were implemented in some other developing countries. The latter model would have left the country in a big mess since the country did not have the requisite science and technology manpower at that time.

It is important to keep this in mind as we conduct our science and technology ventures after the nuclear deal.

The planned investments in science and technology that the country made through the establishment of a chain of research laboratories as well as the starting of IITs with foreign help including the US took nearly two, three decades to have some effect in generating scientific and technical manpower of a critical size.

Thus, when IBM and Coca-Cola had to leave the country in the late 1970s, the Indian management and technical skill set quickly filled the gap. The country adopted a pro- business approach to development in 1980 under Indira Gandhi and then Rajiv Gandhi.

This is an essential prerequisite for any country to prosper as an economic power. Visionaries like Homi Bhabha and his successors helped shape the atomic energy programme and laid the seeds of the electronic revolution. Vikram Sarabhai laid the foundation of the space industry.

In education, the influence of President John F Kennedy and Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith left a lasting legacy in terms of unleashing the computer revolution in India through the then advanced IBM 1620 at IIT Kanpur in 1963.

The IT manpower generated through this had a large multiplier effect which is now there for all to see.

Much as she is criticised for other things, Indira Gandhi in the late 1960s and 1970s left her own imprint on modern India. The nationalisation of banks and the insurance sector resulted in making those services available in rural India.

In the context of the current global crisis and the choices before the US, one can see the wisdom of a Nehru who chose the middle path in 1947. The fruits of the Green, Milk and Telecom revolution are there for all to see.

If properly harnessed, the fruits of both the Internet and space revolution can change the rural landscape. These activities would not have happened if the country had embarked on liberalisation in the first four decades after Independence. Computerisation in all sectors of the economy had fierce opposition from the labour unions and being a democracy it took time for it to be accepted by all.

The 21st century saw the maturing of India in terms of developing world class managerial skill set through the schools of management which paved the way for a smooth transition to globalisation.

A sustained 7 to 9 per cent growth was now possible and for many, a college education with exposure to IT is now a passport for a good job. This has never happened in India since 1947.

India now has a great demographic advantage in having half the population in the 25+ age bracket. The so-called brain drain of the 1960s and 1970s is now reversing. The economic fundamentals that were laid out in the first four decades which many dub as the period of 'Hindu' rate of growth paid off ultimately and the country is now well poised to being an economic power in its own right.

Hence, it is easy to understand why there is a 300 million strong middle class with disposable income. The almost exponential growth in cell phones and mobile technology is set to change the face of rural India. IT is now poised for the next phase of growth in terms of innovation, thus climbing the value chain. The country needs to move beyond IT in the realm of mathematics and computer science and nurture future Ramanujans.

In some sense India offers a text book case of development for a poor country. India had the good fortune of a secular and democratic Constitution similar to the US and with those attributes progress at times, seems slow. In the long run it is worth the effort. Gender equality as well as inclusiveness of low income people is aggressively pursued.

There are, however, many sectors particularly the infrastructure like water, health, electricity, roads and education which are in a sorry state of affairs.

These are the areas where the country needs committed leadership and vision to implement. The private sector must be involved in a major way. For example in the power sector it is time to examine whether the state electricity boards in spite of the reforms are doing an adequate job.

It is time to privatise the government-managed power sector. Institutions like the Bharat Heavy Electricals [Get Quote] etc have proved equal to the task. For a country which is one third the size of US and has 1 billion people, there is no place to grow except vertically for which we need reliable electric power to operate elevators, pumps etc.

Renewable technologies have a place, but not to the exclusion of grid power with efficient power plants with a minimum of theft and electrical losses. The nuclear deal is not a solution for the next 10 to 15 years.

The state of education is in disarray. At the primary level privately managed schools with a secular outlook must be encouraged and perhaps supported by the government. At the higher education level the quota crisis has distorted the picture greatly. The poorer sections of the society are still left out.

The whole range of infrastructure issues needs attention by competent people as in the days after Independence. There in lies the challenge of today and tomorrow.

M A Pai is Professor Emeritus, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Anatomy of crisis

noreply@blogger.com (shibin) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 03:58:00 +0000

If your palms start to sweat whenever you see the business headlines or flip to a business channel, you might draw solace from the fact you share these symptoms with millions. Investors across the world are in a state of absolute panic. As they dump risky assets like shares and rush to safe havens like gold and government bonds, stock markets and currencies across the world keep falling.
The origins of today’s crisis can be traced back to mid-2007 when three things became clear. One, low income or sub-prime US households that had borrowed heavily from banks and finance companies to buy homes were defaulting heavily on their debt obligations. Two, the size of this sub-prime housing loan market was huge at about $1.4 trillion. Three, Wall Street’s financial engineers had packaged these loans into really complicated financial instruments called CDOs (collateralized debt obligations). American and European banks had invested heavily in these products. However, no amount of financial engineering could protect investors from one simple and irrefutable principle—if these housing loans turned ‘bad’, the instruments that were based on these loans would lose value. CDO prices started plummeting as defaults on US home loans rose. Falling prices dented banks’ investment portfolios and these losses destroyed banks’ capital. The complexity of these instruments meant that no one was too sure either about how big these losses were or which banks had been hit the hardest.
Banks usually never hold the exact amount of cash that they need to disburse as credit. The ‘inter-bank’ market performs this critical role of bringing cash-surplus and cash-deficit banks together and lubricates the process of credit delivery to companies (for working capital and capacity creation) and consumers (for buying cars, white goods etc). As the housing loan crisis intensified, banks grew increasingly suspicious about each other’s solvency and ability to honour commitments. The inter-bank market shrank as a result and this began to hurt the flow of funds to the ‘real’ economy.
To cut a long story short, today’s financial crisis is the culmination of these problems in the global banking system. Inter-bank markets across the world have frozen over. Indian banks are in the middle of a severe cash crunch. Wall Street blue-chips like Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch have been acquired by other more ‘solvent’ banks at bargain-basement prices. Lehman Brothers, which had survived every major upheaval for the past 158 years, went bust. Panic begets panic and as the loan market went into a tailspin, it sucked other markets into its centrifuge. The meltdown in stock markets across the world is a victim of this contagion.
Some questions need answers at this stage. Why are the sensex and the rupee getting hurt so badly by the woes of the American and European banks? Their presence in India is minuscule compared to the nationalized banks or the bigger private banks. A glance at Indian banks’ balance sheets will show that their exposure to complex instruments like CDOs is almost nil.
A word, ‘globalization’, and a phrase, ‘risk aversion’, should explain why India has not been spared the contagion of the US and European banking crisis. Global investors are seriously concerned about the prospect of a great upheaval, if not a complete collapse in the banking system in the developed world. This, they fear, would affect all financial transactions in the near term. Going forward, this disruption could trigger a global recession (that is about 3% growth in 2009 for all economies put together). Agencies like the International Monetary Fund have endorsed this view.
The upshot is that the global investment community has become extremely riskaverse. They are pulling out of assets that are even remotely considered risky and buying things traditionally considered safe—gold, government bonds and bank deposits (in banks that are still considered solvent). Emerging markets like India have over the last few years offered spectacular returns but have always been considered ‘risky’. It is not surprising that they have got the short shrift in the flight to safe haven.
Does India deserve to be treated differently? Are we the victim of irrational ‘herd’ behaviour where differences across economies are getting blurred in this mad rush to safety? Yes and no. It is true that our economy depends more on domestic rather than external drivers, a fact that we keep touting endlessly. However, it is also true that we have embraced ‘globalization’ fairly enthusiastically over the past decade-and-a-half.
This, from an economic perspective, means two things. For one, we depend more on external markets to sell our goods and services. In 1995-96, for instance, we sold 9.1% of our goods abroad. In 2007-08, we sold 13.5% of our goods to foreign buyers. It also means that we depend more on external funds to support our growth. 7% growth target realistic
In the last fiscal year alone, we borrowed $29 billion from foreign lenders and got $34 billion of foreign direct investment. A global recession would hurt external demand. ‘Risk-aversion’ among international lenders could limit access to international capital. Both India’s financial markets and the real economy will be hurt in the process. The 9% growth target doesn’t seem that ‘doable’ any more; we should be happy to clock 7% this fiscal year and the next.
The sell-off in the stock markets is not entirely the effect of global contagion. To a degree, it reflects anxieties about our prospects of future growth. The blood-letting in the financial markets is unlikely to stop soon. Governments and central banks (the RBI’s counterparts) are trying every trick in the book to stabilize the markets. They have pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into their money markets to try and unfreeze their interbank and credit markets. Large financial entities have been nationalized. The US government has set aside $700 billion to buy the ‘toxic’ assets like CDOs that sparked off the crisis. Central banks have got together to co-ordinate cuts in interest rates. None of this has stabilized the global markets. Thus, it is impossible to predict when the haemorrhage will stop and what will stem it. That said, history tells us that financial crises end as suddenly as they start. I would not be surprised if by early next year, the worst of the mayhem is over. The wounds that it leaves behind could take longer to heal.