More Bits and Pieces...

1. That Indians abroad, especially engineers suffer from a condition known as Technofetishism or Technonationalism is easily noted.
Nations and individuals who suffer from it tend to believe that skills to decipher the most complex differential equations and write lengthy and complicated computer code arewhat matter most in a nation's progress.
Indulgence in self-praise as a group and ridiculing the natives' skills at arithmetic is a worser symptom of this malaise. An unassailable belief that these skills will take them to the summit of success is another.
While mathematical skills are very handy, I can't help thinking that the importance of these skills is overestimated, especially in the business world where a majority of these Indians want to make a mark.

My views remain a minority, especially in this bunch.

Luckily for me, there is some support from Amar Bhide's paper which argues that good managers are atleast as important science and engineering graduates and that America's venturesome consumers egged on by these managers are a strong reason for the nation's progress.
And good managers can come just as much from Anthropology, Psychology and English degrees as they can from Maths, Engineering and Science degrees.

2. A friday evening at Smollensky's in Canary Wharf saw me run into a bunch of affable Farsis who had lived in Sweden all their lives as their parents left behind the Mullahs.
And they had a similar story to tell - That you are nobody in Iran unless you are a doctor or an engineer.
And how people wondered how sitting behind a counter handing slips to customers pays so much in London, for bankers get paid nothing in Tehran!

3. Talking of Canary Wharf, that's where I spend most of my weekdays - courtesy of my first full time job- Lehman brothers, London

References:
1. Amar Bhide, Venturesome Consumption, Innovation and Globalisation, CESifo and Centre on Capitalism and Society Conference, July 21-22, Venice.
2. Technonationalism and Technofetishism by Ostry and Nelson, the Brookings Institution.
2. Economics Focus, The Economist, July 29- Aug 4 2006.

On Why These Reservation Protests Make Little Sense.

Do you think the students below would want swap their lives with the people above?

(*Hint: Those above get reservations!)

Whom would you rather be?

The students in the picture seem to think they are going to be worse off than those in picture above if the new reservation legislation comes about.

Their arguments,
1. The 'Quality' of students is going to detiororate, if you fix a percentage of seats in the country's best institutions.
2. They are going to have fewer seats and fewer jobs if the legislation comes about.

The second argument's rather selfish, if they are going to say they are worse off, then those from the 'Backward' castes can say the same thing if the lawmakers decide against.
Moreover, the 'backward' castes, represented poorly in the private sector and in the country's top educational institutions, have a more legitimate claim.

So that leaves us with argument no. 1,
'Quality' is going to detiororate, let's take that to be true, so let's say the reservation doesn't go through on these grounds, who benefits?
The 'upper' castes, simply because they are going to take a disproportionately large share of the benefits that accrue from economic growth.
So that's two self serving arguments that claim to act for the nations' sake.

Reservations need to be opposed because they fail and their failure is pretty evident thanks to a small number of 'backward' caste beneficiaries taking a big chunk of the benefits.
Incentives that make improving the status of the backward castes a national priority by including private sector firms, schools, universities are likely to bring more change than half hearted attempts by India's lethargic bureaucracy.
These could include -
1. Tax cuts for companies that have diverse caste populations
2. More govt funding for those schools that follow population patterns in castes and incentives for top city schools to take students from villages and backward castes such as vouchers, tax cuts etc etc.
3. Lumpsum payments for girls who complete class X, Class XII, and Intermediate and University.
4. University admission policies can be altered as the IIMs seem to do to take in more girls, Backward castes can be accommodated without a strict rule for 49% or whatever.
5. More scholarships and funding for backward caste students.

Obsolete best describes the nature of the protests today, with old ideas from the unsuccessful Mandal protests passing through high tech communication networks .

The angry young man is passe', they don't even make movies like that these days.

No anti-reservation protest can be complete without a recognition that more needs to be done for the 'backward' castes. That's why the current protests are bound to fail.

Pictures: (Anti reservation protest online e-mail campaign, conservationtech.com )

Pray for a good Husband..

I am going to get married at 21, as soon as I graduate. The sooner the better my parents say. And they have started searching too. Occasionally, they send me photographs of rich, attractive young men in USA, UK and Australia which I share with my friends at college, who of course can't hide their excitement!
My Dad can afford it, he's been doing well, accumulating quite a sum of money over the decade to get me the best possible groom.
Getting a good groom is very difficult if you don't have that kind of cash.
A cousin of mine working in London wants a crore! And I can't really guarantee he's a good groom either.
And let me tell you that you cannot underestimate the importance of money. Why, my other cousin, not so rich, had to to get married to an unemployed chap in India and guess what? He didn't come cheap either. 4 acres of prime irrigated land, that's what he cost.

But money's not everything. A husband must be nice and caring. We hear so many stories of women who spend long hours confined to home and housework, some are married to frauds, some others to incapable men and lots more to difficult men.

Another cousin of mine, (Indians have lots of cousins and big families!) had to get a divorce. When she got married, everyone thought she was very lucky but it was not to be.
The chap was working in Silicon valley and made a fortune, but she found out that he did not really need a wife, he only needed someone to cook and clean.

My mother says it's all in one's destiny. There's nothing one can do but accept, she says, but we must try our best to get the best possible groom. And predictably she adds, Look at me and your Dad!

I can only wait and see how my arranged marriage goes. If my destiny's good, I can study for a Masters, work hard and earn my money and freedom.
If it isn't, I just have to wait until we have a child and children need so much attention that I can hardly think about my own troubles then. And after they grow up, I'll be too old to bother about any of my ambitions.
If you have got really high ambitions that you are not sure are too realistic, I have a suggestion - have children, and off go your ambitions, and with them your troubles.

But before that I need to look at some more photographs and pass some interviews,
fingers crossed until then.
Wish me luck.

So you want to be a politician ?

By any measure, India needs lots and lots of scrupulous politicians today.
And people seem to have started noticing, wanting to become an MLA/MP is, refreshingly, not so rare an ambition among fresh graduates as it was.
Given the high demand and low supply, a good elected representative can expect to get a lot - A lot of goodwill, popularity and some money to go with it.
And a lot of chaps from India's elite colleges seem to be up for it. For chaps from the IITs and IIMs with whose infinitely stretching career horizons I tend to be familiar with, the standard route's as follows -
1. Get a foreign degree to get credibility,
2. Make some/lots of money working for a few years/starting something,
3. Hit the road running ten odd years from graduation.
And voila! You are going to be there, waving your V for victory to the crowds!

The ambition is noteworthy, but it stops short of being noble if it has no clue about what changes you want to bring about. And if it's a career as a politician that you fancy more than bringing about a few changes that you really want to bringabout, rest assured that you are in low demand. We've got loads of those already.

Well, you might say, you know that the chaps around now are pretty bad, and that you are better and that's all that counts. (given that you went into an IIT/IIM and your major readings were Tom Clancys and Robert Ludlums and the Econ times now and then and of course, your leadership has been proven time and again organizing pop/rock shows)

If you have won an election at college before, that's great too but the real difficulties begin much later.
I quote a few to give an idea of the monumental task that lies ahead.
1. After Tehelka exposed the corruption in the defence ministry and the Army, the following happened
a)The Judicial commission had a retired judge to look into the motives of those who published the news ie Tehelka's journalists etc.
b) Income tax inspectors raided Tehelka's offices.
c) First Global, Tehelka's biggest investor, had its licence to trade cancelled by SEBI and all its offices except one were shut.

2. The Neta Babu raj, commonly used to talk about the nexus between the bureaucrats and the politicians, takes in on average 60% of all government expenditure meant for rural development. Given the size of India's bureacracy that's a lot of people who'll see their income cut and leisure taken away - Not really good , if they include teachers and other government officials who man polling booths.
As some distiguished lawyer remarked, " It takes a superhuman effort to keep India poor and that effort is made by the government servants.

3. And lots of things that can only be summed up in one word - a big mess.
And these include reservations for backward castes, farmer suicides, water shortages, pollution among others.

It would be a good idea to get started atleast on one of these problems, there's a long way to got and lots of things to do unless you are happy with one small appearance in the big and long Indian political theatre.

Only competition makes this class.

1. Self Esteem: Can soon become non-existent, if it depends on just outcomes.

2. Competition: Can destroy 1 above.

As a student in the computer science programme at IIT Madras, I was of the strong opinion that most people in the class were a bit off the usual. Well, they were expected to be, you might say, all of them had to make it through a gruelling examination and come out on top or do very well in the first semester at college. But they are different in a different sort of way as the "winners"/victims of excessive competition are likely to be.

If you do run into one of the guys (girls, luckily seem to be above all this), and cannot see the Halo around their heads, which other competitive individuals aware of their achievements do, consider yourself rather unlucky.
For most of them will strike you as merely usually slightly eccentric, some outrightly so and as a general interesting aside - ordinary looking :) (unlike what's expected as some people who've never been to the IITs but only heard of their 'magnificence' say)

Well, before someone says, speak for yourself,

Being a member of this class, I must admit to my own eccentricities too, the major one - an obsession with competition that seems to need tremendous soul searching to get rid of.

And various less important others (provided solely for entertainment below!) such as:
1. Searching for free stuff on gumtree.com and good bargains on ebay when I don't really need anything.
2. Going through blogs and websites (esp. rediff.com and econtimes.com, given) even when I know there's never going to be anything useful there
3. And a general absent-mindedness which makes sure i pocket any bunch of keys i find much to the consternation of their owners, and keep banana peels in my schoolbag for weeks to keep London clean and make biomanure in the front pouch.

But my most severe symptoms used to be the following,
1. A general mistrust of people especially if they could be competition. So I would never trust you if you told me you lost the book I wanted to borrow from you.
2. An obsessive curiosity about who's doing what, even if they have no relation to what I am going to do.
3. And my most worrying one - An association of self esteem to achievement and thus, outcomes, which is most worrying.

No 3 is a classic case, the university you get into for postgrad, the job you get after that, and perhaps the pay are all potential 'uplift'ers/destroyers of self esteem.
Given the number of desired jobs there are and the number of people who want them, it is likely that they destroy than uplift for most.

And the fourth year at college and the past few placement seasons at the IIMs were fantastic windows for observation.
From those who did not get into the universities(the IIMs included) they wanted when everybody else around them was to
Those who couldn't get the company or the pay they wanted to maintain their current self esteem at the IIMs and find it extremely difficult to mail friends, talk to relatives, classmates and colleagues, and these days, post blogs or scraps,
All of them are all classic examples of people who manage to get by in, what anthropologist Jules Henry put as, “a competitive culture endures by tearing people down."

History? Depends on who's writing it.

Rewriting history textbooks is a nice pastime, especially for those self-declared "preserve our culture and tradition" types. These types generally dwell on foreign lands that guarantee political equality, ie USA, Europe etc.
Distance, they say, breeds attachment. So Indian culture and tradition are suddenly more important than they ever were before crossing the border.
And as a yiddish proverb goes, "if you are a rich man, you also look good and write well", good finances are enough to make experts on Indian culture and its history.

So with enough money in the bank, close to retirement, nothing much to do except reading some partisan version of the Vedas, what do they choose to do ? - Join a Hindu society and lobby to change history or fund those who will change it at home in India, to put it rather bluntly.

And what happens to all of us, poor and rich families alike in India, indifferent to these changes ?

Before we know it, our children (and probably us, if we did not pay too much attention to history at school) are going to be learning that the Vedas are full of mathematics and science, that the Indus valley civilization is actually the very Hindu Indus-Saraswathi civilization,
Nor will you find a mention of Nathuram Godse and his membership in the RSS if you happen to forget the assassin of Gandhi.
( See "On Inventing the Past", The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen, if Prof Sen is to be believed)

Given the more urgent needs of poverty and other growing pains of development, one does not expect any but the reasonably well off to bother about this 'rewriting' of history.

Even for most of this bunch, all that matters is that their children score well in the final examination, how do a few lines changed here or there matter anyway?

History is just another exam.

After all, If they do well then they can go to America, earn money and maybe make their "mark" on Indian history too!

For more on Hindu nationalist revisionists,
http://abcnews.go.com/International/CSM/story?id=1534056
and an older reference to it on The Hindu, a national newspaper
http://www.hinduonnet.com/2002/03/25/stories/2002032500041000.htm

Bits and Pieces.

Once again, it's that time of the year, when the exams are near, when the ink that runs the blog threatens to dry out excusing itself for other troubles one's mind has to go through.

So all I can do is submit yet another patchwork of some unrelated pieces of my writing,

1. Life at College's coming to an end, atleast for now. Things that I can no more have:
a) Lectures in the Old and New Theatres, eating at the Brunch Bowl and the Wright's Bar
b) Eating out at the GBKs, Masala Zones and Pizza Expresses/Huts before catching a movie at Prince Charles Cinema, Odeon or Vue whenever i please
c) Footloose and fancy trips to England's countryside, the lake district , Scotland or Belgium or the Netherlands on shoestring budgets.
d) Catching that fantastic view of London over Waterloo Bridge at night.

And things to look forward to: ?
a) A daily 12 hr grind from 8 to 8.
b) Sandwiches for lunch on the desk, may be innumerable trips to bring breakfast, tea and lunch?
c) A nice home to get back to, perhaps and a lot more stuff that's affordable, only there's no time to enjoy it perhaps.
d) Minute-to-minute checks to see how much money I have accumulated so far?

2. To imagine life as a highly paid sales guy who has to sell to people born with gold nappies under their bums is not entirely pleasing.
Atleast that's what I picked up from the movie Syriana, even as rich Sheiks with no semblance of intelligence get, by simply being born, what most people have to work their entire lives to get.

3. It's bumper time, atleast for Indian graduates in the US and those at the IIMs. Nonetheless there will always be a few gloomy faces - especially those who would bet their lives that the frightening CGPA is the most foolproof predictor of future success.
(9 pointer Elec/CS toppers, average 8 pointers, lowly seven pointers, Cul Secs and Not-even-Sac Secs find themselves in the same boat, with similar pay in similar firms - so what decides who comes out on top ? I don't know but I can safely bet that it won't be the CGPA.)

True, High CGPA indicates a drive among young men not very common, but those in the middle ranges cannot count on a number printed on a sheet of paper to take them through the cut-throat concrete jungle that business districts in the world's prominent centres have become.
Nor are those numbers going to assure smooth sailing in academia, not with the politics professors have to play to stay in the game these days.

4. Coming back to the CGPA, nothing haunts the average male IITian more than a question about that feared number.
"Why is your JEE rank not correlated to your CGPA" is a common question that these hapless victims face, that I feel compelled to suggest, " Why was your JEE rank not as great as your CGPA then " as a reply to the chap who asks that question.
For such a question can only come from someone so insecure not just about one number but two(his JEE rank!) that he is adopting a time tested strategy of searching for security by fishing for people with lower CGs and pointing it out to them!
Moral-of-the-story : If you want to sell something to an IITian (These chaps tend to have big paychecks,unfortunately not always big hearts as is always the case with this kind of people - see 3 above) start with anything but the CGPA, starting on hostel life is a good bet.

5. As for the rest, I am doing fine and will be in India in June to seek your blessings whereupon I know i will be asked my grades and my pay converted to the highest possible exchange rate - I will however resist until early July after which I shall take leave to return to my 8am-8pm paradise.

PS: If No. 1 sounded like one of those stereotypical write-ups romanticizing foreign places to which most readers haven't been to, while ignoring similarsights at home, it was not meant to be.
I must say it's only true that the view over Waterloo Bridge is indeed wonderful, and so is the view over Tank Bund in Hyderabad, only I have not seen it with as much intensity as Waterloo, which i see twice a day everyday.
If that sounded apologetic, it wasn't meant to be. Bah! One of thse post scripts that leaves you with a tinge of dissatisfaction, I must say:)

Kulturbrille : Glasses you should not always need.

The world seems to be ready to go up in flames anytime now if the global intolerance on display today is any indication. And we seem to be happy to see the sparks disappear, not realizing that burning embers can still start a fire.
Which makes me think if a lack of understanding of 'culture' is what it is all about. Perhaps, an understanding of modern anthropology might help, especially of the work of Franz Boas, a German Jew who migrated to the US in those heydays of intolerance.

Nothing is more striking than the idea of 'Kulturbrille', literally culture glasses. These are glasses that you and I wear depending on where we come from and how we are brought up.
These lenses help us perceive the world around us and interpret the meaning of our lives, thus providing a tinted vision of the world, which we take to be absolute if we are not aware of it.

To quote a typical example from Anthropology to illustrate Kulturbrille (Monaghan and Just)

Let's see how a traditional Hindu and a member of the Dou Donggo might see each other. The Dou Donggo are a tribe on the Sumbawa island of Indondesia. A typical Hindu might be reluctant to accept a traditional delicacay of the Dou Donggo, bee larvae just as much as the Dou Donggo will be to have onion soup for a meal.
It would be a mistake to look at the Dou Donggo, taking Hindus as absolute, something you are likely to do if you are wearing glasses tinted with the 'Hindu' vision of life.

Similarly, taking Islam as absolute and labeling non-believers as infidels would be a mistake too. And so would it be if other communities were considered less civilized than the one in the west.

If differences in eating habits strike too simple a note, there are several other that come to mind.
Marrying a cousin for instance, while unthinkable in Europe and the US is common place in India and the Middle East.
Arranged marriages are yet another example, suggesting that romantic love is never as important as the well being of children in societies in India as against those in the west.

For Telugu and Tamil readers, the movie Abhinandana in which the protagonist (played by actress Sobhana) is asked to marry her deceased sister's husband by her own father so that his grandchildren can be taken care of is an example, such an idea is unpalatable even in the cities of India today but offers a reflection of one now non-extant cultural trait.
To go further, it would not be wrong to suggest that she would have married her brother-in-law without much thought if she had not fallen in love with someone else, showing that it was as a rule, acceptable for a girl to marry her sister's husband, Sobhana being the exception.

So what do you do to help in this world of ever interacting cultures, looking for an opportunity to clash?

Push those glasses above your head, and look at yourself as being just as one of several groups wearing different brands of Kulturbrille, none more precious than the other.

A free woman : Beautiful, Desirable and very Rare in the Lands to the East

There's not so much so beautiful as equality, especially when it applies to men and women.
and it is getting frustratingly hard to find.
Even as some countries move ahead trying hard to make their women feel equal citizens, some others are falling behind at an alarming rate.
And a few others are stuck, intention take them a couple of steps forward and their implementation looks like they took one step backward.
Notably, India's one of them. Indian women have made rapid strides in the last 15 years, making the most of economic opportunity and a growing awareness about women's rights. But here from a ringside view of society in Britain and Europe, India's progress seems far from satisfactory.
I blame two things for this poor progress report,

1. The Middle Class Indian Mother, who wants her daughter to study in the best possible schools and colleges , wants to buy her a scooty to zip around with independence - Only to let her know that she has to marry a stranger who's been paid to let her daughter cook/earn/sleep for/for/with him, the moment she is 21.
The doting mother also teaches her daughter that the good wife has to be obedient to the point of being subservient if her marriage with her (sometimes unbearable) husband needs to survive a hundred years so that she can remain married (to her still unbearable) for another hundred in their next incarnation.

The middle class mother has the power to determine how the representative Indian girl will be, only however, she chooses to make her daughter no better than herself where it matters most.

2. Our New Identity asserting our Rediscovered "Super Culture".

A good friend from college, on being asked if he would take a dowry said: " I would as I want to get married traditionally". He has since, very thankfully, changed his mind.

So blurred are our distinctions between what is modern, traditional, western and downright medieval that all the blur is causing a considerable lack of focus on the path to empowering women, the path to moving ahead as a modern society.
The new forces of the RSS( A Hindu Right wing organization with close ties to the BJP) and their hypocritical allies have not helped either. Roughing up couples in public parks, while widely condemned, atleast find some support from a society with young men obsessed with virginity and consquently with other sources such as pornography.

Hypocritical men who claim to be fighting for the women's cause don't help either - As they expect a good cooked meal to be served with utmost devotion when they get back home after fighting for society's good all day and can't stop worrying when their daughter reaches 21.

But then there's hope and things are moving in the right direction and there's always something to be proud of when you compare - You only have to look to the middle east, where freedom is wrapped around in a long dark burkha, blurring both vision and hope.

In 2006, I wish ....

With another new year coming up, I thought it was only apt that I wish for a few things to happen,
(It's now a year since I wrote the blog entry "The New Year, what's so new?" and, I really cannot believe a year has gone by already (Cliched but true). And it has been a very important year in my life, and it's going to change me for the rest of my life)

And here's what I am wishing for...

Can I wish to see a vibrant labour market mechanics at work in the government sector?
From the Traffic police on the road to the chap who certifies your electricity meter, from the clerk in the births and deaths registrar to the one for marriages, from the district magistrate to the IAS officer, each and every member of the executive affect your life.
It is not very difficult to notice that they are not a very happy lot on being asked to work for a few hours more as one Chief Minister of Andhra found out in an election.
Itis also reasonable to assume that a good percentage of them believes they are not paid enough for the work they do, given how many people supplement their earnings from hard work under the table.

My wish list for this horrendous institution that we know as the Government Employee.

A) Introduction of a very objective appraisal system that rewards hard-working and efficient employees.
B) A performance linked pay system that allows from considerable flexibility in hiring, ie Government jobs are no longer for life ie The so-called 'Permanent Ayyindi' (I have become permanent ie i can laze around for life) will become a myth.
C) Introduction of Lateral recruitment - If an IIM grad with the experience of managing a company's division wants to run a department in the government, welcome him warmly.
D) And I no longer should be able to buy a judge on the way to court.

Can I wish that professors stop blaming students for a lack of motivation and do some self-introspection?
Introduce a contract system, that goes from short-term to medium term contracts and then on to a permanent status. If you need to make attendance compulsory to get students to attend your lecture, well there lies the answer.
We don't want to guarantee a job for life for under-performing academic staff who have decided that the leafy environs of the IIT campus is where they want to stay until they retire in the same position they joined.

Can I wish that the IITs and the IIMs give up their general compartment mentality?
For those of you opposing the expansion of India's famed institutions, what you are probably displaying is a variation of the General class comparment mentality that ensures survival in the famed compartment of the Indian Railways - Get in by Hook or Crook and do your best to keep the rest out.
If the top 3000 out of a 100,000 are so good, the next 3000 grouped together, armed with a mighty brand cannot be that bad, can they?
Can I wish that the IAS officers compete so that they don't vegetate?
Smart people who don't want to compete - that's what the IAS officers stand out as, apart from being a colonial legacy that has largely disappointed.
When you choose 50 people a year across a nation of 1.1 Billion, you would expect the ones who do badly to stand out, alas! It is the few good ones who do.
The smugly comfortable modern day Sahebs are fighting hard to keep high quality lateral entry out, even as India faces a scarcity of quality managers in the government.

Can I wish for more regulation that will ensure that not so many colleges are affiliated to caste ?
Studying in a college with peers and teachers from the same community is not going to help shape your view of the world, which is becoming increasingly pluralistic. Esp if you are one of those roughly 100,000 Indian students seeking to find a career abroad.

Can I wish that medical degrees are not sold to the higest bidder?
Banning the NRI quota of admission will mean more talented doctors - and less money spent by fathers looking to buy doctors with purchased degrees as husbands for their daughters.

Can I hope to see more intercaste marriages, that will give rise to new generations each of which is increasingly less aware of its caste identity?
That the caste system is preserved by marrying within is easily noted. Without breaking the stranglehold of the arranged marriage on the Indian youth, caste is not an institution that can be gotten rid of.
So can I see more marriages of love, atleast acquaintance so that our parents won't have to bother.

Can I hope to see all this in the next ten years? :)
A very Happy New Year to you.

Liberal ? Conservative? Can't Decide? - Take the test

Here's an attempt to devise a tool to identify your opinion on social and economic issues. And to give you a tag as 'conservative' or 'liberal'.
While there exists no clear distinction in a number of cases, here's an attempt nevertheless.

Answer the following 5 questions and find out.

1. Homosexuality
a) I accept it as being beyond an individual's control and am willing to accept homosexuals as equals.
b) I do not believe there is a place for them in Indian society and that it is unnatural to be one.

2. Migration
a) I would prefer to see people who are similar to me in my hometown, ie if I am Telugu, I prefer to see most jobs in Hyderabad taken by Telugus. North Indians belong in the north and have no place in the South. They are here just to make the most of the IT revolution happening largely in the south.
b) I like seeing people different from me, they make life different and enrich the place I live in with their food and culture.

3) Marriage
a) I am in favour of mixed caste, mixed religion and mixed race marriages, and willing to marry from outside my community. I am not necessarily inclined to my parents' view of the world and am willing to challenge what is generally perceived to be custom and tradition if the need be.
b) I believe people from different castes are culturally incompatible, and see myself as preserving my community's way of life - be it language, customs or tradition. My parents/family have a big role to play in my marriage.

4) Cultural Issues/Birth
a) I believe in woman's rights but also believe there is an inherent division of labour between women and men. I am against abortion and pre-marital sex as they are against my culture.
b) I believe in choice, so I believe people are inclined to do as they like. Be it pre-marital sex or Abortion. I do not have strong cultural/religious inclinations.

5) Standard Trade/Economics
a) I believe in Open Competitive markets that favour free movement of goods and labour.
b) I believe in some degree of protection as competitive markets can be disastrous for poor people in my region.

As I said, we cannot put the two into watertight compartments, but the idea was to help think about a few things that can help you decide.
Barring 5 which is a rather standard question that our political parties battle on ( On which you are entitled to your own opinion somewhere between a and b or something else), I believe the first four do pretty much pin you down to one of liberal/otherwise.
If you are A B A B A, you are inclined to the liberal view of the world. The exact opposite is a very conservative view of the world.
Either way, if you think you lie between or if there are more than two alternatives to either of my questions 1-4. I would be glad to find out about that and your view of the world.

Learning to love the salesman

Selling stuff to people is not the easiest thing in the world.
As a salesman, you have to smile as the door slams on your face. You have to learn to live with a lack of trust from a constant suspicion that you might sell stuff that is not necessary or is not worth the price you ask for.
But what can explain why the best achievers are all wonderful salespeople in their own right?
People who constantly sell themselves and their ideas to hard nosed men in power who got there the same route stand out from those who want recognition and do nothing about it.

But then the life of a salesman is never easy.

I only had to attend the public lecture at LSE by Prof. Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Business School who happens to be the convenor of the Copenhagen Consensus to find out.
Before I get ahead, the Copenhagen Consensus is a get-together of the 30 best economists in the world, with experts on the biggest problems that the world faces today.
A 'dream-team' of eight (of which four are Nobel laureates in Economics) decide on the problems that have to be prioritized first. These are on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis, thus if you had one dollar where would you put it to get the maximum benefit is the question they sought to answer.
To quench your curiosity, the four were
1. HIV/AIDS
2. Water Sanitation
3. Micronutrients ie providing the world's poor with sufficient vitamins and minerals
4. Malaria
Notably missing were Global Warming and lack of education, primary and secondary.

His effort is undoubtedly noteworthy as seen from the popularity the consensus has with mainstream media, including the economist magazine. However, it was a bit of sight as he was pulled apart by the other two on the panel.
Questions from the audience, which included comments on him being more of a statistician, an accountant, a PR guy and a number cruncher did not help the image either. The image of a salesman who just had the door slammed on his face that is.
After all, He was trying to sell his ideas on saving the world and it did not seem he found many buyers at LSE.
Me, on the other hand did find myself a buyer, even if rather reluctant initially.
The whole thing might seem simplistic to those with an intellectual bent of mind - Those who firmly believe no problem can be solved in this world without finding the complex roots of a nth order differential equation, but I beg to differ.
I liked the idea of putting all the world's problems in a simple table with costs in one column and benefits in one column.
Atleast the politicians will know something about it, not having to read through a billion pages of abstract papers and best of all, if they get their act, we will get somewhere in solving some of the world's worst problems. They might not be first four of the world's worst problems but they will be somewhere in the top 10 and that would be four already dealt with.
All because someone decided to do what most consider a rather dreary job of selling these ideas to the most powerful laymen in the world - the leaders of the world. He might fail to sell big when he has to deal with intellectual might of academic institutions that will inevitably be reluctant if anything at all, to buy his ideas. In the end, all that matters is he get the big fish, even if he misses out on the small ones.
Much better than Dr M Singh commissioning a study on what we need to deal with first, when there are problems staring at you in your face - you only have to walk on the road, which he has has probably not done after getting into government.
Twenty one years in India can only make you think- Before our bureaucrats get our act together, the list will probably change only for another PM to commission yet another study and so on it goes.

Snippets - Multiracial London to Tofu in a London Bus

There's seeming so little to write about when you open the editor, and you thought your mind was brimming with ideas only hours earlier.
So here's an attempt to recall and put a few things down in a style unusual to mine. Inevitably, that means it is inspired and thankfully it means shorter sentences and no preaching:)

1. London's amazingly multicultural - going by the number of mixed race couples you see on any given day in the city. Atleast one outdated edition of Lonely planet London claims you see more interracial couples in one day in London than a whole week in New York. Now before I succumb to the 'hey, I am at a better place' feeling, let me move on.

2. The gap in wages between women and men has had many labour economists baffled. Nothing seems to explain the wage gap. One interesting experiment asked a sample of men and women to fold letters in to envelopes. On being asked how much they should be paid - the average woman asked for 20% less wages and did some 20% more work than the average man.
Now who would not want to hire these women?

3. Looking at the news I have been reading, the countries that feature most after India seem to be Netherlands, Belgium, Kazakhstan and Poland. Countries, my life is going to be inexplicably linked with? Odd, very odd indeed. But then, as they say, the only chains are self imposed. A few weak ones might be imposed by your parents too.

4. Telugus have the unusual ability to live in oblivion. For a language spoken by more people in India than any language bar Hindi, it is largely unknown in many parts of the world.
Funnily enough, the only place in the world to get a book that teaches Telugu seems to be Andhra Pradesh - where not many people need it.
Whoever wrote up Google's HR page thought it exotic enough to write 'Googlers speak everything from Turkish to Telugu'
Given that atleast 5o million people speak Turkish, it can be assumed that the writer wanted to suggest geographical reach and diversity of people at Google. Thus, Turkish to Tuvalian might have achieved that objective. But then there are close to 100 million that speak Telugu!

Also worth mentioning is the uncanny ability of their neighbours, the Tamils, to stand out. While those at IIT Madras stood out quite easily for more reasons than one, I took it to be a characteristic of that one particular group.
Alas, it was not to be, there are Tamils in the corner store across the street, Tamils from all over the world at LSE, they are everywhere -A position their neighbours have managed only in the US and the IIT in the Tamils' backyard.

5. All those ideas have made me hungry, rather simplistically for food. That reminds me of that poor bag of groceries which made it to someone else's home when I paid for it. What would you expect if you absent-mindedly leave two carefully picked packs of Tofu1 and Noodles from that rather smelly Chinatown supermarket in a bus? - A nice free meal for two people in some house in South East London.

Well, That finishes my little experiment writing and I have no materials for my experiment in cooking as you now know. So that finishes everything.

NB: 1 Tofu is just soybean curd, or a variant, not deep fried duck legs in green tea - no offence meant to anyone. After all the Telugus fondly stomach explosive red chilli in oil for breakfast, lunch and dinner that can detonate next morning.

Bliss forever....

Imagine...
It's a nice warm sunday morning, you are sitting in this lawn at the back of your house.
You can smell the grass, and there's a lovely woman bringing breakfast for you, behind her is a chocolate Labrador with soft brown eyes.
You can hear a couple of beautiful kids running to the breakfast table in the lawn to take their seats beside this lovely woman and you.
Wait a second...., Before you can put a face to all those lovely people other than yourself, you need to get married or officially cohabit atleast.
(And to remove any hints of a male chauvinistic overtone, You did help make the breakfast, she's only getting it for you :)

But then why is that people in this state of bliss hardly get back in touch with the rest of their world. The world they knew before they met this woman.
Atleast one person I know has stopped mailing, calling etc. Especially when you want to know how well he's doing in this new stage of life.

May be he'll get in touch after this very spontaneous blog:)

The Confidence hinge that breaks and builds and breaks and builds....

In the past, more often than not, I found the roots of my self-confidence not far from the surface. And i found them uprooted more often than I would have wanted them to be.

I had to plant them back through some 'victories' now and then.
In retro, only now do I get the full significance of the so-called moral victory.

Confidence that I would get through life came from comparison with others, belief in my abilities, or very simply, in some cases, not mine perhaps, parents' wealth.
While I would rather not talk about the kind of confidence that comes from knowing you're going to be wealthy just because you were born, I can say a few things about the rest.
This kind of self confidence doesn't last very long however.
You might clear an entrance exam and be confident that your neighbour's son or your friends didn't make it. Unfortunately, Everybody else at college made it through this exam as well. - So that's no reason to be confident.
If you got this really nice job at this great firm, you walk into the firm and everybody else there has made it, and what's worse you're at the bottom of the ladder - that's no reason to be confident either.
Getting a very well paid job is not going to help either, the higher your pay gets, the more likely are you to hear of people with better paychecks. So just getting a lot of money can't make you smarter.
The roots need to go deeper.
If they don't, you'll have to keep planting them back each time you recover after a setback. A lean period without a job, a long period single will uproot it again, and make you into this hapless soul desperately in need of some kind of success to get back to your confident self.
The idea would be to plant them deeper and deeper after each setback, so they don't get uprooted as easily the next time round.

But then how deep can you plant them?
Ok, you've got this really well paid job - How do you stand up confident when you meet this chap who earns more than you?
You think you're really smart and on this very complicated PhD program, how do you stand up to this very smart chap who's ahead of you in his research, and whom everybody thinks is really smart?

The answer according to one man, who ran a very big company called General Electric for a long long time was to simply be confident in your shoes!
Whatever he meant.

Low divorce rates - Not as nice as they look...

Prone as we are to give in to our incessant desire to compare, it is difficult to accept the enormous difference in living standards when we come abroad.
It doesn't seem fair that some people in some parts of the world can lead vastly better lives than others elsewhere.
It doesn't seem fair that old people, like my grandparents, are not cared for by the government like those of my european friend's. Or that every guy here has been to some part of the world other than their own while a large number of my own relatives, (well-off in their own communities by any standard) will not in their lifetimes go further north than Delhi or south than Chennai. Or that you are going to be fed by the government if you have no food to eat and no job you can do.

But then our belief that the law of averages holds, and the lord Yama/Indra will take care of it, suggests that we must have something that people here don't. How can it be that these people have more than what we do ? There must be something that's better.

And the first thing that comes to mind, due to more a lack of imagination, than keen observation is that we have better family lives.No Divorces, No broken families, No pre-marital sex, No illegitimate children et al.

Ideally, if we had everything else as in this part of the world and still had the above, things couldn't be better.But little do those who raise such an argument understand that these are not independent to our current social and economic situation.

India's low divorce rate is explained as much by the degree of independence that women have as much it is a culture that we are so proud of.
More Divorces are better, India's divorce rate is a little too low.

I wouldn't want it to be so high as the US or the UK. But a little higher than now is definitely a lot better.
I'm not asking more women to divorce their husbands, rather I claim that less divorces are due to the highly dependent condition of women on me than what is believed.

My intention is to rebuff those who take lower divorces and better family lives as defence to the lack of comparable living standards at home against in this part of the world.
If more women taking up jobs and being financially dependent mean more divorces so be it.
We could have marginally worser family lives and more divorces to feed more of our people, make our women more independent, and send more children to schools.

A divorce will be easier to digest than the idea of millions of women stuck in their homes performing duties far lesser than their potential suggests.