Year: 2008

Speaking of Books…

I am currently reading “Imagining India” by Nandan Nilekani. I got a free copy from Webchutney, the PR firm for the book, on the condition that I review it and write about it.  ( I checked with them. A negative review is also allowed.)  I haven’t finished reading it, so this isn’t a review yet. But my initial impression is that it is quite well-written, which is a relief as I wouldn’t want to trudge through 500 pages of badly written prose.  As for the content, well, quite honestly I am not sure what to expect. Nilekani is obviously quite smart ( he is from IIT Bombay, he must be.)  Smart people have clever ideas. But solutions for India’s problems have been obvious for over 50 years now, and they haven’t been implemented. It is rather unlikely that Nilekani has anything radically new, and I don’t think that he is claiming to have any. 

Perhaps what is required is for someone to communicate those ideas clearly and forcefully? There is always a need for someone to communicate ideas and the more the better. From what I have heard, Nilekani is a great communicator, but his comparative advantage is in execution – after all, he founded Infosys and turned it into one of India’s most successful companies. With this record, it is natural for him to expect to be able to do more. But to be able to bring about actual change, it requires skills of a completely different kind, skills that he lumps under “Politics” in the preface. So his attempts to use his skills to actually execute change ends up in task forces with minimal impact. 

As I understand, the book is born out of this gap between what he has been able to achieve and what he thinks ought to be done. The answer to the question of how to close this gap is one that will require fresh ideas.

The White Tiger

Did I actually read The White Tiger  before pronouncing the Booker “undeserving”? No I did not. which is why I attributed “undeserving” to common consensus rather than to myself. I had gone by the views of reviewers I trust,  such as Chandrahas Choudhury.  

But I am happy to report that since then, I have, as a service to my readers, read that novel. This surprising turn of events came about as a result of a series of coincidences. I visited Mumbai, and there I found that my brother was in possession of a pirated copy of the book. The horrors of a long-distance flight on Northwest airlines lay ahead of me, and I wanted a book that I could finish by the time I reached Amsterdam. I asked my brother if I could borrow it. He was only too happy to lend it. I started reading it at the airport and finished it somewhere over Asia Minor. Yes the novel is utter crap and Aravind Adiga is an incompetent writer.  

Continue reading →

Dogbert Takes Over Citibank Marketing

Neel has a good post on how ICICI has made life difficult for customers who want to redeem reward points on their credit cards. Citibank has done something similar.  They have cut down on the number of items you can get by redeeming reward points. To hide this fact from customers, they have “redesigned” their website. Now, they no longer display any sort of catalogue. They show this page. You are supposed to choose your card type from the dropdown and also whether you want to go high-bandwidth or low. Then they take  you to an incomprehensible page that provides you with absolutely no clue as to what gift you can find where. To complete the insult, they say the following at the bottom of the page: 

Simply looking for items to redeem? Chances are, you want something a little different, something more. CitiRewards aim to do just that: to take you from plain rewards and introduce you to all the experiences possible with them. After all, rewards are good. Ideas make them brilliant. 

Huh?

Ganti says: 

Lets give it an honest thought. Imagine a situation where gunmen/terrorists had taken a chawl in Bombay hostage instead of the Taj. What do you think would have been the nature of media coverage ?

If he is talking of the Indian media, then yes, they would have covered it almost as breathlessly as they covered the Taj and Oberoi standoffs. 

Continue reading →

Rerun – Popular Will and Divine Will

As you ponder over the results of the elections in the five states, it is time to rerun an old post from over a year back: Popular Will and Divine Will

Essentially, I believe that the first fundamental lacuna of India’s democratic system is that a government’s performance at governance has nothing to do with its performance in the elections. Everyone can explain an election after the results are declared, but no one can predict it in advance. I believe that in India, a statement like “If you do X, your probability of returning to power in the next elections is Y” cannot be made for any values of X or Y. This applies to all X, whether X stands for “good” policies  or populist policies. Neither kind of X will have any kind of cause-and-effect relation on election results. 

The problem is not just the electoral system. It is also because no value of X will translate into any result on the ground. A politician can hatch a scheme whereby he can promise free colour TV to all voters. He may think that voters will get TVs and vote for him, while he gets kickbacks from the manufacturer. But given the corruption in the administrative mechanism, it is pointless to try and put this scheme in action. There is no guarantee that the TVs will reach the voters, and therefore there is no way to ensure that his constituents vote for him. 

Given this reality, if I were a politician, I would basically forget about trying to get reelected and concentrate on making money.

Very few politicians have tried to break out of this cycle, and I believe that the person with the greatest chance of succeeding is Modi.

This Time They Hit the Rich

One argument that is being made about the Mumbai attacks is that they are garnering so much attention because this time the rich were targeted. This argument contains multiple levels of silliness. 

Yes, there is a class divide in India. There is a divide between the literate and the illiterate. There is a divide between those who read English newspapers and those who don’t. There is a divide between cities and villages. Now, the whole point of a class divide is that those on one side of a divide feel greater kinship among themselves than with those on the other side. Readers of English newspapers like to read about the travails of other middle-class readers like themselves and don’t care much about farmers dying in Vidarbha. A citizen of Mumbai cares more about people dying in train bombings in his city than he does for deaths due to Naxalism or caste wars. That makes sense.

But if you try to stretch this standard argument to argue that this particular terror strike is getting more attention because it was targeted at the rich South Bombay types, that is where the argument snaps. The typical English speaker is far more likely to travel by train than be able to afford coffee at the Taj or Oberoi. He is much more likely to feel kinship with those who died in a train blast on July 11, 2006  than with those who died in the November massacre.  

There is a sliver of truth in the argument – in that it is true that the attacks got more attention in the West because Americans and Britons were killed.  But using the argument to explain why they have generated such an enormous outrage amont Mumbaikars involves lazy thinking as well as an active effort to avoid the blindlingly obvious.

Shameful Piece by the Economist

Five years ago, the Economist was cheering not only the invasion of Afghanistan, but also that of Iraq. Now, when it comes to India’s response to the Mumbai terror attacks, the Economist has declared  that we should not emulate the US “mistakes” like… the invasion of Afghanistan.  Worse still, now it turns out that the US incursions into Pakistan – the threat of which is the only thing that is keeping Pakistan in check, are also a bad idea.

This Time it is Different

I am usually contemptuous of attempts to link enormous tragedies to the writer’s minor personal misfortunes, but bear with me on this.  On 27th November, I was stuck in a hotel room in the United States, unable to return to Mumbai because my flight was cancelled due to the terrorist attacks. I had missed breakfast because I was glued to the television, and because it was Thanksgiving day and no restaurant was open, I faced the prospect of staying hungry throughout the day. I was also feeling exceedingly lonely and was desperately missing my two-month old infant son.   

My problems, needless to say, were trivial compared to what my city went through. The reason I am mentioning them is to explain why the incident of Karambir Kang, General Manager at the Taj,  losing his wife and two daughters in a fire while he was saving hotel guests caused me to burst into tears. 

It has been over a week since, and I am still seething. This is not the first terrorist strike on Mumbai or on India, and the way things are going, this will not be the last. But there was something different about this one. It is one thing to anonymously set off a few bombs and kill a couple of hundred people. It is quite another when 10 or 20 people, armed with guns and grenades, hold off the might of the Indian State. This is probably the greatest display of India’s military weakness since the defeat of 1962. 

More, Stronger, Effective

VK wants to know if I meant more, stronger or more effective regulations in the previous post.

If it is more,  well how much more? Which country has escaped a crisis by having more regulations? Of course, India can avoid the crisis that comes about when growth rate drops from 9% to 7%, if we are willing to accept a steady growth rate of 3%. The point is to manage crises without accepting stagnation in return. Now, I don’t accept that the US is a libertarian Mecca, but obviously, many of you think that it is close to one. But it also so happens that the US is one of the most prosperous countries in the world. It has experienced fewer and shallower crises than the rest, and has recovered from them faster than others. If you think that having few regulations is bad, then how do you account for this result? If you think that having more regulations is the answer, then how do you account for every other country in the world?

If it is stronger, well “stronger” presumably means having stricter punishments for the same crime. But you can’t punish an action if it is not a crime in the first place.  It was not a crime for companies to borrow from abroad, so unless you make it illegal, you can’t increase the punishment. 

If it is effective, is it something like what libertarians and communists supposedly say when their preferred systems supposedly fail? Just as a libertarian system has not yet failed because a truly libertarian system has not yet been tried, regulations have not yet failed because truly effective regulations have not yet been tried. What is an effective regulation? Whatever, in retrospect, could have prevented the last crisis.  If a regulation fails to prevent a crisis, then, by definition,  it is not effective, which means that effective regulations have not yet been tried. 

The challenge is to be able to predict in advance which regulations will be effective and to put in place a political system that has the will to impose only those regulations and not the other. So far, no one has figured this out.

Thatz Why We Need Strong Regulations

Okay, so why are Indian companies in trouble in spite of Palaniappan Chidambaram’s ironclad assurances that Indian markets are so well-regulated that we are insulated from the crisis?

It is because our financial sector is so well-regulated that we do not have a decent corporate bond market.  So, Indian companies that wish to borrow end up borrowing in foreign currency from global markets. In other words, we have regulated our financial markets so well that we are more tightly coupled with the evil deregulated financial markets than we should have been.

The solution, of course, is more regulation. It always is.

The Country of the Blind

I had started this post in May this year and it had remained in  a draft state ever since. The topic I intended to cover has been covered in the post I made in reply to Ritwik today, so there is no  reason to complete this one. But I liked the start I had made. Here it is, broken links, outdated information and all. 

The saying goes that “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”.   To contest the saying, H G Wells wrote a  short story titled “The Country of the Blind“. It  describes the travails of a sighted man who stumbles into a valley of blind men and tries to use the advantage his eyes give him.  He fails because the country has been organized in such a way that his eyes give him no advantage at all.

Continue reading →