The Examined Life

Missing the Point

Ravikiran Rao — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 03:13:29 +0000

Gaurav responds to a couple of my posts on democracy. He misses the point in both.

He claims that my argument that democracy provides stability for the rulers is incorrect, and cites the examples of Bhutto and Allende. Both were democratically elected and both were deposed and killed. These are puzzling counterexamples. It should have been clear from my posts that I do not classify a country as democratic just because it manages to elect its leaders in free elections once in a while. There is a great deal of truth in the statement that for a country to be considered democratic, the test is not its first election, but the second. To hold one election is easy. To hold the second one requires a significant amount of “infrastructure” in terms of cultural acceptance of orderly transition of power, a free press, a neutral military, etc. The coups that deposed Bhutto and Allende tell us that their countries were not democratic - by definition.

I am not indulging in circular reasoning here. I am not saying: “A democratic country cannot have a coup. If a country has huad a coup, it is not democratic. Therefore, my point that a democratic country provides stability for its rulers is true by definition” What I am saying is that it is possible to classify a country as democratic or not based on its underlying “infrastructure”, of which the ability to hold the first election is only one. The existence of the infrastructure will make a coup highly unlikely. That infrastructure exists in India, and therefore a coup is unlikely.

But that by itself does not ensure good government in India. The infrastructure of democracy in India has ensured a stable government, but not a responsive one.

It so happens that Gaurav agrees with me on these points. I know, because he makes the same points in the same post. I am just puzzled as to why he thinks that I disagree with him.

The same holds true for the other post he comments on. I am curious to learn in what way this post “…confuses specific structure of state with underlying social dynamics.” I agree with Gaurav that the road to democracy is a tortuous one and goes through many social and cultural changes. In fact, I believe that the example of the BJP legislators electing their leader is in itself a result of a cultural change. I don’t know why Gaurav thinks that I believe otherwise.

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Explaining My Absence

Ravikiran Rao — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 10:28:24 +0000

Ravi Kiran

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Paul Reilly
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How much should I charge? As my selling out will naturally be a great loss to humanity, I am open to a counter offer from humanity.

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Editor Type Answers

Ravikiran Rao — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:38:50 +0000

Nilakantan Rajaraman S wants to know my opinion as an editor to this piece. Very quickly:

I don’t find it badly written. It is not great writing, but if someone thrusts it before me and asks me to edit it, it will probably pass muster.
But before it can be placed before me for editing, it has to pass a tollgate where someone decides whether to publish it or not. If I were that someone, I would not publish it. The hurdle is not quality of writing, but quality of the content.
But the reason to publish something written by someone with the name of Sitaram Yechury is not the content. It is the name. His views will be published for the news content, if you know what I mean.

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An Analysis of South Indian Brahmin Wedding Feasts

Ravikiran Rao — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 08:24:10 +0000

Growing up, life was full of mysteries waiting to be unraveled. The wedding feasts I used to attend represented one such enduring mystery. The dictionary meaning of “feast” had led me to expect a lavish spread of dishes, while actual experience was utterly at odds with that expectation. There were quite a few dishes, but the course that was served first and which overwhelmed everything else was rice and saaru (rasam). Everything else served later was in small quantities. A young boy with a small tummy, a habit of eating slowly and an ill-developed strategic approach would easily get overwhelmed by the feast. He would find, as I did, that the meal he had at the feast was less rich than the what he consumed on an average day.

Let me illustrate this point for my North Indian readers. How would you like it if you were lured to a feast and served copious amounts of dal with rotis, and when you were almost sated, minuscule amounts of paneer butter masala and malai kofta were plonked on your plate? The wedding feasts I attended were like that.

I grew to adulthood without the puzzle being solved. I learnt to cope by consuming less saaru, eating faster and by developing a better appetite. In time, as the cares of the world began to weigh down on me, mysteries that challenged me during my boyhood receded from my consciousness till the debates over Sainath’s and Utsa Patnaik’s assertions that the poor are consuming less food brought back the memories.

Those who followed the debate will recollect that Patnaik had claimed that the poor were consuming less food on the basis of the fact that they were consuming less foodgrains. Many others, including Aadisht, had pointed out that they may be consuming less foodgrains, but the same data indicated that they were consuming more of every other kind of food items. Thinking through that debate gave me the answer to the puzzle I had forgotten.

The key to the solution lies in the fact that these wedding feasts are heavily influenced by tradition. The basic format of the feast has probably not been altered for centuries. Even 25 years back, the basic meal for most people at the feast would have been ganji. Rice with tomato saaru as the main course and some huli (sambhar) with actual vegetables in it would have counted as a feast for them. The format served to give the guests a taste of better food without busting the bride’s father’s budget.

Now, while the format of the feast is guided by tradition, it is not bound too tightly by it. It is inevitable that improvement in economic conditions has brought about some changes. You can increase the number and quantity of the other dishes served. You can make all the side dishes a little richer, which will result in guests consuming less rice.

Have these things happened? Last week, in Mumbai, I had an interesting conversation with an uncle on this. His family has been cooking and catering to wedding feasts for three generations. Apparently, when his father was cooking, the rule of thumb was 40 sers of rice for every 100 guests. When his brother started, it came down to 25. When his nephew started, it was 16 sers, and now it has reduced to 8-10 sers. In other words, over a period of 50 years, the consumption of rice by middle and lower middle-class Brahmins at wedding feasts has come down by over 75%. That is something to chew on.

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The Amazing Dilip D’Souza

Ravikiran Rao — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:23:53 +0000

I understand that one faction of my readership wants me to stop baiting Dilip D’Souza. I have never understood their point of view. Dilip’s views are invariably interesting, not because of their content, but for the insight into the mind of the holders of these views. As an example, let us take this sentence:

All right, let’s see. Iceland, Singapore, Korea, Norway, Taiwan, Japan and Germany after being devastated in WW2, arguably even Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, Botswana until it was hit by AIDS a decade ago: all these countries managed to “improve the lot” of their citizens, all somehow created the “conditions for human development.” (More than three seconds)

How many of us lesser mortals can manage a sentence like this? This is the difference between an ordinary lazy writer and Dilip D’Souza. To be an ordinary lazy writer, all you need to do is not think, and reach into your wardrobe of soiled cliches for one that fits the occasion. To be Dilip D’Souza, this is not enough. You need to be actively lazy. It must take an enormous amount of effort to push away thoughts that are contrary to the cliched point that you are trying to make.

If your or I had tried to write the above sentence, we would have paused and given some thought. “Wait a minute. Did I just add Korea to the list? South Korea? The country whose very existence would be in danger if it were not for the United States’ implicit guarantee to use power on its behalf if attacked? I guess the same goes for Taiwan? And Germany too… presumably I mean West Germany? And Sri Lanka, which did achieve a high level of human development which is now under threat because it did not play the power game well. Hmmm… I guess I must think a bit more about what exactly Nitin means when he says ‘power projection’.

But that is for you and me. Dilip D’Souza operates at a different level. He can get up in the morning, do twelve push ups, have six eggs for breakfast and miss a point completely in under three seconds.

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On Editing

Ravikiran Rao — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:46:20 +0000

Most of my readers should have already downloaded and read the July 2008 edition of Pragati. If you have been remiss, please do so now. It is focused on India’s foreign policy and contains many high-quality articles, as Pragati always does.

Here are some thoughts on writing and editing, based on the few months of poring over submissions and editing that I have done as an editor of Pragati:

If you are a novice writer, the word limit is your friend. Virtually every tenet of good writing that you follow will result in a reduction in your word count. If you approach the problem from the other end, i.e., if you set your focus entirely on reducing your word count, you will find that you are writing well.
Following the principles of good writing will make you a good writer, but it will not make you a great writer. Great writing requires that extra “something” which cannot be stated in terms of principles.
But that extra “something” is not extra word count. Great writing is enjoyable even when it is long; one should not conclude from this that it is enjoyable because it is lengthy.
If you think that you have written a great piece even though it is long, you can verify its greatness by trying to reduce the word count. If it is really good, you will feel the pain when you try to cut. If you are too softhearted, you should give it to someone who is more brutal with his knives. That person does not have to be a better writer than you. He just has to be a different person from you.
Virtually anything that is suitable for Pragati can be made really short and convey the “essence” of the information. This is not to say that the shortest version is the right version – you will want to convey much more than the bare essentials. The point is that this is in contrast with a well-written travelogue, a “feature” or a novel, where cutting out the descriptive details can destroy the piece.
That you are writing a travelogue is not an excuse to abandon brevity. If you are writing a 1000 page novel, there is more reason to be brief.
Point no. 5 suggests that writing the precis first and then expanding upon it is a good way to write an article. I am not sure, though, because I never do it that way. However, I never have a problem keeping within a word limit. In fact, when I am writing under word limit constraints, I tend to finish with hundreds of words to spare and then worry about what the hell I can add more.
The extension of point no. 5 is that if you cannot convey the essence of your article in 200 words, it should probably be more than one article.
It is a lot easier to edit a clumsily written article than a well-written article. I can make indiscriminate cuts to the former and rewrite whole paragraphs. I cannot do this for well-written articles. My worst fear is that I will get a well-written article that is way over the word limit. The cuts I need to make will cause me physical pain.
The second worst fear is that I get a well-written article written in a substantially different style from mine (or Pragati’s). When editing that, there is a substantial risk that I will make it worse.
Surprisingly, editing an article I utterly disagree with is not very difficult.

Finally, one opinion on writing that I have changed my mind about during my editing tenure is on the value of the personal pronoun. Nitin wanted “I” to be avoided. I didn’t see the point of opinion pieces forcing the writer to avoid using “I”. Now, enforcing the guideline on multiple articles, I see that it does improve the writing. In an opinion piece, the “I think” is assumed, and is therefore redundant. The only purpose it serves is as a disclaimer. You are saying, “hey, I think so, but I may be wrong.” The disclaimer is useful if your opinion is a matter of taste or preference, but readers of Pragati don’t care about your tastes or preferences. They will agree or disagree with your views based on how soundly you back it with reasons. Avoiding the “I” will force you to give those reasons.

The only exception to this norm that I can think of is when you have to talk of your personal experiences. There you may need to use the “I”.

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Dear Sainath

Ravikiran Rao — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:46:16 +0000

You say

The region’s farmers could be trading one volatility for another. (via)

In your world, does having a Plan B increase risk?

Update: OK, so my point was not clear, but the article is. The farmers are not getting married to soya bean. They are planting it this year and they can return to cotton next year - the article itself predicts that they will, when the price of cotton moves back up. The two crops could be individually as volatile as they want. But unless their volatilities are perfectly correlated -the evidence of the article indicates that they are not- when the two are combined, their effect on the farmer’s fortune will be to reduce volatility.

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The Baptists are the Bootleggers

Ravikiran Rao — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:20:55 +0000

The government of Madhya Pradesh has banned the sale of alcohol in the vicinity of temples in designated “holy towns”. It turns out that there is a temple to Kal Bhairav where you offer booze to Shiva and get it as prasad. Now what?

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Shorter Dilip D’Souza

Ravikiran Rao — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 06:24:22 +0000

When it comes to the NREGA or reservations, resistance from the existing order is a sign of why the measure is needed. When it comes to market forces, resistance from the existing order elicits the question “What market forces?”

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The Bhaskar Ghose Glasnost

Ravikiran Rao — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 08:29:54 +0000

Swami, arguing against my point that deregulation makes things better, claims that Tamil TV hasn’t got better at all after the entry of private channels - the positive changes have been balanced out by the negative ones. My only experience with TV in Tamil Nadu involved watching midnight masala on Sun TV when I was in Chennai, so I am not very qualified to comment about that. But about National TV, I partly agree. Indian TV was at its best during the Bhaskar Ghose era. The quality of serials that were on air at that time has not been equalled since.

But the fact is, the deterioration has nothing to do with deregulation or privatization. The great quality was attributable to one person who was fired when he went too far. I distinctly remember that Doordarshan had become unwatchable by 1991, when the dish arrived. There were reports of bureaucracy and corruption, about how producers had to pay bribes to get their serials cleared, and the cumbersome processes they had to follow.

There are three points here. First, people often argue that great art flourishes under State patronage. But they neglect to point out that usually they are not talking of the modern democratic state, but autocracies and monarchies of the past where this happened. “State patronage” therefore just means that great art flourishes under rich guys who happen to have great taste. (Survivorship bias ensures that mediocre and bad art is extinguished from public consciousness.) There is not much evidence that great art flourishes under democratic checks and balances or decisions by committee.

Second, even when we have examples like independent, decent media like the BBC or the PBS, we do not know how to replicate that success in other countries. With private players, we will get mediocre art, but at least we know how to do it.

Thirdly, government success decays. One of these days, I will write a post about why it happens, but it does.

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