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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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)
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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:
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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.
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?
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?”
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.
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