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?”
Year: 2008
The Bhaskar Ghose Glasnost
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.
The Nominee for the Most Brainless Website Registration Page is…
Airtel. If you want to register with Airtel to pay their bills, these are the steps you need to follow:
- Go to www.airtel.in
- Find the small box that says “My account” and the smaller link that says “register”.
- It will show you a page that asks for a user id, Airtel number, account number and a captcha. You can enter any valid looking phone number there and any junk you want into the account number. These are not validated. Only the captcha is validated.
- Once you successfully go past the captcha… a PDF form is displayed. You are supposed to take a printout of that form, fill in all the details by hand, sign it (with signature proof, address proof etc.) and drop it off at an Airtel relationship centre. No, none of the details that you entered in step 3 gets pre-filled into the form.
Why step 3 exists is a mystery to me. Just another example of the phenomenon I talked of here.
One Good Turn…
Taboos Are Funny Things-II
My wife loves wearing sleeveless dresses. In fact, it would be accurate to say that she has a fetish for them. If she ever gets salwar kameez with a long sleeve, she won’t wear it till it has been altered so that the sleeve is short enough for her comfort. I once gifted her a nice full-sleeved shirt and to my horror she wanted to mutilate it to sleevelessness. it took all my powers at emotional blackmail to dissuade her.
There is one exception, however. Once while discussing how she wanted a saree’s blouse to be stitched, I suggested a sleeveless blouse. She looked at me with disgust and said: “That is what whores wear!”.
My guess is that this is what happened. A generation back, the saree was the only dress for most people. In North India, fashionable women took to wearing sleeveless blouses. In South India, they did not, and wearing a sleeveless blouse was considered daring and mildly disreputable. Over a generation, young women over most of India have made the transition from sarees to other forms of dress. So, a woman in South India who wants to look fashionable will wear a sleeveless kameez. This means that if you have grown up in a town in Karnataka, it is entirely possible that you have never seen a woman wearing a sleeveless blouse with a saree. The only exception would be whores. Of course, all this will change with the introduction of the Tata Nano.
Not Stupid, Just Inattentive
Nicholas Carr’s article on the cognitive style of the Internet has been linked and discussed quite a bit. Ironically, I found that his article was an ostensive refutation of his own point. I liked the article the first time when I skimmed it. But when I read it in detail and thought through it, I think that he was incorrect on most details. I think that the low attention span that he is talking of is actually a manifestation of three factors:
- It is difficult to read on screen. People’s eyes hurt.
- It is easy to get distracted when you are on the net. This may be related to point one. If you get physically tired when you read an article, it is easy for your mind to wander and look up something else.
- People read more actively on the net. Reading paper books is enjoyable. But just because you enjoy something it doesn’t mean that you are thinking. Carr’s article is nicely written and it flows well. If I were reading it on paper, I would be lulled into complacency by the flow. But because I was reading it online, I was also actively thinking about which parts I agree with and which parts I don’t. For example, I was thinking “Hmmm… Jakob Nielsen has written about writing for the web. I should head over to http://www.useit.com to compare.” It was all I could do to stop myself from giving in to the temptation immediately, thereby proving Carr’s point. (Coincidentally, his current article is on the same topic.)
On the whole, I think that 1 and 2 are bad, while 3 is good – though I suppose that actively thinking without actually reading an article and understanding something is counterproductive.
What the Government Says and What it Means
Ritwik says:
Your argument is essentially that regulations will ensure that only those who see a profit motive in education and are able to lobby with regulators will survive and the true educationists/ philanthropists will move out due to overburdening and ever increasing regulations. Isn’t this in contradiction to the usual lament that one of reasons why education lags in India is the fact that one can’t open schools for the profit motive? In such a case, a law that disallows the provisioning of education for the profit motive should keep these people out, right?
Ritwik is obviously not married and has never attended the Art of Living course. If he had done either, he would have learnt that the words of your wife or of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar are never to be understood at the superficial level. There are always deeper levels of meaning to it. So it is with the words of the government.
Taboos Are Funny Things
There is a performing form of art called Yakshagana, prevalent in coastal Karnataka. In Yakshagana, women’s roles, called “stree vesha”, are usually performed by men. While this happens to be true for many folk art forms in India (and historically, it used to be true of operas and dramas even in the West), you have not really seen a man perform a woman’s role till you have seen it in a Yakshagana performance.
It used to be that Yakshagana was performed by professional troupes. A hundred years back, it used to be that women performing in professional troupes were reputed to be whores – and a reputation like this tends to be self-fulfilling. If the profession’s reputation is that only whores will work in it, only the kind of women who don’t mind that reputation will work in that profession. Yakshagana, unlike the Tamasha of Maharashtra, could not live with such a reputation, because it primarily depicted mythological themes and depended heavily on patronage from temples. Yakshagana performers carried low status, but not so low a status, if you get what I mean.
Why is Democracy a Good Thing?
Nilakantan Rajaraman asks. Well, because it provides stability…
…for the ruling class. Dictators can get deposed and they can get executed, especially by other dictators. Bad rulers like Mayawati, Lalu Prasad Yadav or Y S R Reddy can at worst expect to lose the next election and continue to enjoy their ill-gotten gains. Likewise, if you are running a major political party and you aren’t a strong and charismatic leader like Indira Gandhi, allowing intra-party democracy at the local level is a good bet to protect you from the convulsions of periodic splits and rebellions.
It is debatable whether a dysfunctional democracy like India is good for its citizens, but I rather think that India’s democracy has been better for the Nehru-Gandhi family than Pakistan’s system has been for the Bhutto family.
The Road to Democracy
I have pointed out earlier that adopting democracy is like nuclear disarmament – there are serious costs to being the first one to do it. This does not mean that it is impossible. One possible approach is to have dictatorship at the central level, but democracy at the local level. This is best done when the central leadership is neither too strong nor too weak. If it is too strong, the central leadership has no incentive to allow democracy. As it gets weaker, allowing local democracy is a good way to contain discontent and preventing rebellion. But the central leadership should not be too weak. It should be strong enough to make a credible commitment that it can enforce the rules. BJP might be in that situation:
Bihar BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi held on to his job as Deputy Chief Minister after an unprecedented secret ballot, allowed by the party leadership, showed he enjoyed support of majority party MLAs and MLCs in the state. (Indian Express)
The other example I can think of is.. China, but I am not very sure of it.
Of course, allowing local democracy is the first step; the ultimate goal is to have democracy at the central level too. But I am not sure if there is a next step that is not dangerous.
How Do You Find Good Schools?
In a curious response to my post, Ravikiran Rao points to an earlier post that draws an analogy between blogs and educational institutions. In particular, it should be easy for people to start educational institutions — just as it is easy for people to start blogs. You have heard about the death of set-up costs, haven’t you?
Students will be able to discover for themselves where the good institutions are, and they will flock to them — just like readers discover good blogs now. Death of transaction costs, too!
Ravikiran Rao seems very confident that he has found a clever solution to our higher ed problems.
Just imagine the possibilities of this wonderfully costless world: our students will be able to sample a whole bunch of colleges / courses for two minutes each. Or, they’ll just need to discover one or two good colleges, which will point them to many other similarly good colleges. (nanopolitan)
I did not intend to claim that I knew the solution to all the problems of higher education. I was merely pointing out that regulation is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Regulations impose barriers to entry and they tend to penalize the honest the most. Being snarky does not free you from addressing the point.
His second point is of course, quite valid. If it weren’t for the government certifying the quality of schools, the only way to find out their quality is by enrolling in them and studying in those schools for two minutes. It is because of the regime of school inspection that has freed us from the burden of selecting schools for our children. It is a proven fact that middle-class parents who have to choose schools do so by draw of lots. It is also a fact that there is a social taboo against speaking about how good or bad your school is, which makes it impossible for parents to gain any information about the quality of schools.
Private Players in Higher Education Are Corrupt! How Horrifying!
Our current problem is not that there are no private players, but that they have among them too many crooks, politicians and thugs whose primary motive is demonstrably something other than education. So the real issue is this: What changes do we need in our regulatory structure so as to attract the ‘right’ sort of private players — philanthropists — to enter the education sector in larger numbers? How do we keep the undesirable kind from poisoning the pool? (nanopolitan)
Bzzt. Already answered. Next question please.