Year: 2009

Heuristics at 10 Months

My son has a rather instrumental view of parental love. As far as he is concerned, the affection felt by his parental units is a means for him to achieve certain ends. At 10 months, his main objectives are to be fed when he is hungry and to be taken out of the house so that he can see cars zipping by. In seeking the second objective, he has learnt that  when one of the parental units says “Let’s go Tata”, they often follow  it up by opening the door and taking him out, but sometimes they cheat him and do not take him out. Worse still, the PU pretends to take him out, but then cheats him by leaving him with the other PU and goes tata all by himself. So, he now applies the following  heuristics:

  1. The male parental unit is more likely than the female parental unit to take him out to tata.
  2. The parental unit that is putting on footwear is the better bet.
  3. The parental unit that is standing at the door is more likely to take him tata.
  4. Once the parental unit has gone out through the door and closed it, it means that he will not be taken tata now, but sometimes wailing loudly opens the door.

These heuristics have served him well so far, but sometimes strange things happen when they come into conflict. For example, today, the male parental unit was putting on footwear, while the female parental unit decided to say “Tata” to him and go out. This brought two of his rules into conflict, but he stuck with rule nos 1 and 2 and stayed  calm. Then, after the MPU seemed ready with his footwear, it turned out that the FPU was at the door, offering to take him Tata, so he lunged for her. Then, to his surprise, he found that the positions were now reversed and the MPU was at the door pretending to go Tata all by himself.  A quick wail soon corrected the situation.

The August Pragati

Have you picked up the August 2009 issue of Pragati yet?  It is good. The focus this time is on legal and regulatory reform and it has been guest-edited by Shruti Rajagopalan.  My favourites are this piece by Ajay Shah about the changes in legal regime required for  further Financial Reform, Aadisht’s article on the widespread prevalence of retail corruption in India, and Jaivir Singh’s article on Labour Laws and Special Economic Zones.

A little more about that last piece. The common wisdom is that we need to reform our labour laws to make life easier for our companies. The theory is that if employers know that they can lay off workers without getting mired in red tape, they will be more willing to hire workers.  Now, many people argue that labour inflexibility is not actually much of a burden on employers and that they get around restrictions by hiring contract labour or by “persuading” labour inspectors to be more flexible.

Labour laws do hamper employers when the workers have lots of market power anyway and there are strong unions, as was the case in the Bombay of the 60s and 70s, but when companies set up textile mills in remote areas of Tamil Nadu and Gujarat where employment is scarce and the low wages they offer are still better than the alternatives, they are pretty much useless. In other words, labour laws are ineffective precisely where they could be of use to Labour.

Jaivir Singh points out that instead of changing the law to provide a little more flexibility to employers, opposition to the relaxation   has forced government to adopt a subterfuge wherein they are ignored almost entirely within SEZs. Incidentally, Aadisht’s article is also about why India’s preferred mode of corruption is one where industries buy lax enforcement of the law, rather than lobbying to have laws changed.

Senility and Justice

Commenters have suggested that Justice Iyer is getting senile. Not really, it is Justice that has suffered  from an onset of senility. Amartya Sen  will be writing a book about what V R Krishna Iyer has already put in practice. Justice, acording to Sen, will not be achieved by identifying specific principles that are to be upheld, violation of which would constitute injustice. Instead, like pornography, we will know injustice when we see it. So, Justice Iyer saw injustice in hanging Dhananjay Chatterjee, so he opposed hanging him. He sees injustice in dowry harrassment, so he supports hanging those who drive women to death for dowry. The relevant principles can be thought up after we figure out which side we are on.

Five Years is a Long Time

The New Indian Express, July 29, 2009:

Asking for July 29 to be observed as the ‘death sentence day’ for dowry harassment across the world, Justice V R Krishna Iyer, former judge of the Supreme Court on Tuesday said, “The Indian Dowry Prevention Act is still inadequate. Not a single person has been sentenced to death for dowry harassment till date.” (Hang Dowry Seekers: Ex-Judge) 

The Hindu, August 13, 2004:

The former judge of the Supreme Court, V.R. Krishna Iyer, writer Khushwant Singh and eight other prominent personalities have appealed to the President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, to stop the execution of Dhananjoy Chatterjee following the dismissal of the petition by the apex court seeking a stay of the execution fixed for tomorrow.

…

They drew the President’s attention to the fact that there had been a general shift worldwide towards total abolition or towards the non-use of death penalty.

They said the International Criminal Court set up in 1998 by 120 countries did not allow itself to hand down death sentence even though it oversees large-scale heinous crimes including rape, murder, crimes against humanity and genocide. The United Nations Security Council had also disallowed death penalty by the International Criminal Tribunals trying crimes in Rwanda and the former Yogoslavia. As many as 79 countries had abolished death penalty completely, 15 had abolished for all except wartime crimes and 23 have it in law but not in practice for the last 10 years (Krishna Iyer, others appeal to President )

The Dangers of Labeling

I was going to write a post on this today, but coincidentally, Wired’s piece on 100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About has “Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s” as one of those things.   The United States of America faces a dystopian future where no child under 3 will have a toy he or she can play with.

I got a taste of this future back in November, at a Toys R Us outlet in New York. I was searching for something to buy for my then 2 month old son to show people what we got from phoren. Sadly, the only thing that was available was some cuddly soft toy that hummed tunes when its tummy was pressed. Indian children at that age have rattles and other toys to play with, but not their American counterparts.

I am back in India, and my son is now a few months older. I have managed to find some toys for him, but attempts to buy high-end ones usually fail. Companies like Fisher-Price attempt to follow the same standard for labeling toys as they do in the US, and sadly this means that any interesting toy is labeled “Not suitable for children under 3”, because apparently those toys invariably have small parts that cause a choking hazard.

We were planning to buy an inflatable rubber tub to pour water into and let him splash about. Just as I took out my credit card, we saw the choking hazard warning. It took some detective work, but we finally figured out that the small part in question was the lid covering the inlet for air.  The lid was attached to the tub, and it was exceedingly unlikely that a child would swallow it. In any case, responsible parents who will let 6 month old kids play in water will watch over them all the time. The warning label was obviously intended, not to protect children from choking, but manufacturers from lawsuits.

The danger from this defensive labeling is that either children will be left with no toys to play with, or parents, inundated with too many pointless warnings will start ignoring them, and some will also ignore real hazards.

A Drafting Error

How could Shekhar Gupta write this sentence with a straight face?

That is why it is fascinating that the most commonly stated discomfort with the Sharm el-Sheikh joint declaration is with its drafting. (The big rewrite)

The “drafting” in question says  that India will talk to Pakistan without insisting that Pakistan prosecute those responsible for killing Indian citizens on 26/11 and without insisting that Pakistan takes action to prevent future such attacks.  Is Gupta saying that this is a drafting error? No, because he goes on to claim that this is a game changing move, which is entirely to Manmohan Singh’s credit. He goes on to suggest that we should do exactly what the draft says. Then why say that the “discomfort” with the declaration is only “with its drafting”? 

He keeps saying that we should not concentrate on tactical issues, but on strategic ones. I am not quite sure what he means by tactical issues. If he says that the “drafting” is the tactical issue in question, then he is misrepresenting opponents of the declaration, because they are in fact concerned with the substantive issue of terrorism, not with the “drafting”. If he is saying that terrorism itself is a “tactical” issue, then it is a disgraceful statement.  Terrorism is a tactical issue for Pakistan, a tactic to achieve its larger goals in India. Stopping terrorism against India is a strategic issue for India. In fact, as far as I am concerned, that is the only issue. Prosecuting those responsible for the deaths in Mumbai is a tactical step towards that goal.

He goes on say that India should “engage” Pakistan while keeping up the pressure on it to prosecute those responsible for the massacre on 26/11. But what did the declaration achieve except reduction of that pressure?

Frisking Kalam

Frisking an ex-President of India on the grounds that “As per policy we frisk everyone regardless of stature” is a stupid waste of time. It is exceedingly unlikely that Kalam is a terrorist and is carrying a bomb, and if you can save some time and bother by exempting a small category of people from security checks, it gives you a little more time to frisk more likely targets more thoroughly.

Unfortunately, this stupid policy is the only sensible response to a culture where people start expecting  to be exempt on the basis of rank. While it is highly unlikely that Kalam is a terrorist, when sitting MPs, MLAs, etc. start demanding to be exempt from frisking on the basis of their ranks, the probability that one of them will either deliberately or inadvertantly end up carrying an explosive device to a plane goes up.

The Politics of Reservations

In the  July 2009 Pragati, you can find my article on the politics of reservations.
Whenever supporters of reservations have to make the case for extending reservations for another 10 years, they are faced with a dilemma. If they admit that reservations have achieved their goal, then why do they want them extended? And if they admit that they have not achieved their goal, then why are they persisting with a failed policy for over 60 years? The generally accepted solution to this is to claim that reservations have had some effect, and the policy would be even more effective if it had been properly implemented, and for that they need to extend reservations in time and scope.  This is what I meant when I compared reservations to Yossarian’s liver in Catch-22 – if doctors can confirm that it is a disease, they would have to treat it. If they pronounce him cured, they would have to discharge him. Because the problem was invariably in between, Yossarian could stay indefinitely in hospital.

Here, I would like to respond to some points that were made by Anubhav Agarwal, who made these points as twitter replies. The points here have been edited for readability:
Continue reading →

Restart

Why do I go on blogging breaks so often?

Sometimes,  blogging slows down because of unavoidable reasons – work, family or travel interfere.  Other times, what happens is that I get fixated on a particular long post that I want to write. Usually, it is a bad idea for me  to write posts. It is the posts that write themselves.  So, when this long post refuses to write itself, I end up writing a few lines every day, with the result that a few days later, I think that the post is a complete mess, and needs to be rewritten. The prospect daunts me, and I don’t have time. So, I am stuck in a loop.

The worst is when a combination of the two reasons happen. Work forces me into a reasonably long break, and then I decide that when I come back, my first post just has to be about some recent event – like the elections, Article 377, or about Manmohan Singh’s capitulation in Egypt, or something. Then the post refuses to write itself, and I am stuck in another loop, and then another event occurs that absolutely has to be written about.

The solution is to first, get out of the topicality trap. I may write about the elections or article 377, but it will be when I choose to. If my post on the election is worth reading, it will be worth reading even if I write it a year after the election. Second, I should adopt the Fire and Motion strategy.  As long as I keep writing some short post every day, The Examined Life will maintain the momentum and the longer posts will write themselves.

Or, the second point may backfire – I may keep writing the short posts and never write the long one. But at any rate, I don’t see how things can be worse than these long shutdowns of my blog.

Scion Rise

There are many reasons why the dynastic system finds favour with people. A minor one among these is that every generation a new scion of the ruling family descends on the scene and makes a bid for a top post. Chances are, he will be a relatively young person among more senior contenders. Youth always attracts people – they associate it with freshness. They also instinctively associate it with a rapid rise, achievement and talent, even when they should know better.  Because this person is  from the ruling family, chances are that he has not had to fight his way to the top, has not had to make ugly compromises and does not have a history that gives some people a reason to hate him. His “clean past” is an empty vessel into which people can pour their hopes and aspirations, whatever they are, however unrealistic they are. So it was with the Rajiv Gandhi of 1984. With absolutely no basis in his track record, nay with no track record  people had decided that he was the one who would lead the country into the 21st century. [“Barack Obama and Rajiv Gandhi”, The Examined Life,  March 20, 2008]

And so it is with the Rahul Gandhi of 2009. With absolutely no basis in his track record, nay with no track record, Ramesh  Ramanathan has decided that he will be the one to reorganize the Congress Party, make it a rule-based institution, and bring financial transparency to the party. 

Of course Rahul Gandhi is just the man to bring about financial transparency. To start with, he could ask his mom for details on the Lotus, Tulip and Mont Blanc accounts. He was just a minor when you could read about those in every newspaper of the country, and if he is like his dad, he wouldn’t be reading newspapers.