Classic

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.

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.

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.

Opinion Polls

Opinion polls have a reputation for inaccuracy in India, but how inaccurate are they in reality? Has a meta-study been conducted on them? The reason I ask is that as I see it, there are two main steps where the polls can go wrong. Either they get the vote percentages wrong, or they make an error in translating the votes into seats.  My ill-informed guess is that the first step is easier to get right than the second. It is possible that they get the vote percentage right and screw up in their model that will translate it into seats, or a small error in the first leads to a large error in the second. It should be possible to test this hypothesis by looking at the data for the last few elections. I am willing to bet (though not a large amount) that the non-shady organizations that conduct the polls get the vote percentage right. (I am also willing to accept the possibility that there are in fact no non-shady pollsters.)

The reason for this speculation is that it occurs to me that if I am right, this time the polls should be very very inaccurate, because the delimitation must have completely screwed up whatever models they have to translate votes into seats.

Stocks Hypothecated to…

At Food Bazaar yesterday, there was a notice that said “Stocks Hypothecated to:”  followed by a list of banks that the stocks were hypothecated to. I know that many retailers are in trouble because of falling demand and difficulties in finance, and I can understand hypothecating your stocks to get working capital finance. But why announce that fact to your customers? What possible relevance can it have to a customer who has shown up with cash to buy toor dal to learn that the toor dal is in fact hypothecated to State Bank of India?  Obviously, once he buys the toor dal, it is his. SBI will not raid his kitchen to recover money from Big Bazaar.  It looks like some legal requirement or some requirement imposed by the creditors, but I don’t see why it makes sense to the creditors either. If at all the notice has an effect, it will make the customer unnecessarily panic, driving him away and making it less likely that Big Bazaar will make enough money to return its loan. So why put up those notices? Any ideas?

Why Don’t Indians Leave Voicemails?

When Vodafone (then Hutch, or was it Orange?) offered voicemail on my cellphone, I immediately got it activated. I hoped to move to a system where I never ever pick up phone calls from unknown numbers. If I heard a voicemail I was interested in, I would call back. Unfortunately, it turned out that people rarely left voice messages.

Those who were calling from numbers known to me had no reason to leave voicemails. Obviously, telemarketers wouldn’t dare to leave a messagge, But even someone calling from an unknown number, but had reason to believe that I would want to call back, wouldn’t leave a message. The only people who did leave messages were people who had gotten into the habit of leaving them, typically by interacting with phoreners.  This means that I couldn’t put in place the system I wanted. I had to call back every number.

I realize that we don’t leave messages because we have not developed a culture of leaving messages. Unless you are used to leaving messages, when an voice comes up asking you to leave a message, composing a crisp message stating your name and a number to call back on is a struggle. The most obvious reason why we didn’t develop such a culture is that we had no occasion to. Till the late 80s, even getting a phone was a struggle; buying a separate answering machine would have been a luxury. After cellphones and caller ids became common, a missed call is sufficient indication of who called; and usually we know why they called and have an idea whether to call back. In a sense, this is one of the areas where we have adopted a more advanced technology, bypassing the need for an intermediate technology.

I am guessing that even apart from the above reason, there would have been other reasons why Indians would not have adopted the answering machine. First, somehow, it seems rude to have others announce why they are calling. Second there would have been no reason to have an answering machine because there would always be someone at home. Third, why call back and incur the cost, when you can just answer the phone and talk to the other person for free?  Fourth, when you have a multiple language situation, in which language would you want your greeting to be? This barrier can be significant. If you have an English greeting and someone who doesn’t know English calls you, they will get confused and hang up, and this will retard the adoption of the answering machine. (True story: I had told my mother that if she left a message, I would get an SMS and call her back. Her first few messages were in English, though I speak Kannada with her. It turned out that she thought that the system actually transcribed the message and sent it as an SMS, and she reasoned that it wouldn’t be able to do it for Kannada messages.)

Still, I wish we’d adopted the culture of leaving voice messages. It seems much more respectful of people’s time and priorities.

Private Schools as Madrassas

Via Acorn,  we learn that private schools in Uttar Pradesh have been rushing to convert themselves into madrassas to take advantage of Manmohan Singh’s subsidy intended to encourage madrassas to provide modern education.

We should have strong regulations to ensure that private schools do not incorrectly classify themselves as madrassas. If they want the subsidy, they should be forced to provide Islamic education.

Some Links

When I wrote my post “Most blogs are terrible”,  I had intended to write a post on how to think of whether blogging will replace journalism. The idea was that we should disaggregate all the functions that current mainstream newspapers perform, and see how the same functions can be performed by the blogging network. That post has now been written, though not by me.

Ajay Shah writes that India may be in for terrible times. He has been writing that the fiscal situation of 1991 may be back. He has also been claiming that India has not yet learnt to manage business cycles.

Edmund Phelps writes about the inherent uncertainty of the capitalist sysem and points out that it is not really a problem with capitalism as such.

On Pakistani Unity

Kupamanduka protests my characterization of his post as “He wants India to be more like Pakistan”. He claims that he does not want India to be like Pakistan in every respect. But  why does he want India to be like Pakistan in that particular respect? What benefits has the deep religiosity and solidarity with fellow religionists brought Pakistan? He does not say. To the untutored eye, it seems that Pakistan is hurtling towards self-destruction precisely because of the blindness brought about by the deep religiosity. But because deep religiosity seems pleasing to Kupamanduka’s eye, he approves of it and thinks it a source of strength.

In any case, it is not at all clear to me that Pakistan is a particularly united place. I doubt whether West Pakistan and East Pakistan felt any solidarity with each other because they shared a common religion. Even if we dismiss that example as being before Zia’s time, it must be pointed out that ethnic tensions and tensions between provinces exist, and they are worse than in India. The overflowing of religiosity has hardly brought them any greater sense of national unity than it has brought India.

Kupamanduka says that it is deep religiosity and solidarity with co-religionists that causes Muslims pain when they see atrocities on Palestinians, but causes them no pain to see the atrocities in Darfur. This distinction, which Kupamanduka approves of, seems to me to be the ugliest aspect of unity.  The first question, of course, is whether the Muslims in Darfur, who are being slaughtered by their brothers feel much solidarity with other Muslims who are standing shoulder to shoulder with Palestinians. The second question is why Kupamanduka used that particular example while there is a much more pertinent one. The more pertinent example is that Pakistanis succeed in uniting themselves against Indian infidels, but fail to fight the clear and present danger of the Taliban dismembering their country.

This particular blindness, the failure to see internal threats, the propensity to blame everything on an external enemy and banding together against it, seems to me to make the case against solidarity, not for it. I would like Kupamanduka to explain why this is a strength of unity.

I have written about unity and disunity before (1,2). I believe that the puruit of “unity” is ultimately counterproductive and leads us to disunity. I may write more on this. But it is instructive to note that Kupamanduka does not even notice that he has made an extraordinary claim that needs to be backed up with some reasoning. That, I believe, is part of the problem that a pursuit of unity brings about.

Unity and Delusions

On our side of the border, we have Kupamanduka who claims that the Pakistanis’ religiosity gives them strength that Hindus lack. Ergo, we Hindus should unite, so that our country achieves the heights that Pakistan has achieved.

On the other side of the border, we have Ejaz Haider who claims that we Indians have developed a sense of nationalism that binds our various institutions, civil and military,  and that this has helped us pursue a tough policy, in contrast to the softer Pakistan.