Examined

Longer pieces, features and articles

Using DLS to fix NRR

The net run rate has a few disadvantages as a method of comparing performance of teams. There are three that I’ve heard or thought of. 

  1. Team 1 gets bowled out in 33 overs having scored 230 runs. Team 2, while chasing, loses 9 wickets and reaches the target in 25 overs. Intuitively, we would think that this match was close. But because Team 1 got bowled out, its run rate calculation has 50 in the denominator, while Team  will have 25, which means that NRR exaggerates the gap between them. (I think I read of this example in the feed of Twitter user ZaltzCricket)
  2. The bind that Pakistan found itself in recently provides another example. A team that bats first, scores 350 and dismisses its opponent for 150 rightly gets a boost to its NRR. A team that fields first, bowls out the batting team for 150 and then reaches the target in 15 overs has arguably done better than the first team, and this shows up in the run rate difference for that match. But when its net run rate is calculated over the whole tournament, the team that wins by batting second gets a disadvantage in the NRR because only 151 and 15 get added to the numerator and denominator respectively, with the result that the impact of this win is smaller than that of the team that scored 350 in 50. 
  3. A team that scores 300 in 50 overs for the loss of 3 wickets and a team that scores 290 in 50 for 9 wickets will have nearly the same NRR, even though we intuitively feel that the number of wickets lost should also matter. 

Can the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method help fix the deficiency in the NRR? Prima Facie, it appears that the DLS method, used in its current form, should help with the problems in examples 1 and 2, but not in example 3.  The idea behind DLS is that it considers the overs remaining to play and the wickets in hand as “resources” that are, statistically speaking, proportional to the runs that you can expect to score. To understand this, let’s use this table found in the Wikipedia page for DLS. It says that if your team has lost 9 wickets, unless you have fewer than 7 overs remaining, you have 4.7% of your resources left. This makes intuitive sense, because if you’ve lost 9 wickets at 40 overs, the number of overs left is not much of a constraint on how many runs you are statistically likely to score. If you have scored 200 runs at this point, DLS predicts that you are likely to score 200*100/95.3 = 210 runs. 

DLS Table – Standard Edition. Image Credit: Wikipedia User Chintan9, license: cc-by-sa3.0

To take another example, if, when the rain interrupts play, the team batting first has played for 25 overs without loss of wickets, DLS predicts that you still have 66.5%, or 2/3 of your resources left.  If the score at this point is 125, DLS predicts that the team is likely to have scored 125*100/33.5 had it been allowed to complete its full fifty overs. If the chasing team is also given only 25 overs, it is assumed to have lost the first 25 overs of its innings, which amounts to 100-66.5, or 33.5% of its resources. So the chasing team’s score must be scaled accordingly, which means that we must compare 125*100/33.5 with S*100/66.5, where S is the chasing team’s score, to determine the winner. This is equivalent to saying that the target to chase is 125*66.5/33.5, which is how the target is given. 

Going back to our three examples, it should be clear now why DLS won’t help with the third one.  By definition, a team runs out of resources when it has used up 50 overs or has lost all its wickets. In example 3, both teams are at the same position as far as DLS is concerned. In examples 1 and 2, the DLS method holds more promise. Both of the situations involve a team batting second not having to bat for the full 50 overs because it reached its target score. In the first case, because the team has lost 9 wickets, DLS will predict that it will score only 231*100/95.3 =242 runs, and adjust its run rate accordingly. In the second case, assuming that the chasing team loses 5 wickets in the process of scoring 151 in 15 overs, DLS will predict that it has 48.1% of its resources left and add approximately 300 runs and 50 overs to its run rate calculation. Both these results seem fairer than using NRR as it is. Does that mean that a DLS-enriched NRR is the right option. I will give the case against followed by the case for, and let you decide.

 The case against: In Oscar Wilde’s play “The Importance of Being Earnest”, there is a brilliant line that goes “I do not know whether there is anything peculiarly exciting in the air of this particular part of Hertfordshire, but the number of engagements that go on seems to me considerably above the proper average that statistics have laid down for our guidance.”  The line is funny because statistics are supposed to measure reality, not guide it. It is one thing to use statistical averages as guidance in exceptional situations like rain interruptions. If we start using them for NRR calculations, we will be using them routinely. To use them to predict the score of the chasing team is particularly inappropriate. The canonical team that forms the basis for DLS is a team that is trying to score as many runs as possible within constraints of the number of overs and wickets remaining. But a team that is batting second is not aiming to score as many runs as possible. It is trying to reach its target. A team that needs to reach just 150 runs doesn’t need to bat as if it has 50 overs and 10 wickets. It can adopt a T20 strategy and score them as fast as possible. Going back to our examples, the team in the first example can protest that it is being unfairly penalized for losing wickets, when that was the right strategy in the situation. The team in the second example may benefit from DLS (because more runs and overs are added to the numerator and denominator – I think this depends on how many other matches it has played and how many other runs it has scored)  but it can also argue that it is being unfairly penalized for losing 5 wickets. More pertinently, the introduction of DLS for NRR will make chasing teams completely change their strategy, which is not what  we should be aiming for. 

The case for: Yes, the introduction of DLS for NRR will make teams change their strategy, but that is a good thing, because now this is more of a like for like comparison. To do a perfectly fair comparison between two teams, we must put them in the exact same position. However, in a normal ODI, the team batting first does not know how much it must score; and the situation it is faced with is to score as many runs as possible within the 50 overs it has. The team batting second knows its target,and its strategy must adjust accordingly. For both teams to be in the same starting position, after the first 50 overs are done, we must inject both teams with a drug that induces amnesia and makes them forget the first 50 overs till the next 50 are completed. Unfortunately, anti-doping regulations do not allow that. Therefore, using the DLS to adjust the NRR seems like a good way to level the playing field between the two teams. Hence proved. 

The case against, once again: Using DLS for NRR will slow down the batting of the second team. Any innovation that results in slower batting will never be acceptable to the ICC. Quot Erat Demonstrandum. 

What went wrong with Game of Thrones

Long back, during Doordarshan’s golden era, I watched an episode of a TV series, one those where every episode was a short story. This particular episode told the story  of a novelist who was getting his novel serialized in a magazine. A fan of the novelist comes to meet him and begins discussions about turning this novel into a TV series (or movie, I don’t remember which). As the discussion progresses, it turns out that she is particularly interested in the fate of one particular character and is distraught to learn from the novelist that she was going to die. She pleads with the novelist, asking for the character’s life to be saved, but the novelist refuses, saying “It is not I who is killing her. It’s the logic of the story that is!” The fan and the novelist have more meetings where she continues to implore him to change the course of his story, till finally the novelist relents. He tells her that he had found a way to save his character’s life, but the story would have to be crafted in a particular way and that the producers of the show would have to promise not to deviate from the script. She gladly accedes to the request. The twist at the end was that it turned out that the TV series was just a ruse. In reality, the fan was so interested in the character arc because the character’s story was magically getting turned into the story of her own life, and she naturally did not want to die. 

I remember being fascinated by the idea that the story of a novel is not something that the novelist creates or controls, but something that has a life of its own. I remembered this story in the context of Game of Thrones because it struck me that the essential problem with the series was that there was really no way to end it in a  satisfactory way. 

Game of Thrones is the Mahabharata of Kali Yuga. It is said that the Mahabharata, unlike the Ramayana, prefers realism to idealism. Characters have grey areas, make and morally ambiguous choices. In the Ramayana, Good triumphs over Evil and the story ends in Rama Rajya. The Mahabharata culminates in a great war and the end of the epic marks the beginning of the Age of Kali. This denouement is logical, because unlike in a simple story where good triumphs over evil, in the real world, it is difficult to tie up all the loose ends and come to a tidy conclusion.  There are actually no endings in the real world. A victory in one battle leads to a reaction from someone somewhere. Kill one person and someone from his clan is out there plotting revenge. Get all people in a room and agree on something, and at least one person goes out from the room intending to break the agreement as soon soon as he is in a position to do so. 

Game of Thrones exceeds the Mahabharata in its realism, as befits an epic set in Kali Yuga. It is morally ambiguous. Good people die because of their goodness. Ned Stark got killed because he did the honourable thing. Rob Stark got killed because he married for love. These morally ambiguous events added to the complexity of the story, which branched off in many different directions, making it tougher and tougher to bring them all together. But if Game of Thrones is the Mahabharata of our age, the end of the story must also end Kali Yuga. After the cycle of four yugas is complete, Krta (or Satya) Yuga, the first yuga where righteousness prevails must begin again. The complete inability of the showrunners (and I suspect, Martin as well) to direct the arc of the story towards this ending where Kali Yuga ends and Truth and Righteousness prevails at the end leads me to suspect that the end of Kali Yuga is still far away. 

While the series had many themes and failed to bring any of them to a satisfactory conclusion, the one theme that was of most interest to me was Danerys’ desire to “break the wheel”.  I am not sure how many people noticed the parallel between her desire and Joffrey’s outburst back in season 2 or 3, where, in a conversation with his mother, he expressed frustration that he had to work on the painstaking task of building alliances with all the lords of Westeros if he wanted to assemble an army. It was all so primitive, he exclaimed. Why couldn’t he have an army of his own, answerable only to him? 

The answer to Joffrey’s question is that the medieval economy did not allow such a setup. A medieval monarch faced two choices about where to maintain his army. Should he keep it close, in the capital, or should it be distributed throughout the kingdom? If he opted for the former, maintaining control over the periphery would be difficult. If he chose the latter, given the tyranny of distance in medieval times, maintaining effective central command over the army was difficult. He would have to distribute command by giving autonomy to local leaders. But the latter option meant that the soldiers would be loyal to the local leaders, not to him. 

Modern states maintain large standing armies. A medieval state that tried to maintain a large standing army would face famine because moving young men off farm to the army meant that the fields lay fallow – this would be especially true if it kept this standing army concentrated at some place for purposes of control. A modern state needs a much smaller proportion of its population in agriculture . It can also, because of modern weaponry, maintain a monopoly on use of force with a much smaller and more centralized army.  

For a medieval state, maintaining effective monopoly on use of force was pretty much impossible.  Other than the limit on size of the army, entry barriers to someone else raising an army were non-existent. Raising a modern army requires sophisticated machine guns, tanks and other artillery. In modern day India, if someone began to acquire such weaponry, the state would notice pretty quickly. In a medieval state, if someone decided to acquire spears, bows and arrows and cannon, there’s a good chance that they’d be able to do it without the state noticing.  

If medieval states did not have monopoly on the use of force, how did they maintain political stability? For most part, they did not. There was always palace intrigue, rebellion brewing in the peripheral regions or a foreign invasion going on. To the extent that stability existed, it was built and maintained by the king negotiating coalitions with the various lords and satraps throughout the kingdom. It was the need to do this that so frustrated Joffrey. The need to maintain these coalitions constrained the medieval monarch, preventing him from turning into an absolute ruler.

The more successful states embedded these constraints into customs and traditions that carried on over generations – Game of Thrones was at its best when it depicted this delicate balance in Westeros. The formalization of these customs and traditions, the codification of them in writing (for example, via the Magna Carta), was one of the ways in which democracy began.   

But while medieval kings were not absolute rulers, the economic and social conditions of those times did not actually permit an evolution to real democracy. In a parliamentary system, we know the challenges of having to build coalitions and and governing with the support of many small parties. Imagine having to do that, but with the difference that those parties are not accountable to the people and have armies of their own.  Your attempt to govern for the benefit of the people will be hampered by the fact that your coalition partners want absolute rule over their own jagirs and may want you to run the government for their benefit rather than their subjects’. Your attempt to bring about the rule of law will be stymied by the fact that the government is constrained, not by laws, but by balance of power, and as the balance changes, your coalition partners will want to renegotiate the rules. 

 So here is the paradox. The journey towards democracy may begin with the codification of customs and traditions that constrained kings, but to actually achieve a modern democracy, you need a centralized army with the ability to exercise monopoly over power. One way to achieve democracy is to evolve towards it, slowly changing the rules towards greater and greater participation of the people. The other way, which was Danerys’ preferred way, was to break the wheel – to bring about revolutionary change that blows away the existing power structures in the kingdom. It did help that she had access to the three dragons that, through their awesome firepower, would be able to subdue any opposition to their monopoly. But if you seize power by destroying the existing power structures, you have also destroyed the customary constraints on the autocrat’s power, and now what will stop the military monopoly from sliding into tyranny? 

It is clear that Game of Thrones wanted to conclude the series by coming out in favour of evolutionary over revolutionary social change, but because of the incompetence of the writers and because the showrunners were in a hurry to end the series, they went about it in the dumbest way possible. The worst scene of the worst episode of the worst season of the series is the one that takes place at the dragon pit after Jon Snow has killed Danerys Targaryen. There, the lords and ladies  have gathered to elect the new monarch, and Sam Tarly rather timidly suggests broadening the franchise to include commoners. His suggestion is scoffed at, with the gathered lords arguing that they might as well include dogs in the vote. Quite clearly, this was meant to signal that the socio-techno-economic conditions of the time did not permit a drastic transition to full liberal democracy. 

But the point about evolutionary change is that each step in the evolution needs to be sustainable, possibly over many generations till conditions are ripe for the next steps. The finale of Thrones was a masterclass in papering over the obvious cracks. The surviving dragon, has for some reason, flown away to an unknown location, conveniently doing away with the problem of civilian control of dragonry. But how is this new setup supposed to maintain political stability in its absence? The capital has been destroyed, most of the army has been killed, the military force that conquered the kingdom has been pensioned off, and the one person who is a competent military commander has been sent off to guard against a non-existent threat. Worst of all, the kingdom has installed as ruler a philosopher king who is more philosopher than king, and the philosophy in question being more of the mystic variety than of the kind that will provide guidance in this world. At least, if at the end it had been revealed that Bran the broken intended to use his warging abilities to exercise surveillance over the entire kingdom and use his information asymmetry as power, the series would have been slightly salvaged, but this ending is an unmitigated disaster. 

It’s quite clear that the producers of the series knew that the ending was stupid and that they were airbrushing visuals of loose ends from the picture – Yara Greyjoy, for example, makes some noises about she being still loyal to her old queen, and before she could set out to lead a rebellion to extract vengeance, she is asked to shut up, presumably because the producers were in a hurry to end the series.  This hurry has been visible right from season 6, when they started using their their various dei ex machina to eliminate the complexities in the story. Till that season, all the unexpected twists – the death of Ned Stark, the Red Wedding or the poisoning of Joffrey – had increased the complexity in the story. But when Cersei blew up the Great Sept using wildfire – yes, it led to Olenna Tyrell plotting revenge and joining Danerys, but you have to wonder about the High Sparrow and the Faith Militant. Was there no fallout from eliminating them? Did they not have a following in Kings Landing? Did killing them all not cause any kind of unrest?  In the same season, Dany uses her dragons to burn the slavers’ ships and destroys their fleet. No fallout from that? No one left to plot revenge?  

Evidently, the showrunners were incompetent at plotting the course of the series when unmoored from George R R Martin’s guidance. But Martin himself has been unable to finish writing his books, and while he is good at fleshing out the complexity of the real world, I don’t see any evidence that he has the ability to resolve the complexity and bring the series to a satisfactory conclusion. Which is just as well. A satisfactory conclusion to the series will bring about the end of the cycle of the four yugas, result in Pralaya, and the start of a new cycle. I don’t think we are ready for that yet.  

Cash for Votes

It is true that corruption, as Indira Gandhi once famously said, is a global phenomenon. That said, the nature and quantum of corruption varies across space and time. We believe that the first world has less corruption than India, but a citizen of a western country will ruefully point out the prevalence of lobbying and bribery through campaign contributions in his country. We would both be right in our views. Outright bribery in cash seems a lot uglier than corruption through lobbying. In practical terms, it is also less transparent because it is unaccounted for.

Of course, the first world wasn’t always wealthy and wasn’t always so sophisticated in its modes of corruption. The United States, during its gilded age, was famous for corruption among its legislatures. Businesses bought favourable laws by bribing lawmakers outright. William A Clark, the Copper Baron, bought his way into the US Senate by bribing members of the Montana state legislature. This was back when senators were elected by state legislatures. This scandal led to the passage of the 17th amendment, providing for direct elections to the Senate.
There is one curious incident of the dog in the night time that failed to bark. Why do we not have examples of an Aya Ram Gaya Ram culture having developed in the United Kingdom? The party system seems to have developed early and grown strong roots there. There has never been the equivalent of an Anti-Defection law in Britain. Why was there no phase when MPs routinely switched parties, leading to unstable governments? Legislators in the US decide legislation while in the UK, they choose governments. There should be much greater scope for inducements in the latter system. Why did it not happen?

One explanation is that at the time the party system formed in the UK, members of parliament were independently wealthy, making them less susceptible to inducements. I think that this explanation is partly true. But I think a stronger explanation exists. Back when the British party system formed, the two parties were the Whigs and the Tories. (The Labour party did not yet exist, which is not surprising given that franchise was limited to holders of property and land.) The two parties represented two classes of British society. The Whigs were the party of the aristocratic land owners while the Tories were that of the industrial and business classes. Given the rigidity of British society of the time, your class was your identity. Imagine an MP of the time trying to change his party affiliation. Given how closely the affiliation was tied to class and identity, such a thing would have been impossible to imagine, let alone put into effect. I think that this close linkage between party affiliation and identity explains why the party system got so strong in the UK.

How does this relate to India? Indian politics is identity politics. People vote according to their caste or religious affiliations. The are parties that are closely linked to particular castes or religions. You’d expect the same party dynamic to develop in India too? But it hasn’t, and the reason is perhaps that politics developed to be a lot more transactional in India. For example, BSP is closely associated with the Dalits, but if a Dalit leader switches over from the BSP to the SP, or a Brahmin leader joins the BSP, it isn’t considered a big deal. The supporters of the leaders in question may migrate with them or they may not, and if they do not, switching parties was a bad career move for the politician in question, but it is not an unthinkable or a career-ending move.

The exception to this would be things like someone switching from the MIM to the BJP, from the communist parties to the BJP, or vice versa. Politicians freely switch from the BJP to the Congress or vice versa, but the BJP has a core drawn from the RSS that doesn’t easily switch.

Also, the BJP is more likely to have a base of supporters who are fiercely loyal to the party and its ideology, are unlikely to follow a leader to another party and are willing to punish someone who switches out of the party.

Overall, it appears to me that the incentives that face the BJP are different from those that confront other parties on the question of party discipline. The BJP is likely to benefit more and more quickly from a culture of strong party loyalty developing than will other parties, which should mean that they face a different trade-off when they have a choice between buying legislators and staying out of power.

The voice in your head

The Guardian reports that MIT Media Labs have developed a device that can read people’s minds and translate their thoughts into words. While this is a remarkable development, the piece makes it clear that the device cannot read your raw thoughts. You have to actually verbalize your thoughts, i.e. think out the exact words in your mind for the device to pick them up and translate them into sounds.

When you think of it, the process of forming a thought and converting them into words is fascinatingly complex. I am not a neuroscientist, but introspection tells me that the process has at least four stages. First, there is the raw thought that forms in your mind. This thought just exists, albeit at a high level of abstraction. For example, at this point in time, even though I am struggling through the process of structuring and picking the right words for this piece, the thought I want to convey exists fully formed in my mind. The device should pick up these raw thoughts when I think them, and in theory, a sufficiently advanced AI would be able to write this piece for me. But in the absence of such an AI, the thoughts would be just a jumble of electrical signals as far as this device is concerned.

Second, this thought needs to be structured into a sequence of ideas best suited for communication. Third, the ideas need to be converted into sentences and words that best describe the thought, and finally in verbal communication, at the point of speaking these words, the brain will send electrical impulses to the mouth that will set off the mechanical process of converting them into sounds. When we speak, at least the last three, perhaps all four, steps occur within a split second. Those who are good speakers make this seem so easy, and we make fun of the inarticulate. But it is only when we think of what is involved in human speech that we realise what an extraordinary thing speech is.

The device that the MIT labs have developed is unlikely to intercept your thoughts at the first or second stages, so it’s unlikely that it will be useful as an interrogation tool. I wonder whether it picks them up at the third stage or the fourth.

I once got introduced to someone and at the beginning of the conversation I gave him my name. At the end of the conversation, as we were saying our good byes, to his great embarrassment, he found that he had forgotten my name. He fumbled and he addressed me as “Bhaskar”. I found this mistake fascinating because both my name (“Ravi”) and “Bhaskar” mean “sun” in Sanskrit. Quite clearly, my interlocutor had saved my name with a reference to its meaning in his head, though when it came to translating the meaning back to the actual word this system had failed.

Now, I don’t think that everyone who knows my name thinks of it with reference to the sun every time they have occasion to think of my name. Once the name is familiar, it is just a name. But I think that the way the guy did the translation of meaning to word happens everytime we choose the appropriate word in either speech or writing. Does the technology MIT labs have developed detect the human brain during this process? My initial guess was that that is how the technology worked. If true, then an obvious extension of the technology would be translation. You can think in one language but the device senses the meaning of what you wanted to convey and translates to another language. Another application would be to have a speaking device for the deaf.

But when I thought to the implications of this, I realised that it was very unlikely that that is how the machine works. It is more likely that the device intercepts the brain in the process of sending neural instructions to the mouth to create a particular sound, i.e. at the fourth step of the verbalizing process. If that is the case, the device can potentially transcribe your thoughts to any language, but it cannot translate. It cannot help the deaf, because the sign language is completely different from the verbal language. The mistakes the device would make would be more on the lines of confusing tree with three, the same kind voice recognition systems make.

It is said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Well that is true, the opposite is also true. Advanced technology that seems magical will cease to be so when one understands it. So it will be with this technology.

One last thought. I wonder how this device will handle a person’s second language. I hate to describe Kannada as a second language for me given that it is my mother tongue. I read it very well, I can write it with some effort and I speak it fluently. But it is not the language I think my complex thoughts in. When I attempted to think in Kannada while writing this post, I had to imagine myself speaking to someone. I don’t need to do that when thinking in English. I fear that if I attempt to think in Kannada for the device, it will actually detect the original English I am translating from!

The Pirate Game

The Pirate Game is an extension of the Ultimatum Game. While the Ultimatum Game involves 2 players and a few gold coins, the Pirate Game involves 5 pirates and 100 gold coins making offers to one another. Describing the problem and explaining the solution will take up too many words, but unless you understand the problem and the solution, the rest of this post will not make sense, so I must ask you to read the Wikipedia article before proceeding to the next paragraph. The Wikipedia article has the solution as well, but try to figure it out yourself first. It’s more fun that way. Most importantly, understand the assumptions (The wiki entry calls them “factors”) involved, because that’s the focus of this post.
We are now in the second paragraph of this post and I will assume that you have heeded the warning in the previous para. So, without further ado, here is the assumption I want to relax: “the pirates do not trust each other, and will neither make nor honor any promises between pirates.”
To understand why this assumption is important, let’s revisit the solution at the  point where we are down to three pirates, C, D and E. The canonical solution says that C cannot offer any deal to D that leaves C alive, because D knows that he can get 100 coins plus a dead C, which is a better deal for him than 100 coins and a live C. And C knows that if he dies, E is going to get nothing under D’s regime, so C can get away with offering one coin to E.
But… this solution seems unsatisfactory. D and E are left with nil and one coin respectively. If D could credibly promise to offer more than 0 to E, they could conspire to refuse C’s offer and divide the 100 coins between themselves. The exact proportion could be anything as long as E got more than one. Of course, as soon as C gets wind of the deal, he will try to save his neck by offering a better deal to either D or E. He may also try to offer a deal to both D and E to ensure that neither initiates a conspiracy with the other.
In the strict version of the game, these deals are precluded by the rule that the pirates do not trust the other pirates to keep any promises they make. The relaxation of this rule turns the problem into one with an indeterminate solution. If the lack-of-trust assumption is in place, the three player pirate game results in a definite solution, with C getting 99 coins, D getting none and E getting one. Relax the assumption, and while we cannot definitively solve the problem, we can safely say that D and E will get a better deal than they would get under the strict version. Now, note that if you’re down to two players, there is no difference between the strict version and the one with the assumption relaxed, as there is no longer anyone to make deals with. E will be badly off in the two player version, i.e. he is in a better position when he has an intermediary to play off against the one who has custody of the gold coins than he is in when he has to negotiate directly.
In other words, the three player game is a pretty good model of reality, where E is the proletariat, C is the bourgeoisie government and D is the communist movement wanting to overthrow C. It explains why the threat of a revolution worked to the benefit of the proles in some cases, while in others the threat was managed by buying off the revolutionaries. It also explains why an actual revolution invariably ends up as a bad deal for the masses.
But if we know that achieving a revolution to overthrow C is bad for E, it’s a safe bet that C also knows this, so why would the prospect of D and E colluding ever be a credible threat to C? To show credibility, E may need to demonstrate a willingness to irrationally go against his interest. If C is afraid that E and D will kill him even if it’s against E’s interests, it’s cold comfort for him to know that E will be worse off as  a result. One way for C to have this fear is if another E in another game has overthrown his C. The C in our game will be afraid that something similar may happen in his own game. We may note that something very similar happened in Western democracies vis-a-vis communism. Another way is to set up the game so that the overthrow of C doesn’t turn it into a two-player game. For example, if D turns into C and vice versa, the next iteration is also a three player game. This is of course what happens in a multi-party democracy.
I am sure we can find many other real life situations where the three-player Pirate Game is a good model. What about the four-player game? I haven’t thought through it in detail, but here is one situation where it may be a useful model:
  • E: people
  • C: state government
  • D: opposition party in state government
  • B: central government
I’ll let others do the analysis required, but I have ab strong hunch that as you add more pirates to the game, the possibility that E gets a good deal reduces significantly

Thoughts on the GST

Much reporting on the GST is about how tax rates have changed after the rollout. You may have read that a good or service was taxed at, say15% earlier, but will be at 18% now. I suspect that these reports are comparing on the basis of sales tax and VAT in the case of goods and service tax in the case of services. Such reporting displays a lack of understanding of the fact that GST replaces many other taxes, as also of the value added nature of the tax.

Suppose that you run a shop. You have been buying a widget that incurred excise at 10%. The cost to the manufacturer, ex tax, was Rs50. With tax, you bought it for 55 rupees. Your value addition and profit came to Rs45; with a 15% sales tax on Rs 100, the widget retailed for Rs115. The tax incidence on the widget was 20/95, or 21%.

Now, the GST at 18% has been introduced, replacing all other taxes. In a perfect world that adjusts to the GST immediately, you would receive an invoice for the widget from your supplier showing a price of Rs50 and the GST of Rs9 as separate line items. This GST would not figure in your pricing decisions because you would claim it as input tax credit. Your value addition and profit would still be 45 rupees, so your widget would be priced at Rs95 pre-tax. With a GST of 18%, your widget would be priced at Rs112.1. In other words, in our perfect world, it is perfectly possible that replacing sales tax of 15% with a GST of 18% results in a reduction in price.

The real world differs from the perfect world in several crucial ways.

First, the widget in question is imaginary and I have made up the tax rates. I have only a dim understanding of what taxes used to apply at what stage, and I have no idea what the tax rates were on different products. The government has claimed that the tax rates were aimed at achieving revenue neutrality. If they are right and if they have done a perfect job of being revenue neutral on every product and service, retail prices should not change at all. Of course, it is unrealistic to expect that kind of perfection. It will take significant analysis to figure out how good or bad a job they have done on this count, and whether they have erred on the side of higher or lower revenues. But the point to note is that revenue neutrality can only be achieved if the GST is higher than or equal to the current sales or service tax.

Second, the example assumes that the shop will instantly respond to a fall in input prices with a reduction in price. In reality, it’s just as likely to keep its listed price the same and slap the 18% on top of it, and try to pocket the profits as long as market forces let it.

Third, even if the shop does want to adjust prices in response to the GST, it is unlikely to have full visibility into prices along the entire supply chain. The example of the widget was a deliberately simplified one. The more realistic scenario is a complex supply chain with multiple stages involved in the conversion of raw materials to finished goods. Each participant in the supply chain faced a certain set of taxes earlier and is faced with GST and input tax credits now. Getting all the costs worked out and the prices renegotiated is going to take time.

Fourth, one of the avowed aims of the GST rollout is increased tax compliance. While that is a good thing, if it succeeds in achieving this goal, it means that taxes that weren’t being paid earlier are now being paid. If that happens, it means an increase in prices.

In other words, any claim you read about how the GST is going to increase or reduce prices should be taken with a pinch of salt. Unless there is evidence that those who are making the claim have done rigorous studies taking into consideration the above factors, they are probably just pulling numbers out of their ass.

A partial exception to this principle of scepticism can probably be made for services. Unlike goods, there is no supply chain to deal with, so it’s more likely that replacing a 15% service tax with GST at 18% results in a straightforward increase in price. Of course, a hairdresser’s shop does deal with raw material like shampoos and hair dyes, while for a financial services firm, the tax credit on office stationery and on ISP payments will probably not compensate for the higher GST rate.

The point of all this is that calculating the impact of the GST on prices even in the short to medium run is difficult. In the long run, the GST is supposed to bring about a whole bunch of structural changes in the economy, like speedier transport of goods, economies of scale in warehousing, more rational decision-making on the question of where to locate factories, etc. All of these should contribute to economic growth and should also have a positive impact on inflation. Calculating that impact is a different story.

In Defence of the GDP

The GDP as a measure has well-known limitations – in fact, I learnt about these limitations in the same chapter of the introductory Economics textbook that taught me how the GDP is calculated. The most glaring among these limitations is that voluntary and unpaid labour is not taken into account in its calculations. This tends to devalue women’s work. A woman cooking for her family in her own kitchen does not add to the GDP, but if the family hires a cook, the payment to the cook does. Likewise, as Alan Greenspan pointed out, a natural breeze does not show up in the GDP, but air conditioning does. Other things being equal, a society naturally endowed with pleasant weather is better off than one that has to keep the A.C. on all the time, no matter what the GDP says.

There are other criticisms that I am sympathetic to from the moral point of view. Purchase of cigarettes adds to the GDP, but a cigarette reduces the well-being of a smoker. The GDP has no way of knowing that. As far as it is concerned, a rupee spent on a cigarette or a prostitute’s services is as good as a rupee spent on buying healthy snacks for the children. This shortcoming has led some to argue that we must junk the GDP as a measure. Apparently, one of them is Lorenzo Fioramonti, who has written The World After GDP. I haven’t read the book, but I learnt of it by reading this broadly unsympathetic review in the FT (The FT article is subscription-only, so you should probably not bother clicking that link, and you should continue to read this blog post)

Now, as a non-smoker who abhors cigarette smoke, I am willing to lend a sympathetic ear to any method of GDP calculation that would lead to us not counting cigarette purchases while measuring the GDP. But is it really fair to say that the GDP is a top-down measure which takes society in the direction that it would not prefer to if it didn’t have GDP growth as a target? The argument that it is is not convincing.

First off, the GDP isn’t top down. It is a bottom up measure. In a market economy, a nation’s GDP is what it is because of the individual purchasing decisions of individual citizens. In fact, it is precisely because it is a bottom up measure that it ends up measuring things that some of us find abhorrent.

My friend is a smoker who smokes two cigarettes a day. Were you to ask him if his smoking makes him happy, his answer would be an empathetic no.  He claims to have cut down his smoking from his earlier quota of three a day and periodically claims that he is planning to quit altogether, but rather dubiously explains that quitting all at once is not recommended. He used to carry two cigarettes with him to work every day, but he’s stopped that. Now he walks down to the cigarette shack to buy his fix. The shack is 500 metres away from the office block, and his hope is that the prospect of doing the 1km trek twice a day will, at some point,  discourage him from going. It hasn’t so far. He takes his two breaks right after lunch and at around 4pm each day.

Peak temperatures these days in Hyderabad hit 42 degrees Celsius; I get dehydrated just looking out of the window. My friend pays for the cigarettes, not only in money, but also in sweat, quite literally. He is also quite willing to spend an hour of his time each day. Only the money he spends shows up in the GDP. Going by what he spends on it, the value added by those cigarettes to the national economy is actually much more.

Wait a minute! Didn’t we start from the premise that my friend’s smoking should be excluded from the GDP,  because when you ask him, he says that he does not like smoking and wants to quit? The problem is, if I tell the GDP: “Exclude my friend’s smoking when you get calculated. He says he doesn’t actually like smoking”, GDP will answer: “Look, first of all, it is very common for people to say one thing and do the other. That is why economists have a term called ‘Revealed Preference’. Words are cheap. People can say what they want, but the best way to find out if they get value from something is to check if they are willing to give away something they worked hard for, for it.

“Second of all, it’s not just a question of your friend. There are millions of smokers in this world, and it would be impractical to hand out a questionnaire with every cigarette that asks the smoker ‘Are you smoking this cigarette because you get utility out of it or are you just hopelessly addicted and trying to quit?’ And if you want me exclude smoking from my calculation because of a few people’s opinion that smoking does not add value to the smoker, well, that is not what I’d call a bottom-up way to measure me.”

OK, so the argument that the GDP is a top-down measure is unconvincing. What about the argument that the GDP as a top-down target leads us in the wrong direction? Well, that is even less convincing. When you get to work each morning, do you do it because you want to do your patriotic duty to your country by increasing its GDP or do you do it to earn money to buy the things you and your family want?  Or perhaps you are highly competitive and you enjoy the sense of achievement, you like winning the rat race, or you just enjoy having a lot of money. People have different motivations for doing things that contribute to the GDP, but “I want to increase the nation’s GDP” is rarely one of them.

The same goes for companies and businesses. They often do boast of how much they contribute to the nation’s economy, but surely primary motivation of those who run businesses is the growth of their business’s bottomline. This motivation would be unaffected if the government’s statisticians stopped reporting the GDP.

Does the GDP as a target take government policies in the wrong direction? Politicians want to get reelected, and the policies they pursue are the ones that will help them with that goal. While they may think of the GDP or the economy as a useful shorthand for the things that voters want, they must surely be aware that what the voters want is not the GDP in the abstract, but tangible things like jobs, roads, education for their children. These things tend to be correlated with the GDP, but voters will not stop wanting the tangible things they want just because the government stops reporting the GDP. In fact we know that governments do implement policies like protectionism even when they reduce the GDP. They do it because they care more for tangible things like saving jobs than the GDP in the abstract.

Given all this, I am just not convinced that giving up on, or even modifying the calculation of the GDP is worth the bother. If you are concerned about the untrammeled pursuit of material wealth, the problem is human nature. We aren’t doing it because the GDP tells us to, and we won’t stop if the GDP tells us to stop.

Arya Stark and Advaita

Arya Stark has had one of the strangest story arcs in Game of Thrones. She spends most of Season 6 getting beaten up, ostensibly in an attempt to become “No One”, but at the last moment, she declares that she is in fact Arya Stark of Winterfell. This has left many fans nonplussed. What was the point of the whole storyline? Why did she go through all that only to run away from her goal?

To those confused souls, this post shall offer enlightenment by explaining Arya’s actions through the prism of two great Indic philosophies, Advaita and Dvaita. It should be clear that the many-faced God is the Paramatma, or the Supreme Soul, who, in Advaitic terms, is the ultimate reality. A follower of the many-faced God aspires to be a faceless “No One”, who considers himself an instrument of the Supreme Soul.

You can see why this would be an attractive philosophy for someone like Arya. She has suffered a lot as Arya, and letting go of her identity probably seemed to be a liberating prospect. But of course, it is not just a question of peace of mind. She was also training as an assassin. Letting go of your self-doubt and considering yourself as an instrument of a being who is directing you for a higher purpose has a positive impact on your personal effectivenes – certainly if your calling is to be an assassin, but almost as certainly in any other profession.

In the event, it turns out that Arya doesn’t succeed in achieving No Oneness. It is possible that it wasn’t her intention in the first place. She hid away Needle when she was expected to give away her personal possessions. This could be an indication of insincerity, or it could be a confession of weakness. We will never know.

Instead, she affirms that she is Arya Stark rather than No One. Was all her training wasted then? Of course not. She has gone on the path of Dvaita, which posits that the human soul exists independent of the Supreme Soul. The girl has not achieved namelessness. The instead, achieved the ability to play the part of Arya Stark. She can still be a highly effective assassin because Arya Stark, the human soul, has achieved the same detachment from the bonds of Maya that one expects from the Supreme Soul.

It could get worse after Trump

I believe that Donald Trump is not an aberration, but that he is the continuation of the same tend that gave us Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, the Tea Party movement, the Occupy movements, Brexit, and a whole bunch of other people or movements.

It is a well-established now that the communication and coordination tools associated with the Internet – social media, email, blogs and independent media etc. have made activism, self-organizing and building political movements easier. When it is cheaper to make something, there will be a greater supply of that thing, it should not be a surprise that we see so many of these movements.

When we see a lot of passion and fervour among followers of a movement, we tend to believe that there must be an underlying fundamental reason behind that passion and fervour. I think that this belief is a mistake. Any organized movement where followers spend most of their time with one another, feeding on each other’s grievances and sense of injustice can generate in its followers the same self-righteousness, an inability to see other points of view and an unwillingness to compromise.

The American political system is more vulnerable to these internet-enabled movements because it is unusually bottom-up. Party leaderships have very little control over politicians’ careers, which are instead made or unmade by popular voting, either in the general elections or at the primaries.

American politics over-promises, but under-delivers change. Obama is a much better and saner man than Trump, but the fact is that the rise of both to power was fueled by movements whose followers fervently believed, against all evidence, that the American system was broken so badly that a complete overhaul (in Obama’s case) or complete destruction (in Trump’s case) is worth risking in order to make it better[1]I am not questioning the idea that some changes are necessary. I am flabbergasted that the richest nation in the world is risking annihilation to solve the problem of some people being richer than … Continue reading.

Trump’s contribution to worsening the trend is norm breakdown. Norms are what cause people to stop saying ?? ???? ????? ??????   and start saying ???? ??? ???? ????? [2]For some reason the Hindi font isn’t showing up. The first phrase is “Hum Paanch Hamaare Pachchees” and the second is “Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas”. Trump has gotten away with saying and doing outrageous things, and this means that he has also reduced, for future presidential candidates, the cost of saying and doing outrageous things. Again, when cost reduces, supply increases, and the US’s supply of crazy leaders with outrageous policies will increase.

I’ve made the argument that US version of the two-party system with two big-tent political parties and open primaries gives them everything, good and bad, that a multi-party democracy would. But the system has an important structural constraint, which is that ultimately two candidates face off against each other. This used to mean that craziness got airtime during the primaries, but moderation won out in the general elections. With so many movements that can’t stand one another, the structural constraint that pushes candidates towards moderation will prove inadequate.

And what stops the US from turning into a de jure multi-party democracy? Just the fact that it’s a stable equilibrium. The Republican Party won’t split as long as the Democrats stay united, and vice versa. But this equilibrium won’t hold if there is a three-way split where the third party is formed by slicing off chunks from both parties. Or a four-way split where the two parties split simultaneously.

The multi-party system could be a phase. But even a phase lasts multiple election cycles. During this phase, the US will have presidents who are electoral accidents, disliked by most of the voters. India has gone through this phase – it lasted over 30 years for us. The defining feature of the age will be presidents that prefer radical policies, but lack the legitimacy and political capital to implement them.

Americans are worried about Fascism under Trump, and yes, Trump has the instincts of a Fascist. But the democratic institutions of the US are strong enough to prevent Fascism from taking hold; that is not what they need to worry about.

India’s experience should prove instructive in this regard. We complain that the Supreme Court has taken over so much of policy-making. This process started with judgments like the basic structure doctrine and Maneka Gandhi vs. Union of India[3]I wrote much of this post before Trump had his first run-in with the judiciary with his Executive Order on immigration, and events are already proving me right. There is a parallel here with Maneka … Continue reading that were responses to the authoritarianism of the India. It gathered pace and became a full-blown problem during a period of weak governments of dubious legitimacy. We recently had this controversy over the propriety of a decision to bypass seniority when appointing the Chief of Army Staff. Principles like these stem from the idea that the government cannot be trusted with any discretion at all, lest it be misused. They were solidified at a time of weak minority governments that lacked legitimacy.

The US is likely to be in for such a stint at a time when it can least afford it. Checks and balances are great at preventing bad things from happening. They aren’t very good at ensuring that the right things happen. The best way to understand this is to imagine that the government is your employee, and the institutions imposing checks and balances are his manager.

If the manager consistently finds that she and her subordinate don’t see eye to eye, or if she finds that the subordinate is too incompetent and won’t follow broad directions, the only solution is for them to part ways. But what if, for some reason, she is stuck with the subordinate? She may try to make the best of a bad situation by micromanaging, by giving increasingly detailed instructions and by having too-frequent reviews. As any manager who has tried them should know, these don’t work.

There is no easy or good way out of this situation. Yes, Trump needs to be impeached. But impeach him too soon and it will seem like a coup – a legitimately elected president, still reasonably popular with his base, taken out by the establishment. Leave it too late and his actions are normalized – if you didn’t impeach a president for clear evidence of ties with a foreign country, what will you impeach him for? The longer you wait, the more damage the institutions of the US will suffer, if you impeach too early, you are left with President Pence, a weak president with little legitimacy. Of course, impeaching Trump does nothing about the structural issues that made him possible.

The only way out of this is if the USA somehow finds a moderate, unifying, likeable and decisive person as president. It may yet happen, but if it happens, it will be a stroke of good luck rather than the system correcting itself.

Notes

Notes
↑1 I am not questioning the idea that some changes are necessary. I am flabbergasted that the richest nation in the world is risking annihilation to solve the problem of some people being richer than others
↑2 For some reason the Hindi font isn’t showing up. The first phrase is “Hum Paanch Hamaare Pachchees” and the second is “Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas”
↑3 I wrote much of this post before Trump had his first run-in with the judiciary with his Executive Order on immigration, and events are already proving me right. There is a parallel here with Maneka Gandhi vs. Union of India. In that case, Maneka Gandhi was denied a passport by the Janata Party government for clearly political reasons. The case reached the Supreme Court, and the Court ruled in Gandhi’s favour. In doing so, it expanded the definition of the right to life to such an extent that it could then be used for almost any intrusion by the courts into the realm of policy-making on the grounds that they were securing the right to life and livelihood. Earlier the job of the courts was to prevent bad things from happening (i.e. preventing the government from taking away your life without due process). Now, it is to ensure that the “right” things happen (making sure that the government does things that guarantee your life and livelihood). The dispute in the courts over Trump’s immigration order runs a similar risk of the courts getting into policy-making to prevent him from screwing up.

Sort by Weight

Here is an interesting puzzle that was published in The Guardian on Monday. The challenges is to find which of the four machines will sort objects into increasing order of weight. The way the machines work is that the four objects start at the  top and fall through the slides. When they meet at one of those scales at a junction, the lighter object is sent to the left.

The problem is not very difficult to solve. It was originally set for German middle-schoolers. It can certainly be solved using trial and error. I want to explain how I solved it in order to make a point about how human intuition works.

I first saw the problem in the morning on my phone. I was busy with getting my son ready for school and so couldn’t spend time staring at the four machines trying to figure out the pathways. This constraint proved to be key to solving the problem quickly. Because I was unable to look at the machines and also was unable to let go of the problem, I decided to think of how I would design a machine if I were doing it de novo.

The thought occurred to me that I could model this as a tournament between four players. I could have a semi-final, followed by a final and a third place playoff. Would that work? Close, but not quite.

You have four players A, B, C and D. A defeats B and C defeats D in the semis. A and C meet in the final while B and D in the third place playoff. Say that A defeats C while B defeats D. We can be sure that A is at the first place while D is at the last, but we aren’t sure of the relative standing of B vs. C. So you’d need a second place playoff between the loser of the final and the winner of the third place playoff (which means that the third place playoff only decides the fourth place, not third place). This arrangement will get all the players arranged in order of weight.

Armed with this knowledge, I sneaked back to my phone and looked at the four machines once again. Aha! Machine #4 implements the exact design I had thought up, so it must be a right answer.

Great, but can we be sure that the other three are incorrectly designed? I took another look, and sure enough, another pattern jumped out. Machine #2 is really the tournament without the second place playoff,  and we know that it has a weakness, so it’s out.

Now, look at Machine #3. It looks very messy, but it is possible to disentangle the wires a bit. You see that there is a playoff between #1 and #4, but other than that it is really Machine #2! It is a tournament with a semifinal, a final and a third place playoff, with an added twist that before the semifinals, two random players have had a playoff and the lighter of the two goes to the left. Does this do anything to do away with Machine #2’s weakness? Not really.

That leaves Machine #1. I couldn’t compare or contrast this one with the other three. Figuring this one out turned out to be a matter of staring at it a bit. It occurred to me that in that machine, the heavier of #3 and#4 would always end up in the third or fourth position. Likewise, the lighter of #1 and #2 would always take the first or second position. That couldn’t be right, and it wasn’t.

So there, the problem is solved. No need for any trial and error. Of course, this approach wouldn’t have occurred to me if I hadn’t had to step away from the problem. And no, it doesn’t mean that stepping away from the problem is the way to obtain insight. It just means that human intuition is weird.

Third Parties in the United States

The two-party system is well-entrenched in the United States, and the blame usually falls on the First Past the Post (FPP) system.

It is true that FPP discourages third parties. Suppose that you have an election in one constituency, and three candidates A, B and C are competing to be first past the post. Now suppose that A and B are likely to finish at first and second place respectively. If you are a supporter of candidate C while B is your second choice, voting for C will in fact help A. Once you realize this, you, as a voter will shift your vote to B. When enough voters do the same, C will realize that he or she has no chance, and drop out of the race. Over a long enough period, the lesson will be learnt, and the constituency will be left with only two parties.

Does this explain why the US has only two parties? Not really. What is true for one constituency does not necessarily hold when scaled up. You could have only two viable parties in a constituency, but they don’t have to be the same two parties across the nation.

In a parliamentary democracy, for example, third parties have an incentive to exist, because they can punch above their weight in coalition governments. It is claimed that the presidential system in the US favours a two party system because it makes the whole country a single constituency. But that does not make sense. The US also had a fairly strong Congress that takes its law-making duties seriously. Why aren’t there multiple parties representing differing interests in the Congress?

Also, the US is geographically large, moderately diverse and a strongly federal country. Why aren’t there regional parties as we have in India? “Presidential Elections” is not a good answer. The parties could easily line up behind two major candidates at election time. The continued persistence of the two party system in the US requires an explanation.

I believe the explanation is that political parties in the US are unlike parties anywhere else in the world. They are big-tent parties. They are much more bottom-up than parties elsewhere. Their leaderships, such as they are, have very little leeway to steer their parties in their preferred direction.

Third parties form when a faction or an ideological grouping feels too constricted within the confines of an existing party. Because the two major parties are big tents, that is but a dim possibility in the USA. In other countries, if you disagree with the party leadership, you often have no option but to split and form another party. In the US, the party leadership has very little control over your career. Your career is decided by your performance at the primaries.

In India, regional parties are a way to handle the diversity of the country. They also provide popular local leaders the freedom of manoeuvre they wouldn’t have if they were part of a larger national party. But in the US, all politicians are free agents anyway. There is no need for a local politician to form a regional party to be independent of the national leadership.

Given this, how would a third party improve the politics of the USA? Aspiring third parties like the Libertarian Party and the Green Party complain that the two mainstream parties do not give space to minority viewpoints. Really? What stops someone from forming a libertarian wing of the Republican Party or a green wing of the Democratic Party? If those ideas have enough appeal to win elections, they should have enough supporters who would be willing to register as members of those parties and vote for libertarians or greens in primaries.

Actually I suspect that the third parties’ real complaint is that if they tried to work within the two major parties, they would have to compromise on their core principles. That is a valid complaint. The politicians and policies that emerge from within the two major parties are the result of compromises forged among the major wings of those parties.

But how would it be any different if, instead of a two party system, you had multiple parties, each with a core set of principles of its own? Those parties would still have to join together in a coalition to come to power, and in a coalition, they would have to compromise on some of their principles. We have seen the weird results that coalitions throw up in India.

I could be wrong here, but third parties in the US seem to show up exclusively for the presidential election. They put up candidates, they complain a lot about how there is no space for alternative voices and then they disappear for 4 years. This seems to me to be no way to build an alternative. If they really need to build a party, there’s a lot of organizational work that would be needed. I would expect them to focus on winning lower level elections first and then work their way upwards. They are either not doing this, which means that they are not serious; or they are trying to do this and failing, which supports my point that there is really no need for them.

And if for some reason, they think that a presidential candidate that doesn’t fit clearly into one of the two major groups coming out of the blue and getting elected just like that is the right way to change the political system, the recent election of Donald Trump has proven that that too is possible within the two party system. (I mean that the election is possible, not the change.)

Overall, I do not understand the case for a multi-party system in the US. There is nothing that such a system can bring to the table, either good or bad, that the two-party system with American characteristics does not already provide. It is precisely those specifically American characteristics that have stopped third parties from emerging, not the generic stuff like the FPP system or the presidential form of government.

Shyam Narayan Chouksey – the Movie

Shyam Narayan Chouksey is a great man who deserves to have a movie made about his life. More Indians need to know about this public spirited citizen.

Back in 2002, Mr Chouksey was watching Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham at a theatre. The movie has a couple of scenes involving the protagonist’s son learning to sing and then singing the National Anthem. Mr Chouksey, a simple, but patriotic man, knew what one must do when one hears the Anthem. He stood up to pay his respect. Unfortunately, his actions blocked the view of others in the theatre, who, lacking a similar conception of patriotism, remained seated. They objected to his standing up while he objected to their continued sitting. The dispute did not find a resolution then, but it instilled in Mr Chouksey a determination to teach his nation the right way to pay respect to its Anthem.

Mr Chouksey took his campaign against the disrespect to the National Anthem to other movie theatres and then to the High Court of Madhya Pradesh, where a bench comprising of Justices Dipak Misra and A Shrivastava sided with Mr Chouksey, and ordered deletion of the scene containing the National Anthem from Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham.

Unfortunately, a year later, Mr Chouksey suffered a setback. In 2004, a bench of the Supreme Court ruled that standing up for the National Anthem is not mandatory, especially if the playing of the National Anthem were to occur during the movie, as part of the story. Expecting moviegoers to stand at attention in the middle of the movie would cause disorder and confusion, rather than add to the dignity of the Anthem, the Court ruled.

Undeterred, Mr Chouksey began a long battle to get the Supreme Court to determine the proper way of paying respect to the National Anthem. Finally, on 30 November 2016, a bench of the Supreme Court comprising of Justices Dipak Misra (now a judge of the Supreme Court) and Amitava Roy ruled for him. The proper way to pay respect to the National Anthem, they found, is to play it at the end of every movie with the doors shut so that moviegoers cannot escape. While the Anthem is being played, the National Flag should be displayed and everyone should stand up to pay respect. It is unlawful to play the Anthem in any setting that involves commercial expropriation or entertainment, and the full version of the Anthem must be played.

Mr Chouksey’s 14-year long struggle has finally borne fruit. Indians now have clear guidelines regarding how to pay appropriate respect to the National Anthem. More of us need to know his inspiring story of struggle against the apathy and scorn of his fellow citizens. A movie needs to be made about his life, and I suggest that Karan Johar should make it, to atone for Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham.

Once the biopic is made, Mr Chouksey will move the Supreme Court to pray that Mr Johar be held in contempt, because the movie will have to depict examples of what Mr Chouksey was fighting against – fragments of the National Anthem, people disrespecting and mocking the Anthem, showing of which is illegal under the current Supreme Court regime. Plus, the movie will be a commercial venture and make an attempt, whether successful or otherwise, to entertain the public. By banning a biopic made in his honour, Shyam Narayan Chouksey can perform the greatest service possible for his motherland.