As promised, I had started a post answering the points I had asked in this post, but then it occurred to me that I can try to get it published. So that is what I shall do. If someone publishes, I will link to it here. If no one publishes, there is always The Examined Life, which will.
When Free Markets Are a Bad Thing
A year back, we were visiting my wife’s relatives. The head of the family, my wife’s uncle, used to be in the police force before he drank himself to death.
As is the norm in these cases, his eldest son was given a job in the police department. Of course, he had to pay a bribe for the job. He got a discount because of his late father, but he wasn’t exempted. If the son had been a graduate, the amount would have been lower, but he would still have had to pay.
And oh – he did not get an actual policing job. That would have cost him much more. He was given a clerical job in the department, dealing with personnel matters. That cost lower.
“I don’t suppose you have any opportunities to make extra money in this section?” I asked him.
The Model of Law Enforcement
It so happens that my article in Pragati is around 200 words shorter than it should have been, because it was supposed to be one of a set of 2, and had a reduced word limit than the normal Pragati article. Neither Nitin nor I are very strict about word counts while editing. If an article is well-written, we don’t care if it goes a couple of hundred words over. But while writing I am very very conscious about word limits. I set a target, constantly check my pace, and almost always ensure that I make the limit. When it became clear that Karthik’s article was not going to arrive, I was thinking of revising my article a bit, but then I had to rush to the hospital. So if I had given myself another 200 words, I would have been able to cover some of points I am covering now.
Beyond Parody
Yeah, I know that I should stop picking on random people on the net and argue with more substantive points, but…
But the Indian farmers who refuse to give up their land – and thwarted plans to build the world’s cheapest car in West Bengal — know one thing. As long as they have their land, their fate depends on the weather and the harvest. Once they leave their land, they face even greater uncertainties — from the job market to the world economy. Just like Singaporeans today. (Abhijit)
I suppose certain poverty is infinitely more preferable than fluctuating prosperity.
OK…
Why didn’t the Tatas (and others who extol the virtues of the free market) acquire their land on the open market? (Rahul Siddharthan)
Now let me get this straight. It is not enough for Amit, Shruti, me, the editors of the Mint, etc. to just write in support of property rights for farmers. We should have actually gone ahead and pooled our money and bought the land on the free market for Tata?
Me in Pragati
I have an article up in the October 2008 issue of Pragati. There I argue against Karthik’s post on statistics and terrorism. I argue that if we give a “free hand” to our police to fight terrorism without insisting that they obtain convictions from courts, we will not only end up with too many innocent victims, but also too few genuine terrorists. This was supposed to run in a debate format, with an article from Karthik and a response from me, but Karthik asked for a bailout at the last minute, which left only my article standing.
The Delivery
At 9:28 PM, September 29, 2008, we took delivery of this as-yet unnamed package at Fernandez Hospital, Abids, Hyderabad. He weighed 2.8kg at birth and took 30 hours to push his way out of his mother Soumya’s womb. He came a few days early, partly in response to his father’s threat to name him “Mohandas” if he dared arrive on October 2. His other major accomplishment in the past week has been to learn to feed himself. In the coming weeks, his parents hope that he will learn to distinguish between night and day, and stay awake during the latter rather than the former.
Where am I?
I am busy with an impending important delivery. Posts will be sparse till December.
Missing the Point
Gaurav responds to a couple of my posts on democracy. He misses the point in both.
He claims that my argument that democracy provides stability for the rulers is incorrect, and cites the examples of Bhutto and Allende. Both were democratically elected and both were deposed and killed. These are puzzling counterexamples. It should have been clear from my posts that I do not classify a country as democratic just because it manages to elect its leaders in free elections once in a while. There is a great deal of truth in the statement that for a country to be considered democratic, the test is not its first election, but the second. To hold one election is easy. To hold the second one requires a significant amount of “infrastructure” in terms of cultural acceptance of orderly transition of power, a free press, a neutral military, etc. The coups that deposed Bhutto and Allende tell us that their countries were not democratic – by definition.
Explaining My Absence
Ravi Kiran
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Paul Reilly
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How much should I charge? As my selling out will naturally be a great loss to humanity, I am open to a counter offer from humanity.
Editor Type Answers
Nilakantan Rajaraman S wants to know my opinion as an editor to this piece. Very quickly:
- I don’t find it badly written. It is not great writing, but if someone thrusts it before me and asks me to edit it, it will probably pass muster.
- But before it can be placed before me for editing, it has to pass a tollgate where someone decides whether to publish it or not. If I were that someone, I would not publish it. The hurdle is not quality of writing, but quality of the content.
- But the reason to publish something written by someone with the name of Sitaram Yechury is not the content. It is the name. His views will be published for the news content, if you know what I mean.
An Analysis of South Indian Brahmin Wedding Feasts
Growing up, life was full of mysteries waiting to be unraveled. The wedding feasts I used to attend represented one such enduring mystery. The dictionary meaning of “feast” had led me to expect a lavish spread of dishes, while actual experience was utterly at odds with that expectation. There were quite a few dishes, but the course that was served first and which overwhelmed everything else was rice and saaru (rasam). Everything else served later was in small quantities. A young boy with a small tummy, a habit of eating slowly and an ill-developed strategic approach would easily get overwhelmed by the feast. He would find, as I did, that the meal he had at the feast was less rich than the what he consumed on an average day.
Let me illustrate this point for my North Indian readers. How would you like it if you were lured to a feast and served copious amounts of dal with rotis, and when you were almost sated, minuscule amounts of paneer butter masala and malai kofta were plonked on your plate? The wedding feasts I attended were like that.
I grew to adulthood without the puzzle being solved. I learnt to cope by consuming less saaru, eating faster and by developing a better appetite. In time, as the cares of the world began to weigh down on me, mysteries that challenged me during my boyhood receded from my consciousness till the debates over Sainath’s and Utsa Patnaik’s assertions that the poor are consuming less food brought back the memories.