There was an English King in 1842. Who?

Hint: I have phrased this question very carefully.

One of the things I like about the Americans is their insistence on using the right tools for the job. Take this post by Michael for example. It is “typically American” of him to wonder about why those workmen weren’t using better tools.

This is not to say that all Americans will do it or that no Indian will do it. But I know from personal experience that if I have to suggest some weird workaround to a client, an Indian client will accept it while an American client will not, except under a lot of protest. It is also true that Indians have much less appreciation of software usability than Americans.

I have many theories why this is so, all of them half-formed, so I haven’t made up my mind. It could be economics – designing stuff well is capital intensive. Why do it when adding two people will do the job? It could be culture – people don’t care, or think that it is not worth caring. It could be culture – designing things to make them easy to use requires, either that the designer actually uses the product, or that there is a feedback loop from the user to designer. In a hierarchical society, this loop is not closed. It could be structural – closing the feedback loop requires a well-designed organization. For example, designing sidewalks that people can actually walk on is an easy engineering problem, but a difficult political problem. The latter requires a well-designed government, which means taking the design problem one step higher.

Anyway, I will have more on that some other day. The reason I started off on this topic is to give an example of design which only an American could have thought of.
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I am sorry that I have to report that there has been no change in the deplorable state of America’s showers since I reported the problem more than a year back. It has been a daily ordeal for me to get into the shower, direct the water towards the bathtub, start the hot and cold taps, adjust both so that the water is neither scalding hot nor freezing cold and then direct the stream towards the shower. No man ought to be subject to such indignity, especially before he has had his coffee. Continue reading →

I don’t know if it is legal to burn the American flag in India. Even if it is not currently illegal, the Indian government can certainly pass a law banning the burning of the American flag. It can do so, even though nominally the right to free expression is protected by the Indian constitution, there are so many exceptions to that right that in India, a “constitutional right” is a meaningless concept. There is, for example, an exception for “Friendly relations with foreign countries” under which the Indian government can ban the burning of American flags in India. It is, of course, illegal to burn the Indian flag in India.

But the point is, it is legal to burn the American flag in the United States. It is legal, because their constitution recognizes that right. Because it is written in the constitution, no government, federal, state or city, can pass a law banning flag-burning. They’d have to pass a constitutional amendment just to make flag-burning illegal. In fact, it was tried and it has consistently failed to pass.
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Busy with a job-change and stuff. Will be busy for some more time, till I get stuff into shape and stuff.

I shall be in New Jersey from 10 Feb 2006 for a month or so. Anyone in New Jersey? Leave a comment.

So what has been happening in the Indian Blogosphere when I wasn’t paying attention? Ah, yes, there has been the start of an exciting new blog that has rather pompously set out to educate us on How the Other Half Lives.

A commendable initiative, but the posts are too long to read. I am too hardhearted and too busy making money to go through them. I’ve fully read only one post, this famous post by Dilip, that seems to have generated the maximum acrimony and the most comments. My only thought is, whatever possessed him to include Airport employees in “the other half”? How rich must the rest of the country be if someone drawing a Central government payscale qualifies as part of the “bottom half” of the population? Is this a tacit claim by him that poverty has become history in India?

I am obscenely busy with some things, so I won’t be able to blog much till the first weekend of February. So I am sorry that all those amazingly great posts that I’ve saved as drafts won’t get published till then. I am sorry to deny my readers the benefit of my superior condescending intelligence. I regret that your education will remain incomplete as a result

Amit, who is enjoying life in Pakistan, wants us all to vote for him as the Best Asian Weblog at the 2006 Bloggies. Go forth and do his bidding. Desh ki Izzat ka sawaal hai…

Finally, Michael Higgins, who was an Indian in his previous birth, has given an interesting reply to a question I asked via email about when the culture of restaurants came about in the West. His post is here. I’ve posted my email to him and his reply in the extended entry, so you can read that up before you read Michael’s post to understand my thinking.

Anyway, help me out on this. Michael tells in his post that restaurants didn’t exist in the West till the 18th century or so. I guess India not having restaurants till the 19th is not as incongruous as I thought. But there were definitely inns in the West for long before that, but somehow I think that inns and hotels, i.e. places where you could pay and sleep for the night would be alien to India before the Westerners introduced it. I don’t mean the dharamsalas – I mean a place where you can pay and stay. Any guesses? Any cultural referents?
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Young Shivam wants to join the Cartel and as per plan, all the other Cartelians are confusing him about what exactly the entry requirements are. Now of course, a lot of people might want to join it and they will have doubts about how to get in. I can only tell them what I told Aadisht sometime back, when he wanted to join.

Aadisht!
Why are you knocking on door after door trying to join the Cartel? Look within you! The Cartel is right there. There is a little bit of the Cartel in each one of us. You don’t need to do anything to join the Cartel. When the time comes, the Cartel itself will reach out for you. Then you will be of the Cartel and the Cartel of you.

Aadisht has a brutal review of One night @ the call center.

It is Kaizad Gustad all over again. Write a mediocre first novel (or make a mediocre first movie). People go ga ga over it. You get encouraged, and your second work ends up as something so bad that people wonder what went wrong. I’ve said this before and I will say it again. Bad novelists (and film-makers) are not born. It is society that makes them this way. It is your toleration of mediocrity that makes them this way.

Vajpayee’s analogy is neither stupid nor mixed up. Parashurama went around the world 21 times trying to eliminate the race of Kshatriyas from the world. If you think, as Vajpayee probably does, that it was an unpleasant, thankless, but necessary task that was ultimately unsuccessful, then you’ve got perfectly what he thinks of the whole thing. He is tired and is now passing on the mantle to the next generation, but without really achieving anything that he hoped to achieve.
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Have a great 2006 all of you!

Yes, that’s an order from the Cartel. In 2006, we Cartelians will ensure that the Libertarian stranglehold over the Indian Blogosphere is complete. By December, We will ensure that you will be incapable of thinking any thoughts other than the ones We allow you, except on Sundays between 4 and 5 pm.

Incidentally, I don’t know how many of you have read the previous post, but please do. It is an important one.

You know what the greatest advantage of a democracy is? No, it is not that it gives us the power to elect the right person to power. In my view, the coolest thing about democracy is that it enables us to chuck out the wrong person after five years.

Democracy is a civilised form of civil war. In a real civil war, the winner can kill the loser – literally, not figuratively. Once the winner emerges victorious, he is more or less obliged to commit a huge massacre to give people a warning that any further rebellion will not be tolerated. That buys him some time – usually more than the five years that democracy gives its rulers. But sooner or later someone will plot against him. If not against him, they will plot against his son who, though he is a weakling, has ascended the throne after his father.

Now, in a usual democracy, you don’t get to do that. You can, in theory, have a “democracy” where the winner gets to be an absolute ruler for five years, but it would never work. That’s obviously because the winner can still kill the loser and all potential rivals so that there is no one to challenge him five years later. His rivals will know this, so the election campaign will quickly turn into an actual civil war.

So democracy is meaningless without limited government, which in turn is meaningless without rule of law, and rule of law is meaningless without institutions. This post is about institutions, not about democracy.
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In a comment at Desipundit, Amit Kulkarni provides the best proof that Communism, as a scientific theory, was false.

Yazad, Ravikiran

To address the criticism of you people about Communism, it does not really matter what badge you wear if you are hellbent on killing people either by waging wars or conducting mass genocide, for the sole profit of a few people. In recent memory of last 100-200 years, you could be a ‘Communist’ or ‘Fascist’ or ‘Khmer Rouge’ or ‘Imperial’ or ‘democratic’ or ’socialist’. If you can get away with it, you do it. Just because you can. You coincidentially align with the people in power. You change your stripes when necessary. To justify to your unconscious hidden self, and to the public, you lie. It has been clinically proven, if you tell lies consistently, a point comes when you believe your own lies, and it becomes the truth.

It is just pure coincidence that the Communist Soviet Union, Communist China, Communist Khmer Rouge, Fascist Germany, Imperial Japan, etc… killed 100 million. It could very well have been that if Communism had triumped, all that is ‘democratic’ would be villified

Read the whole thing.