A Drafting Error

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

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

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

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

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

Frisking Kalam

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

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

The Politics of Reservations

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

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

Why do I go on blogging breaks so often?

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

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

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

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

Scion Rise

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

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

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

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.