It seems that a Parliamentary Committee has suggested that IIT graduates and (medical) doctors shouldn’t be allowed to join the civil service, because the money that is spent on them goes down the drain.

The first [Reason] is financial: ‘If the per student expenditure incurred by Government on producing IIT and MBBS graduates is taken into account, it shall run into several lakhs (of rupees) if not crores. This means that when such a student joins the Central Civil Services, all the money spent on him goes down the drain.’

The second is social: When fully-trained engineering and medical graduates ditch their original calling and end up as civil service officers, ‘what is more disturbing is the fact that those many seats were blocked by them thus preventing as many students from becoming engineers and doctors.’

I am happy that they have realised the real worth of the civil services. I think we should take this to its logical conclusion. I think that the civil services should be staffed entirely by convicted criminals. It is a better option than to keep them in jail where they’ll only be a burden to society.

Actually, a similar idea has been tried in India before. Back in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries, what used to happen was that all the basketcases of British society – young men who’d gotten girls into trouble, wanted to escape gambling debts, etc. used to be sent to India to work with the East India Company so that they’d get a second chance.

They did a better job of running the country than our civil servants are doing now. I think the idea is worth trying again.

Infosys Technologies on Sunday said it had entered into a $3 million out-of-court settlement with its former employee Reka Maximovitch in connection with a sexual harassment lawsuit she had filed against the company and former Infosys director Phaneesh Murthy

(Economic Times)

Murthy said under the terms of the settlement, Infosys retains all rights to proceed with legal action against Phaneesh Murthy.

The evil genius Indian female scientist has been identified.
It is Firuza Parikh, head of Reliance life sciences initiative. It is a diabolical plan, you see. Reliance has made Indians immune so that its employees can continue to work in its factories in China.

Now we just have to find out if she hates her mother-in-law. That would be the clincher.

In the tradition of conspiracy theories, I am ignoring all contrary evidence, glaring logical inconistencies and sense.

The Great Indian Road Show Crawls
A good series in the Indian Express on how (and why) the Prime Minister’s dream project is moving at the same speed as his speeches do.

Part 2

A scathing article by Shekhar Gupta on how the Civil Aviation Ministry functions.

Such is the power of the largesse that this pipsqueak ministry wields that even the doughtiest of reformers in our establishment have failed to get it to mend its ways. The only reform it has allowed is the opening up of domestic aviation to private airlines but again with so many restrictions and caveats that it gives even the licence-quota raj a bad name. The ministry puts a limit on the size of aircraft a private airline can buy, each new aircraft acquisition has to be cleared by it. There are loads of other protectionist regulations – including a fiat to government servants and ministers to only travel by the public sector carriers. And to see how they flaunt it, check out the executive class in Jet Airways flights but then don’t ask me how they do it! (Kill it. Shut it. Forget it)

See my point? Why do we need a Civil Aviation Ministry? Just shut it down.

I don’t think the SARS virus was created in Chinese labs. I think it was created in Indian labs. Don’t you see? The evidence is overwhelming.

• It was unleashed on China
• Indians are genetically immune to it.
• The virus is a mutant strain of the common Common Cold virus. Where is Common Cold most common?

I think the virus was created by an evil genius Indian female scientist who hated her mother-in-law. (There! I finally managed to make use of the pun that was crying out to be used)

There is one thing wrong with this piece of advice to India and Pakistan by Praful Bidwai. On the surface it seems okay, albeit somewhat platitudinous. But it is failure-proof.

The talks might fail, but this advice never will. If the talks fail, it will be because the advice was not “fully followed”, or was not followed “in the right spirit” or Vajpayee was “not really sincere” about the talks. The peaceniks said the same things after the failure of the Agra and Lahore talks, and we can rest assured that the same things will be repeated.

It will never be Pakistan’s fault of course. Or to be precise, Pakistan is the petulant kid brother from which nothing better can be expected. It is upto the elder brother to take the kid’s tantrums in his stride and act with maturity and tact.

This warped way of thinking is not really Bidwai’s fault. Pacifism as a whole is a failure-proof concept. The pacifist’s favourite cliche is that “War has never achieved anything”. This statement is provably untrue. War has solved a lot of problems in the 20th century.

But then, we cannot turn around and ask the pacifist: “Give me an instance where peace has succeeded”, because the demands of pacifism are impossible to fulfill and how much ever you feed the demon of pacifism, it is never enough.

To be a pacifist, a country has to talk of peace while the other country is arming against you. You should not raise a finger while the country is moving its troops towards your borders, because that will only “escalate the situation”. It has to make gestures of friendship even after they enter your borders. Which self-respecting country will do that?

No that was not a rhetorical question. There is an answer. Do you need a hint?

But of course, eventually that country fought back and lost badly. In fighting back, it ensured that the sacred tenets of Pacifism remain unrefuted to this day. In return, it was accused of being the “aggressor” by the Communist Party of India* , because according to the “enemy”, the territory that the countr? occupied was actually that of the said enemy.

If that country had instead welcomed “enemy” troops into its capital, it would have “won without war” wouldn’t it?

After all, that was the advice the father of that nation gave to its former rulers

‘… I want you to fight Nazism without arms. I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them… I am telling His Excellency the Viceroy that my services are at the disposal of His Majesty’s Government, should they consider them of any practical use in advancing the object of my appeal.’ (Stanley Wolpert’s Jinnah of Pakistan, pp. 187-188 as cited on page 144 of Chapter I of Constitutional Law of India, Supplement to Third Edition, 1988, written and published by H M Seervai, a giant in the field of constitutional history.)

*which split on this issue – the question was whether to support China or the USSR. India of course never figured

An email and instant messaging program that lets users share contact details, appointments and other information without the need for an expensive central server has been released.

Chandler 0.1 is designed to provide similar features as Microsoft’s Outlook program. But instead of storing shared information on a central server, a more robust peer-to-peer network is used to distribute information between the computers of individual users(New Scientist )

Chandler is owned by Mitch Kapor, who developed Lotus Notes and 1-2-3

The brain is a wondrous organ. As scientists uncover more of its inner workings through brain-mapping techniques,1 our understanding of its astonishing abilities increases. But the brain isn’t the rational calculating machine we sometimes imagine. Over the millennia of its evolution, it has developed shortcuts, simplifications, biases, and basic bad habits. Some of them may have helped early humans survive on the savannas of Africa (“if it looks like a wildebeest and everyone else is chasing it, it must be lunch” ), but they create problems for us today. Equally, some of the brain’s flaws may result from education and socialization rather than nature. But whatever the root cau?e, the brain can be a deceptive guide for rational decision making ( The McKinsey Quarterly: Hidden flaws in strategy -Free Registration Required via Ramnath)

The article is wonderful and the free registration is worth every buck. It provides a very good summary of the insights from behavioural economics and how it is useful to keep in mind while formulating strategy.

We are overconfident. We tend to categorize and treat money differently depending on where it comes from. We have a bias in favour of the status quo. We tend to relate in our minds unrelated events just because they are presented together. We are uncomfortable with the concept of sunk costs. We tend to follow the herd. We err in estimating how happy or sad we will feel in the future becuase of our current actions (we tend to overestimate both the intensity of happiness and unhappiness). Finally, we are prone to false consensus, i.e., we look for evidence which confirms our hypotheses, remember only those facts that reinforce our assumptions (selective memory), judge contrary evidence more harshly than evidence that supports our view(biased evaluation) and we are prone to groupthink, the tendency to agree with every one else in the group.

Incidentally, I have never understood the concept of rationality. Being rational is different from being logical. The rules of logic are fairly well defined, whereas the rules of rational behaviour, according to Economics, seem to be:

1. Human beings want some things. They are willing to forgo some other things, or put in some effort, in order to get the things that they want more.
2. Whatever human beings want, they prefer to have more of it than less of it.
3. Whatever human beings want, as they get more and more of it, they are willing to expend less and less of additional effort in order to get the next incremental unit. (Also known as the law of diminishing marginal utility. The first two rules are so basic to economics that those rules do not have a name )

There are others (such as the tendency to risk aversion), but the point is that these rules don’t follow from any higher-order principles. They come from observation of human behaviour. So why do we call these rules rational and the new insights we are getting from behavioural economics non-rational?

For the sudden, long and unexplained absence. Project delivery beckoned.
Hopefully will start blogging soon.

It all started when I called in a standing promise from Yazad that I could borrow this book from him whenever I wished. Three witnesses were called in to ensure that the handing-over process was free and fair. There was international presence too. The press wasn’t invited.
It ended with the discovery that I am a genius in the garb of simplicity and that I have a a scholarly bearing about [me]

Many things conspired to prevent the momentous event from taking place. The night before the meeting, I was in the same state that Salman Khan got into in Andaz Apna Apna as a result of Amir Khan’s machinations.* The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation dug up trenches all around my office, perhaps anticipating an invasion by American special forces. (after all, anti-war types keep saying that India could be next ) But with grim determination and gritted teeth, I landed up, albeit 45 minutes fashionably late and just before Sampada could throw a tantrum (in Yazad’s words ) I didn’t know which to fear more – a lady’s tantrum or a German’s disapproval of unpunctual people, but thankully I was spared both.

Sampada was as vivacious as I’d expected her to be. Sameer being the silent type shouldn’t have surprised me. After all, I had my own experience to go by, but it did. I had met Yazad before, so he wasn’t a suprise. This time, we did not get into an argument about whether a government was needed or not, but we did manage to discuss ostentatious Indian marriages, a German’s cultural shock at finding people without a sense of time (he meant people in Africa, not me – at least that’s what he assured me) and the Protestant movement and Martin Luther’s part in stopping the sale of indulgences.

I think I missed a lot of the conversation this time because of BMC’s war preparations. I want to make it up.
Here’s to many more such meetings! When do we meet again? This time I promise I won’t be late.

*You know, where Amir takes revenge because Salman subjected him to a diet? That state. Literally

Shanti is facing a flame war about her comments policy.

Inspite of my best efforts, I haven’t managed to attract any trolls or hatemailers, but hope resides eternal. In any case, as a contingency measure, I have put in place a pre-emptive comments policy.

1. If you are a decent guy, your comments will be welcome here. I won’t tell you what kinds of comments are acceptable. Decent guys don’t need to be told and nutcases won’t read it anyway.
2. I will tolerate the occasional over-the-top comments from decent guys. I won’t even tell you that your comments are over-the-top. Decent guys don’t need to be told, and nutcases won’t care.
3. I won’t tell you what action I will take against nutcases, except to assure you that it won’t involve physical violence. I won’t even tell you after I have taken such action. Once again, decent people won’t need to be told and nutcases will?find a way to circumvent if told.
4. I can, however, tell you that my first reaction to a troll or a hatemailer will be to ignore him.
5. Subject to [1] and [2], I won’t put any restriction on the content of the comments, save one. No one will ever tell me that I am “entitled to my opinion”, or that “this is a democracy where everyone has freedom of speech.” I am putting this restriction as a matter of taste. This is the most cliched way to end an argument and also the most pointless.

   Likewise, no one will ever accuse me of throttling their freedom of speech because
   a) I criticised what they said, or
   b) because I took some action under pt 3.
   That you do not have freedom of speech on my property ought to go without saying, but people cry “freedom of speech!” so often that it has to be said.

In places where I have said “decent guy”, please change the second word according to your gender.