6:30 am IST

I have moved (almost)

2008-09-02T16:46:00.001-07:00

I have moved this blog to http://khag.wordpress.com. Request you to please update your bookmarks and feeds to point to the new site.

Yes Sir, Yes Sir, Three Bags Full

2008-07-22T22:22:00.000-07:00

Commentator after commentator in the Indian media, political inclinations and insinuations notwithstanding, shed copious amounts of reptilian tears over the appearance of naked cash in the floor of the Parliament during the trust vote yesterday. A hallowed shrine, the sanctum sanctotum of Indian politics, was eviscerated, they wailed.

Hogwash.

Indian politics, right from the dark days of the 1970s have had carried the cancer of money infiltrating its ranks. The first generation of politicians had the dream of building a nation but that dream turned into a sordid nightmare for the citizens once the second and third generations swooped down. Governments - at both state and center - became less about governance and more about making the quick buck. The matter is remarkably akin to how countries with rich natural resources are the world's largest anarchies today. Owners (which sometimes is the state) realizes that velocity of resource stripping is directly proportional to the quickness at which riches will flow. Actually, it is not different from the way Gordon Gekko planned to strip the assets out of Blue Star Airlines in Wall Street. Current day politicians are very awake to the fact that five years is all they have to strip whatever comes their way. And they do it with awe-inspiring efficiency.

The money, hidden away like Indian sex in the dark corners of the bedroom, finally entered Parliament in broad daylight. Good that it did. It had already entered our living rooms through scenes captured in sting operations. It had already entered our minds fifteen years back when a stock broker confessed paying money to a Prime Minister - his lawyer even brought along the suitcase used to ferry the cash (politicians then were a touch naive - they returned a $20 suitcase after taking the $250,000 content). Members of the House brandishing stacks of currency notes represents the smelly armpit of Indian politics. Unfortunately that is the current unwashed state of the country's political existence. Those in airconditioned studios wearing Davidoff perfumes may not like it, but - alas - the brutal truth cannot be quite wished away.

The image of Mahatma Gandhi clutching his chest as he falls to the assassin's bullet is an everlasting image in the Indian psyche. That was the day the guiding light of the country went out. Let the image of waving cash in the Lok Sabha be burned into our minds as well. The soul of Indian politics died a long time back. Yesterday we merely concluded its last rites.

They Come Together. And How.

2008-07-15T02:31:00.001-07:00

Rabindranath Tagore - the Poet Laureate of India
Matt Harding - an idiosyncratic individual bit by the wanderlust bug. Jives with strangers around the world in a dance that is somewhere in-between Chicken and Raindance.
Garry Schyman - a musician based in Los Angeles
Palbasha Sidique - a 17 year old Bangladeshi girl who lives in Minneapolis, USA
Praan - poetically means "life" in Bengali. A small poem from Gitanjali

The end result is as sublime as it is electric. I'll stop here.

Technorati Tags: Palbasha Sidique, Matt Harding, Praan, Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

It would be funny if it wasn't sad

2008-07-15T00:23:00.001-07:00

They came driven in their own cars to do the needful. The needful were different for the two protagonists of the Nuclear Deal Drama India has witnessed in the past couple of weeks. Prakash Karat, the Communist boss, came to announce the withdrawal of support in a Wagon R (the small car from Maruti Suzuki). Mulayam Singh Yadav and Amar Singh, the two leaders of the Samajwadi Party, came in a Toyota Camry (a luxury sedan in India) to start on the deal to extend support to the beleagured government. Cars - perhaps - don't make the men but in this case it starkly revealed the polar differences between the two parties and also a pointer to what the Congress party was getting into. Ajay Shah writes in his blog about Congress' inexperience with coalitions and Saubhik Chakrabarti, who Shah cites, is correct. The SP with its skullduggery and under-the-table arm twisting will ensure that some key policy decisions are seen through while extracting their pound of flesh from other quarters. And that is the way India is destined to be run in the next few crucial years of the country's existence.

Being a democracy is bad enough to push radical reforms through - every decision has to be debated ad-infinitum and often by people who just don't get it. And imagine a colatition - an euphemism to describe a bundle of opportunistic once-goons-now-politicians trading horses of every size and shape - working within a democracy. If Apple hadn't staked a claim on the phrase and put it as their address, we could have justly termed the situation as "Infinite Loop".

A corporation that drags its feet to make decisions and flounders in forcing ahead purposefully is soon consigned to the back-alley of history. Why should governments (and nations that are ill-fated to have them) be any different?

Post Script: The UPA government faces a trust vote on the 22nd of July. Several Members of Parliament (I couldn't bring myself to prefix the "Hon'ble") will be brought out from jail so they could vote ("all hands on deck - rapists and murderers first").

Post Post Script: The cast of this drama is dominated by two individuals. Your political inclinations will decide which of Manmohan Singh or Prakash Karat you will call the hero. However, neither will vote on the no-confidence motion. They were never elected to the House. TVR Shenoy writes more...

Technorati Tags: Nuclear Deal, IAEA, UPA Government, Samajwadi Party, CPM, Congress party, Prakash Karat, Manmohan Singh, Amar Singh, criminalization of Indian politics, India

GL 007: Licensed to Separate

2008-07-14T02:17:00.001-07:00

I have been following the Gurkha movement for an independent state with tepid interest. I must confess that I have never been to Darjeeling or have crossed the Teesta river and my only exposure to the northern part of West Bengal has been through Satyajit Ray's "Kanchenjungha" and the songs of Anjan Dutta. I have no reason to believe otherwise that the topography of the region is breath-taking with the majestic Himalayas in the north and smoky blue foothills all around. I also do not have reason to beleive otherwise that the socio-economic state of the region is as pathetic as the natural beauty is scenic.

History is laced with examples of people seeking an identity because that would make them prosperous - or so they think. This almost never works in the United States because your identity hardly counts as a parameter for success. Unfortunately it does elsewhere, and it does even more where ethinicity is inbult into a social structure. An even cursory look at large regions where races of multiple ethnic origin were bound together by a fragile fabric of nationhood reveals that they fragmented away over time. Yugoslavia is a prime example. So is the esrtwhile Soviet Russia. And fires of ethnic battles have not yet doused in several parts of Africa (the only saving grace is that no external constituency seem to be interested in redrawing boundaries in that continent).

I fear for my country. I fear that someone has managed to sneak a foot in the door. The ethinic army is waiting to swoop down through the crack that the door has opened. I am afraid that there will be a boundary line going through my courtyard.

Technorati Tags: Gorkhaland, Separatist Movements in India, Separate State, West Bengal, Darjeeling

What does the sign in your store say?

2008-06-05T22:48:00.001-07:00

I took off from work early yesterday and on my way to home decided to stop by Reliance Digital to check out some LCD TVs that I have been earning to own for a while. Given that it was non-peak hour, there weren't many people in the store. There was however this big sign that said

"We wanted to let you know that we really don't care if you bought from our store - our goals are not aligned with your custom towards us. You are free to stroll around, see and touch anything so long as you do not ask questions of the sales staff. Please don't expect a sales person to approach you, smile at you or display any initiative to help you purchase. You are here for reasons you know best but we definitely know that we are here not to help you bring those reasons to fruition"

No - obviously there was no such physical sign. But the sign was everywhere. I tried to engage some of the salespersons in a conversation but they somehow were gravitating towards the microwave section (possibly because that is the ladies-heavy zone). I left the store in fifteen minutes.

All businesses have signs that say something about them. It is not necessary that they are painted on a board. What does your business say?

Somehow I like Wordpress more

2008-05-31T08:34:00.001-07:00

For those of you who may be interested in my professional existence, I write a separate blog on it. Perhaps to try out a different service, I chose Wordpress to host that blog. I was impressed by the service.

The dashboard has exactly what a blogger would want to know about his site
The metadata service is better
There are many more themes than blogger to choose a layout

I haven't figured out how to insert Youtube videos though (not that I do that often). Just out of curiosity I tried to import this blog into Wordpress. "Khag" is the bengalee name for a weed that was used to make pens that people would dip in ink to write. As children, we were made to write the name of Godess Saraswati (deity for knowledge) on banana leaves using a "khag" pen and milk for ink. Hence the name for the blog.

Starting a Mexican Wave

2008-05-20T00:27:00.001-07:00

I went to watch the Bangalore Royal Challengers play the Delhi Dare Devils in an IPL 20-20 cricket match yesterday. It was fun because I had never witnessed, in person, the off-field entertainment aspect of the sport. Shaan (a super-hit singer from the Hindi filmdom) performed live on the far end of the ground. He looked like a puppet from the distance but the gigantic video screen more than made up for it. There was this psychedelic display of laser lights and loud music played each time something worth celebrating happened during play. Lastly, but most definitely not the leastly, the presence of the Washington Redskinnettes (the cheer girls) added a whole lot of spice to the balmy evening. The spectators were hugely engaged with what was happening all around.

At the Chinnaswamy Stadium, the video screen usually sends out prompts to the audience to start a Mexican Wave. I guess the rapidity of events in a 20-20 match possibly precluded such attempts this time around. So an entrepreneurial spectator (he was wearing a South African rugby shirt) decided to try start one all by himself.

· He did the "1-2-3-Ho" act of counting and standing up after the count with raised hands. Obviously people around him didn't respond because they didn't know they had to

He did the act again but this time shouting "c'mon fellas, let's do it" before he did. Suddenly the whole aisle was rising up with him. People in the adjacent aisle took notice but didn't respond quickly enough
Now everyone in the first aisle was kicked up and people from many aisles out were noticing this attempt. A lot of them were just waiting for the juggernaut to reach their stands.
The next attempt was miraculous. Not only did the second aisle respond but the wave just spread across the aisles all around the stadium. Not once but the wave did three rounds around the stadium before people again got engrossed in the cricket.

It takes time to build momentum around an initiative that involves several people to succeed. And there will always be one person with the idea to start things off.

PS: Delhi Dare Devils won the match comfortably.

Vote Not?

2008-05-10T00:24:00.001-07:00

The first phase of elections in Karnataka is today and Bangalore is one area that goes to poll. Looking (and driving) around it is impossible to tell today apart from any other given Saturday (of course the booze joints, euphemistically called "Wine Shops" in Bangalore are shut). Some reports say the polling is 12%, which possibly explains why the queue outside the ATM is longer than that outside a polling station. Apathy towards a chance to decide governance is a dangerous symptom in a democracy. When I used to stay at Harare a lot of my friends took pains to tell me that this is exactly what used to happen during election time in Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe methodically ensured he "got" the votes year after year and stayed on power to rule the country. Twenty eight years into its independance, Zimbawe stands perilously close to economic obliteration. Chilling though but let me drop this analogy here.

The Indian Premier League

2008-05-08T01:14:00.001-07:00

The IPL is at its halfway stage. For the duration that it has been on air, the tournament has re-written television habits of Indians besides altering the cricketing habits of a few T20-migrant cricketers. It is impossible to pick up any form of media - print or electronic - that doesn't dwell on IPL. Even business channels on TV inevitably veer to that in favor of bulti-billion dollar take over bids.

Coming to the cricket, a few truisms have started evolving

It is futile to have the jack-of-all-trades all-rounders. This is a game of specialists.
Having a bowling superstar or batting superstar doesn't help. The top wicket taker at this stage (Zaheer Khan) and top run-getter (Virender Shewag) don't feature in the top teams
Any team that loses 3-4 wickets in the first 6 overs is doomed. They may produce isolated fireworks later on but their fate is sealed
(corollary of above) Any team that scores 60-ish losing no more than one wicket in the first 6 will most likely win the game
And for my J. Pierpoint Morgan style phrophecy - the fortunes of teams in IPL shall fluctuate

I am betting on the Delhi Daredevils to win the tournament

Many Faces of a Genius

2008-05-02T01:54:00.001-07:00

He wrote, he made films, he composed music, he painted. He was arguably only second to Rabindranath Tagore to leave an indelible impression of Bengali art on the rest of the modern world.

Much before I was introduced to the films of Satyajit Ray, I was an avid fan of his fictional detective "Feluda". It was only later that I realized that his films had a deep impact on the way he wrote. His writings, like his films, were devoid of flab, of excesses and told a story through a multidimesional plot. Moreover, his literature had a strong visual aspect to it. It was impossible - especially for a teenager - not to try visualizing the story in parallel to reading it. And then Ray had the uncanny ability to create a film out his own story that brought out completely unexplored aspects of the written piece. It was this ability that converted a short story for children called "Atithi (The guest)" to his last and seminial film "Agantuk (The Stranger)". It would be apt to describe the film as - if our perceptions were not pre-clouded by the phrase - an adult film. In fact, Agantuk went on to tell the story of not only a family under dilemma of accpeting a relative they had never seen but also allowed Ray a medium of communicating his philosophy of life through the main protagonist. The same went for his music, especially the fusion of eastern and western classical music that came about in his composition.

Like Tagore, Ray is relevant even today. It is the responsibility of our generation - the thirty and forty somethings - who grew up on Ray, to propagate his creations to the next generation.

Agantuk Part 1

Easy-con Valley?

2008-04-23T02:24:00.001-07:00

The Congress has pitched the daughter of the late Chief Minister Ramakrishna Hegde to fight ex-CM H D Kumaraswamy in the Ramanagaram constituency. The move has nothing to do with promoting women in legislature. Unabashedly the Congress party declared that is was due to astrological reasons! It so transpired that a woman is unlucky for the Gowda's and this strategy is a sure shot way to ensure defeat for HDK. In fact, the younger brother of Kumaraswamy, H D Revanna, will also find a lady fighting him this elections.

Bangalore epitomizes the progress India has made, especially in high technology. Can it do something to the politician's minds?

Chipping Away...

2008-03-26T23:04:00.001-07:00

If you are an ice-cream man why would you not let your customer lick (or bite) the luscious scoops on the cone as soon as you hand it out? Having spent so much in making the packaging look attractive it is insane to make it extraordinarily difficult for the user to start using the product (or for the consumer to start consuming it). I recently bought a bag of Lay's chips and settled down on my recliner to watch the Manchester United versus Liverpool soccer match last Sunday. No matter how hard I tugged at the seams the bag just refused to open up. I had to
(1) get up from the recliner (read give up my comfortable posture)
(2) walk into the kitchen
(3) find a pair of kitchen scissors (they are not a standard issue in my kitchen)
(4) Cut open the top of the bag
(5) dispose the sliver of plastic into the kitchen bin
(6) get back to my recliner and taste the first chip from the bag
Shouldn't bags be designed to give way at the slightest tug? Especially when quicker I get the opening bit out of the way I can get to the reason why the food company exist.

To find the bestseller...

2008-03-23T20:31:00.001-07:00

...don't go to your neighborhood bookstore.

Bookstores typically have a section called "Bestsellers" - mostly located near the entrance to the store, targeting the fad-conscious, non-enterprising reader. Books in this section are the ones the store wants to sell to you and has little to do with sales activity (how else can you explain finding "Black Swan" there. That is not a book picked up by the masses). A definitive direction towards bestsellers can be found on the sidewalks with vendors who sell pirated books. Laws of economics demand that they invest in books that are greatly in demand (low inventory risk, which is compounded by the possibility of police raid and ultimate confiscation). Yes - they also know how to place the better-bestsellers near the edges of their spread-outs (ask for "The Last Moghul" by Dalrympyle and it will take a while to for the stall owner to fish it out from a remote sack).

The most obvious things may not be always found at the most obvious places.

I upgraded to IE6.0

2008-03-20T00:01:00.001-07:00

I recently upgraded to IE 6.0. I was quite irritated at the way my earlier version of IE was behaving and thus made this choice. I was using IE 7.0 earlier

Generation in Transition

2008-03-10T00:44:00.001-07:00

If the advertisements are to be believed, the Indians haven't yet decided if shunning the US is a better option or embracing it is.

There is this advertisement of a motorbike that has an young Indian riding in the dilemma of accepting or rejecting an employment offer from the US. He goes to a construction site, looks up at the impressing skyscrapers in the making and makes the decision on the spot. He will stay back. "I don't need your job, Mr. Richards", he says and displays the Indian side to his civic sense by tearing up his acceptance letter and littering the street with debris.

Then there are two ads, both from HDFC, the financial services behemoth in India. The more poignant one is where a dejected daughter returns to inform her parents that while she was accepted to an US school, the scholarship she managed would cover just half the expenses. Her mischievously beaming father breaks it to her how he has been saving for this situation ever since the girl was a toddler.

As we transcend from one generation to another, hopes and aspirations are changing as is changing the outlook towards the West. I sincerely hope we imbibe from the West something more than just calling the last alphabet "zee". Whether we do it by going to the United States or otherwise is an individual choice.

Those who live by the sword...

2008-02-06T03:11:00.001-08:00

Two disgruntled employees of Patni Computer Systems, an Indian technology outsourcing company, has filed litigation that they were grossly underpaid, contravening their employment contract when brought over to the US on an H1-B visa. This may come as a surprise to some but is something that has been going on for quite a while now. In fact, it will not be incorrect to claim that such wage difference - covertly or overtly perpetrated by outsourcing companies - is at the heart of the outsourcing business. The reason why qualified immigrants brought over by US companies, supplied by the outsourcing shops, can't be paid wages less than that for peer groups in the US is allegedly to protect the US workforce. But who is expected to protest if this norm is violated? Knowledge workers are non union-ized, ruling out collective bargaining or collective remediation. Institutions bringing the knowledge labor in is least likely to even raise an eyebrow because cheaper "raw material" costs directly inflates the bottom line (leading to several thumbs-up from Wall Street analysts).

I don't know the solution but something tells me that factors of production, especially if they are scarce (and most importantly, human beings), should be nurtured well. I am not sure if someday the knowledge industry will perish by the same sword that they wield to rule the world today.

The People Falacy of Democracy

2008-01-29T20:10:00.001-08:00

The bombers of the Twin Towers and other hijackers on the fateful day of 9/11 hailed from Saudi Arabia. George Bush decided to attack Afghanistan instead. A 'regime change' was effected after the country was pulverized yet again and an ally of the Texan oil lobby was installed as head of state. President Karzai spoke impeccable English while his subjects were mostly tribals from different sectarian politics that mired the country, not well versed in the language or polish the head of state espoused. The disconnect could not have been more stark. After six years of installed democracy, the sponsor super power confesses that Afghanistan is at the tipping point of failure. Interestingly democracy is about people but its implementation is almost never people centric. Democracy is about building solid Institutions and this is where the Republican administration in Washington D.C. got it very wrong. They made the same mistake in Pakistan where they placed complete faith on President Musharraf. Dealing with people and mistaking that as democracy is an easy trap to fall into and it is not unusual that the US has placed faith on more westernized leaders. Involvement with Institutions need a much deeper understanding of the fabric of the nation, its culture and most importantly, its past. American impatience has put two important nations in Asia on the brink.

Standing up for Honor

2008-01-13T20:12:00.001-08:00

It is a running joke amongst my friends about how many times I have seen the movie "A Few Good Men". I saw it again last evening and asked myself the question - "why do I keep seeing this movie so often".

The answer lies in my stand for honor - something that was ingrained in me by one Mr. K.S. Srinivasan, President of a company I worked for. KS, as he was called, handed me my offer letter and in his bid to discourage me from shopping around with it said - "always work for honor, Mr. Majumdar". I've tried to be honest about that aspect of corporate existence ever since.

The film "A Few Good Men" is full of characters, as you would expect in a courtroom drama. There is a victim, a couple of "innocents", a bundle of marines, a fair sprinkling of lawyers and all other garnishing. The single string that passes through each character, irrespective of which side of the story they are in, is their stand for honor - the character to stay faithful to what one believes in life and an unfailing persuasion of that belief. And this goes right from the marines who are accused of killing a weaker marine to the base commander and the defense lawyers (who incidentally do not uniformly believe that their client is innocent but respect their own honors nonetheless). There is just one character in the film who doesn't seem to have honor. It is Private William Santiago. Incidentally, he is the weak marine who gets killed at the base.

The corporate world I live in is mired by questionable ethics and constantly lowering standards of human values. Honor has clearly left the building. It is sometimes necessary to watch A Few Good Men just so I keep my mind clear in these turbulent times.

"I'm tired of monkeyin' around"

2008-01-07T02:33:00.001-08:00

The new year has got off to a racist start - at least on the cricket field. A brown skin, skinny, Asian fellow has been accused of racially abusing a fair (almost) skinned, burly anglo-saxon. This must be the first time that racism has happened in almost the reverse order in which it traditionally has operated. Perhaps the white-men doesn't quite understand the basic nuances of racism. Racism is nothing about races - it is about power and if the Australians are the numero uno cricket team in the world then it is they who wield oodles of it and not the Indians. It is also foolish to attribute a rank to an insult, which by itself is something grossly deplorable. Making a "racist" insult to be of higher severity is opening up the ranks to other "innocuous" insults that can be equally demeaning. This monkey business of insult and insinuation in the name of "sledging" has gone too far. It's time the monkeys looked upto Darwin, took encouragement and moved on with evolution.

Kolkata's Kommunist Korruption

2007-10-31T08:46:00.001-07:00

I always land at Kolkata, where I generally make one trip each year, with tepid expectation. I am keen to observe the progress made by this city, which was until recently quite untouched by the economic revolution sweeping the rest of India. My first brush with organized corruption started at the pre-paid taxi counter (run by some union of the leftist government). My home is about 7 kms (4 miles) from the airport and hiring a pre-paid cab takes Rs. 105. The gentleman at the counter asked for my destination and called for someone to get me there. He instructed me, in English, to pay the person Rs. 130 when I get there. No receipt was given and no entry was made of the hire. On questioning I was told that no cab driver wants to take a short fare so I will have to wait (perpetually) if I don't avail of this "scheme". I had little option but to take what was on offer. During the journey I could have been waylaid, mugged or murdered and there would have been no evidence that I ever boarded a cab at the Dum Dum airport.

I'll wait for yet another year for things to change. For the better.

Cricket 2.0

2007-09-13T02:01:00.001-07:00

Thankfully they did not decide that players will have to don shorts and muscle Ts to play the World Twenty20 cup. The desire to do something different should have been overwhelming and it must have taken character to not do what Packer had done with cricket clothing. However, in the age of instant gratification, this form of the game had to be different from any versions of its predecessors. And different it is. Cut short by less than half of half of the number of overs bowled in a test match day, this is the cricket equivalent of the wham-bang-thank-you-ma'am phenomena. As Robert Redford so poetically said in the movie "Spy Game" - "twice the sex with half the foreplay". 20-20 cricket resides in the twilight zone that intersects frivolity, entertainment, power and true cricket.

Every form of the game merits its own strategy. The opening batsmen dig in and see off a new red ball in test matches while the same opening batsmen take the skin off the white ball in the opening overs of a fifty over match. There are different approaches to different situations and the art of playing the game almost resembles an implementation of Sun Zu's principles of warfare. Then there is osmosis - both straight and reverse - where principles from one form get to the other. It is not merely coincidental that more test matches end decisively ever sine the fifty over format got popular. The propensity to take risks in an otherwise staid form of the game originated from the ODI format and has made the five day format more exciting. The 2005 Ashes series in England was one of the most exciting series in recent times and the heroes of the series were electrifying cricketers from the one day format. Twenty20 will usher in more changes as more situation specific strategies evolve.

Frivolous it may be as it may be an entertainment show more than serious cricket, but it cannot be dismissed. The shortest version of the cricket game (yet, that is) is here to stay and will influence other forms of the game much quicker than people can think. Get to your couch, grab your soda and chips and enjoy the game - after all the result is just three hours away.

Shelf Life of Leadership

2007-08-16T00:59:00.001-07:00

Turning left as one exits the Harare International airport, the visitor is faced with what the locals call "Independence Gate". It is a gateway built to celebrate Zimbabwe's independence from the British rule in 1980. Twenty seven years is not a long time in a country's history but for Zimbabwe it has been enough to shape its destiny. And the picture looks fairly grim. The country is ruled by the same person who brought them freedom but President Mugabe has metamophosized from being a hero to the most hated person in Zimbabwe today.

India, on the contrary has been now free for sixty years. More for the better than for worse - many would think. Pakistan, our neighbor, was given independence twenty four hours before India and the country has hurtled from one crisis to another and even today is only a step away from being a anarchy. We Indians must thank visionaries like Pandit Nehru and Sardar Patel who gave the country a solid foundation at birth. It requires an iron will and vision to build anything, leave alone a nation and our early executives had oodles of both. But perhaps so did Robert Mugabe.

Here is my theory on this. All leaders come with a shelf life and any tenure beyond the sell-by date has dangerous ramifications. We in India came perilously close to it when China invaded us in 1962. It was Nehru's naivety that he couldn't anticipate the threat and foolishness later on to not realize the severity of the invasion. Nehru passed away soon after, leaving the reins of the nation to the younger generation but only after he ensured the solid bedrock of sustainable growth - political, social and economic. Jinnah died too - but my guess is he died too soon, and in the shadow of the partition it was easy for the armed forces to play the role in Pakistan that the army continues to even on this day.
Perhaps Zimbabwe would have continued to be the beautiful country that it was had President Mugabe not lived well past eighty.

Bubble 2.0

2007-08-09T23:46:00.001-07:00

Every silver lining has dark clouds around it. This makes for famous last words from a glass-half-empty kind of a person like me, but truth was never farther away from this maxim when stock markets reach bubble proportions. I was witness to the dot com bust in 2000 and to quote from a film a I saw recently - it would be funny if it were not sad. People were pouring money into every venture that had anything to do with the two most powerful vowels in those days - "e" and "i" (for electronic and information respectively). Sometimes things assumed hilarious proportions like one day when the CRISIL (a credit rating agency in India, later acquired by S&P) stock started piercing stratosphere just because the company released a new version of its website. The Chairman of a company I worked for proudly pointed our collective attention to Amazon.com, a company he revered. Why? Because it had no revenue yet commanded such huge market cap,you stupid imbecile. Commonsense economics had clearly left the building.

Turn the clock to what is happening now. The buzzword is anything two point zero. Web 2.0, Datawarehousing 2.0, BI 2.0 - you name it. Blame it all on the cheap money that made bankers and investors throw moolah at ideas that look great on Powerpoint. So you have social networking that is white hot these days. Neural networks and patented algorithms that allow me to connect to the doorman of a building that housed me in Boston for a week in 1996 (the owner of a two point oh venture now lives in the same building so you can connect to him through the doorman, you stupid nineteen eightyfive idiot). Sheer amazing stuff - six degrees of separation. I have 48 contacts in Linkedin (another social networking site for professionals), my friends have 203 at least, everyone recommends everyone and as a family it is much happier than my own. But how do these people make money, I wonder. The day Linkedin asks me to pay for the membership I will walk out - albeit with misty eyes - from this cauldron of social clustering. That perhaps brings us to flogging the most flogged path of revenue generation - online, targeted advertisements. But in a downturn, when everyone is busy running for cover who will stop to advertise lingerie on Linkedin just because your fourth degree separation happens to be that bombshell from college days?

Watch out for the end is nigh. In the words of Warren Buffet - only when the tide goes down will we find out who all were swimming naked. I will run for a swimsuit straightaway.

Bengali Blues

2007-08-03T01:53:00.001-07:00

I have this rather untested theory about stock market crashes. Every time you spot Bengalis becoming active and investing in the stock market, you are pretty much near the peaks. I actually witnessed this to some extent during the Harshad Mehta induced 1993 crash when it was common for a Bengali in a crammed Calcutta mini bus beam happily - "ACC book kore dilam dada" (just booked some ACC stocks. Curiously they used the word "booked" instead of buy - a hangover from the license raj where one had to get into a queue even to get cooking gas).
So are the Bengalis buying stocks now? I am not entirely sure since I have moved away from Calcutta. However, I have started gathering observations around another hypothesis of mine. Watch out for the "Sir, personal loan sir" guy outside my office building. If he is there frequently enough just short the stocks with high PE ratios. It is sad that I don't run a hedge fund - else, I could have pioneered the "Human behavior relative value" strategy. Watch this space to see how my strategy does!

Equality Anyone?

2007-06-27T03:47:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago Thomson Corporation made a bid for – and was accepted by – Reuters for a whopping $17 billion and change. My employers, Thomson Financial, a market group within Thomson Corporation will become Reuters once the deal is approved by the regulators. Thus it was not quite without reason that I started reading Tom Glocer’s blog. For the uninitiated, Mr. Glocer is the current CEO of Reuters and Chief-in-the-wings for the Thomson-Reuters combine. Mr. Glocer’s blog is a pioneer idea in transparency of thought and action – I don’t know of many CEOs who run public blogs. He writes well too (has to, right? Isn’t he the boss of a zillion and a half super journos at the most respected member of Fleet Street?). Now with all that corner-office-pleasing stuff out of the way, I want to turn attention to his recent post on China and its careful balancing act of socialism and market economy.

Mr. Glocer takes cognizance of the dilemma that governments face with public welfare, especially in income distribution and equality. The conundrum here is whether to rob Paul to pay Paula or trying bringing Paul and Paula to an equal social and economic standing. Straying clear of taking a stance, he quips towards the end of the post that he’ll stick to running companies. It is not that corporate management is free of this predicament. General compensation and executive remuneration has been a sensitive matter, leading to much discussion and even more controversies in any implementation. The question is whether employees are happy with their absolute wage increases or do they also keep a close watch on the chasm between different layers in the organization. It is not so much a problem if that gulf remains more or less constant. Adverse reactions are not uncommon is that gap expands. This is one reason why compensations are so secretive in most workplaces and why a lot of time around water-coolers is spent on salary speculation. Recently, the Indian Prime Minister, himself a humble economist, touched a raw nerve asking corporate India CEOs to cut down on conspicuous consumptions lest they stoke fires of social unrest. The media pounded on Dr. Singh for making this “blasphemous” appeal and not a single CEO stepped up to support the Prime Minister. The matter is one of high contention in the highest echelons of corporate existence. And – strangely - in the lowest echelons of corporate existence too.

There are some CEOs who have grown their business with higher social responsibility while ensuring wider income distribution. Mr. Narayana Murthy of Infosys gets top of mind recall – it is said the ladies who clean the Infosys campus are Rupee millionaires from grants of Infosys stock. Social equality is a matter that touches all aspects of life and retribution to an imbalance happens eventually albeit they take time to reach a tipping point. A one Nicolae Ceausescu will doubtlessly agree with this. So the question in front of corporate executives is whether to shroud compensations hoping the information distribution inefficiency will help curtailing unrest. This is akin to what the Chinese government is doing by clamping the spread of the greatest weapon of democracy – the public internet. Of course the other way out is for eminent leaders of the corporate world like Mr. Glocer to take a bold step in transparency and boldly go where no man has gone before.

Reality Check In

2007-04-11T00:13:00.000-07:00

I always have had poor experience while checking into any Lufthansa flight from the US. The girls (wo)manning the counter mostly have no clue to anything beyond lip-gloss and nail polish and turn to each other for advice on a matter as simple as printing a boarding pass. I always wondered why this has to be so complex. Is it just that their systems are archaic and the interface is in Cantonese or is it something more genuine? I cannot help a feeling of amazement (and pride) when I contrast that with some experiences I had recently in a trip to Mumbai.

I walk into the Bangalore terminal (the only other airport worse than Bangalore is the one at Patna) and a bloke from Jet Airways asks me to check in at the kiosk. “You’ll get an additional 250 miles for free, sir” was his carrot. He punched in my ticket details (India is labor surplus so there is a guy who does all this for you at the kiosk) and hallelujah, comes out my boarding pass. I just walk to a counter and add my bag and I am all set.

On my way back I was in a rather longish queue to check in. Up comes a person from Jet Airways and asks for my ticket. He has a handheld in which he ticks in my ticket details with a stylus and shows me the seats available. After the “I’ll take 10C please, thank you” he prints out the boarding pass from his handheld. I am pointed to a counter with much less crowd where I add my bag and I am done. This was an awesome experience and I just couldn’t help think of Lufthansa and feel proud of what we have achieved since private airlines came into play just eleven years back.

If anyone has qualms about privatization of airports (my communist brethren perhaps) they should just go to the Mumbai airport. It still is work-in-progress but whatever that has come up is mind blowing. I had always wondered why announcements in the terminal are so clear unlike the typical railway station like sound quality. I discovered that all acoustics in the terminal is done by Bose. I watched some cricket in a forty six inch LCD panel that had DTH service, heard my flight called and was headed home.

PS: The stewardess announced in-flight that “Captain Saurav is in command” while I read the newspapers screaming out “Rahul Dravid retained as skipper”. Life’s twists!

Bob Dylan, When Will The Hard Rain Fall?

2006-12-30T09:32:00.000-08:00

Sshh my blue eyed son, don't you shed a tear.
The man is no more, the man who evoked fear.
He killed his own they said, he killed his foe
He tortured who he captured and his own demise he did sow
He crossed the fence to the neighbor's house
He started those fires earth's water couldn't douse
If we let him live he would have killed us all my son
Little choice, we had to kill him, my little one.

Sshh my son don't tremble anymore and be afraid
You are in our world, my safe hands like I said
We never kill our foes, leave alone our own
Our captive we forgive and our sins we atone
We don't bomb out cities and we trespass not our neighbors
We make the world more peaceful, ruling it with our sabres.

Hush my baby, the demon's dead once and for all
Look at the heavens - a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Post Script: I wrote this the same day the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was executed - on live camera. I am no fan of Saddam like I am no fan of either hypocrisy or the act of taking away something that we cannot give back.
Let some rain fall on this parched earth - let it be the rain that brings peace and feeds that little girl in Somalia who doesn't know terror as much as she knows hunger.

Social Clustering

2006-12-19T20:45:00.000-08:00

“He has a cross [crucifix] on the chain around his neck but is still a practicing Hindu. When he enters the field he touches the ground in true South Indian style”. I was intrigued to read this kaleidoscopic demographic description in the Times of India recently. It struck me odd how people juxtapose personality traits, especially those that are contrasting, to bring about color in a personality. Obviously there is little fun if a person who wears a crucifix actually goes to Church every Sunday. The description also reminded me of Dr. Amartya Sen, who in his book “Identity and Violence” goes a long way to describe how mindless demographic straitjacketing – especially along religious lines – can lead to serious consequences of mass scale alienation, which in turn can and does lead to identity driven violence. I was also reminded of a delightful article by the late Stephen Jay Gould on how human beings react to being identified at the mean or at the tail of a demographic distribution they may have been fitted to. For example, I may be identified as a resident of Calcutta (incorrect), culturally oriented (correct) Tagore-Ray loving (correct) Bengali intellectual (correct) who is a staunch communist (incorrect) calling for a “bandh” every other month to protest against capitalism (incorrect). The truth is that I do not lie anywhere around the mean. If at all, I would like to consider myself somewhere in the +/- 3 standard deviation region of the distribution. Professor Gould argued that it is this behavior of a cluster that determines how closely knit they are. The closer a clan converges around the mean the more diluted is pluralism in the cluster. “Even at this age he starts his day with Saraswati vandhana on the banks of the Ganges and later goes onto read the Namaaz five times a day” is definitely not a definition of someone who converges to the mean. On the other hand, it is because of such out-of-tail personalities that the world becomes richer – perhaps not in wealth but definitely in enriching human values. David Ricardo, the seventeenth century economist wrote – the produce created by one class is useful only if it is of perceived value to another class producing another set of goods or services. Out of tail personalities extend the Ricardian theory beyond the realms to Economics to Sociology.

Post Script: If you have not figured out the personalities described above – the Hindu chant singing Muslim is the Shehnai Maestro Late Ustad Bismillah Khan. The first personality is more contemporary – Sree Sreesanth, the break dancing entertainer who also plays cricket for the Indian national team.

Emancipating Tagore

2006-12-13T22:48:00.000-08:00

The copyright for the works of Rabindranath Tagore was handed over to Vishwa Bharati after Tagore’s death. Vishwa Bharati behaved in a draconian manner and took particular pleasure in letting people know who the boss was when it came to rendering Tagore’s work. Gate-keeping, it was argued, is essential to ensure that the works of the great philosopher-poet were not culturally defaced. Every artiste who wished to publish her rendering of Tagore had to first get a clearance from Vishwa Bharti and people who did not bother towing the line of the gatekeeper found them stranded on the wrong side of the fence. Several artists faced economic crises as fallout but they stoically stood by what Tagore said – “where the mind is without fear and the head is held high”. One such artist, Debabrata Biswas, who besides converting to Christianity also refused to bend backwards to Vishwa Bharati sunk into sheer poverty and Hemant Kumar – another legend – stepped in and arranged a public facilitation to raise money for him.

Tagore’s copyright went away in 2001 (after a suspicious 10 year extension). Nothing thereafter has suggested that people are now creating Tagore re-mixes or overlaying heavy percussion atop a soothing song so it can be played at the local sinful discotheque. If at all things have improved. His written works, for which people earlier had to get on a wait-list to buy, are available off the shelf (in fact I have it all on a CD-ROM). People are experimenting with his music, creating compilations and private recordings are now widely available. Tagore’s work is being translated into other Indian languages making him the true Vishwa-Kobi (Poet of the World) that he wanted to be. Economic freedom has emancipated a cultural bondage that was wrongfully thrust on a public-good. His book of songs “Geetabitan” celebrated 75 years of its first edition last week. Today you can get a song sung by Rabindranath Tagore himself followed by one rendered by a Malayali by name Manoj Murali Nair in the same album. Like the poet himself said “Vishwa veena rabe, vishwa jana mohiche” (people of the world are mesmerized by the music of the world)…

Bhoole Toh Nehi?

2006-12-07T04:10:00.000-08:00

Power corrupts – absolute power corrupts absolutely. What is not said here is what happens if someone absolutely corrupted is put through strenuous self-inflicted rehabilitation. Perhaps the turnaround is as quick as the corruption was. There is little doubt that it was absolute power that made Saurav Ganguly go corrupt and lose everything he ever stood for – transparency, performance, lead-from-the-front and that single minded desire to succeed. All that remained was his aggression, which in isolation resembled empty arrogance. Rightly, he was dropped from the national squad and quickly slipped into cricketing oblivion. Then something happened and Maharaj went back to where he was after the 1992 dumping. It is said he even took low-cost airline flights to play cricket for Bengal and worked his heart (and flab) out to make it back to the team. He did make it back – not so much by choice than by the TINA factor – but he did get his toe in the door for sure. Then came something that shows how his rehabilitation may have made a man out of a brat. Saurav took a flight from Kolkata to Mumbai and from there flew nine hours to reach Johannesburg. Instead of checking in to the hotel and working off his jet lag, he drove two hours to Potchefstroom where the rest of the team was at practice. A whole lot has been written about the luke-warm response he got even from people who must thank “dada” for their careers but that is not the point here. Where there is an iron will to perform and the desire to hitch rides on the winding and dusty track there possibly awaits a pot of gold at the end of the road. Saurav Ganguly may not make it in his second coming but it certainly will not be for want of trying.

A Tale Told by an Idiot

2006-12-04T21:40:00.000-08:00

William Dalrymple’s “The Age of Kali” makes for good reading only in patches– something in the lines of Mark Tully’s “No full stops in India”. I picked it up to prepare myself to read his magnum opus – “The Last Mughal”. Leafing through it I wondered why is it that only foreigners write about India (the only exception must be Bengalis, who both travel widely and write even wider). Perhaps the Indian experience for them is so overwhelming that it compels them to pen things down and give us sometimes impressive sometimes irrelevant travelogues. That brings me to the question why Indians, who travel widely in foreign shores, seldom write about foreign countries. I have traveled widely in Africa and remember jotting down at least three writing plots on an airlines napkin on flight from Addis Ababa to Harare. Never got to write anything though. So it maybe we are plain lazy while foreigners are not. By the way, Tully gives a much more balanced view of India – Dalrymple’s account of the country suffers from the same bias as I would have if I wrote about African societies. Superficial in nature, colorful in presentation – essentially “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

At the Corner of All Action

2006-12-01T02:51:00.000-08:00

There are a whole lot of things wrong about Bangalore. A common answer I often encounter is the city’s inability to suddenly scale up to the blistering growth that came its way. I agree – and nothing embodies it more than the city’s cops. When I first came to Bangalore it was their hats that caught my fancy. They had a neat touch with one side of the brim turned over. If that looked good and smart, any reference to those adjectives in their demeanor was quickly dispensed away. I am not very aware of the cops’ skills in fighting organized crime but it is the traffic police that I find vacillating between ridiculous and comic. They lack the basic knowledge that street crossings are meant to be controlled with unidirectional traffic. I have found the cops asking (on the verge of imploring) vehicles from all roads to come for a quick team-India like huddle at the intersection. This must obviously be the cops’ performance objective because once this is done he quietly recedes to the most obscure corner away from the intersection. Sometimes he just stands there chatting with other cops or just sweeping a curious eye on his magnificent creation that is trying its best to untangle, mostly using blaring horns, abuses (in truly cosmopolitan tongues) and maneuvers that you’d expect only to see on an F1 track. My favorite policeman is the one who mans the Wheeler Road-Asaye Road crossing at Cox Town. On several occasions I have actually seen him helping himself to nariel paani from a vendor after he has achieved his daily target. At most intersections you will see the cop standing at an obscure corner controlling traffic with nothing more than microscopic movements of his hands. It becomes sinister after dark because you have a dim chance of even locating the cop given that their once-white shirts compete with their never-white complexion to provide camouflage cover in their operations. It is said that every city deserves the cops they get. What did Bangalore do wrong?