A Letter to Sri Kapil Sibal

Dear Mr. Sibal,

Like many of my fellow countrymen, I had known little about you till you surfaced on the political scene as a minister.  Most of us had an initial impression of you as a learned man with a cheerful disposition and felt happy that people like you could make it to politics.  I searched out your bio-data on the internet using Google and the bio-data, as provided by you or whoever, seemed to confirm the initial impression.  However this image gets a severe blow as one scrolls down to the end and reads the angry comments by visitors on your recent move to censor social media on the internet.

It seems that what is exercising the collective public consciousness and hogging the eyeballs today is not your impressive bio-data.  Instead it is the collection of vakeel-like tricks that you have been trying out, albeit unsuccessfully, to confound the 2G case, then to browbeat Baba Ramdev, subsequently to infiltrate the Anna Movement and tarnish it jointly with another outspoken colleague from your profession.  I have deliberately used the hindi word vakeel as like neta it is used in a not-so-flattering sense and no longer commands the respect that it may have initially done.

It is sad indeed that you remain undeterred by your failures and are now trying the same dirty tricks to force censorship on the social media on the internet.  You cannot be fool enough to believe that you will succeed in this matter that is so close to the hearts of public at large.  And you must also know that you are making yourself look like the villain of the piece.  And if you still persist in the matter, it must be on account of a conviction that the electorate is powerless against you and your class.  Perhaps this is why you and other of your ilk keep on challenging Anna and other crusaders to contest the elections.  And this is why the politicians are even more afraid of demands for changes in the electoral system than the fight against corruption.

Well this state of affairs will not last forever and your own actions will provoke the public to force changes down the collective neta throat that keeps gulping nation’s resources shamelessly.  But till it happens, enjoy your antics.

Yours musingly

JANATA

Persecuting Kiran Bedi

I haven't researched much about Kiran Bedi and my opinion about her is based on her coverage in the popular media over past several years. These have shown her to be an upright police officer and individual who strived to break free of the set mould and bring about changes in the system for the better. Chances are that you haven't researched Ms Bedi's life very thoroughly either.

However our politicians, their stooges, and agencies that are at their beck and call, seem to be making up for this lack of research on Ms Bedi. Never mind that these agencies are frequently admonished for public, media, and court for their dilly-dallying in many important and crucial cases awaiting swift action from them.  But they have all the time in the world for inspecting Kiran Bedi's life with an electron microscope!

Their hard academic work now shows that Ms Bedi has refused to pass on the benefits of certain concessions to sundry organizations and business houses. She became entitled to these concessions through her meritorious work. There should be little debate that the monetary value of these concessions belongs to her and hence it should be her decisions as to who would benefit from them. So she is very much within her rights if she decides that the benefit should go to her trust and not to a commercial organization that may have invited her and agreed to bear the costs. In fact even if she chose to retain the benefit for herself, it will be absolutely okay because the concessions are meant for the recipient as an individual. So what is all the brouhaha about?

The netas and agencies have further made a brilliant discovery that Ms Bedi's trust received a donation from Microsoft. As this can not be labeled wrong by any stretch of imagination, a vague accusation is being made that it has not been used for the purpose for which it was meant. Though Microsoft has never made any noise about it. 

All this is being done without sharing the specific details of their research project with the public.

So what signal is being sent out?  Are the netas asserting that they can be as vindictive as an underworld Don? Are they desperately trying to prove that the crusaders against corruption are also tainted, howsoever lightly, and have no right to question their huge blots?

We must send out a clear and strong message to the netas that their games now stand painfully exposed and they must mend themselves instead of persecuting those who urge them to do so.

Is there a civilized Alternative to slapping?

Slapping of Sharad Pawar by an irate youth is being hotly debated. Pawar refuses to forgive him. A section of public opinion says that while the anger and frustration of the young man is justified, the way he gave vent to it is not. This anger and frustration was reflected in Anna Hazare who asked if he was slapped just once. Another section, miniscule but vocal, proclaims it as a grave offense and demands most severe punishment for it. This section has also called for enhancing the security of Pawar and other leaders. This confirms and underscores what I said about providing security to all sorts of netas in my earlier blog.


In the political arena initially a proper facade was maintained and the all the murky business was kept carefully hidden from public view and knowledge. Thanks to the media more and more detail of the murky dealings and goings-on are being dug out and exposed to public view. And the public is becoming more and more desperate and irate and getting more and more exasperated by the unabated murky dealings and irresponsible statements and acts of the political class. The political class, in turn, is getting more and more brazen. Their smugness comes from the knowledge that they have the levers of the system firmly in their control and an electorate hopelessly divided along the lines of religion and caste is in no position to displace them. With all these deep divisions the politicians need not work too hard at getting votes either. They can win by bagging a miniscule percentage of votes. And a disappointed electorate has no right to recall either.


So what does a deeply aggrieved member of the public do? How does he vent his anger? Well, if he is daring enough, he goes ahead and slaps any politician within reach. And politicians clamor for more security instead of mending their ways!!! I reiterate the need to take away all protection from politicians except those occupying the topmost positions like PM and President. Doesn't each party have its quota of goons who can protect their leaders as was done recently to protect Rajiv Gandhi? The same goons can also serve to attack the leaders of other parties. Leave the security forces alone and let them protect the public that is their primary job.

Why should politicians be given special protection?

How would you react if a soldier demanded protection against the professional hazard of getting shot? Though this a rather dramatic example, each profession carries hazards that must be squarely faced by those who engage in that profession. A statistically dictated number succumb to the hazards in each profession and are routinely replaced by new incumbents.

So why should it be any different for politicians? They think it is their job to play with public emotions. After all it is emotions that help them win votes and not real issues. None of them care for the real issues. They put up farcical fights to win certain groups over to them without ever acting on the real issues plaguing the electorate at large. An exaggerated example of this is provided by statements currently being dished out by Mr. Digvijay Singh and his counterparts in other parties on serious issues of corruption and governance. This entails obvious professional hazards. They should face such hazards squarely as people in other professions do. But instead they stridently demand and get special protection. There are hordes of them at various levels. We are told that there are more policemen allocated to guarding the politicians than to their hapless victims - the public at large.


Such special protection also betrays their lack of confidence in the system that they run. The system is created to implement the constitutional guarantees given to the public such as the right to life. If the system created by them is good enough to serve the vast ocean of general public, why should they insist on special treatment for themselves? And even if they had no protection and were to succumb to their perceived hazard, why do they consider themselves irreplaceable? And is this paranoia justified by the available data? As far as public memory can tell all successful and unsuccessful attempts have only been on persons occupying highest office of Prime Minister. It is only people at the very top who face dangers from outsiders. As such outsiders are not subject to our control, it may be proper to accord more protection to the said class than what is available to common citizen. Everyone else must must be on equal footing.


Accordingly I strongly suggest that the current system of providing special security to politicians / bureaucrats at various levels except to a few at the very top should be done away with.

Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) - Crusade for upliftment of the masses or deplorable gambling?

Lust and greed together with ego and anger are the prime movers of each individual. Take them away and much of the sound and fury surrounding the life's idiotic tale will cease. In fact these movers are so powerful that the society has to regulate them through various mechanisms to ensure that they are channelized productively and the pace of activities does not heat up beyond control.


Marketeers have exploited the tremendous power of these motives for commercial gains. If you want to sell something create an association between it and, say, sex. Catch hold of a model with sex appeal and associate that appeal with your product whatever it is and howsoever useless it is. Lo and behold. Buyers, well, the majority of them, mindlessly rush to acquire it as the money in their pockets flows to the seller. This has gained reluctant approval of the society. Though occasional noises are made about obscenity in advertising, these are accommodated by the system. So use of sex appeal as a tool of advertising, whether appropriate to the product or not, is not considered illegal. Of course, selling sex itself whether in the form of pornography or flesh trade is considered taboo or illegal in most societies for reasons stated at the beginning.

Greed too, like sex, has been used to oil the wheels of commerce. While the object of sex is a living being that of greed are normally money and inanimate objects. So how do you associate greed with a product? We all know the mechanism too well. Provide the buyer with a chance to get something additional while paying only for the product (ignoring the component loaded to finance the prizes.) So at the time of purchase he is given a scratch card or a chance to participate in a draw of lots. The prize(s) may be out of all proportions to the cost of the product being sold. You may be buying a bar of soap and getting a chance to win a holiday abroad that would otherwise cost you a couple of lakhs! Or you could get a chance of getting your toothpaste's weight in gold.

The moot question is whether or not does this practice of exploiting greed for promoting sales amount to gambling? In my opinion it does and I find it surprising that governments, even those that have banned gambling raise no objections to such practices. Possibly the argument is the same as in the case of sex (appeal): You can use it to promote sales of a product but you cannot sell it by itself. So while lottery may be banned, a scratch card with a product or even a draw of lots for genuine buyers is okay. Though farcical attempts are made to further disguise this, howsoever thinly, as a test of skill rather than chance. So you may be asked to write a slogan or answer a silly question for entering the draw of lots. The whole point is that though gambling as an appendage to a genuine commercial transaction may be grudgingly allowed, it is not okay by itself and in itself.

In these days of technology enablement, new formats and tools for gambling have emerged. SMS based contests are foremost amongst these. In these contests you are required to answer a silly question, pay inflated charges for an SMS and then a winner is decided by draw of lots.  Draw of lots because one hundred percent of the contestants are going to give the correct answers. Unlike the case stated in the preceding paragraph, there is no sale transaction associated with it. I do not think anybody subscribes to an argument that this is a test of skill and not a lottery. The questions are normally such that even the most retarded inmate of a lunatic asylum would answer it without a thought. And even if it is not, you have all the time to do your research on the net. This new variant of lottery business is made all the more lucrative by the fact that technology has substantially slashed costs of printing and distributing tickets. Technology has done away with distribution of physical paper tickets and collection of subscriptions and replaced them with your telephone number and SMS charges that you pay. It is surprising that no government has even thought of banning this form of gambling. Even the states where gambling is totally banned have failed to recognize these contests as such.


Gambling in any form including that through SMS contests is habit forming like a drug. You feel an initial euphoria after subscribing to the game. This euphoria is later replaced by dejection and severe depression for all the millions of contestants except a few very lucky ones. So they go for another dose. The cycle keeps repeating and the addicts lose their hard earned money and peace of mind. This also creates a moral hazard where people expect a fortune in return for nothing more than a chance and a small payment.


With this background in place, I wish to make an assertion that the currently popular TV programme, KBC is just a variant of the online gambling discussed above with a vast group of active spectators added to it. Of course, the format is cleverly modified and designed to disguise its true nature and make it as interesting for the viewers of the show as the participants. Another advantage of the modified format is that it further reduces the chances of the lucky participants winning a bigger prize higher up in the ladder of questions. This is partly done by making the questions progressively more and more useless and less and less relevant to our day-to-day affairs.  Needless to reiterate that the lucky participants in the actual game are chosen through plain gamble or lottery mechanism. Of course a few may be chosen on the basis of their top-dog or under-dog status to add further spice to the show for the viewers and further disguise it as very different from gambling. The top-dogs add one more veil to this gambling venture to make it look like a charitable one.


I hope that you have carefully listened to the ramblings of participants who made it to the show. They tell you like a typical addict the efforts that they have put over a decade or so and thousands of rupees that they have spent on their phone bills. And there are millions like them who spent thousands but couldn't make it. And naturally so because it is after all a game of gambling.  The viewers too contribute to the gambling kitty by answering one silly question per day.

It is truly pathetic and deplorable that a person of the stature of Amitabh Bachchan is made to proclaim this program as a laudable crusade for the upliftment of the downtrodden masses though it is merely a sugar coated and glamorized version of gambling.

We can all be sure that a person of Mr. Bachchan's standing must be able to see through the whole gimmick but he carries out his brief as a true professional and leaves questions of ethics to his principals.

As in any business of lottery it is the organizers, and in this case the host too, that become multi-crorepatis. The hapless participants await the next season with clenched fists and a distracted mind.


Are you convinced?  Will you call an axe an axe?

Wake up, dear fellow countrymen!

It is quite fashionable to blame the government for all the imagined ills plaguing the country. In doing so we tend to completely overlook the altruistic measures taken by the government for boosting the economy. Altruistic because in doing so the government has risked its own credibility and image. Yet it persists in doing the right things, ingratitude of the public notwithstanding. I would like to illustrate this with some very concrete examples.


We cry ourselves hoarse about the unsteady and erratic power supply and long power outages. But we fail to see the abundant availability of all kind of gadgets for overcoming these annoyances. These include voltage stabilizers, inverters, generators etc: Gadgets, unknown to denizens of more developed economies. Have we ever given a thought to the employment that the manufacture and maintenance of these gadgets generate? And we must not forget that this not achieved by understaffing the power corporations. It is quite to the contrary. It is common knowledge that these corporations err on the side of overstaffing. Erring may not be the right expression because it is this overstaffing that leads to the inefficiencies and incompetencies that stimulate industrial growth by creating demand for power conditioners at retail level. I do trust that this shows the power boards and corporations in better light. Can you see that the apparent bad governance in power boards is in fact deliberate and prompted by the noble objective of promoting industrial growth and employment?


Take the case of another essential item - water. We have heard of Coca-cola’s frank admission in USA that the packaged water marketed by them is plain tap water. And it is quite okay as the tap water there is absolutely potable and guaranteed to be so. (Though, this being the case, one fails to understand the need for purchasing packaged water unless it is purchased by the homeless only.) Back home here tap water carries no assurances of potability and many a time it has positive visual evidence of not being so. Having learnt our lessons in the previous example let us refrain from calling names and look at the positive side instead. Yes, this too has spawned an industry, the water purifier industry. And let us not forget the packaged water industry. We do hope that they do not follow the US practice of packaging tap water itself.


Yet another example is apparent lack of law and order. This too is a studied and deliberate act aimed at promoting private security agencies that provide employment to ex-servicemen in large numbers. What could be more patriotic than this?


Look at our primary education. Despite huge outlays and employment of an army of well-paid primary teachers, primary education remains the butt of jokes. We know that even the BPL guys earning INR 32 per day or less hardly display any preference for these public (government) institutions for their progeny. This deliberate mess painstakingly created by governments and its pay-happy teachers has again been done with the sole objective of promoting schools in the private sector. What is difficult to understand is the insistence of these private schools on calling themselves public schools! These schools also provide employment to a large number of educated unemployed.


What has been said for education applies equally to the health sector. This has helped a large number of health care businesses to come up and India now figures as a medical tourism destination for people from developed economies. This would perhaps have never happened if the public health care system left little incentive for private players in this sphere by working all too well.


This penchant for promoting employment has been imbibed by each and every department of all governments - central, state and local, especially those supposed to directly interface with the public. They encourage enterprising people to come forward and facilitate this interfacing by deliberately making themselves a little too difficult to approach directly and making procedures a wee bit too difficult to be correctly understood by the public directly.


The public is not merely deluded about the real motives behind apparent shortcomings and inefficiencies in governance. They are equally deluded about the real reasons behind politicians occasionally dipping their fingers in the Consolidated Fund of India. The do it with a view to provide capital to industries, their own or those of deserving entrepreneurs. This again generates employment and improves general well-being. And after putting in all this hard and thankless work for an ungrateful public, they do need an occasional break. So what is wrong if they set aside some funds at well-known tourist destinations like Switzerland?


Wake up dear fellow countrymen and stop quibbling over bad governance, corruption etc. Thank your leaders for their hard work and vision and give credit where it is due.

Queuing Up (& Close)

Queuing and dignity are antithetical. If you are really important, facilities are set up exclusively for you. The very concept of queue is missing. If you are a little less important there is a queue alright but you can have someone else stand in for you. And if you are not so important but Dabang enough, you may insist on the queue starting from where you are. Who doesn't remember the famous dialogue by Big B - "Hum jahan khade hote hain, line wahin se shuru hoti hai. Hain! (I am always at the head of the queue and the rest queue up behind me.)"


However for lesser mortals like us queuing up is required almost everywhere. Here in India we have our own customs associated with queuing up. These are now being challenged because of concepts imported from places that consider themselves advanced. For example you now find an yellow line that is drawn some distance away from the counter servicing the queue. You will find this at airports, immigration counters etc. and the concept is catching on. There may be a notice displayed asking you to await your turn behind the yellow line. Now this is not merely a waste of precious space but also a denial of an educational opportunity. And all in the name of privacy, whatever that might mean. Our well-established customs permit no porosity in a queue right up to the head. In fact it is all the more important at the head. We gain much of our knowledge and worldly wisdom by observing the person at the counter and how he handles the mysterious ways of the service provider. Isn't a wise man one who learns from others? And if you are already wise enough, the fellow queuer at the counter gets the benefit of free counsel. So the proximity definitely benefits one of the two.


Apart from the loss of an educational opportunity, there are certain very real risks too in standing a couple of feet behind the guy at the counter. This may mislead a newcomer into thinking that he is in luck and there is no queue. So he goes ahead and stands next to the guy at the counter in a non-porous way. And if you object, he asks with real surprise the reasons for the huge gap between you and the fellow at the counter. I have also come across cases where this newcomer says in all honesty that he did not see you in the queue.


I must hasten to add that allowing no porosity at any place in the queue is just as important as it is at the head. According to our local and time-honored customs, any gap in the queue is taken to signify its end. And a newcomer will go to the first of such gaps and contribute his mite to removing porosity from the queue.


Such non-porosity automatically ensures that the paunch of the fellow behind you snugly fits into the small of your back. Since you may, after sometime, stop noticing that and get worried at being the last person in the queue, it is customary for the one behind you to occasionally nudge you in the ribs to assure you that there is no cause for worry. He may also use your back as a writing pad to enhance the quality of assurance.


Despite this solidity of the queue there are adamant queue-jumpers who keep hovering near the head of the queue and monitoring the alertness of and strength of protest from those in the queue. At the slightest sign of weakening in these vital signs, they quietly slip into the queue sideways. This is why you find the number two person in the queue moving out and rubbing shoulders with the fellow at the head on one side while number three rubs shoulders on the other side. Surprisingly this is practiced even if there are only two or three persons in the queue.


A more esoteric practice is not to jump the queue but to jump the counter itself and stand beside the service provider. This is normally preceded by months or years of hard work in getting chummy with and close to the service provider him/herself.


For gleaning more insights in queuing theory do observe queues at public places in UP and neighboring states.

UP IS FREE OF CORRUPTION!

In this post I propose to pick up the threads from where I left them in the previous one (BiMLaR). The fact that BiMLaR is widely observed and enthusiastically practiced without any hindrance from the rule making authorities is proof enough that UP is totally free from corruption. The simple logic behind this deduction is not difficult to understand. People ignoring rules laid down by the authorities present an opportunity which will leave any graft loving traffic police drooling. They can stop them, threaten with fines and force them to pay up in return for not doing so. This will, of course, be a corrupt practice.

However I have not seen a single cop doing this, not in Lucknow. They just exchange pleasantries with each other as they observe BiMLaR in operation. And it is not BiMLaR alone. There are other laws and practices which contradict official traffic rules. And these are also looked upon with the same benign indifference or bemusement as invoked by BiMLaR. If you know the population of UP and the number of vehicles and drivers, you can easily estimate the fortune that could have been made by a corrupt police force. But this does not tempt our honest policemen here. What more proof do you need for UP being free of corruption?


Do you say that they may not be corrupt in the literal sense but failing to enforce the rules is dereliction of duty and a form of corruption? Well, you are stretching things too far. Farther than the queues that routinely form on the roads on account of a rule-free traffic. Farther than the distance between the fingers and toes of the honest policeman as he stretches himself as he watches BiMLaR in action.


Some truckwallahs seem to disagree with this view of a corruption-free traffice police in UP. This needs to be taken with a pinch of salt or whatever they have overloaded their truck with.

The Bipolar Magnetic Law of the Road (BiMLaR)

Have you lately driven around on highways and city roads in UP?  If you have, you must have been either wonder struck or struck by terror depending on how adventurous you are.  Yes, driving on the roads here is not a drab exercise in following traffic rules and reaching your destination feeling bored to death.  It is a far more colorful and adventurous exercise of braving the unknown; interpreting the numerous rule-sets laid down by each driver and pedestrian, sometimes at the spur of the moment; savoring the frequent thrilling and threatening attempts at door-rubbing / bumper kissing closeness et al.

Authorities who have a penchant for rules, do make attempts at reducing the chaos only to be defeated at the hands of ingenuity of the enterprising denizens.  Quite sometime back the authorities decided to erect dividers on the highways and even major roads in the city in the fond hope of separating the up and down streams of traffic.  The openings in the divider have been minimized or eliminated altogether.  This is supposed to reduce the interruptions arising from right or U turns every 100 meters or so. But the authorities failed to correctly estimate public's penchant for taking the shortest path, their ingenuity, and their love for freedom from rules.

So what does the public do? Suppose you are at point A and aligned with the slavish rule bound traffic. The destination, B, is behind you. The mindlessly framed rules require you to go down the road till you can take an U turn and then drive back to a point opposite A and further down to B, the destination. Now why should you do this and waste your precious time and fuel? Do I hear you asking what should you do? Simple. Just take an U turn right where you are and drive up to point B!  When in UP do as the UPians do.

On second thoughts this may not be a total disregard for the rules but rather a quest for more fundamental laws.  Looked at this way, this UPian way of saving time and fuel is probably based on a theory which holds that irrespective of divisions and sub-divisions a road never loses its two-way character. It is like a magnet where both north and south poles must be present. You can not separate the two poles merely by cutting a single bar magnet into two. What you get instead is two magnets each with its own pair of north and south poles. So I propose that this view taken by the enlightened local drivers be termed the Bipolar Magnetic Law of the Road (BiMLaR.)

Thus in the example above BiMLaR would require that when you are driving in what the rules call the wrong direction in a one-way lane, make sure that you keep to the left. One does make exceptions and there is little harm in following this old, well-established simple rule. Now the newbies who are yet to be initiated in BiMLaR may shout that you are moving against traffic and that too in the fast lane. Just ignore them or if they turn too annoying give them your nastiest look and step on the gas threateningly.

It is a pity that BiMLaR can be applied only to the two halves created by the divider. One would love to extend it to each of the lanes on the either side, but unfortunately they don't make the lanes wide enough for that.

So all those who have not studied magnetism or have studied the silly traffic rules too hard, be warned. You either take cognizance of BiMLaR or perish.

Those who would like to study BiMLaR in all its magnificence will be well advised to drive on the newly constructed beautiful six lane Lucknow-Gorakhpur highway. Though you will find it practiced everywhere on city roads too.

Wish you a happy and rule-free driving.