Author: Atanu Dey

Economist.

Blogs as Conversations

Physically, the Internet is a network of networks, a network of physical connections with computers as the nodes. In a logical sense, at a higher level of conceptualization, it is a network of relationships that is established through conversations between humans. The Internet is new but it is merely a modern technological manifestation which addresses the much older higher-level need for humans to connect. We connect in our daily lives through conversations with people in our neighborhood. The Internet expands the concept of the neighborhood to global proportions through the World Wide Web.

Conversations on the Internet are not a new phenomenon. Before the World Wide Web, the Internet was home to Usenet, a very diverse set of virtual communities (called news groups) with interests that ranged from metaphysics to culture to science and everything in between. In the mid-80s and 90s, I conversed furiously on the various Usenet groups (such as soc.culture.Indian) writing thousands of posts on matters that mattered to me as an Indian living in the US, and connecting with others with similar interests—India, economic development, Buddhism, etc. That habit of conversing with others quite easily transferred to writing a blog centered on my obsession with India’s economic growth and development.

Einstein had noted that humans, limited by time and space, suffer from what he called an “optical delusion of consciousness” which makes one experience oneself as something separate from others. The goal then, he said, was to “free ourselves by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

At its best, blogs enable that widening of compassion by connecting with others in conversations that continue to draw people with differing points of view. My blog helps me connect and learn from those who converse with me on my blog. By writing I often reveal to myself what I know implicitly but don’t know explicitly. It is process of discovery. Then there is the wider learning that comes from visiting other blogs and overhearing the conversations going on there.

Of course, one may not find all conversations interesting or meaningful. Coming across tales told by idiots full of sound and fury signifying nothing, one just moves on. There are many tellers of tales and many stories being told that deserve to be heard. Our neighborhood now has a virtually (sic) unlimited number of interesting people for us to hear stories from.

Let the blogs roll on.

Billions and Billions

Over the weekend, I spent some time with old friends in San Francisco. P was visiting from Delaware and B from North Dakota. Beautiful weather after the exhilarating storms that passed through a few days before that.

Sitting in the financial district Holiday Inn lobby waiting for A to show up (stop and go traffic, he kept telling us over the many cell phone contacts), the conversation drifted to ‘faith’.

B wanted to know what was it that made people have faith. I confessed that I have absolutely zero faith. P said that he had faith in his ability. B said that he was more interested in the faith that people have in an afterlife and in god and so on. I said that only feeble-minded people need the crutch that faith provides against the terrors of non-existence that follows death.

***

Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher and emperor, was not feeble-minded when he wrote in his “Meditations”:

What a soul that is which is ready, if at any moment it must be separated from the body, and ready either to be extinguished or dispersed or continue to exist; but so that this readiness comes from a man’s own judgment, not from mere obstinacy, as with the Christians, but considerately and with dignity and in a way to persuade another, without tragic show.

That was the attitude that Carl Sagan expressed when he was dying of cancer. He wrote

I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.

. . .the world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides

…  Many [people] have asked me how it is possible to face death without the certainty of an afterlife. I can only say that it hasn’t been a problem. With reservations about feeble souls, I share the view of a hero of mine, Albert Einstein: I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I, nor would I want to, conceive of an individual that survives his physical death. Let feeble souls, from fear for absurd egotism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoting striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

***

Sagan passed into the great beyond in December 1999. A truly great soul, in a manner of speaking of course. I don’t have faith in the concept of soul. I am not one who believes that the universe is made of ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’. It is all of one thing — call it matter or call it spirit — take your pick. But you can’t have both.

Sagan is remembered for his great and triumphant attempt at sparking an interest in our wondrous universe in millions of people through his television series COSMOS and his many popular writings. And his trademark “billions and billions” expression which many people affectionately remember him saying in his COSMOS series (but which in fact he never did.)

He did say billions though and said it many times. But what else can you say when you are talking about the age of the universe or the number of galaxies and the number of stars in these galaxies. I dare you to talk about all that without saying billions.

***

When you talk about the length of a Day of Brahma, you have to say billions. One episode of Sagan’s Cosmos tv series focused on India. When asked why so, he replied that it did so because of that wonderful aspect of Hindu cosmology which first of all gives a time-scale for the Earth and the universe — a time-scale which is consonant with that of modern scientific cosmology. We know that the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, and the cosmos, or at least its present incarnation, is something like 10 or 20 billion years old. The Hindu tradition has a day and night of Brahma in this range, somewhere in the region of 8.4 billion years.

He is referring to Mahakalpa. One thousand Mahakalpas is equal to one Day of Brahma.

Brahma’s waking period lasts 4.32 billion years. Following that he sleeps for another 4.32 billion years. While asleep, he dreams the world into existence.

We are a dream in Brahma’s mind. Brahma is running a simulation of the world while asleep. When he awakes, that simulation ends and so on.

We are just a lot of dream stuff.

The ancients in India dreamt all that stuff up, of course. And the physicists of today are dreaming more such stuff. And from time to time, there are surprising convergences between the two.

***

Here’s Sagan:

As far as I know [Hinduism] is the only ancient religious tradition on the Earth which talks about the right time-scale. We want to get across the concept of the right time-scale, and to show that it is not unnatural.

In the West, people have the sense that what is natural is for the universe to be a few thousand years old, and that billions is indwelling, and no one can understand it. The Hindu concept is very clear. Here is a great world culture which has always talked about billions of years.

Finally, the many billion year time-scale of Hindu cosmology is not the entire history of the universe, but just the day and night of Brahma, and there is the idea of an infinite cycle of births and deaths and an infinite number of universes, each with its own gods.

And this is a very grand idea. Whether it is true or not, is not yet clear. But it makes the pulse quicken, and we thought it was a good way to approach the subject.

***

It is a cyclic universe. Big crunches following big bangs following big crunches. The boom and bust cycle of the economy played on a stage the size of the known universe.

And I am at the center of that known universe. Just as you are of course. And so is everyone else at the center of the known universe. Everything is at the center of the known universe.

And the universe is perfect at every moment.

It is the perfect dance of Shiva as he dances the Tandava in his form as the King of Dancers, the Nataraja. Shiva dancing at the “Edge of Forever”. Which is the title of a chapter of COSMOS. Sagan explains

The traditional explanation of the Nataraja is that it symbolizes the creation of the universe in one hand and the death of the universe in the other — the drum and the flame — and after all, that is what cosmology is all about. So in addition to being artistically exquisite, the Nataraja provides exactly the kind of symbolism that we wanted.

So there you have it. What we can be certain about is that fact that we are going to die one day, as Bipin pointed out. The rest is uncertain. How did the universe begin? What caused it to come into existence? What is the point in all this?

Big minds can perhaps answer these questions. Or maybe not. The “Hymn to Creation” of the Rg Veda concludes

Who knows for certain? Who shall here declare it?
Whence was it born, whence came creation?
No one knows whence creation arose;
and whether god has or has not made it.
He who surveys it from the highest regions
Perhaps he knows it, or perhaps he knows not.

That’s the ultimate expression of agnosticism, of doubt, the first necessary step in the infinite journey of discovery and enlightenment. The ancients in India conjectured about the origin of the universe and why.  The Isa Upanishad:

“. . .in the beginning there was Existence alone
One only, without a second.He
the One thought to himself:
let me be many, let me grow forth.
Thus out of himself he projected the universe;
and having projected out of himself the universe,
he entered into every being. . .
He is the truth.
He is the Self.
And that, Svataketu,
THAT ART THOU.”

It is all karma, neh?

[This recycled post is from Nov 2002.]

POST SCRIPT: It is best not to interpret the above to mean that I claim that there is some mystical connection between ancient Hindu thought and modern cosmology. I merely noted that the time scales are similar. Just as I could looking up at the sky point out that the pattern made by the clouds reminds me of a leaping tiger.

I am merely doing a bit of pattern recognition. I just noted a curious coincidence. I would not stretch it to mean that all sorts of modern physical explanations derive their insights from Hindu metaphysics.

To learn something

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”


— T.H. White, The Once and Future King

Ending Two Years

I love you too much
To ever start liking you
So don’t expect me
To be your friend.

Time flies like an arrow (but fruit flies like a banana.) Especially when you are having fun. I had great fun writing this blog since Sept 2003. Can’t say that I did not piss off a bunch of people. This blog has been the expression of a personal viewpoint. It could have been worse. It could have been an account of what I had for lunch or reporting on the details of the fad de jour or some such trivial pursuit. It was, instead, a contrarian viewpoint. I picked on holy cows such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, the incompetent Indian governments, Mother “the Merciless” Teresa, and others. Being an equal opportunity offender, I even dared to poke fun at Thomas “Flat-head” Friedman. Finger-pointing at idols is not taken very kindly by idol-worshippers.

I do not write about pretty things. And some of the ugliness I write about is connected with India, but not all. Me write pretty some day but not yet. The population problem received quite a bit of play on this blog. So also the problem of inadequate infrastructure.

My motivation for asking why is India poor is simple. I don’t want India to be poor. I love India too much to ever like what I see around me in India.

Only by seeking to comprehend why India is poor can we figure out how to not be poor. I admire those who have transformed their nations and societies profoundly instead of merely making pretty speeches. That is why I admire leaders like Lee Kuan Yew. I think democracy in India is a rather pathetic joke. That viewpoint is, as Dale Carnegie would have pointed out, doesn’t make friends and influence people who talk loudly about democracy without recognizing that it is an institution that does not exist in a vacuum.

I have suggested some solutions along the way. For instance, Rural Infrastructure and Services Commons. I hope some day it will be implemented. Recently I hear Vinod Khosla, my co-author in the RISC concept paper, spoke to the Planning Commission about RISC. Or my recommendations about how to make India literate in three years, or the integrated rail transportation system (IRTS), etc.

Well, that is all for now. I speak my mind and I am sure that my readers (all five of them) will not hesitate to speak their minds and tell me where I am right and more importantly where I am wrong.

Goodnight, goodbye and may your god go with you.

A Man of Practical Genius

Visiting Singapore is both an exhilarating and a depressing experience for me. To observe the transformation of a mosquito-infested swamp full of poor people into a vibrant developed nation of prosperous people in a brief span of 40 years is exhilarating. Comparing Singapore to India from an Indian’s perspective is depressing: how did we–given all the advantages we had in 1950 compared to Singapore–squander it all and end up being a poor misgoverned over-populated country? That is the depressing bit.
Continue reading “A Man of Practical Genius”

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme

In a land where reportedly every generalization is trivially true, one generalization holds non-trivially and with overwhelming force. It is this: Indian governments are pro-poor. Every policy that any government ever espouses, fundamentally it always is pro-poor, irrespective of any minor variations such as pro-market or pro-planning or pro-industrialization or pro-globalization or pro-self sufficiency or whathaveyou.

My claim is that this pro-poor policy is not mere rhetoric. The policy works and how. I argue that all other policies have not yielded their expected results but the pro-poor policies have delivered as could be reasonably expected.

Pro-industrialization policies are expected to lead to an increase in industrialization. If India ever had such policies, they have had only marginal success because India is arguably not an industrial economy. Pro-poor policies are expected to promote the number of the poor, and there has been a monotonic increase in the number of poor in India.

The percentage of people below the poverty line is estimated to be around 25. That is, India has about 250 million people who are so unimaginably poor that they can’t cross the poverty line that is set way below what can be considered necessary for a human existence. Around 33 million were added to that role in 2001-02 alone For comparison, that is more than the entire population of Canada in 2001 (30 million).

Let’s put the number of the abjectly poor in perspective. Consider the number of people below the poverty line at the time of India’s independence. We had about 350 million people then. Assuming that 50 percent of them were below the poverty line then, there were 175 million abjectly poor people then. Now, about 57 years later, we have 250 million abjectly poor people. There has been an increase of 75 million in the ranks of the abjectly poor in the nearly six decades of pro-poor policies..

India’s pro-poor policies have succeeded in increasing the number of poor in the past and while past performance is not a guarantee of future results, the most probable outcome of current pro-poor policies can be expected to lead to increase in the number of the poor. The “Employment Guarantee Scheme” (introduced by the National Rural Employment Guarantee Bill) is pro-poor and the result will be as before.
Continue reading “The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme”

Dr Manmohan Singh’s Interview

It is always instructive to learn what our policy-makers are thinking. Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh is especially edifying since he is at the helm of the ship of the Indian state. I therefore recommend the recent interview (Aug 16th, 2005) of Dr Singh by Rajat Gupta published in the McKinsey Quarterly.
Continue reading “Dr Manmohan Singh’s Interview”

Fighting the population battle

Two major threads weave through Joel Cohen’s book How Many People Can the Earth Support? (1995): the insufficiency of our present understanding, and the finiteness of time. Continue reading “Fighting the population battle”

Don’t Drive Like My Brother

“Don’t drive like my brother” is usually the last bit of advice that “Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers” give to their around 2 million listeners of their weekly National Public Radio show Car Talk on 370 radio stations.

I used to listen to them religiously. They are funny and irreverent and clever and poked as much fun at the callers as they did at themselves. In the closing credits, they acknowledged the research done by Paul Murky of Murky Research and thanked their law firm Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe. They would also thank random people such as their adopted son from Sweden, Bjorn A. Payne Diaz, or their airline reservation manager, Will Price Randomly. (See this for a complete list of credits.)

I was pleasantly surprised when I recently learnt that Tom and Ray Magliozzi (Click and Clack) were the speakers at MIT’s Commencement Exercises in June 1999. Here is part of a MIT news item on the event.

They received tongue-in-cheek letters from MIT President Charles M. Vest explaining that both the United Nations and the President of the United States had “really spiffy flags” that came in handy to “cheer up a drab corner of the campus.”

So, not to be outdone, the Magliozzi brothers created a flag. Their flag — purple, red and black on a white background — is 4-by-6, emblazoned with the slogan Non Impediti Ratione Cogitatonis (Unencumbered by the Thought Process) surrounding a seal showing the fins, taillights and bumper of a 1959 Cadillac, complete with a raccon tail on the trunk. They say it memorializes the rear end of Tom’s recently deceased 1963 Dodge Dart. The flag flew on the podium alongside the US and state flags.

In their rambling, hour-long address, the brothers occasionally jockeyed for position at the podium, yelled “Stop it!” and “Behave!” at each other and laughed harder than almost anyone in the audience at their own jokes. Their speech was accompanied by hand-made graphs on posterboard that showed the relationship between happiness levels for “left brain vs. right brain” individuals.

Although each brother seemed loath to give the other the last word, Ray finally managed with: “Have fun, enjoy the ride and don’t drive like my brother.”

The address is a must read. I read it because it was delivered at what C&C said “is the world’s foremost institute of technology on Massachusetts Avenue” but I guarantee that you will not have wasted your time for having read it as well.

Netaji’s Ghost: The Freedom Struggle

Didn’t know much about history, Indian or otherwise when I was in school. I went to a missionary school and I recall reading about English history (King Arthur comes to mind) and a bit about Indian history (Chattrapati Shivaji figured along with all sorts of Mughal emperors) but there was no attempt at communicating what I call a sense of history or instilling a spirit of inquiry about the history of India. My school did alright when it come to science and mathematics, but failed dismally in the social sciences.
Continue reading “Netaji’s Ghost: The Freedom Struggle”