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Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel;
Which frightened both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel.

Trump is the monstrous crow, as black as a tar-barrel. He will be good for the US. The system needs a bit of shaking up. The Republicans and the Democrats — Tweeledum and Tweeledee — have messed it up with their kabuki. Their staged battles, costumes, flying through the air tricks, etc., is highly entertaining. The details of the stage design are a perfect metaphor for the existing political setup.

A disruption will dislodge the status quo and perhaps push the moribund system to a different (and likely better) equilibrium. Granted that Trump is no visionary leader with wisdom oozing out of him. But he is the mild heart attack that jolts a person to take a serious look at his life and turn things around, if I may introduce another metaphor.

A friend recently quoted SS Ravi Shankar’s profound proclamation. It goes:

“There are people who are married and unhappy and there are people who are unmarried and unhappy. Then there are people who are married and happy and there are people who are unmarried and happy. You better be in the second category. Whether you are married or not, if you are happy, if you are centered, then you are close to enlightenment.”

I read it and I am forced to agree with the German historian Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759 – 1805) that against stupidity, even the gods struggle in vain. We mere mortals are powerless to resist such inanities.

On April 12th, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. The first human space flight lasted 108 minutes. He became an instant hero, as is right since it was an extremely risky voyage and he could have ended up dead. There are many unsung heroes in any such venture. I feel most for the person who was the chief designer of the space vehicle — Sergey Korolev (1907 -1966). Because of the secrecy of the Cold War, he worked without any recognition. The video below is about Gagarin’s historic flight. It recognizes the work of Korolev. Deep respect to both the heroes of the Soviet Union.

I find it remarkable how talented the people of the erstwhile Soviet Union were. Trouble was that even talent could not overcome the self-imposed handicap of communism. Remember that the Soviet Union was not a very large union — only around 200 million people around 1960. They were very successful in science and technology. But communism/socialism forges very heavy chains. Without freedom, even talented people fail. Slavery is always harmful and freedom always the key to prosperity. Too bad India continues to labor under socialist slavery.

Our descriptions of reality are necessarily based on our perception of reality. But our descriptions are not what reality is because what we can perceive given our limited faculties cannot be comprehensive or even undistorted. The world appears magical but magic does not explain the world, if and when we do attempt to explain the world. Myriad explanations have been advanced. Each points to a limited aspect of that which lies beneath it all. Looking from each of those varied viewpoints and somehow integrating them may help us approach a better appreciation of reality.

Decades ago during my engineering undergraduate days, I had read a few of Carlos Castaneda’s books about a Yaqui shaman named don Juan Matus from Sonora, Mexico. Castenada was an anthropology student at University of California at Los Angeles in the 1960s. He wrote a book The Teachings of don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, and submitted it as his master’s thesis. It was published by the University of California Press in 1968.
Continue reading “A Path with a Heart”

The wiki page about virus says that it “is a small infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of other organisms. Viruses can infect all types of life forms . . .” Ideas are analogous to viruses because they too are infectious agents that replicate in living brains. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme to mean a unit of idea that can infect a brain and get transmitted to other brains. Viruses are responsible for genetic diversity through horizontal gene transfer. Analogously, ideas are responsible for diversity of human mentality.

Viruses of biological kind are generally bad for the organism, just like the software variety are bad for computers. There are no good viruses. In contrast, ideas come in two principle varieties: the benevolent and the malevolent. The good kind leads to overall benefits, both to the individual with the idea and to the collective of individuals that have that idea. The malevolent kind inflicts great harm but they eventually die out. There are two pathways. One, they just destroy the host collective, thus resulting in the extinction of the bad idea. Or, two, they mutate into a less malevolent form that does not kill the host, or even into a benevolent idea that benefits the host. Good ideas are forever and bad ideas are never forever.
Continue reading “Viruses, Ideas and their Life Expectancy”

The transition from an agrarian to an industrial society was the great challenge that faced economies before. Much attention was paid on ways to make the transition. Of the various models of development (such as export-led growth, import-substitution industrialization, and others) used it is instructive to recall one called agricultural development led industrialization, or ADLI.

ADLI recognized that cost-reducing technological change increased agricultural productivity and therefore increased rural incomes. Increased rural incomes provided a demand boost for manufactured goods both for consumption as well as for use in agricultural production. The increased demand for domestically manufactured goods raised wages which in turn were spent on the consumption of agricultural output. On the labor side of the market, as agricultural productivity increased, labor shifted from the agricultural sector to the manufacturing sector. Thus the industrialization of the population was achieved at pace with the labor transition and was based on increased agricultural productivity attained through the use of appropriate technology.

The lesson from the ADLI model is directly relevant to the question of ICT production and use in the economic growth strategy of a large country such as India. The ICT sector in India is very small compared to the rest of the economy, as in any other developing country. While IT exports will only lead to direct gains only for the IT sector, far more gains can be realized through the use of IT in the non-ICT sector and through the production of IT for domestic consumption. The use of IT in the non-IT sector will increase productivity leading to higher incomes and greater demand for consumption goods which will increase employment, and so on.

A few days ago in this weblog, I wrote about our wonderful reforms and wondered why we don’t ask what it was that made our economy so desperately in need of reforms. The causes are many. As they say, dhoondo ek, milenge hazaar. Yet there must be a core set of causes that essentially constrain the Indian economy. I believe that one of them is what I call the personality cult disorder (PCD).

Tavleen Singh in an Oct 26th Indian Express article titled Midnight Alley to Dawn’s Highway presents me with the perfect introduction to that. Her analysis is, as always, right on the money and worth reading. In that article, she refers to the refreshing change in the economic policies. Then she writes

My grouse against Nehruvian socialism is that this is precisely what it did not do. Instead of building the tools of empowerment it crippled the average Indian by teaching him to believe that all he needed to do was sit back and be a good boy (by voting Congress) and the state would take care of all his needs. This led to an entire generation of Indians growing up to believe that the state had a broom and a magic wand that would provide him with shelter, food and prosperity. In pursuit of this mad dream we continue to spend more than Rs 30,000 crore a year on rural development programmes that have mostly been named after members of the Nehru dynasty. Indira Awas Yojana, Rajiv Gandhi Schools and the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana, to mention only three. It is wrong to use taxpayers money as if it were a family trust but it accurately illustrates the family’s approach to development.

There you have it: an excellent example of PCD. Indians are obsessed with personalities. One manifestation of this is the naming of roads, for instance.

I have been paying close attention to street names since I am new to Mumbai. I observed that with very few exceptions, all roads are named after people. Each road will have stretches named after someone. Each short stretch of a road will have a different worthy named usually etched on a granite slab somewhere or the statue at an intersection. There they get their 15 yards of fame, so to speak. Of course, people simply ignore the idiocy and call the road by a simple name. So “Senapati Bapat Road” is simply “Tulsi Pipe Road”.

Contrast this with, say, the roads in the US. They are occassionally named after some personalities (Lincoln Expressway, Martin Luther King Jr Way, etc) but mostly they are not people centered. They will have their University Avenue, College Street, Telegraph Ave, 42nd Street, Avenue of the Americas, Vine Street, Cedar Lane, … and more recently Disc Drive, Micron Lane, Internet Alley, and so on. The important point is that they are not hung up on personalities.

You may ask, what is so terrible about the naming of roads after people. Nothing on the face of it, but it reveals a deeper dysfunction of the society. It indicates that we raise people on pedestals and value personalities and not institutions. My point is that institutions matter and not people. In India, we neglect institutions and that is partly responsible for the decay of our society.

Institutions matter because they are rule based. They are not dependent on subjective arbitrariness — the whimes and fancies — of personalities. Institutions persist and outlast individuals and therefore have alonger memory. They are also less likely to be hijacked by narrow personal interests and can pursue socially beneficial objectives.

When institutions are hijacked by personalities, they decay. The Indian National Congress was a worthy institution until the Nehru-Gandhi family made it into their personal fiefdom. The tranformation was tragic and it will continue to be a dysfunctional political party as long as it persists in elevating personalities over the institutional character of the party.

One can conjecture that it is the legacy of our feudal social system that is the cause of our dysfunctional emphasis on personalities rather than on institutions. After all, the raja ruled at his pleasure and did not bother with constitutions. The serfs realized that the law was basically whatever the raja said it was. Survival in this sort of a system depended on unquestioning loyalty to a person.

A modern highly complex economic system requires the rule of law, rather than the rule of men (or women). Arbitrary decisions based on personal prejudices cannot in general lead to socially beneficial outcomes. One can imagine an enlightened benevolent dictatorship but they are rare and rarer still is the possibility of a long succession of benevolent dictators. The odd raja may be good personally but his successors are likely to be rapacious murderers.

Sadly, rajas continue to exist in India. They go about in cars with led lights flashing. They consider themselves above the law (just another institution). They hand out or withhold favors depending on whether they personally gain from the deal. The license-permit-quota-subsidy raj is the only institution that these rajas find worthwhile.

It is a curious fact that some of these neo-rajas live in places named after previous plunderers of the land — Aurangzeb Road, Ghaziabad, Victoria this, King George that. How long will it be after the masters have left, that the slaves will declare themselves free?