I drive through the silent darkness, all alone,
If I don’t see you in time, I’ll surely break a bone!
God knows what was in the mind of your maker,
All hail thee, You are the mighty Speed Breaker!
Unmoving on the road, you lay in your slumber,
10-to-1, even the mighty buffaloes you outnumber!
Instead of warning us to be careful and slowly tread,
Why do you put up a sign that says “Hump Ahead?”
And then there’s your cosuin, the infamous pothole,
Seems like you’re a part of the Indian road’s soul!
As soon as the rain comes I hear you cheer,
‘Cause in infinite numbers you can now appear!
God only knows why the hell you exist at all,
Slowing down traffic that’s already in a crawl!
Only bike guys with girlfriends really like you,
They brake sharply and come a little closer too!
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
so sweet!!
Some time ago, a friend of mine punished his 4 year old daughter for wasting a roll of gold wrapping paper. Money was tight and he became infuriated when the small child tried to decorate a box to put under the tree. Nevertheless the little girl brought the gift to her father the next morning and said "This is for you Daddy."
He was embarrassed by his earlier over reaction... He opened the box and his anger flared again when he found the box was empty.
Then he yelled at her:
DON'T YOU KNOW when you give someone a present there's supposed to be something inside of it???
The little girl looked up at him with tears in her eyes and said,
Oh Daddy it's not empty, I blew kisses into the box, all for you Daddy.
The father was crushed. He put his arms around his little girl, and he begged her for forgiveness. My friend told me that he kept that gold box near his bed for years.
Whenever he was discouraged he would take out an imaginary kiss and remember the love of the child who had put it there. In a very real sense each of us has been given a gold container filled with unconditional love and kisses.
There is no more precious possession anyone could hold
He was embarrassed by his earlier over reaction... He opened the box and his anger flared again when he found the box was empty.
Then he yelled at her:
DON'T YOU KNOW when you give someone a present there's supposed to be something inside of it???
The little girl looked up at him with tears in her eyes and said,
Oh Daddy it's not empty, I blew kisses into the box, all for you Daddy.
The father was crushed. He put his arms around his little girl, and he begged her for forgiveness. My friend told me that he kept that gold box near his bed for years.
Whenever he was discouraged he would take out an imaginary kiss and remember the love of the child who had put it there. In a very real sense each of us has been given a gold container filled with unconditional love and kisses.
There is no more precious possession anyone could hold
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Pollution is Good Business for CCX Carbon Financial Instrument
Who knew dirty air could be such good business? Last year, the global carbon credit market topped $30 billion, and traders exchanged more than 1.6 billion metric tons of CO2 emission permits worldwide.
Unlike the rest of the world, however, the U.S. remained largely skeptical of carbon trading. Long after the EU adopted the Kyoto Protocol, they refrained from implementing any mandatory emissions limits or trading structures. (Smells too much of Al Gore-style eco-evangelism.)
But on March 17, St. Patrick's Day, NYMEX's Green Exchange launches its first carbon futures for trade, effectively opening up the States' infant carbon market on the world's largest commodities futures exchange. That - combined with the fact that all three remaining U.S. presidential candidates favor a mandatory CO2 trading system - might just turn the U.S.' current emissions trading scene into a major vehicle for global climate change.
Or will it? Analysts still can't decide whether carbon trading is an innovative application of free-market capitalism, or a wild goose chase for greenies. It all comes back to the hotly debated question: Can good business and conservation coexist?
Cap-And-Trade 101
Since 1751, we've spewed about 315 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - about half of that in the last 40 years. The IPPC estimates that, if left unchecked, global greenhouse gas emissions could rise another 25-90% over year 2000 levels by 2030 (CarbonPositive). That's bad news, since greenhouse-gas-related climate change also brings rising sea levels, crop failures and even worldwide species extinctions.
Policy makers and environmental groups have floated several approaches toward curbing greenhouse gas emissions, but few proposals have gained as much traction as emissions trading, also known as "cap-and-trade."
Cap-and-trade is simple enough: Governments (or international agencies) set a limit or "cap" on the total amount of CO2 a country can emit each year. Companies are issued emission permits, or "allowances," that give their factories the right to emit a certain amount of CO2 (or its polluting equivalent in other greenhouse gases). The cap alone should drive many companies to upgrade to more eco-friendly equipment, thus cutting down their emissions.
Since low-emissions companies won't need all their allowances, they can sell their surplus on the open market as "credits." Polluters that can't or won't upgrade their technology can purchase these credits to cover their emissions excess.
In addition, companies can pay someone to reclaim CO2 through green projects called "offsets." Calculated to absorb a given amount of atmospheric carbon, offsets effectively cancel out those extra emissions from high polluters. Common projects include planting forests to suck up greenhouse gases, or recovering methane from a landfill to fuel power plants.
Yes, the cap-and-trade system still allows polluters to pollute. But in theory, companies that can easily and cheaply curtail their output are likely to do so, since they can profit from selling excess credits. Indeed, the more they cut back, the more money they stand to make. Thus, CO2 reduction occurs as the least financial burden to society.
Reaction At Home
And yet, the cap-and-trade scheme isn't perfect. An accurately valued market depends on careful, rigorous measurement of CO2 emissions across local, national and global levels. It also requires an independent third party trustworthy enough to verify when offset projects have taken place, and that their emissions savings were counted properly. But companies cheat, particularly by exaggerating their CO2 output. And in many systems, the same third parties verifying an offset's legitimacy are also in charge of approving the project, too.
Some critics argue that cap-and-trade is fundamentally flawed, that it doesn't solve the carbon problem so much as redistribute it. Since low emitters just sell their pollution rights to the highest bidder instead of retiring them, pollution isn't reduced beyond the initial cap restriction. There's also the problem of "grandfathering," where the government gives credits to polluters, instead of charging for them.
Still, many analysts consider cap-and-trade better than its alternatives - the carbon tax or emission fees. True believers can point to the example of sulfur trading, which, in the last 10 years, has successfully curbed sulfur emissions in the U.S. by more than 50%.
Politicians in Washington are already sold on a CO2 cap-and-trade scheme; two separate bills in Congress propose a mandatory nationwide cap. For example, the Senate bill, America's Climate Security Act, would limit carbon dioxide emissions to 15% below 2005 levels by 2020, while still allowing state and regional initiatives to impose more stringent restrictions.
On the local level, 22 states have explored or established voluntary cap-and-trade programs, many modeled after the EU's system. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, supported by 10 Northeastern states, is set to start next year and aims to reduce CO2 emissions to 10% below the 2009 level by 2018. A similar collaboration, the Western Climate Initiative, involves seven Western states and even two Canadian provinces.
Voluntary Carbon Trading In The U.S.
So far, however, the U.S. carbon market remains voluntary. Experts still disagree on just how large our market could grow, but Morgan Stanley, already active in voluntary carbon credit trading, puts the domestic carbon offsets volume at $91.6 million in 2006. They estimate that figure could triple - or more - by 2009. A September 2007 report from Lehman Brothers projected a $100 billion market by 2020 (Bloomberg).
In the U.S., carbon credits and offsets have traditionally been traded in futures and options contracts on the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). CCX, which opened in 2003, is the world's first - and, until NYMEX's Green Exchange, North America's only - active voluntary carbon trading system.
CCX trades in annual contracts of "carbon financial instruments" (CFI), which represent 100 metric tons of CO2 (or CO2 equivalent). The contracts cover credits (set according to the CCX Emission Reduction Schedule) and offsets, regulated and verified by an approved CCX verifier.
The exchange has been a testing ground of sorts, a laboratory to experiment with the rules and standards that a future, national mandatory cap-and-trade system might adopt. But actually hammering out specific operations and regulations has been tricky.
"You don't come up with the rules of baseball sitting in a room with a bunch of lawyers," Scott Subler, chairman of the CCX offset committee, told the WSJ. Baseball evolved through years of trial and error on the sandlot, he says, and so far, "CCX has been the best sandlot."
On the other side, NYMEX's Green Exchange will tap into the vibrant European carbon market. It'll offer futures and options in European Union Allowances (EUAs) and Certified Emission Reductions offset credits [CER]which often run at different prices). Futures contracts on the Green Initiative will cover 1,000 metric tons of CO2 (or 1,000 EUAs).
"The Green Exchange will be more than a financial marketplace," says Andrew Ertel, president and CEO of Evolution Markets (one of the exchange's partners). "It will be an engine behind global efforts to improve the environment."
The Super Tuesday Spike
CFI) Contracts Daily Report" title="Carbon prices on CCX over the past two years" height="450" width="470">
Carbon prices on CCX over the past two years.
Source: CCX
If the Green Exchange performs anything like CCX, then Ertel might be right. Last month, prices on CCX more than doubled, swelling from below $2/CFI in November to about $5.50/CFI in mid-March.
Volumes have skyrocketed too, with January and February setting trading records. Almost 2.5 million people traded on Feb. 11 alone - more than CCX's average monthly trading volume for the entirety of 2007.
But the surge in carbon prices has less to do with a sudden attack of American eco-guilt, and more to do with the 2008 presidential primaries. All three remaining contenders favor carbon trading, and each has put forth his or her plan for a mandatory cap-and-trade system.
Carbon prices jumped after Super Tuesday, when Rep. John McCain - the only remaining Republican favoring a mandatory cap-and-trade scheme - secured his front-runner status. And since both remaining Democratic candidates also favor cap-and-trade, the possibility of a future mandatory national cap-and-trade system seems assured.
There's a lot of kinks to work out of the U.S. market when it goes mandatory - not the least of which that carbon prices run anywhere from 1 to 30 euros, depending on where you look (WSJ). And we still need to standardize just what qualifies as a legitimate offset project - does nuclear count? Or only renewable energy? What about energy-efficient projects? And so on.
CFI) Contracts Daily Report" title="Carbon prices on CCX more than doubled right after Super Tuesday" height="450" width="470">
Carbon prices on CCX more than doubled right after Super Tuesday.
Source: CCX
Still, while nothing's a sure bet in trading, the carbon market is probably as close as you're ever going to get. In our current political landscape, it's seems less a question of if prices will rise than when. Those who jump in now, before the impending nationwide carbon cap, may reap the rewards from dirty, smelly air. And that means a whole lot of green.
Links:
NYMEX's Green Exchange
Chicago Climate Exchange
International Emissions Trading Association
CarbonPositive
Offsets Market Evolving Slowly - WSJ, 2/27/08
PointCarbon's Carbon Market North America - 2/27/08
Unlike the rest of the world, however, the U.S. remained largely skeptical of carbon trading. Long after the EU adopted the Kyoto Protocol, they refrained from implementing any mandatory emissions limits or trading structures. (Smells too much of Al Gore-style eco-evangelism.)
But on March 17, St. Patrick's Day, NYMEX's Green Exchange launches its first carbon futures for trade, effectively opening up the States' infant carbon market on the world's largest commodities futures exchange. That - combined with the fact that all three remaining U.S. presidential candidates favor a mandatory CO2 trading system - might just turn the U.S.' current emissions trading scene into a major vehicle for global climate change.
Or will it? Analysts still can't decide whether carbon trading is an innovative application of free-market capitalism, or a wild goose chase for greenies. It all comes back to the hotly debated question: Can good business and conservation coexist?
Cap-And-Trade 101
Since 1751, we've spewed about 315 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - about half of that in the last 40 years. The IPPC estimates that, if left unchecked, global greenhouse gas emissions could rise another 25-90% over year 2000 levels by 2030 (CarbonPositive). That's bad news, since greenhouse-gas-related climate change also brings rising sea levels, crop failures and even worldwide species extinctions.
Policy makers and environmental groups have floated several approaches toward curbing greenhouse gas emissions, but few proposals have gained as much traction as emissions trading, also known as "cap-and-trade."
Cap-and-trade is simple enough: Governments (or international agencies) set a limit or "cap" on the total amount of CO2 a country can emit each year. Companies are issued emission permits, or "allowances," that give their factories the right to emit a certain amount of CO2 (or its polluting equivalent in other greenhouse gases). The cap alone should drive many companies to upgrade to more eco-friendly equipment, thus cutting down their emissions.
Since low-emissions companies won't need all their allowances, they can sell their surplus on the open market as "credits." Polluters that can't or won't upgrade their technology can purchase these credits to cover their emissions excess.
In addition, companies can pay someone to reclaim CO2 through green projects called "offsets." Calculated to absorb a given amount of atmospheric carbon, offsets effectively cancel out those extra emissions from high polluters. Common projects include planting forests to suck up greenhouse gases, or recovering methane from a landfill to fuel power plants.
Yes, the cap-and-trade system still allows polluters to pollute. But in theory, companies that can easily and cheaply curtail their output are likely to do so, since they can profit from selling excess credits. Indeed, the more they cut back, the more money they stand to make. Thus, CO2 reduction occurs as the least financial burden to society.
Reaction At Home
And yet, the cap-and-trade scheme isn't perfect. An accurately valued market depends on careful, rigorous measurement of CO2 emissions across local, national and global levels. It also requires an independent third party trustworthy enough to verify when offset projects have taken place, and that their emissions savings were counted properly. But companies cheat, particularly by exaggerating their CO2 output. And in many systems, the same third parties verifying an offset's legitimacy are also in charge of approving the project, too.
Some critics argue that cap-and-trade is fundamentally flawed, that it doesn't solve the carbon problem so much as redistribute it. Since low emitters just sell their pollution rights to the highest bidder instead of retiring them, pollution isn't reduced beyond the initial cap restriction. There's also the problem of "grandfathering," where the government gives credits to polluters, instead of charging for them.
Still, many analysts consider cap-and-trade better than its alternatives - the carbon tax or emission fees. True believers can point to the example of sulfur trading, which, in the last 10 years, has successfully curbed sulfur emissions in the U.S. by more than 50%.
Politicians in Washington are already sold on a CO2 cap-and-trade scheme; two separate bills in Congress propose a mandatory nationwide cap. For example, the Senate bill, America's Climate Security Act, would limit carbon dioxide emissions to 15% below 2005 levels by 2020, while still allowing state and regional initiatives to impose more stringent restrictions.
On the local level, 22 states have explored or established voluntary cap-and-trade programs, many modeled after the EU's system. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, supported by 10 Northeastern states, is set to start next year and aims to reduce CO2 emissions to 10% below the 2009 level by 2018. A similar collaboration, the Western Climate Initiative, involves seven Western states and even two Canadian provinces.
Voluntary Carbon Trading In The U.S.
So far, however, the U.S. carbon market remains voluntary. Experts still disagree on just how large our market could grow, but Morgan Stanley, already active in voluntary carbon credit trading, puts the domestic carbon offsets volume at $91.6 million in 2006. They estimate that figure could triple - or more - by 2009. A September 2007 report from Lehman Brothers projected a $100 billion market by 2020 (Bloomberg).
In the U.S., carbon credits and offsets have traditionally been traded in futures and options contracts on the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). CCX, which opened in 2003, is the world's first - and, until NYMEX's Green Exchange, North America's only - active voluntary carbon trading system.
CCX trades in annual contracts of "carbon financial instruments" (CFI), which represent 100 metric tons of CO2 (or CO2 equivalent). The contracts cover credits (set according to the CCX Emission Reduction Schedule) and offsets, regulated and verified by an approved CCX verifier.
The exchange has been a testing ground of sorts, a laboratory to experiment with the rules and standards that a future, national mandatory cap-and-trade system might adopt. But actually hammering out specific operations and regulations has been tricky.
"You don't come up with the rules of baseball sitting in a room with a bunch of lawyers," Scott Subler, chairman of the CCX offset committee, told the WSJ. Baseball evolved through years of trial and error on the sandlot, he says, and so far, "CCX has been the best sandlot."
On the other side, NYMEX's Green Exchange will tap into the vibrant European carbon market. It'll offer futures and options in European Union Allowances (EUAs) and Certified Emission Reductions offset credits [CER]which often run at different prices). Futures contracts on the Green Initiative will cover 1,000 metric tons of CO2 (or 1,000 EUAs).
"The Green Exchange will be more than a financial marketplace," says Andrew Ertel, president and CEO of Evolution Markets (one of the exchange's partners). "It will be an engine behind global efforts to improve the environment."
The Super Tuesday Spike
CFI) Contracts Daily Report" title="Carbon prices on CCX over the past two years" height="450" width="470">
Carbon prices on CCX over the past two years.
Source: CCX
If the Green Exchange performs anything like CCX, then Ertel might be right. Last month, prices on CCX more than doubled, swelling from below $2/CFI in November to about $5.50/CFI in mid-March.
Volumes have skyrocketed too, with January and February setting trading records. Almost 2.5 million people traded on Feb. 11 alone - more than CCX's average monthly trading volume for the entirety of 2007.
But the surge in carbon prices has less to do with a sudden attack of American eco-guilt, and more to do with the 2008 presidential primaries. All three remaining contenders favor carbon trading, and each has put forth his or her plan for a mandatory cap-and-trade system.
Carbon prices jumped after Super Tuesday, when Rep. John McCain - the only remaining Republican favoring a mandatory cap-and-trade scheme - secured his front-runner status. And since both remaining Democratic candidates also favor cap-and-trade, the possibility of a future mandatory national cap-and-trade system seems assured.
There's a lot of kinks to work out of the U.S. market when it goes mandatory - not the least of which that carbon prices run anywhere from 1 to 30 euros, depending on where you look (WSJ). And we still need to standardize just what qualifies as a legitimate offset project - does nuclear count? Or only renewable energy? What about energy-efficient projects? And so on.
CFI) Contracts Daily Report" title="Carbon prices on CCX more than doubled right after Super Tuesday" height="450" width="470">
Carbon prices on CCX more than doubled right after Super Tuesday.
Source: CCX
Still, while nothing's a sure bet in trading, the carbon market is probably as close as you're ever going to get. In our current political landscape, it's seems less a question of if prices will rise than when. Those who jump in now, before the impending nationwide carbon cap, may reap the rewards from dirty, smelly air. And that means a whole lot of green.
Links:
NYMEX's Green Exchange
Chicago Climate Exchange
International Emissions Trading Association
CarbonPositive
Offsets Market Evolving Slowly - WSJ, 2/27/08
PointCarbon's Carbon Market North America - 2/27/08
Thursday, March 20, 2008
"The Work is simply four questions that, when applied to a specific problem, enable you to see what is troubling you in an entirely different light. It's not the problem that causes our suffering; it's our thinking about the problem. Contrary to popular belief, trying to let go of a painful thought never works; instead, once we have done The Work the thought lets go of us. At that point, we can truly love what is, just as it is."
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
A nice story.....never hurt anyone
There once was a little boy who had a bad temper.
His Father gave him a bag of nails and told him that every time he lost his temper, he must hammer a nail into the back of the fence.
The first day the boy had driven 37 nails into the fence.
Over the next few weeks, as he learned to control his anger,the number of nails hammered daily gradually dwindled down. He discovered it was easier to hold his temper than to drive those nails into the fence.
Finally the day came when the boy didn't lose his temper at all. He told his father about it and the father suggested that the boy now pull out one nail for each day that he was able to hold his temper.
The days passed and the young boy was finally able to tell his father that all the nails were gone.
The father took his son by the hand and led him to the fence. He said, "You have done well, my son, but look at the holes in the fence.
The fence will never be the same.
When you say things in anger, they leave a scar just like this one. You can put a knife in a man and draw it out.
It won't matter how many times you say I'm sorry, the wound is still there."
A verbal wound is as bad as a physical one. Friends are very rare jewels, indeed. They make you smile and encourage you to succeed. They lend an ear, they share words of praise and they always want to open their hearts to us."
His Father gave him a bag of nails and told him that every time he lost his temper, he must hammer a nail into the back of the fence.
The first day the boy had driven 37 nails into the fence.
Over the next few weeks, as he learned to control his anger,the number of nails hammered daily gradually dwindled down. He discovered it was easier to hold his temper than to drive those nails into the fence.
Finally the day came when the boy didn't lose his temper at all. He told his father about it and the father suggested that the boy now pull out one nail for each day that he was able to hold his temper.
The days passed and the young boy was finally able to tell his father that all the nails were gone.
The father took his son by the hand and led him to the fence. He said, "You have done well, my son, but look at the holes in the fence.
The fence will never be the same.
When you say things in anger, they leave a scar just like this one. You can put a knife in a man and draw it out.
It won't matter how many times you say I'm sorry, the wound is still there."
A verbal wound is as bad as a physical one. Friends are very rare jewels, indeed. They make you smile and encourage you to succeed. They lend an ear, they share words of praise and they always want to open their hearts to us."
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Never judge anyone by their appearance...
One beautiful spring day a red rose blossomed in a forest. Many kinds of trees and plants grew there. As the rose looked around, a pine tree nearby said, "What a beautiful flower. I wish I was that lovely."
Another tree said, "Dear pine, do not be sad, we can not have everything."
The rose turned its head and remarked, "It seems that I am the most beautiful plant in this forest."
A sunflower raised its yellow head and asked, "Why do you say that? In this forest there are many beautiful plants. You are just one of them." The red rose replied, "I see everyone looking at me and admiring me."
Then the rose looked at a cactus and said, "Look at that ugly plant full of thorns!" The pine tree said, "Red rose, what kind of talk is this? Who can say what beauty is? You have thorns too."
The proud red rose looked angrily at the pine and said, "I thought you had good taste! You do not know what beauty is at all. You can not compare my thorns to that of the cactus."
"What a proud flower", thought the trees.
The rose tried to move its roots away from the cactus, but it could not move. As the days passed, the red rose would look at the cactus and say insulting things, like: This plant is useless? How sorry I am to be his neighbor."
The cactus never got upset and he even tried to advise the rose, saying,
"God did not create any form of life without a purpose."
Spring passed, and the weather became very warm. Life became difficult in the forest, as the plants and animals needed water and no rain fell. The red rose began to wilt. One day the rose saw sparrows stick their beaks into the cactus and then fly away, refreshed.
This was puzzling, and the red rose asked the pine tree what the birds were doing. The pine tree explained that the birds got water from the cactus. "Does it not hurt when they make holes?" asked the rose.
"Yes, but the cactus does not like to see any birds suffer," replied the pine.
The rose opened its eyes in wonder and said, "The cactus has water?"
"Yes you can also drink from it. The sparrow can bring water to you if you ask the cactus for help."
The red rose felt too ashamed of its past words and behavior to ask for water from the cactus, but then it finally did ask the cactus for help. The cactus kindly agreed and the birds filled their beaks with water and watered the rose's roots.
**********
Another tree said, "Dear pine, do not be sad, we can not have everything."
The rose turned its head and remarked, "It seems that I am the most beautiful plant in this forest."
A sunflower raised its yellow head and asked, "Why do you say that? In this forest there are many beautiful plants. You are just one of them." The red rose replied, "I see everyone looking at me and admiring me."
Then the rose looked at a cactus and said, "Look at that ugly plant full of thorns!" The pine tree said, "Red rose, what kind of talk is this? Who can say what beauty is? You have thorns too."
The proud red rose looked angrily at the pine and said, "I thought you had good taste! You do not know what beauty is at all. You can not compare my thorns to that of the cactus."
"What a proud flower", thought the trees.
The rose tried to move its roots away from the cactus, but it could not move. As the days passed, the red rose would look at the cactus and say insulting things, like: This plant is useless? How sorry I am to be his neighbor."
The cactus never got upset and he even tried to advise the rose, saying,
"God did not create any form of life without a purpose."
Spring passed, and the weather became very warm. Life became difficult in the forest, as the plants and animals needed water and no rain fell. The red rose began to wilt. One day the rose saw sparrows stick their beaks into the cactus and then fly away, refreshed.
This was puzzling, and the red rose asked the pine tree what the birds were doing. The pine tree explained that the birds got water from the cactus. "Does it not hurt when they make holes?" asked the rose.
"Yes, but the cactus does not like to see any birds suffer," replied the pine.
The rose opened its eyes in wonder and said, "The cactus has water?"
"Yes you can also drink from it. The sparrow can bring water to you if you ask the cactus for help."
The red rose felt too ashamed of its past words and behavior to ask for water from the cactus, but then it finally did ask the cactus for help. The cactus kindly agreed and the birds filled their beaks with water and watered the rose's roots.
**********
Thursday, March 13, 2008
The SUCCESS STORY of Mr. Subroto Bagchi ......
Address by Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B) on defining success.
I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep – so the family moved from place to place and, without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father. My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system which makes me what I am today and largely defines what success means to me today.
As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government – he reiterated to us that it was not 'his jeep' but the government's jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep – we could sit in it only when it was stationary.
That was our early childhood lesson in governance – a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.
The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father's office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix 'dada' whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed – I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, 'Raju Uncle' – very different from many of their friends who refer to their family drivers as 'my driver'. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe.
To me, the lesson was significant – you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.
Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother's chulha – an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was no gas, nor electrical stoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman's 'muffosil' edition – delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson. He used to say, "You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it".
That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.
Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios – we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios – alluding to his five sons. We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, "We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses".
His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant. Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.
Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father's transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, "I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited". That was my first lesson in success.
It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.
My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life, I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper – end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness. Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term "Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan" and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University's water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination.
Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.
Over the next few years, my mother's eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, "Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair". I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, "No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed". Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes.
To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not ‘seeing the world’ but ‘seeing the light’.
Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life's own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life's calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places – I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and travelled all over the world. In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him – he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, "Why have you not gone home yet?" Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self.
There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what is the limit of inclusion you can create.
My father died the next day. He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts – the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of an ill-paid, unrecognized government servant's world.
My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Chandra Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking.
Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.
Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, "Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world." Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity – was telling me to go and kiss the world!
Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.
I wish you good luck and Godspeed.
Go and kiss the world!!
I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep – so the family moved from place to place and, without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father. My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system which makes me what I am today and largely defines what success means to me today.
As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government – he reiterated to us that it was not 'his jeep' but the government's jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep – we could sit in it only when it was stationary.
That was our early childhood lesson in governance – a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.
The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father's office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix 'dada' whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed – I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, 'Raju Uncle' – very different from many of their friends who refer to their family drivers as 'my driver'. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe.
To me, the lesson was significant – you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.
Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother's chulha – an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was no gas, nor electrical stoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman's 'muffosil' edition – delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson. He used to say, "You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it".
That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.
Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios – we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios – alluding to his five sons. We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, "We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses".
His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant. Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.
Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father's transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, "I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited". That was my first lesson in success.
It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.
My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life, I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper – end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness. Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term "Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan" and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University's water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination.
Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.
Over the next few years, my mother's eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, "Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair". I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, "No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed". Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes.
To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not ‘seeing the world’ but ‘seeing the light’.
Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life's own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life's calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places – I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and travelled all over the world. In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him – he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, "Why have you not gone home yet?" Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self.
There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what is the limit of inclusion you can create.
My father died the next day. He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts – the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of an ill-paid, unrecognized government servant's world.
My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Chandra Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking.
Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.
Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, "Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world." Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity – was telling me to go and kiss the world!
Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.
I wish you good luck and Godspeed.
Go and kiss the world!!
Liberalize the Education System or Fail.
These are some commonly agreed upon facts related to education. First, it is an investment and the benefits arise much after the costs have been paid. It therefore requires foresight and will, and also disposable resources. Second, it is a process which takes time. The time taken can be somewhat shortened if sufficient resources are available but it cannot be arbitrarily speeded up. Third, the level of education determines the future capacity to produce and be productive. Fourth, an appropriate education provides more benefits than it costs. Fifth, in our contemporary world of dynamism and rapid change, education is indispensable.
Those facts and many others like them hold both at the individual level and the collective level. An economy cannot prosper without an educated population in just the same way that an uneducated person cannot. One good predictor of the success of an economy – which generally means that it is able to meet the requirements of its population in terms of producing goods and services – is the level of education. By that measure, India’s historical and contemporary poor economic performance is understandable given that its educational system is extremely poor.
Why India has a flawed education system can be explained at least in part by recognizing that it was an instrument created by and for the benefit of its colonial rulers. By restricting education to only a select minority, they were able to control the economy more effectively. The colonial objective was to exploit the economy for extractive purposes and it was never development oriented, as is natural for a colonial government. But even after political independence, the objective of the government did not change. The institutions and processes established by the British served the narrow interests of the post-colonial rulers just fine and so the education system continued to be controlled by the state. It remains so today and unsurprisingly the system is dysfunctional at its core.
Universal primary education is guaranteed by the constitution of India but the system fails to deliver. The literacy rate is around 60 percent. India has the largest number of illiterates, around 400 million, in the world. That is, India has more illiterates than the combined population of the US and Mexico. Secondary school enrollment is around 25 percent and higher education only 8 percent of the relevant population. Furthermore, tertiary education is poor as only about one of four college graduates is employable.
Very few receive any vocational education. China has 500,000 vocational schools which train 60 million a year; India has only 12,000 vocational schools and graduates only 3 million students.
Hundreds of thousands of Indian students study abroad at an annual estimated cost of around US$ 1 billion. There are very few foreign students in India. India has around 27,000 foreign students. Compare that to tiny Singapore (population 5 million) which has 100,000 and Australia (population 22 million) which has 400,000 foreign students.
The public expenditure by the center and state governments is of the order of Rs 100,000 crores which is around 3.5 percent of GDP. What explains the dismal failure of the education system? One possible explanation is the license permit quota control raj.
Briefly, the government bureaucracy has a monopolistic hold on the Indian educational system. Monopolies maximize profits by restricting quantities so that the prices people are forced to pay are much higher than the costs. The established rules and regulations do not allow the supply of educational services (through schools and colleges) to expand to meet the demand. The excess profits are siphoned off by the politically connected. The presence of these excess profits acts as a powerful deterrent against the liberalization of the education system.
Aside from the profit motive, there is another very powerful reason why the supply is kept limited. Where there are shortages, political fortunes can be made by rationing out the limited supply to groups in exchange for their patronage. This is what reservations based on caste and religious lines achieve.
The general solution to much of India’s educational problem is to liberalize the sector so that the market is free to adjust its supply to meet the demand. The government must be fully out of the education business; its role must be restricted to regulating the sector. As in all other markets, the educational market will also have its share of market failures. Correcting for these market failures will be the job of the regulator. The regulator must be independent of the government.
The foreseeable market failures can be dealt with simply and cheaply. First consider primary education. Very poor people cannot afford to pay market prices for primary education. They need financial support. This can be delivered via vouchers that allow them to choose among various supplier of primary education. Once universal primary education has been ensured, the same method can be used for secondary education. And as for tertiary education, it should be entirely merit based. That is, if everyone has had an equal opportunity to be educated to the secondary level, they can compete for entry into tertiary education.
Tertiary education should be priced at full cost. Those who are eligible for tertiary education but are credit constrained, the role of the government would be to create the credit market for such students to be able to borrow what is required. This not only helps those who need the help but also does not subsidize those who can afford to pay. In the current system, the rich benefit more. They are able to afford a good education up to the secondary level and then are able to compete for the limited seats in tertiary education and often are the only ones who enjoy the subsidies in tertiary education.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
B Raman: “Aurangzebs of Today”
B Raman is the one to read to understand matters of security. His analysis is accurate and dispassionate. So do yourself a favor and read his recent paper (March 8th) at the South Asia Analysis Group site on “Aurangzebs of Today.” He delves into the history of how Aurangzeb is perceived in Pakistan and why.
Here’s Mr Raman:
3. The Pakistani jihadi organisations such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), which are members of Osama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front (IIF), project Aurangzeb as the greatest ruler in the history of the Indian sub-continent and describe their aim as the “liberation” of the Muslims of India and restoration of what they view as the golden era of Aurangzeb in the sub-continent.
4. This glorification of Aurangzeb was actually started by the Pakistan Government after the birth of Pakistan in 1947. The text-books got written and prescribed in schools by different Pakistan Governments depicted that there was no civilisation or culture in India before the Muslims came to the sub-continent and glorified Aurangzeb. In September 1996, Murtaza Ali Bhutto, the younger brother of Benazir Bhutto, was allegedly killed by the police of Karachi after he had returned from Islamabad, where he allegedly had a fierce quarrel with Benazir and her husband Mr. Asif Ali Zardari over his demand that he should be appointed as the Vice-Chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party. In a piece on the rule of Benazir, the “Economist” of London compared her to Aurangzeb.
I did not know that about Benazir. I can now understand why she used to spew venom against India in her speeches and promise death to Hindus. (Watch the video in this post: Benazir the Benevolent.) She wanted to be Aurangzeb.
Of course, this is why the “secular” Indians wept copiously at her assassination, correctly identifying her as a great leader. That she must have been to Pakistanis — and to the “secular” Indians. But she was not the original Aurangzeb. So if an Aurangzeb wannabe is admired, surely “secular” Indians admire the original Aurangzeb even more. That is why one of the major streets of the capital of India, New Delhi, glorifies Aurangzeb.
Now we know why Aurangzeb cannot be portrayed as a murderous thug and has to be spoken of in India as a hero.
Just to be clear, who are these “secular” Indians? It is not a matter of religion. It is a matter of attitude. You are “secular” if you consider Aurangzeb to be a hero, regardless of whether you are a Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Isahi. If you think that it is not a matter of supreme shame that the names of invaders and mass murderers should grace present day “free” India, you are a “secular” Indian.
Following the text of Raman’s analysis are a few annextures. First, there are two pieces on Aurangzeb — one from the Columbia Encyclopedia (Dec 2007) and the other from Wikipedia. Again, I learnt stuff that I did not know. (Does anyone doubt the power of the internet and the world wide web?)
Even if skip over those, go to the last one which is a March 2005 article from “Dawn,” the Pakistani newspaper, by Prof Shahida Kazi, “The Myth of History.”
We, in Pakistan, are a breed apart. Lacking a proper mythology like most other races, we have created our own, populated by a whole pantheon of superheroes who have a wide range of heroic exploits to their credit.
But the difference is that these superheroes, instead of being a part of a remote and prehistoric period, belong very much to our own times. A seemingly veritable mythology has been created around these heroes, their persona and their achievements, which is drummed into the heads of our children from the time they start going to school. So deep is this indoctrination that any attempt to uncover the facts or reveal the truth is considered nothing less than blasphemous.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Happiness....the ultimate meaning of life!!
Placements!! the current buzz on campus. People are worried whether they will get one of their dream companies or not, or the best one they have in hand!! everyone knows they will get placed in some company, but how good or bad that will be, what is the package, what is the profile, the location.....and the list goes on..This is the scene at one of the most prestigious institutes of the country. Ever wondered what happens in so to say, the lower grade colleges. Was talking to one of my friends, and then I came to know that most of the students in her colleges are getting their internship, on their own, through sources and all, because the profile/company being offered at campus is not worth taking. All the institutes claim of hundred percent placements, but how good or bad the placement is, only the insiders know. Thankfully I am out here and so the tension is still less.
So, what do students look for during placements. During summers all you care for is a company, except when you have the privilege of getting a number of offers. But during finals you still have a choice. You may or may not get a PPO but only few finally accept them. For those who get the privilege, they can decide after the placement process, while some have to decide long before the process starts, due to which many reject it. So many students tank the interview if they have a better company at hand! Talk to people and the major considerations are the brand name, package, profile, location etc etc......and whats the highest priority, all depends on person to person, though most of them would go for pay package and the brand name, there are some who would take a lower brand company if the profile is better. Difficult choice indeed!! that to when you get to choose among the companies you have a final offer from.
But only some people are sure of what do we finally want to do in future, 5 years down the line. What do we want from life. Most of us are still wondering while some may have a clear goal..Good question! what do we want from life....money, independence,name fame this is the list many may have. but at the crux of it I feel what matters the most is peace and happiness.If you are happy, there is nothing else you can ask for. But now a days, that is one of the scarce things to find. The other day I was watching the movie 'Bawarchi' and the lesson in end was be happy and spread happiness. The most important thing in life are the small things which give us happiness, but which we often forget. In the haste of achievement everyone is concerned about themselves, but the happiness we get with our loved ones is indeed unparalleled. In this growing competitive world, people dont have time for anyone. they just want to move ahead in life, and for this some might even choose the wrong path. I don't say that its wrong to move ahead in life but it should not be at the expense of some one else. Let your deeds be a reason for others to be happy about and not a cause for their distress...
In the end I would just say:
So, what do students look for during placements. During summers all you care for is a company, except when you have the privilege of getting a number of offers. But during finals you still have a choice. You may or may not get a PPO but only few finally accept them. For those who get the privilege, they can decide after the placement process, while some have to decide long before the process starts, due to which many reject it. So many students tank the interview if they have a better company at hand! Talk to people and the major considerations are the brand name, package, profile, location etc etc......and whats the highest priority, all depends on person to person, though most of them would go for pay package and the brand name, there are some who would take a lower brand company if the profile is better. Difficult choice indeed!! that to when you get to choose among the companies you have a final offer from.
But only some people are sure of what do we finally want to do in future, 5 years down the line. What do we want from life. Most of us are still wondering while some may have a clear goal..Good question! what do we want from life....money, independence,name fame this is the list many may have. but at the crux of it I feel what matters the most is peace and happiness.If you are happy, there is nothing else you can ask for. But now a days, that is one of the scarce things to find. The other day I was watching the movie 'Bawarchi' and the lesson in end was be happy and spread happiness. The most important thing in life are the small things which give us happiness, but which we often forget. In the haste of achievement everyone is concerned about themselves, but the happiness we get with our loved ones is indeed unparalleled. In this growing competitive world, people dont have time for anyone. they just want to move ahead in life, and for this some might even choose the wrong path. I don't say that its wrong to move ahead in life but it should not be at the expense of some one else. Let your deeds be a reason for others to be happy about and not a cause for their distress...
In the end I would just say:
"Har pal mein pyar hai,
har lamhe mein khushi,
kho do to yaadein hai,
jee lo to zindagi......"
har lamhe mein khushi,
kho do to yaadein hai,
jee lo to zindagi......"
Infinite Information, Infinite Ignorance
The world has come a long way since the 1960s when the future was defined by one word – “plastics” – as Mr McGuire advised the young graduate Ben. Now the future is defined by another word and the word is “information.” Plastics was a wonder product of the world of industrial technology which fundamentally transformed the world of objects. Information is the new thing, the product of information technology, which is going to transform the world of ideas. Actually, information is not a “thing” in the usual sense of the term. So it is the new non-thing which defines the new and exciting future.
Let me enumerate some fun facts about information. First, people produce information. So now that more people are producing information, a lot of information gets produced. Second, information accumulates. Once produced, unless every copy disappears, it persists. Third, it is a “public good.” One person’s use of a particular bit of information does not preclude another person from using the same information. Fourth, when information is “internalized” it becomes knowledge in a human brain. So the monotonically increasing stock of information raises the potential of acquiring knowledge by other humans. Processing information is one of the necessary steps in the acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge in turn is a necessary ingredient in the process of generating ideas. Ideas eventually fuel the engine that drives human civilization.
So this note is about information, knowledge, ideas, human civilization, and the rest of it. A pretty large subject which I will necessarily deal with fairly superficially given my own limitations. First I will explore the subject from a micro perspective and then move to the macro. The objective is to draw some plausible conclusions about where we as a collective of humans are headed.
Rejecting Information
The object of analysis at the micro level is the individual human. At the bare minimum, a human has to have a brain and a set of sense organs for acquiring information. Mostly it is through hearing and seeing that one receives input information – touch, smell and taste are not as important in the modern world as it would have been in our pre-literate past. Only if one is blind, or cannot read and is unable to comprehend language, do touch, smell and taste predominate – with the possible exception of tasters, noses, lovers and toddlers. Observe a toddler and note how he or she acquires information.
Physiologically the sense organs take in a huge amount of information that gets filtered and most of it is rejected. For example, from the total visual input from the eyes only a tiny fraction of the information gets processed by and stored in the brain. What we perceive is much smaller than what we see. Our brains would be overloaded if it were to process every bit of information that is presented to it. The different kinds of living organisms filter out different bits of information from the environment. Who you are determines what you perceive.
Biological versus the Artificial
A person acquires information from the environment and also the ever-increasing stock of created information. At this point it is useful to distinguish between what we can call the biological (or natural) environment and the cultural (or artificial) environment. The natural environment is that world which our species evolved in over evolutionary time scales. Our sense organs and our brains are in a strict sense biologically fit to deal with the natural world. The ability to deal with the information from the natural environment is hard-coded within us. We don’t have to go to school to learn how to process the information.
The artificial environment is created by human action. The information from it comes in terms of language and words. We have to go to school to learn, so to speak, how to process that information. An artist and a neurologist could see the same brain scan images but perceive it entirely differently because their training is different. The neurologist has over the years taken in a lot of information about brains and internalized it into knowledge. That knowledge allows the neurologist to process the information of the brain scan differently and thus acquire additional knowledge. The artist also acquires additional knowledge from the brain scans but that knowledge is different from that of the neurologist.
Sequencing
The point is that what you know already determines what you are additionally capable of knowing. There is a path dependency in the knowledge sphere that is tied to the sequence in which information was presented. Though the information available may be comprehensive (in the sense that it is complete), if the sequence of presentation of that information is out of order, it will not be comprehended. Graduate level physics information has to be presented after the undergraduate level physics has been internalized for it to make sense.
Knowledge accumulates in a human brain to the extent it is presented information in the correct sequence. It is not even theoretically possible for an external agency to determine what the correct sequence for a particular individual is. It is so because an external agent cannot fully know what the knowledge base of an individual is at a specific time. The solution is therefore to let the individual himself or herself pick out the next bit of information to internalize from a reasonably broad set of information.
Teaching versus Learning
This is where we need to distinguish between teaching and learning. Traditionally “teaching” is when an external agent presents information and expects the individual to internalize it into knowledge. “Learning” is when the individual picks up the next bit of information from the available collection. Learning can never be out of sequence. Teaching often fails in its attempt to impart knowledge because it is not even theoretically possible for an external agent to fully comprehend the internal knowledge state of the student and therefore competently present the information in the right sequence.
Summing up the points so far: information is the basis for knowledge in the brain; knowledge accumulates by internalizing information in the correct sequence.
Infinite Ignorance
The totality of information available to humans is enormous. Let’s call that “public information.” From that collection, each human being internalizes whatever little bit it is able to. That is “private information” leading to “private knowledge.” Since there are around 6 billion brains in the world, each brain has unique private knowledge but derived from the same public information. The larger the population, the greater is the stock of public information. But given the limitations of the human brain, progressively any human’s private information shrinks relative to the public information. In other words, a person becomes more ignorant relative to what is potentially knowable. All of us are privately ignorant in a world awash in information. Some time ago – perhaps as recently as a few hundred years ago – a person could potentially know a reasonable fraction of the available public information. Today that percentage would be approximately zero.
A world of infinite information is also necessarily a world of infinite individual ignorance.
This poses enormous challenges for the individual as well as humanity as a whole. As individuals, we have to accept that we cannot know everything that we potentially know. A trivial example. A few decades ago, you could have enjoyed watching within the year every movie made anywhere in the world that year. The trouble would have been that you would have had to be fabulously rich to go see them. You had the time but accessing the movies would have been costly. Today, it is fairly trivial to have access to all movies produced. But you just don’t have the time to watch even the good ones produced in just one year. World enough but time.
The Challenges and Opportunities
The challenge for the individual is how to choose which bits of the public information to consume and in which sequence. We are biologically equipped to filter out the massive amount of information coming at us from the natural world. We are not equipped to naturally filter out the currently massive amount of information coming at us from the artificial world. An individual’s success in doing so determines how successful one is in this artificial world. One of the primary jobs of the education system we need is to give us that skill. We did not need that ability and therefore our current educational system which was created for a different environment is totally ill-equipped to handle this task.
That brings us to the macro level. Any organization which does the filtering of the public information for individual use is going to be phenomenally successful. The largest corporations will be those that deal with information in the future. One can be accused of Monday morning quarterbacking for saying that. You could point to information technology giants of today and say that the lessons are plainly evident. But I don’t think that we have fully understood what the real lesson is. The point isn’t making a lot of information available to the individual. The point rather is that any institution that most efficiently and effectively reduces the information available to an individual will succeed.
General Purpose Machines
The other lesson pertains to education. The old paradigm was one-size-fits-all because only one size was available. It was an older, simpler, static world where you could learn a small set of skills and hoped to cope with the world for the rest of your life. The dynamic world of today requires constant learning and the acquisition of new skills. A useful analogy would be the distinction between a special purpose machine and a general purpose machine. A typewriter is a special purpose machine while a computer is a general purpose machine. Depending on what software you load, a computer can do a range of things – from guiding spaceships to controlling your microwave oven. People have to become the equivalent of general purpose machines. People must become capable of “loading the appropriate software” to handle any task they want done.
The education system of today churns out special purpose machines. To make it produce general purpose machines requires a few basic changes. First, it has to teach a set of very basic skills so well that everyone is literate and numerate. That is equivalent to designing a machine which has a complete set of machine instructions which it executes very efficiently and all the other tasks are just the execution of a long sequence of these basic operations. Once you know how to competently read, write, do arithmetic, and reason logically, you can pretty much learn how to do pretty much anything that the human mind is capable of.
That bit is the “teaching” bit of the educational system. Nothing else needs to be taught. The rest is entirely dependent on what the individual is interested in and capable of learning. Here the job of the educational system is to make accessible to the student a comprehensive information set – and NOT the entire public information – for the student to pick from, and in the sequence that he or she feels naturally inclined to, and internalize it. By allowing the student freedom to choose what he or she wants to internalize, it releases the information constraint (that is, the problem of knowing what the student knows) which otherwise is impossible to circumvent.
Development
The age of agriculture yielded to the age of industrialization. Agriculture did not go away. It just became sufficiently productive that it released labor that was absorbed in producing non-agricultural goods and services. The percentage share of agriculture declined – not the absolute amount of agricultural production. Wealth, standard of living, or whatever you call it increased in pace with the decline in direct employment in agriculture.
The industrial age is giving birth to the information age. Once again, it is not that the amount of goods produced by the industrial sector is itself declining. It is not. Indeed, it is increasing. But that increase is due primarily to an increase in productivity and hence it releases labor to the rising sector – the information sector. As the labor force increases in the information sector, the production and subsequent consumption of information is bound to increase.
In the agricultural age, those parts of the world which were the most productive agriculturally prospered. It largely depended on the endowment of natural resources and a bit of human capital. It was a simple world and the social order was commensurately simple. Not much investment in terms of human capital was required. Education was largely an informal affair.
In the industrial age, prosperity depended on industrial productivity, which in turn depended on a reasonably educated work force. Education had to be formalized and the requirements could be met with standardized schools. The public information was limited but sufficient to meet the needs of the industrial worker.
In the information age, prosperity depends on how efficiently the people can produce and consume information. It is critically dependent on a very highly educated labor force. Needless to say that agriculture and industries will continue to need labor as well and that that labor would not need to be highly educated. Conversely, if a population is very minimally educated, then it can only be engaged in agriculture; if the population is moderately educated, it can move up to manufacturing.
So at the highest level of abstraction we can reasonably say this. Prosperity in the world to come depends on how highly educated the population is. So those economies that are able to create the most effective and efficient educational system will count. The rest will be forever falling behind.
Most of India lives in the agricultural age because overall our educational system is only able to supply to that. A small part of India lives in the industrial age. That part is increasing but slowly because of the inability of the educational system to provide the human resources required. Less than one percent of India lives in the information age. To a first approximation, the Indian educational system does not create any human resources for the India to live in the information age.
This is a dismal assessment. But there is nothing in the laws of the universe that actually prevents the Indian educational system from creating what is needed for India to prosper. What is lacking is the understanding, the vision, and the will of the people and their leaders.
by Atanu Dey
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