What the hell is going on?

Coalgate is the latest feather in the UPA government's cap. And the latest ingredient in the spicy saga of corruption in India. If it hadn't been for a couple of Finance chapters I read during my adventures with academic pursuits, I wouldn't have appreciated the rationale behind something being called a loss just coz it could have been earned and the government gave up the possibility of earning it. I still don't often understand that way of looking at things, but if that's the rule, so be it.

It would be interesting to go through the methodology of calculating the loss, although my past record with Valuation tells me that I won't understand much of it. Damodaran on Valuation is considered a good book on the subject, but books are never the best way to learn stuff in college. And as far as learning from peers is concerned, stuff like laziness, inferiority complex, superiority complex, shyness, arrogance, etc etc., each applicable to different subset of peers, stopped me from reaching out, and I was left wondering on most topics, but passed the course nonetheless, like I did most others at IIM and IIT, from whatever bits I understood and from whatever bits I managed to cover up with good english.

I didn't intend to discuss this topic here, but like law, my articles take their own course. I was a great notes-writer at IIM. I wrote good notes at IIT too, but there I was outdone by people like Abhishek Bhargava by miles of written crap. I did have a couple of loyal customers like Ratnesh Bansal and Jeetu. And a few others who played safe by xeroxing notes by Abhishek, Saumya and me, just to make sure they don't miss anything at all. But sadly, half of my time at IIT was spent figuring out what the seemingly better people did, and writing good notes with the mind shut and ears open was one of them. I utilized in IIM that skill developed over 2 years in IIT, and it didn't take me long to become the 'notes-guy' of my section. IIMs are culturally a little different from IITs, in that you cannot and need not totally rely on class-notes. The curriculum is full of the so called 'Case Studies' which you can solve, resolve, analyse and answer just from common sense. Some part of the remaining stuff can be tackled through the gyaan in class-notes, which must also be there in some form in the books, I am sure. But you need to be a Schizophrenic John Nash to find those bits and connect them in a way that it makes any sense. So a few who care a little, look at the notes. For those who care more than a little, and there a few of those, there are the books. You are charged in your fees for books and they are thrown to your face, even if you don't want them. And naturally, very few actually see those books after the day they register for a term, when they have to collect the books from the Academic Office. So proud or amused they are on that day that they take pictures of stacks of books and put them on facebook. Some perverts see a phallus and worship it in hope that it bears some fruit. The few who do study them, are either in BCG (and the like) or in some unknown company which they joined after they were forced to sign out of placements without job just coz it was convocation day and the diro had to declare 100% placements!

Coming back to Coalgate... Why the hell do they make a 'gate' out of every damn scandal? They should have avoided that here, at least, coz they ended up naming the scandal after a popular toothpaste, sticking to the phonetics. But who are 'they'? I don't know. I wish we had some democratic way of naming popular newsy stuff. A discussion in Parliament may be a good idea. Afterall when we are known by our Scandals, we better have good names for those.

As it gets more and more ridiculous with our leaders throwing blames in defence and playing defence when blamed, some channel(s) highlighted yesterday or the day before the fact that we lost 147 crore in the Parliament sessions where nothing happened except shouting and gossip. Well, I wonder if we should consider this a loss at all, given that even otherwise, those parliament sessions are no good. However, from similar to but slightly different from the Chidambaram logic, one can say that if the session happened and the cost of the session was incurred, where is the loss? At some level this makes sense coz there is always a way to justify chaos in Parliament, as something done in National Interest. Also, given the fact that our leaders do everything for National interest by default - from watching porn in Parliament when they are not sleeping to dancing naked with prostitutes to making favors to lobbies for 'nominal' monetary gains. 'Nominal' because the numbers are so huge, you can't key them into calculators, and have to settle with the names only. Of course technology has advanced and now we have stuff that take long numbers... but we will not tell those politicians of the ancestral generations. Otherwise, they may think beyond their calculators. They already carry iPads and stuff, although turned off. The moment they learn how to poke into their screens, India will have bigger scams. Unless somebody comes up with 'politician-lock' app like they have child-locks in TVs.

Lastly, with all this talk about huge numbers, that too of money, stuck in various messes - some here, some there, some nowhere - I am really confused how money really works. Does anyone really know how much there is, how much there can be and how much there needs to be, and what the hell is going on?

Fighting over Religion - Can we stop it?

Many Pakistani Hindus are seeking refuge in India and none of them wants to go back to Pakistan. They say they had miserable lives in Pakistan. Pakistani government officials say it's not about religion, but just the feudal system in Pakistan which affects the poorest guys most, and that's Hindus. Feudal system may be responsible to a certain extent, but for a nation like Pakistan which came into being purely on religious grounds, it is hard to imagine a secular environment with equal status for people with all faiths.

Religion, which for most of us is a hereditary attribute rather than a chosen belief, is the root cause of most tensions between humans. I was wondering about the possibility of abolishing all the existing religions and starting afresh. I realized that it requires a round of devastation of human civilization at a scale big enough to wipe out all our luxuries and take us to a level of misery such that we lose faith in the existing manifestations of God we believe in or have imagined. If that really happens, and we do indeed start afresh, it is very unlikely that the humans spread all over the globe will develop new concepts of god and religion with consensus. There is bound to be different schools of thought and imagination, and therefore we will most likely end up again with this situation with many religions. If we cannot have one religion, we should somehow have peaceful coexistence of all religions. Is it possible with where we stand right now, with our 2000-3000 years old religions or is there an easier way to achieve it with a new set of religions? If it is possible now itself, what should be done to make it happen?

An Opportunity Wasted...

It is difficult to say whether forming a political party is the right thing to do for team Anna. Sadly this anti-corruption movement by Anna Hazare and his team has come to a point where most people just don't care any more. There was a time when everyone looked up to them with admiration and hope. For once, the public did make them heroes by placing them all on a pedestal. But they wasted it.

I wondered for a moment whether wasted is the right word. Possibly they are honest individuals with genuine concern for the country and they did what they felt was right. If that is true, they should not be blamed for losing an opportunity, coz according to their judgement they were making the best of it. Their fighting against corruption was totally voluntary. So it is not really justified that we blame them for misjudging at a certain point and leading the movement to its doom, coz we did not elect them for the cause. We, the common people, were only going to be beneficiaries if the movement succeeded, i.e., we were there to share all rewards, but not contributors to the movement in any significant way. Of course the public support did give strength to the movement, but the public also left when it got bored.

But the opportunity was indeed wasted by team Anna, thinking from their own point of view, for whatever aspirations they had. May be they indeed want a clean political system. Or may be this whole movement was one huge show to gain publicity and build a reputation, that can lead to a direct and strong entry into politics with possibilities of fastest rise to the top. Or may be it is something else. In any case, they wouldn't be happy about the way things flopped for them after the first two super-hit shows. So much so that they couldn't even motivate themselves to fast for the cause they so much expressed belief in, and ended it all in haste, as if they found it totally useless to do it any further when people didn't care and government didn't bother.

On another note, it is interesting to understand what could be the incentive for someone to launch a movement against corruption and fight for a clean system. At an individual level, the motivations and benefits sought are generally too personal and micro to really justify a mass-movement. Still, we have definitely come across individuals who have died for causes beyond their own. Or did they internally link the cause to something their own and found a personal benefit big enough to justify embracing death? Suicide bombers, army men, social and political fighters who don't fear death - what really drives them?