India so Tedious and Frustrating

Rahul Gandhi has become an object of widespread criticism and mockery, and has been so for a while. And yet, he continues to stay on. And his party continues to be sycophant to the Gandhi family like before, and there is no visible change the way the Congress party works. Probably the old members of the party neither know any other way of working nor are capable of adapting and changing with the changing times, since they've learned and perfected their traits over many decades, and had once believed them to be the winning formula, and the challenges that have emerged now were unforeseen.

Let the Congress go to hell. Why should I care. We now have alternatives that seem to make better sense and seem to stand for real ideologies aimed at improving lives of common people. I want to vote for AAP, and have initiated trying to register into a voter list in Mumbai, to which I recently migrated.

Which reminds me - systems and processes for some of the most basic things in India are so complex, I find it frustrating and surprising.
A few examples:

1. Getting yourself registered in a voter list to be able to cast your vote. You are highly unlikely to be able to vote if you move around within the country very often. Remember, we are a democracy. Yet we've made it too difficult for our citizens to vote. Please don't expect each individual, especially one 18 year old or from early voting age population, to be such a strong believer in the power of his vote that he will take pains beyond a certain extent to get himself registered. Rather give him a chance to try democracy like a lot of other things the 18 year old experiment with, and create transparent and responsive systems to demonstrate the effectiveness of democracy and generate that belief in the model. We expect people to believe in flawed instances of great theoretical models like they are Hindu gods and goddesses. With that we can only end up creating temples that need dakshina for pujaari in the name of God. As this analogy struck me, I could see so clearly why bribes don't seem so terribly criminal to most of us Indians.

2. Getting a passport. Besides issues like having to pay bribes for getting police verification cleared (I had to pay Rs 2000/- last year), and many more stupid stuff, the whole deal is so tied to having an address where one has stayed for quite some time. It's all quite messy if one hasn't. Lot of people prefer giving false clean info rather than honest true info that's more a messy reality of the contemporary times but an abnormality 50 years ago. May be not. May be the rules were intentionally made absurd in the first place.

3. Vehicle registration. All vehicles are tied to a State. You move out, your vehicle doesn't belong there. And past 6 years, I've lived in 3 states, and this is not a lot of movement in the current times. And getting the vehicle registered in a 'foreign' Indian State, or at least payment of the road tax there, cannot happen without paying a huge bribe. Without getting into a lot of details, let me say it's insane. Thank God our driving licenses are nationally valid. But getting one without a bribe is another battle many don't want to fight.

4. Marriage registration. I'm yet to get married and attempt a registration, but from what I hear from everybody, this can get terribly complex and tedious. I guess bribes can get it done a bit faster. Given that marriage registration is legally compulsory in India, this should have been a simple thing to do, so that people happily adhere to the law, not get beaten down trying to follow it.

May be old ways of doing things. May be systems designed for corruption by the corrupt and powerful. But these and a lot of other things like these are because of which we Indians find it hard to comply with rules, adhere to legal requirements, participate in building the nation, and be proud of who and where we are.

Randomness of Change

One of the main tenets of modern capitalist philosophy is to let every person seek his own gains and rest assured that the whole human civilization will progress as a result. While this may be true in aggregate and average terms, there are two levels where it needs to be analyzed whether we make real progress and not aggregate material progress alone. One, is the attainment of psychological satisfaction which includes emotional and intellectual well being. In other words, the level of happiness, both at aggregate and individual levels. Two, is the nature of the competition between individuals and the human values manifested in human interactions on the ground. Since humans are such emotional species, it is necessary that human happiness and feeling of satisfaction be accounted for into economics and we have more civilized economic models.

Of course it is easier said than done. And besides, the economically powerful, sitting at the peaks of current hierarchies as defined by current models exercise all their powers to keep things in ways that best serve them. And the poor, unhappy masses are still incapable of taking them out. Coz democracy in real world is the weakest approach of extracting what one wants from the system. We've seen it fill Indian political system with criminals whom nobody likes, yet we elect them through democratic election process, where candidates get elected through simple majority albeit by getting small percentage of votes coz there are so many parties contesting, and then we have an absolute majority group of such minority voted elected representatives together forming the government, where the very reason most guys from that group get together is just so that they get to be part of the government and share the loot that's the implicit purpose of forming governments in India.

I don't know how things will change in India and elsewhere - of course different problems with different intensities in different places, mostly coz of the differences in respective prevalent cultures that define the way people think and behave. And India is doing terribly. I often conclude, although with lot of reluctance and embarrassment, that our culture sucks, specifically the cultural elements that matter most in our lives. Of course we have great temples, music, dance and cuisine, but in terms of human values, we are terrible. Aspects of culture which define how we treat each other are more important than art forms and food. And it's these cultural aspects which set the context for people with certain traits and engaging in certain kinds of actions to rise to seats of power. And it's the powerful that choose what's to be done from the options that they have. Sometimes it's with the consensus with the other powerful guys, so as to ensure the cartel is safe. By peaceful means, the common man can just make some noise and hope to be heard. By aggressive means, violent or non-violent, the common man can replace the cartel with some other cartel and hope it works for his interests. But in a society that is defined by certain values, power just differentiates between the haves and have-nots. Once a have-not becomes a have, he'll become who he always hated when he was a have-not.

Therefore, we are talking about cultural transformation. Which is impossible in the short term. And in the long term, it is impossible to transform culture in a specific direction one wants. And who is that one anyway? It is random, chaotic, yet evolving. So little, local disruptions are all one can create and hope that things fall in place in the long broad term to lead to change that one had strived for in his small lifetime and which was carried forward by other small disruptions which may or may not have culminated into large revolutions.

I could not reach a definite conclusion on how our models can be transformed to achieve what is best for the human kind. I think that is because it is not totally in our hands. We can only demand for it, may be mobilize people and resources too, and create minor local short-term impact, be optimistic that many more would see value in it and strive for similar change after our lifetime, and hope that in a few hundred years things would be different.

But that leaves me with another question - what is the incentive for a human being to strive for change of such nature which he would not experience or benefit from in his own lifetime? Why should someone screw his own life to achieve something for future generations? There are many who seem to have done that. But it's also possible that they were actually not screwing their lives but were enjoying what they were doing, and that drove them to it, and the long-term future-generations impact was not really a driving force. Or another possibility is the hope that things will change sooner than they do, the stupid mind hoping against hope. Or yet another possibility is the foolish belief that one is going to live forever. And then, there might be other guys working equally hard for another change that might be totally contradictory or nullifying what one is fighting for. Well, humans are crazy! We end up having something we never imagined and imagining something we'd never have...

Note: Masculine forms like he, his, guys, etc. have been used just for ease of writing. They apply to both men and women, without meaning any difference whatsoever.

Blogging into darkness

Once upon a time, the reason I blogged was to be read, understood and agreed to. Now I blog just to speak into the darkness, coz blogs are hardly read these days. And it's satisfying, albeit in a strange and inexplicable way. It's perhaps for the same reason that people wrote personal diaries, more commonly about 20 years back. I remember those movies where one's diary acted as a great source of useful information for solving criminal cases after his/her murder... sound funny when I think of those now.

When I moved my blog from o3.indiatimes to livejournal and later to blogger, I stopped enjoying blogging as I was hardly read and commented on. Back then, I used to feel it was no use writing volumes when nobody was gonna read. And eventually a few comments with agreement and appreciation would be the least I should get in return for the effort of writing - that's how I thought. I guess I sought acceptance for my thoughts, my feelings and, well, me.

But over the years as my blog has moved and matured to some extent, so have I, to some extent. Writing for me now has become a way of feeling that connection with myself. When I connect my thoughts into a chain and give it meaningful ends with anchor and grip, I sometimes manage to tie down an idea, that I find beautiful. Sometimes, it's still loose chains of ideas, but if I am able to see links, deliberate or incidental, I still feel happy coz I always struggle with my mind that continuously throws too many bits and pieces of creative or real images that fail to have a sequence of relevant and connected snapshots. Writing helps me force my mind to go back repeatedly and produce focussed and aligned thoughts based on which I can draw tangible conclusions about stuff of life. The natural randomness built into my thinking, however, makes me creative in interesting ways. I just need to capture each of the random thoughts and build on it, possibly by writing about it! And writing into this darkness called blog works quite well as a way to experiment with ideas.

And if I want some post of mine to be read or noticed, I post a link to it on facebook, and I do get a few hits, often driven by subconscious curiosity lost before my page opens in an adjoining browser. Still, I do have a way of turning on a twinkling star in the dark sky. And that's all the hope I need to go on staring into space and wondering about all that is, or is not. And ya, with a pen in my hand and a page to run it on... metaphorical, of course...

Gutthi come back

I used to like Gutthi in 'Comedy Nights with Kapil', but never felt he was so much the backbone of the show until he left the show. It's sad he has, and Comedy Nights is no more what it used to be. It gets boring very often now, while earlier I used to find quite a few bits very funny, and I used to forgive the few boring bits, like those by the buaa.

But the show itself has been fundamentally amazing. Totally desi. And appeals to my sense of humor.

It seems stand up comedy in India has reached a point where it can now explode ahead in a big way... Thanks to The Great Indian Laughter Challenge a few years back, for giving Indian humor and the Indian humorous a platform to take off.

But where have we lost our Haasya Kavis? The best ones have aged. And the younger good ones are not so keen (Kumar Vishwas for example). And they've been outdone by modern media in terms of focused delivery of comic content. And nobody cares much for poetry these days, especially that delivered as such. Besides, I believe poetry is not a requirement for humor. It's more an element of linguistic adornment, more relevant to songs these days. But then, it seems Haasya Kavis were more poets than comedians. So, although it's not right to compare them with the current breed of standup comedians, their business and popularity, whatever little it was before, has been affected by the latter.

Coming back to what I started with, I hope Gutthi comes back...

Need parallel models

I don't have any numbers but I believe a significant number of customers are driven away from stores because the guys in the store, who are there to assist, jump unnecessarily in front of everyone who enters the shop and ask what he/she is looking for. Most shy customers like me simply say nothing or that they are just looking and walk away or out of the store. A lot of impulse buyers and a few serious buyers are driven away in the process. All customers are not alike. One size doesn't fit all. The world needs parallel models for shy and introverted people, which right now are there only for the extroverts and the shameless (pardon the word... does shy have a better antonym? :P).

and then, you wait...

The professional skills of an individual make sense only with respect to a context in which they are desired. Our educational institutions fail to create good professionals because of their inability or unwillingness to create the right setting for imparting and testing the skills that they intend to. What comes out is not someone who is refined by education, but someone whose natural skills are rusted, yet still can be in shape with slight professional oiling, and certain other skills which he can claim he possess coz his education has misled him into believing himself as what he is not, nor trained him adequately to really acquire that skill with an adequate degree of skillfulness. (Equally applies to her but using only him for convenience). Often people get into jobs demanding the latter set of skills, coz that's what their degrees say they possess and then they end up with stressed and distressed careers. And often the former set of 'natural' skills are abandoned or forgotten, since either the market for such skills is not that lucrative or one is not able to find the right gaps in the market where they can fit in with their natural inclinations. But then, it is very stupid to expect every individual to also be skillful at marketing or positioning and stuff. To an extent these are survival instincts, but when the question is just of being optimum and sub-optimum, the instincts of survival are not invoked, coz there is no life at stake. One can be sad and dissatisfied and still spend a whole lifetime.

Therefore the issue is of economics. The fight for a bigger and bigger claim for the available resources and amenities of the world leads one to make compromises in the choices he makes. To begin with, choices are about basic necessities, but then choices are sticky and one can't generally jump in another boat once in the middle of the ocean, coz all boats you crave for are far far away. You can swim across, but the ocean we sail is heavily infested by man-eater sharks. So you go on sailing in your boat, which you hate, but that's your life. You wait to reach the shore, where your boat takes you. You would get off your boat and freely walk into the woods. Perhaps you'd still regret you didn't fight the sharks and reached the other boat that went to the shore you'd have liked better. Or perhaps there is only one shore and all boats lead you there. Or perhaps you'd just laugh at the meaninglessness of it all. Your journey defined by the choices you made. But at that point, it's just some more walk. A walk of regret or a walk of a satisfied life. Yet in the wilderness, into which you walk away, it's only dark and lonely. You wait. As do the sharks that you always dreaded.

The Loop

Whenever I travel by local trains in Mumbai, especially when they are stuffed like luggage with people, I feel ashamed of my country. It didn't have to be like this. So much hard work put in by the common man, leading his/her life in conditions crazily adverse at times, is all going waste because our leaders are incapable and unwilling to set the right framework for the nation to progress in areas it needs to. Rather than lubricating our economic machinery, all they do is to add creaky friction to it. And then they argue how better they are as compared to their own kind from another party. Their focus is on fooling the section of this country, which is struggling for basic daily meal, by drawing mirages with words. And the hungry, poor, dying majoring of India holds on to that hope and votes for whoever draws it best. What else can it do? Hope is built into life itself. And for someone hungry and dying, hope for the next meal is the biggest hope. What's the way out? Are we too culturally challenged to be able to deal with it? Or have out centers of power become too powerful for us to be able to uproot with better alternatives? Or is it that better alternatives do not exist in our context? In other words, the same question - are we too culturally challenged to be able to deal with it? And I realize the questions form an endless loop we are all stuck in. At least for now!

Fixing Fixing Fixing!!!

The so called spot fixing scandals becoming breaking news each day in all news channels are appalling to many, but whenever I think about the fundamental basis on which an action like fixing of a spot in a match or a session or a complete match is considered wrong, I find that it is hardly a strong one to justify putting someone behind bars or banning to play for life. If you look at it in many logical and practical ways, it is not even wrong, and takes place in many other professional and personal contexts where we don't complain and consider it totally fine. Here are a few arguments to substantiate my point.

Does one always play to win? -  Consider this: The underlying assumption in every sports-viewer's mind is that each of the players in both teams is giving his/her best in all ways possible to make his/her team win. I find it absurd that one must consider this implicit even in the conventionally cleanest of the games. While drawing from what Adam Smith said long back, if each player plays best for himself/herself, the team as a whole does best, with survival of the fittest players in the team. However, the best of the players individually may not be good team-players, for example mutual rivalry between some can harm the team and even lead to losing overall. But again applying the Adam Smith logic to teams, the teams that would survive, will be those that have the best combination of talented players, individual efforts, team efforts and whatever it takes for a team to win or survive in a competitive environment where limited resources will allow only a certain number of teams to exist and participate in the show. The simple postulate of modern economics and the science of evolution leads to unimaginable complexity as it applies to each level and layer, of which I mentioned only 2. But there is a basic flaw in the way we would ideally apply it to sports in the contemporary world and therefore assuming that each player up there is doing what is in the best interests of his/her career, his/her team and the sport he/she's part of. The flaw is in our understanding of the ultimate goal of the entire system. Sports at professional levels are not played for self-actualization or pleasure. They are played to make money. And if winning or playing well does not necessarily make as much money, then although the postulate of economics and evolution stands true, the operating model at each layer to reach the actual eventual goal is different from what we assume it to be. Now let us apply the postulate to the revised goal - a player who does his/her best in earning money through ways and means available to him/her (which may also include playing well) and also does things collectively with other players in the team, which help the team stay in a competitive position vis-a-vis other teams, such player succeeds. Now with the revision of the ultimate goal, it is impossible that players in a match are all playing to make their team win. Overall, they may be boosting the earnings of their team in the process of boosting their own. But with externalities like fixing money on offer very easily, the players do not necessarily earn best if the team goes on winning. And since the matches don't happen on another planet, externalities will come into play in whatever manner possible, coz they have their incentives too.

Then why do we blame these players for indulging in something that is in line with their professional goals? Just coz it is not in line with our foolish assumptions, which interestingly are so sticky, that I find it amusing how irrational we are in our thought processes. And this is true especially of sports, coz somehow we are not able to digest that this could be so rampant, while the same sort of fixing happens in the so called Reality Shows, and we don't complain, although it is much more understood there to all of us, and we even enjoy the spice that it adds.

One can argue that Fixing of matches is illegal, and therefore it is wrong. But again, legality of an action is based on where it stands vis-a-vis expected and accepted behavior. But if our expectations are foolish, why should law not be fixed by some wise individuals, who are supposed to have better understanding of right and wrong. But then, we are democratic on the surface and hard nuts on the inside - in other words screwed at both levels, coz we are eventually humans - and we are like that only :). An amazing fact is that we can fool ourselves by feeling real emotions by watching movies where people pretend and lie, i.e., act, and create situations that don't exist and may never possibly exist. Can we sue an Ekta Kapoor for bombarding a considerable chunk of educated Indian population with unrealistic family dramas full of lies, politics, murders, and also love and beauty, in the name Indian culture by manipulating the minds of innocent individuals in the way they perceive the world? Or should we sue Steven Spielberg for making a movie with Dinosaurs! We don't - coz we enjoy fiction and wild imagination. That's human. But we do try to draw a line by calling something too outrageous even for us to see, coz we do acknowledge that our minds are vulnerable.

But the case with sports is different. And I am surprised it is not the same with Reality Shows. We get entertained by matches because of the uncertainty of the outcome and the inherent action during the course of the match. The reason we are put off by fixing is that it sucks to know that the outcome of the match and even some of the events during the match we saw had been decided beforehand by someone, the element of reality in the action that stunned and inspired us may have been enacted, and it was all possibly a drama. We do enjoy movies, though, especially when we don't know the outcome. But with sports, our expectations are different. We expect universal uncertainty and genuine human effort, coz finally those are the very entertaining elements of sports. While for movies, it is much wider - the experience of emotions, the small bits that we relate to, the artistic appreciation, sexual appeal and the climax, which does not have to be uncertain to be likeable, but should rather appeal to our dreams or desires or sense of right-wrong or hormones or something else, coz there are many movies we can watch hundreds of times and like every time. I guess that's why they make reality shows so bitchy and sexy, so that we don't complain of fixing and just enjoy the show. In many ways IPL has tried to become like that and is becoming better at it. But it needs more masala to be a hit reality show, for people to look at it like one and also enjoy it like that. In parallel, views need to change, law needs to fix itself, some cleanup definitely needs to happen, and Arnab Goswami needs to calm down :). But then, he works for money too, and this is what earns him best these days! Consider this - when corruption is a hot topic, news channels gain if more and more leaders are corrupt and if they are able to break bigger and bigger scandals. Possibly some of them fix people too - reminds me of Zee News vs Naveen Jindal case.

We a kewl bunch of fewls!!!

The Sanjay Dutt Case

Was watching a debate just now between Justice Katju and Subramanian Swamy on pardoning Sanjay Dutt. The former thinks Sanjay Dutt should be pardoned on humanitarian grounds, while the latter quotes some Articles and says pardoning is justified only if it serves some public good. Justice Katju does not deny Swami, but goes on to quote some Nanavati case where the pardon was granted in spite of no public good served. The grounds, as pointed by Arnab Goswami - the anchor of the debate, were not Humanitarian either, in case of the Nanavati case. They were all power and politics. After hearing both sides in the debate today, and they are probably going to be the two sides in Supreme Court soon, and from my own point of view, I feel there is no reason to pardon Sanjay Dutt. The sentence is not so severe - just 3 more years, and is in fact in proportion to the crime committed. Also Dutt is not a poor guy who's lived under social torture, seclusion or abandonment, nor has be been thrown into gutter or ill-treated by society or anything which can be said to be even remotely equivalent to already having suffered for what he's done. He's lived a great celebrity life, so rewarding that his going to jail is gonna hurt business lobbies, and so they want him out. It's all money speaking now. The only possible public good I can see in granting him pardon is to set an example by penalizing our judicial system in a way for being so slow and late in pronouncing judgments and closing appeals, so as to make sure the same thing doesn't happen in future, and Dutt being a harmless person now, there will be no public harm by his being out. But I am 100% sure that our judicial system will not improve by this one case. For one, this is India. And secondly, the backlog itself must be so huge that even wanting to improve the scenario won't lead us far. On the contrary, we will end up setting examples for hundreds of such cases of delayed judgments, who will start demanding pardon quoting Dutt's precedent. So, forget it. To conclude, it is not justified that the whole intellectual machinery of the country debates this case of a celebrity, except for increasing TRP ratings of TV channels and for bringing more people in limelight for having points of view and claim to 2 minutes of fame.