The RSS-BJP post

Note: I don’t belong to RSS :P .. the post is about my reflections on the recent Anna-RSS controversy and about my recent reading of BJP’s Philosophy

#CustomaryRecruiterAlert: Okie by now you should be knowing what to do with such posts

Anna-RSS-Nanaji Deshmukh

2011 A.D was the year of Anna for Indian media (A.D for rest of the world translates to “Anno Domini” .. for India it is “Anna Domini” .. an year dominated by Anna :P).This post is about the most recent “Anna-is-a-RSS-man” controversy… obvly there have been many in the recent past orchestrated by you-know-who.

Given that i do have some spare time these days.. i am reading quite a bit online and offline. One of these days i read about Nanaji Deshmukh and his experiment in Chitrakoot M.P. I was thoroughly impressed with his work there… i.e., creating a huge network of  tens of hundreds of self-reliant villages in line with the ideas of Gandhi and Pt.Deendayal. I bookmarked their website that day. Later when i read about him on his wiki page i realised that he was awarded “Padma Vibhushan” , the second highest civilian award in India and that he was a Rajya Sabha Member.

A cursory reading of the wiki page is enough to understand that he was a great political and social worker. Agreed..all i am doing here is arm chair analysis .. he may or may not been as good as he is portrayed .. but then my point is .. government doesn’t distribute padma vibhushans jus like  that.Just because someone had RSS links is no reason to discount all the good work they have done. There is more on his work in this page (obvly it is a sangh parivar page so focus only on this text. rest of the text should be taken with two three pinches of salt :P) .

As per this TOI article that i flipped from the wiki page.. “praising nanaji deshmukh for his single-minded devotion to the uplift of the people, kalam said what the octogenarian leader was doing at chitrakoot should be an eye-opener for others”. Again.. Abdul Kalam doesnt go around praising just about anyone. .. so Nanaji shud’ve been a great man ;)

Now the media was full of Anna-RSS accusations some days ago. It was just a couple of days before this controversy that i read about Nanaji Deshmukh.. so i was obvly surprised at the coincidence. (More like i-know-this-man types).

But the reactions from all the parties totally baffled me .. first was that of Digvijay singh .. then that of BJP … that of RSS .. and that of Hazare himself.  I hope someday people learn to rise about petty party politics.. like Anna said… people like Nanaji deserve to be seen in a different plane altogether. I didn’t see a full fledged article on the work of Nanaji deshmukh in any of the papers in the last few days .. in the wake of the recent controversy i thought the nation deserved to know atleast something about the man who is at the center of this controversy.

I was planning this “akhil bharatiya pad+rath yatra” type thing once my course ends :P .. okie that was a flashy name.. but jus wanted to visit a few places.. Chitrakoot has been added to that list now.

[Edit: S.Gurumurthy's article in IE dated Mar 2010 "Nanaji, as I knew him"]

Deendayal Upadhyaya

After seeing his name again and again on the chitrakoot page.. i decided to do a bit of reading about “Integral Humanism” the core philosophy propounded by Deendayal Upadhyaya which is the founding philosophy of today’s BJP.

I remember .. long back when i read L.K.Advani’s autobiography “My Country My Life” he spoke at length about Deendayal Upadhyaya and i was wondering .. who the hell is this guy! :) . So finally i managed to finish reading it.. a short 50+ page pdf it is.

I was surprised to see some striking similarities with Mahatma Gandhi’s “Hind Swaraj”. It is a wonderful vision for a national party to have. Though, i see that they have done very little in that direction when they were/are in power in state and center :P (discounting the stuff done by people like Nanaji ofcourse)

There are some vehement criticisms to the document which i found here. I found them to be very very shallow. Obvly the person who wrote the website already decided his stance before hand and was very biased when he started off.. like we all know.. biased people make some really absurd analysis.. and this one is no exception. What amused me most was some lines from the ending text:

“Capitalism and socialism centralize, so we shall decentralize. Had capitalism and socialism decentralized, we shall centralize. Capitalism and socialism are both western concepts, so we shall build something on our own. The scientific knowledge of the West belongs to the whole world, but not their economic policies. The US is in the West and therefore I shall be in the east. Socialism is a reaction to capitalism. Ours will be a reaction to socialism and capitalism”

The author obvly was trying to be very sarcastic.. and show that he is a smart chap. But like telugu film directors in the runup for flashy oneliners .. he forgot the strength of a good storyline i.e., content. Deendayal obvly was not the first to talk about decentralisation. Like i myself have documented in my blog in recent past all the below men at various points of time in their career spoke about this model.

• M.N.Roy talked about co-operative economy after he got disillusioned with Communism
• Gandhi talked about that in his “Hind Swaraj”
• “Loknayak” Jayprakash Narayan said the same  too about the self-reliant village model
• Tagore said the same in his “Samavaya Niti”
• Louis Kelso talked about a similar model in which every man is a capitalist
• G.K.Chesterton and Hellaire Belloc proposed the same by drawing inspirations from Christian traditions
• There are legions of economists on the New Economics foundation page who have said the same about “the third way”
• Am damn sure there will be many many others .. :)

So  as per the author of the “antibjp” site i think all these people are crackpots? :P .. The list has got devout christians.. ex-communists .. congressmen.. socialists and intellectuals .. so all those random arguments of the website guy pale.Case closed :P.

PS: Like i said in the first line..i neither belong to RSS nor BJP. I think just like Congress betrayed Gandhi.. BJP of today also has betrayed Deendayal’s “Integral Humanism” . So no point being enamoured by party websites and mission-vision documents. I do not hold any political affiliations as of now. Heck! i couldnt even vote till now as my name went missing from electoral rolls :( .. So please don’t get judgemental about me :P .. i am just your quintessential middle class indian armchair analyst :P ..

 

Thought provoking?

#CustomaryRecruiterAlert Ignore.. Ignore.. Ignore the post! I will work .. I will work .. I will work :P

#ReaderAlert .. lot of text

The last time i spoke of the atomic physicist turned environmentalist ‘Winin Pereira’ was here. Recently, i happened to read one more of his books “Inhuman Rights – The Western System and Global Human Rights Abuse”. This post is about that reading.Such books make us think about a lot of things in our everyday life we take for granted today. This is a 1997 book.

This one again was from arvind gupta’s book gallery but i believe the hardcopy also can be procured from here.( I haven’t tried this channel yet.. but i plan to buy sometime soon :) )

Anyway, the book talks about many things.. westernisation, colonisation, businesss unsustainability, exploitation, rights abuse, exterminating indigenous peoples etc. I will only refer to some parts of the book which made me sit back, think and reflect.

On Individualism

The book talks about a lot of things.. but somewhere in the last 20% of the book there is this chapter on individual rights.. and that is the one which made me think the most esp considering the fact that i myself am troubled with extreme individualism these days.

“Individualism is based on the belief that personal pleasure is the only good and personal pain is the only evil. The unlimited pursuit of pleasure, usually confused with happiness, is considered the ultimate right of every person, thus transmuting selfishness into a universal virtue“

In recent past, discussions in class and off-class are leading to this fundamental.. individualism vs collectivism thing. I think this interaction will continue to shape our lives in the next few decades :)

“The sombre side of the doctrine of individualism is that those disadvantaged by the same system must also take personal responsibility for their own misfortune, poverty or suffering. The west has accumulated such unparalleled wealth that the affluent can claim that only individuals who are flawed in some way could possibly failed to do the same. The system promotes itself as the most perfect form of human society achievable, given the fallen state of humanity. It is only one step from this to assert that all the problems of so prodigious a system must stem from the failings of human beings. Individuals can then be made to bear the burden of pain inflicted by social and economic wrongs as though these were their own self-inflicted tragedies”.

The system is “ruthless”. I myself have experienced this feeling many times .. from the time i started by higher education in 2001. The whole things runs on a up or out funda sadly :( .. Again like i said prevly.. i don’t agree that India is a collectivist society in its entiriety anymore. A lot of “the India that i am in” is very very individualistic.

On Consumption

“Western economics claims that “consumer sovereignty” as a fundamental ethical right: “What i want, I have a right to get”. The criteria people normally use when attempting to satisfy their wants are: “Do i like it?” “Can i afford it?” . This implies that the money at the disposal of the individual has been justly earned and that no one has been impoverished or hurt by its acquisition. It further conveys that the purchase contemplated has in no way harmed or exploited those who produce it or the environment. In other words, money cannot be tainted and money itself overrides all other ethical considerations.”

This aspect of our consumption today is interesting. Urban Indian consumer of today is very much like that in the west.. so am sure the attitude has percolated down to us today :).

“Consumption over basic needs requirements — hyper-consumption — is an abuse of other people’s right to life. The failure to observe this, is one of the major yet rarely mentioned violations of human rights today. It is an abuse that is perpetrated by nearly all citizens in the West and those in the Two Thirds World who imitate their life-styles”

Totally agree. This is also similar to what gandhiji said on this topic. But i will also say that it is incredibly difficult to stay simple in “my India”. Infact, the whole economy post liberalisation is running under the assumption that the whole of india turns on the hyper consumption mode and india shall “grow and develop!” :P

On “turning back the clock”

“Well, if the revival of modest and frugal ways of life is turning back the clock, at least it is an improvement on those, who, urging on an industrialisation without end, risk turning back the clock to the book of Genesis when chaos covered the face of the earth“

Interesting! .. I think Gandhi’s Hindswaraj also argues on similar lines. By the time i am 70 perhaps the answer to this question will be much clearer.. by then there will not be a debate on modes of development .. there will be only one answer .. which one it is .. is the question :P

On “Human Nature”

“Another attack (on critics) is that the present system reflects the reality of human nature and that this nature cannot be changed. “Human Nature”, in  this context invariably means greed, selfishness and individual self-aggrandisement

But human nature is also charectarised by self-sacrifice, concern for others, compassion and cooperation; otherwise the human race would have extinguished itself long ago“

Very true.

Doomsday predictions?

“Such statements are dismissed as the ramblings of irrational, millenium cultists; of people who have been predicting doomsday for generations. But doomsday has not yet come and will never arrive since Western science and technology are religiously believed to be capable of indefinitely substituting resources and eliminating pollution. However even though it appears to be permanently entrenched, the Western systems already showing a variety of signs of deterioration“

I think it is easy to pass judgement on people who think differently. But seldom do we actually evaluate their  merit. This crisis that our world is seeing today is i think unique and cannot be compared with others like  Ozone depletion scare or Y2K scare or End of millenium scare etc.. this is much deeper and bigger in both scope and scale. (Btw Halley’s comet arrival in 1910 also was one of the doomsday prophecies ;) )

Solution?

“The shift to simpler life-styles- reducing the purchase and use of non-necessities – will itself undermine the system, in a sense, “the magic of market place” , can be used not only by choosing what we buy, but by choosing what we don’t buy. The system, no matter how tyrannical it becomes, cannot deprive citizens of the right not to buy. And since the source of its wealth and power is the manufacture and sale of its products, not buying is a potent means of hastening its downfall“

Well. well. now this is something :) . But i like i said prevly… it is now very very difficult to stay simple :) The economist Ludwig Von Mises in his book “anti-capitalistic mentality” took the argument to the other extreme and  questions this whole funda. Well.. for now looking at the way things have gone around .. may be consumers have been brain washed i dunno.. but i think Von Mises argument won the game :)

More Solutions?

“Many ancient systems, still practised by indigenous peoples who have been living simply for thousands of years, provide viable and more just model alternatives to the Western system. They can teach the wisdom of smallness, the value of communities which include individual autonomy with communal generosity and a non-violent ecological perspective“

“Small is Beautiful” …. Indeed !

 

The manifesto of the ESOP man

So in one of my older posts i wrote about this man called Louis Kelso who is behind the Employee Stock Ownership plan. I finally managed to finish his book “The Capitalist Manifesto” (279 pg pdf takes 2-3 days to read and absorb).

This post is about that reading .. (Wait! don’t groan :P .. there is time for that).

He has been succesfully sidelined by the mainstream economists i think.. if it was not for the reading of that television elimination book by Jerry Mander i wouldn’t have known about Kelso. Sad!

Apparently he once told a reporter that his book is about “one of the most important discoveries in the history of mankind!” :D . It defintely is a important discovery.. “most” or not i don’t know.

The book discusses in detail about the problems with current day economics and makes some radical proposals.

• The fundamental argument is on these lines .. as time progressed technology has made “Capital” (Machinery and other such investment) a lot more powerful+productive than “Labour” .
• A lot of the wealth is now generated by the capital and very little by labour. Infact, as per author in the USA of the 60s ..90% of wealth was generated by capital and only 10% by labour. But the tragedy is that only 5% of the populace own this 90% capital.
• Now, what has been happening is .. the labour which is infact responsible for only 10% of the wealth keeps on demanding higher wages by attributing the increase in overall productivity to their labour while it was infact because of the capital. Not only that .. lop-sided government policies keep on pushing companies for higher labour employment whereas on the other hand technology is becoming more efficient and needs as little labour as possible.
• Infact, he criticises the taxation policies also which draw away a lot of income from the rich who got their income for their capital and distribute it to the poor who demand “just” wages for their labour. He calls this ridiculous because a man should get a wage as per his contribution to the economy.
• If you have contributed only by labour then you can’t expect to “steal” what someone else has legitimately earned by their “capital”. He says that these dynamics and more are responsible for all the inequality in the world, inflation, false promise of full employment, depression-recession cycles of economy etc.
• He says that the modern day solutions of “socialism”/”communism” or welfare-states that tax rich to pay poor etc are flawed ideas. His argument against communism is that .. it draws away the power of “capital” from everyone except the bureaucrats and government and makes everyone depend on “labour” which is infact worse than the present state. The argument against robbing the rich to pay the poor also has been mentioned already.
• He calls for a new form of capitalism called “Capitalism” (with capital C :) ) . The idea here is to move in exactly the  opposite direction from where communism has moved. To make everyone capitalists! . To distribute capital as freely as possible. Diffuse capital to all employees to make them all owners of capital etc. Thus the productive power of capital supplements the reliance of the employee on his own manual  labour.
• From here he goes on to make some more radical proposals like : (a) Zero corporate tax and tax only on personal income (b) 100% employee owned companies (c) Infact, he also talks about consumer owned companies elsewhere (not sure if it was in the book). Consumer Stock Ownership Plan also is an interesting idea.

My criticism: Obvly i am too small a fella to critique accomplished economists. But here are my thoughts from my first reading of “the Capitalist manifesto”. Afterall my blog is about  my thoughts :P . Clearly, the model of distributed ownership he proposed is in line with all those things that i have written about in the recent past .. be it Tagore’s Co-operativism via his Samavayaniti or Chesterton’s distributism and many other things. But to contrast with Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and similar such books .. Kelso assumes that the supremacy of Capital over labour is good or that the supremacy of technology over our way of production is good while Gandhi was vehemently against technology that is against the growth of the soul. Also, there is very little that kelso talks about in terms of the damage to the environment and other sustainability issues of today caused by the techno-centric production. Agreed .. in 1958 it was perhaps very difficult to visualise all this. And then there is this inherent assumption that this path of “development” is correct and only the means of ownership and ways of distribution has to be changed. I think this part of the book is debatable.

The awesomeness of Kelso’s effort regarding ESOPs

So i wanted to finish my reading on Kelso ( that is him in the pic btw) for now by reading about the reasons for his so called failure and sidelining by mainstream economists. I stumbled upon this article titled “Fifty Years of Utopia: A Half-Century after Louis Kelso’s The Capitalist Manifesto, a Look Back at the Weird History of the ESOP” .

Like mentioned in the article.. from the birth of the idea of the ESOPs .. to the legislation regarding it .. to the vigorous lobbying related to it .. it was all done by one man .. “Louis Kelso”. This story makes a very interesting read. It also emphasises the impact a committed individual can make on economic policy.

Also happened to read some more on “when democratic ESOPs fail” .. very interesting read again.

Conclusion:All in all i have added one more name to the list of people who’s works have inspired me :) What i do with those inspirations is a very different thing :P . As of now i need a job for subsistence :D

 

More desiness

On India – (You may call it jingoism if it makes you happy to brand it so :P)

Of late, i have been listening to various arguments from multiple friends online and offline about this whole idea of “we were living dark ages .. the colonialists came and enlightened us“, “india missed out on the industrial revolution lets not miss out on the knowledge revolution” (this was by a ceo), “we are backward .. they are forward” so on so forth. Now, i get irritated when i listen to this. No, i am not saying india was a near perfect civilisation.. we had our negatives we also had our positives. That is the case with every civilisation. But i have this thing for blanket statements like that above.

I tried to understand why we are like this from a longgg time .. 2006 shud i say?

Like i have mentioned “macaulay” a couple of times before .. in my 2007 post on viswanatha’s “veyi padagalu” and more recently when i wrote about wenin pereira’s book .. I think the british deserve a pat on their back for ruining India ;) (and for creating India as well ??) .

I think the argument is very clear .. one side quotes text from macaulay’s minute on education … “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” and says .. “look this is how India got ruined”. The other side says.. this is all RSS propaganda .. infact it is good that they came and enlightened us. (I am simplifying arguments here.. but i think the reader gets the idea)

I have read some criticisms about the pro-pre-colonial India school of thought and i just can’t understand how anyone in their sane mind can support ludicrous ideas like colonialism .. Manifest destiny or The White Man’s Burden.

I would put myself close to the former school of thought .. i believe every land in the world is unique and has its own local needs and history .. so there is no point propagating a mono-culture for the entire world. I also feel as people from this land.. we need to have some respect for its science, its history, its culture .. what not. Again, i am not saying we were perfect.. no one is.. from time to time there were reforms and they will continue to be so. But that is no reason to assume that we lived in dark age and india before british was charectarised by legions of ignorant masses.

It is in this context that i would want to write about this very interesting series of articles that i read a couple of days ago. These are articles from the “Economic and Political Weekly”.

So the first article is titled “A critique of eurocentric social science and the question of alternatives” by Claude Alvares .. to describe it in very simplistic  terms.. the article is about “academic slavery”… It is about how most of the social science curriculum is uncritically imported from the west. I think one of the followup articles also says clearly that this import is not limited to social science alone and the case is the same with maths or physics or biology as well.

This takes me to my recent reading of wiki page on “Indian Mathematics“

This was my complaint with my schooling for long .. I still dont know why my maths textbooks never spoke about the math in Bhaskara’s Lilavati . If ever there was one book that made learning maths fun it had to be this! .. the idea of teaching maths with puzzles embedded in poems is fantastic. I go straight to this section in wiki on Indian Mathematics .. not a single one of these was taught to me anywhere in my 12yrs of school mathematics or 2yrs of engineering mathematics! Who is to blame? ..It is easy to blame Macaulay :P .. but what about post independent India :D ?

Now, it is easy to understand the attitude of present day educated urban intelligentsia .. if from childhood you are barely taught anything about Indian Science or Indian Social science.. and every bloody axiom or theory you studied was an import.. then you are bound to think that .. “okie .. we indians were just a bunch of fools” . I am not giving a “holier than thou” discourse here .. i am as much a party to this culture as anyone of you are .. we are all just a bunch of fools :P ( *joke* )

And btw this is not so much about “Hindu” sciences .. the wonder called “Seamless celestial globe” invented in Mughal India is just as much an Indian invention as anything else. This is again a fascinating story though i don’t understand the full technicalities of it .. but it is about casting big large spheres without any seam. There are two ways in which big globes could be made .. one way is to cast two metal hemisphere and soldering these to produce a big sphere… it is the other way which surprised the west and by and large the rest of the world when it was discovered.  I have already written about India’s legendary “wootz steel” before here.

Moral of the story is we have done a great job in forgetting to teach the new generation about everything that was ours and teaching only imported stuff. This has a direct impact on the lack of cutting edge research in India today.. if every single line of what you studied was imported .. and had a built-in dependency .. then how can “original” research spring up?

And by no means am i saying that cultures shouldn’t interact.. way back in the 5th century Varahamihira was influenced by Romaka Siddhanta ( Doctrine of Romans) .. all i am saying we shouldn’t let all the original works of the land erode .. and accept whatever is taught to us as holy gospel.

So coming back to the article..

“The question few people ask is: Why do Indians or Iranians or Chinese for that matter allow themselves to continue to be fed a diet of what Europeans or Americans decide is social science? Is it possible that they could survive for thousands of years without intensive know-how about social, political, scientific or military organisation ? Why are we unable to resist the notion that European sociology or anthropology or American political science or psychology is some kind of absolute which cannot be questioned? Or as we simply too lazy to surrender this colonial inheritance and rethink anew?“

Totalllyyyyyyyy Agree :) .. I dont know if this can be applied to MBA curriculum also.. but definitely if the idea of “management” can be extended to non-industrial societies also (coz humans were humans then also :P) .. then i am sure there will be something we can learn from Indian knowledge systems as well.

The author later quotes a far more powerful passage from a african writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o :

“The biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance [was] the cultural bomb.The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other peoples’ languages rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which would stop their own springs of life”

The author goes on to say:

“It is truly amazing to discover that so many educated segments in practically every colonized society could be so convinced eventually of their own – and their civilization’s – worthlessness, that they would allow themselves to be robbed of everything that their civilizations had to offer and then meekly submit to remould themselves in the manners and thinking of those who came from far outside their borders”

It is truly amazing Sir.. It is :( And the article goes on in this tone.It is a wonderfully well written article (tats my fav phrase btw :p)

Infact there is another one titled “Steeped in eurocentricism” which is a far more scathing criticism of the whole thing.. some passages will actually hit your straight on ur face :D

Btw no offense meant to any of my friends who were party to these arguments. Afterall we are argumentative indians.. it is our birth right to argue :D

 

The rise of the machines

(These are just thoughts. I will be a dutiful worker #CustomaryRecruiterAlert :P)

Note: This is a dull boring post just to make a note of the stuff i read in the past few days.

Ever since my term-IV course on “Business sustainability and carbon markets” understanding the “rise of the machines” has been one of my key focus areas. I still remember after one of the course lectures on bio-mimicry i sent a mail to the course prof asking about how the whole idea of industrialisation seems ridiculous and anti-thetical to the idea of living in sync with the nature.

I remember that day i wrote this in my notebook:

As i have documented on my blog this journey took me to works of multiple people starting from Schumacher .. to Gandhi.. to Tagore .. to J C Kumarappa to many more. In the last week i had read a couple of books which also clarified a lot of the questions i had on this topic… these are Ivan Illich‘s “Tools for Conviviality” ( Interesting to know this book is behind the evolution of Personal Computer)and Claude Alvares‘s “Science, Development and Violence, The revolt against modernity”. Both of these are very well written books.

I am currently reading Lewis Mumford‘s “Technics and Civilisations” which is Volume-1 of his “The Myth of the machine” series.

I am also doing a parallel reading of this philosophical treatise by E.F.Schumacher titled “A Guide for the perplexed”. The only reason i bought this book is because i happened to read that .. Five days before he died Schumacher handed a copy of the finished manuscript of this book to his daughter with the words “this is what my life has been leading up to”. It is a very difficult read. Not because it is deep philosophy but there is something else which makes it very difficult to understand .. or may be it is deep philosophy.. i dunno! I think this is one of those books which i will appreciate only after i re-read after sometime (though i haven’t finished it yet!)

The “Leadership through literature” course ended and my team presented last on the book “Life Of Galileo” by “Bertolt Brecht” . I enjoyed reading the book. The book did fit in well with all the other stuff i was reading otherwise.Thanks to the course i also read “Beyond the last blue mountain” and Irawati Karve’s “Yuganta” for the first time. I did read some more in the first half of the course but these three are my take aways from the course.

If not for all this term-V was a bit boring academically speaking. The courses i took somehow weren’t exceptional … they didn’t really ignite that spark in me.. like a couple or more courses in Term-IV did. I however, enjoyed all my reading which should be evident in the upsurge in my blog posts in the past couple of months.

So, that is that.

 

On Irfan Pathan and the other Indian fast bowlers :P

This post is primarily about the irfan pathan mania of recent past regarding the speculation about his selection to the Indian team to Aus. So finally selectors decided to take him for 2 ODIs vs WI and send Mithun to Aus. The comments on the cricinfo page is full of hardcore Irfan fans like me and ofcourse some brickbats galore as well. I have been having a lot of debates online and offline with friends about my irfan pathan madness and this post is to defend my stance :P. Even during last IPL my irfan pathan madness was mocked at by my learned friends .. but i continue  to persist :D. It is an analysis purely from statistical standpoint.. i am a big statsguru fan and i believe in the saying “In God we trust, all others please bring data” :P

Anyway let me start with the post..

The ODI scene

So i tried to get the ODI statistics of all the pace bowlers that India experimented with in the past few years starting 2003 . If as the critics say.. the 27yr old Pathan is too old .. tried and tested . then lets see how the so called better pacemen of India fared in the past few years.

• Z.Khan’s recent form might be good but the last 8yrs of Z.Khan and I.Pathan is no diff. In 134 matches from 2003 Z.Khan has 180 wickets as opposed to Irfan’s 152 wickets in 107 matches. Pathan has a better strike rate and better average than Z.Khan. This is despite the so-called disastrous lean patch he had in his later years.
• Praveen kumar has a far worse strike rate and average than I.Pathan.
• Nehra’s ODI bowling is shade better but considering the batting skills of Pathan this also is negated.
• Sreesanth has a higher strike rate but we all know how bad he is with his economy rate. His average doesnt help either.
• Vinaykumar at 27yrs 297 days is infact older than I.Pathan so those of you who support him based on the assumption of “youngistan” need to rethink.
• Munaf comes close to Pathan in ODIs but as discussed in next section his test record is pathetic and we all know how good a batsman he is.
• Balaji who ? :P
• U. Yadav, A.Mithun and Aaron are kids so please don’t belittle I.Pathan by comparing him with them
• Batting prowess: This is a summary of the batting stats of all the Indian batsmen from 2003 in ODIs. The first non-frontline bastman in this list is I.Pathan. None of the aforementioned bowlers can even compete with Pathan on that metric. So case closed on that aspect :P
• Moral of the story: Given the dismal performance of all other pace bowlers we have tried in the past few years. Pathan deserves a second chance. I am not saying he will rule the world now. He may fail again. But he deserves a second chance. So thanks to BCCI for that.

Now, moving on to the test arena

The test scene

The test scene for the Indian bowlers is infact far more dismal :P as can be seen from the pic below.

• Irfan pathan has a better average, better strike rate, better economy rate, more five wicket hauls and more ten wicket hauls than the 2nd best Indian pace bowler  after Zaheer i.e., Ishant sharma. Agreed sharma has more wickets but that is plainly because he got to play more matches. Also compare pathan’s 1100 runs with a godly average of 31 with 1 100 and 6 50s with a 0 50s 0 100s and 383 runs record of Ishant sharma.. you clearly know who is better
• Sreesanth and RP Singh with bowling averages of 37.59 and 42.05 dont even warrant a comparison. And again the batting prowess tilts the balance in favour of pathan. Moreover, pathan had two golden years in 2004 and 2005 when he had a godly average for an Indian pace bowler of 24.xx. Sreesanth ahd it just once and RP was miles away from it all along.
• Infact the great Z.Khan himself had a <25.xx average only twice in his career of 11 full calendar years. The best year of his was in 2010 when he had an average of 21.xx . This came at an age of 32yrs. Not exactly young alright!  Ishant sharma ofcourse had averaged 30+ throughout his 5yr career
• Munaf patel has an abysymmal test record. An average of 38.54 and a strike rate of 75.9 isnt exactly “good” for a fast bowler .. forget about “greatness” .. he is miles away from it
• Praveen Kumar is the only bowler who as of now can compete with Irfan Pathan.. but he has played only 6 tests to-date so can’t exactly do pattern matching now.
• Batting prowess: Coming back to the batting point. Though i have harped enough about it already. It is important to look at it in perspective. This is a list of runs of all batsmen from 2003-2011 who played tests for India. Harbhajan singh is the first non-batsman on this list. But considering the fact that he took double the innings than pathan to reach there i think there is no point comparing. Plus we are infact comparing pacemen now :P . Bhajji still averages 21.xx as opposed to Pathan’s 31.xx so either case .. it is not like Bhajji is a better batsmen.. yes.. not even stastistically :P I am finding it difficult to locate the others on this list.. someone please lend me a magnifying glass :P
• Moral of the story:Given the dismal performance of all other pace bowlers we have tried in the past few years. Pathan deserves a second chance. I am not saying he will rule the world now. He may fail again. But he deserves a second chance. Die BCCI Die for rejecting him

Conclusion: India badly needs an in-form Irfan Pathan because .. all the other pacemen whom we tried in the past few years havent really sizzled. Atleast irfan sizzled in two calendar years so he deserves a second chance. No point gambling with 10 more new pacebowlers again to come back in 2015 and again lament about the lack of a pace bowling partner for zaheer or the search for an all-rounder etc. 

 

Four arguments for the elimination of television

I first wrote about this book some days back when i posted this. Due to heavy workload here at L (it gets insane in the last few weeks always.. very manageable still though :) ).. i took a while to finish the book. Now that i am done with it.. i thought i should quickly finish a post on the book as is the custom :) .

The book was written by Jerry Mander in 1977. If i understand the story correctly he wrote this book after working in the US ad industry of the 60s and 70s for over 15years.

Mediated environments

This is how he starts his first argument.. he talks about how his five year old son once asked him “Daddy, Who built Mount.Tamalpais” ? The question shocks the author and he replies saying “No person could build a mountain”. It is when he tries to understand the genesis of the question that he realises that most urban americans spend almost their entire lifetime in human-created environments.

“What we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, feel and understand about the world has been processed for us. Our experiences of the world can no longer be called direct, or primary. They are secondary, mediated experiences”

“We are so sorrounded by a reconstructed world that it is difficult to grasp how astonishingly different it is from the world of only one hunderd years ago, and that it bears virtually no resemblance to the world in which human beings lived for four million years before that. That this might affect the way we think, including our understanding of how our lives are connected to any nonhuman system, is rarely considered“

Very deep thoughts these. Infact, my own life in the 90s in a small town is much much different from what it is now. I wonder how some of my friends who actually spent their time in a village feel about their own lifestyle changes!

This line again is brilliant ..

“In three generations since Edison, we have become creatures of light alone”

On Advertising:

It is this part of the book that i loved the most partly because the arguments seem more authentic thanks to the author’s experience with the ad world.

This chapter titled “Inherent need to create need” (Its a 2 page pdf..can be read in a jiffy) makes some very valid arguments on the ad world. I read this chapter after i came from a presentation by a FMCG major about how they launched various variants of soaps, shampoos, biscuits etc . All the while in the presentation i was sitting there and wondering whether one really “needed” a shampoo + a conditioner+ a hair gel + a after shower gel+ a moisturiser etc to take that ideal head bath :D.

“I have never met an advertising person who sincerely believes that there is a need connected to, say, 99% of the commodities which fill the airwaves and the print media. Nor can i recall a single street demonstration one single product in all of American history“

Hehehe! .. and he doesn’t stop here ..he goes on to say..

“People do need to eat, but the food which is advertised is processed food: processed meat, sodas, sugary cereals and candies.  A food in its natural state, unprocessed, does not need to be advertised. Hungry people will find the food if it is available“

Hmm.. I dont remember seeings ads for idli, rice, sambar, chutney :P . but i do remember seeing ads for idly mix, instant noodles , sambar powder etc :P . So the “instant”-ness is then argued as the need i think. But is the instant-ness really needed? Is processed food as good as it is proclaimed? .. Those are i think deeper questions. The other day in one of the marketing presentations a friend of mine said .. the per capita biscuit consumption in US is 7.5kg and in India it is 1.5kg “only” .. so there is tremendous growth oppurtunity. But do we really “need” to eat so many biscuits ? If yes, then our hunger will automatically redirect us to biscuits :P ..  I am sure all those flashy biscuit ads wouldn’t have been there if it was not about creating “artificial needs” :)

“The goal of all advertising is discontent or, to put it in another way, an internal scarcity of contentment. This must be continually created, even at the moment when one has finally bought something. In that event, advertising has the task of creating discontent with what has just been bought, since once that act is completed, the purchase has no further benefit to the market system. The newly purchased commodity must be gotten rid of and replaced by the “need” for a new commodity as soon as possible.The ideal world for advertisers would be one in which whatever is bought is used only once and then tossed aside“

I think this is the fundamental argument of “Story of stuff” as well. Some of these are also discussed in my classes here in MBA. But the discussions are never so deep. The professor shows a video of an ad with a woman using shaving cream and asks the class .. “can advertisement help sell such a product” .. the class then says “No. The woman has no “need” to shave as she has no beard”.. then the prof concludes .. “hence, proved that advertisers can’t create a need” . I think that argument pales before this one. Especially considering the fact that the author himself got into the field smitten by the glamour of the ad world.. i think it is important to understand his argument.

I still have an academic interest in the subject as it is a lot about “influencing” people and who doesnt like to influence :P .. Wait a min.. wasn’t that the problem in the first place ;)

The trickle-down theory

(Though the pic above is about “aid” .. i think that is how trickle down economics works now :P)

This is my second most fav part of the book. Whenever i was in doubt about the business-as-usual i used to console myself saying.. someday it will all trickle-down and we will all be happy :P . This part of the book is a scathing criticism of the trickle-down theory.

The theory is first explained as follows:

“When people buy more and more commodities, they produce more profits for industry, enabling it to expand. When industry expands, more jobs result.This puts more money into circulation, enabling people to buy more commodities, expanding profits again, yielding more investments, more jobs and starting the cycle around on another turn”

And then the criticism starts

“It turned out that the pursuit of all those happy goodies didn’t produce happy people; it produced isolated, frustrated, alienated people. More important, the economic benefits didn’t trickle down to create some egalitarian democracy. The benefits trickled up“

He further criticises the trickle-up theory with some stats.In 1965 apparently 0.005% of the corporations enjoyed one-third of all  the corporate profits. I couldn’t really verify the statistics but considering the OWS protests of today i can only say that not much has changed 46 years later :P

Thanks to the book i also got to know about one other economist whose works are next on my to-read list.. “Louis Kelso” . For a simple introduction.. he is the guy who is the inventor and founder of the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). This is what he said on this trickle-down theory .. i find these lines to be very very insightful :)

“As the production of goods and services changes from labor intensive to capital intensive, the way in which every person — not just a few, but every person — earns his or her income must change in the same way. You can’t do that unless two things happen: (1) you have to broaden the ownership of capital, and (2) you have to tighten up the laws of property so that the capital owners collect the wages of their capital with the same faithfulness that the labor workers now collect the wages of their labor.

At present, we do exactly the opposite. We pretend there is only one way to earn income — namely, to work. And we therefore conclude that it doesn’t really make any difference who owns the capital”

Simple No? .. All inequalities of the modern day world.. explained in one paragraph :D .. The idea is that the “owners” have access to both Capital and Wages ( Eg: Some CEOs get stocks and salaries 100s of times more than the assembly line worker) while the worker more often that not has just wages. So workers by design will remain poorer.

I now sort of understand the line of thought behind ESOPs.. when i got my ESOPs from symantec i never knew Kelso’s deep foresight was  behind the financial instrument :) . I am looking forward to my reading of Louis Kelso :)

Conclusion

I have written very little about the subject matter i.e., why television needs to be eliminated. That can’t be dealt with in a 1000 word blog posts :p .. it is the deeper arguments which make it interesting and i don’t want to dilute his arguments anymore ;) .

And this article by no means should be seen as disillusionment with MBA :P .. i think ESOPs .. Worker owned co-operatives etc are all wonderful ways of running businesses. It is just that all this parallel reading helps understand the MBA doctrine better ;)

So that is that. Signing off.