So i will write the rest of the post when i find time next. For now this should do :P

Someone i know had shared a youtube video on fb sometime back. And like all such things .. it pissed me off immensely. I think 2yrs of MBA has hardened my world view on some things.. namely environmentalism, industrialisation, modernity, developmental economics etc . I just can’t accept a different opinion on some things these days. This happened to be one of them. So here i go.. i dedicate a post to the ubiquitous youtube vid .. “If I wanted America to fail” !

The full script of the thing can be found at this link.

The video talks about many things. But what makes it interesting is the fact that it does have a lot of admirers .. not just the video.. that school of thought basically. A lot of people believe the environmental concerns of today’s age to be a hoax .. or yet another dooms day conspiracy. Some people believe that all this is another attempt by “them” to convert “us” into communists or collectivists yet again! .. So the video did make me think a lot about that line of thought.

However, there were some lines which utterly butterly amused me ..

“So, I’d make Americans feel guilty for using the energy that heats their homes, fuels their cars, runs their businesses, and powers their economy”

In my prev post i had written about a similar argument by someone on the earth hour .. asking people not to demonise electricity and to appreciate how emancipating it is .. so on so forth. I think this video guy has a got an exceptionally short term view of human civilisation and human progress . What is wrong with making someone feel guilty about using energy for absolutely unnecessary things? :P .. if we take out half of the means of propaganda like television, internet ads etc etc.. i am sure i wudn’t have bought a lot of things i buy today.. Does that make me any less happy? .. I doubt! .. I seriously doubt if things can ever make humans happy! .. They can only “lure” them and make them addicted to buying more and more .. (Like Apple does! .. first iPad1 then iPad2.. in 4yrs u have 4 iPad .. each one ideally shud have made you happier than the other :P) ..The idea of life for long in this land ( the orient) at least was to live on less and less! .. It is this philosophical thought and anti-consumerism behind the environmental movement that makes people understand the consequences of rampant use of fossil-fuel based energy sucking devices .. cars .. what not . Yes.. it may hurt a few of those car makers .. but how exactly does it make it “BAD” ? .. like murder or sodomy? .. i dunno!

“If i wanted america to fail …. I would never teach children that the free market is the only force in human history to uplift the poor, establish the middle class and create lasting prosperity”

Again.. an absolutely outlandish claim! .. I am not a communist.. but that doesn’t mean i worship free markets either! .. The video chap  talks as if all the so called richness of the “developed” world in the 1900-2000 era has come without any cost. All the “poor” of the world which need to be uplifted now as per the video chap .. were not as poor not until long ago . The rich europe was not as rich in early 18th century. It wouldnt have been as rich today.. if it was not for the loot of all the colonies in Africa-Asia-South America .. This is pure unadulterated history! :D ..  The rich america of today was pristine wilderness back then… with the natives living their own happy life (Note: This isn’t a “Rich” life .. as per the video chap! :D) . Richness-Poverty is a cycle.. and most regions across the world have experienced it across centuries. Believing that there is something called “lasting prosperity” is extreme stupidity.. and believing that such a young and untested force ( measured in terms of age of human civilisation ;) ) called “free market” is enough to make everyone rich is such a insane idea! :D . I think it is impossible to have a world that is “rich” the way the video chap imagines it to be .. that kind of richness is simply not scalable and unsustainable.

“ Instead, I’d demonize prosperity itself …”

A great man from India called M.K.Gandhi once said .. “I suggest that we are thieves in a way. If I take anything that I do not need for my own immediate use, and keep it, I thieve it from somebody else. I venture to suggest that it is the fundamental law of Nature, without exception, that Nature produces enough for our wants from day to day, and if only every-body took enough for himself and nothing more, there would be no pauperism in this world, there would be no man dying of starvation in this world. But so long as we have got this inequality, so long we are thieving“

If this means demonizing prosperity.. So be it ! ..It is exremely difficult to understand and adapt to.  Just because i read such stuff and continue to work for a corporate doesnt make me a hypocrite! (as discussed below) .. The first step is to atleast recognise the problem to appreciate the solution like the one above ( a lot of so called extreme environmentalism of today has stark similarities with gandhian thought).

“If i wanted america to fail .. I’d teach children how to ignore the hypocrisy of condemning logging, mining and farming — while having roofs over their heads, heat in their homes and food on their tables”

So what he means is that.. just because i use technology .. i can’t be critical about technology. Because i use fossil fuel i cant criticise rampant usage of fossil fuels. I am born in an environment where i need to commute 10s of Kilometres everyday to reach my work place.. so i am bound to use some fossil fuel! .. But that doesn’t mean that i can’t criticize this system that has massacred the beauty of smallness and increased distances all around! .. Calling that hypocrisy is a big joke :P .. Unless you ask hard questions about the status quo.. you can never ever have change (Ofcourse just asking questions is not enough ;) .. but that is Step1 :) ). If this hypocrisy argument is extended .. you can never every criticise anything and by corollary never ever change anything … one big full stop to human ingenuity .. mankind should shut shop and die :P

“I’d make it almost impossible for farmers to farm, miners to mine, loggers to log, and builders to build”

It is like a type writer manufacturer cribbing about the entry of keyboards :P .. or the fountain pen maker cribbing about ball point pens :P .. Strict environmental regulations do limit some industries .. but the reason why they limit more often than not is because of simple cost-benifit analysis. The video chap ignores the social, ecological costs of industrial farming .. logging and building or mining and simply blames the environmentalists as if they are responsible for all the mess. Myopic view! .. Hyper myopic view :D

Extreme environmentalism shatters a lot of your beliefs .. like it did when i first read winin pereira’s work here. It takes courage to say that “No industrial product is fully “green” and making slight improvements to claim viridity will not prevent drastic degradation” . I agree with the environmentalists on that. Solutions will ofcourse take a generation atleast :P .. but it is i think important to agree on the problem :)

I loved some comments on the youtube video link though ;)…

“If I were an oil company, I would make a video like this” “This video brought to you and paid for by the oil and gas companies of America!” .. “It is hard for me to believe there are people who refuse to open their eyes and see what we are doing to this extremely rare planet, the only one we have. Who paid for this video and website? My bet it was someone like the Koch Brothers. It’s not “Obama and environmental extremism” fool. It is the whole world. You need to turn off Fox News and go see for yourself” …

“YOUR alternative means MASS starvation”

“Everything you do affects something else. Eat meat, you have to kill and animal, eat a vegetable, you have to kill a plant. How far does it go?”

“There are two kinds of global warming liars. There are those who invent the lies and those who repeat them.”

“oh, so 97% of the worlds climate scientist are all wrong. I’ll take the side of Exxon/Mobile. Fool.”

“Oh right because anyone who criticizes the unfairness of the system much be a welfare leech right? Guess what, I work full time, pay taxes, and volunteer in the community. How will you invalidate my points now?”

“when 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming/climate change is real and caused by burning fossil fuels, right-wingers go with the 3% (funded by Exxon/Mobile) who dispute it. Just like the “doctors” working for the cigarette companies who claim smoking does not cause lung cancer.”

“What it overlooks is that environmentalists are about supporting life on earth in the long term not short term modern notions of unsustainable consumption”

“no moron. most scientists who work for a university or governments are not wealthy by any means. It’s the deniers who are funded by the oil and coal companies how are doing it for the money. My God, how can so many people be so stupid.”

Obvly i am selective in choosing the comments :D

But i thoroughly enjoyed the video and the internal brainstorming there of. Thus reinforcing my belief that these are really the questions for a lifetime of my generation :D

The article was a general critique about the hooplah around the “Earth Hour”. What pissed me off had nothing to do with that. It was some of this stuff like..

“Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity”

“Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the west developed”

The first one inherently assumes the goodness of the “material social advance“..Whether it is necessarily an “advance” or not is questionable in the first place! .. The last line is what irritates me the most i.e., “After all that’s how the west developed“. I think this is the new age “White man’s burden”. (Note: White is a metaphor for the “developed” he/she might as well be in the third world!). This assumption that third world has to rise up and develop like the west and that the way the west developed is the way forward for the rest of the world.. as if it is the ‘noble eight fold path’ irks me a lot. The reason why the third world today is third world needs no new explanation. Not too long ago these very countries had some of the biggest reserves of resources.

And best of all was this line.. i still do not understand the real meaning of this one.. except for the life expectancy stuff which perhaps is true .. though i haven’t really done my own research on this bit..

For humans, living in “nature” meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty and relief from disease are fighting against nature.

But i really feel it is an extremely “myopic” view of “living in nature” .. perhaps the author comes from a mindset where the culture doesn’t have enough artifacts that reflect the glory of past well enough. I really don’t know. But anybody who knows the charms of the traditional ways of east cannot but disagree with this. ( Tradition does NOT mean some static edifice stamped and sealed thousands of years back which doesn’t change. Tradition does NOT mean some orthodox rigid system that resists change. For all that i know the traditional ways did “evolve” and “embrace” a lot of new things as time progressed)

I have blogged in the past few months about these very issues here, here, here and here and a lot many more! My blogging may not make an iota of difference to the ways of the world. But it is important for me that i think and if possible.. if feasible.. if doable act as well :)

The second painful aspect of this story is that a technological fix will fix almost all the negatives. It is like saying… if coal is bad .. go solar and lo! you are done! . This whole of attitude of considering this problem as having a “technological fix” shocks me. I am reminded of a long article i once read .. it is a very long article but some paragraphs did strike me hard coz i was thinking exactly that back then! .. a couple of paragraphs relevant to the current post here.

“… Build enough of the right kind of energy technologies, quickly enough, to generate the power we “need” without producing greenhouse gases, and there will be no need to ever turn the lights off; no need to ever slow down.

To do this will require the large-scale harvesting of the planet’s ambient energy: sunlight, wind, water power. This means that vast new conglomerations of human industry are going to appear in places where this energy is most abundant. Unfortunately, these places coincide with some of the world’s wildest, most beautiful, and most untouched landscapes. The sort of places that environmentalism came into being to protect.

And so the deserts, perhaps the landscape always most resistant to permanent human conquest, are to be colonized by vast “solar arrays,” glass and steel and aluminum, the size of small countries. The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of five-hundred-foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons, and wires. The open oceans, already swimming in our plastic refuse and emptying of marine life, will be home to enormous offshore turbine ranges and hundreds of wave machines strung around the coastlines like Victorian necklaces. The rivers are to see their estuaries severed and silted by industrial barrages. The croplands and even the rainforests, the richest habitats on this terrestrial Earth, are already highly profitable sites for biofuel plantations designed to provide guilt-free car fuel to the motion-hungry masses of Europe and America.

What this adds up to should be clear enough, yet many people who should know better choose not to see it. This is business-as-usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted, and the nonhuman. It is the mass destruction of the world’s remaining wild places in order to feed the human economy. And without any sense of irony, people are calling this “environmentalism.”

So that is that. I do not understand those who worship the “boons” of the modern day post industrial societies. Neither do i really understand the new age environmentalists who feel that going solar may perhaps resolve everything. What i do understand is stuff like above or like the one’s spoken of by E.F.Schumacher or people like Gandhi-Kumarappa.. but the problem is that those who worship the former obviously do not understand the merits of this and we ended up where we are today. I think when i am 60 the world would be debating exactly these questions (In small pockets it already is! Perhaps it always was :P). So these are questions for my lifetime perhaps. I hope i can help in assisting in the efforts to provide some answers. But then again i have hoped for a lot of things already in the past few months :D .. Just for a quick recap.. the questions :)

Q1) Is the way the west developed in the 20th century the only way forward now for the third world? (I remember reading somewhere that we would need 6 earths if the whole world has to live like in the US ;) )

Q2) Is a mere technological fix i.e., a shift from lets say a coal to a solar based energy just enough to undo all the wrongs (if any!)

Q3) Does living in sync with nature really mean a life of penury, darkness, backwardness? (Whoosh! There goes centuries of human civilisation.. coz the 20th/21st century man has declared so :D)

PS: On a vacation of sorts now. So reading a lot of books, meeting a lot of friends, watching a lot of movies etc :)

There is very little cynicism in these posts as far as i can see (which means obvly the discerning reader may see a lot more). It is not a case of sour grapes.. i did taste one or two grapes in my tenure and they were sweet. Neither is it about a holier-than-thou thing as i myself am party to a lot of these things and they were all my learnings which clearly shows that it was me who made most mistakes in the first place. Neither is it a Us vs Them thingie .. the Us and Them tend to overlap in most cases.

So i start ..

Learning1: A business is a business. You may sell soap ,you may sell sanitory napkins, you may sell luxury car or toiletries … anything and everything can be a business. There is nothing more noble or less noble about anything. You may find a business dull and boring but there might be hundred other takers for that on campus.

Learning2: Similar thing applies to roles as well. Just because nobody on your campus opts for lets say a HR role doesn’t mean that it is more bad as compared to a Fin or Mktng or Consult role. There are takers elsewhere for the same role and perhaps they may earn a lot more than what you would earn in your less bad role. It all lies in between your ears .. no role is superior and no role is inferior. So no point in carrying a respect-my-authority kind of an image about any goddamn role

Learning3: What are very petty things in the larger scheme of things (called life! :) ) like a pre-placement offer or a membership in a campus or club can change people (and it does!!!). Sample change i noticed in many .. From being a courteous gentlemanly type to being a pompous i-am-the-king-lick-my-foot types overnight. It is a fact of life and you have to live with it. Nothing can be done about bloated egos. Not just here but elsewhere in life too. It is like what Vivekananda said about Untouchability … “Don’t-touchism is a mental disease” . Well yeah .. I agree :)

Learning4: Milton Friedman was right when he said that “the business of business is business”. That is pretty much how things run here.Ethics and CSR are just pep words and it shall remain so in the future as far as i can see it . As long as CSR is the penultimate slide of the pre placement talk presentation i.e., just before the “we work hard and we party hard” slide… i don’t see things changing ;) .

Learning5: B-School is the best celebration of the Adam Smithian doctrine of “Self Interest”. This is the best training ground for the big bad corporate world as it is called ;) .

Learning6: There was a prof here who spoke about “Power Elite” and their influence on societies. One would totally experience it. The power elite exists and it does know how to get things done for itself. The silent majority either serves the power elite indirectly or just remains silent .. true to its name. If they protest .. slowly they would be inducted into the elite and the silence shall remain. What is so special about this then.. isn’t that how the world works?

Learning7: Everyone working in the white colar corporate labour force at whatever level should be exposed to these little nuggets of MBA curriculum. The course does change your world view and makes you understand a lot of things better.

Learning8: Like the now famous “Disadvantages of an elite education” article says .. there are many many pitfalls of an elite education and most people i know of (including me) are party to it. Perhaps some unlearning is in queue next!

Learning9: Like a prof once said in the class .. “Money money money.. brighter than sunshine.. sweeter than honey”. No better place to learn this than a B-school. All ideals in 7 out of 10 cases are shallow. Scratch the surface and somewhere the “M” word shall crop up. Again.. isn’t that how the world runs? Perhaps!

Learning10: You can learn a lot more from the people around you than from some dated academic textbook. Institutions like these are what they are because of the people and i did meet some awesome people and i shall carry those memories for the rest of my life.

The biggest benefit of them all: It offers you immense time to introspect about yourself. My world view has changed in its entireity. My faith on a lot of things has been questioned. Perhaps i understand the rights and wrongs of a lot of things a lot better than what i would have done otherwise before.

With that i end the post.

From now on i am an MBA. What i do with that degree i do not know. Will it really make a “tangible”/”material” difference to my personal and professional life in terms of what they would have been otherwise? .. I do not know.. Yet!

All i am left with now is a sense of emptiness.

PS: Oh yeah! The rider is that … i will be an MBA only if i manage to clear my last term courses! :D

Note: This is a english post on a telugu movie :P .. so the ones who dunno telugu also can read ;)

It is a telugu movie called “Sontha Ooru” (Hometown) . It is a movie about how an entire village is sold off by the villagers as the Govt wants to come up with an SEZ in that area. It talks about lost livelihoods, the goodness of village life, the fate of those hundreds of villagers who migrate to cities in hope of better life etc

I will write about some of the things in the film that appealed to me.  I might be revealing the entire storyline.. but given the fact the movie released months ago.. i think it should be okie. The movie btw has got loads of good dialogues and not just the ones mentioned in this post.This is not a great film strictly from an entertainment point of view. There are many mistakes and constant interruptions to the flow. But for a serious movie viewer this movie shall remain a cherished one. Especially considering the dearth of such films in telugu industry.

The central message of the movie starts when a govt officer comes to the village headman’s house and says   “మన ఊరుకి మంచి బేరం తెచ్చాను . మన ఊరు అమ్మేద్దాం ” (I brought a nice deal for our village. Lets sell it off) . The premise being that the government wants to build factories/industries in the area which can potentially generate employment to lakhs of people. To this the village headman reacts “అసలు ఊరే లేనప్పుడు అభివృద్ధి ఎవరికి” (If the village itself vanishes .. who’s development are we talking about) .

They then call for a village panchayat to decide whether to sell the village or not . During this panchayat an old farmer gets aggressive and reacts “మీరు ఇచ్చే ముష్టి పట్టుకెళ్ళి పక్కూరిలో పాలేరుగానో పట్నంలో కూలీలుగానో బతకమంటారా” (Are we to take your alms .. and live like milkmen in the neighbouring village or like labourers in the city?? ) . The village headman by now clearly under the delusion of SEZ driven development advocates in favour of the “sell” .. citing the utter poverty and farmer suicides. He goes on to say that the juggernaut of globalisation and industrialisation is unstoppable and that change is permanent. What follows is a interesting debate between the farmer and his son at their home. The son obvly in favour of selling the farm land and the father saying the farm means everything to him.

The central character of this film is that of an Undertaker portrayed by L.B.Sriram who also penned the dialogues. Once the village is sold and people start leaving .. the Undertaker sits with the village headman and complains about the decision to sell the village for SEZ. The headman then asks ” Don’t you want your grandsons and granddaughter to become doctors and engineers ? Do you want them  to remain as Undertakers?” . To this the undertaker replies .. “ఎంత మంది కావాలండీ డాక్టర్లు . వెయ్యి మంది బతుకులకి లక్ష మంది కావలాండీ ? మరి ఆ వెయ్యి మంది చస్తే కాల్చటానికి ఉండద్దా ఒక్కడు ? (How many doctors does the world need. Do we need a lakh doctors for a thousand people? If those thousand die .. will we still not need a undertaker to perform their deathrites?) “ .

The book is called “Indian Food A Historical Companion” by K.T.Achaya. I first wrote about this book here. Recently, i wrote about this in telugu here which goes to show that i fell in love with this book. It was infact my birthday gift to myself :P .. Boy oh boy what a gift! :P

“The Hindu” had  two articles on this book long back .. links to that here and here.

I will keep this short partly because i have already written about it once so the initial enthusiasm would have died down obviously ;) . Anyway, the book is about the history of our food as the title says. The book talks about our eating traditions and the paraphernalia around our cooking styles etc from pre-vedic to vedic to modern days. This has got mentions about where all the food we eat today has come from and where all our food customs have come from so on. The book will also change your own idea of globalisation .. once you finish the book you would realise that the kitchen is the best example for globalisation. And if your kitchen itself is so globalised then what is the point harping about protectionism elsewhere ;) ?

Anyway, some of the interesting snippets from the book are as follows:

Mention of Meat eating and meat cooking expertise in vedic scriptures amazed me. Particularly so because i had absolutely no idea about the food of the gods ;) . So as per the book Brahmins of those days had their share of horse meat after the sacrifice during the yagna ;) . Similarly, there is talk about meat of  Deer, Peacock, Porcupine, Rabbit, Rhinoceros, Lizard, Monitor Lizard, Donkey, Camel, Monkey etc :P . So next time you say anything overtly racist about the eating habits of our eastern neighbours then please look back at your own history :D

Then  the book also talks about alcohol consumption across various eras etc. It has some mentions of wine consumption by Lord Rama-Sita as well. A very nice collection of stories these.

Achaya then slowly traces the evolution of vegetarianism in India, the social pressures created by the rise of Buddhist and Jain religions which neccesitated these changes so on.

The best part of the book starts after this. There are so many stories about the export-import of our kitchen items that after sometime your whole idea about swadeshi will be shattered.. if at all there was one in the first place i.e., ;) . I will try and jot down some of those stories.

• Pineapple came to India from SouthAmerica
• Jalebi has Persian and Arab origins
• Cocunut has travelled along the ocean waters from Papua New Guinea and reached india through the waters of Indian Ocean
• Sweet Potato has its origins in Peru
• Rajma and Ragi are again from South America. Infact, the ancient South America-India civilisational links make a fascinating read
• Rice has a east indian-chinese-vietnamese origin
• Sesame Seeds, Mustard Seeds, Brinjal, Cucumber are Indian (Yay!!! :P)
• Ladyfinger or Okhra has come from Africa
• The andhra special “Gongura” is infact from Angola or Sudan it seems :P
• Some citrus fruits like Lemon, Mosambi, Orange and others like Mango also seem to have an Indian origin (Yay!! :P)
• Most of the spices ofcourse seem to belong either to India or Malacca Strait
• Pumpkin came from Mexico and Pomegranate came from Iran/Iraq :P
• Sunflower wasn’t there in Indian till the 1940-70 period until the russians brought it ;)
• Groundnut came from Europe while Soya came from China
• Tomato came to Europe from Mexico in 1550 and reached India in 18th Century
• Potato came from Bolivia to Europe in 1570 and reached India in 1830

Thus, Ladies and Gentleman .. from times immemorial we have been a globalised civilisation :P .. Like they say we were a melting pot of various cultures and traditions and foods thereof. This book has many more such stories.. it is a must read for anyone who loves eating :D .. I think we welcomed all foods and thoroughly Indianised them in the due course .. guess that is how it works for everything else as well.

Indiaaaa .. Incredible Indiaaaa ;)

This book is very well edited i should say. The editors interview can be found here. What i loved the most about the book is the political nature of most of the speeches. Some of them will give you goosebumps :)

• The first speech that took me by surprise totally was Syed Ahmed Khan’s 1888 speech titled “One country, two nations” .. It makes such a thrilling read! .. In parts of this speech he makes radical statements like “….. we do not want to become subjects of the Hindus instead of the subjects of the ‘People of the book’ .As far as we can we should remain faithful to the English Government” .It makes you sit back and wonder about how (politically speaking) the situation has remained the same even after over 124 years of the speech! In today’s India Hindu-Muslim question is as delicate as ever. Reference: The recent ruckus over religion based reservations
• The next speech is Mushtaq Hussain’s 1906 speech about the Muslim League. Here again are some startling lines. Some of which go like .. “… our own prosperity is bound up with, and depends upon our loyalty to British rule in India” . I’ve never read muslim league stuff before.. guess its time now ;)
• Speeches by Gandhi .. Tilak .. Vivekananda .. Lord Curzon .. Nehru etc follow
• Veer Savarkar’s “Dangerous cult of absolute non-violence” again is a riveting speech. I have started reading another book by savarkar recently and i am not surprised with his anti-gandhi tones in this speech now ;)
• Mohammad Iqbal’s 1930 speech proposing an Independent Muslim India also makes for a very interesting read.
• This is followed by M.Singaravelu’s speech called “The death of God” which has strong atheist overtones
• Shyama Prasad Mukherjee’s speech on Calcutta killings makes you clench your fist .. whichever side of the argument you are on. There is something about the right wing speeches in this book.. both Hindu and Muslim right.. they are all very powerful. Wonder how it was to the actual listeners back then! His other speech on the special status given to Kashmir also is equally captivating
• Then comes Jinnah’s speech which Advani quoted when he went to Pakistan only to meet with a lot of brickbats from the Sangh Parivar.
• Godse’s speech about killing Gandhi is famous by now. Kripalani’s speech against the Hindu code bill also exposes the hypocricy of the congress back then which some call pseudo secularism today. Even today we do not have a uniform civil code!
• Jayaprakash Narayan’s “Importance of NGOs” speech was very new to me and i enjoyed it thoroughly. He speaks of “snatching the initiative from the hands of politicians, from the Parliament and the Legislatures and giving it back to the people” .. Interesting!
• Indira Gandhi’s emergency speech in 1975 has the best one liner i have heard in a long time. “The president has proclaimed the emergency. This is nothing to panic about” !!!
• Speeches by J R D Tata, Satyajit Ray, Rajiv Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, P V N Rao etc follow
• Another BJP-Right wing speech which will catch you attention is L K Advani’s “Why Ayodhya is a setback”. I remember reading about this in his autobiography.
• The book ends with some more recent speeches by Sonia Gandhi, Vajpayee,Advani, Amartya Sen . The last speech is on Buddha by Gopal Krishna Gandhi

I read a library copy of this book. I dont mind buying it again once i make enough money :P .. But i somehow feel the book has mainly political speeches with strong religious overtones :P .. atleast those are the ones that strike you hard after your finish reading the book and look back at it :)

This post is about my reading of E.F.Schumacher’s “A Guide for the perplexed”. I first spoke about this book in this post here. Back then i thought it was a difficult read… But i have taken this one course this term and my reading speed has improved exponentially .. so much so that i am able to finish difficult books with ease when the lecture is going on :P . Anyway .. over to the book.

The book talks about many things like the importance of religion, the limitations of conventional science, the folly of faith vs reason debates so on so forth. I will try and jot down some lines that appealed to me the most.

He starts the book by talking about different levels of being.. what is it that differentiates Man, Animal, Plant and Mineral. He says physics and chemistry more often than not deal with the lowest level of being i.e, tat of matter. And he brings about the limitations of such an approach by saying:

“To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combination of atoms is like saying that Shakeshpeare’s Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters“

He then goes on to talk about Science being used for Manipulation first of nature then of people. He traces this from the thoughts of Descartes and Francies Bacon. He says this concentration of scientific interest on manipulation alone has three dangers.

In the absence of sustained study of such “unscientific” questions as “What is the meaning and purpose of man’s existence?” “What is good and what is evil?” and “what are man’s absolute rights and duties” , a civilisation will necessarily and inescapably sink ever more deeper into anguish, despair and lack of freedom.

Faith, instead of being taken as a guide leading the intellect to an understanding of the higher levels, is seen as opposing adn rejecting the intellect and therefore is itself rejected. Thus all roads to recovery are barred.

The higher powers of man, no longer being brought into play to produce the knowledge of wisdom, atrophy and even disappear altogether

Agree on all three dangers! Especially the second one. I myself am a victim to that. I have always failed to understand the place of “faith” in modern day life. It is only my post-mba confusions and questions about life and the readings thereof that made me read a lot and understand the issue better.

The book then talks about four fields of knowledge. It is a wonderful philosophical journey as it makes you think a lot. The four fields of knowledge put simply are about :

(1) What is going on inside me? (2) What is going on inside others? (3) What do i look like in the eyes of others (4) What do i observe in the world around me?

Very very interesting chapters these. Though initially i felt that they are difficult to comprehend. Upon re-reading i feel that they cant be put in any simpler terms than this.He talks about how all the four fields of knowledge are important and how each one of them adds to the completeness of knowledge.In the later parts of the discussion on these fields of knowledge he also brings in the contrast of a conventional proof based scientific approach by talking about the difference between “What we can know” and “What actually exists”.

The best part of the book for me personally starts from page 124-150. It starts with a very critical analysis of Darwin’s theory of evolution. On this he says,

“It is one of the great paradoxes of our age that people claiming the proud title of “scientist” dare to offer such undisciplined and reckless speculations as contributions to scientific knowledge- and that they get away with it”

I had read some criticisms of Darwin’s approach before, but this one in this book is very convincing. I remember i first read about Darwin in school in a hindi textbook and from then on my world view did change ;) . My world view both inner and outer did seem to have changed in the past one year and this book definitely has played its role in that process. So Darwin-Schumacher 1-1 ! :)

He makes some pretty strong statements here in these pages. I can only form an opinion after reading some of the books that schumacher suggested in these chapters.

Evolutionism is not science; it is science fiction, even a kind of hoax. It is a hoax that has succeeded all too well and has imprisoned modern man in what looks like an irreconciliable conflict between “science” and “religion”. It has destroyed all faiths that pull mankind up and has substited a faith that pulls mankind down

Umm.. it is easy to dismiss such statements as extreme theological discourse.. but schumacher’s arguments are not just blind criticisms. Like i said i am convinced that what he says is not mere namesake criticisms. I will need to read more to understand it better. So a small study on evolutionism is next in queue then perhaps :) Infact schumacher goes to the extent of saying that this alone can cause the collapse of the modern western civilisation which today is the modern world civilisation. Like we all know all civilisations to date have died unlike a few which learnt to adapt, so this may very well be the cause for the future downfall of the modern world.

“It is impossible for any civilisation to survive without a faith in meanings and values transcending the utilitarianism of comfort and survival- in other words, without a religious faith”

In the concluding parts of the books he says something which is fast becoming my line of thought as well on the various eco-friendly things we do in the world today. I think it is time we realised that all this is a part of undoing the damage and not really contributing to the solution.

“Everywhere in the modern world there are now experiments New life styles and voluntary simplicity; the arrogance of material scientism is in the decline, and it is sometimes tolerated even in polite society to mention God. Admittedly, some of this change of mind stems not initially from spiritual insight, but from materialistic fear aroused by the environmental crisis, the fuel crisis, the threat of a food crisis and the indications of a coming health crisis. In the face of these -and many other- threats, most people still  try to believe in the “technological fix”. If we could develop fusion energy, they say, our fuel problems would be solved; if we would perfect the processes of turning oil into edible proteins, the world’s food problem would be solved; and the development of new drugs will surely avert any threat of a health crisis.. and so on.

All the same, the faith in modern man’s omnipotence is wearing thin. Even if all the “new” problems were solved by technological fixes, the state of futility, disorder and corruption would remain. It existed before the present crises became acute, and it will not go away by itself”

This is again brilliant! I think energy consumption and resource evaporation is just a part of the problem with our modern day world and by just shifting to renewable means etc we will not really wipe out the problem. We may only wipe out only a part of the problem that too with a lot of ifs and buts. The bigger problem is something else. Like he says elsewhere again,

“The modern experiment to live without religion has failed”

I think i will agree with this line. I myself am a victim to this in more than one ways ..so i can very much understand where the author is coming from. The best lines ofcourse are reserved to the last paragraph of the book.

“Can we rely on it that a “turning around” will be accomplished by enough people quickly enough to save the modern world? This question is often asked, but whatever answer is given to it will mislead. The answer “Yes” would lead to complacency; the answer “No” to despair. It is desirable to leave these perplexities behind us and get down to work”

A guide to the perplexed indeed! I would treasure this book in my collection forever and i don’t say that about every book i read! :)

So this is the story of Rajasthan’s Ranji Trophy 2010-11 win. What made the win special was that they had never won it before.. they were piled up last in the plate league (ranji trophy has plate division and elite division) .. which means i think they were rank 27 of 27 teams :P .. they had never come close to winning after a runner-up finish 36 yrs ago in 1974 season.. it is the classic underdog story narrated wonderfully well by akash chopra. This year’s ranji trophy also seems to have another underdog story in the making ;) ..

What makes the book special is the stories.. classic underdog triumphs.. each one of them! :) .. I will try and write down some stories.. just like in the cricinfo review :P .. May be this one needs a spoiler alert? :P

• Akash Chopra’s own story of how he was unceremoniously kicked out of Delhi Ranji team because he had hit a bad patch despite being one of the highest run getters in season before that has all ingredients of a suspense thriller .. you never know whether he is in or out of the team and the reasons thereof :P  He gets a call “Out of the Blue” to be a part of the Rajasthan ranji team 2010-11.. and that is how the book starts :) . His autobiographical take on what a player undergoes when he faces the axe makes you wonder about how ruthless we all are as “fans” :P
• The story of Hrishikesh Kanitkar also is quite similar to the one above. Kanitkar is axed from the Maharashtra side after he hits 4 back2back half centuries in five matches .. citing “perceived lack of fitness” as the reason without conducting any tests whatsoever. He then moves on to Madhyapradesh team and finally to Rajashtan team in 2010-11.
• The story of the paceman Pankaj Singh is no less inspiring. He moves from a village near Lucknow to lucknow to allahabad to kolkata to chennai and finally to jaipur .. all in pursuit of a stable cricket career. In the midst of this pursuit there are innumerable rejections from various cricket teams and cricket associations across states. He joins in a college in hope of finding a job in army as he decides to forget the idea of playing cricket forever .. so on so forth. Very inspiring. He later turns out to be one of the biggest success stories in Rajashtan’s rise in Ranji.
• It also has the story of another paceman who was called a “Good for nothing” by Greg Chappel :P He goes on to have a god level 7.3-2-10-8 stat in his debut match against Hyderabad in the by now famous 21 all-out match
• The story of another bowler in the team who used to practice bowling action on the railway platform much to the ridicule of people  around him is hilarious and touchy at the same time. And why did he have to do all this?? .. because of financial compulsions at home which meant that he can’t quit his job in railways!
• There is this other story about a player who had to play cricket because it was the only way for him to feed his family. This story particularly will make you shed a tear or two as the player in question goes through instances of multiple deaths in family in a span of months.. including the death of a two month old baby girl. It made me sit back and wonder about how many times.. i carelessly pass a comment or two on many cricketers little wondering the circumstances behind the failure. Like this player.. who had to pack bags to play a first class match within hours after his daughter’s burial ! .. I think sometimes we just view at cricketers as if they are devices of entertainment little wondering about their human side! :( .. Infact this story also talks about a planB of this player which was to enroll in correspondence course to clear CFA! .. Cricket – Plan A.. CFA- Plan B! .. He also takes up a job in Indian Postal Department somewhere in the story! .. Reality can’t get any bitter than it is in this story .. Hatsoff to him for having survived through all this. Every problem in your own life would seem inconsequential and insignificant when you get to know of such stories
• The book then moves on to another interesting story .. that of someone who had to write CAT in pursuit of an alternate career as he had to face too many rejections from cricket associations! .. He scores a decent 84% which could have definitely got him a decent MBA degree :P
• The story of another cricketer who lost both his parents before his teens is no less inspiring. So much is his love for his mother that he inscribes his mother’s name on every single piece of apparel and gear he uses while playing representative cricket! ..
• Akash chopra then converts the book into a player’s diary by giving a commentary of all that happened on-pitch and off-pitch in the path to the Ranji trophy win .. includes the scorecards and detailed descriptions about matches with Maharashtra, Goa, Tamilnadu, Tripura, Jharkhand etc etc

All in all a super awesome book! Must read for all cricket fans.. Go buy the book :P .. If you stay in and around my place of residence .. then borrow :P .

UNDERDOG ZINDABAD!!!!

So a prof here had asked us to read Amartya Sen’s “Development as freedom” as a part of some course. I read through the book the other day .. conveniently skipping those parts of the books which seemed too scholarly or economistly to me…  thus defeating the purpose of the professor :P

I found this part of the book i.e., chapter10 on “culture and human rights” interesting. I think a lot of this is also seen in Sen’s “Our culture their culture” speech in 1995-96. This is about tolerance – interaction of cultures – globalisation etc. As always i quote paragraphs from the chapter it is up to reader to imagine the context :P

The Book

He says..

“The threat to native cultures in the globalizing world of today is to a considerable extent, inescapable. The one solution that is not available is that of stopping globalisation of trade and economies, since the forces of economic exchange and division of labor are hard to resist in a competitive world fueled by massive technological evolution that gives modern technology an economically competitive edge“

Totally agree! The more i read about the history of industrial revolution and technology in general .. the more i am convinced about how monstrous it is and how powerful it is. O technology! I bow down before thee! :P

“When an economic adjustment takes place, few tears are shed for the superseded methods of production and for the overtaken technology. There many be some nostalgia for specialised and elegant objects (such as an ancient steam engine or an old-fashioned clock), but in general old and discarded machinery is not particularly wanted. In the case of culture, however, lost traditions may be greatly missed. The demise of old ways of living can cause anguish, and a deep sense of loss“

I like this distinction between losing old machines and losing old traditions and customs. I think lost culture-traditions are far more closer to the heart than a lost typewriter. There was this fb pic that was floating around saying that “if you are born in the 80s then you are the last casette generation”. True.. but does that really make you feel sentimental? I don’t think so. But does the mention of lost knowledge systems of India make you feel sicker .. I think yes. When a very learned prof says .. “Europe had great philosophers in that age like aristotle, plato , socrates. India also had some during those times .. like.. aryabhatta.. no not him.. umm.. errr” .. You know something is wrong with your country :P. So i think lost culture is a bigger problem.

Sen says “…cultural nationalism or chauvinism can be seriously debilitating as an approach  to living”

Agree. But i think it is also important for people to be assertive about their roots/origins.

On that he says..

“Ways of life can be preserved if the society decides to do just that, and it is a question of balancing the costs of such preservation with the value that the society attaches to the objects and the lifestyles preserved” …

“What is crucial for a rational asessment of such choice is the ability of the people to participate in  public discussions on the subject”

Will the power wielding elite give so much freedom for the populace? Did anyone ever give so much freedom to the public? More importantly is it possible to have time bound resolutions on such things?

Chilly – Sine and others

He then goes on to say that .. “there are more interrelations and more cross-cultural influences in the world than is typically acknowledged by those alarmed by the prospect of cultural subversion”

“Chili may be a central part of Indian cooking as we understand it, but it is also a fact that chili was unknown to India until the portugese brought it there only a few centuries ago”

On a similar note .. I remember reading on IE long back about Idli’s Indonesian links. I was able to dig out that article from my 2007 gmail chat logs :P .. quoting from that article:

“Hindu kings from Indonesia, a country where fermenting is quite common, often came to India between the 8th and the 12th centuries, looking for brides. The cooks with them, suggested Achaya, brought the technique that changed the character of this breakfast delight”

“Among many foreign ingredients that are now indistinguishably Indian include the tomato, the potato, the chilli and the cabbage”

I remember in 2007 i wanted to buy Achaya’s book and didn’t buy .. I think now i should! (As i was typing i realised 5yrs is way too long a wait for any book on the to-read list..so i bought one of his books on flipkart ;) ).That apart.. i also find this other book interesting “Curry: A Tale Of Cooks And Conquerors” .. Added to the to-read list.

So i also did some more research on vegetables inspired by the article and i found this table. Very funny it is. I cross-checked some of the vegetables..and it is really inspiring to know how much we have globalised :P .. So protectionism doesn’t really make sense.. Ofcourse like Gandhi said (refer below) we shouldn’t be blown off our feet ;).

And Sen doesn’t stop there.. (Yes.. i am still on track.. this post was about Sen’s book ;) ) . He says..

“The image of regional self-sufficiency in cultural matters is deeply misleading, and the value of keeping traditions pure and upolluted is hard to sustain”

“..some chauvinists in India have complained about the use of “Western” terminology in school curriculum, for example in modern mathematics. But the interrelations in the world of mathematics make it hard to know what is “Western” and what is not. To illustrate consider the term “sine” used in trigonometry, which came to India straight through the British, and yet in its genesis there is a remarkable Indian component”

“Aryabhata, an Indian mathematician and astronomer who lived in the fifth and early sixth centuries, discussed the concept of “sine,” and called it Jyanardha, or “half-chord,” in Sanskrit. From there the term migrated in an interesting way, as Howard Eves describes in An Introduction to the History of Mathematics: Aryabhata called it ardha-jya (“half-chord”) and jya-ardha (“chord-half”), and then abbreviated the term by simply using jya (“chord”). From jya the Arabs phonetically derived jiba, which, following Arabic practice of omitting vowels, was written as jb. Now jiba, aside from its technical significance, is a meaningless word in Arabic. Later writers who came across jb as an abbreviation for the meaningless word Jiba substituted Jaib instead, which contains the same letters, and is a good Arabic word meaning “cove” or “bay.” Still later, Gherardo of Cremona (ca. 1150), when he made his translations from the Arabic, replaced the Arabian jaib by its Latin equivalent, sinus [meaning a cove or a bay], from whence came our present word sine

“We must not lose our ability to understand one another and to enjoy the cultural products of different countries in the passionate advocacy of conservation and purity”

No words :P .. But i think he chose a convenient example ;) .. nevertheless this is a fun fact :D

He then also talks about traditions of skepticism and tolerance in the east. He talks about how the only firmly agnostic religion in the world i.e., Budhism is of Asian origin and about how strong athiestic arguments were there in the Indian Carvaka/Lokayata school of thought and how even Ramayana had some arguments on the folly of religious beliefs.

All in all a very entertaining 22 pages these! :)

Gandhi’s words on this actually are amazing i think and hits the target bang on..

“I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.“

Like i had vented out my frustration on this topic sometime back :P .. i think a lot of us in Modern day India are now okie with being blown off feet by the culture of other lands.. infact i know some who have a contempt for the culture of this land .. that is what irritates me :P.. Else i am in total agreement with all that Sen says ;)